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Presented by the Author

THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY

THE DYNAMIC
OF CHRISTIANITY
£ g>tuDE of tyt ©ttal anfi permanntt
dftemmt in t^e Christian Religion
BY
EDWARD MORTIMER CHAPMAN

" Enthroned above the world although He sit,
Still is the world in Him and He in it ;
The self-same Power in yonder sunset glows
That kindled in the lords of Holy Writ."
Richard Hovey.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
(Cbe Slinntfi&e ^uM, Camorfoge
1904

COPYRIGHT 1904 BY EDWARD MORTIMER CHAPMAN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published November 1004

To
I. N. C.

PREFACE
A preface would scarce be needful to this
little book were it not for a fear and a hope
cherished by the Author. His fear is lest
some casual reader should be tempted to num
ber him among those who go about to " re
concile Science and Rehgion." He has no
claim upon the fellowship of that noble and
futile company. Their ideal is so worthy that
they deserve the reward of all peacemakers —
a reward which he would gladly share. But
he is hindered from seeking it in their society
by a doubt as to the apphcation of the Beati
tude to those who cry " Peace, peace," where
there is no quarrel. The reconcihation of
Science and Religion seems to him to be
like an attempt to harmonize the fact of sun
rise with the joy of walking and working in
the hght.
His hope is that he may succeed in remind-

viii PREFACE
ing a generation very busy with the statics of
Rehgion — its organizations and its machin
eries, its creeds and its charities — of the
principle of hfe and power which gives them
their significance. It may be that this princi
ple and that which has given to the last cen
tury of adventure in the realm of Physical
Science its peculiar and compelling fascina
tion will prove to be identical.
The theme is so large that many essays
must be made toward its exposition and its
application to life. Some of these will prove
to be successes and others failures ; the fail
ures being perhaps no less needful to the
ultimate prevalence of truth than the suc
cesses. Since that which is set down between
these covers has been born of experience, the
Author ventures to hope that it may find
place in the more cheerful category; but if
not, that it may at least be numbered among
the Failures that Help.
E. M. C.
The Homestead,
Oxd Saybrook, Conn.,
23 July, 1904.

CONTENTS
PAGB
I. Introduction  1
II. The Zeitgeist  22
III. The Present State of Popular Theologi
cal Thought  47
IV. The Religion of the People ... 72
V. The Social Unrest  96
VI. The Thesis  121
VII. The Witness of Scripture .... 142
VIII. The Witness of the Christian Church 168
IX. The Witness of Individual Experience . 193
X. The New Freedom of Faith . . . 221
XI. The New Meaning of Some Old Words . 255
XII. The New Harmonies of Revelation . 288
Appendix : Synopsis of Argument . . 321
Index  327

THE
DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
I
INTRODUCTION
Moke than six decades have now passed since
Macaulay imagined his famous traveler from
New Zealand perched upon a broken arch of
London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St.
Paul's. The essayist's contention was that
even in the day when London should have
become a desolation, and the centre of her
formal worship a heap, the Church of Rome
might still prove to be an undiminished power
in the world. He argued with characteristic
grace and assurance that theology was not,
and could not become, a progressive science ;
that Socrates, in confuting the little atheist
Aristodemus, had anticipated all that is really
significant in Paley's argument from design ;
and that the fact of Sir Thomas More's readi
ness to die for his faith in transubstantiation
is sufficient to lead us to expect that any man

2 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
of similar intelligence and honesty may hold
the doctrine now as firmly as Henry VIII's
chancellor held it, since our advance in science,
great as it has been, scarcely served to make
it more unreasonable in the nineteenth than
it must have seemed to be in the sixteenth
century. His process of reasoning apphed to
natural theology applies a fortiori, of course,
to theology based upon what Macaulay called
" revelation." " All divine truth is, according
to the doctrine of the Protestant Churches,
recorded in certain books. ... A Christian
of the fifth century with a Bible is neither
better nor worse situated than a Christian of
the nineteenth century with a Bible, candor
and natural acuteness being, of course, sup
posed equal."
Nothing could better illustrate the trans
formation that the years have wrought in the
Protestant attitude toward theology than the
mere quotation of such a passage as the above.
It is to be remembered that in writing it
Macaulay hardly misrepresented the thought
of his day in England and America. He
perceived the Evangelical to be scarcely less
bound by the traditions of the Fathers than
the Tractarian, though they were of course

INTRODUCTION 3
very different Fathers. The Nonconformist as
well as the Churchman was to a considerable
extent an antiquarian ; and the results of
his antiquarian research, so far as they had
theological significance, concerned an insti
tution known as the Church, rather than a
body of truth closely related to life. The
" Leben Jesu " of Strauss had been published
but five years, and its author was in disgrace
even in Germany. George Eliot's translation
was not yet begun, nor to be issued until
1846. Few English students of theology read
German, and some of those who did, read it
upon the sly. And twenty years were still to
pass before Colenso should precipitate the
great question of the Higher Criticism of the
Bible upon his unwilling countrymen.
The Unitarians kept something of the tem
per of the elder Maurice, whose enthusiasm
we are told " went out, like that of so many
others of his class, into politics rather than
religion." 1 The avowed champions of unbe
lief had not yet revolted against the crass
misrepresentations and travesties of religion
which men like the elder Mill were not
ashamed to perpetuate, and which, to the
1 Tulloch, Religious Thought in Britain, p. 263.

4 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
amazement of later generations, seem to have
been not without some influence upon the
thought of his far greater son. The more in
tellectual among the Presbyterians and Inde
pendents were largely occupied with" barren
doctrinal controversy. In the realm of philo
sophy, students at the universities heard much
talk of " progress of the species, dark ages,
and the like, but the hungry young looked up
to their spiritual nurses, and for food were
bidden eat the east wind." *
It may be answered that when Macaulay
wrote his " Edinburgh Review " essay on Von
Ranke's " History of the Popes," from which
I have quoted, a new era had been ushered in
by Coleridge and Maurice, torch-bearers of
the higher and richer thought of Germany.
This is true, and with them should be num
bered Thomas Erskine ; while Wordsworth's
parallel influence in the realm of poetry, and
Carlyle's in the field of general literature,
but especially of the ethical interpretation
of history, is not to be overlooked. Maurice,
the near spiritual kinsman of both Coleridge
and Erskine, had but just published his "King
dom of Christ," — it appeared in 1838, —
1 Sartor Resartus, bk. ii. c. iii.; Tulloch, p. 170.

INTRODUCTION 6
and the sub-title of this notable work, "Hints
on the Principles, Ordinances, and Constitu
tion of the Cathohc Church, in Letters to a
Member of the Society of Friends," reveals
that institutional bent or tendency which has
proven itself to be at once the strength and
the limitation of so many English theologi
ans. Nor should the fact be overlooked that
it always takes time, and what often seems
to be a disproportionate and unreasonable
length of time, for the results of theological
investigation to find their way out of the study
and the treatise into the general thought
and speech of men. It is not enough to say
that the man of the street does not care about
such things. He probably does not care
about their mere academic aspect, but in their
relation to life they interest him and often
interest him profoundly. It frequently hap
pens, moreover, that the " man of letters " is
among the worst informed and the least in
telligent of the observers of theological and
rehgious phenomena. Like the cockney who
counts his ignorance of country ways the
cachet of his town-bred superiority, he chooses
to hold aloof from any special acquaintance

6 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
with this branch of what he very likely calls
a pseudo-science. If he be a portrayer of the
manners of the time, as# an essayist or a
novelist, he has of course a theologian among
the lay figures in his studio. Occasionally he
makes large use of him, profiting especially
by that infirmity of position, that feebleness
of " stance," to filch a word from golf, which
makes him such an easy prey to the attacks of
his master ; for, be it observed, this figure is
always set up to be overthrown. He is care
fully provided beforehand with so much of
the theological equipment of day before yes
terday as his master's odds and ends of yes
terday may suffice to vanquish. An excellent
type of this sort of creature appears in the
late Mr. Harold Frederic's " Theron Ware."
Mrs. Humphry Ward laid him under tribute
for the original of " Robert Elsmere." He it
is who is periodically ground to powder when
Professor Goldwin Smith essays Old Testa
ment topics ; while the man who clamors from
time to time in the newspapers and maga
zines for a " prayer-test " would find his
occupation gone without him.
The contention of Macaulay with reference
to theology is only another case in point.

INTRODUCTION 7
Though tricked out in seemly dress enough, it
was in reality nothing less than a damning ac
cusation, and none could have known better
than he that the doom of theology as a fit sub
ject for the consideration of intelligent men
would be sounded if he should succeed in sub
stantiating his claim. Nor is this the less true
because many theologians of the most ortho
dox type would have rejoiced to agree with
him; for the ultimate nature of a current
theological system has been a favorite premiss
of the most devout behevers as well as the
most cynical scoffers, though they have rea
soned from it to utterly diverse conclusions.
Indeed, among those who read this essay was
very hkely one man of thirty-nine from whom
Macaulay's contention would have won a glad
assent, — a man whose efforts in behalf of
the dependent classes in English society were
just beginning to assume influential propor
tions, and who was one day to be counted
among the most significant and beneficent
forces in the social life of the century. The
pronounced evangelicalism of Lord Ashley,
better known to the world as the seventh Earl
of Shaftesbury, was of precisely the type that
dreaded theological change, and was pre-

8 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
pared to deny the possibility of any appre
ciable theological development, while it rev
erenced theology as the mother of sciences.
Though Lord Shaftesbury never laid claim to
the gift of tongues, he possessed one tongue
whose facility, eloquence, and occasional acerb
ity made it quite equal to the work of many.
" I have not," said he on one occasion, " that
faculty for mild speech which distinguishes
some persons in this country." ! He justified
the confession by characterizing "Ecce Homo "
as " the most pestilential book ever vomited
from the jaws of hell." 2 He " loathed with
the utmost abhorrence " Colenso's book, even
while with characteristic high-mindedness he
protested against Bishop Gray's summary
methods of disciplining its author.3 He called
heaven to witness how absolutely he ab
horred the theology of Jowett,4 though he
would not put him down by dishonoring his
office. Perhaps most significant of all was his
letter to Pusey during the " Essays and Re
views " controversy, in which he said : " Time,
space, and divergent opinions have separated
1 Edwin Hodder, The Life and Work of the Earl of
Shaftesbury, K. O., iii. 160.
2 Id. p. 164. « Id. p. 168. « Id. i. 170.

