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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

LEX CREDENDI

Works by
THE REV. GEORGE TYRRELL

NOVA ET VETERA: Informal Meditations. Crown
8vo. 5s. net.
HARD SAYINGS: A Selection of Meditations and
Studies. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
THE FAITH OF THE MILLIONS : A Selection of
Past Essays. Two Series. Crown 8vo. 5s- ne'
each.
LEX ORANDI ; or, Prayer and Creed. Crown 8vo.
5s. net.
LEX CREDENDI : A Sequel to Lex Orandi. Crown
8vo. 5s. net.
EXTERNAL RELIGION : Its Use and Abuse. Crown
8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
OIL AND WINE. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
THROUGH SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS : or, The
Old Theology and the New. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
THE SOUL'S ORBIT; or, Man's Journey to God.
Compiled and Edited, with additions, by M. D.
Petre. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA.

LEX CREDENDI A SEQUEL TO
LEX ORANDI

BY
GEORGE TYRRELL
AUTHOR OF "NOVA ET VETERA," "HARD SAYINGS,"

ETC.

"LOOKING UNTO JESUS, THE AUTHOR AND FINISHER
OF OUR FAITH." — Heb. XI.

NEW IMPRESSION

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1907
All rights reserved

CONTENTS

PART I
"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST"
I. THE SCOPE
II. THE METHOD
III. THE MEANING OF "SPIRIT"
iv. Christ's spirit as feeling
V. CHRIST "ACCORDING TO THE SPIRIT'
VI. SENTIMENTALISM .
VII. " MYSTICALITY " .
VIII. "PRACTICALITY" .
IX. "CARITAS DEI" .
X. "NEW TESTAMENT CHRISTIANITY"
XI. HOLINESS AND TRUTH
XII. THE PERFECTION OF MANHOOD
XIII. THE SUPERMAN, FALSE AND TRUE
XIV. RESUME .

PAGE I

15
21
2531
38
43
47 54
616372

PART II
THE PRAYER OF CHRIST
I. THE PERFECT PRAYER
II. DEFECTIVE TYPES .
III. THE INVOCATION . ,

8288
101

CONTENTS

IV. THE FIRST PETITION
V. THE SECOND PETITION
VI. THE THIRD PETITION
VII. THE FOURTH PETITION
VIII. THE FIFTH PETITION
IX. THE SIXTH PETITION
X. THE SEVENTH PETITION
XI. RESULTS

132 151
178 199
214227
235 241

Conclusion— Lex Orandi

PREFACE
THE title which I have chosen for this volume
needs some explanation. In "Lex Orandi"
I endeavoured to show how the Christian Creed
had been, not entirely, but principally shaped by
the exigencies of the devout life ; and how it ought
therefore to be viewed primarily as a Law of Prayer
or of practical devotion, and only secondarily as
a theology. My intention was far more practical
than apologetic. I wrote in the interest of that
growing number of earnestly religious persons whose
impatience with theological disputes, and whose con
viction that the Gospel means deeds rather than
words or theories, lead them to look upon the Creed
with a cold eye ; to view it as belonging more to the
outward life of the Visible Church than to the inward
life of the individual Christian ; to regard it as the
sword of militant orthodoxy rather than as a subtle
factor of the very same Spirit of Charity in whose name
they would fain thrust that dividing sword into its
scabbard. There (and still more explicitly elsewhere
in subsequent occasional articles and reviews) I
emphasized the importance of distinguishing between
the " substance " of the Creed, which we owe to

viii PREFACE
revelation, and whose proper vehicle of expression is
the language of prophecy and mystery rather than
that of science or philosophy, and that " form " which
the same Creed has necessarily and rightly received
in consequence of becoming an object of theological
reflection. Revelation offers us mysteries of Faith ;
theology endeavours to translate them from the
language of prophecy into that of science, and to
harmonize these translations with the whole system
of our understanding. It is the " substance " of the
Creed and not its " form " that Faith lays hold of as
the food of the souL the Bread of Life, the Word of
God. If we accept the form it is only because we
cannot draw water without a vessel. In the Te Deum
and in other hymns and canticles of the Church we
possess the Christian Creed more nearly in the pro
phetic language of revelation, and divested to a great
extent of its theological setting. There we find it
exercising its principal and original function of
appealing, not so much to the understanding as to the
imagination ; not so much to the explicit reason of
the mind as to the implicit reason of the heart.
Thus we not only may and ought to, but we actually
do separate the substance of the Creed from its
theological or scientific form.
Again, in the interests of devotion, I frequently
insisted on the danger of treating disjointed frag
ments or articulations of the Creed as independent
wholes, intelligible and spiritually valuable even when
divorced from their context. The possibility of doing

PREFACE ix
so is the result of giving (as we are prone to do)
objective value to the distinctions and divisions of
scientific reflection — of transferring to the living
reality the form that belongs merely to our under
standing of it Yet what Faith embraces is never
the severed part, but that same whole which is also
the indivisible object of Hope and Love. The mind,
indeed, may abstract, and analyse, and dissect; it may
give a fictitious completeness to what are really
fragments ; but it is only the unbroken unity of the
living whole which appeals to the heart — and Faith
is of the heart. To this or that separate article we
may give a theological assent with our mind ; but
the assent of Faith belongs to it only as vitally one
with the complete object of Faith, which is the
mystery of the Kingdom of God. In this mystery
all others are included ; from this they get their
meaning and unity ; apart, they may live for theo
logical thought, but they are dead for Faith.
In substance, our Creed is but the expression of
that conception of God and His Kingdom which is
the light of our spiritual life — a conception constitu
tive of that same indivisible life which is at once
Vision, Feeling, and Will according as it is viewed
from different angles. By one and the same act we
identify ourselves with God, who, viewed as Truth,
Might, or Goodness, characterizes that act as one of
Faith, Hope, or Charity respectively. Faith is the
right orientation of the spirit in relation to its end
and action, and the Creed is primarily the verbal

x PREFACE
expression of this adjustment — the correspondence
is that of words to things ; of abstract signs to the
inexhaustible fulness and complexity of a concrete
spiritual act.
But if its purpose is the perfection and spiritual
education of the individual believer, it attains this
end only because it is the expression of the collective
spiritual life of the Church at large — which life is
normal and authoritative for the individual, and
must be appropriated by him before any sort of
healthy personality of belief can be developed. In
no two souls could the words of the Creed stand for
quite the same thing, while to the Reader of Hearts
our divergencies of conception, veiled from us by the
coarse medium of language, widen out indefinitely
and make inward heretics of us all. Even were
perfect uniformity of inward belief conceivable, no
language, however flexible and subtle, no test, how
ever cunningly devised, could possibly prove its
existence. It is not then directly as an expression of my own
private judgment and spiritual orientation that I say
the Credo, but as an expression of the Church's
collective Faith, which I desire to share and appro
priate, and which I acknowledge as a rule or norm.
I say it as a quasi -sacramental act of association
with the corporate life of the Christian people, past,
present, and future. It is the " I " of the whole
Church which finds voice in in me and each of her
members. "Credimus," ILo-Tei?o/«-i/, "We believe,"

PREFACE xi
was the older formula, as it is that of the Te Deum,
and it gives us the true sense of the newer.
But since this is so, it is plain that in reciting the
Creed I do not address myself to, or profess to be in
inward agreement with, any other individual or
school or passing phase of theological thought ; that
none of these have any more right to rule my spirit
than I have to rule theirs ; that the only norm I
acknowledge is that to which they must defer as
well as I — that of the slowly forming, but divinely
guided, mind of the living Church of all times and
places, of which mind the Creed in its present form
is the only authorized expression. To say that such
a norm is necessarily indefinite and ambiguous in
many respects, is only to say that it is living and
progressive. By these and similar considerations I strove to
show that those whose impatience of theology drove
them to a somewhat onesidedly practical and utilita
rian conception of religion, could not afford to dis
pense with creeds and dogmas, since these were really
the presuppositions (however subtle and implicit) of
all life and action, and had been largely shaped in
the interests of feeling and practice. In other words,
I tried to show that the Creed was primarily a Lex
Orandi — a law of prayer and of the spiritual life.
In this volume I pursue much the same theme,
strengthening some of the positions taken up in
"Lex Orandi," criticizing and establishing some of its
underlying assumptions, defending myself ' against

xii PREFACE
certain misunderstandings due to the fact that in ad
dressing myself largely to " Pragmatists " I seemed
to some — in spite of fairly explicit precautions — to
accept their doctrines far more than I do.
But as I called the former book " Lex Orandi" be
cause it dealt with the Creed under its aspect of a rule
of prayer, so I may call this book " Lex Credendi," for
in substance it is a treatment of the Lord's Prayer
viewed as the rule and criterion of pure doctrine — as
the living expression of that Christian spirit whereof
Faith in God and His Kingdom, together with Hope
and Charity, is a constituent factor. As no single
article of Faith is rightly intelligible torn apart from
the living organism of truth which it helps to con
stitute, so neither is Faith itself fully intelligible as
considered apart from Hope and Charity, its correla
tives, which together with it constitute one simple
and really indivisible life of the spirit. Our grasp on
Faith is simply included in our grasp on that life in
its totality — in our grasp on God, who is the object
at once of our Faith, Hope, and Love. Because it is
bound up, in our past experience, with our super
natural life, we hold to the Christian Creed in its
entirety by the same act wherewith we hold to God.
For it is the form or shape in which the Divine is
presented to us and apprehended by us.
Far surer, therefore, and truer than any mental
or oral expression which we can give to our belief
as separated by abstraction from the concrete unity
of our spiritual life, is the expression which it

PREFACE xiii
receives in every exercise of that life in its fulness.
" By their fruits ye shall know them " ; it is not by
what a man says he believes (or disbelieves), or by
what he explicitly and consciously thinks he believes,
but by the Faith implicit in his spontaneous life and
action and in the whole orientation of his feeling and
will that the deep, subconscious convictions of his
heart find true utterance. If "the heart has its
reasons," it has also its language, often at strife with
that of the lips — eloquent when these are silent,
dumb when they are busiest. No explicit utterance
of the Christian Faith can ever hope to equal the
implicit utterance it finds in that Prayer which burst
forth from the depth of Christ's heart and which is
the embodiment of the spiritual life in its concrete
fulness. There in truth we have the supreme rule and
criterion of Faith, the divinely sanctioned Lex Credendi
— no ready solvent indeed for theological contro
versies, but a law that lifts the heart to a higher
plane where it can abide in peace, unaffected by the
alternations of intellectual light and obscurity.
Surely it is well to insist on these truisms at a time
when sun and moon are darkened, and when our
guiding stars are falling from heaven, and the once
solid earth trembles beneath our feet, and the in
dolent hearts of men of little faith are failing them
for fear of the tribulation that threatens their
spiritual peace and tranquillity. It is well at such a
time to see that we do not confound things so
different as theological confusion and shipwreck of

xiv PREFACE
Faith ; or hold ourselves bankrupt because we have
mislaid the mere symbol of a wealth that is still
safely treasured in the secret chamber of our heart,
and vouched for by every instinctive exercise of the
Christian life.
Faith in God the Rewarder, or rather the Reward,
of them that seek Him is, according to even the
most rigid theology, the saving substance of the
Creed wherein all its further determinations are
enfolded, as are the form, fragrance, and glory of the
full-blown flower in the first rudiments of its green
bud. If we hold this we hold all ; for there is no real
" unfaith " of the heart as to any particular revealed
truth or truths which would not be instantly fatal to
that deepest truth in which they are all rooted and
involved, and which finds implicit utterance in the
Lord's Prayer, in the Lex Credendi.
But do we really hold it ?
This, as has been said, is no question as to our
theology or religious philosophy, but as to our whole
practical attitude towards life; as to our spiritual
character and orientation. Faith in God means
faith in Conscience, in Sincerity, in Truth — blind
faith in what neither reasoning nor experience can
justify, but what is whispered and revealed to the
heart, namely, that Truth and Right must at last
prevail ; that apart from all other rewards and
irrespective of all consequences, these are the only
ends claiming our absolute and unconditional self-
subjection, and compared with which all others are

PREFACE xv
vain and illusory. However variously determined
and diversely applied, these are the ultimate ends for
which the saints, prophets, and martyrs of all times
and places have lived, suffered, and died, and which
unite them into one invisible society, one world-wide
mystical Christ, one ceaseless sacrifice for the world's
salvation. Faith in God means faith in Christ
crucified, in His method, His spirit, His way ; in His
fearless attitude towards the worldly, in His uncom
promising truthfulness and sincerity which triumphed
most in the moment of His extremest disaster.
With this Faith we need not fear the temporary
obscuration or confusion of some of our theological
conceptions at a time when the publicly notorious
disputes between critical and theological experts as
to the historical or philosophical values of revealed
truths and mysteries (i.e. as to the precise translation
of the language of prophecy into that of science)
make it quite impossible for us, who are in no sense
experts, to arrive at a decision. At such a time we
may firmly decline to stand an examination in history
or theology or physics; the Church is not an university
or a school. We may content ourselves with Faith in
the unbroken totality of revelation as presented to us
in its original and essential form of "prophetic
truth " ; and we may refuse to express any opinion
on the various attempts which have been made,
especially of late, to translate that prophecy into the
language of exact thought.
Enough that we hold the root of the matter, from

PREFACE

which, when the sharp winter of healthy criticism
has fulfilled its divine mission, a gentler spring will
call forth stalk, leaf, and flower in dufe season : " quia
post hiemem sequitur aestas ; post mortem redit
dies ; et post tempestatem, magna serenitas" (" Imi-
tatio Christi," lib. II, ch. 8).
G. TYRRELL
Freiburg i. Br.
7 March, 1906

NOTE
Several of the chapters of this book have appeared in
" The Dolphin " (now no more) under the title, " The Spirit of
Christ " ; and later in " The Catholic World " under the title,
" The Prayer of Christ." Except the Preface, the whole was
finished some months ago ; hence none of the elucidations
of " Lex Orandi " have been made in deference to criticisms
that have since appeared. They are in no sense correc
tions, but only elucidations of points there lightly touched,
though not fully developed, or, at most, completions of
what had no pretence of being more than a rough essay.
Such are, e.g. (i) the renewed insistence on the funda
mental difference between the " Pragmatism " of Christ and
the philosophy which to-day goes by that name, and with
which it has else so much in common; (2) the iterated
recognition of the rights of a sane and free theology
ministering to, but no wise to be confounded with, revela
tion, whose prophetic truth it endeavours to translate into
exact language and to reconcile with the ever-varying
requirements of contemporary knowledge ; (3) the emphasis
of the fact that some kind of, at least implicit, dogmatic
(but not necessarily theological) conception is the pre
supposition of even the simplest and most elementary
religious experience; (4) the exposition of the essential
difference between the Catholic and the non -Catholic
forms of Christianity which lies in the frank appropriation
by the former of the fruits of the general religious process
of humanity, gathered together in the religious syncretism of

xviii NOTE
the Roman Empire, of which fruits Judaism contributed but
a part — albeit a principal part. In other words, the insistence
on the supra-sectarian character which at least in principle
distinguishes from all particular religions that Catholicism
which allows some degree of supernatural inspiration to
every genuine religious utterance of mankind according to
its strength and quality ; which sees in the totality of such
utterances the ever-inadequate expression of That which
seeks to reveal Itself to the human spirit as far as the
limited receptivity of that spirit will permit ; a Sun whose
light struggles to us through clouds of varying density,
from the most darkly impenetrable to the most brilliantly
luminous, but whose face and form we have never beheld ;
(5) the definitive abandonment of the two notions of eccle
siastical and theological development, whose insufficiency I
discussed in an article, " Semper Eadem " (" The Month,"
January, 1904 ; continued in " The Catholic World," August,
1905), in favour of a much simpler view more consonant
with facts and with unsophisticated tradition ; one which
neither implicitly degrades the present to exalt the past,
nor degrades the past to exalt the present ; which finds the
type of ecclesiastical growth neither in a dialectical, nor in
a mechanical, nor in a physiological process, but in pro
cesses of the same order as itself. For as we cannot
explain physiology by mechanism, so neither social and
religious processes by physiology.

LEX CREDENDI PART I
"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST"
I
THE SCOPE
THE purpose of the present writer's book called
" Lex Orandi " was to show that the doctrinal
system of Christianity is the result of the attempt
to fix and formulate the implications of the Church's
spiritual life ; that " vitality " is the test of truth, not
in Newman's sense of the phrase, not as though mere
persistence and survival were enough, but in the sense
that a belief which universally and persistently fosters
growth in the spirit of Christ is not only pragmati
cally true, but is proved to be, in some symbolic
way, representative of that world of ultra-reality in
accommodation to which our spiritual life consists.
It was necessary in such an undertaking to assume
that the " spirit of Christ " and the " spiritual life "
were values familiar to all, or easily determinable;
for a criterion must be something better known or
more easily knowable than that to which it is applied.
The concrete is prior to the abstract; the master-
works of art are prior to art-theories and art-rules ;
and if we test art-works by these rules and theories,

LEX CREDENDI

yet we will accept no theory that would condemn
what are admittedly master-works of art. Here is
a circle, but not a vicious circle. The master-works
are the supreme criterion ; theories and rules are but
instruments for the application of that criterion.
Master-works are above criticism ; at times they
break up all our theories and systems. If we measure
them by our rules, it is rather to test and verify those
rules ; to bring them back to their source. So, too,
we " try the spirits," we test the conduct of Christians
immediately by the teachings of Christianity, ulti
mately by the life of Christ, by the spirit of Christ,
which itself is the criterion of sound teaching. The
doctrine of the Church is avowedly nothing more
than an unfolding of the implications of the spirit of
Christ, of the life of Jesus. That life necessarily im
plied certain conceptions of God and of man and of
their relations one to another.
To these conceptions the spirit of Christianity
owes its distinct and unique character. Without any
unfolding of these implications it is possible for
those whose spirit is akin to Christ's to feel at once
the harmony or discord between other lives and His
life, other ways and His way ; to make His Way and
Life a direct criterion of false and true. But such
criticism is too subjective, too uncertain, too un-
verifiable to be of general service in the corporate
life of the Church. In due limits the art and theory
of any sort of life is necessary to its general advance
ment among men — necessary for the protection and
proper application of those standards which are
furnished by the creations of genius, by the works

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST"

of God or of Nature. We judge the lives of ordinary
Christians by Christian teaching; but when this
teaching itself is in question we test it by the
admitted or classical standards of Christian life ;
we turn to Christ, whose life is, in a sense, a divine
revelation, an implicit " depositum fidei," and to the
greater Saints, whose lives are, so to say, authentic
developments of His, authentic manifestations of the
same spirit. Teachings which harmonize with these
sacred lives, which foster and further that spirit in
others, express the true implications of Christianity.
It is the purpose of these paragraphs to consider,
not the teachings of Christianity, but Christ ; not the
implications of His life, but the life itself; in other
words, to give more definite meaning and content to
the term, " the spirit of Christ."
As before (in " Lex Orandi ") there was an in
evitable tendency to force the interpretations of
theology in the interests of pragmatism, so here
there may be a like danger of unconsciously shaping
our presentment of the spirit of Christ in the in
terests of theology. Even were our present purpose
apologetic and not purely practical, it would be in
the best interest of apologetic to lay aside all theo
logical prepossession, and to allow the theme to work
itself out freely, confident that the result will, on the
whole, verify our religious teaching.
We must not come to the master-works as critics
with our art-theories ; but as learners, with an open
mind. Doubtless we shall learn from them what
thousands have learned before us. But we shall
learn it ourselves, and possess it in a new way.

V

LEX CREDENDI

II
THE METHOD
"Let it therefore be our chief study," says a Kempis,
" to meditate upon the life of Jesus Christ. The
teaching of Christ excels all the teachings of the
saints, and had one His spirit one would find therein
the Hidden Manna." Some rudimentary sympathy
with the spirit of Christ is the indispensable condi
tion of understanding the Gospel. We cannot con
struct an idea out of nothing ; the beginnings, the
germ, must be already within. If there be but a
rudiment of Christliness within us we can develop
this germ into a more perfect image or presentment
of Christ. And to understand Christ's spirit is
nothing else but thus to reproduce it in ourselves.
In order to hear and recognize His voice it is needful
to have heard it before, to be His sheep already — as
we all are, unless conscience be wholly extinct in us.
But there are other subsidiary conditions indepen
dent of our spirit and moral character. " How shall
they hear without a preacher?" It is needful that
the word should enter the ear and the mind before it
can enter the heart and spirit. Every aid that learn
ing offers us to ascertain the exact mental value of
Christ's teaching, the precise sense which it conveyed
to His hearers (were these good or evil, friendly or
hostile), is of inestimable value. For though its spirit
is incommunicable save to the sympathetic, yet the
vehicle of the spirit, the bare sense, is communicable
to all equally, and of that vehicle every fragment
and particular is vocal and eloquent to those that
have ears to hear.

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" J
We must then always strive to determine as
exactly as possible what sense our Lord's words
conveyed and were intended by Him to convey to
His hearers, to Peter, Andrew, and John, or to the
scribes and Pharisees. For He did not speak in
vacuo nor use some absolute or ideal language.
A musician's performance is always limited by the
range and possibilities of the instrument before him ;
the speaker or word-artist must work within the
limits of the language and ideas of those whom he
addresses. The mentality, the education of the Gali
lean crowds fixed the range of that instrument
through which Christ had to convey the eternal truth
of the Gospel. He could give only what they could
receive. Hence we must in all cases first ask our
selves : " What did these words mean for Peter,
Andrew, James, and John?" before we go on to ask :
" What do they mean for us ? How would He have
spoken to us had He lived in our day, so as to
convey to us the same spiritual and eternal values ? "
And we must remember to distinguish carefully
between that spiritual value and the words and ideas
which are its vehicle. When we translate the primi
tive forms of religious thought and language into
our modern forms we do so at some risk — the risk of
spilling the precious wine of the word in pouring it
from one vessel into another. Though we must not
give to the primitive vessel the sacredness of its con
tent, yet it has a derived and secondary sacredness of
its own as being the first and divinely chosen vehicle
of revelation. Thus, to come to our present pre
occupation, before we attempt to determine what

LEX CREDENDI

" the spirit of Christ " should mean for us, we must
ask ourselves what it meant for the Apostles and for
the Christians of the Apostolic age. For, rightly
understood, Apostolicity is the criterion of Christian
truth; not in the sense, e.g. that Peter's notion of
a "spirit" is to be a norm and fetter for all subse
quent metaphysics and psychology, but in the sense
that it was the vehicle of religious and moral values
which we must take care to secure when we venture
to substitute our own philosophy for his. Apostolic
teaching is classical as the most perfect manifestation
of the Christian spirit, albeit in a most imperfect
medium. There is more truth, more spirit, in a rude
draft of a Michelangelo, were it but of a single
limb, than in the finished perfection of an Andrea
del Sarto.
It is not in the rudeness, but in the spirit, of
Apostolic religious thought that we are to look for
the criterion of Christian truth.
There is little doubt as to what a " spirit " meant
for the Apostles, when they spoke of men being
possessed by evil spirits or being filled with the Holy
Spirit, or when our Lord promised that His Spirit
would abide with them. In the simple philosophy of
earlier times, whenever a man's mind or tongue or
limbs or faculties seemed to be wrested from his own
control and made the instrument of an intelligence
other than his own, whether better or worse, this
effect was ascribed to the locally and materially con
ceived entrance into him of a spirit, i.e. of a principle
akin to that which normally animates and controls
our bodies when we are alive and leaves them when

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST"

we are dead. We can see now that in many ways
this first effort of philosophy to explain the normal
and supernormal phenomena of our life is necessarily
anthropomorphic and childish ; but though to some
degree we may seem to have corrected its crudities
we should be less pardonably childish ourselves did
we fancy that our deeper philosophizings had entirely
escaped from the necessaryflaw of anthropomorphism,
and even materialism, which must always vitiate our
efforts to represent things spiritual.
Our philosophical notion of a spirit may be less
imperfect than that of the Apostles : we may legiti
mately refuse to fetter our metaphysics and psycho
logy to those of earlier times or to make an idol of
the ancient vessel out of reverence to its content ;
but neither may we make an idol of the modern, nor
flatter ourselves as having attained finality and ulti
mate perfection.
It is with the moral and religious effects of these
possessions and inspirations that religion is directly
concerned, and not with the metaphysical nature of
the agency to which they are due or with the mechan
ism of its operation. It is concerned with the
presence or absence of certain spiritual gifts and
qualities. Where there are love, joy, peace, and the
other gifts and fruits of Grace, religion speaks of a
spirit of holiness entering in and making its abode
in the soul ; taking control of it ; raising it to a
supernatural mode of life. Where, on the contrary,
the normal power of self-determination is shattered ;
where some vice or passion seizes the reins of
government, usurps the throne of reason, divides the

LEX CREDENDI

house of the soul against itself— there it speaks of the
presence of a tempter, or an evil spirit. Christian
art and imagination pictures such exits, entrances,
presences, as local and material, and the symbolism
is practically serviceable and convenient. So far as
it is thus serviceable it is true to the purposes of
religion ; but to its philosophical truth, religion as
such is indifferent. If, however, because religion
speaks with practical truth, of an unclean spirit
going out of man, as out of a house, and wandering
in dry places, or because sacred art represents the
exit as that of a winged mannikin from the mouth
of the possessed, we give philosophic truth to such
images, we are literally superstitious, for we cover
with the mantle of religion what is no part of religion.
Ill
THE MEANING OF "SPIRIT"
In modern language the term " spirit " is used in a
moral sense as well as in a psychic or metaphysical
sense. It stands for a certain complexus of ideas
and sentiments ; for the character or quality of a
man's thought and feeling. These have been con
ceived as rooted in and manifesting the occult nature
of the spirit of which they are the phenomena ; of
the " I " which thinks and feels ; and the name
" spirit " has been transferred from that which thinks
and feels to the thought and feeling in which it
makes its hidden character known. That every
spirit was unique, the only possible one of its kind,
was a point of mediaeval philosophy to which perhaps
we owe our modern use of the word "spirit" as

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST"

designating what is distinctive and individually
characteristic of each personality ; as being the
equivalent of personality in this moral sense. For
" personality," too, has been transferred from the
metaphysical substance to its manifestation in life,
thought, sentiment, and conduct. Here at all events
it is undeniable that no two personalities or spirits
are alike ; for each is the resultant of its own history,
of a sum-total of experiences whereof no one can
ever be matched precisely in all its inwardness and
outwardness. When in this modern sense we speak of " the spirit
of Christ " or of " the spirit of Holiness " we do not
directly mean what the Apostles meant by the Holy
Ghost ; and at first sight it might seem somewhat
sophistical to work with ambiguous terms as though
they were univocal, and to read a modern sense into
ancient language. And this would be so were our
interest philosophic and not religious ; were we
quoting Apostolic writings as authorities in meta
physics rather than as authorities in Christianity;
were we studying the vessel rather than its content.
We have no direct metaphysical insight into the
nature of the human spirit or of the Divine Spirit.
They are known to us only through and in their
effects, through the thoughts, feelings, utterances, and
actions of man, whereof some are attributed to man's
own spirit, others to the influence of good or evil
spirits over man. Since therefore spirits are known
to us only in their manifestations, and interest us
only as the sources of these manifestations, and so
far as we (like the Apostles) are interested in religion

LEX CREDENDI

and not in philosophy, we are not false to Apostolic
thought if we prescind from the metaphysical con
notation of the word " spirit," and confine ourselves
to its religious and moral values. Here we must be
at one with primitive oracles ; there we may, and to-
some extent must, differ from them. The religious
meaning (e.g.) of the descent of the Holy Ghost is
the same for us and for them ; yet the precise
psychology of the event may be differently esti
mated by us ; whether more or less imperfectly, who
shall say ?
If then we speak of " the spirit of Holiness "rather
than of " the Holy Spirit " as guiding the Church
into all knowledge, we are only uttering the same
religious truth with greater precision ; we are fixing
our attention on the "formal aspect" under which
the Holy Spirit acts as our guide, and withdrawing
it from the religiously irrelevant conception of the
metaphysical nature and mode of that operation.
When we say that the spirit of Fra Angelico has
exercised a guiding influence in art, we do not deny
that this influence derives in some mysterious way
from the metaphysical principle of his being ; but
for artists, such a consideration is irrelevant ; for
them, in this connexion, his " spirit " means its mani
festation in certain effects and productions whose
guiding influence in art is explicable artistically.
It is only in the life and utterances of Christ that His
human spirit is revealed to us ; nay, we have no other
revelation even of that Divine Spirit of which He
possessed the plenitude. In that life of His, there
fore, we have the classical or regulative manifesta-

"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST"

tion of the Spirit by which all other manifestations
are to be tried and measured. For all its limits of
time, place, occasion, language, tradition, that life
alone is a pure utterance of the Divine Spirit ; the
finitude, the limitation is solely on the part of the
vehicle. Given such material to work upon, it could
not have been more divinely shaped and mastered.
The greater the limitations within which it works,
the more fully is the creative power of the artist
revealed. It was in the language and conceptions of
Galilean fishermen, not in those of modern culture,
that the Word took flesh. Is it so evident that these
latter had been a better vehicle of revelation? It
may seem so to the intellectualist ; but not to those
who see in Christianity a revelation of the spirit, not
of the letter ; who look to its religious, not to its
philosophical values.
What precisely do we mean by the spirit of Christ,
the spirit of Christianity ; by knowing Christ no
longer after the flesh but after the spirit ?
A man's spirit is doubtless something that is
betrayed or manifested in his conduct, words, and
actions ; but is felt to be distinct from these embodi
ments and, as it were, their animating principle. It
is not literally resident in them, but in their author.
When we say it is manifested in them, we mean that
there is a certain mode and manner, to be distin
guished from the substance, of such utterances which
betray the intention, the mind, the personality, the
sentiment from which they proceed. In substance,
and abstracting from mode and manner, they might
be the product of any spirit, but taken concretely
they could be the product only of one.

LEX CREDENDI

Different playwrights or artists will treat the very
same theme with an infinite difference of treatment.
In that difference is revealed their spirit and person
ality. We feel, moreover, that this spirit is in some
sense an unique quality; that if it be the resultant
of simply innumerable and incalculable factors, yet
it is not merely their sum, but rather an indivisible
point whither rays of influence converge from all
quarters, making it what it is, and no other. Again,
we distinguish the faultless finished work that results
from calculation, understanding, and practice, from
the faulty, but far higher results of one who has
" caught the spirit " of the idea to be realized ; who
is guided by that spirit rather than by any rule.
This points to the spirit as being primarily a sense,
feeling, sentiment, or instinct — not necessarily, or
even possibly, a blind feeling ; but one whose
determining perceptions and experiences are too
infinitely complex to admit of any sort of analysis
or statement. When used as the equivalent of one's
whole "personality," and not only with reference to
certain particular interests, it is that abiding massive
sentiment or state of feeling which is determined by
the totality of our experience past and present, for
gotten and conscious.
Though betrayed in the words and conduct to
which it gives birth, yet a "spirit" is not directly
communicable ; it cannot be formulated. The signs
of anger seen in another are not the feeling it
self. Only in the measure that I have felt anger
myself and uttered it in these signs is it possible
for another to communicate his anger to me.

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 13
And so of his spirit ; only so far as my own
spirit is potentially (and to some extent actually)
like his, do his utterances shape my sentiment into
conformity with his. Hence, Christ is made to say :
" My sheep hear My voice" ; i.e. only Christians can
hear Christ. As the soul is wholly in every part of
the body — to speak scholastically — or as the organism
is potentially in each of its constitutive cells, and can,
in some cases, be renewed from any one of them, so
the whole of a man's spirit is incarnate in his every
deliberate word and action, and might be inferred
therefrom by a comprehensive and all-penetrating
kindred spirit. But in point of fact it is only by the
accumulative effect of a great variety of impressions
and manifestations, correcting and supplementing
one another, that we can gradually approximate to
that precise and unique quality of sentiment which
belongs to a personality other than one's own.
Hence, according to our degree of potential
spiritual kinship, it is possible for us to divine the
spirit of Jesus revealed in the scattered utterances
and reminiscences preserved to us in the Gospels ; to
feel and enter into the affection and sentiment of
which they are the expression; and thus indirectly
to apprehend that view of life, of time and eternity,
by which the said spirit and affection are determined.
It should be possible for one fully possessed by the
spirit of Christ to divine, by a sort of tact or instinct,
how He spoke and acted or would have spoken and
acted under given circumstances. And such a por
trayal might be a far truer revelation of His mind
and personality than the shreds and scraps of bio-

14 LEX CREDENDI

graphical evidence that have come down to us.
Historical fiction may be truer to inward reality than
historical fact.
We must allow considerable importance to a man's
philosophy as both shaping and revealing his spirit ;
yet so far as it is imposed on him by tradition it
rather hides than reveals it. So far as he reacts
against its influence, shapes it, and gives it a personal
impress or style, we have a revelation of his distinc
tive quality of mind. But even were he to elaborate
a whole system for himself from ground to roof, yet
this self-analysis may be wholly inaccurate, must be
at best inadequate, abstract, formal ; for, as we have
said, a spirit cannot be formulated ; what I feel in
the face of my world, in the face of all my experience
past and present, can no more be uttered than that
experience itself; it can at most be hinted or sym
bolized, and interpreted by those who have felt more
or less the same. What I feel about life may be
much truer than what I think or say about it — even
to myself, i.e. it may be the product of a truer, though
of an obscure and inexpressible intuition.
If " the pure in heart shall see God," it may be
because the feeling toward life of unspoilt hearts
may enwrap depths of philosophic truth which will
never find utterance in system.
For if we assume, as surely we may, that the
world itself is the symbolic self-utterance of the
Divine Spirit, then it is to those spirits most attuned
to the Divine that the inward sense of that utterance
will be most fully revealed. Others will apprehend
the bare sign, the dead letter, the mere physics or

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 15
physiology of the matter, for lack of that inward
kinship with the Divine Artist which He Himself
works in the souls that do not resist His ingress.
Whatever the philosophical or theological defici
encies of the language in which Christ had to speak
to the fishermen of Galilee, yet they could not hinder
the revelation of His spirit, of that feeling with which
the purest of all human hearts reverberated to the
love of the Divine Heart symbolized in the work of
the Divine Hands — a feeling that enwrapped a philo
sophy which no categories shall ever compass ; a love
kindled by a glance from that Love which is the
Root and Reason of all things.
No theological construction of Christianity, how
ever faithful and laborious, could ever guide our life
so surely in accordance with the ultimate truth of
things as could even a little measure of the spirit of
Christ — of His feeling toward life, toward God and
man and all creation. That is the true Gnosis, of
which it might be said, " Ye have an unction from
the Holy One and ye know all things " — not merely
in the way of practical knowledge, but potentially
in the way of theoretical knowledge, in the sense
that the implications of that feeling, could they be
unravelled, would open the very heart of Reality to
our understanding. IV
CHRIST'S SPIRIT AS FEELING
If it is convenient and suggestive to speak of the
spirit of Christ as a feeling or sentiment, we must be
all the more careful to enter an emphatic caveat
against the sentimentalism, or emotionalism rightly

16 LEX CREDENDI

or wrongly associated with the name of Schleier-
macher. Intellectualism, Voluntarism, Sentimental
ism, are three fallacies that have played a great part
in the history of Christianity. Each is usually the
result of a reaction against the extravagances of one
or both of the others.
All assume in common that the spirit-life may be
portioned out into three quite separable departments
— knowing, willing, and feeling — and that some one
of these must reign supreme over the other two ; and
each claims this supremacy for itself. Yet this
division is a mere work of abstraction for the con
venience of speech and reflex thought. There is not
a movement of the spirit in. which knowledge, feeling,
and will do not interpenetrate. When this is clearly
recognized, it matters little from which of the three
sides we approach the study of the spirit-life, since
each entails the other two, and if we grasp one we
grasp all. If however it is forgotten, it matters very
little which part we treat as supreme and indepen
dent, the result can only be extravagant, abstract,
unreal, and its nemesis will be an equally extravagant
reaction in favour of one or other of the neglected
claimants for supremacy. Religion does not consist
in knowing ; it does not consist in feeling ; it does
not consist in willing and doing, nor is it a sum or
addition of all three; but it is a life, an operation in
which the mind can view now under one, now under
another of these aspects. It is not possible to feel
with Christ, unless we think and will with Him,
nor to think with Him, unless we feel with Him, for
the spirit-life is one and indivisible.

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 17
Yet "thinking" may mean two things; and for
this reason it is more convenient for our present
purpose to view the spirit of Christ as "feeling."
Every feeling implies some apprehension or know
ledge which explains it. But this implied appre
hension is one thing, and the explicit account we
give of it to ourselves or to others is another. It can
never equal or exhaust, it can easily misinterpret
and pervert the concrete mass of perceptions on
which the feeling is founded, or rather, with which it
is interpenetrated and interwoven. The reasons we
give to ourselves or to others of our likes and dis
likes, of our attractions and aversions, of our passions
and emotions, are a small part, if any, of the multi
tudinous reasons which we cannot give and yet
which are acting upon us. It is of these latter, not
of the former, that we speak when we say that the
spirit and inward life of Christ may be viewed in
differently as knowledge, feeling, or will. It is the
total response of His spiritual being to the Divine
Reality by which it is encompassed and in which it is
rooted ; the response of a soul so absolutely pure and
translucent as to be able to see down to those all but
fathomless depths where it springs from the heart of
eternity ; a response that is at once vision, feeling,
and will ; '' none afore or after the other ; none
greater or less than the other."
We need then to distinguish between Christ's
vision and the expression of that vision ; the latter
being but a rude sketch or suggestion of the former
in terms and conception familiar to the fishermen
of Galilee. c

18 LEX CREDENDI

If then we prefer to speak of the spirit of Christ
as "feeling," we are not sentimentalists, for we
recognize that this feeling is also vision, that it is a
principle of discrimination, a guide to truth.
The influence of feeling upon reason, for good or
evil, is a commonplace. It is possible just because
every feeling involves a judgment, and this judgment
of feeling may conflict with the judgment of reason.
In this sense feelings are true or false. I like a man
or dislike him without reason or against my reason.
My feeling (i.e. my implicit judgment) may be true
and the judgment of my reason false or inadequate.
Sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly, according to
the quality and clearness of the feeling, we correct
the judgment of reason and arrange our beliefs so as
to justify and explain our feelings. In this sense St.
Thomas Aquinas speaks of faith as a sort of instinctive
discernment or feeling whereby even the unlettered
can scent out heresy through the sympathy of spirit
with spirit. It may not be true of all the faithful
distributively, but it is true of them collectively, true
of the Church in whom the faith of her members is
focussed and purified. From all this we can under
stand how the spirit of Christ, though something
akin to a feeling or instinct, acts as a principle of
doctrinal discrimination and development. More
commonly we speak of this guidance, with reference
to its supernatural and metaphysical causation, as
effected by the Holy Ghost working in the souls of
men. But here we view it as the orderly develop
ment of the effect of that working of the Holy
Ghost in the soul of Christ, as the development of

"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 19
" the spirit of Christ " in the moral sense of the term
spirit ; as controlled by Christ's spirit in the way
that a legitimate growth is controlled by its germ.
The truth, the intensity, the depth, the purity of
Christ's spirit, that is, of His vision, feeling, will all
in one, was such as to make it indeed the Light of
the World. To unravel the implications of that
Love fully and rightly, were any human language or
thought-system adequate to the purpose, would be to
lay bare the fulness of Divine Truth, moral and
religious, to reveal all the mysteries of the Kingdom
of God. For from the vision of these things, that
Love was kindled, that spirit was created. Here was
a feeling the truth of whose judgments might stand
as sovereign criterion of the judgments of formal
reason : , ... ,
And like a man in wrath, the Heart
Stood up and answered : ' I have felt.'
It was not for our Divine Saviour to invent so
contradictory and unserviceable a thing as a final
and absolute philosophy and language, and therein
to embody exhaustively the inexhaustible meaning
of His Love. His revelation was no divine " Summa
Theologica " written with the finger of God ; it was
His own Spirit of Love which He bequeathed, with
all its implications, to His disciples. The theology
implied in that Love, the notions about God and
man and their relations on which it was fed, were
brought to expression but gradually, as occasion
demanded, through conflict with uncongenial doc
trinal systems. Thus we can see the loving spirit of
Christ correcting and reinterpreting all that was

LEX CREDENDI

harsh and unlovely in the religious teaching to which
the Apostles had been familiar. Similarly, through
out the ages, it acts in the same manner upon the
doctrinal materials presented to its criticism, and
thus slowly its own implications find fuller and more
adequate expression."
Proximately it may often seem to be theological
ingenuity that settles points of doctrine ; but ulti
mately it is the verdict of the Saints, i.e. of those
who possess some measure of the discerning spirit of
Christ, the true regula fidei. Well may the Church
honour and worship the sacred books of the Gospel
with her most solemn ceremonial, with lighted torch,
and waving censer, and tender cadence, and reveren
tial kiss. For these are the fontes Salvatoris, the
salutary wells, from which, time and again, she has
drawn living water in her days of spiritual drought
and famine. " Back to Christ, back to the Gospels,'
has ever been the watchword of Salvation in such
seasons ; back, that is, to the classical, normative
manifestation of that spirit by which all other spirits
have to be tried and criticized ; back to the very
thoughts and words of the Apostles, not as to a final
rule of thought and speech, but as to the rude vehicle
and embodiment of the first, fullest, and supremely
authentic manifestation of the spirit of Christ.
Every great forward movement in the Church's
life has been a sort of Gospel renaissance, a return
to some forgotten or perverted point of Apostolic
Christianity. So with the rendition of the Gospel of
poverty and simplicity through St. Francis of Assisi,
So, too, when the reforming Council of Trent insisted

*' THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST"

on the importance of the reading and preaching of
the Mass-Gospels to the people. Again it was through
meditation on the Gospels that Ignatius Loyola hoped
to revive and sustain the spirit of Christ in the
face of renascent paganism. It is on the same staff
that the present Pope leans for support in his work
of reform ; and perhaps while his other efforts are
thwarted in a thousand ways, the little society of
St. Geronimo with its cheap gospel-texts may be the
mouse that is to gnaw through the network of com-!
plications. Be this as it may, enough has been said
to show that the life, the prayer-life, the spirit-life,
whose furtherance is one of the great criterions of
doctrinal truth, is not something vague, subjective,
elusive; that it is the Life of Christ, the spirit of
Christ as revealed to us in the Gospels. Its closer
determination is not arbitrary, but will lead us to
a study of those priceless records.
v
CHRIST "ACCORDING TO THE SPIRIT"
To know Christ no longer after the flesh but after
the spirit (not perhaps in the Pauline metaphysical
sense, but more in that ethical sense of which his
conception was a symbol) means to believe in Him,
hope in Him, love Him as the embodiment of the
Divine Will ; of the cause for which He lived and
died ; of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. This
is the love He cares about when He asks men to
leave all " for My sake and the Gospel's." The holy
women loved Him, and the disciples for the most
part loved Him with a human love ; but of His

