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Gift of

M. RAY SANBORN

OUR CITY OF GOD

OUR CITY OF GOD

BY
J. BRIERLEY, B.A.
'" ("J. B.")
Author of" Religion and Experience," " The Common Life" " The Eternal Religion,'
" Studies of the Soul" " Ourselves and the Universe" &c, &*c.

' The poet says, ' Dear City of Cecrops I '
And wilt not thou say, ' Dear City of God "I"
— Marcus Aurelius.

London
JAMES CLARKE & CO., 13 & 14 FLEET STREET, E.C.
1907

Contents

Part I.— THEOLOGICAL
CHAPTER PAGE
I. — Our Doctrine of Man .... 9
II. — Our Dootrine of God ... 17
III. — The Incarnation . . . .26
IV. — The Gospels and Miracle ... 36
V. — Our Doctrine of Sin . . . .50
VI. — The Doctrine of Sacrifice . . 64
VIL— On Being Saved . . . .72
VIII.— Theology's Hidden Factors . . 81
IX.— The Quality of Belief . . . .89
X. — Of Religious Transition ... 97
XI.— The Church's Great Moment . . .106

Part II  SOCIAL
XII.— The Social Pressure . . . .117
XIII. — Our Unprotected Classes . . . 125
XIV.— The State and Happiness . . .134
XV.— The Ethics of Ownership ... 143
XVI.— The Gospel of Work . . . .151
XVII.— Our Debt to Life . . . . 160
XVIII.— The Doctrine of Limit. . . .168
XIX.— Of False Independence . . . 176
XX.— The Undefined Moralities . . .184

Vlll

CONTENTS

Part III.— PERSONAL

CHAPTER

PAGE

XXI.-

-The Gift of a Day

. 195

XXIL-

—Our Personal Fortunes

203

XXIII.-

—Friends and Friendship

. 211

XXIV.-

—On Being There

219

XXV.-

—The Mind's Adjustments

. 227

XXVI.-

—Of the Incomplete .

236

XXVIL-

—Life's Appeal

. 244

XXVIIL-

—The Great and the Small .

252

XXIX.-

—Our Holy Places

. 260

XXX.-

—Renewals ....

269

XXXL-

-On Being 111 .

. 278

XXXIL-

—Character and Reputation

286

XXXIIL-

—Old and New

. 294

XXXD7.-

—Remainders ....

302

Our City of God

INTRODUCTION
When Augustine, amid the fast approaching
dissolution of the Empire, with the Vandals already
in his native Africa, wrote the " De Civitate Dei,"
he worked upon a conception which perhaps strikes
us most for its contrast with our own. With the
world, as it seemed, going to pieces around him,
he looked for consolation in the thought of a Church,
a body of elect souls who, and who alone, would
be saved from this wreck of all that was visible.
He makes an absolute dichotomy, to us terrible
in its completeness, of the human race. On one
side are the elect, found in all the six periods into
which he divides world-history, from the Creation
to the Second Advent. With the saints are included
the elect angels, and these together make up the
eternal kingdom, the heavenly Jerusalem, the
abiding City of God. The host outside are a
massa perditionis, whose very virtues are splendida
vitia, and whose doom is the eternal fire. Within
Christendom the Catholic Church was to rule the
State, the function of the latter being that of hand-
A l 1

2 OUR CITY OF GOD
maid and servitor. Under this regime the secular
arm was to use compulsion against heretics and
schismatics. Organised Catholicism was the sole
depository of power. That is the world-picture
according to Augustine.
It is one in which the brilliant light at the centre
serves only to make more appalling the blackness
of darkness that surrounds it. The modern mind
cannot enjoy the splendours of this " City " for
thinking of the too capacious dungeons beneath. A
system which shuts out the greater half of the
human race from any share in the good that is
going, which instead hands them over to a pre
destinated ruin, has become for us plainly impossible.
The fact is, Augustine brought too much of his
early Manic haeanism with him into Christianity.
His " City of God " is too manifestly overtopped
by the opposing " City of the Devil."
Yet with all its defects, what great and eternally
true things are there in his conception ! The view
of world-history as the continuous unfolding of a
Divine purpose ; of world-policies, moralities, and
economies as being rooted finally in spiritual
principles ; of the State as subordinate to an invisible
power that is higher than itself — does not all this
remain to us not only august and venerable, but
as essentially valid ? August! nianism needs and
has received in our time rigorous revision. But
its root idea holds. It is the only one that covers
humanity ; that accounts for its history, and gives
to its institutions and government their true basis.
In the present volume I have tried to follow this
conception. But I have given to it the turn which

INTRODUCTION 3
the modern consciousness demands. We see to
day truly a " City of God," but one built on broader
foundations and with a mightier population than
the one we read of in the African Father. Our
Civitas Dei is Humanity itself. But not humanity
alone. For us, as for Augustine, it is always man
and God ; humanity and the Divine Power that is
forming humanity. With us as with him the
ultimate solutions are religious. " It is surprising,"
exclaims Proudhon, " how at the bottom of our
politics we always find theology ! " That is and
will be so. For theology, properly conceived,
is not a shut-up compartment of things, but an
all-embracing scheme, a true scientia scientiarum,
holding in its scope all that belongs to the life of
nations and of men.
That is the view offered in these pages. They
begin with some chapters of definite theological
statement ; with a doctrine of God, of man, of
Christ, of salvation, and allied topics. I have put
these matters first, because in our time and country
no complete scheme of living can dispense with
some convictions about them. They form part
of the ethical atmosphere which we breathe, and
every member of the community, whatever his
standpoint, must have his view of them. It will
be seen that the themes treated of in this section
bear special reference to controversies which are at
the present time agitating our religious life. But
the treatment has been not so much controversial
as expository. It is not by calling each other
names, but by getting at facts and the right deduc
tions from them that we may hope to reach any

4 OUR CITY OF GOD
sure ground or any clear light on these high matters.
What we want is not so much a New Theology as a
True Theology ; and the progress towards it can only
be in proportion as men seek and speak, not in
the interests of this or that party, but solely that
they may find and utter the thing which convinces
their own mind and satisfies their own soul.
But, as our age is coming to see, in intimate
alliance with these ultimate themes, inseparable
from them in any conception of the world as a
" City of God," are questions which have been
left too long as the exclusive domain of the economist
and the party politician. The Church, by its
neglect of the social problem, has lost much of its
position as a leader and guide of humanity. It
will only regain it by recognising this question, and
the solution of it, as a part of its evangel, as having
their roots finally in the same spiritual principles
as those which govern its formal theology. Our
doctrine of society, as much as our doctrine of sin
or salvation, enters into any true scheme of living.
What is dawning upon the best religious minds is
that the heavenly Jerusalem is not for ever to
remain in the clouds. It is to be brought to earth
and made visible to all men. We are far enough
from this yet, and the distance between the ideal
and its fulfilment measures the work which it is
now for the Church to aid in accomplishing. The
" City " will contain no slums. Its government
will have found and put into practice the true
doctrine of property, of labour, of dependence and
independence. It will have created the system
which permits the fullest development of the

INTRODUCTION 5
individual life without violating the communal
principles which hold society together. In the
chapters devoted to this subject I have accordingly
endeavoured to outline the main ideas which should
govern our treatment of it. In " The Gospel of
Work," "The Unprotected Classes," "The State
and Happiness," " Independence," and allied topics
I have sought the Christian solution of some of
the social questions which press most closely upon
us to-day.
After the social, the personal. For, as most of
us discover sooner or later, it is this which in the
long run counts most. The best social arrangements
that human wit can arrive at enter only to a most
limited degree into the business of high and happy
living. When our " City " is as healthy, wealthy,
and beautiful as a perfect arrangement can make
it, the problem of each life in it, of its happiness or
unhappiness, has received only the beginnings of
an answer. For us everything begins and every
thing ends with the personal. Our third division
is accordingly occupied with the varying sides of
our separate and private problem. That is an
exhaustless theme, and for the reason that under
every conceivable future condition of our world
the individual possibilities will be infinite in their
variety, in their range of well- or ill-being. The
final thing here is our own character. As individuals
we shall never know ourselves as of the " City of
God " until we have the mind and disposition which
belong to its citizenship.
J. B.
London, 1907.

Part I
THEOLOGICAL

Our Doctrine of Man
The controversies which agitate the modern
Church go a long way down. The world has sud
denly waked to the fact that not surface matters,
but the most fundamental principles of religious
belief are in question. Ultimately we find that
all these centre in our doctrine of man. The whole
of theology is there. What we think of God, of
Christ, of sin, of Church, of life beyond, comes back
finally to what we think of man. Greek philosophy
early recognised this, and has put it for us in its
own incisive way. There was a kind of Hegelian
evolution in its thought here. Said Protagoras,
" Man is the measure of all things." " No,"
answered Plato, " God, the Divine Mind, is the
measure of all things." Comes Aristotle, still later,
with the thought that combines and reconciles the
two : " It is the perfect man, in whom God's
thought is clear, who is the measure of all things."
And, so far as the ultimate truth of things can
ever be a human possession, this Aristotelian dictum
concerning it seems likely to be the final one.
If theology to-day is to restudy its positions it
cannot do better than begin with man. For here

10 OUR CITY OF GOD
at least is a subject on which we do know some
thing. It is the reproach against religious thought
that it occupies itself so much with questions to
which it has no satisfying answers. But man at
least is knowable. If we are sure of anything, we
are sure of ourselves. Here, at any rate, we can
bring dogma to a test. We have not only our
own mind and its verdicts to go upon, but an
enormous accumulation of facts about other minds.
This, which was true of earlier times, is especially
true of ours. There never was an age so equipped
for a study of humanity. In the light of modern
knowledge we can no more accept unquestioned
the earlier verdicts on this subject than we could
accept the Ptolemaic astronomy. Of man's history
as an animal and as a soul ; of his physiology and
his psychology ; of the way in which his beliefs,
his first theologies came to him ; of the laws which
have governed the development of his mind, in
the successive stages of his progress ; of his ethical
history, the story of his falls, his recoveries, his
crimes, his virtues ; of the value and action in
him of the spiritual faculty, and the results offered
by his world-wide and age-long religious experiences
— in all these and other directions we have such a
science of man as no past age could pretend to.
And to that science our theology is bound to conform
itself. If we now examine these new facts for what
they yield us of doctrine, the first conviction they
force upon us is that theology, instead of having
reached a finality, is as yet only at its beginning.
Our discoveries have so far only increased the

OUR DOCTRINE OF MAN 11
puzzle of fife. Its curve is so immeasurably greater
than we had imagined. Up to now the most
conspicuous service of science has been to throw into
an intenser relief the contrarieties of our existence.
It has allied us, in a way our fathers never dreamed
of, to the animal kingdom. Here indeed it offers
nothing to boast of. On this, the material side,
Nature puts us on a level with her flies and beetles.
On occasion she destroys us by the same methods
and with the same indifference. In an earthquake
our value, our consequence to the cosmos, appears
to be that of an anthill. If life had no other side
than this visible one our doctrine of man would be
indeed a doctrine of despair ; our philosophy " to
eat and drink, since to-morrow we die."
But the facts of life which point to such a con
clusion are met by another set, not less certain, far
more august, which look in an opposite direction.
These are the facts of the spirit and of the spiritual
world. That their argument has been the more
cogent, their appeal the more impressive, appears
in this, that, spite of his brusque and nonchalant
treatment by nature, spite of having been, in all
his generations, the child of catastrophe, man has
remained a believer, a cherisher of immortal hopes.
The central thing about man is not that he can
be crushed by earthquakes or smothered by volca
noes. It is that \e is a spirit, a thinker. " Man
is but the feeblest reed in nature," says Pascal,
" but a reed that thinks." It is this side of him
that appeals even to Schopenhauer. " Against the
assertion that I am a mere modification of matter,"
he observes, " this must be insisted on, that all

12 OUR CITY OF GOD
exists merely in my idea." The thought kingdom
within man is truly a wonderful thing. It is no
accident or chance product, for it has its own
immutable laws, at work in all the myriad minds of
the race. Closely allied to matter, it shows in a
thousand ways its independence of it and superiority
over it. Shut in a tiny human body, it is big enough
to hold the universe and all its worlds. In a
second it can traverse infinity and eternity. So
imperial, so divine is this possession that were his
prospect annihilation man could never rank himself
as other than a spiritual being. He would say
with Henry More :
Yea, though the soul should mortal prove,
So be, God's life but in me move
To my last breath — I'm satisfied
A lonesome mortal god to have died.
There is next to be observed that man, resting,
as to one side of his being, on natural laws that
treat him with scant respect, founds himself
on another set whose operation and significance
are very different. One of these, a law which
seems to dominate all others, is the law of progress.
Against that man is mortal put this, that he is
progressive. The individual dies, but the race
moves forward. It is at this point that science
and philosophy meet with a concordant message for
theology. They remove the old limits from
humanity — at both its ends. They revise our
view as to where it begins and where it will finish.
Evolution has so far concentrated itself largely
upon human origins — has shown us the lowliness

OUR DOCTRINE OF MAN 13
of our birth. But it has another aspect which, in
the coming time, will count for more than its
doctrine of origins. Evolution has upward as well
as downward implications, and it is here that, as
we have said, it joins philosophy in a message to
theology. Philosophy in the great Greek thinkers
had anticipated evolution in its most important
particular. Aristotle, in his doctrine of ends, had
taught that a thing, a being, could not be judged
from its beginning or its present appearance, but
only in its completion, in the perfect type toward
which it reached. You get no proper idea of an
oak by examining an acorn or the young sapling.
The application of this to humanity is a much bigger
thing than an affair of acorn and oak. That man
essentially is not what he is now simply, but all
he is to be, is a truth which in the controversies of
the hour is the one which most needs to be remem
bered, and the one most constantly forgotten.
The scientific view of man as constantly evolving,
as moving from lower to higher, has, on both its
sides, vital consequence for theology. On the
lower side it touches its doctrine of sin, on
the upper its doctrine of Christ. As to the
first, the doctrine of the Fall, which belongs
to Christian teaching, is a doctrine of science and
philosophy as well as of the Bible. If the history
of our race is, as modern thinking affirms, that of
" an individual ever growing and ever learning,"
then a period came in its ascent when, as with a
growing child, there arose in it the capacity of
moral distinction, as compared with the earlier
stages of mere animal instinct and appetite. That

14 OUR CITY OF GOD
was the age when ideals were born ; it was the age
also when there came the first consciousness of
sin. As Paul has it, " I had not known sin but
by the law." It was when this law, this higher
ethical sense, dawned on the human spirit that
actions which seemed good to the earlier animal
hood were now felt as bad. The brute " good "
had been killed by the spiritual " better." The
facts of evolution join, then, with the Genesis story
of the Old Testament and with the Pauline argument
of the New in affirming a Fall, a breach of the earlier
ethical unity, as coming at the beginning of our
spiritual history.
Evolution, while offering this contribution to
the under side of our doctrine of man, makes a not
less important one to its upper. From origins it
passes to developments. After its journey back
wards to what man has come from, it compels our
thought forward to what he may grow to. When
once more we ask our question, " What is man ? "
we have to reaffirm with a new emphasis our
philosophy of Becoming. Man is not simply what
he is, but all he may yet be. And the prospect along
these upper ranges of his nature opens plainly
upon infinity. As we contemplate his history — the
history of a being who through the ages more and
more clearly exhibits himself as an organ of the
Eternal Consciousness — we are compelled to an
attitude of expectancy. We look for the next
step. The process that has lifted this being from
animal to human; that has developed in him a soul,
that has filled him with the sense of a spiritual
kingdom of which he is part, will not stop there.

OUR DOCTRINE OF MAN 15
What will be the new departure ? After human
ising comes divinising. It is at this point that
Christianity comes, with such impressive effect,
into the story. Humanity, at its topmost level,
opens itself to take in Christ. The Church, in all
its history, led by a sure instinct, has stood at once
for the humanity and the divinity of Jesus. As
man in his earlier evolution contained in himself
the vegetal and animal worlds combined with what
was higher than they, so Jesus held all that was in
man with something more. The most searching
critics of modern times have to acknowledge that
" something more." Harnack finds in the con
sciousness of Jesus a quality that is unique and
transcendent. Wernle sees in the language of the
New Testament concerning Him, the endeavour
to put into words an experience that was beyond
all existing categories and classifications. As Zeller
puts it, " In the domain of the inner relations of
Godhood and humanity, Christ has reached the
extreme and unsurpassable stage of union." Schleier-
macher, the noble-hearted thinker who combined
in himself almost in its perfection the philosophic
temper with the true Christian devotion, has put
in unsurpassable language the truth we have been
here striving to express : " Christ's work is a com
pletion of the creation of human nature. In this
sense of expressing the perfect consciousness of
God, Jesus is Divine. He is not merely exem
plary ; He is archetypal (urbildlich). He is the
manifestation in a definite Person of an eternal
Act — the completion for which all that went before
was preparation."

16 OUR CITY OF GOD
Of a doctrine of man, as viewed in the light of
modern knowledge, this is necessarily the merest
sketch. But we stop at its topmost note. Even
such a hasty glance as we have given will
be enough to show how sure are the grounds
for faith. The researches of science, the verdicts
of criticism, properly considered, serve only to
throw into greater clearness the illimitable expanse
of man's spiritual inheritance, the deep founda
tions of his immortal hope.

II
Our Doctrine of God
Were there no man there would be no God.
The statement may seem startling enough, but it
is really, on this theme, the first thing we have to
learn. Do not let it be misunderstood. The
Ineffable Reality that is in and behind the Visible
has been there from aU eternity. But God, to us
as human beings, is just as much as we know and
can conceive of that Reality. Our manhood
is our measure of Godhead. It is a measure
which, always inadequate, is ever growing, and
consequently it may with reverence be said that
our God is ever growing. When Diderot cries
"Elargissez Dieu," he is speaking to the fact. It is
in the light of this conception, the conception that
God is for us a constant growth in the conscious
ness, that we understand many things that would
otherwise everlastingly puzzle us. Rightly handled,
it offers us the best of answers to the modern
doubt. For instance, writers like M. Guyau in France
and Mr. Grant Allen and others in England have
laboriously traced the evolution of the idea of
God from the primitive notions of savage tribes,
17 2

18 OUR CITY OF GOD
as though this were an indictment. They show
how man, in different stages of his development,
has " made God after his own image," and imagine
apparently that here is an anti-theistic argument.
Their readers agree with them and consider the
doctrine exploded ; that, as a French writer puts
it, " Vhypoihese Dieu s'elimine." What it proves
is simply that the savage has got as much of the
reality in him as he could hold, and no more. The
formula here might be : " As much man as you are,
so much of God can you conceive."
It is precisely also from this standpoint we see
the absurdity of the talk about Anthropomorphism,
as though this were a reproach to belief. That is
an old story. We remember the jest of Xeno-
phanes — " that the lions, if they could have pic
tured a God, would have pictured him in fashion
like a lion ; the horses like a horse, the oxen like
an ox." To-day the argument is revived in another
form. We are told that in worshipping God as
Father, in picturing Him as loving, chastising,
forgiving, redeeming, we are acting as the Rons and
the horses ; simply, that is, projecting into the
heavens a magnified image of ourselves. We might
answer this with a tu quoque. For the most arrant
materialist and anti-theologist is, in his own theory,
doing precisely the same thing. When he talks
of force, of motion, of sequences, of attractions
and repulsions, as explaining the system of things,
he is, in his turn, simply projecting himself. His
ideas of force, of causality, of attraction, are, just
as much as the religious idea, derivatives of his
consciousness. But our answer is not a tu quoque.

OUR DOCTRINE OF GOD 19
It is that in realising God in terms of our highest
self we are doing the natural and only possible
thing. This is as much of Him as we know because
it is as much of Him as we are. When we are
higher He will be higher to us. Our God-conscious
ness is, we repeat, the measure of our growth.
It is along this line also that we find our doctrine
of Divine Incarnation. When Jesus spoke of
losing life that we might find it, the word was true
of God as well as of ourselves. The history of
God, as far as we can see, is a history of losing that
He might find Himself. In the German proverb
God sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal,
wakes in the man. Creation is His humiliation and
self-emptying. The stone holds and expresses
all of Him that it can ; the animal has more, and
man most of all. God emerges into ever clearer
self-expression according to the organs of body
and soul that are there for Him. When Quaker
George Fox said that " though he read of Christ
and God he knew them only from a b'ke spirit in
his own soul," he was putting in his own way the
precise truth we are here following. What he
knew of God, he found, was God in him. It was
thus that Jesus, in His supreme self-consciousness
knowing His entire oneness with the Father, spoke
and acted from that.
It is from the same standpoint we catch the mean
ing of the silence and seeming indifference of God.
Man's incessant cry has been for Divine revelation.
In ruder times he wanted it hot and hot, a vision
in flaming heavens, or signs and wonders on the
earth. Later, the aspiration, unanswered, appa-

20 OUR CITY OF GOD
rently, has turned to a tormenting doubt. It has
been his astonishment and despair that the heavens
Make no disclosure
And the earth keeps up her terrible composure.
With the decay of the easy, old-world beliefs in
sprite and fairy, in magic and witchcraft, in the
constant play of the supernatural, man's loneliness
in the universe has, we say, grown upon him. He
looks from his island planet to the waste infinitude
around him in search of neighbours and friends,
and there are none in sight. The stars to him are
Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes,
Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand
His nothingness into man.
But in this despair man is forgetting one thing.
It is that there is Divine revelation, actually and
incessantly going on, and that he is the organ of it.
His own voice has in it the accent of eternity,
and the more according to his height of soul. " The
soul of God is poured into the world through the
thoughts of men." Our own reason, as is plain to
anyone who thinks, springs out of an Eternal
Reason. That the outside world makes the same
impression upon us all ; that we call things by the
same names ; that we find in each of our minds
the same laws of thought and feeling ; all this points
to a common, underlying source. Our separate
minds are leaves of the same tree. And when,
from our mind inward, we look outward on the
world of visible things — the grass of the field, the
stone in the road — we find them all embedded

OUR DOCTRINE OF GOD 21
in mind. They are thoughts hardened into matter.
Why, then, talk of isolation ? We five ever, did
we know it, in the highest society. We are in
immediate communication with the Eternal Mind.
But this Divine self-revelation goes on, as we
have said, according to a fixed law — the law of
growth. It is precisely according to our height that
God opens Himself to us. Thus is it that we see a
constant progress in the idea of God. A man's
education, the age he belongs to, with its notions
and prejudices, are his apparatus of observation.
The difference in the apparatus makes all the
difference in the object viewed. Jupiter to the
naked eye is one thing ; quite another to spectrum
analysis and the Lick telescope. Hence the God
of the Middle Ages is impossible to us. The
instruments were imperfect and so reported badly.
Anselm's theory of the Atonement in his " Cur
Deus Homo " offers us a deity with the sentiments
of a mediaeval baron, jealous of personal honour,
and determined to vindicate it with blood. This
eleventh-century deity is not ours. So, too, in
the long, fierce centuries during which power, mere
force, was regarded as of itself the supreme right,
the source of all authority ; and when remorseless
cruelty was considered a mere detail of its exercise,
the doctrine of hell, as an underground furnace
whose torturing flames enwrapped myriads of
victims through all eternity, seemed natural enough.
In the Roman Church this view appears still to
subsist, for we read in a recent Jesuit book that
" sinners in hell have asbestos souls to ensure their
burning for eternity."

22 OUR CITY OF GOD
But the level to which the average religious
mind of to-day has risen has made the God of such
procedures impossible. To the modern ethical
sense it is absurd to talk of force alone as making
or conferring right. Giant strength is not of
itself Godlike. Used for cruelty it is demonic.
The mediaeval hell was consonant with the feudal
ferocity which enabled the baron to feast in his hall
with the more gusto from the thought of his miser
able captives in the dungeons underneath. Their
God was in that image. We see with clearer eyes
to-day. Revelation has advanced in us to the
point of exhibiting ethic as supreme over mere
power. The eternal energy at the back of the
universe could doubtless create hells a million times
hotter than the centre of the sun. But energy
of itself is not God ; no, nor the greatest part of
Him. God's hell, whatever it may be, must be
full of God's righteousness and full of His love.
We might cite here a conversation with an earnest
Christian man who discussed once this subject
with us. We put the following queries : " Do
you believe that God is everywhere ? " " Yes."
" Wherever He is He is there in the fulness of His
nature ? " " Certainly." " And you believe that
God is Love ? " " Yes." " Then surely you have
enough there for your doctrine of hell ? For if
God is everywhere He is certainly in hell. And
in hell as the Father, whose nature is Love."
When we speak of God as Father — the great
word of Jesus concerning Him — we come to another
corner-stone of our doctrine — the element of per
sonality. Here, again, we are told we are projecting

OUR DOCTRINE OF GOD 23
on to the sky a gigantic image of ourselves. The
Infinite, it is affirmed, cannot be personal, because
personahty implies hmitation. To which we reply
the limitation is the objector's, not ours. When we
talk of personahty, do these people suppose we
mean our personahty ? Enough that it meets ours
and knows ours. The ultimate Reality is the source
of our love, of our justice, of our forgiveness, just
as it is the source of our mind and reason, and of^
our physical force. But love, justice, forgiveness
are functions of a Person. The hmitation of it
is one in our own minds. The Personahty that on
one of its sides reaches down to the plane of our
consciousness, is no more limited by this contact
than is the Pacific by the islets round which its
waves sweep.
It is impossible to explain this universe apart
from personahty, and every attempt to do so
only ties the experimenter in a tangle of
contradictions. Apart from it we find no in
telligible beginning and no intelligible end. It is
indeed along all the sides of our personahty that
we touch God and are made conscious of His
presence. The intellect is our poorest proof of
Him. It is when we love, suffer, labour, serve,
forgive, that we are surest of God. We know Him
in these things as our other higher part ; it is from
these affectional and moral riches of His being
that we draw our strength. It is curious what
blunders are made on this theme by our cleverest
men. Mr. Bernard Shaw has been recently telling
us " he did not believe in a God who forgave.
Nothing could be forgiven." One wonders how

24 OUR CITY OF GOD
the word " forgive " ever came into our diction
aries if there be no such thing in existence ?
We have here simply the vulgar confusion
between cause and effect in the physical sphere
and the free movement of volition in the spiritual.
Because an action, a crime, shall we say, produces
its inevitable series of results, and that, whatever
may pass in the mind of the wrongdoer, we are
asked to disbelieve in the possibility and actuality
of forgiveness. As a matter of fact, we are con
tinually proving the contrary. Our word is not
in the dictionary by accident. Mr. Shaw is con
fusing the meaning of words. What is forgiveness ?
Not assuredly that reversal of natural laws which
he seems to suppose. It is a transaction of the
moral and volitional being. To take Ritschl's
definition : " Pardon is an act of will by which there
is cancelled that aspect of an injury received which
interrupts intercourse between the injured person
and the offender." When we know God as personal
we realise, though the laws of His universe go on
in uninterrupted operation, how He whom we
grieve by our sin can and does forgive.
We see now in what sense our paradox at the
beginning holds good. When we say that without
man there were, for us, no God, we are simply
putting in another way the formula that God's
revelation to us is in us. And the revelation is
continuous. Spinoza's doctrine, that the Universe,
because it is in itself the Infinite Being, can know
no such thing as ends, or progress, being perfect
as it is, does not satisfy the facts. The Cosmos
is a deeper thing than Spinoza's mathematics.

OUR DOCTRINE OF GOD 25
Calvin's great word, " Pie hoc potest dici Deum
esse Natur am " (" One may say with reverence that
God is Nature "), has to be taken with a reservation
which he himself held. For God is Nature, and
more. Evolution, if it means anything, means a
progression. Is not the greatest thing we are
reaching to-day this, that out of evolution is emerg
ing a doctrine of God which sees Him as the perfect
worker behind a perfecting Universe, a Universe
which, under His hand, is becoming the ever truer,
the ever more adequate expression of Himself ?
We adore the God whose infinite splendours we
see. But these are not His perfection. That be
longs to a realm which eye hath not seen nor ear
heard ; the disclosure of whose treasures will be
the occupation of eternity.

Ill
The Incarnation
When we speak of the birth of Christ we can
imagine someone asking, " Which birth ? " It is
the wonder of Jesus that He is being perpetually
reborn. Each generation incarnates Him anew,
clothes Him in the flesh and blood of its own life
and thought. As we glance back through the ages
we see a procession of Christ-figures successively
filling the scene, each different from the others, yet
always with a mystic likeness that tells us it is
He. Starting from the apostolic time, what trans
formations do we behold ! We pass from the first
to the second century to find ourselves amid the
gigantic phantasies of Gnosticism. Christ is here
one of the interminable chain of shadowy beings
conjured up by the fevered Eastern imagination.
As we study them in the pages of Irenseus and
TertuUian, our brain reels as though we had been
caught in a dance of Dervishes. Later comes
the Christ conceived in the Platonised minds of
Alexandrian Clement and Origen. Next we have the
Christ of the great creeds, the Christ of the Greek
metaphysics. Further down, as we approach the
dark ages, we see the historic Jesus still further

THE INCARNATION 27
receding from the view, the compassionate Son of
Man yielding place to a stern and terrible being, a
rex tremendae majestatis, whose wrath is turned
aside by the intercession of His Virgin Mother.
There was a time in mediaeval Christianity when
Christ seemed indeed obliterated almost from the
popular mind. Thorpe, in his " Ancient Laws and
Institutions of England," gives this direction :
" Pray first to St. Mary and the holy apostles, and
the holy martyrs, and to all God's saints. . . .
And end by signing yourself and by saying your
Pater-Noster." The Founder was lost in His own
institution. There have been other rebirths since then, of
which we have no time to speak. Let us come to
our own day. For our age, too, has had its Nativity,
has welcomed a new-born Christ. Jesus dominates
the modern consciousness. His is still " the name
above every name." But His form differs for us
with all the difference between our age and those
behind it. The garments in which Gnostics, Platon-
ists, Nicene creed-makers, Medievalists, Puritans
successively clad Him have dropped away. He is
to us other than these presentations, and for the
reason that we see Him with other eyes. We are
here under a law against which it is useless to strive,
for it is that which binds us and the universe together.
The law is that the world and all things in it change
as we change. Earth, air, fire and water are quite
different things to us from what they were to our
fathers, who thought of them as the four elements.
And history has changed just as much as fire and
water, and for the same reason. In this, as in other

28 OUR CITY OF GOD
departments, the raw material shows a new aspect
to the new instruments. We sweep the past, as
we sweep the heavens, with telescopes, and the
results in the one case are not less remarkable than
the other. The facts of history under this inspection
take on a fresh aspect ; and besides, we have a new
universe into which to fit them. Thus is it that the
Christ comes to us to-day clad in the new garments
of our making, as a rebirth in our special conscious
ness. Paul, Augustine, St. Francis, Luther, Wesley
saw their Jesus. What Jesus do we see ?
Here, we have just said, is a question of vision,
and we have accordingly first of all to note the
development that has come in that quarter. The
eye with which we now view the past is an eye charged
with certain powers that are comparatively late
acquisitions. We work, for instance, with a new
historic sense, with a new principle known as
evolution, with a definite philosophy of history,
¦with a new conception of personahty. And every
one of these acquisitions affects in the most vital
way our knowledge of Christ and of the Incarnation.
This is not to say that we have reached certainties
on all points. One of the first results from the
new methods was indeed to create a sense of con
fusion and of uncertainty. A freshly won power
begins generally by maiming and slaying. If we
ever fly there will be a holocaust of early victims.
We begin our new eras with blunderings and catas
trophes, and this has been specially true in the
sphere of religion. Evolution, for instance, stumbled
first into materialism. It swept the unseen world
bare of inhabitants. Not only had goblins and

THE INCARNATION 29
fairies disappeared ; there was no room for person
ahty anywhere. Incarnation and Divine visita
tions were out of the question, for there was no
Divinity left. Matter, force and law were the only
trinity — a trinity with which it was clearly im
possible to get on speaking terms. But we are
emerging from that most dismal of conclusions.
Science, as Wundt, one of her most distinguished
sons, declares, " can only indicate the path which
leads to territories beyond her own, ruled by other
laws than those to which her realm is subject."
And in those further realms, where philosophy
enters, the truth most visible to the best minds to-day
is the ubiquitous presence and supremacy of
personahty. It is realised as the top and bottom of
everything, the one element that gives significance to
life and makes it intelligible. The latest science, join
ing hands here with philosophy, finds the universe,
instead of being a mere unconscious mechanism,
to be, in the words of Professor Shaler, " a realm of
unending and infinitely varied originations. Into
the equation is continually going the influential
qualities of newly-formed individualities, and from
it is continually being drawn those that pass away."
This doctrine of personality and of " new origina
tions " — the doctrine, in other words, of the universe
as spiritual and as ever developing — carries us a
long way in the direction of our theme. Conjoined
with it, as a still further help, let us take now another
of our instruments of vision, our present-day
philosophy of history, our view, that is, of humanity
as a whole. The world is now in full possession of
the idea that history is no mere coUection of isolated

30 OUR CITY OF GOD
facts, but that it represents an organised and
definite movement towards an ascertainable end.
History is, in short, the record of the spiritualisation
of humanity. Augustine, as we have said, in his
" City of God," worked on that principle, though he
restricted it to only one portion of the race. Pascal,
in his great saying that human history was as the
story of a single individual ever growing and ever
learning, put the idea into its modern form, the
form which was developed with such prodigahty of
illustration by Lessing, by Herder, by Hegel, in
short, by the whole of the German illuminati. It
is now no longer a German speculation, but the
property of the race. It is at the back of aU our
thinking about man. The late Archbishop Temple
worked it into his much-discussed essay on " The
Education of the Human Race." Lamennais, in
his " Paroles d'un Croyant," carried it to the extreme
of representing humanity as in itself the incarnation
of God, the eternal victim, bearing its cross, ascend
ing its Calvary, offering its expiation.
We speak of this as extreme, and yet it was a hint
of the truth. For it is now perceived that we
cannot separate our thought of God from our thought
of man. We remember Kant's definition of the
Son of God, as humanity in its moral perfection.
In our dissection of the inner spiritual conscious
ness, whether of the individual or of the race, we
find it more than ever difficult to say where the
human ends and the Divine begins.
Draw if thou canst the mystic line
Severing rightly His from thine,
Which is human, which Divine.

THE INCARNATION 31
And it is noteworthy, in all that world-wide doctrine
of the Trinity, which, in differing forms, we find
in India, in ancient Babylonia, in Egypt, in the Neo-
Platonists, in the Jewish Kabbala, to emerge
finaUy as a foundation principle of the Hegelian
philosophy, we have always the " Word," the
manifestation, that is, of the formless abyss of
Deity, becoming incarnate in the sphere of the
visible, of space and time. The idea is rooted in the
world, and gains strength by every advance of
scientific knowledge and of philosophic thought,
that humanity stands for more than is now visible ;
that it is grounded on something mightier than
itself ; that it is an organ of a greater voice than
its own ; that it is open to vast " new originations,"
to continual advances in the spiritual order ; that
its present appearance is chiefly a prophecy of what
it is yet to become.
When, therefore, we find Christianity putting in
its forefront a doctrine of Incarnation, and pro
claiming the historical Jesus as Divine, we find
ourselves in presence, not of a suddenly launched,
isolated claim, but of a continuity, both of idea and
of experience, which must command our attention.
Observe on what the claim is based. We need to
come back here, not to late tradition, but to begin
nings and to first principles. It has been a mistake of
orthodoxy, from which it is time Christian thought
finally rid itself, to base its doctrine of Incarnation
on the notion of a virgin birth. It is here that, as
against earlier thinking, the modern historic sense
asserts itself. From the old view of Scripture which
regarded the Bible as homogeneous, in aU its parts

32 OUR CITY OF GOD
of equal value, that sense has brought us back to the
facts. We see the New Testament as the first age
saw it. In the apostohc time these writings were
not regarded as Scripture at aU, but as the free
expression, differing in value, of individual Christian
opinion. Modern scholarship passes through these
writings to their sources, from the later additions to
the original material. In this appraisement the birth
stories of Matthew and Luke fail to approve them
selves as of authority. They stand alone. Mark,
whose gospel is now generaUy recognised as the
earliest of the four, knows nothing of these events,
nor are they mentioned in the fourth gospel. Jesus
Himself, in all His recorded utterances, lets drop
no word about them. St. Paul, whose Christology
is of the loftiest, from whom above aU others the
Church has taken its doctrine of Jesus as the
Divine Redeemer and Saviour, nowhere bases or
props his doctrine on these or similar stories.
Could he have omitted them had he heard of or
believed them ? He begins his great Epistle to
the Romans with a contrary affirmation, declaring
that " Jesus Christ our Lord " . . . "was made
of the seed of David according to the flesh." He
was made to be " the Son of God with power,"
not by His birth, but " by the resurrection from
the dead." This is precisely the position taken in
the early chapters of the Acts, where, in the reputed
utterances of St. Peter, which form unquestion
ably a very early Christian tradition, Jesus is
declared to be "a man approved by God among
you," and " whom God had raised up, having
loosed the pains of death."

THE INCARNATION 33
The birth narratives of Matthew and Luke,
which stand thus solitary, so strangely unsupported
by the earliest and most authoritative witnesses,
bear also in themselves the plainest marks of their
late origin. So clumsily have they been compiled
that the genealogies which have been tacked on to
them actuaUy derive Christ's royal descent through
Joseph. It is noteworthy here also that the MS.
discovered by Mrs. Lewis in the Sinaitic convent
gives the reading of Matthew i. 16 as, " Joseph, to
whom was espoused Mary the Virgin, begat Jesus
who is caUed the Christ." Besides, the two narratives
are so flatly contradictory. The conditions they
describe are absolutely different. Matthew gives
us a state of terrorism at Bethlehem and Jeru
salem, with Herod commanding a slaughter of
the innocents, with Joseph and Mary fleeing into
Egypt to escape his bloodthirsty hands. Luke,
in contrast to this, paints a picture of idyllic
calm. So far from infant murders, from conceal
ment, and from a terror-stricken flight we have
the mother of Jesus going with her babe publicly
to the temple, showing her child to the authorities,
and making there the offerings commanded by
the law !
One need not add to these arguments. We might,
indeed, have dilated on the absurdity of the old
Protestant position, which made the virgin birth the
safeguard of the doctrine of Christ's sinlessness,
forgetting that the human taint, if it did not affect
Him through Joseph, assuredly, according to their
view, reached Him through Mary. The Catholics,
with their doctrine of Mary's Immaculate Conception, 3

34 OUR CITY OF GOD
are at least more logical. But enough, surely, has
been said for a revision on this point of our doctrine
of Incarnation. It is time, we repeat, that the
Church's thought should abandon this untenable
position, and should instead put itself once more
in fine with our earhest and most authoritative
New Testament Scripture. It is time we once
more based our Christology where Paul and
Peter and John and the Master Himself based it.
What was good enough doctrine for the apostles
and the first believers should be good enough
for us.
What then, in this view, is the Christian Incarna
tion ? It is, as the New Testament puts it, " God
manifest in the flesh." And not the less so that the
manifestation is under strictly human conditions.
In Jesus, " our divinest symbol," humanity enlarged
its boundaries to take in Divinity. The " new
originations," of which modern science speaks,
found here their subhmest example. We have
only to read the Life depicted in the Gospels to
realise how, entering into all the human condi
tions, it at every point transcended them ; how
it lifted the experiences and possibilities of hving up
to a new scale ; how it compels us to say with
Origen that " Jesus was united to God in the most
essential manner " ; with Theodore of Mopsuestia,
that " God in Him was not simply immanent, but
that the spirit of Jesus so perfectly appropriated the
Divine as to become one with it ; " with Fichte,
that " Jesus is in a wholly peculiar manner the only-
begotten and first-born Son of God " ; and with
Ritschl, that He represents to us " the religious

THE INCARNATION 35
value of God." We do not, we have said, in the
spiritual evolution know where man ends and God
begins. But as we study Jesus in His hfe and
death, and in the power of His Resurrection, what
we do know is that here God and man are manifestly
one.

IV
The Gospels and Miracle
The time has arrived for an entire openness of
treatment on this and alhed subjects. There is a
notion abroad that the modern theological mind is
too dexterous in concealments ; that the popular
preacher has an exoteric doctrine for the pulpit, and
an esoteric doctrine, of a quite different complexion,
for himself and his intimates. Without discussing
here the morality of an attitude of that kind, we
may say at once that it is an economy for which we
at least have no use. In rehgion, as in any other
subject, if a teacher is to be of any genuine service
to his feUows it wiU be by telling them the best and
truest he knows, by speaking from the farthest
height he has reached. That is so in science, and
it will have to be so in theology. There is no virtue
in concealment, and the age is sick of it. The re
proach which Mark Pattison hurled at the England of
a generation ago that " it contained no pubhc
for a scientific treatment of theology " no longer
holds. The best men of all communions are with
Pascal in his declaration that " the highest of
Christian truths is that truth should be loved above
all." Let us in this spirit try to ascertain the
present-day aspect of our question.

THE GOSPELS AND MIRACLE 37
Most scholars, whatever their standpoint, would
admit, to begin with, that our age is in a position far
more favourable than any other for forming upon
it a competent opinion. We have absorbed the
lessons of the past — the lessons of its aggressive
criticisms, of its reactions of faith, of the mistakes
made on both sides — in attack and defence. We
have new hght on history, on the way it has been
made ; new hght on the working, at different
stages of its growth, of the human mind ; we have
a science of myth and legend, of the way they arise
and develop ; we have a fresh psychology, with
its openings into the mysterious forces of the soul.
And we have a phUosophy which, after a period of
confusion, is at last assigning the proper limits of
science, as an authority on life's ultimate problems.
These gains and growths, where they have been
reaUy assimflated, create in serious thinkers an
attitude towards our question which is at once
critical and constructive. It is an attitude that has
outgrown both the scepticisms and the orthodoxies
of former days. Their " yes " and " no " are
absorbed into a larger synthesis. The scornful
rejections of a Voltaire, a Diderot and a Condorcet
are, in the hght of modern investigation, as im
possible as the open-mouthed credulity of the dark
ages. The arguments for and against on this
matter form altogether a prodigious and at first
sight a very bewildering accumulation, and it is
only by a careful sifting of both that we can see
the way to any sane conclusion.
The history of this controversy is a compara
tively brief one. Christendom, torn from tbp

38 OUR CITY OF GOD
beginning by countless dissensions, was up to quite
a late period practically unanimous about its miracles.
Belief in them was easy, because it coincided with
a certain phase, not then outgrown, of the human
development. Every rehgion, every history of
the early world produced them, and for the reason
that it was the nature of the mind, at its then stage,
to produce them. They grew in this soil as naturally
as wheat grows to-day in a Midland shire. But a
stage was reached when the production ceased. And
that not because the outside world had changed.
The change was in minds and thoughts. And now,
instead of pious wonder stories, each more astonish
ing than the last, with which to regale the faithful,
we have a Conyers Middleton, from the bosom of
the Church of which he was a divine, opening a
daring inquiry into these stories, accusing the
Church fathers of wholesale forgery, of falsifying
history, of adopting to the fullest extent the system
of pious frauds. There follows Hume with his
famous argument of the credibility of miracle-
evidence. " We have no experience of the break
ing of natural laws ; we have every experience of
the credulity and liabUity to error of human narrators
of such occurrences." And then Strauss with his
elaborate doctrine of the myth and its apphcations
to the New Testament.
It would be absurd for anyone to minimise the
importance of these later movements of the human
mind. They were natural movements, as irresistible
as the tides or the march of the seasons. The science
of comparative mythology has settled for us a host
of questions in this sphere. It has established

THE GOSPELS AND MIRACLE 39
with the utmost certainty the way in which at
certain stages of its progress the mind of man
works, the way in which it views the world and
events. As Crozier, in his " Civihsation and
Progress," puts it, " It is a law that when natural
causes are unknown events are attributed to the
agency of wiUs like our own. As the causes are
discovered the wills disappear." Accordingly, when
to-day we deal with witnesses of events, especiaUy
uncommon events, our first business is to inquire
into their mental character, into the kind of observ
ing apparatus they bring to bear. The account of an
eclipse given severaUy by an Australian savage and
by a European astronomer would be in each case
the genuine observation of an actual fact. But
what a different story they would make of it ! The
one, awed and terror-stricken, talks of an avenging
Power blotting out the sun in his wrath ; the other,
who has been taking photographs and making
calculations, relates the particulars of what to him
and his circle is an entirely natural and foreseen
occurrence. It is impossible to keep this question of the char
acter and competence of the witnesses out of our
study of the New Testament miracles. The modern
man is quite entitled to ask — and he will ask, with or
without our leave — whether what actuaUy happened
in Judsea, in the lifetime of Jesus, would, if witnessed
by an observer with the mental equipment of a
modern scientist, have been recorded after the
fashion of our Gospels ? But that is not the only
question. The Gospel records, as we have them,
are not even the accounts of the first-hand witnesses-

40 OUR CITY OF GOD
The earhest of these records is separated by at
least a generation from the occurrences it narrates.
Criticism, as we know, has made the most of this
fact. Examples have been adduced from history
of the way in which, amongst simple peoples, a
plain narration has in the course of a few decades
blossomed into a miracle-story. A famous instance
is that of Francis of Assisi and the chroniclers of the
thirteenth century. The account of him given in
the " Speculum Perfectionis " by his friend and
contemporary Frater Leo is of historical value.
But the hfe of the saint written by Bonaventura,
just a generation after, is stuffed with the incredible.
An instance stiU more remarkable, because so
close to our own day, is the story of the Babist
prophet Ah Mohammed, the seer of Shiraz, held
by his foUowers to be a kind of Messiah, and who
was executed in 1850, at the age of thirty. There
have appeared since his death two fives of him — one
by a contemporary, Mirza Jani, who was himself
martyred in 1852, and another published in 1880
by two disciples. A comparison of the two is the
most suggestive of studies in the development of
legend. The latter " History " is entirely on the
plane of the miraculous, including even a trans
figuration of the prophet in 1846, on his way from
Shiraz to Teheran. And yet this wonder-story
appeared in the Ufetime of Ah's widow ! True indeed
is it, as Sir Richard Burton says, that " miracles
grow apace in the East, and a few years suffice to
mature them."
The great trouble of the modern investigator is,
then, the haziness of the old-world witnesses as to the

THE GOSPELS AND MIRACLE 41
difference between a fact and an imagination. To
reach our fact we have to struggle through two thick
fog-banks. First, there is that of the secondhand,
hearsay character of much of our evidence. In pre-
scientific times the story as it passes from mouth to
mouth continuaUy changes form. It does so accord
ing to a regular law of the primitive mind. It was
an early perception of this law which led Euhemerus
to his shrewd suggestion, adopted by many modern
thinkers, that the Pagan deities were really pre
historic heroes whose deeds had been magnified
by hearsay into the legends of Olympus. But
when we have got through this fog-wall ; when,
through the region of second or third hand reports
we have reached our first-hand witness, we are not
even then in clear dayhght. Our first-hand witness
may have a fog in his own brain. What is his
capacity of seeing the thing before him, and of
reporting it ? We remember our Australian and
the eclipse. People see according to what they
carry in their minds. That good Chinese Buddhist
Hiouen-Thsang declares that Buddha's footprint
" appears of more or less size according to the
greater or less faith of the beholder." Exactly.
It is this " faith " of the early beholder which
is the problem of the modern observer. How
much of what he reports is " faith," and how much
fact ? We remember the story told by Erasmus
of a party riding to Richmond, when a wag of
the company stopped suddenly and stared into the
sky. " God avert this prodigy ! " " What 1 "
" Can you not see that large dragon there with the
horns of flame, and tail hooped into a circle ? "

42 OUR CITY OF GOD
" No." FinaUy one, dreading to be thought short
sighted or blockish, said he saw it. Then the others
in quick succession. In three days the rgport ran
through the land of a great portent !
Here, then, we have the modern difficulty. The
world is what it was, but the mind of man is not
what it was. It has attained to a perception of
law, of the relation of cause to effect, of the uni
formity of nature, to which the early world was a
stranger. And this difference of mind has thrown
us into a new attitude towards the primitive histories.
We can no longer take them at their face value-
We deduct a heavy discount, the discount of their
psychological element.
We have now to inquire as to how far this modern
attitude, and the criticism that has arisen out of it,
affects the question of miracle as a feature of
Christianity. Faced with our difficulty, we find a
variety of attitudes toward it recommended to us
from different quarters. There is that of turning
our heads away from such questions as beyond our
competence. We are to accept the thing as it
stands because the Church says so. We are to
enthrone Authority in the place of reason, and cry
with TertuUian, " Credo quia impossibile J " This
is the Roman demand, and we see the condition to
which it has brought rehgion on the Continent.
How this conflict between reason and authority
works inside the Church is shown in the case of a
scholar like the Abbe Loisy, who, in his capacity of
critic, after subjecting the New Testament to an
analysis which reduces everything to pure naturalism,
tells his hearers to accept, as Cathohcs, what he has

THE GOSPELS AND MIRACLE 43
been instructing them to deny as students ! When
we inquire more closely as to what this " Church
authority " really amounts to, we shaU probably
come to the conclusion of the first Napoleon at the
end of his prolonged discussions with the Roman
hierarchy over the Concordat. After interrogating
one dignitary after another, from the Pope down
wards, on questions of faith, his final word about it all
was : " Each Catholic priest has in reality his own
rehgion. The Pope's is different from that of the
Cardinals, and these do not agree among them
selves in rehgious matters."
But if we dechne this way of meeting our question,
are we compeUed to the opposite one, of revolt and
wholesale rejection ? Must we join the Diderots
and the D'Holbachs ? Are we to say with Condorcet,
" there is not a rehgious system or a piece of super
natural extravagance that does not rest on ignor
ance of natural laws " ? On the contrary, we
beheve that the encyclopedists are as much outgrown
as the medievalists ; that the deniers and the
assertors come alike short of their fact ; though the
two, while they failed to reach it, were moving in
its direction, as the twin arms of the scuUer, work
ing on opposite sides of the boat, each propel it
towards its goal. The mind, by its very constitution,
must go on asking its questions and demanding
answers. Let us see to what its resistless process,
operating on our problem, has brought us to-day.
First of all, it is to be noted that we cannot treat
this special New Testament question apart from
its relation to some others. Truth is one, because
the Universe is one. And so what has happened