INTRODUCTION

us for many years. . . . We will fight about
those another day; in this 'we must con
tend earnestly for the faith once delivered to
the Saints ; ' and it must be done together

now." J

Yet at this very period, though neither
Macaulay nor Shaftesbury was clear eyed
enough to discern the signs of its advent, an
era of theological development was opening
which in its ultimate results is likely to prove
to be the most significant since the Reforma
tion. The day of the barren deistic rational
ist of the eighteenth century was past. The
Evangehcal Revival as a revival had practi
cally spent its force, though its substantial
fruits remained. The German leaven was at
work. Schleiermacher, who died in 1834, was
still little but a name to most Englishmen
and Americans, with the exception of such
as knew their Coleridge well. But his inter
preters were at the door. The ethics of Kant
were receiving practical apphcation to the
problems of life at the hands of Carlyle, and
coming to such men as Froude like a new
gospel.
1 Edwin Hodder, The Life and Work of the Earl of
Shaftesbury, K. G., iii. 166.

10 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
With respect to Hegel and his influence
the case was somewhat different. There is a
story that Comte once expressed a half -petu
lant wish that Hegel would publish a little
book summing up his philosophy " succinctly
and in French ; " to which the great philoso
pher replied that his system was capable of
expression " ni succinctement, ni en f rangais."
The saying, though doubtless apocryphal, is
none the less significant. The practical Eng
lishman with his institutional tendency was
not very hkely to become a student of so
great and abstruse a system, and still less
hkely to become its apostle. In Germany upon
the appearance of Hegel's philosophy, " The
ology," as a distinguished critic has said,
" was happy at the supreme good fortune that
had come to her, — her abihty to speak in
her own tongue the thoughts of her old en
emy." 1 But among English-speaking peoples
the practical theological outcome of the He
gelian philosophy has long been closely asso
ciated with the work of Strauss. Strauss has
been cleverly characterized as the Franken
stein of Hegelianism. He was its unnatural
by-product, — made, not begotten ; and he has
1 Fairbairn, Christ in Theology, p. 222.

INTRODUCTION 11
perhaps done more than' any other writer to
bring German influence in theology under
suspicion among the mass of British and
American Christians. Even at this late day
great numbers of intelligent persons, to whom
the works of Baur and his Tubingen brethren
are sealed books, know the name and dread
the power of Hegel. Of the real and abid
ing service to the faith wliich the Tubingen
school rendered in compelling the adoption
of a new and scientific historical method in
theology they know nothing. Shaftesbury and
Pusey, with the multitudes for whom they
stood, when they thought of theological devel
opment, beheld it branded with the mark of
the Teutonic Beast.
In America the situation was apparently
though not essentially different. The ultra-
Calvinism of the Fathers had from its very
nature compelled "improvement." It was a
perpetual challenge to men's reason. There
was a haunting power about it quite distinct
from its almost regal place among the systems,
that forbade its contemptuous or, cavalier
rejection. Its preeminent quahties fascinated
as well as repelled the student. Hence arose
endless more or less successful tamperings

12 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
with it. It stood like some vast structure, —
a tour de force of other days, — ill adapted
to the needs of the present, but too splendid
to be destroyed; though its interior might
be remodeled, and so many minor changes
wrought upon its outside as to tone down its
pristine ruggedness and, it must be added,
belittle its original majesty. So in almost
every generation after Edwards there was a
new school to which a newer school succeeded.
Thus the general notion of theological
change and development was less strange to
the men of New than to those of Old Eng
land. But it is to be noted that it was change
within definite limits. The content of revela
tion was fixed. There was a certain sum of
truth delivered to men. It might be rear
ranged. Deeper research might result in the
discovery of heretofore hidden things. The
immediate limits of the mine in which it was
man's privilege to delve might be unknown to
him, but they were none the less limits, pre
cisely as a " coal measure " may reach for an
indeterminate distance into a mountain-side,
but still be defined by the general shape and
size of the mountain. There was an academic
assent given to Robinson's historic dictum

INTRODUCTION 13
that more truth might yet break out from the
Word of God, but it was a rather hard say
ing even when the Word of God to men
was supposed to be altogether included within
the covers of a book. In short, 'the present
dispensation was generaUy admitted to be
an ordo ordinatus rather than an ordo ordi-
nans. Here and there, to be sure, a voice was
raised in protest ; none clearer or braver than
Horace Bushnell's. Yet in a singular sense
Bushnell stood " Between two worlds, — one dead,
The other powerless to be born.''
He reminds us of those souls in Tintoretto's
great Judgment Scene who, though arisen,
are not yet wholly risen. The bars of their
earthly prison-house have burst and they are
hving in the free upper air, but not yet un
hampered by the clods. This is in no sense
to belittle Bushnell's place or work. Had he
cut loose from all that was temporary in the
thought of his day, it is possible that our
debt to him might have been less rather than
greater. For in the literal rather than the
tropical sense, Bushnell's work has proven
itself to be profoundly conservative. His

14 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
greatness is the substantial greatness of the
reinterpreter, the rebuilder, and the reformer,
rather than the notoriety of the mere revolu
tionist. Had he held a different view of the
FaU, for instance, his abihty to interpret the
significance of the Atonement might conceiv
ably have been diminished rather than in
creased. Had he foreseen the significance of
the new doctrine of Evolution, it is doubtful
if his message to the men of his day with
reference to Nature and the Supernatural
would have been so inteUigible and uplifting.
WhUe had he undertaken to grapple with the
modern science of Biblical Criticism, he would
have found it hard work to convince those
about him that there was any common ground
for them to stand on.
As things were, he found, to quote the
luminous words of his latest biographer, that
" relief was needed at four points : first, from
a revivalism that ignored the law of Christian
growth; second, from a conception of the
Trinity bordering on tritheism; third, from
a view of miracles that implied a suspension
of natural law ; and fourth, from a theory of
the Atonement that had grown almost shad
owy under ' improvements,' yet still failed to

INTRODUCTION 15
declare the law of human hfe. The time had
also come when a rational, scientific, cause-
and-effect habit of thought was imperatively
required, not only on these four points, but
in the whole realm of theology." x
Now it is preeminently such a "rational,
scientific, cause-and-effect habit of thought"
that has been exerting its influence upon
every branch of human knowledge during the
six decades since Macaulay assured the world
of 1840 that theology was not a progressive
science. It has been very learnedly and plau
sibly contended that the theological temper
has always been either implicitly or overtly
hostile to scientific progress ; and the conten
tion voices one of those half truths which
deceive quite as many as they instruct. The
warfare that has seemed to exist between The
ology and Science has reaUy been a conflict
between institutionalism and science. It is
the priest who has laboriously and painfully
reared the walls and completed the roof of his
particular system, often at expense of utmost
personal sacrifice be it remembered, to whom
the structural change that accompanies nat
ural growth seems dreadful. There has been
1 T. T. Munger, Horace Bushnell, p. 387.

16 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
no provision for it in his plan. So when
the prophet comes to tell him either in the
name of religion or of natural science that his
whole structural system is wrong, and must
continue to be wrong until he ceases to do
violence to the organic by classing it with the
inorganic, he is incontinently met with bell,
book, and candle. Yet the prophet is no less
a theologian than the priest; nay, in most
instances he is the greater and the more per
spicacious theologian, in so far as he sees the
subject-matter of his science to be living and
continuous rather than dead and completed
revelation. It would be quite possible, too, to
counter upon those who maintain that science
has always found theology at odds with it
by two equally plausible contentions. One is
that a vast number of the discoveries whereby
scientific advance has been accomplished have
been made possible by those very systems of
education and schools of learning which the
church and priesthood have always fostered.
The other is that it is to the theological im
plications of his scientific hypotheses that the
investigator often owes no small part of the
popular interest which it is to his advantage
to arouse.