LEX CREDENDI

spirit, of the governing enthusiasm of His life, they
had no realization, and hence they could have no
adequate sympathy with it ; — nay, at times they were
jealous of it because it detached Him from all lower
ties and affections with which they fain would have
bound Him to themselves. It was another Self they
cared for than that which He had made His own
by the constitutive act of His Will. "Get thee
behind Me, Satan ! " — so He slights and repulses the
warm-hearted but purely human love of Peter. And
from the woman who clung to His feet to keep Him
on earth for ever He shook Himself free : " Hold Me
not, for I have not yet ascended to My Father " ;
and to His parents He says : " Why did you seek
Me? Did you not know that I must be about My
Father's business ? " It was to His spirit, or to Him
self only as embodying that spirit, that He strove to
win their love and loyalty. The fire with which He
burned and which He came to kindle was an enthu
siasm for certain ends and certain principles, for all
that was summed up in the conception of the kingship
of God in men's hearts, of the Divine Will realized
on earth as in heaven. This fire, or enthusiasm, is
" Christ according to the spirit " or " the spirit of
Christ." It is, indeed, the work of God immanent
in and pervading the workings of man's spirit, and
trying to bring forth His image therein. To be
permanently and absolutely the voluntary instrument
of this Divine enthusiasm ; to be so completely and
perfectly wielded by God's Will that the action and
effect must be called simply Divine, all separate
personality being merged indistinguishably in that

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 23
of the Infinite Spirit ; to be subject to it as the hand
or foot is to its owner — is the moral manifestation of
that mysterious hypostatic union which entitles Jesus
to be called the Son of God in an unique and in
communicable sense.
This is the ethical and religious value which finds
theological expression in the doctrine of the Incarna
tion, — a doctrine which recognizes the infinite gulf
that divides the ideal from its closest conceivable
approximation. " Christ according to the Spirit " is another name
for God as effecting that ideal in the human nature
of Jesus and making it purely an instrument of the
Divine operation ; and as striving to effect an
approximation to that ideal in each one of us.
" For My sake and the GospeFs " — this, then, is the
key to true " devotion," to that devotional spirit whose
furtherance is the end and therefore the criterion of
doctrinal truth. In his book on "The Characteristics
of True Devotion," Abbe Grou adds his voice to that
of all the great masters of the spiritual life in warn
ing us not only of the possibility, but of the existence
of spurious devotion to Christ. It is not enough to
love Christ in any way ; we must love Him precisely
as the representative and embodiment of the cause
for which He lived and died, the cause of the Gospel,
of the Kingdom of God. " It is the spirit that giveth
life ; the flesh profiteth nothing " : it is in the love of
Christ's spirit, not in that of His flesh that Eternal
Life is found. In our own experience what is more
distressing, more disappointing, than to be loved and
admired for qualities which we know we do not

24 LEX CREDENDI

possess ; or for those which we do not value, or even
dislike in ourselves ; and, on the contrary, to fail to
attract others to what we believe to be best in our
selves, or to interest them in our deepest interests ?
We are overwhelmed with affection that pleases us
as little as would a complimentary letter intended
for some one else but mistakenly directed to ourselves.
For all our seeming friends, we stand unloved and
alone. To a great extent this was the lot of Christ
upon earth. He was loved, but mostly with a human
love and "according to the flesh," not with the
love that meant a likeness of spirit. Is it other
wise now? Alas, they are not so many who love
Him at all, that we can well afford to stop and criti
cize their love and ask whether it be according to
the flesh or according to the spirit ; whether it be
a love of the Christ of the Gospel or of some other
Christ of their own fabrication or fancy. Yet ask
we must ; since identity of name is no guarantee for
identity of notion, and it is at least possible and
probable that our Christ may be largely fashioned in
our own image and likeness. In the Christ of the
Gospels the Church gives us an objective criterion of
all these subjective Christs of our own. In the
measure that the lines of that portraiture puzzle and
bewilder us, that they lack life, unity, and coherence,
we may suspect our own spirit of being at fault ; but
when we find them falling together, growing in
telligible, taking life and warmth and strength, then
we have a sort of inductive assurance that our spirit
is shaping rightly ; that it has the clue to the labyrinth.
Speaking of the visions of St. Gertrude and Blessed

"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 25
Margaret Mary, a devout Catholic lady recently re
marked to a priest : " They tell us about our Lord,
and without them one would know nothing of Him."
" Do you ever read the Gospels ? " asked the priest.
"Oh no, they are so dry." Here, no doubt, there
was devotion to Christ of a sort, but hardly of the
healthiest sort ; and one feels that it was fed, not by
the Gospel spirit in the said visions which alone con
stitutes their substantial value, but by what is acci
dental in them and secondary, by their poetic appeal
to the emotions, to the aesthetic need ; that it was
not worth much more than would be a delight in
the physical beauty of the Sacred Humanity. The
question is therefore not only : " Do I love Christ ? "
but also : " Why do I love Him? under what aspect ? "
Here as elsewhere mischief comes from a onesided
view of the nature of spirit-life ; from making senti
ment everything, or conduct everything, or mysti
cism everything ; from forgetting that they are all
sterilized when divorced from one another. If Christ
does not evoke and satisfy all our spiritual needs,
there is surely a flaw in our devotion somewhere ; it
cannot be the Christ of the Gospel, the spirit of
Christ, which draws us. vi
SENTIMENTALISM
There is plainly a very undesirable sort of senti-
mentalism which systematically builds up such an
image of Christ as will appeal most sensibly to the
emotions of the devotee, to love and pity; which
uses the belief in His Godhead to legitimate what

26 LEX CREDENDI

else would be the idolatrous worship of created
beauty, of " the fairest among the sons of men." It
does not rest altogether in the exterior. No truly
aesthetic emotion does that. But being so largely
aesthetic, it is very dependent on the imaginable as
on the medium in union with which alone such
beauty is revealed. It must gaze up into the eyes of
Christ ; it must hear His voice, read His smile, feel
His embrace, cling to His feet. It envies those who
knew Him " according to the flesh," when He walked
and talked with His disciples in Galilee :
How I wish that His hand had been placed on my head,
That His arm had been thrown around me,
And that I might have heard His kind voice when He said,
' Let the little ones come unto Me.'
Surely a most inevitable and natural wish. Which
of us would not wish to have seen the great and wise
of old, or is not interested in those features of their
personality which have nothing to do with their
greatness and wisdom, yet which gain a value for us
as associated with them ?
Sentimentalism does not lie in valuing these
dependent and associated interests, but in forgetting
the principal interest which is the source of their
value ; in concentrating upon them. Some will be
thrilled by a visit to Stratford-on-Avon who have
never thought or felt with Shakespeare in their lives.
It is equally possible to have a tender love of every
feature of Christ's Sacred Humanity, and yet never
to have thought or felt with the spirit of Christ, and
to find the Gospels " dry." For indeed they cater
but little for sentimentalism and leave us ignorant of

"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 27
those thousand details about which such devotion is
curious. Love of this kind is no doubt the love of
One who is believed to be God ; but is it the love of
God, the love of that which is Divine in Him ? The
nursing of such an affection by such means — that is,
by the selection just of such traits, real or imagined,
as will build up a Christ in the interests of devout
feeling — must necessarily lead to a continual falsifica
tion of the Christ of the Gospel. He came to " show
us the Father," — as it were, in the mirror of His own
life and spirit — so that between our love of the reflex
and our love of the Father there might be no difference
of motive, but that we might come to the Father
through Him.
As I have said, it seems a poor service to religion
to criticize any sort of devotion to Christ, seeing it
is all too scarce a commodity. Yet perhaps the
same criticism that makes us cast aside certain sorts
as spurious, unhealthy, or decadent, may show us a
great deal more of the best sort in quite unexpected
quarters ; in many of Tertullian's animae naturaliter
Christianae who, never having heard of Christ, are
Christians unawares. " All who have ever lived by
the Word," says Justin, " were Christians even though
they were reputed to be atheists, as was Socrates
among the Greeks." Moreover, since all direct
cultivation of feeling for its own sake leads to the
corruption and impoverishment of feeling, it can be
nothing but a service to devotion to point out this
danger and abuse. We have allowed that sentiment
is an element in true devotion ; that we cannot love
Christ fully unless it be with every part of our soul ;

28 LEX CREDENDI

but we have defined sentimentalism to be the error
which makes feeling the whole or the principal part
of devotion.
All this being clearly understood, there are certain
facts that we ought to face bravely and frankly, for
they have much to do with the present impotence of
Christianity. It is not without reason and justice that we speak
of woman as " the devout sex " : " Ora pro devoto
femineo sexu," says the anthem of Our Lady. It is
sometimes said that women are by temperament
more religious than men. This I think seems true,
partly because our religion has been so much shaped
by women that as a fact it has been largely adapted
to their temperament. I doubt if the same impres
sion would obtain in the East, where men think
meanly of woman's spiritual gifts and give her a
secondary, if any place at all, in the Kingdom of
Heaven. That the catalogued saints of the Church
are predominantly men does not really alter the fact
that, in proclaiming the spiritual equality of woman
with man, Christianity has made it possible for her
to play a preponderating part, not (overtly) in the
government, but in the religious life and devotion of
the Church. For naturally she has more leisure, and,
in some ways, more need for the services of religion.
Be the reasons what they may, the fact remains that,
from the first, devotion to Christ has been mostly the
devotion of women, religious or others; that the
Christ which it has created is to some extent a
woman's creation, and since demand determines
supply, the male preachers and exponents of that

"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 29
devotion have rather yielded to, than resisted or cor
rected, the tendency to feminize the presentment.
" Men drawn by women," says Sir Leslie Stephen,1
" even by the ablest, are never quite of the masculine
gender. They may indeed be admirable portraits, but
still portraits drawn from the outside." This merely
means that likeness and sympathy are the condition
and measure of understanding. In the fulness of
Christ's humanity there is more than all that fulfils
the two ideals of manhood, the woman's and the
man's ; but these ideals are different and it is the
woman's ideal that prevails most widely in the pulpit,
in religious art, in devotional language and literature.
And the result is that the Christ so presented fails to
appeal to, if it does not somewhat repel, men of the
masculine type, to whom action means more and
sentiment less than it does to the feminine type.
Were we to make a holocaust of nine-tenths of our
pious pictures and images, it might be symbolic of
the reform needed in this matter. We owe much, no
doubt, to the visions of St. Bridget, St. Gertrude,
B. Margaret Mary, Sister Emmerich, and others ;
but on the whole the spiritual gain has been for
women rather than for men ; and we cannot help
suspecting that male visionaries — if there had been
truly such — would have presented the " perfect man "
to us under a somewhat " drier " aspect, in which case
we might have been spared the coarse and blas
phemous revolt of the Nietzsche school in favour of
the so-called " Superman " ( Uebermensch) and against
the supposed Christian ideal of diluted manhood.
* " George Eliot," p. 74.

30 LEX CREDENDI

The remedy against all sentimentalism of this sort
is to be sought in a return to the Gospels, in an
endeavour to get at the integral spirit of Christ as it
lives for us there, whole and concrete, not split up
into factors. Only when we understand and feel
with that which was the central interest of His life,
that sovereign end with which He identified himself,
which was the core of His moral personality and
spirit ; only when we love that in Him to which He
most wanted to win our love, and for which alone He
cared to be loved, — only then is our loving interest
in all other things that concern Him a pure and
wholly acceptable sentiment, an outflow or re
dundancy of that central and substantial devotion to
the Divinity revealed in Him. " Weep not for Me,"
He says to the women on His way to Calvary, " but
weep for yourselves and your children." Their tears
were those of womanly pity for the outward and
obvious aspects of the tragedy, but of its inwardness
they knew nothing. Their love was for Him, yet not
for His central Self or Spirit, which they could not
understand. We may stand by His Cross, enter by
force of keen imagination into all His pangs and
tortures ; we may mourn, as a friend for a friend, or
as a woman over her first-born, for the torn and
bleeding God, and yet lack the true key to the
meaning of His Passion and waste ourselves in
sentimentality. The true sentiment of pity must
flow not from any sort of love of Him who suffers,
but from that sort which He most desires. We do
not mean to disparage the lesser love, or the senti
ment which it genders ; but, as we have said, to

"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 31
emphasize the danger of resting in it, of cultivating
it as an end in itself, of confounding with the love
of God as God, the love of One who is God. The
genuine and discerning love of Christ " according to
the spirit" will necessarily foster and perfect our
sentiment and deliver us from all danger of senti
mentalism. VII
" MYSTICALITY "
If, on the whole, sentimentalism is a devotion to
Christ " after the flesh " — a shaft which misses what
is the very heart and centre of the matter and sticks
fast in what is merely adjacent — there is another sort
of devotion more spiritual, more intellectual, which
is equally ill-aimed and leads to analogous perver
sions for analogous reasons : a sort of false mysticism
which, for convenience, we may call " mysticality."
As before, the error comes from separating aspects
that should be organically inseparable. The integral
Christ satisfies at once our emotional, our moral, and
our mystical needs. A Christ that satisfies but one
or two of these needs is a divided, a perverted Christ ;
and the spirituality fed on such a Christ is a false
spirituality, either unpractical or heartless or rational
istic or dreamy or metaphysical.
At all times man has experienced certain feelings
of awe and reverence in the face of the immensities
and eternities in the midst of which he and his little
world are afloat. He is ever straining his eyes through
the nearer gloom that deepens away into that im
penetrable darkness whence all things come and
whither they return ; ever seeking to understand and

32 LEX CREDENDI

adapt himself to that All which lies beyond and ex
plains the nearer world of his clear vision. Every
sense of contact with that mysterious Beyond lifts
him above earth and out of himself; and though his
native materialism of thought and desire drag him
down again and again, yet his restlessness and dis
content with earth are incurable. Were it but a need
of his intellect, we might call it his " metaphysical
need " ; but it is primarily a need of his heart which
earth is too small to satisfy, and, as such, let us call
it his " mystical need," — >the need whose perverse
cultivation leads to " mysticality."
In old-world thought the connexion between re
ligion and morality was obscure. Sometimes religion
was but a department of morality, — our duty toward
God ; at other times morality was, in comparison
with observances and forms of worship, only a sub
ordinate part of religion — the religious sense fed
itself almost exclusively on the thought of the Beyond
without reference to the moral life. It was Chris
tianity with its conception of God as subsistent
righteousness, its recognition of the voice of con
science as the voice of God, that first revealed the
two interests — the religious and the moral — as identi
cal, and thereby gave a mystical depth to morality, 1
and a moral earnestness to religion, and brought this
world and the Beyond, and our lives in reference to
both, into a coherent unity. Abortive attempts in
the direction of this identification are traceable in the
Orphic mysteries; but neither the ethical nor the
religious elements were there sufficiently purified to
reveal the full secret of their sympathy and to admit

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 33
of their final and permanent synthesis. In the
Hellenic world, in which Gentile Christianity first
took shape and with whose spirit the spirit of Christ
entered into a relation of mutual permeation, strug
gling to leaven it and transform it to its own nature,
religion in its highest and, to Christianity, most con
genial developments was in the main mysticism, not
to say " mysticality." Its purest though subsequent
culmination is associated with the name of the neo-
Platonist Plotinus. However over-speculative and
intellectualist, however extravagant in its dualistic
contempt of the body as the antagonist rather than
the complement of the spirit, there was much in
this mysticism for Christianity to work upon. At
first sight there might seem to be little kinship between
a religion of the crowds, of the poor and simple,
a religion altogether practical and concrete, and one
that was so largely philosophical and abstract, the
monopoly of a small intellectual aristocracy, whose
ideal attainment was mental ecstasy rather than
moral devotion. Yet this pursuit of intellectual
ecstasy, this audacious effort to push behind the veil
of the visible and to live a superhuman life entailed
a contempt of this world and the flesh, an aspiration
after higher things, a hunger and thirst after righteous
ness with which Christianity could not but sympathize,
— Christianity with its own doctrine of "the two
ways," of the flesh and the spirit, of death and life ;
with its call from earth to heaven ; with its crowds of
Saints, Martyrs, and Confessors who lived the exalted
life that philosophers but dreamed of.
This " way of life " was to a great extent co^aM^SrjP
d

34 LEX CREDENDI
ground ; but whereas with the Greek it was merely
the condition of the life of intellectual contempla
tion and ecstasy, something secondary and deduced,
with the Christian it was primary, the very substance
of his religion, of eternal life. For him Christ was
the Truth in an altogether practical sense; "the
Way, the Truth, and the Life," were synonyms. And
so far his doctrine of the Cross was " to the Greeks
foolishness." They wanted the philosophy of the
matter. They knew by experience that contempla
tive ecstasy depended partly on asceticism and the
mortification of the flesh ; that this disordering of
the body was the condition of those unnatural mental
states which they assumed to be supernatural. But
the Christian had no such motive for his mortification
and unworldliness, which were dictated merely by
the exigencies of absolute self-devotion to the service
of God and man, or else by a belief in a speedy
world-catastrophe that cancelled a number of other
wise rational human interests.
Yet the Christian's indifference to theory and
philosophy could not hinder the fact that his way of
life and his spirit necessarily involved a theory of
God and man, of time and eternity, of here and here
after, — a theory that could not but become explicit
as soon as reflection set to work. In so far as " the
Way" was common to Christian and philosopher, the
theory of that Way was bound to have many points
of contact on both sides; and it was just here —
namely, in regard to its intellectual implications —
that Christianity blended with Hellenic mysticism,
each giving to and receiving from the other. For the

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" \ 35
sake of the Greek, Christianity now became interested
in its own implicit theology and mysticism and
brought them to expression in the language of philo
sophy. But while acknowledging the due claims of
the mystical and intellectual interest, Christianity
fought hard against the excesses of intellectualism
and " mysticality." If religion was not all conduct,
so neither was it all mysticism. Already in the New
Testament, in the writings of St. John and St. Paul,
we see this accommodation of Christianity and
Hellenism in process ; on one side, the full acknow
ledgment of the mystical interest, on the other,
the emphatic protest against its usurpations. For
St. John, Love is the Truth, the true Gnosis, the
true Light, the true Life. For St. Paul Charity,
the spirit of Christ, is above all mystical gifts and
graces, above visions and ecstasies and prophecies
and miracles and intuitions. These have their place,
but it is a secondary and dependent one. Life is
something far greater and fuller.
The Greek then was inclined to be more interested
in Christology than in Christ ; in the metaphysics of
the Spirit than in the fruits of the Spirit ; in the
theory of life than in living. And his devotion was
apt to run into mysticality ; to feed itself too exclu
sively on mysteries, to revel in the twilight outside
the little sphere of our clear intelligence and even to
tempt the further darkness. When St. John tells
him that Jesus is the Logos, the Reason, the Truth, he
at once acknowledges the rights of his mysticism and
repudiates its usurpations : " You seek a false Logos
for your mind alone : here is the true Logos for your

36 LEX CREDENDI

heart as well. You seek a false light that shines
only for an intellectual ilite ; here is the true Light
that enlighteneth every man that cometh into the
world." Let the Greek look first to the plenitude of
the spirit-life, to the Kingdom of God and His
righteousness, and all his mystical needs would be
inclusively satisfied. For, the mysterious relation
ship of Christ to the Father and through the Father
to the world and mankind, was wrapped up and im
plicated in the Way of Life which He taught us,
and was the secret of the inexhaustible depth that
distinguished it from mere moralism or practicality.
Not only to unwrap it, but to separate it from the
living whole, to make it the central and even the
sole interest of the Gospel, this was the danger for
Greek Christianity which had to be met by a system
of concessions and limitations.
If we are told that " God is a spirit," this is doubt
less a metaphysical affirmation, a negation of material
istic notions of the Divine Substance which would
confine the Deity to houses made with hands, to
Jerusalem or to Mount Gerizim. But the real interest
of the Evangelist is not in the metaphysical state
ment, but in the ethical and practical truth of which
it is the implication : " They that worship Him must
worship Him in spirit and in truth." For him the
rule of prayer and life is the rule of doctrine and
belief. Let the life and the worship be purified from
materialism, and doctrinal purity will look after
itself. His own interest, unlike the Greek's, was less
in the metaphysical spirituality of God's nature than
in the ethical manifestations of that nature in man,

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 37
in the spirit of holiness, in the fruits and gifts of the
Spirit, in grace and charity. God is a "spirit" because
God is Love. And so, too, while not forbidding the
Greek to exercise his intellect and feed his religious
awe on the mystery of Christ's metaphysical relation
ship to the Father and to the world, the Gospel calls
him back continually to the great life-interest on
which this mere mind-interest is wholly dependent,
back to the life and the ethical spirit of Christ as
the manifestation of the Father's love and goodness,
as the Word or Expression of the Divine character
and will in human terms ; as a truth to be lived and
not merely contemplated. " Mysticality " just inverts
this order of dependence. It concentrates the soul
wholly or principally on the metaphysics of Christ's
being, and not on that aspect of it on which He
wishes us chiefly to concentrate ourselves, — not on
His life, His spirit, His way. It leads us to adore
Him as the incarnation of the First Cause, as the
Alpha and Omega of creation, and feed our mystic
appetite on our contact through Him with the Eternal
and the Infinite. So far as it stops here it makes
us descend from the fulness of Christianity, with its
identification of Godhead with Goodness, to the
level of those earlier religions for which God was
Power rather than Righteousness.
There is a latent mysticism involved in the Christian
" Way of Life " and organically inseparable from it.
If we separate it from that living unity, we tear it
from its root and source of vitality, and are com
pelled to nourish it from the turbid streams of philo
sophical speculation. We end with what is a devotion

38 LEX CREDENDI

to Christ no doubt ; and in one sense a devotion
to Christ "after the spirit" rather than "after the
flesh " ; and so far it is an advance on mere senti
mentalism. But if we take " spirit " in the religious
and moral sense, and not in the metaphysical sense,
then we must reckon " mysticality " to be a devotion
to Christ "after the flesh"; for it is not a devotion to
Him formally as to the embodiment of the Gospel,
of the Divine Will, of the Cause of God on earth ;
nor does it spring from such a devotion, but rests in
the metaphysical mystery of His being as though
this were the substance of His teaching.
Devotion of this kind will perhaps find food in
a onesided reading of the Fourth Gospel and of parts
of St. Paul. But it will find the Synoptics " dry " ;
yet in truth its Christ is as little the Christ of St. John
as it is the Christ of St. Mark.
The correction for mysticality, as for sentimentality,
is to be found in a return to the integral spirit of
Jesus that still lives for us in the evangelical records,
a spirit that satisfies all our needs and delivers us
from the false pieties that are fostered by its dis
memberment. He who dissolves Christ is anti-Christ.
VIII
" PRACTICALITY "
The third error, which I will call Practicality, is so
much the more dangerous because of its resemblance
to the truth. Nevertheless it is as much a dividing
of Christ and of His spirit as the other two. It is
a far more prevalent error in these days of practical,
utilitarian, common-sense Christianity, and in a work-

"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 39
shop atmosphere little congenial either to sentiment
or to mysticism. It has not a more plausible or able
exponent than Matthew Arnold. He partitions life
between conduct, science, and art, — a division which
is, at root, almost identical with that which we are
following. Conduct, he insists with somewhat weari
some iteration, occupies exactly three-quarters of
life ; art and science each one-eighth. Three-quarters
of conduct, plus one-eighth of art, plus one-eighth of
science, equals life. Right conduct is righteousness.
Instead of God we are given a " Not-Ourselves that
makes for righteousness." This " Not-Ourselves " is,
then, concerned about three-quarters of our spirit-
life, about conduct. It is indifferent to the remaining
quarter, — to science and art; it does not make for
truth or for the beautiful.
Now this is to divide the spirit with a hatchet ;
and it is hard to conceive how one to whom intel
lectual and artistic truth meant so much, could have
so sundered these interests from that of righteousness
or failed to see their organic and indissoluble con
nexion. A less thoughtful person, however, might
easily be excused. For we certainly see that very
good people are often quite indifferent to intellectual
and aesthetic truth ; while the devotees of these latter
are often as indifferent to truth of conduct. But
Matthew Arnold ought to have known that these
several indifferences, if complete and deliberate, are
eventually fatal to the favoured interest. As a fact,
they are never complete and deliberate ; no good
man says: "Knowledge does not matter"; "Art
does not matter " ; nor is any artist or thinker wholly

40 LEX CREDENDI

indifferent to conduct. It is a question of imperfect
balance, of undue emphasis.
Instead of "the Not-Ourselves that makes for
righteousness" (i.e. for right conduct), let us rather say
"that makes for truth — truth in conduct, truth in
thought, truth in feeling" — that is, for the truth of
the whole spirit-life of man, for its progressive corre
spondence to the life of the Eternal Spirit. By the
time we have made this amendment, we have got
back from Matthew Arnold's divinity to that of the
Fourth Gospel : " God is a spirit, and they that
worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in
truth." We have given to the "Not-Ourselves" the
character of that which it "makes for," — the pleni
tude and perfection of spirit-life. We cannot give
it less. Conduct is not three-quarters, but the whole of
life; for there is a conduct of the mind and a con
duct of the feelings. Conduct, thought, and feeling
are each the whole of life, — three dimensions of the
same thing ; there is no " human act," no movement
of the spirit-life, into which they do not all enter.
When we say, " Faith without works is dead," we
mean that it is not really faith at all ; that intuition
and feeling necessarily embody themselves in will ;
that the spirit cannot really apprehend a situation
without taking some practical attitude toward it.
So, too, works without faith are dead, — the mere
corpse of conduct. If they are true works, true
actions of the spirit, they are necessarily an expres
sion of faith, — of intuition and feeling ; they are
faith viewed from another end.

"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 41
What favours "practicality" is the fact that we
only see men's good works, but do not see their
faith ; that for social utility and beneficence it matters
more (immediately, not ultimately) what men do
than what they feel or mean. Thus, by a false
abstraction, conduct comes to be cut off from the unity
and fulness of spirit-life ; Christ comes to be regarded
as the incarnation of right conduct in this narrow
sense; and the value is laid on the outward mani
festation rather than on the immanent spiritual reality
of His righteousness. We have already said that in
Christianity for the first time the interests of man's
mystical sense (for which earlier types of religion
catered almost exclusively) and those of his moral
sense were clearly recognized as identical, inasmuch
as the Will of God and Righteousness and Truth
and Love were proclaimed to be the same thing.
We said that what we called " mysticality," or false
mysticism, partly ignored this identity and was so
far a reversion to a lower type of religion. It is
equally plain that "practicality" also ignores the
said identity ; that it is blind to the mystical depth
of Righteousness and of Divine Love, to their latent
implications of a world of supernatural reality beyond
the little sphere of our clear vision, and separated
from it by that band of twilight in which the mystic
loves to linger. " Practicality " is right in affirming
the great and primary importance of conduct as
a test of spiritual reality, as a criterion of faith and
doctrine. The "fruits" to which Christ appealed
were " good works " that men could see. But there
is a mere surface seeing, and there is a spiritual dis-

42 LEX CREDENDI

cernment that leaps from the outward expression
to its true inward significance, that sees the faith
through and in the works.
It is with this vision that we must come to the
Gospels if we would get at the spirit of Christ in its
fulness and solidity, and not merely recognize one or
other of its dimensions. It is, however, through the
conduct-dimension that we are to get at the other
two, and so to grasp the whole. Passing thus from
the conduct-aspect to the fulness of that spirit-life of
which it is a partial manifestation, we shall escape
from that mere "moralism" or "practicality" which
Newman has so justly criticized is his three essays
on " Rationalism in Religion." On the other hand,
we shall be saved from a false, abstract, merely philo
sophical mysticism or " mysticality," if we contem
plate the being of Christ not apart from, but only in
and through, the life in which He has revealed it to
us ; if we feed our mystical appetite solely on the
mysteries latent and implied in His spirit and in His
redeeming love. Thus, too, we shall find the measure
and criterion of healthy religious feeling or sentiment,
and protect ourselves against a fruitless sentiment
ality. In fine, we shall learn to love in Christ just what
He wanted us to love ; to feel about Him just what
He wanted us to feel ; to know about Him just what
He wanted us to know. Our Christ will not be
a Christ of our own, a maimed or divided Christ,
a Christ "after the flesh"; but the true Christ,
Christ "after the spirit."

"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 43
IX
"CARITAS DEI"
Sentimentality, Mysticality, Practicality, — none of
them exists pure and unalloyed in the soul of any
worshipper and follower of Christ. Each stands for
an exaggeration of one of the elements of true
devotion and a consequent enfeeblement of the
other elements. The right adjustment or blending
of all three is called, in the New Testament, " Love "
or " Charity " ; that Charity which St. Paul says is
a " more excellent way," a greater gift than all other
gifts or sharings of the spirit of Christ, because it in
cludes and overpasses them all, and because without
it, and except as flowing from it, they are nothing
worth ; better than the understanding of mysteries
and of all knowledge; better than prophecy and
miracle-working and speaking with tongues ; better
than giving all one's goods to feed the poor, or
giving one's body to be burned. This Charity is
" shed abroad in our hearts " by the Spirit of Holi
ness which is given to us ; nay, it is that same Holy
Spirit dwelling in us ; it is God Himself, for "God is
Charity." Here, indeed, is food for mysticism; for we are
dealing with relationships between the divine and
human which necessarily defy, and so will always
defy, definition or accurate expression. If we seize
one-half of the truth, we have to let go the other ;
and whether we hold them together or separate them
we fall into some contradiction. We are safest when
we leave metaphysics, with its problems of sameness

44 LEX CREDENDI

and otherness ; and instead of considering its subject
or agent, simply consider the life itself, the process,
the love. This process of living and loving we can
clearly characterize as divine or human, as super
natural or natural, according as man lends or refuses
himself to be the perfect instrument of the Divine
Will, the flawless mirror of the Divine Goodness —
though we know that "instruments" and "mirrors"
must be utterly inadequate symbols of the ineffable
metaphysical relationship between God and the
soul. Unfortunately these words " Love " and " Charity "
have been " soiled with all ignoble use." The former
is overloaded with sentimental and mystical associa
tions; the latter has lost all depth and tenderness
through the loveless deeds that are done in its name,
and stands at best for the business of philanthropy.
No name will safeguard the idea, for the meanings
of words are continually corrupted. Even if, to
make sure, we call it "Christliness" or the "spirit
of Christ," this will not avail, unless our conception
of Christ's spirit be kept sane and well balanced by
a persistent pondering of the Gospels ; for we are all
inclined to some sort of characteristic onesidedness
in our idea of Christ ; we shape Him, directly
or indirectly, according to our own image and like
ness. If then we want to determine what that spiritual life
is whose development and increase in ourselves and
others is the end and chief criterion of religious truth,
we must turn to the Gospels, we must study it in Him
" of whose fulness we have all received and grace for

"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 45
grace." All the apparatus of religious institutions
and teachings is but the channel through which the
living water flows from His soul into ours to produce
in us the fruits of the same spirit. The apparatus is
justified if the results correspond.
It will be reasonably objected that " the eye sees
only what it brings with itself the power of seeing " ;
that each will read his own Christ first into the Gos
pels and then out of them. In a book called " Jesus
von Nazareth im XIX Jahrhundert," H. Weinel has
shown us how variously and contradictorily the Gos
pel has been read in the last century ; how many
conflicting causes, philosophies, and interests have
claimed Jesus for their master and exponent.
Against such scepticism, which would rob the
Gospels of all objective meaning, let it be noticed
that the diversity of the said views is founded rather
on the actual sayings and doings of Christ than on
the inward spirit embodied in them, about which
there is little explicit interest ; that they are reached
by reasoning from them rather than by feeling with
them ; by looking to their logical consequences rather
than to their inspiration ; by taking them as isolated
oracles rather than as diverse manifestations of one
and the same spirit. This is a fallacy of " literalism "
to which we shall return presently.
Secondly, the Gospel is not of " private interpreta
tion" any more than are the great master-works
of art. In these the uneducated eye or ear discerns
little ; praises and blames the wrong things ; misses
the unity, the spirit, of the whole. Yet this is no
plea for scepticism and relativity. The artistic truth

46 LEX CREDENDI
is there, and those who would reach it must study to
correct their faulty vision till the common judgment
of the discerning becomes their own, not by forced
obedience to authority, but by a personal conviction
"' of sin and of righteousness," i.e. by an awakening
from darkness to light, from " dryness '' to refresh
ment. The first impressions of the Gospel will be
as various and different as the minds impressed. But
we can trust to its power as an instrument of spiritual
education ; the longer it is pondered, the more it will
shape those various minds to its own truth and bring
them toward a perfect agreement with one another.
We do not come to the Gospels spiritually blind or
wholly untaught. We have imbibed something of
the Christian tradition around us ; we know what
others have found there before us ; and now we come
to verify this collective experience of others for our
selves, to make it from a hearsay into a living ex
perience of our own. As long as we find the study
" dry," the fault is in ourselves. For this we have the
assurance of those millions to whom it has been
"a fount of water springing up unto everlasting
life." But we should certainly expose ourselves to grave
misunderstanding did we not say a word against
what we may call the fallacy of " New Testament
Christianity." When we say " Back to the Gospels,"
we do not mean back to a phase of Christianity that
cannot and ought not ever to return ; what we do
mean we shall consider in a separate section.

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 47

X
"NEW TESTAMENT CHRISTIANITY"
So-called "New Testament Christianity" is purely
and blindly reactionary ; it is a denial of all flexi
bility and vitality in the religion of Christ. Its
perfect realization were only possible if we could
miraculously change ourselves back into the mental
a"hd social conditions of Palestine two thousand years
ago. No one pretends that the perfect imitation of
Christ requires that we should all be carpenters, or
that we should all live at Nazareth ; yet this is
really implied in the principle of so-called New
Testament Christianity. Plainly, it is the spirit of
Christ which we have to imitate, though the matter
upon which, and the conditions under which, we
have to work are wholly different from His. For the
discerning, the spirit of the master-artist lives whole
and entire in the least and rudest of his efforts, and
can be gathered still more easily from a collection
and comparison of them all. But to canonize the
vehicle together with the spirit which it conveys, to
copy his works slavishly and mechanically, were to
make a tyrant of a teacher, and to bring the spirit
under the bondage of the letter.
What we have to study in the New Testament is
the spirit of Christ at work upon matters which
often concern us very indirectly or not at all. The
religious errors He combated were not those of our
day ; the scribes, lawyers, Pharisees, and Sadducees,
with all their controversies and causes, are only
analogously represented in modern times. The

48 LEX CREDENDI

more closely and critically they are studied in the
light of the past, the more evident is the measureless
gulf that divides their mind and sentiment from ours.
We have for so long read the Jewish Scriptures
through our Gentile glasses that we falsely credit
ourselves with understanding the Judaism of Christ's
day far more than is really possible. The needs and
social condition of the crowds to which our Lord
ministered were so unlike those of our crowds that
a mechanical imitation of His methods is full of
danger. And so in other matters. This is largely
forgotten by those who turn to the Gospels for guid
ance in intellectual, social, and political matters, for
getting that most of what are called "questions of
the day " could not have been formulated or under
stood in Judaea two thousand years ago ; that surface-
analogies, however striking, are profoundly dangerous
and misleading. The Christianity of the New Testa
ment, the first embodiment in which the spirit of
Christ manifested itself, was necessarily shaped and
framed either in accordance with, or in opposition to,
conditions which have vanished for ever. To deny
the equal right of later and fuller manifestations, to
hold us back to the first as to an iron rule, would be to
nail Christ hand and foot to another Cross, to bury
Him in the tomb of the past without hope of resur
rection. What makes New Testament Christianity in some
sense classical and normative is that it exemplifies.
for us the working of Christ's spirit in its purest
form and at its greatest intensity, — albeit under con
ditions that have largely ceased to obtain. However

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 49
different the matter subjected to its influence, yet the
tendencies of that spirit, the mode of treatment, are
always the same. It is through the modification
produced by the Gospel-spirit in its environment,
through its selections, repulsions, attractions, that its
character is disclosed to us, and its implications are
made explicit. To have expressed all those inex
haustible implications at once and abruptly ; to have
anticipated the final results of an endless process of
unfolding; to have made an absolute revelation in
an absolute language without reference to the mental
and moral capacity of any age or people, would have
been utterly futile, had it not also been intrinsically
impossible. In a sense the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ,
was itself the Revelation, the depositum fidei ; nor is
the manner in which doctrines, systems, and institu
tions lie latent and implicit in a spirit or sentiment
at all unfamiliar to us. We commonly reprove a
man for letting his feeling bias his judgment or
blindly control his conduct. That it does so, means
that the feeling is full of implicit judgments and
practical consequences that are first brought to light
by their conflict with the judgments of reason. My
dislike of a man requires for its justification that
a certain prejudiced reading of his character and
conduct should be true ; that my action toward him
should be hostile ; and so forth. If this is a dis
advantage when my feeling is wrong and untrue, it
is a great advantage when my feeling is right and
true, when it is in touch with fact and reality, when
it is the feeling of a spirit that is rightly and healthily

50 LEX CREDENDI

adjusted in relation to God and man. Thus the
" charity that thinketh no evil " is a divine and true
feeling, and the construction it puts on things and the
direction it gives to conduct (seemingly, but not
really, a priori) is far truer than the dictates of mere
reason and calculation ; for it is begotten by the im
mediate contact of the soul with God, who is the
root of all reality.
And of this charity, Christ's spirit is the pleni
tude; and what we see in the Gospels is just this
spirit of Christ working everywhere in its own
interests ; in its own justification ; broadening
what was narrow ; deepening what was shallow ;
softening what was harsh ; raising what was low
in the religious, moral, and social ideas and institu
tions of our Lord's own day and people. We see
it selecting, attracting, repelling, according to its
own exigencies ; slowly leavening Judaism and trans
forming it to a vehicle of self-expression ; moulding
its conceptions, its language, its symbolism, its tradi
tions to its own use and service.
Notably in St. Paul the implications of this spirit
were brought to light in their opposition to the un-
catholic and exclusive elements of Judaism, whose
limits of adaptability were thus at last recognized as
too narrow to admit of a full and free expression of
Christianity. With the speedy accretion of Gentile
multitudes to the little flock of Christianized Jews,
the leavening process was for the moment thrown
back to begin again on a vastly larger scale and in
an entirely different, in many ways more congenial,
medium. For the strictly Judaic elements of New

"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 51
Testament Christianity, even in its Pauline form, the
Graeco-Roman religion, or religions, of the Empire
had little affinity or power of assimilation ; but they
had much of their own that lent itself to a richer
and more flexible manifestation of the spirit of
Christ and of all that distinguished Christianity from
Judaism. It was the spirit, rather than the body, of
New Testament Christianity that passed over to the
Gentiles, and began there its work of leavening that
great syncretism of all the religions of the Empire
into a vast catholic, world-embracing Church. Much
that was a scandal to the Jew was congenial to the
Gentile. The notions of a plurality of Divine persons ;
of an incarnate God ; of a theotokos ; of a deity
slain and risen ; of sacraments and mysteries ; of
asceticism, world-flight, and consecrated virginity, —
all these notions and the catholic idea itself were
familiar to him. The Christian spirit had only to
correct and spiritualize what was gross and super
stitious in these conceptions, to tolerate what was
indifferent, to supplement and utilize what was good.
And this process by which the spirit of Christ slowly
shapes for itself a body and organism out of the
materials offered to it by the philosophies, beliefs,
institutions, traditions of those who come under its
influence is unending. If its New Testament em
bodiment is in some sense its most vigorous and
purest expression, yet it is far from being its com
plete expression. For this we must wait till the last
page of its history is written. And through those
pages there are scattered other manifestations of it
which have become in a secondary sense classical

J2 LEX CREDENDI

and universally authoritative for all subsequent times,
— institutions and developments which have been
proved and accepted by the experience of all as
genuine " explicitations " of the spirit. It is the
whole body of these that constitutes Catholic Chris
tianity, — a body whose parts are not all, for our
minds, dialectically linked together or deducible
from one another, however lawfully we may, post
factum, strive to detect such a unity. Their con
nexion is that of the various works of some great
master-artist which in all their diversity of theme
and circumstance exhibit and transmit one and the
same spirit, and are valued solely on that account.
We see then at once the truth and the fallacy of
" New Testament Christianity"; and how false and
thin a conception of Christ he would have who,
without distinguishing the spirit from its embodi
ment, should take the religion of the Synoptics or
even of St. John or St. Paul as the sole and only
legitimate expression of Christianity to be slavishly
imitated by all future ages, to be a fetter on all
progress and lawful variation. This has been the
mistake of all puritanic reforms inside and outside
the Church whose cry was '' Back to the Gospel " or
" to the Bible." Certainly, if we compare St. Francis
of Assisi with a typical Puritan or Bible-Christian,
we shall find that the latter thinks, speaks, and con
ducts himself generally (or a'least strives to do so)
much more in accordance with the New Testament
embodiment of Christianity; but who does not feel
that, for all the palpable differences that exist
between the external religion of the first and the

"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 53
thirteenth centuries, St. Francis' spirit is im
measurably truer to the spirit of Him whose con
sciousness of Divine Sonship lit up the whole world
for Him with a joy that no sorrow could quench,
whose delight was to be with the lilies of the field,
with the birds of the air, with little children and with
the sons of men ? In one case we have a conscious
imitation of a past manifestation of the spirit, in the
other a new and original manifestation of the same
spirit ; the Puritan copies an ancient masterpiece, St.
Francis is inspired by it to yield new results.
New Testament Christianity errs in attempting to
identify the Gospel exclusively with one of its infinite
manifestations ; in forgetting that the spirit of Christ
is " one, manifold, subtle, more active than all active
things, and reaching everywhere because of its
purity." If this is an error, yet it is perhaps a greater error
to speak of a " Christianity pure and simple," as if
we could separate the spirit from each and all of its
embodiments and study it apart. For we do not
know it in itself at all, but only in its workings ; nor
can we apprehend it or speak of it except in terms
of its effects. Therefore what we must study in the
Gospels is precisely the conflict between Christ and
His surroundings ; between His spirit of love and
the ideas, beliefs, traditions, and institutions of His
people and country. We must try to see just where
these were congenial and were offensive to His spirit ;
to notice the way in which He modified, interpreted,
corrected, or supplemented them. In a word, we
must watch His spirit in movement and at work ;

54 LEX CREDENDI

and not simply contemplate the work done as if it
were a theme for mechanical copying. What we
want to get at is the Master's secret, His creative
power. XI
HOLINESS AND TRUTH
To realize that the Spirit of God guides the Church
first into holiness and through holiness to truth ; that
the Holy Ghost precisely as holy, and as the author
of holiness, is the Spirit of Truth, is to cut away the
ground of one of the commonest attacks on the
whole idea of doctrinal authority. When we say,
"first holiness and then truth," we are speaking of the
truth of explicit understanding which is attained by
after-reflection on that truth which is always implicit
in holiness and quite inseparable from it ; we mean
the truth of the Credo already latent from the first,
but only gradually drawn forth from the Pater noster,
— the veriti ' pense"e as distinct from the verite" ve"cue.
We hold that the Church is " infallible " in doctrine,
but we deny that she is impeccable in conduct ; we
affirm that Holiness is one of her notes ; and we
explain it by saying : " She teaches a holy doctrine
and offers to all the means of holiness and is dis
tinguished by the eminent holiness of her children."
Were we speaking of the Invisible Church, that
" Sancta Ecclesia Catholica " which is identical with
the " Communio Sanctorum," with the assembly of
the Just in heaven and of the Just on earth, whether
inside or outside the pale, we should need no qualifi
cation. That Church is holy, simply because all its
members are holy. But plainly we speak of the

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 55
Visible Church, the sacrament, symbol, and instru
ment of the Invisible, the bodily organism through
which its life is normally and principally manifested
and sustained ; we speak of that field in which tares
and wheat grow together till the harvest ; of the net
containing all manner of fishes, good and bad ; of
the Church which moral corruption has assailed at
all times with varying degrees of success ; whose
very life, like that of our own bodies, is a continual
fight with death, an endless process of self-repair and
self-reform which may not be interrupted without
disaster. The notion of a visible institution whose
members shall all be saints is little short of a contra
diction, since sanctity is a secret of the heart known
to God alone. From the days of Montanus down,
all attempts to realize that notion have issued in like
results. Pharisaic pride, hypocrisy, and imposture
are inevitable wherever external status is supposed
to be a sure guarantee of inward worth, or of any
thing more than a belief in an ideal. If we call
ourselves Christians, it should rather be to condemn
ourselves than to approve ourselves.
The Visible Church is the vessel that contains the
leaven and the dough, and so brings the latter under
the influence of the former. To separate the one
from the other, to assess their ever-varying propor
tions, is impossible. To call oneself a Catholic, only
means that one freely subjects oneself to be leavened
by the secret influences of the living part of the
Visible Church, — for there is always a dead part and
a living, however difficult it be to distinguish them
clearly.