44 OUR CITY OF GOD
in any part of the Universe, if its innermost mean
ing is to be reached, must be studied in connection
with the whole. We need then, at the beginning,
to take a far look, and to ask how the entire cosmic
scheme, as far as we can see into it, appears in
regard to the questions we are raising. Modern
philosophy, for one thing, has taught us how
cautious we should be as to arbitrary verdicts
resting on appearances. Inquirers here might
study with advantage — it would be for them a
capital exercise in dialectics — works such as Bradley's
" Appearance and Reality," and Herbert Spencer's
" First Principles." Here they would find, on
reason's own showing, the limitations of reason.
They would find how our fundamental working
ideas— those of time, space, motion, causality —
when analysed, show as absolutely self -contradictory.
Our reason works up to a certain point and then
stops — or proceeds to refute itself. Anyone who
has explored these heights comes back with the
feehng that behind our logic is a deeper one ; that
our apparatus measures only a few feet down into
the fathomless ocean ; that life, as it weUs from
the fountains of being, is something so infinitely
subtler than all our syllogisms.
When, with aU that in mind, we come closer to our
topic, we discover next that Science, which has
destroyed so many of the older grounds of belief,
has been not less busy creating new ones. It has
given us for one thing a new definition of miracle, a
fresh thought to bring to the interpretation of the
New Testament " semeion." Old Hobbes, long ago,
in his " Leviathan," pointed out that the same

THE GOSPELS AND MIRACLE 45
thing might be a miracle to one man and not to
another. He saw, as we now see, that it is a
question of personahty. Science, in its enormous
widening of the reign of law, has at the same time
opened to us the immeasurable possibilities of
personahty. And it is, we say, personahty that is at
the root of miracle. This, in both the ancient and
modern conception of it. According to what we
know and are, does the miraculous he in us. The
civilised man who lands on a savage island and,
in sight of its untutored inhabitants, kiUs a bird at
a hundred yards by bending his finger on a trigger,
is to them a wonder-worker. He has accomphshed
aU they understand by a miracle. He has shown
himself a being beyond their capacity of being.
What he has done, however, is no infraction of law.
It is simply a result of the knowledge of law. And
here, talking of laws, we perceive emerging another
law — this, namely, that the higher the grade of
personahty the more complete, and to lower natures
the more miraculous, wiU be his power over Nature.
And that always, not by contradicting her, but
by knowing her. Could a judge or chronicler of the
first century be imagined as witnessing what
we see to-day ; could he see a motor whizzing at
twenty miles an hour without visible means of
traction, or invisible molecules in a Crookes' tube
beating by their impact a mass of metal into white
heat, he would write it all down as miracle. And so
it would be — to him. Not so to the chauffeur, or
to Sir Wilham Crookes.
Personality, then, we say, is at the top and bottom
of everything. Get the quality of it high enough

46 OUR CITY OF GOD
and there is nothing we may not expect from it.
Nature herself is the expression of personality.
Thought and will are the ultimate ground of her
existence. A Schopenhauer and a Hartmann
acknowledge that. Your pebble, your piece of
chalk, are but the outer crust of ideas ; their
existence, their qualities, cannot be conceived apart
from thought. They are embedded in mind. And
as Nature exists by the thought behind her, so
she obeys thought made visible here, in humanity,
in proportion to the height of that humanity.
AU this has brought us, by a somewhat circuitous
route perhaps, to the personahty of Christ, and the
relation of Christ to the New Testament miracles.
What He did upon this earth is partly a question of
evidence, and partly a question of His quality of
being. As to the evidence, we have made aU the
admissions concerning it which the severest criti
cism demands. For ourselves we are prepared to
admit the possibUity of a legendary element having
crept into the Gospels, and coloured certain of the
accounts there of His doings. A guaranteed human
infallibility is not, and never has been, included in
the schedule of the Divine education of man.
How much is to be deducted from the Gospel story
on this account is a matter which, in the present
state of our knowledge, we should not, ourselves, care
dogmaticaUy to pronounce upon.
But no one will be in a position to form a proper
judgment here who has not previously taken into
account certain considerations. We can, to some
extent, judge of what we do not know by what we
do know. And we have in this matter one certainty

THE GOSPELS AND MIRACLE 47
to start with. That is the impression made by Jesus
upon His disciples and upon their successors through
all the foUowing ages. You calculate the intensity
of a force by its effects. The propulsive quality of
a new explosive is shown by the distance to which it
hurls the shot. If we try in this way to measure
the quality of Jesus, the sheer power of His person
ahty, we are at a loss to put a limit to it. It created
a devotion to Him, a worship of Him, which has
never ceased, and the like of which has not been seen.
It founded a rehgion which has changed the world.
If the Gospel narratives are exaggerations, we have
to account for the feeling which produced the
exaggeration, which compelled these people to
speak in superlatives.
The question for us here, be it remarked, is not
how Jesus came to be what He was, the actual
process which brought Him as a personality into our
world. The controversy as to the Virgin Birth is not,
as we have before said, of the importance which some
attribute to it. The point is not how things come
to be, but what they are. Processes are mere
details. When we see radium at work the thing
that strikes us is riot chiefly how it got here — the
way in which pitch-blende and other materials
have been handled so as to produce this result.
The supreme matter is not the genesis of radium,
but radium. It is the new power that has emerged,
this extract of extracts, which by its sheer superb
quality of being accomplishes its effortless miracles,
that holds us enthralled. And so with Jesus.
He Himself says nothing about His birth, nor
does St. Paul. Had it been one of the things

48 OUR CITY OF GOD
that mattered we should have looked for some
word. But the word was not needed. His being is the
miracle just as radium is the miracle. In the two
cases, in the higher realm of spirit, as in the lower
realm of the physical, we have the emergence of a
new power that works according to its character.
In each there are effects that transcend the effects
accomplished by lower grades. With what scornful
incredulity should we, a few years ago, have met the
suggestion of a mere atom containing force enough
to keep a clock ticking through tens of thousands of
years ! The suggestion is not laughed at to-day.
And if the region of the visible gives us these
wonders, what reason have we for rejecting simUar
possibilities in the more potent realm behind, the
realm of the invisible, of the spirit ? Give us here a
quality of being high enough, and we shaU not be so
foohsh as to dogmatise on what it can or cannot do.
Radium is, to our present observation, a break in
the history of matter. The Gospel story is a break
in the history of spirit. The world's record as
disclosed to us by science has prepared us for
phenomena of this kind. It shows us on the natural
plane periods of steady progress interspersed at
long intervals with breaks, with vast upheavals,
with fresh, wonderful developments of the life-
process. The first spin given to the nebulous gas,
the beginning of hfe on the earth, the appearance
of man upon it, are starting-points of this kind —
red-letter dates in eternity's calendar, new chapters
of the cosmic story. And if this is the course of
things on the lower, physical plane, may we not

THE GOSPELS AND MIRACLE 49
expect its analogue in the realms of the mind and
the soul ? Here, as in that other region, we look for
the steady humdrum movement, continued till it
has run out its hour, reached its farthest Umit, and
there touched the spring which releases another
mystery of power. From pitch-blende we arrive
at radium ; from centuries of Jew legalism we
come out upon the Christ.
It is to some such point as this that modern
research, moving through all its departments,
seems to conduct us. The writers of our Gospels
are simple-minded persons who bring us a report,
couched in their own language, of an unparaUeled
phenomenon in the spiritual world. Their descrip
tion bears aU the marks of the time and place from
which it derives. It is coloured by the preposses
sions, and characterised by the hmitations of an
unscientific age. But through all this shines the
tremendous Fact itself ; what is more, through all
this pours to-day upon us, undiminished, the
spiritual power inherent in that Fact. And the
force it contains is a redeeming force. Jesus is
stiU the soul's miracle. His attraction is perennial,
and whomsoever He attracts He uplifts and purifies.
As to physical signs and wonders, though we cannot
in that sphere measure His power, it was not upon
these He put the emphasis. Nor need we. He
was capable of so much greater things — the things
He accomphshed and does now accomphsh in
the minds and hearts of men. What need for
further witness ? Who hath seen Him hath seen the
Father. In Him we read the Divine secret. Union
with Him is union with God. 4

V
Our Doctrine of Sin
In the great inteUectual resettlement which the
Christian consciousness owes to itself in our time
there is perhaps no outstanding account more
pressing than that of its doctrine of sin. What is
that doctrine, and how does it relate itseff to the
facts and realities of our modern world ? It is
on this subject, we are told, that science and theo
logy come most definitely into collision. Chris
tianity, it is said, bases itself on the dogma of a
Fall ; science, on the contrary, asserts that the
human history is that of a perpetual rise. A
Continental school of philosophy, headed by Nietz
sche, goes further. It makes the consciousness of
sin to be a kind of disease, which man has caught by
the way and which he must get rid of. It came in
with the change he experienced when he passed from
the wild into the social state. It is analogous to
the feeling the water animals had when compeUed
to become land animals. The special type of
evolution-philosophy represented by Fiske ap
proaches the theme from yet another point of
view. " Theology," says he, " has had much to
say about original sin. This original sin is^neither
. 5°

OUR DOCTRINE OF SIN 51
more nor less than the brute inheritance which
every man carries with him ; and the pro
cess of evolution is an advance towards true
salvation." Modern phUosophic ideahsm, so far
as it foUows Hegel, also has its chaUenge to the
average Christian thought, by its practical denial
of human freedom, treating, as it does, our person
ahty as a phase of the absolute consciousness which
is here going through its series of necessary pro
cesses. And as if there were not enough already
on our hands, we have modern investigation open
ing up for us the whole story of sacrifice and ritual
in relation to sin, as it has developed through the
ages, and asking us how the Church dogma on
these points looks in the new hght ?
In discussing this theme we cannot do better
than begin with a Uttle history. How did the
world come by its notions of sin and demerit ?
The record is curiously mixed. From the begin
ning men everywhere have a right and a wrong,
but their " right " and " wrong " are often to
us so utterly strange. Amongst the Tupinambas of
BrazU the saints, who wiU reach their heaven as
having " lived well," are those who have weU
avenged themselves and eaten many enemies.
In the rehgion of ancient Babylon we find in the
Incantation Tablets, amid curses directed against
definite immoralities, others equaUy pronounced
against " pointing with the finger at fire," and
" sitting facing the sun." In those uncounted
millions of the human race, who through scores of
generations have fiUed the vast Chinese empire,
there seems never to have been a consciousness of

52 OUR CITY OF GOD
sin in the usual Christian sense. In the teaching
of Confucius, and later of Mencius, man has no need
of grace, for he is not inherently bad. He is, to
use Lord Palmerston's famous phrase, " born
good," and requires only proper instruction and
favouring circumstance to develop what is in him.
In ancient Greece we find phUosophy at logger
heads with theology. The old rehgion confused
the moral issues by its villainous deities, who
incited men to abominable crimes, which they
then punished in an abominable way. We have
Socrates, on the other hand, identifying virtue
with knowledge. A man is vicious because he
does not know better. Sin is moral unskilfulness, a
kind of folly. It is worth noting in this connection
that the Greek word in our New Testament which
stands for " sin," hamartia, means in its first,
classical acceptation, just a failure, a missing of
the mark.
We need to bear in mind these various attitudes
as to sin in order to estimate accurately the teachmg
and spirit of Christianity. Unquestionably the
Gospel brings to the theme a new and deeper note.
At the same time, it simplifies the issue. The heathen
doctrine of sin was largely a doctrine of taboo.
You might, as did the Assyrian kings, burn or
impale your captives, and glory in it, but you
must not " point your finger at the fire." Sin, as
often as not, was the offending of ridiculous or
immoral deities, to be placated by something
equally ridiculous and immoral. Jesus would
have nothing to do with the taboo notion. He had
no use for ceremoniabsm. He did not believe, aa

OUR DOCTRINE OF SIN 53
priests in every generation have beheved , in creating
fancy theological diseases to be cured by fancy
theological remedies. With Him sin was bad
ethic. It was the contradiction of hfe's highest law
— the law of love. It was the wounding by this
means of your neighbour and of your Heavenly
Father. It derived its sting and its heinousness
from the fact that the love on which it trampled
was so high, so beautiful, so perfect.
It is from this as starting-point that we begin to
see our way into many things. Christianity, we
have said, has a deeper note concerning sin than is
found elsewhere. Its " conviction of sin " is
peculiar to itself. Its saints, in every generation,
have begun with this. There is no literature out
side which carries such an accent of contrition.
You may search the classics of Greece and Rome, of
China and India, of Egypt and Babylon, and you
wUl not find it. This sentiment of guilt-consciousness
has doubtless often been carried to extremes,
and has earned the criticism it has met with.
There is no religion in groveUing.
But we have nothing here to do with exaggera
tions. Let us consider the sentiment in itself.
When we ask why it is that Christianity carries this
special note of the consciousness of sin we are
immediately, for answer, thrown back upon some
fundamental facts of the spiritual hfe. We stumble,
for instance, on that foundation paradox that the
sense of sin is the gauge of progress. That man
has this sense is the sign that he is rising ; the
intensity of the sense denotes the height to which he
may rise. In his pre-human, animal stage he did

54 OUR CITY OF GOD
the things he now calls sinful, and many more.
But he did not know them by that name. It was
when the ideal of something higher dawned on him,
that the sense awoke of moral defect. It is what
might happen in art. A viUage dauber by his
early efforts gains the admiration of his circle, and
has an excellent conceit of himself. Later he
emerges from these surroundings to come in con
tact with the real thing, in the great masters. The
confrontation with this perfection confounds him.
He feels now an " artistic conviction of sin." He
repents, and abhors himself in dust and ashes — a
sign that he is on the way up. And as in art so in
morals. It is precisely because the Christian ideal
is the loftiest that has opened to the soul of man,
that the contemplation of it has produced in him,
age after age, this peculiar depth and intensity of
self-abasement and reproach.
It is along this fine also that we find answer to
the objection of science against the Christian view
of man as fallen and needing redemption. " There
has been no fall," says our evolutionist ; " man
has been continuaUy rising." " WeU and good,"
we reply, " but let us consider a little." What
do we mean by f alhng and rising ? It may turn out
that the two are necessary parts of the same process.
We may here remember Pascal's definition, made so
much of later by German phUosophy, that the
history of mankind is as the history of a
single individual ever growing and ever learning.
What is individual history ? It is that at the
beginning of the child who physicaUy rises by
degrees to the capacity of a faU — which will

OUR DOCTRINE OF SIN 55
come probably in its first journey across
the floor — and morally of the same child,
beginning with mere animal appetite and
sensation, arriving at last at the moral sense, at
that knowledge of right and wrong which it wiU
sooner or later violate, one way or another. And if
humanity as a whole made its progress after this
fashion ; if in its advance, according to the evolu
tion account, from subhuman to human, it has
foUowed the analogy of the child, what quarrel
arises between science and theology ? Rehgion
holds to both a rise and a faU ; the faU as part of
the rise. It not only accepts the advance of the
race. By its opening to the soul of the spiritual
ideal, with the consequent immediate overpowering
sense of inner loss and defect, it operates as
the most puissant factor in furthering that
advance. But this, which is true of Christianity in its pure,
spiritual conception, is assuredly not so of very
much that has been offered as Christianity. And
that by Protestant not less than by Catholic.
Both, in their dogmatic treatment of sin, have
practicaUy denied the Gospel. They forgot its
central doctrine of the Fatherhood. They took
hold of infinity by the wrong end. They argued
that because God was an Infinite Being, therefore
man's sin against Him must be infinite, and open
to infinite punishment. A sense in them even of
humour, one would think, should have saved them
from such a conclusion. God's perfection here comes
in indeed for some strange handhng. In its name
Auo-ustine faUs into self-contradiction, and then

56 OUR CITY OF GOD
into what seems like blasphemy. In one breath he
declares a good God cannot create a bad nature.
In the next he is asserting that evil resides in the
will, though as to where that originaUy came from
he does not enhghten us. His further doctrine
that the choice of good in one wiU and of evil in
another rests on the bestowal or non-bestowal of
grace, throws in the end, though he does not recog
nise it, the whole responsibility on God. The circle
of theological atrocity is complete when, holding
still to the dreary fiction of man's infinite sin, he
and his successors make God to plan the eternal
torment of His creatures before they are born.
Calvin surely gives the process its finishing touch
in his decretum horribile, which we had better give
in his exact words : " Non pari conditione creantur
omnes ; sed aliis vita aeterna, ahis damnatio
aeterna, preordinatur." " AU are not created in
an equal condition, for some are preordained to
eternal life and others to eternal damnation."
But perhaps this is not the finishing touch, which
may properly be apportioned to our Anghcan
Pearson, who, in his work on the Creed, tells us
that " in the reprobate and damned souls the spot
of sin remaineth in its perfect die ; the dominion of
sin continueth in its absolute power ; the guilt of
sin abideth in "a, perpetual obligation to eternal
pains." Altogether a very pretty gospel to offer to our
poor humanity ! Assuredly the earlier Protestant
ism did not shine in its doctrine of God ! It is
curious to notice how Rome, while holding specula
tively to these imphcations concerning God, man

OUR DOCTRINE OF SIN 57
and sin, in its practical teaching mitigated these
horrors in a fashion peculiarly its own. God the
Implacable was to be bought off by a pecuniary
arrangement with His agents the priests. It
devised that system of pardons and " saleable
exemptions" as Erasmus, himself a Catholic,
termed them, by which, as he goes on to say,
" Any notorious highwayman, any plundering
soldier, or any bribe-taking judge, shall disburse
some part of their august gains, and so think
all their grossest impieties sufficiently accounted
for; so many perjuries, lusts, drunken bouts,
quarrels, bloodsheds, treacheries and aU sorts of
debaucheries, shaU all be, as it were, struck a
bargain for, and such a contract made as if they
had paid off aU arrears, and might now begin upon
a new scale."
It is not thus we have learned Christ. Catholic
and Protestant alike have here blundered fatally
away from His doctrine of the Fatherhood. The
infinitude of God, if He be Father, in its relation to
transgression is surely first of aU an infinitude of
forgiveness, pity and love ! If " unto seventy times
seven " is the measure of man's patience with the
wrongdoer, how shaU the same work out of the
Divine patience ? To suppose that God's nature
and feeling can change utterly to a man at the
moment of his death is to suppose a child's falling
to sleep were enough to turn its mother into
its murderess. The wrath of God is always a
Father's wrath ; His punishments ever a means of
grace. " Zom ist der Liebe zweite, heiss're Flamme,"
says beautifuUy a German poet. " Wrath is a second

58 OUR CITY OF GOD
love, its hotter flame." To beheve other, to beheve
that sin and punishment are everlasting, is to
beheve in Zoroaster's Ormuzd and Ahriman, to
beheve the devil is as strong as God.
At this point some practical questions emerge.
Sin, as we have seen, is at aU points related to law,
but is there in this sphere a law which is one and
universal ? Is the human heart in contact every
where with the same moral code ? At first sight
the exact contrary would seem the case. We remem
ber Pascal's mot about right on one side the Pyrenees
being wrong on the other. Ethnology opens to us
the widest divergence of moral theory and practice.
There are tribes that hold cannibahsm as part of
their rehgion. What common ground between
our view of sin and that of the Indian thug, or
of the brave who exhibits the scalps he has taken
as a certificate of character ? But the comparison
here is surely more apparent than real. It affects
in no way the existence of that universal moral
law which, in the Christian position, is the ground of
its doctrine of sin. The human dissonances here
are evidence not of a confusion of laws but of
varying stages of development. To take a com
parison from music. Could anything be more
bewildering as a study in men's views of musical
theory and practice than what we find actuaUy
to-day among different peoples ? What com
munity between the hideous uproar which dehghts
the African savage and, say, the Eroica Sym
phony ? And yet who wiU deny that music rests
upon a harmonic law which is universal, rooted in
the inmost nature of things, there before all the

OUR DOCTRINE OF SIN 59
worlds ? That the same rule holds in morals is
seen in this, that amongst the different peoples
as mind, conscience and personahty develop there
is, keeping step with the process, an ever growing
approximation of ethical idea.
But the question of questions to-day concerning
sin is that of free-wiU. Are men really responsible
for their actions, or are they simply hnks in a chain
of irresistibly working forces ? Is our notion of
freedom an Ulusion, like that — to use Spinoza's
iUustration — of a stone flung into the air and imagin
ing that it is flying ? If the latter, the doctrine of
sin in the Christian sense faUs, of course, to the
ground, for if man cannot help being what he is,
or doing what he does, there is no guilt in his deed.
Atonement would be out of place, and punishment
a monstrous cruelty. It is curious to note how
thought on this theme has swayed backwards and
forwards throughout the Christian centuries. Theo
logy has time and again denied freedom to the wUl.
Irenseus, long before Augustine, has a strong doc
trine of predestination, while Methodius speaks
against it. At the Reformation, Luther wrote his
" De Arbitrio Servo " against Erasmus, who con
tended for freedom. While Calvin and Luther, and
Jonathan Edwards after them, argued against
freewiU in the interests of evangehcal faith,
we have in our own day the spectacle of rehgion
fighting for free-will, as part of its very hfe,
against the new predestination of scientific materi
alism. The doctrine of Helvetius in the eighteenth century
that " aU men are what they must be; a fool

60 OUR CITY OF GOD
produces follies just as a wild shrub produces sour
berries," has been reproduced under a new, pro
fessedly scientific form by physicists of the type of
Buchner and Haeckel. Human action, according
to them, is a product of predetermining causes as
natural and as inevitable as the production of a
crystal or a salt. Thought is a function of the
brain ; will is controlled by motive ; by the neces
sary reaction of a character transmitted through
heredity upon an external stimulus. Your deed
to-day is one of a chain of effects traceable back
wards in unbroken succession to the attractions
and repulsions of the primordial atom.
It is an extraordinary feature of this teaching
that it has been presented, not only as a truth of
science, but as a gospel of hberation. And a
wonderful rehef truly for rascahty that it should
henceforth have not to blame but only to pity
itself ! " Gentlemen, I am a martyr of circum
stance ; I am the victim of heredity and unfavour
able social conditions ! " With this as his appeal
to society the scapegrace imagines that the new
doctrine wiU let him off much more easily than the
old. What he does not perceive is the under side of
the argument. Between the Christian word which
says, " Thou hast sinned : repent," and this other
which annihilates sin, there is reaUy aU the difference
between hope and despair. The Biblical treatment
may seem stern and severe. It teUs the delinquent
what it thinks of him. But its very condemnation
is a promise. It holds in it the suggestion of remedy.
" You are wrong, because you can do better. And
in repentance and grace and the nev/ resolve you

OUR DOCTRINE OF SIN 61
can find a way out." Compare this, in the matter of
help and hope, with a doctrine which tells a man
that his degradation, the vileness to which he has
sunk, and for which he cannot help cursing him-
seff, is just the thing he must be, one of the results
for which the whole world-process from the begin
ning has been working !
But this teaching, as the best minds both in
science and philosophy are now discovering, is not
only wretched in result but wrong in its facts. The
attempt to reduce everything to energy and matter,
" Kraft und Stoff," as Buchner phrases it, has
signaUy broken down. The thought kingdom in
which man fives cannot be expressed in terms
of matter. The region of brain cells, corpuscles,
absorptions, exudations, respirations, is one thing ;
the region of emotion, of ecstasy, of contrition, of
love, is quite another. The measurements of
this are of no use in that. And the arguments
that apply there have no application here. And
this failure of correspondence between the matter-
world and the mind-world applies equally to the
wiU. You cannot argue about it in the terms of the
material world. It is in a realm of law truly, but
of a different law. For any real knowledge of the
wiU we have to come right away from the foreign
region of matter and force to the facts and sequences
of the psychical realm. We have to study the
wiU by what it does. We cannot explain it for the
reason that it is a primary fact of consciousness
and so beyond explanation. To " explain " a
thing is to refer it to a primary, but you cannot
explain a primary because there is nothing to

62 OUR CITY OF GOD
refer it to. That we wiU a thing cannot be demon
strated. It simply is so ; it is a thing which can
only be proved by being experienced. As Dr.
Johnson put it, " all theory is against free-wiU ;
all experience is for it."
It is precisely on this experience of the will in
action — just as on the experience of sight, as a
primary sensation — that we have to found our
whole knowledge of it. We have to begin with the
fact as given in consciousness. What we find next
is that the whole moral world starts from this fact
as its centre, and groups its laws around it. Consider,
in relation to free-wiU, the formation of man's
moral vocabulary. The strongest words in the
language ; those which bite most deeply into the
heart of us ; which are found wherever man
fives, acts and suffers, spring aU from this fountain
of man's moral freedom and responsibility. When
we speak of a man's merit or demerit ; when we
characterise him as villain or saint, we are naming
the bottom facts of him. And no jugghng with
determinism, " scientific " or other, deprives these
words of their awful strength, of their absolute
finahty. Destroy their meaning, and you destroy
the meaning of life.
Solvitur ambulando. The wUl proves itself free
by acting as free. No study of the outside machinery
of brain or nerves, no calculations carried on in the
region of matter and force, really touch the question.
The wiU, in its movement up or down shows itself
as belonging to that inner moral and spiritual
realm in which man dwells, and where he finds his
true being. And it is in the way that Christianity

OUR DOCTRINE OF SIN 63
meets man here ; in the way it meets his sense of
loss and failure, of guilt and disgrace, with its
august economy of sacrifice and redemption ; by
its offers to him in his extremity of a Divine and
gracious forgiveness, that it estabhshes itself as
the eternal answer to his eternal problem.

VI
The Doctrine of Sacrifice
It has been made a subject of reproach to modern
rehgious thinking that while using the terms of the
great Christian doctrines it has emptied them of
their meaning. It is, of course, quite possible to
do that. But let it, at the same time, be remembered
that no term in theology can keep an unbroken
sameness of significance. The innovators here are
not the " higher critics " or " levelling rationalists,"
but that " time-spirit," greatest of revolutionaries,
whose eternal movement no bulwarks we may
raise can resist. Nowhere is that movement and
its results more conspicuously displayed than in
this theme of sacrifice, which we propose now to
consider. The word has changed its meaning
because the thing has changed its meaning ; changed,
not in the sense of contradiction, but in that of
advance and enlargement ; changed, because new
and higher elements have come into it, a deeper and
more spiritual sense.
It is in a study of this sort that we see at work
one of the most wonderful things in human history.
That history, surveyed from the beginning, is one of
the Divine ideas which, as it were, have incarnated
61

! THE DOCTRINE OF SACRIFICE 65
themselves in man, and which each generation has
tried to express in its own fashion. In the dawn
of civilisation these ideas take on the lowliest and
most uncouth shapes, simply because man at that
stage is lowly and uncouth. But as the ages roU,
we see them assuming ever higher forms, whose
majestic proportions compel us finaUy to recognise
their exalted source. It has been one of the
stupidest blunders of a superficial criticism to
imagine that it has explained away Christianity by
tracing back its central ideas to savage origins ;
to suppose that its doctrines of sin, retribution,
sacrifice, atonement are done with when it has been
shown that they have their roots in primitive
institutions and barbarous behefs. If they have,
we ask, what then ? Is not aU this exactly what
we should expect in a cosmic system which, in aU
its departments, works from below upwards ? An
oak is not an acorn because it comes from one. A
rehgious system is to be judged not by its human
beginnings, but by the thing it has grown to, and
the kind of future which seems to open before it.
Rehgion from the first has been fuU of the doctrine
of sacrifice. But how f ar we have traveUed from its
earher conception would perhaps best be iUustrated
by contrasting a modern function of worship with
one of two or three thousand years ago. Imagine
the consternation of a London congregation if its
presiding minister, say the Dean of Westminster or
Dr. Clifford, instead of foUowing the accustomed
order of service, should suddenly hark back upon
that Old Testament usage which we read of so com
placently — should introduce a sheep or buUock to
5

66 OUR CITY OF GOD
the chancel, and there and then proceed to slaughter
it ! Nothing indeed is more difficult for us of
to-day than to comprehend or even imagine that
earlier state of mind. We can understand neither
the men nor their God. What meeting-point is
there between our view and that of Homer when, in
the Iliad, he declares as a rehgious commonplace,
" The gods, too, may be turned from their purpose ;
and men pray to them and avert their wrath by
sacrifices and soothing entreaties, and by libations
and the odour of fat, when they have sinned and
transgressed ! " Imagine the kind of spiritual
world in which Agamemnon lived when, at Auhs,
as pictured by Euripides, he is prepared to plunge his
sword into his loved daughter, Iphigenia, because the
prophet Calchas informs him this is the only way
to propitiate the gods ; to make them change
the wind which keeps back the Greek fleet from its
voyage to Ihum ! Yet that was as far as men had
got in that age in their notion of sacrifice.
But history shows us the steady march of ideas
on this theme. The light as it dawns falls always
first on the highest summits. In Israel, whUe the
masses were pretty much in the condition depicted
in Homer and the Greek tragedies, the great souls
were opening to a truer conception. Their view
of God had heightened, and with it their view of
sacrifice. To the Hebrew prophets belongs the
glory of hfting it out of the region of outward
ceremony to that of character and the inward life.
The magnificent outburst of Micah, which struck
Huxley as containing religion's highest and final
expression, " What doth the Lord require of thee,

THE DOCTRINE OF SACRIFICE 67
but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly
with thy God ? " may, indeed, well be taken as the
classic instance of prophetic inspiration.
The movement, however, did not stop there.
The soul of humanity in its slow evolution had yet
deeper, subhmer elements to disclose than that of
mere personal uprightness. It began to be realised
that man's hfe, in its full expression, did not end in
himself. It was mingled inextricably with that of
the race. AU that was in him would enter into
humanity ; all that was in humanity would enter
into him. More : in some high but dimly -discerned
manner his life streamed out to the Infinite,
and touched and was touched by the Unseen
Powers. Those rudest sacrifices of which we have
spoken meant that. The animal offerings, so
revolting to us, were, after all, a rehgion, a true one
as far as it went. They meant an intercourse of
giving and receiving between man and God ; they
meant that rehgion was for one thing a renunciation,
a surrender of things that were valued. But now
came a deeper note. Through experience, and
through the soul's inward working, it began to be
understood how vicarious suffering formed a condi
tion of the higher hfe of the race. It began to be
seen that somehow this element was rooted in the
nature of things, and in the very heart of God. It
was in Israel's later period that this view found
expression in the Second Isaiah, in the subhme
picture of the " suffering servant " of Jehovah as
depicted in the fifty-third chapter. StiU later we
see how the idea has taken root in that prayer of
the dying heroes in the fourth Book of Maccabees,

68 OUR CITY OF GOD
" Make my blood a sacrifice of purification, and
accept my soul in place of theirs" (the people's).
That which appears as root and germ in the Old
Testament flowers into glorious perfection in the
New. The Christian Gospel is above all things a
Gospel of vicarious sacrifice, of a love that suffers,
that gives itself for the race. Its centre is the death
of Jesus, By a sure instinct theology has built
itself round that fact. Yet the marvellous thing
is that no one of the participators in that event
suspected there was any theology in it ! The Jewish
priests, the Roman procurator, the soldiery, the
spectators were aU theologians of a sort. They were
famihar with a doctrine and practice of sacrifice.
But they saw no example of it here. What they
saw was simply an execution, the carrying out of a
legal sentence. Even the earhest Christian thought,
as exhibited in the reputed sermon of Peter in
the second of Acts, seemed not as yet to have
grasped the significance of the Cross. The death is
charged home on the Jews as a wickedness, but
it is not the death so much as the resurrection which
the speaker urges as reason for his hearers' repent
ance and acceptance of Christ.
It was reserved for St. Paul, whose deep, intense
personality and marveUous spiritual experience
made him, afike by nature and grace, the predestined
organ of this higher revelation — it was, we say,
reserved for St. Paul to catch the fuU glory of the
death on Calvary. It was by a flash of inspiration
that the apostle, inheriting as he did the fuU Jewish
tradition, famihar with aU its ritual of expiatory
sacrifice, saw now its relation to the Christ who

THE DOCTRINE OF SACRIFICE 69
had died. Just as in His teaching Jesus had so
divinely spirituahsed the Jewish law, so now in
His death He had, and yet more marveUously,
spirituahsed its ritual of sacrifice. The truth so
rudely adumbrated by the priest and his victim
was to gleam henceforth from the Cross in a new,
diviner setting. " He gave Himself for us, the
Just for the unjust." Here was the final, ultimate
expression of the truth wrought into the very
spiritual fabric of the universe : that humanity is
redeemed by suffering love ; that it chmbs through
sorrow, and chiefly by sorrow of the Highest for the
lowest. The difference between rehgion and theology is
perhaps nowhere more strikingly exhibited than in
the successive theories of the Cross that have fol
lowed each other through the Christian centuries.
When good men to-day are accused of tampering
with the doctrine of the Atonement we are inclined
to ask, " Which doctrine ? " The rehgion of the
Cross is one thing ; the doctrine of it quite another.
If men are saved or lost by their correct or incorrect
theology of it, then whole ages of the Church —
ages which numbered its noblest martyrs and con
fessors — are surely past praying for. What has
modern orthodoxy to say of that view which held
its ground for nigh a thousand years, that Christ's
death was a ransom paid to the devil, and that the
resurrection was a kind of trick by which Satan was
finaUy defrauded ? Think of a man hke Ambrose
of Milan, one of the noblest saints and teachers of
the fourth century, who brought the cruel Theo-
dosius to his knees, who was the spiritual father of

70 OUR CITY OF GOD
the young Augustine, being able to pen a sentence
hke this : Oportuit hanc fraudem Diabolo fieri, ut
susciperet corpus Dominus Jesus. " It was necessary
in order that this fraud should be carried out upon
the devil that the Lord Jesus should take a body " '
Can we imagine a theology of the Cross more
grotesque or impossible ? And yet who amongst us
has known more effectuaUy than this fourth-century
saint the rehgion of the Cross, as felt in the soul and
realised in the life ?
A similar thing may be said of the quid pro quo
theory of Anselm in his " Cur Deus Homo," a
theory which, strangely enough, was in its main
features accepted and taught by the Reformation
leaders. This theology, which regards Christ as
having, by His passion and death, paid in suffering
the exact equivalent of human guilt, and thus
satisfied the claims of God's justice and offended
honour, is, as competent theologians have repeatedly
pointed out, not so much a doctrine of grace as a
negation of grace. For if in Christ's death man's
debt has been fuUy paid he can claim his salvation
not as a matter of grace from God, but as a matter of
right. If salvation is a debtor and creditor account,
when the adverse balance has been wiped out the
creditor has no further locus standi. He has
assuredly no right to talk of " grace " as extended
to the debtor.
This mechanical view, which was constructed out
of the Roman law and the feudal system, has no
ground in Scripture, in experience, or in the nature
of things. Augustine saw this ; saw that the Atone
ment was no mere payment, no mere appeasement.

THE DOCTRINE OF SACRIFICE 71
Says he in the De Trinitate, " Would the Father have
dehvered up His Son for us if He had not been
already appeased ? I see that the Father loved us
before the Son died for us."
In sum : Sacrifice is an integral law of the spiritual
life. Its root is in the heart of God ; its expression
is the rehgious history of man. Beginning in
lowhest forms it reaches its supreme glory in the
Cross. The interpretations of the Cross are at
best only imperfect endeavours after a Divine
mystery. When in our personal or pubhc hfe we
turn aside from the law of sacrifice we deny the
Cross and desert God. In drinking the bitter sweet
of this cup the soul finds its uttermost self. Along
this fine is achieved aU inner progress. AU the
heroisms draw here their inspiration. From this
source flows the power that redeems the world.

VII
On Being Saved
It is a saying of Renan that " at the outset a new
rehgion is often but a new kind of hterature." He
applies the remark to Mohammedanism and the
Koran, but it is suggestive also of things nearer
home. The state of rehgion, for instance, in our
selves and the society to which we belong, has
hardly a surer test than the literary one. The
secret of our spiritual condition is revealed in the
significance we attach to words. The faith of a
people or a time, whether a growing, a stagnant, or
a decadent faith, shows in the changes that have
come in its word-symbols. The change wiU,
usuaUy, not be in the words themselves. The
vocables are there, permanent residents in the
language, speUed and pronounced with smaUest
variation from one generation to another. The
difference hes in the new meanings that have crept
into them, in the old meanings that have dropped
out, in the effect they produce upon us as compared
with their effect upon our fathers.
The remark applies to the whole of our
religious phraseology, but to none of it with
greater force than to that with which we propose

ON BEING SAVED 73
here specially to deal. " Salvation," " being saved,"
and the allied words and phrases form to-day,
as they have formed in aU the Christian ages, an
integral and vital part in our Church vocabulary.
The all-important question is, What do we now mean
by them ? That we mean something is evident.
The youngest and perhaps the most vigorous of our
Christian organisations, the " Salvation Army,"
has found its title in them. Yes, we mean something,
but what we mean is the question. Are we, for
instance, in the mental position, on this matter,
which dictated the phrase extra ecclesiam nulla
salus (outside the Church is no salvation) ? Are
we with Hooker in his saying that " Scripture
teacheth aU supernatural revealed truth, without
the knowledge whereof salvation cannot be attained " ?
Or are we to-day anywhere near the frame of
mind which almost in our own generation inspired
the cry of Newman, in his agony at Littlemore :
" The simple question is, Can I be saved in the
Enghsh Church ? Am I in safety were I to die
to-night ? "
To ask our question is to answer it. No ; we
are not in the mental attitude which inspired these
utterances. The standpoint has shifted. The new
generation is beginning to inquire, indeed, with a
certain surprise why such questions should ever
have been mooted. " What," it asks, " has man,
here solidly fixed on this planet, to be saved from ?
Or from whom ? Has he an enemy then ? Or
is not this universe on the whole a beneficent
universe, weU-intentioned towards him ? Have
we not in all this phraseology a misconception of

74 OUR CITY OF/ GOD
the meaning of fife ? Are \ive then a shipwrecked
crew, whose one business Is to leave a doomed
vessel and to scramble by/some means to shore ; or
is it not rather that we/ are no shipwrecked crew,
but comfortably ashr^re, planted, indeed, in a
magnificent inheritance, with invitation to cultivate
it, to open its treasures and enjoy them ? Is not
this quest of ' Salvation ' an obsession of the past,
from which ;tt is time we were reheved ? "
There is a certain basis for these queries. They
serve, indeed, to bring home to us the fact that some
of the elements which entered into the idea of
salvation in earlier ages have lost their force in
ours. Conceptions that stiU hold their ground in
official theology are (and it is time we recognised the
fact) simply survivals of an earlier, savage state.
Man is not only an active, working force. He is
also a museum. He carries in him the relics of bis
immeasurable past. And one of the most formid
able of these remainders is Fear. In the far-off ages
from which we have come it was a terrible thing to
be a man. Not only had he, with his scanty
equipment, to fight against savage beasts and the
rage of the elements ; he had by day and night the
far more awesome conflict with the unknown. This
unknown was not only far mightier than he ; it
seemed to him also to be malignant. The darkened
sky, the gleam of lightning, the thunder's roar, the
earthquake's upheaval, sickness, pain, death, what
were these if not the anger of the Powers behind ?
The natural causes were all undiscovered, and it
is a law of the primitive mind that where natural
causes are unknown events are attributed to the

ON BEING SAVED 75
agency of wills like its own. Hence there grew in
the early world an enormous Fear, which ruled its
actions, created much of its rehgion, and which
still in strange, fantastic ways asserts its sway over
us. Against our clearest reason and firmest per
suasion we are stiU haunted by the idea that the
universe is malignant. In an empty house at
midnight it is difficult to rid ourselves of the feehng
that the darkness conceals a foe, that the creak of a
door is a stealthy footstep, that from the gloom
some ghastly shape may emerge. The past, which
still holds its ground in the back chambers of the
brain, would persuade us that 'tis a demon-haunted
world, where not God but the devil rules.
Clearly we do need to be saved, to be saved from
fear. We are not yet persuaded that this is a
cheerful, homely, well-meaning universe, whose
powers, if strict in their working, are neverthe
less beneficent and not diabohc. Not yet are we
dehvered from the mental condition which Plutarch
— one, surely, of the sanest, as weU as devoutest,
minds of antiquity — has pictured for us in his
" De Superstitione " : "In the very sleep of her
victims, as though they were in the realms of the
impious, superstition raises horrible spectres and
monstrous phantoms, and whirls the miserable
soul about, and persecutes it." At death, he con
tinues, superstition makes " deep gates of heU to
yawn, and headlong streams of at once fire and
gloom are opened, and darkness with its many
phantoms encompasses . . . and chasms and
dens fuU of innumerable miseries." We have not
yet emerged from that region. Salvation is to

76 OUR CITY OF GOD
multitudes of us a theological device against theo
logical phantoms. We are not yet convinced that
God is Love. Newman, we see, had such an opinion
of Him as to beheve Him capable of damning him
to eternal torments on the score of the difference
between Anglo-Cathohcism and Roman Catholicism.
At a time when, in our criminal system, the in
fliction of pain for pain's sake is rejected as barbar
ous ; when our entire action in this department is
directed to reformation and prevention, we stUl
go on attributing to Deity the most fiendish and
senseless of penal codes. We do this, we say,
officially. Practically most of us have probably
reached the position of that fine old Christian lay
man Sir Thomas Browne : " That most terrible
term (hell) hath never detained me from sin, nor do
I owe any good action to the name thereof. I fear
God, yet am not afraid of Him. His mercies
make me ashamed of my sins before His jud -.aients
afraid thereof." We have a certain syi jt" thy
with the woman whom Diderot speaks of in 7 Sur
les Femmes," who promenaded the streets of Alex
andria, a torch in one hand and a ewer of water in
the other, and who cried, " I would burn heaven
with this torch, and extinguish heU with this water,
in order that man might love God for Himself
alone." Plainly our salvation, as theologically conceived,
has survivals in it which we were weU rid of ;
that are not Divine, no, nor human, but only sub
human. Nevertheless, salvation is a living word,
expressive of a most real and hving thing. There is
no man of us but needs it, nor that wUl not faU

ON BEING SAVED 77
without it. As the outside hfe — the battle with the
elements, with circumstance, with the dead weight
of things — demands our best effort, so here, in the
inward hfe, victory comes only through struggle
and pain, the putting forth of our utmost wiU, the
reinforcement of other powers than our own.
Augustine found two things in the universe, God and
his own soul. Yes, God and the soul, and the
problem with us, as with him, is to adjust their
relations. To begin with, no man is at peace till
he has found God, and is on right terms with Him.
Through all the languages and aU the religions of men
we see this emerging as their chief and final business.
Read Bunyan's " Grace Abounding " and Carlyle's
" Sartor Resartus," and you shall find their theme
the same. Their language, their general cosmic
outlook, how poles asunder different ! Yet the
deep essence of their trouble is, we say, the same.
When the Tinker at the worst of his distress wishes
himself a dog or a worm, he is with Teufelsdrockh
when the " Everlasting No " had said : " Behold
thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is
mine (the Devil's)." And the joy of the two
pilgrims when they get the " Spiritual New Birth or
Baphometic Fire-baptism," and can say " I am not
thine but free, and for ever hate thee," is the same
joy. But New Birth and Fire-baptism, for a
Bunyan or a Teufelsdrockh, for you and me, means
the conscious union of our poor self with a greater
and better self, the finding of that Highest whose
Witness has been ever in us, and to whom now,
as our refuge and strength, we joyfully give our
selves over. Christianity, as hved, means that

78 OUR CITY OF GOD
first and last. The perfection of Jesus was the
perfection of His union with God, and what He
offers us is that same Divine secret. We have
entered into it when we can say in our humble
measure, with Him in His highest measure, " I
and my Father are one."
God and the soul. Salvation, working upward to
the first, works downward next upon the second.
We have to be saved from ourselves, and it is a
tough business. Says Amiel, " The animal in
man becomes human only late in the day, and then
only in the beautiful souls." The Gospel is, in this
matter, more optimistic than the Geneva phUosopher.
It proposes to make beautiful souls out of the
most unpromising materials. Its chaUenge is of
the boldest, yet quite natural. It says in effect
that the illimitable physical forces which, as we
discover their secret, are transforming our world for
us, are matched by illimitable spiritual forces, which
in proportion as we learn and obey their laws wiU
work grander transformations in the kingdom of
the heart. And it is too late in the day to contest
this fact. The experiment has been made a thou
sand times over, and the results are for anyone who
chooses to study them. They exhibit Christianity
not as a dogmatic system, but as a spiritual force
that renovates and cleanses the soul. Wesley's
Kingswood colliers showed its operation on the
roughest classes. For its work on the cultured
take the beautiful words of Erasmus on Dean
Colet : "He was a man of genuine piety. He was
not born with it. He was naturaUy hot, impetuous,
and resentful, indolent, fond of pleasure, disposed

ON BEING SAVED 79
to make a joke of everything. He told me that
he had fought against his faults with study, fasting
and prayer, and thus his whole soul was, in fact,
unpoUuted with the world's defilements. . . .
I never knew a man with a sunnier nature." That
is salvation.
There remain two observations. First, the real
saving, as thus appears, is a saving into character ;
from a lower to a higher spiritual state of ourselves.
But what room does this leave for the ceremonies,
the priestly absolutions, the sacramental efficacies,
the orthodoxies by which ecclesiasticism proposes
to deliver us ? Dehver us from what ? Is there not
at the bottom of this whole business the idea that
our great need is to be saved from God, an idea
that to us at least is the worst of aU blasphemies ?
If ceremony can wash away sin — turn a man from
thieving to honesty — weU and good. If not, what
use is it ? To observe it as a means of placating
God is to resort to the superstition, begotten of
that old-world fear of which we have spoken,
which places Him, whose name is Love, on a level
with Thor and Woden — with savage deities whose
wrath must be appeased by magic rites.
And, finaUy, salvation, considered as the finding
of God and the finding of character, contains in it
the idea of a Church, as part of its method. Do
we not, indeed, find here the true sense of that
otherwise hard saying, " Outside the Church (that
is, outside a brotherly fellowship) is no salvation."
For we cannot complete our character without
our brother's aid. AU the virtues of it suppose him.
We cannot love nor serve nor sacrifice ; we cannot

80 OUR CITY OF GOD
cultivate humihty nor patience nor seU-abnegation,
except as members of a society. We cannot find
our own soul except in the soul of our brother.
There is no true joy that is not a sharing. Being
saved, then, is a feUowship with God which unites us
by love and service with every soul that He has
made.

