-.¦ -.

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME
OF THE
John Elliott Fund

EXTRACT
FROM THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

OF THE LATE

EEV. JOHN BAMPTON
CANON OF SALISBUEY
". . .1 give and bequeath my Lands and Estates to the
Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Oxford
for ever, to have and to hold all and singular the said Lands
or Estates upon trust, and to the intents and purposes here
inafter mentioned; that is to say, I will and appoint that the
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford for the time being
shall take and receive all the rents, issues, and profits thereof,
and (after all taxes, reparations, and necessary deductions made)
that he pay all the remainder to the endowment of eight
Divinity Lecture Sermons, to be established for ever in the said
University, and to be performed in the manner following :
" I direct and appoint, that, upon the first Tuesday in Easter
Term, a Lecturer be yearly chosen by the Heads of Colleges only,
and by no others, in the room adjoining to the Printing-House,
between the hours of ten in the morning and two in the
afternoon, to preach eight Divinity Lecture Sermons, the year
following, at St. Mary's in Oxford, between the commencement
of the last month in Lent Term, and the end of the third week
in Act Term.

EXTEACT FROM CANON BAMPTON'S WILL
"Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity Lecture
Sermons shall be preached upon either of the following Subjects
— to confirm and establish the Christian Faith, and to confute
all heretics and schismatics — upon the divine authority of the
holy Scriptures — upon the authority of the writings of the
primitive Fathers, as to the faith and practice of the primitive
Church — upon the Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus
Christ — upon the Divinity of the Holy Ghost — upon the Articles
of the Christian Faith, as comprehended in the Apostles' and
Nicene Creeds.
"Also I direct, that thirty copies ofthe eight Divinity Lecture
Sermons shall be always printed, within two months after they
are preached ; and one copy shall be given to the Chancellor of
the University, and one copy to the Head of every College, and
one copy to the Mayor of the city of Oxford, and one copy to be
put into the Bodleian Library ; and the expense of printing them
shall be paid out of the revenue of the Land or Estates given
for establishing the Divinity Lecture Sermons ; and the Preacher
shall not be paid, nor be entitled to the revenue, before they are
printed. " Also I direct and appoint, that no person shall be qualified
to preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons, unless he hath taken
the degree of Master of Arts at least, in one of the two
Universities of Oxford or Cambridge ; and that the same person
shall never preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons twice."

CREED AND THE CREEDS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
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WHAT IS FAITH? A Hermit's Epistle
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CREED AND THE CREEDS
THEIR FUNCTION IN RELIGION
BEING THE BAMPTON LECTURES OF 1911

BY
JOHN HUNTLEY SERINE
VICAK OF ST. PETER IN THE EAST, OXFORD
SOMETIME FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE

'He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith
unto the Churches'

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YOBK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1911
AU rights reserved

THEOLOGIAE DOCTORI
ERUDITO, FACUNDO, DULCI,
ANIMARUM EPISCOPO ET MAGISTRO SANCTO
NUPER IN IMMORTALITATEM PRAEREPTO
FRANCISCO PAGET
HUJUS FAUTORI OPERIS
SERO NIMIS CONFECTUM
DEDICAT INTER LACRYMAS AUCTOR

PREFACE
The title under which these lectures were written and
delivered may seem insufficient for them as published.
For the enquiry proposed into the religious value of
formularies of belief and the credal principle which
underlies them, became on its way something larger —
the search for a ground of the soul's spiritual en
deavour which should be neither church tradition nor
private conscience, but should be both and more than
both. Its scope was no longer to reconcile two
members of the religious fact — authority and reason,
church and believer; but to comprehend in one two
regions of universal fact — religion and nature, life in
the Spirit and life in the world. The continuity of all
existence, the oneness of things holy and things
common, things present and things to come, life in
the Spirit and life in the world, — this one creation of
the One God seemed to open to the view, and the closed
folds of the sacred and the secular to throw their fences
down : the walls of space and time were rolled apart.
'Our eyes behold a far-stretching land.' Across the
equal plain thus expanded lie the roads which, we
surmise, will lead us, taught by the principle taken in

x PREFACE
our quest for guide, to some rallying-point of Faith's
scattered and disharmonised defenders; and to some
meeting-point, where they that call themselves Faith's
adversaries, and are not, shall discover themselves her
allies. It may be only another instance of that illusion of
Greatness, which seizes every age and every student
of his own age ; but to this student of our time it does
seem that the time is great. It is in travail with a
birth, magnum incrementum, a new vision of Faith
and of the Fortune of Man ; a vision to which creeds
and their interpretations, in common with all human
'forms of sound words,' are more inadequate than in
our humility already we confess them.
For the churchmen of to-day this travail-hour, as
all such hours, inspires hopes for the Church or else
fears, according to the temperament and the ' measure
of faith.' It may be that, in the total consciousness of
our communion, the pulse of fear beats at this moment
louder than the pulse of hope. The more is the reason
that, if for any one the happier note is the more insis
tent on the ear, he should make report of what he hears
himself. At a new beginning long ago when ' builders laid
the foundation of the temple of the Lord, they sang
together giving thanks unto the Lord, for his mercy
endureth for ever towards Israel. And all the people
shouted with a great shout when they praised the Lord.
But many of the priests and Levites and chief of the
fathers wept with a loud voice, and many shouted aloud

PREFACE xi
for joy : so that the people could not discern the noise
of the shout of joy from the noise of the weeping.'
In that intermingling of a Church's cries let this
voice add one slender echo to the joy.
J. H. S.
August, 1911.

These lectures were delivered, with some necessary
abbreviation, as they are here printed.

CONTENTS
PART I
AN INSTRUMENT OF RESEARCH
I
CREED, SALVATION, LIFE
PAGE
I. Is man saved by his creed ? .... 3
II. What is it to be saved ? Existing metaphors to
express Salvation  6
III. A new metaphor, which is an old, — Life - 9
What is Life ? A mutual self-adaptation of
organism and environment - 11
IV. This hypothesis tested - - 12
(a) Interchange of substance at the beginnings
of organic life - 13
(b) Reciprocity in plant life 14
(c) In animal hfe - - - - 15
V. (d) In the social and moral life, where the name
of Life is Sacrifice - 16
Which must be a mutual Sacrifice 18
VI. The hypothesis tested in the Intellectual life of
man - - 18
The Imaginative life 19
Artistic creation of sculptor and of poet a reci
procity of two Wills - - 20
Life then in all forms is the mutual self -giving of
organism and environment, of soul and God - 23

xiv CONTENTS PAGE
VII. A last witness — the Instinct of Self-devotion - 24
An Old Testament type of the Sacrifice which is
Life - - 25
II
CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH
Salvation, then, is best expressible by the meta
phor of Life, which is the mutual adaptation of
an organism and its environment - 29
I. This adaptation is an interchange of being or
* selfhood,' and at the level of the human
consciousness is Sacrifice - 30
II. How Creed ministers to this Life - - 31
Creed as an Utterance of the inward faith, a
' confession with the mouth ' (St. Paul).
Creed also an instrument for defining faith by a
' form of sound words ' - 32
III. ' Utterance ' and ' Definition ' are not ex
clusive names of Creed, but complementary ;
by uttering we make definite 34
Utterance by a creed is the religious counterpart
of the act of Knowing, or the relation between
Subject and Object 34
IV. But Believing is more than Knowing, and Creed
is the utterance not of thought only, but of the
whole personal experience 36
V. Creed makes for men's salvation because con
fession is the action of one term, the human, in
that reciprocal relation which is life - 39
The Confession of Peter - 39
Was the giving of self, which is half the act of
life 39

CONTENTS

xv
P40B

VT. And was answered by the divine self -giving 40
*,VTI. [A question] - 44
VIII. Peter's faith-story is that of all behevers. Our
belief in the Resurrection - 44
In uttering this belief by a creed we make a sacri
fice of
IX. (1) Our Thoughts . 46
X. (2) Our Affections 48
XL (3) Our Will 50
XII. The confession of the Creed, ' I beheve in the
Resurrection of the Dead,' is an act of self-
giving. If it is met by a self -giving of God, so
that life results, the creed is true - 50
III
THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY
The tale of the belief in Immortality continued 57
Does this belief receive the divine answer which
is the proof that it is true ? - 58
[A caution. The immediate aim of this enquiry
is to test, in the instance of the belief in a
Resurrection, an Organum of religious research] 58
I. The signs by which hfe in the soul can be verified - 59
An illustration from physical vitality, as measur
able by the three signs of Extension in time,
Extension in space, and Intensity - - 59
II. These measures applied to the life which accom
panies a belief in the Survival of Man - 61
(i) Life in the Rational nature.
(a) Does the belief persist in time ? 61
(6) Does the whole mind beheve ? 62
6

xvi CONTENTS PAGE
(ii) Life in the Emotional nature.
\ (a) Do the affections for the Dead survive ? 63
(6) Do they harmonise with the rest of the
affections ? 64
(iii) Life in the WiU.
(a) Do we will the Survival with all the will ? 65
(6) Can the will maintain its belief ? - 65
III. The third measure of life, Intensity. Can this
be measured by experience, or must we resort
to Intuition, the organ of the mystics ? - 67
IV. We must reconceive the World, and learn its unity
and continuity, using Imagination, a faculty
deeper than Reason - - - - 69
V. The organ by which the soul can know the
World beyond sense is Herself 73
She knows the facts of the eternal world by being
alive to them with all her self ; and among those
facts she knows the Resurrection of the Dead 75
VI . A parable of Knowledge as a mode of Life ; and
the apphcation 75
VII . This Knowledge is in part an experience by the
senses. There can be a science of faith 77
VIII. Can the Resurrection of the Dead be verified in
part by such a science of research into the
Spiritual ? 78
IV
THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION
I. Recapitulation.
The Soul has an organ of knowledge that is neither
Sense-experience nor Intuition. This is her Self.
It knows the world by living to the world ¦ 83
Images of this relation of Soul to World 84

CONTENTS xvii PAGK
II. Resumption of the argument for Immortality - 86
By help of an imaging of the world as one and
continuous, the third sign of life in the soul,
Intensity, can be discerned 86
The personal being of a friend, surviving in the world
beyond sense, is a fact attested by a conviction
which has Intensity, the third measure of life.
This conviction is not illusion.
It is a better informant than Intuition, since it
appeals in part to the Senses - - - 87
III. The knowledge of a departed friend's survival in
the world of spirit is of the same order as is
the knowledge of a friend's existence in the
world of matter  88
For this latter is a knowledge of relations between
him and ourself, of an action and reaction of the
two personalities - - - 89
IV. The knowledge of a friend's existence in the super-
sensuous region is like to this. We discover
relations between us 90
(1) Of the Intelligence .... 91
V. (2) Of the Affections .... 92
VI. (3) Of the WiU  94
VII. The evidence then of the Resurrection of the Dead
is the life received by the Soul when it makes
communion or interchange with this fact in the
eternal world — the survival of a friend - - 96
This life of the soul which results from her contact
with a spiritual reality is in part an experience of
the senses, measurable in some degree even
by others than ourself - - - - 97
VIII. That a knowledge of the Eternal is gained
through the Imagination is the old doctrine,
approved by a traditional saying of Christ, that
truth comes by the passion of Wonder 98
62

xviii CONTENTS PAGE
IX. What then of Intuition ? Is it the sense of life
experienced in that part of the personal being
which is extended beyond the region of sense into
the supersensuous ? And are Experience and
Intuition one same knowledge in successive
stages ? - - 100
Communion and full Communion 101
X. The knowledge of the Resurrection of the Dead a
clue to the problem of the Resurrection of Jesus 102
XI. A study of a Witness's faith - - 104
John ' saw and believed '  105
John believed and saw - - - 106
PART II
THE INSTRUMENT APPLIED

THE CREED-MAKING OF THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL
I. What is Creed when it is Creed of the Church ? Ill
It is an utterance not of an individual faith, but
a corporate - - - 112
That is, a means by which the Christian lives unto
God as a social being .... 113
Man's life is dependent at all stages on Society,
and at the stage of Spirit on the Church - 114
II. The theory of ' Christianity without Creed ' con
sidered .... . . 115
The apology for dogmatic pronouncements as
' defences of the faith ' forced on the Church
by heresies  116
III. This attitude is faulty. Not polemic, but dialectic,
is the more fruitful method of dealing with ques
tioners of the Church's creed - - 117
For dialectic is a function of Life - 118

CONTENTS xix
PAGE
IV. In the ' marriage of true minds ' by dialectic
we must regard less what a disputant says
than what he thinks - - 119
The Anti-dogmatist is combating not the defining
of belief, but the faulty defining. The apologist
of dogma should remember that the ' definite-
ness ' necessary to faith must be not in the
language of a catechism but in the mind of the
catechumen - - ---119
V. These disputants may be brought together by the
principle that Salvation is Life and Life of the
Whole Man. Man cannot be saved in his mind
alone, nor yet apart from his mind - 121
VT. Creed, the minister of Life, must itself be living.
What then if a living Creed have in it a dead
member ? - 124
Shall we answer that a creed of the undivided
Catholic Church cannot die, being the work of
the Holy Spirit ? - - - - - 125
VII. What is Catholicity ?
The canon of Vincent examined 126
VIII. CathoHcity, as defined by this canon, proves to
be Life - ... - 128
IX. In this truth he answers to all the questions which
rise for the ' Catholic ' Christian - - - 130
And among these to the question whether a Par
ticular Church can reformulate a creed and
remain Catholic in doing so 131
X. But can she remain ' Apostolic,' and a keeper
of the Tradition ? - - - 133
To keep the Tradition is to keep and convey not
a doctrine but a life from Christ, as the Apostles

xx CONTENTS
PAGE
conveyed it. The instance of S. Peter and
Cornelius  133
XI. In the transmission of the faith Creed is an
agency. But there is a greater than Creed - 135
VI
THE CREED-MAKING OF THE CHURCH PARTICULAR
I. Re-formulation by a Particular Church can be a
catholic act, if it be an act of life. But how
shall it be known to be so ? - - - 139
II. The process of Creed-making studied in the
classical instance, the making of the Nicene
Creed - 141
The Promulging and the Accepting of the
Homoousion - - - 142
III. Judicavit orbis terrarum. A reconstruction of the
act of Acceptance by the Populus - 143
This Creed-making was an experiment of the
body corporate, by which the Homoousion was
proved a truth that brings life to man - - 146
IV. The articulation of the process, into the two mo
ments of the debate in the Council and the fifty
years controversy in the Church at large, ex
hibits a structural law. Faith begins in venture,
ends in realisation - 147
The Venture by the Council - 147
The Realisation by the People — in the Spirit 148
V. The structural lines of this process reappear in
the Creed-making of a Branch. But here Pro
mulgation and Acceptance are fused - - 149
An example studied ; the re-formulation of the
theory of the Bible's inspiration - - - 150

CONTENTS xxi
PAGE
Here there was venture by the leaders and
realisation by the multitude - 151
The resulting confession of faith was a catholic
article of belief - 153
VI. The theory of Inspiration is an extra-credal
belief ; but in one instance at least an article of
a creed has been re-formulated by our church - 154
VII. The case of the Quicunque ... 155
How the Church can so act that her action shall be
a sacrifice - 155
VIII. How it can be known that this sacrifice is an
answered sacrifice - - 158
The experience of a cathohc-minded reciter 158
Result. The doctrine of the Creed and of the
Warning Clauses can both be maintained — but
not in their present illogical conjunction - - 162
IX. The proper scope of this argument recalled to view.
This scope is not to determine the right treat
ment of the Quicunque formulary, but to
show by this instance that Life is a practicable
test of catholicity in faith 163
VII
THE HISTORIC CHRIST
I. The organ of research, Life, to be tested on the
article of the Incarnation - 167
The Eternal Incarnation and the Temporal
are one truth in two aspects - 168
The doctrine of the Eternal Incarnation has already
been tested ; it is one with the doctrine of Life 168
II. It is the Temporal or Historic Incarnation which
we have to test - 169
An ' Interrogation of Nature ' must be applied
to the fact, Christ the Incarnate - - 170

xxii CONTENTS PAGE
III. An interrogation of the fact of Incarnation in the
individual soul.
It is the birth of Life in the soul ; and this Life
can be traced back through all its transmissions
to an origin in the historic Jesus 171
IV. But of the Life in Jesus Himself no origin can be
traced. In Him it was underived, a new thing,
an act of creation, ' the Lord's doing ' - 174
V. The event here described as the 'Lord's doing'
is the story of Jesus and its consequence, the
Christian character - - 175
This Underivedness is the truth which Christians
are asserting by some articles of their belief , in
which they are liable to confuse symbol and
substance of truth - - - - 176
The Personality of Jesus is in part an evolution of
humanity, but essentially is a New Creation - 177
VI. This conception of the Historic Incarnation
belongs to metaphysic ; but to the inevitable
metaphysic to which an interrogation of nature
leads backward all enquiry - - 178
Here observation of fact must give place to imagin
ative Wonder, the energy in which the Soul
becomes her own organ of knowledge - 179
VII. The belief in the Historic Incarnation — that is, the
belief that Jesus is the cause of our spiritual
life — submitted to the test by our method 180
Proof that this belief vivifies the heart and the will
need not be laboured, but only suggested - 180
VIII. What will be denied is that the understanding can
live by surrender to this belief . ' The Incar
nate One may be loved and obeyed, but cannot
be thought ' - 182

CONTENTS xxiii PAGE
IX. Some thoughts of Jesus are not able to survive.
The historic Jesus is not the Absolute, is not
the Omniscient, is not the Consummation or
Totality of human fact - 184
X. Jesus was the Life
In this is an answer to our difficulties in conceiv
ing the Incarnation - 185
XI. And, among these, to the difficulty raised by the
speculation that Jesus was the dupe of apoca
lyptic illusions - - 187
XII. A behef in a historic Incarnation is not only
possible : it is even necessary to a behef in an
eternal and mystical - - - 190
XIII. The Historic Incarnation is the Sacrament that
enables faith - 192
VIII
AN APPEAL TO THOSE WITHIN AND THOSE WITHOUT
Recapitulation of the argument - 195
Creed is an instrument of salvation, that is, of
the soul's life. This Ufe, as aU other, is an
interchange of SeU, or mutual sacrifice, between
Creator and Creature ; and the confession of a
creed is instrumental by enabUng the believer
to make that self-surrender of his personahty, in
thought, affection, and action, which is one haU
the act of life. If the divine response is made
by a vitality experienced in the human per
sonahty, then the reciprocation has happened,
the man has Ufe, and his creed is true - - 197
But Creed which thus ministers hfe must be itseU
aUve. That is, its language must be and must
continue such as to start the life-movement
in the confessor's soul. But the language of a
creed, Uke aU language of men, is Uable to decay
and death - ... igs

xxiv CONTENTS

AN APPEAL TO THOSE WITHIN
PAGE
I. If these premises are estabUshed, what is to be
done as concerns faith and practice ?
In practice very little. The plea sometimes
heard for the abrogation of creeds as antiquated
and inconvenient must be disaUowed, in the
name of CathoUcity.
Decay, if found in credal language, can be re
paired by Interpretation, which is a CathoUc
remedy 199
II. In faith, however, there is much to be done.
Our principles are a caU to sacrifice — the sacrifice
of Thought, which is part of SeU ... 201
It was by a sacrifice, or passion, that our fathers,
and latest the Tractarians, attained the thought
about the Creeds which they committed to us.
By a sacrifice, or passion, we must maintain
the faith dehvered to us - 202
This sacrifice may be the surrender of the thought,
that to suffer any change in a creed of the indi
vidual Church is to corrupt the Tradition - - 203
But the Tradition is not a word but a power,
not a doctrine but a Life from Christ ; it is the
conveyance of the eternal Sacrifice or Passion - 203
III. A Passion can be conveyed only by a passioning,
a sacrifice only by a continual offering.
God demands from the Church, though he may
forgo, the sacrifice of the first-born. She must
hold her creed in the spirit of sacrificer - - 204
IV. But the sacrifice of Thought must be the Answered
Sacrifice which brings Ufe to the offerer ; and the
life of Thought, which is a reciprocity between
sub j ective and obj ective, must in reUgious thought

CONTENTS xxv
PAGE
be an interchange and inter-dependence of
the historic and the experiential knowledge
of Christ, a ' mutual faith ' of dogmatist and
ideaUst 205
V. Life, as a ground of authority in rehgion, is further
commended by its power to promote cathoUc
Unity.
In the Church of England (where Ues Christen
dom's best hope of re-union) Life is the bond
of Catholic, EvangeUcal, and Liberal minds 207
The bearing of this on the Vestments controversy
and others - - 209
VI. ' No new Commandment ' 209
VTI. Is Life too precarious a principle to be trusted
in practice ? Life the most precarious of
things is the most stable. The Church was
rightly Ukened to a Ship 210
AN APPEAL TO THOSE WITHOUT
Vni. Faith is not Obscurantism ; for we behevers
are scientists in our beUef 211
Nor Asceticism ; for the Gospel message is a
Passion, or surrender of the personal seU to the
Divine Personahty, who wills that man shaU
suffer, and also that he shaU enjoy.
Nor Devotionalism ; nor Ecclesiasticism ;
Nor UnreaUty ; for the Christian doctrine is that
Sacrifice is the law of Life ; and aU nature
attests the realness of this law - 213
IX. The appeal of this Gospel is also to the Poor, i.e.
the Many.
The ' Idle Rich.' What they ' ignorantly wor
ship that declare we to them ' — life through
sacrifice 215

xxvi CONTENTS PAGE
X. The Rich in Opportunity. Their freedom through
service - - - 217
XI. The Poor in this world's wealth. An appeal to
be neither worldly, nor other-worldly, but
whole- worldly 218
XII. A last word.
' Life ' is as real as it is mystical. If it seems
indefinite, that is because man is both finite
and infinite, heir of aU things, possessor of
few - - 220
Vita hominis, visio Dei. But the Life is here,
the Vision is hereafter - - 222

PART I
AN INSTRUMENT OF RESEARCH
I
CREED, SALVATION, LIFE
[February 19th, 1911.]

"The God that answereth by fire."

I
CREED, SALVATION, LIFE
John i. 4. — "The life was the light of men.''
I
A poet of the last generation, whose gift of pungency
in the portrayal of the stronger human emotions is
perhaps unsurpassed, has drawn the portrait of the
passion of hate, as it can work in the heart of men
under religious vows. A monk soliloquising in a
Spanish cloister ejects the venom of his spirit at a
brother monk, whose piety and harmlessness have
made him the ' heart's abhorrence ' of the other. The
climax of petty malevolences is reached in the resolve
to gratify spite by foul practice on his brother's
immortal soul : he will ensnare him into some incorrect
statement of a dogma. There is, he tells himself, ' a
great text in Galatians ' which entails not a single but
a multiplied ruin for the man who trips on it, ' twenty-
nine distinct damnations, one sure if another fails.'
Brother Lawrence shall stumble, and be plunged in
hell. The picture of folly and atrocity which the fancy of
Robert Browning has drawn would be too intolerable

4 CREED, SALVATION, LIFE
to interest us, if our consciousness did not persuade
us that the portrait has a truth to humanity. The
truth of exaggeration, indeed of caricature. But
caricature renders a service to truth. This horrific
picture bites upon the intelligence, and leaves stamped
on it an attitude of the religious mind which is no
fancy but a fact, and in religious life and thought a
very ruling fact. It is the opinion that a man's
salvation depends on the correct confession of a creed.
The ignorant and brutalised religionist of the Spanish
cloister presses that opinion to a conclusion which is
monstrous ; but Christians whom his inferences revolt
could not quite disown his premises. His error is
in spirit not in logic, and it is not their logic but their
spirit which abhors his reasoning. For they, too, hold
that a man is saved by the tightness of his creed,
though they do not reason that to trip will earn
damnation. Is it not so ? What is the assumption which under
lies the controversy arising in the press or elsewhere
when the member of any Church is charged with
interpreting falsely some point of its doctrine ? What
is implied in the challenge usually uttered on such
occasions by some man of law or business, that the
questioner of an article of his Church's belief should,
if he holds office in it, retire from that office, as an
honest man who keeps his contracts ? What is under
stood by the ordinary layman, I do not say of the
wiser sort, when he assents to those phrases of a creed
which warn him that men are saved by holding the

CREED, SALVATION, LIFE 5
Catholic faith, and instruct him that the faith which
they must hold is made up of the intellectual definitions
of the Godhead which follow thereupon? What is
the most actuating idea — I do not say the most valu
able — of our Church's claim for denominational and
definite teaching in her schools, if not that faith
cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God,
and that it is in the formularies of a Church that this
word of God is communicated and faith imparted to the
hearers ? What is commonly understood by the ' faith
once delivered to the saints ' but a system of deductive
thought drawn from a revealed datum; and what by
the ' tradition ' of this ' deposit of faith ' (as it is called)
.but the safeguarding and conveyance of that system
in a documentary form? Is not the practice of tests
and subscriptions supposed to rest upon the principle
that a man's expression of his faith is a voucher for
its reality? And, to end with the instance which is
most poignant, why do we praise the martyr? Why
should a man die for his opinions unless because
' man's word is God in man,' and to deny God in word
is to reject Him in fact?
To ask these questions is to become conscious that
the attitude we have ascribed to the general mind of
Christians, the opinion, namely, that a man's salvation
depends on the correctness of his confession of a
creed, is a fact. This is how Christians think, or at
least suppose themselves to think. If their thought
is put before them in the bare shape, that a man is
saved by the creed he recites, they make reservations :

6 CREED, SALVATION, LIFE
they recall the phrase of the Quicunque, ' they that
have done good . . . they that have done evil,' shall go
into life, into fire. They recount God's uneovenanted
mercies, they remember that He looketh on the heart,
that His ' larger other eyes than ours ' make allowance
for us all. But they hold these two thoughts, God's
requirement of a creed and God's allowance of the
good man with a faulty creed, as diverse and unrecon
ciled elements in their conception of the final fact,
the salvation or loss of soul. The religious Populus
does think, with whatever correction by the Clerus
or its own deeper-minded members, that a man's
creed is the faith which saves him.
II
This theory we are to examine. We will not allow
ourselves to bias the enquiry by a prejudice against
an opinion, which at the outset provokes in a modern
thinker an instinctive antagonism. So strong and
stately a conception it would be childish to credit with
mere fallaciousness. How can the martyrs have been
simply wrong? Yet they are asseverators of the idea
that ' the word is the man,' and that ' man's word is
God in man.' Doubtless we have before us one of
those first thoughts of men which are better than his
second thoughts, though only so when they return to
him as the third thoughts ' which are a riper first ' ;
on§ of those instincts which criticism will dissolve
only to crystallise again in a more intelligent and more
authoritative instinct. ' From the great deep tp the

CREED, SALVATION, LIFE 7
great deep he goes ' is said of man's personal being :
it is the history also of man reflecting on himself.
And as the man who comes forth from the deep a
naked soul, goes back a clothed and armed, clothed
upon and armed with a wealth of personality gathered
in the world of the concrete and particular; so may
one anticipate that the instinct which has taken creed
for faith will pass through the gate of criticism to
return again as instinct, not shamed by a discredit but
exalted by an interpretation.
We are then to ask ourselves whether it is the case
that creed is one with faith, faith which saves. Does
creed save a man? Is it so, that, when confession is
made with the mouth, it is made unto salvation?
No answer can be begun until we know what this
thing is unto which the confession is made. We must
know what salvation is.
What has it seemed to be in the successive thoughts
of Christian generations? To the Apostolic Church
salvation was figured as a personal share in the Second
Advent, a being caught up to meet the Lord in the
air and be with Him evermore. To the Medieval
Church the home of the redeemed was a Paradise
with a clearly featured landscape, set off to view by
the contrasting features of a place of torment even
more confidently delineated. To the mystic in that
and other ages the salvation of man was the grant of
the Beatific Vision. For the Protestant, at least
among our countrymen of the middle class, has risen
the bourgeois paradise, too easily derided, of a well-lit

8 CREED, SALVATION, LIFE
parlour with idealised comfort, spaciousness, bright
ness, and socialities of worship. And for the religious
of our day who reflect — heaven has no landscape,
and salvation is a condition which has no form or
feature, because reflection has shattered the old images
of our fate, and the new are yet to build.
For images are they all, these presentations to the
mind of the fact named Salvation : ' the best in this
kind are but shadows.' To remember that they are so
is the beginning of wisdom for the thinker about faith ;
and it is a beginning which some or many fail to make,
of those who offer to reason with their fellow-men
about man's final destiny. The shifting conceptions of
heaven and hell are but variable service of metaphor,
such metaphor in each age as the age could fashion
out of the material that lay in the grasp of its own
experience. The first Christian age had as material
for its fancy the eschatology of the Jew, which it
inherited. The coarse practical life of the middle
ages furnished images of sufficient appeal to the
emotions in the feudal court and the torture-chamber.
The juridical mind of the eighteenth century framed
a mechanic theory of salvation out of the machinery
of the legal process and the apparatus of a law-court.
The middle-class Englishman, having constructed the
good English life of family, remains, as a certain one
of his own poets has said, ' true to the kindred points
of heaven and home ' by constructing the heavenly
happiness after the pattern he had seen on earth.
Each metaphor was helpful in its time, and was dis-

CREED, SALVATION, LIFE 9
carded in turn. If to-day we fashion a new metaphor
for our help, we may not count on a more lasting
helpfulness; though it is hard to restrain the hope
that the symbol offered us by the experience of this
age has an element of permanence which those others
lacked. Ill
For the special experience of our age is of a new
knowledge of the world and of man, acquired by ita
organ of the inductive method. Among the sciences
which have made a new heaven and a new earth for
us in the last half century, one has in fruitfulness surely
a pre-eminence : it is the science which is interpreting
to us the phenomena grouped under the once vague,
though eloquent, name of Life. To know what life
is and how man may wield its forces to his advance
ment is the conquest, so far as we have conquered
here, which has most enriched the dominions of man
the mortal, to whom life is given, as the Roman poet
notes, 'for all in tenancy, as a freehold for none.'
Life is the category of existence under which fall
in every age man's most urgent concerns. In our
age it is also the name of his highest achievement in
discovery. In no quarter, then, can we look with so
much hope for the metaphor by which we may help
fully present to our consciousness the knowledge
obtained from whatever source divine or human, of
our destiny in the world of things. This metaphor
of Life it is proposed to adopt in our enquiry concern-

10 CREED, SALVATION, LIFE
ing the soul. We offer the hypothesis that Salvation
is Life, that to be saved is no more and no less than
this — to be alive and not to die.
It is only a metaphor, like those others which have
preceded it and are now obsolete, and hke them it
is doomed, we must suppose, to obsolescence. But
meanwhile it is for our age the best metaphor, the
nearest to the unnameable, unknowable reality which
it symbolises, and therefore the surest ' guide of our
dark steps ' in the journey of soul along the way of
salvation. For a guide we beheve it to be. If life
be a metaphor, a shadow of the true, like all the rest ;
if it be symbol and outward sign of the unseen reality ;
yet it is an efjicax signum, having a gift of truth, a
symbol which is in word but also in power. For we
trust to show presently that this metaphor is more
than an illustration of things otherwise learned; that
it is no less than a method of discovery in religion,
an organum of research into the truth which matters
most and matters all.
When, however, we advance the hypothesis that
salvation is life, and that he who wills to be saved wills
to live, it will be said that this is nothing new, but
that life is an old and perhaps the oldest name for
salvation. There is no need to cite the authorities,—
Moses setting before the people life and death for their
choice, Jesus declaring Himself the resurrection and
the life, the Rabbi asking of Him the way to enter
into life, Paul and John and every preacher since
calling their disciples to live unto God in Christ. Life

CREED, SALVATION, LIFE 11
surely has been man's name for salvation in all his
times : here is the oldest metaphor, not a new one.
It is so. But men, who knew that salvation was
life, have not known what life was ; have not at least
known it as we are coming to know it. When Paul
wrote of a ' life hid with Christ in God ' and of ' Christ
who is our life,' he makes allusion to an experience
which every hearer might possess, but none had
learned to analyse. There was an intuition of life,
not yet a science. This we are beginning to have.
To be alive is no longer a thing we can feel, it is already
a thing we can describe, and that with a growing
exactness. It was something to learn, before the days
of the evolution theory, that a living organism is that
which has the powers of nutrition, growth and repro
duction. It was much more to learn half a century
ago from the physiologists that life is the self -adjust
ment of the living thing to its environment. But we
shall ask to be allowed a further advance. We would
go beyond that definition of life as an accommodation
of organism to environment, and would define the life-
phenomenon as an accommodation at once of the
creature which lives to its encompassment in which
it lives, and of that encompassment to the living
creature. An adjustment of environment and organ
ism which is mutual, an action and reaction from each
side to the other, an infinitely subtle and ultimately
unimaginable movement of a reciprocity between that
which makes and that which is made alive — this is the
conception of the fact, Life, which we propose as the

12 CREED, SALVATION, LIFE
metaphor by which we would interpret the salvation
of a soul. IV
The conception can have no power to interpret any
thing unless it is the conception of a reality. This
hypothesis, that the law by which living things have
their life is an interchange and reciprocal action of
the two factors, an organism and its world, must be
justified by a study of the facts. Of these, some are
in the province of the physiologist, as the phenomena
of life in protoplasm, vegetable, and animal ; and one
who is no student of that science must be informed
by those who are. But of life in its more elaborated
forms, the life of man's emotional and mental nature,
of man as a social being and a moral, an enquirer
who is no physiologist may venture to speak out of
his own observation. And since Life in all its degrees
and phases is one thing, this enquirer will confidently
expect that his study of the higher manifestations will
yield him as fruit the same principles as the scientist
gathers from the lower : either study may borrow light
from either ; the investigator of man's spiritual fortune
may catch a glimpse of the truth he needs in the
uniformities of existence where consciousness has not
yet dawned; and the collector of physical details at
the root of the tree of life may find (who knows?)
the generalisations he craves for shadowed down to
him from the blossom and fruit on the branches
overhead. We will endeavour, then, to justify our hypothesis.