INTRODUCTION 17
Swedenborg, for instance, anticipated in his
mystical way the nebular hypothesis. Kant,
as early as 1755, gave it form and practi
caUy estabhshed its scientific basis. Here was
the doctrine of evolution in embryo, waiting
for general apphcation throughout the whole
realm of human thought. But it attracted
comparatively httle interest among those mul
titudes, the horizon of whose intelhgence it
was finally to broaden so wonderfuUy, until
Darwin had formulated the theory of Natural
Selection, and his disciples began to expound
what they supposed to be its theological
significance. Then the world of plain people
began to attend to the new teaching. A
feeling went abroad that here was something
to be dealt with, pro or con ; and the result has
been of the greatest possible moment. Darwin,
to be sure, carefuUy avoided this phase of the
discussion. But Tyndall and Huxley and Clif
ford welcomed it so heartily that it is scarcely
too much to say that they are known as theo
logians by many who would be sorely puzzled
to tell whether or not they had rendered any
considerable service to pure science ; while in
America great numbers of inteUigent people
would forever remain in ignorance of Pro-

18 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
fessor John Fiske's special contribution to tbe
doctrine of evolution, had he not wisely and
suggestively expounded it in certain little the
ological treatises that found their thousands
of readers while his " Cosmic PhUosophy "
was waiting for its hundreds.
Returning now for the moment to Macau-
lay's thesis, we may fairly reduce it to this
syllogism. Systems of thought which are
constitutionally intolerant of development are
doomed to extinction. Theology is thus consti
tutionally intolerant of development. There
fore theology is doomed to extinction. It is,
however, only in the light of the evolutionary
notion of life as a perpetual adaptation to
environment that we reach this conclusion.
Macaulay by no means went so far. He seems
to have felt instinctively that some provision
must be made for the ineradicable tendency
of men to cherish superstition ; and this pro
vision he believed that the Church of Rome
might stiU be found to furnish when the
ruins of St. Paul's should adorn the sketch
books of cultivated New Zealand travelers.
His difficulty lay in accepting his own major
premiss; the minor constituted his principal
contention. Our difficulty lies with the minor ;

INTRODUCTION 19
the major we are coming to regard as almost
axiomatic. It is quite true that the change of
position has been made unwillingly, and that
multitudes of honest folk have contended that
a theological system which was capable of
development could not reaUy interpret eternal
truth to the minds and hearts of men. But
that is only to say that theology has not
found herself exempt from the same hard
conditions that have forced reconstruction in
every other field of human thought. She has,
like astronomy and anthropology and medi
cine, been forced to discover some practicable
path of progress between the rocks of dog
matism and the gulf of superstition. It is
useless to deny that there is any such path,
and to claim that the man who searches for
it is bound to find, like the victim of Poe's
" Pit and Pendulum " adventure, that the wall
is so arranged as of necessity to thrust him
who would fain creep about its foot into the
abyss. The human mind wiU not consent to
be thus put to confusion. Comte essayed a
hopeless task when he undertook to convince
the world that the themes which had in aU
ages fascinated some of the greatest men were
not germane to the human intellect ; and

20 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
that it was the part of the true philosopher
to relegate them to the limbo of chimeras.
The dogmatism of negation is even more
antipathetic to the mass of men than the
dogmatism of assertion. Nothing can be
more profoundly unscientific than an a priori
denial of religious experience, or an unwill
ingness to give candid and unbiased attention
to religious phenomena. Nor can anything
bring true science into greater contempt than
the refusal to regard the investigation of these
phenomena and the generalizations which
such investigation appears to justify, as wor
thy of the best thought and endeavor which
men can bring to the task ; unless, indeed, it
be an assumption upon the theologian's part
that all the significant facts in his particular
realm have been discovered; that investiga
tion, except for the purposes of rearrange
ment, is therefore futUe; that the content
of his budget of premisses is fixed ; and that
his true work is merely to manipulate them
in accordance with the well-worn processes of
a deductive logic.
It is my purpose in the chapters which
follow to state a condition ; to propound a
question ; and to suggest an answer. Condi-

INTRODUCTION 21
tion, question, and answer all have their theo
logical implications. But the theological sub
structure which they imply appears to me to
be in no sense a finished product. Christianity
is not a completed system gloriously fash
ioned after the similitude of a temple, but
an organism instinct with the power of an
endless life. Its helpful application to the
affairs of men depends less upon the discov
ery of some architectonic plan, than upon ac
quaintance with the power and principle of
its development. In our reverent search after
this Dynamic of Christianity we shall first
look at the theological, religious, and social
conditions amid which it is at work.

II
THE ZEITGEIST
The reader wiU remember that on the even
ing after Faust's compact with Mephistopheles
he sat down to translate the prologue of St.
John's Gospel into German. This, by reason
of the compact, had become a forbidden occu
pation, and he was at once interrupted by the
howhng of his dog, in whom just then his evil
genius chanced to be embodied ; but not until
he had opportunity to begin debate with him
self upon the great question wliich the pro
logue raises.
" ' T is writ, ' In the Beginning was the Word ! '
I pause, perplexed ! Who now will help afford ?
I cannot the mere word so highly prize ;
I must translate it otherwise,
If by the Spirit guided as I read.
• In the Beginning was the Sense ! ' Take heed.
The import of this primal sentence weigh,
Lest thy too hasty pen be led astray !
Is force creative then of Sense the dower ?
' In the Beginning was the Power ! '
Thus should it stand : yet while the line I trace,

THE ZEITGEIST 23
A something warns me, once more to efface.
The Spirit aids ! from anxious scruples freed,
I write, ' In the Beginning was the Deed ! ' "
Faust, part i. 876-89, Swanwick's trans.

It is a tribute to the prophetic element in
Goethe's genius that as early as 1808 — and
very probably a score of years earlier — he
should thus have made Faust forecast the
phUosophical temper of the nineteenth cen
tury. It has been eminently critical in its
attitude toward received opinion in every de
partment of life ; and it has often chosen to
deal with phenomena as though they were
ultimate realities. The " thing in itself " in
the scientific thought of the century has been
the Deed rather than the Word or the Power.
I do not mean, of course, that outside the
school of Comte men have chosen to defend
this as a thesis ; but they have been wUling to
accept it as a rule of hfe and thought.
Their experience, however, has not been
satisfying. As the century grew old, it be-j
came increasingly evident that they could
never rest in Faust's position, though they
might sojourn there for a time. A somewhat
larger view of the sphere and scope of man
has been accepted. Phenomenon though he

24 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
be, set amid kindred phenomena, there is stUl
noumenon-stuff in him. Something in his
personahty bespeaks his kinship with the
Power behind the Deed — the Reason which
the Word utters. As the shallower and more
materiahstic scientific doctrine of the first
three quarters of the century was forecast by
Goethe in criticising the prologue of St. John,
so the deeper and more vital faith of its later
years has been suggested by Browning in his
comment upon the prologue of Genesis.
"I find first
Writ down for very A B C of fact,
' In the Beginning God made heaven and earth ; '
From which, no matter with what lisp, I spell
And speak you out a consequence — that man,
Man, — as befits the made, the inferior thing, —
Purposed, since made, to grow, not make in turn,
Yet forced to try and make, else fail to grow, —
Formed to rise, reach at, if not grasp and gain
The good beyond him, — which attempt is growth, —
Repeats God's process in man's due degree,
Attaining man's proportionate result, —
Creates, no, but resuscitates perhaps."
The Ring and ihe Book — Prologue.
The contrast between these utterances of
two great interpreters of life separated by
fourscore years is even more significant than
at once appears. It extends to the manner as
well as the matter of their prophecy. Goethe's

THE ZEITGEIST 25
word is graceful, but hoUow and cynical. It
is the message of one who has compassed hfe
in its length and breadth only to find it of
more than doubtful quahty — worth beautify
ing and bedecking, perhaps, but to be adorned
as a stage is adorned that a play may be elab
orately produced. He says in effect to man,
" Thou *rt after all — just what thou art,
Put on thy head a wig with countless locks,
Raise to a cubit's height thy learned socks,
Still thou remainest ever — what thou art."
Faust, part i. 1451-4, Swanwick's trans.
Browning is as negligent of the Graces as
Goethe is worshipful toward them. His style
is as chaotic as that of his predecessor is
orderly and finished. But the attitude of the
man himself is ever prophetic and expectant.
He looks to see things come to pass, and sum
mons men to the exercise of their high pre
rogative of putting compulsion upon events.
The very ruggedness of his method seems to
reflect the abundance of the unorganized
material which he sees lying in rough masses
about him, waiting the constructive genius of
the architect, bravely seconded as he would
have it by the honest handiwork of the mason.
Indeed, the relation and the contrast between

26 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
the two poets are not unlike those which a very
acute critic has discerned to exist between
the Itahan Renaissance and the Protestant
Reformation. The outlook of the former is
toward culture, the exercise and enjoyment
of balanced and regulated faculty; that of
the latter toward religion, the genesis of new
beliefs as to God and man, and the impulse
to embody them in action.1
It is not to be denied that the theological
situation as it faced us at last century's end
was primarily suggestive of chaos. The Zeit
geist had proved to be no respecter of great
theological names or systems ; and those who
have rejoiced to see the wreck of time-hon
ored structures, or who have lifted up their
voices to prophesy the passing of theology
altogether from the sphere of rational human
interest, have seemed able to enroU Time and
the Hour among their allies. Two very stub
born facts, however, have maintained their
ground amid the confusion. One is that the
general subject-matter of theology — the raw
material with which it deals — appears to pos
sess permanent interest for men. They may
grow weary of the theological terminology of
1 Fairbairn, Christ in Theology, p. 137.

THE ZEITGEIST 27
their day, and in their disgust fancy that in
throwing it away they dispose of the problems
which it inadequately expresses. Yet in an
other form the problems recur. It is a far cry
from Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad to Profes
sor John Fiske. But the challenge which the
existence of evil issues to the New England
evolutionist is just as compelling as it ever
was to the creator of the great Idumean sheik
and his three friends. Between an Alexan
drian Neo-Platonist of the third century and
a Bampton lecturer at the end of the nine
teenth, great gulfs of experience would seem
to be fixed ; yet the human soul puts the same
question to Mr. Inge that it asked Plotinus.1
The other fact is that no great and in
fluential principle ever finds its way into the
thought of men without exciting immediate
interest as to its theological implications. If
theological systems be in vogue, there is, as
was suggested in the Introduction, an anx
ious canvassing of each new principle and
theory to determine its bearings with refer
ence to the accepted modes of thought. If,
on the other hand, systems totter, and perhaps
require more substantiation at the hands of
1 Cf. Inge, Christian Mysticism.