VIII
Theology's Hidden Factors
We have had in these pages occasion to speak
more than once of the distinction between rehgion
and theology. Rehgion is a hfe ; theology is the
attempt to explain that life. When we have
reached the secret of life in even its humblest
forms ; — when we can really explain an amoeba
or a rat — it will, perhaps, be time enough for us to
talk of explaining hfe at its highest. Yet from
the beginning the attempt has been made, and it
wiU continue to be made. Theology is an old-
established business. And so long as it takes itself
at its true value ; so long as it is content to recognise
itself as provisional, as immeasurably behind its
subject, we may not only tolerate, but welcome
it. It is only when it waxes fat and insolent,
when it puts on airs and talks as though it knows
when it does not, that it becomes an offence to
thinking men.
But taking theology in the sense we have indi
cated, as the attempt, quite legitimate in itself, to
explain the world of spirit by the hght which each
age offers, it is deeply interesting to note the
factors which go to its formation. We shall never

82 OUR CITY OF GOD
understand its dogmas ; never estimate properly
their positive and their relative value, until we
have some idea of the process of their evolution,
and of the material that has been built into them.
What it is so important to note, and what we want
here to try and point out, is that so much of this
material is, to the general eye, quite unrecognisable
as theology, at the furthest remove apparently
from the subject. Your theology is a curious com
pound. It is weU, as you swaUow it, to know
something of its ingredients, of who and what helped
to knead them together.
Note first the forces employed in the theological
movement. As an expression of hfe theology is
bound to move, to grow, and to change its form.
And that because it is a fundamental law of the hfe
it deals with to do these things ; that is, to move, to
grow and to change its form. But the process is a
slow one. It is a matter of common remark that
nowhere so much as in theology is the progress of
ideas so difficult and so halting. What is not so
clearly seen is the set of causes that produce this
retardation. A study of them should restrain our
impatience, both with men and systems. For
it shows us how natural they are ; how inevitable
that they should work as they do.
First among the retarding causes is the compara
tive permanence of fixed ideas, especiaUy when, as
in this case, they receive the immense reinforce
ment of the soul's feehng. A theological idea,
crude, it may be, and quite inadequate in itself,
becomes another thing when alhed with rehgious
emotion. It is not perceived by those under the

THEOLOGY'S HIDDEN FACTORS 83
influence that these two things, the idea and the
feehng, are not really one. The fact that the two
have, for years, centuries perhaps, been alhed,
has given them an appearance of identity which it
is supremely difficult to displace. And thus while
the old inferior idea has for a time behind it the
incomparable force of rehgion's inner feehng, the
new, higher one has often the fate to he bare and
seemingly unaccompanied. It wUl only reach its
hour when the soul by its growth recognises it
finaUy as the wider, deeper channel along which the
tide of its faith and love may flow.
What must also not be forgotten here is that the
old, the established in theology, will by that very
fact have gathered aU the vested interests around
it, which wiU naturaUy fight for its life as their own.
The new faith, which begins by opposing an earlier
order, may usually reckon on crucifixion. Jesus,
greatest of revolutionaries, expected to be put to
death by the vested interests, and was not deceived.
Orthodoxy, that is to say, the line of hfe and thinking
that has established itseU, is sure of its army of
defenders. There is money in it, and the people
who love money will accordingly be there. On
this side, too, are the honours and dignities. Annas
and Caiaphas are well housed, and belong to the
best Jerusalem society. The Galilean has not
where to lay His head. Along this well-worn
track, too, the mental going is so easy. It is the
fine of least resistance, and upon it accordingly will
be found that numberless host who wish to be
spared the trouble of thinking. Truly, when one
surveys these accumulated forces of resistance

84 OUR CITY OF GOD
the wonder is that theology has ever moved
at all.
" And yet it moves." The forces we have
mentioned are strong, but what they contend
against is stronger. There is one thing which no
combination can resist, and that is the law of hfe.
It is just this law lying directly underneath theology,
which compels its movement. Consider, for instance,
the working on any system of the mere lapse of
time. No vested interests, no accumulated force
of feeling can prevent the years from rolhng. But
observe what that means. As Ulustrative of its
effect upon thought, one might choose an historical
period almost at random out of any of the Christian
centuries. Suppose, for instance, we take the
middle of the second century, and compare it
with the first, the apostolic age. Any one con
versant with the hterature of the two periods
knows the enormous difference of the theologic
outlook, a difference created, one may say, by the
years. Though they bore the same name, what a gulf
separated the second century Christians from those
who were contemporaries of Jesus ! We in this
age, with our neatly bound Bible, our creeds, our
established church order, our printing press which
multiplies our rehgious documents without limit,
have difficulty in realising the mental state, the
theologic condition, shall we say, of the disciples
of that second period — who had no first-hand
witnesses left of their faith, and no hterature
scarcely to take their place. What they
have in this kind are a few manuscript
copies circulating here and there of the

THEOLOGY'S HIDDEN FACTORS 85
" RecoUections " quoted from by Justin Martyr,
and which in aU probabihty were our synoptic
gospels ; the Apostohc Epistles ; some letters of
Christian bishops, such as the Epistles of Clement
and Ignatius ; a number of imaginative and visionary
works, such as " The Shepherd " of Hermas ; and
further — most significant of aU — the fantastic specu
lations, every year growing wUder, of the Gnostic
thinkers. What a position for theology, yet how
inevitable ! We see here at work its unnoted
factors. Time has carried away the apostohc
witnesses ; the lack of education, of printing, and
aU our modern arts, has prevented the diffusion of an
adequate hterature. Left to tradition, to the often
treacherous memories, which during three genera
tions have been almost the sole conservators of the
Gospel facts, what wonder that the theology of
that age, orthodox and unorthodox, as we have it
reflected later in the pages of Irenseus and TertuUian,
assumes a character so bewUdering ?
This time-Ulustration might have been taken
from any other age, only to show similar results.
There has never been any standing still, no, not
in those Middle Ages, which are sometimes ignor
antly pointed to as a period of theologic immobihty.
Each generation, whUe holding to the same pre
scribed form of words, has given them its own
special significance. Each, we perceive, under the
influence of the time spirit, has had a changed
Weltanschauung, or general world-view. In this
process of alteration it is interesting to note how
the most influential factors are often apparently
at the farthest remove from the subject. One might

86 OUR CITY OF GOD
hazard the paradox that the real theologians are
those who have nothing to do with theology.
Darwin would scarcely be named to-day as an
ecclesiastical student, yet the thinking of every
ecclesiastic of our generation is conditioned by
Darwin. Every theological work, whether for or
against, pivots round his central idea. And as with
the past so with the future. The theological move
ment of the next decade will be determined, we
venture to say, not by the theologians. It wiU not
be by what the divines can dig out of their time-
worn manuscripts, but by what the new zoology
of the Neo-Lamarckians ; by what De Vries,Hamann,
Driesch and Wundt have to offer against a material
istic " natural selection " as the origin of things,
and in favour of a purposed movement discoverable
in the world, implying intelligence and personahty
behind it ; it will be by further researches into the
mysteries of cellular and atomic formation, reveahng
the spiritual basis of matter, that the great reaction
is coming from the doubts of the last generation
to a new faith in God.
Another of the hidden factors in theology is to
be found in the earher religions of the peoples
who, by one means and another, have been won
over to the Christian faith. The kind of ground
your seed faUs on, not less than the seed itseh, will
determine the quality of the crop. Zealous Pro
testants have, for instance, denounced the saint
worship and practical polytheism of Cathohc coun
tries as a kind of diabolical perversion of primitive
Christianity. The modern historian takes a different
view The " polytheism " is simply the revival

THEOLOGY'S HIDDEN FACTORS 87
under other forms of the earher paganism which
Christianity nominaUy supplanted. The worship of
the " Mother of God " is a baptized version of the
old Astarte cult ; and viUage festivals in Italy, with
priest and mass book assisting, are traced back to
pagan rites in honour of local divinities — assets
that the Church took over and continued to run as
part of its business, under another name.
Temperament also, the temperament of races
and of leading individualities, must be noted as one
of the vastest of the unseen influences that have
shaped and coloured theology. Some constitutions
exude more bUe than others, and too many theo
logians have been bihous to begin with. That has
been the real secret of their view of God and man.
They had been in another universe could you have
improved their liver. Other leading thinkers,
speaking out of a good digestion and a happy career,
have never been able to see the actual evil of the
world ; and their theology, occupied mainly with
the sunshine, is, in consequence, scarcely reliable
as to life's under side. Like Madame Recamier, as
described by Sainte-Beuve, who " ne croyait pas
au mal," they do not beheve in evil. But the
evU for all that is there.
Thus much of temperament. One could multiply
indefinitely these under-working forces that play
upon the theological product. Geography, for
instance. The mere fact of a man transporting
himseh from one degree of longitude to another has
had more than once the most critical and far-reach
ing influence. Pusey, early in his career, spent
some time in Germany, and caught therethe

88 OUR CITY OF GOD
critical spirit to such a degree as to lead some of
the old school of Anghcan divines to cry out against
his rationahsing tendencies. One wonders what
would have been the later history of Anghcanism
had our young theologian remained some years
longer in Rhineland, instead of coming back as
he did to Oxford ! The question is simflar to that
asked by Stanley as to what would have been the
course of Church thinking had Newman known
German !
Ours is a mere sketch of a vast subject, but
enough, one hopes, has been said to show how
impossible it is to keep theology at a standstiU ;
to show still further that there is no separate
department for it in the scheme of human know
ledge. All truth is one, because the universe is
one. Every fact and every happening plays into
every other fact and happening. The movement
is inevitable. But what faith discerns is that the
march is always in one direction. As the horizon
broadens it shows only more clearly the outhnes
of our spiritual inheritance. Every truth, from
whatsoever quarter it opens upon us, fits into its
place as part of the continuous, ever-growing and
evermore luminous revelation of God.

IX
The Quality of Belief
Amid the wrangles of to-day about behefs, it is
worth while asking a prehminary question about
behef. Not that this is by any means an undis
cussed subject. There is, perhaps, no topic of
rehgion that has been more exhaustively handled.
Were we to mention even the names of the books
in which theology, to say nothing of philosophy, has
expounded the theme — tomes on the nature of
faith, on justifying faith, on prevenient grace as
related to faith, on the factors in behef, on behef
and the creeds, on " the wiU to believe," on faith
and authority, and the hke — we should more
than fiU this volume. A vast deal of the argument
is of a dry-as-dust character, and too much of
it is morbid. What trouble has there been in
pious, unpractised minds, as to whether their faith
was of the right, saving brand ; what probing, and
sifting, and analysing of poor distracted souls !
Their dog all along has been a better philosopher.
There has never been a sounder faith than that
which he has in his master, and yet these disquiet
ing questions concerning it have never for one
moment troubled his doghood. Our introspection

90 OUR CITY OF GOD
is too often hke that of a healthy man who, on a
spring morning, should shut himself up to examine
his eyes instead of turning them joyfuUy on all the
beauty outside.
Nevertheless, on this so over-trodden theme, there
are some considerations — other than those usuaUy
treated in the tomes we have mentioned — which, in
the present position of matters spiritual among us,
seem very worthy to be dealt with. We need, for
our time, to have it made quite clear to us what
behef is and what it is not ; to note the different
forms of it and their value ; and, not least, the
mistakes concerning it which previous ages have
bequeathed to us as a damnosa haereditas.
Let us, first of aU, rid ourselves of the notion that
there is any diminution of behef in the world.
There is as much now as ever there was. Every
man is fuU of behef. When we talk of behevers
and unbelievers we are using the terms only by
way of accommodation. The atheist is as full of
faith as the most devout Cathohc. For aU his
denials are simply affirmations read backwards.
When he denies that this thing is as it appears to
you, it is only another way"qf saying that he beheves
it is as it appears to him. He can, in fact, no more
help believing than he can help breathing. The
capacity is in him, just as his heart and lungs are in
him, and is as constantly being used. The differ
ence between men is not here at aU. We are aU
ahke full up with behefs ; the point is not here, but
in the quality of our behefs ; in other words, in
what we beheve and how we beheve it.
Let us, in the next place, be sure of another

THE QUALITY OF BELIEF 91
thing, that behef has a quahty of its own, not hard
to be discerned, and which marks it off from aU
counterfeits and imitations. History is full of
these last, but we can always detect them. And we
can see the genuine belief under the imitation.
When Charlemagne, after one of his battles, offered
the defeated Saxons the option of conversion to
Christianity or of being put to the sword, the con
sent of his captives to the former alternative was
certainly, in its way, an act of faith, but it was not
faith in Christianity. It was the assured behef —
the fuU assent and consent of their minds to the pro
position — that unless they there and then accepted
baptism their throats would incontinently be cut.
And there are iUustrations much nearer home than
Charlemagne and the Saxons. In his essay on
" Compromise," Mr. Morley asks : " Are we to
suppose that it is firm persuasion of the greater
scrip turalness of Episcopacy that turns the second
generation of dissenting manufacturers in our busy
Lancashire into Churchmen ? " As everyone knows,
and not least the converts themselves, the Anghcan
creed which they now recite represents in no way
the actual behef upon which they have acted. The
working conviction here is that of the dominance
and power of the Establishment, and of the social
advantages which a connection with it secures.
Behef, as an active exercise of the mind, is
involuntary. You can no more will to beheve
than you can will to be hot or cold. Just as these
sensations are registers within of a fact outside,
namely, of the temperature, so belief is the soul's
register of an outside fact, namely, of the evidence

92 OUR CITY OF GOD
presented to it. You may, it is true, act on the
temperature by various means, and so in a sense
wiU your heat and cold. But the actual sensation
is always a register of what is there. In like
manner you can manufacture evidence ; or pay
attention solely to one class of evidence ; and so in
a way seem to will your belief. But what you
cannot do is to alter the way in which the evidence
presented works behef on the mind. And here
comes in Locke's famous proposition, where, dis
cussing the love of truth in men, he says : " And
I think there is this one unerring mark of it, namely,
the not entertaining any proposition with greater
assurance than the proofs it is built upon wUl
warrant." Theologians of a certain school have
exclaimed loudly at this thesis, but it wiU hold
water. And that we can best see when we note
the attacks upon it.
For instance, it is urged that such a rule would do
away with that behef upon authority on which the
vast majority of the race — children and the mass of
the uneducated — have to depend as their working
faith. Does it not, argues Newman, " cut off from
the possibihty and the privilege of faith all but the
educated few, all but the learned, the clear-headed,
the men of practised intellects and balanced
minds?" The reply is simple. The objection is wide
of the mark. Locke is here in no wise impugning
the legitimate exercise of authority as a ground of
belief. We all begin this way. As children, and
in our whole career as learners, we have very largely
to take things on trust. But what Newman and
others of his school have forgotten is that the

THE QUALITY OF BELIEF 93
exercise of this trust, of our yield to authority, is
an iUustration of this very Lockian law of behef on
evidence which is attacked. For why do we, children
and adults, beheve upon authority ? Precisely
because the evidence for the vahdity of the authority
seems to us sufficient. Young people know that
their elders and teachers know more than they do,
and go upon that. In our turn, when we accept the
conclusions of Newton's " Principia " without
studying it, we do so on the evidence of his capacity
as a mathematician and the agreement with him
of other competent minds.
Thus — and here is the whole point to be noted —
the behef through authority is still and entirely
a behef upon evidence. The authority is itseh the
evidence. If the authority is a strong, an indubit
able one, our behef will correspond. If the authority
is doubtful our mental condition wiU be one of doubt.
And it cannot be otherwise, for the mind in this
works automatically, by its own law. And it is
precisely here that the so-called Church authority
advanced by Catholics as the ground of behef for
their dogmas so hopelessly breaks down. We accept
authorities, as we have said, when we have evidence
that they know things better than we do. When
we find they do not the situation is changed. An
almost perfect iUustration of what we mean is
furnished, curiously enough, by one of the greatest
of the Church authorities — to wit, St. Augustine.
Readers of him wiU remember how his first doubts
of the'Manichsean system, to which, in his youth,
he had attached himself, arose from his contact with
Faustus, its most noted leader and advocate.

94 OUR CITY OF GOD
When Augustine, who began with the deepest
reverence for him, found that the great man, in
subjects such as mathematics, with which he him
self was famihar, was really only a pretender to
knowledge, he began to distrust his competency to
decide for him the greater matters of rehgion.
That is precisely where the educated mind of to-day
is in respect of the Councils and Popes, and of the
entire ecclesiastical machinery which undertakes
to decide for us what we are to beheve. We have
discovered their incompetency as authorities. Their
decisions represent a mental condition that in a
hundred ways has been outgrown. " What is
always, everywhere, and by aU beheved," to quote
the famous Catholic formula, is really in itself no
adequate evidence. A single Copernicus may over
turn in astronomy what for ages has been " every
where and by all beheved . ' ' Professor Curie with his
radium was a better witness on the atom than all the
chemists of aU the ages. The modern mind, with
its science of history, with its knowledge of the
uniformity of law, with its insight into the growth
of tradition, can tell us more about the vahdity of
dogma than the whole catena of the fathers.
Does it follow, then, because we find the earher
Christian ages wrong about so many things, that
the rehgion they teach is no longer authoritative
for us ? Because their behef is not in aU respects
ours, have we no behef ? Far otherwise. At this
point comes before us a different sort of evidence.
Inside the truth revealed by scientific research
there hes another truth, even more vital, that,
namely, which opens to character and service-

THE QUALITY OF BELIEF 95
There is a persuasion which results from hving in a
certain way, from foUowing certain disciphnes and
ideals. This is the truth of the heart, which is
always greater than the truth of the inteUect. The
conviction that two and two make four is reached one
way ; the conviction that the pure in heart see God
in quite another. And it is when we search the
Christian centuries under the guidance of this
principle that we find a reahty independent of
and infinitely higher than all the dogmatic, doctrinal
forms in which it is wrapped. We see that the
opinions of those times were one thing — time
vestures suited to certain mental conditions. But
the love, the sacrifice, the devotion that were there ;
the holy lives, the martyr deaths, are in a different
category. These are the treasure in the earthen
vessel. These hold for us a truth immortal and
Divine, which it is for us in our turn to seek
adequately to body forth.
The tree is known by its fruits. A conviction
which makes a man better than he was before ;
which holds him back from sin, which stirs his love
and sets him on the road upward, has the truth
inside it, however rude his attempts at explanation.
It is deeper, in fact, than our best explanation. A
Russian correspondent of The Pall Mall Gazette,
writing of the Nonconforming sects in his country,
said their viUages had an air of brightness and
weU-being absent from those of the Orthodox
Russians ; " the evangehcal sectarian is one who
does not drink or smoke ; is economical, thrifty,
and more industrious than the slaves of the Synod."
We might dispute half the opinions of these people ;

96 OUR CITY OF GOD
they are probably crude enough. What hes out
side dispute is that proof from hfe which shows the
presence here under lowhest forms, of a something
so infinitely higher than our logic, whose working
is bit by bit redeeming the world.
It is the supreme business of the Church to-day
to exhibit this logic of the heart. For this is the
evidence which not only compels behef, but behef
of the highest kind. So different is it from the
mere persuasion of the inteUect. It is not on the
same level at all with your conviction about arith
metic or chemistry. You may have those and be
a brute and a sensuahst. You cannot have these
others without feehng an upward tug. With this
kind of truth growing ever upon us we can afford the
strictest revisions in the rehgion of the inteUect.
Let criticism exact here what it will. Whatever
changes it may effect in our thought it can serve
only to deepen in us the sense of that Kingdom
whose glories are discerned by faith, and whose
products are righteousness, peace and joy.

X
Of Religious Transition
The picture which Lucian, in the Hermotimus,
draws of the bewildered traveUer, besieged in turn
by a dozen different philosophic and rehgious sects,
each pointing to a different road as the one and
only way to truth and peace, was surely never
more vividly or pathetically realised than in our
day. Not the least striking feature of the con
fusion is that it occurs amongst the first-class
minds. Consider what has happened in this gene
ration amongst our best Enghshmen ! The two
Newmans, starting from the same Evangehcal
household, dowered each with rare mental gifts
and deep rehgious feehng, passing through the
same discipline of school and coUege, emerge finaUy,
the one as a Roman Cardinal, the other as a non-
Christian theist. Leshe Stephen, beginning in his
home with the very finest brand of Evangehcal
Anghcanism, ends in a mihtant Agnosticism.
Frederic Harrison, brought up amidst devout
High Church influences, becomes the apostle of
Positivism. Mr. AUanson Picton, in his ancestry
and his earher years representing the most cul
tured for i of Nonconformity, anchors himself
97 7

98 OUR CITY OF GOD
finally in the system of Spinoza. The wonder of
these transitions is that the several traveUers
seem all equaUy satisfied with the bourne they
reach. Cardinal Newman declares that after his
conversion to Rome, he never had a doubt. Mr.
Harrison, in his own recent " Apologia," expresses
himself in almost exactly the same terms. Mr.
Picton speaks with no less emphasis of the spiritual
peace he has found in Pantheism. And the others
we have mentioned are equaUy sure that the posi
tion they have arrived at offers the best inward
satisfaction that this hfe affords.
Is there, then, no ultimate truth which humanity
wiU reach, in which all minds and hearts wiU finaUy
agree ? We should be sorry to think so. The
lesson for the moment here is that the curve is
too large for our measurement. The ultimate
all-uniting synthesis is vaster than we can at present
see. To reach it there seems necessary the ex
perience by our race of every possible mental
attitude, an experience, not only of minds, but of
fives. Our various " noes " and " yeas " are aU
to be put to the test, that we may learn exactly
what they do and do not yield. Let us be sure,
however, that the final answer wiU not be a " no,"
rather a " yea," which will comprehend all that
the " noes " have to teach us, and be so much
the more satisfying by that very comprehension.
Let us, however, now bserve some things con
nected with these transitions. One does not
wonder, considering the apparent confusions to
which they lead, that rehgious minds dread them,
and the inteUectual operations which ring them

OF RELIGIOUS TRANSITION 99
about. Newman fled to Rome as a refuge from
what he caUs " the wild hving inteUect of man."
Isaac Taylor deprecates too much mind in divinity.
" Theology," says he, " offers no field to men
fond of inteUectual enterprise." Men are afraid of
what the " destructive force " of reason will bring
upon reUgion and the Church. A well-known
divine recently expressed his thankfulness, in view
of what was coming, that his ministry was behind
rather than before him. Some find no remedy
except in a speedy Apocalypse and dissolution of
things. They are here of Luther's mind ; " The
world is an odd feUow ; may God soon make an
end of it." The same shiver, in thought of the
future, comes over Sir Thomas Browne in the
Religio Medici. He thinks a sensible man " is not
likely to envy those that shaU hve in the next
age, much less three or four hundred years hence,
when no man can comfortably imagine what face
this world wiU carry."
These surely are strange notions. They iUus-
trate what one is so continually meeting with —
the rooted, unreasoning scepticism of believers.
What sort of a faith is it to imagine that God, who
is held to have wrought so wonderfuUy in the
past, wUl have no hold on the future ? What
kind of behef is this which dreads the operation
of that mind within us which is our best evidence
of an Eternal Mind ? As if inteUect were outside
of law ; instead of being, as anyone may see who
wiU study its history, the finest iUustration and
expression of Divine law ? Its movement from
age to age is as steady, as irresistible as the growth

100 our:;city of god
of a tree, as the swing of a planet in its orbit. Re
ligious transition is in fact simply a feature of the
mind's growth, and must always go on because
the mind is always growing. Our world-view at
sixteen, how entirely different is it from that we
held at six ? And the one at thirty-six will be
just as different from the one at sixteen.
The human race, as a whole, foUows in this
respect the history of the individual. The most
conservative of thinkers cannot get away from
that fact. Newman, in his essay on Development,
makes fuU use of it, though he limits it in his own
way. His personal experience had shown him the
irresistible forces that make for movement. " How,"
says he in the " Apologia," " was I to be sure that
I should always think as I thought now ? " And
again, " It is the concrete being that reasons ;
pass a number of years and I find my mind in a
new place. How ? The whole man moves ; paper
logic is but the record of it." He ever realised
that,as he elsewhere puts it, he "was on a journey."
He imagined he had reached the end in Cathohcism.
But where old men end young men begin. The
young Cathohcs of to-day find they too are " on
a journey," the end of which they see not. SchiUer's
hne about Goethe, " Much that stiU interests me
has already had its epoch with him," is so true of
mind hfe everywhere. We have our epochs. To
day rehgion and hfe appear to us under a certain
aspect. Then comes a turn in the road, a new
province of knowledge, or the sheer, unconscious
gestation of the soul, and that aspect has dis
appeared, never, by any process, to be recalled.

OF RELIGIOUS TRANSITION 101
What is the law in individual hves has been,
on the greater scale, the law of rehgious history.
Of this the story of Christianity from beginning to
end has been one long iUustration. Its thought-
movement, " unhasting, unresting," has never for
a moment ceased. It has been unhasting. Here,
as elsewhere, Natura non facit saltus. The tran
sition from Judaism to Christianity was by no
means the sudden affair that people are apt to
imagine. The modern student sees the one fading
into the other in the most gradual way. It is
step by step. The Master was Himself a Jew ;
His disciples thought of themselves as Jews. The
first churches, not only in but outside Palestine,
had Jews as their nucleus. Supposing it had been
otherwise ; supposing the missionary churches had
been made up entirely of pagans, of people whose
traditions were simply of Jove and the Olympian
gods and goddesses, how different, how impossible
the thing would have been ! It is to the Judaism
in Christianity that we owe our possession of the
Old Testament, much of our moral code, a large
part of the Church's organisation.
But the movement, though step by step, has
never ceased from then tiU now. The Romanist
" Semper eadem " is the oddest of fancies. The
notion of an infallibility, of a final utterance on
doctrine, whether by the Fathers, or by Councils,
or by Popes, is for people who do not read history.
As to the Fathers, let any one read the large-minded
Greeks among them — Origen, Clement of Alex
andria, Gregory of Nyssa — and contrast^ their
Universahsm with the Eschatology of a TertuUian

102 OUR CITY OF GOD
or an Augustine ! They are as the poles asunder.
Their " unanimity " is beautifully Ulustrated by
the proceedings at Sardica, where the Eusebians
declare the Athanasians to be " an unscrupulous
set of liars," and accuse Athanasius of blasphemy.
What absolute truth, too, was in Councils may be
gathered from that of Carthage, which pronounced
an anathema on " those who say that man was
created mortal, and would have died even though
he had not faUen." And what becomes of Papal
infallibility when we read of Pope Honorius teach
ing " ex cathedra " the Monothehte doctrine con
demned afterwards as a heresy by an OEcumenical
CouncU ; or of Pope Vigihus, who, in Justinian's
reign, made four or five " ex cathedra " assertions
and afterwards the flattest contradictions of them,
on the doctrine of the two natures ?
When we advance from this period to that of
the Middle Ages the spectacle is the same. People
are apt to think of the medieval time — the age of
faith — when Rome had undisputed supremacy
over Christendom, as one of doctrinal unanimity
and immobility. There could not be a greater
mistake. Look beneath the surface and you find
a tumult of onward hurrying thoughts. The
movement, it must be admitted, was not always
in one direction. Christian doctrine became more
materialised. Transubstantiation grew into a dogma.
Jesus, as is shown very clearly in twelth century
pictures, had ceased to be gentle, and had become
terrible. Yet what immense upheavals, what revo
lutions in thinking there were in those days ! Think
of the Franciscan leaders, Joachim di Flor and

OF RELIGIOUS TRANSITION 103
John of Parma, with their " Eternal Gospel,"
according to which Christ's reign would end in
1260, and the reign of the Spirit then begin ; which
declared the Greek Church to be Sodom, and the
Latin Church Gomorrah ; which held the Roman
Court to be the scarlet woman of the Apocalypse !
It is important to notice how, in these successive
movements, everything that has happened in the
world has borne its part. The unity of hfe shows
itself in this, that nothing takes place in one depart
ment of it that does not react on all the rest. The
attempt to shut off theology into a water-tight
compartment, to make its positions independent
of the general world-progress, is always a failure.
Every discovery in science tells, sooner or later,
upon divinity. The Copernican astronomy upset
the geo-centric theory on which the Church built
so many of its earher assumptions. Geology played
havoc with the infahibihty of Genesis. In like
manner the sheer growth of the general moral
consciousness has made it impossible for us to
accept the punishment theories that seemed natural
to a crueller time. The one infallible revelation
is the revelation that is going on from age to age
in the mind and soul of humanity.
The question remains, What, in view of aU this,
should be our attitude to rehgious transition ?
Do the facts shut us up to an Agnosticism which
sees no purpose in the world, no serious meaning in
life ? Or to Newmanism, which finds refuge only
in the infallibility of Rome ? Or to that timid
brand of Protestantism which harks back on its
ownjjpast, and looks with undisguised terror on the

104 OUR CITY OF GOD
future ? In what has been aheady said seems to
us the sufficient answer. The past, if we have
truly read it, offers us the key to the future. It
shows us, what, indeed, is all we need to know,
that " a God orders the march." We cannot stay
the march if we try. It would be impious to
attempt it, for the movement is so clearly divine,
so plainly toward the highest spiritual end. The
records of the journey should surely be of this
the sufficient proof, for do they not show us how in
the mighty process there are no steps backward ;
how conceptions which served their turn in the
ages they fitted are replaced by higher ones when
their work is done ; how the forces that work
in the mind and those that move in the soul are
united in the production of a common end ; and
how amid aU the changes wrought by the vast
transitions which rehgion has witnessed nothing of
spiritual value has ever been lost ?
Our own soul, in its solitary journey, if faithful
to the highest in it, becomes ever more conscious
of a Divine leading. Its transitions are progresses,
successive disclosures of the revelation that goes
on within. The outer universe, opening to us at
every turn its new exhaustless energies, reveals
itself as symbol and faint expression of a diviner
universe behind. More sure do we become, as the
years pass, that our inteUect is fed from a higher
intellect, that our heart draws its inspiration from
a greater heart. As surely as our bodily eye opens
to us a visible world of matter and force, so surely
does the soul's eye reveal one whose powers are
higher. As surely as hohness is greater than

OF RELIGIOUS TRANSITION 105
gravitation, so surely is the kingdom of holiness
the real and enduring kingdom. Our greatest
knowledge is our knowledge of values. The highest
in us points to the highest without us. Science
knows that God is Power ; the soul knows that God
is Love.

XI
The Church's Great Moment
" Never before were so many men fiUed with such
longing as to-day for firm and consistent convic
tions. Men are ready to-day to give anything for
a conviction that is real conviction — for a behef
that really is believed in. The demand is for a
faith in which there is real faith ; men require
convictions as to the meaning of hfe." It was in
these words that Harnack, in an address to the
Prussian clergy, and deahng with the attitude of the
Social Democrats to rehgion, described the spiritual
situation in Germany. But their apphcation is by
no means a local one. The state of things beyond
the Rhine is the state of things in England, in
America, everywhere amongst the educated peoples
of Christendom. Men long for a basis of hfe which
shaU be as credible to the inteUect as it is inspiring
to the soul. They want a rehgion into which their
whole manhood can go. And this is what at present
they have failed to find. The Church, they say,
feeds the heart at the expense of the brain. And
so it has, to the modern man, become as unsatisfy
ing in one way as the world is in another. The
disaster that has happened to it is that people
106

THE CHURCH'S GREAT MOMENT 107
have come to repeat its creed in a quite different
sense from that in which they repeat the creed of
electricity or mechanics. This last is actual behef,
a behef by which they run trains or build bridges.
The other is, in part at least, make-beheve. And
the teachers of it are often in worse case than the
people. In Sainte Beuve's words, " Ils se font
prophetes afin de tdcher d'etre croyants."
The saying of another witty Frenchman concern
ing Cathohcism in his own country is, in a sense,
true of the entire Church as it exists in modern
civilisation. " We can do neither with it nor
without it." Men cannot do without it, and for
the reason that, with aU its defects and hmitations,
it contains the very salt of hfe. Our age, and some
others behind, have tried their best to dispense with
it. They have made experiments in two directions ;
in that of the inteUect and that of the senses. They
have both been faUures. Science, which within the
last fifty years has given us a new universe, with aU
the secrets it unlocks, has not yet stumbled on the
secret of happiness. We are stiU trying hard at the
other experiment, that of the senses. Wealth is the
minister of the senses and ours is the age of million
aires. But in our rage for money we have forgotten
to inquire as to its purchasing power. It can buy
you houses, lands, furniture, LucuUus banquets —
in fact, world, flesh and devil. But in your luxurious
hotel, as you drink the champagne and order about
the obsequious waiters, and receive the homage of
those who would make their profit in you, you dis
cover there is a class of things not contained in the
menu, and which not aU the resources of the manager

108 OUR CITY OF GOD
can procure for you. It is that class of things by
which the soul lives. Those invisibles we call love,
joy, peace, temperance, meekness, faith ; the
commodities known as fidelity, comradeship, trust ;
the disciphnes by which man becomes conscious of
his best seh, of the Divine in him and around him ;
these are the articles with which neither your
banker nor your hotel manager can supply you.
How they would stare if you asked them to ! And
yet without these things you are miserable. Said
Boswell to Johnson as they were going over Lord
Scarsdale's mansion at Keddlestone : " One would
think the proprietor of all this must be happy."
" Nay, sir," said Johnson, " aU this excludes but
one evil — poverty."
The supreme moment for the Church hes in the
fact that modern society is finding all this out for
itseh. It discovers that neither in science nor in
wealth lies the satisfaction it craves. But the pity of
the situation is that when it turns from these sources
to rehgion, as ordinarUy exhibited, it fares almost
as badly. It finds it cannot do without it, but
equally that it cannot do with it . And for the reason
that the Church, while providing one spiritual good,
blocks the way to another. It offers peace at the
expense of truth. And this at a time when the world,
by its training in science, is beginning to appreciate
truth as never before, as amongst the highest of all
possible goods, as the first essential of the soul's
prosperity. Is it not time that the Church, talking
as it does to-day about " the restoration of behef,"
should recognise that its prime duty is to offer
men something they can believe ? It must pay its

THE CHURCH'S GREAT MOMENT 109
long-standing debt to the world's inteUect. It must
make its door high enough to enable the entire man
to enter, head and aU, without stooping — or decapi
tation. In order to recover its lost place in the
world the Church must have at least as lofty a cult
for the mind as it has for the heart.
And to set itself right in this matter its first
business wiU be to make clear to all and sundry
precisely what Christianity does, and what it does
not, stand for ; what part of it, as it has come down
to us, is a priceless and eternal possession, and what
part of it is accidental, transitory, a mere time
vesture, now worn out. And to strike the cleavage
line here is, with our modern knowledge, after aU
not so difficult as one might think. To reach it we
cannot do better than go back to the Gospel's
beginning, to the great moment when this new thing
came upon the world. Observing primitive Chris
tianity in actual operation we can by careful atten
tion dissect the elements of which it was composed,
and separate the gold from the alloy needed to
work it.
As we study the Christian communities of the
Apostohc age we find them occupied by two widely
different inner positions. These were first their
current ideas, and second — and chiefly to be noted
— their new condition of feeling. It has been a
disastrous mistake which the Church, from then till
now, has persisted in making, to put these two things
on the same level, to bind them as of equal authority
on us who have followed. Whereas the difference
between them is as the difference between time and
eternity. The early Christian opinions were im-

110 OUR CITY OF GOD
portant enough — to the early Christians. We see
how those opinions influenced their actions. Their
idea, for instance, of an immediate appearing of
the Master and end of the world affected their con
duct in a thousand ways. To give up their posses
sions, to take no thought for the morrow, to have no
care for the great world developments, for the vast
movements of commerce and of science with which
we are so occupied, was entirely natural for people
who looked in their generation for a transformation
scene which would bring in a new heaven and a new
earth. But such a view is as impossible for us as
it was natural for them. It was part of a cosmic
outlook which we now regard as naive and child
like. The early Christians, as we must now recog
nise, have nothing to teach us in the scientific
domain. We know a thousand times more about the
universe than they did ; about its history in the
past, and its possibihties in the future.
When it is asked how a position of this kind
relates itseh to the acceptance of Christianity as a
religion of eternal truth and hfe, the answer is simple.
Early Christianity did its own business in its own
way. It was the way of the spiritual process as we
see it everywhere and always. It was in itseh an
incarnation — a spirit clothing itseh in a body. The
body was of the earth earthy, and of the time timeous
and transient. The Master Himself was, in His
appearing, obedient to this law. His eternal was
clad in a temporal vesture. His very mind, so far
as opinion went, was steeped in the colour of the
time. It had the hmitations of the period. No one
would go to His teaching as reported in the Gospels

THE CHURCH'S GREAT MOMENT 111
for information about geology or molecular physics.
We have to recognise that in that spiritual evolution
of our race in the centre of which Christianity finds
itself, the homely methods of iUusion have been
suffered to play their part. Heaven, let us never
forget, has its method of iUusion. It is, we suppose,
a part of its humour. Children begin with iUusion,
and find their way by degrees to the truth. And
we children of a larger growth are treated similarly.
The eternal treasure of the Gospel had this as part
of its wrappage. To deny that is to deny the most
obvious of facts ; to accuse it is to accuse the
method of the universe.
When, as truth compels us, we have conceded
all this, what remains ? For answer we say the
whole gospel of redemption. We can now, unhar-
assed and unencumbered, without concealment or
arriere pensee, point the modern man to Christianity's
inestimable and enduring treasure. We come again
to the Church's first age, not to discuss its crudity
of opinion, but to recognise its unique gift to the
world. That gift was an unspeakable joy and an
incomparable spiritual reinforcement. No one can
understandingly read the story without reahsing
this. Matthew Arnold saw it, and has put his
impression in unforgettable words : " It is this
which made the fortune of Christianity, its gladness
not its sorrow ; not its assigning the spiritual world
to Christ and the material world to the devil, but
its drawing from the spiritual world a source of
joy so abundant that it ran over upon the material
world and transfigured it." There is no doubt
either as to where the joy came from. It centred

112 OUR CITY OF GOD
in a Person, whose presence was felt in the soul,
and who had taught people the Divine secret of
loving and of serving. What matter to us their
notions about Antichrist or the miUennium ! What
does matter, and that infinitely, is their secret of
living and of loving. They had tasted the purest
joy that a human soul can know, a joy which no
Ritz banquet wiU ever furnish you. And that was
the actual contact with a Perfect Love. It was in
this lay the Divinity of their Master ; here was His
eternal gift. It was because the weary world had
never in its long history tasted such joy and felt
in its veins so conquering a power as now appeared
in it, that we call this the Church's great moment.
It conquered not so much by teaching as by giving.
The Christian love offered itseh everywhere without
expectation of return. It lent itself " hoping for
nothing again." As that early Christian, the un
known writer of the Epistle to Diognetus, puts it :
" They love aU men and are persecuted by aU ;
they are poor and make many rich ; they lack all
things and abound in all." The transfiguring power
of this new spirit turned dungeons ifito palaces.
Read the diary of that lovely soul, Perpetua, the
young mother dehvered at Carthage to the wild
beasts for her faith. She writes : " The gaol
became to me suddenly hke a palace, so that I hked
to be there better than anywhere else." The
disciples felt, as Justin Martyr has it, that nothing
that happened to them could be an evil so long as
their Lord was with them.
And that, we say, is Christianity, the eternal
rehgion. It is love thrilled by a felt contact with

THE CHURCH'S GREAT MOMENT 113
One whose hfe and soul were Love Incarnate, love
that goes forth in constant joyful service. It is the
Church's mission to preach, and stiU more to exhibit
this as the whole secret of hving. When we contrast
the programme with the course that has actually
been taken, we realise at once the enormous amount
of ground and of time that have been lost. The
Church, century after century, has been trying to
stuff the brain — and that with most inferior material
— instead of to train the heart. The world, break
ing here from the tutelage of the Church, has of late
carried on its own inteUectual affairs to its enormous
mental advantage. But its heart is starved. What
it craves now is precisely the thing Christianity
has to give, if it will only open its treasure house.
When the Church reaches once more that first
temper ; when it offers to men what the first
believers offered, its great moment will ha^e come
again. It has centuries of lost time to make up.
It has to retrace long leagues of wandering in order
to get back to the track. We need not trouble
about the revelation of truth. That is streaming
in upon us from aU quarters. What we want is to
enter again into the Gospel's open secret. When
the Church has caught afresh its first great rapture
of love and set it forth in the works that foUow,
there wiU be no infidels in sight.

Part II
SOCIAL

XII
The Social Pressure
Victor Hugo once spoke of the poor as the cary
atides of modern civilisation ; pathetic human figures
upbearing on their patient shoulders the whole
enormous weight of the social structure. The figure
is undoubtedly an exaggeration. In some impor
tant respects it is, indeed, the very opposite of the
truth. The pressure of the social system, in so far
as it is actively reahsed, is felt at its utmost by
the men who are highest rather than by those who
are lowest. It is the statesman, harassed daily and
nightly by his enormous responsibilities ; the pro
phet of the age who carries in his soul the burden of
its sin and need, far more than the hand worker,
who know the downward thrust of the mass they
help to carry.
Nevertheless the simile of the great Frenchman
remains with us as setting forth vividly and with
sufficient accuracy the features of a position which
is becoming to the modern world daily more intoler
able. Amongst our poor there is a pressure being
apphed, not indeed of imperial anxieties, of the
burdens of the State, but of sheer material con
ditions which, as the weight of them increases,
117

118 OUR CITY OF GOD
squeezes out all the fine flavour of hving, and
leaves only a dull endurance behind. That in
itself is no new thing. What is new is the social
consciousness about it. The world to-day is not
comfortable at its meals. A whiff from the Chicago
stockyards blows across the dinner table and spoUs
the appetite. Nearer home we have " Sweating
Exhibitions," with revelations scarcely less dis
composing. Here we see good honest people mak
ing 144 match-boxes in order to earn twopence.
And that is not the worst. Down in this pit,
where our brethren have been thrust to struggle in
its black darkness for breath and hfe, aU the condi
tions are topsy-turvy. Higher up it is not only
that money is earned quickly and easily ; there
is the same advantage in the spending of it. At
the bottom it is the other way — you earn the
minimum, you are compeUed to spend the maxi
mum. In the middle-class a man with £800 a
year wUl give perhaps £80 a year for his house, and
think it enough. He secures a relatively com
modious and well-situated dweUing for a tenth of his
income. Our match-box makers, man and wife,
who by unremitting toil, at a gross for twopence,
earn together twelve shillings a week, spend prob
ably six shilhngs of it on the rent of two fetid
rooms. For a tenth of his income our middle-
class man gets what to these others would be a
palace ; for their own squahd holes they pay fifty
per cent, of the income. Sweated London is
indeed the " city of dreadful night." As we con
template it we are reminded of the speculation of
old Vanini, who, when he saw the misery about him,

THE SOCIAL PRESSURE 119
asked whether men were not evil sphits who had
passed into human form and were now atoning for
their crimes !
But is pessimism the proper attitude here ?
We do not think so. " Despair," said Vauven-
argues, " is the worst of our errors," and the adage is
as apphcable to the misfortunes of others as to our
own. The remarkable thing is that the poor them
selves, the victims of our present system, are not
themselves pessimists. We see a great deal more
of their need than they do themselves. Nature,
who means weU by us aU, brings in here her kindly
art of the balance. She so cunningly fits the con
sciousness to the condition. The pig enjoys his
sty better than any palace we could build for him.
And remember, aU of us, as compared with the ideal
state, are in the sty. M. Levy-Bruhl holds that
" our civilisation in some respects will seem as
repulsive to our descendants of the fiftieth century
as that of Dahomey does to us." He may be
right, but our deplorable inferiority to the coming
fiftieth century does not disgust us with hfe as it is.
It is astonishing on what a small capital a sense of
happiness wiU maintain itseh. What to the out
sider seems sheer misery is not so to the soul in
side. Were it otherwise men would not go on hving.
But considerations of this kind, while an argument
against pessimism, are no argument for the status
quo. The best feature of the present situation is
the revolt against it. As we have aheady observed,
what is new in the condition is the feehng about it.
Society has in its heart a redemptive force which
yearns to deliver the captive and to break every

120 OUR CITY OF GOD
yoke. Imagine the moral distance we have travelled
from the day when medieval barons could feast
merrily in their haUs, all the merrier for knowing
that sixty feet down beneath them were miserable
wretches, their captives, suffocating in horrible
oubliettes, without hght or air or hope ! To-day
we do not feel it right to claim our happiness while
our fellow-creatures are unhappy. Another hope
ful element in the consciousness of to-day is the
growing certainty that there is no human wrong
that cannot be set right. We beheve that good is
not only better than bad, but that it is stronger and is
going to win. The bad things are being beaten one
by one. The Chicago scandals were bad, but Southern
slavery was worse. America, which put down
slavery, wiU, if we give her time, put her other bad
things down. England by her Factory Acts swept
away the horrors of forced and infantile labour in
the mills. Now that the pubhc conscience is awake
she wiU carry the same reform into the homes.
The problem of the social pressure is a tremendous
one, full of every imaginable comphcation, yet we
are beginning to see our way in it. What has to be
done, we recognise, is to untangle the several threads
of it and foUow them up. Some of the apparently
most hopeless features look far less hopeless to-day
than they did not long ago. John Stuart Mill's
pessimistic conclusion, for instance, that, whatever
our methods of rehef, the population would go
on increasing always to starvation point, is no
longer held. There are, instead, nations aheady
crying out that their population is decreasing.
But keeping now to the people who are here,

THE SOCIAL PRESSURE 121
what do we find ? At our bottom stage we have
three ragged regiments — the badly employed, the
unemployed, the unemployable. But there is one
classification that includes them all, and which
has to be remembered in any scheme of reform.
These people almost without exception are the
unskiUed. The honest among them are sweated
because they know no craft that wiU bring them a
better wage. Abihty always commands its price.
But now the question is, Can we not to a certain
extent create abihty ? While the nation is spend
ing all this money on education, might it not use
some of it in teaching brains and fingers to earn a
hving ? What better schoohng, after all, than that
which puts every social unit on the way to independ
ence ? And when in addition the State has learned
the lesson that it has not done with its young when
they have reached the age of thirteen, but enters then
on its chief responsibility towards them ; when,
reahsing this, it secures to our youth the old appren
ticeship system, or some efficient substitute for it,
we shaU by degrees clear out of the way this huge,
helpless element of the unskiUed, who at present are
the despair of the philanthropist.
Take another side of the question. Our badly
employed are, we say, badly paid and badly housed.
The unemployed are badly housed and not paid at
aU. How has this state of things arisen ? Here is'
the problem of the land and of the city. The people
have drained from the country into the town, till
the town is gorged. There are two men for one
job, hence the wage of it goes down ; there are two
men for the one room, hence the price of it goes up.

122 OUR CITY OF GOD
Evidently this process must be stopped. And it
will be stopped by making country work at once
attractive and profitable. We are ripe to-day for a
rural renaissance. France was saved from ruin by
the Revolution, which transformed it from feudahsm
to a system of peasant proprietors. A still more
modern instance is Denmark, which a century ago
was a land of large estates, as England is to-day.
It, too, has become a land of peasant proprietors.
The State has passed Acts which enabled the labour
ers to purchase small holdings. In addition it has
established agricultural schools, a system of co
operation and of cheap railway rates. It turned from
unprofitable corn-growing to butter, bacon and
eggs. The result is that Denmark is to-day, per
haps, the most flourishing agricultural country
in the world. It is next to us in wealth, but
ahead of us in that, while our wealth is con
centrated, hers is diffused. When England,
foUowing this example, finds the moral courage to
break with its feudahsm and to open the land to the
people, hah its poverty problem will have been
solved. Meantime we have the people in the towns
sweated at their work, hosts of them unemployed,
herding in unspeakable tenements. Can we not
straightway introduce here some betterment ?
There is no doubt of it. We have so much to learn
in these matters from our better -instructed neigh
bours. Germany, for instance, is, in this whole
civic problem, miles ahead of us. Why have we
not the counterpart of its splendid Labour Bureaux
such as those which in Prussia, Wurtemberg,

THE SOCIAL PRESSURE 123
Baden and Bavaria filled up last year close on hah
a million situations ? Why not buildings hke
those in Berlin, where in waiting-rooms, supphed
with books, newspapers and refreshments almost
at cost price, the unemployed gather to receive
information as to all the openings in their own hne ?
Why have we not in our great towns something at
least as good as the Elberf eldt system, under which in
the great German cities the municipalities have
organised an army of unpaid visitors of the poor, a
system by which, in times of need, every man,
woman and chUd in the several districts is secured
from want, and that without any breaking up of the
home ?
And, lastly, the badly employed, the sweated
people, our matchbox makers, our fur-puUers, our
sack-stitchers and the hke. Is there no remedy for
their condition ? The Germans believe there is,
and so do our Austrahan cousins. In the Reichstag
the Social Democrats have introduced a BiU for
regulating home industries which fixes the minimum
cubic space for each worker, compels the registration
both of workers and employers, and fixes the rate of
wages by local Concihation Boards. In the clothing
trade in Victoria a council has been estabhshed,
representing both employers and employed, which
fixes the rate of wages, and is working successfully
to the enormous benefit of the home worker. It
is quite certain we must have some such develop
ment in England. Where home industries are
carried on there must be inspection of the homes.
The State must interpose itseh between the sweater
and his victim, as it interposed itself eighty years ago

124 OUR CITY OF GOD
between the manufacturer and the workhouse boy-
and-girl slaves he employed.
England is, it is evident, awaking to the facts of
the present position. Its conscience is stirred.
It is aware there is something wrong. But it is not
fully awake. It is not so aware as it should be of
its immediate responsibihty. ShaU we palter with
our miserable conventions, be tied for ever by our
feudal traditions, when, if we will only put forth the
strength that is in our hand, guided by the know
ledge that is in our brain, we can straightway
drain dry the Serbonian bog in which our poor
are weltering, and plant them out on wholesome
ground, in fuU view of the sun ?