CREED, SALVATION, LIFE 13
The beginning should be where life began, in time
though not in idea, at the point where first matter is
alive ; or if not quite so early as the very first stirrings
of protoplasm (since actual beginnings are too fine for
use in illustration), at the point where there is a clear
dawn of vitality in those atomic entities, which we
call living creatures by some stretch, being more truly
the bricks out of which a creature can be built. Of
these beginnings of life I read that —
' Two, three, or more Amoebae approach each other,
partially coalesce, and remain united for some time.
They then separate again. No new creatures are
formed by this contact : there are no visible results
at all. But that something which is for the advantage
of the organisms takes place during this period of
union is certain, and in the light of what is known of
processes in other organisms we can make a very good
guess at what this something is. Each Amoeba parts
with some of its chromatin (i.e. the 'hereditary
element ' or ' selfhood substance of the cell ') — parts
with some of this to some others and receives an
equivalent in exchange. The creature is thus recon
stituted.'* That is, as I understand it, each amoeba
has vitalised itself by an interchange of its ' selfhood '
with the environment, at a particular point of that
environment, namely another amoeba with which it
has contact.
At this stage of being, then, vitality appears as the
result of an interchange of substance, a reciprocity
*Rollestone, Parallel Paths, p. 47.

14 CREED, SALVATION, LIFE
of action, between an organism and something in its
environment, in this case a similar organism. There
is enhanced vitality, one is told, but no reproduction :
' no new creature is formed.' That higher manifesta
tion, the birth of a new individual, becomes more
sensible to us in the range of existence above the
microscopic, where a new plant comes into being by
the fusion of two cells physiologically different, though
originating in the same organism ; or, when the zone
of sexuality in plant life is reached, by an interchange
between male and female in one kind. For each
member of the pair there is in the act of generation
a reciprocity between itself and the Other than Self
or environing existence, effected at that point of the
environment which is constituted by its mate. The
humble-bee mediating life unconsciously by the pollen
dust it conveys from anther to pistil of the clover,
may serve as familiar type to interpret the marriage
of the Self with the Other than Self, which from
Nature's lowest range to highest is her way of
creation. Then when the new life has from such a marriage
entered the shores of light, how does it there maintain
itself but by a perpetuation of this same marriage of
Self and Other? The tree that springs from the
reciprocation of two germs lives on and grows by
reciprocation with its world, the water its roots drink
from the soil, the gases its fibres suck from the air.
It is give and take between Nature and her child.
The leaf, when the sunbeam touches it, absorbs from

CREED, SALVATION, LIFE 15
the atmosphere certain elements which nourish it, but
can only so feed itself if at the same time it can breathe
out from its tissues another element of air. Its roots
draw up the mould for nourishment, and its branches
drop to the ground their burden of leaves which will
presently be earth of earth again. Its elastic stem
and liquid branches consent to the law of the winds
which would break what will not bend; its diving or
spreading roots are at accord with the laws of gravi
tation and balance; its pores and veins over all its
frame are of one will with the sunlight, to inhale its
vibrations and respire. All this life is union and
interchange and consentaneity. Let that interchange
be arrested by any cause, let the green tree be severed
from her context of nature, the passages of the com
merce between them be blocked by cold or drought,
and the spire of verdure is presently a blanched
skeleton among the living woods.
We can spare ourself the illustration of our principle
in the zone of animal existence, because the law of
reciprocal self-impartment is not less but more obvious
in this region, whether the aspect contemplated be
the reproduction of life or the maintenance of the
individual ' selfhood ' in face of nature's forces — her
heat and cold, moisture or drought, the need of
nourishment, exercise, and rest. The animal per
petuates its kind, as does the plant ; and supports its
several subsistence by the same give and take between
the matter of the organism and the brute matter which
presses on the organic to nourish it or to strain. One

16 CREED, SALVATION, LIFE
passes on up the stairway of Being to where it climbs
more steeply in that flight of degrees, the intellectual,
social, and moral relations of the species Man that
hath Reason, which are the culmination at least of
terrestrial existence. V
And here too we must economise by selection, and
make our choice of illustration fall on the less likely
fields. Thus to convince of the reciprocity of unit
and whole in the social life would be to force a door
of conviction that is open. No one needs persuading
that the life of wedded love subsists by a reciprocation
of love, or the parental love, though with less equality
between the terms : that friendship is the mutuality
of one with one, patriotism of one with many. The
moral life is the just interaction of the individual self
and the corporate self, till that corporate being
becomes the All-Being, and morality loses itself in
religion. It is almost idle to illustrate our thesis in
life of this order. But this it will not be idle to
remark — that when the stage of the moral and social
relations has been reached, our hypothesis receives a
sudden enrichment of meaning. Hitherto this inter
change between organism and environment has been
a statement of abstract and almost mathematical rela
tions. The communications, which pass to and fro
between the plant or the animal and the nature in
which it moves, are mechanical facts with no spiritual
quality. But when the factors in the relation are the

CREED, SALVATION, LIFE 17
citizen and his state, the friend and friend, the lover
and lover, a new light has fallen and a colour clothes
the facts. It is the light of Spirit, it is the hue of
Righteousness. The interchange between these terms
is the play of a moral energy ; it is a loyalty exchanged
for a justice, a heart-service for a heart-service, a
passion for a passion, and a fidelity for a fidelity.
Under all these names it is one thing in all the diverse
relationships alike : it is a self -imparting of one to
other met by a self -imparting, a self given up to a
self ; in a word, — the word we must henceforth make
the keyword of all our thinking, — it is Sacrifice.
We adopt the word, because of single words there
is no other that comes so near to the meaning for which
we seek expression. But there must be understood
in it a qualification which is essential. Life is sacri
fice : but there is a sacrifice which is not life. There
is a sacrifice which is barren, which reaps no good,
which is not unto life but unto death. There is an
offering in which the offerer spends his gift, and the
gift brings him back neither gain nor love : there is
a casting away of life which helps no cause nor yet
redeems the loser : there is a sacrificial rite in which
the self -torturer or self-mutilator pleases no God nor
saves his own soul alive : there are devotions of self
by which man or woman only mews up in prison a
nature of rich power to redeem mankind; vows in
which a potent self is given as a ransom for many,
and the ransom's worth is never rendered back.
Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum.

18 CREED, SALVATION, LIFE
This is the sacrifice which is not life. By the
Sacrifice which we say is Life, we mean a Giving of
Self which is mutual, in which the Self and the Not-
Self are rendered each to each, the organism is
penetrated by the environment, but is suffered to
penetrate that which environs it, in which the soul is
apprehended by the God whom it apprehends. This
reciprocal uprendering of the selfhood, this altar-rite
which is answered from heaven, this sacrifice met by
sacrifice, is what we propose to mean when we use
the single word, sacrifice, as the significant name for
Life. But to speak of a mutuality between Creator and
creature — does it derogate from the absoluteness of a
creator ex nihilo by implying some self -subsistence of
the creature? We suppose there is contradiction
here; but one of the contradictions which lie at the
root of all thinking about God and man. It is but a
form of the problem of man's Free Will.
VI
That Life is rightly figured, then, as a reciprocation
between two terms, and that this reciprocation acquires,
a new character as we mount the stairway of Being
to the platforms of the social and the moral levels on
which is found the species Man, is a hypothesis which
seems to have been now not insufficiently illustrated,
though by somewhat brief allusions. The life of
society and of morality is almost by force of the terms
a reciprocity, and that of an order which can be

CREED, SALVATION, LIFE 19
characterised more specifically as sacrifice understood
to be not on one side but on both. Accordingly for
more economy in presentation of the argument, we
turn to another department of man's existence, the
intellectual ; and across the field only of these activities
pursue our research into the characters by which the
presence of vitality can be known and named. In
this field the evidences will be more crucial, because
the activity of the intelligence does not seem at a first
glance to be dependent, as are those of his heart and
will in the other fields, upon two factors and their
interaction. Science and art are operations in which
we might conceive there was only one operator, the
man who thinks : indeed we call the man's thoughts,
specially in art, 'creations,' as if he were creator
and the material which he fashions were dead clay
until he says ' Let there be ' and breathes into it a life.
Yet if, as we have admitted, even the divine creative-
ness must be combined in our belief with some
co-operance of the thing created, more certainly the
human creator needs a creature with whom to work
his work. However, it is in the doings of mind that
the interaction and interchange, which are the char
acter of life, are least obvious ; and here the detection
of them will most sustain our hypothesis.
Even here we will use some thrift, and select for
more attention that tract of the intellectual where
instances will be the most demonstrative, because the
demonstration is least to be expected. That will be
the tract of Imagination. For works of imagination

20 CREED, SALVATION, LIFE
are those to which the title of creation is most un
grudgingly given, as if the artist were among thinkers
the most of an originator, and the subject were in
this kind the least dependent on the object. Also it
is the products of art which we are most ready to
describe as ' living,' as though these more than others
had the attribute of vitality. This then should be the
area to scrutinise for evidence which shall be decisive,
that to live is to be in the relation of reciprocal and,
as we now say, sacrificial action.
What is it then that happens when Michael Angelo
hews out his David from a block of marble, or Raphael
paints the Madonna, or Shakespeare writes Hamlet?
Are there here two factors co-operating for the result,
two terms by whose intercommunication the living
thing has birth? Is there a to and fro, a give and take
between the artist and the matter — the marble, pig
ment, language — which he fashions into a shape?
Michael Angelo said that the statue lies already
within the marble block before the artist carves it :
the chisel does but liberate what is hidden there in
prison. We perhaps take that for a fancy, a gracious
conceit. Looked into, it is simple truth in a luminous
image. The statue is there already : if it were not,
the sculptor could not make it : — as neither could it
ever be made unless the sculptor came.
The statue is there already. To the making of it
come two factors, the chisel and the marble ; between
them the statue comes to the birth. But the chisel
and the marble are not the real factors. Behind and

CREED, SALVATION, LIFE 21
in the chisel is the mind of the sculptor who wields
it : behind and in the marble is the Mind that made it
what it is. That mind is present by the presence
there of the physical laws of marble, its plasticity at
once and resistance, which make it susceptible of the
chisel : for who could carve a statue if marble were
either adamant or sand? But it is also present in
this way, that in the raw block there is already existent
the idea of the statue; in the marble lies that which
a Platonist might call the heavenly original, and a
Christian the image in the Creator's mind. It is by
no conceit, but a necessity of thought, that we speak
of the idea of the statue as latent in the block of
marble, meaning that a portion of the creator's mind,
his conception of the statue which is to be, lies in
that block of matter, ready to come forth and meet
the mind which is behind the graving tool of the
artist. Here then we have the contact of two wills, a finite
and the Infinite. Man's will and That which made
him. And the contact is a reciprocation of forces :
the man brings and gives his intelligence of the beauti
ful, and the cunning of his right hand; the marble
carries within it the idea of a shape of beauty and the
physical gift of a grain which can take on that shape.
Each term gives up its forces to the other, and by that
crossing and intercommunion the statue comes to the
birth. If the sculptor makes his statue thus, how does the
poet make his poem ? His case is the same : the poem

22 CREED, SALVATION, LIFE
is there in the material, waiting to be liberated. The
poet's marble is the language, with its laws of sound,
the rhythm, the rhyme, the melody of syllable and
cadence. But behind and in this material there is
the Idea ; there is the beauty which is in nature, the
passion which is in human things, their splendour and
delight, the gloria mundi, the lacrymae rerum, and
behind all these the power that makes them all. It
is there, but potential, a buried glory, a life hid. At
the wedding of the poet's passion and the passion of
the world the vision is born. If this seems too abstract
to be verifiable as an intercommunion of the two,
there is, to help us conceive it, again a parallel in the
concrete and sensible process of this marriage. For
what means the fact that the laws of rhyme and rhythm
and measure, which might be thought to be a poet's
hindrances to the making of his verse, are instead his
help and inspiration, so that where law is less severe
and the impediments less cramping, as in blank verse,
there success is harder and more rare? What does
this mean? It means that as the stubborn marble
grain, which causes the graver's tool to force it, also
tones the graver's energy of mind, and enables a more
delicate and a more enduring beauty in the shapes,
even so the reluctant fibre of the language which
makes the poet intend his fancy, provokes that fancy's
fertility, yields to his forms a more strenuous beauty,
inspires him to build the more lofty line, and so out
of the strong comes forth sweetness.
But this, as I read it, is an example in art of the

CREED, SALVATION, LIFE 23
truth which Bacon perceived in science, that Nature
can be ruled only by obeying her. That is, when
the man bows his will to the laws of fact and so makes
surrender of himself to Nature, then and therewith
and thereby Nature bows her own will and makes
surrender to the man. Man learns and yields himself
to the hard conditions of the laws of soil and weather,
and so yielding subdues the earth, begetting on her
the harvest : he complies with the laws of water and
wind, and so has the dominion over the sea and
presently, it may prove, over the air. So at each
new reciprocation there springs
"A bridal dawn of thunder-peals
Wherever Thought has wedded Fact."
We must let the examples we have studied in art,
and those just alluded to in the practical application
of man's imagination by the farmer, and by the sailor
of waters and sky, stand for the whole induction over
all the imaginative field; and persuade us that the
same reciprocation is the lord of hfe in the triumph
of orator rising on the wings of his hearers' sympathy,
of humorist whose 'jest's prosperity lies not in the
mouth' of speaker but in the ear of listener, of the
prophet who is null without the faithful, of the states
man who builds an empire by partnership of a people's
will, of a patriot Hannibal who fails to build for lack
of a patriot Carthage. Can one doubt that over the
whole region of imagination, whether this special dis
course of reason has for goal the Beautiful as in art,

24 CREED, SALVATION, LIFE
or the True as in science, or the Good as in practice,
a study would lay bare everywhere the same law —
that Life is a reciprocation of the Self and the Not-
Self, is the mutual and interdependent self -giving of
organism and environment, of creature and Creator,
of the soul and God; that life is the sacrifice made
ready on earth, which is answered by the fire from
heaven. VII
The cause is pleaded. And yet in another range of
human mind we will address one more interrogation
to Nature. What is the meaning of that deep-seated
principle in our being, the instinct of Self-devotion?
Why do men devote themselves, or yearn for such
devotion? Why does Curtius leap into the gulf, and
Roman Decius or Swiss Winkelried hurl himself upon
the spears? For tribal love, it is answered: but let
us know what tribal love is. Why did hermits crowd
in the Thebaid, and monks condemn their warm
humanities to the grave of the cloister ? They sought
merit with God in a world of sin ; they sought security
in a world of violence. Ah ! but more than that.
Why did Jesuits make over to their General a man's
wit and force perinde ac cadaver? Through necessity
of soldiership. Yes, but also through a more mystic
compulsion. Why do our missionaries of religion
devote a career to dark barbarians, our missionaries
of charity to the barbarism of a slum? For love of
their kind they do this deed : but when they do it unto

CREED, SALVATION, LIFE 25
these, unto Whom are they doing it in their heart?
The Greek prince, for whom all ventures prosper,
casts his valued jewel into the sea. To avert God's
anger, we say; but what told him the God could be
angry at man's success, unless a surmise that to exalt
self apart from the All is ill for man ? There are some
on whom the impulse to surrender self to a greater
than self comes by the anxiety of the struggle to live ;
some whom it falls on when the storm of sorrow falls ;
some whom in strange contradiction it visits when a
great joy has surged up in them, and in that tide wells
up a longing to give self in service even to suffering.
Tell us why these things are, or else believe with us
that God has made the soul to be one with Himself,
and the soul has no bliss, until it can be at one with
Him : believe with us that the spirit of man knows in
its deep of deeps that sacrifice of self is life.
Not yet, not wholly. Sacrifice of self is not life,
unless that Other than Self has joined in the offering :
the giving of self must be man's, and also (be it
reverently spoken) God's. He that loseth his life
shall find it, — else it is lost in vain. The Christ laid
down his life ; He laid it down of Himself, — but that
He might take it again. The world were not else
redeemed. On a Syrian hill-top are met the four hundred
prophets of Baal and the one prophet of the Lord.
On which altar shall the sacrifice prosper? The stones
are heaped for Baal, the wood is laid, the bullock slain
and laid upon the pyre. What is there wanting to

26 CREED, SALVATION, LIFE
the rite? Even the ministrants make offering of
themselves, of their flesh cut with knives and lancets
after their manner. In vain : there is no voice nor any
to answer. No Divine One comes hither to join in the
sacrifice of men. And on the other side, where the
twelve stones are piled, and the wood laid in order,
and on the wood is set the gift, — behold, at the prayer
of Jehovah's prophet offering himself to the dread
ordeal, ' Let it be known this day, that thou art God
in Israel,' the fire of the Lord fell. To this altar side
heaven comes as priest, bearing the torch; in this
ritual the Divine is celebrant with the Human; in
this communion the Eternal mingles with the mortal;
and there flames between them the answered sacrifice
which is life unto the living God.

II
CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH
[March 5th, 1911.]

" Words are the man." Tennyson, Marold.

II
CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH
Romans x. 10. — "With the mouth, confession is made unto Salvation."
Our study of Creed has required a preliminary study :
— Creed is a means to an end, Salvation, and we had
to ask, first, what is Salvation?
We glanced at man's answers, the heavens he has
successively imaged to himself as the country of the
soul. All were metaphors, names borrowed from
things seen, to bring him nearer to the things not seen
as yet. Each metaphor in turn was good, if it did
bring him nearer; but this could only be if it were
the name of the likest among things seen; if the
attempted bridge from the known to the unknown
sprang from the last promontory of solid earth that
jutted into the void. Each metaphor in its time might
be the best : but each, as it ceased to be the best,
ceased to be even good, since nothing but the highest
could be stepping-stone to the higher yet. So for our
selves, in the age to which the highest of things seen
are the facts which we name to ourselves by the word
Life, the metaphor which is to build the bridge into
the void for thought's upward passage shall be a figure

30 CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH
which is a creature of the age, yet can claim the
longest antiquity and the most august sanction as a
human name for Reality. Following Christ and Paul
and John, we shall say that Joan's salvation is life,
that to be saved is to live unto God.
I
The metaphor is ancient and is sacred, but it can
serve us better than it could serve the first readers
of Paul and John. They knew as well as we how it
feels and looks to be alive, but they had not analysed
that consciousness of life. This we have tried to do.
The hypothesis we offer of the secret of hfe has indeed
no extrinsic authority; but it can commend itself by
the tokens of its accord with reality gathered on many
stairs ,of the ladder of Being which climbs from
inorganic matter up to man, ' the roof and crown of
things. ' We hope presently to commend it by a proof
the most convincing, its power to interpret the main
problems of man's spiritual experience. We hope to
show its efficacy, as, if we may venture the word, a
Novum Organum, as an instrument of research into
religious truth and the final destiny of man who is
saved by faith.
This hypothesis was that [hfe is not an adaptation
of organism to environment, which is the most popu
larised presentment of the facts at present, but a
mutual adaptation of the two, each to each) an adapta
tion which can be analysed as a mutual giving of self
between the one and the other, and which, as we rise

CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH 31
past amoeba and plant and animal to the zone of human
consciousness, takes on a moral character, till [it can
be at last described as a reciprocity in self-giving
between human and divine, creature and Creator ; as
a sacrifice (for so at last we thought to figure it) which
man offers to God and God kindles by the fire from
heaven^ II
If then salvation, to which creed should minister,
is life, and if life is what our hypothesis names it, an
interchange of being between man's soul and its
Maker, we have now to ask what is Creed, and how
does it minister to this life?
Again, let us first consult authority. Creeds have
from the earliest days of Christianity been called con
fessions of faith; as first by St. Paul, where he dis
tinguishes the two moments of faith which saves :
' with the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and
with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.'
And again, let us also re-word authority, and charge
the name it gives us with a precise meaning. To
confess a belief is to speak out before men a thought
that has been the silent thought of the speaker; to
make outward what was inward. fCrjeed for us shall
be named Utterance, and religious creed the Utterance
of a religious faith \
To some there will occur a different synonym.
They will rather describe creeds as 'Definitions,' a
word which will commend itself to them as having a

32 CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH
more philosophic exactitude than 'utterance.' And
this word too has strong, though less ancient and
sacred authority. The creed formulated by the
Fathers of Nicsea and the creed which carries the name
of Athanasius would be less naturally described as
utterances of the Church than as definitions. Also,
it is the word which has become a flag in a modern
controversy concerning Christian faith, one side
asserting and the other deprecating the use of defini
tion in religion; one making their watchword the
demand for definiteness in doctrine, the other seeking
for the liberty of the Gospel in a faith which ignores
dogma. For the former the value of creed lies in
its character as definition, in its being ' a form of sound
words ' ; a form, with strong outline and clear-cut
feature; and of toords, whose soundness in large
measure consists of their being plain Yea or Nay; a
form, contrasting with the formless, featureless,
ambiguous haze of conceptions which the theology of
the opposite character appears to them to present.
Which of these two contentions has the right, or (as
may very well prove the apter question) what is the
proportion of the whole lightness which is held by
this and by that, is what our enquiry will necessarily
be asking all along its course. We will at this outset
anticipate our conclusions only so far as to express
our adherence to the positive judgement declared in
the demand for definition, without prejudice to a
positive judgement, not declared but latent, in the
opposed contention. Definiteness is a most insepar-

CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH 33
able property of religious faitm Those who are argu
ing, as we, that life is the keyword of religion, must
range themselves with alacrity in rank with those who
claim that the function of creed is to give definition.
We are not ready to follow even an Augustine in his
apology for the precision of dogma, that the Church
has framed statements of mysteries, not from any wish
to express herself, but because she could not avoid
it [Non ut illud diceretur, sed ne taceretur]. The
Church ought to wish to express herself, and to express
herself with all the definiteness she commands and the
matter admits of. For definition, distinctness from
all things else, is a character of that which is alive :
where the least spark of the fire of life has kindled,
something has severed itself from all the rest, stands
on one side with the world over against it on the other,
says a Nay and a Yea, a Nay ' to the world, a Yea to
its separate self.' (Life indeed, in one aspect, is
Definition, and we therefore must readily accept the
view that creed, if an organ of life, will be an instru-
ment that defines.,
Perhaps one should not pass from our reference to
those who challenge dogmatic definiteness without
noting a distinction between challengers. One
resents precision because he feels the mystery and
the glory of things, and fears that any formula will
do them wrong. Another resents the self -commit
ment in thinkings and doings, if he undersigns a
creed. In the sacrifice of believing one withholds
his offering as too poor a gift, one grudges it as too

34 CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH
rich. They are contrasted, as in the life of action
are the man who shrinks from the positive step
because he knows the momentousness of decision and
the blindness of judgement, and the man who only
dreads to pay with the person for a step. To the self-
mistrust of the one and the selfishness of the other
our conjurations cannot be the same. To a third
offended one whose eyes love, not darkness rather than
light, but the comfort of haze rather than the austerity
of broad day, there is due from us a tender forbear
ance, till he can adjust his vision.
Ill
To resume. If we accept the description of Creed
as an instrument which defines belief, this is not to
reject our earlier description. 'Utterance' and
' Definition ' are not mutually exclusive names of
Creed, but complementary : they are the names of
the end and of the means to that end : utterance is
the process of which definition is the result : by creed
we utter our belief in order that by uttering we may
make it definite.
It is easily seen that to utter a belief is to make it
definite. In the act of cognition or knowing, which
is a part of belief, thougli not as popularly supposed
co-extensive with belief, we distinguish two factors,
the subject and the object ; the Mind which knows and
the Things which are known ; and we say that knowing
is the relation in which the one stands to the other.
Whether or no this dualism is the final account of

CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH 35
existence, and if so why the Creator, as He made living
things in the beginning to be male and female, made
all things to be subject and object and to have their
being only by this wedded relation, are questions for
philosophers. The generally accepted dualism is
foundation deep enough for man's practical reason
ings, and will serve for his spiritual. It may not be
philosophy enough to reveal to us the secret of the
universe: but we are content if it shows us how to
live there.
' So we take the popular account of the act of know
ing, that it is the coming into being of this relation
between subject and object, Mind and Things. As,
when my eyelid is raised, there springs into existence
for me a world of things seen and an image of it on
a retina, so when the mind thinks a thought there is
created the landscape of an objective world conceived
and the eye of a subject conceiving it. Without
deciding which of the two terms of this relation is
prior to the other and cause of it, or even that there
is any priority or causality (as for our own part we
suppose there is not), we may call this operation an
utterance of itself by the Subject. For in this action,
or rather transaction between the two, the Subject
has made itself outward. It has projected itself, has
held something of itself— something which will now
become a thought — out at armslength, where it can
look at it as an object, and recognise that this thing
is at once part of itself and other than itself. Until
it has done so, there is no thought; for a thought is

36 CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH
a relation between Mind and Fact; it is the child of
their wedding, and, if either term in that parentage
is not there, the thought has not been born. This
action, then, of the subject by which it comes into
existence, the existence, namely, of being in a correla
tion with an object, or (as we have figured it) united
with it in a fruitful wedding, is an act which can be
properly described as an utterance, a making outward.
When we speak only of the subject as uttering itself,
we are not forgetting that the converse must be true :
the object utters itself in the subject, since it equally
creates the relation between the two, and in that union
neither is before or after other. But, when the matter
we are dealing with is human faith, our interest is
rather in one term, the subject : our concern is to
show that faith knows itself or becomes, as we said,
definite, only when it utters self by creating a thought
as an object to its vision. IV
Creed, then, is the utterance which makes behef
definite, that is, an object of clear consciousness.
But this is not enough to say. We have been taking
cognition as an illustration of the process of behef,
and have talked accordingly about the utterance of
thoughts. But believing, or faith, is much more than
knowing, and creed is an utterance of far more
experiences than of our thoughts. Knowing is a
function of one organ of man, his mind : faith is a
function of the whole organism, mind, heart, and will

CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH 37
together, directed towards the whole of Being in its
three aspects of Truth, Beauty, and Good. Man has
to live by knowing his world as true, loving it as
beautiful, conforming his practice to it as good. He
must use a creed to utter himself in each direction;
towards the world's truth his creed will be a science,
towards its beauty an art, towards its goodness a code
of conduct. Thus, while the creed of the philosopher
will be the utterance of a thought, his conception of
how the world is made, the artist's creed will be the
utterance of an emotion at finding it so fair, while the
patriot's creed ' I believe in serving my country ' will
be the pronouncement at once of an affection and
a resolve ; and even the anarchist's frenzied formulary,
that Order is humanity's enemy, is the voice less of
an idea than of a passion and a force. And all this
which is the case in man's natural existence will be
not less the case in his religious. Here, too, his creed
does not utter and make definite only his thought.
That has been the mistake of the way of Christian
thinking about faith which our enquiry is to examine,
— that it is supposed we are to be saved by our
thoughts, our thoughts digested in a creed. This
cannot be right, if our enquiry has so far given us
any true results. For salvation is, we are well
assured, the life of the entire man, not his thinkings
' alone : Creed cannot save his soul alive, if it save only
the thinker in him, not also the man in him who feels
and acts. Yea, let all that is within me live unto the
Lord. Creed, then, must be the utterance of the whole

38 CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH
personal being : it must be able to place outside us,
and so render objective and clear, not alone our con
ception of what God is, but the motions of_our heart
towards Him and the posture of our will, f At one and
the same time a confessing with the mouthraust be
three things : it must be, first, the presenting of an
object to the mind — that is, creed is to give us a
language which defines our mental vision of God.
Then it must be the presenting of an object to the
heart — that is, creed will focus our affections on a
definite point, in the case of a Christian creed upon
the person of Christ; and last, it must be the pre
senting of an object to the will — that is, the speaking
of a creed will be the choice of a definite course of
action, the conduct, namely, of a Christian man?) The
' Hear, 0 Israel ' which the Church pronounces, to
be answered by our acceptance and profession, is not
only 'The Lord thy God is one God,' to be received
with all the mind ; but also ' Thou shalt love the Lord, '
to be welcomed with all the heart; and 'Him only
shalt thou serve,' to be grasped with all the will.
The conclusions we have reached then, so far, are
that creed is a definition of belief obtained by means
of an utterance or externalising of that belief; but
that the belief uttered is more than a mental experi
ence, being the experience of the whole relations of
the man to the Reality which his creed confesses. All
that is within him must become outward by confession
in order that it may become wholly and fully his own,
may become definite, may pass from the vague and

CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH 39
dusk fringes of consciousness into the periphery of
vision where objects are focussed and the eye possesses
them with force. It is such definition by utterance
that we mean when we say men are saved by their
creed, that the confession made by the mouth is unto
salvation. V
But, now, is this true, that men are saved by creed?
How should an utterance which defines belief make
for salvation?
We remind ourselves again that salvation is life,
and hfe a communion of self -giving between man and
his Creator. To make for salvation is to make for
life, and we have to ask how creed can do this.
There comes at once the answer, that though the
confession of a Creed may make for life, it cannot make
life, while it is no more than confession. For life is
the reciprocity in the action of two terms, and con
fession is the action of only one, the human. But that
action of the one term it is : to confess a truth, to
utter a faith by a creed, is to give the self.
We must judge of this by an instance; and none
can well be more crucial than that of the first Christian
creed ever formulated. (When a Galilean fisherman
cried 'Thou art the Christ, was it not a giving of
self? Did not Peter in that cry give himself to the
Reality which his formula sought to name? He gave
himself, the whole of him; mind, heart, and will
together. His mind. When the long debate in the

40 CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH
shrewd peasant consciousness, 'What say I of this
Jesus?' is brought to an issue by the shock of a demand
'Who say ye that I am?' ; and between the compet
ing conclusions, ' This man is Elias : is the Baptist
re-risen : is one of the prophets,' the choice is made
'This is God's Messiah,' — Peter gives himself in his
thoughts. For he has limited himself in the sphere
of the understanding, has parted with his mind's free
dom to do what it will with its own, is made over as
thinker to the Fact which he has thought out into
speech ; the truth ' This is the Christ ' is master now
of his intelligence. But he gives away also his affec
tions. These are his no longer, to turn them whereso
he lists : their object is fixed, and fixed on a Lord who
is a jealous Lord; he must love this Jesus, love Him
beyond all else, and love Him more than these his
fellows, because He was the first of them to confess his
love. And, with mind and heart, he has given away
his will. To acknowledge aloud that this man is the
Christ carries with the word all the course of his actions
in all his days ; he is free no more to gird himself and
walk whither he would ; already he has stretched forth
surrendering hands and is girded by this Master
absolute and for ever, to be carried by him whither
.i-i j
as mortal he would not.\ VI
This story of how the first Christian made his creed,
as we reconstruct it by sympathies which need not
distrust themselves, is the story of what happens when

CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH 41
any creed is made by any Christian or Church of
Christ. He who speaks a creed renders one-half of
the act we call life : he gives self to the Reality of
which he has spoken a name. Half the act of living
unto God has been done, the human half, the sacrifice
offered by the man.
But in this matter half is not only less than the
whole : it is less than itself, it is nothing. The
sacrifice offered by the man, if it be only offered,
only laid on the altar, and the fire does not fall, is not
a sacrifice; it is not anything. The creed in which
the believer gives himself to the object of his con
fession is in the process of salvation not a value, has
no power to save a man, unless the Divine Reality
gives itself in answer.
But how can that be, and what is the sign that this
Divine Reality has taken its part in the mutual action
which is life?
What happened in the making of that first of
Christian creeds, the confession of Peter? The fol
lower by his word, 'Thou art the Christ,' has uttered
his loyalty, given head, heart, and hand to the leader.
What comes back to him?
There can be utterings of loyalty to which there
comes back nothing; as when a pilgrim train of
Galileans cries 'Hosanna to the Son of David,' and
then, under the cold eyes of their betters in Jerusalem
street, they find their protestations have been answered
by no firm assurance, and they can now only say ' This
is Jesus the prophet from Nazareth.' There are (do

42 CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH
we not know it?) utterings of our own, which die by
the act of uttering; as when a teacher puts forth to
learners some article of his faith, not doubting that
he is convinced of its truth until he has given it speech ;
and then (for who can be always on the heights of his
belief?) conviction seems to have expired with the
breath that sent it abroad. These are credal acts that
have not saved our own soul alive; they have not
found the reciprocation, hfe has not kindled here.
Did Peter's creed find answer?
That is a question which from direct knowledge only
two can answer, Peter's self and, in Peter's phrase,
God who knoweth the heart. But signals which we
can read are thrown us by the story of the man. The
life of flesh is declared by the activities of the body,
and the life of spirit in saints by the Acta Sanctorum.
If the record of the Acta Petri could chronicle no
more than that his utterance at Caesarea Phihppi
opened that train of spiritual consequence which we
call the Church built by Christ upon the rock of the
utterer, this impersonal fruitfulness of his deed would
be proof that here was a sacrifice which heaven
answered by the fire. But the tale of the man is not
so lost in the tale of the community. The train of
spiritual consequence in the believer's own person
ality is registered with a convincing fulness and
vivacity on the page of Luke'. We read the brave
memoir, and do not doubt that where Peter sowed
there he reaped life. The rapture which in the great
confession launched him from a brink into a void, did

CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH 43
not dash him to wreck upon the stones : it buoyed him
on a long flight of spiritual enterprise with wings like
eagle's which, if they could falter at moments, yet
dropped only to mount again higher. The faith that
cried, ' Thou, the Galilean teacher, art the Christ of
God,' becomes the faith which at the baptism of fire
can avow ' Thou, the crucified, art made both Lord
and Christ ' ; it can lift the cripple to his feet by the
name of Jesus of Nazareth, can affront with a fol
lower's defiance the priest who had sent the Leader
to a cross, and bear the scourge rejoicing in a dis
honour suffered for the Name; can shatter in a
morning the race-pride of ages and 'break his birth's
invidious bar ' for Cornelius the alien man of faith ;
can be strong to walk in freedom whither he would on
the Master's errands, and strong at the last to be in
weakness and in bondage and be carried to the like
ness of the Master's doom. We read the story and
are sure that faith's venture bore the fruit of faith's
achievement. The life in Peter was not exhausted
by that outpour of its energy, but replenished more :
was set on fire by the utterance, but with a fire of the
divine Presence which inflamed and did not consume.
This earliest formulation of Christian belief was plainly
an utterance to which heaven replied, a sacrifice
offered by the worshipper and accepted by the fire
from heaven, a self-giving of the Man answered by the
self -communication of God. The creed of Peter was
an act of life. The creed of Peter was found to be
true.