28 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
faith than they furnish to it, hope springs
eternal that the new truth may either revital
ize the old categories, or furnish a sufficient
reason for their abandonment by supplying
better ones.
Probably these principles have never been
better illustrated than in the changes that
have been wrought through the general accept
ance of the theory of development, as it has
found scientific expression during the last fifty
years. There seemed at first to be no limit
to the ravages which it might commit among
the systems. It set at naught the old notion
of cataclysmic creation. It did not appear to
comport well with the Idea of Divinity gener
aUy held in Western Christendom. The whole
universe conceived as an elaborate machine
seemed to be thrown out of gear by the intro
duction of this new theory of it. Law bade
fair to usurp the place of God. Method was
apotheosized. There was no place for reve
lation. The supernatural was bound to be
come an outworn term. Miracle was not to
be thought of in an orderly universe. All
experience would eventually be expressed in
terms of the material, and if behind the visi
ble frame of things some ultimate force had

THE ZEITGEIST 29
to be posited, the most that we were permit
ted to say of it was that it was unknowable,
and the largest concession that could be made
to the childishness of those whose heart and
flesh still cried out for a living God was to
print the Unknowable with a capital initial.
The brain was fitted to secrete thought as the
liver secreted bUe ; though if, by chance, so-
called religious thought were secreted, it was
a sort of by-product not to be counted to the
brain's credit. Christianity was a mere pass
ing way-mark of human immaturity. The
Church was engaged in an immoral calling
while it countenanced the teaching of rehgion
as touching ultimate realities. Society was
helpless in the grasp of Evolution, and the
Survival of the Fittest, like a nineteenth
century Minotaur, contradicted every holiest
instinct of the human heart by demanding its
tale of victims, not from the fair and beau
tiful, but from the weak and dependent.
It was some such prospect as this that the
Gospel of Evolution spread before the eyes of
multitudes of men when it was first preached
by advocates who had but a meagre concep
tion of its phUosophical foundations. Men
heard, and found themselves in a strait be-

30 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
twixt two. The more inteUigent among them
were quick to perceive that a great truth had
been discovered. They could not fail to re
spond instinctively to its appeal. But multi
tudes also perceived quite as instinctively that,
as at first expounded, it was hkely to put them
to permanent inteUectual confusion.- Its advo
cates seemed to contradict as much experi
ence as they amplified and explained. Hence
it followed that men everywhere took sides
with reference to it, some blindly, and some
intelligently and hopefully. From this very
fact the new principle proved to be a disturb
ing, sometimes apparently a disintegrating,
element among the systems of thought. Here
it threatened destruction ; there it inspired a
hope of reconstruction. The more intimately
the vital interests of men were concerned, the
more profound and painful was the agitation.
Now the mutual relations of natural science
and theology at the time of the promulgation
of the theory of development were of a sort
to render each somewhat antipathetic to the
other. Theology as a science had been ham
pered and confined through its subservience,
or supposed subservience, to an institution.
In all Roman Catholic and in most Protestant

THE ZEITGEIST 31
lands it was under some authority other than
that of a simple law of truth, and was forced
to square its conclusions, if it could, not
merely with the spirit, but with the form of
dogma, — dogma being in too many cases
unscientific dogma, based less upon observa
tion than upon a process of deduction from
inadequate premisses. Theology was so occu
pied with the Whence and the Whither and
the Why of life that it was much too con
temptuous of the When, the Where, and the
How. It was entirely honest in its intent to
go down deep and to reach up high ; but it
was careless of a great deal of truth which,
near at hand and close to earth, seemed too
commonplace for intimate relation to its lofty
purposes. Natural Science in its revival dealt eagerly
with just this truth. It found a vast field for
its energies. Investigation there proved so
rich and fruitful that the scope of science was
mightily enlarged. With the key of the the
ory of development at hand, Nature's cipher
was translated at a surprising rate. Answers
to the scientist's questions of When, Where,
and How poured forth in such abundance, that
he and his disciples were fain to pull down

32 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
their old treasuries and buUd greater, assured
that here were aU the goods they needed for
indefinite future sustenance. They were se
verely condemnatory of the theologian who
had missed these things ; contemptuous, if he
failed to share their enthusiasm at the new
meanings which they now saw aU about them ;
not a little restive, too, that he should continue
to insist that other things stUl existed, and
that their new-found principle might prove to
be, after all, proximate rather than ultimate.
To this period of open warfare or armed
neutrahty between the biologist and the the
ologian a calmer mood has succeeded. A
suspicion seems to have been born in the
heart of each that his neighbor's contentions
may be quite as likely to represent the com
plement as the contrary of his own. In
point of fact, leading Protestant theologians
have proven to be far more complaisant than
the naturalists here. The wisest of them
have shown themselves entirely hospitable
to the theory of development. They had
learned, however, by a more or less bitter ex
perience, that every great principle "which
is seized with rapture by the imagination
and imperfectly apprehended by the rea-

THE ZEITGEIST 33
son " x may, even though true in itself, lead
men in the wrong direction. The shallower
and less philosophical naturalists have there
fore sometimes been inclined to taunt the
theologians with their change of front in face
of what threatened to be the assaults of the
evolutionists. But it always remains for the
Protestant to reply that his apparent change
of front in face of evolutionary advance has
been in no sense because he saw in it a new
foe about to attack him in flank ; it has been
rather the rearrangement of position neces
sitated by the accession of considerable rein
forcements. It has been made not without
some unfortunate confusion, to be sure, not
without some suspicion and unwillingness
here and there, but it has been made, for all
that. Moreover, the true Protestant rejoices
in his ability to make it. Such power of adap
tation is an essential attribute, he beheves, of
a really scientific theology. He is inclined to
answer the taunt of the naturahst as Leib
nitz answered Bossuet, when the latter asked
him whether he could find a way to hinder
the Protestant Churches from being eternally
variable : " It suits us, Monseigneur, to be-
1 Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, p. 412.

34 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
long to this moving and eternaUy variable
Church." The century closed before this confusion
had entirely resolved itself into order. Yet it
has left theology expectant. Men are fiUed
with a large assurance that when the new
alignment shall be effected, it will make the
defense of the old sacred places more im
pregnable than ever. Of course one does not
have to go far to find the grumbler and the
man who sighs for the old systems and the
old watchwords ; which is only to say that
the Great Twin Brethren, Tradition and Cus
tom, find as many worshipers among theo
logians as among soldiers and saUors. It may
properly enough be asked, however, what defi
nite grounds there are for this more confident
and expectant attitude of the theologian. I
am content to designate four or five of the
many that might be indicated.
1. As the apostles of the Doctrine of De
velopment have thought themselves through,
have come, that is, to see the real range and
scope of their own hypothesis, they have
tacitly if not explicitly recognized the theolo
gian's rights, even though they may not like
his name. Whether he find it a hard or easy

THE ZEITGEIST 35
task to give the world a reason for the par
ticular faith that is in him, his raison d'etre
is scarcely in need of defense to-day.
Men like the late John Fiske and G. J.
Romanes have borne distinct testimony to this
fact. Professor Fiske, as was intimated in the
Introduction, himself became a theologian of
note. Mr. Romanes, with a frankness so ad
mirable that it ought never to be abused by
any claim- that he was made the captive of
Canon Gore's1 orthodox spear and bow, has
set down in black and white the record of
his own experience. The story of his renun
ciation of his faith at the supposed demand of
biology and its implications has become classic.
" And forasmuch as I am far from being
able to agree with those who affirm that the
twilight doctrine of the ' new faith ' is a de
sirable substitute for the waning splendour of
' the old,' I am not ashamed to confess that
with this virtual negation of God the universe
to me has lost its soul of loveliness ; and al
though from henceforth the precept to ' work
while it is day ' wUl doubtless but gain an
intensified force from the terribly intensified
meaning of the words that ' the night cometh
1 Now Bishop of Worcester.

36 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
when no man can work,' yet when at times I
think, as at times I must, of the appalling
contrast between the hallowed glory of that
creed which once was mine, and the lonely
mystery of existence as now I find it, — at
such times I shall ever feel it impossible to
avoid the sharpest pang of which my nature
is susceptible. For whether it be due to my
intelligence not being sufficiently advanced to
meet the requirements of the age, or whether
it be due to the memory of those sacred asso
ciations which to me at least were the sweet
est that life has given, I cannot but feel that
for me, and for others who think as I do, there
is a dreadful truth in those words of Hamil
ton, — Philosophy, having become a medita
tion, not merely of death, but of annihilation,
the precept Know thyself has become trans
formed into the terrific oracle to (Edipus : —

' Mayest thou ne'er know the truth of what thou art.' "

These words must have been written as early
as 1876.2 At his death in 1894 the same writer
left a further record to this effect : —
1 Romanes, Thoughts on Religion, Ed. Pref., p. 29.
2 The Candid Examination of Theism, in the concluding
chapter of which these words occur, was published in 1878,

THE ZEITGEIST 37
" I take it then as unquestionably true that
this whole negative side of the subject proves
a vacuum in the soul of man which nothing
can fill save faith in God. Now take the posi
tive side. Consider the happiness of rehgious
— and chiefly of the highest rehgious, i. e.
Christian — behef. It is a matter of fact that
besides being most intense, it is most endur
ing, growing, and never staled by custom. In
short, according to the universal testimony of
those who have it, it differs from aU other
happiness not only in degree but in kind.
Those who have it can usually testify to what
they used to be without it. . . . So much
for the individual. But positive evidence does
not end here. Look at the effects of Christian
belief as exercised on human society — first,
by individual Christians on the family, etc. ;
and, second, by the Christian Church on the
world. AU this may lead on to an argument
from the adaptation of Christianity to human
higher needs. All men must feel these needs
more or less in proportion as their higher
but written, the author says, " several years ago." " I have
lefrained from publishing it," he remarks, " lest after hav
ing done so, I should find that more mature thoughts had
modified the conclusions which the author sets forth."
Thoughts on Religion, p. 9, note.