XIII
Our Unprotected Classes
In the last chapter we discussed some phases of
the social problem as it offers itseh to-day in Eng
land. We dealt speciaUy with the " three ragged
regiments " at the bottom of our system — the
badly employed, the unemployed and the unem
ployable. But there are people who, while tech-
nicaUy not at the bottom, are nevertheless under
neath — in a position which to them seems one
exactly between the upper and the nether mill
stones, and who feel all the mercfiessness of their
inexorable grind. We are beginning to wonder
whether the bottom dog of all is most to be pitied,
whether others, better fed, maybe, than our stray
mongrel, are not reaUy worse off, fattened perhaps
for the vivisection-table ! Of what avail to promote
you from the ceUar to the ground-floor, if it is
only that you may daUy feel the cold steel cutting
into nerve and tendon ? As we hsten to these
stories of driven and tortured people, we realise
how utterly anomalous, ragged and patched a thing
our civilisation is. We could make a new division
of society, into the protected and the unprotected.
And the division, as we shaU see, is not the same
125

126 OUR CITY OF GOD
as the common one between the " upper " and the
" lower " classes. It cuts across these distinctions.
It is not the artisan who is unprotected. The
sharpest pinch of our present system is felt else
where. Before coming to particulars of what we mean,
it may be worth while to remark on that new social
consciousness which is rising in our midst, and
which is impelling men of all classes and shades
of opinion to discuss these themes as they were
never discussed before. We are reaching an idea
of the State and its functions which, before we
have finished with it, wiU make aU things new.
It is curious to note here the difference between
the modern feehng on this theme and that of the
early world. The Greek philosophers had a very
clear — and, in some respects, a very high — con
ception of society considered as a universal bond.
But the emphasis here was on the duty of the
individual to the State, not the duty of the State
to the individual. Never, surely, was this view
carried to a loftier height than where Socrates, in
the " Crito," sketches the place of the citizen :
" Has a philosopher hke you failed to discover
that our country is more to be valued and higher
and hoher far than mother or father or any an
cestor ? . . . And when we are punished by
her, whether with imprisonment or stripes, the
punishment is to be endured in silence ; and if she
leads us to death or wounds in battle, thither we
follow as is right ; neither may anyone yield or
retreat or leave his rank, but whether in battle
or in a court of law, or in any other place, he must

OUR UNPROTECTED CLASSES 127
do what his city and his country order him." A
fine development indeed of the communal conscience
on one side — one which, if we measured ourselves
by it, would make some of us look sufficiently
smaU. But the Greek had no feeling such as
throbs in us to-day for the other side of the account.
He had smaU sense of that common responsibihty
for the well-being of every member of the State
which is the note of the finest spirits of our time.
The fact that he built society on slavery as a normal
condition is sufficient evidence of that.
But in this new hght of to-day how do matters
look ? Under the Divine pressure of the Christian
sentiment our programme, we say, is of a new
solidarity in which we wiU indeed " bear each
other's burdens " ; share the burden so that it
shaU not press unfairly on any shoulders ; be
satisfied with nothing less than a social state which
secures to every soul in it its opportunity of happi
ness. As we study the actual condition, however,
what do we find ? A society entirely out of hand ;
some portions organised into effectiveness and
security, while other great masses of it are strug
gling helpless in the grip of alien and merciless
powers. Who and where are our unprotected classes ?
To begin at the beginning one cannot forbear a
word, if only a word in passing, on the most help
less of aU, the babes born yesterday. It is a state
of things infinitely humiliating, but which we
have to face, that over large tracts of English
hfe the mother-instinct is not to be trusted as the
guardian of infancy. We have left the children

128 OUR CITY OF GOD
to that with the result that they die hke flies.
The statistics, in some of our northern towns espe
ciaUy, are too awful to contemplate. We think
twenty in a thousand a sufficiently high death-
rate for grown-up people. What think we of 274
babes per thousand as the death-rate of some
Lancashire towns ? These children are born into
death-traps. Lucretius, in his pessimistic way,
compares the new-born child to a shipwrecked
mariner cast on a barren shore ; its wail fitting
to a being with so much trouble to pass through.
The simile is not harsh enough for the conditions
we are here considering. The wail in these cases
would be not so much that of a mariner wondering
where he wiU get his subsistence, as of a prisoner
expecting immediate execution. These deaths come
not so much from heartlessness as from ignorance
and the pressure of unwholesome surroundings.
And the mother-soul of the community, its best
heart and mind, has now for its task an education
of our women workers in true motherhood, and
such a bettering of home conditions as shaU give
both mother and child a chance.
It is not, however, here that the shoe pinches
most. The child does not know its disabihties or
its danger. The most reaUy hapless of our com
munity are those who know aU the hardness of
their lot and see no shield against it or escape
from it. What of our drapers' assistants, clerks
and warehousemen ? As we read their stories,
our question is whether in the whole of our social
fabric there are any more tightly wedged or harder
pressed than these ? We hear of shop employ6s

OUR UNPROTECTED CLASSES 129
who are compeUed to teU hes as part of the day's
work ; to be co-partners in fraud without, how
ever, sharing the profits. While the artisan has
his free Saturday afternoon and evening, this
black-coated brother of his, on a pittance often
lower than his own, is toiling tiU midnight. What
becomes of shop assistants when they grow old ?
H. G. Wells, who knows his subject at first-hand,
gives us the reply in " Kipps " : " When you get too
old to work they chuck you away. Lor, you find
old drapers everywhere — tramps, beggars, dock
labourers, 'bus conductors — quod. Anywhere but
in a crib. I teU you we're in a blessed drainpipe,
and we've got to crawl along it tiU we die." One
wonders how many feUow-citizens in this " merrie
England " of ours find themselves to-day in pre
cisely this situation ; who have no capital and
no chance of saving any ; who, well or UI, have to
stand to their work, knowing the eyes that are on
them, the fines waiting to be inflicted, the notice
to quit which hangs over them ; who shudder at
the thought of growing old, knowing this to be the
unpardonable sin ; who are without joy in the
present and with no future that will bear looking at !
And on either side of this forlorn tract of our
English life stretch others, which, perhaps, exceed
it in forlornness. There is the case of the " general "
in the poorer households. Dickens sketched this
for us in " the smaU servant," whom Mr. Dick
SwiveUer dubbed " the Marchioness " :
" Do you see this ? " said Miss Brass, shaving off about two
square inches of cold mutton, after all this preparation, and
holding it out on the point of the fork. 9

130 OUR CITY OF GOD
The small servant looked hard enough at it with her hungry
eyes to see every shred of it, small as it was, and answered " Yes.
" Then don't you ever go and say," retorted Miss Sally.
-' that you hadn't meat here."
One could add without end to the list of our
unprotected. There are governesses, strangers in
the household, suspended, like Mahomet's coffin,
between the two worlds of the drawing-room and
the kitchen, recognised by neither ; the barmaids
exposed for their hvehhood to endlessly long hours,
to poisonous fumes, to the worst temptations.
To right and left of us, on all sides indeed, stretches
this weary, dispirited array of our undefended.
It is time to ask some questions about them.
We perceive three factors entering into their
condition, and to be reckoned with in any proposed
amehoration ; these are the State, the employer,
and themselves. Let us take the last first. When
we look over the classes we have enumerated,
and others who are alhed to them, we are struck
with one fact. They all of them, from the assistant
in the shop to Mary Anne in the kitchen, are in the
class of the unorganised. It seems never to have
occurred to these workers to inquire how other
classes have attained their liberties. The working
man is considered a grade lower sociaUy than the
shopman, but he has attained to freedom, to privi
leges, to an independence beyond the dreams of
the other. And he has done this simply by com
bination. He has opposed power to power and
won by that. It may seem a humiliating truth,
but it is one which all historians and sociologists
now recognise, that so far spiritual and moral

OUR UNPROTECTED CLASSES 13J
agencies alone have never succeeded in bringing
about social amehoration. The extinction of slavery
in Europe was not brought about by Christian
preaching. For centuries after Christianity had
estabhshed itself slavery was accepted as part of
the social order. We had slaves in England up to
the reign of Edward VI. A great class change
comes from a redistribution of power. To move
anything, whether a people or a mountain, you
must get the requisite pressure. As long as the
artisan class was unorganised its power, so far as
its own objects were concerned, was a waste Niagara,
an unharnessed energy roaring uselessly into the
abyss. When its thinkers came along, and driUed
and regimented the workers into unions and trade
combinations, their Niagara, harnessed this time,
and turned on the machine, showed itself irre
sistible over the whole realm of industry. When
our unprotected classes have in hke manner reahsed
their latent energy ; when thinkers arise amongst
them, who,rwith knowledge of their special needs,
know how to combine for securing them, their day
of deliverance wiU dawn. Every class, in a degree
at least, works out its own salvation.
Meantime the employer. We should be griev-
ouslyjmisunderstood if what has been said were
regarded as an attempt to set one class against
another, or as an indictment of the employer class
as such. One recognises with gladness the great
and, we beheve, constantly increasing host of
large-minded employers who make the interest
of their workers their own, who believe with Ruskin
that " the only wealth consists in noble and happy

132 OUR CITY OF GOD
human beings." We know, too, that many em
ployers drive because they themselves are driven.
They, with the people under them, are the victims
alike of a remorseless competition. Yet there are
two things to be said to our capitahst brother ; two
things to warn him against. One is the fatal
notion, which aU the slavery systems of the past
and aU the Protectionist systems of to-day have
consciously or unconsciously acted upon — that
human life, hke the raw materials of production,
is a means to an end, that end being the creation of
wealth. A fatal notion we say, as opposed to
pohtical economy as it is to heaven's economy.
For no community and no trade system will ever
prosper or has ever prospered which regards human
hfe as a mere means, as anything less than an end
in itseh. When your system depresses the human,
it depresses and in the end ruins everything, your
self included. It is as good as over with you, my
friend, when your one aim is at all costs to possess
money ; " to possess it," as says prophet Carlyle,
" to have your bloated vanities fostered into
monstrosity by it, your foul passions blown into
explosion by it, your heart and perhaps your very
stomach ruined with intoxication by it ; your
poor life and aU its manifold activities stunned
into frenzy and comatose sleep by it — in one word,
as the old prophets said, your soul for ever lost by it."
And the other warning — one for women employers
in households not less than men employers in shop
and warehouse — is against the lust of mere order
ing, of governing, of the exercise of power. When
aU possible readjustments have been made, when

OUR UNPROTECTED CLASSES 133
every class has secured its fuUest possible liberties,
it wUl yet remain, and that by the very order of
Nature, that the mass of our fellow-creatures will
be, in some way or other, under direction, unpro
tected, in the sense of being exposed to the fuU
force of another's volition. The children wiU be
ever thus. And as long as the world lasts the
weaker wUl stand over against the stronger and be
ruled by him. In the whole realm of things there
is surely no mandate more imperious laid upon
us than this, to secure a proper education and
governance of ourselves in the use of power. The
world wiU not have reached its happiness until
every holder of power — the parent with the child,
the mistress with the maid, the master with the
servant — has, in using it, learned and caught the
spirit of Christ.

XLV
The State and Happiness
In the last chapter we mentioned three factors as
entering into a possible social amefioration — the
employes themselves, the employers, and the State.
This last demands a separate and special treat
ment. By the State here, let it be observed," we
do not mean the Government simply, but the
community at large — the whole sum of its activities
as affecting the lot of each separate individual.
The question now before us is, how far it is in the
power of our social system to secure the essential
well-being of the men, women and children who
compose it ; whether, in a word, it is possible in any
degree " to organise happiness " ?
It is hardly necessary at this time of day to argue
the question whether man is entitled to happiness
or intended for it. There have been ages, and at no
great distance from our own, when that was dis
tinctly arguable. There are, indeed, creeds extant
to-day which represent man as intended for some
thing quite the opposite of happiness — as under a
curse, with a vast proportion of his number born
for the express purpose of being damned. But
to-day we search in vain for believers in them.
131

THE STATE AND HAPPINESS 135
AU true science and all sane philosophy recognise
pleasure as one of Nature's most clearly-marked
ends. When we speak of duty, of labour, of sacrifice,
of spiritual development as great objects of hfe,
we are offering no contradiction to the earher
thesis. For duty, labour, sacrifice, development
have, aU of them, their own pleasures attached.
The difference between high and low in ethics is,
we see, a difference in the quahty of pleasure. If
Nature has any articulate message at all, this
surely, of her design for our happiness, is one of the
distinctest. AU her normal and healthy states
yield this as their product. Towards this tend her
marveUous and fine-strung adaptations ; her attune-
ment of melody to the ear, of beauty to the eye, of
fruit to the taste, of truth to the mind. Every
faculty in its exercise yields its joy ; we can
dig our pleasure out of the ground, breathe it
in with the morning air, meet it on the printed
page, hear it in the voice of our friend. The
world would seem to exist that from every eye
there might beam, in every heart there might
thriU, this exquisite, invisible something we call
happiness. It is not necessary here either to enlarge on the
point that individual happiness, of any deep or
durable kind, depends on things which no social
manipulation can of itself secure. Man is a spiritual
being in a spiritual universe. As Carlyle has it,
" the spiritual everywhere originates the practical,
models it, makes it." It takes a soul
To move a body ; it takes a high-souled man
To move the masses , . . even to a cleaner stye.

136 OUR CITY OF GOD
We wUl take that for granted, and come now to
what some of us have not so clearly seen — that man
cannot reach his true spiritual estate apart from a
true social one. Just as in this world his soul
cannot get on without his body, any more than
his body can get on without his soul, so in the
community ^the two^things have ever to go together.
Let anyone who imagines that, in attending to a
man's spiritual requirements all has been done for
him, re-read the first chapters in the history of
Christianity. One of the immediate results of the
Day of Pentecost was a redistribution of property.
By that act the early Church affirmed for all time
the principle that the production of inner emotions
is not enough as a rehgious work. There must also
be the production of right external conditions.
And the Church Fathers of succeeding centuries were
never weary of insisting on that point. Let any
one read the utterances on the subject of wealth
and poverty of TertuUian, of Basil, of Jerome, of
Chrysostom, and he wiU find that these men at
least knew the connection between economics and
the highest human welfare.
What, then, are the true social conditions ?
What can the State, the community in its corporate
capacity, do as an organiser of happiness ? This
is an old theme ; one, indeed, that has been the
fascination of philosophers in every age. It is
distinctly damping to study, one after another,
the schemes of social perfection that have floated
before the minds of men from Plato to Condorcet,
from More to Fourier. They have come to so
httle. As John Morley has said, it is one of the

THE STATE AND HAPPINESS 137
discouragements of the student of history that he
finds ideas uttered one or two or twenty centuries
ago which are just as useful and just as httle heeded
now as they were when they were made. Man is
so slow-moving an animal, His vision travels so
much faster than his feet. With a single glance of
the eye he beholds the distant summit which it
takes him endless painful climbing to reach.
But the ideas of gospeUers and philosophers
ahke, on these points, though as yet far from
realised, are not lost. We are nearer to them,
indeed, to-day than the world has ever been before.
Profoundly interesting is it to note how these
utterances and schemes, scattered over the ages, aU
converge upon one point. There is an extraordinary
and, as it were, fateful unanimity in them. The
message of the primitive Church, the utterances of
the Fathers, the " Repubhc " of a Plato, the
" Utopia " of a More, the economic and social
schemes of a Proudhon and a Saint Simon, make,
taken together, a very curious medley of reading.
One could hardly imagine a wider divergence both
of temper and of standpoint. And yet these
seemingly discordant voices are actuaUy sounding
one note. You can boil down their systems into a
word. They aU preach Sociahsm. Plato in his
Repubhc would have no excessively rich and no
excessively poor ; TertuUian declares " everything
must be in common among us, except women " ;
More, in the " Utopia," argues that " the one way
to the wealth of a commumty is that equahty of
aU things should be brought in and established " ;
Fourier would divide the community into great

138 OUR CITY OF GOD
common households, with a division of labour
which should give the chief honours and rewards
to those who performed the most unpleasant and
drudging tasks. Later there have been the Paris
" national workshops " of 1848, and the anti-
capitalist propaganda of a Karl Marx and a LassaUe.
What, now, is the significance of this note ?
Where are we to-day as to Sociahsm ? Assuredly
it is to be reckoned with. A great deal
of its contention is aheady practicaUy accepted.
Christian ethics on the one side and economic
science on the other have been working for its
victory. The conception of society as an organism,
every part of which is vitally related to every other ;
the iU-health of one organ meaning the ill-health
of all, is fast capturing not only the mind of the
thinkers, but the imagination of the populace,
and wiU undoubtedly dominate the legislation of
the coming years. Unhmited laissez faire is doomed
as a pohcy. The State is a famfly, every member
of which, for his own sake and for the sake of the
entire household, is to be looked after.
But how far is this common concern and common
supervision to go ? It is here, amid aU the schemes
that are afoot, we reach the parting of the ways.
There are socialisms and socialisms. The term
includes ideas fertfie, fruitful and aheady half
realised, together with extravagances which the
best minds have aheady seen through and dropped
as impossible. Amongst the latter is the notion of
extinguishing the private ownership of property.
The sense of possession is one of the primitive
human instincts, and whoever starts to fight those

THE STATE AND HAPPINESS 139
is running his head against the thickest of stone
walls. No system founded on such a principle has
ever lasted. The New Testament communism
speedUy merged into one which recognised in
dividual rights. The sense of property is one of
Nature's greatest incentives to labour and one of her
chiefest rewards. It offers a happiness of its own,
sohd, intense and enduring, which humanity cannot
afford to part with. Think of the diffused joy among
the eight million peasant proprietors of France ;
the deep-seated satisfaction with which these
sturdy toUers put spade and plough into a soil which
they caU their own ! The man who owns, though
it be a sohtary acre, or the smaUest of Savings-
Bank accounts, is no anti-capitalist. He wUl not
be robbed of his bhss of possession. Private
property, earned and held as the reward of labour,
is part of that nature -scheme of individual develop
ment, by which evolution works to the constant
enlargement of our race. To abohsh it would
mean the death of progress.
Where then does our Sociahsm come in ? The
mention of the French peasant proprietors supphes
us with the answer. The true Sociahsm proposes
not the extinction of property but its universal
diffusion. We would give every man his joy of in
dividual possession. It is here, in a larger system,
that individualism and communism can meet and
combine their separate advantages. We want aU
that develops individuality ; we want also aU
that solidarity can offer. The pohcy of to-morrow
wiU be a union of these two. The end is the highest
well-being of every individual man ; the means,

140 OUR CITY OF GOD
the use for his benefit of all that the wisest
combination can secure.
But this principle, or union of principles, will, in
the matter of capital and ownership, work out one
particular result. It will secure the individual
right of possession, but it will limit the extent of
possession. We all recognise that individual hberty,
precious though it be, has to be hmited in certain
directions in the interests of society generaUy — of
the larger happiness. I am allowed the possession
of a revolver, but not to shoot at large in the street
with it. Where the use of a given personal hberty
is a proved curse to the community, society has no
scruples in curtaihng it. And this curtailment in
the general interest will unquestionably come in the
matter of ownership. We are aheady clear on
certain apphcations of the principle. We run a
pubhc road through private property, a road on
which the pauper has the same rights as the million
aire. Were a multi-bUlionaire to propose to buy up
Middlesex, his billions would be of no avail against
the pubhc sentiment. But we are on the way to
further apphcations. In the interest of the highest
happiness of the highest number society in the now
near future wiU lessen the gap between extreme
riches and extreme proverty. The idle rich and
the idle poor are equaUy a misery to themselves
and a danger to the community, and the com
munity wiU not continue indefinitely to tolerate
their existence. In their own interests and in that
of the common weal it will furnish them both with
a conscience — its own conscience — with occupation
and with an end in hfe. By an income-tax which

THE STATE AND HAPPINESS 141
wiU absorb private accumulations beyond a certain
amount, or by other means, society will secure that
the wealth of the nation shall be diffused rather
than concentrated, that its surpluses shall be devoted
to the development and happiness of the many
rather than to the ruin, through extravagance, of
the few.
Another of the great private possessions of fife
is time, and here also the State will intervene to
secure an equitable distribution. ' ' What time may
possibly be spared from the necessary occupations
and affairs of the Commonwealth, all that the
citizens should withdraw from the bodily service to
the free hberty of the mind and garnishing of the
same." This ideal of the " Utopia " is one which
we are far enough as yet from realising. The
employe in shop or warehouse works with one eye
on the clock. He hves only, in his own feehng, in
the too brief hour that intervenes when the long
toil of the counter is over. When businesses are
co-operative, and the worker has a personal share
in what is going, those work-hours wiU have, ah !
so different a flavour ! But meantime, what has
been done for the factory in protection of the
worker must be done also for the shop. The wage-
earner, in this the most trying of all employments,
must have his boon of time, a sohd freehold each
day of hours which he can call his own and when
he can feel himself a man.
The State can do much to organise happiness.
We are on the eve of vast developments in this
direction, developments in which the poor, the
ignorant, the unprotected, wiU find themselves

142 OUR CITY OF GOD
backed by the highest intelhgence, the highest con
science, and the best resources of the community
to which they belong. In a railway train every
passenger, the stupidest as well as the wisest, shares
in the skill of the engineer, the skiU that built the
road and that carries him along it. What we are
now endeavouring for is that, in hke manner,
every man, woman and child of the community
shaU have, for the favourable issue of their life-
battle, not only what capacity hes in their own
poor body and mind, but the reinforcement of the
nation's highest brain and heart, to shield, to
encourage and to inspire.

XV
The Ethics of Ownership
" What I am complaining of," says Dr. Gore in
one of his Bampton Lectures, " is — not that com
mercial and social selfishness exists in the world, or
even that it appears to dominate in society ; but
that its profound antagonism to the spirit of Christ is
not recognised, that there is not among us anything
that can be caUed an adequate conception of what
Christian morahty means . ' ' Excellent words , which
the Church of aU denominations would just now
do well to take note of. We wonder whether it has
dawned upon the average ecclesiastic that, in the
coming generation, the one question that will concern
him as weU as the rest of us, is not so much the
theological as the social question ; whether he
properly understands that the issue on which the
Church wiU stand or fall is not its attitude to baptism
or prevenient grace, but its attitude to the tremend
ous struggle on which the world is now visibly
entering for man's elementary rights ? Here in
England, for instance, it is truer than ever what
Carlyle said hah a century ago : " What the Uni
verse was thought to be in Judea and other places,
this, too, may be very interesting to know ; but
143

144 OUR CITY OF GOD
what it is in England here, where we hve and have
our work to do, that is the interesting point."
The whole problem of how men should live together,
of how they should share amongst them the goods of
life, is up for rehearing, and no teaching institution,
by whatsoever venerable name it may caU itseh, will
be listened to, unless in these matters it can give a
sane and courageous lead.
We have, in previous chapters, been dealing with
certain aspects of this question, and what has al
ready been said leads up naturally to the theme now
before us, that of the ethics of property. There is
evidently a great deal of fog abroad on the whole
theme, and it is desirable to get, if we can, some
straight thinking about it.
Let us ask then, at the beginning, what we mean by
property, by owning a thing. How do we come to
say, " This is mine " ; by what right do we say it,
and how far does our right go ? By our property in
a thing, speaking generaUy, we understand our
liberty to use it. The extent of our ownership is
the extent of our power to use. If some one
bequeathed me the moon, I should be no better off,
because I could do nothing with it. Its interior
might be of gold or diamond, but I am no richer,
because it is out of reach. And if the power to use
a thing constitutes the essence of property, it is the
actual use which confers much of the right to it.
In the most primitive conditions of society, the
savage who has worked at his felled tree and shaped
it into a canoe is regarded by himself and his neigh
bour as having a right in it which does not belong to
another. Priority of possession, which is held by

THE ETHICS OF OWNERSHIP 145
sociologists as constituting the original basis of
ownership, is also mixed up with this idea of use.
The man who found the cave first has the prior claim
over the one who comes later, for one thing because
he is aheady there, and for another because he has
been making various uses of the shelter.
And it is this idea of use that constitutes the
right to permanence in property. It was early
realised that a man could not work successfuUy
unless he was secured in the possession of his tools.
There could not, in agriculture, be any profitable
use of the land unless the sower of the seed could
be sure of possession tiU the harvest. But use, as
essential to the idea of property, goes a great deal
further than that. We ask sometimes, " How much
does a man own ? " But concerning what he owns
there is another question : " How much does he
own it ? " And the answer depends again on use.
The differences here are enormous and vital.
The Red Indians, who for ages wandered over the
American continent, owned it, in a fashion. But
the white man, who succeeded, has owned it in
another. After centuries of occupation the Indian
was as poor as when he began. His successor, by
superior uses of what he held, has made himself
boundlessly rich. He owns America more than the
savage did, more by all his mind, by aU his faculty
of apprehension and appropriation.
There are, indeed, aU varieties and intensities of
owning. When the poet says to Dives, " The land
is yours, the landscape is mine," he suggests two
most absolute forms of possession, though we have
no scale for determining the two values. A nouveau 10

146 OUR CITY OF GOD
riche may own a Plato, gorgeously bound, which he
has never opened. How different his ownership of
the volumes from that of a Porson or a Jowett !
It is, indeed, when we consider property under this
master-idea of use that we see how men of small
incomes are often wealthier than millionaires. It
is the man who is making most and best use of the
world he hves in who has the greatest property in
it. It was the sense of this which led Faraday, on
his £300 a year at the Royal Institution, to refuse
offer after offer of wealth which would have led
him away from research ; and which made D'Alem-
bert turn from the ghttering bribes of Frederick the
Great and the Empress Catherine, preferring, as he
said, " poverty with freedom." These men with
superb faculties for using the Universe, were deter
mined at aU costs to be able to use it their own way.
That was their notion of property in it.
But all this is preliminary to our main question,
the question which Sociahsm is everywhere pushing
to the front, between coUective and private owner
ship. The new contention is that private ownership
is wrong ; that the State, the community, should
be owner, as the only way of securing justice to the
individual. Let us examine this a httle. In order
to get dayhght upon it we must come to first principles.
Nature is here our prime instructor. What does she
teach ? Her very first lesson is on the inseparable
union between these two apparent opposites.
" CoUective," " Private " ? She insists upon both,
and wiU allow you no property in which the two
principles are not conjoined. Joint ownership,
for instance, however extended, leaves you in the

THE ETHICS OF OWNERSHIP 147
end a private owner, for your share in profits is yours
and not anothers. On the other hand private
ownership is always in the end a coUective affair.
The famUy relationship, which is older than political
economy, makes sure of that. The head of the
house, who receives the income, never receives it for
himself alone. As he looks round on his family he
cannot say of his receipts " they are mine " ; only
'' they are ours." And supposing this " owner "
stands alone, without famUy or any directly depen
dent on him, the coUectivism of his ownership still
comes in. For in his utmost isolation he owns simply
as a tenant of society. It is by the wiU and tacit
agreement of the community he keeps possession
of what he has. Apart from this tacit social partner
ship he could keep nothing.
We can go even deeper than this and stih find
the same principle. If there be one thing which
amid all possible economic revolutions we can still
caU our very own it would surely be our separate
personahty. What men cannot rob us of is the
treasure of our own thoughts, of our own soul. Yes,
but even here we perceive in full operation the system
of dual ownership. We do not even know our
selves except in relation to the " not ourself ." We
can only perceive, can only think, when in partner
ship with something outside. Going even deeper
still, we find our individual consciousness derives
its hfe and itB vahdity from being grounded upon a
universal consciousness, of which it and every other
individual mind ahke partakes. The ownership
of our own souls is clearly a partnership.
Here, then, with the nature of things for our

148 OUR CITY OF GOD
guide, we have surely a sufficiently clear lead on the
question before us. CoUectivism and individualism
in ownership are not, as some suppose, clashing
opposites. Nature declares for both, insists on both,
in all her combinations makes use of both. The
social read j ustment wiU have to f oUow this order. It
has, indeed, done so up to a certain point. What is
wanted is to carry the principle courageously for
ward into departments where as yet it has not been
sufficiently recognised. It is, for instance, as we
have aheady pointed out, aheady accepted in
our social system, that private ownership must be
limited by the over-ownership of the State. A man
owns, uses what he owns, transmits to others what
he owns, simply by permission of the community,
as expressed in its laws and customs. Where his
share in this dual ownership seems by excess to be
hurtful to others, society claims the power to
redress the balance. It would not aUow a million
aire, whatever millions he offered, to buy the square
mile of land round the Mansion House and to pull
down aU its buildings. A single example hke this is
sufficient to show that the State, the community
that is, not only theoreticaUy but practicaUy
stands as the one supreme landed proprietor ; that
private ownership in land is aheady a delegated,
leasehold ownership, limited in a thousand ways
by the universal, ultimate owner.
What in the near future is coming, and what aU
earnest reformers have now diligently to strive for
is, then, the proper apphcation of the power which
the community aheady possesses. In the supreme
questioned the land, for instance, the national

THE ETHICS OF OWNERSHIP 149
proprietor must'put'end to those phases of private
ownership which are crippling industries and hinder
ing the development of the individual citizen. It
must stop the expulsion of men in order to make deer
forests. It must abolish the monopoly of pro
prietorship and shed its joys, as France has done,
amongst the millions of the population. The Eng
land of to-day, as to its land question, is in exactly
the position which brought about the ruin of ancient
Rome, where the expropriation of smaU proprietors
and the concentration of almost the entire country
in the hands of a few wealthy patricians divorced the
people from the soU and drove them into the towns,
to lose there the sturdy physique and the repubhcan
virtue of their ancestors. We cannot allow, with us,
the same process to be carried to the same end.
The community, as overlord, must also hmit
other forms of private ownership which mitigate
against the Commonweal. The pubhc conscience
here must curb the aberrations of the private one.
America, France and England are already in sight of
immense apphcations of this principle. The death
duties aheady existent are a recognition of the
power of the State to control private accumulations
and to divert their transmission. Unearned incre
ments which now pour into private pockets, though
they are created entirely by the labours of the
community, wiU be diverted to the uses of that
community. The sums thus reabsorbed from com
merce and industry by the State as chief owner will
be used to bridge the gulf between our abject
poverty on the one hand and our bloated luxury on
the other. The community is rich enough to give all

150 OUR CITY OF GOD
its constituents a chance. It wiU do so by its care-
fuUy-considered and gradual redistributions. Said
Diderot a century and a half ago, " The net profit
of a society, if equaUy distributed, may be prefer
able to a larger profit, if it be distributed unequaUy,
and have the effect of dividing the people into two
classes, one gorged with riches, the other perishing
in misery." France has since gone a long way
towards realising that programme, and wiU go
further. Western civihsation as a whole is, in
fact, to-day in fuU sight of the principle that the
prosperity of the community is contained in the
prosperity of the individual, and that the idea of pro
perty, as of every other private right, must be
brought into full subordination to this common
end. Let us sum up our conclusions. There is inherent
in the nature of things the two principles of private
and of pubhc ownership. The task of the modern
State is so to regulate these two as to secure the
highest welfare of the individual and of the com
munity. In this evolution the Churches, if they are
to remain as conservators of man's spiritual heritage
and as foremost agents of the Divine Kingdom, must
take an immediate and a foremost part.

XVI
The Gospel of Work
The world is to-day asking a thousand questions
about labour. The questions are not new ; but
they are more insistent than of old, and, what is of
chief importance, they seem nearer now than ever
before to their solution. Fifty years ago Carlyle
preached his gospel of work. Two men, he said,
were worthy of respect in this world — the man who
toiled with his hands and that other who wrought
with sweat of brain. The rest were chaff and
rubbish. An exceUent doctrine truly, but whether
our generation as a whole has been converted to it
is more than doubtful. The signs are, indeed, of a
retreat rather than an advance in this matter, from
the ideals of our fathers. The numbers grow of
those who are " born tired," who do not propose
to work if they can help it. Then there is the
modern revolt of labour against its conditions, its
status, its rewards. If we are sohdly to found
our " City of God," we must reach first some sound
conclusions on this vital point.
Amid vast confusions and divergencies of view
one thing emerges into clear certainty, and we
may begin with that. This sure thing is that
151

152 OUR CITY OF GOD
man, placed here in his world, was intended to
work in it. Nature has fixed him to that by two
compulsions, an outer and an inner. The first is
the very simple and effective law that if he does not
work he shaU not eat. To ensure our keeping to the
line we are put on a system of short rations. It is
the greatest of faUacies to talk of the world's accumu
lated wealth. As a matter of fact we aU hve from
hand to mouth. A three weeks' universal strike
would bring the world to starvation point. Sup
posing we were aU made mfilionaires to-morrow, we
should have to go on working just the same. We
should still want bread to eat, clothes to wear,
houses to shelter us, fires to warm us. And so
our milhonaire farmers, tailors, builders and colliers
would find their daily task indispensable to them
selves and to society. AU our property is perish
able, most of it quickly perishable, and nothing but a
constant forthput of energy will keep us going.
Like Father Adam, we occupy our garden on condi
tion of keeping it in order.
The other or inner compulsion is not less clear
and imperative. It is ordained in the system of
things that man can only preserve health of body and
mind by labour. Unemployed human nature is
hke stagnant water, becoming quickly muddy and
foul, a breeder of worms and corruption. It is by
constant exercise that our faculties exhibit their
possibilities and augment their powers. We only
know ourselves, reach ourselves, by energising.
There is no abiding happiness away from effort. It
is this which makes it so foolish for men to retire
from work simply because they have accumulated

THE GOSPEL OF WORK 153
money. What is it they are proposing to retire
from, themselves, or from the law of nature ? These
demand from us that, each day, we shaU press from
the hours the hid treasure our powers can evoke.
That pathetic hne which Lamb, after his retirement
from the Indian Office, wrote to his friend Bernard
Barton contains all the truth of the matter : " I
pity you for overwork ; but I assure you no work
is worse. The mind preys on itself — the most
unwholesome food." The problem of our un
employed to-day, the necessity of setting them to
work somehow, is not so much a problem of pro
duction, of the relatively good or bad quahty of
what they may produce. The problem is that of
their own nature, of the wrack and ruin that is going
on there, so long as hands and heads are unoccupied ;
of the poison their character and habits will exhale
so long as by idleness they are kept out of the con
ditions essential to moral health. And at the
other end of the social scale the cry against the
idle rich, where it is a sane cry, is not against their
wealth in itseh but against a mental habitude fatal
to their own best interests and those of the com
munity. With this as a beginning, let us look now at some
of the more insistent labour questions of our time.
The great modern revolt is not against labour so
much as against certain kinds of labour. Men want
to pick their work. They see in operation a caste
system here as rigorous as that of Hinduism. It
is a very old system. Plato in Athens and Cicero
in Rome ahke express their contempt for handi
crafts. They are fit for slaves. To-day the root

154 OUR CITY OF GOD
difficulty in South Africa, a difficulty which promises
to hinder permanently the progress of the sub
continent, is the refusal of the white man to do
manual work. He leaves it to the black. To soil
his hands would be, he thinks, to degrade himself
and to lose prestige. There will be neither peace
nor prosperity tiU that fatal notion has been extir
pated. And it is aU so purely a fashion, an artificial
fashion, in thinking ! At Eton in the old days the
fag — who might be the son of a duke — would
make the fire for his senior, fry the sausages for his
breakfast, run his errands, and on occasion black
his boots, and that without the shghtest injury to his
rank or self-respect. And the aristocrat of to-day,
on a big-game expedition, would do all this if
occasion required with perfect gusto. We have
only to spread this feehng and hah the problem is
solved. The body cries out for work just as much
as the mind, the body of the millionaire as much as
the body of the pauper. We have only to proclaim
it dignified and it is so. What a new day for South
Africa when the white man has become willing
to show the native that superiority consists not so
much in scorning to do work as in doing it weU !
But while this is true it is not the less certain
that the human movement is aU in direction of
substituting higher for lower forms of work. Manual
labour, we have said, is both healthful and honour
able, but it may be excessive. The tendency is to
reduce it, to bring it into bounds, so that man may be
easily master of his toil instead of being mastered
by it. He is becoming more and more a director
rather than a forth-putter of energy. Outside the

THE GOSPEL OF WORK 155
force stored in his muscles he discovers there is
another force, of the same kind but measureless in
quahty, which waits to be employed. It is the
force of the universe, the force of gravitation, of
heat, of electricity, of winds and waves. Here is a
servant who never tires, who never grumbles, who
demands no wages, who asks only to have its ways
understood, who discloses at every turn new and
marveUous resources. With this spring of eternal
energy behind there seems no end to the human
possibilities. We are only at the beginning of the
harnessing process. The powers as yet unused are
enough of themselves to start the millennium. There
is force sufficient in the tides alone to do aU man's
muscle work could he but hit on the way of using
them. Enough has been done aheady to change
all the conditions of labour. Our generation has
seen the transformation of agriculture. The
" labourer " is a watcher more than a labourer.
He sees the machine do the reaping, the haymaking,
the lifting, the threshing that were done aforetime
by the swing of his own arms. And it is the same
everywhere else. At the St. Gothard it was the
diamond driU and the dynamite blast that pierced
the mountain. On sea and on land pur workers
are steam and steel rather than nerve and muscle.
But here emerges the question that stirs to rage
the proletariat and that confounds the reformer :
" Why is it that the revolution accomphshed by
machinery has done so httle for the worker him
self ? Why is it that with the magnificent victories
achieved for the race by modern science — that with
all our splendid progress — the condition of masses

156 OUR CITY OF GOD
of the people remains so hopeless ? Why is it that the
intensity of the light in one direction is counter
balanced, as though automatically, by the depth of
the shadow in another ? " Here, indeed, is our
sphinx-riddle, which we have to solve or perish.
We are ceasing to be satisfied with the stock
answers offered by the political economy of a
generation ago. There is, for instance, the amaz
ing argument of Malthus, the more amazing that it
has imposed on so many and such able men, that
population, by its law of increase, is bound to over
pass the means of subsistence and to reduce, con
sequently, the lowest class to starvation point. How
utterly false is this calculation is now evident to
every student, and yet it was accepted by MiU.
It was about as reasonable as the argument that
because a child doubles its weight in the first year,
it wiU go on doubling its weight every year. The
human race does not increase in any such ratio as
was alleged. Moreover, it is not the size of a
population which brings it into poverty. Quite
otherwise. It was in 1727, when the population of
Ireland was only two millions, that the terrible want
and suffering made Dean Swift utter his bitter
suggestion about roasting babies as the only famine
remedy. On the other hand, it is seen in new countries,
such as the United States and Canada, that it is
not the increase of food that brings the increase of
men, but the increase of men that brings the increase
of food. Under proper conditions man can develop
food resources far faster than he can use them.
And the balance on his side in this matter tends J;o
increase rather than diminish.

THE GOSPEL OF WORK 157
What, then, is the matter with us ? Why the
existing want and discontent ? Why, at one end,
workers without work, or without the due rewards
of work, with, at the other, a swollen luxury and
extravagance that are not less a curse ? An answer
which created a great sensation when it appeared,
and which stUl justly commands attention, was
that given by Henry George in his " Progress and
Poverty," where he traced aU our present evils to
absolute ownership in land, and found a universal
remedy in the abolition of that ownership. No one
can read that book without being impressed with
its lofty purpose, its array of facts, its solemn and
prophetic earnestness. But it is not conclusive.
The gaze of our reformer was directed so entirely to
one point as to leave out essential features of the
question and to distort his view of some things
within his field of vision. His laboured contention
that wages are paid out of labour rather than out of
capital amounts really to nothing, since, according
to his own showing, capital is simply accumulated
labour. His argument, too, that increase of pro
ductive power tends always to the increase of rents
and to the lowering of wages is disproved by the facts.
If, as he says, high wages mean low rents and vice
versa, we should have the lowest wages in London,
where city rents are enormous, and the highest
wages in the country, where rents are lower and
lower. The reverse, we know, is the case. Were
landowners the absorbents of all the increase of
production and possessed of the omnipotence he
speaks of as theirs, we should have the spectacle of
everyone possessing capital rushing to invest it in

158 OUR CITY OF GOD
this wondrous commodity. As a matter of fact,
people are to-day putting their money into any
thing rather than land.
Moreover the dragon of absolute private ownership
in land against Which Mr. George fights is a chimera.
There has never been such a thing. In every form
of government, ancient or modern, the State has
been recognised as ultimate owner. In the Middle
Ages the feudal tenure, with its claim of military
service for the broad acres bestowed, was the fullest
recognition of this fact. In the State of to-day
that the community is final owner is evidenced by
the power it claims of making land laws. It claims
to give its own meaning to the term " owner,"
putting just as much or as httle power into the word
as it deems good for the individual and the State.
That the mere holding of land by the community,
which is our reformer's panacea, does not contain all
the beneficial potency he imagines is shown amply
enough, one would think, by the history of common
ownership as seen in Russia, amongst the Indian
tribes, and in other primitive communities.
The land question is a potent factor in the problem,
but assuredly not the only one. It is not a land
question which has produced the state of things at
Chicago described in " The Jungle." What we see
there is a mass of helpless people, Poles, Lithuanians,
Sclavs, who, ignorant of the country they have come
to, of its language, its laws, its customs, and driven
by then daily necessity, are forced into the wealth-
making machine, worked there to their utmost
strength, and then, when energy faUs, flung aside
to make way for new-comers, hapless as themselves.

THE GOSPEL OF WORK . 159
What is needed here, as aU over the world, is plainly
more than a settlement of land rents. The essential
thing is the realisation by the State — the organised
community, that is — of its supreme power, not only
over land but over aU other species of property, and
of the intervention of the State to prevent the
exploitation of the poor by unscrupulous private
greed. Not until the State has asserted its supreme
power ; not until the pubhc conscience, guided by
its best inteUect, has transformed the idea of owner
ship, making it a trust subject to the interests of all,
wiU humanity's day of deliverance have dawned.

XVII
Our Debt to Life
In preceding chapters we have been discussing the
forms of social improvement that are concerned
with its external side. We cannot easily exaggerate
the importance of that side. Property, ownership,
labour and capital, the relation of the State to the
individual — these are matters which affect us aU at
every point and at every moment. In this sense we
may say with a French statesman, " Pohtics are our
blood, our money, and our happiness." The spirit
uality which ignores this realm, which remains
ignorant of its laws and forces, is a false spirituality.
The Kingdom of God amongst men is a kingdom
which comprehends everything about men. While
aU this is true it is not the less certain that pofitical
and social readjustments are the vainest of imagina
tions if regarded as the only or chief factors of the
human problem. Let us by all means try to get
this part of our sum right. Bad calculation here,
we recognise, muddles the entire equation. But
our figuring on these hnes is only the beginning of
our bookkeeping. The greatest factor has yet to
come in. Behind pohtical economy comes character.
Before we talk of Sociahsms we must talk about the
160

OUR DEBT TO LIFE 161
Socialist. The State cannot make the individual.
It is the individual who makes the State. And so
we come back to the truth which Socrates taught
over two thousand years ago, and on which Chris
tianity has always insisted, that the true politics
is first of aU a pohtics of the soul, that all outer
conditions depend finaUy on the inner conditions
there. The supreme want of our time is a spiritual
teaching which, addressed with fearless impartiality
to our upper, our middle, and our working classes,
shaU, with irrefutable argument and irresistible
appeal, urge them to inner improvement as the
indispensable accompaniment of any external
advance. This teaching must be adapted to the
new thought-conditions. It must, above aU, be a
teaching that shall capture the imagination of the
young. One of the leading features of it should be
the creation in their minds of an intense sense of
social obhgation. They should be taught to realise,
as their great initial lesson, then debt to hfe. This,
indeed, is the old evangehc doctrine of grace, pre
sented in the form which the new generation can
understand and appreciate. Put in the old theo
logic phraseology it would be to multitudes repugnant
and meaningless. But there is a way of putting it
which will make it plain enough and impressive
enough to every youth and maiden of common
understanding. The doctrine to be taught, we say, is a doctrine of
grace, and of a commensurate indebtedness. There
is a huge account against us, which, if we possess a
spark of honour, we shall want, as far as we can, to
11

162 OUR CITY OF GOD
repay. We are where we are and what we are
because of boundless benefactions bestowed upon
us by invisible donors, because of measureless
service rendered us by invisible helpers. It would
be the deathblow, one would think, both of cynic
ism and of pessimism, if people, instead of accepting
what they possess to-day as a thing of course, would
take the trouble to trace the process by which
it has come to be theirs. We should see then, if we
never saw it before, that a Cross is signed upon aU
things, that we hve by a system of vicarious sacrifice.
To begin close at hand, what a gospel, if only we
would listen to it, is preached us by our breakfast-
table ! Almost everything there — the tea, the
coffee, the bread, the sugar, the condiments — has
come to us from overseas. For these things to reach
us it required that a host of those bravest, simplest,
and most enduring of our fellow-men, the merchant
sailors, should watch and toil by day and night in
hardest conditions, amid fogs and tempests, with
smallest spiritual aid, with smallest chance of
morality. How little we think of all that ! How
httle is there in us of the mind of Quaker John
Woolman, who, in his first voyage across the
Atlantic, determined, well-to-do citizen that he
was, to company with the saUors in the forecastle,
to share their hfe, that he might know at first
hand how they fared, and that also he might
minister to them of his inner treasure ! We,
unregenerate that we are, take all from them
without any feehng of the debt.
To come from visibles to invisibles, think of our
present freedoms and how they have reached us !

OUR DEBT TO LIFE 163
We accept our liberty of speech and of action as a
matter of course. One might suppose it was in the
nature of things, as sunlight and fresh air. As a
matter of fact, it was won for us by godhke heroism,
by agony and bloody sweat. It came because men
dared to say the thing they held to be true, though
they saw the torture chamber and the scaffold as
the certain result. We think of Bruno burning at
the stake, of his fellow-countryman, Carnesecchi,
tortured and executed, for saying his say in the
face of Rome. Can you count it out in gold, or
other value, my brother Protestant, what you and I
owe to our own Ridley and Latimer, enduring the
smoke and flame of that Oxford pyre ? Think of
Sebastian Franck giving up his easy ecclesiastical
post and becoming a working soap-boiler at Eriangen
in order that, with a free soul, he might testify
against a rehgion of corruption and superstition,
and for one that was inward, vital, and spiritual !
What number of shekels or other coin will represent
the obhgation which Free Churchmen are under to
" that obscure Baptist congregation " of the early
seventeenth century, of whom David Masson
writes : "It seems to have become the depository
for aU England of the absolute principle of liberty
of conscience. ... It was, in short, from this
httle dingy meeting-house somewhere in old London
that there flashed out first in England the absolute
doctrine of rehgious liberty." Free Churchmen
meet peaceably for their worship to-day because
their forefathers were not afraid to brave the
possibility of having their gatherings broken up
with pistol-shots and themselves haled to prison.

164 OUR CITY OF GOD
Not only our rehgious hberty but our rehgion itseh
is aU a debt. We are here ministered to daily by
invisible, unpaid helpers. From what distances,
through what processes, does our inner sustenance
reach us day by day ! In Glasgow the maidservant
who turns on the tap in the kitchen draws water
which has flowed into the grimy city from Loch
Katrine, that far-off lovely lake set in its circle of
mighty hills. And when, before the turmoil of the
day, in our secret place, we open on a book of devo
tion, and taste there some hving word — it may be a
passage from Augustine, or a page of the " Imitation,"
or the message of prophet or apostle — is it not here
again a matter of murky city and the highland
springs ? Only the matter goes deeper. Glasgow
pays for its water. But as we taste our draught
of inner refreshment what have we to offer in return
to those far-off souls who, centuries ago, climbed
the hills of God, who, high up there, struck the
rock and caused to flow down upon us the hving
stream that we here drink of ?
There seems only one appropriate answer to aU
this. Our past is a huge debt. The great spirits
that have toiled and suffered for our enlargement
seem from their height to contemplate us, waiting
for our response. Behind them is a greater appeal
still. It is that contained in the entire life process.
We are the heirs of all the ages. For us through
immeasurable eons Nature has carried on herpatient
work — upward, ever upward, from the unconscious
to the conscious, from rock to plant, from plant to
animal, from mollusc to man. And to-day her cry
is stiU onward. She is adding to-day to the human

OUR DEBT TO LIFE 165
soul. The Divine inspiration known to prophet and
evangehst is a fact of the present hour. The human
consciousness is aware of a constant secret inflow
from its upper side. It knows a Power that helps,
that inspires, that wUl not let us go. It is as if a
millionaire had invested his capital in us, had trusted
us with his utmost wealth, and was looking patiently
for a return.
All this, we say, leaves room for but one reply.
Let the account be properly presented to the youth
of our day and they wfil draw the inference them
selves. Generous natures, as they come thoroughly
to understand under what conditions, and at whose
charges, they find themselves seated at the banquet
of hfe, wUl feel the stir within them of a new mighty
impulse. It wiU be too intolerable for them, a
poltroonery not to be endured, to partake of this
feast and to offer nothing in return. But their
debt to the past, they wiU see, cannot be paid to
the past. It can be paid only to the future. The
boons they have received are to be passed on — with
an increment supplied by themselves.
The other point here to be considered is the form
which this offering shaU take. And here the main
thing to be taught is that being comes before doing,
that the quahty of service depends first of all on a
quahty of nature. " Operari sequitur esse " — " do
ing follows being, is according to being." Nothing is
more striking in the world's annals than the sheer
power of character, as in itseh a benefaction
apart from the special activities with which it has
been connected. It reminds one of the description
given by old Thorpe of Wychffe. " Master John

166 OUR CITY OF GOD
Wychffe was considered by many to be the most holy
of all the men in his age. . . He was absolutely
blameless in his conduct. Wherefore very many of
the chief men of this kingdom were devotedly
attached to him, and kept a record of what he said,
and guided themselves after his manner of hfe."
In this way a great character is, by its sheer quality
of being, rendering service at every moment, and
for the most part unconsciously. It is in this
respect like a mountain whose fine air we breathe,
whose beauty and far-reaching prospects we enjoy,
though it knows us not.
It is this consideration above aU others that those
entrusted with the spiritual guidance of the nation
need most to remember. A clergyman of the old
school once remarked to the present writer that he
did not see why the clergy should be caUed on for a
higher morahty than the laity. " Only," was the
reply we ventured, " that the laity regard morals as
" the clergyman's business." When the rehgious
teacher seeks an excuse for lowering his own standard,
society is in evil ease. On the other hand, a purified
soul acts on the community with a unique power of
its own. Such men find their simplest word backed
by mysterious forces which compel the minds of
men. So different their eloquence from that of
the mere rhetorician ! Goethe understood this.
Says Wagner in " Faust " :
ich hab' es ofters ruhmen horen,
Ein Komodiant konnt einen Pfarrer lehren.
Faust : Ja, wenn der Pfarrer ein Komodiant ist.
" I have often heard it said that the actor has

OUR DEBT TO LIFE 167
much to teach the clergyman." " Yes, when the
clergyman is just an actor."
But this rule, of character first and performance
after, applies not to one form of service only. It
is the rule in aU. What every department of hfe
is calling for to-day — commerce, pohtics, the arts
and hterature — is lofty and firmly-rooted individual
principle. When that decays we are lost. As
John Morley has put it : " The immediate cause of
the dechne of a society in order of morals is a
dechne in the quantity of its conscience, a deaden
ing of its moral sensitiveness." But how is this
" moral sensitiveness " to be procured and sustained ?
It is on this question that every scheme for running
the State by pohtics only, for creating its well-
being by mere socialisms and property redistribu
tions, sphts as on a sunken rock. When we have
reached the ultimate here we find we are only at the
beginning. The healthy State is made up of good
citizens. There is no other way of producing it.
But the good man, the good citizen, is made only in
one way. By whatever road we travel in these
investigations, we come round to the same truth :
" The soul of aU improvement is the improvement of
the soul." The laws of the spiritual hfe are the only
laws of the nation's hfe. Our supreme duty, then,
to the present and the future is to train our young
to the fuU sense, first, of their indebtedness to hfe,
and, second, to the conviction that the only way of
discharging it is by being and doing the highest
that they know.