44 CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH
VII
One pauses to ask a question, which at this point
we will not try to answer. That Peter's utterance
brought him life, we who have his after-history before
us can well discern : and that makes us satisfied that
the creed he uttered was a right one. But how did
Peter know his creed to be right, at the time of its
utterance, before the history came to prove it so?
The question is of the greatest importance to our
selves : for we want to know whether our own belief
is true, not years after, when there will have accrued
proof of it, but now, when we are committing our
selves to the belief. Years hence it will be too late
to know that our creed was wrong, if wrong it shall
prove to have been : for we shall have staked our
fortunes on it, and they will then be irrecoverable.
The question is a vital one ; but the answer, if we can
find one, will be more serviceably given at a later
point in our argument, where too it will meet us with
more insistency than here.* VIII
That venture of faith which stands to the name of
Peter assigns him a kind of primacy among believers
which provokes no challenge from history. But if it
has made him first, it is the first of many brethren.
For change the name and of thee the tale is told,
whosoever art believer through all the days of the
Christ. Is it not so? Would it have been possible
imaginatively to reconstruct, as attempted here, this
*This is touched on.in VI. , pp. 147, 152.

CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH 45
story of how Peter, one day in a pause of the wanderers
on a hill-slope of the Lebanon, sought and found the
truth, if his case were not also our own ; if it were not
that always he that seeketh findeth truth in no other
fashion than did this stout venturer, the fisherman who
showed the way to a world. The story of the faith of
every Christian among us has now been told; for it
is the Galilean's story. And yet let us try to re-tell
it, in a shape of circumstance and language more new
and living to ourselves, that we may feel more sure
his tale and our own are one. That our language may
be more new and living we will not take for our
instance the truth which Peter confessed, ' Thou art
the Christ ' ; for, though that remains the summary
of a Christian's faith, it has for us lost the concrete-
ness and the poignancy of human and immediate
interest, which faith in the Messiah had for a Jew of
the Roman empire waiting for the consolation of
Israel. Let us choose the article of our belief which
concentrates our attention on an interest not less
drastic than the coming of a Redeemer of Israel, —
' I look for the Resurrection of the Dead and the Life
of the world to come.' The hope of Peter, 'This is
the Christ who shall free my race from Rome,' did not
more strain his heart-strings than does with one of
us mortal men and women to-day the hope, even under
the shadow of a tyranny of death, that
"for me, I lie
Broken in Christ's sweet hand, with whom shall rest
To keep me living, now that I must die."

46 CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH
We shall ask, then, not what happened in Peter,
when he confessed 'Thou are the Christ,' but what
happens in myself when I confess ' This is the Christ,
by whom, though I die, yet shall I live?' When I
utter that creed, do I give myself to the Reality for
which my name is Christ, the Son of God, and does
that Reality give itself to me?
Critics of our religion have told us that our hope
in a future life is begotten by a spirit not of giving but
of getting. ' Selfish mortal, is it not enough for you
to live once : must you covet another life still? You
who make a virtue of the eternal hope, are you not
in truth greedy men, believing that gain is godliness?'
Enough to live once ? Why, enough it is for me, who
am but one, — if only I may indeed once live. For
once to live is to live always. But not less than one
life contents me ; and if it be a sin to covet life, I must
still be an offending soul.
But let us ask whether to believe in the resurrection
comes by a spirit of greed or by a spirit of self-
forsaking. IX
That first of believers, in the act of uttering his
creed, gave up, we said, the self of his thoughts, his
affections, his will. We also in this our creed make
an offering of our thoughts, a sacrifice of the mind.
For to believe that this man shall live on after he has
died, is first an act of mind ; it is the imagining of the
scene of After-Death, the landscape of a new heaven
and a new earth. To do this the mind must forsake

CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH 47
self. She must cast away those conclusions which are
the gettings of her terrene experience, that all that
lives must die, for that every sense bears witness it is
so. But to cast away conclusions of the mind, how
real a sacrifice of self is this ! For how strong is the
mind's desire for selfish ease, for the peace of a fixed
conclusion, the repose of definitiveness. How she
wants to rest here and not go on. And what a labour
and strain and adventurous welcoming of the un
familiar is demanded by the imagination of a world
wholly unlike the world of sense, in which the mind's
home is. Forth of that house and home she must
go : naked she must go out of the world, the world
with which experience by the senses has clothed her,
and wander beyond these ' warm precincts ' out into
the vast and void. All imagining of that which we
do not know, all sympathy with those who are not
ourself is indeed a going out of self : but to make this
pilgrimage of vision into the uncharted region beyond
the flaming walls of the world ' alone, withouten any
companie ' ; to start on this quest of a hospitality for our
trembling, dazzled, stranger soul among those yonder,
who, however our companions once, are now of all
the company of heaven, who, however dear, are in
their new greatness dread — tell me not this journey is
the deed of the selfish man. It is the journey of that
hero of faith who ' went out, not knowing whither he
went, and sojourned in the land of promise as in a
strange country. ' Abandon self all ye who enter, even
by your thought, this gate that leadeth unto life.

48 CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH
X
Again the utterance of this belief ' the dead are
raised ' is a sacrifice of the heart : we give the self of
our affections. A man does not credit a world to come
towards which he cannot feel an emotional regard
either of desire or of repulsion, a passion of love or
else of hate. Commonly, no doubt, we suppose that
our heart hopes for or fears those alternative dooms of
the future, because our intelligence has informed us
that they are facts ; just as men hate poverty or covet
public honour, because reason tells them that bank
ruptcy or distinction are possibilities. In the doom of
spirit this is not so. Reason and emotion here are not
as cause and consequence : they are conditions each
one of the other : we expect the doom if also we desire
or dread it. That hero of a fiction who boasted in his
motto that he lived ' ne fleyt at hell, ne fond on
heaven, ' did not really believe in either fact : his
heaven was a picture on a cloud, his hell the place
only of ' a painted devil. ' Those to whom this reason
ing seems doubtful will at least allow that wish can be
father to thought, that an emotional interest in the
truth is not a blinder of the eyes, but a steadier and
quickener of the judgement by the responsibility it
wakes; that where we bestow our heart there we are
readiest to lay the treasure of our confidence. That is
allowance enough to serve our present contention. It
allows that there can be a giving of self, the self of
the emotions, when a judgement on reality is being

CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH 49
framed : and this is what we are saying. In the judge
ment concerning an after-life, we judge that the reality
is there because we love to have it so, or hate. Even
of a heaven it is the case that we ' must love it ere to us
it will seem worthy to be loved ' : we must set our
affections on things beyond, not on things on the earth,
if our mind is to pass beyond earth and set its thoughts
yonder. Because our affections are at home there;
because heaven is the country of the soul and our
citizenship is in it ; because it is for us the land of such
dear souls, our kindred who now inherit it ; therefore
are we sure that heaven is. The selfish man does not,
so far as he is selfish, believe in an after-life, because
he does not care for it, does not covet one which should
be heavenly; and if he believes at all in one which
should be hellish, it is because a something in him,
not the bad but the remaining good, makes him able
to hate an evil world, since the woe of an evil world,
whatever be his imagery of it, is the woe of darkness
away from the face of God; and this the good that
still is in him hates. Ah yes, our mind gives credence
to a world of bliss or woe when our heart goes thither
at its side, when the soul of a mortal is led as a bride
towards the gate of heaven, or dragged as a shudder
ing slave-bride towards a king of terrors, Death.
Verily we must render up a self to the Reality we
foresee, the self of our affections, when we confess
with our mouth that the dead are raised.

50 CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH
XI
And the Will ? Do we in that act of credence give
out of us lastly the practical power, the energy that
handles facts and expresses itself in our conduct?
It will hardly be questioned that an activity of the
will is a part of that act of credence. We cannot
genuinely believe in a future and enduring life, and
not make some effort to accommodate our present
conduct to the interests, which are overwhelming, of
that future. 'Longer is the time,' says the Greek
poet's hero-maiden, ' wherein I must please those
yonder than these here ' ; and the measure in which
we seek to please that yonder world is the measure in
which we credit it : thought and will are as thought
and affection are, mutually conditions each of each.
Then in the judging that we shall live on we make a
surrender of our actions as of our emotions. We
give up our temporal conduct to be the instrument of
an eternal interest : our creaturely will is offered up
to the Creator Will, to work out His word, ' Let there
be — a Hereafter.' XII
What have we done in this train of reflections? We
have changed the name and of ourself has been told
the tale of the disciple who avows the Creed ' this is
the Christ of God — in whom though I die yet shall I
live.' The Galilean fisherman, as we tried to read his
spirit's experience, did in his confession of the Christ

CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH 51
a deed in which the mental activity which conceived
the words was at the utmost a third part, and a lesser
third, of the whole activity in it of his being. He
formulated a creed, the first a Christian ever made.
Did that formulation effect the salvation of Peter? If
it was only an act done by a thought, and the word that
made the thought public, how could it save — even if
by itself it could save at all — how could it save any
more of Peter than the mind in him which thought
and spoke it ? But the act of this archetype of Chris
tian confessors was an act, as we judged, of his entire
personal being. The heart and the will went with the
mind. And the action of this threefold nature, what did
we find it to be ? His utterance of a faith was, we saw,
a renunciation, a surrender, an offering of the sacrifice
of faith. He threw open the gate of his mind to the
entry of a truth beyond his experience, a divine
thought that was above his thought : he gave away
the dearest thing he had, his heart's force of the love-
passion, to be a vowed passion sealed to this Christ : he
committed his way unto Jehovah as known to him in
Jesus, gave it up to ways that were not his ways.
Here was all the meaning and the might in the first
uttering of a creed : a self was given to God, a man's
whole self, when the disciple who believed in his heart
that Jesus was the Christ did with his mouth make
confession. And this tale, with the names of things changed
into names of our modern experiences, we have tried

52 CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH
to tell of ourselves, and have found that it can so be
told. When one of us makes his creed and confesses
a Resurrection of the Dead, his confession is an utter
ance in which he gives himself, all that is within him,
to the Reality of which he shapes a name.
What then has he done by this utterance? This
confession which has been made with the mouth,
in what sort and degree has it been made unto
salvation? In the language of our enquiry we must say that by
this utterance of a Credo there has been done one half
the act of life : the man has given himself to God.
Half the act. But in the region of living things the
half without the half is nothing ; life has not happened
yet; for life happens only when there is a giving of
self not by one but two. Can then the tale of that
man who was in Christ before us all, be told as our tale
up to, the end? The other half of the act of life, is it
in our case rendered ; does God give Himself to us who
give ourself to Him? Is our gift, when we lay it on
the altar, fired from heaven? Does our confession
issue in life for us?
That is the question which we are brought in sight
of. Though we cannot here begin an answer, let us
already note what issue hangs on our answer. The
issue is no less than this.
[If to be saved is to have life, and if the work of
creed is to save men by causing this life, so that the
whole use and significance of creed is in this, that it
causes life, — then, if we shall learn that our confession

CREED AS CONFESSION OF FAITH 53
of this creed 'I believe in the Resurrection of the
Dead ' is an act of self -giving which is met by a self-
giving of God, so that life happens to us, we shall have
learned that this creed is a right creed and a true ; we
shall know assuredly that the dead are raised, and that
we, though we die, yet shall we live.

Ill
THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY
[March 12th, 1911.]

Ultra processit flammantia maenia mundi
Atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque.

Lucretius.

Ill
THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY
1 Coe. II. 9, 10. — " Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, . . . the things
which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God hath
revealed them unto us."
The uttering of a faith by a creed is, we have said,
the one half, the human half, of that process of
reciprocatory self-giving between God and the soul
which is the life, or salvation, of man. Does the other
half, the divine half, in that reciprocation take place :
does the spiritual environment impart itself to the
human organism, a soul? If it does, by what signs is
the fact known?
That question, we noted, is the same, though in
other words, as the question, Is the creed true ? (_Creed
has no significance and worth and reality, is, as St.
Paul would say, nothing in the world, except as an
instrument which saves us, or, in closer language,
helps us to live. The truth it imparts is simply the life
it imparts. If then by uttering a creed the utterer
receives life, then his creed is a right creed, the thing
he believes is so.
We took for examination an instance of credal asser-

58 THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY
tion, ' I believe in the Resurrection of the Dead ' ; and
were lighting our research by the historic example of
an utterance which attained the divine-human reci
procity and made the utterer live, Peter's creed ' Thou
art the Christ.' That utterance was the confessor's
self-giving, was half the fact of life to him. We found
an analogue to this in -our own confession of a belief —
a specific part of the whole belief in Christ — that in
the After-life of the soul. Only by a surrender of the
self, in its tripartite being of mind, heart, and will, can
we Christians of to-day confess our faith in that fact
of human destiny. Peter's tale was ours so far. But
is it ours to the end; and does the faith-movement in
us meet the same divine answer as in Peter? If it
does, then in spite of nature's apparent witness to the
contrary, 'yet is our hope full of immortality.' If it
does not, then we may have believed in vain.
We chose our instance because of its drastic interest,
compelling attention. But that very interest might
prejudice the actual enquiry, if it made us think our
object is to prove the truth or untruth of a future exist
ence. It is not. We are to prove the validity or
invalidity of a particular method of research in the
field of faith. We are testing an instrument of the
mind for verifying spiritual fact, namely, the applica
tion to belief of the question, Does it give life? This
instrument or organum of research (which, if in any
way a Novum Organum, is new only in the terms it
adopts for the analysis of the idea of Life) we are test
ing over the instance of the Resurrection tenet. If

THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY 59
the organum should fail under the trial, that would
not show the tenet to be unproved, but only that it is
not provable in this particular way. Our existing
reasons for holding it would be left where they were.
It seemed useful to insist on this caution.
I
So we set forward. Is our utterance of a belief
that the Dead are raised, which is a giving of ourself,
verified by a gift of Himself to us by God, so that we
can know that the reciprocation which constitutes the
soul's life has taken place? By what signs can we
recognise that God gives this gift?
The signs can only be our own human experiences.
God is known to my soul only by what He has done
for my soul, and what He has done is known by the
things that happen in my soul. So our question is,
What things happening to me are indications that the
Divine has communicated Itself to this human? In
other words, what things are signs of life in the soul?
At starting we will borrow, as heretofore, the light
of Nature. In the natural existence, bodily or mental,
there are signs by which we recognise that vitality has
been acquired by an organism. The beginning of life
indeed never falls under our observation, nor is even
imaginable. But the restoration of life after partial
interruption can sometimes be observed. The most
crlicial instance we can avail ourselves of would be
a man rescued from drowning, with animation sus
pended, and some organs functioning no longer. His

60 THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY
rescuers apply resuscitative methods, and by manipu
lation of his organs of breathing produce artificial
respiration, which is followed by full revival. How
would they describe the fact that the man was being
restored to life ? They would say that now the breath
ing repeats itself, when they cease handling the body :
the lungs go on breathing, and this persistence is a
sign that the man is alive. Then they find that all
the other organs are regaining life : the pulse, which
had been at ebb, is now driving the tide of the blood
up the emptied channels again : the skin is resuming
its action; and the torpid senses are warming back
into the powers of feeling, hearing, and seeing. Here
is another sign of life, that the whole of the frame is
coming alive together : life is not only persistent in
part of the body, it is everywhere in it. Do they
notice any other sign of life ? Yes, they presently say
the man is getting fully alive : his lungs not only
breathe of themselves, but breathe deeply, his heart
not only beats, but beats with strength. Until they
get this sign they are not sure that the recovery is
real. This is probably the kind of description which
the rescuers, if not scientific but plain men, might give
of the return of life. But we, for a convenience in
our future argument, will take notice of a certain logic
which underlies this popular language. For one sees
that these physical symptoms fall naturally under three
heads : the life in this body of the restored man first
is continuous, then it extends throughout it, and last,
it is there in force. If we give logical names to these,

THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY 61
and say that the three signs of life in that man's
organism are its extension in time, its extension in
space, and its intensity of degree, we shall presently
find that this scholastic refinement proves no idle
pedantry, but a most useful framework or scheme to
distribute and classify our thinking about the pheno
mena of life, as seen not in the body but the soul.
The instance of life in the drowned man restored draws
for us, as it were, a diagram to aid our study of how
man lives unto God. II
We turn the light then of this physical example of
the phenomenon, vitality, upon the field of spiritual
fact. By what signs, we ask, can we estimate the
increase or the diminution of life which accompanies
a belief in our soul's survival of death?
1. And first, What will be the signs we must look for
in the rational nature ? Let us study this in a homely
fashion, and not as the scientific would ; for the enquiry
is one concerning our fate as men, and to prosecute
it there should be need not of a philosopher, but only
of a man. We shall ask then whether the life of the
intelligence in a man is enhanced by his committing
himself to a belief that there is a future life. Does
the sign of permanence, of continuance, offer itself?
Certainly it does in the mind of the race. The per
sistence of the expectation, in the races which it has
once reached, is impressive. That impressiveness is
not disturbed, but rather deepened, by the fact that

62 THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY
all the varying conceptions which men have formed
of an After-life of the soul have successively been con
fessed illusions. This transiency of the form does not
discredit the substance of the belief; the more it
changes the more it remains the same. But what has
happened in the history of the race will persuade us
less than what happens in the history of ourself. Has
the hope that has dawned on me of a life beyond this
life held its own in time ? If I find it will not let me
go ; that still, with all the present poverty of rational
evidence and all the wealth on the other side of
evidence that living creatures in nature come to an
end, still the image haunts me, image frail as air and
as the air invulnerable, of a world not like to this world
nor all unlike it, where I and mine shall be, — then I
have caught the trace of a life that beats in me and
lives unto that world to which my mortal senses cannot
live, but which they in vain deny. On the line of time
my prophetic soul has life in its prophecy.
And then, does my whole mind join in the prophecy ;
do all its faculties agree in their testimony ? There is
a picture of the universe which my rational faculties
have made for me. In that landscape of existence
does this one feature, a future life, appear as an
incongruous feature and out of drawing, a jarring
patch in the scheme of colour : or does my conscious
ness own it as consistent with its other experience?
Unanimity of the thoughts would be another strong
indication that the mind lives in the prophecy.
Here I think we shall not refuse attention to

THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY 63
observers, who allege that the religious impulse, in
which the expectation of a future is commonly a pre
dominant element, is accompanied by a rise in the
general intelligence. An argument of some value
seems indicated here.
2. Then the signs of life which must be demanded in
the emotional nature. For the belief in an After-life
is an affection as well as an idea ; and always, as the
poet urges, there have been the men who ' felt within
themselves the sacred passion of the second life.' As
men can be lovers of this world, so can they also be
lovers of the other world. It will have to be asked
whether this affection set on things beyond not on
things in the earth is an enduring affection. This
can be tested in that part of the love of the world to
be, the 'sacred passion', which takes concrete shape
for us in a love for those others, who are of that world
and will make it, if our human loves endure, what to
ourself it will be. If the affection does not wane with
the hours that chime for the survivor upon the clocks
of mortals, the fact will not be meaningless. For in
the sphere of the sensible it is so with our loves, that
they suffer extinction if their object ceases to be there.
The loved one become unlovable (if that can happen,
as some will deny), the friend turned traitor, the child
grown for ever ingrate — these are objects of love which
have ceased to exist; for, though the persons may
still be there, that in them which was loved is there
no longer. Here are affections that have died with the
death of that in the once loved one by union with

64 THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY
which they had their existence. We turn from these
and ask, How it is with those loves of ours in which
lover and beloved are now sundered by the gulf of
the worlds. The relation which we name love was
between these two terms, but if that other term in the
love-relation is nothing any more, then love on this
side the gulf must be cancelled too ; God is not a God
of dead men, but of living : and a lover is lover not
of those who are not, but those who are. But if this
love is not cancelled, if along the viewless unimagin
able line, drawn and twined out of the stuff of that
mystic ether of which all the web of the All is woven,
there come and go vibrations that strike from heart
to heart between Here and There, then the love-tie is
not sundered and the loved one yet is. On the line
of time my affections have life yet whole in them.
Yet again in our emotional nature there is, in the
degree in which a personality is realised in us, an
order and a principle, making of it a whole : our
affections, like our thoughts, are a world. We shall
ask therefore whether those affections which have their
objects in ' the other world ' belong to a world really
' other.' Whether, that is, they are incongruous and
incompatible with the rest of our dispositions. Do the
loves towards our parted friends move in the home of
a heart as outlanders from a stranger race, or are they
given a welcome and sistered there by the most
gracious affections that are of the household of love?
If so, then my affections have life in the measure of
space.

THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY 65
3. But the Will, the faculty of action,— how is it
with this? The will, as we know it most familiarly, is
the will to live : it is the mainspring of that machinery
by which my present existence is maintained. But my
belief in an After-life is a will to live on. We ask then
whether, in the determination to survive, the whole
organ of volition concurs. Are we able with all our
will to drink of this cup of immortality and be baptised
with this baptism in the water of life? Does our
personal ambition include this in its scope, and do we
plan our courses of action so as to compass this
achievement among the rest ; or are we content to be
faithful over few things, the ambitions gratifiable on
earth, and not also to be rulers over the many things
hereafter ? If our whole will is bent on living on, that
fact has significance. As was said of racers towards
a rowers' goal, Possunt quia posse videntur, so can be
said of a nobler race. If our soul be set on reaching
the goal of immortality, that is no light persuasion
that the goal can be attained.
But this Will, can it keep its grasp upon the belief
that it will survive when hand and feet, the strong
servants of the will, shall have been unmorticed from
wrist and anklejoint? We men, who are maintained
in temporal being by the will to live, are we conscious
of a will to live on which can endure and knows no
surrender? How powerfully have I seen it urged that
the very old give token, as the mortal fire dies down
in their bodies, of a will not to go on but to cease.
Not to begin new work is their desire, but to have
E

66 THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY
done with the labour of living as they are. Or have
we perhaps ourselves heard some potent spirit, over
worn with study or statesman cares, avow that, in the
stress of the new ideas and many inventions which are
changing the world, he is not sorry to be at the end of
his own time? Surely here, might it be said, Nature
teaches, nay, in Lucretian phrase, vociferates the
truth that the organism, when its task is done, is an
outworn tool to be cast upon the scrap-heap, not
re-forged for other use. But I think we should interro
gate Nature's meaning more closely. What will is this
in the fading body that has stretched out conquered
hands of surrender to death? The will to live per
haps : but not the will to live on. King Harold on the
eve of Hastings fight flings himself down on his couch,
refusing to task his mind with cares of battle, however
urgent, any more.
"Were the great trumpet blowing doom's-day dawn,
I needs must rest."
That is not because he has no will to fight next morn
ing. And the worn fighter, that is ourself, lays him
down with even such a will, not to live, but to live on.
Our death, even as some have called our birth, ' is
but a sleep and a forgetting, ' and is a forgetting only
because it is a sleep, and because though the great
trumpet will blow doom's-day dawn, yet this night
time before it we needs must rest. Judge every one
for himself whether or no his mortal will has a hope
full of immortality.

THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY 67
III
We have measured life in the soul in its dimensions
of time and space; have seen that it can be known
whether by his belief in a future the believer's soul
lives through all its parts and in all its days; have,
as it were, spanned the length and breadth of the life.
But besides extent and duration life must have also the
dimension of intensity; we must gauge the pressure
of the force within the limits of time and space. If
we know the length and breadth, we have still to learn
the depth and height. Otherwise, just as things inani
mate, if they had but the two dimensions of surface
and not the third which makes them solid, would have
no real existence, so things animate do not exist as
animate if their existence is only in time and space.
Life, might a Pythagorean say, is a cube. Therefore,
though our investigation so far of the facts which life
presents to our sense-experience may have yielded us
some inference for or agaiust the survival of man, it
will be an unsubstantial inference, if it ceases here.
Those with whom we reason will object that ' with but
little persuasion they wouldest fain persuade me to be
believer in the Resurrection.' We must measure
life's intensity; we must ask not only how widely and
how long but also how much we are alive, when we
hold the faith that the dead are raised.
But can this be measured? Can the methods of
scientific research be applied to this? Can the inter
communion of the human spirit with the divine, which

68 THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY
life has seemed to us, be interpreted in weights or
numbers? How long that communion endures, over
how great a surface of the soul the divine embrace is
felt, we may somehow reckon in earthly numbers. But
when it is not the spaciousness but the pressure, not
the persistence but the insistence that we would know,
what instrument of sense can register this? Surely
one must lay down the rules and spans of men and
borrow some angel's measuring-rod, such as the
mystic's faculty of super-sensuous, immediate percep
tion, which for the sake of a name he calls Intuition.
And indeed if one should press the maxim that
spiritual things are spiritually discerned, it might well
seem that only a mystic's method can deal with a fact
so mystical as life's dimension of intensity. For this
quality of forcefulness, one is led to think, will prove
to be the true differentia of life, that which makes a
living thing unlike all else in nature ; here may be the
secret we are in quest of, Life's very self.
It is not the continuance nor the spread of a life
in me, accompanying the belief in another world, that
works assurance of that world's reality : it is the
strength of the stroke of life upon the thing that fives,
and the vigour of the counterstroke from that living
thing. This event that happens in my soul, that a con
viction, which is unreasoned and cannot be reasoned
out of me, of a Second Life for me and for mine, beats
in my veins with so strenuous a pulse ; that there are
' moments when I feel I cannot die ' nor my own can
die — this event surely can be no other than the touch

THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY 69
of the creative Finger out of the dark that girdles my
range of mortal sight. Here is what no sense reports
and no science registers. Here we have done with
reason, and some more ghostly function of the spirit
must become our intelligencer henceforward. Why
then should not that 'Intuition' of the mystic, that
sense added from without to the other senses, be the
organ of the soul by which we hold converse with the
Beyond? This world of Nature we know by Sight :
but it is Faith — not Sight — which beholds that which
is invisible. IV
The mystic, and the simple, who with his own nomen
clature aims at the same mark, are right and they are
wrong; right when they assert a power of human
nature for which they find the name of Intuition or of
Instinct, wrong when they deny the power of reason
and the senses to inform of them of the unseen Reality.
Their error lies here. In their conception of an
organ of spiritual discernment separate in kind from
the organ of sense-perception, they misconceive the
world. They suppose that there are two worlds, the
Seen and the Unseen, and a gulf between them which
reason cannot pass. If this were so, then it might well
be that there were two faculties by which to know the
two, Sight and Faith, or Experience and Intuition.
But then it is not so. We must change our whole way
of thinking : we must make a new beginning of thought
and conceive the world afresh. There is need to be
born anew, to have our thoughts come again as the

70 THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY
flesh of a little child, if we would see the kingdom of
God as in earth so in heaven.
But how to make this new beginning? Some new
power of our nature must deliver us from our limita
tions of thought. This will not be the power which
we call, at least in popular speech, the reason. In
our late analysis, tedious perhaps and meticulous as it
may have seemed, of a believer's experience, by which
we have sought to measure out the facts of vitality in
the soul, we have gone as far as can be gone by the
pedestrian march of logic, and it is time to let imagina
tion lift us for a moment on a wing. We shall be
exchanging the lesser teacher for the greater. Analy
sis, observation, induction, are true muses; but the
mother of all muses is not Memory, as was fabled, but
Imagination. Reason and logic are not her sisters,
but her children : in the best knit argument and
shrewdest analytic, it is still the Image-maker that
works, though there she images, not lovely shape and
scene and act, but the hard anatomy within the curves
of beautiful form, the dry schedule of reason under
the glowing rhyme, the naked diagram of abstract
relations on which the Visions that make blest are built.
This must be our teacher now if we are to learn and
to keep whole and undefiled the behef that the dead
shall live. For why is that belief hard? Because of
the poverty of our power to image a world to come.
It is not criticism, as some suppose, that breaks the
resurrection hope. Criticism can do nothing to break
down or to build up, until imagination has given it the

THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY 71
images which it can order and erect into a thought.
If we are to reason out to ourselves a faith in a world
in which we are to live on, first we must image forth
that world. That is what is hard. For it must be a
world where time (as we tell ourselves, perhaps too
hastily) cannot be, and where space will have no mean
ing : but how image anything without this frame of
time and space ! The troubles of Time overcome our
mind. To think of an end may choke our spirit, but
to think of an endlessness — this too is a fear that hath
some torment. From that gulf of an infinite, homeless
sky, we are half fain to take shelter in the tent which
some philosophers erect for us, when they say, in our
day as in Paul's, that the resurrection is passed
already, for behold we have risen in a New Life of
character achieved on this homelike floor of present
earth, and need not to look on to that vasty hall of
Futurity. Or the troubles of Space go over us. With
what body do they come, the dead? With what body
indeed, when we ask it, came from His empty tomb
the Risen Lord? And how shall I bear up against the
leaden weight of Nature's monotonous affirmation that
all the children of space came from earth, and to earth
all return and none of them are found any more again ?
Almost our spirit is tempted to seek relief in that
Eastern creed, that as the body crumbles back into
nameless dust, so will the soul re-melt, as cloud into
sky, as wave into ocean, and be lost in the unfeatured
Whole, which at once is the All and is the Nothingness.
From this prison of logic the liberator must be the

72 THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY
Imagination, which again and again has liberated the
human spirit. As when she was the angel of the Lord
who took the Syrian shepherd by the hand and led him
forth at night to look upon the stars and know the
number of his seed, and the Oneness of the God, who
was Father of all the family in heaven and earth. Or
as when she was guide to that sage of Greece, master
of Roman Lucretius, who ' first of mortals dared to
lift eyes against a tyrant faith, Religion, the Binder of
souls, brow-beating mortals with her scowl from a
lowering heaven.' And is not our prison of thought
very like to that from which Lucretius would lead out
his countrymen. For they imaged the place of man's
destiny as a narrow floor of earth-dust overarched by
a low dome of iron firmament, ' studded with burning
stars.' From this close place he would have them
come forth with him and his master. They must
venture out beyond ' the flaming walls of the universe '
and watch the tides of creative energy 'bearing all
things through a void ' ; for so they would learn the
width and wonder of the All, and the idle terrors would
be withered off their souls. And are not we lodged,
we too, in such a prison-world, with even such narrow
ing and stifling walls, and even such a gaoler of it to
brow-beat us with idle fears, when we conceive of a
human existence in that image and likeness which our
sense-experience has constructed for us; and which
we suppose, by ' a weak disabling of ourselves,' is the
only image which that experience is competent to
build. The world, which alone we think is known to

THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY 73
us through our senses, is a closed circle or hollow
sphere of matter, of which floor and wall and roof are
just so far and no further from us than the furthest
points to which on all sides our mortal senses reach.
This sphere of the temporal and actual encloses as in
a dome the soul of man : she sits at centre of it, and
the senses are the radii with which she spans the cir
cumference, the arms which she can stretch to feel the
bounds of her strait prison, the world that now is.
Doubtless she knows, or at least hopes, that this world
is not all her being's world. Above that near, hard
firmament of the vault of space, this low-browed crypt
of mortal time, there is another world, the Eternal :
she prays some day to inherit it. But meanwhile this
Eternal is to her another world : that is her error and
her sorrow. It is another : the worlds she knows of
are two ; they are not one. And the powers by which
she knows them are two ; they are not one. There are
the senses, with the reason to unify them, by which
to know the present world ; there is some other organ
by which to know the world to come . It must be faith,
says the soul to herself, if she is simple Christian : it
must be Intuition, she says, if she is also philosopher.
That is her error; and the pity of it is much.
V
For all the while she has an instrument of knowledge
by which she can know the things outside the range
within which her senses seem tethered. That instru
ment is and is not Intuition, and it is not and is

74 THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY
Experience. The organ by which the soul knows the
eternal world is Herself. It is her total nature, the
whole personal being which has the name of man.
What is this Self, and of what is it made? It is
built up of the manifold relations in which the personal
being, a man, stands to the whole of Being. Such
relations are seeing, hearing, touching ; and such are
understanding, feeling, and putting force upon things.
This organ, the whole Self, has its functioning, as all
the lesser organs have, in fulfilling and maintaining
these relations to the Whole : it sees and touches with
eye and hand, and with mind or heart it perceives or is
emotionally affected. One of these energies is that
which we call Knowing. But it is only one of them :
it is the sensitiveness of only a portion of that total
surface of sensibility which the Self exposes to contact
with the world outside it, and by which it lives, moves,
and has its being in that world. In the activity caUed
Knowing, the soul, as it were, specialises : her general
ised function of relating herself to or living unto the
world becomes a specific function, that which we call
Thought. But this faculty of Thought or Knowing
differs from the faculty of Being or Living only as a
species differs from its genus. Thinking is the species
of which Being is the genus. When, therefore, the
soul, instead of merely relating herself generally to
the world, enters into the particular relation of know
ing it, she does not cross a frontier from one kind of
action to another; she only makes her relations with
Reality more definite, complex, and intimate. But

THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY 75
before she ' knew ' Reality in the common sense of
knowing, she was alive to it : the relations in which
she stood to it were already there : she felt the reality,
she re-acted towards it. To be in these relations to
the world of fact was already to know the world : not
to know it well, but to know. This is the meaning
with which we assert that the soul has an organ by
which she knows the Eternal Facts. That organ is
Herself : by living unto the Eternal with all her self,
touching and touched by it, she knows it.* And when
she is aware of being alive unto this fact among eternal
facts, — a world to come of which she is part and
parcel, a law of survival of men that die, — then she
has learned that she is immortal, and her belief in the
Resurrection of the dead is a right belief.
VI
It was imagination, we said, that must give us this
vision of the world and of the faculty by which we
know it. But it must give it us by an image. So one
images to oneself the life of some deep-sea creature
which lives and moves and has its being in boundless
ocean. Round it floats an enveloping sphere of sea-
water : this is the near environment to which its
* To speak of a Self which at once knows and does not know the
remoter world will appear to be an intrusion on ground over which
new philosophies of the Subconscious are working. This territory,
however, lies for these philosophies within their ' sphere of influence '
(in the statesman's phrase) but not of occupation ; and beside their
metaphor of the Subliminal Consciousness there is room for others
such as our own, attempting the interpretation of the problem.