38 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
natures, moral and spiritual, are developed.
Now Christianity is the only religion which is
adapted to meet them and, according to those
who are alone able to testify, it does so most
abundantly. AU these men, of every sect,
nationality, etc., agree in their account of
their subjective experience ; so as to this there
can be no question. The only question is as
to whether they were all deceived."
A little further on he quotes two sets of
quatrains with the following comment : —
" ' La vie est vaine :
Un peu d' amour,
Un peu de haine —
Et puis — bon jour !
" ' La vie est breve :
Un peu d'espoir,
Un peu de reve —
Et puis — bon soir ! '
" The above is a terse and true criticism of
this life without hope of a future one. Is it
satisfactory? But Christian faith as a matter
of fact changes it entirely.
" ' The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one ;
Yet the light of a whole world dies
With the setting sun.

THE ZEITGEIST 39
" ' The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one ;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.' " 1
Friedrich Nietzsche — one of the very few
reaUy consistent atheists the last century knew,
most consistent, perhaps, in the insanity to
which he logically foUowed his negations —
would have said that this changed attitude of
Romanes was only the working out of the
poison of Christianity with which he was
prenataUy tainted. But in point of fact, as
Newman was said to have " hved over again
in his experience the course of Latin His
tory," 2 so Romanes Ulustrated in his brief
but busy hfe the experience of nineteenth
century theology. I have quoted from him at
considerable length, less because I am just
now concerned to substantiate or to use his
conclusions, than because he exemplifies so
weU my contention that the facts of rehgion
and the rational treatment of them which is
the essence of theology have a real claim
upon intelligent men.
2. Another substantiation of the more ex
pectant and reasonably confident attitude of
i Romanes, Thoughts on Religion, pp. 162-3.
2 Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, p. 412.

40 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
theology during the last few years is found
in its larger recognition and adoption of the
historic method.1 Herein it has half unwit
tingly come into closer touch with physical
science, and their mutual antipathy has less
ened proportionately. Moreover, in the pur
suit of its historical researches, theology has
found in the development hypothesis an unex
pectedly clever and devoted coadjutor. The
evolution key unlocks doors in theology as
elsewhere which had before seemed hope
less. The principle of continuity has long been
recognized as becoming to Theism. It com
ports with a belief in an omniscient, omni
present, and ever-working God. Without it
there is grave danger lest a man's God prove
too smaU for his world. The heart and flesh
of man do not cry out for a demiurge occa
sionally breaking in upon the world of his
creation with cataclysmic interruption of its
order ; but for a living God, able and willing
to sustain by inherent vital force an organ
ism which He planted and which He still
1 Cf. Addresses of Professor Alexander Gosman and Pro
fessor G. P. Fisher, International Congregational Council,
Boston, 1899, Proceedings of Council.

THE ZEITGEIST 41
nurtures. As the principle of continuity
comports well with Theism and in a sense dis
tinguishes it from mere Deism, so the Doc
trine of Evolution is but one application of
this principle in the sphere of creative method.
It contradicts no first principle essential to
theology's existence. It explains much. It
promises to explain more.
3. StUl again, theology has discovered that
some of the implications of the development
hypothesis which its more dogmatic expositors
once proclaimed to be destructive of theologi
cal positions have reaUy substantiated them.
The Gibeonites who were feared as spoilers
in the distance become hewers of wood and
drawers of water when we really enter their
land. There is perhaps no better iUustration
of this than that offered by the treatment
which evolution has accorded to the doctrine
of final causes. It threatened to rule Paley's
argument from design, Ulustrated by the
watch found upon a desert shore, out of
court altogether ; not so much because it was
fundamentaUy false as because it was alto
gether inadequate. In thus confounding Paley
a certain school of evolutionists seemed to
think that aU teleology was forever put to

42 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
confusion. It only remained for another and
wiser school to show that the old argument
from design was meagre rather than false, and
that it failed because it undertook to express
a vital process in mechanical terms. As time
has passed, a larger place has been found for
teleology than the old doctrine of final causes
ever dared to claim. There is a significant
note in Romanes' " Thoughts on Religion "
to the effect that in a projected book he must
show how much better a treatise Butler might
have written had he known about evolution,1
and he might have included Paley and the
essayists of the Bridgewater Treatises in the
same category.
4. Then, finally, there is the confidence of
the practical Christianity of the time. The
Church at large, though, as I shaU show in
a later chapter, her confessions of faith, her
pohties, and her practical activities are all
more or less confused and Ul-coordinated, is
still vigorous with the vigor of healthful and
hopeful even though untrained youth. The
Church in the broad sense is not a decadent
institution, though she may sometimes seem
to be a distracted one. She is quick still —
1 Thoughts on Religion, p. 182.

THE ZEITGEIST 43
perhaps quicker than ever before — to hear
and heed the voice of the prophet.
The century just closed has been charac
terized in an extraordinary degree by or
ganization under the general inspiration and
direction of the Christian Church. Confining
our view to Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, we
may see four great organized movements
which, during the century, have enlisted the
gifts and the services of millions of Chris
tians. One of these is the Sunday-school. Its
inception by Robert Raikes in Gloucester,
England, belongs to the eighteenth century,
but the real adaptation of the institution to
the purposes of the Church is of the nine
teenth. On the American continent to-day
there are nearly 150,000 of these schools, with
1,500,000 officers and teachers and about
12,000,000 pupils.
A second significant organization arose in
the middle of the century with the founding
of the first Young Men's Christian Associa
tion. This was followed in due time by the
Young Women's Christian Association. One
or both of these associations may now be
found in more than forty countries, enrolling
250,000 men and nearly 40,000 women.

44 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
In 1881 an organization known as the
Society of Christian Endeavor came into
being. It seemed to have pecuhar pertinence
to conditions then existent in most Protestant
churches. Expanding with astonishing rapid
ity, it came to represent in the closing years
of the century 56,000 affiliated societies, with
a membership of 3,400,00c.1
MeanwhUe the Church has felt such an ac
cess of missionary zeal as has not been known
since the first three centuries. The Christian
missionary has penetrated into all quarters
of the globe. He has come to represent a
vital world-movement. Almost every branch
of natural science, as well as anthropology,
phUology, geography, ethics, and comparative
rehgion is under obligation to him; whUe his
intimate acquaintance with rehgious thought
abroad has reacted with teUing power upon
religious thought at home. All future histo
rians must reckon with him and his work.
It is beside my present purpose to ask
whether these manifestations of Christian
vitality have been wisely inaugurated or
are being directed to beneficent ends. I
1 C. E. Jefferson, Address, International Congregational
Council, Boston, 1899, Proceedings of Council, p. 308.

THE ZEITGEIST 45
am simply calling attention to them as phe
nomena, indicative of vast stores of energy
gladly subject to the direction of religious
impulse. It is perfectly idle to attempt to
explain them away as manifestations of mere
passing sentiment. They speak of willing
gifts, devoted lives, dehberate intentions, and
often consummately able leadership. These are
only examples from a great and ever increas
ing store of simUar organized activities. They
represent the emphasis which the Church, fol
lowing Faust's suggestion, has during these
years been placing upon the Deed.
The Church thus vigorous in act — more
vigorous, perhaps, than in any other century
of her history — has a right to ask the theo
logian for some unifying and coordinating
principle for the satisfaction of her mind and
the guidance of her ever developing vital
ity. That some such principle exists she feels
instinctively. There is too much Doing aU
the time to permit a doubt as to the existence
of some Power behind the Deed, and some
Dynamic which shaU set forth the order and
method of its working. It is when the Church
puts this question to the world that she be
comes aware of the extent in which Doing

46 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
has outrun Thinking in the century's life,
and of the more or less incoherent state of the
average man's thought upon the great and
closely related subjects of theology, rehgion,
and social life.
I shaU attempt in the three succeeding
chapters to sketch the present state of popu
lar thought upon these themes, with a view to
discover, if possible, some common principle
which, even though generaUy unrecognized,
may stiU aid us in our search for the Dynamic
of Christianity.

Ill

THE PRESENT STATE OF POPULAR THEO
LOGICAL THOUGHT
"But, Sir," said BosweU to Johnson in a
famous endeavor to defend the Presbyterians
against that prejudiced worthy, "their doc
trine is the same with that of the Church of
England. Their Confession of Faith and the
Thirty-Nine Articles contain the same points,
even the doctrine of Predestination." " Why,
yes, Sir," answered Johnson, " predestination
was a part of the clamour of the times, so it
is mentioned in our articles, but with as httle
positiveness as could be." a
Johnson's prejudice, portentous as its pro
portions often were, was never able altogether
to vanquish his good sense and keenness of vi
sion ; and in that phrase " the clamour of the
times," he hit upon one secret of the stranger
forms which theological speech has sometimes
used. He was only saying in his ponderous
1 Boswell's Johnson, Hill's ed., ii. 119.