56 LEX CREDENDI

The attack above mentioned is founded on the
manifest ethical corruption to which the Visible
Church is subject. Is it likely, we are asked, that
Christ, who certainly did not guarantee ethical
infallibility or sinlessness, should have guaranteed
doctrinal infallibility to the Church and its officials ?
Is not the former a far deeper need? She is His
Vicar and representative ; why does she not represent
Him in this ? It was by example that He Himself
taught and guided men ; not by doctrinal decisions :
" Learn of Me," He says, not because I am a theologian,
but " because I am meek and lowly of heart " ; and
to His Apostles He says : " Let your light so shine
before men, that they may see your good works." It
was as an example of life that He was the Light of
the world, a City set on a hill, a Good Shepherd who
goes before the sheep ; and the Apostles were to
carry on the same work by the same method. This
surely is what is meant by the promise of an abiding
Spirit of Holiness, and by saying : " As the living
Father hath sent Me, so send I you " ; " He that
heareth you heareth Me." His disciples are not the
learned scholars of a rabbi, but those who " take up
their cross and follow Him." When He prays that
His disciples " may all be one, that the world may
believe that Thou hast sent Me," the unity is surely
that of which He says : " Hereby shall all men know
that you are My disciples, if you love one another."
And when we study the history of the Apostles (who,
moreover, theologians tell us, were confirmed in grace
and sinless), surely their teaching and guidance were
all of this same practical experimental kind : " Be ye

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 57
followers of me, as I am of Christ Jesus." Their
authority, like their Master's, was entirely spiritual,
appealing to the heart and affections, not coercing
the mind or the will ; it was not that of " the rulers
of the nations " (divine in its way and in due measure),
but His who though He was the greatest became as
the least ; who recognized that, of its very nature, the
spirit may be drawn but cannot be forced. Had the
successors of the Apostles, or even of Peter alone,
been confirmed in grace ; had men always been able
to turn to the Church or the Bishop of the City of
Rome for an infallible pattern of Christliness in life
and conduct, surely we should have had miraculous
evidence that Christ was with us always, even to the
end of the world ; we should have been well content
to leave doctrines alone in their implicit state and to
follow our Shepherd trustingly and unquestioningly.
For doctrine is but the theory of eternal life to aid
us to conceive what we do not behold ; but if it is
there before our eyes, who needs the doctrine ?
All this would be unanswerable, were the Visible
Church intended to be a " Collective Christ " in at
tainment and not merely in aim and aspiration ;
were she a finished work, and not an endless growth
toward an ideal. Being what she is, a mixed multi
tude of good and evil, living and dead, we have no
more right to look for Christ in her average life than
in her lowest ; we must seek Him in her best, and in
those acts in which she turns round upon herself to
criticize and reform herself according to the dictates
of her conscience, i.e. according to the Spirit of
Holiness which animates her living members.

58 LEX CREDENDI

The Spirit of Truth is with her just because the
Spirit of Holiness is with her. In neither case is
the measure quantitative or numerical. Had she but
one saint, the leaven would still be there in the
midst of her. But she has multitudes of such, known
and unknown, of various levels and degrees of Charity ;
and it is in these collectively that the Spirit of Truth
and Holiness dwells and spreads its leavening in
fluence to the savourless mass around.
As average Catholic holiness is not the holiness of
Christ, so neither is average Catholic truth or doctrine
the truth of Christ. Is there a single mind, even
among doctors of theology, wholly free from ignor
ance, misunderstanding, and superstition in religious
matters? Catholic truth, explicit to some extent in
the minds of the learned, lies implicit in all its
fulness in the hearts and spiritual lives of the
holiest members of the Church, and all that the
official teachers of the Church can do is to mediate
between the highest and lowest levels and make
these latter benefit by the spiritual riches of the
former. We say rightly that the decisions of councils and
popes are more or less determined by the Holy
Ghost. As a fact of the metaphysical order we hold
this on faith ; the mode of causation is as hidden
from us as is the nature of the two agencies involved,
— the divine spirit and the human. But the effects
of this mysterious operation are given to our ob
servation, and we can study their connexion and
interdependence. Thus history shows us to some
extent the process by which this Divine guidance of

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 59
the Church is effected ; it shows us how the really
fruitful and lasting decisions have been called forth
and shaped by the influence of the saints ; by con
siderations of the practical bearings of dogma on
the spiritual life rather than by speculative considera
tions. The guide whom councils practically and
ultimately follow is the Holy Spirit as active in the
living members of the Church. The spiritual life
and needs of these is really the determining agency ;
these, all unconsciously, are the guides and teachers
of their brethren. For, avowedly, nothing new can
ever be defined, but only that which is already im
plied in the Christian life. The Pope is in theory no
irresponsible absolutist who can define what he likes,
who can make truth and unmake it. He is but the
interpreter of a law written by the Holy Ghost in
the hearts of the saints. He is bound by this living
book. The Christian revelation, the depositum fidei,
is the spirit of Christ with all its implications. If
we say that that revelation culminated in Christ, it is
because no sanctity can be greater than His. If we
say the Church can develop that revelation, but not
add to it, it is because the saints only share and
" explicate," each in some special way, the fulness of
Christ's sanctity. The particular form or symbol in
which the implications of Charity or Grace find ex
pression is but the vehicle of the Spirit which is
expressed ; its truthfulness is its greater congeniality
to that Spirit as contrasted with some other expres
sion which it excludes and denies. So far then as
the Church is guided purely by the Holy Ghost in her
doctrinal decisions, her eye is fixed on the spiritual

60 LEX CREDENDI

life of the faithful, and in the light of that interest she
shapes her verdict with the sort of infallibility that
belongs to every spiritual instinct. There are rare
crises in the Church's history when the mystical life
of her living members is intensified and concentrated
and silently exerts an irresistible pressure on the
minds of her official teachers, forcing them to act and
directing their action in its own interest. However
scholastic and theological the reasonings may be by
which their decisions are professedly justified, yet the
true motive and directive power is always the Holy
Ghost, always some practical need of the spiritual
life. To take the most unfavourable case, the con
demnation of Galileo may have been ultimately in-
inspired not by any alleged speculative interest of
science or astronomy or even of exegesis, but by a
just fear of the spiritual disaster that would result
from a sudden revolution of theological thought for
which the general mind was as yet wholly unprepared.
Scientifically the argument from practical inconveni
ences is inadmissible, but "pastorally" it should be
respected within due limits. For if our deepest faith
tells us that the interests of life and truth must be
at root identical, we may resist a tenet which seems
hostile to life until its evidence actually coerces our
assent ; and then the same faith will assure us that
its hostility to life is only apparent. As long as it
is still disputable, science and religion will each solve
the question in its own interest Thus, instead of
dismissing it as a complete mistake, we ought to
distinguish between the religious and the scientific
values of the condemnation of Galileo, as of every

"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 61
other doctrinal decision of the same weight and
solemnity. What the religious instinct implicitly
affirmed was only that fundamental religious truth
which seemed to be implicitly denied by Galileo's
affirmation. And thus of all judgments so far as they
are truly forced from the Church under pressure of
the mystical life of her living members ; they are all
protective of that life and of the one deep truth
implicit therein.
Thus the Visible Church is infallible in doctrine
because she is, and in the same measure that she is,
holy in life. As sin and frailty abound among her
members, so also ignorance, superstition, and doctrinal
error of all sorts, — wheat and tares ; good fish and
bad. It is to her living members, to those who are
animated by the Spirit of Holiness and Truth, that
we must look for that mystical Christ who is with
her all days, even to the end of the world. They
collectively are the seat of her spiritual vitality;
from them the leaven of truth and holiness is com
municated to those around. To bring both sorts
together in one receptacle, to mediate between them,
to distribute the strength and light and riches of the
few among the many, is the very end and aim of the
ecclesiastical organism, with its institutions, its official
teachers and rulers, — itself the creation of that Spirit,
and guided by that Spirit. XII
THE PERFECTION OF MANHOOD
We know that our religion is true because it fosters
in us the true life, the life of Christ, the spirit of
charity. We turn to our Lord Himself, as He still

LEX CREDENDt

lives for us in the Gospels, to study that life in its
highest and most classical manifestation ; and we
shall find that charity is neither '' Sentimentality,"
nor " Mysticality," nor " Practicality," but the
ideal of Perfect Manhood in its fullest and richest
development. The perfection of manhood is the perfection
of a spiritual being made to be the mirror of the
divine perfection. " He that hath seen Me hath
seen the Father. How then sayest thou, Show us
the Father ? " From the very nature and necessity of
our thought we can only " realize " and deal with a
spirit like, but indefinitely more perfect than, our own.
We know that God is infinitely more than this ; but
for us that " more," that surplus, is an outer darkness.
Christ's perfect humanity has revealed to us as much
of the Father as we can ever imaginatively " realize,"
love, or deal with ; He has translated the divine life
into terms of human life : " The Word was made
flesh and dwelt among us." We know now by revela
tion (for Christ is that revelation) that all which is
best in man, and immeasurably more, is found in God :
So through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying : ' O heart I made, a heart beats here !
Face My hands fashioned, see it in Myself !
Thou hast no power, nor may'st conceive of Mine,
But Love I gave thee, with Myself to love,
And thou must love Me who have died for thee.'
For all practical purposes of life and religion, our
God is in human form, and that form is primarily the
form of Christ ; secondarily and dependently, that of
His brethren of all ages and nations. Through Him

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 63
" we have access to the Father " ; " No man cometh
to the Father but by Me."
To-day a revolt from Christianity has raised up a
new standard, a new ideal, — the Uebermensch, the
Superman or " More-than-man." Let us look patiently
and sympathetically at this new doctrine and see
whether it may not contain, as every heresy does,
some perversion of a too long neglected truth, some
angry reaction against excesses in a contrary direction,
against perversions of the Christian ideal of perfect
manhood for which Christians are in some measure
responsible. It has recently been contended : that the only type
of manhood which now commands respect in Western
civilization, or lives effectually as a goal of moral
endeavour and a potent factor of progress, is neither
Christian nor Greek, but "Gothic." It is not the
Saint, with his mystical other-worldliness, his
womanish tenderness, patience, and compassion ;
his asceticism and mortification ; nor is it the
"phronimos," with his absolute reasonableness, his
cold, statuesque perfection of conduct ; but it is the
military or " Gothic " type, with its ideal of chivalry
and honour as the great duty of man. The others
still linger on men's lips : this alone rules in their
hearts. So far as there is truth in the contention, it
points to the fact that the Christian type is either
misapprehended or misrepresented, or both ; for the
true ideal of perfect manhood is a salt, a moral and
social antiseptic, that can never possibly lose its
1 "Christian, Greek, or Goth?" by H. Garrod : the " Hibbert
Journal," April, 1905.

64 LEX CREDENDI

savor or fail to appeal strongly to the taste and
appetite of the healthiest and most vigorous. It
shows that the prevalent notion of Christliness is out
of touch with life in some way or another.
It is to a revolt of Nietszche against his former
guide and master Schopenhauer, that we owe this
new fetich-ideal of the " More-than-man," more kin
to the " Gothic " than to the Greek or Christian type.
Schopenhauer's pessimism, his conviction of the total
and irremediable badness of life, made him the violent
foe of Jewish optimism, and even of Christianity so
far as it was saturated with Judaism. It threw him
into sympathy with Buddhism, with its antagonism
to that "will to live" which it views as the cause of all
the sorrow and suffering entailed by the struggle for
existence and by the impulse of self-assertion, self-
preservation, self-propagation. Obviously the whole
inspiration of this sad decadent philosophy is sym
pathy with the pain of the entire sentient world, a
pain that preponderates immeasurably over the
meagre sum of pleasures in the opposite scale. If
Christ had the merit of being in sympathy with all
this pain, yet He was no pessimist ; for He taught
that this sorrow might be turned into joy, that it was
light and momentary compared with the weight of
glory to be revealed. Schopenhauer accepted Christ's
condemnation of the present world as hopelessly
wretched ; and welcomed the great example of pity
and sympathy and world-flight; but with His doctrine
of Hope he would have nothing to do.
However innocuous in the motionless East, the
decadent and demoralizing tendencies of this pes-

"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 65
simism in our progressive Western civilization soon
made themselves felt to healthier and more vigorous
instincts than Schopenhauer's. With Nietzsche the
reaction became vocal. " Away with this puling
pessimism and its corollary of enervating pity!
Back, not to Judaism, but to a frankly pagan belief
in the worth of what this life has to offer, a belief
destroyed by sickly over-reflection, by mystical peer-
ings through the clouds into dream-land. Let us take
life simply as unquestioning children take it, as it was
taken in the childhood of humanity. Let us trust in
the rude self-asserting instincts of unsophisticated
Nature. She knows what she is about. Through
the struggle of each for himself, through the survival
of the strongest, the elimination of the weakest, she
has shaped the beast into the man ; let her alone and
she will shape the man into the More-than-man.
Pity for the feeble and maimed only weakens them
and weakens ourselves; it multiplies the image of
suffering by a series of mirrors and gives it an inten
sity and importance of which healthy savages know
nothing. Still more, all the energy, thought, and
time that go to the service of compassion are worse
than wasted ; they but secure the survival and
multiplication of those whom Nature's kind ruthless-
ness would eliminate, and they do so at the expense,
and to the exclusion, of the hardier type. It is to self-
worship that we owe the heroes, the strong men, the
strong peoples, of history : to the instinct that bids
a man give the fullest possible play to all his energies,
and forbids him to emasculate or mortify his manhood
in any way; or to stand aside to let the weaker pass.
F

66 LEX CREDENDI

Away with the Saint and his otherworld; with the
" phronimos " and his pedantry of virtue and self-
restraint, and let the Strong Man come to the front
once more. Christianity, with its semi-pessimism and
its gospel of indiscriminate, short-sighted pity has
but thwarted Nature, wiser and kinder by far, in her
task of shaping the man into the More-than-man.
As for Schopenhauer, he has but accentuated what is
worst in Christianity and tried to find for it a philoso
phical basis."
It is plain that this More-than-man is somewhat
of the " Gothic " and military type ; that he is a
spiritual descendant of the hordes of Northern bar
barians who swept down on the effete Roman empire,
and to whose fresh vigour, innocent alike of Greek
ethics and of Christian saintliness, our European
civilization largely owes its birth and progress. Need
less to say that this Superman might be more
properly called the Superbrute ; that he competes on
just the same plane of merely psychic selfish
existence as other animals, although through the
development of his reason he has left all competitors
behind. This ideal has been easily and freely criticized.
It is easy to show that the self-giving as well as the
self-seeking instincts are essential to the survival of
species ; that brutal unmitigated egotism is a prin
ciple of decadence and deterioration ; that competi
tion obtains only in regard to material goods of
limited divisible quantity, and to the conditions of
merely animal life ; that violence is not strength ;
that society is the condition of individuality ; that

"THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 67
the social instinct is the complement of the individual
instinct ; and so forth.
But it is far more important to recognize the con
fused gropings after a better conception of perfect
manhood ; the revolt against an exaggerated pes
simism which excludes all possibility of God's Will
being done on earth as it is in heaven ; the revolt
against a transcendental mysticism that finds the
theatre of man's highest life only in the clouds ;
against a sentimental, enervating pity that views pain
and sorrow as the sovereign unmitigated evils, and
fosters a blind self-defeating "indiscriminate charity";
against the confusion of gentleness with softness, of
meekness with weakness ; against an overstraining
of the " organic " idea of Society and against kin
dred theories of government and authority, socialistic
or absolutist, which are fatal to the growth of person
ality and to the truly Christian principle of individual
dignity. We should sympathize with the scorn of
contented mediocrity, of the average and paltry ;
with the feeling that in some sense a man should
" be himself" and not the creature of servile imitation
and conformity; with the aspiration after the " strong
man," the hero, the More-than-man, whose production
is the goal of all moral endeavour. For all his mon
strosity, the Superman is largely built up of, and
lives by, certain too neglected elements of the Chris
tian ideal of perfect manhood. He represents a re
volt, although an excessive and indiscriminate revolt,
against false mysticism and false sentiment. He
moves at once away from and nearer to Christ in
the same circle or orbit. The ideal is not all of iron

68 LEX CREDENDI

or earth, and whatever admixture of heavenly gold
it may possess we have a right to seek the same, pure
and unalloyed, in the ideal manhood of Christ.
XIII
THE SUPERMAN, FALSE AND TRUE
That by which man is man, is the spirit ; distinc
tively human life is spirit-life. Man is a spirit ; and
to make God intelligible to man, in the highest terms
known to man, revelation tells us " God is a spirit."
Man's best life is a divine life, an imitation of God's
life so far as we can realize or comprehend it : " Be
ye therefore perfect, as your Father in heaven is
perfect." As before, we leave aside the metaphysical
problem of the relation of the Divine Being to our
own, of sameness and otherness, and speak simply
of those manifestations of the spirit of which man's
soul is the theatre, though God is also their author in
some mysterious way.
There is another life in man which is not spiritual,
but psychic, or even animal ; subservient to the
higher ; a lower stage through which he has to pass :
to which he ever relapses when he ceases to struggle
upward. Of this life the Superman is the highest
and most heroic development. Let us remember
that it is not nothing because it is not all; that it
does not — because it is evil as an end — cease to be
good and useful as a means, a divinely ordained
means. Manichean exaggerations that have crept
into our piety and falsified our asceticism, "for
bidding to marry and commanding to abstain from
meats," are partly answerable for the appearance of

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 69
the Superman. The Gospel forbids sovereign solici
tude, not moderated care, for the psychic life. The
self-regarding instincts are its governing motive power.
In its absolute purity it exists nowhere in man. Even
in the worst of us the Spirit intervenes at times and
subordinates the lower life to the higher, sacrificing,
or wishing to sacrifice, the interests of the separate
Self to those of objective Truth and Right, to the
interests of God and of the Spirit. There is " honour
among thieves " ; nor is the disinterested sense of
Justice for others ever wholly extinguished. Rightly
interpreted, this is a sense of union with God, a sense
that the universal interests of the Divine Will are
also our own deepest and truest interests, to which
our separate interests should give way. This is
Conscience, and Conscience sleeps, but never dies;
it is a " worm that dieth not and a fire that is not
quenched." To the vigour of the psychic life of self-love we
owe large results of human development, individual
and social, — results that in many ways stimulate and
prophetically foreshadow those of the spirit-life. It
has developed a desire for truth as an instrument of
life ; for that knowledge which is power ; an esteem
of right and justice as conditions of social progress ;
an esteem of fine arts as a means of subjective enjoy
ment. It is the struggle for existence, for enjoyment,
for personal advantages of all kinds that has made
man work hard and has sharpened his wits and has
taught him the useful arts and has discovered for
him the secrets of nature ; it is a provident self-
interest that has taught him the value of association

70 LEX CREDENDI

with others and that he must give and serve if he
would get and be served. In societies where com
merce and competition are rampant and spiritual
influences largely discredited, we can see very fairly
what wonderful, if not very admirable, results are
produced by the psychic life. Such societies tend to
realize the Gospel idea of a "Kingdom of this World,"
a " Kingdom of Satan," whose children are wiser in
their generation than the children of light — naturally
enough ; for the lower and older forms of life are
deeper-rooted than the newer and higher.
Yet for all its possible abuses, the psychic life is for
man the condition of the spiritual; he needs the
meat that perisheth as well as the meat that endureth.
It is the quest for the former that has raised him to
a level in which his need of the latter has made itself
definitely felt. The blind instinct of self-love, of
regard for this separate organism destined to be the
theatre or instrument of the spirit-life, is therefore
from God ; a rule and guide, but not a sovereign rule ;
good as a servant, bad as a master.
However indefinitely the psychic life may be de
veloped above the level of animalism or savagery
through man's superior mentality and power of self-
control which can be pressed into the service of
egoism, yet its fundamental character remains un
changed ; it is the life of one atom among an infinite
multitude, of one moment in limitless time; of a
mere point that would make itself the universe, relat
ing all to itself ; and yet whose insignificance is simply
immeasurable. It is with Conscience in the widest acceptation —

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 71
moral, intellectual, and aesthetic Conscience — that the
spirit-life begins; with the sense of universal, im
perative interests to which those of one's separate
self must be wholly subordinate, interests which are
identically the same for every spiritual being ; with
the sense that we are, or ought to be, before all else,
instruments of the Divine Will, manifestations of the
Divine Life, finding thereby our true, abiding, im
measurable significance and dignity. Of this " over-
individual" life of disinterested devotion to divine
ends it is said : " I live, yet not I [the separate Self],
but Christ [the spiritual Self] liveth in Me," or again :
" I in them and Thou in Me." Yet if it is a divine
life it is also that life by which man is man ; or, if we
choose to call the psychic life " human " and "natural"
in an unfavourable sense, the spirit-life is the life by
which man becomes "Superman" and puts on the
likeness of God. It is, moreover, a supernatural life
to which the psychic or " natural " man cannot attain
by his own methods or motives. All he can do is to
learn his own limits, the futility of his ends and
desires, to dash himself despairingly against the
barriers that shut him in. He can rise to the sense
of a Beyond and the need of a Beyond ; but to
believe in it, to live for it firmly and prevalently, he
cannot. This is something which must be given
to him ; for which he is as dependent on Providence
as he is for the bread that perisheth ; for the rain and
the sunshine and other conditions without which all
his husbandry were in vain.
And if our science is so slow to understand, to
arrange, classify, and connect, the fragments of that

72 LEX CREDENDI

world which is given to our outer senses, and to
which our organic, psychic self belongs, is it wonderful
that our understanding should be infinitely slower to
piece together those experiences that are given it
from within ; especially, since the nature of language
requires that they should be expressed in terms and
symbols drawn from the world of sense? Is it
wonderful that the spirit-life should be so essentially
mysterious and full of seeming contradictions, and
that to determine the relations of the spirit to God
should be as difficult as to define the spirit or to
define God ? If then the true Superman is necessarily
the spiritual man, it is vain to look for him in any
development however vigorous of the psychic life.
His type is not to be sought in the first or psychic
Adam, " of the earth earthy," but in the second Adam,
who is, " the Lord from Heaven." xiv
RESUME
True devotion to Christ means believing in Him,
heart and soul, as the true life, the divine type of
manhood ; it means sameness of spirit, identity of
interest, unity of aim, conformity of action ; it means
the only kind of sympathy and discipleship which
He supremely desires and values : " Weep not for
Me, but weep for yourselves and your children " —
that is, Weep not for Me ; but with Me ; weep for
that divine cause for which I live and die ; for Me,
only as for the embodiment of that cause. To repro
duce His spirit in us is the sole end, justification, and
criterion of the Catholic Church and all her institu-

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 73
tions and teachings — to make us More-than-men,
Sons of God ; — an elementary truth, but, just for
that reason, easily obscured and confused.
Looking then to the archetype of perfect manhood
as portrayed in the Gospels we find a spirit free from
every blemish of " Sentimentality," " Mysticality," or
" Practicality," yet, in its simplicity, embracing and
overpassing the excellences which these exaggerate
and violently tear asunder.
Certainly, the first and most obvious impression is
that of a loving personality, full of sweetness, tender
ness, and compassion, entering readily into all the
joys and sorrows of those around. As contrasted
with the austerity and asceticism of the Baptist, He
presents Himself as one who comes eating and drink
ing, the friend of publicans and sinners, a Bridegroom
whose presence diffuses joy on all sides, and forbids
fasting and mourning. He is one who delights to be
with the children of men, rather than alone in the
desert ; one who embraces little children and is at
home with the birds of the air and the lilies of the
field, who wanders happy and improvident among
the hedgerows and the cornfields; one who sees a
Heavenly Father's love in the rain and the sunshine
and in all that happens; one who squanders com
passion and forgiveness on all around, merciless only
to the merciless ; to all others merciful and indulgent
on the sole condition that they too shall be merciful
and indulgent.
This plainly is the temper of one whose own heart
overflows with love and tenderness. With such,
feeling is apt to assume the reins of spiritual govern-

74 LEX CREDENDI

ment to the prejudice of insight and action. The
subjective satisfaction becomes an end in itself; the
appetite for the luxury of emotion grows strong and
tyrannical by indulgence. Feelings, we have already
shown, are false or true according to the implicit
judgments which they embody. When they are thus
fostered for their own sake, they necessarily become
false and lose touch with reality. They need to be
continually clarified by intelligence, solidified by
action. Those to whom a sentimental Christ is con
genial dwell too exclusively on the lineaments just
indicated. For the rest they find the Gospels " dry "
and needing to be supplemented by pious imagination.
Their Christ and, by consequence, their God, is apt
to become wholly emasculate, void of all ethical
vigour, of all mystical depth, the apotheosis of
universal amiability and indiscriminate indulgence.
The religion which worships such an ideal is of
necessity decadent and feeble; and is characterized
by a whittling away of the substance of the moral
law, and by a stagnation of all intelligent interest in
the mysteries of God.
But if we look more closely at the Gospel portrait,
we soon realize the utter superficiality of the sen
timentalist's impression. We find that the Love
there presented to us is the fruit of deep vision ; that
it is fed from the very foundations of truth to which
its roots reach down ; that if Christ is tender it is
because He is true ; that if He is merciful it is because
He is just and because so often the gentler judgment
is the more just, the harsher judgment the more
narrow and irrational. We find that He can also be

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 75
severe and unyielding, just because His love is long
sighted, a strength and not a weakness. Moreover,
it is a love that does not rest in and feed on itself; it
is an energy, an enthusiasm that embodies itself in
will and action ; in labour and suffering on behalf of
Righteousness and Truth, on behalf of the Kingdom
of God in the soul of man.
To other eyes the Gospel presents the figure mainly
of a mystic and ascetic. They find one to whom this
world was little more than an idle dream on the point
of vanishing for ever in the already breaking dawn
of eternity; one who lived solely in and for the
mysterious Beyond; whose message was: "Repent,
for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand " ; one whose
doctrine of self-denial and renunciation was largely
based on a sense of the speedy evanescence of all
temporal and earthly values. Still more does He
come before them in the writings of St. John and St.
Paul as one impregnated with the sense of eternal
realities, for whom the fleshly veil has grown trans
parent ; who descends to earth by an effort, but rises
naturally to heaven ; who lives in the presence and
by the light of Divinity ; ever absorbingly conscious
of Himself as the Word of God.
And from this they are apt to pass to a conception
of a purely contemplative and ascetical Christ, who
finds the whole substance and essence of the spirit-
life in the exercise of intellectual vision to which
feeling and action are but subordinate conditions or
concomitants. In this they rend at once the unity of
Christ and the unity of the spirit-life. They soon
begin" to shelter under Gospel authority a mysticism

76 LEX CREDENDI

and asceticism far more pagan than Christian, — a
mysticism which sets the supernatural at discord with
the natural, which looks for the divine as breaking
into, rather than blending with, the human ; which
seeks God not through and behind the realm of Law
and Order, but in supposed oases of interspersed
chaos ; and an asceticism grounded on a false trust
in those visions and experiences of abnormal men
tality to which the " corpus sanum " is an impediment
and which are favoured by nervous exhaustion and
derangement ; the asceticism not only of Gnostics,
but of dervishes and fakirs and of all who implicitly
hold that body and spirit are essentially antagonistic
and derived from antagonistic principles. The
Johannine and Pauline antithesis of flesh and spirit,
together with the example of Him who was " poor
and in labours from His youth up," who had not
where to lay His head, who fasted in the desert, and
spent long nights in prayer, whose sufferings and
death were in a certain sense self-inflicted and volun
tary, all may easily be, and have often been, invoked
to favour such a view.
But here again closer inspection reveals the
superficialty and onesidedness of this presentment
of Perfect Manhood. If Christ is not Love alone,
neither is He Light alone. To sever these interests
of Feeling and Vision, to make either principal, is as
impossible as to sever the warmth and the brilliancy
of sunshine. Still less possible is it to find in Christ
that hostility to feeling and affection, that frigid
detachment from all mortal ties and necessities, that
abstract aloofness from the world of sinful, suffering

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 77
humanity, which are the almost indispensable con
ditions of a life devoted entirely to intellectual
contemplation, to an effort to realize permanently
the condition of angels while still in the flesh.
True it is that the perfect simultaneous exercise
and balance of the lives of feeling, thought, and
action are not possible ; that it is by the alternating
emphasis now of one, now of another, that a harmony
of successive parts is to be secured. Hence the life
of sentiment or of activity that is not interrupted by
explicit contemplative effort with more or less fre
quency becomes quickly impoverished and earthly.
Yet equally true it is that the contemplative effort
cannot be permanently maintained without predudice
to mind and body and to the whole life of the spirit ;
but needs to be steadied and rested by action, and
brought into contact with feeling and reality. Else
there results a complete upset of the psycho-physio
logical balance, whose fruits are illusions and halluci
nations on the part of injured mind, while the body,
left masterless, avenges by its rebellion the wrongs
done to it by a morbid asceticism. " How often have
I seen those who were fed with the bread of angels
delighting in the husks of swine ! " says a Kempis.
Such a fall may conceivably be a Divine punishment
of spiritual pride ; but more often it is the result of
misguidance, ignorance, or well-meaning indiscretion.
It is the vengeance of Nature on those who ignore or
defy her laws, which are indeed, after all, the Will of
God. We may then be confident that the spirit-life
as revealed to us in Christ is not, in any morbid sense
of the terms, mystical or ascetical.

78 LEX CREDENDI

To the far greater number of average common-
sense people who pride themselves on a freedom from
sentiment and mysticism, the eminently practical
side of Christ's spirit will make a strong appeal.
His vehement insistence on good works as the fruit
and criterion of faith ; His repudiation of the devotion
which says "Lord, Lord," and stops there, of the
affection based on natural relations of kinship, friend
ship, and nationality, and not on unity of aim and
work ; His life of vigorous, active, self-sacrificing
devotion to His Father's business, — to teaching,
healing, saving, ministering ; His conflict unto death
with the powers of evil ; and then, His opposition to
theorists and doctrinaires, to those who preached
salvation by dialectic and would make religion
primarily intellectual and speculative ; His disdain
of prophecy and miracle and of any other preter
natural, criterion of discipleship as compared with
the criterion of that charity of experimental good
ness that feeds the hungry and clothes the naked, —
all this and much more, makes out an easy and
most plausible case for " Practicality." Circuibat bene-
faciendo: He went about doing good. " Doing good "
seems to be the whole of the matter ; more especially
that sort of good that involves " going about." Con
duct, in this narrow, practical sense, is indeed, as
Matthew Arnold says, three-quarters of life for the
vast majority of mankind. Naturally then the im
portance of the Gospel seems to lie wholly in its
bearing on this sort of conduct. Hence the tendency
to regard philanthropic activity as the substance of
Christianity; to absorb oneself in works of parochial,

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 79
social, national, and international beneficence; to
merge one's whole personality in the organism of the
community; to forget that when all are sufficiently
fed, clothed, housed, and tended, the question still
remains: What to do with life, — a question which
they cannot answer to whom philanthropy is the
whole of life.
Philanthropy is Christian so far as it means a
denial of self for the sake of others, a subordination
of the particular to the general interest. But it easily
consists with a somewhat materialized view of the
general or universal good and describes it as "the
greatest happiness of the greatest number." This
means estimating action by its external fruitfulness
rather than by its subjective and spiritual quality.
Under the influence of this view conscientious people
often scruple to follow the less extensively and
quantitatively beneficent course, and will perhaps
neglect themselves or their own homes in order to
minister in city slums. The " Universal Good " to
which self must give way is simply the ethical
"Ought." It is that which is good and right ab
solutely, and not in reference to myself or to others.
Altruism no less than Egoism has to bow before this
sovereign rule. They are few who have the power
or opportunity of working for the many. But they
are still fewer, if there be any, who have not both
power and opportunity of self-forgetful devotion, of
actions which, externally insignificant, are, on their
spiritual and subjective side, of eternal and absolutely
universal importance.
If Christ's spirit was practical, it was certainly not

80 LEX CREDENDI

utilitarian. If it disdained faith without works, it
also disdained works without faith. We see that in
Him the inward and the outward were organically
connected ; that they were but different aspects of
one and the same spiritual life and action, a life that
was at once Vision and Love and Will ; that His
love was active and His action loving, and that both
were penetrated by the light of truth. Now one,
and now another aspect of that spirit-life would be
emphasized or brought into play, according to the
exigencies of the moment ; but at the centre they
were all merged in, and sprang from, that which is at
once all of them and none of them, which is simply
Spirit and Life. Drawn forth momentarily from that
centre, each of them — Love, Vision, Will — was still
quickened at its root by an infusion of the other
two ; and returning to the centre again, invigorated
by exercise, became to them in turn a source of en
riched vitality.
All idea of priority or principality or of true
separableness among these elements of the spirit-life
must be abandoned, if we are to read the Gospels
aright and to grasp the conception of Perfect Man
hood there presented to us. If we would arrive at
such a conception we cannot do better than try to
apprehend the spirit of Christ just as it breathes
itself forth in that prayer whose words He has
adopted, but whose sense and inspiration (of which
they are the vehicle) are all His own, and can only
be determined in the light of all His teaching and
action. This prayer of Christ is at once the deepest and

" THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST" 81
most succinct expression of the Spirit and Life of
Christ, of that Life whose reproduction in ourselves
is the criterion of our religious beliefs and institu
tions. It is the norm of all pure prayer and in
directly of all pure belief; it is at once the Lex
Orandi and the Lex Credendi. The Credo is but the
" explicitation " of what is latent in the Pater noster.

PART II
THE PRAYER OF CHRIST
I
THE PERFECT PRAYER
SURELY it must have seemed like a momentary
descent of the spirit of peace on the angry
tumult of primeval chaos when, in the name
of the oldest and widest Christian Communion
(and doubtless by a prophetic instinct of that same
spirit), a Roman Cardinal, in the year 1893, opened
the Chicago Parliament of Religions with the simple
prayer taught by Jesus to the fishermen of Galilee
nearly two thousand years before.
At its height the wave pauses before it dashes
itself in foam and confusion upon the shore. Such a
brief instant of pause, of inward silence, must have
been felt in that spiritual Babel ere the many
tongues were let loose in the interest of their multi
tudinous creeds and contentions. It was as when the
little child in their midst stood as a mute rebuke to
the worse than childish contentions of the chosen
Twelve. It was a recall to simplicity, to directness,
to the one thing needful ; to the point whence all had
diverged and scattered, as sheep issuing from the
pen, and to which all must converge again, as sheep
gathered into the fold at evening. And surely from
82

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 83
any other lips than those of a prince of the court of
Rome the prayer had lacked the same fulness of
significance. A man's spirit utters itself to some degree in every
voluntary movement of his life ; but never so fully
and perfectly as in prayer — prayer that is really his
own. For prayer is " the lifting up of the heart and
mind to God " ; it is an act in which vision, feeling,
and will, the three factors of the spirit-life, designedly
blend together and strive to attain their highest and
deepest expression. In prayer the spirit pierces down
to the root and beginning of all reality from which it
springs, and stretches up to the end and summit of
all reality towards which it strains and struggles ;
and between these two poles lies the whole sphere
of the finite which it strives to compass and trans
cend. In prayer it expressly deals with the Ulti-
mates ; with the first and the last and, in reference
to them, with all that lies between them. And in
this contact with Reality it attains Truth — truth of
vision, truth of feeling, truth of will.
There is a sense in which the whole spirit-life may
be called prayer ; for it is, indeed, communion with
God. Laborare est orare — to work is to pray, to think
is to pray, to love is to pray. But we do not now
speak merely of this implicit and practical prayer ;
but of conscious explicit prayer, in which the spirit
is concentrated expressly on the religious aspect of
life — on God, or on things precisely in their relation
to God. We speak, not of the prayer which is
" lived," but of the prayer which is " prayed."
In such prayer the spirit-life finds its fullest em-

84 LEX CREDENDI

bodiment. Here we find what a man is in his deepest
self — if only the prayer be real, his very own. Yet
even in those prayers that are most deeply our own,
prayers of the spirit at its highest tension, the words
and conceptions in which they normally embody
themselves are never wholly our own ; they belong
to the language and tradition which we inherit.
They are our own only in so far as they are inspired
by the inward prayer ; in so far, namely, as the
spirit, like the whirlwind that sweeps up the autumn
leaves in its vortex, rearranging and ordering them
after the pattern of its own movement, seizes
instinctively from the mind's treasury the words and
images most congenial to its need of self-expression
and weaves them into a living garment, in which its
own form and movements become visible.
Taken singly and literally, the several phrases of
the Lord's Prayer were familiar to every pious Jew
of that day. They were then, and they are now, to
be found up and down in the Old Testament, in the
sacred books and liturgy of the Hebrew people. So
far, they were our Lord's only by tradition and by
adoption. Studied literally, without respect to His
whole life and personality, and simply by an analysis
of the words and expressions as they were then
valued by any ordinary Jew, they could never yield us
a distinctively Christian sense. We must, therefore,
try to seize them as they fell from His lips, still aglow
with His spirit ; we must take them not one by one,
each complete in itself, but as part of a complex,
organic whole, each in the light of all the rest, and all
in the light of His whole life of action and utterance ;

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 85
we must look to the sayer as well as to what is said.
Else our study will be of the dead letter, the skeleton,
the empty husk of that prayer. For a prayer is a
vital utterance, or it is nothing ; no dissection of the
lifeless corpse can discover the soul.
Yet, on the other hand, it must be remembered
that the " Our Father " is not given to us as a prayer
which our Lord Himself prayed, but as one which He
taught His disciples to pray. Though this fact does
not make it any less truly an expression of his own
spirit, with which they too were to be filled, yet it
allows us to attach more significance to the actual
form of words than we should be otherwise quite
justified in doing. For the words in which vehement
desire escapes from the heart straight into the ears
of God (the Reader of Hearts, to whom even our un-
worded desires are eloquent), are not calculated with
a view to reveal that desire to our fellow-men.
According as the prayer is more real and vehement,
its utterance tends to be more broken, interjectory,
with strong cries like those of Gethsemani and
Golgotha ; less reasoned, less connected, less dis
cursive ; at times tumultuous and incoherent, as the
impatient spirit hopelessly tumbles over and ran
sacks its vocabulary in search of words for its un
utterable need ; while in moments of utmost tension
speech may be completely paralysed.
But the words of the " Our Father " were intended
to convey to the disciples our Lord's spirit of prayer ;
they were addressed to their human understanding
and not to the Divine Omniscience. As such, they
possess a certain degree of that reasoned complete-

86 LEX CREDENDI

ness and unity which belong to an instruction. We
must remember, therefore, that they are accommo
dated to the intelligence, to the customary modes of
religious thought and speech, familiar to the simple
folk of Galilee ; that they belong far more to the
language of prophecy than to that of philosophy.
The expression which they give to our Lord's own
inward prayer and spirit is, no doubt, the best and
highest possible within such limits of thought and
speech ; but that it is infinitely inadequate cannot be
denied, and should not be forgotten. The Master-
Artist works here with the rude materials to hand ;
and to some extent their very rudeness reveals His
mastery. His whole spirit is here, as it is even in
the least of its manifestations ; but not so wholly
or clearly manifested as it might have been in a
higher medium of expression, or in the language
of angels.
Language, like outward sensation, is at best
suggestive — a few points, a few lines which the
responsive mind fills in from the storehouse of
memory, and so more than half creates the object of
its apprehension. According, therefore, to the ex
tent and kind of our own spiritual experiences shall
we be able to seize some measure of the spirit, at
best rudely hinted in the words of the Lord's Prayer.
" My sheep hear My voice " ; only because the spirit
of Christ is already in us can it be strengthened,
educated, and developed from without through the
instrumentality of words. Without such inward
responsiveness no clarity or perfection of outward
expression would avail ; but when spiritual sympathy

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 87
quickens the inward ear the obscurest whisper is a
revelation of spirit to spirit.
It will help much, therefore, in all cases first to
determine as exactly as we can just what sense our
Lord's words must have conveyed to His hearers'
minds, independently of the heart response which
they elicited from those whose spirit was closer to
His own ; to determine, that is, the current value of
those words for the religious thought and language
of Galilee two thousand years ago. This is no easy
task. For centuries the Church has pondered this
prayer in her heart, and has loaded every phrase
with a growing wealth of meaning, according as she
has penetrated more deeply into the implications of
Christ's spirit. Thus, much that was latent and
confused for former times has become for us clear
and explicit ; and it needs some effort of well-
instructed historic imagination to put ourselves back
to the beginning of this process of expansion, to
realize what " fatherhood " and " heaven " and " the
kingdom " and " daily bread " and " temptation " and
the "evil one" meant, and were intended to mean,
for Peter and Andrew and the sons of Zebedee.
For this meaning must in some way be the
criterion of any fuller sense our own minds may
then attach to these same terms ; of any attempt to
find a re-embodiment for the same prayer-spirit in
our own language and modes of thought and to
pour, without spilling a drop, the contents of the old
vessel into the new. For the spirit abides unchanged
through all changes of thought and speech ; man's
mind transforms itself ceaselessly, but in the depths