76 THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY
organism makes the response which is of immediate
necessity for its existence. But that sphere of water
is continuous with all the water of ocean from pole to
pole ; and to all that world of water this living creature
is, as it were, alive, is in vital continuity with it. Into
that little envelope of fluid the earthquake a thousand
miles away sends a tremor from its spasm ; into it steals
the warm touch of a far-off gulf -stream, the cold of
arctic ice-mountains, the freshness from the rain-floods
poured off a thousand hills, the saltness from the briny
heart of ocean which no rivers of the sweet rains can
reach; hither the arrows of the sunlight pierce with
spent, pointless shafts, through the unsounded dark,
and the roar of battling navies descends with a
smothered rumour into the deaf abyss. All the liquid
world affects its creature with its warmths and rigours,
sweetnesses or salt, its lights and echoes, its pressures
and its thrills.
This is our parable and thus we would interpret it.
A human soul moves in a near environment of the
things the man hears, sees, touches, the world of time
and space. By his relations to these he has his hfe
of the present. But not all his life. He is also living
to other facts than the facts near him. Things that
happen further off, the things of what we call the
Eternal Order, these send their vibrations to and
through the envelope of his mortal conditions, and
these too deliver their stroke upon his being. We do
not say that he ' knows ' them ; for we do not say he
sees, hears, handles them, since we cannot assign to

THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY 77
any one sense the thing that happens to him, when the
impact of a remote happening falls upon him. Yet he
does know them by the Self which is spread through
all his senses. He knows them by what happens to
that self, by a response which the self makes to the
stimulation, though the stimulus is not recognised and
named. If the effect of that stimulus on the organism
of a soul has been an enhancement of that soul's
vitality, then in this way the soul knows the force which
causes it. The creature of our sea-parable knows of
the solar beam that travels all but extinguished into
its dark ring of water, not because it has knowledge
of a sun in the sky which visits it, but because an
animation quickens in it by the touch, and because
thus that far, unseen sun is a fountain of life to it : in
its light it sees light. So the man knows the day of
his visitation from the world beyond sense, not because
he has descried in heaven a day-spring from on high,
which has visited him in his mortal dark, but because
his nature has been thrilled and strung, lightened and
quickened, eased and comforted, by an impact he
cannot name nor even clearly discriminate among his
sensations, but which has wrought these effects upon
him. With that Power unseen is the well of life, and
in its light he has seen light. VII
Yet in a measure he can name, not the force itself,
but his experience of it. For that experience (this
we want here to assert and later make good) is a thing

78 THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY
that happens to the man not in the spirit only but also
in the body. For the body, or flesh, is the soul so far
as related to this world, the time and space world.
This human frame of sense, and of mind and character
embodied in sense, this manifestation of a spirit in
matter, is in response to the supernal reality, it is acted
on by it and re-acts ; it is visited and knows the day
of its visitation. Things happen to that human frame,
the flesh of a spirit : thoughts happen on the brain,
emotions happen in the heart, actions are performed
by the hand; and all these are effects in the flesh of
an influence from the spiritual world. These happen
ings can be noted, verified, and in a degree estimated,
can be known in fact even as all else is known that is
knowable. Yes, in some sort flesh and blood do reveal
to us the act upon us of the Father who is in heaven.
In homelier language, there can be some science even
of Faith. VIII
The Lord our God is one God, and God's world is
one world, and the knowledge by which we know it
is one. That is our contention. God's will is done
as in heaven so in earth; and God's way is known as
by heaven, so by earth ; not by spirit only but also by
flesh. The mystery of divine vitality doth already
work in the children of obedience, while they are yet
in the body, and we can have our mortal senses exer
cised to discern good and evil, as good and evil are in
the world of eternal fact.

THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY 79
But our research is into truth more particular than
the existence of an eternal order. Concerning this
momentous particular in that order, the Resurrection
of the Dead, and how man can know it, we have chosen
to be called in question. It will have to be asked
presently, what cannot be asked now, whether this
great article of the creed is a truth which can be
verified only by the tests which in all times and places
all believers have been wont to employ — the tests
of Scriptural authority, church tradition, deductive
reasoning, and mystical intuition, which is a Christian's
second sight. It will be asked whether human nature
has not, in its present low estate of mortal existence,
a knowledge of this particular fact of eternal existence,
— that man whose life is unto time and space also has
hfe unto the timeless and spaceless reality, and because
It lives he shall live also. And it will be asked whether
that knowledge is not like all his other knowledge, and
attainable in part by use of these same natural senses,
which light up for him that little arc of the whole circle
of Being, a man's time on earth.
To ask these questions is to put on trial a proposed
method of spiritual research. It is to endeavour to
make good the assertion just now ventured, that the
soul has an organ of proof by which she is informed
of eternal fact, and that this organ is Herself. Its
functioning is all that activity by which the soul lives
to the seen and actual world, but also to the unseen
and yet more real world. In part, and not in little
part, this activity is exercised through the use of the

80 THE CREED OF IMMORTALITY
natural senses by which all other experience is har
vested. We do not put aside the well-recognised
verifying instruments of Tradition or Reasoning, nor
do we deny the alleged faculty of Intuition. We do
claim that Traditionalist and Intuitionalist should not
reject this instrument of Sense-perception, and give
to their own instruments work which the bare senses
can achieve. It is true that we walk by faith and not
by sight. Yet, for some of the near reaches of our
pilgrim road, Faith, even she, is also Sight.

IV
THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION
[March 19th, 1911.]

"He that wonders shall reign."
"Wonder at that which is before you."

Traditional sayings of Christ
preserved by Clement of Alexandria
{Strom.. II. 9, 45).

IV
THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION
Psalm cxxvi. 1-5. — "When the Lord turned again the captivity
of Sion, then were we like unto them that dream. Then was our
mouth filled with laughter and our tongue with joy. Then said
they among the heathen, The Lord hath done great things for them.
Yea, the Lord hath done great things for us already, whereof we
rejoice. Turn our captivity, O Lord, as the rivers in the south."
I
We have now ventured to name an organ of knowledge
by which the soul knows the world it lives in. It is
an instrument which must not be identified either with
the Senses, by which alone many think we experience
fact; or with that Intuition by which a few conceive
that we can apprehend remoter Being. The organ by
which we know the facts that lie beyond the range of
the senses is, we ventured to say, our Self. This Self
lives to the world, the whole world, material and
spiritual : and it is by living to this world that it knows
it. The measure of its knowledge is the measure of
the life by which the Self responds to That which Is.
This position, that to be alive to God's world is to
know that world, was attained by exercise of that
faculty of the Reason which we call Imagination. By

84 THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION
it we have pictured the world as a sphere of Being,
one and continuous throughout, not really divided into
provinces of Seen and Unseen, with a blind wall
between them at which the march of reason must halt.
All motions that take place anywhere within this sphere
of the All must move through it everywhere, just as,
in a similitude which we framed, the sea-creature in
ocean's depth receives upon its body some impulse,
however dulled, from every agitation in the remotest
parts of its liquid continuous world of waters. There
fore the soul, while conscious mainly of such agitations
as occur in its near envelopment of the bodily exist
ence, must also receive the impact, with however
infinitesimal an effect, of the events or facts which
originate in the further environment called the spiritual
existence. To that impact it must respond, as really,
though not as consciously, as it responds in its physical
organism to the stimulus of the external forces of
nature, the touch of air and water, of storm and sun
shine, of hurtful shocks which must be shunned. That
is to say, the soul of a man is a personal being which
extends, potentially at least, and to a degree actually,
through all the world. Each soul, one must venture
it, is in all Being and knows it all, by making that
response to it which is to live unto its world. As on
a lake the water-ring about a thrown pebble spreads
ideally to the shore everywhere, and a myriad other
such rings would over-run it and reach the same
margin, and each become one with the whole lake-
circle, yet each remain itself, not lost in the whole

THE CEEED OF THE RESURRECTION 85
nor the whole in it, — so is it with the universe and
the souls of men. Our soul can grow till it gather
into its circumference all the world, and every soul
can do the same, and they cannot be numbered and
yet none is lost.
But there is an image which will suit our purpose
better. The soul is a web of far-spreading threads
which are so many sensitive nerves, with its centre,
the Ego or Self, placed (if it have a centre, as is not
certain) on the plane of earth. It stretches the net
work of perceptive nerves out and out, till they cross
the earth-horizon and travel on, unsevered and alive
and sentient still, into the infinite, where abide the
great Facts which are the works of God, the Facts by
response to which He who made us ordained our souls
to live. When our soul does respond to the touch
of these Facts, it lives to them. And when it lives
to them, then and thus it knows them. When it lives.
That living to the Facts of the Eternal World must
be a living of all the soul, not of a part. Not of the
mind which lives to facts by a reasoning, but also of
the heart which lives by a feeling towards them, and
of the will which lives by an act that meets their action.
The soul of the wise man, said the Greek, is spectator
of all time and all existence. That would be a too
sparing saying of the soul. She is not spectator only
of creation : she is also lover of it and actor with it.
Not by Vision does she know the world what it is ; she
knows it by a Vision, by an Affection, by a Deed.
Visio Dei Vita Hominis.

86 THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION
II
From Imagination's watchtower, which we climbed
to overlook the world, we would now descend and
regain the path our quest was pursuing. We had left
it at this point. It was necessary for our argument
that we should particularise the experiences in the
organism of a soul, which would be signs that it was
receiving life Irom that unseen reality to which it had
given itself by the act of belief. This life, we thought,
was to be measured in the three dimensions of Perma
nence or Extension in Time, Pervasiveness or Exten
sion in Space, and Intensity or Force. This third,
however, seemed to be a dimension which can not be
measured. We hazarded that this was because
Intensity is the very secret of life, is Life Itself. But
there we paused, and betook ourselves to the vantage
height from which we hoped to see the wider field, by
relation to which this portion of the field would be
more intelligible. It is as we hoped.
For now, when we come to ask how we can discern
the intensity of life in the soul, when by the act of
belief it delivers itself over to the believed reality —
a friend's survival after death, — we find it is possible
to discern that sign of life ; and possible because we
learn that the world is one world, and the spirit of
man dwells always in the whole world, and not, as we
were fancying, first in the one province and afterwards
in the other.
Among the facts of the eternal world is this fact,

THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION 87
our faith says,— the friend who has departed this
present life. If that fact, his personal being, is there,
then the fact must have an action upon our personal
being; for our personality is also within that world.
What then is that action?
It is the stroke of a conviction which falls upon my
soul. I know in myself that it is so. He is there. I
know it, not because that conviction abides and will not
away, not because it fills all the chambers of my mind
and heart : but because my conviction is so strong.
I cannot keep it out : it is the violent who takes by
force the kingdom of my Self. I am sure of this Real
Thing, my friend alive, because the life in my soul
that kindles on that belief not only endures, not only
pervades me, but also beats with such a mighty pulse.
' No ' says the truster in positive science. ' The
mourner doubtless has sometimes that conviction you
name. But it is an illusion. It is memory of the past
that still lights up the present; it is the trail of a
meteor, luminous for a while; it is the shining arc in
the wake of the brandished torch; it is the dreamed
touch of a hand that has vanished, the sound in fancy's
echo of a voice that now is still.'
We will see whether this is so.
The mystic, on the other hand, says 'Yes. There
is in you a sense beside your senses. These cannot
know the world beyond, but this Intuition can know
it.' We will see whether it is so, or whether it is even
better than so.

88 THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION
For we are daring to think that it is both as you,
brother, suppose, that we have a sense of eternal
reality beside our senses of mortal man, and also, as
you have foregone to think, that these same mortal
senses can tell us something of the great News ; and
that beautiful on the mountains even of our low earth,
the Flesh, are the feet of messengers who bring us
good tidings of this good. Ill
For to us it seems that this knowledge of things
in the world beyond the horizons of sense, which you
call intuitional knowledge, and another critic calls no
knowledge but illusion, is the same knowledge, — not
indeed throughout, but for a great reach of its extent,
— the same knowledge as that whereby we know the
facts of which positive science informs us; — such a
fact, for example, as this, that some now present
living man, any friend of mine, exists and has to do
with me.
For how do I know that what stands there is my
friend, and not an illusion of the vision, a phantasm?
I know him in a threefold way, by my thought of him,
my feeling for him, my action towards him. For my
mind has an experience of him as a person, so has
my affectional nature, so has my active. But I know
him, be it observed, not by my thought, my love, my
will, but by our thoughts, loves, wills. I know the
person of a friend, the thing that he is in truth, by
his thoughts and mine that interchange, our affections

THE CREED OF THE RESUREECTION 89
that interlock, our purposes that interact. If when
my thought went out to him, no thought of his came
back to me ; when my love expanded towards him, no
love on his part came out towards me ; when my will
moved to act on him, no will in him either received
me or repelled me or went any whither along with
mine : — if no relation between him and me came into
being, either of friendship, or (to make our reasoning
complete) of hostility or rejection either — then there
was no such thing before me as I had for a moment
believed to be my friend in the body : there was an
illusion of the eye, a phantom, or, if any object, some
thing that was not a person.
All this knowledge, then, of another person who
is with myself in the sphere of things temporal is a
knowledge of the relations which exist between him
and me. This is a mere commonplace of philosophy.
And all these relations between us are experiences of
the senses; they are seen, felt, heard by me through
the organs in me which deal with the facts of the
world that now is. They are matters verifiable by
science, though, in the case of the perceptions of
personal relations, not an exact science ; while yet it
is a science which satisfies the enquirer's self, if no
one else. My sense-experience convinces me that the
friend is there and is a person of such or such a nature ;
and if some thorough-going sceptic warns me that I
cannot prove anything exists except my own person
ality, I am not impressed. On the contrary, I find
myself in agreement with the commonsense philo-

90 THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION
sopher, at whose simpleness it is usual to smile, who
confutes the idealist by the pressure of hand or foot,
which he says demonstrates the existence of matter.
I see that he is wise. For he has proved the reality
of substance by its reaction to his touch, made known
to him in sensations of a limb which dealt it; and I
prove my friend's reality in the same way. I act
towards him, and there is a reaction from his person
ality upon my own : I know it by the strokes of a force
which fall upon my sentient self.
IV
This is how we convince ourselves that our friend
exists in the world of matter. Our conviction, when
we have it, that a friend who has left the material
world still exists in the spiritual, is a conviction of
the same quality. We discover that between us and
him there are relations. This is what we come to
when we analyse the insistent consciousness, which
at first seems an inscrutable instinct, that a friend is
not dead, but alive. It is a discovery that our soul
is in response to him, and his to ours; things pass
between us. Thus, first on the side of its intelligence,
our soul is in this response ; there is an intercourse of
mind and mind. For this we will not cite the evidence
of those articulate messages from the unseen world,
'airy tongues that syllable men's names,' which
some living men and women have believed themselves
to receive. Such evidence appeals to the recipients,
less to others. And again, if we glance at the labours

THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION 91
of some who are now seeking by methods of strict
science to verify communications between the living
and the 'discarnate,' it is that we may bid them a
brotherly God-speed in a quest so lawfully and
reverently pursued by them, and in a spirit so wholly
noble, while we may not call in aid of our own research
results of an enquiry, which is still only on its way.
We shall ask instead, What think ye of this fact which
we find in ourselves, — this assurance which fastens on
our consciousness and will not away from it, that the
friend who died is not dead, but survives ? This assur
ance is a fact, whatever be its explanation. It is a
thing among things, whatever be the law of things
which it exhibits. There really are for man 'the
moments when he feels he cannot die ' and that his
brother has not died. Cogito, ergo sum, avowed the
metaphysician: 'I think, therefore I am.' Cogito
ergo est, ' I think, and therefore my friend is,' the plain
man may pronounce as a reason for the faith that is
in him. His conviction is inarticulate, formless,
abstract : there is no message in it from the further
world, ' telling what it is to die ' : it is not in word, it
is only in power. But in power it is : it possesses, it
masters the mind : we try to shake off its domination,
and let the other image of an existence ended, a life
consumed in the fires of Not-Being, sit in its place
upon the throne of our intelligence. But the image
of a life that lives on will not yield its place, and the
other vision is a strengthless phantom that goes brow
beaten away. Of this fact of human experience an

92 THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION
account must be rendered. There is the account
which many enquirers render : the image of a con
tinued life is subjective, they say, it is a fume of the
mind, a memory mistaken for a present experience;
it is the fancied sensation in a limb which the surgeon's
knife has severed. We claim that our account of it
fits the phenomenon more closely : this is the vibra
tion, we say, from a distant consciousness which beats
upon our own. It is known already that mind can
send such vibrations upon another mind across wide
distances on the earth-plain : why should the telepathy
fail when the space to be traversed lies in part along
the earth-plain and in part along reaches of the wider
world? Why, in the communication of spirits, should
the line break at the horizon of matter; seeing that
matter has no horizon line in fact, but world of matter
flows into world of spirit, as sea melts into sea, and in
the one continuous ether of which all the worlds are
built there rises no disconnecting barrier to stay the
current of the travelling force, which is a thought?
V
Thought, do I say? Do we know the friend is there
in the Unseen only because we think his survival?
That survival is made known to us not only by a
relation to him which we experience in our rational
soul, but also by what happens in our affections.
' Peace, let it be, for I loved him, and love him for ever ;
the dead are not dead but alive.' So cries a mourner
in a poet's verse, and those also who cannot verse

THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION 93
their love, can avow it. The love for the lost comrade
is there: what shall be assigned as its origin? If
illusion or memory's trick is the interpretation offered,
the lover who is mourner will answer that you have
not spelt his case ; he knows what love living and ex
perienced is, and he knows what love dead and
remembered is; it is not memory, but experience,
that is with him now. This too he knows, that this
love has joy for him. But were the love unreal, were
it a passion that found no response, were it a yearning
for that which is no more nor ever can be again, the
love would be to him not a joy but a bitterness, a tragic
pain, like the memory of an affection for a yet living
friend who has proved unworthy of being loved, a
memory which we would drive away from our brain
and breast. Or again, the impulse thus denied an
outlet would be the ache of a faculty denied its exer
cise, the woe of the strong, wild creature caged. But
this love, though it may kindle tears, has not suffering
for him, but joy and enlargement, it has the blessing of
peace, a savour not of death, but of life unto life.
So then that assurance of a friend's existence is not a
conviction of the mind alone, but also a passion of the
heart. And the passion is there in power. It does
not only persist, it does not only pervade our being :
the rhythm of life which pulses in the heart-beat of
this love is also strong. It is in the length and in
the breadth, but also in the depth.

94 THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION
VI
And yet there is a third element in the assurance
we are analysing. The soul is thinker and lover, but
also it is actor. Towards the parted friend it can
have also a will.
When the idea is raised of an intercourse between
two wills, one in the temporal, the other in the supra-
sensuous sphere, a broad field of the human conscious
ness is stirred by that challenge. Men have always
and everywhere held, in a surmise or even a convic
tion, the belief in such intercourse, whether for
succour or antagonism. St. Paul wrestles not against
flesh and blood, but unseen evil wills ; Joan of France
fights not till she has conferred with her ghostly
' Council ' among the trees ; soldiers in old Greece and
soldiers in new Japan have thanked the spirits of the
past for championship in the battle of to-day ; Harold
of England tells his men before a victory
" Last night King Edward came to me in dreams ;
He told me we should conquer,"
and the world has tales enough of revisitant forms
dimly glimpsed in postures of aid over child or friend
in danger. These things we have called pious fancies.
What do we say of the experience, known inwardly,
though rarely and in secrecy professed, of not a few
from the days of Socrates to our own, — the experience
of a monition or an impulsion to act or refrain from
acting? 'It came on me,' one says, 'to do this or

THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION 95
that : I could not see why, but I did it, and then I saw,
for it was the thing that needed to be done.' What
do we say of this touch of spur or bridle? 'Mere
coincidence' perhaps you call it. Some of us,
then, will prefer to err with Socrates, who named it
a 'Something Spiritual.' And, while one muses on
these things, it breaks upon one that just now certain
new readings of natural fact are pointing a finger
towards this old reading of facts transcending nature.
That will can sometimes act on distant will across
terrestrial intervals is a truth which, to state the posi
tion modestly, can now hardly be refused the name
of a scientific verity; and it needs a somewhat self-
confident scepticism to scout the hopes of Research
that she may bridge the intervals which lie for part
of the distance within the Unseen. But while Research
is still groping her way across, some of us ' believing
where we cannot prove,' will ride out on private
adventure. We shall come back avowing that there
went Another on our quest : a presence in the dark
barred a false path against us ; a tender hand drew us
aside to a generosity, a forgiveness, a loving-kindness ;
our nerve was steeled for a peril by a touch of steel,
that was the temper of some fighter of the past, so that
"Almost I felt him fold
An arm in mine to fix me to the place
That way he used ; "
or in a lonely wrestle of the reason we were not alone,
there was again a dialectic of two souls, and ours
sought a truth with his.

96 THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION
So then along the line of this third strand of con
sciousness, the will by which man acts, along this also
as well as the strands of thought and emotion, the com
munion passes of the Seen and the Unseen. Threefold
is the knowledge that has come. It is a conviction,
and it is a passion, and it is a power. How strong is
the fibre of this bond which knits us to the Unseen!
The doubts which interpret our experience by the
theory of Illusion might make the bond perish, could
they strain its members one by one. A threefold cord
is not so quickly broken. The man who feels the life
quicken in brain and heart and will at once, must be
alive indeed unto some reality. By an organ of know
ledge which is his Self, and by a function of it which
is the sense of living, this man knows of a fact beyond
the veil of bodily sense. That reality among the
realities is this Other, whom here he loved and lost.
In that death they are not divided. They hold sweet
counsel yet together, and still in the great house of
God they walk as friends. VII
Let us briefly sum this reasoning up. We have
reasoned that where we speak of ' knowing ' an eternal
truth we misname that energy of the soul : we are
using the name of a part for a name of the whole.
The soul knows a truth not by the workings of its
intelligence, but by the energy of its whole being.
This energy is the movement by which the soul
approaches and touches the unseen reality which it

THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION 97
seeks to know. In that contact the soul finds life.
There happens a communion of the mortal self and
a Self in the eternal world : by that interchange each
lives unto each. That sense of life received by the
soul is its evidence of things not seen. Hereby it
knows the Resurrection of the Dead.
Yet we are not of those reasoners who by retreating
with their argument into the shadowland of myth,
evade refutation. On the contrary, it is our main
contention that this evidence of things not seen is
rendered in things that do appear. This life of the
soul which results from its contact with a reality
beyond the range of the senses, is a sensible fact.
Our senses receive upon them the stroke of the reality
which has met us, and they register that force so that
we can read it off, as we read off by our instruments
the weight of winds, volume of rains, the heat of the
sunbeam. The signs which register our contact with
this reality — the survival of man — are the conviction
which grips the mind, the passion which strains the
heart, the energy which animates the will. These
phenomena are sensible phenomena. They have even
their material equivalents, which could be read, had
science the insight, in the thrills of the brain and the
labour of the blood. This eternal blazon can, in some
measure, be to ears of flesh and blood. But at least
for the science, less exact but still science, of psy
chology, the soul offers itself to observation : it can
be observed whether the intelligence has or has not
an assurance, and the will a purpose, which are vivid.
G

98 THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION
This observation of what happens to a man's soul in
the flesh is in some measure possible even for another
than the man's self : so far as we can estimate char
acter in another, so far can we observe these psychic
changes in his inward nature, which we claim as effects
of a cause which lies in the super-sensuous region.
Doubtless that is not very far. But our argument that
the proof of spiritual fact is discernible in fleshly fact,
is not thereby invalidated. For as the heart knoweth
its own bitterness and a stranger doth not intermeddle
with its joy, yet none the less the joy or the bitterness
is to the heart certain, and assures it that there is a
real cause of what it feels, even so is it here. To
whom if not to my own soul is it necessary that proof
of the eternal life be given? When I have found it,
how gladly will I share it with others. But first, it
is myself who crave assurance. I shall not find it by
a stranger's eyes : he cannot appease the bitterness of
my doubt, no, nor intermeddle with my joy when in
my house of life unto me is born my faith.
VIII
Here then is our reasoning. It has been made
possible, let me recall, only where the way has been
made plain for the discourse of reason by a more
primal faculty, the imagination. The human soul, an
heir of the wide universe, is by its earthly generation
born into the narrow dwelling-house, her nursery after
birth, which we name Experience, meaning the experi
ence of the senses. 'Thence she comes forth to

THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION 99
re-behold the stars,' the stars of all the heaven, and
to learn that in this All she is at home. There she
can know even as she is known, by a knowledge which
is the life that builds the world and binds it into one.
That the knowledge of the eternal world comes not
but by imagination is no new doctrine, but a very old.
The Greek who said in his pragmatic way that philo
sophy begins in wonder, was wording this truth,
though in part only, for wonder is more than the
curiosity which leads to science. Far nearer came
his brother Greek who praised that myth which made
Thaumas, Spirit of Wonder, to be parent of Iris, winged
messenger of heaven, the Spirit of divine-human
communion. And nearer still comes our re- wording
of the truth, when we speak of imagination in her
activity of Wonder. For Imagination wondering —
what is it? It is not surprise, with which we tend to
confound it ; for surprise is only the attempt to adjust
the self to an emergency ; to be surprised is to be aware
that something new comes over us, a peril or an oppor
tunity. The least conscious of living things, the dull
beast, the fish, the insect, is susceptible of surprise.
Wonder is the reaction not to the new simply, but to
the new which is also the great. It is the reaction of
the self to the contact with greatness, whether the
greatness of the vast, or the strong, or the beautiful.
It is a poet's Adam, gazing for the first time on the
starry world revealed by night-fall, when
"Hesperus with the host of heaven came,
And lo ! creation widened in man's view."

100 THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION
Wonder is that vital act by which the soul attempts to
relate itself to the world, as discovered to be great
beyond her knowledge of it ; and this act, like all acts
that are vital, is an uprender of herself to this great
ness which renders itself to her. [_We know the
eternal world by that effort of our spirit to live unto
that world, which we have called imaginative wonder\
In that effort there is hardihood at once and awe, as
the soul peers out from the shell of her temporal
encompassment, ventures to confront the greatness
which is for her, and the heart fears and is enlarged.
' He that wonders shall reign ' is a word recorded by a
too doubtful tradition as a saying of Jesus. It is a
true saying, even if of less authority. He shall be
inheritor of the Kingdom of Life who dares lift up his
eyes to heaven and wonder at the vastness of his doom.
IX
If, then, our faculty of sense-perception gives us
intelligence of facts in the spiritual region, what do
we say of the faculty, which some claim for the soul,
of knowing supra-mundane fact intuitively? We shall
offer the surmise that this Intuition is a name for the
soul's capacity of experiencing fact by that part of its
organism which extends, according to the metaphor,
beyond the circle of the temporal order into the
eternal order. Those outstretched threads of the
web, as we figured it, of sentient being, perceive by
touch the forces which move in that more rarified
atmosphere, and they make those adjustments of the

THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION 101
self to the far environment which, if they prosper, are
acts of life. But these members of our total con
sciousness, since they lie in the supra-sensuous region,
cannot record their experiences of the facts they
encounter there in terms of the temporal order, cannot
translate into the language of sight and sound that
which eye hath not seen nor ear hath heard, but which
it yet does somehow enter into the heart of man to
conceive by a faculty of personality to which, since we
need to name it, let us give the name Intuition.
Sense experience, soul intuition, these, then, are not
two kinds of knowing, but successive stages of one
knowledge. Here in our mortal estate, our cognisance
of the immortal reality, and of those lives in it which
for each of us breathing men are our own dearest
concern in that reality, — this cognisance must mainly
be that experience of the senses ; though doubtless it
is for ever over-passing the ideal but not actual horizon
fine of space and time. The hungerer after com
munion with souls now on that line's further side is
hke that tender singer of exiled and rescued Israel to
whom had been vouchsafed, in the remnant restored,
a pledge of his people's full return, while the fulfilment
tarried yet. ' When the Lord turned again the cap
tivity of Zion, then were we like unto them that
dream.' And when the Lord turns again for ourselves to-day
our captives of Zion; turns them again, restores, by
that frail communion in which through the experience
of one organ of the soul, our mortal sense, life touches

102 THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION
parted life again, then we, too, are like unto them that
dream. The Lord hath done great things for us
already, even this scant restoring to us of severed
souls, whereof we rejoice. Yet 'turn our captivity,
O Lord, like the rivers in the south,' when the sweet
rains have filled the desolate hollows of their bed.
Turn again to each yearning spirit of man the captives
of mortality, in that river that brims its bank, of a
communion where all of their soul shall commune with
all of ours. X
To what are we being led by our study of the behef
in the Life Everlasting? We have reached a goal, to
find it a starting-point. For in learning how we of
this day believe in the survival of our brother who
has died, we perhaps have been learning how men in
the first days believed that Christ, who for us men and
for our salvation died on the cross, rose again on the
third day from the dead. Are we this way finding a
clue to the problem of the Resurrection of Jesus?
The difficulties which beset our understanding of
the Appearances of Jesus after the Passion are largely
the perplexities which arise from the mingling in the
story of two orders of fact, the bodily and the spiritual,
supposed to be not only distinct, but disparate and
incompatible. We need but name the empty tomb,
the vacant grave-clothes, the body offering itself to
touch, yet more unsubstantial than the air, the scars of
wounds showing on limbs which were now of spirit

THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION 103
texture not of the human clay. The hypotheses
applied hitherto to these contradictions have failed.
The notion, held by simple men, of a human organism
dead but reanimated, is a childish thing, helpless to
explain the matter. The counter theory of Visions,
meaning self -illusions of the mind of witnesses, is no
less helpless to explain the fact of the Christian life
generated in the vision-seers, and through them in the
Christian community. The interpretation that the
risen body was a ' spiritual ' body is no more than
a reverent name for our ignorance. But by the
hypothesis, which in our present train of reflections
has presented itself, there seems to open a direction
more hopeful for the solving of the enigma.
For in that hypothesis the spiritual and the material
are not disparates, but intercommunicables : the world
is one, and the soul's knowledge of it is one.
We apply it here, and ask whether that which
happened to the Disciples who saw the Lord Jesus
risen, was not the same thing as what happens when
one of ourselves attains the belief, that his own dead
friend is not dead but alive.
That happening, as we sought to analyse it, was that
some impulsion falls upon our conscious being from a
reality in the eternal world. The stroke is received
alike upon the spiritual sensibility of our organism
and upon the physical. Our body and soul alike make
the response of a vital intercommunion with the unseen
reality, which is the act of knowing that reality.
But this action, call it a knowing or a living, is an

104 THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION
action of the whole man together. It is realised in
the senses as well as in the spirit, and the motions of
mind, affections, will are reactions in the flesh which
register the vibrations reaching them from the world
beyond sense. XI
That analysis we laboured enough : this application
of it we will not labour. We will try to render it after
the method of the great master among Greeks of the
art of presenting spiritual truth, who when dialectic
and logic had done their best upon a problem, would
seek the last interpretation of it in the imaginative
expedient of ' truth embodied in a tale ' or in the par
able of a fancy. Our imagining, however, of how men
became witness to the Resurrection shall be no
mythos, as Plato used, but a tale of a human experi
ence ; only a tale retold, not as it has been chronicled
with so slender particularity, but as a human sym
pathy can fill in that bare outline with significances
that may be for other time and place.
And, as at our outset we tried to reconstruct the act
of belief in a Peter, so let us here attempt the faith-
story of a John.
And be it premised that any student of the Christ-
fact who may doubt whether that faith-story, as told
in the Fourth Gospel, is history otherwise than as ideas
are history, may yet be able to listen to our reconstruc
tion, though translating it perhaps the while into terms
of his own theory.

THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION 105
What is it that holds fast in a spell the young man
who has come out from the dark of the garden tomb
and hangs tranced beside the dusk doorway, like unto
them that dream? It is Wonder, the parent of Com
munion, that holds him tranced. ' Here we laid fore-
yesterday,' he muses, ' the Master's body, dead. And
here he to-day the dead man's robes, but not he.
Where then? What is this that is happening to
us ? . . . That saying of his ' On the third day I shall
rise.'... He said it . . . can this thing be that?'
And here there is convulsion in the mind of John. All
that familiar scene, the world he knew, is shaken as
by earthquake and flung backward into the perspec
tives of immensity. The walls of space roll apart, and
gasping he looks out into the infinite. The Lord is
in this place, and he knew it not. . . . The house of
God. . . . The gate of heaven. With lips parted and
a soul that opens to receive the flood of a mystery that
is being given him, he casts himself in whole surrender
upon God, whose ways are in the deep but His foot
steps are not known. It is the beloved disciple's
moment of Wonder. He is flinging away his concep
tion hitherto of the world of fact, by which a man
entombed is a man who exists no longer, and he is
drinking in, as it were, through amazement's opened
lips, this new conception, vast but as yet unfeatured,
of a world where things are not so, but where a man,
it seems, can fall on sleep and yet not see corruption.
John saw and believed. He that wonders shall reign :
and this is the wondering of John.

106 THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION
Wonder must have her perfect work. How is it
with John now at nightfall, sitting back in the shadows
of the Upper Room ; groups of the brethren near him,
restless men, faces haggard with surmise and doubt,
glances of one at other that answer question with
question? A knock, and unbolting. Peter enters, a
smothered fire in his eyes, a message that is stifled
on his lips: 'I saw Him.' Silence then, except for
the heartbeats loud in each one's ear. Again a knock.
Two wan, dazed faces in the doorway, framed by the
dark. 'He was with us but now. . .we knew Him
when He brake the bread . . . then He was gone . . .
but it was He.' Silence once more, and hearts beat
ing louder in the ear. Heartbeats; and a mightier
Something than the beat of heart, pulsing upon the
soul of each. Something that draws near and near.
Something with a footfall that enters the house of
life of each disciple, that echoes clearer, like strokes
of a bell increasing on the ear, as it comes inward
from soul's outer gate to inner chamber : divine
Reality coming home to men. Coming home, ah!
even to their fleshly senses; a Presence that lays its
touch even on the organs by which man sees and hears,
till these also stir and quicken, and an energy goes
forth of them to meet the creative energy of God shed
abroad in heart of man, and to know the Christ because
unto the Christ their soul in all its senses lives.
Then — then — who spoke ? Is it John, that way he
has? Is it speech at all? Ah, surely that disciple
whom Jesus loved says 'Brothers, it is the Lord.'

THE CREED OF THE RESURRECTION 107
And the Lord is there indeed. In His habit as He
lived, in His wounded body as He died ; the eyes, the
brow, the scarred hands and feet, the very mien and
bearing of Him; at last the Master's voice : 'Behold
me, it is I Myself.'
Then that disciple whom Jesus loved believed and
saw.

PART II
THE INSTRUMENT APPLIED
V
THE CREED-MAKING OF THE CHURCH
UNIVERSAL
[May 7th, 1911.]

"Lo, I am with you all the days."

THE CREED-MAKING OF THE CHURCH
UNIVERSAL
Romans xii. 5. — "We being many are one body in Christ."
The point, reached now by our enquiry, at which we
must turn from the study of Creed as a principle in
the life of religion, to the study of those specific appli
cations in practice which are the Creeds of the Catholic
Church, is the point where sympathies will most wake
and questions begin to burn. The interest felt in what
happens when a man makes or keeps his private
formula of belief is for every one except the man
himself a speculative interest only, with which no
one else, at least in our day, claims to intermeddle.
What happens when it is the Church which formulates
a belief and requires an open act of obedience by
confession of it, is a question the answer to which is
a public concern and draws with it overt consequences
not in the spiritual sphere only, but in the practical
sphere where there are Tests and Subscriptions, and
the binding and loosing of communion.
I
What is a Creed of the Church? It is easily
answered that it is a confession of faith formulated

112 THE CREED-MAKING OF
not by the individual Christian, but by the body of
Christians. But in our analysis Creed is a mode of
utterance, by which the confessor does the act of self-
giving to an unseen Reality : and the Creed is true if
there comes to him from that Reality the reciprocation
which makes life for the soul of the confessor. If
this analysis is correct, a Creed affirmed by the Church
is an utterance in which not the individual but the
body makes that self-impartment, and receives, if
answer comes, the life. Yet if no more is said than
this our thinking will not be advanced, and still less
our religious practice guided.
For what to us, in any sense touching human con
duct, is the Church?
It is a question in metaphysics and high meta
physics : for it is the question of the relation between
the Universal and the Particular, asked at that level
at which the Universal is Divine Reality and the
Particular is a Soul of man. There is, however, a
metaphysic which the humblest Christian must needs
employ if he tries to think at all of this soul and its
fortunes : it is this Everyman's Metaphysic which we
will put in exercise.
We are, I believe, accustomed to say that not
Churches are saved, but Souls. Now to say that
churches are not saved may be to affirm concerning
the counsels of the Creator more than we can certainly
know : for it is to say that a certain social order which
is now being evolved on earth cannot possibly survive
as an entity in the eternal world : and that is a thing

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 113
which we cannot with modesty either deny positively
or assert. But to say that souls are saved and not
churches is a useful and impressive way of reminding
us that persons and not things are the realities of
existence ; that ' Church ' is an abstraction, the name
of a relation between personal beings, the members
of the Church ; and that what a church does or suffers
is only done and suffered, by these persons. By help
then of that reminder,} let us define the creed of a
church as a means of utterance by which the Christian
lives the life of spirit, not as an individual soul, but
as a social being; that is, a being whose personality
is, in a great and vastly predominant measure,
constituted by his relations in sentiment and conduct
to a multitude of other believers like himself. So
much of the man's being as is built up of these rela
tions to the society of the Church ; all that range of
his existence which is parcelled out into duties to his
neighbours and specially those of the household of
faith, into the emotions of sympathy with aU persons
and causes covered by the name of Church, and into
the imaginings and understandings which are his
picture of the world as the kingdom of the Christ, —
all this of him (and is there much else that is left him
to be all his own?), all this utters itself and finds itself
alive when he believes in his heart and makes con
fession with his mouth of a creed, which is not his
but the Church's. As member of the society named
the Church, he lives by this confession. That ground-
law of man's existence in the world, that man is the
H

114 THE CREED-MAKING OF
creature of Society, has its last requirement fulfilled
in the life he gains by incorporation in the Church.
It is Society, the union of his parents in marriage,
which brought him out of the pre-natal dark into ' the
shores of light.' Society sheltered and tended the
faint flame of being in the lap of a family, Society
fashioned the child and the youth in the school, pro
tected him from enemies in the tribe, enriched him
and amplified his powers in the community of the city,
made his intellectual being live and thrive and grow
in the republic of letters and of science, and his moral
being attain its stature in the fraternity of the state.
And last, Society has her perfect work in the family
of the household of God. That angel of God's
presence, who in form and fashion of Humanity has
fed man all his life long unto this day, the day of a
spirit's dawning; who has redeemed him from all evil
of body and of mind, from hunger and nakedness
and fang of beast, from poverty and ignorance and
savagery and war; that Angel still has him by the
hand, and now at last unveils to show Himself as the
Spirit who is Giver of life to the Church. In the City
of God the spiritual being of man, by virtue of which
he is ' the roof and crown of things, ' is guarded,
gifted, disciplined by the ministrations of the Church.
Apart from Society, man, it was said, must be either
beast or god, or else be nought at all : and, apart from
the Church, man the spirit is also nought, or else a
something more evil than nought; he must perish as
a babe exposed upon the heath, or the lost tribesman

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 115
in the forest of the wild beast, or the lone merchant
man fallen among thieves. Within the Church his
spirit can live. Her truths of the divine realities
nourish it, her sacraments fortify, her worships warm,
her gospellings enlarge, her discipline moulds, her
opportunities of service exercise to strength and
tenderness, her glory nerves with loyalties, her visions
that make blest inspire to sacrifice. Living to the
Church he lives to Him who said, ' When ye do it
unto the least of these my brethren, ye do it unto
Me.' Thus is it that the corporate creed makes
for our salvation : it is the means by which the
soul can seek and find and avail herself of the
communion of saints, which is a mediate communion
with God Himself. The life which a believer can
have as churchman (and how vast is its proportion in
his whole of life !), this life can breathe and beat in
the exercise of uttering the Church's creed.
II
How then say some among us that the believer can
be a good believer without a creed, that denomi
national religion is a less true religion, and undogmatic
Christianity is the most Christian? This contention
is quite plainly in conflict with our present contention
thatT dogma, in the form of a creed to be recited in
common by churchmen, is a means, not an exclusive
but an essential means, of life unto GojLj How do we
deal with this contention, the theory of Undogmatic
Christianity? -

116 THE CREED-MAKING OF
One cannot think that the justifiers of dogma choose
the right line of justification when they adopt, as some
do, the apologetic attitude. When the Church is
charged with a needless and mischievous production
of definitions, an answer frequently heard is that the
Church had no desire to define the truth with this
particularity, but was forced against her will to do it
by the errors of the heretics which could not be left
uncorrected. Thus, if she asserted at Nicaea that the
Son is of one substance with the Father, it was because
Arius was denying the deity of Christ, and Athanasius
had no choice but to affirm it. But this he was com
pelled to do in a language which, while it could not
truly image the unimaginable, yet was the image most
near to it among conceptions attainable by men of
that day. As at Nicaea so always, it is urged, the
church gave the names to divine reahties, not from
a wish to name the unspeakable, but from the necessity
of rejecting the wrong names which human error was
inventing. And a favourite figure for the popularis
ing of this view of dogma has been to speak of the
' defences of the Faith ' : each new dogmatic pro
nouncement has been not a gratuitous attempt to
fasten a hard word and metaphysical theory on the
mind and conscience of Christians, but to preserve
a threatened truth by a new face of entrenchment
thrown up to rebut a new assault.

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 117
III
This metaphor is not felicitous. To suggest that the
warfare of the Christian belief is to be a defensive
war, and even a fighting behind entrenchments, is
of ill omen : in war the pure defensive is apt to lose ;
and, like other combatants, the Christian soldier must
defend his cause in the open. But indeed it is not
warfare, of defence or offence, which is the illuminat
ing metaphor here. Doubtless there is to be a con
tending for the faith once delivered; but beside the
contention of polemics, there is that of dialectics :
there is the ayadrj epis, the ' healthful strife, ' of contro
versialists who strive together not for victory over
the opponent, but for a conquest of truth between
them through the encounter of minds. That is what
the dispute of orthodoxy and heresy should often be,
though it too rarely has been. We have come to
recognise of late that the reproach of a heresy con
demned by history may be the mis-spelt inscription
over the grave of a true man, who went on honest
venture in the quest of religious truth, but miscarried,
because to find the truth is hard for the whole church,
and for the single quester without the church a some
thing more than hard. Would the church, however,
herself have found the truth without the heretic?
Was it not in the dialectic, misgrown into a polemic
between her and him that the truer formulation was
gendered ? If no Arius had raised the question which
gathered the Bishops to Nicaea, would Athanasius —
or, if he, would the Catholic Church — have attained

118 THE CREED-MAKING OF
the distinct and confident vision of a Christ who was
very God, of a union of man with God which is real
and throughout? Perhaps. For dialectic is not the
only way of the birth of truth ; God is also to be known
' in solitary places, and out of the glowing intelligences
which he gave to men of old;' though even so that
lone intelligence is only imparted to the multitude
of them that believe through a dialectic between
prophet's mind and people's. But certainly, unless
the gift of prophetic illumination is claimed by the
apologists of dogma, they do well to think of their
opposites in controversy first, and so long as they may,
as fellow-seekers of truth in this 'healthful strife'
where wit sharpens wit to the more knowledge of holy
things. And yet, as the prevalent methods of contro
versy in the Church have been, and, with much
softening latterly, still are, would an adoption of this
attitude towards the questioners of our dogmas be
less than a revolution in method?
Yet that such a dealing with questioners is a right
way towards truth does seem pointed out to us by all
the considerations which we have been traversing in
our study of creed. If life does indeed come, as we
think, by the self-uprendering interchange of that
which lives and that unto which it lives, will not that
vital function which is the reception of divine truths
and among them of true dogma be effected by such
an interchange ? And if so, may not the mind of the
disputant with whom our contention is, be to our own
mind that special spot in our environment at which

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 119
we must attempt the intercommunion through which
life is born; — as again to his thought, if it is truth
indeed, not victory, that he desires, our thought will
be that Other than Self which he can touch and live?
IV
At any rate, ' Let us not to the marriage of true
minds admit impediment,' even in dispute concerning
the truth as it is in Christ Jesus. That union is to
be sought not in what a disputant says, but in what
he thinks. What the Undenominationahst says is that
the defining of truth is an evil : what he thinks, though
unwittingly, is that wrong defining is evil, and that
the defining of the undefinable is wrong. His revolt
is not against the science of theology, but against a
science which is unscientific. He sees theologians
laying down laws of fact, where from the state of the
matter enquired into, it is not yet possible to formulate
a law, as when there is pressed upon acceptance by
his logical faculty some proposition about spiritual
things which are spiritually, not logically, discerned.
Or when theologians teach as divine doctrines the
speculations of men, enforcing, for example, some
theory of the Atonement, as if it were the eternal truth
of the matter, when it can be no more than the best
metaphor, forensic or sacrificial or other, which they
have been able to find to image what is beyond imagi
nation; and even so the best for its own day only or
until a better has been inspired.
Then on his side the apologist of dogma needs to

120 THE CREED-MAKING OF
have his true meaning discovered to the other, and,
in order that this may be, needs to have it discovered
first by himself. For when he makes the claim that
religious belief must be definite, we who wholly assent
to that pronouncement, must yet be allowed to go
behind the terms of it. For he is supposed to say,
and supposes himself to say, that belief must be
expressed in words which are definite. When he pro
tests against statements of religious truth as indefinite,
vague, amorphous, invertebrate, he is applying these
epithets to the language in which the faulty catechisms
are written. And he may be right in so characterising
the formulations he decries. But in this he misses
the point which really matters. The language in
which religion is taught ought certainly to be as
definite as the circumstances may permit; but it is
not the language of a catechism to which definiteness
is essential. In ' definite church teaching ' (to use a
standard idiom) what must be definite is not the phrase
of the teacher, but the impression stamped on the
mind of the taught : in vain the clear-cut formula
unless it leave clearness in the scholar's conception.
No teaching, for instance, is conveyed, I suppose,
with more definiteness of word than that of mathe
matics; but there are intellects upon which the pre
cision of an algebraic or geometric exposition will leave
no impress at all, not even of a blur. Of wisdom,
no less than wit, the prosperity lies in hearer's ear,
not speaker's mouth. But of the heavenly wisdom
the prosperity lies not in the hearer's senses, but in

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 121
his soul. There then, and no where else unless there,
the definiteness of religious teaching must be achieved.
How will that be? By the teaching, whether definite
or vague, which stirs in the learner the movement
of his soul whereby all that is within him of judgement
and sympathy and force unites itself to the reality
which the teacher bids his scholar know. We shall
have taught the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God
if, while we are speaking of it in stumbling accents,
our disciple has felt move in him the instinct of adop
tion that cries Abba, Father : and the doctrine of the
Atonement, when his heart burns in him with a blind
forecast that the Saving Passion is a fact in nature,
and that in very deed it is more blessed for the Self
to give than to receive. This is why there have been
masters in the chief of sciences, who had a scanted
gift of lucidity, and yet were great doctors of the faith,
because in the clouded thought and stammering utter
ance there went a virtue out of them : the faith in
them stirred by its vibration the faith in their scholars,
and the lesson echoed thus was learned.
V
We have glanced at the limitations of the disputants
over the cause of Dogma. Is there some common
standard against which we can measure each of them?
For us that standard of measurement could be no
other than the conception from which and towards
which all our reflections have worked. Man's salva
tion is man's life unto God : faith saves him because

122 THE CREED-MAKING OF
faith is this life. But that which lives unto God is
the whole man : not a part only, as those would seem
to hold who suppose a man can enter into life with
the right eye of his thought plucked out, or the right
hand of his activity cut off and cast from him. We
people of a faith which is Catholic cannot make this
division of the indivisible, cannot admit a schism in
the ' single state of man ' who is to be saved. His
salvation must be a whole salvation, a saving of his
being throughout : the man must have life semper,
ubique, omnis, not only in all time, but in all parts of
him and in all of every part. (But if this be so, then
the undogmatic believer does greatly err who thinks
to be saved without a creed ; thinks that he can enter
the Paradise of the life spiritual, taking with him a
heart that loves and a will that serves the Almighty,
and leaving outside the pale that organ of his being
through which he can know God by His holy Name,
and can give, like the first man in earth's paradise,
names to each of God's creatures, and among these
creatures to each Godward thought and emotion which
has a being in his soul. And the champion of a dog
matic Christianity also errs, though for the most part
in theory only, theory which his practice betters, when
he speaks as if one part of man, his reasoning faculty,
could save the whole. For that is what is said, though
far indeed from what is thought and farther yet from
what is acted on, when he says that it is ' before all
things necessary to salvation that a man hold the
catholic faith ' ; and then — then — says that ' the

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 123
catholic faith ' which is to save the man ' is this ' ; is
the form of words that follow thereupon. ' Before all
things necessary.' Can it be that? Can it be first
and most in the fortunes of the living soul of a man
that a form of words, however sound and healthful
words, yet a form and of words, should be recited by
him with assent? Can this be the head and front of
our redeeming from the everlasting loss? Can it be
a perfect counselling of the soul to name as first the
care of one strand in the triple cord of life, the strand
of reason, and leave the strand of action not named
except in a brief syllable at parting, and that of love
not acknowledged by even one bare syllable of a
name? It is not a perfect counselling, while it is left
thus unguarded, with no warning of its partialness of
intent, which might comfort simple souls, who feel
the imperfectness, but, being simple, give that feeling
some name that does it wrong. They think them
selves and are thought to be denying the catholic
faith, when they are but hungering for the whole of
faith, and discontent that for the whole they are offered
a third.! Trfc-isTof these simple folk that we are thinking, when
we plead that the apologist of dogma should meet the
rejecter of dogma in the spirit, not of polemic, but of
dialectic. We are thinking of the simple who says
in his mind ' There is no name I can give to God, ' not
of the fool who hath said in his heart, ' There is no
God to whom a name can be given.' Too readily the
dogmatist confounds these two. Let him distinguish.

124 THE CREED-MAKING OF
For when iron sharpeneth iron, where humble dogma
tist and honest undenominationahst are countenance
to countenance; when selfless heart and open mind
and ready will of both join, by a mutual sacrifice of
each to other, in a common sacrifice to the Very
Truth; the spark will fall from heaven, and between
them will spring alight the faith.
How that mutual faith of the two in union will
differ from the faith which each had in his isolation,
we have forecast already by our criticism of the two
attitudes. We may give this forecast a summary
form, by saying that what the two will learn between
them concerning belief and salvation is this. [_Since
living — and not seeing — is believing, we may not
hope that a belief will save us, if to believe is only
to see with a mind's eye the truth of a creed. And
since not part of us, but all, needs to be saved, we
may not hope for salvation if the mind that makes
creed be left unsaved. Soul is not saved by the mind,
and soul is not saved without it. How undeniable by
x — \
either disputant ! By both how unremembered !)

VI
But now out of this same ' Living is Believing,' and
out of the repugnancy of undogmatic religionists to
our dogmas, because they seem to these to be not
living but dead, comes a question charged with most
anxious issues. Faith is life unto God, we say, and
of this life creeds are to be ministers. But life comes
only from life, and a creed that is to give life must

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 125
be alive. How then if a creed of the Church should
be not alive but dead? Or, since that question is,
though ideally possible, yet hardly a real one, how if
a creed, which is itself a living body, should have a
dead member in it? What can we do about such a
mortified hmb?
It is a question which will not be spared us in our
dialectic with the 'undogmatic Christian,' for his
difficulty is that parts of the Church's formularies are
for him not alive. Shall we then answer, as is usual
with maintainers of credal religion, that first the
creeds are not dead, and then that they cannot die :
that they were framed by the catholic church, still
undivided, and therefore throughout all her frame still
'the spirit-bearing body,' still assured of truth in
her judgements through Christ in the midst?
It is our confident belief that this answer is a true
answer, — if only it understands itself. Our attempt
will be to examine whether this condition — a right
understanding of their answer — is always fulfilled in
those who put it to use. There is much need to ask
ourselves afresh, on occasion of the challenge of our
comrades in this dialectic, what we mean by the terms
catholic church and catholicity, what by the authority
of Councils, what by Tradition and the Deposit of
Faith, by Antiquity, Continuity with the Primitive
Church, Succession from the Apostles.

126 THE CREED-MAKING OF
VII
We shall most compendiously study this by con
sideration of a formula of great prestige in which is
crystallised as it were the theory of catholicity most
accepted in our church. This is the apophthegm of
Vincent of Lerinum, that we must hold as of Catholic
faith ' that which has been believed everywhere,
always, by all.' It has seemed to many among us
that the canon of Ubique, semper, ab omnibus rules
out of all hope any change in such definitions of the
faith as possess these notes of catholicity. For such
definitions, notably in the Nicene Creed, have come
down to us from an age in which the requirements of
that canon were fulfilled. There was once an undi
vided church, able to agree upon a creed, and by that
church creeds were framed which did obtain this
universality of belief. There is an undivided church
no longer, and the divisions are so many and so deep
that the whole church can do nothing as a whole;
cannot meet in council, and there, with Christ's spirit
in the midst, apprehend a truth which all men every
where shall assent to and recognise as having been
in all time the belief of Christians. The endowment
of Catholic truth which has descended to the present
dismembered kingdom of Christ from the centuries
of the Church's wholeness is therefore incapable of
addition : the foundation on which she must support
herself is the wealth of experience capitalised in these
few centuries only : the Sparta which has fallen to her

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 127
lot may seem a narrow one and an austere, but her
lot it is, and this she must order as best she may.
Does Vincent's Canon really consign us to this strait-
ness? Let us look at it closely. It is impressive
enough to match its greatness in history, but not
transparently clear. At a first glance one might think
its logic is at fault, for it has the look of the logical
fault of cross-division, or at least the blemish of
tautology. If a thing is believed everywhere and
always, why add that it is believed by all men; this
ab omnibus seems to repeat the ubique and the
semper. Are we to charge Vincent with slovenliness
in so critical and momentous a formulation ? No : one
looks again, and the logic has emerged with a brilliant
instructiveness. Vincent was thinking of the Christian
world he knew, Christian Europe. If a belief were
found to have been held in all preceding generations,
and to be exhibited in all bounds of the present terri
tory of Christendom, yet this Semper and Ubique
would not be convincing notes of Catholic truth till a
third note made itself recognised. This belief, he
feels, may have been held always ; universality in time
may be predicated of it : but how if at any one point
in time it has been held indeed, but held faintly, only
by few. Again, it may be at all times held every
where, and universality in space can be claimed : but
how if this spread of the belief were but a thin film
covering the surface of the Everywhere, but not going
below the surface? This is not enough for Vincent.
' Not all my France must hold it, but all the Christians

128 THE CREED-MAKING OF
in France; not the Bishops and Doctors only, while
the lay people hold it not, nor the lay people only and
not the learned too.' The faith should be found not
merely everywhere in the body corporate of believers,
but also with a real specific density at every point.
This he expresses in quantitative language by saying
it must have been believed ' by all,' from the Doctors
at the top to the simple folk on the lowest stratum.
VIII
It is, however, not to the science of Numbers, but
to the most contrasted one, that we shall go to interpret
Vincent. May it be here recalled how in an earlier
lecture it was ventured that this third dimension of
Intensity was to be identified with the principle of
Life itself? We are suggesting that this principle,
which came to us by simple observation of natural
fact and not by memory of the theologian's canon, is
what really has inspired the truth which Vincent has
expressed in the rude mathematical figures supplied
to him by the logic of his time. If we are jealous of
this Doctor's credit, we shall not understand his canon
as if it prescribed an arithmetical measurement of
truth, as if truth were true because it seemed so to
the multitude, and catholicity could be decided by a
count of votes. Vincent was not anticipating that
statesman of recent times, who said that all the people
can be deceived for some time and some people for
all time, but not all people for all time. For only note
how he presently escapes out of mathematical into

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 129
vital ideas. ' What shall the true Catholic do, if some
particular Church shall have cut itself off from the
communion of the universal faith? What surely but
prefer the soundness of the whole body to a diseased
and corrupt limb of it?' 'The whole body,' the
'diseased limb,' — there is the very truth of the
matter, though it springs to light incidentally. It is
not the undividedness and totality of the body of the
Church which makes it Catholic : it is the health and
soundness of it ; not the wholeness but the haleness,
which is but changed spelling for the same word.
Now healthy, sound, uncorrupt, whole or hale, these
are so many synonyms for 'living,' as diseased and
corrupt are names of dying and dead. Here is the
secret of it all. 'Catholic,' though it is Greek for
English 'whole,' and in etymology identical with it,
is greater and better than whole, as the cause is more
than what it causes. Catholicity in the Church is the
Life which makes the Church a whole. As in a living
creature the wholeness of its body is the oneness of
it, and the oneness is made solely by the life which
beats in it from centre to circumference ; as the limb
mortified by the damming back of the life-streams is,
as Vincent tells us, a limb severed from the whole;
as the complex frame, 'wonderfully made,' of bone
and sinew and tissue, which we call an organic body,
is, once the mystic fire of life is blown out, not a body,
but a heap of earth-matter crumbling back into un-
featured dust; — even so is it with the life spiritual.
The wholeness or catholicity of the Church is indeed

130 THE CREED-MAKING OF
her oneness and undividedness; but that oneness is
the life in her, which we name the indwelling of Christ
or of the Spirit of Christ ; and that soul or that church
into which the life flows not, is no part now of the
catholic whole, not because it is severed, but because
it has died or is dying. And this mighty frame of
Christendom, if the Lord who is Giver of Life should
depart from His temple, would keep in vain, if it kept
at all, the stately and subtle frame of catholic creed,
catholic sacramental system, catholic order : for it
would be One no more. As a corpse sinks into its
dust, it would have sunk back from the One in Many,
Many in One, which is Christ's Body the Church, into
the Many which are not the One, but are the Nought.
IX
How known and old a truth is this ! And how
needing to be known !
For out of it comes what ? There comes the answer
to every question which tries the heart of the Catholic
Christian. There comes the warrant of the divine
right by which priest rules and pastor ministers
righteousness; there comes the title-deed by which
bishop inherits Apostle ; there comes the security by
which it is known that sacraments have virtue to heal
and save; there comes the inspiration by which the
scribe instructed unto the kingdom of heaven brings
out from the treasure of Holy Scripture the things old
of the Letter and the things new of Interpretation;
there comes the law by the guidance of which the

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 131
Church has power to decree rite and ceremony, to
maintain the old uncorrupt, to sanction or condemn
the newly-forged, to recall the suspended into use, to
proclaim in ritual controversy peace to them that are
near and peace to them that are far off, peace to the
contenders for a Use and to the contenders against
it, the peace of Christ who is our Life and makes us
one; there comes the pure and holy casuistry by
which the formula of a test is interpreted and the
conscience of the subscribing priest is taught; there
comes the guidance for the Church's rulers, by which
they can wisely bind and loose; and there come the
best regulatives for the crowded, jostling march of
our social evolution, and the clearest light upon the
lone path of the single soul.
All these things come out of the truth that Catholicity
is life. And with these there comes, last, not because
it is least nor yet most, but because it is that which
we are now setting out to judge, there comes the right
of a Branch of Christ's Church to study, by herself
and not in council with the rest with whom her com
munion is no longer full, the ancient inherited creeds
which are both hers and theirs ; to study them afresh
with her own living intelligence, so that it be also with
the mind which she has in her of Christ; to study
them, and to re-judge. Yes, to re-judge. We must
not fear the word, as if it were presumptuous. For
indeed the duty of judging the creed we profess is
part, and an inseparable part, of the duty of pro
fessing it. Judge we must in any case, for if to find

132 THE CREED-MAKING OF
a formula inadequate is a judgement, so also to confirm
the formula is a judgement of it. And the judgement
is one which must take effect. If when a Particular
Church has studied her creed, taking counsel in the
light of a spiritual communion brooding over her as the
wings of a dove, if she finds its language, so studied,
to be all-sufficient and able to bring forth in her the
fruits of knowledge and strength and love, then she
is assured that in her creed she is Catholic ; Christ is
her Father, though some Abraham of the earliest
Christian past be ignorant of her, and the Israel of
some stately sister-communion acknowledge her not.
But also, if it should be revealed to her by the Spirit
that, among those ancient words of mortal language
which framed her old-time knowledge of God, are
any words which were once potent ministers of faith
and life, but have outlived this potency and are even
cumberers of faith, unless the Spirit touch them into
life again : — if this should be, then, in the power of
this truth that Catholicity is the Divine Life in a
church, and Catholic belief is belief which is alive by
Christ that liveth in it, a branch of the Church may
venture to re-interpret or even to re-mould the
language of her creeds; and this action — or, in the
other case, the refusal of action — if only it be an act
of life unto Christ in God, shall have the name and
the worth of Catholic.