48 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
but still trenchant way, that there has been
a fashion in theology as in almost every other
department of science and philosophy.
The general appeal to the Doctrine of Evo
lution and the insistence upon its recognition
in every discussion of the day is due in some
measure to the clamor of our time. This is
in no sense to disparage it. It is only to say
that it is to the fore to-day as the principle of
the sovereignty of God was to the fore in the
heyday of Calvinism, and that it is liable to a
simUarly exaggerated apphcation. For better,
for worse, all our theological thinking has to
reckon with it. Just at present, however, we
stand at a point where its substantiation of the
main positions of theology is much more ap
parent to the man of the schools than to the
man of the street. The former has generaUy
recognized the need of a reorganization of
system and is hopefuUy expectant. The latter,
slow to give up the old to which he has be
come habituated, is yet doubtful whether he
may not be forced to give it up. As a system,
he has grown accustomed to uphold or to an
tagonize it, and were it to crumble he would
miss it equally in either case ; for it is a tru
ism of experience that one misses an old and

POPULAR THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT 49
cherished antagonist little less than an old
and cherished friend. In some cases where
purely religious questions give him little trou
ble, the prospect of an overturn of his theo
logy causes him keen distress. The shaUow
observer advises him to forswear all theolo
gical speculation and rule theology out of the
circle of his thought, sufficing his soul with
simple religious observance. But it wiU not
do. One man may heed the advice, but his
fellow instinctively feels its false quality, and
is dissatisfied to leave the ranges of his soul
unexplored and unmapped, while science is
reducing to order his knowledge of other
sphere^ of activity. He instinctively believes
this exploration to be a legitimate function of
the human reason. His experience of other
lines of investigation leads him further to
believe that, for exploration here, he needs
some guiding principle which shall render
experience coherent, and to the test of which
he may subject his hypotheses. It is just this
principle, however, that is notably lacking;
and the lack seems all the more pitiable inas
much as recent monistic tendencies in science
give renewed force to the demand that such
high matters as sin, righteousness, and char-

50 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
acter be treated, not as mere names or con
cepts, but as realities.1
In Ulustration of this lack of system in the
theological thinking of Christian people to
day, one need only interrogate the men or
women of somewhat more than average intel
hgence who comprise the bulk of the mem
bership of our Christian churches. In talk
ing with a man of this company, intelhgent
and well acquainted as he generally is with
the world, — all the better and more deeply
acquainted often because his acquaintance is
meUowed and sweetened by his benevolence,
— one is stiU struck by the fact that he is a
duahst, and somewhat restless and puzzled by
reason of his dualism. Ormuzd.and Ahriman
are ever with him, bidding f^r his suffrage in
life's intellectual as weU as moral contests.
While he believes that Go/fl is in His World,
stiU there is antinomy between natural and
supernatural. The world activities are not
merely distinct from, they are opposed to, the
divine activities.
To take a concrete iUustration, the so-
called law of gravitation is, in his thought of
it, quite divorced from the divine working,
1 Cf. art. "Theology," in Johnson's Universal Encyclopedia.

POPULAR THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT 51
except as God may use it as He might use any
other device or instrument. The law itself
may very hkely seem to him to be a concrete
entity, to which he ascribes certain personal
attributes, making it in reality a kind of de
miurge. He continuaUy speaks as though the
law accounted for events, and as though hav
ing been referred to the law, there was no
room, or at least no need, for any reference
to God. As a behever he is bound to hold to
God's supremacy over this and all laws, but
the supremacy is that of a foreign dynasty
over a conquered realm; and it is manifest
most clearly in what are supposed to be its
interferences with the law's normal working.
Between Nature and the Supernatural there
seems to be a great gulf fixed. Everything
that comes into the category of ordinary expe
rience he assigns to the realm of the natural;
the supernatural hes, he would very hkely
say, beyond his personal experience. He
believes in it, but bases his belief on hearsay
evidence. His heart cries out for the super
natural as somewhere existent and somehow
manifest, but it is existent in other times and
manifest to other men ; not to him while
in his present pilgrimage. He is prone to

52 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
think of miracle as a breach in the natural
order; and the thought of a breach in the
natural order gives such a wrench to what
he supposes to be his scientific habit of mind
as to require aU his faith to substantiate it.
Indeed, if by common consent all behef in
miracles should faU into abeyance, he would
think his faith relieved of an incubus.
This antinomy between his conception of
natural and supernatural extends itself to the
realms of the rational and spiritual. If he
could find standing-room beside Whichcote
when he wrote to Tuckney, " Sir, I oppose not
rational to spiritual, for spiritual is most ra
tional," 1 it would be to look out upon a world
of vastly broader horizon, and one far better
fitted than his present world for the habita
tion of reasonable beings ; but in many cases
such a possibility never presents itself to him.
In his thought upon the Bible, the Chris
tian man of this type often regards the divine
and human agencies in its composition as
mutuaUy exclusive, and, feeling instinctively
the presence of the divine, his doctrine of
Sacred Scripture is extremely inhospitable to
the human ; while his neighbor, who is not
1 Quoted by Inge, Christian Mysticism, p. 20.

POPULAR THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT 53
quite wilhng to be counted a Christian, recog
nizing as instinctively the human element,
and being possessed of the same duahstic
philosophy, is equally inhospitable to the di
vine. Both very likely agree in their conten
tion that except the Bible be infallible, it
cannot be inspired ; if there prove to be a
considerable legendary element in Genesis, it
is therefore by so much unfitted for its sup
posed religious office ; and except the unity of
the Isaiah prophecies and the exact historicity
of Jonah be accepted, then Isaiah and Jonah
can have no legitimate place in the canon.
The same evil principle is always plaguing
men as they attempt to frame for themselves
a doctrine of God. Neither Unitarian nor
Trinitarian has altogether escaped it. The
former is very likely to find himself a Deist
with a God who is a mere deus ex machina
— a device to account for things ; or else a
Pantheist, whose God is a pervasive and imper
sonal Presence not to be very carefully distin
guished from the World, or, if distinguished,
only as the personification of rather mawkish
sentiment. In neither case is there hkely to
be much spiritual comfort or much incitement
to worship in such belief. The Trinitarian, on

54 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
the other hand, especially if he pride himself
upon his orthodoxy, is in great danger of re
garding his Trinitarian formula as an attempt
at definition — a course which lands him al
most inevitably in Tritheism. Every reference
to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost which he
makes seems like an attempt to emphasize his
belief in their separateness ; and it is with
aU the pride of " credo quia impossibile "
that he admits how oppugnant his faith is to
reason. It is only fair to state, however, that
he represents but a smaU fraction of the great
body of Trinitarians. It is what Bushnell
used to call the "mere logicker," the man,
that is, who would confine his definition of
the human reason to the faculty of ratio
cination, who in his fear of the ScyUa of
Unitarianism throws himself a wUling victim
into the Charybdis of Tritheism.
The instinct of the plain man whose 'faith
grows up out of his experience, as that expe
rience in turn springs out of the experience
of the Christian Church, keeps him from any
attempt to use the Trinitarian formula as a
definition. It appeals to him as an attempt
to express the Christian world's experience
of the infinite wealth of Being in God. If

POPULAR THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT 55
pressed to define his position further, he will
very likely say that his theory of it can be
stated only in terms of the doctrine of a
modal Trinity ; that is, he sees God as mani
festing Himself to men in three aspects or
modes of revelation.
He may be told that this Sabellianism of
his is shallow and meagre ; and the authority
of great names from the third century to
the nineteenth can be adduced to give weight
to the charge. If the Trinitarian thus ac
cused be a humble man, he will very likely
plead guilty and admit that he has no thought
of compassing all the truth in his partial
attempt to give a reason for his faith ; but
rather of indicating the direction in which the
larger truth lies as it is divined by his vision
of the lesser truth revealed. Yet he will be
an exceptionaUy thoughtful and gracious man
if he take this position. He is far more likely
to find himself puzzled and distraught by
tEe seeming antinomy between the wealth of
spiritual experience that has always accom
panied the acceptance of the truth which the
Trinitarian formula struggles to express, and
the difficulty of the formula itself. He feels
the need of some underlying interpretative

56 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
principle which current theology quite fails to
supply. This need is perhaps nowhere more defi
nitely emphasized than when the man of
whom we have been speaking attempts to
formulate his doctrine of the Kingdom of God.
He sees before him the Christian Church as
a visible institution ; or, as he may think
himself forced to admit, he sees a multitude
of churches bearing the Christian name, and
almost aU presenting many of the notes of
a true Church. Yet the note of catholicity
seems wanting — most sadly wanting, he
sometimes thinks, in those very bodies where
its possession is most stoutly affirmed. But
(for we suppose him to be a man of generous
temper) he may stUl discern some adumbra
tion of the City of God in the omnium gath
erum of aU these sects. The mass seems so
heterogeneous as to defy the skill and pa
tience even of the Divine Head of the Church
Himself. Yet on a closer view it appears
rather to be unorganized than disorganized.
Many of the distinctions which separate the
churches represent not only no fundamental
differences, but no appreciable differences.
Though now and then these distinctions are

POPULAR THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT 57
all the more pitiable and lamentable on that
account, as in the case of two strugghng
Presbyterian sects in a small New England
vUlage, which were divided, according to
waggish report, by the fact that one sang
the Psalms of David, while the other used
David's Psalms, yet it remains to be said
that in a great number of cases these dis
tinctions are simply the notes of natural dis
tribution rather than of unnatural division.
It is not to be expected and probably not to
be desired that uniformity of Christian pur
pose should result in conformity of Christian
method. Not all Christian worshipers are
likely to agree upon a universal liturgy, from
the very fact that not all men are so consti
tuted as to be genuinely edified by the same
modes of worship. The appeal of the spiritual
is made to one man most naturally and effec
tively through the avenue of his intellectual
processes; to his neighbor through his emo
tional nature. While each should yield mere
preference in such a matter to the demands
of the common good, he is under no obhga
tion to incur permanent and utter sacrifice of
this sort unless the common good demands it
very clearly. Under normal conditions, these

58 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
two men may weU work and worship in sepa
rate organizations, distinct rather than dif
ferent, cooperating rather than conforming,
members of one larger body rather than of
rival bodies ; but it is evident that if this is
to be, it must come about through some com
mon power dwelling in and animating both,
and directing them as diverse agents in the
performance of wisely distributed parts of one
work. It is this Dynamic of Christian union
and common endeavor that seems wanting to
the vision of the average Christian man. He
believes in it as existent, but as at present un-
discerned or at least unrecognized. He looks
to see it one day supply to the churches the
notes of the Church.
The same problem in a somewhat subtler
aspect confronts him when he pushes his in
quiry into the relations of the Church and the
world. Christ warned His disciples against
worldhness in a way that clearly indicated His
prophetic vision of a long-enduring antago
nism between His Kingdom and the realm
of the prince of this world. It has been a
habit of religious teachers in all generations
to assign to the latter realm everything that
did not bear the direct impress of the Cross.