88 LEX CREDENDI

of his heart, where God meets him, he is always the
same. Could Christ teach us, His disciples of to-day,
to pray, the language would be different, for it would
be our own ; but the spirit and substance would be
the same. As it is, we must seek that spirit through
the language and thoughts of the Galilean fishermen
of two thousand years ago. ii
DEFECTIVE TYPES
St. Luke (xi. 1-4) gives the Lord's Prayer in an
abbreviated, St. Matthew (vi. 9-15) in an amplified,
form. We may be sure that neither the omissions
in one case, nor the expansions in the other, are
substantial, although it is the amplified form which
has obtained permanent footing in the Church. St.
Matthew introduces the prayer into the Sermon on
the Mount as illustrating, by way of contrast, our
Lord's admonition against certain false conceptions
of prayer, Jewish and Pagan. St. Luke represents
it as given by our Lord, on another occasion, in
answer to the request of one of His disciples : " Lord,
teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples."
Thus, in both cases, it is presented to us explicitly
as a norm or ideal of what prayer ought to be. It is
opposed both to two false standards and to a less
perfect standard.
It is (1) the prayer of those who seek the glory of
God and not the glory of men ; it is (2) the prayer of
those who would raise man to the likeness of God, not
of those who would lower God to the likeness of man.
It is (3) the prayer of the children of the bride-

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 89
chamber, of those who have at least crossed the
threshold of the kingdom ; not of those who still
strain towards its borders, and for whom it is yet an
ideal, not a reality. 1
Two types of prayer are signalled out for us al
together repugnant to the spirit of Christ.
Of these, by far the more reprehensible is the
prayer of the hypocrite or actor, whose offence does
not consist in the fact that he prays in public, but
that he does so for the sake of publicity and in
order that he may be seen and praised of men. Our
Lord Himself had been praying in public, or at least
before others, when the disciple said to Him : "Lord,
teach us to pray." And He even bids us let our
light shine before men, " that they may see our good
works " ; but then it is to be in such a way that they
may glorify, not us, but our Father who is in heaven.
Plainly He would have us look directly and im
mediately to the inside of the cup and platter and
leave the outside to look after itself, confident that
if the heart be right all will be right. A deliberate
aiming at edification and outward righteousness,
like a deliberate aiming at happiness, defeats itself;
it becomes self-conscious, self-complacent, hypo
critical. If the true light is in us, it will shine
through us unawares and bring glory to God. To
feed the flame in our hearts is our concern ; the
shining is God's ; we are not even to think about it :
"Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand
doeth." It is as food for self-complacency that the hypocrite

90 LEX CREDENDI
desires the approbation of others, that he may con
template a flattering image of himself mirrored in a
multitude of minds. What our Lord would exclude
is, at root, spiritual self-complacency. Secrecy from
others is important only as a means to secrecy from
oneself. Here, as everywhere else, the outward is
valued merely for the sake of the inward. A man
may enter into his oratory and shut the door and
pray — yet not in secret. He may be no less of an
actor than if he stood at the street-corner or in the
synagogue. On the other hand, the Pharisee and the
publican both prayed openly in the temple, yet the
latter is as plainly a type of secrecy in prayer as
the former is of hypocrisy or acting. What, then, is
the inward spiritual secrecy symbolized by the out
ward, but by no means to be identified with it ?
It is the disposition of the soul which realizes that
in prayer it stands before a " Father who sees in
secret " ; One to whom all hearts are open, all desires
known, from whom no secret is hid ; One, therefore,
before whom it is utterly vain to pose, to act, to pre
tend to be other than we really are. To some extent
we must think of God and deal with Him humanwise,
as we deal with our fellow-men, with our parents, our
rulers, before whom we are always tempted to act a
part, to seem better than we are. But, so far as
prayer is a " raising of the heart and mind to God,"
it is a deliberate effort to rise above this limit of our
imagination on the wings of faith, to put ourselves
honestly face to face with conscience, with the Father
who seeth in secret. This is what the publican did,
though he prayed openly in the temple, and what the

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 91
Pharisee could not have done had he even entered
into his chamber and shut the door. And why not ?
For surely the educated Pharisee was far more
capable than the theologically untrained publican of
a more spiritual view of God's nature.
If such elevation of view depended on philosophical
training it would go hard with the world at large.
But in truth it depends only on a disposition of the
heart. It is not the intellectual man, but the spiritual
man, who apprehends God spiritually. For the
intellectual man may be morally on the psychic level
still, self-centered, worldly, and even animal. If so,
his God will necessarily be in his own image and
likeness ; One with whom he will deal as individual
with individual, as self with self; One with whom he
can make a bargain, an adjustment of mutual
interests ; not One whose interests are realized as
indistinguishable from his own.
But in moments when a man rises, however briefly,
to the spiritual level, and yields himself to the im
perative, unconditional claims of conscience, of truth,
of principle ; when he loses his separate self, with its
separate interests, in the consciousness of being
before all else the servant and instrument of a divine
and universal Will — in such moments he can view
himself only from the standpoint of that divine
" over-individual " interest, and as he really is ; all
motives for self-flattery melt away as illusions and
dreams ; he can but see himself with the eyes of his
Father, who seeth in secret ; he can but strike his
breast and cry : " God, be merciful to me a sinner."
Here there is an entire absorption in God's point of

9* LEX CREDENDI

view, in God's will and interest ; a complete dying to
one's own, so far as separate from God's or separable.
It is as when for a brief space we forget ourselves
absolutely in the sorrows or desires of another, and
lend our whole being to the service of that other,
with whom we are made one just for the moment.
Such moments of union with God's view and feeling
and will are graces given to all from time to time ;
to multiply them till they become fused and con
tinuous is the whole aim of mystic endeavour.
Prayer, therefore, like fasting or almsgiving, if it is
not to be a mere doing or saying, must be an action
of the spirit-life, not of the psychic life; it must be
the utterance of vision and feeling, proceeding from
the spirit and the heart, from the secret chamber
where the soul meets God as the stem meets its root
in the bosom of the earth.
As little would our Lord condemn public prayer as
He would condemn public almsgiving, or fasting, or
other overt good works. He would but teach us that
the intention of the hypocrite or actor in seeking
publicity simply excludes that self-forgetfulness
through which alone the soul can meet God as a
spirit on the spiritual plane. On that plane all self-
consciousness of the lower sort (that is, all conscious
ness of the narrow, individual self, whose interests
can be conceived as other than God's) vanishes for
the time being ; all inward " acting " is laid aside,
because the desires and motives that would prompt
it are annihilated. The same perfect simplicity,
directness, and sincerity are attained in such prayer
as in the unself-conscious beneficence which asks in

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 93
wonder : " Lord, when saw we Thee hungry and
fed Thee?" 2
If some sort of visible and external religious
society is undoubtedly necessary for the waking and
education of our spiritual life — since consistent in
dividualism in religion is as sterilizing as in other
spiritual interests, such as science and general culture
— it follows that public prayer and worship are as
necessary in their place as secret prayer ; that they
foster secret prayer in the same way that public
intelligence and taste foster private intelligence and
taste. But public prayer must necessarily be couched in
words and symbols in which the common spirit finds
common utterance. As little as Christ would con
demn public prayer in condemning the hypocrites,
so little would He reject vocal prayer or forms of
prayer when He warns us against much speaking and
vain repetitions. Galilee of the Gentiles may easily
have familiarized His Jewish hearers with the heathen
practices here denounced ; and that materialism of
thought, which materialism of life so invariably
introduces into every religion, rendered His warnings
by no means superfluous for a people who were at
all times only too readily infected by surrounding
idolatry and superstition. More particularly did this
point of Christ's teaching need to be recorded and
emphasized for the benefit of those Gentile Chris
tians who had crowded into the Church by the time
that St. Matthew's Gospel was written, and whom
the laws of mental inertia and "least resistance"

94 LEX CREDENDI

disposed to retain as much of their old religious
tradition as could possibly receive any sort of Chris
tian interpretation. What with their own inevitable
tendency to receive Judaic-Christian traditions in a
Gentile sense, and with the Church's wise willingness
to tolerate, baptize, and reinterpret, rather than
destroy, all those ideas and symbols of paganism
that might serve as a more flexible vessel for the new
wine of the Gospel than Judaism would offer, there
must have been a continual danger for the early
Gentile Christians lest the older and deeper habit of
mind should rise up again and vanquish the new.
We have only to acquaint ourselves with some of
the lower phases of contemporary religion to realize
what is meant by this " battalogy," this babbling or
gabbling or vain repetition which our Lord repre
hends. It is the prayer of those who think that they
will be heard for their "much speaking," and that
quantity of prayer is as important or more important
than quality ; who attach a certain ex opere operato
value to bare words, apart from the inward prayer
which they should embody ; who hope to weary
their gods into compliance with their own will. An
error so ancient, enduring, and universally recurrent
is sure to be " natural " in some sense, and to have
some plausible justification.
When we would move the tardy and reluctant
will of our fellow-man we know — and every beggar
and every spoilt child knows — that insistence and
reiteration count for much ; that each request makes
some little impression, were it only as a drop of
water on a stone, and that the accumulation of such

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 95
impressions may at last break down the most stub
born opposition. Has not Christ Himself told us the
story of the importunate widow, just to teach us that
we should always pray and never weary ? As long
as men conceive their God humanwise — not as a
spirit, not as a Father who sees in secret — it is but
natural that they should treat with Him as with a
man ; that they should think it necessary to acquaint
Him with their inward desires ; that they should hope
to weary Him with repetitions, to cajole and flatter
Him with praises ; and that they should attach more
importance and effectuality to their words than to
their desires. Hence the ceaseless tongue-clatter dis
tinctive of pagan worship, the hurrying through of
formulas, the measuring of prayers by their number,
length, time, etc.
If true prayer is a raising of man's heart and mind
to God, it can be no true prayer which simply
lowers God to the heart and mind of man. To some
extent such a lowering is inevitable while man is on
earth and God in heaven. He must stoop, and stoop
almost infinitely, to meet us; but if there be no
straining upwards on our part, no effort to raise our
thoughts and desires to a diviner and more spiritual
level, the essence of prayer is absent. Not only does
the mechanical lip-service drag God down to the
level of man's mind, but also to the level of his
heart. It is importunate in a bad sense; it en
deavours to force and weary the divine will into
conformity with man's unpurified will ; to wfing from
it a reluctant consent to man's natural psychic
desires. Only while we think of God humanwise is

96 LEX CREDENDI

it possible to imagine that our desires should be
better and wiser than His ; or that He should yield to
that which He knows to be less good and wise. But
when we remember that no prayer avails but that
which the Holy Spirit puts into our heart, and
which is therefore an expression of the Divine Will ;
that we are told to seek first the Kingdom of God
and His righteousness, and all else only in reference
to that end — then it is manifest that the importunate
prayer which Christ commends is that which struggles
to bring man's will into conformity with God's, not
God's into conformity with man's ; that which raises
man's heart up to God, not that which drags God
down to man's heart.
Yet to sweep aside as so much rubbish and super
stition all the rosaries and litanies, Christian and
non-Christian, that have busied man's lips since he
first began lisping his prayers to God, would be as
foolish as to condemn all public prayer on the score
of hypocrisy. Formality is the evil, not form, nor
even formulas. Is not the " Our Father " a divinely
sanctioned form or formula? Prayer, like every
movement of the spirit, necessarily tends to embody
itself, to become explicit in words and symbols.
And this embodiment is an aid to its development,
just as our whole spiritual life is shaped and fostered
by our religious beliefs, and shapes them, in return,
by a process of action and reaction involved in the
unity of our faculties of thought, feeling, and will.
As proceeding from the most hidden depths of the
spirit, where it finds its roots in God, prayer does not
lend itself readily to formulation, and the attempt to

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 97
give it exact verbal expression must be largely un
successful unless it be a prayer of the mind's surface,
rather than of the heart's centre. Hence there is
much more unreality and formalism in a discursive,
well-reasoned address to Heaven than in the broken
aspirations and reiterated cries forced from the soul by
the pressure of its travail. Tbe confessed irrelevance
between the words used and the intention behind
them, which would be preposterous in the dealings
of man with man, may in prayer give the heart a
freedom of movement which an endeavour at exacti
tude of expression would destroy ; while it implies,
or may imply, a recognition that the prayer is
addressed to One who sees in secret, who considers
our desires rather than our halting words. Thus
there is no condemnation passed on forms and
repetitions, but only on formality and on vain re
petitions, on the merely quantitive and mechanical
view of prayer. We should not then admit it as a
reproach when attention is drawn to the likeness
between many points of Catholic and ethnic worship,
as in this matter of rosaries and litanies, forms and
repetitions. We see in it a proof that such practices
are the spontaneous natural creation of man's religious
needs— needs which the Church purifies and to which
she ministers. Nor will the disciples of Him who so
often held up the heathen and the Samaritan to our
imitation allow for a moment that all the formulas and
repetitions of heathenism are vain ; or that in them
the true spirit of prayer never finds blind utterance ;
or that the cries which blameless ignorance sends up
to false gods never enter into the ears of the true.
H

98 LEX CREDENDI

Like faith, superstition is an affair of the heart far
more than of the mind. Where the object or motive
of prayer is non-moral, psychic, selfish, no orthodoxy
of mental conception or verbal expression will save
such prayer from superstition. On the other hand,
if the motive be spiritual, ethical, inspired by the love
of goodness and not by the love of self, no theo
logical error or crudeness of form will affect the
substantial purity of such a prayer. Of its own
nature, no doubt, the spirit tends to shape the mind
into conformity with itself; materialism of life and
affection tends to materialism of belief; purity of
heart tends to spirituality of thought. But the pro
cess is tardy, and is worked out usually in the
collective life of the religious community, rather than
in the single life of the individual. The individual
inherits the forms and conceptions of his people, and
can modify them but slightly at best. His own spirit
may be far too high or far too low for the medium
of expression placed at his disposal by tradition ;
the prayer of the heathen to his idol may at times be
less superstitious in spirit than that of the Christian
to the true God. 3
" Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his
disciples." Besides these two false standards of prayer
— that of the hypocrite and that of the heathen-
there is a true but less perfect standard to be con
trasted with the Lord's Prayer, namely, the prayer
of John the Baptist — greatest of those born of
women, yet less than the least in the Kingdom of
God.

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 99
The errors we have dealt with' consist in bringing
God down to the level of man's heart and mind in
prayer, instead of raising man's heart and mind to
God. They are begotten of man's great need to feel
God close to him, like to him, and therefore manage
able by him ; to find in Him a powerful friend, or
relation, or father, a " very present help in the time
of trouble." Yet in the measure that we bring Him
down to our level, we rob Him of the power of raising
us up above ourselves. The more human He becomes,
the less is He divine, all-seeing, all-mighty, all-loving,
all-good. If He is our Father, it is because we have
given Him our nature and likeness ; it is because we
have made Him man ; not because He has made us
more than men.
Contrary altogether to this debasing tendency was
the spirit of the great prophets of Israel, of whom
John the Baptist was chiefest, as nearest to Christ,
as herald of the dawn. In them the sense of God's
greatness, His otherness from man, His transcendence,
was all-dominating, and filled them with a burning,
reforming zeal against materialistic and unworthy
conceptions of the divine majesty. Insistence on
this truth brought home to men a sense of a measure
less gulf interposed between God and themselves, of
a distance and unlikeness hard to reconcile with the
close relation of fatherhood. If the later prophets
would at times turn abruptly from the preaching of
God's awful might and majesty to the assurance of
His fatherly love and compassion, yet it was rather
with reference to Israel as a whole than to the indi
vidual sinner. For how could the individual dare

loo LEX CREDENDI

to see in himself the filial counterpart of a being
so transcendentally other and unlike himself? He
listened, at best, in faith to promises of a coming
Kingdom of Heaven in which men were to be trans
formed into sons of God, and were to sit at meat
with God as children at their father's table. But
that kingdom had not yet come. With the sense of
God's greatness he had lost the sense of His nearness.
He had yet to learn that the greatest is the lowliest,
that the furthest is the nearest, that the most divine
is the most human.
And this is a truth that revelation has made current
coin among the least in the Kingdom of Heaven. It
is the truth of which Christ was the living revelation ;
which became incarnate in Him who "gave to as
many as received Him power to become the sons of
God." Great and other as God was, yet men could
become the sons of God, because they could become
other and more than men ; because the sense of
nearness could be achieved otherwise than by ma
terializing the spiritual, or by debasing God to man's
image ; it could be achieved by spiritualizing man
and lifting him nearer to heaven. If then John the
Baptist, like the other prophets, taught his followers
some brief prayer embodying the spirit of his mes
sage and mission, it was but fitting that our Lord
should do as much for the children of the bride-
chamber ; for they had lived to see what kings and
prophets had vainly longed to see, namely, the
Kingdom of God begun upon earth ; and their hearts
were filled with his own joy, with the fulness of that
spirit which enabled them to cry : Abba, our Father.

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST

III
THE INVOCATION
Pater noster qui es in ccelis. — Our Father who art in heaven
I
The invocation, " Our Father who art in
heaven," is designed to bring the soul face to face
with God in the secret chamber of the heart; to
determine its attitude and disposition ; to establish
that due relation of mind, feeling, and will which is
the condition of communion and converse between
the creature and the Creator. When we call to
another in our need, his name serves but to attract
his attention ; but when the child calls " Father,"
the appeal is not merely to the attention, but to the
heart; it is a reminder of the relationship upon
which the right to appeal is grounded.
The mother may for a moment forget the babe
that clings to her breast ; her attention may be
diverted till a cry wins it back again. But the
attention of the Heavenly Father is not diverted for
a second ; else we should return to nothingness :
" He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor
sleep." It is not to call His attention to us, or to
remind Him of claims which he never ceases to
fulfil, but to recall our wandering soul to the con
sciousness of that love which, like the ether, ever
surrounds and permeates us, that we need to cry
out to Him.

102 LEX CREDENDI

In many of the ethnic religions the worship of
departed ancestors has associated the notions of god
head and fatherhood. The title "Father" in such
cases expresses principally the worshipper's sense of
descent and derivation from the Deity. So also on
the far higher plane of philosophical religions, where
the term is applied in a quite metaphorical sense to
the First Cause of all things, to the " deorum homi-
numque pater " — to " the Father of gods and men."
But in the ears of Peter, Andrew, and John the
sense of the word " Father," as applied to God, was
far more ethical than metaphysical. To a little
child, untroubled about problems of Whence and
Whither, the word " father " conveys no suggestion of
descent or derivation. It stands for ethical relation
ships of love, care, protection, intimacy, authority.
To the physical or metaphysical root of these
relationships the child is indifferent. They them
selves are matters of experience ; their root is a
matter of speculation — of inference from that ex
perience. God's Fatherhood over Israel was a matter
of history and experience for Christ's hearers. Israel
was His well-beloved son, whom He had chosen and
adopted ; whom He had delivered from Egypt,
fed and watched over in the desert, brought to the
Land of Promise; whom He had borne with,
chastened, and forgiven again and again with all
the long-suffering and compassion of a Father.
This, rather than any causal relationship, is what
His Fatherhood meant for them. " I will be to him

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 103
a Father, and he shall be to Me a son" implies a
fatherhood and sonship of adoption rather than of
nature. It was a mystery of God's free choice, a
favour granted to Israel and denied to others :
" Jacob have I loved, and Esau have I hated " ;
" He hath not done thus to any other nation, nor
manifested His judgments to them." The fact that
all alike were His creatures was not felt to be enough
to make them all alike His children. The special
and higher sense of sonship which belonged to Israel
was interpreted exclusively as the only sense ; if God
loved Jacob, it seemed to follow that he must hate
Esau. Depending on God's free choice rather than
on His essential love, this Fatherhood over Israel was
conditional on the obedience and reverence of the
adopted son, whose sin or apostasy might break the
bond. That it had not done so a thousand times,
that God had forgiven again and again, was but
another mystery of His inscrutable will.
With the growing sense of God's otherness and
transcendent greatness, as revealed by the prophets,
the distance of heaven from earth had been magni
fied in the general consciousness, while the sins of
Israel rose ever higher as a barrier between them
and the All-Holy, of whom righteousness was more
and more clearly realized to be the central attribute.
It was as when we wake to some unexpected great
ness in a friend which seems to put him out of our
reach and destroy all ease of intercourse. In us,
though not in Him, some feeling of estrangement is
inevitable ; and He will need to give some new
revelation of his unaltered affection, if he is to

104 LEX CREDENDI

restore our confidence. So Christ came, as the
newest and highest revelation of the Father's love,
when Israel's sense of sonship had been weakened
by the sense of God's transcendence and unlikeness,
and of man's sinfulness. Who could dare to call
Him Father whose infinitude seemed to exclude all
possible likeness with the finite? Who could give
men power to become the sons of so high and holy
a God? 3
In one sense it is untrue, in another it is true, to
say that Christ first revealed to men the Fatherhood
of God. What was an occasional flash of intuition
for the greater prophets, was with Him an abiding
vision of which His whole life was one continuous
utterance. The relative purity and tranquillity of
heart, which at times allowed them a glimpse of the
sources or roots of the spirit-life, was in His case
absolute and constant. He looked down through
the depths of His own spirit as through a crystal
well of light into the abyss of all life and being, into
the bosom of God, " the Father of spirits." " No
man," no prophet, not even the greatest born of
woman, "hath seen God at any time; the only
begotten who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath
declared Him."
In this vision He beheld the root and reason of
that fatherliness of affection and care, which to Israel
had seemed but a mystery of God's inscrutable will.
He saw that in all its degrees, from the least to the
greatest, it was founded on true fatherhood ; that it
was the love of the parent for his offspring, of the

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 105
Creator for the creature, of the Source of life and
being for every measure of life and being, natural
and supernatural, in which He has reproduced His
own image. With Christ this sense of their deriva
tion and descent from God was ever present; the
bond of creaturehood, invisible to other eyes, was
visible to His at all times. He beheld the divine
love, not merely in its effects and appearances, but
in its cause and substance.
Philosophical religion had, at best, argued out
some glimmer of the truth, had expressed some such
relationship of maker and made, but it had not
directly felt the love, the Fatherhood. He felt the
love, and framed in the love He beheld the truth,
intuitively, face to face, without argument. Reason
could only oppress men and chill their hearts with
the thought of an infinite unlikeness between God
and man that made loving relation and inter
course unimaginable. The further it removed men
from idols and man-faced deities, the more fatherless
it left them.
As reason could not raise God to heaven without
taking Him from earth, so neither could the crude
religions of the imagination keep Him on earth with
out dragging Him down from heaven ; the more He
was for them a Father, the less was He a God. But
He whose purity of heart enabled His vision to
pierce to the lowest depths and foundations of truth
saw the Fatherhood rooted in the Godhead ; saw
that God was a Father, just because He was God ;
that He was the nearest, because He was the
furthest; the most merciful, because the most just.

106 LEX CREDENDI

No philosophy of God's infinitude and unlikeness
could equal the truth implied in Christ's reverence
and mystic awe; no fond likeness-making of the
imagination could justify or explain His boundless
feeling of childlike love and confidence. Reverence
and love in Him were fed by no inferences of the
mind or pictures of the imagination, but were be
gotten by direct spiritual contact with the divine ;
in Him vision, feeling, and will blended together,
independent, without priority or succession. This
was His spirit; and this was His revelation. The
truth that He revealed was Himself; and when He
would bequeath us His Truth, He bequeathed us
His Spirit, His Love. 4
"He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father."
This surely is true, directly, of Christ according to
the spirit, not of Christ according to the flesh. It is
as a spirit that man is made to be the image of God,
who is a spirit. Idolatry sought that divine image
in the psychic, natural man ; Christ found it in the
spiritual man, who is more-than-man, who is the Son
of God. Man's spirit is the mirror in which, accord
ing to the measure of its purity, God's face is re
flected. In One alone were the purity and the
reflexion such that He could say without limit :
" He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." Here,
as throughout, we speak of Christ's moral and
spiritual relation to the Father ; not of the meta
physical relation of personal union, which is its
mysterious, inscrutable root. We speak of that fault
less, unbroken unity of will, which practically merged

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 107
all distinction of agency and made His spirit-life as
much a part of the Divine Life as the life of any
member is part of that of the whole body : " The
word which ye hear is not Mine, but the Father's
who sent Me" (John xiv. 24). "The Son can do
nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father
doing; for what things soever He doeth, these the
Son also doeth in like manner " (John v. 19). The
spirit feeds on truth ; it becomes what it sees.
Christ's visible life was purely an expression of His
spirit-life; and this again purely an expression of
the Divine Life. And thus that Divine Life was
made visible : " He that hath seen Me hath seen the
Father." In this sense He has taught us that we
have a right to look for the likeness of man in God,
and for the likeness of God in man ^. " Face My
hands fashioned, see it in Myself!" Thus the blind
hankerings of idolatry after a God within the reach
of man's mind were tenderly refined and super
abundantly satisfied by Him who never yet broke
the bruised reed of our mental infirmity, or quenched
the smoking flax of our faint desires.
As little as Christ's knowledge of the Father was
an inference, so little was His revelation of that
knowledge a formula. As He beheld the truth in His
love, so He uttered it in His life — in the expression
of His love. His life was His doctrine. Reflecting
on that life, we try to formulate the truth it implied
according to our modes of speech and thought ; and
thus the Church shapes her theology from age to
age. His life and spirit are the subject-matter of
this reflection, the supreme rule of faith. His life is

108 LEX CREDENDI
the revelation of the Father ; of what the Father is
in relation to man ; of the eternal humanity of God.
In Him we see God as a servant in the midst of His
creatures, kneeling at their feet, ministering to their
needs, feeding them with His flesh and blood, bearing
with their infirmities of mind and body, forgiving
their sins, healing their sickness ; full of compassion
for the multitudes ; the Friend of publicans and
sinners, of simple folk and little children, of the birds
of the air and the flowers of the field ; the Foe of
scribes and Pharisees, of the unreal and pretentious ;
the upholder of truth and justice and mercy;
rejoicing with those that rejoice, as at Cana ; weep
ing with those that weep, as by the tomb of
Lazarus ; a Good Shepherd who lays down His life
for His sheep, yet whom death cannot hold or
conquer. "He that hath seen Me hath seen the
Father," yet " the Father is greater than I " ; for all
that He has shown of the Father's humanity, and all
that His saints, in whom His spirit continues for ever
to develop and unfold its inexhaustible riches, can
ever show us is infinitely short of the truth.
5
When complementary truths are set over against
one another by some apparent contrariety, owing to
the limitation of our outlook, we forget one as we
emphasize the other. We are always defective either
in our sense of God's nearness or in our sense of His
distance ; for we only believe, where Christ felt, and,
through feeling, saw. Our progress, if we are not to
oscillate idly and unprogressively from one side of the

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 109
truth to the other, demands that in each case we
should return to the forgotten side enriched by a
deeper realization of the other. In Christ's hearers
the sense of God's distance and otherness had been
more deeply realized than hitherto. Their more
pressing need was to learn that His greatness, far
from diminishing, was the measure of His fatherli-
ness ; that " the All-Great was the All-Loving too."
This Gospel or Good News was for the poor, the
lowly, the empty, lest their humility should pass into
hopelessness. " Lift up your heads, for your redemp
tion draweth nigh " — such was its burden. If our
Saviour preached the love, He also preached the great
ness, in order to measure and enhance the love :
" You call Me the Lord and Master ; you say well,
for so I am. ... I, your Lord and Master, wash your
feet." God, who on earth washed their feet, through
Him, was not only their Father, but their Father in
heaven. Heaven for Christ's hearers meant God's dwelling-
place above the sky, from whence He viewed the
world beneath and governed it through the ministry
of ascending and descending angels. Our own con
ceptions of the Beyond are not so adequate that we
can afford to set these simpler and more confident
representations aside as religiously valueless. In one
point we may easily underrate them, through our
inability to clothe ourselves in the garment of the
past. If our astronomy has in some way enlarged, it
has also impoverished, our notion of the heavens. It
has given us quantitative mysteries in exchange for
qualitative; it has made heaven homogeneous with

no LEX CREDENDI

earth. The once mysterious planets, and the sun
itself, are but material orbs like our own ; and as the
mind travels endlessly into space it meets only with
more orbs and systems of orbs in their millions, an
infinite monotony of matter and motion, but never
does it strike against some boundary wall of the
universe, beyond which God keeps an eternal Sabbath
in a new order of existence, a mysterious world which
eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor heart conceived.
The heaven that lay behind the blue curtain of the
sky, whence night by night God hung out His silver
lamps to shine upon the earth, was a far deeper sym
bol of the eternal home than the cold, shelterless
deserts of astronomical space.
For the Galilean fishermen, heaven stood for dis
tance and transcendence, for a world other in kind
than our our — however imperfectly they may have
grasped the extent of that otherness. The expres
sion " Father in Heaven," or " Heavenly Father,"
reminded them of difference as well as of likeness,
and warned them that they were on holy ground and
in the region of mystery.
This sense of God's otherness, unlikeness, infini
tude is, both historically and philosophically, of the
very essence of religion — the motive of that rever
ence, awe, and worship, which is even a more primary
element than love, confidence, and sonship. Man
passes from the religion of servitude and fear to that
of liberty and the Gospel ; yet he does not leave fear
behind, but carries it on with him, deepened and
spiritualized, into a reverence that is part of the
very substance of love.

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST

Christ's reverential love was that of one to whom
earth was permeated by heaven as by an all-pervad
ing ether invisible to less pure eyes than His own.
The enfolding curtain of the sky was for Him but a
symbol of the manner in which the visible and mate
rial is encompassed and penetrated by the spiritual.
It was not from beyond the outmost circumference
of space that He sought the explanation and source
of all that exists and lives and moves ; but in the
very centre of each several creature, living in its life,
breathing in its breath, yet transcending it infinitely
in kind and nature. For Him earth and heaven were
continuous, as the light and heat of the sun. The
visible, of itself meaningless, found its complement
and explanation in the invisible, as a part is ex
plained when the whole is revealed. For Him
the whole realm of ruthless law and necessity was
but an instrument in the grasp of liberty and love
which, without destroying its structure, could bend it
to their own designs. The world of matter was but
a little islet afloat on the boundless, encompassing
ocean of spirit, rising and falling on its bosom, borne
hither and thither by its currents, yet held together
within itself by rigid relations of necessity. With
seeming indifference the sun might rise upon the evil
and the good, the rain descend upon the just and the
unjust, the sparrows whom Nature had nursed might
fall to the ground, the grass she had clothed with
glory might wither and fade, but behind all and over
all were the love and care of the Heavenly Father.

LEX CREDENDI

Man's heart has always been too big for earth to
fill, too hungry to be satisfied with the mere husks of
reality. Repressed again and again by various sorts
of materialism, the mystic appetite as often reasserts
itself, and will feed on any garbage if wholesome
food be denied it. A world of rigid law and order,
a world of blind chance and chaos, are alike in
tolerable to a spiritual being, which necessarily seeks
its own likeness at the root of things, and will be
satisfied with nothing less, while ready to accept
infinitely more.
We must, then, recognize a perverted truth and
value in the crude mysticism which dreams of a
divine power alongside of and, in some sense,
co-ordinate with nature, as a ruler is co-ordinate
with his subjects ; a power which the powers of
nature, in the main, obey according to prescribed
laws, and whose existence is only revealed when it
breaks through this order of nature and comes into
collision with it. Mysticism of this kind looks for
God, not in order but in disorder, in storms and
earthquakes and portents, in abnormal states and
phenomena of the spiritual faculties, in seeming
disturbances of nature's rhythm that point to the
intervention of a will above nature. Yet so steadily
and persistently does maturer knowledge tend to
reduce these seeming exceptions to some higher rule,
that to build our divinity solely on such foundations
is to build it on the sand. He to whose spiritual
gaze nature was transparent has taught us the true

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 113
mysticism ; He has taught us to see God, not along
side of nature, but to see nature in the bosom of
God, and God through and in nature ; to find Him
as revealed in the rule ; to seek for Him as hidden in
the exception ; to believe in a unity which we cannot
yet see; to hope in a love which we cannot yet
understand. There can be no conflict of faith and
science when faith compasses science as heaven
compasses earth ; when mysteries are sought not in
the faults and lacunas of science, but in the higher
world that permeates and engulfs the visible order, in
the darkness from which it comes and into which it
vanishes, a darkness which faith alone can enlighten.
7
Like a water-weed, whose blossom alone floats on
the surface, man's being is, for the most part, merged
in the spiritual world and reaches up to the visible
order only in virtue of its psychic and organic mani
festations. Slight as may be the seen indications of
his connexion with the hidden, they are there never
theless. To bring them to full consciousness, to
control his psychic life entirely by that conscious
ness, is the work of religion. The spirit-life, as we
have said, is that in which a man's interests have been
so identified with the divine, universal interest
that he becomes dead to himself, to his narrow,
separate, psychic self, and feels that God has taken
possession of him, that he is merely an instrument of
the Divine Will : " I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in
me." It means a disinterested devotion to truth in
every form — truth of life, truth of feeling, truth of

H4 LEX CREDENDI

vision. In virtue of this spirit-life man belongs
(actually, to some degree; potentially, to an indefinite
degree) to heaven rather than to earth, for he is a
son of the Heavenly Father, the "Father of Spirits."
Heaven is his home, his natural environment ; it is the
communion of all wills, so far as they are identified
with the divine, and through the divine with one
another ; it is the Invisible Church, the Communion
of Saints. .^"
It is hell, and not earth, that, is described in the
Gospel as separated from heaven by an impassable
gulf. A view of heaven that would so cut it off from
earth would turn earth into hell: "Where Thou art,"
says a Kempis, " there is heaven ; and where Thou
art not, there is hell." As the spiritual order enwraps
and permeates the physical and makes with it one
intelligible unity, so the spiritual and psychic in man
are not, by right, antagonistic or mutually exclusive,
but belong to the same whole. What God hath
joined together, let no man put asunder. In this
truth we stand firm against all false asceticism as
against all false mysticism. The height of heaven
above earth is not local but qualitative ; a distance
of kind, not of space; a distance that no more
stands in the way of unity and nearness than the
distance that separates the spirit from the body
which it informs, and which it could not possibly
inform were it like in kind.

Christ has " given us power to become the sons
of God." This gift or grace supposes a certain

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 115
receptivity in us which belongs to us as spiritual
beings. A merely psychic being could not so much
as desire or receive the gift. It is difficult and idle
to speculate what man would be without grace ;
without that perpetual " giving " on God's side, apart
from which our spirit-life would remain purely
dormant. It is of God's gift that the last and
least of us from time to time rises above the psychic
self and elicits some disinterested act of goodness.
It is of His gift that we desire to multiply such acts,
and to sustain ourselves continuously on the spiritual
level. It is of His gift that we weary of the psychic
self-seeking life ; that we cry out against our limita
tions ; that we ask and seek and knock : " Thou
wouldst not have sought Me, if thou hadst not
already found Me." All that the merely psychic
man can do of himself is to work out his own
misery; to learn by some wider experience the
hollowness of the highest attainment of the lower
non-spiritual life. So far and no further can he
"prepare himself for grace," unawares — wandering,
as it were, into a far country with his face turned
from home. To realize that he is not enough for
himself, that he needs another, that Other must first
present Himself to him in his loneliness ; must run
to meet him. Unlike the monologue of the ethical
life, the spirit-life is essentially a converse, a com
munication, a passing out of self into God ; it is an
affair between two ; a mutual giving and receiving.
Without grace it is unthinkable. The initiative
must be from God ; as it is with all life. It is He
who " teaches us to pray," who gives us the desire to

n6 LEX CREDENDI

pray ; to arise and go to our Father. It is by prayer
that we strain forward to meet Him ; that we open
our arms to receive the kiss of peace; that we
stretch out our hands for the ring and the robe. It
is by the " raising of the heart and mind to God," by
the spiritualizing of our affections and thoughts, that
through grace we make ourselves sons of God.
This Divine Life is not something that we draw
forth from ourselves, but rather something that we
appropriate. To be a spirit is simply to have the
power of appropriating it when it is offered to us.
We might say this in some measure of the civiliza
tion into which we are born ; of that organized
system of beliefs, traditions, customs, and institu
tions which society has slowly built up. This, too, is
a ready-made life which the individual may appro
priate and enter into. If he would stand alone he
must remain on the brute level, a savage at best.
Still more, the Divine Life — God's mind, God's love,
God's will — is something which the Spirit lays hold
of and appropriates in various measures ; which it
cannot educe from itself, and for which it is as
dependent on God as the babe is on its mother.
Being Himself in the fullest possession of this
spirit-life, and imparting it to us, Christ has given us
power to become the sons of God. He is Himself
the bread of that life ; and in the measure that we
feed on Him we become what He is.
9
It was in the consciousness of union and solidarity
with his people past and present, of membership in

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 117
Israel, that the Jew invoked God as "our Father."
He was Israel's God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob. Moab and Egypt had their gods ; but Israel
alone had the true God, and none could claim His
fatherhood and protection save through Israel and as
adopted into the family of Abraham. There was a
note of exclusiveness in the pronoun " our " ; it meant
"ours and not theirs." That the individual as such
and apart from his title of membership with Israel
had a right to call God " Father " or " my Father "
had hardly come into clear and general recognition in
Christ's day. As in earlier forms of society, the
people was everything, the individual was altogether
subordinate. Israel collectively was God's son, or if
later the dignity was vested in the King or the pro
mised Messias, it was as in the representative of the
whole people.
It is to the influence of Christ's teaching that we
owe that development of the sense of personality
which has destroyed the excessive collectivity of
ancient social institutions, has led to a juster idea of
the relation of the individual to the community, and
has taught us that neither can be wholly subordinated
to the other ; that their interests are common ; that
the hurt and perfection of the one is the hurt and
perfection of the other. But the modern reaction
against old-world collectivism has often been in the
direction of a crude individualism, as hurtful to true
spiritual personality as ever was slavery. One great
factor at least of such personality was saved in the
Israelite's sense of participation in a corporate life,
in the cause of God, in the Kingdon of Heaven.

n8 LEX CREDENDI

When he stood in the temple with the worshippers,
when he went forth to fight the battles of Israel, he
was no longer himself in the narrow sense ; it was
the life of God's people which pulsed in his veins
and raised him to the over-individual level. He had
not yet realized his own separate value and import
ance in the eyes of Him who is the Father of each as
well as the Father of all : he had not yet broken
down the walls of partition that divided Israel after
the flesh from Israel after the spirit, that narrowed
the cause of God to the cause of a nation ; he had not
yet entered into an all-inclusive universal life, but he
had to a great extent risen to a sense of spiritual
personality and had entered into the Divine Life as
far as he understood it.
Far deeper and wider was the divine love that
burned in Christ's heart, and whose meaning and
implication was ever clear to His vision. He who
felt not merely the effects and manifestations of God's
fatherliness towards Israel, but also its very root and
substance, felt also that it could not be so limited to
Israel as to exclude any creature begotten and sus
tained by the Eternal Love ; that though there were
infinite degrees and kinds of sonship, yet God's love
for the least of His children was " greater than the
measure of man's mind " ; that no will could be per
fectly true to His which set limits to human brother
hood. It is not the voice of Israel alone, but the
voice of all humanity, the voice of all creation, the
blended voices of the " Benedicite," that cried, " Our
Father who art in heaven."
This is evident from our Lord's whole practice and

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST tig
teaching as set before us in the Gospels, and as inter
preted more explicitly by St. Paul. His life was one
prolonged fight against exclusivism in any sense ;
and in the interests of Catholicism in every sense.
Whom or what did He shut out from His love?
Nothing that bears the shape of man ; nothing that
breathes the breath of life ; not the birds of the air,
nor the grass of the field, nor the heaven that is
God's throne, nor the earth that is His footstool.
Hence St. Paul (Col. I. 19) speaks of the whole
fulness of creation as dwelling in Him, as gathered
up into His consciousness and His love, as already
sharing in the redemption which His blood had
wrought for all mankind, as groaning and travailling
for the fuller deliverance to come.