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 133
X
'Yet I believe,' a churchman may say, 'in one
Cathohc and Apostolick Church : in a deposit of faith
handed down by tradition. This is forgotten in your
interpretation of Catholic'
But the Deposit of Faith — what is it? The Tradi
tion — by what means do we hand it on?
For many of us the Deposit of which each age is
trustee has meant the creeds and credal institutions
of the Church ; the Word, Sacraments, Order. It is
all these : but it is out of all proportion more. JNot
the creed of Christendom, but the life with which
Christ endowed His Church is the trust put in our
keeping^ This life, unless all our reasonings have
been idle, is not a name for a mystery embraced by a
vague emotion, but for a reahty having substance,
form, and feature; a fact that can be recognised and
in some degree even measured. We can know
whether this life is in us or is not, and therefore can
know whether the Church has kept safe her trust and
is transmitting it unabated and unspoiled.
By what means does the Church transmit it? By
Word, Sacrament, and Disciphne. By nothing else?
Well, many perhaps have so supposed, (inji long
controversy over religious education in the school, how
dominant, though unconsciously, has been the assump
tion that if we can teach a creed we shall convey a
faithj When it was remembered that besides definite
teaching there must also be demanded 'atmosphere,'
an environment of social influence inspired by religion,

134 THE CREED-MAKING OF
it was a timely recall from a misdirection : we had
reminded ourselves that creed and catechism alone
do not make Christians. No, for Christians are not
made; they are born.
And their birth is on this wise. We call the Church
our Mother; she bears children unto Christ. That is
no figure; it is the utter fact. As the human parents
engender the child of their flesh not by creation of a
life, but by transmission of a life entrusted to them
selves, so the church genders her children. She lives
the life unto Christ, and the new souls brought into
contact with her act of life are born alive to Christ :
are born alive not because they have received a word,
but because they have touched a power ; not because
a creed was taught them, but because a faith set their
faith afire. >
Watch it happen. \Go with Peter to the house of
Cornelius, and note how~the Church engendered her
children then. Did Peter make those men Christians
by a creedl^ Not without one indeed, for the tale of
Jesus slain and risen was a creed. But do we think
the story of a martyred Prophet's return to life worked
the conversion ? Admiration, pathos, wonder it might
work ; not the surrender of self to the Divine, which
is faith. No, the life that was in the speaker touched
the hearers and life was lit in them. There was hap
pening in him, as he spoke, the sacrifice of self, which
is kindled by the fire from heaven. The love that
went and came between Peter and his Lord burned
before his listeners as he spoke the things of Christ;

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 135
burned not only or even most in the words which
framed his story, but in the flame of a conviction, a
passion, a resolve, that streamed out in the accent on
the lip, the light quickening in the eye, and all that
nameless irradiation by which the spirit of a man
transpires to those who mark him. But those who
marked Peter, let us remember this, were men capable
of that spiritual reception. They were not un-
awakened Syrian peasants, nor religionists of the
' hard church ' ; they were men ' whose hearts God
had opened.' To this opened heart of seeker there
is offered in the tale of Peter the spectacle of the
world-secret, that by sacrifice comes not death, as
seems to mortals, but, as seen in Jesus, Life. But
this spectacle — here lies the truth we are aiming
at — came home to their heart and will not by force
of the record of a past human incident (though not
without that record), but by force of the visible hap
pening of an incident in the present, the narrator's
own act of faith wrought before their very eyes in his
telling of the tale. 'While Peter yet spoke these
words, the Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard
the word.' These listeners felt happen in themselves
the like act of faith : they too made the self -surrender
to God in Christ; their souls were born alive.
XI
This was the manner of the tradition of the faith
which had been once delivered unto Peter. The same
had been the manner of the delivery of the faith to

136 CREED-MAKING OF CHURCH UNIVERSAL
Peter's self. Not the doctrine which Jesus taught
made this disciple receive the faith ; not this, but the
life unto the Father which lived in Jesus, the spectacle
of a life laid down and taken again. In the contact
with that life the first disciple's soul was born alive :
and by contact with the fire of sacrifice lit in him the
fire kindled again in these.
And we maintain the Apostolicity of the Tradition,
when we transmit, as did the Apostles, the life that
is from Christ. For that transmission there are
instruments, and among them is ' the form of sound
words ' in which the Church came to tell more elabor
ately what Peter told with brief simplicity. But this
form of words was not Peter's, and not in it is stored
the force by which Peter's work upon his brethren's
souls was wrought. It costs more to redeem their
souls. What then, we have to ask, what is that ' more ' ?
To know it matters all in all. The knowledge of creed,
doctrine, sacrament, ritual, order, is a knowledge
briefly comprehended in this Something More, this
faith that makes faith again. This it is that a church
must minister where she ministers a creed, if she would
prove herself true branch of the Church which is
Catholic and Apostolic. What is this Something
More?

VI
THE CREED-MAKING
OF THE CHURCH PARTICULAR
[May 14th, 1911.]

" Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am
I in the midst of them."

VI
THE CREED-MAKING
OF THE CHURCH PARTICULAR
1 Cor. xii. 27.—" Now ye are the body of Christ, and members
in particular."

The position has been taken up in our foregoing
argument, that a Branch of the Church Catholic is
able not only to decree rites and ceremonies for the
good of her members, but also to revise her creeds
and to re-affirm or to re-formulate. Further, that
although she cannot in this divided Christendom take
counsel with the whole church, yet her act can be
catholic, if it is an act of life unto God in Christ ; and
that, although she may depart from the word of the
Apostolic tradition, yet she will have discharged her
trust faithfully, if she has transmitted the life unto
God which is the matter of the tradition.
In this, however, lies all. If we shall have so far
prospered in our reasonings as to persuade those loyal
and reverent minds in our communion who are most
zealous for the faithfulness to its trust, that the
catholicity of a church consists in no quantitative
relation, that her 'universality' is no matter of
numbers, areas, and periods, but of the Spirit, the

140 THE CREED-MAKING OF
timeless and spaceless, who dwelleth in her ; that this
indwelling of the Spirit has its demonstration in the
life that beats in this living organism the Church,
whether the Church as spread through the wide world
of the Ecumene, or the Church as islanded in the
narrow bound of a self-dependent communion, — still
they will object that this test of life is an instrument
which we cannot use. 'You tell us,' they will say,
' that the making or re-making of a Creed must be an
act of life. But what is the way of such an act : what
function of what organ in Christ's Body the Church is
the function of living? And if there be such an organ
and such a function of it, how can we know that this
functioning has taken place and the organ has lived?
A written Creed which has descended from the past
is a plain unchanging standard against which we can
set a new thought and ascertain agreement or diverg
ence : but this "Life " is a vague, immeasurable thing
which cannot be the measure of anything. As well
might one estimate the height of a tree by comparison
not with a neighbouring tower, but with the cloud
carried past it. How then invite us to exchange the
test of definite written words for the impalpabilities
of this principle of life? The ship of the church has
lain these many centuries safely moored from a ship
wreck against the rocks of Doubt, while her anchor has
been cast in the sure holding ground of ancient creeds
which record the once-delivered faith. Shall we now,
for fear lest, under the winds of Criticism, this anchor
should drag and throw us on the reef, dare to pull

THE CHURCH PARTICULAR 141
it in, and trust to our mere seamanship with sail and
rudder to ride the peril out? Is this "life," so vast,
elusive, and immeasurable, a thing with which a
Church can trust her soul ? '
Indeed that is well asked : and it needs to be
answered well.
Yet first it must be said, though we cannot stay to
make it good, that the choice is not between anchorage
in the Past and our own seamanship. The anchor
drags. The Church does not trust her soul, nor did
she ever trust it, to the anchorage of 'It is written,'
if it were only written and were not also read, marked,
learned, and inwardly digested, and so made life in
the believer. If the principle here advocated be a
seamanship, those who mistrust it must still provide
some other. II
We are then to show that the fashioning of a creed
by a Particular church can be an act of life, and that
it can be known whether the church lives in doing it.
This requires that we should carefully picture to our
mind the process of a creed-making. The picture
can best be constructed by the study of some historical
instance. There is one which is the classical instance,
the creed-making of the fourth century by the two
first General Councils and the half century of struggle
which came between them. In this action of the
Church Universal we may read, writ large, the act of
a Church Particular.

142 THE CREED-MAKING OF
What is the picture? As drawn for us by history
it is the flocking of three hundred bishops to hear the
cause of the advocates who impugn and the advocates
who defend the Divinity of Jesus Christ, and to judge
which of these has the truth. Three hundred Over-
Shepherds, but for the most part a very simple
shepherd folk, innocent of metaphysic, even in its
theologie branch, and practised not in the making,
but only the administration of the faith. These men
are asked to weigh out Arius and Athanasius, and
with a practical unanimity they decide to affirm with
the latter the clause which declares the Son to be of
one substance with the Father. In technical language
they promulge the Homoousion. When they have
done this, has the Church decreed an article of
Catholic belief? That question is answered by the
fifty years of strife, of insurgent Arianism, hours when
ingemuit totus orbis et Arianum se esse miratus est
(Jerome) ; fallings away of timid moderates from the
side of Athanasius, left lone against the world as
Elijah, and after a like Carmel victory; Athanasius
tossed to and fro, from home to exile, exile to home,
and back again and back, on the clashing tides of a
warfare in which politics seem all but all, and faith
only not nothing : fifty years of strife, and then —
Constantinople. The seven thousand in Israel who
would not bow the knee to that earthly image of a
Christ who was less than Very God of Very God, who
would not consent to the low destiny of man which
matched that low thought of man's Redeemer, hearts

THE CHURCH PARTICULAR 143
whose ' greatness did not fail through craven fear of
being great,' — these men have now in their following
the holy catholic Church wheresoever spread through
out the world. What the Clerus in their council at
Nicaea had promulged, that the Populus in the
council of the wide world has accepted. The dogma
that the Son is of one substance with the Father, the
truth that God has verily and indeed made human
nature capable of union with His own, this is now
the Catholic faith. For the Church throughout the
world has travailed — with what pangs of labour :
ingemuit totus orbis ! — and this is the truth she has
brought to birth. Judicavit orbis terrarum : and that
judgement is sure. Ill
When we seek by aid of a humane imagination, to
which history gives up more of its secret, to see deeper
into this picture of a judgement by the orbis terrarum,
we find ourselves in converse with a range of facts
very different in complexion from those which the
historian has to handle. Instead of debates in council
halls, motions, votes, and pronouncements, intrigue,
agitation, impeachments, depositions, excommunica
tions, things which can be registered in records, our
converse must be with facts multitudinous, minute,
homely, human, insignificant, with the infinity of the
thinkings, feelings, and doings of private men, which
in their sum are the total mind and will of Christendom.
We look upon a vasty sea-surface of human conscious
ness, its welter of indistinguishable wavelets, an

144 THE CREED-MAKING OF
ocean's 'innumerable smile,' or frown, in response to
unseen forces which draw or agitate or smoothe again
the immensity of its waters. This infinitude of human
stories of men and women of no account is the true
history of how a faith is formulated. The stories are
not to be read on the written page, as we can read
how Athanasius hides for his life, how Arius expires on
his way to a triumph ; which emperor succoured one
champion, and which the other ; what votes were cast
in council for this cause and for that. Yet there is
a chemistry by which we can restore this vanished
writing : it is the light and warmth of an imaginative
sympathy. By it we can decipher at least this much,
that these men framed their creed, as each of us to-day
frames his own, by living it, and finding that it brought
them life. When was it otherwise? (Two men come
from a prison gate to question a prophet in a Galilean
market town, 'Art thou he that should come?' and
they carry back the answer, ' This is verily the Christ,
for he works life in men : in the blind, the deaf, the
lame, the dead? And even so this multitude of the
fourth century addressed their question to the Christ
presented to them in the Council's word, — a Christ
who is the God-Man, human flesh made one with
divine Spirit. Art thou he that should come? Art
thou our humanity's hope? That must be seen by all
and each of us. And it will be seen by me, says
each one, when I have learnt whether this word they
offer me is life-giver to me. I am layman and not
learned clerk, and I ask for no say in theology ; but I

THE CHURCH PARTICULAR 145
have a touch on things, if not on words, and I will
know whether this belief in a God made flesh is a
power upon things or a shadow among their solids.
I am trader, and understand good business : in the
exchanges of the moral life are they wise money
changers, as Jesus bade his disciples be, who traffic
in this belief, and do they reap their interest in it?
1 am statesman ; does it counsel me in rule? Thinker ;
does it point me to the secret of the world's order?
Poet; does it illumine the world's beauty? I am
working man; what glory does it lend my coarse
labour, what delivery from my coarse lusts? I am a
master's slave ; is there a liberty wherewith no lesser
Christ than this can set me free ? I am a sufferer : if
this word is medicine, if it makes all my bed in sick
ness, then it shall be my faith. I am woman; but
they say that in Christ Jesus there is neither male nor
female : if a God-Man so betters my estate, then the
God-Man he is the Lord, my Lord. I am mother,
sighs one : does it help me to be mother indeed to
know that of a woman was born a Holy One? I am
child yet, whispers another ; but it makes me ' full of
growing ' to be told that son of Mary was son of God
and increased in wisdom and stature, — as shall not I?
I am girl that will be woman and may be wife ; is it
true that in such an one can dwell the eternal purity,
eternal love? I am boy that shall be man and must
be strong : I will know if what they say is true, and
a spirit of counsel and of strength is in me out of
heaven to make me fearless unto deathA

146 THE CREED-MAKING OF
Such is the picture, drawn not by formal history,
but only by the power to re-construct to vision an
unrecorded past, and authorised by our belief that
man has always been man and his relation to spiritual
things the same of old as now, — such is the picture
we offer of the Church formulating a creed. In such
ways, as we suppose, the Populus of the Church under
the Empire weighed, judged, and at last accepted the
decree Homoousion; the multitudinous conscience of
the world bearing witness and the thoughts of the
innumerable Obscure accusing or else excusing be
tween themselves a formula which the few in their
council had propounded. Do we not correctly sum
marise this diffused moral activity of the multitude by
calling it a vast experiment of the body corporate, the
vast experiment in living by a truth thus offered to
their consciousness. To the stimulus of a creed's
claim on their adherence the wide organism of the
household of Christ attempted to make response. In
that response came to them animation, an animation
of each one's living self. The doubting found assur
ance, the struggling by their patience won their soul,
the timid had courage, the lame walked, the deaf
heard, the blind received sight, and to the poor —
this above all — to the poor in wealth or wit or oppor
tunity a Gospel which could save was preached. The
Church Universal made this creed, ' The Son is of one
substance with the Father,' by an action of its whole
being which was an act of living unto God.

THE CHURCH PARTICULAR 147
IV
But, while we summarise the vast process, let us
also articulate it. It will presently assist us in our
application of the ancient example to modern instances,
if we note that the far-extended action by which this
creed was made divides itself into the two plainly dis
tinguished moments, that of the promulgation at
Nicaea and that of the acceptance in the Ecumene.
The process of creed-making which we desire to study
in our own times is writ large for us not merely by
the grand scale on which is deployed the Nicene
controversy, but also by this so legible distinctness
of the two moments, the debates of the clerus in
council and the fifty years' agitation of the populus.
For that articulation seems to be a psychological law
of the Church's dealing with creeds; and this struc
tural law will be more easily traced in the perplexed
phenomenon of a formulative act done by a modern
church, if we have viewed it first in the Nicene
example as in a norm.
In that example the promulgation and the accept
ance embodied in actual history the two ideal stages,
which faith, whether individual or corporate, must
pass through. [Faith must begin in venture and end
in realisation, just as knowledge begins in hypothesis
and is completed in verification .\
It is plain that the action of the Council was a
venture. To a company of men who were not prac
tised reasoners about their faith the question is put,
'What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is He? Is

148 THE CREED-MAKING OF
He the Son of God and nothing less?' They answer,
'He is. For when we examine our conscience we
find such has been our thought and the thought of our
flocks; we have lived our lives on this assumption,
though, being simple men and not philosophers, we
have not tested it with any logic, but only tried it
against our heart and our people's hearts. When
Athanasius declares that Christ is Very God, our
experience echoes him. Our spirits bear witness to
it, and the Spirit who helpeth our infirmities He
witnesses with us. Yea, it is so : Christ is God.'
In the colder speech of this day it would be said,
they bare the witness of an instinct, they saw the
truth by an intuition. Also it can be said, as we
have phrased it, they confessed the faith by a venture.
Else the Incarnation truth would not have been
achieved : nothing ventured had been nothing won.
There followed the people's moment, the realisation
by experiment. A moment it is, though it measures
fifty years.
To the eye of one who reads only such facts as
can find place in chronicles, there may be presented
a spectacle unsanctified enough, and liable to the
sneer of history. He will recognise only a random
seething embroilment of churchmen and men of state,
in a war, under sacred emblems, of worldly passions
and blind violences. But, to the sense which spiritu
ally discerns things spiritual, this scene of an empire's
corporate consciousness seeking to respond to the
stimulus of a truth wherever that truth made contact

THE CHURCH PARTICULAR 149
with the myriad minute experiences of common men
and women, will rather be the scene of a pouring out
of the Spirit upon all flesh, a secret descending and
dividing among the multitude of them that believed
of an inspiration's ghostly fire, a conviction that sat
upon each of them. So to speak of it is not to use
the elated language of a pious fancy, seeing in the
dark of the past not what is there but what it wishes
should be there. There are indications few, but not
disproportionately few, on the scant page of written
history, that in the thought and conduct of the rank
and file of churchmen there was, in answer to the
leadership of the recorded few, a serious and sincere
contention for the faith. This should enable us to
discern in the people's assent to the Council's pro
nouncement no mere secular movement manoeuvred
by the forces of nature or of statecraft, but a demon
stration of Spirit and of power. V
How then does this creed-making by the whole
church light up the problem of creed-making by a
Particular Church? The structural lines discovered
in the admittedly catholic procedure will reappear in
the action of the Branch, though with a difference.
In our own communion, to which we may here confine
our attention, the two moments of Promulgation and
Acceptance are in practice fused, but in principle
remain. The Council of the Fourth Century has at
present no true equivalent in the Twentieth, nor indeed

150 THE CREED-MAKING OF
could possibly, in our democratised society, have an
exact counterpart, even after a hoped-for reconstitu-
tion of our church's legislature. But then the conciliar
function of promulging is only a particular mode of
the function of leadership in thought; and without
leadership no body of men can formulate a thought.
A formulary may, like a proverb, be the wisdom of
many men, as indeed we have just now been arguing
that it is : but as certainly it is one man's wit. A
leader must find the word of the common faith, the
multitude must find that it is the true word. The
conciliar and the popular parts may be, in appearance,
merged in a debate where the two Houses, as it were,
of the Clerus and the Populus discuss and resolve as
one in common session; but the two distinct parts
will still be sustained, and creeds be still made, as
was the earliest of all, by a Peter who confesses ' Thou
art the Christ ' and a brotherhood of disciples who
assent that so do they believe.
We do not need to construct imaginatively the
procedure of our church when it gives shape to a
confession. She has done it more than once in the
knowledge of our generation. For there are beliefs
held by the church which have found no statement
in any formal creed, yet are as substantial and as
operative on thought and conduct as many articles of
a formulary. Two such beliefs we have seen re
modelled by our generation, the old theory of Verbal
Inspiration of Scripture, and the theory involved in
it of a Six Days' Creation. These articles of faith

THE CHURCH PARTICULAR 151
were extra-credal, but they were defended, when
attacked by the criticism of that day, with an energy
which confessed that in the mind of the church at
large they ranked in value with the positive creeds.
These articles the church has reformulated, and she
does not doubt that her actions was catholic. What
then was the method which this reform pursued ?
The method was an effort of churchmen to readjust
themselves to an intellectual environment suddenly
changed, to make new and fit response to the stimulus
of new facts, such as the enlarged distances, temporal
and spacial, of the universe, or the actualities of the
sacred literature's production. Men of science and
of scholarship declared these facts, and the general
consciousness of churchmen repelled their doctrines
for a while as heresies : the new discovery of how
God made the world and those who tenant it did not
lack a Galileo to suffer in that less stringent question-
chamber of our wiser time, the court of general
opinion. For in that court was the cause heard and
judged. No Convocation, no Synod of Bishops pro-
mulged by authority a revised article of belief and
sent it to the provinces for their assent. The pleading
and counter-pleading were heard in the open, equal
street of public discussion through the agencies of
pulpit, press, and conference, of speech, lecture,
magazine article, letters in journals, conversation in
private circles, teachings of philosopher or of catechist.
Here and there were cardinal moments when some
pronouncement by a leading mind in book or sermon

152 THE CREED-MAKING OF
started a fresh crystallisation of fluid opinion in the
masses; and always went forward the long, long,
insensibly-graded process of mental and moral growth,
declaring itself in some last 'unimaginable touch of
time ' at which the general mind of the Church awoke,
without a start, to find faith unchanged but faith's
word transmuted. One year we all believed that the
Holy Spirit wrote with a mortal's pen the very phrase
of Scripture, and it was sacrilege to think any syllable
of a prophecy or even any cipher of a record on its
page could err ; but there came a year when we smiled
at that old simplicity, and agreed that
"every fiery prophet of old time,
When God made music through him, could but speak
His music by the framework and the chord,"
yet that God's the music still was, and still by his
Spirit was the Bible writ. One year we listened under
this pulpit, as under many another, to hear a biologist's
theory denounced as faith's betrayal : and now we
chide that timid imagination of ours which hindered
us to conceive that God fulfils Himself in many ways,
and not only in the way of our first ignorance of His
power. What had happened? In council of the
whole body of the faithful we had reformulated the
articles of our belief touching Holy Writ and the
Origin of Man. In council of the whole body. But
we can discriminate here, as in the fourth century,
the functions of faith's venture and faith's realisation
by experience. The venture was of the stronger

THE CHURCH PARTICULAR 153
hearts that ' feared and were enlarged ' at the chal
lenge of new facts in the soul's environment, and
ventured to promulgate their own new understanding
of God, as one to whom the thousand years are as one
day in the making of man, as one who can make His
meanings clear to mortal sense, though He chooses
to speak them through a mortal's faltering memory
and stammering lips. And the realisation — that was
our part, the many. We tested the offered thought
which claimed to be a truer truth, against our living
souls, and noted whether they languished at that touch
or rather quickened. This refashioned article of an
inspiration not verbal yet an inspiration, or of a heaven
and earth made by evolution and yet the work of
God's fingers, is it (one asked oneself) a savour of
death to my faith ? And one answered that ' It is a
savour of life unto life; it is a freeing and widening
of my being, God has set my feet in a large room,
this more spacious world, where yet I find my Spirit
still at home. It is strength to me and comfort : for
if man from so low has been brought so high, surely
the spirit of the mighty God is in him, and in this
weakness of mine His strength can be made perfect :
surely God was in this place of human flesh and I
knew it not.'
So was made faith's venture by the few, faith's
experiment by the many. Was the resulting con
fession a heretical opinion, or a right article of Catholic
belief? Our church thinks the latter, even if here and
there some true churchman still stands somewhat

154 THE CREED-MAKING OF
forlornly aloof, saying the old wine is better : she has
refashioned the creed outside the creeds, and has done
it by the experience that so believing she had life.
Would she have had that life without so believing?
There is a sister church which has hitherto refused,
and is at this time emphatically refusing, so to believe,
and to refashion in the light of a new knowledge an
old scholastic interpretation of the world. Is she by
that refusal gaining life? Do her teachings promise
to obtain by consequence a wider range over the
intelligence of Christendom, or her spiritual influence
more command even over simple hearts ? If we have
to judge that to refuse to reformulate an article has
been a loss of life to our sister communion, our own
action stands confirmed by the method of difference.
VI
These instances, however, of extra-credal behefs
which the Church has reformed will seem to lack
instructiveness, as being, it will be said, of another
genus than the articles of a primitive creed. They
are of another genus no doubt on the theory of a
closed Apostolic tradition, a deposit of defined belief
to be transmitted intact without subtraction or addi
tion by the later church. That is the theory which
we are sifting, with expectation that our search will
restore us this truth of Apostolicity with a deeper
meaning and more fertility of helpfulness. But mean
while it will seem in point to remind ourselves that
in one instance we have reformulated a part even of

THE CHURCH PARTICULAR 155
a primitive creed. The clause 'He descended into
hell ' has been reformed, though tacitly, by the general
consciousness of our church. When we recite it
to-day we are not confessing the belief which its
framers and its reciters till of late confessed. The
Harrowing of Hell pictured with so grotesque a realism
on medieval church-walls, is an event for which we
recognise no more valid authority than a Christian's
speculation about the state of the departed which has
found a moment's light notice in the Scriptures. We
teach our children to understand the clause as a
parable of the reality of the death of Jesus, of His
passage by a real dissolution of soul and body, into
the spiritual existence. We have, that is, reformu
lated the clause by allegory. Not a letter has been
changed, but the clause is a new one. Yet it is a
Catholic member of the Catholic creed : and it has been
formulated as such by the same activity of the common
church consciousness, as that which has reformed the
extra-credal beliefs in a verbally inspired Bible and
a six days' creation. VII
We shall bring with us from these examples a
greater lucidity and sureness of tread to problems
which are actual for us. How shall we do about a
creed, ancient though scarcely primitive, about the
treatment of which there is much division of opinion
in our church at this time : how shall we act about
the Quicunque in a way which shall be catholic?

156 THE CREED-MAKING OF
Our deliberations on the conflicting proposals to
modify it by excision of certain clauses or to retain
it intact, and the proposals to repeal or to confirm the
obligatory public use, can these deliberations be so
conducted that, when one or the other conclusion
has been reached, we shall be sure that the faith once
delivered unto the saints has been guarded by us
uncorrupt ?
Let it be said, as on an earlier occasion, that we
are pleading here the cause not primarily and ex
pressly of a truth, but of a method of seeking truth.
[Our aim is not to prove right the one or the other
view in this controversy, but to show that there exists
an instrument by which we can assure our hearts, that
we have made our decision by the Spirit who dwelleth
in the Church and usK, The advocate of this method
must therefore plead his cause with both parties to
this question, and beg them both to let no controversial
interest in that question obstruct, confuse, or divert
the course of that enquiry, which is our true concern
here, as to whether our method is a valid one and of
practical service in theology and in faith.
The enquiry divides itself into the two questions
given us by the very structure of our idea of Life. We
must ask first, ' Is the church's decision for the one or
the other treatment of the Quicunque an act of sacri
fice?' and then, 'Does that sacrifice meet with God's
acceptance, that divine partaking in it which makes
the act of sacrificing an act of living unto God?'
The sacrifice. It is not difficult to indicate what

THE CHURCH PARTICULAR 157
the things are of which we must make oblation on
this side and on the other of the controversy. They
will be the prejudices which may block the intelligence
against truth's entry, and the predilections which
chain the activity from its due forth-goings. (What
upholder of an existing order has no selfishness to fear,
which is against the open mind and the ready will?
His championship of antiquity is loyalty, yet perhaps
not all loyalty, but in part that desire of fixity and
mental rest which an English philosopher noted as a
foe of secular science; and in part a clannishness of
the churchman's mind defending his church's practice
because it is his church's, as a patriot might cleave
to 'my country, right or wrong.' Again, what re
pealer of a use is beyond the temptings of that pride
of life, to which the zest of change, of freedom, of
adventure, of reason's self-sufficingness, of the delight
of mental battle with the dignified Past for adversary,
gives food and stimulus ?\ Here are materials to lay
upon the altar of that sacrifice by which we inaugurate
our council over our church's estate, and plead for
heaven's blessing and inspiration. It can be known
whether this sacrifice is offered by us or withheld.
It may be objected perhaps that each churchman's
action is an inward fact, known only to each. Still
we believe that a society of men organised as a nation
can have a corporate consciousness and not only a
multitude of individual consciousnesses, that a people
can know what as a people it thinks and resolves. No
otherwise we must believe that a society which is a

158 THE CREED-MAKING OF
church can do the same, and therefore can know
whether in a corporate deliberation the body corporate
has made a sacrifice or has kept it back.
VIII
The oblation has been laid then on the altar : but
the sacrifice which prospers is the sacrifice which is
answered from heaven. Man's self -giving may perish
fruitless, an error and a waste, if it fails of the self-
giving of God, which makes it life. Can we know
whether our altar burns; whether by her decision to
bind or to loose the church becomes more alive ?
A phenomenon so complex and subtle as that of
vitality in a body corporate will be most hopefully
studied if we narrow our observation to a concrete
and particular case. I would propose therefore that
we try to follow with sympathy the experience of some
average member of the church when he uses this
creed, and judge whether that use brings vitality to
his individual faith and in what measure. If it is life
to him, then it may well be life to the Church.
And we will imagine this churchman to be one whom
the upholders of the creed will not rule out of the
enquiry as a disqualified witness. He shall be a man
who is convinced that strict definition of doctrine is
a right ideal, and also who is not repugnant to that
severe statement of the eternal issues of faith and
unfaith which certain clauses of that creed will put
into his mouth. Let us follow such a man's experience
as he reads and hears read this formulary.

THE CHURCH PARTICULAR 159
'Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is
necessary that he hold the Catholic faith, which faith
except every man do keep whole and undefiled without
doubt he shall perish everlastingly.' Our worshipper
assents. He has correctly retranslated vult salvus
esse into ' wishes to be saved ' ; has limited the refer
ence of the creed to persons to whom the faith has
been adequately presented; and he remembers that
to ' perish everlastingly ' must mean to ' lose that life
which is of the eternal world.' So he assents.
But there follows ' And the Catholic faith is this . . . , '
upon which there opens before his eye the long vista
of metaphysical definitions, forty verses of statements
about the laws of God's Being, of His relations to
the Being of Man ; that the Godhead is both One and
Three, that the Three are uncreate, eternal, almighty,
infinite, God, and Lord, but with the differences of
a Son who is begotten, a Spirit who proceeds, that
Jesus Christ is perfect God and perfect Man, yet not
two but one Christ, that He has redeemed men and
will judge them.
The prospect causes him shock. It is not because
the words are the language of philosophy and hard
for the plain man. He is no doubt bidden wander
in what to himself is an austere wilderness, but he will
traverse it, for in such austereness has God of old made
the revelation of Himself. What has shaken him is
not this, but the assertion that the Catholic Faith, the
faith which saves, is this — the long array of meta
physical definitions. ' How can that be?' he murmurs.

160 THE CREED-MAKING OF
' How can these things save a soul, or, if missed,
cause the loss of it? These sentences of mortal
speech, these fragmentary images of divine fact caught
on the dusky mirror of human intelligence, these
echoes of truth about the Godhead fallen from afar
on the nerve of man's logical faculty, and that nerve
only, while all else in the man, heart, conscience, will,
may remain blind, deaf, unresponsive, impassible, —
can it be that these sentences, or any that language
can mould, are the Catholic Faith, are the equivalent
of the ghostly force by which a man's soul is saved?'
So he asks : and the heart which makes the theologian,
and the reason which makes the reasoner, answers him
No. But already he has passed the point of shock : he
finds himself reciting the Divine Attributes as man
has gathered them from the inspired Book. He goes
on this road, once entered, without a stumble. Some
of the language is archaic, but then the Church too
is ancient : obscure, but the unlearned may leave it
to the learned : some appears to him to outrun the
word of Scripture, but the Church, not he, is inter
preter. His mind and will run on through the two
score verses, along a road often rugged, but nowhere
impassable, till at last it narrows in the grim defile
of Judgement upon works good and evil. Here he
walks through a valley of the shadow of death, but
the rod and staff of the Divine Shepherd do comfort
him, for he knows that the ' everlasting fire,' whatever
thing it be, is an ordinance of a God whose nature

THE CHURCH PARTICULAR 161
is love, since only from His lips do we know the name
of it. But then  .
' This is the Catholic Faith : which except a man
believe faithfully he cannot be saved.'
'Then comes my fit again,' he cries. Here is the
impasse across which his foot cannot travel. ' These
forty verses, forty save one x pronouncements in meta
physic, however scriptural a metaphysic, are these
the Catholic Faith, and can I not be saved except by
believing these? Nay, can I by believing them be
saved? What, shall the friend here worshipping at my
side, the comrade of my chambers, a better man than I,
if to be more selfless, truthful, brave is to be better,
shall he, because he does not repeat with me the ' He
rose from the dead,' since like Thomas, one of the
Twelve, he thinks the physical wonder is attested by
witness that has not been sifted as it needs, shall this
man perish everlastingly?' And one worshipper's
voice at this last verse drops from the chorus.
Why? What has happened to him?
This. He has been first required to affirm that man
is saved by holding the Catholic Faith. He affirms
this, for he believes it is so. Then he is required to
affirm that this aforesaid Catholic Faith consists of
certain intellectual propositions. But that is not so :
the faith that saves is not these.
Next he is bidden rehearse certain propositions in
which the Christian brotherhood has uttered its con
ception of God's nature and action. He rehearses
'"Eose again the third day," is not metaphysical, but historical.
L

162 THE CREED-MAKING OF
them : for they are, he judges, true. But now he
must add that these propositions if believed can save
him ; if disbelieved can make him to perish. But that
is not so. These things, however true and to be
believed, cannot, he is sure, be the faith which saves
a soul. It costs more to redeem a soul.
But now let these two members of the formulary,
the credal portion and the warning clauses, be drawn
apart, and he can affirm both. He can aver that the
Catholic faith is that we worship the One God in
Trinity, and Trinity in Unity. And he can also aver,
provided it be done in no connection with the former
avowal, that a man who desires salvation must hold
the Catholic faith. Why can he not join the affirma
tions? Because in the latter case the Catholic faith
means the faith which has power to save, and in the
former means not this faith, (^n^tbje_cre^_djwhich_^an
jnjstrufit-JLuitjcannat. save. He is required, in fact, to
say that faith and creed are one and the same thing :
"and they are not one; they are two.
Those who would repeal the Quicunque find fault
mostly with its temper, the harshness, as they consider,
of the warning clauses. To the student of the formu
lary who speaks here it seems that not the temper is
wrong, but the logic. The logic, however, not of
those who made it, but of us who in this age use it.
Those who framed and accepted the formulary were
not at fault in their logic, but in the assumptions on
which their logical process rested. They thought —
I will rather say, they thought themselves to think —

THE CHURCH PARTICULAR 163
that to believe a creed is to hold the faith. Then all
was consistent : the warning clauses did not clash with
the credal. We know, though we sometimes speak
as if we had forgotten it, that creed is not faith ; but
we have shrunk from amending an error which so
reverend an antiquity has sanctioned. But if, when
we are seeking the ground of authority for the deter
mining of truth and practice, we judge that a greater
than antiquity is here to arbitrate, even Life, which
was and is and is to be, we ought not so to shrink.
We do not well when we fear to put asunder those
two whom not God but man has joined together, the
doctrines of the Quicunque which are a creed, and the
clauses which are not a creed, but, standing where
they now stand, are the assertion that a creed and a
creed only can save a soul. IX
' If we judge that a greater than authority is here,
even Life.' The word recalls us to our true concern,
which is to enquire not what is the right treatment
of a formulary or a rubric imposing it, but whether
the principle that Catholicity consists in Life is a prin
ciple which can be used in practice. We are testing
it over the question of the use of one of our Creeds,
and are asking if it is possible to know whether that
use ministers life to the user, and by inference to the
Church. It is submitted that this is a fact which is
capable of being known ; that the specific effect upon
the reciter is a phenomenon which can be observed

164 CREED-MAKING OF CHURCH PARTICULAR
and estimated : that a judgement can be formed as to
whether the rehgious vitality of a believer is heightened
or is lowered by the recitation. Not all our judge
ments will agree. Some will be convinced that the
Quicunque, in its present form of two logical incom-
patibles joined in one, cannot be responded to by a
believer's soul, because part of him, his ' reasonable
soul ' or mental faculty cannot concur in the response ;
they will conclude that it is no ministry of life to him.
Others may rate this disability of the creed as a less
evil than the disablement of church authority or of
positive doctrine which they fear from any change.
This is only to say that facts which are subject to
observation are apt to be differently reported by
different observers. We have not here to decide
between conflicting readings of the facts we have been
studying. Such a decision was not the scope of our
immediate reasonings ; and, whichever be the decision
at which the church may arrive, our present enquiry
will equally be furthered by the poignant illustration
of it. If we have been able to make it appear that
facts of this spiritual nature, facts of a vitality in men's
souls ensuant upon the formulation of a creed, can be
observed at all, our purpose has been served : it has
been successfully reasoned that the life in church or
churchman, which is the deeper name for CathoHcity,
is matter of fact which we can verify and measure.

vn
THE HISTORIC CHRIST
[May 21st, 1911.]