XVIII
The Doctrine of Limit
The idea of the hmit, as a fundamental principle
both of hfe and of thought, was a favourite and
much-used doctrine of Aristotle. You could not
have, he argues, a boat of either an inch or a mile
in length. At both ends, of smaUness and of
greatness, the being and the uses of the vessel
demand a limit. Starting with this, he carries
the principle into many departments of affairs.
It crops up repeatedly in his treatment of pohtics,
of philosophy and religion. And it occurs to us
that in manifold questions of our own time, affecting
all these spheres, this Greek idea needs to be re
membered. In some of these matters we have been
forgetting it, to our hurt. The apphcations of the
doctrine are multitudinous, and we can only select
a few. We may begin with the lower and more
obvious as an introduction to others whose reach
is further towards the central mysteries.
Let us start with a civic question. The Greeks
had a doctrine of the city or community which is
well worth our consideration just now. Believing
that man was essentially " a pohtical being," that
his hfe realised itseh completely only in the social
168

THE DOCTRINE OF LIMIT 169
system, they held that this realisation demanded
as one of its conditions the apphcation of their
" limit " doctrine. The State, which to them was
commonly a city, must be of a certain size. Plato
is more insistent on this than his successor. His
ideal repubhc must keep itseh within bounds, both
as to population and other matters. When the
numbers reached a certain point there must be,
as with bees, a swarming off and the founding of a
new colony. The idea was that the feUowship —
for the State was a fellowship — must not be so
large as to prevent the supervision and management
necessary to the highest communal fife. This view
has had no good fortune so far. Alexander broke
it down for the Greeks by the creation of an enormous
empire, an example in which he was speedily fol
lowed by the Romans. How far we are from it
to-day is too evident. Our idea of greatness is
size. Nations compete for the biggest mileage and
the hugest population. It is the same with the
cities. London boasts her six mUlions, and New
York and Chicago strain every nerve to come up
with her. And so these huge amorphous wens
grow perpetuaUy, eating more and more of the green
fields, and diminishing in the same ratio the portion
of fresh air to each human lung inside them. In
this swarm the individual counts for less and less.
In a viUage we know the shoemaker and his neigh
bour the tafior. They have room enough to culti
vate an individuality, in which all the rest of us
take a friendly interest. In London ten thousand
of us might disappear to-morrow, and the human
tide would roll on as before. Increasingly clear

170 OUR CITY OF GOD
does it become that if we are to secure the best
ends of the common life we shall have to revise,
and in the Greek direction, our whole doctrine of
the city. We shall seek its greatness elsewhere
than in mere aggregation.
Another side of the Greek doctrine, not less
suggestive for our day, was its application to
wealth. Neither Plato nor Aristotle believed in
milhonaires. Their philosophy of fife, both indi
vidual and social, was dead against this particular
phenomenon. And while their economic theories
were in some respects naive — as, for instance, in
their view of interest — their general position on
this subject was, it has to be confessed, vastly
higher than our own. It was their virtue in these
matters to look steadily to the end. How to achieve
the fullest, highest hfe, in a man's own nature and
in all that the community could offer him — this
was the question they incessantly asked themselves.
Mere money -spinning, where it absorbed a man's
whole time, was, in this view, worse than a waste.
The man ought rather to be spinning himself,
developing on all sides his capacity and stature of
being. And that too, surely, is a doctrine for us.
Modern society, in its rage for mere accumulation, is
forgetting the alphabet of the great living. It sub
stitutes the size of its money-bag for the size of its
own soul. Quaker John Woolman, to mention him
again, who gave up half his business and half his
income in middle life, alleging as his reasons that
he did not wish his sons, through beginning too
rich, to miss the bracing of life's struggle, and also
that he wished himself to give more time to the

THE DOCTRINE OF LIMIT 171
personal service of God and his neighbour, lifted
our doctrine of hmit here surely to its highest
point — the point where it stands not as of Aristotle,
but as of the mind and spirit of Jesus.
One could add indefinitely to these apphcations,
but there is another side of the theme which opens
on another and deeper hne of thinking. The old
doctrine of limit was intimately connected with a
doctrine of ends. The Greeks had no difficulty
about final causes. Just as a boat was made of a
given size and'shape to serve the purpose of its builder,
so our hfe in its orderings and hmitations showed
in hke manner the evidence of purpose. We know
how that view has been assafied in our time by a
certain school Jof scientific thinkers. But let us
consider the matter a little.
A fresh mind, untrammelled by the schools,
fixing its attention on the facts of hfe, would be
struck probably by nothing so much as by the singu
lar limits of man and his world. That man should
be so much and no more ; that he, who can calculate
in centuries and eons, should himself havejsome
three or four score years for his time-portion ;
that, carrying in him a concept of infinite space,
he should himself occupy some six feet or less of it ;
that he, so hmitless on one side, should be so
exactly bounded on the other, is surely a first-
class puzzle to begin with. Consider, further,
man's environment. He is in a universe of gigantic
forces, compared with which his own resisting power
is as that of a snail under a Nasmyth hammer. In
earthquakes and volcanoes and whirlwinds he
gets hints of the sort of world he is in. The sun

172 OUR CITY OF GOD
that warms him is a fiery furnace thousands of
times hotter than anything he knows on this planet.
The smallest as weU as the largest things show on
occasion this incredible and destructive energy.
The molecules in a Crookes tube rush with a velocity
that would melt any metal by their sheer impact.
Yet these giant powers, in their normal action upon
man, are held in what seems a marvellously calcu
lated hmit. They work at highest pressure outside,
as in the stupendous energy which hurls us round
the sun or projects us, with the whole planetary
system, on that other journey we are making
through space. But the forces that directly touch
our hfe are all tempered. The sun's heat, the
winter's cold, the sweep of winds, the flow and
ebb of tides, the faU of rain, have all their limits.
A httle more on this side or that and we were
burned, or frozen, or drowned. Meanwhile through
all the ages of man's history the balance has been
maintained, and the miracle of life has gone on.
Naturalism of the Haeckel type finds in all this
nothing but the outcome of a material necessity,
the action of primordial forces which worked this
way because they could work in no other. Man
is here not as the child of purpose but because he
is the kind of being that evolution would naturaUy
produce, and whose nature harmonises with his
environment. But this school of thinking is rapidly
being found out. The footrule it uses is discovered
to be ludicrously short for the measurement of
the universe we are in. As an eminent scientist
himself puts it : " Science can only indicate the
path which leads to territories beyond her own,

THE DOCTRINE OF LIMIT 173
ruled by other laws than those to which her realm
is subject." Our doctrine of limit receives here, in
fact, one of its most interesting apphcations. For,
as the best minds now perceive, there is nothing so
strictly bound and fettered as science, considered
as an interpreter of life. Its verdicts deal only
with one world, the world of appearance,
and appearance at best is merely the vestibule
of reahty. Its calculations are good up to a certain
point — and then they break down hopelessly.
To give an instance. Science deals with the realm
of matter and force, a realm which in all its parts
is conditioned by time and space. It reasons
always in terms of time and space— in terms, that is,
of succession and of magnitude. But when we
question it about these terms it is immediately
landed in hopeless contradictions. On its own
plane of reasoning we can prove it equaUy impos
sible that the cosmos could have had a beginning,
or that it could not have had a beginning ; and that
the visible universe has a hmit, or that it has wo
hmit. There are many similar dilemmas known to
philosophy, and the sum of them combines to
make abundantly clear the sharply-marked boundary
where the mechanical theory ends, leaving us with
the mystery of reahty all unsolved.
And it is just where that world of appearance
ends that rehgion begins. In every age, in its
most naive as weU as in its highest manifestations,
rehgion has always stood for a world beyond the
visible, a world that transcends the mere plus and
minus verdicts ; a world not so much seen by the
inteUect as felt by the heart ; a world which takes

174 OUR CITY OF GOD
matter and its manifestations as a secondary affair ;
a world which finds its life not in ponderable masses,
but in will and purpose, and moral values, and
spiritual affinities. The further science advances
the more clearly does it show the necessity and the
function of faith. That the sense by which we
perceive a spiritual world is trustworthy is shown
by its persistence, and by the place it takes in our
scale of moral values. As Lecky puts it : " That
the religious instincts are as truly a part of our
nature as are our appetites and our nerves is a
fact which all history establishes, and which forms
one of the strongest [proofs of the reahty of£that
unseen world to which the soul of man continuaUy
tends." And here it is well we should understand the
essential difference between theology and religion.
Theology is all for definitions, for boundary lines,
for exact expressions, whereas it is the essence of
rehgion that it is free, unlimited, and undefined.
It is not properly seizable by the inteUect, and it is
by a sheer impertinence that age after age the
theologians have presented their lucubrations as
the final word upon it. Heavens ! What do
these people take themselves for, with their tin-
pot systems, proclaimed as ultimate, panophed in
anathemas, yet in dismal succession superseded
one after another by the sheer growth of the soul 1
It is part of the transcendence of Jesus that,
putting aside the theology of His day, He spoke
to humanity in words and in a tone that its heart
at once recognised as from the source of its own
deepest aspiration.

THE DOCTRINE OF LIMIT 175
It is the wonder of our hfe that we belong to
the hmited and to the unlimited. The wise man
is he who takes fuU account of both, who knows
how, at aU points, to quahfy the one by the other.
In doing this he wiU put always the emphasis on
what is biggest in him. Against the littleness of
his knowledge he wUl put the depth and range of
his soul's feehng ; against the brevity of his mortal
life that he has felt eternity ; against the hard limita
tions of his earthly lot the measureless range of his
spiritual kingdom. Lamennais, in one of his pas
sionate utterances, declares it to be man's misery
that he is torn asunder by the two worlds to which
he belongs. Rather say we, that herein hes his
supreme dignity, and the road to his final joy.

XIX
Of False Independence
When Burns sang the joy " of being independent "
he set vibrating one of the inmost chords of his
countrymen and of the entire Anglo-Saxon race.
This passion for independence is writ over our
whole history. It crops out in a multitude of
aphorisms, composed by us or about us. We say
" the Enghshman's house is his castle." The
French say of us " not only is England an island,
but every Englishman is an island." It is this
passion which made England Protestant ; which
split its rehgion into a multitude of sects ; which in
the seventeenth century puUed down the monarchy ;
which in the eighteenth century created the demo
cratic United States ; which has produced the freest
hterature and the freest institutions the world
possesses. The man we most respect is the one
who stands upright on his feet, four-square to all
the winds that blow, " lord of himself though not of
lands," as Sir Henry Wotton has it. The race is
continuaUy producing men who carry the principle
to all lengths — a George Fox, in his suit of leather ;
a Walt Whitman, in his boathouse ; a Thoreau, of
whom Emerson says, " He never married ; he
176

OF FALSE INDEPENDENCE 177
lived alone ; he never went to church ; he never
voted ; he refused to pay a tax to the State ; he ate
no flesh, he drank no wine. . . . He chose to
be the bachelor of thought and nature."
The quahty in itself is assuredly a great one and
worthy aU our respect. That it has accomphshed
such things in the world and produced such characters
is, on that head, argument enough. One traces,
indeed, in the actual present a certain declinature
from the old ideals which may well cause misgiving.
For every man who to-day stands upright and
pushes forward there seem half a dozen who are
leaning against the wall. Some of the iron has
gone out of our blood. The sturdiness of the father
is not repeated in the son. Instead of emulating
the force which carried the elder through the rough
and tumble of circumstance to his present height,
the younger too often is content to fink himself on
to the parental energy, as a car to the engine, and to
be carried along as mere luggage. We could do with
a revival of the earher independence. This high
respect for one's own body and soul, as ours to make
the best of ; this trust in our own faculty, as worth
something ; this brave measuring of ourselves
against the universe, and joyous use of our tools
upon its possibihties ; this preference of our own
earned bread, however plain or scanty, to the dole
of another — we cannot have too much of this, in
England or out of it. \
What we propose here to deal with is a quite
different independence, a false orbastardspecies which
men are trying at in various spheres, and always
with bad results. The error is one not so much of
[12

178 OUR CITY OF GOD
personal character as of policies, and tendencies
and modes of thinking. It is, in fact, whenever
it exhibits itself, a kind of ignorance, an attempt at
the impossible, a running one's head against the
world's adamantine laws. Yet we have the spirit
at work to-day over the whole field of life — in
religion, in morality, in politics, and in commerce.
In every instance, as we shall see, it is an attempt
at ignoring the cosmic unity ; a shutting off of one
sphere from communication with aU others, as
though one part of our universe could ever be
disjoined from any and every other part. It is
astonishing with what persistence men continue to
act on this assumption, - in face of the flat denial
of it which nature invariably gives.
That this notion of the watertight compartment
in thought and conduct obtains so largely is not
surprising when we remember that it is only in our
generation that the idea of the essential unity of
things has begun to dawn on the world. It is our
day that has discovered how everything changes
into everything else ; how electricity, heat, hght,
motion are modes of one force ; how the very atom,
regarded hitherto as the fixed point in physics, is
really transmutable. It is our day which has found
out the oneness of all substance ; how the materials
of our planet are in the sun and in Sirius ; how aU
the universe is in touch; how the faintest impact
on the luminiferous ether that fills space causes a
tremor which is felt on the surface of countless
worlds. And it is our day which has struck on the
fact of the interpenetration of aU laws ; that there
cannot be a discovery in chemistry or biology which

OF FALSE INDEPENDENCE 179
wiU not affect the entire realm of thinking, and this
because the whole realm of hfe — physical, mental,
moral, and spiritual — is one. What the early world
caught a glimpse of in its " omnia tendunt ad unum "
is the demonstration of to-day. We know that
aU is in one, and one in the aU.
But whUe science and philosophy have together
reached this height, our commoner thinkings and
actings are a long way below it. On these levels men
build their waUs as though nothing had happened
higher up. To begin with one of the more palpable
iUustrations. The larger half of society is pursuing
its schemes, contrivings, and general manner of
hving on the supposition that one social level
can be independent of all the others. What has
Kensington to do with Poplar, the West End with
the slum ? Why should Midas in his palace trouble
about Tom-aU-alone in his cellar ? Only that, as
Dickens put it, " there is not an atom of Tom's
shme, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in
which he fives, not one obscenity or degradation
about him but shaU work its retribution " — upon
Midas and all the class he represents. Carlyle
in " Past and Present " teUs the story of an Irish
widow who, her husband having died in Edinburgh,
went forth with her three children, bare of all
resource, to seek help from the charitable establish
ments of that city. They aU denied her, until, her
strength failing, she sank and died of typhus fever.
But some seventeen other people having caught the
infection died also. Upon which our philosopher
thus comments : " The forlorn Irish widow applies
to her feUow-creatures. ' Behold I am sinking,

180 OUR CITY OF GOD
bare of help. I am your sister ; one God made us.
Ye must help me ! ' They answer, ' No, impossible ;
thou art no sister of ours.' But she proves her
sisterhood ; her typhus fever kills them ; they actu
ally were her brothers though denying it." It
does not say much for our progress in what we may
caU social common-sense, to say nothing of its
higher moralities, that it takes typhus and cholera
to teach us its first principles. When we assert our
social independence ; when we deny that brother
hood of man which Christianity proclaims, plague
and fever become our theologians, and drive the
truth home.
" Become our theologians " ! This reminds us
of another sphere in which a false independence has
wrought and is still working grievous damage.
Plague and fever are not prepossessing as professors
of theology, but they have at least this to recom
mend them, that they are always in strict accord
ance with the facts. Their first principle is the
essential unity of the universe, which they wUl
prove, if necessary, by Irish widows or other equaUy
cogent demonstrations. They are entirely up to
date and in complete harmony with aU other truth
that is to be had. But who shaU say that the
theology of the schools has attained to any such
position ? Much of it hangs now in mid-air, un-
propped, unsupported. The Roman syUabus of
1864 was a theologic anathema against modern
science as an enemy of the Church and God. And
in present-day Protestantism there are writers and
preachers of considerable vogue who teach doctrines
formulated centuries ago, as though nothing had

OF FALSE INDEPENDENCE 181
Deen discovered since. They would be shocked to
hear that their sons at school, or college, were being
taught the geology, the geography, the chemistry,
the biology of the sixteenth century. But they
teach the theology of that period, as though the
progress in these other departments meant no
difference to this. This is an independence which
the nature of things wiU not suffer. For there is no
discovery in science which does not inevitably
react on dogma. The Copernican astronomy put
out of court a whole world of patristic and medieval
ideas. Modern geology gave us an entirely new
reading of Genesis. Comparative rehgion has altered
all our conceptions of outside faiths and their
relation to Christianity. Ecclesiastical Protection
ism may buUd its walls heaven-high round the
theologic domain. They do not avail, for the
Cosmos is a confirmed free trader in ideas. Noth
ing can prevent their circulation and interpenetra-
tion. While ecclesiasticism has, to its hurt, been indulg
ing in these confusions, it is curious to note how a
precisely similar blunder is being made in an opposite
quarter of thought. Laborious efforts are just now
being put forth to construct what is called " an
independent morahty " — an ethic, that is, which
is to be quite free from the religious influence and
the rehgious sanction. There are, we are assured,
materials for an exceUent secularist moral, with no
thanks to the Church. Evolution is to give us aU
we want. It does not seem to occur to theorists of
this order to ask how evolution, in this sphere, has
actuaUy worked, and the part which the rehgious

182 OUR CITY OF GOD
instinct has played in it. No first-class thinker has
ventured to leave its influence out of his calcula
tion. When Kant, in his " Critique of the Pure
Reason," showed how it was impossible to demon
strate God, Freedom, and Immortahty by the
intellect alone, he found them aU in the deeper
reason of the soul which is beyond logic. And the
general voice of humanity confirms that verdict.
Hegel is stating the simple fact when he declares
that " all the various peoples feel that it is in the
rehgious consciousness they possess truth, and they
have always regarded rehgion as constituting their
true dignity, and the Sabbath of their soul." Every
where the healthy growth of the rehgious instinct has
meant the rehabihtation of morals. Everywhere
the decay of the one has been the decay of the
other. When Voltaire's friends were one day argu
ing against the existence of God and a future life,
he ordered his servants out of the room. When asked
why, he replied, " Gentlemen, I do not want to
have my throat cut." He had taken a true measure
of the situation.
But this is not the only direction in which a
false independence has been sought in the sphere
of morals. The religionist, as weU as the outsider,
has tried his evasions. Rehgions of ceremonial, relig
ions of enthusiasm, rehgions of credal shibboleths
have, age after age, been set up as substitutes for
the moral law. It is curious to watch these naive
attempts to hoodwink the Almighty, as though He
did not know His business. The attempts all
break down. The cosmos wiU have nothing to do
with them, and for the reason that it is built and

OF FALSE INDEPENDENCE 183
everlastingly sustained on the silent, irresistible,
irreversible ethical laws. Thus is it that slaveries,
pohticalcorruptions, business iniquities, whatever the
rehgious pretensions of their backers and abettors,
spell bankruptcy in the end. The sum will not
work out right. AU the rules are against them. It
is because the rule of three, the moral principle and
the rehgious instinct, in fine the entire cosmic
machinery, are in accord, are parts of one whole,
that roguery, in the Church or out of it, comes to
its inevitable crash in the end.
Plainly there is no such thing as independence
for us. The quahty we eulogised at the beginning is
misnamed. The fighters for liberty, the men who
respect themselves, who hold their own in the
battle of circumstance, are what they are, not by
aloofness and insulation, but by alhance with the
world's facts and laws, by a reasoned and complete
dependence. It is in union we find our strength.
Nine-tenths of ourselves is outside ourselves.
It is in our superb faculty of alhance that we dis
cover the possibilities of life. We are then our
selves plus the universe. The true man is a focal
point where everything meets. He knows himseh
one with God, with his feUow, with every force that
energises in the heavens above and on the earth
beneath.

XX
The Undefined Moralities
Not the least of the difficulties with which the
hard-pressed modern spirit is beset hes in the fact
that it has, from day to day, to construct its own
morahty. We are only at the beginning of ethics.
Our Bibles, prayer-books, and other spiritual
directories grew up in times so much younger than
ours. In them we find eternal principles, but a
mighty paucity of application. The soul of man
to-day finds itseh embarrassed by its growth.
Its height enables it to look over waUs which shut
in the prospect for our fathers ; and that prospect
for the present is somewhat bewildering. It is
largely over an untrod region where we have to
make our own roads. Our age is, of course, not
unique in this respect. Every generation has had
to provide its own supplement to the Ten Command
ments. In many instances, indeed, the supplement
has been too voluminous a production. Catholicism
in particular has seized upon this sphere of " the
undefined moralities " to erect in it the chief strong
holds of its sway. It offers itseh as above ah
things a director of consciences. In the vast and
sinister elaborations of the Jesuit casuistry, in
181 .'

186 OUR CITY OF GOD
silent. The region here is a vast one, and we can
do no more than glance down one or two of the
directions along which it stretches. The undefined
moralities are at once public and private. They
belong to our action as fellow-citizens in the
commonwealth, and also to the daily, intimate
habitudes of our separate life.
To take an illustration of the former kind ; in
what an extraordinary tangle do we find ourselves
on the subject of international ethics ! The topic
here, indeed, offers us an admirable example of the
development of morahty, of the way the human
spirit, moved by the inner forces which govern it,
reaches out to higher and ever higher solutions. In
the old days the modern difficulty had not even
arisen. The question was so easy ! Patriotism
was love of your country and hatred of the outsider.
" Love your friend and hate your enemy." The
Greek caUed the foreigner a barbarian, and was
prepared at every opportunity to make war upon
and enslave him. The Jew would die for Jerusalem,
but thought it a religious duty, when occasion
offered, to lay waste Moab and Edom. It is
actually only within our own lifetime that inter
national ethics have come up as a matter for the
general conscience. It is only now that we are
waking up to the singular conditions that prevail
there ; that we are conscious of the extraordinary
anomaly of statesmen foUowing one scale of morahty
for their private life and an entirely different one
for the conduct of " foreign affairs." It is only
now that men begin to ask why faith, generosity,
and the Christian law of loving-kindness should be

THE UNDEFINED MORALITIES 187
recognised in our family and social deahngs, while
mistrust, cunning, and undisguised self-interest
should be the recognised motives in the intercourse
of States.
We can easfiy test the new moral growth in this
sphere by comparing our present standpoint with
a not at aU remote past. It is, for instance, inex
plicable to us how England could have forced the
American Colonies into separation under conditions
of Ill-feeling and of bloodshed ; how, as has been
said, " Lord North could have lost America for
£16,000 a year revenue ! " It is not simply the
crass stupidity of the thing that amazes us ; it is
the' want of moral perception which prevented
men from seeing the impossibility of governing a
high-spirited, independent people by mere force
and violence. Such a thing simply could not happen
now ; it could not happen in our relations with
Canada or Australia. And yet England and its
Government had in 1775 the same published moral
codes and sanctions — Bibles, prayer-books, and
what not — as we now possess. It is the " undefined
moralities " that have been moving, the new code
of the human spirit. Look also at the feehng of
to-day with regard to war. Here again the author
ised moral standards are where they were ; but
man is not what he was. It was the particular
height and colour of his thought in the past that
stocked the world with arsenals and made it glitter
with bayonets. But a thought of another height
and colour is now here, pushing out the old. And
this one wiU fiU the world with something quite
other than bayonet and arsenal.

188 OUR CITY OF GOD
When, from public affairs, we come to hfe's more
private and intimate side we discover how here also
we are constantly moving in the region of the moraUy
undefined. In the most important concerns we
have no published code or scale of values. We
act by that secret instinct whose working reveals
the height and complexion of our spirit. And here
what curious varieties we find ! Where, for instance,
in our standard ethics have we a proper appraisement
of cheerfulness ? There are multitudes of exceUent
people, with consciences that quiver to the slightest
monitions of law and rehgion, but who lower the
value of hfe to all around them by their incessant
gloom. Is not this a kind of villainy ? What if a
man tells me the truth and pays me twenty shiUings
in the pound ? Is that enough ? Is not his
lugubrious countenance a species of robbery ?
Ought it not to be an indictable offence to lower
the common joy of hving by inflicting our dismal
moods upon the world ? Hazlitt thought a good
companion emphatically the greatest benefactor.
Says Stevenson with entire truth, " A happy man
or woman is a better thing to find that a five-pound
note . . . they practically demonstrate the
Great Theorem of the hveableness of hfe." Hear
Emerson also on this theme : " There is one topic
peremptorily forbid to all well-bred, to all rational
mortals, viz., their distempers. If you have not
slept, or if you have headache or sciatica or leprosy
or thunder-stroke, I beseech you by aU angels to
hold your peace, and not pollute the morning, to
which all housemates bring serene and pleasant
thoughts, by corruption and groans." Is there,

THE UNDEFINED MORALITIES 189
indeed, a more frontal virtue than this of good
cheer ? And yet so ethicaUy confused are we that
tender consciences by the score around us, the highest
product of church and chapel, are not aware appar
ently that it is a virtue ! They plod through the
commandments and rob you daily of your sunshine !
They would be horrified at the theft of a penny,
whUe they filch from their neighbours what is worth
more than a miUion pennies — the chance of being
happy !
What a moral complex, too, is that presented
by the dafiy clash of duties ! How much time
and strength shaU we give to our private business,
and how much to the public ? It is in proportion
as a man's influence widens that he finds the ever-
increasing pressure of this difficulty. The successful
pastor is caUed in a myriad directions outside his
own special sphere. How these invitations appeal
to him ! What want of workers, leaders in that
outer field ! What reproaches of good men if he
turn from it ! But from the other side, from the
home work which awaits his hand, what reproaches
again wait upon neglect ! Who shall draw his
boundary-line ? There is none can draw it but
himseh. Most curious also is it, tragically pathetic,
indeed, at times, to note how men have gained their
moral predominance in one department of life by
the moral sacrifice of another. Wesley is incom
parable as evangelist and religious leader. He could
not be cited as a model husband. And speaking of
Wesley, have we noticed that strange piece of
undefined ethic which arises on the question of his
relation to authority ? He himseh finds no way of

190 OUR CITY OF GOD
carrying out his mission but by disobeying the
bishops and breaking the rules of his Church. From
his own foUowers, on the contrary, he requires a
strict obedience. " Do not seek to mend our rules,
but keep them." The man whose whole strength
lay in a daring personal initiative desires as the
very last thing to see that character reproduced in
his converts. The ecclesiastical rebel founds the
severest and best-obeyed ecclesiastical rule of modern
times. 'Tis an illustration of the maxim, famihar
to the student of history, but not found in the
text-books, that the morahty which makes a great
leader is something quite other than that which
makes a good follower.
It were indeed an almost endless task barely to
enumerate the moral dUemmas of our time. We are
not sure about the ethics of eating. A biU of fare
is a problem to the conscience. Who shaU tell us
how much time we should give to work and how much
to recreation ? Was that old Greek adage justified,
that " Zeus frowns upon the overbusy " ? Should
we strive for the greatest possible output of our
zeal and energy, or seek instead^tojimprovejits
quahty ? Were it better if we had done " a hundred
times as httle, and that httle a hundred times as
well " ? May we share in SchiUer's aspiration
to hve " in the full enjoyment of my spirit," or
forget all that in soul-engrossing activities ? Have
we balanced the claims of giving versus saving, of
generosity versus prudence ? To what extent shaU
a public teacher say out what he thinks and knows ?
What economies of utterance shall he practise,
out of regard for weak brethren and wavering faith ?

THE UNDEFINED MORALITIES 191
Woman, too ; how shall she carry herself in the
new world that is here ? ShaU she cultivate the
modesties and repressions of the Victorian ideal, or
strike in with the assertiveness, independence, and
free expression of this later time ?
The problems are plainly endless, and they beset
us every day. And the higher we rise the more
they press. The fact that we have upon our hands
so vast a range of them unknown to our fathers is,
as we have said, evidence of the constant growth that
is going on in humanity. The old text-books no
longer suffice. We are being taken out of them to
something higher and surer, to that constant revela
tion which is being communicated to earnest and
receptive souls. The problems are an education,
and as we face them we are conscious of a Teacher.
God has not finished His Bible. He writes its new
chapters daily upon our hearts. With " Nil sine
Deo " as our motto we move surely and serenely on
the untrod way. Its turns are baffling ; the cloud
is often on the landscape ; but the road leads ever
upwards.

Part III
PERSONAL

13

XXI
The Gift of a Day
We aU of us awoke this morning and began a new
day. A commonplace affair enough, the repetition
of a thousand similar awakenings. But the wonder
here is that we do not see the wonder of what we
have done. What are all the miracle-stories of folk
lore or rehgion in comparison with the marvel of
opening our eyes upon such a world as this ? It
is only at by-moments we taste the strangeness —
shall we say the weirdness ? — of the thing. We catch
it sometimes when, hah awake, we find ourselves
asking which is the reahty — the dreamland we
have left or this we are come into ? Antecedent
calculation would put the chances at millions to
one against there being such a universe as the one
we are in and such beings as we are. That we
actuaUy are, and where we are, makes anything
else so easily possible. Future existence ! That
surely is the simplest affair compared with the
a priori improbabihty of our present existence.
Consider the consciousness we wake into. It is
the ultimate fact, the one thing we know, and yet
the one we are utterly unable to explain. How
matter and force, how nerve and blood corpuscle can
195

196 OUR CITY OF GOD
turn into love or logic is an unsolved riddle. Our
mind informs us of an outside world about which
we are perpetually talking. But of our real rela
tion to it we know nothing. So far as we can make
out there would be no outside world without our
consciousness, or the consciousness of someone
else. Antarctic explorers have recently brought
news of a range of mountains down there as high as
Mont Blanc. But could these mountains exist of
themselves ? Could there be such a thing as their
height apart from a mind that calculates height, or
their whiteness without an eye that knows colour,
or their cold without a soul that knows sensation ?
This is the realm of puzzledom we find ourselves
plunged into afresh every morning.
We emerge upon our day out of sleep. We went
to bed last night probably without thinking of the
greatness of the adventure. For there we took
leave of ourselves, and laid down our hves. So far
as our personality is concerned we die every twenty-
four hours. Our body becomes inert, our reason
fails, our wUl ceases ; we are, through the darkness,
the playground of unknown powers. These have
their own way with us ; let us be thankful it is
mostly a kindly way. Sir Thomas Browne in his
" Religio Medici " thanks God " for his happy
dreams," and so should we aU. May we not call
them a valuable part of hfe's assets ? Some of us
have reached there our highest moments. These
unknown dream-powers work for us. We remember
Stevenson's " brownies " ; how, as he slept, they
gave him plots of stories and constructed whole
chapters. Meanwhile our main life has gone under

THE GIFT OF A DAY 197
— where we know not, only that it is clean away from
our guidance and cognisance. But this morning,
after the night's oblivion, it came back to us — not at
our caU, mark you, but by the working of its own
occult machinery — came back with all its elements of
sensation, memory, wUl, desire, linking us once
more to the working universe and to all our yester
days. With this rniracle our day begins. Observe
now what it offers us.
It takes perhaps a ripened age and an experi
enced spirit to appraise a day at its proper valuation.
Si jeunesse savait ! But youth does not know.
Heedless, and with a wealth of years in store, it
rattles the time-coinage in its pocket, and is careless
of sixpences. But the elders, whose years are num
bered, become greedy of time. " Our blessings
brighten as they take their flight." Every day
counts ; its passage is a felt diminution. But to a
healthy nature that is only one side of the reckon
ing. To such the new morning is not only a
treasured portion of a swiftly dwindling store ;
it is not only a miracle ; it is also a sacrament. For
here once more, out of the infinite, there has been
handed over to us a priceless gift, which we could
not claim, and which we are powerless of ourselves
to produce. The gates swing open each morning
and we are ushered into the spacious domain of our
thought and feehng, of our possessions and activities.
" Here is your paradise ; enter, enjoy, achieve ! "
As we muse on this we reahse, as Schleiermacher
taught the mocking Germans of his generation,
how the only sane attitude to life is the rehgious
attitude, how only in this way can we properly

198 OUR CITY OF GOD
adjust ourselves to a cosmos whose scheme from
end to end is one of pure, unmerited grace, of a
boundless giving. That one could take such a
gift as this without acknowledgment, without the
devotion of his powers to the Giver, were a mean
ness against which the stones should cry out.
There comes here, of course, the inevitable
question — It is shouted at us from a thousand
throats — " is there not another side to aU this ?
What of the multitudes who open their eyes day by
day upon nothing but dreariness ; upon the deadly
monotonous round of cheap labour ; upon a hope
less, ill-paid servitude ? What you are here celebrat
ing is the day of the well-to-do ; of the Sir Thomas
Brownes, of the man with a thousand a year. Let
him rejoice in his luck. He ought to. With a
pound a week how different the story ! " And truly
there is ground enough for the criticism. God
forbid we should aUow our personal gratitude to
degenerate into a complacent acceptance of things
as they are. Can I be satisfied with being up while
my brother is down ? A curse on optimism if it
means content with a system which keeps any
mortal of us out of his sunshine ! A Christian soul
is bound by its very contract to agitate tiU every
human being has room enough for his proper ex
pansion, opportunity for taking his fifi of hfe.
But let us make no mistake on the other side.
We still believe in " the gift of a day." Taking
things as they are, we say, with Renan, that, properly
managed, they yield everywhere their surplus of
happiness. As to poverty, people too often caU
themselves poor because they have not taken the

THE GIFT OF A DAY 199
trouble to reckon up their estate. They do not
see the way riches are distributed. Mr. Carnegie
the other day was offering mUhons for another clear
ten years. The young feUow on the street there
has a clear forty of them in his blood and bones.
Would you take fifty thousand for your eyes ?
Is there a man hving fool enough to exchange his
health for five thousand a year and perpetual
rheumatism ? Can you then call yourself poor
when you are carrying about with you over fifty
thousand pounds' worth of vision-power and of
clean-hmbedness ? When it is a question of hfe
versus figures we are all such poor hands at reckon
ing. John Wesley in his " Journal " tells of one of
his preachers who died leaving for fortune one and
f ourpence in cash. But his theme had been perpetu-
aUy of the love of God, and his last words were of his
joyous confidence in that love. Wesley did not
count his preacher to be at aU poor, nor do we.
Bad social arrangements may do much to spoil
hfe, but at the worst they are a long way from
spoiling it altogether. The capitalists, as Thoreau
said, " cannot cut down the clouds." No, nor can
they bottle the sunshine, nor stay the march of
spring. It does not require an income of four figures
to share Milton's rapture. Are we not with him
when he says : "In those vernal seasons of the
year, when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an
injury and sullemiess against Nature not to go
out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing
with heaven and earth " ? And when you are
shut indoors, plying maybe for wage a monotonous
task, the task has not got the whole of you. The

200 OUR CITY OF GOD
cosmos has not given you away to that extent. It
has secured you immense reserves of life which
none can invade. The more routine your task,
the more your thoughts are your own. And thoughts
are often at their best and happiest when one is
driving a nail or watching a loom. You are a
thousand things, remember, beside an employe.
You participate in all that is human. You are on
the tide of the common progress. You behold every
year the march of the seasons, the incomparable
beauty of the heavens and the earth. You may
be student, comrade, lover, parent. You are in a
spiritual kingdom, working out a character, a
personahty. You are a partaker of God's grace, of
all He is and is doing for humanity.
Whatever the situation, our happiness to-day is to
so enormous an extent in our own hands. A man
is happy when he thinks he is. And why should I
not this morning think so ? Why should I be gloomy
when I can be glad ? Here inside me is a force that
can drive away the clouds. Our will power, which
can caU up good thoughts and disperse bad ones ;
which can concentrate on " the hghted side of
things " ; which can fall back on gracious memories
as a refuge from present evUs ; which, in a word,
can make its own weather, winning through thickest
clouds to the blue sky and shining sun — our will
power, we say, if we wiU only use it, is our philo
sopher's stone, that turns aU things into gold. The
more we give it to do the better it works. Adversity
braces it as the Styx hardened AchiUes.
The wiU, in a rehgious soul, regards each day as a
pure gift, to be made the best of. Its outer rough-

THE GIFT OF A DAY 201
ness only hides the treasures that are in it. The
jewel often enough is cased in uncouthest packings.
Our problem is each morning to find that jewel.
We are bunglers if we miss it, if we miss our happi
ness. Happiness, we say, for that is what the day
should bring us. That the soul was meant for joy
is shown by its instinct for it, an instinct which the
New Testament takes for granted and seeks always
to develop. Gloom — tristitia — even in the monkish
morahty, was regarded as of the nature of mortal sin.
Jean Paul is in the f uU Christian tradition when he
exclaims, " Be every minute, man, a full hfe to
thee ! Enjoy thy existence more than thy manner
of existence, and let the dearest object of thy con
sciousness be this consciousness itself." There is a
false phUosophy, foUowed by many, which postpones
aU this to the future. Such look from a sordid present
to the better beyond. Their heaven is to-morrow.
They do not reflect that their future is always no
more than a coming present, and that if they cannot
achieve something with " now " they wfil achieve
nothing at all. To-day, if ever, God is Perfect Love,
and we can hve in that and have it hve in us. A
wondrous word for us here is that of Dr. Donne, as
reported by Izaak Walton, " Blessed be God that
He is God, only and divinely hke Himseh."
To-day is given us not only for enjoyment but for
progress. The true happiness is no idle passivity.
It is a movement towards higher things. As time
passes a disciphned nature becomes more and more
jealous of the hours. To-day must yield its fruitage,
for it wiU never come again. It is this considera
tion which makes one astonished at the methods of

202 OUR CITY OF GQD
so-called " Society," which seem nothing more than
an elaborate arrangement for the wasting of time.
Think of men and women spending their days and
nights in playing bridge — in a universe where there
is everything to learn and everything to be done !
If life is a game this assuredly is not the way to
play it. The laws of the game, fixed from eternity,
make it impossible for to-day to be a success if
yesternight was spent in dissipation. Talk of
orthodoxies and heterodoxies ! The modern hetero
doxy, beside which all others sink into insignifi
cance, is the neglect by men and women of the first
elements of the science of hving.
Carpe diem, says the Roman poet. " Pluck the
day." We should be able to do it now to better
effect than Horace. The fruit is richer. " Here
and now," as an American writer has it, " is hfe
eternal, with gleams of inexhaustible possibihties
around and beyond us." Truly it is a great thing
to be alive to-day. When its hours have passed we
shaU sleep in our beds, expecting that the Power that
has withdrawn our consciousness wUl to-morrow set
it going again. In that faith a healthy soul goes to
its final sleep, looking to the same beneficent Almighti-
ness for a yet more wondrous awakening.

XXII
Our Personal Fortunes
Socrates found the city more interesting than the
country, as did Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb a
good many centuries after. To aU cultured minds,
indeed, the appeal of the city is immense ; it is
fascinating to form one in this vast group of souls.
You walk down a crowded street. What a story
behind every face you look into could it only be
fully told ! These men, women, youths, maidens
carry each of them the ever-present consciousness
of their separate fates. They know to a nicety
their income ; how much they have saved, or what
they owe. That figure, great or small, what a
significance it has for them ! Beyond this each
has an account with the universe, vaster and more
comphcated, of which they also know something,
but not so much. The faces all speak. They are
all accurate registers of inward experiences. Every
line of feature is a history ; it is the hardening into
flesh and form of joys and sorrows, of victories and
defeats. Each pair of eyes is intent on two prospects.
There is a gaze upon all the busthng visible of the
city's life ; there is another, awesome and wistful,
forward on to that immeasurable unknown to

204 OUR CITY OF GOD
which they all are being hurried, but which will be
ahke to no one of them.
This singularity of man, his perpetual wrestle
with the unknown, has been from the beginning
the subject of his deepest thought. It has created
phUosophies and rehgions. In ruminating upon it
man has fled instinctively from chance to personality.
He could not bear to think that his fate was a mere
toss-up. So we have the Latins turning their
" Fors," which signified luck, hap, accident, into
" Fortuna," not a word only, but a goddess, whose
worship was one of the most popular in Italy.
Her functions were stead Uy extended until they
spread over the whole private, domestic, and national
life. It is a curious iUustration of the materialism
that at present envelops our own age that our word
" fortune " in English, descending from these
heights, does duty simply for our money and
possessions. When we talk of a man's fortune,
in nine cases out of ten we mean his bank balance,
his rent-roll, his personal and real estate.
But in what we have here to say we propose to
extend the definition. It is that larger account, of
which money is a mere detail, with which we propose
to deal — our entire traffic with existence, and the
outcome of it. In the survey we are struck immedi
ately with one notable difference in the human
experience. The events of life, of any hfe, belong
to two classes. A vast number of them are in the
class of the calculable ; but another host, not less
vital or determinative of our fate, belong to the
incalculable. As you anticipate to-morrow you can
reckon upon a quantity of what may fairly be

OUR PERSONAL FORTUNES 205
termed certainties. The sun wUl rise at a given
hour ; the world wUl look very much as it does
to-day ; the bank will be open ; the laws of com
merce wUl be duly operating ; the principles of the
" Rule of Three " wiU not have changed. This
great area of the certainties — an area which, with
the growth of human intelligence, is ever widening
— enables us to predict a good deal of our future,
and with tolerable assurance.
But, as we have said, the peculiarity of the human
fate — that which makes life so vividly interesting
and at the same time so awesome — is the fact that,
into the tamed and weU-ordered sphere of the
calculable, there are perpetuaUy intruding the
mysterious forces of the incalculable. With aU our
knowledge we do not know our universe yet. We
are mere scratchers of its surface, and it is continu
aUy springing upon us fresh surprises. A William
of Orange shall go through his battles and dangers of
aU kinds unscathed to stumble fataUy at the last
over a molehiU. You come sound in wind and
Umb through the earthquake to lame yourself for life
over a bit of orange-peel on the pavement. There
is an event approaching you, which has been on its
way through eternity. All unknowing, your course
moves towards it. You will meet it to-morrow
and aU life wiU be changed. It may be a face that
wiU then for the first time look on you ; or a book
that you wiU open ; or a death, or a birth. When
we have calculated to the last ounce aU our powers
and faculties, and what they seem capable of accom
plishing in the world, we are only at the beginning
of the reckoning. Our fortune is an affair not only

206 OUR CITY OF GOD
of ourselves but of a whole unknown world outside —
a world out of which at any moment may come the
most wondrous aUiances, the most unimaginable
fates. Of what avaU Napoleon's genius had KeUer-
man failed to come up with his dragoons at Marengo
when all seemed lost for the French ? Look back
at your own career, and note how at critical points
of it the affair has been taken out of your hands, and
events mightier than yourself have shaped it for
you ! What, then, is this unknown that incessantly
breaks in, that plays so masterly a role in our drama ?
How mighty is the unknown ! In comparison
with its operation how infinitesimal our own share
in our own life ! We are here as the results of a
force that has been working from eternity. We
are thrust into our lot without a word of explanation.
Why in this tiny planet instead of the other end of
the cosmos ? Why a man or a woman and not an
archangel or a beetle ? Why to have waked in the
nineteenth of twentieth century instead of the
fifth or the fortieth ? Why with this particular
status, this mental endowment, this temperament ?
With your host of queries you knock at the door
and get no reply. " Here you are and make what
you can of it ! " That seems the word, though
even this does not come as a word, for no articulate
sound ever breaks the silence, except your own
voice and that of your brother man, as mystified
as yourself.
The modern mind is tortured by this problem
and does hot see its way to' a happy solution.
William Watson speaks of man as " child of a
thousand chances 'neath the indifferent sky."

OUR PERSONAL FORTUNES 207
Maeterlinck tends to the same pessimistic view.
" For although," says he, " it has not perhaps been
incontrovertibly proved that the unknown is neither
vigUant nor personal, neither sovereignly intelhgent
nor sovereignly just, or that it possesses none of
the passions, intentions, virtues, and vices of man,
it is stiU incomparably more probable that the
unknown is entirely indifferent to aU that appears
of supreme importance in this hfe of ours." This
is the Heine spirit, which regards the world as Das
qualvoll uralte Bdthsel, und ein Narr wartet auf
Antwort, " that torturing eternal riddle to which
only the fool expects an answer."
But things are not, surely, as bad as that. Else
the world could hardly be so comfortable and merry
a place. For our part, instead of the cosmic
indifference we are struck at every point with the
cosmic kindness. Consider our way of coming
into this world ! Into a universe where million-ton
forces are hurtling ; where suns are blazing at
temperatures a thousand times hotter than our
furnaces ; where stars and planets are rushing across
space at inconceivable velocities ; into this tremend
ous scene comes the httle child, hfe's feeblest spark,
that a breath would extinguish. Yet it hes quietly
on its mother's breast, encircled by that most wonder
ful of products, a mother's love. The blazing suns,
the million-ton forces do not hurt it ; they caress
it ; co-operate to its safety and growth. From the
beginning our bairn, in this most extraordinary scene
of things, is quite at home. Wind and sun, sea
and shore, wiU be its playfehows. Inside it, packed
away in mind and body, is a whole apparatus of

208 OUR CITY OF GOD
happiness. This, at least, seems more than a cosmic
indifference. Consider also that stream of tendency on which
we are aU afloat, its quality, and the point towards
which it flows. The force of gravitation which
keeps our earth suspended over empty space, and
whirls it round the sun, is not less mighty than
the invisible power which operates unceasingly,
though invisibly, in the sphere of the human
consciousness, moving always in one direction.
Keeping pace with tho process in the material world
by which flaming gases are converted into sohd
earth, and earth into vegetable, and vegetable
into animal, and animal into man, does this inner
force, working ever on the mind, hft it from barbar
ism to reason, from reason to morals, from moral to
spiritual. On this unseen power the soul rests as
secure as our planet on the viewless air. It is as
men's acquaintance grows with this power and its
laws that they become ever bolder in their experi
ments with hfe. They discover that every rudest
experience has a moral basis, is packed with moral
issues. They see that each event as it passes over
us leaves its own deposit, which forms henceforth
a new part of ourselves. They see, further, that,
according to our treatment of these experiences
will be the kind of deposit they leave. What a
happening leaves in us depends on what we bring to
it. Nothing happens to us which is not of the
nature of ourselves. Thus ultimately our moral
fortunes are recognised as our only real ones.
It is out of this higher discernment that the hero
isms and martyrdoms have grown that age after

OUR PERSONAL FORTUNES 209
age have Uluminated history. So sure have the
great souls become of the strength and universality
of the moral law that they have cheerfuUy ventured
their whole private fortune upon it. Plato knew
the secret when, almost in the language of St. Paul,
he declared that aU things work for good to the good
man. So did the Stoics, who affirmed that if we
acted in harmony with the Eternal Reason no harm
could befaU us. " Everything great and good,"
says Fichte, " on which our present existence rests,
and from which it has proceeded, exists only because
noble and powerful men have resigned aU the
enjoyments of life for the sake of ideas." They did
this because of their complete assurance that the
Power behind the ideas would more than vindicate
them. It is when considerations of this sort have
gained their fuU hold upon us that we have perforce
to break at once with the pessimism of our time and
with the brutal worldliness that seems now also in
the ascendant. If the universe is moral ; if the hfe
is more than meat and the body than raiment, what
kind of intelfigibihty is there in making our career,
to its last hour, a mere mad rush for material
accumulation ? What kind of inner growth is to
be had out of your twenty millions ? The soul has
no place for them. You can neither build them
into you nor take them with you. Cicero wonders
that men, as they come nearer their journey's end,
should go on burdening themselves with more and
more luggage. We are minded of the picture
which Erasmus draws, in his " Praise of FoUy,"
of " decrepit old fellows that look as hollow as
14

210 OUR CITY OF GOD
the grave into which they are falling, that rattle in
the throat at every word they speak, . - -
whose skin seems aheady dressed into parchment,
and their bones aheady dried to a skeleton," but
who, as he goes on to describe, grasp with unabated
eagerness after more worldly good and more fleshly
delight. FoUy, truly. The fife-riddle is not solved
that way.
We have spoken here so far only of the universal
moral laws and of the stream of tendency. Chris
tianity has translated these terms into something
more affirmative. Behind law it discerns a Person.
In our daUy experiences it bids us recognise the
ever-fresh revelation of a gracious Will. And the
religious instinct which supports these affirmations
justifies itseh by its inner effects upon us. Here
is a view which makes for inner serenity, for cheer
fulness, for the utmost daring of aspiration, for the
energy which insists on getting the best out of
ourselves. The faith that lifts you most, that
extracts from outer events the wholesomest nutri
ment, that makes for the fuUest fife in yourself and
your neighbours — is not this plainly the thing to
seek ? In this hght our personal fortunes seem
after aU in good hands, and we join with our poet in
his valorous song :
Grow old along with me !
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made :
Our times are in His hand
Who saith " A whole I planned,
Youth knows but half ; trust God : see all, nor be afraid ! "

XXIII
Friends and Friendship
One wonders at times whether modern life offers a
friendship at aU resembhng that of antiquity. At
any rate we do not talk of it as did the ancients.
The " De Amicitid " sounds, much of it at least,
strange to our ears. We do not find amongst our
young men aUiances such as that between Harmodius
and Aristogeiton, or between Damon and Pythias, or
Orestes and Pylades. Have we in modern society
anything akin to the passionate devotion which
Montaigne expresses for the memory of La Boetie,
or that which impels Sir Thomas Browne to say : " I
never yet cast a true affection on a woman ; but I
have loved my friend as I do virtue, my soul, my
God " ?
The old Norwich physician was, we fear, some
what of a woman-hater, but his remark suggests a
prominent reason for the difference on this subject
between earher ages and our own. In classic times
especiaUy the intense attachments between men
owed themselves very largely to the inferior place
of woman in the social system. The distinction
between man and woman was one not simply of
sex ; it was a distinction of inteUectual and moral
211

212 OUR CITY OF GOD
caste. Woman was an instrument of pleasure, a
subordinate factor of the social hfe. The ideal
perfection was virile. And when to this is added the
fact that the attachments between men were often
connected, amongst the Greeks especiaUy, with prac
tices which our morality decisively condemns, we
have some part of the reason, if not aU, for that
striking divergence of tone on this theme between
the classic life and hterature and our own.
But friendship, if we do not rhapsodise upon it, is
yet for the twentieth century a five enough theme.
The friendships we form and keep remain for all of us
one of the outstanding features in the hfe history.
Our friends are a kind of certificate of character.
The quahty of an age or a civUisation might be
measured by its capacity for friendship. If it
could be said truthfully of our time that we were
producing nothing better in this line than acquaint
ance ; that the cash-nexus, as Carlyle caUed it, had
taken the place of the old devotion, this, indeed,
would be enough to prove our degeneracy. There
are symptoms in that direction which we need to
take note of. And for our individual selves it may
be wholesome to turn an eye for a moment upon
our conduct and fortunes in this department,
and on the ideals we have been pursuing.
The best friendships, as a rule, are those that begin
young. Life's iron is then fire-hot, and we weld easily.
And the special happiness here is that, properly
managed, these unions are often for all the years.
In the coUege common room we stumble upon a
brother soul which vibrates responsive to our own,
and now after three or four decades, and when we

FRIENDSJAND FRIENDSHIP 213
are almost at the end of the journey, the music is
still going on. Our careers have been wide apart,
our fortunes different, our meetings perhaps in
frequent ; and yet the mere sense that our friend is
yonder, thinking his thoughts and doing his work,
is a strength and a companionship to us. How
much so, we shaU know when he has gone. A soul
ful intimacy of this kind acquires an ever better
flavour with the years. And here it is that a mere
self-seeking ambition defeats itself in the search for
the prizes of life. In the rush for worldly advance
ment, our pusher, eager for more brilliant aUiances,
drops his old friends, or, what is worse, adopts
towards them an attitude of condescension. What
he has gained in this process we will not inquire.
We know what he has lost. Such a man has no
friends. To apply this title to his new entourage
would be too cynical. And the friendless man,
whatever height he has chmbed to, is surely a being
to be pitied.
The ideal friendships come from the knitting in
each other of our nobler parts. FeUowship in
great enterprises, a common aspiration concerning
life's deepest things, are their truest foundation.
This it is which makes a genuine rehgious com
munion so uniquely beautiful a thing. When men
can find a real spiritual leader, the union of soul
between him and them is heaven's own marriage.
There is nothing in the sphere of feeling so exquisite.
No language, we suppose, could express how
Paul's companions felt towards him, and this was
only a faint reflex of what an earher generation felt
towards Jesus. When a great and withal gracious

214 OUR CITY OF GOD
soul appears in the world, and begins to exhale
its strength and sweetness, the circle that forms
around it constitutes our heavenfiest image of
society. Such was the group around the noble
Origen, which Gregory Thaumaturgus, one of his
disciples, speaks of as " this sacred fatherland."
Says he of that feUowship : " The very first day of
his receiving us was in truth the first day to me and
most precious of aU days, since then for the first
time the true sun began to rise upon me." Such
was the company that gathered round Bernard in the
Clairvaux wilderness ; such the fellowships of the
" Brethren of the Common Life " that grew up in
medieval Europe ; and those later of the Moravians
and the early Methodists, and that of the gifted
Frenchmen who stUl later drew around Lamennais at
La ChSnaie.
FeUowship of this sort might be described quite
accurately as a seeking and finding of God in each
other. For it is the divine element in us, the some
thing, as Browne puts it, " that was before the
elements and owes no homage to the sun," that we
here commune with. We love our brother for
what he is revealing to us of our God. Such friend
ship transcends all difference of rank and station.
The feeling Lord Shaftesbury had for his old Baptist
nurse, from whom, as a child, he learned what genuine
religion meant, was, be sure, of a sort he could not
offer to mere rank and riches. It was a spiritual
affinity which knit the gay and wealthy Alcibiades
to the poor and homely Socrates. A real spiritual
value wiU indeed always and everywhere assert
itself as against any exterior one. A man in

FRIENDS AND FRIENDSHIP 215
England can, by merely being rich enough, get
obedience and hat-touching from his footman. But
he cannot get his soul that way. The devotion of a
Caleb Balderstone is not a cash product. It was
not by any cash process we come by the delightful
picture which Izaak Walton gives us of Richard
Hooker and his poor parish clerk, who " did never
talk but with both their hats on, or both off, at
the same time." Wealth in this age is doing its
hardest and its brutalest to win in everything
supremacy, but the soul, through all, mocks at its
endeavours. There is one respect in which our age in the matter
of friendship has improved on earlier times. The
best minds to-day, in their regard for each other,
are proof against very wide differences of opinion.
It is the modern spirit, and surely a good one,
which shows in Huxley's devotion to two such
widely separated men as Darwin and Gordon.
" He and Darwin," says he, " of all the people I
have known in my life, are the two in whom I have
found something bigger than ordinary humanity —
an unequalled simpUcity and directness of purpose —
a subhme unselfishness." The feehng here is what
we get in Carlyle and Sterhng, who, at one phase of
their career, as the former put it, " agreed in every
thing except opinion." One of the best things we
know of Dupanloup is that, when his protege Renan
renounced Catholicism and the Church, the Bishop
offered him money to start on his literary career.
True souls can see each other behind their argu
ments. We have, we say, in these later ages grown
somewhat in this respect. We love Luther, but not

216 OUR CITY OF GOD
because he refused to shake hands with Zwingh
over their difference about the sacrament ; no, nor
for describing Erasmus, who was a fine man too,
and whom he had caUed once his " dearest brother,"
as " that venomous viper Erasmus of Rotterdam."
He would hardly have put it that way had he hved
in our time, though it has to be confessed that even
now theologians have hardly grown out of the
habit of calhng each other names.
One could write many chapters on the ethics of
friendship. A first-class maxim is that we should
offer our friends always of our best and never of our
worst. We owe it to them that we should show
" our hghted side." There is so much in Hazhtt's
remark that " a good companion is emphaticaUy
the greatest benefactor." E. L. Godkin describes
the best office of a friend in what he says of Lowell :
" He proved to me for twenty-five years a most
delightful friend — for he kept up a constant supply
of what was most grateful to me, sympathy and
encouragement." Diderot has been for a century
and more a terrible fellow for the theologians, but
surely his faculty of friendship should cover a
multitude of his sins. Mr. Morley does not exag
gerate when he says of him : " He was content to
take friendship as the right, the duty, or the privUege
of rendering services without thought of requiring
either them or gratitude for them in return. . . . He
seemed to admit every claim on his time, his purse,
and his talents." Men of this sort puzzle our
orthodoxy. When we expel them from religion the
question forces itseh — " From what rehgion, that of
doctrine or of practice, of the head or of the heart ? "

FRIENDS AND FRIENDSHIP 217
We have in these later times also made a vast
improvement on the friendships of the ancients, in
that some of the highest and purest are found be
tween men and women. Christianity has here a
mixed record, but its total effect has been un
doubtedly upward. Against the ascetic fanaticisms
which regarded the sex, to use a monkish phrase,
as " the gate of heU," we have to set, in those very
times, the noble relations of Chrysostom with
Olympias, and Jerome with Paula, and later on of
Dante with his Beatrice and Petrarch with his Laura.
From the beginning, indeed, the genuine Christian
note was a long advance on the current paganism.
In the third century Clement of Alexandria offers a
doctrine of man and woman which is not out of
date to-day. " For if the God of both is one,
the Master of both is one also ; one Church, one
temperance, one modesty. Their food is common,
marriage is an equal yoke ; respiration, sight, hear
ing, knowledge, hope, obedience, love — all are
ahke." It would be hard to-day to meet a man of
real value who would not be willing to acknowledge
that much of his best inspiration, as weU as the
most helpful sympathy, has come from women.
More and more the feUowship of souls overleaps
the sex barriers.
Our inner progress could be accurately measured
by the range and quahty of our friendship. As the
quahty heightens the range extends. " Qui Deum
amat, amatomnes," as Leibnitz says. We sympathise
with that saying of St. Teresa about the demons :
" How unhappy — they do not love ! " And in lov
ing men we learn, as Fenelon said to Destouches,

218 OUR CITY OF GOD
" to expect httle from them." Why, indeed,
should you look for this and the other in return ?
Is not the pure joy of loving and serving reward
enough in itself ? As you travel along this line
it becomes more and more difficult to hate. We
hardly need Augustine's reminder : " Most often
when you think you are hating an enemy, you are
hating your brother without knowing it." Friend
ship of this order, fed and inspired from the highest
sources, beginning its action in the private circle of
those nearest us, spreads and spreads tiU it en
compasses the world. And it wiU be the growth of
this power, more than the achievements of science
or the harnessing of the world's physical forces, that
will ultimately bring to our race its age of gold.