This sense of solidarity, through God, with all that
proceeds from God and belongs to God, is of the
essence of the spirit-life. " All things are yours ; and
you are Christ's, and Christ is God's." God is
transcendent ; He stretches beyond the world in
every direction ; infinitely higher, deeper, wider.
But it is only through, in, and with the world that
we are one with Him ; we must take it all into our
selves, into our thought, feeling, and will, if we would
possess Him. That mysticism is doomed to sterility
which would seek Him, like the entombed hermits
of Thibet, in absolute silence and darkness, which
would empty the mind and heart of every creature
in the vain hope of finding more room for God. As
little could our mind think of life apart from things

120 LEX CREDENDI

that live. What God is out of relation to His
creatures, His creatures can never know. Whatever
ghostly figure of Him such abstract contemplation
may conjure up owes the little substance it has to
relics of concrete living experience which the mind
has failed to banish, and which still cling to it in its
mad endeavour to soar up beyond all atmosphere to
the region of the Absolute.
The seeming justification of this endeavour to
escape from creatures lies in the notorious fact that
the preoccupation and overcrowding of the heart
and mind with creatures is manifestly hurtful to
converse with God. Such converse is favoured by
the liberation of the faculties for the contemplation
of divine things ; hence the conclusion that a total
liberation should be our aim. This is equivalent to
supposing that because surfeit is injurious to health,
starvation can never hurt us. Life, experience, is
the pabulum of the spirit. As the bee goes to and
fro between the garden and its hive, now gathering,
now storing up and utilizing what it has gathered, so
the spirit lives by alternations of experience and
reflection. An undue excess of either over the other
is fatal ; either religion is choked amid thorns and
briars, or it becomes abstract, empty, unreal, out of
relation to life, a frail thought-structure imperilled by
every breath of fresh air. We need then to pause
frequently in life ; to turn from experience back to
reflection and prayer, so as to consider experience
explicitly in its relation to God as revealing Him; and
then to turn from prayer and reflection to the quest
of new experience with an enlarged capacity for

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST

receiving and profiting by it ; with a greater power
of assimilating it. And thus gradually the whole
world should become food to us. " If thy heart were
but right," says a Kempis, " every creature would be
to thee a mirror of life, a holy book ; for there is no
creature so small or despicable as not in some way
to represent the divine goodness." The way to con
templation, therefore, is not to fly from creatures,
but so to rectify the heart by reflection that one can
gradually embrace them all ; for the more we em
brace of them, the more we embrace of God.
The spirit in prayer then comes face to face with
God without intermediary; but it must not come
alone, isolated, separate. Such separateness belongs
to the psychic self. The spirit takes the whole world
into its thought and affection ; gives it a conscious
ness and a voice which cries, not " My Father," but
" Our Father " — " ours," because inclusive of every
thing, exclusive of nothing. Through the spirit the
whole world returns to God in praise ; but to return
through it the world must first enter into it ; must
be assimilated and transformed by it.
In One alone has it been so perfectly; that One
whose " heart was right " in an unique sense ; that
One who alone could say, " All Mine are Thine, and
all Thine are Mine " ; that One in whom " it pleased
the Father that all fulness should dwell," and of
whose fulness we have all received.
n
It is, then, vain to approach the altar, to draw near
to God if one is estranged from one's brother. Let him

122 LEX CREDENDI

first go, and by reconciliation take the whole world
into his heart and so come and offer it, together with
himself, as a gift. As the negative estrangement of
indifference starves the soul, and as the positive
estrangement of hostility narrows and contracts it
by pressure and opposition, so it is sustained,
strengthened, expanded, enriched by spiritual com
munion with others, in the measure that it lives
in them and they in it. " I in them, and Thou in
Me, that we all may be perfect in one."
If this holds pre-eminently of the " rational crea
ture," i.e. of the world of spirits and wills, yet it
must be extended in due proportion to the humbler
and humblest orders of existence to which man, in
virtue of his complex nature, stands in relation of
brotherhood — He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small ;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
This we had learnt already from the Hebrew
psalmist ; this was the inspiration of the authors of
the Laudate and the Benedicite. But what with them
may have been but a spiritual instinct, was for
Christ a felt fact, a clear vision. His joy in creation
was enriched with a sense of fraternity and affection.
He beheld all things proceeding from the same root
as man, fostered by the same love. It was the
same Father who clothed the lilies of the field and
Solomon in all his glory ; who fed the birds of the
air and the Israelites in the desert ; who noted the
fall of a sparrow and numbered the hairs of man's

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 123
head. To the Poverello of Assisi belongs the glory
of having resolved the harmony of Christ's spirit
into its closely allied components of sorrow and
joy ; of having taken each apart, and brought it
home with new freshness to the Christian conscious
ness. The prophets had told us that "the sea is
His, and He made it, and His hands prepared the
dry land: the strength of the hills is His also";
that " the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness there
of" ; that " sun, moon, and stars obey Him " ; that
" the winds are His messengers and the lightnings
His ministers " ; but they had hardly reached that
joyous sense of brotherhood and friendliness which
belongs to the child of God and springs from the
deeper intuition of His Fatherhood, which greets the
sun as a brother, and the moon as a sister, through
an inspiration of true fraternal feeling and not
merely through a flight of poetic fancy.
It may be rightly objected that this nature-feel
ing often exists when the love of God and man is
weak, and is absent when this is strong. One might
reply that those who so lack it would be all the
better for it ; that those who possess it would be
still worse without it ; that no one loves God more
for loving nature less ; or less for loving nature
more. The true answer is that not all nature-feel
ing is religious, but only that which springs from the
intuition of God's Fatherhood, and whose quality and
extent are determined by the depth and purity of that
intuition.

124 LEX CREDENDI

"Generationem ejus quis enarrabit?" — "Who shall
declare His generation?" These words have been
applied somewhat uncritically by patristic writers to
signify the mysterious generation of the Eternal
Son. They might be applied with equal truth to
the mystery of the origin of all things; to the
relation of fatherhood and sonship that obtains
between God and the last and least of His creatures.
We know well that the dependence of the creature
is immeasurably greater, closer, and other than that
of a son ; that sonship is little more than a symbol,
a feeble image of the reality, an expression which
belongs to the order of parables and similitudes
rather than to that of allegories or metaphors. We
cannot break the idea into its factors, and find for
each of them a parallel in the relation of creature
hood. Some of them correspond, others do not;
hence sonship is a similitude of creaturehood, partly
like, partly unlike. Thus a son is begotten by an
act that passes, but a creature is being breathed forth
by God's love at every moment of its existence ; a
son becomes separate from and independent of his
father, but a creature is ever clinging to the bosom
of God ; a son is a product of blind instinct and
necessity, but a creature is a product of intelligence
and unconstrained love ; a son reaches maturity and
attains the perfection of his father's nature, but a
creature will always fall infinitely short of the per
fection of the Creator. Other relationships offer
points of similitude, and have been used to supple-

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 125
ment the poverty of that of fatherhood and sonship.
" Though a mother should forget her child, yet will
not I forget thee." " How often would I have
gathered thee as a hen gathereth her chickens under
her wing." " There is One that sticketh closer than
a brother." " Abraham was called the friend of
God." Here we see how God is our mother, brother,
and friend. Mystics delight to see in Him the
soul's Spouse and Lover. Nay, He is even in some
way the child of His children ; the servant of His
servants : " Inasmuch as ye did it to the least of
these My little ones, ye did it unto Me." "Lo! I
am in your midst as he who serveth " — for our Lord
says these things in the name of the Father and as
revealing the Father, who in so many ways is depen
dent on us and serves us.
Yet fatherhood is the similitude in which He has
principally revealed His relation to us. And if in
various civilizations the rights and duties of father
hood have been variously understood, we need not on
that account be over-critical to determine exactly how
they were understood in Galilee 2,000 years ago ; for
that would be to press a similitude point by point as
though it were a metaphor. Its value lies in what
fatherhood signifies everywhere and always, under
all varieties of usage and custom, namely, a claim to
reverence and love. 13
The conception of God as a father is easy for
religion in its childish stages, when reverence and love
are but crude and embryonic. But when science has
pulverized the earth and made it a speck in a

126 LEX CREDENDI

measureless waste of suns ; when it has shown us
the reign of ruthless law in little and great, outside
us and within us ; and when reflection has penetrated
us with the sense of God's otherness and unlikeness
and brought it home to our feeling and imagination
— then, indeed, it is only the very heroism of faith that
can affirm a likeness and sameness notwithstanding,
and can say, " Our Father who art in heaven." Yet
without such faith, our mental and moral life must be
brought to a standstill through a paralysing scepti
cism. If God's otherness were such that what is false
for us might be true for Him, or what is evil in us
might be good in Him ; if, as rash preachers have
sometimes implied, He has a right to deceive or to
be cruel ; if differences of false and true, good and
evil, depend merely on His arbitrary fiat — then our
standards of moral and mental endeavour are purely
relative. We might fear such a Being as we fear
an earthquake, or a volcano, or the unknown and
capricious forces of nature ; but reverence Him we
could not. Reverence is not of the merely vast and
wondrous, but of an excellence that is vast and
wonderful ; what we reverence is an excellence
which we can imagine, magnified beyond our im
agination. And this excellence is that of per
sonality, of the human spirit — its power, wisdom,
goodness, and love. In us, these attributes are separ
ate, and limited each of its kind ; that in God they
should be unlimited and identical makes Him end
lessly vast and wonderful, the supreme object of
mystic awe. It makes Him unlike us in His likeness.
But it is the substance of these same spiritual ex-

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 12J
cellences, as distinct from their limits and modes,
that makes Him like us in His unlikeness, and
constrains us to cry, " Our Father."
But it is only by faith of the highest kind that
this Fatherhood can be held firmly, so as to be the
governing inspiration of our lives. The evidence of
all-controlling goodness and love in the world round
us grows weaker and not stronger in the cold light
of purely intellectual criticism ; for such criticism ex
cludes the reasons of the heart. It sees only a vast
mechanism, callously grinding out good and evil, joy
and sorrow, on no conceivable plan ; now rewarding
virtue, now punishing it, with a capriciousness that
excludes all idea of intelligent goodness. We could
not possibly love, praise, or reverence a man who
acted as nature, or God through nature, often seems
to act. We should feel ourselves immeasurably better
than such a one, for all our selfishness and frailty —
that is to say, if we were to attend to what seems to
be ; to the imperfect revelation of God given in the
world, apart from the things made known in the
heart. Could the worst of us stand by and witness
the agonies of any innocent, reasonless creature,
child or animal, if our bare fiat could relieve those
agonies ? One such instance would be an unanswer
able difficulty against millions of contrary instances.
Yet there are oceans of such seemingly gratuitous
and useless agony all round us at every moment.
We cannot, then, under pain of moral scepticism,
say that the world, as it seems in the light of purely
intellectual criticism, appears to be the work of One
who is at once all-good and all-mighty.

128 LEX CREDENDI

But to study the world apart from man's heart is
like studying music on its mathematical side and
without reference to the ear. Man's heart is also the
heart of the world, not something outside it ; and
neither of them can be studied truthfully in abstrac
tion from the other. Had the Bouddha looked within
as well as without, he might have divined a power
that could transmute the all-pervading waters of
human tribulation into the wine of gladness ; but in
his contemplation he sat aloof, as one who witnesses
a play in which he has no part ; as having no sense
of his solidarity with the world which he con
demned. Faith in God's Fatherhood is our answer to the
revelation of His Fatherhood, a revelation which is
made in our own spirit by God's Spirit. It comes to
us as a feeling, not as a blind feeling, but as a felt
truth, a felt reality ; as a feeling which implies and
demands a truth. "We have received the spirit of
adoption wherein we cry, Abba, Father." " The
Spirit itself beareth witness to our spirit that we are
the Sons of God." And, in its ethical manifestation,
this Spirit is " Charity " or " Love." It is therefore
in the sudden kindling of our purest and strongest
spiritual love that the revelation of God's Father
hood is given to our faith ; when " Like a man in
wrath, the heart stands up and answers, ' I have felt' ";
when it asks : " Shall man be more just than his
Maker ? " " Shall he be more good, more pitiful,
more wise, more loving ? " " He that made the eye,
shall He not see ? He that made the ear, shall He
not hear? He that made the heart, shall He not

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 129
understand ? " In such moments we feel that
the life and the love within us stream from the very
centre and heart of reality, from the veins of the
Eternal who lives in us, who is our Father in
heaven ; we feel that what pains and resists our
higher will in the world around us, pains and resists
Him too; that He through us and in us, in some
mysterious way, is in conflict with all that evil whose
opposition to the spirit is the very condition of our
spiritual growth and expansion ; that in us He is
battling with ignorance, error, selfishness, suffering,
and sin.
It is this faith in the revelation of the spirit, faith in
the intuitions of love, faith in the felt truths of our
best moments, that warms and fills up the chill and
ghostly conception of a " Supreme Being," infinitely
vast and strange, that corrects our despairing sense
of God's otherness and distance by a trustful sense
of His likeness and nearness ; that transforms mere
awe and wonder into filial reverence and love.
Of this faith it is said : " No man knoweth the Son
but the Father ; neither knoweth any man the Father
save the Son and he to whom the Son will reveal
Him." 14
This explicit faith in God's Fatherhood gives life
its warmth. Let us contrast the life without faith in
its best and highest manifestation, and the life with
faith in its thinnest and poorest manifestation. Let
us take the case of a truly cultivated man of the
highest moral principle and practice, one whose will
K

130 LEX CREDENDI

is, unawares, altogether sympathetic with the Divine
Will, whose life is sincerely, selflessly, and enthusias
tically devoted to the interests of truth and goodness,
and yet whose religion has remained implicit and
latent ; who has never realized the Lawgiver behind
the law which his conscience imposes ; who has never
felt the personality of that Goodness and Truth for
whose claims he would utterly sacrifice self indeed,
but with a confused notion that it was himself to
whom he was sacrificing. Such a purely ethical life
(so far as explicit consciousness goes) is after all
a monologue of the heart, a cold soliloquy. The
faith that somehow or other Goodness matters abso
lutely and eternally, is a blind faith that must either
stumble, or open its eyes on God's face. As the race
of man on earth began, so it will also end within an
appreciable time ; and then, faith apart, what will it
matter whether we have lived well or ill? Is not,
then, the affirmation of conscience as to the absolute
and eternal importance of right a lie? Only by
a studious self-blinding to ultimate problems can
such a man as we have described escape a sterilizing
pessimism, and maintain his spirit-life in its vigour.
And even if he succeed, still in his heart he is always
alone. And if, as usually happens, the circumstances and
conditions are far less favourable than above de
scribed ; if he be an uncultured, lonely, aimless, un
successful or much-tempted man, then he will feel the
chill of faithlessness far more keenly than one clad
in prosperity. But let a man be never so im
poverished and obscure socially, mentally, and even

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 131
morally, if he has an explicit faith in God's Father
hood, it will transform his spirit-life into a dialogue,
and abolish his inward loneliness. Each thought
and action, however small, is felt not only to matter
absolutely and eternally, but to strengthen or loosen
ties of love and friendship with the Divine Spirit and
Father of Spirits.
" I am not alone," says Christ, " but I, and the
Father who sent Me " (John viii. 16). If a certain
dualism of oneself against oneself is a practical
necessity of the moral life, a dualism of person
against person is no less a necessity of the religious
life ; and to this need He has ministered who taught
us to say, " Our Father." IS
Thus the new wine bursts the old bottles. The
new love of Christ, the new commandment of
Christ, the new spirit of Christ, could not be cramped
up in the Old Testament categories and modes of
thought. Into every time-honoured phrase and ex
pression a new wealth of meaning was crowded.
" Go, borrow thee vessels abroad of all thy neigh
bours, even empty vessels ; borrow not a few "
(2 Kings IV. 3). In obedience to some such pro
phetic impulse the Christian Church wandered forth
among the Gentiles, borrowing their vessels, even
their empty vessels, right and left, to hold the
treasures for which she found no receptacle in the
home of her birth. And if the flow of oil is stayed,
it is not that its source is dry, or that we have
exhausted the depth of meaning latent in the " Our

132 LEX CREDENDI

Father," but only because "there is not a vessel
more." Whenever human thought frames a larger
and worthier vessel, that too will be filled.
Christ's love was a " felt truth " ; feeling alone was
its adequate expression ; no language could ever
equal it. It was not only the feeling of a truth, but
the feeling of an end, of a will to be accomplished ;
it was at once a perfection of mind, heart, and will —
of the whole spirit-life.
The invocation, " Our Father who art in heaven,"
is designed to bring our spirit into accord with His ;
to determine our inward attitude of prayer in the
presence of God ; to adjust our feeling, our thought,
and our will ; to safeguard the emotional, moral, and
mystical interests of the spirit against mutual en
croachments, against Sentimentality, against Mysti
cality, and against Practicality.

IV
THE FIRST PETITION
Sanctificetur Nomen tuum. — Hallowed be Thy Name
I
It has been suggested that these words embody
an aspiration, like " Alleluia '' or " Blessed be God,"
rather than a formal prayer or petition, and that as
such they belong to the invocation preceding the
petitions. No doubt analogies favouring this view
abound in Hebrew liturgy and psalmody. Yet
not only has the constant tradition of the Church

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 133
numbered this among the petitions, but the difference
between aspiration and petition in such a case is
superficial and not substantial. Viewed as an aspira
tion, " Blessed be God " is a wish ; viewed as a peti
tion, it is an appeal to Heaven for the realization of
that wish. It is the substance of the wish that
concerns us. What child of God could wish and
not also pray and work for the hallowing of His
Name ? Moreover, the petitions of the Lord's Prayer
are justly considered as a summary of the principal
aims of our Saviour's life and work upon earth ;
and of these the hallowing of His Father's Name
was among the first : " I have glorified Thee on
earth. ... I have manifested Thy Name." The
Christian's first aim should be the Christian's first
prayer. Also it is noticeable that St. Luke, who
keeps to the barest substance of the prayer and
reduces the invocation to the word " Father " (which
St. Matthew amplifies), retains the clause in ques
tion, which he would hardly do were it a mere
embellishment. But, at best, the point is academic,
and need not detain us. 2
A prayer of petition involves feeling, vision, and
will, and thus brings the whole spirit into exercise or
act. It implies a wish or desire, born of a perceived
contrast between what we are and might be, between
what we have and might have ; and also a will to
give effect to and satisfy the said wish, to change the
sense of hunger into a sense of fruition.
This holds of prayer in its simplest and most self-
seeking form, of the prayer which the psychic or

134 LEX CREDENDI

natural man pours forth to the gods whom he seeks
to control in his own interest as he would control the
forces of nature ; gods whom he has often con
founded with those same forces ; gods whom he
serves only that they may serve him ; who are to
him as means, not as ends ; the most powerful of
his friends, the most dangerous of his foes.
Far different is the petition of the spirit, and born
of a diviner discontent ; for it is the prayer that God
Himself prays in man, the cry of a Will in us that
is divine — our own, yet not our own. Friendship
makes us forget our own particular interest in the
particular interest of another ; makes us see with his
eyes, feel with his feelings, will with his will ; but the
prayer that raises our heart and mind to God by
way of likeness and conformity, makes us forget our
own particular interest in an interest that is divine
and universal. If this now becomes " my " interest,
yet it is in no exclusive sense, but only because my
will has been so perfectly merged in God's and made
one with it that "mine" and "His" are the same:
" All mine are Thine and all Thine are mine."
This discontent of the spirit is a divine discontent ;
it is God's own discontent ; it is His knowledge of the
contrast of the actual with the ideal ; of things as
they are with things as they ought to be ; of the little
good accomplished with the much that has yet to be
accomplished — it is this knowledge as in some
measure communicated to us and felt by us. And
out of this divine feeling and will is begotten in us
a will to remedy our spiritual discontent, to devote
ourselves entirely to the task.

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 135
The sense that this desire and will though in us
is not of us, that it is an impulse and direction re
ceived from One in whose hands we are voluntary
instruments, carries with it a sense that the work is
not principally our own but His ; that it is altogether
beyond our unassisted powers ; that our efficiency
depends on our acknowledging our dependence, and
in adapting ourselves in everything to the hand that
wields us so as to follow its impulse and direction as
faithfully as possible. Not only must we pray as well
as work, but we must pray precisely in order that we
may have the desire and will to work ; for it is by
prayer that we dispose ourselves to the influence of
the Divine Will, subjecting and adjusting ourselves to
the hand that moves and guides us. Nor is implicit
prayer enough : but we must from time to time with
draw our attention from our work and turn it upon
our relation to God, so as to readjust whatever may
have gone amiss or may lessen the energy or accuracy
of our aim. We pray, then, not merely that God's
will may be accomplished, but above all that we our
selves may will to work for its accomplishment.
3
We pray, then, that we may be filled with God's
Will as to the hallowing of His Name ; that He may
stir us up to desire and work for this end.
To the Galilean disciples the words will have had,
mutatis mutandis, much the same suggestion as for
ourselves. God's Name stood to them for man's
notion or knowledge of God ; for that representation
of Him by which He is made present to the human

136 LEX CREDENDI

mind. Israel might make no graven image of
Jehovah, but to the sacred Name itself an external
honour was paid — not strange in times when even a
man's name was held to be almost part of himself,
impregnated with his spirit and power, expressive of
his nature and destiny, something through which he
could be controlled and affected even in his absence.
Idea and thing, name and idea, were far closer wedded
in those days than in our own. But even when Christ
spoke, the hallowing of God's Name had, for popular
religious consciousness, little suggestion of the mere
external honour of taboo. It meant, as it means for
us, the upholding of God's honour and glory in the
esteem of men. The son holds the father's repute as
his own. The reputation of Israel and of the God of
Israel were one and the same thing. The dishonour
of one was the dishonour of the other : " Not unto us,
O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy Name give glory;
lest perchance the Gentiles say, Where is now their
God?" In the measure that religion rose above the psychic
to the spiritual plane, and that the interests of truth
and right were felt to be absolute, to be not only above
individual interests, but above those of the Jewish
nation itself — this identification of God's honour with
Israel's needed careful limitation lest the son should
bring shame upon the Father and tarnish the glory of
His holy Name. This was the fear that kindled the zeal
and indignation of the prophets, according as they be
held God mirrored more clearly in the purity of their
own hearts and contrasted that image of His glory
with the travesty frequently offered to men's eyes by

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 137
the life, practice, and teaching of Israel, His son and
appointed representative.
It was to this representative and exponent that the
alien or even the individual Israelite was taught to look
for his conception of the Divine Will and Character ;
it was through this glass, so often blurred and stained,
that the pure light of heaven had to reach his eye.
If, owing to the limits of the human mind, some such
mediation was a necessity, surely it was also a
danger ; nor could any idol, however grotesque and
unworthy, libel the Divinity more effectually than
the false lives and false teaching of the living repre
sentation. Thus what should be a gate of access
became a barrier of separation : the window of light
was made into a curtain of darkness. Israel was to
the world what the eye is to the body : " The lamp
of the body is the eye ; if thine eye be single, thy
whole body shall be full of light ; but if thine eye be
evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness." God
had "put His Name in Israel," He had committed
His honour on earth to the safe keeping of his
people, and thereby exposed it to endless fluctuations
and mischances. Yet in His saints and prophets
He had provided for the continual correction and
elevation of the public representation of His Name.
It was no lifeless impress graven with a style upon
rock, but was written only too delibly in the heart of
Israel and liable to be falsified and obliterated were
not the letters renewed and deepened day by day
through the ministry of the prophetic spirit.

138 LEX CREDENDI

4
The fulness of truth beyond all prophetic insight
as to the Divine Nature, and as to God's Fatherhood,
was involved in the love that burned in Christ's
heart, wherein vision and feeling were blended as are
the sun's light and glow. None realized as He the
infinite difference that must always obtain between
the Name of God, between any possible human con
ception or representation of His Fatherhood, and
the ineffable reality which the name Father sym
bolizes. Yet also, being man, He knew too well
what was in man not to realize how essential this
naming of the Unnamable is for the waking and
development of man's spiritual life. Not that any
naming of God, or notioning of God, will of itself
make Him known to the heart by inward experience ;
but that such inward experience is occasioned, fixed,
communized, and fostered by such naming. For
association and converse with others is the indispen
sable condition of any sort of development of the
spirit-life ; and such converse with others involves the
understanding and naming of our experience. Nay,
even for the inward converse and soliloquy of the
soul, which is so needful for the unfolding and fertiliz
ing of its capacities, notions and names are requisite.
To shut out the understanding from all participation
in the spiritual life, to trust merely to intuition or to
the implicit apprehension involved in feeling and
love, would be to exclude the normal condition of yet
deeper love and wider intuition , it would be to
embrace a false mysticism that divides the spirit

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 139
and impoverishes the fulness of its life. Man is not
only a "reasoning animal," but he is nevertheless a
reasoning animal. The reasons of the head are not
his only reasons, but neither are the reasons of the
heart. It is not enough to feel God, to apprehend
Him implicitly in the love by which He is really pre
sent in us ; we must also name Him ; and name
Him as worthily as we can. " Sanctificetur Nomen
tuum." S
To admit this is to admit the rights of theology ;
for the naming of God is the beginning and root of
all theology. " A faith that really springs out of our
rational or spiritual nature, or commends itself to it,
cannot be fundamentally irrational or incapable of
being explained and defended ; and a reason which
is unable to find an intelligible meaning in some of
the deepest experiences of human souls must be one
sided and imperfectly developed."1 In other words,
there must be reflection on religious experience
as on all other experience if it is not to be
squandered. Between the theology and the spiritual life of the
Church there is a process of action and reaction
necessary for the development of both. The former
increases our command of the latter, and every such
increase of religious experience entails a widening
and readjustment of our theological conceptions.
" Never has there been a religious experience without
some sort of connected notions as to the relations of
1 "The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers," by Ed.
Caird, voL I, p. 20.

i4o LEX CREDENDI

Self, God, and the World, i.e. without dogmas.
Dogmas are the presupposition of every religious
experience which forthwith utters and fixes itself in
new dogmas. There never has been an undogmatic
Christianity, nor ever can be. Not only does a
religious experience, owing to the essential con
nexion between the understanding and the other
functions of the spirit-life, of necessity seek to
utter itself in dogmas, but it is itself the offspring
of a religious disposition which is fixed by dogma." 1
These purely philosophical conclusions of non-
Catholic thinkers are worth noting at a time when a
well-merited reaction against the excesses of in-
tellectualism in the past bids fair to hurry us into
the arms of sentimentalism and mysticality : when,
lest we should be content to name God without feel
ing Him, we are often advised to be content to feel
Him without naming Him. What we need is to
recognize the value of both, and their true relation
to one another ; to be content with neither alone, nor
yet to confound them. Certainly it would be great
folly to confound Physical Science with Physical
Nature, our abstract system of names and notions
with the inexhaustible ever-growing body of ex
perience which it symbolizes and represents. Yet
we do not despise our scientific structure because it
has to be continually broken up and reconstituted so
as to correspond to new tracts of experience which
it has itself brought within our reach. We know it
is the barest algebra of reality, meaningless for any-
1 Wilhelm Dilthey, "Naturliches System der Geisterwissenschiiften
im 17 Jahrh." Archiv f. Gesch. d. Philos. VI, a. 370.

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 141
one to whom the experience-value of its signs were
unknown, yet it is an instrument of priceless impor
tance through which experience has been brought
under man's control, and the possibilities of life have
been enlarged in every direction. Science multiplies
and deepens experience; experience so multiplied
bursts through the categories of science and demands
its reform : and so each aids and furthers the other.
So, too, with the naming of God and the experi
encing of God in the spiritual life of the world ;
theology and devotion act and react upon each other,
and whoever would vainly strive to petrify one or the
other would show no understanding of the process.
Let our name or notion of God, the system of our
theological ideas, be petrified irreformably, and all
further religious experience is sterilized and squan
dered for lack of dogmatic expression and record ;
the name of God from being a help to the experi
ence of God becomes a hindrance ; through the
alteration and growth of its object the representation
becomes a misrepresentation. Identified with such
a misrepresentation, God becomes for us unreal and
even unlovable. Hence, while acknowledging the
close connexion between God and His Name, we
must take care never to identify them, or to forget
that He is infinitely greater and better than any
thought of Him we can frame; that in His Name we
have only His abstract representation, but that in
the love which He kindles in our hearts by His Holy
Spirit we have His real presence. This clearly
understood, we cannot pray or work too hard for the
hallowing of His Name, for the continual perfection

142 LEX CREDENDI

of a representation always imperfect, always short of
the Living Truth, always susceptible of perfection in
the measure that the Living Truth reveals itself to
religious experience.

But besides the laboured language of theology
which clothes the conceptions of the understanding,
there is the inspired language of revelation which
clothes the intuitions of the heart, and in which
religious experience embodies itself so spontaneously
as to become almost visible and incarnate. Theology
tells us God is Self-existent, infinite, eternal ; Revela
tion tells us He is our Father ; Theology expresses
the mind's conception of His goodness, Revelation
expresses the heart's feeling and experience of His
goodness. Though intimately connected and depen
dent on one another, Revelation and Theology are
two different parallel systems that must not be
blended together, for their laws of growth are as
different as their natures. We have already seen
that, like other sciences, Theology grows by continual
readjustments and occasional reconstructions. Quite
otherwise is the growth of Revelation, which in some
sense is not a growth at all, but an unfolding of what
was implied in the Revelation of Christ. The great
master of some school of music or painting may
well be surprised one day by a disciple who in turn
may become the founder of a new school, the revealer
of a fuller and higher spirit. But the greatest of the
saints has but some share and measure of the pleni
tude of Christ's spirit. Collectively they stand to

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 143
Him as does a prism to the white light of the sun,
breaking up and revealing the inexhaustible riches
of His simple perfection. And so, too, the love-inspired
language and action in which they have revealed
their inward experience of things divine stand to His
master-revelation as so much comment and illustra
tion ; as partial revelations of the same spirit, but in
no wise possibly adding to its substance. With it, as
controlling rule and criterion, they make up a growing
body of revelation whose parts are not connected
dialectically like those of theology, but are related to
one another as all the works of the same school of
art, namely, as various manifestations of one and the
same master-spirit. And in this living, growing body
of variously inspired utterances — in which the spirit-
life of Christ and the Church spontaneously clothes
and reveals itself, we have the subject-matter of
theological reflection. This is that world of spiritual
experience which it seeks to name and understand,
ever readjusting, and at times reconstructing, itself
according as the treasures of Christ's revelation, un
earthed in ever greater abundance by the spiritual
labour of His saints, create a demand for wider and
worthier conceptions. We may and must demand
restatements of Theology, but to demand restate
ments of Revelation would be to confound it with
Theology. We do not ask that Da Vinci's " Last
Supper" should be corrected in the light of criticism ;
nor do we respect the Temperance proposal to sub
stitute water for wine in our Eucharists. Inspired
language is never " out of date," but shares the time-
lessness of the spirit. God will always be " our

144 LEX CREDENDI

Father in heaven," Christ will always be the Son,
the Word of God, the Good Shepherd, the Lamb of
God, the Vine, the Light of the World, the Bread of
Heaven. 7
Thus Revelation and Theology co-operate in the
naming of God, in the formation of progressively
worthier ideas and utterances about Him. Mere
reflection and reasoning exercised on unchanging
data degenerate into a barren, abstract scholasticism.
The heart and spirit of Christ must supply fresh
stores of experience for the theological mind to work
upon if it is not to prey on its own vitals and weave
mere cobwebs of the brain.
Perforce men must use their minds on Revelation
as on all other experience ; they must name, classify,
and arrange it in their understanding for future
use in the service of life. And since this may be
done in two ways, rightly or wrongly, we need a
science to ensure that it shall be done rightly. To
repudiate all theology could not stop theological
reflection, but would let it run riot into all manner
of absurdities and superstitions. Could we possibly
stop such reflection altogether, the streams of
religious experience would at first run to waste, and
eventually be dried up completely. When we read
or listen to the fervid flow of inspired language, so
careless of theological thought, so often professedly
intolerant of it, we are too apt to forget how largely
that inspiration has itself been fed and formed by an
unconsciously imbibed theology.
Much insistence has been laid sometimes on the

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 145
entirely non-theological, or even anti-theological
character of our Lord's teaching as set before us in
the Synoptic Gospels. Not merely does He never
address Himself to the intellect or insist on correct
mental conceptions of divine things ; not merely
does He disdain the wise and prudent with their
scholastic disputations and address Himself to babes
in that inspired language of Revelation through
which heart speaks to heart ; but the very cause for
which He sacrificed Himself in the interest of Truth
was His steady warfare against a theology that had
made vain the Word of God through the traditions
of men. If this reading of the Gospels be right, if
theology be something quite repugnant to the spirit
of Christ, it is certainly somewhat perplexing to find
so much theology, not merely in the later Gospel of
St. John, but in the earliest documents of the New
Testament, namely, in the writings of St. Paul. Is
it likely, we may ask, that Christianity was so
speedily corrupted into its direct opposite? And
since not (for nemo fit repente turpissimus), must it
not be a hasty inference that interprets Christ's
opposition to a particular theology as a condemna
tion of all theology whatsoever ?
He did not, however, combat theology with theo
logy — the false with the true. Things had gone too
far for any mere readjustment of a system that had
long hardened itself out of all plasticity and power
of accommodating itself to religious experience ;
that regarded the prophetic spirit as its natural
enemy ; that had become a yoke and a burden to
souls instead of a support and deliverance. As it
L

146 LEX CREDENDI

could no longer bend or adjust itself, it needed to
be broken up and reconstituted by the power of
that Spirit "which spake by the prophets." It was
with the might of a vaster love, a vaster spirit, that
Christ assailed this system, and tore through its
bonds as Samson through the withes of Delilah.
He had but to reveal the Father, the Divine Reality,
as it lived and wrought in His own spirit, in order
to show up the paltriness and unworthiness of that
presentment which loveless intellectual pedantry had
made of God, His will and His way. His mission
and method were prophetic, not theological. In
due relation, as we have seen, Prophecy and
Theology are allies ; but when either encroaches
on the other's rights and liberties they become
enemies for the time being. But the enmity cannot
be permanent. As prophecy presupposes theology
in its very inspiration and aim, so it requires it for
the garnering of its fruits. If Christianity was the
creation of prophecy and not of theology, yet with
out theology of some sort it could not have lived
and fructified. If our Lord's zeal for the hallowing
of His Father's Name took the form of righteous
indignation against an unworthy theology whose
presentment of God He refuted by confronting it
with the Realty as living in His own spirit ; if He
was content to shatter the false system without
Himself reconstructing a truer — this was only because
Revelation was the first and most pressing need,
and because theological reflection could be better
deferred till the creative period was passed and its
results might be arranged and set in order at leisure.

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 147
8
And what sort of presentment of God was that
which our Saviour confronted with the living Reality —
with the Father as revealed in the Son — and which
He shattered to pieces as a libel on the Name of the
Father ?
In judging the Rabbis and Pharisees we need
great discrimination, lest we mistake the spirit of the
dominant clique of a passing day for the abiding
spirit of the Jewish people and its rulers. From the
New Testament and the early Christian documents
we only know of that school and tendency of
Judaism with which Christianity came into direct
collision. We hear so exclusively of the points of
difference that we easily forget the vast area of
agreement. Not only was the earliest Christian
Church made up of Jews almost entirely, but such
a movement within the bosom of Judaism would not
have been possible had the spirit of (what we may
conveniently, if not quite justly call) Pharisaism
held so universal and undisputed a sway as com
monly supposed. The fields were already ripe unto
the harvest when Christ thrust in His sickle. There
were many sheep in Israel, His own already, who
would recognize His voice as that of the Spirit
" which spake by the prophets." Even amongst the
" teachers in Israel " Nicodemus represented a class
or party, and among the scribes and law-doctors
there were many "not far from the Kingdom of
God." All this vague and diffused Christianity was
drawn into Christ, as a nebula into the sun, and in

148 LEX CREDENDI

Him became definite, active, and vocal. What
others guessed, He knew and touched ; what they
groped after, He possessed and comprehended.
With this proviso we can talk freely of Pharisaism
as the dead element of Judaism with which He was
at war just because it was strangling the living
element. After all, it was only a particular mani
festation of a disease to which every institutional
religion is liable, and as such it is an ever-recurrent
phenomenon. Since man mirrors God in his own heart, he neces
sarily tends to represent Him in his own image and
likeness. The soul of superstition and idolatry is
not mental error, but moral corruption : a pure
heart is the eye which sees God straight even through
the crookedest theology, as a corrupt heart sees Him
crooked even through the straightest. The God of
Pharisaism was therefore simply a deified Pharisee,
and as such could not command the reverence and
love of mankind.
Conscious of sitting in the chair of Moses, of being
God's official representatives on earth, the scribes
and Pharisees would have needed unusual elevation
of character had they not been continually tempted
to cover their own ideas and prepossessions with
the mantle of divine authority, and to say, " Thus
saith the Lord " far more freely and readily than
was warranted. Even those who might have scrupled
so to canonize their personal views and judgments
would have had little scruple when the interest of
their caste and its tradition were at stake, loyalty to
which may have honestly seemed to them identical

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 149
with loyalty to God and conscience. Yet egotism
is not less but more dangerous when it is the egotism
of corporation, for which no one member is singly
responsible. When authority is conceived as a licence to make
things true or false, good or evil, at will, rather than
as involving a duty of finding out and declaring what
is true and right, its exercise can only bring God
down towards man's level instead of raising man
up towards God's. Those who call themselves His
representatives on earth may, if unscrupulous, end
by treating Him as their representative in heaven,
bound to ratify all their wishes and further all their
designs. Thus the will of the scribes and Pharisees
had been canonized as the Will of God, their notions
and ideas were the Truth of God, what they fought
for as His glory and honour was really their own.
The spirit of their clique was put forward as His
spirit. The narrow nationalism, the political aims
and intrigues of the Pharisees, were His also. It was
He who laid the law, a soul-destroying burden, on
men's weak shoulders ; who enslaved men to His
Sabbaths ; who spoke to them in technicalities that
wearied their brains and left their hearts cold. And
even when God revealed Himself, as He always does,
to the hearts of His children, they dare not trust what
their hearts told them of His fatherly goodness, for
they were ever confronted by this official present
ment of His Will and Character, by this Pharisee-
God, to which in some sense their allegiance was due.
Thus the official teaching which should have fostered
their spiritual growth cramped and obstructed it;

150 LEX CREDENDI

and this, not because it was official, or because it
was a theology and a tradition, but because it
was a dead theology sterilized in political or non-
religious interests, in the interests of authority viewed
as an end in itself and not as a means ; in the
interests of the rulers rather than of the ruled ; of
the teachers rather than of the taught ; and all this
because it refused to be continually fed and re-shaped
by religious experience, and turned a deaf ear to
Prophecy and Revelation.
Hence it resulted that the Name of God was
brought into dishonour, and fell as a harsh discord
on the spiritual ear, so that His very children were
alienated from Him by those who should have
gathered them in confidence to His feet.
Our Lord's anger was not therefore against
theology or science, but against that egotism and
corruption of heart which is as hostile to true know
ledge as it is to true religion, " Woe unto you
lawyers, for you have taken away the key of know
ledge : ye entered not in yourselves, and them that
were entering in ye hindered." 9
The desire for the hallowing of God's Name is a
desire that He may be so rightly known as to be
rightly reverenced and loved as our Father in heaven.
It looks to that knowledge which is to be read from
the book of life and love ; which is continually fed by
experience and directed to ampler experience. It is
a desire kindled by the contrast between what is
and what ought to be ; between God libelled and dis-

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 151
honoured, and God as He ought to be known, loved,
and reverenced. And fuel is heaped on the flame
by the thought of all the lies that have been spoken
in the name of God's Truth, and of all the wicked
ness that has been wrought in the name of God's
Will ; and not only by this direct dishonouring of
His Name, but by the indirect dishonour which
accrues to the father through those who bear the
name of son only to disgrace it.
Plainly it is not to be a barren desire that burns
itself away fruitlessly. The heat must be turned to
work, and fed by the fuel of prayer only for the
sake of work. God not only prays in us, but works
in us ; the prayer is but the beginning of the work.
It but fosters the germinating seed still hidden in
the bosom of the earth.

v
THE SECOND PETITION
Adveniat Regnum Tuum. — Thy Kingdom come
I
It is not too much to say that this is the central
and governing petition of the whole prayer, which is
the prayer of the Kingdom. The hallowing of God's
Name is but subordinate as a means to the coming
of His Kingdom ; the doing of His Will is but the
effect and consequence of it. The petitions that
remain are entirely governed by, and directed to,
those that precede.
This, then, is the dominant desire of Christ's heart,

152 LEX CREDENDI

the dominant vision of His mind, the dominant aim
of His will and endeavour. We might look on it
as the briefest and most essential definition of His
spirit. It is not therefore surprising that much
controversy has been raised as to what our Lord
meant by the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom
of God; whether He understood it as internal or
external, or both ; whether by the external Kingdom
He meant the Catholic Church militant on earth, or
a millennium, or the Church finally triumphant in
heaven. With these controversies we deal but in
directly according to our method, which is, to ask
ourselves first what the terms meant for His hearers,
Peter, Andrew, and the rest, and then what they
should mean for us. In other words, we are study
ing, not a prayer which our Lord prayed, but one
which He taught us to pray. In the difference
between the cruder and more childish sense which
the petition would have borne for the least sym
pathetic of His hearers, and the deeper and fuller
sense it has come to bear for the Christian conscious
ness, we have a revelation of Christ's spirit. We see
it patiently and sweetly struggling with the earthli-
ness of man's thoughts and affections, and raising
them gradually but surely to the spiritual level.
And in the study of this process we find perhaps
our best hope of entering into the mind of the
Christ on earth. The later developments of the
idea of the Kingdom in the mind of His saints
furnish the best clue to His spirit, " of whose ful
ness they have all received," and of which each
manifests some particular aspect.

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 153

According to the popular conception of Christ's
immediate hearers, the Kingdom of God, or of
Heaven, meant the triumph of Israel, God's peculiar
people ; not the triumph merely of a nation, but of
a church, a theocracy ; of a nation which was God's
representative on earth, with which His Name and
His cause were identified : " Not unto us, O God, but
to Thy Name give the glory."
The national and the religious interests were then
in some sort united. Where the sentiment of
nationalism was stronger than that of religion, the
divine interests were interpreted and measured by
the national. Where, as in the prophets, the religious
sentiment dominated, the national interests were
interpreted and* measured by the divine. In the
former case God was brought down to man's level ;
in the latter, man raised to God's. There, the notion
of the Heavenly Kingdom was materialized ; here,
it was spiritualized. The ebb and flow of religious
fervour, alternating periods of depression and revival,
of backsliding and repentance, had not however been
inconsistent with a slow progress from less to more
worthy conceptions, and had made it fairly clear that
the identification of God with Israel was conditional
and not absolute ; that God might for a time, though
surely not for ever, cast off His people for their sins
and infidelities. Israel, it was recognized, could not
triumph till he was holy even as his God was holy.
His holiness was the essential condition of his
triumph ; but that it was the substance of his triumph

154 LEX CREDENDI

was the secret of only a few. For most, the national
glory was the reward ; righteousness was but the
condition ; the Kingdom was on the same plane as
that of David and Solomon, only that God Himself
should reign vicariously in the Messias, His Son, a
righteous King over a righteous Israel, and that in
Him all the subjugated nations of the earth should
be blessed. This was the Kingdom of Heaven, the
Rule of God upon earth.
But, moreover, it was to be a Kingdom from
heaven, a new Jerusalem descending from above.
For after many tribulations and backslidings Israel
had learned to despair of his own strength. As little
as he could deliver himself from his oppressors, so
little could he attain that righteousness which would
compel God to his aid. His hope was only in God's
mercy, in His fidelity to His promises to Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob. If he but cried out to Him, if he
but struggled to purify himself and to meet Him,
God would surely, in the person of His Messias,
burst through the heavens and come down to
cleanse and justify him and to establish his throne
on the basis of righteousness.
This was the hope and prayer of the religious
Pharisees at the time of our Lord. To hasten this
event by penance and purification as they understood
then, i.e. by a rigorous fidelity to every letter of God's
law, was their noble endeavour. Formerly the de
liverance had been conceived more in the national
interest and less in the religious. It was to be a
triumph of Israel indiscriminately, and the confusion
of the Gentiles. But now we find the germ of

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 155
S. Paul's distinction between Israel after the flesh
and Israel after the spirit. It is only the righteous
Israelite that shall sit down to meat in the Kingdom
with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The saints and
prophets of old shall rise from their tombs and
together with living saints shall be caught up to meet
the Messias as He comes in the clouds, and shall
sit as His assessors to judge the world. Thus the
event took the character of a Day of Judgment, a
separation of sheep from goats, a winnowing of
grain from chaff. Hence the call to repentance, to
preparation, that as many as possible might make
themselves worthy to enter into the Kingdom of
God. In this conception of the Kingdom we have the
result of a gradual entering into the deeper sense of
Old Testament prophecy ; of a discerning between
the letter and the spirit ; between the symbolism and
the divine mystery. _Even to the prophets themselves
the distinction may not always have been clear.
For them it may have hardly been possible to dis
sociate that triumph of God and His cause, of which
their glowing faith assured them, from the triumph
of Israel after the flesh, His chosen people, His
earthly representative. That same Israel, purified
and glorified, was their highest expression of the
Reign of Righteousness; and for them this expression
may have contained but little conscious symbolism.
Still, even such a Golden Age had to be presented in
terms of one that was brass or iron ; and to the
carnal-minded it was necessary to express spiritual
prosperity and glory under the figure of temporal.