And so the Word had breath."

VII
THE HISTORIC CHRIST
John xiv. 6. — " I am the way, and the truth, and the life."
Oue enquiry into the nature of Creed has been
throughout its course an endeavour to establish a
theory of how the truth of creeds can be tested. i£he
theory is that we can know our creeds to be true by the
life which results to the soul when it believes. 1 We
claim for this principle that it offers a new method of
research into religious truth, a Novum Organum, as it
were, for a science of spiritual fact. The claim has no
presumption ; for the ' new method ' is, we maintain,
an old method and the oldest . Man always believed this
way and in no other way. Man's belief in God is no
other thing than man's life unto God : to believe is, to
live, and it is nothing else.
This organ of research we have tested on an article
of the Creed which is cardinal, the Resurrection. We
must test it lastly on an article which is more than
cardinal, the all-inclusive tenet, the Incarnation. Why
do we believe the Son of God was made man? Is it
because believing we have life?
I
Incarnation is a word used not with double meaning

168 THE HISTORIC CHEIST
but with double reference. There is the Eternal
Incarnation of the Lamb slain before the foundation
of the world, a process of union of divine and human,
which is, if rightly understood, the process of the
creation by which God makes the worlds through the
Son, a process which is eternally actualised for every
soul of man when Christ is found in us. And also
there is the Temporal or Historic Incarnation, the
event once in time of the appearance of Jesus. The
two events are aspects of one same truth, but for our
study we need to distinguish them.
To apply our method to the eternal or spiritual
Incarnation will ask no patience of a listener. No
tedious analysis, such as we had to put in exercise over
the test of the Resurrection truth is here required.
There is a shorter way.
A Greek painter, when art was young, called his
friend to view a new picture. Before it hung a
curtain, which the visitor was bidden draw aside that
he might see the painting : he reached his hand, but
could not draw the veil : for, behold, the curtain was
the picture.
We desire by this apologue to say that the idea of
Incarnation is one thing with the idea of Life as by us
conceived. Incarnation is the penetration of human
by divine and the taking of manhood into God. ' I in
you and you in Me,' is a scriptural name for this. Life
is the same ; the creature giving self to the Creator, the
Creator rendering Himself to the creature. There is
therefore no need to tesf the doctrine of an Incarnation

THE HISTORIC CHRIST 169
by applying our instrument, the doctrine of Life. We
do not come to the knowledge of an Incarnation in the
soul by knowing of a life received in the soul ; the one
knowledge is the other. To say that the soul has life
is to say that God indwells it. We do not pass through
the curtain to come at the picture : for behold the
curtain is the picture. II
It is however not this spiritual and eternal
Incarnation for which proof, by our own or by any
method, is demanded. It is the historic Incarnation,
the union of the divine with the human nature in the
person of a man, Jesus of Nazareth, who presents
Himself at one point in time and space, which the
Christian is challenged to prove. Can we take up this
challenge with the weapon of our organum of research ?
Can we show that Jesus is God and Man by this proof,
that believing it we have life?
What is the historic Incarnation; what is it to say
that Jesus was God?
This is the question on which at this moment many
are speaking, while the people are in expectation and
all men are musing in their hearts concerning Jesus,
whether He is the Christ. Is this hour of our Church
burdened with a less heart-searching issue than was
the hour of Arius and Athanasius ? If I approach the
problem with small reference to these studies and
speculations, it is not because of isolation from them,
but because obvious limits impose on a speaker this

170 THE HISTORIC CHRIST
economy in the presenting of such thought as is his
own. We must for the time, with those speculations,
also put aside our familiar Christologies and their
definitions of Jesus as God and Man, yet not two but
one Christ, uniting two Natures in one Person. To
depart from the established language of theology will
not be presumptuous. For that language is the
coinage of metaphysicians, and we, when we go out to
encounter a giant difficulty of faith, must needs put
off us that armour of the kings of theologie thought :
we cannot go with this, for we have not proved it : we
must arm our hand with our own familiar rustic sling, a
certain homely conception which has been hitherto
our weapon of research. We will take with us the
conception, Life. We have a trust that here too it
may give us the victory.
Whenever human knowledge has become scholastic,
it must be rescued by the Interrogation of Nature.
And our theologies are not untouched by this much
of scholasticism that to the unlearned they seem
unreal, to be not things but names. Let us draw the
simple man with us to interrogate nature : invite him
to see not how the Christ is one Person in Two Natures,
but how when Jesus who is called Christ was born in
Bethlehem, there happened a fact with effects upon
the world, which have passed on to this man's self and
can be experienced by him to-day.
For the historic Incarnation does not mean only
the train of domestic and political incidents which

THE HISTORIC CHRIST 171
formed the career of the prophet from Nazareth in
Galilee. That would be a past fact, which our method
could not touch, and only the method of historians
can put to a test. The fact to which we give the
name of Jesus Christ is that past occurrence and all the
consequences of which it is the only and the complete
cause. Among these is that occurrence which to each
believer is not past but present, his own birth of faith,
which is the happening of tpe Incarnation to himself.
As we know that a star is set in the depth of the sky,
because the spark of light which falls on our retina is
the end of a star-beam, and star and beam are one
continuous undivided fact, and our experience can
touch the distant star when it touches this off-shoot of
it; so(we shall know that God was incarnate in Jesus
two thousand years ago if we shall find that God is in
our soul to-day ; and that this which happens to ourself
can be traced back in unbroken line of precedence to
the day of Jesus as its sole and whole caused
III
But this can be done. Let a man question the thing
which happened to him when his faith was born. He
will need perhaps to go back to memory's most ' dewy
dawn,' the moment when the friend who was in Christ
before him, the mother if he was so happy, spoke to
his childish ear of the Unseen Things. Her word
was of a 'Father that is in heaven.' There rose in
him an image of this Father ; that is, he gave his child
intelligence over to a reality beyond his world of sense,
1

172 THE HISTORIC CHRIST
and there came (did there not?) a power upon his
mind. But also she spoke as one who had an affection
towards this Reality, who was actually feeling the
love she named for this Father. Thereupon a move
ment of affection stirred in her hearer, that is, he gave
his heart to God, and his heart received a warmth,
became a more vivid organ of the soul. And yet
again she did things in his sight or knowledge
answerable to what she spoke, deeds of kindness,
selflessness, courage, patience, truth. At this a
purpose awoke in him ; that is, he gave the child's will
up to the Not-Self, by willing like his teacher to please
not self but It. This was life unto God which began.
And if it was life in him, then it was in his soul the
act of Incarnation. In that incident of a nursery
hearth there passed an act of the world-process : there
was a creative moment; the awaking of the first
pulsation of a child's heart, set a-beat to the rhythm
of the Heart of All Things, was as the shock which
out of the lap of eternal night shook a universe.
For is it not so? When we ask how this thing
happens, that the activity of one soul that has life
makes life start in a new soul, we find ourselves
peering into the primal mystery of how Being came
to be. The disclosure is not made to us. As thou
knowest not how the bones do grow in the womb, so
thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit. Even
in this body of death, our flesh, the coming of life is
untrackable. What have we discovered more than
this, that if actual and living life of flesh touches

THE HISTORIC CHRIST 173
dormant and potential life of flesh, there springs a
new life? So is every one that is born of the Spirit.
Character makes character, said a sage; and faith,
say we, makes faith. |The life of a spiritual being is,
as we have analysed it, the state or relation of mutual
self -surrender between a soul and its Maker : and,
when a soul that is in this state comes into contact
with another soul, this same relation stirs in that
otherTjy Even as on our hearths coal kindles from coal,
the black from the glowing; as at touch of the light
and heat, which is already the condition of the live
ember, there springs in the dead substance beside it
the like condition; so at the touch of living spirit
comes alive a spirit. Ever since the day of Pro
metheus man has known that life is fire ; and fire life
is indeed, this way. And this way our parents of
the spirit gave us the life that was already theirs ; this
way the fore-fathers gave that life to them; this way
the first fathers of the Church, witnesses of the
Resurrection and men of the Pentecost, gave it to
those first ancestors of ours; and this way did Jesus
of Nazareth in Galilee give the life to the men and
women who heard Him teach, saw Him do acts of
life before the Baptist's messengers, watched Him
die upon a cross ; then received upon their hearts the
' Behold, it is I Myself,' and knew that in this Jesus,
the man they loved, who was dead and is alive again,
there was come upon the earth the life which cannot
die by death, but by sacrifice is made alive. Thus
we to-day from our parents, they yesterday from

174 THE HISTORIC CHRIST
theirs, these again from the Apostles, received the
committed fire, and the Apostles from Jesus the
Galilean. IV
Jesus Himself — from whom did He receive this hfe?
We have traced the Incarnation-fact, as it is found
in a Christian's experience, back to Jesus : have gone
up the stream of the tradition of a Hfe unto God to
reach a fountain head, the thirty years in Syria.
What is there beyond that fountain head? No other
stream that fills it : only the unseen, unknown
fountains of the great deep of transcendent Being.
Exit in mysterium. The life in Jesus is origin of
the life in men, but of the life in Jesus no origin can
be discerned. He is the river head underived, the
unbegun Beginner, the cause of all, Himself uncaused.
We venture to put forth as the fact which, at least
for our human understanding, constitutes the Divinity
of the Person of Christ this fact, — that the life He
communicated to men was a new thing, not in the
world of mortal things till then, which came there by
an act of creation.
For ' where wast thou, 0 man, when God laid this
new foundation of the world : declare it if thou
hast understanding. Who determined the measures
thereof, if thou knowest, or who stretched fine
upon it? Whereupon of things human were the
foundations of this house of life fastened, and who

THE HISTORIC CHRIST 175
laid the cornerstone thereof, when this second time
the morning stars sang together and all the sons of
God shouted for joy, — because Man was born alive?'
No language lesser than this elating rhythm of the
grand creation-hymn seemed fit to echo our sense of
the mystery veiled by the name of Jesus of Nazareth,
son of Mary. Jesus is God incarnate in human kind
because His personality, whatever be its relations to
God the Absolute as they are known and named in
heaven, can be named and known in earth as an act
of creation. God said, Let there be Man, truly and
wholly in our image and likeness, Man having
perfectly the life unto God : and there was — the
Man Christ Jesus. The thirty years of Jesus are
the second stroke of creative power : this new Adam
is the Man from heaven. It is the Lord's doing and
not Nature's; and it is marvellous in our eyes.

The Lord's doing and not Nature's. It is this that
will be challenged, where the Divinity of Christ is
disputed; for the disputant will contend that Jesus,
though in a sense new and even unique as a personality,
yet was a fruit of the human evolution. To answer
this by a mere obiter dictum in our present argument
is not possible : it would be like setting forth a
summa theologiae in a parenthesis. We can only
point to where we find the proof. It is in the history
of Christendom. For this fact, the personality of
Jesus, is not comprised in the record of the thirty

176 THE HISTORIC CHRIST
years but in the record of these and all the years that
flow from them. The thing that is original,
underived, unaccountable, is a certain happening
in the large experience of mankind, the rise and
persistence of the Christian character, recognisably
in the Church, but discernibly also in the world. It
is this happening which we call the Lord's doing and
marvellous. It is provable, though not to prove in
this place.
Yet to some of us who the most earnestly
contend for the divinity of Jesus, may we not say
that this Underivedness is the truth for which they
are really contending, when they champion certain
articles of our creed which are of value only as the
historical correlatives of that truth, or as symbols
of it. {Thus, they assert the Virgin Birth of Jesus,
as if the Divinity of Christ stood or fell with that
physical event. It is not so — the manner of the
Birth can have efficacy for human fate only as a
fleshly accompaniment of the spiritual event, the
entry into the human current of a force not derived
from humanity. This entry is what we have to
prove. This ought we to do, and not indeed to leave
the other undone, but still to assure our hearts that,
proven or found incapable of proof or disproof, it
cannot shake our faith that God sent forth His Son;
sent Him forth made of a woman; but His Son.
Sometimes now we fight for a symbol when we should
fight for the substance; as ere now in campaigns of
our countrymen, a regiment has lost a victory by a

THE HISTORIC CHRIST 177
useless strife to save the colours. Are not we liable
to do the same — to remember the banner, forget the
battlejj *>f*^ \ v *
Yet when we assert the underivedness of the life
that was in Jesus, the immediacy of the Creator's
action in the making of it, we do not deny the
evolution in Him of human elements. On the
contrary a Christian lays much stress on the signs of
a preparation for the Christ, of a fulness of time when
God sent forth His Son. But the constituents out of
which issued the life in Christ were elements in some
measure of earth, but in an over-proportion beyond
all measure were elements of heaven. Those human
and natural antecedents do not in all their sum make
up the sum of the constituents which built up that
Reality : they are indeed no more the cause of Jesus
than the molecules of his corporal frame, with the
mechanical and chemical forces which combined
them, were the cause of His living body of flesh.
As that body which was made of earth's dust and
her mechanism and chemistry was, not a man, but
some of the makings of a man, till the breath of life
was breathed into the nostrils, so into the thin stream
of nature's evolution of manhood entered — Jesus.
On that instant the slender current became a march
of waters, with volume, breadth, momentum, as if
through a floodgate of the Unseen had been poured
from fountains of the great deep the river of all the
water of life.

M

178 THE HISTORIC CHRIST
VI
Have we, in this conception of the historic
Incarnation as a fresh creative act of God, taken
flight back again from our proposed interrogation of
nature to the metaphysic of church doctors, who
have always described the Redemption as a 'new
creation ' ?
We are back again no doubt in metaphysics, but
it is an interrogation of nature that has brought us
there. The sound path which our research into fact
has footed has carried us through nature's territory
till we came to that precipice edge where the border
of the finite marches with the infinite, a brink beyond
which not the foot but the wing must voyage. AU
interrogations of nature lead to that brink. Trace
back the physical life on our planet through all its
generations, and you reach a seed dropped on earth,
as physicists have surmised, from ' moss-grown
fragments,' the wrecks of an earlier world, itself
peopled with seeds of living things from who knows
what yet older world. Or if life should after all
discover its parentage in the chemical and mechanical
nature, whence was begotten the primal ether which
came to be woven on the looms of that mechanism
and chemistry? There is still that leap of Being out
of the dark. Or trace back the spiritual in man, as
the artist's 'creations,' and the line of intellectual
descent can be followed no further back than to the
poet ' waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.' Or
unravel the evolution of a Paul from Pharisee to

THE HISTORIC CHRIST 179
Apostle, and the thread breaks at the point of a
conversion which is ' wonderful ' : you cannot see
the bridge of process across which the Incarnate One
has entered the saint : ' it pleased God to reveal His
Son in Him ' ; there is no more to say.
To this brink of the gulf then we are brought when
we track the life of Christian faith backward to the
appearance in history of Jesus, who transmits a life
which no one had transmitted to Him. Observation
of fact serves us no longer : another faculty must
here pursue the interrogations. It is the Imagination,
claimed earlier by us as thought's greater instrument :
it is the study of facts with the soul's spiritual
posture of Wonder, according to that reported saying
of Jesus 'Wonder at that which is before you.'
Wonder, we repeat, is the response of a soul to
the new which is also great. It is the Virgin asking
'How shall this be?' yet answering, Be it unto me.
By Imagination wondering we open our soul to the
inflow of a world of spiritual fact for which the
vessel of our merely sensuous experience is not deep
enough and its channel too strait. By this energy
the soul becomes her own organ of knowledge : she
makes assay of the eternal reality behind the temporal
by the life which she experiences or fails to experience
when with that reality she makes the contact, called
believing, which is the intercommunion of the Finite
and the Infinite.
We have now defined by our inductive enquiry
(which led us at last up to this brink of mystery) the

180 THE HISTORIC CHRIST
fact which we are to test by our method — the historic
Incarnation.

VII
To believe in this fact is to believe that a Christian's
personal experience of a life unto God in him has
for its first cause the event called the doings and
sufferings of Jesus of Nazareth. This belief — that a
historical personage is the cause of our spiritual hfe
— is to be subjected to proof by our method. When
our soul believes in the historic Christ, believes, that
is, that all which Jesus did between the first at
Bethlehem and the last on Olivet, is the ultimate origin
in human history of her salvation; briefly, when the
soul has faith in the person of Christ Jesus, divine and
human, does she have life?
There is a great division of this proof which need
not be laboured. To array the evidence that men's
hearts and wills have been vivified by a devotion to
Jesus as a Divine Person; to muster the testimonies
of churches given in creed or deed, to cite the
utterances of saints who confess the story of Jesus
to be the source of their energies and affections —
this might seem a needless pomp of rhetoric. It is
so certain that the power upon a Christian's purpose
and emotion has been the power that has gone out
from the personality which he touches through the
record. From Peter, who believed that Jesus was
Lord and Christ, because God had raised Him up, and
Paul (too hastily marked for their own by idealist

THE HISTORIC CHRIST 181
interpreters as 'knowing Christ no more after the
flesh') whose spiritual wrestle and victory it was to
strive and not prevail against the Man whom Stephen
declared — from these captains of our faith it is all one
story onward to the village enthusiast of to-day who
tells you that he ' does not care much now for what
folks call enjoyments, but what I like to do, when I
have any time to myself, is to get into some old
cupboard or behind a heap of straw in the stable, and
pour out my soul to the Lord Jesus ' ; and as he speaks
there falls a beam upon the homely features and lights
up to you the honesty within. It is this Lord Jesus,
the Christ not of metaphysic but of history, who has
been for this man's heart and will the power of God
unto salvation.
Yet since things seen are mightier than things
heard, and our own experience outweighs all report
of others, let a believer ask himself whether in those
approaches to the Divine which most are mystical
and where most he is ' in the Spirit,' it is not the story
of a Man which strongliest animates his power to will.
He has come to the Sacrament which shows the Lord's
death in history, before an hour of hazard or decision,
of encounter or suffering, that he may eat the bread
of comfort and drink the cup of holy Passion. There
before the altar
" As a man calls for wine before he fights,
Or asks one draught of earlier, happier sights,
Ere fitly he can hope to play his part,"
even so this worshipper knows that the force which

182 THE HISTORIC CHRIST
there enters him comes by a devotion which is a
remembrance of ' earlier sights,' remembrance of one
Man and His deed in story, how in the days of His
flesh He endured a mortal's agony, and in no ideal
but most actual Passion gave his members to a death
which brake a mortal body and poured the life-blood.
Let this worshipper be witness to himself whether
heart was warmed and will was sinewed by an event,
that once on a time and on one spot of earth befell
one man, Jesus the Galilean. It will be his witness
whether the belief in a historic Christ makes life in
the soul. VIII
But we hasten on to the proof more demanded of
us. The historical critic of our faith may grant us
the quickening of heart and will by a Christ of story ;
though he will say the believer has mistaken that
animation's cause, which is not an event but the
impulsion only of an idea, to which the Christ-tale
serves as helpful symbol. With our mind, he will
say, it is otherwise. An idea which has crystallised
into a relation to an imagined Person — this a Christian
can perhaps love and obey : what he cannot do is to
think it. His intelligence does not live by a
surrender to this belief : on the contrary it refuses
to believe in a Jesus who is a Christ. Thought
faints and is annulled in an effort to assimilate this
idea. It cannot salute, as the presence of the Divine
in humanity, an individual man at one epoch of time,

THE HISTORIC CHRIST 183
and an individual too who had so little claim to a
universal significance as this Jewish preacher, this
person who however good was a personality of one
kind only, a man of one trade and a humble one, a
carpenter; one whose mind had the limitation of a
narrow peasant ignorance; whose character offers to
some critics' judgement even a blemish here and
there, such as an inadequate sensitiveness to social
injustice done to wife or slave; and whose fanatic
temperament could prophesy for his cause an
apocalyptic victory, which did not happen, and force
on a martyrdom, which for an illumined conscience is
a wrongful self-immolation, to be repented of on the
cross. This allegation, that a historic Incarnate One can
be loved and obeyed but cannot be thought; that, if
heart and will can live unto such a Christ, yet the
intelligence cannot so live, must be met. And met
on its own ground and terms, not evaded, as has too
often been the strategy of apologetics, by disparaging
the value of the understanding in the activity, faith.
That forlorn scholar of the 17th century, Vincent
Flaccius, who had fought his sicknesses with a life-
power he found in a scholar's activities, bade grave
on his tombstone the testimony, ' Vita sine literis
somnus, sine Christo mors est.' And we say after
him that our life, if without Christ it is but death, even
with Christ, but without intelligence, is a life not dead
indeed but much asleep; Christ is come to awake it
out of sleep. My mind must live unto Christ made

184 THE HISTORIC CHRIST
man, my mind with all else that is within me. 'I will
live with the spirit,' we exclaim as might Paul; 'I
will live with the understanding also.'
Can we then live with the understanding also unto
this truth, that the Man Jesus was God's Incarnation
in history? IX
The critics urge that, if emotion and energy can
thrive on the acceptance of a historic Christ, thought
on the other hand languishes in the effort and dies.
We must look into this. What thought is it which
encounters this deadening repulse? Perhaps it is a
thought concerning Jesus which is unreal and ought
to die. Is it a thought of Jesus, the individual, as
identical with the Absolute? — an idea certainly
unthinkable. Of Jesus as the Teacher who reveals
the nature of God, or as the full and perfect exemplar
of all varieties of human conduct? — ideas which the
mental limitations and the brief, narrow moral
experience of a Jewish craftsman seem to forbid. Of
Jesus as the consummator of man's evolution? — an
idea which His momentary and solitary position,
midway in the secular process, makes incredible to
evolutionary science. Or is the thought of Jesus of
a kind that undergoes shock, when it is met by that
speculative reading of His ministry which would
present him to us as the dupe of an apocalyptic
fantasy, and the victim of a wilfully self-inflicted
doom? Here no doubt are difficulties under which

THE HISTORIC CHRIST 185
the faith of many withers as by a frost. We would
invite them to think more largely of the office of the
Christ, and to note how vital warmth returns. Jesus
has been to them the Teacher and Revealer of truths,
or the Example and the Guide of conduct. These
He is, but these are not He. These are aspects of
His deed, facets of His being, beams which ray out
from His glory, not the glory, the being, the deed.
We seek the Jesus behind all these and within them
all, that which He is first and last and midmost.
r
(We believe that we have found it when we recognise
in Jesus not the divine Teacher, divine Exemplar, but
the divine Life. He came as man not that we might
be instructed, exampled, disciplined, but that we
might have life and have it abundantly. He is Way
and Truth and Life. The Truth, for by Him we
know the world-secret, what God and Man is : the
Way, for His footsteps trace the believer's walk : but
first and midst and last he is the Life ; the Life which
is the light on men's path, the Life which is their
strength to walk therein^ His birth in the flesh was
the Creator's second stroke, that struck into man,
already become a living soul, the power to live indeed,
by living not unto his world but unto his God. See if
to think of Jesus as the Life does not wither at their
root the doubts that were withering our faith. Did
we doubt if Jesus was God Incarnate because we
could not find the Absolute within the bounds of this

186 THE HISTORIC CHRIST
one human personality? No, for the Absolute is not
there : but is Life not there? In the act of Jesus, in
the patience and the venture and the sacrifice of self
which lost life only to find it, we do discern a
personality which was human and yet lived wholly
unto God. Did we doubt that Jesus, being one
man and at one moment out of all time, and
contravening the law of continuous and gradual
evolution, could be of a universal significance? But
Jesus was a Life ; and life, though it can evolve when
once it has come into being, must first come to be;
and that beginning can only be by a creative stroke,
must happen at some one point in time and by the
passage at a leap from the moment of ' There was not '
to the moment of ' God said let there be, and there
was life.' An evolution of the Christ there was and
is, in Christian history, continuous surely and surely
gradual enough to fulfil all rightness of evolution's
law. But first it needed to begin : and this beginning
Jesus was. And life, if there was to take place life
in humanity, could not be otherwise than in one man.
It could not be in less than a man, for life is the hving
unto God of a human nature, not of a nature's part.
It needed not to be in more than one : for if one man
were alive unto God, the fire of life was already
kindled, and all the dead could kindle at it. Did we
doubt how a carpenter of Nazareth, a humble
provincial in the kingdom of all time and all
existence, could comprehend in his narrow self the
immensity of human thought and human character,

THE HISTORIC CHRIST 187
and be the recapitulation of human kind? But
Jesus was not man's thought or character : He was
man's life. He was in germ the union of God with
man, He was the Surrender of human spirit to divine
Spirit. But this Surrender and Union could be
realised in any nature and career and experience,
however limited or however enlarged. There needed
only that a Self should be given to God. Were it
self of wide experience or self of narrow, mattered
not ; it mattered only that the Self was given and was
given wholly. Is the sacrifice of a king, who offers
his life in battle, more a sacrifice on his own part than
is the offering of his humblest follower? Each
offers all that he has, his Being : they are equal in
their deed. The Self then of the Galilean working
man was oblation rich enough : it was a whole burnt-
offering ; the fire of the Lord fell on it : and when it
flamed, life was kindled in the earth.
XI
Last, have we doubted if Jesus were indeed the man
from heaven, because He predicted a coming on the
clouds to judgement, and because He did the actions
and spoke the words which entailed a death He
clearly foresaw, and could have avoided, but of set
purpose provoked? Why, let this reading of the story
be granted to the full, and then ask yourself whether
by that reading Jesus becomes any less the Life.
Yield the critic his contention, (on which scholarship
must finally pronounce), that Jesus did verily believe

188 THE HISTORIC CHRIST
in His near return with apocalyptic wonders. You
have only yielded that Jesus was a man of a generation
which had in the minds of its more spiritual members
imaged its faith in the victory of Good over Evil in
this picture of a material and proximate event ; that He
presented to His own faith that victory in those con
ceptions which, unless a miracle were done upon His
mind, were the only mode in which His faith could
utter itself. When He so pictured His return upon
the clouds, it was a dream, if you will, but a dream by
which He lived unto God. It was the very force and
livingness of His faith which enabled Him to see that
vision : the Parousia He pictured was the translation of
that lively faith into a mortal language ; it was material
because it was so real, it was near because it was so
sure. Let us make this reasoning human by an apologue,
Joan the Maid in prison hearing from her Voices that
she shall be rescued 'by a great deliverance.' How
did she picture it ? A rally doubtless of her country
men, or a baring of the sword of Michael. The
deliverance came, but so as by fire : and through the
fire came her confession ' my voices have not deceived
me.' Yield the critic again that far more precarious
and arbitrary speculation of a self-immolation, and
still the perfectness of the character of Jesus stands
untouched. For 'ought not Christ to have suffered
this thing ?' It did behove the Messiah to press to clear
and undeniable decision the Messianic issue, the

THE HISTORIC CHRIST 189
quarrel of Heaven and the World. How else then but
by this implacable self-assertion, demanding from
Israel, in heaven's name, not something, not much,
but all? The battle must be plainly set and visibly
fought out and won. The end could be foreseen,
could be averted? Yes, as the soldier stepping to the
front for a forlorn hope can foresee a death under the
rampart, and can, if he will, stay back in the ranks.
What should Jesus have done, by this critic's counsel?
When Jerusalem's front hardened and threatened,
doubtless it behoved the Christ to steal back in peace
to friendly Galilee, and there tell them once more that
he who loseth his life shall find it. How? — when the
life has not been found nor lost. Who believes then
this preacher's report? to whom has the arm of the
Lord been revealed through this gentle provincial
moralist, who is in word but not in power? But to
dally with surmises of what might have been — how
petty it is in us, who can know not what might have
been, but what was ! That self-immolation stands
approved as rightful by the answer from heaven. The
deed of self-assertion unto death did prosper, the
sacrifice did work salvation ; a Christian can live to-day
the believer's life unto God, because Jesus defied the
priesthood, perished by their hands, and by the rising
from the dead brought to light immortality, the life
that is born from the travail of life's surrender.
"Ah! but," some critic insists, "you may explain
away the apocalyptic hope, but not the despair of an
apocalypse. Besides the ' Ye shall see the Son of

190 THE HISTORIC CHRIST
Man coming in the clouds,' there is also the ' My God,
why hast thou forsaken me.' Interpret the first to be
an act of life, and still the second is a confession of
death." Surely of the Passion which makes Life that despair
was the last and all-completing moment : achievement
could not forego it. This also it behoved the Christ
to suffer, this last detachment from self, to surrender
wholly the hope of a way of escape : this (dare we say
it in words reputed to be a precept of His ?) was ' the
wondering of Jesus at that which was before Him,'
the utter opening of His soul to the unimaginable in
the counsels of God that passed all understanding, the
last gasp of wonderment that the Father should ask of
His Son even this, that He consent to be forsaken !
There are gentler interpretations of the cry on the
cross, as that Jesus was but citing from the psalm an
ancient agony like to His. We choose the severer.
Jesus did undergo the moment of despair, despair of
deliverance. Here was the full up-render of self,
which made the burnt-offering whole. By the utter
ance in which hope's last harp-string broke, the
Redeemer for us men and our salvation died the death
into life eternal. XII
Is this enough to say ? Are we content with proving
that in a historic Christ, as well as in a mystical, the
mind can believe ? We rise from a duly patient study
of alleged difficulties of belief to assert that a Christian

THE HISTORIC CHRIST 191
fully believes in a mystical incarnation only when he
believes in a historic.
'If two of you shall agree on earth as touching
anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them,'
said the Christ. Why should the prayer of two pre
vail ? Because the force of prayer has become twofold ?
No, the prayer is not multiplied ; it is transmuted. My
act of faith while it is solitary, remains, in the dry
technicality, a merely subjective belief, and therefore
an uncertain. Let me see that belief also in another
man, and it has become objective and therefore real.
As I make myself sure of a world of things external
to myself by the touch of my hand on it, so I make
sure that the spiritual world is real by touching this
reality in that which is outside myself, this other man.
The experience which was inward, now is outward :
it has become part of a world which is objective. But
next, the belief, verified already as soon as I find it
anywhere at all in the Other than Self, is confirmed
when I find it not in one point of the Other but in many
points ; not in the one or two, but in the multitude of
them that believe, the Church Catholic and Apostolic,
that is, the Body of Christ that is everywhere and in
all times. And still full assurance tarries. For the
Church Catholic is not actually all men, is universal in
idea but not yet in fact. May not this belief in an
Incarnation be a subjective fancy, though not of
one but of many? Ah! too easily. But — 'see the
Christ stand ' ! That Incarnation which I have felt
within my separate self, which I have experienced in

192 THE HISTORIC CHRIST
the two or three, which I have discerned in a vast
section of my kind — lo ! I have seen it not in the few,
not in the many, but in All. For I have seen it in this
Jesus of history, the One who is the Whole, the Indi
vidual who is also the Universal, the perfect, all-
comprehending manhood ; Jesus, who though he was
not all men, yet was all of man. In Him, this all of
man, I experience the Incarnation; in Him I behold
effected the union of earth and heaven, finite and
infinite, mortal and eternal : for in this one man and
one event I behold a Life that lives unto God indeed.
The timid faith that is in my bosom has ventured out,
has reached thither her questioning finger, reached
thither her mistrustful hand, has touched and proved
an Incarnation which is substance and reality in the
Other than Self, in the solid world of things that are.
By Jesus Christ born of woman the mystic union of
the soul and her Maker has become a thing which our
eyes have seen and our ears heard and our hands have
handled. An Incarnation which is there in history is
an Incarnation which is there in verity. God has
made this Jesus whom a woman bore and men slew
on a cross to be the outward visible pledge of man's
inward and spiritual birth unto life divine; has
instituted in Him a Sacrament that enables faith.
XIII
Without a parable spake He not unto them — the Son
of God in the days of His flesh. Without a parable
of Sacrament speaks not to us the Father of spirits.