XXIV
On Being There
Thereness is a theme which, when we come to
think of it, is fuU of philosophy and full of morals.
Of imagination and poetry also. Some of us, as
we he awake at nights, are pursued with the thought
of being there ; in places we have dreamed of —
the uttermost deeps of ocean, the centre of the
Sahara, the awful solitude of inter-steUar spaces.
It is so difficult for us to realise, in our homely hfe
of the city or the country parish, that just as actual
as the shop across the road is, at this moment,
the flaming centre of the sun or the wastes of the
polar realm — " where no man comes, or hath come
since the making of the world." And these things
have been there through the ages before history,
before man, before time. And someone has always
been there, in actual contact with and knowledge
of them. For it is an axiom of phUosophy that
there is no reahty apart from spirit. There could
be no whiteness, no colour, no extension even,
were there no consciousness to apprehend these
things. When we come from the visible to the invisible
we are shut up also to the same behef— the behef
219

220 OUR CITY OF GOD
in an omnipresent Thereness in touch with every
finite mind. There could be no community of
thinking, apart from a basis of thought which is
universal, a Supreme Thinker who gives the law by
which aU intellects operate. How curious that this
behef in Omnipresent Mind, which to-day is the
starting-point of a spiritual philosophy, should have
been made one of the subjects of scornful reproach
against the early Christians ! The heathen writer
Cecihus says of them : " What monstrous, what
portentous notions do they fabricate ! That that
God of theirs, whom they can neither show nor see,
should be inquiring dUigently into the characters,
acts, nay, the words and secret thoughts of aU
men ! " The sneer to us seems singularly misplaced.
The ignorance would appear to be on the other side.
We have begun with the transcendental. But
the topic is not less fruitful when we turn it into
homeher channels. Deahng with actual human
fife, we find a whole morahty wrapped up in the
business of being there. Our quahty of manhood,
our worth to society, our prospects of success in the
world, could aU be reckoned up in terms of thereness.
Society is based on the faith of finding each one of
us, from day to day, in his place. What a trust it
is ! The City man takes his morning train to town,
chatting as he travels with his friend, or conning the
latest news. And every day his hfe depends on
yonder grimy brother on the engine plate, or this
other in the signal-box, being not only there, but
aU there, their skiU and attention whoUy given to
the duty they are upon. In the higher ranges of
service we see how genius is the faculty of being in

ON BEING THERE 221
the right spot at the right time ; to be, as Wesley
used to say, not where you are wanted, but "where
you are wanted most." Talent is so largely the
faculty of applying your power at just that point
of the lever where it will get the greatest purchase.
That is how great commanders win their victories.
They divine the critical spot and put their whole
seh into that. A Napoleon, a Nelson, are oftenest
where the enemy least want them and least expect
them. Carlyle in his " CromweU," giving account
of the battle of Preston, says : — " The Duke (of
Hamilton), it wiU be seen, marches in extreme loose
order ; vanguard and rearguard being far apart —
and a CromweU attending him in flank ! " It
is always so. The conqueror wins by being there
The faUures, whether of clerk in the warehouse or
the head of an army in the field, are an affair of
absence — of body, mind, or both — at the time and
place where they are needed.
There are, on this head, disquieting reports
concerning the young man of to-day. It is rumoured
that his interests are somewhat astray. The post
at present assigned him in the- world's work is a
post vacant of his mind and heart. To do not his
best but his least in it, and to get away from it at the
earhest possible to idle and expensive pleasures, are
said to be his ruling ideas. Or the work, he thinks,
is not good enough for him, and he scamps it while
dreaming of the loftier objects of bis ambition.
The man with stuff in him does not argue in this
way. What if his present occupation is not the
final or highest he is to reach ! That will not
prevent him from putting his back into this which

222 OUR CITY OF GOD
is before him. Charles Dickens is not ess pains
taking as reporter, that he is by-and-by to be king
of romance. " Here and now is my America,"
should be the motto for us all. ActuaUy where
we are is the battleground where we are to play the
man. To be there and aU there, to put our utmost
soul into the job in hand, is the way of success. A
fig for the student who has perpetuaUy to be chasing
his thoughts back to bis theme ! You will do no
good tiU you know how to be absorbed. We love
that story of the mathematician who began to
chalk some formule on the back of a carriage in the
street, and was then astonished to find his blackboard
moving away from him ! His concentration was
here undoubtedly a httle overdone, but it was this
that had made him a mathematician. Here and
now ! For heaven's sake do not sacrifice your
present for any possible future. Let this be the
best there is for you, whatever may come after.
" Be perfect in regard to what is here and now."
Remember always, as Jean Paul has it, that " this
future is nothing but a coming present, and the
present which thou despisest was once a future which
thou desiredst." Is yours a rough and uncouth
present ? Yet Confucius could say : " With coarse
rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm
for a pillow, I stiU have joy in the midst of these
things." It is one of the special gifts of our time — an
evidence of the continuous growth of the human
spirit — that we are learning to " be there " in
another sense. The trained scientific imagination,
which enables us to reproduce the past as it actually

ON BEING THERE 223
was, and not as mythology and legend have created
it for us, is to-day revolutionising both history and
theology. The West is grapphng in earnest with
the problems which the East has set it in morals and
rehgion. A trained and sober criticism is dissipating
the fog in which the Oriental mind had steeped the
original Christian facts, and showing them to us in
the clear atmosphere of reahsm. Modern Christians
are in consequence becoming primitive Christians.
They are beholding Christ as the first disciples
beheld Him, and loving Him as they did, only with
a better trained understanding.
And concurrently with this mental growth there
has been a growth of the soul which, in yet another
direction, opens new possibilities of " being there."
We are reaching the secret of moral sympathy,
which permits us to put ourselves in the place of
the other man. When the lesson has been fuUy
learned, or even on any large scale in the world,
what a revolution we shall have ! It is only as we
look at our brother from the outside that we can
cherish feelings of enmity towards him. When
once we have reached the point of feehng him, as it
were, from the inside, when we can taste his bitter
ness and chagrin as though it were our own, the
whole shameful joy at his humihation and downfaU
wiU have become impossible to us. He, too, then,
is a companion soul, whose heavy burden and whose
hard fight make our thought about him one only
of sympathy and desire to aid !
The sense of " being there " is entering very
deeply to-day into our rehgious thought. It is,
for instance, revising our whole view as to the

224 OUR CITY OF GOD
principle and method of punishment. Here, surely,
was need of revision. According to the older idea
the myriads of the lost were handed over to Satan,
he being regarded as worst in this universe, to be
tortured according to his fiendish caprice. What
a gaol theory this ! The Best of Beings to entrust
His creatures to the worst ! To-day our prison
governors are required above aU things to be men
of character and humanity. We do not put our
criminals in charge of our chief criminal. Whatever
hells the universe contains are governed, be sure,
by God, not the devil. He is there by virtue of
His omnipresence. And He can be there in no
other character than that which forms His essence,
the character of Perfect Love. This in no degree
minimises sin nor punishment, but it leaves both
in the hands of the All Perfect, not in those of the
aU damnable.
To come back to the present and the human.
Most people, especiaUy the young, are intent on
some sort of " getting there." On every hand
heights rise above us kindling desire to chmb them.
And the ambition is no bad thing in its way ;
properly handed, one of our best things. It is one
of our highest titles that we are chmbers. The
question is as to the kind of summits we are after,
and what we expect when we reach them. One
matter to be settled with ourselves at the start is
that whatever outside elevation we attain, whatever
accumulations we make, will have no effect whatever
in satisfying us. At the topmost peak you are at
the work of wishing just as much as when you were
at the bottom. And to gain the thing you wanted

ON BEING THERE 225
is often enough to lose it. Possession is an impish
Puck that is likely enough to make a fool of you.
You grasp your treasure to see it come to pieces
in your hand. Says GreviUe in his Memoirs : " In
the course of three weeks I have attained the three
things I have most desired in the world for years
past, and upon the whole I do not feel that my
happiness is at all increased."
Is life, then, a cheat ? Only a cynic would say
so. Its business is to train us to the right direction
in our climbing, to show us the proper " there " to be
reached. And here comes in the supreme office of
rehgion. It reveals to us a spiritual world whose
" here " and " there " have no connection with
space, yet are the surest and most abiding of reahties.
The progress towards these altitudes is not measured
in mUes, nor can it be promoted by the most ingeni
ous of mechanical engineering. There are no tickets
to be purchased on this hne ; no saloon carriages ;
it is aU plain tramping. In this progress the
millionaire is no better off than the artisan. He
is, in fact, handicapped by the weight he carries.
The traveUers, unlike those others, have no mis
givings as to the kind of region they are entering,
or as to the satisfactions it offers. As the steps
mount the air becomes ever purer, the view more
majestic, the sense of innermost wellness the more
pronounced. One is continually happening on
great moments, such as that which LoweU describes
when the room he was in seemed filled with the
presence of God ; or that of the American physician,
Dr. Bucke, of whom Professor James speaks,
who in a kind of prophetic ecstasy " saw that the
15

226 OUR CITY OF GOD
universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on
the contrary a hving Presence ; I became conscious
in myself of eternal life."
Getting there — to this " there " — is plainly worth
the trouble. There is absolutely no doubt as to
the existence of the region, and none either as to
its accessibility. You may deny a future hfe, or
anything else you choose. But when it comes to
the soul's Promised Land, high up, invisible, you
may spare the breath of negation, for there are
people who are living in it. And being there they
have a shrewd suspicion, born not of the mind's
logic, but of an experience so much deeper, that
this region is an eternal one, and their relation to it
eternal. Let us conclude with a word on this
point of Renan, where, speaking of the Port Royalists
he says : " Sister Marie-Claire, exclaiming ' Victory,
Victory,' with her last breath . . . proved that
man by his wiU creates a force the law of which
is not the law of the flesh : she set forth the nature
of spirit by an argument superior to aU those of
Descartes, and in showing us the soul quitting the
body, as a ripe fruit drops from its stalk, she taught
us not to pronounce too lightly on the hmits of its
destiny."

xxv
The Mind's Adjustments
There are two master characteristics of the mind,
the study of which, properly conducted, may carry
us far. These are an infinite variabihty combined
with a not less striking underlying unity.
There is no better illustration of what we
mean than the human face, where you have at
every moment a new expression, but beneath aU a
central identity which we never mistake. There
are, it is true, both faces and souls where mobihty
seems the leading feature. Think of the play of
expression in a Garrick ! Diderot says that he
once saw him " pass his head between two folding
doors, and in the space of a few seconds his face
went successively from mad joy to moderate joy,
from that to tranquihty, from tranquility to surprise,
from surprise to astonishment, from astonishment
to gloom, from gloom to utter dejection, from
dejection to fear, from fear to horror, from horror to
despair, and then reascend from this lowest degree to
the point whence he had started." And yet, through
all contortions and all disguises, the Garrick face,
hke the Garrick soul, was one, and could change into
no other. 227

228 OUR CITY OF GOD
As in the body so in the mind nothing is more
marvellous than this play of change round certain
immovable points. No one moment of conscious
ness is the same as another. There is here a perpetual
movement, a movement largely outside our own
volition, an incessant whirl of pulsations in the
primordial mind-stuff. Where our consciousness
comes from, how it is related to the material con
ditions, by what hidden machinery it evolves its
phenomena of sensation and thought, aU this is to
us an unfathomable mystery. We are the spectators
rather than the producers of its effects. The largest
part of what we caU ourself is as unknown to us as
the other side of the moon.
What we know is that this hidden machinery
is incessantly at work producing one kind of result-
namely, a perfect adjustment between ourselves and
the outside world. It has at every moment to
solve a new equation. At every moment that cause
celebre, " Ourselves v. the Universe," takes on a
new form, a form which requires a fresh arrangement
of the constituents. The problem is, out of this
hurly-burly within and without, to construct a
working equilibrium, and it is wonderful to see how
the thing is done. The consciousness of a man who
has lived sixty years in the world has encountered
countless millions of these puzzles, and has solved
them aU. Every event of his life, trivial, critical,
solemn, ludicrous, joyous, tragic, has received in
that interior, subconscious workshop its special
handhng. To each has been fixed with infallible
certainty the appropriate sensation. His wedding-
day, the death of his best-beloved, his greatest

THE MIND'S ADJUSTMENTS 229
success, bis most disastrous faUure, have witnessed in
turn a new mental adjustment, in rigid correspond
ence with the fact. In addition to these separate
events there have been large groupings of experi
ence that have been managed with a similar precision.
The immense transitions represented in the passage
from youth to manhood and from manhood to old
age ; the opening of new horizons, the decay or
destruction of earlier behefs ; the entry upon totaUy
fresh circumstances or modes of hving — aU these
interior operations, enormously complicated, vast
in their range and results, are carried out, one may
say, without a break or a hitch. There are in the
process osciUations, disturbances, inner storms and
conflicts, but these are part of the movement,
contributors to the fore-ordained result. Through
aU, in a normal career, the mind retains its equili
brium ; it always solves its problem.
^Nothing is more interesting, or more helpful to
faith, than to observe these adjustments in face of
the graver crises. The cosmic system to which
man has been introduced is not a coddling system.
His world is an arena where he meets at every point
with caUs upon his strength and his courage. The
system is a conscription, in which every name is
enroUed and no shirking aUowed. Every mother's
son and daughter of us has extremities to face —
with death at the end and whatsoever may he
beyond. It is an excellent training ground for
heroes and the worst of worlds for cowards. Yet,
as a French writer puts it, " this obscure universe evi
dently means kindly by us." It bids us be of good
cheer. We are in a rough scene, but the mind is

230 OUR CITY OF GOD
constructed to meet its roughness. It is in the
direr circumstances, indeed, that we best see the
wonder of its adjustments. A thoughtful man
values his harshest experiences for the insight
they have given him into hfe's secret benignancy.
The inside of a catastrophe he has found to be so
different from its outer appearance. Have any of
our readers been face to face with the prospect of
an immediate violent death ? The sensation is quite
other than timidity would have imagined. The
present writer remembers shpping on a rock surface
in the Alps, and rolling within a few feet of the abyss.
Death seemed certain, but the mental condition
was not even painful. Women will receive their
death sentence from a speciahst in Harley Street,
and front it with less disturbance than they have
had from a quarrel with the cook. Pessimists
would do weU to read, on this head, some of our
authentic martyrology. Let them study, for in
stance, the story of Perpetua, one of the North
African martyrs in the Decian persecution, as given in
her own words. Apart from theology let them take it
as a study in mental conditions. Says she, " The
gaol became to me suddenly a palace, so that I
liked to be there better than anywhere else."
She writes up her diary to the night before being
dehvered to the wild beasts. " This is what I
have done up to the day before the sports ; how
the sports themselves will go, let some one else
write if he pleases." This delightful young soul is
positively gay at her prospect, gay as the veteran
More, who, consoled by the same religion, uttered his
merry jest as he laid his white head upon the block.

THE MIND'S ADJUSTMENTS 231
It is not necessary, however, to go to the tragic
element in life for proofs of our doctrine. Some
of the most striking iUustrations lie elsewhere.
History shows us every conceivable variety of
circumstance, and everywhere the mind's wonder
ful adaptations under them. We are not in love
with asceticism, yet we are glad the world has had its
ascetics, if only to reveal the thousand different
happinesses it contains. Bernard and Francis, follow
ing poverty on her stoniest ways, struck there on a
mental state which they preferred to all others. The
mechanic, the factory worker, engaged in a monoton
ous and seemingly souUess occupation, finds precisely
in that fact a mental freedom which many a humble
toiler has turned to richest uses. The Methodist
collier composes his sermon while he drives his
pick ; the cobbler thinks his way through pohtics
and rehgion as he sews and hammers. Even
madness has its pecuhar joy. Do we not remember
that letter of Lamb to Coleridge ? " Dream not,
Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and
wildness of fancy tiU you have gone mad ! " There
is no condition, indeed, in which the mind does not
labour, and with a certain success, to produce its
balance. Men, under pressure of one kind or another,
have yielded assent to the most horrible doctrines,
and yet have lived happily. The reason is that
their inner consciousness has always elaborated for
itseh a place of refuge. Said Dr. Johnson to Bos-
weU on the subject of Eternal Punishment : " Sir,
some of the texts of Scripture on this subject are
indeed strong, but they may admit of a mitigated
interpretation." Exactly. No man takes his soup

232 OUR CITY OF GOD
as hot as it is cooked. Men may subscribe the
most terrific creeds and fancy they beheve them. But
their innermost mind will have nothing to do with
extremes, and calmly works on the hypothesis that
the Universe is reasonable.
And this brings us to an aspect of the theme which
belongs pecuharly to our own day. The position
which now overshadows all others for thoughtful
men is the profound change which is working in
the region of our most momentous behefs. On the
questions of man's origin and destiny, of revelation,
of the interpretation of the Christian facts, we are
in sight of nothing less than a revolution. The
best minds are aheady fully occupied with the
movement ; and what fiUs the best minds is, by an
inevitable law, certain within a given time to
permeate the entire community. The beams that
at first gild the topmost peaks wiU, later on, give
daylight to the vaUeys. Cautious and timid souls
are aghast at the signs. They imagine that if a given
view is taken from them the privation wiU work
death to the soul. It is consoling here, however, to
note Nature's way of working in these matters, to
note what actually happens. The process man is
now going through is no new one. AU through the
ages he has been passing from one phase of belief to
another. And always when he is summoned to
advance, he finds the way prepared for him. Steps
have been cut for him in the snow ; the precipices
have been barricaded. It is the subconscious within
him, rather than his own noisy argumentation, that
has prepared his solutions. The great controversies,
indeed, seem never to be settled by argument. We

THE MIND'S ADJUSTMENTS 233
do not so much refute error as grow out of it. What
to us now are the medieval theories of the Atone
ment, the contests of Nominalists and Reahsts, the
five points of the Calvinist-Arminian controversy ?
These battles are over not because this or that side
was declared victor, but because the great human in
terests have shifted their ground. Nature, in con
ducting her chUd.keeps open his communications not
only with the past, but also with the future. Man's
present views are provisions on the way. And the
supply has perpetuaUy to be renewed. It is a
wUderness-manna which wfil not keep sweet in
perpetuity. And yet, however swift and far our thought may
run in this direction, it meets always with a limita
tion. Recurring to our opening iUustration, the
greatest mobUity of feature never destroys the
face's unity. And the mind's adaptabihty, carried
to the utmost lengths, serves only, we discover, in
the end to reveal more vividly the ultimate oneness
both of its character and its aim. The soul cannot
be contorted to the extent of denying itseh ; it
cannot amid aU its seeming divagations be kept
permanently out of its appointed road. It is when
we study this side of it that, amid the immense
perturbations of our time, we find our point of
security and of rest. Man may pursue his specula
tions to the utmost extremes, but his soul, hke
the actor's face when the grimace is over, resumes
its natural expression. There have, for instance,
been eras of history when men, led by one
particular impulse, or pursuing one particular
Une of thought, have cut themselves loose from

234 OUR CITY OF GOD
religion. In the eighteenth century the French
Encyclopedists led their countrymen into materialis
tic Atheism. Baron d'Holbach, with his " System of
Nature." proved to his own satisfaction that man
was a machine, his mind a function of the body, that
death ended all, that religion was an invention of
the priests, that the universe arose from the clash of
atoms, that God, freedom and immortality were
scientific impossibilities. And the reasoning, if we
keep to his one particular line, is not easy to answer.
What is the answer ? Here, in considering the
matter, we see the mind's method of adjustment.
The reply lies, not in the speculative reason, but in
something so much deeper. When Voltaire, whUe
a discussion on these subjects was going on, turned
the servants out of the room, lest, as he said, they
should imbibe these views and then murder their
masters, he touched in his satirical way the fringe
of the reply. Dr. Johnson, declaring that, as to
moral freedom, all the argument was against it but
all experience for it, was still nearer the mark. But it
was reserved for Kant to reach the nerve of the
matter when, in his " Practical Reason," after
admitting all the force of the logical argument,
he refounded our doctrine of God, Immortality and
Freedom on the soul's inward necessities. He put
into logical form the truth that the heart's reasons
are deeper than those of the inteUect. It is the heart
which affirms the spiritual world, which affirms the
Eternal Perfection, which affirms man's portion in
that world, and in that Perfection. We accept
its verdict, believing that in and behind it is a
reason deeper than our syUogism.

THE MIND'S ADJUSTMENTS 235
In a word, Atheism is refuted by the contents of
the soul. The soul's argument is in its own aspira
tion and ceaseless desire. It has a scale of values,
and it knows that purity, love, reverence, fidelity, are
life's highest things, and that these, because they
are highest, must be truest. It knows that their
existence in man in the germ means their existence
elsewhere in fulness. Our proof of God is that the
soul is what it is.
And thus it comes to pass that when science and
phUosophy have said their last word, the mind's
final adjustment wiU be a rehgious adjustment.
Here, and nowhere else, does it find refuge against
the infinite mutations of time and the world.
It is an open secret known to all pure souls. The
author of the " Imitation " has put it for us with bis
own simple beauty : " When a man cometh to that
estate that he seeketh not his comfort from any
creature, then first doth God begin to be altogether
sweet to him. Then shall he be contented with
whatever doth befall him in this world, then shall
he neither rejoice in great matters, nor be sorrowful
in smaU, but entirely and confidently he committeth
himseh to God, who is unto him aU in aU."

XXVI
Of the Incomplete
There are a thousand ways of looking at life, a
thousand different ideas which you may severaUy
use as keys to its interpretation. And the keys wiU
each of them open some doors, though it is the
height of foUy to suppose they wiU open all. There
is, for instance, our sense of the incomplete — a
foundation principle on which a whole phUosophy
and at least half a theology could be safely reared.
We aspire here to no such pretentious piece of
architecture ; but it may be worth while to cast a
glance at the kind of material that would be avaUable
for such a structure.
What, in the first place, do we mean by our term ?
If we saw a man minus his head we should have no
doubt about pronouncing him incomplete. But
what if he had his head, and the whole apparatus
of arms and legs, of bodily and mental faculty ? Is
he complete then ? That raises our whole question,
a question the answers to which, before we have done
with them, seem hkely to carry us far. There is, as
is suggested by our headless man, an incompleteness
that stares us in the face, glaringly perceptible to
us ah. Our man must have this particular outfit
236

OF THE INCOMPLETE 237
of head, hmbs and what else to pass muster ;
though why a thinking soul should need such a
machinery may weU give us pause. On the other
side of the universe the fashion in organisms may
be quite other. Do we not aU feel at times hke
Joubert, of whom it was said, that he had the air
of a soul which had by chance encountered a body,
and was doing the best he could with it ?
We wiU grant, however, that on this planet and
under present circumstances, there is a completeness
of bodUy structure which is rigorously demanded in
our notion of a man. Yet about this fuUy equipped
human of ours, possessed of his whole complement
of body and mind, the next thing that impresses us
is his entire incompleteness. Want, and the constant
sense of it, form his peculium, his distinguishing note.
His bodily life is one long demand. At every
moment his lungs cry for air, his eye for hght, his
ear for sound. His appetites are bold beggars
which knock constantly at a hundred doors. Then
behind the body he the pondering mind, the aspiring
soul, the craving heart. When we think of it our
man cannot, by the very nature of him, reach the
status of a finished product, for the things which
are added to him only increase his desire and
capacity of reception. Here, evidently, is a being
always in the making. He stands not for finality,
but for movement. So long as his present relation
to the universe subsists it can never be said that he
is complete. It is curious to note the way in which this feature
of human life has been taken by different observers.
The imperfect is by turns fiercely rebeUed against,

238 OUR CITY OF GOD
stoically accepted as the inevitable, or theologically
pronounced upon as an element of the general
corruption and evU of the world. Taine, from his
outside position, speaks as Calvin might have
done, of " mutilated human nature, dragging its
incurable hurt along the roads time opens to it."
Endless has been the wail — and in some of the
world's finest writing — over the incomplete in all
human achievement and experience. We mourn
over " the petty done, and the undone vast."
We complain of our unsatisfied desire, and still more
of that hour when, with the outer desire satisfied, the
soul still feels its ache. We echo Goethe's cry that
" the wished for comes too late." We know the
experience which Stevenson in his " Ordered South "
has so movingly described, when, coming to beautiful
scenery which for years we have yearned to look
at, we find in ourselves no answering thrill, but
only a duUed soul that refuses to enjoy. Is not
hfe then a tragedy ? EternaUy to come short, to
reach the goal and find it no goal, to wander year
by year in the wilderness, with cloudy pillar in
front, but failing ever to reach our Promised Land ?
So humanity, in many keys and on divers instru
ments, has uttered its musical pathetic lament.
But is this all that may be said ? Assuredly the
mere saying of things, be they never so wise, will
not, by itseh, lift the burden from life. Sorrow,
when we have completely explained it, will not
cease to be sorrow. Nevertheless, in this region
some new conceptions seem to be rising, destined,
may be, to effect real changes in the outlook, and
with them a not inconsiderable inner and spiritual

OF THE INCOMPLETE 239
consolement. It is dawning upon us that, wherever
we take it, the incomplete is not an evil, but a
good ; that its meaning is not curse, but blessing ;
that its awkward-looking gaps and crevices are, if
we narrowly observe them, openings into something
vaster than we knew before.
There is a remark by John Ruskin which wiU
start us excellently on the road we want here to
f oUow. Says he, concerning art, " Nothing is satisfying
that is complete ; every touch is false that does not
suggest more than it represents." Have not all of
us who love art felt the force of this ? The strength
of a great painting is in its appeal to the imagination,
in the caU it makes on our faculty of interpretation.
It does not so much fill the eye as stir the soul.
And where has the painter here learned his lesson
but from Nature, the greatest of all artists ? It is
the fascination of that piece of hers — the visible
universe — that what it dehneates to us, vast though
that be, is as nothing to what it suggests. As we
study the visible she offers, we recognise that this
patch of appearance may have a thousand relations
to the invisible of which we know nothing. Bradley,
our Oxford metaphysician, in his " Appearance and
Reahty," observes that " every fragment of visible
nature might, so far as is known, serve as part in
some organism not hke our bodies." A similar
observation may be made of events. That dark
side of history which we call catastrophe — the burst
ing of volcanoes, the upheaval of earthquakes, the
devastations of fire and pestilence — are fitted by
us into an order of conception and feeling which
we caU " the terrible," " the calamitous," and so

240 OUR CITY OF GOD
on. But this shows only the limit of our interpreting
faculty. These events may, on some other plane
of being, appear as parts of a whole that carries a
quite other significance. When, then, we speak of
Nature's deformities, of her incompleteness, let us
correct ourselves, remembering that it is our
interpretation always that is deformed and in
complete. The same remark may be made in another sphere
of interpretation — that of our present-day rehgion.
It has ever been the aspiration of the theologian
and the ecclesiastic to offer a system that is complete.
Rome, with her " Semper eadem," makes finahty
and infallibility the note of the Church. Protestant
ism has been not less eager. The Reformers argued
from a perfect Scripture, and buUt up what they
deemed four-square, unassaUable theologies. And
one would have thought if Providence intended
man to be rehgious and Christian, it would have
taken care at least to make things quite shipshape
and secure on this side. But no such thing ! To
day the " immutable " Roman Church rocks visibly
on its foundations. The theological systems,
Protestant and other, are seamed with cracks ;
at a dozen points we see through them to the open
sky. The documents, the evidences on which so
many brave assumptions rested, have to the modern
examiner changed entirely in their aspect and value.
Our " complete " theologies have turned out to be
so very incomplete ! But what then ? Has Provi
dence been slovenly ? Or do we not discern in all
this simply the Spirit's vaster way ? Let us here
read again our Ruskin : " Nothing is satisfying that

OF THE INCOMPLETE 241
is complete." Our systems were too complete.
Their covering was so complete as to shut out the
hght. They fitted the soul so completely as to
stifle its breath and prevent its growth. Do we
sigh for a creed so perfect in its demonstration that
there were no trouble in behoving it ? But how if
we are here not to be saved from taking trouble,
but to be developed by striving ? Is it not the
very cracks and crevices of the older conceptions
that are saving us to-day ? Is it not through
them we are creeping into a roomier, vaster temple
of God?
; From his systems and creeds let us come again
to the man himseh. The students of the social
movement of our time have at last reached the fact
that it is out of the calculated incompleteness of
the individual that Nature is building up a larger,
better humanity. It might be argued here that
our individuality — our most precious possession —
in itself requires incompleteness, for it supposes
distinction from, the absence of, the traits of other
personahties. But there is no need for abstractions
of that sort. To keep to the evident and the con
crete — do we not aU reahse what we owe socially
to our several defects ? It is because we individuaUy
lack this and that, that we, as a society, lean upon
one another, and that the whole fabric of our common
life is woven. The woman and the man, the child
and the parent, the brain-worker and the handi
craftsman, the temperament mystical and the
temperament practical — we have here, through a
thousand diversities, the aptitude of one fitting into
the lack of another, and all in this way contributing 16

242 OUR CITY OF GOD
to that organic unity which makes man mighty
through his f eUow man. As we view the spectacle we
reahse with Goethe that " only mankind together
is the true man, and that the individual can only
be joyous and happy when he has the courage to
feel himseh in the whole."
It is also through the philosophy of the incomplete
that we get the clearest of our modern lights on the
mystery of evil. The theology of the conscience,
studied from this side, is a theology of successive
completes and incompletes. St. Paul's pregnant
sentence, " I had not known sin except through
the law," contains the whole history of moral
evolution. There was a stage in the prehistoric
story when the human soul — an infant soul — knew
a moral completeness that later it found itseh to
have lost. It was hke the lost equihbrium of a
good walker who is now learning to ride. From
grace and perfectness he has come to awkwardness
and physical misery. But the awkwardness and
uneasiness that have succeeded the earher ease and
finish are reaUy a progress. The incomplete that
has been reached is higher than the complete that
was left. So in the moral world the sinner, groaning
over his imperfection, is further on than that
progenitor of his who knew no sin. What has made
our man a sinner ? Not the performance of fresh
evil. He did all this before. It is the rise in him
of a new ideal of good, in the light of which the old
hfe is seen as inferior and therefore bad. From a
low grade " complete " he has risen to a higher
" incomplete." His consciousness of sin is really
a great step upward. The seventh of Romans, that

OF THE INCOMPLETE 243
agonised wail of a stricken soul, is also the history
of a soul's ascent.
If there be truth in aU this let us harvest the fruit
it yields. There is in it for one thing a fruit of
joyous hving. The imperfections of our life, its
ragged ends, its unexplained mysteries, are, truly
seen, reasons not for gloom but the contrary. AU
these things are processes of development, are
hints of wonders yet to come. That you are here is
the thing, immeasurably greater, if you can see it,
than that you are this or that. The actual mUestone
you have reached is not the point. Is it not some
thing to be on the infinite road ?
Another thing follows, a supreme thing. The
incomplete in us is, above all else, the soul's prepara
tion for God. Also is it the abiding and all-sufficient
proof of Him. If adaptation is evidence of anything,
if the eye suggests hght somewhere, and the ear's
structure the existence of sound waves, then wha
is in you and me, the
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn,
shape one Name as key to their mystery. God is the
only possible answer to the human soul. In the
apostohc word, " Ye are complete in Him," all
phUosophy is summed.
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure
What entered into thee
That was, is, and shall be ;
Time's wheel runs back or stops ; Potter and clay endure.

XXVII
Life's Appeal
Supposing humanity were to overthrow all its
accepted rehgions ; to wipe the slate clean, and
from the very beginning to reconstruct a theory of
its own presence and significance on this planet !
How would it set about this last work ; what materials
would it find ; what kind of a structure would it
produce ? The question is not an idle one, for
there are multitudes of cultivated people to-day
who find themselves quite in the humour for it.
The past, with all its legacies, has lost authority
over them. It was, they hold, an ignorant past,
and has no right to dictate as though it were superior.
They deny its caU to teach. Could these vanished
generations, with their laboured systems, reappear
in the world, they would have to sit at our feet,
not we at theirs.
When we say that this temper has to be dealt with
we are by no means admitting its contention.
These things are at best only hah truths. AU our
progress rests on the past, and without it ours would
be the blankest of worlds. At the same time to
accept its chaUenge would be enormously interesting.
The line it throws us back upon is so infinitely
341

LIFE'S APPEAL 245
suggestive. We are brought up sheer in front of
Life itself, and set on the business of interpreting
its message. Has it a message ; one that can be
put into language ; that you can build a faith, a
theology upon ? Or are we condemned simply to be
ever putting our own fancies on the outside things ;
mistaking our own shadows for realities ? Are we
of any import to the universe ; or is our notion that
the world was made for us of the same order of
conceit as that of the Athenian lunatic who imag
ined that every vessel entering the Pireus belonged
to him ? It would, indeed, be too presumptuous to
suppose that we — that is, the things we are to-day
— are the be-aU and end-aU of the world. What
does, however, seem affirmable ; what, the more we
study things, seems the more impossible to escape
from, is the conclusion that a marvellous purpose
is busy within and around us, shaping our being
for ends of its own, which seem to be nothing less
than moral and spiritual ends. Let us take up
some of the facts and observe from them how the
account stands.
Our appeal is to life, but we have to begin it with a
confession of ignorance. We are reminded of the
answer of Confucius when his disciple Ke Loo asked
him about death: " WhUe you do not know hfe,
how can you know about death ? " The answer
is as good to-day as when it was uttered. Science
is groping after a definition of fife, and is opening
up problems of its own on this theme with which
we shaU not here concern ourselves. But we doubt
if it wUl ever reach a formula that will express aU
the mystery. For our purpose we do not need one.

246 OUR CITY OF GOD
When we speak here of hfe and its appeal we mean
only the verdicts of consciousness, that common
recognisable experience which is known to us all-
These facts and experiences we say constitute an
appeal ; one that is extraordinarUy comphcated,
that produces in us answers that seem often flatly
contradictory ; one that suggests ultimate meanings
beyond our present ken ; but which, when studied in
its totality, forms, we affirm, none the less a veritable
Gospel. Observe the way we are handled. We are put
through a process, precisely as raw cotton is put
through a process on its way to the finished article.
And there seems, in our case, to be a curious law
in the process ; one might caU it the law of antino
mies or contradictions. We get one set of experi
ences and then their exact opposite. In youth and
early manhood, for instance, we see at work a
whole machinery of passion. The attraction of
the sexes is, at this stage, a purely passional attrac
tion. The blood is hot with desire. As Aristotle
puts it, " The young are heated by nature as drunken
men by wine." It seems at times a madness, but
there is method in it. We have to accept the pas
sions as part of life's purpose in us. MUton finds
in them " the very ingredients of virtue," and
Vauvenargues is probably right when he declares
that to them " we perhaps owe the greatest advan
tages of the spirit." But this tumult of the blood
has a hmit. The movement carries to a given point,
that of parenthood, and then aU is changed. The
inner machinery of thought and feehng is reversed
and set going in a different direction. There is here

LIFE'S APPEAL 247
a double parenthood. The father and mother have
not only this child of their union ; there is a birth
in themselves of an entirely new consciousness.
There is httle or no freewill here. This is Nature's
way with us, not our own. No separate man or
woman ever planned for themselves the successive
developments. Rather are they the surprised
spectators of these phases of their hfe. Each step
has opened a more wondrous prospect ; but neither
the scenery, the route to it, nor the force that pushed
them along it is of their making. AU through
they are the agents of a power that does the
planning and prepares the result.
And it is hardly possible to mistake the signifi
cance of the double appeal that is here made. In
this antinomy of passion and parenthood Nature is
preaching to us the plainest of sermons. She is
clearly no ascetic. She begins by caUing to our
every faculty. She believes in the senses or she
would not have made them, or stirred them as she
does. But the senses are with her only a beginning.
Man is not to end with them. Their result, in
leading to parenthood, is to harness us to duty, to
service, to self-sacrifice. They are, it turns out,
simply the porters who open doors into the nobler
rooms of the spirit.
Here is no word of traditional theology, but these
plainest facts seem of themselves to be getting
us pretty deep into both ethics and rehgion. Observe
now another of the life antinomies, that of Appear
ance and Reality. Here Nature appears to be
positively laughing at us . She is always a humourist ,
andjtheology has made no more deplorable blunder

248 OUR CITY OF GOD
than in overlooking the fact. There is infinite
humour in the love-making prehminary to the
discipline of family life. But that is only one trait
out of many in her genial comedy-making. She
begins by merrily deceiving us. In that lovely
book of medieval religion, the " Ancien Riowle,"
the writer has some perception of this. He thinks
God is playful. " The Lord when He suffereth us
to be tempted playeth with us as the mother with
her young darling. She flics from him and hides
herself, and lets him sit alone and look anxiously
round, and call ' Dame ! ' ' Dame ! ' and weep
awhfie ; and then she leapeth forth laughing with
outstretched arms and embraceth and kisseth him."
Yes, fife plays hide-and-seek with us with evident
gusto. She cradles us in iUusions and dehghts in
every kind of make-believe. Our senses trick us.
They would have us believe the sun goes round the
earth and that our planet is the centre and big
thing of the universe. But the jest is carried
much further. Our expectations are aU merry
deceivers. The goods they deliver are not according
to advertisement. The satisfaction of desire is, we
find, the biggest of dissatisfactions. The moment
of winning the prize is the moment . of losing it.
We grasp a changeling, a something quite different
from the thing we pursued.
It would be easy to stigmatise this play as cruel,
the mockery as heartless. There have not been
wanting critics who have taken this view. And it
would be a true one if aU ended here. But in the
life-process the jest is a kindly one. It is the
smUe on the face of a giver who takes back

LIFE'S APPEAL 249
the dangled toy to offer in its place a jewel of
price. Nature's iUusions are only the veUs of
the real. With healthy minds her disappoint
ments, so far from produoing disgust of life,
create only a thirst for a deeper hfe — and point the
way to it. Humanity was quick to perceive this.
Its rehgions have been built upon it. The old
Eastern philosophy, which recognised the visible
world as phenomenal merely, the projected shadow
of a Divine reaUty beneath, was in fact the human
answer to this part of hfe's mysterious appeal. The
iUusions, mark you, are in themselves good as
long as they last. They contribute to hfe's zest
and enjoyment. And when we find them out it is
only to discover that they have changed their
function. As in that earher antinomy of passion
and parenthood, they have become now once more
the uncouth porters who open to us the gates into
new reaches of the spiritual realm.
To take now one more of our paired opposites.
Life offers itseh to us as for one thing an affair
of the ugly, the hmited, the imperfect. And over
against that there stands in man's heart the inde
structible sense of the infinite, the perfect, the wholly
beautiful. The Bethlehem birth is perpetually
being repeated in this world. Always is the glorious
ideal being born into the lowly actual, the sense of
the highest coming to consciousness in surroundings
of the sordid and the mean. That vision of the
Eternal Beauty which Plato saw, and which has
dwelt since in every artist breast, is a rehgion in
itseh ; one against which there is no sceptic answer.
That such an appeal as this should come to us out

250 OUR CITY OF GOD
of life, and find in the soul such a response, is an
indestructible foundation for faith. It is not simply
that Nature herseh is full of beauty. If that were
all it would be much. It would show that the
power behind was an artist ; that there was mind
there, and soul. No conceivable play of chance
could end in the beautiful. From first to last it
is a soul's affair. And the creed taught by it is
tolerably clear. It could have no affinity with the
ugly. It must reject a sainthood that cultivates
dirt. A Liguori living by choice in a wretched
narrow room at the back of a staircase, receiving
hght and air from an opening covered with paper
instead of glass, has evidently, in the hght of this
revelation, mistaken the cosmic idea.
Plainly hfe's appeal, as it comes to us from the
outside, is a plea for the beautiful. An insistent
plea, which man wiU be compeUed to answer until
his cities, his landscapes, his tools and implements,
the whole furniture and surroundings of his existence
come under its glorious law. But that is only a
beginning. The voices that ring in his soul insist
on another beauty. Consider here the soul's
quahty. There is no revelation so sure as that in
the quahties of things. To fire, or water, or sunlight
you may give any name you please. No name or
lack of name wUl prevent them from working out
into the world all that is hid in their nature. Arid
as with fire or sunlight so with the soul. It works
out of its quahty, out of that mystery of its essence
which is irresistible and indestructible. And its
quahty, ascertainable whenever it shows itseh,
is to aspire and to work ever towards the perfect —

LLFE'S APPEAL 251
the perfect, not only of outward form, but of that
inner and spiritual beauty which we call hohness.
What we have here dwelt on is only a part of that
hfe-appeal which speaks in the modern consciousness.
There is far more, but this in itseh surely is much.
It is a revelation as rich as it is authentic and
authoritative. It is a revelation without books,
without Church, without catechism or tradition.
And yet its mandate is as clear as though it pealed
from Sinai, or wrote itseh on tables of stone. And
the burden of it ? Surely it is to be of good cheer ;
to enjoy what life offers ; to traverse without falter
ing its road of experience ; to take its Ulusions and
disappointments as openings to deeper things ;
to reahse ever behind it that Power which shares in
our laughter and in our tears ; which plays with us,
but wiU not let us stop at play ; which wiU have us
rest at nothing short of the highest. When from
this study of hfe we open the New Testament we
find a name for that Power. Life's unvoiced
appeal and this message from Gahlee — the message
which bids us trust in a Father whose name is
Love — seem marveUously in accord.