156 LEX CREDENDI

Such figures taken literally had given birth to
grosser and more popular conceptions of the Mes
sianic Kingdom founded on the misreading of pro
phecy. Then, as now, it was only the steady working
of the prophetic spirit itself, whether through the
agency of acknowledged prophets, or through that of
the religious-minded section of the community, that
resisted this materializing tendency and effected even
such a refinement of the Messianic idea as the
Pharisees had attained to in our Lord's time.
We say commonly that the wish is father to the
thought ; that our hopes shape our beliefs. The
stronger a man's desire to see the Kingdom of God
upon earth, the more will he be disposed to believe
in the proximate realization of that desire. This is
true of all idealists at all times. Faith in God means
faith that what ought to be will be ; and this faith is
never deceived. But in our judgment as to what ought
to be and as to what God wills, we may easily be
deceived. It is certain that " truth is great and will
prevail " ; here we are not deceived ; but when we
identify truth with some cherished belief of our own,
and expect this to prevail, we often expose our faith
to shipwreck. Similarly, a prophet or idealist may
err in his judgment as to the manner and time of
God's deliverance. He is one to whom the barrier
that divides the temporal and eternal, the actual and
the ideal, the present and the future, have become
more or less transparent ; whose sense of perspective
is gone ; whose spirit is in conscious touch with those
deepest roots and springs of reality which determine
the course of history. But the judgment as to what

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 157
ought to be always has reference to certain facts
already in existence. Unless we know exactly what
is, we cannot say exactly what ought to be. The
prophet, as one in keen sympathy with the Divine
Spirit, will feel at once what ought to be, given that
his knowledge of what is, is adequate. This, however,
it can never be altogether. Hence his forecasts have
always an element of hypothesis. He is prone to
narrow the stage of the divine drama and to
hasten its conclusion ; to conceive the Kingdom as
at once too narrow and too near.
Thus at every period of religious revival, when
men are longing and looking for the Kingdom of
God, they are ready to be persuaded, and to per
suade themselves, that it is near, even at the very
gates ; to translate the inward event into an out
ward one.
Such a public conviction of the nearness of the
Kingdom had obtained in Israel at the time when
John the Baptist came with his call to repentance
and preparation. He was not merely, like the other
prophets, a preacher of the Kingdom, but more
especially of its nearness : " Repent, for the Kingdom
of Heaven is at hand." It was this nearness that
stirred men to repentance and sent them flocking to
the Jordan, as many a time since the expectation of
a general catastrophe, or of the end of the world,
has roused men to realize the nothingness of all but
eternal interests. Hurtful as such erroneous expec
tations have sometimes been to social order and
progress, not only as fostering a certain lawlessness
in the irreligious, but as leading the religious to

158 LEX CREDENDI

neglect a world which they believe doomed to such
speedy destruction, yet the call from dreams of time
to the realities of eternity has usually been an
abiding gain for humanity far outweighing such tem
poral loss. Though not in the literal sense of the
Baptist's hearers, the Kingdom of Heaven was in
deed near ; time was short, eternity was long, re
pentance was urgent. As the Kingdom itself was
a more spiritual Kingdom than men deemed, so also
was its nearness a more spiritual nearness. What is
spiritual is not less real, but far more so. It was
nearer than they could ever understand ; even at the
very doors.

We have, then, a fairly accurate idea of what the
Kingdom of God will have meant for those who
listened to our Lord. That notion of theirs was the
rough material which He had to shape into a less
inadequate expression of His own spirit, adding,
taking away, refining, transfiguring.
All prophecy dealt with the Kingdom of God,
with that Ideal ever struggling to birth in the womb
of the Actual. The Baptist proclaimed its near
ness. Christ proclaimed its presence. In Him it
had come ; in Him God's Will was already done on
earth as it is in heaven ; in Him the Ideal had become
actual, the Word was made flesh, and dwelt in our
midst. " The Kingdom of Heaven is in your midst."
Whatever these words mean, it is hard to suppose
that they simply assert the internal character of
God's Kingdom. They do not enunciate a principle,

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 159
but a fact — the fact that the Kingdom has come.
Could it be said to have come into the hearts of
a miscellaneous crowd ? Is it not rather that " there
stood in the midst of them one whom they knew
not," one in whom the realization of the Kingdom
had already begun on earth? L'Etat cest moi: He
was the King, and He was the Kingdom. Grow how
it will, as a vine stretching its branches all over the
world, the Church is nothing but Christ. The saints
but partake of His fulness. They but manifest what
was latent in His spirit. The fulness was there
when He was there ; the end was involved in the
beginning; the fruit in the germ.
After the fulness, there can be no new revelation ;
only an endless unfolding. It is only in this sense,
and in reference to this unfolding, that the Christian
can pray: "Thy Kingdom come" — not in the sense
of the prophets of old, who vainly desired to see
what we see and to hear what we hear.
In substance, therefore, the Kingdom had already
come ; what had yet to come was its plenary mani
festation. The seed was sown, the least of the
seeds evading observation. Noiselessly, when men
were asleep, the world had slid past the winter
solstice of its history and the era of a new life had
begun.

Never do we find our Lord directly discussing or
controverting the Messianic ideas prevailing around
Him. As the expression of the highest religious
hopes of His people, they were sacred for Him, and

160 LEX CREDENDI

to be handled with all reverence ; nor would He with
a ruthless criticism hastily shatter what was, for so
many of His little ones, the consecrated and the
only possible vehicle of eternal truths. He knew
that no embodiment avails for the religious spirit but
that which it spontaneously fashions for itself; that
it was futile to work directly on the embodiment, or
otherwise than by enlightening and purifying the
spirit. Hence His attitude towards the material and
visible side of the popular Messianic hopes was
largely one of indifference : " The flesh profiteth
nothing." His whole insistence was on the religious
values and significations : " It is the Spirit that
quickeneth." He treats the materialistic bias of the
general mind with tenderness, or at worst with a
kindly irony, as one who thoroughly understands and
tolerates as inevitable a narrower outlook than his
own. The unique and perfect purity of His heart
went with a perfect spirituality of conception un
attainable for others. It was through the purification
of their hearts that He sought to spiritualize their
ideas and slowly detach them from a vision and
conception shaped by their desires. We find Him
therefore not discussing the form of their beliefs, but
pressing their spiritual significance and consequences.
If at times He adopts the current literalism, we feel
that He is speaking in parables and mysteries ; that
under the old sounds He is insinuating a deeper
sense, intelligible only to the few that have ears to
hear; that He speaks as a father would speak to
his little children, preoccupied about matters whose
truth is not even worth discussing, heedless as to the

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 161
deeper sense of the tale that they hear, and only
anxious to know if it be true. What were living
interests for the popular religious imagination were
dead for Him ; and conversely. " How shall the
dead rise? with what bodies shall they come?" —
there is the popular interest. " He that believeth
in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and he
that liveth and believeth shall never die " — there is
our Lord's interest. In many matters the affirma
tions of the Pharisees and the negations of the
Sadducees were to Him equally irrelevant, equally
vitiated by a misplacement of the true centre of
interest. Of the two, His sympathies will have been
more with the zeal of narrow-minded fanatics than
with an easy tolerance begotten of worldliness and
indifference to religion, or than with a certain sort of
hostility to externalities that renders as excessive a
homage to their importance as does the most rigorous
defence of them.
We may then be sure that those features of the
current Messianic hopes which appealed in any way
to personal or national egotism, or which gratified
the childish wonder-lust of popular imagination, or
which were fabricated by the merely speculative
curiosity of commentators and scribes, or whose
interest was other than purely spiritual and religious,
formed no substantial part of the Gospel of Christ.
God and man ; God in man ; man in God — this was
what it all meant for Him; this was the sole and
sovereign end in the interest of which His spirit
moulded and refined the rude stuff offered Him by
popular beliefs.
M

162 LEX CREDENDI

5
To conclude from this that the Kingdom of God is
something fully realized again and again in each
individual soul which subjects itself perfectly to the
dominion of divine love, that it is in no sense a
general and external event, would be not only a
false, but an entirely uncritical perversion of our
Lord's meaning. He came not to destroy, but to
fulfil ; not to break off, but to carry on, the pro
phetic process which had shaped the current
Messianic hopes ; not to narrow, but to broaden
their import, to give them ever a more world-wide,
universal, eternal significance. To have interpreted
them as no more than a parable of each man's
spiritual life would have been to explain them away,
to treat them as the dreamings of national vanity.
It would not have been to develop and transcend
the current doctrine of the Kingdom, but to deny it
altogether ; or to accept it only in an entirely
equivocal sense. As the history of an organism
reproduces itself analogously and with variations,
in each of its parts and members, so, it is true, the
history of the Church, of the Kingdom of God, is
enacted in small in each several soul, which in its
own way is also a spouse of Christ, a Kingdom of
God. But it is so in a secondary and dependent
sense ; the primary sense is social, collective, uni
versal. We may lawfully apply the petition, " Thy
Kingdom come," to our own personal sanctification ;
but that is not what the petition directly meant, or
was intended to mean, for those to whom it was

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 163
taught by our Lord. He meant what all around
Him meant by the Kingdom of God ; but what they
viewed through the distorting medium of imperfectly
purified affections He beheld through the flawless
crystal of a perfect heart. It was the same foreseen
event for them and for Him ; the difference was one
of clouded vision and clear. That event was nothing
more nor less than the consummation of the long
process of human history : nay, of the secular con
flict between good and evil, light and darkness, in
the triumph of God's cause. But what the prophets
had seen in part, and through a glass darkly, He
who was in the bosom of the Father, and of the
fulness of whose spirit they had but received a
measure, saw face to face. In His perfect love the
perfect truth of the matter was implied and felt —
for it was a love that could not be content with the
narrower and less spiritual conception of the King
dom, but broadened and purified it to suit its own
imperative demand. And it could demand no less
than the breaking down of all barriers between God
and man, between man and man ; no less than the
gathering of the whole spirit -world into one com
munion round the feet of the " Father of spirits " ;
no less than the final fusion of many discordant
minds, hearts, and wills into one divine harmony of
truth, love, and aim.
Here is the essence of the matter. The circum
stances under which this Kingdom is to be realized
are comparatively irrelevant. That is what Divine
Charity, what the spirit of Christ implies, postulates,
reveals. Nor does this social conception of the King-

164 LEX CREDENDI

dom conflict with the truth that in the sole person
of Christ it was already realized ; that in Him it
had come down upon earth from heaven. For He
was the Kingdom only in so far as the spiritual
Church and her children were latent in Him as Eve
and the whole human race were in Adam.
So far as the current Messianic hopes of His time
looked dimly towards such a consummation of
human history, they were echoed and re-echoed by
His heart. So far as they looked to anything else
they were dead for Him.
Of His own place and function in that spiritual
Kingdom — as the true or heavenly Messias ; as the
King of the catholic, world-wide, spiritual Israel ; as
the term of the world's best aspirations ; as the
source of its best inspirations — He has spoken in no
obscure language. Through Him and with Him as
the head of the mystic organism we have access to,
and union with, the Father ; " No man cometh to the
Father but by Me."
Against the individualistic conception of the King
dom as consisting primarily in the subjection of the
soul to God, and in the peaceful ordering of her
several faculties, ideas, and affections under His
rule, we must notice that for each single member the
spiritual organism to which it belongs is something
relatively external, a world to which it has to adjust
itself, in which and through which it lives ; a Kingdom
whose rule it obeys, whose ends it serves. Life im
plies environment. The Communion of Saints is the
environment of each several saint ; it is the kingdom
into which he desires to enter — the Kingdom of

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 165
Heaven. When he prays for its advent, he is not
praying directly for himself or for his own spiritual
perfection, but for something outside and above him
self ; for it is God's Spirit that prays in him for a divine
and universal end. Thus the religious Jew who, like
Simeon, looked and longed for the consolation of
Israel, for the triumph of God's cause as he conceived
it, was not far from the Kingdom of God. For he
sought it in an event of world-wide and eternal im
port ; in an end that took him out of his narrower self
and raised him to the spiritual plane of disinterested
goodness. In so doing it also sanctified him individ
ually. For sanctity consists precisely in such an
elevation to a sharing of the divine outlook and the
Divine Will ; in the dying to self and the living to
God.

If this communion or society of the saints with
one another in God, and through Christ, is the King
dom of Heaven in the deepest and most essential
acceptation of the term, yet that term is also used in
derived and dependent senses of the sanctified soul,
or of the visible Church, or generally of the realiza
tion of God's Will upon earth.
The question of the circumstances, the where and
when of the final triumph of truth and righteousness,
is undoubtedly a subordinate one, neither affecting
our faith in that triumph nor materially altering our
duties of conflict and labour in the cause of God
upon earth. It was upon earth that the Jews looked
for the establishment of the eternal Kingdom. The

166 LEX CREDENDI

Kingdom of Satan which it was to supplant was
upon earth. In our Lord the Kingdom had (in sub
stance) come down from heaven upon earth. The
disciples were to pray : " Thy Will be done on earth,
as it is in heaven " — words explicative of the preced
ing petition, " Thy Kingdom come." The Millennium
heresy blindly adhered to the letter of this doc
trine. But the Church, taught and guided by the
spirit of Christ, soon distinguished its kernel from
its husk and recognized that this earth could never be
transformed into heaven ; that the eternal Kingdom
of God belonged to eternity and not to time; that
flesh and blood could not inherit it. Unattainable,
however, as might be the ideal of a world like ours,
peopled by saints alone and ruled solely by the Will
of God, yet, as contrasted with the narrower Jewish
conception, this notion of a spiritual and universal
Israel upon earth served both as a figure or embodi
ment of the other-world Kingdom, and as the un
reachable goal of those prayers and endeavours by
which it was to be realized.
In speaking of " Practicality " and of the danger
of "works without faith," we insisted on the dis
tinction between the spiritual, immanent side of
action, and its external fruit or effect. The former
as belonging to the spirit-life and to the inner world
is of sovereign importance ; the latter possesses but
a dependent and conditional importance as the
object, end, and occasion of the former. The aim, as
an event of the eternal order, is more important
than its attainment, which is an event of the temporal
order ; the will to feed the hungry is a greater good

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 167
than the bodily satisfaction to which it is directed.
So, too, the endeavour to realize God's Kingdom per
fectly in the visible order, though doomed to failure,
is the necessary condition and the unfailing cause of
its realization in the spiritual order. No will can be
united to God's and built into the Communion of
Saints that is not firmly set upon the overthrow of
evil and the triumph of good through the length and
breadth of the earth. Hence we have to do with two
interpenetrating worlds — one spiritual and eternal, the
other visible and transitory. In each the Kingdom of
God has to be established : there, in its very essence
or substance ; here, in its signs and manifestations.
There we have the invisible or spiritual Church on
earth, the secret communion of all those whose wills
are knit through Christ with God's, and who form
but part of that vaster communion which embraces
those saints who have passed out of the limits of
time and place. For the spiritual heaven is in process
of formation, and is fed through roots that are netted
in the soil of sinful earth, where day by day new
souls are fashioned for their place and function in
its organism. Thus heaven, though transcendent
with respect to earth, is also immanent. If it
stretches infinitely beyond it, yet it also permeates
and passes through it, and draws substance from it
for its own life and development.
But, on the side of its visible manifestation, God's
Kingdom on earth stands for something that is at
once the effect and the condition of the invisible
Church ; something that, roughly speaking, is its
embodiment. It stands for the sum-total of those

168 LEX CREDENDI

external conditions of the spiritual life which should
be the aim of religion in its own interest, and of
which it is said, " Seek ye first the Kingdom of God
and His righteousness, and all these things shall be
added unto you," and, "Your Heavenly Father
knoweth that ye have need of these things." Tem
poral things, thus ordered in the interests of eternal,
do themselves constitute the Kingdom of God in a
secondary and dependent sense; they make an
environment in which the inner life can reach its
highest and widest development. The term of such
an amelioration of present conditions may be un
thinkable and unattainable as an ideal, but we have
no doubt about the " direction " which the process
should take. The Jewish conception of the Messianic
reign on earth erred not only by its poverty and
narrowness, but by its finality. It made righteous
ness the condition rather than the substance of God's
triumph, which substance it sought in an absolute
and final amelioration of society. For our Lord the
reign of righteousness, the spiritual and invisible
Kingdom, was the great end ; social amelioration
but its instrument and condition ; final and absolute
amelioration but the ever-receding horizon of our
progress. Paradox though it be, while a " golden
age " on earth is the goal and stimulus of all moral
and spiritual endeavour, yet its attainment would be
fatal to morality and religion. The truth is, we are
to work for ever towards it, certain that we shall
never overtake it ; that tasks accomplished will ever
breed more tasks ; that every attainment makes
higher and wider attainments possible and necessary.

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 169
7
In Christ the Kingdom of God, both spiritual and
visible, descended on earth. In Him the twofold
process began. For out of Him, too, has grown the
visible Christian Church and Christian civilization
in the service of the spiritual Church or Kingdom.
When we speak of the spiritual Church as a king
dom, we are using a similitude rather than a meta
phor, and may not press the correspondence point for
point. In some respects, but not in all, it is like
a kingdom. The very first idea of kingship, es
pecially in ancient times, was that of dominion and
authority, which implies a power of moral, and
eventually of physical, coercion. But in the spiritual
Kingdom the service is free or it is nothing ; it must
be the service of sons, not of slaves ; of love, not of
fear. The Heavenly King is also the Heavenly
Father. His Fatherhood is the root of His Kingship.
The spirit cannot be forced ; it can only be drawn or
allured. No command, under whatever penalty or
bribe, can make us see what we do not see, feel what
we do not feel, will what we do not will. God is the
sovereign rule of right thought and love and will ;
but He works from within, shaping the spirit in
accordance with its own laws. An authority in
matters of truth or of taste means a standard that
is set before us to waken our interest and provoke
our activity. Such is the authority of Christ, the
King of the spiritual Kingdom. He went before us
as our Shepherd to draw us after Him ; He showed
us an example, that we might freely follow it ; He

170 LEX CREDENDI

did not dominate or command, as the rulers of the
nations, but was in our midst as one who serves and
helps. And in all this He but represented and re
vealed the Father. This, then, is the meaning of
authority or Kingship in the spiritual order. And
under Christ in this Heavenly Kingdom there is a
hierarchy of lesser authorities, of those saints who
with Him shall judge the world even as He judges it
— even as light judges darkness — who partake in
varying measures of His fulness, grace for grace,
and draw us by example, step by step, upwards to
His throne, according to our several needs and
capacities ; who cluster round Him each in his own
orbit as planets round the sun, reflecting His glory
and making with Him one system or spiritual uni
verse. If Christ lives for us in the written Gospels
and in the preaching of the Church, yet He lives
for us far more in those who are filled with His
spirit, and whose example silently sways us and
brings us under His dominion. Of these spiritual
authorities it can be said in no equivocal sense, " He
that heareth you heareth Me ; and he that despiseth
you despiseth Me and Him that sent Me." Or again :
" As the living Father hath sent Me, so send I you."
To them the Light of the World has said, " Ye are the
light of the world " ; and the Redeemer has said, " Ye
are the salt of the earth " ; and the Good Shepherd has
said,"Feed Mylambs ; feed My sheep." In the measure
that His spirit lives and speaks in them, what they
bind on earth is bound in heaven ; what they loose
on earth is loosed in heaven ; whose sins they forgive
are forgiven, and whose sins they retain are retained.

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 171
For their mind is His mind, their judgment His
judgment, their will His will. Thus the features
of the hierarchic and visible Church are repeated
analogously and spiritually in the invisible Church
to which it is ministerial as the body is to the soul.
True it is that the members on earth of this Com
munion of Saints are visible to our bodily eyes ; yet
their membership in that society is a secret known
to God alone with certainty, however brightly their
light may shine before men and proclaim them
children of the Father in heaven. Moreover, the
bond that binds them together and gives each his
place and function in the mystic organism of Christ's
body, as a separate and special manifestation of one
and the same spirit, is a bond visible only in the
light of eternity. Scattered through the ages and
nations there is no outward social tie between them ;
only the inward tie of unity of spirit, unity of aim,
unity of faith : " The Lord knoweth those that are
His," and He alone. Their worship is that inward
worship in spirit and in truth of which all outward
worship is but the expression, and without which it
is dead ; it is the worship of the spirit that loves God
alone and above all, that subjects itself unreservedly
to the Sovereign Truth and Love and Goodness ; it
is the practical worship and sacrifice of Him who
was obedient unto death, even the death of the
Cross. And though it is not a public worship, yet it
is a social and collective worship in virtue of the
mystical union which binds Christ and His members
in one body through one spirit, and makes their
sacrifices together with His into one age-long, world-

172 LEX CREDENDI

wide, pure sacrifice offered for the world's redemption
from the rising of the sun to the going down of the
same. 8
This spiritual Kingdom of God is what lies behind
the visible Kingdom, and lends it all its desirableness
as an object of prayer and endeavour. The visible is
sought for the sake of the spiritual. Yet the two are
not explicitly distinguished, but are taken together
as a whole in the petition : " Thy Kingdom come."
The visible, external Kingdom is best described as
a foreshortened statical presentment of that endless
process of amelioration of social conditions in the
interests of the spirit which was inaugurated, on a
new level, by the advent of Christ. It represents,
symbolically, the final result of a task which can
have no end ; fixing the direction, rather than mark
ing the goal, of a race that knows no rest. For
" here w^ have no abiding city," though we must be
for everlftulflding. With Christ this external King
dom had come in substance ; with every new stage
of Christian civilization it has come in greater ful
ness ; and yet its perfect accomplishment remains an
ever-receding goal.
We need not delay to dwell on the obvious relation
of mutual dependence between civilization and
Christianity, founded on the indissoluble unity of
man's spirit-life ; or to dissipate the superficial illu
sion that the Christian as such can be indifferent to
all but the explicitly religious interests of human
life ; that he can look on questions of art, science,

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 173
sociology, and politics as unconnected with the
Kingdom of God and His righteousness. Not one
of these members of life's organism can suffer or
prosper, but religion and all the rest suffer or prosper
with it. It is true that Christ did not come with any
direct doctrine about art or science, or economics or
politics; nor did He commission or authorize His
Apostles to reform civilization in these respects. All
their efforts were to be directed solely to the religious
life of the spirit, to the adjustment of its immediate
relations to God and man ; they were to concentrate
on the ultimate roots and springs of the spirit-life,
on the sovereign interest and end of all. But we
must not confound the special vocation of the
apostle, priest, or prophet with that of the Christian
as such, or forget that the roots of life are cultivated
for the sake of the fruits. The Christian as such,
and as distinct from the minister of religion, must,
according to his vocation and state of life, seek the
Kingdom of God in every department of civiliza
tion, as the minister of religion seeks it i^he soul
of the Christian.
On the other hand, we must remember that special
ization and co-ordination are the conditions of
Christian civilization, as of every other sort of life ;
that the organism of human interests demands that
religion, the supreme interest, should be committed
to the care of a special institution with a ministry of
its own, to the visible Church. As the deepest in
terest, religion influences the rest in the direct line,
and not merely collaterally as the rest influence
one another. It holds the position of head in the

174 LEX CREDENDI

organism. Still, the head is not the body ; and the
members have independent, though subordinate
rights of their own ; and health demands that each
part, the head included, shall have full right to
develop itself in its own order and shall abstain
from all encroachment on the rights of its fellow-
members. Religion is the supreme, but it is not the
sole, interest of life. If it would starve the others,
it would soon perish itself. Hence the law of
specialization requires that there should be a Church
as well as schools, societies, and governments ; and
that by the harmonious working of these institutions
the cause of God's visible Kingdom on earth should
be furthered.
And this exigency our Lord Himself acknow
ledged when He first chose out the Apostles from
the crowd of his disciples and sent them forth on the
special task of ministering to the soul. And what
His spirit then began it has subsequently carried on
in the formation of the visible Church, with her out
ward government, her official ministry, her in
stitutions, sacraments, doctrines. As an external
institution this Church is more aptly (though with
grave and profound differences) likened to a king
dom ; for though its ultimate sanctions are spiritual
and its strongest argument is, " If you love me, keep
my commandments," yet no visible society can sub
sist without some measure of juridical authority
exercised over those who choose to belong to it.
Moreover, it is the net containing bad fish as well as
good, the field abounding in tares as well as wheat ;
and for such a society purely spiritual authority is

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 175
as insufficient as it would be for civil society. Still,
its juridical coercion is not backed by physical force,
but by the free choice by which its members subject
themselves to its rule.
The function of this visible Church we have already
described under its most general aspect, namely,
that of bringing the leaven and the dough together
in one vessel ; of mediating, through its teachings
and institutions, between saints and sinners, heaven
and earth; between the spiritually rich and en
lightened and the spiritually poor and ignorant;
between the religiously active souls and the religiously
passive souls, receiving from the former, breaking and
distributing to the latter. 9
Though we must pray and work towards a state of
things in which the visible Church and the spiritual
Church on earth should be coincident and literally
catholic and coextensive with the race, yet the coin
cidence and the catholicity must for ever remain
directive ideals. Never in the present order of
things will all the members of the visible Church be
spiritually living ; never will all the spiritually living
be members of the visible Church.
Thus, when we pray, " Thy Kingdom come," what
we pray for principally and absolutely, though perhaps
only implicitly, is the increase of the Communion of
Saints. What we pray for explicitly, though sub
ordinate^ and conditionally, is the furtherance of
God's visible Kingdom on earth, the establishment of
those social conditions which make for the increase

176 LEX, -.CREDENDI ,
 ^ — (.».*. r\ ^.-.t.**- •*
of inward religiori. Chief among those conditions is
that divine institution, the creation of Christ's spirit,
which exists explicitly for the defence of the religious
interest, namely, the visible Church, the special organ
and embodiment of the spiritual Church, the earthly
representative, counterpart, and sacrament of the
Communion of Saints.

vi
THE THIRD PETITION
Fiat Voluntas tua in coelo et in terra. — Thy Will be done on earth,
as it is in heaven.
I
The fact that St. Luke omits this petition implies
that it is virtually contained in the preceding, of
which it must be regarded as the amplification, or
the closer definition. Obviously it secures a more
spiritual and religious understanding of the Heavenly
Kingdom, and suggests the distinction between the
essential and the merely dependent elements of the
conception. The relation between the inward and the outward,
the spiritual and the visible, aspects of God's King
dom on earth is one of mutual dependence, of action
and reaction. The amelioration of society is at once
an end of and a means to religion, which itself is an
end of and a means to social reformation. Yet this
is consistent with the truth that the inward is prin
cipal and essential ; the outward, dependent and
secondary. The will is not without the deed ; but

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 177
the will, as an event of the spiritual and eternal
order, is more important than the deed ; and this,
even should the deed be hindered by causes outside
the will. The spiritual Kingdom of God answers to
the will, the visible Kingdom to the deed. In His
saints collectively the Will of God reproduces itself
progressively on earth. Through and in them He
wills and prays and works ; in so far, namely, as they
are raised above the psychic self-seeking level to the
spiritual plane, and lend themselves to be instruments
of the Divine and Eternal Will. In this sum-total of
good desires, aspirations, intentions, hopes, fears,
joys, sorrows, regrets, His Will (viewed subjectively
as a willing ; as a spiritual act or energizing) is made
present on earth in a finite and broken manner as
the sunlight is made present when reflected from the
myriad ripples on a lake. In the mystical Christ the
Divine Will is incarnate and tabernacles here among
us. God's spiritual Kingdom comes on earth just in
the measure that His Will reproduces and expresses
itself more variously and extensively in the hearts of
men. In good will, in the willing of good, God's
Spirit finds its most perfect likeness and reproduction
in the finite order, and the world which came forth
from the Father returns to His bosom once more.
It is not, however, in unconsciously willing what
God wills that the highest union with Him is
realized ; but in the consciousness that this aim
and desire unite us with the Eternal Will and are
the evidence and result of the possession of our
spirit by the Divine Spirit, which uses us as free
instruments of its own operation ; in the conscious-
N

178 LEX CREDENDI

ness that in willing what God wills, namely, His
Kingdom on earth, we are ultimately willing God
Himself, from whom every lesser end borrows its
goodness ; that the utmost realization of all our
ideals could not content us apart from God, with
whom and through whom alone they possess an
absolute value and goodness. The merely ethical
life is a monologue ; the religious life is essentially
a dialogue. Until the cause of goodness, justice,
and truth reveals itself to us in the will of Another,
we are alone in our struggle. He walks with us in
the way, and our hearts burn within us, but our eyes
are held, and we know Him not.
Thus, this willing, this spiritual act, which con
stitutes us sons of God and members of the mystical
Kingdom, is not merely a willing of what God wills,
but it is principally a willing of God. And it is He
who by His Spirit works this will in us.

Most of those who listened to our Lord will have
understood this third petition very simply; not un
truly for practical purposes, but with little sense of
its deeper import.
Their apprehension of religious truth was imagi
native rather than spiritual. Heaven was God's
dwelling-place above the sky — much as it is described
for us in the symbolism of the Apocalypse, which for
them was not symbolism but fact. For them, it was
the archetype of the earthly Jerusalem, that "city
of the Great King " ; an ethereal structure of glory
and light inaccessible, where nearly all the grossness

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 179
of matter, of flesh and blood, was purged away,
where mortality was indued with immortality, and
corruption with incorruption. Here legions and
hierarchies of ministering spirits stood beholding the
face of the Father, "even as the eyes of servants
look to the beck of their master," intent to know
and do His pleasure ; for this was their meat and
drink, the bread of their eternal life. Here there
was but one mind, one love, one Will — even the
Father's. This was the ideal, " the pattern shown to Moses in
the mount" to which earth should be conformed.
And between earth and heaven, between the actual
and the ideal, was set Jacob's ladder with angels
ascending and descending, bearing censers of prayers
and vials of grace ; ministering to the elect and
helping the saints in their struggle with evil, to the
end that God's Will might at last be done as per
fectly on sinful earth as it is in heaven.
Here we have mystical truth expressed in terms of
the imagination, the value of which terms is not
merely "pragmatic," as that of a guide to conduct,
but representative, by way of analogy, of eternal
realities that lie beyond the grasp of clear intelligence.
For the measureless height of the heavens above
the earth speaks to us of God's transcendence, of the
distance that divides His nature from ours, His ways
from our ways, His thoughts from our thoughts.
The light and glory of the heavenly Jerusalem are
eloquent of the antithesis between the spiritual dark
ness of the actual state of humanity and the goal of
our prayers and endeavours — the Kingdom of God,

180 LEX CREDENDI

the Communion of Saints. In the spectacle of the
heavenly hierarchies, pervaded and moved, each in its
own order or function, by one and the same Divine
Will, and making collectively its perfect organ and
vehicle of expression, we see that spiritual world
which is struggling to reproduce itself here upon
earth, as the life buried under the winter soil strives
to push forth and clothe the world in the glory of
spring. And in the conception of ministrant angels,
ascending and descending in the service of this end,
we see an effort of the religious consciousness to
overcome a too exclusive emphasis of God's distance
and otherness, and to bring Him near even to the
very heart of man ; we see a recognition of the
divine immanence, of the interpenetration and con
tinuity of earth and heaven ; of time and eternity;
such a recognition as that of the Psalmist, who sings :
" Lord, Thou hast searched me and known me; Thou
knowest my down-sitting and my uprising ; Thou
understandest my thoughts afar off. Whither shall
I go from Thy Spirit ? whither shall I flee from Thy
presence ? If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art
there ; if I go down to the depths, Thou art there " —
words in which we feel the conflict between the
imaginative and the mystical apprehension of the
same truth.
And let us remember that, our minds being what
they are, we can never altogether strip spiritual truth of
its imaginative clothing so as to apprehend it nakedly;
nor can we think or speak of reality except in terms
of appearances. When we seem to have shelled the
kernel of simpler forms of religious conception, we

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 181
have but removed an outer husk to reveal an inner ;
we have but substituted a less material for a more
material mode of expression. A narrow intolerance
of ruder forms betrays a forgetfulness of this
necessary limitation. The truth that lies behind the
veil of words is the same, be the veil more or less
transparent ; and it may well be that it is often more
vividly felt and loved when it is less clearly revealed
and apprehended.
If Thought, Feeling, and Will, the components of
the spirit-life, are correlative and inseparable ; if the
attempt to make any one of them supreme and
independent issues in confusion, yet there is a certain
order in their mutual dependence that allows us to
consider the spirit-life as completing itself in the act
of will. In this sense Augustine may say : " We
are wills and nothing else," without falling into the
excesses of " Voluntarism " — as the counter fallacy
to " Intellectualism " is sometimes called. A blind
Will, such as Schopenhauer speaks of, that involves no
consciousness of what it makes for, and no feeling
concerning it, is hardly distinguishable from a phy
sical force, and does not deserve the name of Will.
We mean by will that act in which the spirit tends
with all its power, and as far as in it lies, to realize
an end which it sees and desires. It is pre-eminently
the act by which the spirit freely makes and shapes
its own character. We are what we will. It is
precisely as Will, as a Will (and therefore a Person
ality) other than our own, that God is made known
to us in the phenomena of Conscience (moral, in
tellectual, and aesthetic), and it is this revelation that

182 LEX CREDENDI

transforms the monologue of the merely ethical into
the dialogue of the religious life. When we dis
regard the imperative claims of what Conscience
tells us we " ought " to be, or do, or think, or feel, we
are sensible not only of an offence against our
higher and truer self-interests, but, if we consider
more closely, of antagonism to a Will that forces
those interests upon us. It is by resistance that the
Not-self is made known to us, whether it be the
outer world, or God, or our fellow-man. And it is
by the subject-matter of that resistance that the
nature or character of the Not-self is revealed, be it
material or spiritual ; be it lower, higher than, or
equal to ourselves. The subject-matter of the con
flict of Conscience is spiritual, eternal, absolute,
universal. Such, therefore, is the character of the
Not-self which there resists us. It is a spiritual,
eternal, absolute Will other than our own.
It is not only difficult, but impossible for us to
think of the relation between this Will and our own,
except in terms of bodily things which can be
counted and set over against one another, or united
by contact or by mixture and fusion. If we talk of
union or sameness with God, our thought becomes
pantheistic ; if of distinction and separateness, it
becomes materialistic. So, as before, we shall pass
by the metaphysical root of the matter, and speak
only of its ethical manifestations in life and conduct ;
we shall speak of union with the Divine Will in the
sense of willing the same things as God wills.
Plainly this union can never be perfect, since we
can no more apprehend the absolute Good than the

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 183
absolute Truth. But it is one thing to move in the
right direction, at however great a distance from the
goal ; another, to move aside or in the opposite direc
tion. Our heart can be " right " with God, and even
perfectly right with God, though always with the
possibility of indefinitely greater attainment. And
this rectitude or conformity is the end of our whole
moral struggle : " Thy Will be done on earth, as it is
in heaven." We have to make ourselves will what
God wills.
Since the true spiritual Self, potential in all of us,
is the image and likeness of God, to find God, to be
united with God, is morally the same thing as to
find and be united with our true self. Only when He
reigns over us do we truly reign over ourselves and
attain full self-mastery, self-possession, self-deter
mination. Between the psychic individual will and the dis
interested spiritual will in each of us there is a
virtual relation of otherness and opposition, and a
possibility of conflict or of agreement. The choice
left to the freedom of the spirit is that of either sub
jecting the psychic life and interests to its own, or
else of lending itself to the service of the psychic
self and its desires. When it prays, "Father, not
my will, but Thine," " my will " means the interests of
the psychic separate self, of the spirit so far as, some
times lawfully, sometimes unlawfully, it identifies it
self with this individual organism which serves it ;
which it may duly care for, but may not serve. " Thy
Will" means the spirit's own disinterested will
viewed as identical with and imposed by the Divine

184 LEX CREDENDI

Will. " Not my will, but Thine," is the end of the
whole process of the spirit's self-formation and self-
reformation — the process by which it appropriates the
Will of God and the Life of God ; which Life, as
freely proffered to its free acceptance, is the Grace
of God : " The Grace of God is Eternal Life." God's
Will is as natural and necessary a condition of the
spirit-life as the rock is a condition of the limpet's life.
It is by holding fast to God's Will that the spirit
appropriates its subsistence, immobility, eternity.
We have seen in what sense it is true that the
spirit reigns over, masters, determines itself only
when God reigns over, masters, and determines it;
that it is most free and independent when it is most
subject and dependent. For that which is subjected,
mastered, and determined is the psychic self, i.e. the
spirit so far as it tends to identify itself unduly with
its individual embodiment. That which rules and
masters is the spiritual self, i.e. the spirit so far as,
true to its own nature, it identifies itself with
God. Freedom, self-determination, is what the spirit
struggles for. When we say that Christ has de
livered us and given us back to ourselves, we mean
that He has delivered the spirit from servitude to the
psychic self and has subjected its former tyrant to
its service. It is of the psychic self that we ask
obedience ; we could no more ask it of the spiritual
self than we could ask it of God ; for the spiritual
will is coincident with God's Will.
Personality, in the moral sense of the term, means
spiritual freedom and self-mastery; and admits of
endless measures of depth and extension. So far as

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 185
we are passively borne along by our feelings, our
habits and inclinations, so far as we are but wheels in
the great mechanism of nature and are governed by
physical, physiological, and psychological laws with
out attempting to use and control them, just so far
are we things and not persons. We are persons in
the measure that we oppose ourselves to all this
mechanism, and through the understanding of it, are
able to subject and use it to spiritual ends.
" God made man only a little lower than the
angels," in so far as He " put all things under his
feet " ; and man approximates indefinitely to the
Divine ideal of personality in the measure that he
raises himself higher and higher above nature by
knowledge and self-control.
But it is first within himself that man comes in
conflict with this mechanism ; with uniformities of
instinct and habit ; with psychological and physio
logical laws that tend to wrest the government out
of the hands of the spirit, and to destroy personality.
For in virtue of his bodily organism man is a part of
nature and continuous with nature, — a wheel in the
universal machine. He must, then, master nature
within himself, as well as outside himself — a mastery
that demands difficult self-knowledge, laborious self-
discipline. When we remember that virtues and
vices are both classified as " habits," it is plain that a
habit as such is neither good nor evil. A good habit
is a psychological mechanism that frees our person
ality for fuller and wider action, that extends our
control over nature within or outside ourselves ;
whereas an evil habit impedes our freedom and

186 LEX CREDENDI
narrows the possibilities of life. Conditioned as we
are, the same mechanism of nature or habit which
can impede us and destroy our personality is also the
necessary means of our spiritual development. If
our struggle is against the domination of dead uni
formity, law, habit, mechanism, it is only because
such laws and habits, once perhaps useful, have
become mischievous through changing exigencies
and the demands of a fuller and higher life ; because
the virtues of childhood may be vices in manhood ;
or because these laws cross and interfere with one
another, and need an adjustment of their claims.
But the whole aim of our struggle is the constitution
of a higher and better system of laws : not the
destruction, but the reconstruction of the habit-
mechanism. The very inertia and blind persistence
which we have to overcome is necessary to the per
petuity and stability of the fruits of victory. That
old self which has to be moulded into the new,
though blind and dead, has in its day been shaped
by life and intelligence, and bears their traces, as a
mindless mechanism bears the traces of the mind
that devised it. So, too, in the physical world the
principle of death is also a condition of life. The
determinism of Nature, with her system of fixed laws,
of uniformities of grouping and sequence, is itself
the work of Spirit, — the gathered fruit of its past
victories, — and yet its blind conservatism makes it
the foe of Spirit so far as it not merely retains past
modifications, but in doing so resists further develop
ments, yielding only to vigorous and reiterated on
slaughts of the Will. Hence the complex character of

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 187
our sentiment towards Nature as towards something
at once blind and intelligent, cruel and kind, coarse and
tender, forceful and feeble, sublime and despicable.
As long as life lasts there is need of this work of
self-reform. Every new attainment involves higher
and more complex tasks ; just as every industrial
invention saves labour in one way only to employ it
more extensively and profitably in another. More
over, we now understand what the old ascetics had
ascertained empirically, that not to advance is to
recede ; that there is no standing still in the moral
and spiritual life. For, like machinery, habits quickly
become out of date and act as a clog on progress,
unless they are continually adjusted to suit growing
exigencies. When virtue gets to routine it is on the
road to vice. So far as our conduct is shaped by
virtue and habit, it is shaped passively; it is not
active in the full spiritual sense. Yet we must
deliberately commit a great deal of it to the ma
chinery of habit or second nature, if we are to free
our best energies for higher and fuller action and
origination. But if we turn the means to an end,
and think to rest in habituality and routine, the
spirit falls asleep and ceases to be conscious and
self-determining. The ceaseless task of our inward life lies in ever
moulding the natural or psychic self into an
obedient instrument of the growing needs of the
spirit ; ever bringing " my will " into conformity with
" Thy Will " : ever lessening the relative distance
between one and the other under pain of seeing it
spontaneously increasing ; and thus to go on from

188 LEX CREDENDI

strength to strength in respect of personality and
self-determination. It might at first sight seem as if this spiritual
will-strength were something morally colourless, like
health or wealth ; something that might be used
well or ill. For apparently some of the strongest
characters seem to have been of the psychic type ;
while many who live largely on the spirit-plane are
only feebly self-determining. It is this seeming fact
that has led modern Goths to the worship of the
strong, self-assertive type of character, of the man
who curbs and mortifies his passions, who goes
through fire and water, in the pursuit of his ambition,
or his revenge, or his love ; who sweeps down every
thing and every one to make a straight path to his
end. Such egoistic ends are not reached without
great mental and moral exertion and self-sacrifice,
such as would make a Saint, Martyr, or Confessor, if
expended in the service of an over-individual or
spiritual interest. Yet closely examined, this strength
is not true will-strength ; it is the strength of passion,
not of action ; the strength of a rock that is hurled,
not of the giant who hurls it. Admirable it may be
in its own order, as are all natural forces at play
however terrible, or as is all passion, so it be true
Passion : All emotion,
Whether of gods or men ; all loves and passions
Are of two kinds ; they are either informed by Wisdom,
To reason obedient — or they are unconducted
Flames of the burning life. The brutes of earth
And Pan their master know these last ; the first
Are seen in me (Athene) ; betwixt the extremes there lie
Innumerable alloys, and all of evil.1
1 Demeter — Robe, B idges.