THE HISTORIC CHRIST 193
What weight upon the human will lies in the force
among things we name Sacrament, none need here
asseverate. All that weight upon whosoever wills to
be saved lies in the event of time, which laid bare to
our senses the timeless process of creature's reconcile
ment to Creator. Since One Man wrought in Galilee
and died at Zion, the soul of man naturally Christian
and groping after God if haply it might find Him, has
had the Whither of its quest beaconed to the eye, has
had signalled to the ear the Way thereto and the When.
' Behold, the Cross of Jesus, that is the goal : behold,
Love's sacrifice on it, that is the way : and now, even
when thou art beholding, now is the accepted time.'
And thereupon the lonely mortal will, that does not
dare make choice, but hangs yet in the wind, faltering
and unresolved, has caught the mighty rhythm of the
power of Sacrifice, where it pulses through the bound
less All; has timed by it the stroke of spirit which
seals a fate; has made by venturousness the great
acceptance, of the Passion which is the Life of man.

VIII
CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL
[May 28th, 1911.]

'Our wills are ours, to make them Thine."

VIII
CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL
Is. lvii. 19. — " Peace, peace, to him that is far off, and to him that
is near, saith the Lord ; and I will heal him."
On this last opportunity under the statute of this
lectureship, the attempt must be made to gather into
one focus the trains of reflection on the nature and
function of Creed which have occupied us throughout.
Creed is an instrument of man's ^salvation. But
salvation is best figured, at least for our own day,
under the image of Life, the highest expression yet
attained of the fact of existence. Life, studied in all
its kinds and degrees, Proves_to_Jbe the mutual self -
upgivingpf organism and environment, of creature
and Creator. Creed then can be an instrument of
life only by enabling this interchange of self. This
it does by enabling the creature to render its own
part in that mutual action. jWhen a believer recites
a creed, either he does nothing at all, or he offers by
help of the words a sacrifice to the Creator of his
whole personality, thought, emotion, conduct together]
Of the three elements in confession, the mental has no
doubt a prominence to our consciousness in a creed
which is verbal, though in a creed which should be
not in word but in the form of worship or of code of

198 CEEED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL
conduct (and each is a creed), the prominence would
be with the emotional or the practical element. But
the mental element cannot exist in abstraction, nor
can it be understood except as in union with the
others. The forgetting of this has caused much
confusion in theology, and some disablement in
religion. _CreedJhen is, we judge, an indispensable means of
effecting a soul's self -surrender to reality. By recital
"of- a' formula a man can utter his faith, make it
outward, objectify it, discover and contemplate it in
the other than self. By the utterance he makes a
self-committal to a way of thinking, a course of
conduct, a bestowal of the affections. Thus Creed is
the instrument of salvation by enabling the believer's
act of self -surrender which is half the act of life. If
the Divine makes response by giving itself to the man ;
if the man's thought is answered by illumination, his
affection by a love shed abroad in his heart, his energy
by an invigoration that falls on his will, then the
reciprocation has happened, and the man has life.
But this life resultant from confession of a creed is
the truth of creed; the man has believed aright.
Creed ministers life to us. But that can only be if
creed is itself alive; or, to speak more exactly, if it is
such that he who recites it can be alive in the act of
recital. Creed is alive when the echo of its phrases
starts a movement of the soul in the hearer, as of old
a music could start an inspiration in a prophet. \lf
the phrases should be without meaning for him, and

CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL 199
even without those associations by which mere sound
can arouse, as a music does, a movement of the spirit ;
still more if the meaning contradicts his other beliefs ;
then the creed in that part of it does not minister
life. All language of mortals is 'a body of death,'
and the creeds are language of mortals, and able like
it to die. I
If these positions are made good, what follows that
concerns our faith and practice? Are we to believe
and to do any otherwise than as we have all the
centuries believed and done ?
Some Christians, one observes, think that very
much needs doing. They plead that the existing
language of the two longer creeds is that of a super-)
seded metaphysic, and where not out of date is out of
the comprehension of most worshippers; that there
are articles even in the simplest formulary which are
no longer held true in their original sense, and at
least one article the historic validity of which some
of the faithful cannot affirm with the old absolute
assurance ; that in consequence the use of the creeds
in public worship is an inconvenience, or even for
some consciences a mischief; and that it would be
well to discontinue their use.
The plea should be met neither with anger nor
even with disrespect. These protesters against creed
are still entangled in the error that faith is of the
mind, and that creed helps faith by its. work upon .the

200 CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL
intelligence. But it isjhe soul to which creed Jiasjo
minister; and it ministers by words which best can
stir the life-movement in that soul towards union
with the divine realities symbolised. Those words
must be ancient words, carrying the continuity and
catholicity of the church, if they are to carry the
spell of a communion with a faith which was and
is to be. Their fixity has inconyenience : their
mutability would have mischief. \ What unthrift it
would be to exchange the power on heart and will,
which flows out in the echo of the catholic watchwords,
for some small gain of appeal to the intelligence}) A
gain too so easily recoverable. For as in the secular
commonwealth we re-adjust the misfits worked in its
statutes through time and change by the instrument of
equity which re-interprets letter by spirit, or by
silent abrogation of a letter that is dead; so the laws
of the spiritual commonwealth can be re- vitalised, if
need call for it, by the consent, tacit or overt, of
clerus and populus to let the symbol stand indeed un
changed, but stand for a new and better apprehension
of the truth.
This indeed is what the Church is doing. We teach
our catechumens that the resurrection of the body
means a real resurrection of the person; and we let
them understand that the Procession from the Son,
momentous to the Churches as the article has been
in history, is in the salvation of a soul of lesser
moment, if of any moment at all.
This then is a conclusion as to practice which the

CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL 201
Church has already drawn from the premise held by
her, somewhat too inarticulately, that creed is to
minister not a knowledge but a life. The practice of
reinterpreting a creed in any member of it which has
suffered the touch of mortality, from which no speech
of man is immune, is a catholic practice ; it need stir
no alarm or scruple in those who have the catholic
mind. In practice then we see not much that is to be
done, other than what the Church does already —
except indeed (but that is a great matter) to do it
openly, avowedly, without shame of face or inward
misgiving; to do it not, as usual, belatedly and as a
concession to expediency, but timely and as the
exigence of our principles, a fruit and consequence of
a lively faith. II
But when we turn from practice to faith, it will
appear there is much to be done, and very much.
There is for very many of us certainly a new posture
of mind to be taken, perhaps even a conver
sion in our thinking to be undergone. When we
have recognised that faithjs ajsoul's surrender to a
Divine which renders itself in answer; Jhat creed is
an instrument to enable this surrender ; that the verbal
cree<L_enables specifically the surrender of the
reasoning soul, and has no other use or worth but
this"? do we thereupon recognise what call to sacrifice
has been prepared for us by our principle? It is a
call to make ready a sacrifice for the altar, a sacrifice

202 CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL
of our thoughts; thoughts that are our self, being
our own now, however once they were received from
that which is not ourself.
For what has been the thought about our creeds
which has been the predominating and characterising
thought of those in our English church who for more
than half a century by the force ahke of their piety
and their scholarship have determined the faith-
movement of their church? It is the thought which
centres itself in the categories of a Revelation, a
Deposit, a Tradition. A Revelation by which a
knowledge of unseen realities was communicated to
man's mind; a Deposit of doctrines interpreting that
knowledge ; a Tradition, by the articles of formularies
and the lessons of authorised doctors, of the good
thing once for all committed to the saints. This
thought of Churchmen how was it attained? It was
attained by a Passion. Who reads that Oxford story
and the story of a church into which it swelled, and
does not know that the names of those who revived
the dimmed vision and torpid activities of the
Anglican communion are names of men who were,
in that ancient phrase, ' a company of the white
martyrdom,' a company of those ' who for the love of
God sever themselves from all they love though they
suffer privation ('fasting') or trouble thereby:'
men, whom the facts of their time did not call to
resist unto blood, but who for the love of Christ
forsook self that they might live by the holiest truth
their souls could reach, in scorn of consequence.

CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL 203
These men, our fathers, found and held their creed
by a Passion. To us by a tradition they committed
that good thing. We to-day then — by a Passion we
must hold it, by a sacrifice of self we must maintain
it. Do we discern what that sacrifice has to be? For
it may be a sacrifice of any of our thoughts about our
creeds : may be the offer to surrender that central
tenet, that creeds once fashioned by the early
undivided church can never more be changed; that
the Church has but one duty towards them, to keep
undiminished the treasure of a revelation committed
to her, coined in the language of the primitive
symbols of belief ; that she is the witness of
"Christes lore and His apostles twelve,"
and must guard uncorrupt the letter of that lore
against any who would alter, add, diminish.
And so might it have been, if Christes lore had been
a lore; had it been a thing learned, that could be
framed in the letter of a creed ; had the matter of the
tradition been a code of conduct, a table of articles,
a record of events; had it been a treasure we are to
keep safe, and not a fire we are to keep alight. jBut
Christ's lore is not a letter but a life. Christ is
not, first and last, Revealer, or Teacher, Exemplar,
Guide. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, but
He is Way and Truth because He is the LifeT^ The
good thing He has committed to us is not a doctrine
for the mind nor a rule for the will : is not a word but
a power; the ineffable power by which when God
said ' Let there be ' behold, there was ; is the current

204 CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL
of creative energy issuing from the act of Jesus in time
and space, and passing through earth's dust always
and everywhere to quicken it into living souls
of men : it is the divine spark in the soul, of which
the mystic dreams, the ' something in our embers that
doth live,' the holy fire which Christ said He came to
'send on earth; yea, the fire of the divine-human
sacrifice, the sacrifice of reconciliation, the Love
which seeks and saves, the passion which redeems by
making live, the eternal passion that is the gravitation
on which the universe is built, the magnet on which it
is strung; a force that vibrates for ever across the
infinite plasmic ether out of which the worlds are
woven, thrilling into flame the spirits here and there
of the great ones — prophet, priest, confessor, martyr
— who shine as beacon lights in the world, and touch
ing into trembling glow a thousand times ten thousand
taper points of that multitude whom no man can
number, the good who are not great.
Ill
This evermoving flame of Sacrifice, this life-
breath of an eternal Passion that makes things to hve
— this is the good thing committed to us, and our
tradition is to convey this. But a passion we cannot
convey except by passioning : the altar can burn with
a perpetual sacrifice only by a burnt offering daily
laid on it. We do not lay on the altar the daily
offering of our thought when we say 'Thus have I
thought out, or thus have I received as thought out by

CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL 205
my fathers in Christ, the interpretation of the truths
which God spake in times past by His Christ and the
prophets of Christ : and thus, no otherwise, will I
judge the truth and word it, until the Lord come.'
What change in our words of creed, or whether any
at all, will be required of us; whether our sacrifice
will go on to consummation, or be arrested, we cannot
know ; but of a surety we cannot bargain this . Though
it were the first-born of our soul, though it carried all
the divine promise to us, we must bind our first-born
to the horns of the altar, and take the knife to slay
the victim, until there cries out of heaven 'Lay not
thine hand upon it ; neither do thou anything to it :
for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast
not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me.'
Is there need to state this in colder formal
language for clearness sake? What is here pleaded
for is not a practical action but a spiritual disposition.
But this is a disposition vital to faith. To attain it
may be a conversion that saves. The Creed we
should safeguard without re-verifying might be in all
ways right in itself, but it would not be right for us.
Indeed we cannot safeguard so even the Letter of it :
for that Letter has no value or reality, it becomes a
nothing in the world, that moment when we profess it
no longer in the spirit of sacrificer. IV
Let us not turn the edge of the claim on us to make
our creed-holding a passion, by telling ourselves that

206 CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL
already there is essential sacrifice in that submission
of the individual's religious predilections to a Catholic
standard, which the Church urges on the churchman ;
or that it is others rather than ourselves who in belief
refuse the sacrificer 's attitude; as the protester of the
indefeasible private judgement, who refuses the
catholic surrender of the self-sufficiency of conscience ;
or as the reasoner upon truth who refuses the surrender
of reason's self-sufficiency, reproaching us the while
for disloyalty to truth, because he fails to see what
truth is, and thinks that truth is logic. We will not
ask 'Lord, and what shall these men do?' We will
follow the Lord, to a Passion. ( And if we are satisfied
that already we are doing this, for that our faithfulness
to the unchanged ' deposit ' of faith is a real sacrifice,
we will remember that even in faith the sacrifice of
man, though it cost him much, is nought, unless it
is answered by the fire of God ; and that a confession
is an answered sacrifice, a reciprocation with God,
_onlyJJ by it the confessor has life and life abundantly.
If the confessor has life. But life, the life in our
thoughts, life which is the knowing of reality — what
is it for the thinker in religion? Ask what it is for
the thinker in any material. It is, we say, a relation
of a Mind to Things, of Subject to Object. It is the
Subject discovering itself in the objective world, the
going forth of the subject and its return into itself.
A naked diagram this of a bleak science, epistemology.
Yet on that bare frame of the logician can be caught
and held up to our studying eyes the glimpses,

CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL 207
fugitiyje else, which disclose to us faith's realities.
Forlthe error of the too dogmatic believer and that
of his opposite are but contrasted ways of exaggera
ting the one term or the other in that reciprocity of
subject and object which makes the life of soul when
it thinks. The dogmatist rests all proof on the
historic — that is, the objective — element in belief,
on the record of events, and the record of the
church's interpretation of them. The anti-dogmatist
rests all on the experiential element, the personal
consciousness, the subject. Both miss the give and
take between subject and object, the interdependence
of the two factors by which thought has life. We
do not know God with full assurance by the story of
Jesus, and we do not know him by the experience of
a Christ within the man. We know God by a history
wed to an experience, by our bosom's sense of the
Divine found reflected in the outer world of fact, by a
story of all that Jesus began both to do and to teach
found to repeat itself in things taught and done upon
the believer's soul to-day\ Let them cease recrimin
ations, dogmatist and idealist, and learn one from
the other what the faith of each must add to itself
before it is a faith that lives indeed.
V
And may we not ask believers of catholic mind to
consider another ground of the claim made by this
our organ of faith, the principle of Life, to be an
authority in religion by the side of their own authority

208 CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL
of Tradition and History? This ground is its power
to catholicise : the promise and potency in it of
Christian unity. Observe that promise in the action
of the principle within our own church of England.
She is Christendom's best magnet to reunite the
churches — unless and until we rend that unity by
intolerances of the schools, or by some impatient
policy of change in her national status set free the
forces of disruption which her oneness now restrains.
Observe, I pray you, how Life as a ground of authority
is a bond that draws our differences together. For
this is the All-Truth that underlies the truths parcelled
out to each. Life, the hfe of wholeness and
corporateness, is (we trust that we showed this earlier)
the catholicity of the catholic believer. Life, the
life of individual and immediate intercourse with God,
is the experiential religion of the evangehcal Christian.
Life, the life of the free Spirit, the life of growth,
freedom, change, re-adaptation, is the liberty of
prophesying asserted by the champion of rationality.
What each holds of sound doctrine is but a translation
of some one potency of the mystic life, and because
and while they have hold on life, they are holden each
in the unity of the one spirit. (Life is the church's
magnetic centre. No magnet of Tradition, no
doctrine, formula, ritual, order, discipline, or use can
draw her many into one, except as itself has been
magnetised of lifej
Does there not at this moment offer itself a test of
the value of life as an eirenicon in churchmen's

CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL 209
differences? We are in difference about a rubric,
whether the plainness or the richness of the symbolic
dress in which we outwardly clothe our chief mystery
is the right interpretation of the church's rule. That
an agreement will be reached by the ways of legal or
historical scholarship seems hardly to be hoped. Let
us submit the question to the test of life. We shall
do so, if we grant liberty of option, and learn by
experiment which system proves more to make vitality
of soul in those who use it. VI
If however it is ventured that this principle of Life
can be an organ of faith, a test of truth, and a ground
of authority in religion, side by side with the principle
of the objective or historic and in an indissoluble
interdependence on it, it is earnestly pleaded that
what is ventured here is nothing new. To claim that
it is new would indeed not be presumption only but
self-condemnation, since in faith there can be nothing
new. No ' new commandment ' can be given, ' but an
old one which we had from the beginning.' None the
less let one to whom it has presented itself confess, that
where it has risen upon the mind there has dawned
a light of interpretation, which searches out all the
wide fields of human belief and practice, an inter
pretation which sheds light abroad over their tangling
perplexities, arresting doubts, twilight yearnings, in
'a largess universal, like the sun.'

210 CEEED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL
VII
And yet, even yet, a word may be addressed to a
most human instinct in minds among the most devout.
They will feel that we invite them to move their foot
from the ' impregnable rock ' of a scripture, the letter
of Tradition, and launch into a void, this intangible,
mystical life-response of spirit. Who can trust the
weight of his soul to a footing so precarious? But is
life precarious? It may seem so. The marvel that
the rhythm of the heart can in a thousand million
beats encounter no jar to silence it ! That at its side
the breath keeps an unarrested even march when the
most trivial violence might disorder all into ruin!
But life, the precarious, is the most stable among
things, stable in the very degree of its precariousness ;
the subtlest organisms and the most venturous are
those which live with largest range and, by the measure
not of clock-time but of action, with longest duration.
Nor let our metaphor of the rock mislead us. Rock
is not always a house's best foundation; it is the worst
— in earthquake. Let us remember how for early
symbolists the image to inspire was a thing of least
fixity : it was a ship riding a storm, the Navicella of
the Church, of all things the most unstable, yet by
waves the least to be overthrown; for, like life, it
masters nature by yielding, by obedience it makes the
winds and the waves obey it, persists in being by true
response to facts that be.

CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL 211
VIII
Our pleading of the cause of Creed, the Creed of
the Christian, with such frail understanding and
faltering interpretation as this pleader can bring to it,
here must end, so far as it is addressed to those within
the Church, to the people of the Creed.
There remains a brief word of pleading to them that
are without, or who so account themselves; to those
who reject the Christian's creed, perhaps not knowing
what it is; to those who are the people of an alien
creed, which they esteem a better, and a warring one ;
to those who have no creed at all, or who think that
they have none.
Those who reject Christianity as a creed outworn,
the educated abstainers from its worship, the men of
the Defection. 'Your Creed' say they 'no longer
tells the story of the world-process : it is a nursery
tale for earth's babes, not her grown-up family. Tell
the fairy story of ' once upon a time ' to those who are
children still : leave us with our science of what is
real and what is not once upon a time, but now.'
And we ask them yet to consider it again. For
what we use in religion is a science, not a fairy-tale,
a science of faith having its own organum of research,
our experimental method, the instrument of Verifica
tion by Life. You have called us obscurantists. We
reply that the appeal to study facts not fancies comes
not from you to us only, but from us to you. We ask
you to come with us and verify a law unifying all

212 CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL
existence, which has written itself on the facts of every
order from the movements of man's subtlest intelli
gence to the dust which quickens into flesh of worm
and the fibres which burgeon into flower. Behold,
we say, Life : and behold, it is the Mutual Self -giving
of creature to Creator, the Sacrifice, the Passion
of the Christ.
We ask you to investigate with us not the
pages of a record witnessing a far-off event, reputed
by us divine ; not the pages of past-away thinkers who
wrote interpretations of that witness; not these, or
not now. No, but to question things that happen in
this living hour, the things that happen upon that Self
of you, which is all of existence you can with clearness
certainly know, upon your mind, your heart, your
will ; things that are the movings of a Life in you when
it thinks, or purposes, or loves and hates. We ask you
to question these, with that same science of yours that
questions lesser things; as sternly, as patiently, as
discerningly; and to abide by the answer that shall
come to you. To us has come the answer, that what
has lit upon our senses is the Finger of the Reality,
that this Reality is known to us by the life which pulses
in us on that touch, that this intercourse is the Divine
become the Human, the Word made Flesh, which is
the Be- All of the Christian's faith. That answer has
come to us along the ways of science : we men of faith
are scientists in our faith, and say to our brothers in
quest ' Come and see what we — not have believed, but
have seen.'

CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL 213
And you have called us preachers of asceticism,
deniers of the natural life and its wholesome good,
calling humanity to take Poverty for bride. But that
is not the gospel we are preaching here. Sacrifice is
the message, not asceticism : a sacrifice that must
receive the answer by fire. Man can live only by
^giving himself to. God : to save a man there must be
the Passion. But the Passion is the rendering of the
personal self to the infinite Personality, in uttei
obedience to the All-Will. That Will is that man
shall suffer, and also that man shall enjoy : there is a
Passion which appoints a fast from pleasures, or even
stretches the confessor upon a rack; and there is a
Passion which floods his veins with the joy of strength
and fires him with the communion which is feast.
There is a sacrifice which is the casting away for more
unencumbered soldiership of this good or of that
— body's comfort, heart's out-going, reason's delight
of quest; and there is also the sacrifice which is the
glad spending of life's abundance by living at life's
height, by rendering the obedience whose service
is freedom, whose labour joy, in the delight of
prosperous battle for holy cause, in the sweetness of
love's fruition, divine or human, in the rapture of the
flight of thought, when it soars upon a wing beyond
the bound of sense, and across the heaven threshold
beholds the Unbeholden in a vision that maketh blest.
Both these are sacrifices, the suffering and the bliss,
and few are they who are not called to both.
And you say we are pedants in religion, who have

214 CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL
narrowed the life of faith to mere devotionalness, or
even to the thin scholarship of theologian or
ecclesiastic. We thank you for that reminder. It is
not quite unneeded. But when we recollect ourselves,
we gladly put aside these professional mannerismg, and
are, as you, realists in the study of salvation. yWe do
know, we also, that a way is not a goal, and an art
instrument is not an art creation, and a diet is not a
health; we know that a creed's rehearsal is not an act
of faith, nor a ritual is a worship, nor any mode of
religion is religion's self^ We can discern, as could
the Celtic saint, a brother believer in the man who
is not yet of the Church by sacrament or by teaching,
yet has ' guarded safe all his life the natural good ' :
nay, we can discern a brother even in one who cannot
discern that brotherhood in himself, and names
himself unbeliever, yet who walks by the same rule
of sacrifice as the brethren walk, and to whom, if he
be in some thing otherwise minded, God shall reveal
even this in God's true hour.
And you have called us unreal, still echoing the doc
trines of original sin and a dying world, and the vanity
of works without faith, survivals of a barbarous con
science, while mankind's grown intelligence ' is not
worrying about its sins,' and turns to a Deity who on His
part is not caring about the contrition of men's heart
but about the service of their hand. Again we thank
you for the reminder . But those of us for whom sin and
salvation are but other names for death and life unto
God, do not incur your censure. Our doctrine that sin

CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL 215
must be repented and forgiven is but change of
language for a doctrine, learned from universal nature
and charged with all her realness, that whatever thing
would live must live by sacrifice of self, and he that
sins has refused that sacrifice and shall forfeit that life.
IX
But let us not make our appeal only to those who
concern themselves with Christianity by an interest,
friendly or hostile. They are always the few. But
the Gospel must be preached to the poor, which
means to the many : to the poor, whether their
poverty is of material good or of spiritual, the wealth
of wit, of imagination, of heart-affluence, of social
opportunity; Unless the Gospel which preaches that
salvation is life, and life is sacrifice, can appeal to
these poor who are the many, it is no Gospel, not even
for the few to whom it may have seemed so.
But a Gospel to these it is. It holds the secret
which they all are in quest of : it speaks the word
which their natures desire each one to utter and have
not uttered. Consider them. Among these poor are
those whom men call the Rich: the "idle rich," of
whom we hear much just now, and the not idle rich,
commonly called the Educated, of whom we of this
place see more. What is the appeal of this gospel to
these ?
That it offers them what they are seeking; what
they ignorantly worship, this it declares. The one
class of rich are believed and believe themselves to

216 CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL
be seeking pleasure. Like their congener in old
Rome who ' made a feast, drank fierce and fast, and
crowned his hair with flowers,' or 'drove abroad in
furious guise,' but could by no such means enchant
'the impracticable hours,' — so these. They think it
is pleasure they are seeking. They mistake, it is life
they are wanting; life of a pulse beating higher, hfe
of sense that quickens and glows, a nerve that thrills
more responsively, of a being that expands uncon
strained. They are seeking life, but seeking it
astray. They will not lure hfe to them by the
deliciousness of a feast, nor overtake her by the fury
of their wheels. But our gospel says to them, ' Seek
life where it is to be found — in sacrifice; not in
selfishness but in sharing, in the giving which is
more blessed than receiving, but is a giving and a
receiving in one. Seek it where some of your hke
do seek and do find it ; the man of state living laborious
days not for self or family or faction but for the
commonweal; the man of landed wealth who is
master of a dependent flock, but master and pastor
in one ; the man of business careful for the wealth of
his borough, and for its righteousness; the man of
communal zeal who nurses the social settlement or
fosters the school; the man at arms who gives a
gallant self to work the Peace of Britain at an
empire's outposts, ruling with selfless care the wild
men and his own, their lover and beloved. All
these,' says our gospel, ' find life, and pleasure that is
life's self -utterance, because they make sacrifice.
Seek as these, and ye too shall find.'

CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL 217
X
But those other rich who have the wealth less of
gold than of intellectual and social opportunity, is our
creed for them? Of some, of many it surely can be
said that they too seek life, but amiss, because they
seek it in the form of security, not of venture.
Venture they decline, sometimes from an ignoble
fear of narrowing their comforts, as by encumbering
themselves with ties of family in the competitive
struggle; sometimes from the less unworthy fear of
narrowing their intellectual development, if the
attitude of spectator of all time and existence is
exchanged for that of actor, or is compromised by
definite choice of a creed or of a cause. Each is a
mistaken fear. It is nature's law that, if a man will
not venture, neither shall he win. And 'enlarge
ment,' says a Hebrew lyrist, 'doth God appoint for
walls, and bulwarks ' ; enlargement, freedom, range,
adventure, forthgoingness is the soul's safety, not
security that pens it in a rampart. It is by the path
of sacrifice in a human sharing of the human struggle,
in the ' dear concerns ' of wife and child and their daily
bread, in the knowledge and love which spring like
flowers along that path; it is in succouring a state
by the citizen service of rearing a family and
entry into affairs, or a church by the churchman
service of adhesion to a system, that heart and mind
have enlargement and the will has range. Those
who fail to lose life thus, fail to find it. They have

218 CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL
withheld the sacrifice of adventure, have refused
to espouse the bride Reality, austere bride but
impassioned; and in their singleness are left barren
of a mortal's deed. XI
And those poor whom men call the poor, will this
gospel be hid from them?
What is the deepest cause of the defection of work
ing men from religion? Surely it is that the rehgion
too commonly administered to him is in his eyes not
real enough. He will not think the same of the
religion of Life. Nothing under heaven has such
reality as life. We will then go to him and say :
' Brother, you come but little to our house of prayer,
and less to our feast of charity. Our forms of prayer,
you say, somehow miss the mark of your actual experi
ence. Our Bible, as certain self -sent pastors of
human society tell you, is in part an old almanac and
in part a fairy tale. You are wanting bread for your
self and little ones, and the Churches give you a stone,
the doctrine of a better life coming in the other world ;
this does not fill your hunger, and your pastor of
society tells you to let be the other world and take this
world which is your own by right. Brother, we do
not counsel you to wait for the world to come, as some
Christian guides bid you ; nor, as those rival advisers,
to clutch the world that now is. We counsel you to
love and to seek the two worlds, which are the whole.
We call you not to be worldly, not to be other-worldly :

CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL 219
we call you to be whole-worldly. For all the world
is before you, as before Dives the millionaire; all
things are yours, things present and things to come,
as they were Paul's the Apostle ; all are yours, because
you are a soul of man, and your life is unto all the
world that is, since it is life unto God.'
We mean that a soul fulfils its destiny of bliss not
by its possessions or its opportunities in a mortal
fortune, but according as.it is alive to the whole world,
which is the eternal. The Christ, whose passion made
the eternal fortune of mankind, was man's saviour
not because He was teacher, exemplar, even atoner,
but because He was a Life, a life unto God, kindled
in the flesh of man to kindle all men everywhere ; not
because He was a man wise, saintly, wonderful beyond
measure, but because He was a man wholly alive unto
God. That life can become every man's, wherever
born, however nurtured, however clothed with know
ledge and armed with opportunity. A man, it has
been boasted ere now, ' a man's a man for a' that ' ;
and in highest estate or humblest a soul is a soul, —
and what know we greater? In this your narrow
opportunity on earth, yet see your calling, brother,: —
to be a man and live : to make your response of soul
to its Maker by the hourly sacrifice of self : to feed by
your wage the little flock round the scanted board,
to be true to the comrade, loyal to the master, of your
toils, generous to the poorer than you, generous in
heart to the wealthier ; to realise your force of man
hood in art or craft or craftless labour, to stamp the

220 CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL
seal of your person on the clay of a lowly industry,
to match the might of a spirit against the weight of
earth's brute matter : nay, even to go on discovery
of the world-secret, you the unlearned and unleisured,
to ride on quest of the Grail as far and fast as the best-
mounted chivalry of the learned and rich ; to ride and
overtake, and one day, 0 my brother, to find and
See ; in some shock of sorrow to behold heaven open,
in some brief natural joy to taste the Father's love and
know how gracious the Lord is, in some sacrament in
the dim morning chancel, before the city wakes, to
behold the Vision pass that maketh blest, and to know
that you the day-workman, you the office drudge, the
harried breadwinner, that you have been at the heart
of things, have touched the mystery which many
prophets and kings desire to touch, and have found the
life which we have unto God in Christ.

XII
One last word. To many, and them among the
devoutest, it may seem that this claim of Life, as a
ground of truth, to have reality, is of all claims the
least sustainable. Reality, these will sigh, is just what
we miss in it. The historic event of the marvellous
Coming and Going Hence of Jesus, the sure word of
a Scripture and a Creed guaranteed by this solidity
of substance and shape, the structure and unchanging
order of the Christian Church, which is the Body, the
visible Body, of the Christ, — these have reality : these

CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL 221
we can touch and make sure of : these are rock under
the feet of our faith. But this Life you speak of, this
fugitive, frail, formless consciousness, which writes
itself upon the soul in no clear and lasting lettering,
but in the music, fleeting and undetainable, of a thrill
in the spirit, a glow, a tone, a yearning, an elation, —
this to us is a phantasm, 'beautiful but ineffectual,'
adding to our faith nothing. We are not mystics
asking the angels' food of vision; we are men who
live by the bread of fact.
And we answer : — Dear brother and dear sister, if
it is hard to realise Life, the reason is a blessed one.
The reason is in the greatness of you : greatness of a
human soul which has for home a universe that is one
and continuous, the robe of Divinity woven without
seam throughout, and into all that whole can enter as
into an inheritance which in right is already hers and
shall be also in possession. By degrees must we
inherit. We come to our own by feeling after the
unseen eternal facts with a blind, advancing touch of
a soul which is her own organ to perceive them, and
perceives them by the life and health in her, which is
the answering touch of the Unseen Things. A blind
advancing touch; blind because it advances, and the
new knowledge can never have articulate shape till
already we have passed beyond it to knowledge again
new. ' Man never is but always to be blest ' — with the
fruition of the vision of God. This we think is what
the mystics are telling us when they declare a faculty
of intuition, which is seated in no one of our experi-

222 CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL
encing senses. But however that may be, you,
brother or sister, who complain that this way of know
ing God is too frail and dim, are complaining of your
high estate, the estate of a finite being that can for
ever grow into infiniteness of being. You are mur
muring at the lot of the People of God who are
forbidden to worship Him by any manner of similitude,
any image of Reality graven by the mind's device.
That image we shall see, but not now, shall behold
but not near. Meanwhile in this our mortality we
behold God by a knowledge which is the life that
vibrates upon our mortal members from the Un-
beholden. Pray we then with Chrysostom, but in
altered order of his petitions, that there be granted us
in this world the life everlasting and in the world to
come the knowledge of God. For so the order of
Creation is followed in the order of man's attainment
of the divine. In the beginning when God made the
heaven and the earth, ' there was evening and there
was morning, one day.' Eve and morn were of one
stuff of time, parts of one whole : but evening first and
then the morning. So is it in the full creating of man.
There is the evening twilight of our human intelligence
on this side of a night which men call Death. But
heaviness of faint knowledge may endure for a night :
joy cometh in the morning, the joy of clear vision
under the eternal dawn. Ah, yes : even as here and
now for one of us some dim and tangled web of
thought, which we had carried to our pillow, will stand
unravelled and illumined at first touch upon the brain

CREED AS SACRIFICE, AN APPEAL 223
of day, so, as we will guess, the spirit of man shall
rouse from its over-night dusk of mere mortal experi
ence into the clear shining of the morrow's intuition.
For so God giveth to His beloved — in sleep. ' I will
lay me down and sleep,' our soul may tell herself;
' when I wake up I shall be satisfied with His likeness
— when I wake.'

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