XXVIII
The Great and the Small
One of the first lessons our senses teaoh us is the
difference in the size of things. As we grow older
the impression of this deepens, and spreads over
much else than what we see. The question of
magnitudes, of the scale of objects and of our
relation to them, extends from figures to ethics, and
on to the innermost spiritual. Here, we perceive,
is one of Nature's unspoken sermons — a discourse
of infinite depth, and with a thousand apphcations.
In the great and the smaU are wrapped up at once
a theology and a disciphne. The contemplation of
them is a revelation of the ways of God ; the action
of them Is a constantly operating force on our
character and hfe.
The physical universe, as it opens to the eye of
modern science, is our first teacher here. A mar
vellous teacher, truly. As we survey what it offers
we are at a loss to know on which side the greatest
wonders he. Its great and its smaU are aUke in
their infinitude. Both go beyond our utmost
force of computation, or even expression. As to
the^first^we have no figures in which to sum the
magnitudes which encompass us. The size of our
2E2

THE GREAT AND THE SMALL 253
own solar system is enough to beggar thought.
But when we know it as one of millions of solar
systems, separated by distances so vast that it
would take thousands of years to count the miles
which separate the nearest from each other ; when
the telescope shows us stars so far off that they
have no paraUax ; in other words, that when we
have changed our view-point by the 180 million
mUes across which our orbital motion has carried
us, these glittering points, seen from this opposite
extremity, have not changed their apparent position
by a hair's-breadth — we are in a region of magnitudes
which we can talk about and grope after, but can
never reahse. That is our system on its side of
greatness. But the other confounds us not less. The
infinitude of the httle is one of the revelations of
our time. Look into our own body. The anatomist
finds each one of us a macrocosm containing in our
system a whole universe of sentient hfe. What do
we think of the statement that the veins of any
average man contain twenty-five millions of millions
of millions of red corpuscles, each a separate, active
entity ; that intermingled with these is the im
measurable host of white corpuscles, a race of dis
ciplined fighters incessantly warring on our behalf
against swarms of hostile intruders ? With what
mind do we contemplate the recent discoveries in
radio-activity ; discoveries which show us the atom
— the hitherto supposed ultimate of minuteness —
as itseh infinitely divisible ; that, so far from being
a fixed point, it is an aggregate of tens of thousands
of particles, revolving with immense velocity round

254 OUR CITY OF GOD
a centre, as relatively distant from each other as
stars in the sky, in bulk not more than a five-
thousand milhonth part of our atom ? This is the
kind of universe we are hving in ; this is the revela
tion of its physicaUy great and small, so far as it
has at present been disclosed to us.
Observing these two extremes, the first point
that strikes us is our own position in relation to
them. Is not that in itseh a thing to contemplate ?
We seem to have been placed midway. Our
readers are doubtless aware of Dr. Russel WaUace's
speculations as to man and his earth being the centre
of the universe. Without committing ourselves
to the views of that eminent scientist, we are at
least bound to consider the problem which he
offers. Why do we stand where we are in the
scheme of things ? Whatever or wherever we may
be as to physical position, in thought at least we are
central in the cosmos. With equal facihty we look
up and down. We seem at furthest remove from
the least and the greatest, while in immediate
contact with both. There are, we may weU beheve,
hidden meanings here which it will take ages to
disclose. In the meantime our relationship to these
two things offers, even to our present stage of
inteUigence, some very obvious lessons.
Before reaching them, however, there is a con
sideration which meets us at the threshold, and to
which, if only in passing, we must give a word.
In studying the question of size, we realise in the
most vivid way the two worlds we are hving in.
There is the material world, where we think in miles,
metres or pounds avoirdupois. We say Mont Blanc

THE GREAT AND THE SMALL 255
is 15,000 feet high ; that the sun's bulk is near a
million and a half times that of the earth ; that the
house-fly on the pane is less than half an inch long.
But the mind that makes these computations has,
in its own structure and operations, nothing to do
with these figures and sizes. It knows them, but
is not of them. Materialism has made some strange
enough suggestions in its time, but we have not heard
its most ardent disciple arguing that the idea of the
sun in our brain is a milhon and a hah times bigger
than our idea of the earth. We do not either talk
of square thoughts or of yeUow emotions. The mind
that reports to us all we know of matter proclaims,
we see, at every stage of its operations, its own
isolation. It weighs and measures matter, but keeps
it out of doors. It suffers no invasion of its own
august, mysterious realm. The difference between
these two worlds wiU have to be borne in mind in
aU that foUows.
Starting from the physical side, let us recur to
the point we noted, of our contact as human beings
with the infinitely small and the infinitely great.
It is, we may be sure, not by chance that we touch
these two things. Our contact is big with ethical
meaning. Rightly apprehended, we find in them
the two poles of the spiritual life, for they demand
from us at once a boundless aspiration and an entire
humihty. Aspiration, for, say they, there is nothing
too great for us ; humility, because the Divinity we
seek is not less at the bottom of the scale than at
the top. It is along this hne that science most
effectuaUy aids faith. In that exhibition of the
transcendent wonders of the atom which is our

256 OUR CITY OF GOD
latest revelation, we have a new sanction for the
Gospel virtue of lowhness and for its grace of con
tentment. The investigation which has discovered
the infinite potencies of the tiniest visible speck
suggests the infinite potencies in our own least and
lowest. We see here how our insignificancies, our
limitations, are, not less than their opposites, parts
of the Divine order. The infinite is not only in
the heaven of heavens ; it is also in yonder mole
cule. And we shall have achieved one of the
greatest of all the inner victories when it has become
to us an article of faith, a fact of hfe to be embraced
and held fast day by day, that our least and poorest,
the side where we do not count, the failure, the
weakness that keeps us back from honour, the
obstacle that mars our pleasure — that all this, not
less than our shining gift, our sense of power, has
in it and behind it all the majesty of the eternal
purpose. The infinitely great hves with and by
the infinitely httle. Our weakness, not less than
our strength, is a part of God. It is a side of His
purpose, an aspect of His hfe.
And this is indeed a blessed discovery. It puts
us in love, not only with a part, but with the whole
of our life. We look beyond the sordid surface to
the eternal beauty that gleams through. We
reahse that existence itseh is victory. We do not
quarrel with its knobs, excrescences, and rough
surfaces. We know that weeds, so called, are
" plants whose virtues have not yet been discovered."
The doctrine holds of the inner garden as well as
of our plot outside. We examine our limitations
with a new hopefulness. They are the atomic

THE GREAT AND THE SMALL 257
side of us. It is, we perceive, only our ignorance
which hides from us their mysterious, beneficent
working, their stupendous Divine relationships.
The counsel of Walter Pater about hving " so
exclusively in the ideal or poetic elements, the
elements of distinction in our everyday hfe — that
the unadorned remainder of it becomes as though
it were not," impresses us for its beauty of expres
sion rather than for its truth. It is the sentiment of
an Oxford recluse, who knew too httle of the rough
and tumble of average existence. It is in that
rough and tumble, if anywhere, that most of us
wiU have to find ourselves, and it must have its f uU
credit in our scheme of things. The " doctrine
of the little," which we can thus apply so helpfully
to ourselves, is one we also constantly need in our
intercourse with our neighbours. The ancient word
" Maxima reverentia puero debetur " should be
widened in its apphcation. We are to pay the
highest reverence to the boy because of what he
may be. But our doctrine teaches us to pay it
also to the poorest and meanest among us, and that
because of what he is. Here, too, could we but
see it, is the highest in disguise.
This leads us directly to the question of the great
and the smaU in our interior life. We see here at
once how aU the physical analogies fail us. The
rule to judge by now is not the foot-rule. Euclid
gives us no help in the measurement of a great
soul. Yet we know one when we see it, and some
thing in our inmost nature forms the register of its
dimensions. We see, also, how it comes by its
greatness. It is always by alhance with something 17

258 OUR CITY OF GOD
greater than itself. The devotion to great causes,
the fellowship with great personalities, is in every
instance the secret. The second here precedes the
first. William of Orange in the death-struggle of
the Netherlands, Mazzini in the fight for Itahan
freedom, give themselves each to his cause, reckless
of personal interest, because they have each first
established inward alhance with God. The man's
self waxes great in proportion as it is forgotten in
something larger. Spiritual httleness, on the other
hand, exhibits the same law on its opposite side.
When a man is self-centred, he inevitably dwindles,
and for the reason that such a centre is not strong
enough to carry any weight of structure. The New
Testament word that we must lose our fife to find it
is, it thus appears, nothing less than the organic,
fundamental law of the spirit.
Drummond, in his " Natural Law in the Spiritual
World," might have added a chapter on " The
Soul's Law of Gravitation." There is such a law,
which operates as constantly and as universally as
that which keeps the planets in their course. A
character, a personality, draws men in exact pro
portion to its spiritual dimension. We have here
the origin and growth of Churches, of religions. The
secret of diseipleship is a secret of solar attraction.
An emancipated nature, grown beyond the dimen
sions of selfhood, draws the lesser souls by a force
irresistible as the sun's action on Mars and Jupiter.
Here is an astronomy real as that which occupies our
telescopes. As the sun holds and swings the planets,
itseh drawn by some mightier force which keeps it
and them in their vast journey through space,

THE GREAT AND THE SMALL 259
so fiere we see central, elect souls by their mass
and quahty drawing into their light and warmth
the lesser natures, to be, in their turn, with their
foUowers, swept on by a gravitation mightier than
their own toward the spirit's ultimate bourn.
In the human evolution the great of the physical
sphere, whUe keeping its due place in the cosmic
order, wiU in the end be everywhere recognised as
inferior to the other greatness. What the foremost
souls have always seen will be seen in the end by
the brotherhood at large. A nation, a city, will
value itseh not by its material bigness, but by tb°!
height of its inner hfe. The glory of Athens, the
thrill which comes from Jerusalem, have nothing to
do with their diameter, or the census of their
population. " What," cries Renan, " is the whole
of America beside a ray of that infinite glory with
which a city of the second or third order — Florence,
Pisa, Siena, Perugia — shines in Italy ! " The sen
tence is, no doubt, a vast exaggeration. But it
would be true were America to produce nothing be
yond her crops, her iron and steel, and her million
aires. She will be measured in history, as Thucydides
said of Attica, by her capacity to produce men. And
the measurement of history is akin to the measure
ment of eternity. When the seer in the Apocalypse
says, " I saw the dead, smaU and great, stand before
God," the question is, " Who here are the small
and who the great ? " It were weU for us surely
to become clear on this point, and, with the least
delay possible, to square our theory of values with
the one which wiU there be used in judgment !

t XXIX
Our Holy Places
Those holy fields,
Over whose acres walked those blessed feet
Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed
For our advantage to the bitter cross.
The hnes, famihar to most of us, give us Henry IV.,
in Shakespeare's great play, explaining to his
courtiers his project of a new expedition to Palestine.
Is it not, when we come to think of it, a kind of
miracle, this Palestine ? For ages that strip of
land on the far edge of the Mediterranean has
drawn the world as the moon draws the sea. In
the medieval time we have hundreds of thousands
of men, from kings to peasants, leaving home,
family, pleasure, business, that they might look
on this piece of earth, that they might open the
way to it for their feUow-believers. To-day, under
different forms, there is the same mysterious
fascination. From England, from America, from
states Catholic and Protestant, from the snows of
Russia, pilgrims wend there in endless procession.
The rich go in luxury, the poor ragged and barefoot,
but the same emotion burns in all hearts. The Jew
knows this country as the home at once of his race
260

OUR HOLY PLACES 261
and of his rehgion. We English have no such
possession of England as the Jew had of Palestine.
England is not, to such a depth, the country of our
soul. It is our birthplace and our home. But our
religion is an exotic. London bas not the signifi
cance to us of Jerusalem. We have lakes, springs,
mountains, but no Lake of Galilee, no well like that
of Jacob, no hiU sacred as Zion or Olivet. And yet
the Jew, to whom the land was all this, the father
land of both his body and his soul, is in perpetual
exfie from it ! Altogether, we say, a miraculous
country. But there are questions raised here which go
beyond Jew and Gentile, beyond Palestine and its
pilgrims. That the world should have sacred
places at aU, that such emotions towards them
should arise in the minds of men and sway them as
they do, is a matter that in itself claims our fullest
attention. Plainly here is an affair not of reasoning
or of calculation. These movements are born
not of the esthetic sense, not of trade and profit, not
of ambition. We are plainly on the track of one
of those forces outside reason which, more than
reason, go to the making of man. Could we indeed
read to the bottom the secret of man's pilgrimages,
we should have gone far into the entire riddle of
himseh and his world.
The secret is one chiefly of the soul, but not
the soul only. When a spot has become sacred to
men it is always in the first place because a great
spirit bas dwelt there. But another arresting feature
is the way in which, in the making of a " holy
place," the outside matter, the physical surrounding,

262 OUR CITY OF GOD
has acted as a kind of reflex of this soul, one might
say an absorbent of it ; such that, by dwelling in the
place, the saint or hero has saturated it with his
personality, as though emanations from his central
self had poured into this house he dwelt in, into
these fields and hiUs his eye looked upon. There
seems a subtle giving off of the soul, a passing of its
essence into its immediate surroundings ; a process
which might be compared to that outrush of electrons
from the atom which, as science is now showing us,
is one of the forms of radio-activity.
This subtle reaction of mind and matter, be it
observed, extends over the whole area of mental
life. Every feehng in us, our innermost heart-beat,
is held and reflected by the outside that envelops us.
A violin played on by a master acquires a new value.
The music has got into the wood. The soul's music,
in aU its kinds, from sadness to exultation, in Uke
manner vibrates through its physical surroundings-
Has a tragedy happened in the house ? The buUd-
ing becomes henceforth itself tragic. The shadow
in the souls that sinned or suffered there glooms
on the walls for ever. With what weird power
has PhUip Marston put this for us in his picture of
the haunted house !
Must this not be, that one then dwelling here,
Where one man and his sorrows dwelt so long,
Shall feel the pressure of a ghostly throng,
And shall upon some desolate midnight hear
A sound more sad than is the pine-trees' song,
And thrill with great inexplicable fear ?
Compare with this the emotion of the exUe who,
after forty years' absence at the world's far end,

OUR HOLY PLACES 263
comes back to the old English homestead where he
was born ! The timbers, the grey stones, common
place to other wayfarers, shine upon him with a
spiritual radiance ; they have a voice which goes to
his heart. The soul of the past is there enshrined ;
here, preserved for him in doorway, gable and ingle
nook are a thousand precious memories. The essence
of his early years — of loved faces that are gone
and voices that are silent — distils into his heart.
For him, as long as it stands, a dear and holy place ;
holy, because the rude material of it has become
saturate with soul.
This intimate partnership of world and spirit
shows itself in the most diverse forms. We observe,
for example, how the peculiar quahty of a dominating
personahty colours for us the whole impression
of a landscape. Each country has its own style of
haunting. Its presiding genius has each his peculiar
speU, and we see through his eyes. Why does the
Lake Country impress us so differently from the
scenery of the Border and of the Highlands ?
It is not the contour of the hiUs or the colour of the
skies. It is that the region is under a different
inspiration. Grasmere and Langdale we find possess
ing us with the calm cult of Nature, and of the
presence that is behind Nature, with " the sense
of something subtly interfused." We are dreamy,
contemplative, introspective. And we know the
reason. It is because a spirit of this kind bas been
before us, and laid his spell upon the land. We
are in the Wordsworth country. But at Loch
Katrine or under Ben Ledi our mood is all warlike
and romantic. The heart dances to the tune of the

264 OUR CITY OF GOD
old chivalries. The mountains, the valleys seem
made for that, and to give this as their message.
Again, a clear case of spiritual penetration and
possession. This is the land of romance, because
the soul of Sir Walter, its poet and lover, was the
home of romance.
It is precisely this sense of a special quahty of
soul that gives the peculiar flavour of feeling with
which we come to spots that in the stricter sense
we call " holy." Art, philosophy, romance, exhale,
as we have seen, their own particular virtue. But
their charm is not that of religion, of the spirit's
loftiest exercise. This has a thriU of its own, un
translatable into any other. Olivet and Assisi
have a different aroma from that of the Parthenon
or the Louvre. At Oxford you have one grade
of pleasure in the Bodleian, another at the Martyrs'
Memorial, or looking up at the window at Lincoln
CoUege behind which Wesley and the " Holy
Club " met for study and prayer. So remote is this
consciousness from estheticism, from the cult of the
physically beautiful, that the attempt so often made
to produce the one from the other is always a fafiure,
Rome is, perhaps, the best example of what we
mean. St. Peter's charms the one sense, but leaves
the other untouched. The pilgrims to Rome have
found it at once the centre of art and the negation
of faith. So was it with Petrarch, who names it
Babylon ; with Luther, whom it made a Protestant ;
with Goethe, who left it filled with anti-Catholic
rage, to write the " Venetian Epigrams." What
we want for our " holy place " is not architecture,
but the first simplicity. The high rapture we seek

OUR HOLY PLACES 265
would come to us, not under gUded domes, but at
the spot, could we find it, where Paul lodged and
taught in his chains. We should love to hght on
the nook of which Justin Martyr writes : "I am
lodging with a man caUed Martin, above the
Timothine Baths," the house where, he says,
the little Christian band met for worship ; and
that spot, could we hit on it, in Smyrna, of 'which
Ireneus speaks : " I can tell also the very place
where the blessed Polycarp was accustomed to
sit and discourse ; and also his entrances, his
walks, . . . and his conversations with the people
and his famihar intercourse with John, ... as
also his famiharity with those that had seen the
Lord." It is this speciahty of the rehgious sense, this
struggle which it wages for a pure, unadulterated
manifestation, that has given rise to Puritanism, to
those bare simplicities of worship so offensive
to art, but so mighty for hfe. It is the cry for
immediacy of access of spirit to spirit which would
have no distraction of the outward in its high inter
course. Jacob's rude block at Bethel was better
as a Divine remembrancer than a garish temple.
Here is why simple souls have found their bare
meeting-house more sacred than cathedral altar.
They know it as the place where the heart has
reached its deepest and highest, where the soul has
found its utmost wealth of inner experience. The
uncushioned pew, the rude bench, have been to them
the Damascus road where the vision came, their
Milan garden where, hke Augustine, they heard
the inner voice that shaped their destiny. By the

266 OUR CITY OF GOD
Spirit's thrill, most august of consecrations, the
lowly place has become holy ground.
Every thinking man, in his progress through hfe,
has his elect spots, unnoted of others, which are
shrines to him. Poor indeed is our home if there
be not some quiet chamber in it, whose windows
open toward Jerusalem. There is a corner, a chair,
a bedside, whence the soul has found passage
way upward, and where secret strengths have
flowed in on it, as from uttermost heights. Often
these places are the unhkehest of aU. Prison
floors, the bottommost abyss of outward affliction,
are by the soul's magic turned into altars. A
victim of the earthquake at Valparaiso, in a letter to
the present writer, describes how, thrust by the
disaster, with his family, from a comfortable home,
upon the bare hiUside, with no shelter from the
bitter cold, he found, in the four nights thus spent, a
sense which he would never after forget of the Divine
presence and love. To sincere hearts each year
makes the world richer in these sanctities. One
becomes almost superstitious about them. There is
a certain spot in one of the most crowded streets of
London, where the present writer has, in passing,
had time after time such sudden rush of happy
thought as to make him wonder whether hidden
behind the brickwork there be not some ministering
sprite, some mystic fount of inspiration.
But as our view enlarges, the visible world itself,
apart from this or that spot in it, acquires a conse
cration of its own. We apprehend another side to
it. At every point it gives hints of a meaning,
a reality behind, infinitely greater than appears.

OUR HOLY PLACES 267
The old paganism which peopled every hill and
stream with its genius or unseen guardian was but
the crude expression of what humanity has every
where instinctively divined, that matter was im
bedded in spirit ; that the outward was but the
symbol of an inward. All lustrations, baptisms,
eating of bread, drinking of wine — sacraments in
corporated into Christianity from usages old as the
world — mean the same thing. We partake of our
sacrament wherever we discern and reverence the
invisible in our use and enjoyment of the visible.
Our sense of the earth's beauty becomes then an
act of rehgion. We survey its glory in the spirit
of Augustine, with his " Wrangle who pleases,
I wiU wonder." The soughing of the woods, " the
ancient everlasting song of brooks and streams,"
sound in our ears as voices in a temple, the
snowy mountains are our vision of the eternal
throne. AU that has here been said, leads, it wiU be per
ceived, in one direction and centres in one result.
The ultimate " holy place " is always a soul. The
wide earth is consecrated by the universal soul
that is in it. Each elect spot has acquired its
virtue from some pure spirit that has there shed its
hght and power. There is no sanctity of buildings,
of shrines, of rites or rehcs, but is the reflection
from an inner fife. One wonders, amid the rush
of modern civihsation, whether, considering its aims
and tendencies, it is capable of adding to the holy
places of the early world ; whether Chicago or New
York will ever be centres of pilgrimages ? That will
come under only one condition — a condition not too

268 OUR CITY OF GOD
apparent just now — that souls grow there of such
quality and reach to such heights as shaU enable
them, as of old, effectuaUy to hghten, warm, and
purify the world. The modern man needs to utter
with a new intensity the prayer in the Phaedrus :
' Grant me beauty in the inward soul, and may
the outward and inward man be at one."

xxx
Renewals
Life contains a law of renewals which is worth more
study than seems to have been given to it. It meets
us at every turn, this law, impressing itseh on
everything we see and everything we do. It is so
famihar that we are apt to overlook its subtlety,
and the wonderful imphcations that lie in it. Re
newal contains for one thing the element of repeti
tion, which itseh is something to reflect upon.
How strange when we think of it, this law of iteration
on which our world is constructed ! We could
imagine it as so far otherwise ; a world where
every fresh morning and every fresh deed were
radicaUy different from every other morning and
deed. But the sun comes punctually to his hour.
Water, air, fire meet us to-day with the same quahties
as they did yesterday. A great mass of our own
doings are a round of repetitions. How much of our
years have been spent in getting into and out of our
clothes ; in eating our three or four meals a day ; in
turnmg into bed and sleeping there ; in performing
the same daUy journey, in doing the same work !
Sameness, to this degree, is, to be sure, no mere
arbitrary custom. It is a law of life which has more
in it than at present we know.

270 OUR CITY OF GOD
But if we observe closely we discover in this round
of things something more than repetition. Quietly,
unostentatiously — so quietly that her sleight-of-
hand is apt to go unnoted — Nature slips into the
process her touch of the new. When we have
watched long enough we see that her round is not,
after all, a circular one. It is a spiral. To change
the illustration, we may say that into her music,
which begins with the simplest air, come incessant
variations, growing always in fulness and com
plexity. Take natural history as a story of her
renewals. In the animal series, from the ascidian
up to man, she gives you at every stage the same
principle with a fresh application. Her economies
are marveUous. She is ever cutting her old clothes
to new patterns. A man's hand is just the fore
foot of a horse with a cunning twist given
to it. The body of a child before birth takes on in
succession aU the typal forms from the humblest
to this human highest. It is an object-lesson
giving in epitome the slow process of the ages. The
history of forms is a history of renewals ; renewals
that are chmbing always upwards towards some
far-off summit.
It is, however, when we come to the inner, conscious
hfe that we reach the vital lessons of our theme.
Renewal which works in this way in the outer
world is, we perceive, operating with no less cer
tainty in the spiritual realm. The history of rehgion,
as it opens to the modern eye, is teUing us a story
of renewals that is of utmost consequence to faith.
Here again is the eternal music, beginning with the
simple air, into which are constantly woven new

RENEWALS 271
and mightier harmonies. Tindal's " Christianity as
old as the Creation " was, as a title, by no means so
wide of the mark as seemed to his orthodox con
temporaries. Augustine, in a memorable passage,
had said precisely the same thing. The best rehgion
we have to-day has been in humanity in germ aU
along. How significant that remark made by the
Indians to the missionary Ehot : " Their forefathers
did know God, but after this they feU into a deep
sleep, and when they did awake they quite forgot
Him . ' ' The rehgious history of Egypt, of Babylonia,
of India and China, as we are now learning it, shows
humanity as from the beginning possessed by the
same rehgious aspirations, moving under the same
rehgious impulse, waiting for and opening their
minds to the same drip of revelation.
That is the start of the music. But observe how
it proceeds. One of the most sahent examples of
our law of renewal in rehgion is that given in the
history of revivals. We know the rehgious revival
as a period of high spiritual excitement, when
multitudes of men come under a mysterious psychic
influence, and when striking results are obtained
in the region of the moral hfe. No instructed person,
whatever his standpoint, and whatever he makes of
them, can help accepting revivals as a fact, a
part of the world-process in humanity. But here
comes the point. As the years roU on these pheno
mena are renewed ; but the renewal is never the
same thing. There is always to be noted in them a
move forward. To take an instance. Phrygia,
in pagan times, was noted for its rehgious excite
ments. The inhabitants, in their worship of

272 OUR CITY OF GOD
Cybele, gave themselves up to extravagant, mystical
frenzies. Later, under Christianity, Phrygia be
came the centre of the Montanism of the second
century. The old emotional furore was renewed.
Artisans, women preachers, claiming a special
inspiration, stirred the multitudes to intensest
rehgious passion^ The enthusiasms, gesticulations,
prostrations, reminded observers of the Corybantic
orgies of the earher days. But, with aU its excesses,
how far in advance was the Montanist revival
over these predecessors ? Into the old passion
and fervour a new element had come, whUe a mass
of coarser ingredients had been drained away. Of
every revival that has happened since in Christen
dom a similar thing might be said. The mighty
stirrings of the thirteenth century, out of which the
begging Orders arose, were an enormous gain upon
the corruption that preceded ; but how inferior
in the outlook they offered to the revival of the
Reformation ! Methodism was born in a revival, a
movement of magnificent moral vigour, but with
vast gaps on its intellectual side.
To-day we are in the midst of a new, and to many
an apparently ahen, movement. Instead of these
enthusiasms we have, ruling over wide and influential
classes of society, the scientific and critical spirit.
There has been an enormous process of negation, of
weeding out, of mental reconstruction. And the
soul has had to pay for this by a temporary loss of
feehng. It has seemed at times as if the old devo
tion, the old ecstasy of the rehgious life, were gone
beyond recaU. Mr. Morley, in his " Compromise,"
says of our day : " Rehgion, whatever destinies may

RENEWALS 273
be in store for it, is at least for the present hardly any
longer an organic power. It is not that supreme,
penetrative, controlling, decisive part of a man's
life which it has been and will be again." The passage
is a prophecy. " And will be again." Assuredly
we may trust here Nature's principle of renewals.
What she once sets going she never again loses
sight of. The air recurs, in higher key, sweeter, with
divine variations. What has been taking place in
rehgion might be compared to a spiral movement
round a mountain towards its summit. The
path, in its winding, leads at times quite away from
the prospect. But it always comes back to it, and
at every fresh turn the scene is given us from a higher
standpoint and over a vaster realm. There is no
conflict between science and rehgion. What is
going on is this combined upward movement of
the two forces. And the next great revival will
show the result. It wiU be as high above the earher
ones in the quahty of its contents as Montanism
was high above its Phrygian predecessors. AU the
music wiU be in this renewal. Everything that
enters into the rehgious life and constitutes its value
— its unspeakable dehght of feehng, its vision of God,
its moral victory, its triumph of love — wUl be there,
and this conjoined with an inteUectual wealth that
immeasurably heightens the feehng, while provid
ing for it an immutable foundation. We repeat,
there are no leakages in the spiritual order. Not
one atom of rehgion that has come into this world
wiU ever be lost out of it. Nature's law of renewal
is here our sure charter of faith.
" Is this the inevitable world-movement ? " cries
18

274 OUR CITY OF GOD
some one. " Then let it go on. We need not
trouble ourselves further about it." That would be
the worst of constructions and the falsest of in
ferences. The world-movement is our movement.
It is the divine impulse that stirs in us and that it
were highest treason to disobey. As Dr. Gore has
well said, " When the best men stop trying the
world sinks back like lead." And here it is that
the topic becomes immediately personal. The
higher renewals in the life of the nation and the
Church depend on the renewals in our own hfe.
To lose from ourselves the power of securing them
were to lose everything. That power is accord
ingly, above aU others, one to be kept and re
inforced. In order to do this we need to know the
sources and alhes of renewal, and to keep in touch
with them. One of the most potent of these is the
law of association. We all know the way in which
a note of music or the scent of a flower wiU at times
set all our being in a flame. There is a Middlesex
country lane known to the writer where the scent
of a bush of sWeet-briar has time and again sent
him back with a rush upon his boyhood's days
— to an old garden which had, too, its bush of sweet-
briar, and so to recollections which revoke the years
and make him a boy again.
It is on this principle of association, sohdly
laid in the deeps of us, that rehgion founds some of
its most potent forces. It is a spring of renewal.
Through something outward, that appeals to the
senses, we are carried, as in a flash, to our utmost
inward. As Walter Pater puts it : " Rehgious
sentiment. . . . has always had much to do

RENEWALS 275
with localities, with the thoughts that attach them
selves to actual scenes and places." The spiritual
life, wherever it has been greatly hved, seems to
exhale its perfume on the material things it has
had contact with, and to sweeten them for ever.
In one way or another we aU admit the sanctity of
the relic. The tomb of a loved one, to a high soul,
is always a place of spiritual renewal.
It is because of our need to keep in good order,
and at its full working power, our apparatus of
renewal that we see the permanent use of rehgious
observance and worship. We go to it not to
hear the latest news, but for inward refreshing.
Often enough the place of meeting is itseh our
channel of inspiration. The consecration of a church
bunding hes not in any ecclesiastical formula
uttered over it. Its sacredness comes from the
" heart-work " that has gone on in it. Where the
purposes for which the structure has been reared
are truly reahsed the worshipper feels that some
thing mystic has happened to its very materials.
Like a violin in the hands of a great player, " the
music has got into the wood." Modest conventicles,
without pretension to external beauty, become in
this way veritable shrines. Humble souls go there
as to a spiritual rendezvous. Before word is spoken
we are often in the case of good Alexandrian Philo,
who, as he says, from being empty, " suddenly
became fuU, ideas being in an invisible manner
showered upon him and implanted in him from on
high." There are few things, we repeat, more worth
safeguarding than our power of renewal. EspeciaUy

276 OUR CITY OF GOD
in the higher things. Our personal life should, in
this matter, foUow the order we have observed in
the world's wider history. The love of man and
woman, of husband and wife, for instance, if it
accept God's order, will know the renewal which
is always a higher form. Cardinal Bembo, in the
sixteenth century, argued that " knowledge how
to love comes only in ripe manhood, that only the
old really have it, and their skiU hes in eluding the
impulse of the senses, in fleeing from aU that is
vulgar." The worthy Cardinal has somewhat
overlaboured his point, but the contention has in it
a certain element of truth. What it is safe to say,
and most important for us to remember, is that
sexual love comes to us first as a raw material
which needs refining. And where a wholesome
spiritual process is going on within we shaU find —
as in the wider spheres we have noticed — a con
stant upward trend in our love. It wiU carry more
things in it than of old ; have a larger outlook ; be
more deeply and mystically based.
A theme hke this lends itself inevitably to optimism.
Indeed, have we business with anything else in
such a world as ours, with such laws underlying it ?
If our conditions are healthy we shaU be, as Maeter
linck has it, "born afresh every morning, to a world
that for ever awakens to the future." That future !
What has gone is only a rough prehminary to it.
Life has hitherto been simply coUecting its materials,
sharpening its tools, preparing the arena for its
glorious development. Already beyond the horizon
we see hfting itself the time of which the prophets
spoke ; towards which science and rehgion are

RENEWALS 277
working ; for which man's widening capacity makes
ready. " WiU it never come," cries Lessing, " that
age of hght and purity of heart ? Never ? Let
me not entertain the doubt. Surely there wiU
some day be reached that Eternal Gospel promised in
the New Testament."
Yes, assuredly it will come. If the world-pro
cesses we have been studying mean anything they
mean that. The powers that have been started in
the earth and in the soul never leave off. Their
way is towards ever larger fulfilments. It was that
vision of the future surely that inspired Milton's
great apostrophe, on whose high note we may well
conclude : " Come forth, out of Thy royal cham
bers, 0 Prince of aU the kings of the earth ! Put on
the visible robes of Thy imperial majesty, take up
that unlimited sceptre which Thy Almighty Father
hath bequeathed Thee ; for now the voice of Thy
bride caUs Thee, and all creatures sigh to be
renewed."

xxxi ;
On Being 111
There is a lively passage in Emerson in which he
exhorts us, by all that is sacred, never to talk of our
ailments. In vain. The topic is as perennial as
the weather. There are circles in which nothing
is more popular. It is the surest way to the hearts
of elderly ladies to be a good hstener on this, their
most engrossing theme. And, pace Emerson, the
subject is distinctly worth handling in its season. It
draws upon all the requisites of eloquence, for
it is rooted in experience and charged with feeling.
And we are in good company in discussing it.
Literature has handled the topic in all sorts of
humours, and in every one of them has contrived
to be interesting. How we enjoy that story in
Aristotle, so pat to our own time, of Herodicus
the training master, who, falhng into Ul-health,
invented thereupon a regime of gymnastics so
complex and severe as speedily to work and worry
himseh and a number of his pupils to death !
Plato also is distinctly suggestive reading for the
invahd when he speaks of that pleasant practice
of physicians of bis time who " received money
from the relatives of the sick man or from some
278

ON BEING ILL 279
enemy of his, and forthwith put him out of the
way ! "
Where is there a more entertaining book than
old Burton's " Anatomy " I But it is all of ail
ments, physical, mental and moral. We feel a
new interest in Bacon when he tells us he was
" always puddering with physic." We prefer
Richard Baxter's account of his diseases to much of
his theology. How the picture of Knox holds us
where, old and infirm, he is described as tottering
half-fainting into the pulpit ; but, once set going
there, rising to such energy as though " ready to
ding the pulpit into blads ere he left it." The
laugh of Voltaire, his trick of treating everything
en badinant, takes on a new and almost heroic
aspect when we read of his perpetual invalidism—
toujours allant et souffrant. " Ivanhoe " becomes
to us an even more wonderful tale when we remem
ber that Scott wrote it in the midst of racking pain.
We are thankful for Charles Lamb's invalidism,
for we could not have spared his essay on " Con
valescence." The Fathers — to go back on our track
here — are, in their handhng of theological themes,
often incredibly stodgy. We own to a feeling of
rehef when, in turning their pages, we light on a
passage hke the following. It is the good Basil who
calls to us out of his Cappadocian diocese and out of
his fourth century : "I have been fifty days ill,
hardly able to turn in bed , quite crushed with pain.
I am trying aU this month the hot-water cure."
Here, at least, out of the Babel of theological hair
splittings of that distracted age we have something
human that we can understand and sympathise with !

280 OUR CITY OF GOD
We are interested in Ulness, where it is intelligently
observed and discoursed of, because, for one thing,
it offers us hfe from a new aspect. In health we
are, most of us, part of a machine, which occupies
our whole attention, and whose noisy revolution
makes all else inaudible. In illness all this is
changed. We have become spectators instead of
actors. The position offers some salutary if sur
prising discoveries. The first is that the great
world rolls on without us. A kindly world on the
whole, which has welcomed us, allowed us a footing in
it, given us board and lodging, but which now makes
plainer to us than ever before that it was here be
fore we came, and will be there, and none the worse,
when we are gone. We get a wholesome sense of our
relative insignificance. We see the amusing folly
of the fly on the wheel in giving itself airs, as though
it turned the axle. It is worth being UI if only to
get a real grip of that unflattering but most whole
some truth.
There are other things also which, at such times,
become very plain to us. We are met, for instance,
with the question of the apparent waste of power
which iUness entails. Why cannot we always be in
complete possession of ourselves, of our maximum ?
One would think a universe so fuU of every kind
of force could have spared us a little more ! How
httle more would have kept us swinging along our
path of progress, without these halts and down-
fallings and exasperating delays ! Think of the
power there is in things : the sweep of a star, the
force of a Niagara, the adamantine strength of a
Mont Blanc ! All this outside us, vaunting its un-

ON BEING ILL 281
tiring everlastingness, while within we are conscious
only of tottering invahdisms, of nerves so scant of
life ! Shall we never catch this secret of the
mountains and the seas ? Is their health set as a
mock to our Ill-health ?
This question, of course, does not come home to all
of us with equal force. There are people who never
know what it is to be ill, just as others never know
what it is to be weU. And the tendency of things
is, let us hope, to more strength and to less in
validism. Nature takes pains to show that weakness
and suffering are not her first intentions concerning
us. We are on the track of our ailments, and see
from what preventible causes many of them have
sprung. There is that unknown ancestor of ours
whose excesses saddled his descendants, ourselves
included, with perhaps a whole family of diseases.
We should so hke to have a word with that gentle
man ! But not to be too hard upon him. For
aught we know his excess lay in being too moral
instead of not moral enough. Perhaps he was an
ascetic who starved himseh on principle, or a student
who burnt too much midnight oil, or a philanthropist
who tainted his blood by visiting fever-haunted
hovels. Probably he was quite other than that,
but give him at least the benefit of the doubt.
However it be, the way our human destinies, in the
matter of body and brain, have been fixed for us
by the doings of our forbears, without our having a
say in the matter, gives one curious reflections. We
talk of a Divine judgment to foUow this life. But
is there not room also for a human judgment ; for a
meeting with those others whose folhes or whose

282 OUR CITY OF GOD
wisdoms have so largely fashioned us, and for a
general settling of accounts with them ? We think
of a good many things we would like to say to our
ancestors, and our descendants will probably have
as many to say to us.
But this is a digression, and we come back to
the point. It is assuredly not the doings, good or
bad, of our ancestors ; not any succession of fore
going slips or mischances, that offers the final
account of our human weakness. The difference
between us and Mont Blanc in point of robustness
is not explained that way. Our fragihty is plainly an
arranged affair. If mere strength, the force that
defies the years and that makes what we call our
successes, had been the one end Nature sought in us,
things be sure would have been ordered differently.
With all that force of the universe behind her, it
would have been the easiest thing in the world to
give us that. But hfe's ends are deeper and subtler.
What we call our weakness is, it is evident, a
machinery working for results that are beyond the
compass of a Mont Blanc or a Niagara. There are,
it seems, other strengths than that of radium or
gravitation. When we look into it we discover,
indeed, that it is precisely out of this under side of
hfe, out of its fragility, its helplessness, its decay,
its death, that our soul has been made. It is here,
and nowhere else, that man found his trust, his
tenderness, his sympathy, his resignation, his feel
ing of dependence, the vision and sense of the
Unseen, the things in short that make him a spiritual
being. We may listen here to poor Oscar Wilde :
" If the world has been buUt of sorrow it has been

ON BEING ILL 283
buUt by the hands of love, because in no other
way could the soul of man, for whom the world was
made, reach the fuU stature of perfection." Clough,
who knew lU-health and an early decay, had the
same assurance :
. Yet how little thou canst tell
How much in thee is ill or well :
Nor for thy neighbours, nor for thee,
Be sure was life designed to be
A draught of dull complaoency.
In a severe iUness, when the life-force ebbs to a
low point, Nature rehearses the final scene for us,
and shows us how easy a thing it will be to die.
A healthy nature, that enjoys living, will, when the
time comes, enjoy dying. We recognise it as
part of the general scheme ; a kindly scheme, which
does not cease to be kind in this final incident. We
see with Browne in his " Religio Medici," that " we
are happier with death than we should have been
without it." Death is, in fact, a trump card which
Nature holds for us, and which she will play in our
interest at the right moment. And this conviction
comes upon us without any comphcations from
theology. IUness is non-theological. The sick man
knows, if no one else does, that the most heated dis
putes in this sphere have httle or no contact with
reality ; that they are a logomachy with which he
need not trouble himseh. Nature is not much of
an ecclesiastic. She brought us into the world in
her own homely fashion, without formule, and
wUl take us out of it under simfiar conditions. AU the
same, she is not mocker, nor atheist. The space she

284 OUR CITY OF GOD
clears for us from the Church controversies leaves the
more room for religion. In these hours of seclusion,
shut off from the roaring world, we find ourselves
in communion with the ultimate reahties. We are
in love with the heights. We find our kinship with
aU who have loved, who have aspired, who have
suffered. Famihar words from the great souls who
have known God come back to us with an altogether
ravishing sweetness. Our soul dweUs in Holy
Land. We walk in Galilee and hear the Beatitudes ;
we are admitted to Gethsemane ; we learn the
secret of Calvary. We know all this not simply
as history written in a book, but as the human
history that is written in our own spirit. Here is
the road that souls have traveUed from the beginning
of the world, and where they have found victory.
The iUnesses which we write or talk about are
illnesses from which we recover. The other sort
he to be described elsewhere and in another language.
But it is for most a happy experience to come back
again from that weird by-path where we have
spent the painful weeks, and to find ourselves once
more amid the joyous bustle of the main route.
Whence, by what mysterious processes does it
come to us, this returning strength ? From rest
and from movement, from the spring breath, from
wind and sun, it streams in upon us. Day by day
the perspective changes. The old interests, the old
preoccupations revive and resume their sway. We
are becoming once more pohticians, controversiahsts,
shareholders, sportsmen, and the hundred other
things that made up the old life. The world which
has shown how easUy it can do without us gives us,

ON BEING ILL 285
nevertheless, a good-humoured welcome back. Best
of all, it shows us the niche where we can still do
some of its work. WeU wiU it be for us if, as we
tread the old route, we con dihgently and lodge safe
in our memories the signs written in the earth and
sky of that other bit of country we have been
passing through. A sorry thing if, after that
experience, we remain stiU without a sense of the
true proportion of things ; if we have not learned to
estimate aU the world offers at its proper value ; if
we have not with Chalmers, after the illness which
changed his hfe, been made to perceive the " little
ness of time and the greatness of eternity."

XXXII
Character and Reputation
Our character is what we are ; our reputation
is what other people think we are. A good deal
of history, a large part of life's whole tragi-comedy,
is made up of our several endeavours to produce some
kind of workable equation between these two
quantities. Our inner fact and our outer appear
ance ! Incessant and most subtle is the interplay
of these two ; some of it conscious, much of it un
conscious ; all of it vital to our growth upward or
downward. The study of the relation here set up is
not always a pleasant one ; it may lead easUy to
cynicism. Yet it is one that not the phUosopher
only, but every man who cares for his own inward
health needs in some fashion or other to undertake.
There are a dozen different ways of approach.
Perhaps the best for us to foUow will be the one
which comes closest to our own practical life.
We have aheady indicated what we mean by
character. But more must now be offered than
that too brief definition. It is easy to say "character
is what we are " ; but then, what are we ? Who
shall judge ? We remember the sprightly handfing
of this problem in the " Autocrat of the Breakfast

CHARACTER AND REPUTATION 287
Table," where " the young man named John " is
made out to be several individuals, according as he is
viewed from within, from around, or from above.
Do we know ourselves as we are ? Does anybody
know us ? Could Infinity take any such measure
of us as would be compatible with our own finite
view ? What, too, of the moral scale according to
which we measure ? Humanity has not yet hit on
virtue's common denominator. There are Indian
tribes where the women wiU not accept the suitor
who has not kUled his man. The Thug is doubtless
as punctilious as we are on the point of character,
but we do not understand his ethics of murder.
People mix up things in the strangest way. How
bewUdering it is for us to read that calm deliver
ance of Mahomet : " Two things of the world have
an attraction for me, women and perfumes ; but
I only find pure happiness in prayer." We have
a similar sensation when in contact with some of the
roystering spirits of the Renaissance — a Benvenuto
Cellini, for instance — where you have Cathohc devo
tion, prayer, study of the Scriptures on one page,
and a seduction or an assassination on the next,
and all recounted with the same gusto and sense of
approval. We come away from studies of this sort
with a confused notion that man is half-a-dozen
different things, his life pointing, as it seems, at the
same time, in exactly opposite directions.
There is a school of morahsts and litterateurs
who have erected aU this into a doctrine. Flaubert
is at the head of a French group who paint character
and passion without any attempt at criticism. The
thing is so ; delineate it as it is ; that is all. The

288 OUR CITY OF GOD
encyclopedists, at an earlier period, worked on the
same hnes. Says Helvetius : " All men are what
they must be, therefore all hatred against them is
unjust. A fool produces folhes just as a wild
shrub produces sour berries, and to insult him is to
reproach the oak for bearing acorns instead of
olives." The same idea evidently was in the mind
of Rousseau when he wrote his " Confessions."
He gives us there the most revolting detaUs without
a hint of self-blame, describing his book as " a piece
of comparison for the study of the human heart,"
and taking pride in its uniqueness. " Et c'est la
seule qui existe." He was right there. There has
been nothing hke it before or since.
But these confusions are, after all, more apparent
than real. Taking human history as a whole, we
have sufficient evidence that, despite the stragglers
and stragghngs, " a God orders the march." In all
hearts, however varied their present standards,
there is a sense of better and worse. And the
knowledge of what reaUy is better is steadily grow
ing. The human consciousness is homogeneous, and
the inspirations that reach its uppermost surface
wiU in the end pervade the whole. Restricting our
view here to modern Christendom, what we have
reached is a moral standard whose vahdity is
recognised by all classes, by those who transgress it
not less than by those who observe it. The aU-
pervading influence of that standard is seen in our
rich and subtly graded vocabulary of praise and
blame. The average man has a working rule for
his daily use, in itself a curious enough amalgam.
But it is not his only rule. Beyond it, brought into

CHARACTER AND REPUTATION 289
action for his abstract judgments, is a more spiritual
code, shining down as from a high transcendent
background. He recognises the rare natures, the
spiritual possibilities reahsed in some hves, and all
this comes into his standard of judging. The level
he has himseh reached, and that higher one discerned
in the distance, unite to throw into rehef the abyss
into which the social transgressor may faU. Hell is
stiU a working Enghsh word. It is none too strong
for the punishment meted out by society to people
who break through, or fail to hve up to, the accepted
moral law.
Hence, in modern civihsation, we have the curious
spectacle of a subsidiary morahty, the morahty not
so much of character as of reputation. It is
practised by people who, without the instinct of
goodness, have fuUy developed the instinct of self-
preservation. They have no love for the abyss
though they are closely akin to the unfortunates
who have got there. They claim the awards of
respectabihty whUe secretly violating its laws.
They live " the double life." A large part of their
daily business is the business of concealment, of
evasion. Not that concealment is, in itseh,
necessarUy discreditable. Every man conceals a
large part of his life. There are functions of it
which are not for his neighbour's eye. There is an
innocent dissimulation also which we borrow from
mother Nature — herseh the most arrant of dissimu
lators. The honest man's face, as weU as the rascal's,
is at times a mask. He needs on occasion to cover
up his soul, and is glad of the screen that has been
furnished him. But the difference between him
19

290 OUR CITY OF GOD
and this other is that, were his veil torn aside, the
result would be at worst a hurt to his feehngs,
whUe in the other the result is ruin. There are more
people in this latter case to-day than one hkes to
think of. Their problem is not how to avoid wrong,
but how to avoid being found out. The men
who are " doing time " at this moment at Dart
moor or Portland have outside a great host of
counterparts, who are at large simply because they
have been luckier or cleverer in their concealments
than their brother criminals under lock and key.
When we study the career of men in this position
we discern one of the sinister relations between
character and reputation. Swindlers begin with a
basis of character. The " religious rogue," who
appears with such appalhng regularity in our modern
commercial annals, starts usually as genuinely
religious. His zeal combines with his business apti
tude to secure him a vogue amongst his fellow
behevers. As his ventures prosper his ambitions
enlarge, while his spiritual fervour declines. But
that early devotion, he discovers, now figures as a
valuable business asset, on which he can trade. It
no longer represents his character, but it is still
his reputation, and he works that for aU it is worth.
He patronises rehgious institutions, though rehgious
beliefs no longer sway his conduct. There is no
more dangerous man in society, and the Anglo-
Saxon, with his mixture of rehgion and business, is
rapidly producing him on two continents. Laurence
Ohphant said of the financial crash in New York in
1873 " there is scarcely an instance of a prominent
fraudulent bankrupt who has not made a show of

CHARACTER AND REPUTATION 291
piety the mask under which he ensnared his victims."
Recent history, both in America and nearer home,
has added further illustrations, quite as deeply
shaded, of the same theme.
We have here, we say, a sinister and disastrous
relation between character and reputation, the
lessons and menace of which need, with sternest in
sistence, to be dealt with by the preacher and the
morahst of to-day. But this happfiy is not the only
nexus between the two. In other directions character
and reputation work harmoniously and to great
results. Reputation, to look at it from a new
aspect, is a man's past. It is the thing he was
and the work he did in years that are gone. The
world has come to know that past and connects it,
with aU of worth that was there, with the hving man
now before it. And here a great law of values
comes in. The man who has done sohd work finds
himseh worth what he is to-day plus aU he did
yesterday. The artist, the writer, the preacher,
the pohtician, as he steps out this morning before
the world, finds the thing he is doing judged in a
hght of its own — the hght that his past has created.
It is one of the high rewards of later life, where
the fight has been a good one, to reahse this driving
power behind us. That section of our hfe, flung off
as it were from our personality, freed from all
ailments and hmitations of the present, has become
as it were our immortal part, and works for us with
tireless energy both when we sleep and when we
wake. The track we have foUowed has, it wUl be seen, all
the time kept us in view of one fact, that reputation,

292 OUR CITY OF GOD
at however far a remove, is always ultimately
related to character, in a way based upon it. The
danger of our time, even amongst the best men, is
however that of striving for reputation even more
than for character. The rewards of good repute
are so great, the avenues to it, in an advertising and
limelight age are so many, that insensibly a man is
led to think of his pose before the pubhc, rather
than of himseh and his deed as before God. How
good here is that word of the " Imitation " : "No
man doth safely appear abroad but he who gladly
hideth himseh. No man doth safely speak but he
that wiUingly holdeth his peace. No man doth
safely rule but he that is wiUingly in subjection."
A word remains to be said on what is the basis of
this whole theme — character itseh. Can we create
character, or hold it in any way under our own con
trol ? It is the master dilemma, in which hfe and
logic seem eternally at war. If the necessarians
are right all our moral vocabulary is a delusion.
Why blame a man for what he cannot help ? But
the vocabulary is there, with all it means. And
aU the fatahst theorisings of a thousand years
have not shifted it by a hair's breadth. The logic
of hfe here is, in fact, deeper than our own. Its
freedom and its necessity work at a depth beyond
our ken. Assuredly the best freedom we know is
that Divine necessity inherent in the quality of a
pure soul which forbids it to go wrong. The work
ing of that inner power is the secret of religion. The
doctrine of it, permanent amid all outward change,
is that a man wins his fight by linking himseh to a
Something, a Someone higher, in whom his being

CHARACTER AND REPUTATION 293
completes itseh. As Carlyle put it of the Puritans :
" It is a fruitful kind of study, that of men who do
in very deed understand and feel at aU moments that
they are in contact with God, that the right and
wrong of their httle hfe has extended itseh into
Eternity and Infinity. It is, at bottom, my religion
too." To men of this quahty the relation of character
to reputation becomes quite simple. They think
everything of the first and next to nothing of the
second. Their vision of reahty is so clear that they
have little enough care for illusions. Popularity,
the opinion of the moment, the assent of the current
orthodoxy, what are these ? To get one's piece of
work done in this world, to find the truth and say it,
though the utterance lead to Gethsemane and the
Cross — this is the concern of the world's great souls.
And when they have passed, and men catch at last
the actual meaning of their life, they bow themselves
over the print of what they now discern to be Divine
footsteps. They know that once more " God hath
visited His people."