POPULAR THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT 59
The dogma of total depravity gained such
sway over the theologic mind at one stage of
its development, that here again the clamor of
the times thrust it into the XXXIX. Arti
cles, where the quam longissime of Article
IX. stUl abides to confute such as deny the
Calvinistic element in that famous instru
ment. The theory that the earth is the DevU's
and the fuUness thereof has been tacitly
accepted as a corollary of the proposition of
total depravity. Now the doctrine of total
depravity simply overstates a great truth.
The pity is that good men should have given
such emphasis to the overstatement as to
invahdate the statement in a multitude of
puzzled minds. The average man cannot re
concile himself to the behef that the material
realm of nature in any real sense shared in
man's fall ; or that it is participant with him
in God's displeasure at sin. Nor can he see
how a generous deed can fail to meet God's
approval, even in the case of a man who
has not consciously and definitely heeded
Christ's call into discipleship. His whole soul
revolts at the old blasphemy which made even
the honest prayers of the " unregenerate " to
be sin unto them.

60 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
Yet all Christian experience goes to show
that regeneration is a real episode in human
life — a fundamental episode in Christian
life, indeed. It is as unscientific to deny it
or to treat it with indifference as it would be
to deny or condemn the phenomena of physi
cal generation. But does it not discount the
reahty of regeneration as a definite and con
scious experience, to treat the " mere moral
ities " of a self-respecting and respectable
man as though they found acceptable place
in God's thought about him ? Are we not
in danger of confounding fundamental dis
tinctions when we speak of the goodness of
the man who has had no experience which
he recognizes as conversion ? Do we not go
further along the same downward road when
we permit amusements which are not only
capable of abuse, but are notoriously abused ?
Even granting that a right use of them may
conceivably be not only innocent but advan
tageous, is not the safer way to consign them
to the category of the world's employments,
and so to the ban of God's displeasure?
Thus, many good people of honest and un
selfish conviction have held and stUl hold ; and
the "world," whUe vehemently opposing their

POPULAR THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT 61
contention, has been uneasily conscious that
there were elements of truth in it. Both the
Christian and the worldling, however, have
felt at times a certain tendency to self-contra
diction in these theories of the spiritual hfe.
The Christian has been troubled because his
notion of the Kingdom of God did not prove
more hospitable to some persons, acts, and
principles of life which, while not confessedly
Christian, stUl seemed to belong to the Chris
tian order of things. The worldling has been
dissatisfied because all his exceptions to the
meagreness and inadequacy of the Christian
view of life, though some of these exceptions
seem very weU taken, prove utterly unable
to overthrow the worth of the Christian prin
ciple, or to gainsay its persistent and authori
tative demand upon him for a yielding of his
personal aUegiance to it.
The wonder wUl creep in whether there be
not some power less exclusive in its choice of
agencies, less mechanical in its methods of
working, more pervasive in its influence and
vastly more far-reaching in its results, than
the Church has supposed the personal influ
ence of Jesus Christ to be. The Christian is
sometimes forced to ask himself whether the

62 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
whole Gospel has yet been proclaimed or not ;
and whether there be not a Divine Dynamic
at work outside the hearts of men who have
definitely accepted Christ, and beyond the
pale of the visible Church, which we must
recognize and worship before we attain to our
real heritage of revelation.
Before closing this chapter, some reference
should be made to the testimony which recent
fiction and poetry bear to the place that
theological topics hold in modern thought,
and to the general incoherence of that thought
itself. Whether a theological novel can per
se be a good novel or not, it is beside my
present purpose to discuss. Mrs. Humphry
Ward has shown us that it may be an inter
esting, almost a fascinating novel, even
though, as in " Robert Elsmere," the form
of fiction be made to cover a considerable
number of controversial sins. For in the
Squire's library, access to which led ulti
mately to the overthrow of Robert Elsmere's
faith, certain theological treatises were sup
posed to exist whose claims were so incontro
vertible that this not very profound scholar
found his own positions no longer tenable.
It is not for the present writer to contend

POPULAR THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT 63
that such treatises may not find justifiable
existence upon the book-shelves of Mrs.
Ward's creative imagination ; but he would
fain inquire after a clearer glimpse of their
contents before beheving that a man of some
what tougher intellectual fibre than the late
Mr. Elsmere could not have maintained his
ground against them. Indeed, a fairly good
case could be made out to show that in theo
logical discussion such a use of fiction comes
at times pretty close to what Newman called
a " poisoning of the wells " in controversy ;
that is, the preferring such a charge against
an opponent as the nature of the case pre
vents him from bringing to the test of evi
dence. Be that as it may, however, the vol
ume in question stands as a type of a vast
number of works of fiction setting forth one
phase or another of some question that in its
implications, at least, is theological.
No one can rise from the reading of such
a powerful and gloomy book as the late Vic
tor Rydberg's " Last Athenian " without a
new sense of the force of St. Paul's words,
" having no hope and without God in the
world." Thomas Hardy has almost ceased to
be a novelist, so completely has be given him-

64 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
self in his later and more painful books to
the preacher's office. The closing paragraphs
of " Tess of the D'UrbervUles " and " Jude
the Obscure " might properly enough have
found place in the sermon which James
Thomson put into the mouth of the High
Priest of Melancholia, preaching in the cathe
dral of " The City of Dreadful Night."
" I find no hint throughout the universe
Of good or ill, of blessings or of curse ;
I find alone Necessity supreme ;
With infinite mystery, abysmal, dark,
Unlighted ever by the faintest spark
For us, the flitting shadows of a dream."
One cannot but wonder why a maker of
men compact of bone and sinew, like the
Mayor of Casterbridge, should be content to
throw away his work, and turn to the fabri
cation of such flabby creatures as poor Jude.
There was something not unworthy of Greek
tragedy in the way in which Mr. Hardy's
earlier and more masterful heroes were finally
overmatched by Fate. But the later ones
offer no real resistance to Fate because they
are creatures of such loose fibre that Passion
drives them whithersoever it will ; and the
man who is already the sport of Passion is
scarce worthy to be counted an antagonist

POPULAR THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT 65
by Fate. Mr. Hardy's God (if he have any)
would appear to be one who, sitting in the
heavens, doth laugh and have men in deri
sion. In his later novels his foregone and
profoundly unsatisfactory conclusion seems
to be, " There is a tide in the affairs of men
which, taken any way you please, is bad."
From Mr. Eden Philpotts, upon whose stur
dier shoulders Mr. Hardy's mantle seems like
to fall, the problem of life in its ethical and
spiritual phases obtains a much saner and
more reasonable statement. Perhaps the ap
parent contradiction between the theology
of mere sentiment, so prevalent to-day, and
the theology of mere logic, so prevalent day
before yesterday, has never been put more
trenchantly than old Uncle Chirgwin put it
to Joan after her betrayal by her artist-lover.
" 'T is like this : your man did take plain
Nature for God, an' he "did talk fulishness
'bout finding Him in the scent o' flowers, the
hum o' bees, an' sich like. Mayhap Nature 's
a gude working God for a selfish man, but he
edn' wan for a maid, as you knows by now.
Then your faither — his God do sit everlast
ingly alongside hell-mouth an' laugh an' girn
to see all the world a walkin' in same as the

66 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
beasts walked in the Ark. Theer 's another
picksher of a God for 'e ; but mark this, gal,
they be lying prophets — lying prophets both !
You 've tried the wan and found it left your
heart hollow like, and you 've tried t' other
an' found that left it no better fiUed ; now
try Christ, will 'e? Just try. Doan't keep
Him as is alius busy, a waitin' your whims
no more. Try Christ, Joan dearie, an' you 'U
feel what you 've never felt yet. I know, as
put my 'and in His when 't was as young as
yourn. An' He holds it yet now 't is shriveled
an' crooked wi' rheumatics. He holds it. Iss,
He do." 1
It is a picturesque setting forth of the in
expugnable hope of the human heart of a
time when mercy and truth shaU meet to
gether ; when righteousness and peace shall
kiss each other. It is at the same time an
indictment of the partial nature of every
theology which emphasizes mercy as though
it stood in no vital relation to truth ; or
righteousness as though it could be righteous
and not issue in peace. A very good case
might thus be made out for the permanence
of theology's interest for men, from an ex-
1 Lying Prophets, bk. ii. c. xi.

POPULAR THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT 67
amination of the novels of the last five and
twenty years. Should the inquiry be pro
secuted into the realm of poetry, the argu
ment would become a fortiori. Nowhere is
the dictum of Horace Bushnell, " low grades
of being want low objects ; but the want of
man is God," better illustrated. WhUe at
the same time abundant proof is given of
the lack of coherence with which the want is
expressed. Tennyson's somewhat hackneyed and not
very satisfying "infant crying in the night
. . . and with no language but a cry," still waUs
on in many different keys, but with no least
diminution of breath. It was almost funny to
hear so grave and respectable an historian as
the late Mr. Lecky sighing in rather labored
verse, —
" How hard to die, how blessed to be dead,"
especially in view of the fact that he gave us
no least reason to suppose that it is blessed to
be dead. Mr. Swinburne has got beyond all
this, and proclaims
" We have drunken of Lethe at last, we have eaten of
Lotus ;
What hurts it us here that sorrows are born and die ?