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 189
What we really admire in heroic egoism is the
force of an ambition or love which so dominates and
enslaves a man as to press not only his other
passions, but even his reason and best spiritual
energies into its service. But none the less he is a
slave and not a free, self-determining agent as
regards the ultimate motives of his life. He may
have learnt to discipline his mind and conquer his
other passions, but he has not conquered himself,
his psychic, natural self. It is only the conquest
of passion by passion ; the domination of one form
of egoistic self-will over all the rest. Freedom
demands that the ultimate and dominating motive
of our life should not be imposed upon us by
nature, but should be self-imposed by our own
spiritual choice and action ; that we should hold to
it by our own effort, rather than be passive in its
grasp. It is by such a free effort that we hold
to and appropriate the Divine Will, the universal
over-individual interests of the spiritual self. And
just because it is the act of our free effort, and
because our grasp grows weary and trembles, true
self-mastery and will-strength are far rarer and
more difficult of attainment than their spurious
counterfeits. As it is easier to be consistently
worldly-wise than heavenly-wise, so it is easier to be
thorough and strong in the psychic interest than in
the spiritual interest. In the former case the working
energy is given to us, nor can we resist it ; in the
latter we have to make it and sustain it. But if the
children of light show up badly compared with
the children of the world in point of thoroughness

190 LEX CREDENDI

and consistency, yet such strength as they have
is true strength, and their failures are due to the
greater difficulty of their aim rather than to the
greater slackness of their efforts. Doubtless half-
and-half results, neither hot nor cold, neither very
good nor very bad, are multiplied by the upward
endeavour : and frank egoism and self-worship
would give a higher percentage of forcible natures.
But in every department progress is at the cost
of great waste of material and of many failures ;
and the economy which grasps at immediate results
of a lower kind is invariably self-defeating. What
is but struggling to birth, or just new-born, is always
crude, feeble, and helpless beside that which is
adult or senescent ; yet the former is heir of the
future, while the latter will soon be of the past.
3
The endeavour to subject the psychic and natural
to the spirit-life ; to reproduce the Divine Will ever
more fully in man here upon earth; to attain to
ever higher degrees of personality, freedom, and
self-determination, is the essence, rule, and justifica
tion of Christian asceticism, which, far from destroy
ing or maiming, aims at strengthening and building
up human nature into something over-human and
divine. Of the wilful "destruction of the flesh"
as essentially evil, of hostility to nature as such,
there is no trace in Him who was the Word made
flesh. For Him, the blind " will to live," the tumul
tuous, psychic instincts of self-preservation, self-
assertion, self-expansion, the lawless forces of nature

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 191
within and outside us, were as indifferent morally as
the raging of the sea or the scorching of the flame.
It was only from the attitude of the spirit toward
them, resisting or yielding, commanding or serving,
that they could borrow a moral character of good or
evil. Like Himself, they were set for the rise and
fall of many; for a principle of discernment and
judgment ; for the use or abuse ; for life or death.
Yet with all this His call was to a sterner mortifica
tion and austerity than men had yet learnt — that
mortification which is the essential condition of all
strenuous mental and moral development ; of the life
of perfect reason ; of the subjection of the psychic
will to the spiritual and divine. It was not the
mortification of the oriental ascetic, sought directly
for its own sake, dictated by a disbelief in nature
and in life, but such as was incidental to, and
inseparable from, the quest of the highest, widest,
and fullest life. " He was obedient unto death, even
the death of the Cross " — obedience, conformity to
the Divine Will, was the end ; the Cross was but the
inevitable incident : Death for Life's sake, not Death
for Death's sake.
While pagan asceticism laid the chief emphasis on
the external acts of abstinence or endeavour, the
Christian is taught to value them chiefly as manifesta
tions of an inward spiritual power of self-determina
tion and mastery. It is not the act, but the power,
of abstaining that matters. Actual abstinence may
be a question of a particular vocation or duty, but
the power of abstaining must be the aim of all.
Nor is a temperate and moderate use ethically or

192 LEX CREDENDI

spiritually worthful if the power of greater restraint
be absent. However harmless otherwise, action
which slips from the due control of our spirit becomes
evil for us. And in this we touch upon that inward
ness which essentially distinguishes Christian from
non-Christian asceticism.
It was the failure to seize this vital and critical
point that perverted the early Christian doctrine of
chastity into the heresy of the Encratites. The
control of the two strongest, most lawless, and socially
subversive instincts of our psychic nature, sc. those
of procreation and self-preservation, was the most
evident and striking triumph of the spirit of Christ
in the midst of pagan corruption. In a sense chastity
is the very basis of virility and character. Here,
more obviously and forcibly than in the case of any
other instinctive tendency, the contrast between the
psychic self-regarding aspect of the impulse and the
spiritual and universal aspect is presented to us.
Nowhere is it made more plain that if Nature urges
us imperiously to seek ourselves, yet it is only for the
sake of others ; that we should regulate the impulse
in accordance with her social aims ; that we should
correct the roughness of her expedient in the light
of an intelligent appreciation of its purpose, and
modify the mechanism of inborn habit into conformity
with the demands of reason. And if it is sometimes
objected by outsiders that chastity is not merely
the basis, but the sum and substance of Catholic
ethics, to the practical neglect of all else, we
might reply that in this we are at least true to
type, and that a like objection might have been

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 193
urged against the Christians of the sub-Apostolic
age. Externally, and apart from its motives, that
early enthusiasm for virginity and absolute conti
nence might easily have been, and was often, con
founded with like phenomena in the religions of the
East. Gnostic interpretations of Christian practice
were only too frequent ; and even St. Paul speaks
already of fanatics " forbidding to marry and com
manding to abstain from meats." But what the
Christian valued in continence was the spirit which
gave men power to become the sons of God ; which
set all things under their feet, even the winds and
waves of their stormiest passions ; which gifted them
with a freedom and self-determination that made
them more than men.
To marry or not to marry was a question of ex
pediency; but chastity, the power of abstention, was
obligatory on all, whether married or unmarried. In
theory, the Christian Church still asserts this obliga
tion for those thousands who without any special call
to the priestly or religious state are, through circum
stances of youth, poverty, deformity, sickness, disease,
and the like, in a state of enforced celibacy, permanent
or temporary; nor even is marriage supposed in any
way to justify or allow a lesser power of self-control
in diminishing the occasions of its exercise. Deny
the universality of the obligation, and a false ethical
assumption overwhelms us with insoluble social
problems. Affirm and insist upon it, and we cut
away the root of endless miseries and injustices that
spring from the lower and laxer standard of Christian
character that a mistaken indulgence has largely

194 LEX CREDENDI

allowed to prevail in deference to average morality.
Apart from morbid psychological conditions, inherited
or induced, the power of abstinence is possible for all,
and obligatory on all ; and where it is lacking, there
can be no true spiritual strength or manhood, but at
most a psychic counterfeit. One lawless instinct
destroys the unity of character, the perfection of
freedom and self-determination. It introduces or
tolerates a pseudo-personality side by side with the
spirit, in the same inward kingdom, which at any
moment may seize the reigns of government and
bring all things to confusion.
The other great triumph of early Christianity was
the martyr-spirit, the conquest of the fear of death,
the perfect control of the instinct of self-preservation.
A certain insensibility to pain and a reckless con
tempt of life — one's own or others' — is a mark of
savagery and barbarism ; of a defective sense of per
sonality, its rights and values ; of an enforced and
complete subjection of the unit to the multitude.
Plainly it is only in the measure that our personality,
life, and work is valuable and duly valued that free
self-sacrifice for others and for the Will of God
possesses positive moral significance. Of such sacri
fice Christ is the realized ideal. In a sense, none ever
loved His life more, and yet none ever loved it less.
Readiness to die for the Gospel was expected of all
His disciples without distinction ; it was not to be
the special charisma of the comparatively few whose
readiness was put to the test by martyrdom. And
included in the readiness to die, as the less in the
greater, was the readiness to expose oneself to the
perils and occasions of death, to sacrifice health and

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 195
comfort and convenience for the Gospel's sake. As
in the matter of continence, so here : exultation in a
new-found victory over Nature's strongest impulses
often led to extravagances in the form of wanton
self-destruction, demanded neither by reason nor
charity and hostile to the interests of both. Later
there came reaction, and an insensible process of con
cession to average morality. The medieval contempt
of life was perhaps as much due to a recrudescence
of barbarism as to the Christian spirit of fearlessness.
Nowadays, when civilization has made life more
sweet and death more terrible for nervous and highly
developed personalities, the King of Terrors and his
satellites are feared as perhaps never before. To live
anyhow, at any price, by any operation or artifice,
without any reference to the interest of others, and
as long as possible, is widely assumed to be an un
limited right and even an unlimited duty. Fortu
nately the military profession is still with us to
remind us of a principle which surely has wider,
more general, and perhaps more rational applications ;
and even the deservedly obsolete practice of duelling
at least taught men to make light of death in com
parison with the moral evil of dishonour. Not only
in the defence of one's country or of one's personal
honour, but in a multitude of fairly ordinary contin
gencies, the preservation of our own life may not be
that supreme and absolute end that we think it, and
there may be something quite analogous to incon
tinence in the unrestrained eagerness with which we
cling to it ; an eagerness which belongs to the
psychic rather than to the spiritual man.

196 LEX CREDENDI

Nothing is more possible, probable, or common
than to find the direct pursuit of self-denial as an
end in itself co-existing with a total neglect of the
daily and multitudinous self-denials incident to the
perfect discharge of our duty. There is no asceticism
so severe, so exigent, so humble and humbling as
that involved in perfect fidelity to reasonableness.
As in the government of others, so in that of our
selves, arbitrariness is always uneducative and de
moralizing. " Because I choose " is never a reason ;
or it is one which justly brings a government into
discredit and eventually leads to its overthrow. We
must not give senseless orders to ourselves any more
than to others. Our will is not a plaything, and if
we use it as such we destroy it. Mortifications that
are mere will-feats, and are not directed in some way
to the service of reason, only feed vanity at the
expense of character. Of such asceticism Christ
knows nothing. Yet the call to follow Him is in
cidentally and inevitably a call to take up the Cross,
to deny oneself daily and hourly ; to labour in the
sweat of one's brow ; to wrestle with the tough resist
ance of nature and habit ; to discipline one's mind
and imagination, one's senses, feelings, passions, affec
tions ; to withstand the forces that split up and
disintegrate one's personality ; to organize and unify
the lawless multitude of our thoughts, aims, and ten
dencies ; to bring all under the absolute control of
the Divine Will.
This is a task not for the weak, but for the strong ;

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 197
for those who " go on from strength to strength " ;
who do violence to themselves and so take the
Kingdom of Heaven by storm ; not for reeds shaken
by the wind, nor for those who are clothed in soft
raiment and live in the palaces of kings. If the
Crucifix breathes tranquillity in the midst of pain, it
is the tranquillity of a hard-won conquest, the fruit
of Gethsemane's agony and sweat of blood. Nor
without innumerable agonies of prayer and repug
nance can the psychic and natural self be subjected to
the spiritual or the Christian type of manhood — free,
strong, self-determining — be realized, sustained, and
furthered ; or God's Will be done in earth, as it is in
heaven. " The spirit, indeed, is willing, but the flesh
is weak " : to change this weakness into strength is
the work of the spirit which appropriates and identi
fies itself with the Divine Will.
5
Heaven is the abode of eternal peace and rest ; the
assembly of spirits in whom the Divine Will is finally
triumphant. But it is the rest of action, not of
inertia or slumber. In our present militant condi
tion, labour is so invariably painful that we can
hardly dissociate the two ideas. Yet closer reflection
shows us that vacancy and under-exertion are as
painful as the overtaxing of our energies, and that
our fullest joy, our truest rest, is in the adequate
exercise of our best faculties. But such exercise,
whether of the mind or the will or the body, neces
sarily implies an obstacle to be encountered and
overcome. The sense of insecurity, the uncertainty

198 LEX CREDENDI

of immediate victory, are not altogether limitations
of our flesh. In due measure they are a stimulus,
a condiment ; yet the possibility of ultimate defeat
and failure is inconsistent with perfect peace and
serenity. Till that possibility is eliminated God's
Will cannot be done on earth as it is in heaven —
namely, in imperturbable peace and security. Yet
even on earth we may approximate to this heaven :
and thus the growth of spiritual strength is marked
by increasing serenity and restfulness. There is an
ease that comes of habit, and there is an ease that
comes of spiritual strength. The former is useful as
freeing the spirit for higher tasks, but is hurtful if
turned to an occasion of idleness. It is merely a
self-induced perfection of the psychological mechan
ism fashioned by the spirit for its own service. It
puts a better instrument into the workman's hands
and makes his work easier, yet it does not increase
his skill or industry, but only calls him to greater
and higher exertion. Far other is the ease that
without lessening the bitterness of the chalice, or the
weakness of the flesh, increases the willingness of
the spirit. Grace is essentially a spiritual help. It
does not weaken or pauperize us by numbing our pain
or lightening our burdens, but enables us to endure
and to labour by clearing our vision and kindling
our love. At every onward stage the spirit is more
conscious of its nearness and dearness to God ; more
sensible of its communion with the Divine Life ;
more sure that it is in the grasp of a hand that will
not let go. And with this consciousness its hope
and confidence and courage approximate to that

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 199
eternal rest and security which constitute heaven.
The Will that moves all is in itself unmoved in the
infinite intensity of its action ; and the wills that are
merged in it share its rest.
"Then wilt Thou rest in our rest, even as now
Thou dost labour in our labour : and, thus, as Thy
working is done through us, so will Thy resting be
done through us." l VII
THE FOURTH PETITION
Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie. — Give us this day
our daily bread
I
" Labour not," says our Lord, " for the meat that
perisheth, but for the meat that endureth unto ever
lasting life." What this imperishable meat is He
tells us elsewhere : " I have a meat ye know not of.
My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me " ;
and for this meat He has taught us to pray : " Thy
Will be done on earth, as it is in heaven."
The spirit has its hunger. " Blessed are they that
hunger after righteousness." That it can desire, as
its own good and satisfaction, the Kingdom of God
and the Will of God, shows us that it identifies itself
with God, and has nothing individual or selfish in its
nature, but rises above the psychic plane and loses
itself in God ; that it is by destiny an organ in which
the Divine Will and Life expresses itself ; in which
God wills, and loves, and acts. Only because it
1 "Aug. Conf." xiii. 37.

200 LEX CREDENDI

freely identifies itself with God, and dies into God,
can it possibly regard the universal over-individual
interests of truth and justice as its own interests,
since the nature of the object desired explains the
nature of the subject who desires it. Only because
it can, at moments, take the absolute standpoint and
see with God's eyes can it also become conscious of
the relativity and falseness of the psychic, the auto-
centric, standpoint. If the contemplation of stellar
spaces dwarf us in our self-esteem, the fact that we
can be so dwarfed means that we stand outside, or
are greater than, the terms compared — the psychic
self and the material universe.
God's Will, God's Kingdom, is the bread of man's
eternal life — the life in which he identifies himself
with the Eternal. Not merely does it satisfy his
spiritual hunger, but it builds up his spiritual sub
stance. Unlike the bread of the body, which is
changed into man's nature, this heavenly bread
changes man into its own nature. In the measure
that he appropriates the Divine Life and Will, he
puts on divinity. He feeds on a higher nature than
his own, not on a lower. Assimilation requires here
that he, and not his nutriment, should be transformed.
It is a life ready made, like that of the civilization
into which we are born. To appropriate it we must
not narrow or lower it to the compass of our faculties,
but widen and raise our faculties to take it in as it is.
Our civilization may be improved, and, after we have
compassed it, we may criticize and amend it ; but
we cannot improve on the Divine Life, — we have
only to receive it.

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST

The first and principal part of the Lord's Prayer
is preoccupied with the Bread of the Spirit, the meat
that endureth ; the second and dependent part with
the meat that perisheth, the bread of the body. The
first, with spiritual interests ; the second, with psychic
or natural interests in relation to these : " Seek ye
first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and
all these things shall be added unto you."
Bread stands in this petition for the satisfaction of
all the needs of our natural life, — for food and raiment
and housing, and all those things " which the Gentiles
seek," and seek wrongly only so far as they seek
them out of due order and measure, and without
respect to the one thing absolutely needful. And
the selfish greed of this bread is the root and occasion
of all those sins and trespasses for which we ask for
giveness, and which we have to forgive in others ;
and of the temptation to sin from which we desire to
be guarded ; and of the vices and evils from which
we pray to be delivered.

The house of man's heart is never vacant. Either
good or evil spirits must make their abode there.
Drive out one devil, and another will forthwith enter,
unless the Spirit of God have taken possession
already. Merely negative reformation is futile ; un
less evil be driven out by the intrusion of good, and
error by the intrusion of truth, they will return in
some other form, and the last state may be worse
than the first.
It was not in void space that Christ came to

LEX CREDENDI

establish the Kingdom of God, but in an occupied
territory where Satan had established his usurped
throne. He had " to destroy the works of the devil "
in order " to make us sons of God." Yet He did not
first destroy and then build up, but destroyed by
building up. By forcing Himself in, He forced Satan
out. In the Gospel the Kingdom of God and the King
dom of Satan are correlative ideas which explain
one another. The first part of the Lord's Prayer is
occupied with the Kingdom of God ; the second with
the Kingdom of Satan, with the world, the flesh, and
the devil, with concupiscence and sin and tempta
tion. When the Tempter drew nigh to Our Lord in
the desert, the first snare that he spread was the
commonest, the most widely destructive. " If Thou
be the Son of God, command these stones to become
bread." It was an appeal to those elementary and
imperative needs of the psychic man whose inordin
ate quest is the most abundant source of human sin
and suffering. " Not by bread alone," says Christ,
" shall man live, but by every word that proceedeth
out of the mouth of God " ; not by the meat which
perisheth, but by the meat which endureth.
The psychic appetites and desires are as real and
positive as the hunger and thirst after righteousness.
They are forces which should be curbed and brought
under the service of the spirit, and as such they are
constitutive of the Kingdom of God — of the reign of
order. But left to themselves they act blindly, and
make for chaos and confusion, and as such they are
constitutive of the Kingdom of Satan — of the reign

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 203
of disorder. We must not think of evil, or the
principles of evil, as merely negative; or of the King
dom of Satan as an unoccupied waste, or as the
merely embryonic unfinished stage of " good in the
making." We should view it as the moral chaos
produced by uncurbed egotism ; by the unbridled
freedom of instincts made for service and not for
freedom ; by the innate propensity of each psychic
unit to make itself central and supreme, and to subject
every other unit to its own separate and exclusive
interests ; by the intrusion of the natural law of
competition into the spiritual domain. If the result
to some extent is merely destructive of order, sub
versive of the Kingdom of God, yet the destroying
forces are as positive as the powers of good. Nor
can we altogether say that the reign of evil is lawless.
" If Satan be divided against Satan, how can his
kingdom stand ? " There is system and stability in
the world of selfishness. As we have said already,
the psychic life produces a civilization of its own, and
the psychic man, dominated by some enslaving am
bition or desire, can reach a degree of seeming
personality and self-command which the spiritual
man often misses. It is not merely blind passions
and instincts that war against divine order, but
reason and the laws of nature are pressed into their
service and organize their forces for the battle.
Were it otherwise, they would be at once what they
must be eventually, " chaff before the wind " ; where
as now the conflict is between kingdom and king
dom, order and order — between the real and the
apparent, the true and the false.

204 LEX CREDENDI
Man must have bread : in a sense, it is his first
need — first in order of time, and counting from
below. He is earthly and psychic before he becomes
heavenly and spiritual. Non mortui laudabunt Te,
" The dead cannot praise Thee " ; we must live in the
body if we are to live to God. Hence the external
Kingdom of Heaven on earth postulates rational
conditions of bodily subsistence for all. Where
these are lacking, or where they superabound, man is
tempted to live for bread alone. Destitution and
superfluity alike, though in contrary ways, are dis
orders of the Kingdom of Satan.
The Kingdom of Satan, like that of God, has its
inward and its outward aspect. Primarily it means
the reign of selfishness in the hearts of mankind at
large. Secondarily it means all those conditions of
human society which both foster and result from
this inward evil.'
In the Gospel we find the ills of soul and body
indifferently ascribed to Satan. Sickness is assumed
to be the fruit of sin ; the only problem being : Who
has sinned : this man or his parents ? Our Lord
is the Physician of soul and body indiscriminately ;
that is, of the whole man ; of all sickness, moral or
physical. To cure the paralytic of his infirmity and
to forgive his sins are equally " to destroy the works
of the devil." It is Satan who has bound that
daughter of Abraham for eighteen years in her
infirmity. We may explain details differently in these days,
but the main fact of the causal relation between the
inward life and the outward conditions of mankind

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 205
in general is uncontestable. These latter may pro
ceed from sin and make for sin; or they may
proceed from righteousness and make for righteous
ness; they may constitute a visible Kingdom of
Satan or a visible Kingdom of God.
It is to the disorder of man's fundamental and
necessary instinct of self-nourishment, self-care, self-
protection, that the origin of all sin and of the
Kingdom of Satan is traced in the teaching of the
Sacred Scriptures — to the temptation to live by
bread alone and not by every word that proceedeth
from the mouth of God ; to an abandonment of the
spiritual plane, with its selfless universal interests,
and a descent to the psychic plane, with its selfish
interests.

Those fishermen who listened to our Lord, the
first to whom He taught this prayer, were poor men,
and therefore more exposed to the spiritual dangers
of destitution and insufficiency than to those of
superfluity. Their temptations were not those of
the rich men of the parables, whom ease and in
dulgences had blinded to the life-problems raised by
the experience of suffering and sorrow. As destruc
tive of such indolent contentment and optimism,
poverty or even destitution is a grace : Blessed are
ye poor. Luxurious conditions have never origin
ated any high degree of civilization and have
invariably destroyed what has been built up by the
pressure of need and stress. And this is true of
religion — the highest factor of civilization. It is a

206 LEX CREDENDI

shallow scoff that speaks of calamity sending man
howling to his gods. Undoubtedly it is the stress of
man's spiritual and moral needs, his painful limita
tions and necessities, his radical and incurable
discontent with all that a godless world offers, or
could be conceived to offer, that forces him to believe
in a bigger world in which the puzzles of our frag
mentary experience find their solution. Woe, there
fore, to the rich who slumber comfortably through
life without a jolt or jar to wake them from dreams
to realities ; and blessed are the poor, whom suffer
ing presses with questions that faith alone can
answer. Still there is a degree of poverty which absorbs all
the leisure and best energies of life in the struggle
for bare subsistence, which tends to harden and
sterilize the spirit, and which creates habits of greed
and grasping that often persist after the pressure is
removed and tie the soul down to the service of
Mammon. Against such a snare we are taught to
pray, " Give us this day our daily bread " — a prayer
which at once recognizes our lawful bodily desires
and the limits within which they should be con
tained. "Your Heavenly Father knoweth that you have
need of these things." Neither does He need to be
informed of our wants, or to be persuaded to satisfy
them. What He requires of us is an acknowledg
ment of dependence; a sense of confidence in, and
resignation to, the rulings of His providence ; a con
forming of our wills to His, not a wresting of His
will to ours.

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 207
We are told that He who clothes the lilies will
surely clothe us ; that He who feeds the sparrows
will surely feed us. But to find in these words an
encouragement to idleness and improvidence is un
pardonable. When we pray, "Thy Kingdom come,"
we pray for grace to desire and work for its coming ;
when we pray, " Give us this day our daily bread,"
we pray that we may be able to procure it by our
own endeavour. The sparrows are not fed mirac
ulously, but work hard for their food ; and in the
frost and snow they perish in their thousands. Yet
it is God, working in the laws of nature, who feeds
them ; and when, in obedience to those same laws,
they fall to earth and perish, it is not without their
Heavenly Father's will. The fishermen of Galilee
well knew that they had to spread their nets and toil
all night if they were to take the bounty that God
might or might not send them. The field-labourers
knew that they must plough, sow, and reap, though
it was for God to give the increase. Both knew that
their daily bread depended on their own labour as
well as on God's gifts ; that it was idle to pray
except with the intention of working. Prayer looks
to those conditions of success without which all our
labour and foresight would be vain ; which depend
on what, in relation to our ignorance and helpless
ness, we call luck or chance, and what, in relation to
our faith, we call providence — on rain and sunshine,
storm and calm. To pray is to utter our firm faith
that the whole mechanism of nature is in God's
hands ; that its laws and necessities are subservient
to His will ; that seeming evil, no less than seeming

208 LEX CREDENDI
good, is co-operant to wise and loving ends. It is to
resign ourselves, after we have done our part, to
whatever the wheel of fortune brings round to our
lot — not with the stolidity of the fatalist, but with the
obedience of a child, perplexed by the rulings of a
fatherly wisdom which is beyond its powers of com
prehension and criticism. In spite of the implied
dualism which represents God as being, manwise, in
conflict with nature and unable to secure His ends
except through ceaseless interventions with an order
He finds established, there is deeper truth in the naive
faith that prays for such miracles than in the dumb,
sullen resignation of oneself to the senseless control
of an ultimate and all-pervading mechanism. For it is
to believe that God is stronger than nature; that He
is transcendent as well as immanent ; that nature is a
first habit, even as habit is a second nature, and that
therefore, like habit, nature is created and moulded
by intelligence and will. But to believe that this
mechanism itself is the chosen instrument through
which the Divine Love and Freedom shape our ends,
to believe that Law and Liberty are reconcilable — is a
yet deeper faith which absorbs the truth and rejects
the error of these imperfect views of providence.
This higher faith will not dare to dictate or urge, or
to judge what is expedient or otherwise, but com
mends itself blindly into God's hands, praying only,
" Not my will, but Thine be done." As it will not
repine if its desires be thwarted, so neither will it be
elated when they are gratified ; for this too would be
to claim to know what we can never know, namely,
which of the two is ultimately the better for us —

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 209
affliction or prosperity. To see God's finger only in
wonderful coincidences and answers to prayer implies
an unconscious denial of intervention where we do
not see it. " If we have received good things as from
God's hands, shall we not also receive evil?" The
truest faith knows His finger is in everything, but
sees it in nothing : " Because thou hast seen, thou hast
believed. Blessed are they that have not seen, and
yet have believed."
Plainly, what Christ forbids is not a rational and
moderated care for the indispensable conditions of
life, but such a solicitude or absorption as forgets
the end in the means, and thrusts the Kingdom of
God into the second place. It is not so much what
" the Gentiles seek " that is reprehended, as the
manner in which they seek it.
We need not stay to dispute the exact meaning
of " epiousios " (daily). The rendering " supersub-
stantial" is so utterly improbable on philological
grounds, and so subversive of the sequence and
connexion that gives the prayer its unity, that
we may pass it by. The other renderings agree in
their ultimate sense ; that is, they preclude vain
anxiety about future contingencies which lie beyond
all possible human knowledge and control ; and they
enjoin that necessary trust in providence which in
no right sense can be stigmatized as improvidence.
The morrow for which we are to take no thought is
not regulated by the sun, but lies beyond that night
of ignorance which inevitably bounds our foresight.
It is the hidden and uncontrollable future. But
there is also enjoined upon us a sort of unworldliness

LEX CREDENDI

much more akin to improvidence. Our Lord was
immediately addressing those whom He was sending
forth, as sheep into the midst of wolves, to preach
the Gospel of the coming Kingdom ; who would
therefore be constantly confronted with alternatives
between principle and expediency, between truth
and the cost of truth, right and the cost of right.
Here are the moments, not rare in any life, when
one must blind oneself to consequences and plunge ;
when to hesitate or look back is to prove oneself
unfit for the Kingdom of God. Fiat fustitia, ruat
ccelum. This so-called " improvidence " distinguishes
the spiritual from the psychic or natural man, and
constitutes that folly of the Cross which is wisdom
with God.
Yet even short of this, Christian wisdom forbids
an infinite carefulness that would in every case strain
foresight to its utmost limits without respect to the
varying importance of the matters in question ; that
would sickly o'er the native hue of resolution with
the pale cast of thought, and waste golden oppor
tunity through lack of firmness and promptitude.
This is less often an error of the worldly-wise than
of the scrupulous and conscientious. And therefore
we need to be reminded that though we ourselves
are responsible, God is also responsible ; that risk is
inseparable from choice and action ; that it is safer
to lose five talents through boldness than to save
one by timidity.
Finally, belief in the almost immediate end of
the world justified the early Christians in an in
difference to many temporal concerns that would

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST

otherwise have been an inexcusable improvidence.
Who would trouble about his clothing, housing, and
sustenance in future years were he doomed to die in
a month or two ? If at all times a deeper sense of
life's brevity and littleness makes the true Christian
more calm under temporal losses and afflictions,
and mitigates that intensity of competition for sub
sistence and enjoyment which comes of a narrow
and exaggerated estimate of the prizes, this surely
is not improvidence, but a wiser and wider foresight
that rates more justly the relation of the means to
the end. To care too little is bad ; but to care too
much is far worse. From this over-care faith delivers
us, in that it tells us that for each, if not for all, not
only death but judgment is near — even at the very
gates. It presses us with the same spiritual truth
which for the early Christians was embodied in the
belief that the world itself was in its agony.
4
Our Heavenly Father knows that we have need of
these temporal things and that our neighbour has
need of them — need of everything that ministers to
the elevation of man to ever higher spiritual planes ;
need of all that is meant by a rational civilization,
by the external Kingdom of Heaven upon earth.
And with the right and duty of praying for these
ends comes the right and duty of working for them.
It is to our Father in heaven that we pray for the
bread of the body no less than for the bread of the
soul; for He is Father of body and soul alike, of
earth and Heaven ; nor are these interests separable

212 LEX CREDENDI

or separated but by sin. Heaven is in earth, and
earth is in heaven ; if the eternal transcends it also
permeates the temporal.
And as we pray to " our " Father, so we pray for
" our " bread in no exclusive sense ; in no egotistic,
self-seeking spirit which uses prayer but as another
weapon in the lupine struggle for subsistence. It is
a corporate prayer for a corporate need ; we are
looking each of us rather to the common good than
to our own. We are thinking of the wants of others
around us ; of the outward Kingdom of God upon
earth. What is expressed in the following petition is
surely implied in this. For He who has said, " For
give, and you shall be forgiven," has also said, " Give,
and it shall be given to you." He has taught us to
see our Father made visible in our brother, and
thrown upon our mercy and compassion. As it is
vain to approach His altar with gifts unless we be
first reconciled to our brother, so, too, if our brother
be starving, no " Corban " casuistry will buy us off
this more pressing and imperative form of sacrifice.
If need be, let His servants be fed with the show-
bread from the sacred table itself. Will He delight
in vessels of gold when the living vessels of His
service are perishing and neglected ? But again, it is
presumption and superstition to pray for the general
needs of our brethren if we are not minded to work
for them, and to devote ourselves, heart and soul,
according to our ability, to what are called " social
problems." Those of our day were not dreamt of,
could not have been formulated or understood, in

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 213
Judaea two thousand years ago. To look for their
key in the Gospels is folly and fanaticism. But the
great end and the great motive of all social en
deavour are essential determinants of the spirit of
Christ. More than this, the Gospel of Poverty,
sanely interpreted, strikes at the most abiding and
universal sources of social misery, and shakes the
strongest supports of Satan's throne. The greed of
superfluity in the few is largely answerable for the
destitution of the many. There is a rational use of
wealth and an irrational waste of wealth. The
latter, not the former, is the sin of the rich, and the
cause of the impoverishment of the community as a
whole. Society is not poorer but richer, when a
man spends his needless wealth on jewellery or
curiosities ; but if he flings it in the sea, or hoards it
in the earth, or uses his library for fuel, or employs
labour fruitlessly, he is eventually taking bread out of
the mouths of the poor and furthering destitution.
The Gospel teaches a doctrine of frugality when
it bids us seek one thing alone, without restraint or
measure, and all else with a certain severity of modera
tion, in reference and subordination to that ; when it
bids us regulate our ends hierarchically, seeking the
lower in sufficiency for the higher and no more. It
introduces an aesthetic principle into life that con
demns the vulgarity of every sort of profusion or
waste, and secures a sort of Greek elegance of just
proportion. Certain advocates of "the simple life" would
claim Gospel authority for a vandalism that levels
all social inequalities of wealth and possession and

2i4 LEX CREDENDI

robs life of that unity in variety which is of its
essence. The simplicity of uniformity and mono
tony is the cheapest, but it is not the best. That
best is attained when the sovereign end of life
controls the infinite variety of means ; when each
member of the social organism perfects itself for its
own place and function solely in the interests of
the whole ; in a word, when the psychic man is
subject to the spiritual. VIII
THE FIFTH PETITION
Dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus
nostris. — Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass
against us. l
We may leave the whole problem of freedom
and of the possibility and permission of sin aside,
and accept the fact that in the world, as at present
constituted, sin abounds and superabounds ; that
man's need of forgiveness is as universal as his need
of food and clothing. The root of all sin is the
lusting of the flesh against the spirit ; of the psychic
against the spiritual self. It lies in the blind lawless
ness of those self-assertive instincts which, kept in
due subjection, are the indispensable instruments of
spiritual development and self-manifestation. Yet
it is the spirit that sins, and not the flesh. The
spirit not only may, but must identify itself with
the interest of its servant — of the individual organism
which it controls. The actor who puts himself in

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 215
another's place becomes that other for the time
being, and dies to his normal self. So, too, the spirit
has continually to assume the interests of the body,
to clothe itself with material individuality, to become
a psychic self for the time being. Only by rapid
alternations between the spiritual role and the
psychic can it adjust the naturally conflicting in
terests of both sides. In each role it experiences a
different set, or order, of pains and pleasures,
revulsions and attractions. Hence, a certain division
of personality is normal and necessary; we will
and we do not will ; we hope and we fear one and
the same end or object ; and if never in precisely
the same psychological instant, yet a flutter of
alternations gives an illusion of simultaneity. The
spirit sins when it abandons itself to the psychic
r61e, to the neglect of the spiritual ; when it suffers
itself to be swayed passively where it should actively
command ; when it yields itself to the blind laws of
individual self-assertion and self-supremacy. Sin is
the schism of the spirit from the harmony of wills
in communion with the Divine Will — its apostasy
from the spiritual to the psychic order, from the
Kingdom of God to the Kingdom of Satan, from
charity to egoism. The consequent sense of guilt
is a sense of antagonism to the ultimately irresist
ible forces of goodness and truth ; a sense of
identification with a doomed cause ; of loss of that
personality which is measured by power over nature
and appropriation of the divine life and strength.
The spirit fallen from grace or charity withers and
rots as a branch torn from the Tree of Life.

216 LEX CREDENDI

The union of wills through love is a mutual
relation. An unreturned love on either side is not
enough. If the outstretched hand is not grasped
there is no bond between soul and soul. It needs a
free act on the part both of the offender and of the
offended to bridge over the breach; on the part
of the former, repentance ; on the part of the latter,
forgiveness. Forgiveness, however, is a duty in the
same sense in which love — the first and great
commandment — is a duty: and therefore the
offender has a right to our forgiveness as he has
to our love. To refuse forgiveness is an offence
against the offender and against God ; one that
shuts us out from the Communion of Saints till we
ourselves repent and learn to win mercy by mercy.
Sin is the violation, forgiveness the restoration, of
that will-union with God and His saints in which the
spirit-life consists, — of that union which is symbolized
and cemented by those sacramental acts in which we
receive and are received by the mystical Christ ; in
which we profess to be, and are acknowledged as,
sons of God, members of a divine organism.
This union is the Kingdom of God, the sovereign
end of the Divine Will in all its outward workings :
" He that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out."
God could not refuse forgiveness to the penitent
without a violation of His essential goodness. " As
I live, I desire not the death of a sinner, but rather
that he be converted and live."
But this conversion or penitence means a return

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 217
of the old love, a recovery of the abandoned spiritual
plane, a condemnation of the selfishly psychic stand
point. Such spiritual repentance implies an already
accomplished restoration to spiritual life and Divine
Sonship, so that the grace of repentance and the
grace of forgiveness are but two aspects of one thing.
The purely contrite soul, whose contrition is selfless
and disinterested, is already forgiven. It has no
need to pray for forgiveness. To pray for forgive
ness, therefore, is to pray for the grace of contrition,
for power to repent and love.
The spirit-life, as has been said, is not evolved out
of ourselves, as a tree from the seed, but is offered to
us for our appropriation. It does not lie within our
selves to love or to repent, as though we had only
ourselves to thank. If, while breath remains, God's
hand is always stretched out to the fallen, it is not
the less an act of love and grace on His part.
Uniformity is not necessity. We could not pray for
forgiveness had He not already begun the work of
repentance in our hearts; and here the parable of
divine forgiveness breaks down hopelessly, for the
sinner cannot so much as wish to return home "unless
the Father draw him."
Still, forgiven though we be, we can pray for
forgiveness, not only in view of ever possible future
offences, but with respect to those already pardoned.
For as spiritual life and love admit of endless
increase, so also do the repentance and forgiveness
which they carry along with them. " Wash me more
and more from my wickedness," says the Psalmist,
recognizing that divine purity is no mere negation,

218 LEX CREDENDI

like that of the body ; that the soul may be whiter
than snow, and whiter than that again, without end
or limit.
Moreover, the prayer to our common Father is not
personal or particular in any exclusive sense, but
universal and in the name of all. It was the prayer
of the sinless Lamb of God, who came to take away
the sins of the world ; who made Himself one with
His sinful brethren, and as such could say, " Forgive
us our trespasses." We pray, therefore, not merely
for our own repentance, but for the conversion and
repentance of the world.

What we pray for we must work for ; we pray that
we may work. Our Saviour's whole Life and Passion
was at once a praying and a working for the repent
ance of mankind ; and round that central sacrifice all
our sacrifices of prayer and effort are gathered into
one corporate self-oblation for the same end.
God desires that all should repent and live ; but
He gives effect to this all-saving Will through the
instrumentality of man, through those in whom He
lives and works vicariously on earth. In these His
goodness and lovableness reveal themselves and
invite sinners to repentance. But in Jesus Christ
these nebulous and scattered lights of revelation are
gathered into a central sun: "God so loved the world,
that He gave His only begotten Son, that all who
believe in Him might not perish, but might have
eternal life." He is uniquely and pre-eminently the
Resurrection and the Life, who has power to wake

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 219
the spiritually dead, already corrupted in the tomb.
" He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." In Him
God shows Himself as loving sinners even to the ex
tremity of death. In Christ crucified repentance and
eternal life are proffered to us with a persuasiveness
that cannot be surpassed. " Greater love hath no man
than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
Yet it is God and not man who, in Christ, lays down
His life, not for His friends, but for enemies. Thus
" the love of Christ constraineth us " to repentance,
and thereby reconciles us with the Father and
quickens us to eternal life.
And in this atoning work the members of His
mystical body are called to co-operate. Not only
must they pray for sinners, but by their self-sacrificing
Christliness of life and character invite them to
repentance and communion with God.
4
In the external and sacramental penance of the
Church, Confession follows Contrition and precedes
Absolution. In the spiritual and timeless world the
three are coincident. Repentance is a self-accusation
in the presence of the Father, who seeth in secret ;
it is a prayer for forgiveness which is answered
before it is made. The self-accusing habit of mind
is an indispensable condition of spiritual growth ; it
is a part of that general teachableness and recep
tivity without which the spirit is intractable in the
hands of God. The infallible and the unteachable
are doomed to stagnation and petrifaction. "If we
say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and

LEX CREDENDI

the truth is not in us." As necessarily as prayer
tends to embody itself in utterance, and requires
utterance for its due development, so necessarily
does contrition require confession and the deeds of
penance — not merely such deeds as are due already
by a thousand titles, but deeds done more abund
antly, humbly, and diligently to redeem the time
that is lost by past sin and negligence. The spirit-
life for us sinners is essentially, a penitential life —
and it is such for us collectively, and in view of our
corporate transgressions, no less than individually.
The building up of the spirit is no work of waste
less progress, no triumphant march of reason, but a
work of laborious fluctuation, of continual repair, of
going back upon past faults and breaches ; a picking
up of missed stitches, an endeavour to turn losses
into gains, and to weave our very sins into a garment
of glory.
It is only with such penitential purposes in our
minds and for the furtherance of the same that we
have a right to pray, " Forgive us our trespasses."
5
Between man and man, on the psychic or natural
plane, there are relations of offence and forgiveness
of a wholly different kind to those which obtain in
the spiritual order. The self-interests of the self-seek
ing sometimes clash and sometimes coincide. The
pride or avarice or passion of another offends me
because it interferes with my own ; the world is too
small for us ; there is not enough bread to go round.
The dislike or hostility roused by such offence is a

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 221
psychic instinct, rebellious against reason and spirit.
The forgiveness accorded to such offence may be
merely of the same quality, namely, psychic, self-
regarding, an effect of passion rather than of action.
" If ye love them that love you, what reward have
you ? Do not the publicans do the same ? And if
you salute your brethren only, what do ye more than
others ? Do not even the Gentiles the same ? " The
union effected by such friendship and forgiveness is
a union in psychic, not in spiritual interests ; in ends
common to a few, not in those that are universal
and supreme over all.
To refuse forgiveness to the duly repentant offender
is to look on his offence, not in its deepest aspect
as a violation of objective justice and of that Divine
Will which is the supreme interest of the spirit-life,
but in its aspect of opposition to our separate psychic
interests. It is, therefore, to prefer the gratification
of our natural self-defensive instincts to the demand
of charity ; it is to cut ourselves off from spiritual
communion with one whose repentance has reunited
him to the communion of the just with God, and
therefore to excommunicate not him, but ourselves.
On the other hand, the very act of forgiveness,
being an act of disinterested goodness, a denial of
the psychic self for God's sake, raises us above the
natural level to that of Divine Sonship, and thereby
washes away our own sins.
Hence Christian forgiveness has nothing to do
with the almost animal squabblings and makings-up
of the unethical life. It is an exercise of heroic
magnanimity ; an act of the more-than-man, of the

LEX CREDENDI

few, not of the many ; a hard conquest of the psychic
by the spiritual self. It is therefore by no arbitrary
fiat of God's Will, but by the very necessities of the
spiritual nature, that we cannot be forgiven unless
we forgive ; that we cannot forgive and not be for
given ; that when we pray to be forgiven we are
praying for grace and strength to forgive.
6
Obviously the same law must govern our attitude
towards the impenitent offender whose impenitence
excommunicates him from the communion of the
spiritually living. The last condition of forgiveness
is wanting in such case on the part of the offender ;
but the hand of the offended must be stretched out
in invitation and readiness, even as God's hand is
ever stretched out to us all. The psychic instinct of
vindictiveness, the egotist sense of private wrong,
must be kept down and subordinated to the disin
terested judgment of the spirit. If we condemn or
resist or punish, it must be as though the injury
affected another in no way allied with our self-
interest. Our anger must be in the cause of God and
justice, not in the cause of self. This surely is no
child's task, no work of passive benevolence and
amiability, but the deed of one who knows that the
Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence and that only
the violent take it by storm. Christian meekness
has nothing to do with weakness. If weakness re
strains the many from vengeance, strength restrains
the few — those for whom it would be far easier to
yield themselves passively to the tide of passion.