XXXIII
Old and New
Time is our supreme mystery, a thing invisible,
intangible, inexpressible, and yet to each one of us
the intensest of realities. We cannot analyse a
moment. No philosopher has solved the problem
of " now." We believe in the present, but can
never catch it. As you try to think it, it is either
gone or yet to be. Time, which weaves itself
incessantly into our fife, that connects itself with
our every act, never shows us its face. So mystic
this being of ours, where the great forces that
weave it are for ever invisible !
Let us trace some of the relations which time
creates for us, and notably those of past and present,
of old and new. It is of the first importance in fife,
and especially in the religious life, to strike a true
balance here. There is, however, in this matter to
be noted a broad temperamental difference between
men which curiously affects their judgments. There
are those who think the past of little account, who
are all for a clean slate and a fresh start. They are
of the mind of Toland, who regarded the Fathers
as of no authority ; " who thought as little of
becoming a rule of faith to their posterity as we to

OLD AND NEW 295
our own " ; or of Camille Desmoulins, who con
sidered the dead done with, and that the hving and
not these vanished ones should give the law of the
future. On the other hand, we see men — and
great ones — whose gaze is instinctively backwards.
Lamb, in his love of the past, says, " I cannot make
these present times present to me." Newman,
in the age of science and Darwin, hves and teaches
as though all the modern knowledge were of no
account. He has, it is true, a theory of develop
ment, but it is one that leads in exactly the opposite
direction from all the modern tendencies. Clearly
one of the first things we have to do in estimating
the value of a man's teaching is to examine his
time-sense — the temperamental prepossessions in
relation to past versus present which he brings to
his study of facts.
What, then, is the true attitude to the past ?
Note, first of aU, that we cannot get away from
it if we would. A freshly-born child is the newest
of aU facts. It is this birth of the young generations
that compels the world forward. Yet observe how
this new fact is shaped and ruled by the old. Before
the young spirit can begin with its own special
thought it must go to the past for all its tools. The
language it uses, the thought-forms in which its
growing intelligence expresses itself, have been
shaped for it by those who have gone before. The
entire atmosphere in which its mind hves is their
creation. Every word in our vocabulary is a petrified
mentality — a work of bygone thought. We hve
to-day in an ocean of mind, an ocean fed by count
less streams of the myriad personalities who wrought

296 OUR CITY OF GOD
and felt before we came. And it is not only the
past thought in which we 'hve. It is also the past
deed. What men did ages ago is shaping the
fortunes of you and me just now. Gibbon was
hardly extravagant in his statement that had Charles
Martel fafied to win his fight against the Arabs at
Tours in the eighth century, we might now have
had Mohammedan doctors teaching the faith of
Islam at Oxford. The millions of Europe are at this
hour influenced in a thousand ways by the issue of
Waterloo. How different the France, the Germany,
the Italy, the England of to-day had Napoleon won !
We are, it is evident, under a cosmic conservatism
which permits no rash iconoclasms. The old never
dies. Every scrap of it is used in the making of
the new.
Let us now consider this new. That imperious
law of things by which, as we have seen, we are bound
to the old, compels us, under the same necessity,
constantly to the new. It is useless to exclaim
against novelties. The mind insists upon them.
Let the greatest stickler for things as they are,
addressing the most conservative audience in the
world, continue, in pulpit or elsewhere, to give
exactly the same views in exactly the same phrases,
and he would bore bis supporters to death. The
mind, by its very structure, insists upon the new
fact, the new presentation. Our moral constitution
tells the same story. It is one of the surest maxims
of morals that a mere practice of the old is the death
of virtue. It is always in a pressing on from
what we are to something beyond that goodness
exists. As the ancient saying has it : " He who

OLD AND NEW 297
ceases to be better ceases to be good." There is
no standing still in ethic. It is upward or down
ward. " The innermost essence of morality," says
Wundt, " is in ceaseless, never-ending effort." It
is the same with religious experience. The most
stringent orthodoxy is here at one with the widest
liberahsm. They are ahke in their insistence that
no man, in this sphere, can live on his past. That
he had spiritual raptures, ecstasies, heaven's own
assurances ten years ago, forms, they will unite in
teUing him, no sufficiency for to-day. Religious
conservatism does not extend to living on yester
day's manna.
This inner compulsion to the new, derived from
our mental and moral constitution, is, we further
discover, in exact accord with our position in the
universe. We stand on the border hne of two realms,
the known and the unknown. The first, vast as it
may seem, is, as compared with the second, a mere
speck of territory. We are hke colonists encamped
on the edge of a continent, who have explored a
few miles here and there, leaving the immeasur
able vastness behind as yet untouched. To beings
made as we are there could not be a more fascinating
position. It is one that stirs, and evidently was
meant to stir, every faculty in us ; that fires our
whole nature with the desire to know. That
continent of truth is frankly offered us for explora
tion. We are invited to go up and possess the land.
We discern nowhere a warning against trespassers.
And continually, as fresh discoveries are made
there, as fresh treasure-trove of fact is brought in
from its recesses, man perceives a corresponding

298 OUR CITY OF GOD
change in himself. As the universe grows larger
to him he himseh grows larger ; the new facts
are new forces which henceforth reside and work
in him. For the central thing about humanity is
that it is always in the making. From that
territory of the unknown there is ever flowing in
upon us the new fact, the new force that is fashion
ing us into something other and higher than we
were. We have no need to be afraid of the new. After
all, it is but a relative term, a term which exhibits
simply our hmitations, our ignorance. The dis
coveries that have from time to time so startled
our predecessor ; — the Copernican astronomy that
upset his ideas of heaven and earth ; the geologic
facts that destroyed his theory of creation ; the
Bibhcal studies that struck so on his views of
inspiration and revelation, were only starthng
because of the kind of mind they fell upon. We are
such naive, raw, immature children of the universe.
To higher intelligences these revolutionary tidings
were the stalest of commonplaces. Our new facts
are really as old as the world. God, be sure, knew
them all along. The confusion they cause in us is
just a process in our education. It is a knocking
down prehminary to building us out on a greater
scale. The universe will not cramp itself to meet
our tiny dimensions. It is we who must grow to
meet its size.
All nature is in a conspiracy to urge us to the new.
As Plato says in the Symposium : " AU men are
bringing to birth in their bodies and in their souls."
And birth is the greatest of innovators. Men can-

OLD AND NEW 299
not provide against revolutions so long as there
is a child in arms.
A child, more than all other gifts
That earth can offer to declining man,
Brings hope with it and forward-looking thoughts.
Conservatism may build its creedwalls heaven high ;
may fortify itself with Councils and with pre
cedents. But unless it have truth on its side, creed
and Council offer no defence against the new mind
that is here. The fresh generation brings its own way
of seeing, its own way of determining. And
humanity, in the forward march to which it is thus
compeUed, finds no way backwards. It is on, and
ever on. There is something awe-inspiring, as of the
presence of manifest Divinity, in this constant
mental action of the race. As in the body, where
an unceasing process works whereby new material is
added and the old carried away, so it is in the soul.
Down in the depths of the general consciousness
room is ever being made for the reception of fresh
truths. No vacuum is permitted there. Behind
the decay of an outworn belief we behold the fresh
sprout of the larger conception which is to succeed.
It is the view of this regular, concerted move
ment that gives such a significance to history.
Schopenhauer was never further from the point than
when, in his contemptuous way, he speaks of history
as a mere string of disconnected facts. The pro
phets of the race have never believed that. They
have recognised history as the unrolling of a scheme.
Whatever their view of a golden age behind, they
have always discerned one in front. They have

300 OUR CITY OF GOD
known that " a God orders the march," and that the
march is toward a Promised Land. That is the
meaning of ideals — ideals which, as FouiUee puts it,
" are but the deepest sense and anticipation of future
reahty." Yet, how slow the movement ! The
Leader plainly is not in a hurry. Our eyesight so
far outruns our footwork. Long centuries ago Lucan
in his " Pharsaha " predicted the time of universal
peace, when, " with his weapons thrown aside, man
should learn everywhere to love his feUow." What
slaughters, hatings, dehriums of militarism since !
Yet that reign of peace and brotherhood is as surely
coming as is the rising of to-morrow's sun. There
is no chance in the future. Chance is only another
word for our ignorance. Could we only see far
enough and clear enough the new heaven and new
earth would be as visible to us as the stars on a
cloudless night.
A theme hke this is f uU of practical lessons. There
is an outstanding one for the religious teacher. If
he knows his ground he will see himself as for one
thing, a constant mediator between the old and the
new. He will never undervalue the old. He will
in his treatment of it imitate Nature, which makes
its new structures out of the old materials. Even
where error has to be uprooted he will, as Condorcet
so weU puts it, act hke the skilled architect who in
destroying a building, " sets about its demohtion in
such a way as to prevent its fall from being danger
ous." He will teach the young to reverence the
past, and the aged to reverence the future. While
accepting new forms of presentation where truth
compels, he will show how the older form contained

OLD AND NEW 301
in its own way the Ml rehgious reality. He will
show how from one perishable vessel to another that
Divine reahty is in each age transferred, losing in
the movement no atom of its priceless essence.
Believing this we find a further and final lesson, the
lesson of our true attitude towards the future. It is
that, surely, of victorious faith, and of the love that
casteth out fear. We may say indeed with Thoreau
that " nothing is so much to be feared as fear."
With a sure hold on God we know nothing of acci
dents. K human observation and the long experi
ence of the ages are good for anything they have
proved beyond a doubt that we are in a world of
spiritual law, a world where moral and inner values
are the chief products, and where the whole tendency
is toward their complete reahsation and expression.
We are in that movement, partakers of its glorious
promise. To hfe's outer husk — our body, our
circumstance — a thousand things may happen.
But none of these can touch our centre. At ut
most they can only drive us inward and closer to it.
Quis separabit ? Neither hfe nor death can bar
us from the love of God.

XXXIV
Remainders
We are apt to think ill of remainders. We regard
them as the fag-ends and soiled stock of hfe,
a refuse to be shovelled away or jobbed off at
half-price. But there is no greater mistake. We
want a new doctrine and practice of remainders.
Life is full of them, and you might found almost
the entire art of living on their proper manage
ment. Remainders represent losses, subtractions. We
could conceive of hfe as built on a plan which
excluded such things ; which was a perpetual ful
ness, where aU we had was secured to us, and where
the only change was increase. But that is not how
matters have been arranged. We are surrounded
with what seem robber forces that ruthlessly snatch
away our cherished possessions. We grow older,
and each year sees a new depletion of our shrinking
time-allowance. And with the years our powers
weaken and leave us. The once President of the
Alpine Club walks with a stick or takes to a Bath
chair. Our friends one after another drop away.
Age has been described as a losing game, and

REMAINDERS 303
certainly its losses are enormous. As Dryden so
bitterly puts it :
Fool'd with hope men favour the deceit ;
Trust on and think to-morrow will repay ;
To-morrow's falser than the former day ;
Lies worse, and while it says we shall be blest
With some new joys, cuts off what we possesst.
Strange cozenage !
We should not accept that as a fair description, for
it takes no notice of the gains in the account. Cozen
age is not the word. Life is rather a perpetual
exchange. It is a ceaseless traffic, an eternal coming
and going. And in this movement the problem
set us all every morning is an equation between
what is here and what is gone. Our life's victory or
defeat will be found to depend to a quite extra
ordinary degree on our daily management of this
last — our management, that is, of what is left.
It is by their handfing of remainders that great
men have best signahsed their greatness. War is
fuU of that story. It is when his forces have been
decimated and their spirits broken by disaster that
again and again the genius of a commander in
handhng his remnant has gloriously saved the
situation. At Poitiers our Black Prince, with his
handful of men, ragged, famished, weary with
incessant marches, and hemmed in by a fuU-fed
enemy five times their number, so managed his
handful as to turn what seemed certain disaster
into the most resounding of victories. For three-
quarters of his career William of Orange was the
head of a forlorn hope — forlornest of hopes, as it

304 OUR CITY OF GOD
seemed. But the end again was victory. At
Marston Moor the day seemed altogether lost after
the first round ; the Parliament troops every
where broken and fleeing, except in one direc
tion, where stood NoU Cromwell and his Ironsides,
calmly singing a psalm. That their comrades had
given up the day as lost seemed to them no argu
ment whatever, or if argument, then one only
for more strenuous fighting. Here was a remainder
that counted, as Rupert and his Cavahers found
to their cost. We think of Washington at VaUey
Forge ; of Napoleon at Marengo, his troops three-
parts beaten, and then, when all seemed over,
winning with the remaining quarter. Later on it
was the same story with his great rival at Waterloo.
Was there ever a closer shave ? The allies began by
being utterly beaten and dispersed. Wellington's
own story, as he gave it to gossip Creevey at Brussels,
after the fight, is surely the briefest and raciest
battle story extant. " It has been the nearest
run thing you ever saw in your hfe. Blucher lost
fourteen thousand men on Friday night, and got so
d — y hcked that I could not find him on Saturday
morning." It was a remainder he fought with on
the fateful day, with what result we know.
In our own hves we have a question day by day
of personal remainders. What is the argument we
hold with our losses ? There is only one good way
here — the way of concentrating on what is left.
Nothing is nobler in history than the examples
it offers of this form of courage. The spectacle of
Fawcett, falling bhnd in his young manhood and
determining that the affliction should not alter or

REMAINDERS 305
maim his career, living in spite of it the strenuous
hfe, filling the hours with hard work and
sunny play, rising to highest things in service and
achievement, forms, to our thinking, one of the
finest object-lessons the nineteenth century has to
offer. We think, too, of that greater figure behind,
the blind poet of the Commonwealth, strong in the
same magnificent resolve : Yet I argue not
Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope ; but still bear up and steer
Right onward
Surely there is nothing more pathetic in hterature
than the hnes, in his " Second Defence of the Enghsh
People," in which Milton defends himself against
the abominable insinuation of Salmasius that his
bhndness was a Divine judgment for his sins. " I
cah Thee, 0 God, the searcher of hearts, to witness
that I am not conscious either in the more early or
in the later periods of my hfe of having committed
any enormity which might deservedly have marked
me out as fit subject for such a calamitous visitation.
. . . . When I was pubhcly sohcited to write a
reply to the Defence of the royal cause, when I had
to contend with the pressure of sickness, and with the
apprehension of soon losing the sight of my remain
ing eye, and when my medical attendants clearly
announced, that if I did engage in the work it
would be irreparably lost, their premonitions caused
no hesitation and inspired no dismay. . . . My
resolution was unshaken, though the alternative
was either the loss of my sight or the desertion of
my duty." 20

306 OUR CITY OF GOD
Here, indeed, is the great way of hving, and it is
open to us aU. There are few severer tests than
physical defect, but it is only smaU souls that sink
under them. The large nature makes of them
stepping-stones. It is, for instance, a reflection
fuU of optimism to note how men of fewest inches,
deprived of that element of power which comes from
commanding stature, have, spite the lack, by sheer
energy of mind, become the great swayers of destiny.
What a tiny man was Lord John Russell ! Yet he
led the House of Commons, and was Prime Minister
of England. Napoleon was almost a dwarf. Agesilaus
and Alexander were under the middle height. In
other regions of influence note Montaigne, Spenser,
Barrow, Pope, Steele, Watts, Wesley, all meagre
of body. How they bulk to-day in the world of
thought and deed ! Nor, when we are of the right
temper, will the advance of years, with whatso
ever physical shearings and loppings it may bring,
put us off from the business of inner progress. Cato
learned Greek at sixty ; it was at the same age
Robert Hall took up Italian, that he might read
Dante. In his eightieth year Michael Angelo,
walking in Rome, on being asked the reason of
his expedition, rephed, " That I may learn some
thing." But life has other problems for us than those of
physical defect, problems where the handling of
remainders is not less difficult and not less vital.
Domestic happiness or misery ; our entire social
contact, with all it brings to us of inner growth or
decay, are here in question. A man and woman
joined in marriage discover, on the farther side of

REMAINDERS 307
the great venture, that their dreams of each other
and what their union would bring them, were partly
iUusions. Honeymoons are the queerest of histories,
at times the most tragical. A high, impression
able nature finds in the closer intimacy a lack, a
faUure of response to its own highest. The union
is not the complete, the perfect thing that was
imagined. Or it may be worse than that. What
then ? What if it be the worst ? Shall despair
be the attitude ? That would mean another union,
the union of cowardice and foUy. For in what is
left there is room always for a brave soul. Always
is there a remainder to work on, a remainder in
yourseh and in your companion. Keeping steadily
to that ; shutting the eye to all else ; concentrating on
this residue of good aU the energy of love and all the
patience of hope ; here is the road — straight and
narrow may be, demon-haunted, skirting at a
dozen places the precipice — which, nevertheless,
persevered in, wUl bring you through to victory.
There is no better reading than the remnant
histories. And they meet us everywhere. The
Church of England has had hardly a brighter
ornament than " holy George Herbert." But the
author of " The Temple " and " The Country
Parson " entered the ministry in the first instance
as a kind of remainder; He had planned for him
seh the hfe of the court and of diplomacy. It was
only when the death of James I, and his patron the
Duke of Richmond destroyed his hopes of prefer
ment that he thought of taking Orders. We know
how this pis aller became the starting-point of a
consuming spiritual passion, and gave Anghcanism

308 OUR CITY OF GOD
one of its closest approaches to sainthood. Think
ing of Herbert reminds us of his contemporary,
Hooker, who, trapped into a marriage with a
shrew, which lost him Oxford, quietude and, as it
seemed, almost everything else, went on calmly
working his remainder ; in his country parish dehght
ing " to see God's blessings spring out of the earth,"
and there and elsewhere toihng on at the mighty
book which was to estabhsh his fame for ever.
Wesley marries a termagant with dynamite
enough in her to wreck hah a dozen careers. But
Wesley refuses to be wrecked. If domestic peace is
gone, his apostleship is left him, and he makes
something of that !
We have so far dealt with remainders that are
such by mere subtraction. This and that have been
taken from us, or have been kept out of our reach,
and the problem has been to do our best without
them. But there are remainders of a different and
subtler order, remainders which are deposits. In
chemistry it is the remainder that counts. All this
mass of pitchblende rock, all these processes of
crushing and grinding, of refining and solution, for
the sake of so tiny a speck of radium that emerges
at the end ! Human life is also a chemistry, with
processes that are strangely simUar. Our experi
ences, when we are through with them, are not done
with. Their chief significance, one comes to think,
is in the deposits they leave. What queer re
mainders drop, as final result, from our daily doings !
How comes it that an orgie leaves this precise taste
in the mouth the day after ? Singular, when we
think of it ! The flavour is clearly not of the

REMAINDERS 309
man's own willing. FreewiU has gone into the
choice of his pleasures, but there is no freewiU in the
deposit from them.
There is, indeed, nothing more awesome, yet at
the same time more loftily inspiring, than this
question of remainders, where also they are extracts.
We touch here so manifestly on a WiU outside our
own. When we note the sense of degradation
yielded — with the certainty of a chemical result —
by certain courses, and the inner exaltation, the high
sense of achievement and inner progress which
foUow upon others, there is no escaping the con
clusion that here we stand on the confines of a
spiritual kingdom whose rule it is impossible to
escape, a kingdom which includes every soul of us
in its purpose, a purpose whose end is not yet.
Life itself, then, it seems, is a process, carried on in
its turn for the extract it wiU yield. The process is
what we are here and now. The extract is what we
shaU be in the world invisible.

The End.

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CATALOGUE OF BOOKS 11
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THE MESSAGES OF THE BIBLE
Edited by Frank Knight Sanders, Ph.D., Woolsey Pro
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CATALOGUE OF BOOKS 13
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CATALOGUE OF BOOKS 15

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CATALOGUE OF BOOKS 19
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20 JAMES CLARKE AND CO.'S
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CATALOGUE OF BOOKS 21

1/6
•Storehouse for Preachers and Teachers. A Treasury of
Outline Texts and Sermons. By J. Ellis, Author of " The
Seed Basket," &c, &c. Cloth boards, Is. 6d.
" Cannot fail to prove serviceable. Exceedingly suggestive, and such
as the busy worker will be able to utilise with ease and profit."
— The Christian.
" A little work which should be appreciated by preachers, lay workers,
and teachers. It gives a number of suggestive outlines for sermons and
addresses." — Newcastle Chronicle.
" Cannot but prove helpful and suggestive to busy sermoniseis in search
of new ideas and lines of treatment." — The Scotsman.
The Comforts of God. By Richard Glover, D.D. Fcap,
8vo, cloth boards, Is. 6d.
" Every paragraph is pregnant with helpful and comforting thought.
We cordially commend this book of consolation to all who are passing
through the cloud and the shadow." — Methodist Times.
" Will doubtless find many appreciative readers." — Glasgow Herald.
Ancient Musical Instruments. A popular Account of their
Development, as illustrated by Typical Examples in the
Galpin Collection at Hatfield Broad Oak, Essex. By William
Lynd. Linen cover, Is. 6d. ; cloth, 2s.
" The book is unique, and lovers of orchestral music cannot fail to be
profited and interested by the material offered for Btudy."
— Ardrossan Herald.
The Church and the Kingdom. By Washington Gladden.
Crown 8vo, cloth, Is. 6d.
" This most interesting little book is heartily welcome." — Morning Leader.
" A solid contribution to the literature of Christian Science."
— Western Daily Mercury.
Let US Pray. A Handbook of Selected Collects and forms of
Prayer for the Use of the Free Churches. By C. Silvester
Horne and F. Herbert Darlow, M.A. Crown 8vo, cloth,
Is. 6d. net.
" An interesting and fascinating volume." — London Quarterly Review.
Race and Religion. Hellenistic Theology, its Place in Christian
Thought. By Thomas Allln, D.D. Fcap. 8vo, Is. 6d.
" The book is crammed with facts and ideas. It would be difficult to
find anywhere in the same compass a richer collection of living and sugges
tive thought." — "J. B.," in The Christian World.
Short Devotional Services. By George Aitchison. Limp
cloth, Is. 6d.
Thirteen services, compiled chiefly from the Bible and the Book of
Common Prayer. Intended not to supersede but to supplement the usual
extempore prayer.
The Children's Pace; and Other Addresses to Children. By
Rev. J. S. Ma ver, M.A., of Paisley. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, Is. 6d.
" Mr. Maver has produced one of the best books of the kind published
for some time." — Banffshire Journal.

22 JAMES CLARKE AND CO.'S
1/- Net
•The Garrisoned Soul. Meditations on " Peace, Perfect
Peace," by C. E. P. Antram. Fancy cloth, Is. net.
" A sweet little book, full of soothing comfort to the weary wayfarer."
— Western Daily Mercury.
" It is just the sort of book, chaste and beautiful, contents and binding
alike, that would make a pretty present on a birthday or a Church festival.
Its size and its type make it suitable also to send to an invalid. Indeed,
its cheering chapters would to many such, we are sure, act like a tonic,
and be an efficient co-worker with the physician." — Sheffield Telegraph.
•Do We Need a New Theology ? By Harold E. Brierley.
Fcap. 8vo, cloth boards, Is. net.
" Well adapted to arouse the attention and to guide the thought of
seekers after truth. The results of wide reading are used to good pur
pose." — Methodist Recorder.
Women and their Saviour. Thoughts of a Minute for a
Month. By Marianne Farningham, Author of " Harvest
Gleanings," &c. Cloth, Is. net.
" These ' thoughts of a minute for a month of mornings ' are the out
pourings of an entirely unaffected piety." — Glasgow Herald.
" A very touching little book of devotional reflections." — Christian Life.
Reasons Why for Free Churchmen. By Rev. J. D. Jones,
M.A., B.D. Small 8vo, cloth boards, Is. net.
The Price of Priestcraft. By Howard Evans. Crown 8vo,
paper covers, Is. net ; cloth, Is. 6d. net.
" We wish for it a very large circulation. No one has served the cause
of religious freedom better than Mr. Howard Evans by his labours in the-
Press and elsewhere." — British Weekly.
Gain or Loss? An Appreciation of the Results of Recent
Biblical Criticism. Five Lectures delivered at Brixton Inde
pendent Church, London. By Bernard J. Snell, M.A.,
B.Sc. Cheap Edition. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, Is. net.
" Many students who are unable to follow all the lineB and results of
Biblical criticism have desired precisely such a book. . . . The treatment
of the whole Bubject is most satisfactory, and appeals throughout both to
reason and religious sentiment." — Dundee Advertiser.
1/-
•Animal Gambols. Comical Pictures of Animals drawn by
Louis Wain, Harry B. Nellson, J. A. Shepherd and
others, with Stories in Verse and Prose. Crown 4to, coloured,
paper boards, varnished Is.
•Fireside Fairy Tales. Full of Appropriate Pictures. Crown 4to,
coloured paper boards, varnished Is.
Animal Fun. Humorous Pictures of Animals drawn by Louis-
Wain, Harry B. Neilson, J. A. Shepherd, and others.
4to, coloured paper boards, varnished, Is.
A delightful book for the young.

CATALOGUE OF BOOKS 23
1/-
Louis Wain's Animal Show, Full of Pictures specially drawn
for the book, with Stories in Prose and Verse. Coloured
paper boards, varnished, Is.
" ' Louis Wain's Animal Show ' will cause endless amusement in the
nursery, and the difficulty will be to get the fortunate little ones who receive
the volume to put it down. There will be tears to get it, and tears of happi
ness when it is obtained. The contents, like the matter and illustrations,
will fascinate all children, and they blend the humorous and the instructive
with undoubted success." — Sunday School Chronicle.
Outline Text Lessons for Junior Classes. By Gladys
Davidson, Author of " Kindergarten Bible Stories," &c.
Fcap. 8vo, cloth boards, Is.
" The book is simple and practical, and will be found suggestive and
helpful by teachers." — Sunday School Chronicle.
Golden Truths for Young Folk. By J. Ellis, Author of
" The Seed Basket," " Tool Basket," " By Way of Illustra
tion," &c. Crown 8vo, cloth boards, Is.
" Useful, direct and easily understood set of talks to children."
— British Weekly.
How to Read the Bible, Hints for Sunday-school Teachers
and Other Bible Students. By W. F. Adeney, M.A., Principal
of Lancashire College, Manchester, Author of " The Bible Story
Retold," &c. New and Revised Edition. Nineteenth
Thousand. Cloth boards, Is.
" A most admirable little work. We know of no book which deals with
this subject so clearly and adequately within so small a compass. It speaks
of itself modestly as ' Hints for Sunday-school Teachers and other Bible
Students,' but it is one of the very few manuals which are well worth the
study of the clergy." — The Guardian.
A Manual for Free Church Ministers. Cloth, Is. net ; leather,
2s. 6d.
Health and Home Nursing. By Mrs. Lessels Mather, Health
Lecturer to the Northumberland County Council. Fcap. 8vo,
cloth, Is.
A book that should be in every household. Contains
chapters on The Care of the Invahd, Homely Local Apphca
tions, Feeding the Invalid, Infection and Disinfection, Care of
the Teeth, The Value of Foods, Influenza, its Causes and
Prevention, Consumption, its Causes and Prevention, Digestion
and Indigestion, Headaches, Home Nursing of Sick Children,
What to do till the Doctor Comes, Habits in Relation to
Health, The Health of the Town Dweller.
A Religion that will Wear. A Layman's Confession of Faith.
Addressed to Agnostics by a Scottish Presbyterian. Crown
8vo, cloth boards, Is.
" It is remarkable for its breadth of thought and catholicity of quotation,
and will be found helpful to many who are doubtful as to the practical
value of religion." — Church Gazette.

24 JAMES CLARKE AND CO.'S
1/-
Helps to Health and Beauty. Two Hundred Practical Pre
scriptions by a Pharmaceutical Chemist.
" This little book contains two hundred practical prescriptions or formula;
for preparations for the hair, hands, nails, feet, skin, teeth, and bath, in
addition to perfumes, insecticides, and medicaments for various ailments.
As far as possible technical language is avoided, and the directions are clear
and concise." — Pharmaceutical Journal.
Morning, Noon and Night. By R. F. Horton, M.A., D.D.
Fcap. 8vo, parchment cover with gold lettering, Is.
" Deeply suggestive, and as earnest as its fancies are pleasing and quaint."
— Dundee Advertiser.
Wayside Angels, and Other Sermons. By W. K. Bubford,
Minister of the Wicker Congregational Church, Sheffield.
Pott 8vo, cloth, Is.
Tasty Dishes. A Choice Selection of Tested Recipes, showing
what we can have for Breakfast, Dinner, Tea and Supper.
It is designed for people of moderate means who desire
to have pleasant and varied entertainment for themselves
and their friends. It is a book of genuine and tested informa
tion. New Edition. Thoroughly revised and brought up to
date. 130th Thousand. Crown 8vo, Is.
" No home ought to be without this timely, useful, and practical family
friend." — Brighton Gazette.
More Tasty Dishes. A Book of Tasty, Economical, and Tested
Recipes. Including a Section on Invalid Cookery. A Supple
ment to " Tasty Dishes." New Edition. Price Is.
" Every recipe is so clearly stated that the most inexperienced cook could
follow them and make dainty dishes at a small cost." — Pearson's Weekly.
"The recipes given have been carefully tried and not been found wanting."
— The Star.
Talks to Little Folks. A Series of Short Addresses. By Rev.
J. C. Carlile. Crown 8vo, art vellum, Is.
" No one who reads this book can reasonably doubt that Mr. Carlile is
master of the difficult art of catching and sustaining the interest of young
people. He is wise enough to dispense with the preacher's framework, texts,
introductions, &c, and at once he arrests attention by a direct question or a
brief story." — Literary World.
Oliver Cromwell. By R. F. Horton, D.D., Author of " John
Howe," " The Teaching of Jesus," &c, &c. Sixth Edition.
Nineteenth Thousand. Is.
" Worthy a place in the library of every Christian student."
— Methodist Recorder.
Rome from the Inside; or, The Priests' Revolt. Translated
and Compiled by " J. B." of The Christian World. Third
Thousand. Fcap. 8vo, price Is.
This pamphlet may be described in brief as a record of the
new revolt in the French priesthood. Its contents are chiefly
letters and addresses from priests and ex-priests. These, it
will be recognised at once, are a testimony of the very first
order as to what modern Rome really stands for in relation
to spiritual life, to morality, and to intellectual progress.

CATALOGUE OF BOOKS 25
1/-
The Bible Definition of Religion. By George Matheson,
M.A., D.D. Printed on deckle-edged paper, with red border
lines and decorated wrapper, in envelope. Price Is.
" Each of Dr. Matheson's chapters Is a prose-poem, a sonata. This is a
book to be read and re-read. It is in every sense ' a thing of beauty ' ; it
Is a veritable " necklace of pearls.' " — C. Silvester Horne.
The Awe of the New Century. By R. F. Horton, M.A.,
D.D. Fcap. 8vo, Is. Decorated parchment cover and deco
rated margins to each page printed in colours. Gilt top.
Each copy in envelope. Second Edition.
" A most impressive and delightful little book, displaying all the best
qualities of the popular pastor of Hampstead." — The Western Mercury.
The Sceptre Without a Sword. By Dr. George Matheson.
In envelope. Pott 8vo, Is.
" ' The Sceptre Without a Sword,' by Dr. George MatheBon, is worth
reading, and that is more than one can say for the vast majority of booklets
now turned out to order. The subject is more important thai ever to-day,
when it is the fashion to Ignore the root principles of Christianity." — The Echo.
" This is a very charming little book — both externally and internally."
— Ardrossan and Saltcoats Herald.
Our Girls' Cookery. By the Author of " Tasty Dishes."
Crown 8vo, linen, Is.
" A most artistic-looking little volume, filled with excellent recipes, that
are given so clearly and sensibly that the veriest tyro in the culinary art
will be able to follow them as easily as possible." — The Lady.
" The contente are varied and comprehensive. . . . The directions
given are clear and reliable, each recipe having been specially tested."
— Dundee Advertiser.
The Divine Satisfaction. A Review of what should and what
should not be thought about the Atonement. By J. M.
Whiton. Crown 8vo, paper, Is.
By MARY E. MANNERS
Crown 8vo, Linen Covers, Is. each.
A Tale of a Telephone, and Other Pieces.
" Narrative pieces, suitable for recitation." — Outlook.
" Facile and effective pieces in verse of the sort that tells well on the reci
tation platform. They nave a pleasant light humour and a lilt often like
that of the Ingoldsby Legends, and should not fail to entertain any reader
in a jocular mood." — Scotsman.
The Bishop and the Caterpillar (as recited by the late Mr.
Brandram), and Other Pieces. Dedicated by permission to
Lewis Carroll. Fourth Edition.
" The first two pieces are quite worthy of Ingoldsby, and that reverend
gentleman would not have been ashamed to own them. The pieces are
admirably suited for recitation." — Dramatic Review.
Aunt Agatha Ann ; and Other Ballads. Illustrations by
Ernold A. Mason and Louis Wain.
" Excellent pieces for recitation from a popular pen." — Lady's Pictorial.

26 JAMES CLARKE AND CO.'S
1/-
Sunday Afternoon Song Book, with Tunes. Compiled by
H. A. Kennedy and R. D. Metcalfe. Is. net. Words only,
12s. 6d. per hundred net.
" The airs have been selected and arranged under the editorship of Mr.
R. D. Metcalfe, and add so much to the value of the collection that this
edition will easily supersede all others and give the work a new popularity
with choral societies and others interested in church music." — The Scotsman.
Christianity In Common Speech: Suggestions for an Every
day Behef. By J. Compton Rickett. Demy 8vo, Is.

SMALL BOOKS ON GREAT SUBJECTS
(Cheap Edition)
Bound in red cloth, Is. each.
The Ship of the Soul. By
Stopford A. Brooke, M.A.
Faith and Self-Surrender.
By James Marttneau,
D.D., D.C.L.
Martineau's Study of Re
ligion. By Richard A.
Armstrong.
The Kingdom of the Lord
Jesus. By Alexander A.
Mackennal, D.D.

Social Worship an Everlast
ing Necessity. By John
Clifford, D.D.
The Taste of Death and the
Life of Grace. By P. T.
Forsyth, M.A., D.D.
The Conquered World. By
R. F. Horton, M.A., D.D.
The Christian Life. By
Archdeacon Sinclair.

6d.
Max Hereford's Dream. By Edna Lyall, Author of
" Donovan," " We Two," " Doreen," &c. New Edition.
Price 6d.
" The ' Dream ' is intended to illustrate the efficacy of prayer to those
in suffering, and Max Hereford, an orator and philanthropist, is on a bed
of sickness at the time." — Nottingham Daily Guardian.
England's Danger. By R. F. Horton, M.A., D.D. Price 6d.
Contents : Romanism and National Decay ; St. Peter and
the Rook ; Truth ; Protestantism ; Holy Scripture ;
Purgatory. " Good fighting discourses. They contend that Soman Catholicism has
ruined every country in which it prevails, and controvert the leading
positions taken by Roman theologians." — Scotsman.
The Ship's Engines. A Parable. By the late T. Campbell
Finlayson, D.D. In vellum cover, 6d. net.
Rev. J. H. Jowett says : — " I am so glad you are issuing the article in the
shape of the little booklet. I am sure it will be very helpful to many people,
and will bring light and leading to many bewildered. souls."
The Institutional Church. By C. Silvester Horne, M.A.
With plans and designs by P. Mobley Hordeb. Paper covers,
6d. net.

CATALOGUE OF BOOKS 27

6d.
CLARKE'S SIXPENNY SERIES
Demy 8vo, Paper Covers.
Tuornycroft Hall. By Emma Jane Worboise.
Jan Vedder's Wife. By Amelia E. Barr.
St. Beetha's. By Emma Jane Worboise.
A Daughter of Fife. By Amelia E. Barr.
Ourselves and the Universe. By J. Brierley.
4d. Net
Holy Christian Empire. By Rev. Principal Forsyth, M.A., D.D.,
of Hackney College, Hampstead. Crown 8vo, paper cover,
4d. net.
" Rich in noble thought, in high purpose, in faith and in courage. Every
sentence tells, and the whole argument moves onward to its great conclusion.
Dr. Forsyth has put the argument for missions in a way that will nerve
and inspire the Church's workers at home and abroad for fresh sacrifice."
— London Quarterly Review.
The Unique Class Chart and Register. By Rev. J. H.
Ridette. Specially arranged and absolutely indispensable
for keeping a complete record of the scholars according to
the requirements of the Meggitt Scheme of Sunday-school
Reform. Linen cover, 4d. net.
3d. Net
School Hymns, for Schools and Missions. Words only.
Compiled by E. H. Mayo Gunn. Cloth limp, 3d. ; cloth
boards, 6d. ; music, 3s. 2d. Net
The Sunday Afternoon Song Book. Containing 137 Hymns.
For use at " Pleasant Sunday Afternoons," and Other
Gatherings. Compiled by H. A. Kennedy, of the Men's
Sunday Union, Stepney Meeting House. Twentieth Thousand,
2d. ; music, Is.
" Contains 137 hymns, the catholic character of which, in the best sense
of the term, may be gathered from the names of the authors, which include
Tennyson, Ebenezer Elliott, Whittier, G. Herbert, C. Wesley, Thomas
Hughes, J. H. Newman, Lonefellow, Bonar, and others. While the purely
dogmatic element is largely absent, the Christian life, in its forms of aspira
tion, struggle against sin, and love for the true and the good, is well illus
trated." — Literaiy World.

JAMES CLARKE AND CO.'S

Index of Titles

PAGE
Abbey Mill, The . . .17
Adrift on the Black Wild Tide 16
America in the East . . 4
Anoient Musical Instruments . 21
Angels of God, The . .19
Animal Fun . . .22
Animal Gambols . . .22
Apocalyptical Writers, The
Messages of the . .11
Apostles, The Messages of the 11
Art of Living Alone, The . 20
Atonement in Modern Thought,
The .... 7
Aunt Agatha Ann . . 25
Awe of the New Century, The . 2fi
Baptist Handbook, The . 14
Barbone Parliament, The . 5
Barrow, Henry, Separatist . 2
Beads of Tasmar, The . .10
Between Two Loves . .10
Bible Definition of Religion,
The . . . .25
Bible Story, The: Retold for
Young People . .15
Bishop and the Caterpillar, The 26
Black Familiars, The . 4, 17
Border Shepherdess, A . .10
Bow of Orange Ribbon, The 10, 17
Britain's Hope . . .19
Brudenells of Brude, The . 17
Burning Questions . 9, 19
Canonbury Holt . . .17
Cartoons of St. Mark . . 5
Challenge, The . . . 13
Changing Creeds and Social
Struggles ... 9
Character through Inspiration 20
Children's Pace, The . .21
Christ of the Children, The . 13
Ohrist of tho Heart, The . 5
Christ that is To Be, The . 9
Christ, The Private Relation
ships of. , . .5
Christ Within, The . .19
Chrfst's Pathway to the Cross 1 8
Christian Baptism . . 18

PAGE
Christian Life, The . 20, 26
Christian World Pulpit, The . 6
Christianity and Social Prob
lems .... 6
Christianity in Common Speech 2 6
Ohrystabel . . . 10, 17
Church and the Kingdom, The 21
Church, Ministry and Sacra
ments in the New Testa
ment .... 5
Cinderella . . 3, 17
Comforts of God, The . .21
Common Life, The . . 8
Common-sense Christianity . 18
Conquered World, The . 19, 26
Courage of the Coward, The . 8
Crucible of Experience, The . 18
Daughter of Fife, A . 10, 17
Debt of the Damerals, The . 17
Divine Satisfaction, The . 25
Do We Need a Now Theology ? 22
Dutch in the Medway, The . 10
Early Pupils of the Spirit . 16
Earlier Prophets, The Messages
of the . . . .11
Earliest Christian Hymn, The 15
Economics of Jesus, The . 18
Emilia's Inheritance . . 17
England's Danger . .26
Episcopacy . . . .11
Epistle to the Galatians, The . 15
Esther Wynne . . 10, 17
Eternal Religion, The . . 8
Ezekiel, The Book of . .2
Faith and Verification . . 5
Faith the Beginning, Self-Sur
render the Fulfilment, of
the Spiritual Life . 20, 26
Family Prayers for Morning
Use .... 9
Father Fabian . . .17
Feet of Clay . . . .10
Fireside Fairy Tales . . 28
First Christians, The . . 8
Flower-o'-the-Corn . 3, 17
Forgotten Sheaf, The . .19

CATALOGUE OF BOOKS

29

PAGE
Fortune's Favourite . .17
Fortunes of Cyril Denham, The 1 7
Friars Lantern ... 7
Friend Olivia ... 4
Gain or Loss ? . . .22
Gamble with Life, A .9
Garcia, G. H. R. . . . 9
Garrisoned Soul, The . . 22
Gloria Patri : Talks about the
Trinity .... 9
Glorious Company of the
Apostles, The . .16
God's Greater Britain . . 9
Golden Truths for Young Folk 23
Gospel of Grace, The . . 7
Grey and Gold . . 10, 17
Grey House at Endlestone . 17
Growing Revelation, The . 6
Haromi : A New Zealand Story 4
Harvest Gleanings . .14
Health and Home Nursing . 23
Health in the Home Life . 12
Heartsease in the Family . 12
Heirs of Errington, The . .17
Helen Bury . . . .12
Helps to Health and Beauty . 24
Higher on the Hill . . 7
His Next of Kin . . 10, 17
His Rustic Wife ... 9
History of the United States, A 2
Holy Christian Empire . . 27
Holy Spirit, The . . .18
Household of McNeil, The . 10
House of Bondage, The . .17
How to Become Like Christ . 20
How to Read the Bible . . 23
Husbands and Wives . .17
Ideals for Girls . . .16
Immanence of Christ in Modern
Life, The . . . 12
Incarnation of the Lord, The 6
Industrial Exploringa in and
around London . . 9
Infoldings and Unfoldings of
the Divine Genius . . 20
Inspiration in Common Life . 18
Institutional Church, The . 26
Inward Light, The . . 7
Israel's Law Givers, The
Messages of . . .11
Jan Vedder's Wife . . 17
Jealousy of God, The . . 20
Jesus and His Teaching . . 7

page
Jesus, The Messages of, Accord
ing to the Synoptists . II
Joan Carisbroke . . 10, 17
Job and His Comforters . . 14
Joshua, The Book of . .3
Judges, The Book of .3
Kid McGhie .... 3
Kingdom of the Lord Jesue,
The . . .20, 28
Kit Kennedy : Country Boy 3, 17
Lady Clarissa . . .17
Last of the MacAllisters, The . 10
Later Prophets, The Messages
of the . . . . 11
Leaves for Quiet Hours . . 13
Let us Pray ... 21
Letters of Christ, The . . 18
Liberty and Religion . . IS
Life and Letters of Alexander
Mackennal, The . . 6
Louis Wain's Animal Show . 23
Loves of Miss Anne, The 3, 17
Lynch, Rev. T. T. : A Memoir 4
Making of an Apostle, The 19
Manual for Free Church Minis
ters, A . . . .23
Martineau's Study of Religion 20, 26
Maud Bolingbroke . 12
Max Hereford's Dream . . 26
Messages of the Bible, The . 11
Method of Prayer, A .12
Millicent Kendriok . 10, 17
Miss Devereux, Spinster . 17
Model Prayer, Tho . .16
More Tasty Dishes . 24
Morning and Evening Cries . 14
Morning Mist, A . . .17
Morning, Noon, and Night . 24
Mornington Lecture, The . 5
Mr. Montmorency's Money 10, 17
My Baptism . . .16
My Neighbour and God . . 13
New Evangel, The . .12
New Mrs. Lascelles, The . 17
New Points to Old Texts . 10
New Testament in Modern
Speech, The . . 14
Nineteen Hundred ? . .10
Nobly Born . . .10, 17
Nonconformist Church Build
ings . . . .16

30

JAMES CLARKE AND CO.'S

PAGE
Old Pictures in Modern Frames 19
Oliver Cromwell . . .24
Oliver Westwood , . .17
On Seeing Angels . . .16
Ordeal of Faith, The . . 15
Our City of God ... 4
Our Girls' Cookery . . 25
Ourselves and the Universe . 8
Outline Text Lessons for
Junior Classes . . 23
Overdale . . .10, 17

and

Passion for Souls, The
Paul and Christina
Paul, The Messages of
Pa&ton Hood : Poet
Preacher
Personality of Jesus, The
Pilot, The .
Poems. By Mme. Guyon
Polychrome Bible, The .
Popular Argument for the
Unity of Isaiah, A
Popular History of the Free
Churches, A . . 4,
Practical Lay Preaching and
Speaking to Men .
Practical Points in Popular
Proverbs
PrayerPreaching to the Times .
Price of Priestcraft, The
Pride of the Family, The
Principles and Practices of the
Baptists
Problems of Living
Prophetical and Priestly His
torians, The Messages of
Psalmists The Messages of the

Race and Religion
Reasonable View of Life, A
Reasons Why for Congrega.
tionalists
Reasons Why for Free Church
men
Reconsiderations and Rein.
forcements
Reform, in Sunday School
Teaching
Religion stnd Experience
Religion of Jesus The .
Religion that will Wear, A

18 10
11 9
11 13
11 3
151413 151810
22 1714 8
1111

Quickening of Caliban, The . 10
Quiet Hints to Growing
Preachers

11
21 18 18
22
20 19 4
16
23

PAGE
Resultant Greek Testament,
The . . . .14
Rights of Man, The . . 4
Rise of Philip Barrett, The 4, 15
Robert Wreford's Daughter . 10
Rogers, J. Guinness . . 2
Rome from the Inside . . 24
Rosebud Annual, The . 7, 12
Rose of a Hundred Leaves, A . 4
Ruling Ideas of the Present Age 6
School Hymns . . 12, 27
School of Life, The . . 12
Sceptre Without a. Sword, The 25
Scourge of God, The . . 17
Seven Puzzling Bible Books 5, 19
Ship of the Soul, The . 20, 26
Ship's Engines, The . . 26
She Loved a Sailor . . 10
Short Devotional Services . 21
Simple Cookery . . .16
Simple Things of the Christian
Life . . . .18
Singlehurst Manor . . 10
Sissie . . . . 10. 17
Sister to Esau, A . .10, 17
Small Books on Great Subjects 19, 20
Social Salvation ... 6
Social Worship an Everlasting
Necessity . . 19, 26
Squire of Sandal Side, The 10, 17
St. Beetha's . . 10, 17
Storehouse for Preachers and
Teachers . . .21
Story of the English Baptists,
The .... 7
Story of Penelope, The . .17
Studies of the Soul . . 8
Sunday Afternoon Song Book 26, 27
Sunday Morning Talks with
Boys and Girls . . 14
Sunny Memories of Australasia 18
Supreme Argument for Chris
tianity, The . . .20
Tale of a Telephone, A . .25
Talks to Little Folks . . 24
Taste of Death and the Life of
Grace, The . . 19, 26
Tasty Dishes . . .24
Ten Commandments, The . 15
Theology and Truth . . 5
Theophilus Trinal, Memorials of 5
Thornycroft Hall . . 17, 27
Thoughts for Life's Journey . 7

CATALOGUE OF BOOKS

31

Through Soience to Faith
Tommy, and Other Poems .
Tools and the Man
Town Romanoe, A j or, On
London Stones
Trial and Triumph . ,
Types of Christian Life .

PAGE 4
. 22 6

17 19
20

Undertones of the Nineteenth
Century . . .14
Unique Class Chart and
Register . . .27
Unknown to Herself . .17
Value of the Apocrypha, The . 18
Vida; or, The Iron King's
Daughter ... 3
Violet Vaughan . . 10, 17
Voice from China, A . .8

PAGE
Wanderer, The ... 9
Warleigh's Trust , , .17
Way of Life, The . . .20
Wayside Angels . . .24
What Shall this Child Be ? . IS
Who Wrote the Bible t . .18
Why We Believe . . .13
Wideness of God's Meroy, The 18
Wife as Lover and Friend, The 16
William Jeffrey . . .18
Woman's Patience, A . .17
Women and their Saviour . 22
Women and their Work . 18
Words by the Wayside . . 20
Working Woman's Life, A , 7
Woven of Love and Glory . 10

Young Man's Religion, A . 14

Index of Authors

Abbot, C. L.
Abbott, Lyman
Adeney, W. F.
Aitchison, George
Aked, C. F. .
Andom, R. .
Andrews, C. C.
Antram, C. E. P.
Armstrong, Richard A.

Bainton, George .
Barr, Amelia E. .
Barrett, G. S.
Barrows, C. H.
Bennett, Rev. W. H.
Benvie, Andrew .
Blake, J. M. .
Bloundelle-Burton, J.
Bradford, Amory H.
Brierley, H. E. .
Brierley, J. .
Brock, W. .
Brooke, Stopford A.
Brown, C.
Burford, W. K. .

9

4

23

21
8
9
17
22
. 20,
26
16
4, 10.
17
15
11
3,
15
7
18
17
. 6, 7,
20
22
. 4, 8,
12
15
. 20,
26
18
24
Campbell, Rev. R. J.
Carlile, Rev. J. C. .
Clifford, Dr. .
Coulton, G. G.
Crockett, S. R. .
Cubitt, James .
Cuff, W.
Davidson, Gladys .
Dods, Marcus .
Ellis, J.
Evans, H. .
Farningham, Marianne 1, 10,
Finlayson, T. Campbell
Fiske, J.
Forsyth, Rev. Principal
Fraser, J. . ,
Funcke, O. .
Gibbon, J. Morgan
Giberne, Agnes
Gladden, Washington
6, 6, 7, 9, 17,
„
19
7,
24
9,
26
7
3,
17
16
,
IS
. 20
21, 23
4, 18,
9, 26,
22
22
26 2
27 1112 15
17
8, 19, 21
82

JAMES CLARKE AND CO.'S CATALOGUE

PAGE

PAGE

Glass, Henry Alexander

,

5

Meyer, F. B.

18
Glover, R. .
,
21
Moore, G. F.
3
Greenhough, J. G.
14,
19
Morgan, Rev. G. Campbell
15,
18
Griffith-Jones, E. .
6,
18,
20
Morten, Honnor .
12
Griffis, William Elliot
4
Mountain, J.
,
16
Gunn, E. H. Mayo
12,
27
Munger, T. T. .
,
20
Guyon, Madame ,
11,
12
Notewell, Nicholas
16
Haweis, H. R. .
,
16
Haycraft, Mrs.
,
9
Peaks, A. S.
19
Heddle, E. F.
,
17
Pharmaceutical Chemist, A .
24
Henderson, J. G. .
,
9
Picton, J. Allanson
16
Henson, Canon Hensley.
.
10
Powicke, F. J. .
,
2
Hocking, S. K. .
,
9
Pulsford, John
,
20
Hordsr, W. Garrett
,
20
Horne, C. Silvester
Rees, F. A. .
15
i, 14, 15,
18,
21,
26
Rickett, J. Compton 9,
io',
26
Horton, Dr. R. F.
Ridette, J. H.
t
27
5, 18, 19,
24,
25,
26
Robarts, F. H. .
14
Hunter, John
•
19
Roberts, J. E. .
Rogers, Dr. Guinness .
18 2
"J. B." of The Christian
Rudge, C. .
18
World .
24
Russell, F. A.
18
Jefferson, C. E. .
.
11
Jeffs, H. .
.
13
Sanders, Frank Knight .
11
J. M. G. .
.
9
Scottish Presbyterian, A
23
John, Griffith
8
Sinclair, Archdeacon
20,
26
Jones, J. D. . 7,
16,
18,
22
Smyth, Dr. Newman
4
Jowett, J. H.
18
SuelL Bernard J. .
Stevenson, J. G. .
18,
22 13
Kane, James J.
16
Sutter, Julie ,
19
Kaye, Bannerman
4
Swan, F. R. .
12
Kennedy, H. A. .
26,
27
'
Kennedy, John .
15
Thomas, H. Arnold
20
Lansfeldt, L.
17
Toy, Rev. C. H. .
2
Lee, W. T. .
13
Trotter, Mrs. E. .
14
Llewellyn, D. J. .
18
Tymms, T. V. .
5
Lyall, David
i,
15
Tytler, S. .
17
Lyall, Edna .
26
Lynoh, T. T.
i.
5
Veitch, R. .
.
8
Lynd, William .
21
Von Schrenk, E. H.
¦
7
Maofadyan, D.
6
Wain, Louis
22,
23
Macfarlane, Charles
10
Walford, L. B. .
4,
17
Maokennal, Alexander
20,
26
Warschauer, J.
12
Manners, Mary E.
25
Waters, N. MoG. .
14
Marohant, B.
.
17
Watkinson, W. L.
18
Marshall, J. T. .
.
14
Watson, W. .
18
Marshall, N. H. .
.
5
Weymouth, R. F. .
14
Martineau, James ,
20,
26
White, William .
4
Mather, Lessels
.
23
Whitley, W. T. .
5
Mather, Z. .
6
Whiton, J. M. 9, 10, 16,
20,
25
Matheson, George 7,
is,
20|
25
Williams, C.
14
Maver, J. S. .
21
Williams, T. R. .
19
Meade, L. T.
17
Wilson, Philip Whitwell
Worboise, Emma J. 10,
13
Metcalfe, R. D. .
26
17^
27
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