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 223
But besides active and wilful offence, which is com
paratively rare, there is a vast deal of unconscious
offensiveness on the part of our neighbour to which
the spirit of forgiveness must be extended, if the like
offensiveness in ourselves is to be pardoned by Him
whom we pray to forgive not only our sins, but our
negligences and ignorances. Nowhere is the paltri
ness, narrowness, and intolerance of the psychic self
more difficult to control than in this matter. He
indeed would be more than man and little lower than
the angels who here had himself perfectly in hand ;
who could forgive those offensive uncongenialities of
mind and manner and character and appearance which
wound his self-love in a thousand ways, and which by
their multiplicity are more effectual in causing division
than the occasional sword-thrusts of deliberate injury.
Yet here too it is necessary by a strong effort of
the spirit to rise above the psychic and individualist
standpoint and to view the matter with disinterested
other-regarding eyes ; to judge as we would fain be
judged — not flatteringly, but truthfully, and therefore
mercifully — or as we should judge were we not our
selves smarting under personal irritation. Such
mercy has nothing to do with the cheap optimism of
an uncritical eye, a blunted moral sense, or a thick
skin. 'Tis mightiest in the mightiest ; it is an
attribute of God Himself, an active strength, not a
yielding weakness or complaisance.
Thus, not only forgiveness in the strict sense of the
word, but in that wider sense which relates to the
unrepentant or to the involuntary offender, is both a
necessary condition and an infallible cause of that

224 LEX CREDENDI

forgiveness which we need for our own offences
against God ; and this, because it is an act by which
we are raised from the psychic to the spiritual plane
and made sons of God ; an act which God Himself
works in us, who loves, serves, helps, and pardons
man, in man, through man. 7
Plainly the heroism of the act of forgiveness is
measured by the victory over feeling and instinct.
But it also involves a discontent with the very
rebellion of sense which demands such heroism, and
a steady determination to bring habits, instincts, and
feelings into accord with the spirit so as to free its
energies for yet fuller and higher exercise. Con
demned and disregarded, the feeling of aversion or
hostility is inculpable; but forgiveness is most per
fect when it is of the whole man ; when self-induced
habits have disciplined the psychic self to prompt
and ready obedience; have sweetened the temper
by an infusion of reasonableness, and schooled the
easily troubled passions to an abiding serenity.
Such self-mastery is always relative and susceptible
of indefinite increase, but it may frequently suffice
against all ordinary occasions of perturbation. The
psychic, no less than spiritual meekness and serenity
of a Christ, proof against the fiercest onslaughts of
injustice and the deepest insight into human limita
tions, demands no measured portion of the spirit,
but that plenitude of divine goodness and strength
before which the angriest winds and waves sink
promptly to rest.

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 225

This takes us to the question of the difference and
the relation between the spiritual and the natural
love of our neighbour. It might seem that this com
plete victory over the psychic impulses of attraction
or aversion towards others reduced Christian charity
to a bloodless, calculated act of the rational will, in
which the heart with its affections and feelings went
for nothing. This plainly would be a dividing of the
spirit and a dividing of Christ such as we have been
repudiating all along. We have conceded to " Senti
mentality" that the first impression made by the
Gospel Christ is that of a tenderness of affection and
compassion as far removed as possible from the cold
charity of Stoical justice. What we deny is, the
confusion of love with emotionalism ; of feeling regu
lated and controlled by the spirit in its own service,
with feeling blindly and passively obeyed.
Unregulated feeling and affection, like any psychic
impulse, resembles an uncultivated vine that sprawls
out in every direction, and grows poorer and weaker
season by season. Pruned and restrained, its strength
and fruitfulness would have been steadily augmented.
The indulgent softness of indiscriminate charity of
every sort, which follows the first impulse of pity,
never looking to wider and more distant consequences ;
which dares not, when necessary, use the knife or the
lash ; which shrinks from the pain of inflicting pain,
or of denying pleasure — is merely psychic selfishness
in one of its pleasanter manifestations, a sympathy
that has little to do with real costing kindness.
Q

226 LEX CREDENDI

The spirit of Christ grapples with this lawless
rabble of psychic impulses ; subjects them to severe
discipline, and yokes them into its chariot. It is not
driven by them, but drives them. Yet it needs their
service, and is helpless without them. They may
writhe and smart under its lash, but they are all the
better and stronger for being kept well in hand, and
guided to those higher and more wide-reaching ends
of love which else they had defeated.
Our duties towards others are not merely duties of
action, but duties of feeling — we must not merely act,
but also feel, love and forgiveness as far as feeling is
in our control ; and we are bound to strive continu
ally to bring it more fully under our control, and to
conform the psychic to the spiritual will. For feeling
can be and is slowly educated by indulgence or by
denial, and by the habitual control of the imagina
tion. Brooding can develop a spark of dislike into
a conflagration of hatred ; and feelings frequently
uttered in word or action strike a deeper root in the
soul. The truth that God identifies Himself with our
neighbour is one of the keynotes of the Gospel :
" Give, and it shall be given to you ; forgive, and you
shall be forgiven." Yet it is not merely because, in
them, we have given to Him, and have forgiven Him,
that He gives to us and forgives us ; not merely as a
quid pro quo, or as a debt or gratitude or justice, such
as may be due from one individual to another whose
interests can clash or coincide. It is because that
in such giving and forgiving as Christ demands of
us we rise above the selfish standpoint and take

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 227
our place on the spiritual plane among the children
of our Father in heaven, who makes His sun to
shine on the evil and the good and sends His rain on
the just and the unjust. IX
THE SIXTH PETITION
Ne nos inducas in tentationem, — Lead us not into temptation
I
This petition and the following are related very
much as the third and fourth. As " Thy Kingdom
come '' is explained by " Thy Will be done on earth,"
so is " Lead us not into temptation " by the plainly
dependent "But deliver us from evil." Hence St.
Luke omits the seventh as he does the fourth, and
presumably for the same reason — that it adds nothing
to the substance of the prayer.
The preceding petition for forgiveness implies a
sincere detestation of sin ; and this again a sincere
desire, purpose, and endeavour to minimize the occa
sions and causes of sin. Temptations are of two
kinds — those that are, morally speaking, beyond our
strength, and those that are within our strength.
Of the latter it is said, "Blessed is the man that
endureth temptation" (James I. 12); "Count it all
joy when ye fall into temptation " (ibid. 2) ; "I pray
not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world"
(John XVII.). Of the former : " But I pray . . that
Thou shouldest keep them from evil" (John XVII.);
" God will not suffer you to be tempted above what

228 LEX CREDENDI

you are able" (i Cor. X. 12); "Watch and pray,
that you enter not into temptation : for the spirit
is willing, but the flesh is weak" (Matt. XXVI. 41);
" Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from
evil." To strengthen the weakness of the flesh (i.e. of our
psychic nature) by subjecting it to the spirit is the
ever-receding goal of our moral and religious pro
gress, which is therefore a progress in freedom and
self-mastery. The limits of strength and freedom
differ for man and man ; and for different seasons
and states of the same man. Freedom is conditioned
by the clearness of our general moral judgment and
insight, and by that of our judgment as to the
morality of the particular act in question ; by the
degree of acquired or natural control over our reason,
our imagination, our habits, feelings, and affections ;
by our immunity from distraction or surprise or
sudden passion. We must know what we are doing,
and why we are doing it, and that we are in no way
forced to do it. The measure of our normal and
habitual freedom is determined by our own moral
industry on the one side, and on _the other by the
resistance or pliability of the particular temperament
we have to contend with. It is partly a gift, partly
an acquisition. "All have not the same to conquer
and mortify," says a Kempis, " and one who is dili
gent and zealous will often be able to make more
progress, even though he have more passions to
contend with, than another with a kindlier tempera
ment who is less eager after virtue" (I. c. 25). But
it may happen just as often that the more in-

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 229
dustrious reaps a poorer harvest, and must be content
with the just judgment of the Father, who seeth in
secret, who values the industry more than the harvest,
and with whom the first are often the last and the last
first. Again, our normal measure of freedom is liable to
frequent perturbation and diminution, for which
we are not responsible. Sickness, weariness, old
age, depression, climatic changes, and a thousand
accidents may cloud our judgment, tire our mind,
disorder our nerves, throw us back for the time
being to lower ethical levels long since abandoned, |
and so make us the easy prey of temptations against
which we are normally invulnerable.
There may, therefore, be temptations that are too
strong for us, whether relatively to our normal, or to
our occasional, measure of freedom ; and in such
cases sin is imputed to us by our conscience only so
far as we needlessly incurred the temptation or
cufpably weakened ourselves, so as to be responsible
for its improportion to our freedom. For here it is
that the sin lies — not in yielding to necessity, but in
inducing the necessity ; in entering into temptation
above our strength. We are therefore told to watch
and strive and pray that we may not be led into
such temptations.
The prayer for our daily bread is not a prayer for
miracles. We pray that we may work for it and
earn it ; but also with an acknowledgment of our
dependence on God's providence in the matter, and
of our trust that whether He gives or denies, it
is equally the will of a loving Father whose wisdom

230 LEX CREDENDI

must in many ways be inscrutable to His children.
So too we pray that we may strive to avoid in
superable temptations, but with an acknowledgment
that our vigilance is vain if God's providence do not
favour us ; and with a trust that should He, as He
often does, allow such evil to come upon us without
our fault, He will hold us blameless and turn it all to
our good. Sortes meae in vianu tua sunt — " My lots
are in Thy hand " ; no movement of the world's
seemingly ruthless mechanism escapes the Will of
Him whose Spirit fashioned it for its own ends.
"If we have received good things at His hand, shall
we not also receive evil ? " Clearly, then, the striving
against insuperable temptations demands an outward
and an inward vigilance. It demands first that
we walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise ; as
pioneers in a forest where danger may lurk around,
above, or under foot ; that we should be sober
and watchful, not reckless and foolhardy; still less,
presumptuous, as those who tempt God and throw
themselves headlong, relying on angelic aid promised
only to those who tread cautiously should they
chance to stumble. We are required to steer clear
of rocks and shoals, and to this end to learn their
whereabouts, profiting by our own past experiences
and those of others. Still, in this there is need
of that prudence which proportions the measure
of vigilance to the magnitude of the danger ; which
checks a timidity that would paralyse our energies ;
which not only allows, but compels us to risk a storm
rather than lie idle in port. Whatever befalls us
after reasonable and proportionate care is not our

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 231
own doing, but the ruling of providence, even though
greater care had certainly saved us.
But it is principally by strengthening ourselves
inwardly that we are to lessen the number of in
superable temptations ; by adapting ourselves to
our environment rather than by attempting to adapt
it to our weakness. And this is the task of that
sane, rational asceticism which distinguishes the
Gospel from the religions of Pessimism, with their
false " mysticality " and their doctrine of radical
antagonism between the spirit and the flesh. Where
supernatural value is attached to morbid psycho
logical conditions, it is easily supposed that a dis
regard and flagrant violation of all the laws of
bodily health are conducive to the higher life of
communion with God. That the hysterical phe
nomena deliberately induced by such "destruction
of the body'' are precisely paralleled by the effects
of vice and of unbridled wilfulness of every kind, is
evidence of a rationale common to both cases,
namely, the splitting up and disintegration of the
normal psychological harmony. The same result is
obtained by any prolonged over-taxing of the
mental faculties, whose weariness releases the lower
nature from their control and suffers it to set up
a rebel government of its own. In all such cases
God, in nature, avenges the violation of the laws of
reason, and leaves men prey to the countless illusions
and degradations incident to the dismemberment
of our moral personality.
Christian asceticism, on the other hand, unifies and
co-ordinates body and soul with all their powers and

232 LEX CREDENDI

faculties, and builds up that personality which con
sists in perfect self-determination ; in the progressive
mastery of spirit over nature both within us and
outside us. But this is not accomplished without
pain and daily mortification. The service of reason
is the most costing of all. Habit makes the wildest
austerities bearable and even unnoticeable ; but the
life of reason is ever demanding something new, some
thing more, and opens fresh wounds far faster than
habit can heal them. In a word, it is much easier to
deaden and destroy the psychic nature than to train
and perfect it ; much easier to tyrannize over it than
to govern it justly.

By no means are we taught to watch and pray
against those temptations which are within our
strength, which are the indispensable means of
maintaining our strength : " Try me, O God," prays
the Psalmist, " and seek the ground of my heart :
prove me and examine my thoughts. See well if there
be any way of wickedness in me, and lead me in
the way everlasting" (Ps. CXXXVIII. 24). Under-
exercise is as bad for our muscles as over-strain. A
certain moderate strain is necessary for their develop
ment. The same holds good of our spiritual educa
tion. The mind that lies idle, or contents itself with
the easy application of principles already possessed,
that shrinks from grappling with new problems and
from the labour of continual self-reformation, grows
torpid and mechanical. The will that is not always
struggling for some further degree of personality

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 233
and self-mastery loses its vigour and begins to fall
below its present measure of self-possession. Not
to advance is to recede. Hence we always need
some task a little more difficult than any we have
hitherto accomplished ; one that will educe the
power already latent within us, and in so doing store
up new power for some yet more difficult task. As
money gets money, so every truth acquired by the
mind brings new truths within our reach ; and every
conquest achieved by the will makes further con
quests possible. This is an elementary principle of
all rational education, as is plain from the graduated
exercise books that we put into children's hands.
To protect ourselves from difficulties within our
strength is to paralyse and cripple ourselves. It is
spiritual cowardice and laziness, and nothing more.
Far from avoiding, we must seek temptations of this
sort for ourselves and for those whom we would
educate mentally and morally as well as physically.
Hence it is that our Lord says of His disciples : " I
pray, not that Thou shouldest take them out of the
world, but that Thou shouldest keep them from evil";
not that they should be delivered from difficulties,
but from improportionate and insuperable difficulties.
He who sent them forth as sheep into the midst of
wolves, sent them into the very thick of temptation.
And if He Himself fled the world for a season and
went into the desert, it was not to fly temptation,
but that He might be tempted of the devil, and
come forth stronger than ever against the lesser
temptations of the world.

234 LEX CREDENDI

X
THE SEVENTH PETITION
Sed libera nos a malo. — But deliver us from evil.
I
If our modes of theological expression are neces
sarily imperfect, owing to the improportion of our
mind to the matter dealt with, they are doubly so
when the deepest and most insoluble of all theo
logical problems — the problem of evil — is in question.
God must be the author of evil : God cannot possibly
be the author of evil. Here are two irreconcilable
conclusions that seem to force themselves with equal
right on human reason. If we accept one of them,
we must treat the other as an insoluble difficulty.
We are not, then, and never can be, in so superior a
position ourselves as to condemn out of hand a view
of the matter which now seems to us misleading, and
to have been wisely discarded in the later writings
of the New Testament.
Combating a false but evidently common interpre
tation of the older presentments of this truth, St.
James writes : " Let no man say when he is tempted,
I am tempted of God, for God cannot be tempted
of evil, and He Himself tempteth no man ; but each
man is tempted when he is drawn away by his own
lusts and enticed. Be not deceived, my beloved
brethren ; every good gift and every perfect gift is
from above, and cometh down from the Father of
light, with whom can be no variation, neither shadow

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 235
that is cast by turning" (James I, 13-17). God is
the Father of the heavenly lights, of the stars, and of
the angels whom they symbolize. He Himself knows
no rising nor setting — nothing of that mutability
which belongs to every finite will, but shines with a
steady radiance, diffusing good, and only good, to all
His creatures. As He Himself cannot vary or be
tempted to evil, so neither can He tempt any man to
evil, nor will that any shall die, but that all should
come to repentance. Be not deceived ; we may
tempt ourselves, and others may tempt us, but God
never tempts us.
On the other hand, it is equally true that nothing
can evade God's providence ; that it is He who
permits, not only those strictly insuperable tempta
tions which issue in material but blameless breaches
of the moral law, but also those superable tempta
tions which come to us from the world or the flesh ;
and even those sins which, in another sense, are due
to the free opposition of our will to His.
This side of the truth was emphasized in the Old
Testament mode of theological thought and expres
sion. That God should tempt a man to sin, i.e. to
transgress against Himself, is an intolerable thought
for one who realizes the absolute unity and righteous
ness of God ; but it is less intolerable in the measure
that men conceive God humanwise in their own sinful
image and likeness ; and it was altogether tolerable
for those heathen whose heaven was a pandemonium
of intriguing deities, each jealous of the other's wor
shippers, and striving to sow discord. The sense of
being victimized by a divine madness and forced into

236 LEX CREDENDI

sin was familiar enough to those early Semitic neigh
bours whose religious language in many cases passed
over to Israel with a new interpretation, yet always
with a liability to return to the primitive sense on
the lips of the carnal - minded and the pagan at
heart. That God tempted Abraham, that He hardened
Pharaoh's heart, etc., were expressions easily, and no
doubt frequently, misunderstood in a pagan sense.
Hence we find temptation more and more explicitly
ascribed to secondary causes, under the divine per
mission : to Satan and his angels. And as even this
view of the matter encouraged men to excuse them
selves and throw their blame on other shoulders — "the
serpent beguiled me, and I did eat" — the tendency
to seek the source of temptation in men's own hearts
and imaginings becomes even in the Old Testament
ever more pronounced, and in the New reaches its
clearest expression in the passage just quoted from
St. James.
The petition, "Lead us not into temptation," belongs
to that older form of theological thought. It empha
sizes the truth that our lots are in God's hands ; that
our very temptations are in His control ; that no
sparrow can fall to the ground without His will who
feeds the sparrow ; that as we stand, so we fall, only
by His decree.
Still, the havoc that certain theories of predestina
tion and predetermination have played with this
divine truth justifies the needful explanation that the
sixth petition of the Lord's Prayer receives in the
seventh. St. Luke ends with " Lead us not into

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 237
temptation " ; St. Matthew adds the fuller explanation :
" But deliver us from evil," or " from the evil one."
God is not the tempter positively, but at most per-
missively ; He does not lead us, but only suffers us
to be led into temptation, in so much as He does not
always deliver us from evil or from the Tempter.

The liturgical languages of the Church, East and
West, leave it ambiguous whether we should read
"from evil," or "from the evil one." Tertullian,
Cyprian, and the Greek Fathers after Origen take the
latter view ; most of the Western authorities take the
former, which has become popularized with us. Of
the parallel passages in the New Testament where
the same word occurs, seven demand the personal
sense,1 four are ambiguous,2 and one only requires
the impersonal sense.8 When in addition to this we
remember that the Lord's Prayer is the Prayer of
the Kingdom of Heaven, whose establishment on
earth entails the destruction of the Kingdom of
Satan ; when we read of the Tempter bargaining
with Christ for the kingdoms of the world (Matt. IV.
8, 11); when we find the arch-principle of evil pre
sented to us as a personality on every page of the
Gospel and all through the New Testament ; when,
finally, we see in this seventh petition a probable
assigning of temptation to its true origin — we have an
overwhelming argument in favour of the rendering :
1 Matt. xiii. 19, 38 ; 1 John II. 13, 14. m. 12, v. 18 ; Eph. VI. 18.
a Matt. v. 37 ; John xvii. 15 ; 2 Thess. ill. 3 ; 1 John v. 19.
* Rom. xn. 9.

238 LEX CREDENDI

" But deliver us from the evil one," i.e. " Lead us
not into temptation, but deliver us from the Tempter,
from Satan."
So, no doubt, the first hearers will have under
stood the prayer. Yet between the understanding of
it and the interpretation of it which has become
current amongst ourselves there is no substantial or
practical difference. As the Spirit and the fruits of
the Spirit, so the devil and the works of the devil
are the same thing for purposes of religious life and
guidance. The metaphysical nature of the principles
of evil and their mode of intervention are problems
of speculative theology solved in different ways at
different times. From those problems we simply
prescind when we pray, " Deliver us from evil,"
rather than "from the evil one," — "from the works
of the devil," rather than " from the devil."
The " works of the devil," which Christ came to
destroy in order that He might make us sons of God,
of the Father in heaven, are the causes and results
of the Kingdom of Satan. They stand for all that
positive evil and disorder which the forces of uncurbed
egoism have brought into the world ; which are hos
tile to the interests of religion and morality ; and
which are the source and origin of those temptations
against which we are taught to pray. This evil is
within each of us, so far as vices and disorders of
mind, imagination, feeling, affection, and passion limit
our freedom and self-mastery, force us to do the
things we would not, and hinder our doing what we
would. It is also outside us in human society, so far
as egoism has succeeded in organizing civilization and

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 239
its institutions in its own interest to the prejudice of
personal liberty and spiritual development, and has
made the Kingdom of God and His righteousness
subordinate to transitory ends. It is not in making
the spiritual life difficult, but in making it insuperably
difficult to so large a degree for such multitudes, that
the world in its present state of disorder is styled the
Kingdom of Satan. From such evil and suffering as
has its root in sin and selfishness Christ has come to
deliver us and to restore us to the liberty and self-
command of the sons of God. And for this deliver
ance each Christian and the whole Christian Church
must pray and work, ceaselessly and courageously,
against the corruptive forces and the corrupt institu
tions of society — against the Kingdom or rule of
Satan. God's rule is that of a Father over sons who obey
freely or actively because they choose, and because
they love. Satan's rule is that of a tyrant over slaves
who obey passively because they cannot help it,
because their freedom is gone. In both cases, we
have seen that the Kingdom is at once internal and
external with respect to the spirit. When our tres
passes are forgiven we are delivered from sin — from
the inward rule of the devil. But so long as life
lasts, and so long as the world lasts, man's spiritual
liberty will always be fettered to some degree by
disorders within and without ; by the limitations of
his own nature and by those of human society; by
the flesh and by the world. However far we push
the realm of our freedom and of God's external
Kingdom on earth, there will always be a wall of

240 LEX CREDENDI

darkness round our Goshen, a boundary beyond
which our self-mastery may break down under stress
of insuperable temptation. In view of such possi
bilities, not as already captives, but as free sons of
God fighting for yet greater freedom, we pray:
Deliver us from evil.

XI
RESULTS

We have treated the last clauses of the Lord's
Prayer with greater brevity, lest the repeated and
obvious application of the same governing ideas
should grow wearisome. Enough has been said to
give those ideas clear definition and to exhibit them
concretely, as controlling action and life.
Our purpose was to enter into the spirit of that
prayer as being the most authentic and deliberate
self-utterance of the spirit of Christ ; as giving us a
key to the Gospels, and a revelation of the governing
intuitions, affections, and aims of Christ's life upon
earth ; and as therefore defining for us that spirit-life
whose development is a test of doctrinal truth just
because doctrine is shaped by its exigencies and is
but a statement of its intellectual implications.
In the course of our brief exposition we have seen
enough to vindicate the character of true Christian
devotion against the three perversions which we have
stigmatized as Sentimentality, Mysticality, and
Practicality; and to arrive at a positive conception

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 241
of the whole truth in which these lying half-truths
are redeemed.
We have seen that the spirit of Christ may be
viewed as Feeling : that it is before all else a spirit of
Love and Charity. But it is a feeling generated and
determined by a clear vision of the deepest realities
of the spiritual order ; a feeling that is magnetically
drawn to truth and repelled by error just because it
wraps the eternal truth within itself; because it is
the feeling of a heart that is absolutely pure and
transparent. It is blind neither as to its Whence nor
its Whither; it is a creation of Truth and a principle
of Truth.
Nor is it inert, self-consuming, luxurious ; but a
feeling which blossoms in will, fructifies in action. It
is a spiritual feeling, because its object is selfless and
its aims are selfless. It is that love of divine and
universal goodness, that longing for divine and univer
sal ends, of which it is said : " The zeal of Thy House
hath consumed me" and "Lord, I have loved the
beauty of Thy House and the place where Thy glory
dwelleth." It is a hunger and thirst after righteous
ness that rigorously subordinates every psychic self-
regarding feeling and affection to its own satisfaction.
Yet what it subordinates it does not destroy, but
perfects, elevates, strengthens. Under its firm disci
pline every best instinct of the psychic self attains
to its richest development ; because it is purged of
its selfishness and pressed into the service of selfless
love. To this the tender-hearted compassion of the
Gospel Christ owes its spiritual depth and strength,
which distinguish it from that soft, indiscriminate

242 LEX CREDENDI

sympathy of effeminate natures, which weakens
rather than braces the sufferer, which shrinks from
the pain of inflicting wholesome pain, which refuses
the control of foresight and reason, and is rather
a lawless passion than a free act of the self-
determining spirit.
It is precisely as illuminated by Reason and
mastered by Will that Christ's Feeling is all divine,
and is raised above the psychic to the spiritual plane.
Selfishness is the corruption of Feeling as it is of the
Mind and the Will. There is an "ought " of feeling, as
of thinking and willing. For us to feel as we ought
(i.e. to feel with God, to feel divinely) demands severe
and continued discipline and self-resistance, by which
the psychic man is slowly brought into harmony with
the spiritual. To take our feelings as we find them,
to obey our likes and dislikes blindly, is to go from
bad to worse, and to forge fetters for our spiritual
liberty. In Christ one free, over-mastering love held
every other love captive in an iron grip. In reference
to that ideal of right feeling, of feeling with God, we
are, the best of us, viatores, travellers stumbling on
our way : He was the comprehensor, safe at the journey's
end. Fiat pax in virtute tua: in His strength He
found peace ; the peace of the sons of God.
Again, the spirit of Christ can be viewed as Vision,
Intelligence, Understanding ; as a Spirit of truth.
If the pure of heart see God, perfection of purity
implied perfection of vision. No man knoweth the
Father but the Son, who is in the bosom of the
Father, and who hath declared Him. The whole
movement of our Saviour's life was governed and

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 243
controlled by this ever-present vision ; and we, too,
are to walk in the Light, even as He is in the Light.
In the Johannine writings He is presented to us
principally under this aspect — as Light, Truth, In
telligence. As God is Light, so Christ is Light, and
in Him is no darkness at all. And He is the Truth,
even as God is the Truth.
As we must feel with God, so we must think with
God. Every little fragment of truth, every little ray
of light that enters our mind and mitigates its dark
ness, is a new degree of communion with God, a new
appropriation of the Divine Life. A passion for truth,
an antagonism to avoidable ignorance and error, is
an inseparable characteristic of the spirit - life.
For this was Christ born, for this came He into the
world, for this He lived and for this He died — that
He might bear witness to the truth. But truth must
be loved purely, disinterestedly ; not for psychic and
selfish ends ; not as useful or convenient in any
narrow sense of utility. It must not be subjected to
man as a means, but worshipped by him as an end,
even as God. For if God is the Truth, so the Truth
is He. In this the spiritual quest of right thinking
is parallel to the spiritual quest of right feeling. The
latter, too, has its psychic commodities and advan
tages — is useful in a lower conditional sense as well
as in the higher absolute sense. But the spirit-life is
a seeking of God for God's sake, a disinterested wor
ship of the Ought in feeling, in thinking, in willing ;
a dying to self and a living to righteousness.
So to die demands a strength that God alone can
give ; a strength that makes us sons of God and

244 LEX CREDENDI

more-than-men. It demands a courage which can say
to Truth, "Lord, I will follow Thee whithersoever
Thou goest " ; which can leave positions of comfort
and safety and step down fearlessly on the troubled
waters when He says, " It is I ; be not afraid." We
have also seen that Christ's opposition to what was
abstract, unreal, life-destroying in a theology that
refused the check of religious experience and hard
ened itself against the quickening influences of the
prophetic spirit, may not be construed into an oppo
sition to theology in general, to the effort of the
understanding to make explicit and systematize the
implications of religious experience and co-ordinate
them with the rest of human knowledge ; that such
understanding is an indispensable instrument of life,
spiritual as well as temporal ; that dogma in some
form or other is the seed as well as the fruit of all
religious experience. His own work on earth was to
destroy the false theology of the scribes, rather than
formulate the true, and to deliver to His Apostles a
spirit of Truth whose implications could subsequently
be unfolded into a theology as time and occasion
might demand.
Yet of a false mysticism, straining curious eyes at
the darkness that wraps the Godhead, spurning the
psychic life and its limitations as wholly evil, falsi
fying the mind through the violation of its marriage
with the body, confounding morbid with super
natural conditions of thought and feeling — of all
this there is no sort of encouragement in the sane
mysticism of the Gospel. The spirit-life is essentially
supernatural and mystical ; but it is also a strength-

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 245
ening and perfecting of the natural or psychic life.
It recognizes the solidarity and continuity of heaven
and earth ; the permeation of the human by the
divine ; and, for all its relative and practical dualism,
it believes in one God, Creator of heaven and earth,
and of all things visible and invisible. Without in
any sense subordinating right thinking to right
feeling or willing, the spirit of Christ demands their
co-ordination, and will not tolerate the preference of
any one to the prejudice of the others. Each is de
pendent on the other two ; all three together
constitute the supernatural life. Hence the intel-
lectualism of the false mystic which would cripple
the will and dry up the fountains of feeling stands
utterly condemned. The Light that was in Christ
kindled straightway into Love, and broke forth into
Will and Deed. Light is not given us for our solitary
delectation ; the Christian may not stand for ever
gazing up into heaven, but must use the light he has
received in the service of God's Kingdom. Moreover,
of the two it is through work, through experience
rather than through mental effort and much thinking,
that the Christian is illuminated. Yet lessons of
reflection and experience, as we have here said, must
alternate if we are to escape illusion and unreality
on the one side, shallowness and mere " practicality "
on the other.
Finally, the spirit of Christ may be viewed in
Will ; as a spiritual force making for good ; as a
human will so freely identified with the divine as to
be its pure unimpeded manifestation. For every act
of right willing is an act of self-identification with

246 LEX CREDENDI

God, an appropriation of the Divine Life. In treat
ing of Christian asceticism we have seen what a
superhuman degree of strength such an annihilation
of the psychic will involves ; and we have learnt to
look on Christ crucified and obedient unto death
and to say, " This truly was the Son of God."
Viewed internally or externally, on its spiritual
or on its earthly and visible side, we have seen that
the Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence, and that
only the violent can take it by storm. We have
learnt the deeper and truer sense of the beatitude,
" The meek shall possess the earth " — the self-
conquered shall conquer. We have learnt to
distinguish the true spiritual strength of God's sons,
whose ultimate motive is self-chosen and self-
imposed, from its psychic counterfeit, from the
strength that derives from some one enslaving passion
or instinct which presses all the others and even
reason itself into its service, from the strength of
fallen angels. It is by its own free act that the spirit
appropriates and holds on to the Will of God, and
brings all other ends and motives into subjection to
the same.
But if such good will is beneficent in every
direction as far as outer conditions favour its activity,
yet we have learnt from Christ to value the internal
spiritual act far more than its outward fruits ; and
to recognize that it is by the former alone that the
spirit is characterized and constituted what it is ;
that works without faith are dead ; and that this faith
is inseparably bound up with right feeling and right
thinking; in fine, that mere "practicality" is the

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST UI
religion of those who " have a name to live, but are
dead." 2
But why so many words about a matter so simple
and plain, except that it is just these simple ele
mentary notions that are most elusive in every way,
most easily sophisticated in the mind, most easily
neglected in practice ?
St. Paul has the whole matter in a few words
when he says : " I live ; now not I, but Christ liveth
in me" — words whose sense is identical with those
of the Gospel : " I in them, and Thou in Me." Here
we have the clear distinction between two sorts of
life with which the spirit can identify itself — the
natural or psychic and the Divine or Christ life. In
the latter its spiritual nature is realized ; in the
former it is destroyed. God lives in us just in the
measure that by a free effort we rise above the
self-interested individualistic standpoint and devote
ourselves freely and disinterestedly to the service of
goodness, truth, and love ; just in the measure that
we die to the psychic self and become simply and
purely organs of the Divine Life. So that it is God
or Christ who feels in us, who thinks in us, who wills
in us.
That through ever proffered grace we are capable
of such elevation is a matter of experience and
observation. Especially when our private and sepa
rate interest is slightly affected or not at all, we
are all of us, even the most degraded, capable at
times of objective, disinterested judgments, feelings,
resolutions, provided the cost be little. For others,

248 LEX CREDENDI

unrelated to ourselves, we feel the imperative claims
of conscience, the pressure of the " Ought " of feeling
or thought or will ; we can at least be roused to a
sluggish zeal, a cheap indignation, in the cause of
Truth and Right. Feebly and dimly we recognize
that we are not mere splinters and fragments, but
that the whole world lives in us, speaks in us — or
that it ought to. But more than this, we constantly
rise to a certain limit of self-sacrifice in the cause of
God, and stand for odd moments and seasons high
above the natural egoistic plane. Not till such
moments are multiplied so thickly as to run into
one another, like the vibrations that pass into a
sustained note, not till the limits of self-sacrifice
are wholly obliterated, does the spirit die into God
and the psychic self become a mere memory as of a
friend long since passed away, or of the home of our
childhood to which we can return no more.
And if this utter absorption of the human will
into the divine, this impossibility of return to the
psychic level seems prejudicial to the essence of
personality, let us remember that it is a self-imposed
impossibility, effected and sustained by the spirit's
own free act ; that it is the triumph of a strength
which grips God with an iron grasp ; that it is the
very highest achievement of personality and self-
determination. For the same free act by which the
spirit " differentiates " itself from nature identifies it
with God. As against our fellows, separateness and
opposition seem to be the very essence of personality,
as they undoubtedly are of psychic self-hood. We
rightly dread the passive subjection and slavery of

THE PRAYER OF CHRIST 249
one man's mind or will to that of another. We feel
that the spirit so hypnotized is stupefied, debased,
sterilized as by a vice ; that the loss of distinctness
is a forfeiture of dignity. And so far as we imagine
God humanwise, as a psychic unit, the utter subjec
tion of the spirit to Him suggests a like forfeiture.
But we must remember that besides the possible
spiritual dependence of the inert and feeble-minded
on stronger individuals, there is a free, self-deter
mined adhesion to the mind and will of another, as
to a higher manifestation of divine truth and good
ness than we ourselves have yet attained. In such
union we feel that personality is not lost but gained ;
that the spirit is not less itself but more ; for its
subjection is not to the individual, but to the
universal and divine in the individual. And so of
that absolute and direct subjection of the soul to
God, which is the far-off ideal of spirit-life. Freedom
arid victory over nature mean self-enslavement to
God ; distinctness from the lower means identifica
tion with the higher. Such self-enslavement is the
act by which the sons of God win and maintain their
identity and personality. The spirit must choose
between slavery and slavery — whether it is to be
passively enslaved to nature, or to enslave itself
freely to God.
Such, then, is that Love or Charity which is the
New Testament expression for the spirit of Christ.
If we have avoided those terms it is only because
Love is so easily misunderstood in a sentimental or
else a pseudo-mystical sense ; and because Charity has
grown cold and become a synonym for practicality

250 LEX CREDENDI

and the business of philanthropy. Yet Love it is,
in the wisest, tenderest, and strongest sense ; that
love by which God in us embraces Himself and all
that proceeds from Himself. Simple as it is, its
simplicity is that of divine fulness, not that of barren
monotony. The variety of its applications, the
depth of its implications are inexhaustible. All that
has been shown us of its manifestations in the life of
Christ and of His mystical body, the Church of the
Just in every age and clime, leaves infinitely more to
be learnt. Yet even in the least word or deed of
Christ, His spirit stands revealed for those who have
eyes to see, so that the whole series of the Gospel
narratives offers us abundant means of studying it,
as we have been doing, from a hundred different
aspects and of reaching the same end from a hun
dred different approaches. In its form, its modes of
thought and language, the Gospel necessarily belongs
to a certain time and place ; but in its substance it
belongs to eternity. It gives us the very essence of
religion : human and divine, external and internal,
the one thing needful.

CONCLUSION LEX ORANDI
" ~\ TIEWED from the standpoint taken in these
V pages, tested by the criterions of life, of
spiritual fruitfulness, the truths of Christianity cannot
be expected to present the same precision and
clearness of outline as when deduced from defined
premises, and built up into a coherent intellectual
system. We can but see men as trees walking ;
blurred contours ; mountain shapes looming through
mist. Yet the verification is not valueless ; it is not
nothing, if approaching the truth from this side, and
by this less frequented path we find what we had a
right to expect ; it is not nothing if that vague
' Power which makes for righteousness ' in the souls
of men is seen, as we strain through darkness, to
shape itself ever more and more into conformity with
the familiar beliefs of the Christian tradition."1 I
think it well to insist upon this point again, lest an
emphasis of the apologetic importance of religious
experience should be misconstrued into an under
rating of the importance of reflection and reasoning;
lest steering clear of Intellectualism we should be
engulfed in " Voluntarism " or some untenable form
of Pragmatism. 1 ' Lex Orandi," p. xxx i.
251

252 LEX CREDENDI

That the truth of a dogma is simply and only
practical ; that it means merely " act as if this were
true, and you will act aright " ; that it is nothing
more than an ethical myth — is a position which I
have repeatedly repudiated in "Lex Orandi" wherever
I have insisted that a belief which constantly and
universally fosters spiritual life must so far be true to
the realities of the spiritual world, and must therefore
possess a representative as well as a practical value.
If there is a Pragmatism that denies this, I have
nothing to do with it. Still I have equally insisted
that such representations are almost necessarily
analogies or even symbols. And since there may be
two analogies of the same truth, whose literal values
are contradictory, it follows that the "Law of Prayer"
might easily give us very different creeds of just the
same religious value — all equally true to the practical
needs of the spirit-life, and analogously representative
of the spiritual world. If the Creed is principally
the product of the Church's spiritual life, yet other
causes have collaborated. Indeed, as we have said,
the spirit of prayer is selective rather than creative,
and works on materials ready to hand, modifying
and correcting existing belie'fs according to its own
exigencies. And what it thus selects and gathers
together lacks the unity of a theological system. Its
unity is that of varied utterances and manifestations
of the same spirit; such, for example, as pervades
the inspired writings of the prophets. Its language
is literary rather than scientific ; its utterances taken
at their literal value are often irreconcilable, just
because their truth is that of analogy.

CONCLUSION 253

But here it is that theological reflection comes in
and begins its delicate task of striving to get at the
intellectual implications of the spirit of prayer as
revealed in all this prophetic utterance ; to create a
thought-system which by explaining will enable us
to control and extend our spiritual experience, and
which will serve religion in the same way that science
serves life. That it often fails, that if often sterilizes
rather than fertilizes, is the fault, not of theology, but
of the theologian.
Our Creed, therefore, is the joint work of Theology
and Devotion ; of reflection and life. We cannot
prove, then, that in form and substance it has been
shaped solely by the exigencies of prayer in all its
details ; nor that those exigencies could not have been
satisfied by some other equivalent representation of
the spiritual world. All we contend is that a Creed
has representative truth so far as it constantly
and universally fosters the spirit-life ; that it is false
so far as it is spiritually sterilizing and decadent.
That takes us but a little way towards the apologist's
end. There are other kinds of truth which the Creed
claims to possess, and of which the " Lex Orandi " can
offer no criterion. Of these, theology proper must
undertake the defence. Thus, the " Prayer- value "
of certain historical beliefs cannot demonstrably
be shown to depend on the historicity of the facts,
which therefore must be determined otherwise,
namely, by the ordinary apologetic methods. It is
not however so much in the interests of Theology as
in those of Devotion that I have tried to make clear
the relation between the Church's spiritual life and

254 LEX CREDENDI

her theological reflection, and to show their de
pendence on one another. What we may call the
theological temper and the devotional temper are
very different, and each is only too ready to go its
own way with a certain impatience and even disdain
of the other. So far, then, as a propensity to Intellec-
tualism on the part of the theologian tends to alienate
the practical and devout Christian from Theology
altogether, it is timely to insist on the general sub
ordination of Theology to Devotion, and to show
that the Creed is ultimately a creation and an instru
ment of the Church's spiritual life ; that if reason too
has had a hand in its production, yet it has been only
as the servant of Devotion, which is the principal
agent. If, then, that Intellectualism errs which follows its
own dialectic without respect to experience, and en
deavours to drag the Spirit along paths determined
a priori by hard reasoning, that Pragmatism errs no
less which ignores the relation of mutual dependence
between experience and reflection ; which fails to
see that understanding increases our possibilities of
experience, just as experience increases our possi
bilities of understanding ; that dogma, of some sort
or other, is both parent and child of action, just as
action is both parent and child of dogma. We shall
perhaps grasp the relation less awkwardly if we
regard reflection and experience as parallel processes
of the spirit-life rather than as alternating moments
of the same process. Experience borrows its "form"
from reflection ; reflection its " matter " from experi
ence. But each process — the thought which is lived

CONCLUSION 255

and the life which is thought — pursues its own course
and is governed by its own laws, dependent on the
other, yet apart from the other. They are as help
ful neighbours, rendering one another indispensable
services, and to whom a quarrel is equally detri
mental. The difficulty of a correct view arises from our
necessity of thinking and speaking as though Vision,
Feeling, and Will were separable and successive acts
of the spirit-life, and not simply aspects of one and
the same act ; as though one were afore or after the
other, whereas all are simultaneous and co-equal,
because they are all one. Not without reason have
the Fathers sought in various ways for an image of
the Trinity in the spirit of man.
Plainly, then, it would be a complete misappre
hension of the scope of " Lex Orandi " were one to
sit down and sift every point of Catholic belief, with
a view to rejecting those that did not manifestly
stand the " Pragmatic " test, or even were one to
endeavour to deduce a creed a priori from the known
exigencies of the spirit-life. Its purpose was not to
supply a new theological weapon, or a criterion for
violent and artificial criticism, but to furnish a reason
for trusting to the natural criticism effected by Time
and Experience ; for suffering Good and Evil to
grow together till the harvest ; for quietly abiding
the sure uprooting of every plant not planted by
the Father's hand ; for living the Truth rather than
analysing it.
The rough and seemingly cruel methods of Nature,
the struggle for existence, the elimination of the

256 LEX CREDENDI

weak and worthless, may not be too summarily
excluded from the moral and spiritual domain.
Reformers, whether of doctrine or discipline, are often
the worst enemies of reform through palliatives
that protract rather than cure the evils they would
remedy. Often the shortest, the kindest, the most
effectual remedy for abuses is not to weed them out,
but to let them grow and manifest their true natures,
and work their own destruction. Without warranting
fatalistic apathy or inertness, or cooling the reformer's
zeal, faith in the wise methods of Nature, faith in
God, who works in and through those methods, would
impart a very different direction to his efforts in
many cases.
Thus, then, we reach our goal, which was to deter
mine more exactly what we meant by the " spirit of
Christ " when we maintained that religious beliefs
which constantly and universally fostered that spirit
in us were thereby proved to be true to the laws of
our eternal and supernatural life, and to be at least
analogously representative of the realities of the
world to which that life relates us.
Such are the beliefs of the Gospel upon which our
whole creed is built up, — the doctrine of the King
dom of Heaven, of the Eternal Father, the only
begotten Son, the Holy Spirit of adoption, the
Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of sins, the
Resurrection of the body, and Life everlasting.
Plymouth: w. brendon and son, ltd., printers