68 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
We have said to the dream that caressed and the dread
that smote us, -
Good-night and good-bye."
Yet it does hurt, in spite of Mr. Swin
burne's eloquent disclaimer, as witness Mr.
G. A. Greene : —
" They have taken away my Lord ;
They have shattered the one great Hope,
They have left us alone to cope
With our terrible selves :
The Strength of immortal love ;
The Comfort of millions that weep ;
Prayer and the Cross we adored —
All is lost ! there is no one above ;
We are left like the beasts that creep —
They have taken away my Lord."
Mr. Austin Dobson's " Prayer of the
Swine to Circe " iUustrates — all the better,
perhaps, because he does not proclaim his
graceful verse to be an illustration — what
Dr. van Dyke has termed the " cureless mel
ancholy of disillusion."
" If swine we be — if we indeed be swine,
Daughter of Perse", make us swine indeed,
Well pleased on litter-straw to lie supine,
Well pleased on mast and acorn-shales to feed,
Stirred by all instincts of the bestial breed ;
But O Unmerciful ! O Pitiless !
Leave us not thus with sick men's hearts to bleed ! —
To waste long days in yearning, dumb distress
And memory of things gone, and utter hopelessness."

POPULAR THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT 69
It is this prayer which Mr. Henley set him
self to answer in his perverse Rondeau be
ginning, —
" Let us be drunk, and for a while forget,
Forget, and ceasing even from regret,
Live without reason and in spite of rhyme."
But it will not do. The apparently diverse
testimony of the poets of the major and the
minor key alike tends toward one conclusion.
They echo the unforgettable words of St. Au
gustine, " Thou hast made us for Thyself, and
our hearts are restless tiU they rest in Thee."
In the wilderness of modern verse which im
plies this we come now and then upon an
almost startlingly explicit statement of it ; as,
for instance, in Francis Thompson's lines : —
" I fled Him down the nights and d6wn the days ;
I fled Him down the arches of the years ;
I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind ; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped ;
And shot precipitated
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong feet that followed, followed after,
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat — and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet —
• All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.' "

70 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
In somewhat more conventional terms one
of the most eminent disciples of Darwin con
cludes a sonnet written when he saw no hope
that any true and genuine faith would ever
come back to him : —
" I ask not for thy Love; nor e'en so much
As for a hope on Thy dear breast to lie ;
But be Thou still my Shepherd — still with such
Compassion as may melt to such a cry ;
That so I hear Thy feet, and feel Thy touch,
And dimly see Thy face ere yet I die."
Any study of the poetry of our time lends
new strength to the conviction that the great
poet is always a man of faith. It may not be
perfectly coherent faith, exactly ordered and
arranged in easily distinguished categories.
But it is a faith wherein some vital principle
resides. The poet looks out upon a world and
in upon a heart where confusion is evident
enough ; but it is the confusion of abundant
material awaiting the builder, not the confu
sion of the wasted city ready for the sower
of salt. The poet who would sing for some
later age as well as for his own must tell of
the realms of experience yet awaiting human
exploration, and supply some guidance to the
explorer. A map, the latter does not ask for.
What he does ask, and has a right to expect

POPULAR THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT 71
to find, is some truth which shall enable him
to keep his bearings, and always orientate
himself correctly.
One great poet of to-day in attempting to
judge the World-maker by the world has
asked : —
" Is there strength there ? — enough : intelligence ?
Ample : but goodness in a like degree ?
Not to the human eye in the present state,
An isocele deficient in the base." J
Browning's questions are not to be an
swered lightly for the reason that they are
soberly, bravely, and expectantly asked. But
the hne along which the answer is to be dis
covered is suggested by Tennyson's exhor
tation : —
" Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith !
She reels not in the storm of warring words,
She brightens at the clash of ' Yes ' and ' No.'
She sees the Best that glimmers thro' the Worst,
She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the Summer thro' the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wailed, Mirage ! "
Note. For a fuller discussion of this theme the author
ventures to refer to his essay on " The Religions Significance
of Recent English Verse," in Bibliotheca Sacra, April, 1898.
1 Browning, The Ring and the Book — The Pope.

rv
THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE
In the last chapter we discussed the confu
sion which has attended the attempt among
the masses of men to interpret the universe
through the idea of God. To speak more
exactly, it has been an attempt to give mean
ing and congruity to life in face of the prob
lems which experience forces upon it — for
the abstract notion of the universe rarely
oppresses or particularly concerns the average
man. We turn now to a consideration of the
uncertainty wliich hampers multitudes in their
endeavor to regulate conduct through this
same idea. Here we enter the realm of re
ligion as distinguished from theology. It is
useless to claim that the question is remote
and out of relation to life's practical con
cerns. In a real sense it is life's most practical
concern. Whether Matthew Arnold's conten
tion that conduct comprises three fourths of
hfe — one of those unsupported claims which

THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE 73
add a pseudo-scientific authority to the genu
ine hterary charm of his writing — be de
fensible or not, it remains true that nothing
can concern hfe more intimately than the
ideas which regulate conduct, and give to it
direction, tone, and purpose. This regulation
is rehgion's office. It was never more clearly
recognized to be rehgion's office than to-day.
One of the secrets of the fretfulness or sad
ness which characterizes so much of the fiction
and poetry of the last century hes in a discern
ment of the confusion into which rehgious
thought has fallen.
Men are everywhere talking about the age of
doubt in religion, and trying to make out that
it is bringing in an age of carelessness in con
duct. They do not have to go far afield for
examples which seem to Ulustrate their claim.
Whether it be possible to substantiate their
claim or not is altogether another question ;
for the doubt, sometimes regretful and some
times truculent, which has unquestionably
characterized the religious thought of recent
years is susceptible of two widely different in
terpretations. Doubt may be regarded as a sign
,of an approaching divorce between conduct
J and the religious idea, or as a sign of a new

74 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
realization of the need of natural relations
between the two. The history of rehgion
lends countenance to this latter view ; for
rehgion has developed in proportion as it has
felt the necessity of this relation. It has
become more spiritual, and so more deeply
influential, as it has sought persistently for
a rational faith, and insisted at the same time
upon faith's vital inter-relations with con
duct. This endeavor has always been ham
pered, to be sure, by the ineradicable tendency
of conduct to become formal, buUding a roof of
observance over its own head, as it were, and
dwelling beneath it, out of reach of faith's
vitalizing influences. When conduct has thus
degenerated into observance, it ceases to be
conduct in the deeper and more vital sense ;
for conduct is naturally plastic in the hands
of will ; observance is obdurate. The abso
lute refusal to be content with life's offering
of observance upon the altar of faith, when
faith asked for its conduct, has ever been the
note of the prophet; whUe the tendency
toward such content has in aU ages been the
great temptation of the priest. Judaism and
Christianity have proved no exception to the
rule that aU religion tends to harden into for-

THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE 75
mahty on the one hand, or to etherealize into
mysticism on the other. Each has, however,
produced a school of prophets who refused to
let Jew or Christian rest in either form or
dream. The most clairvoyant among the dis
ciples of both dispensations have insisted
upon this vital relation of faith to conduct.
They were not satisfied that faith should issue
in regulative rules or maxims, and that these
should govern conduct. It was needful that
life in its daily acts and relations should be
inspired and iUumined by faith.
So Isaiah, with his " Come now, and let us
reason together, saith the Lord," was bent
upon making and keeping rehgion real. He
sought to bring the reality of sin into saving
touch with the reahty of grace, and to order
conduct in the hght of the resultant expe
rience. The tragedy of Hosea's shattered fam
ily life was but a picture of God's patient
love of Israel, upon which Israel poured the
despite of unfaithful conduct. The burden of
the anonymous Malachi was that men should
believe in God enough to pay Him formal
reverence, and yet despise Him so much as
to permit the form to degenerate into a
practical mockery. This prophetic influence,

76 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
which never was altogether lacking in Is
rael, kept the spark of genuine faith aglow,
despite aU that formalism could do to smother
it. There was enough good spiritual soil in
Judaism to make it possible for the mus
tard seed of a new religion to take root and
grow. Nevertheless, the great enemy with which the
new truth was forced to struggle was still the
old tendency to regard religion as a matter of
observance rather than as a source of life and
a regulator of conduct. The rehgious men
who surrounded Jesus were thrown into con-
fusion — honest confusion, no doubt, in many
cases — by the extraordinary interpretations
whereby He seemed to transform the old
Law. Their religious life had been a thing
which submitted itself to metes, bounds, and
well-defined ordinances. His did not. The
Sabbath of the Scribes, with its limitations
and prohibitions, was a matter that could be
defined. His Sabbath, made for the use of
man, and upon which it was lawful to do
good, seemed vague, indefinable, and liable
to revolutionary abuse. Their Law, with its
eye for an eye, and its fine-wrought distinc
tions concerning murder, adultery, and the

THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE 77
honor due to parents, though it might be
intricate, at least aimed to be exact. His Law
of Love, with its emphasis upon the attitude
of the heart toward God and fellow man,
threw Pharisaic exactness to the winds. It
was doubtless criticised upon the ground that
it was antinomian and liable to miserable
misuse in the sphere of conduct. In point of
fact it was adapted and destined to regulate
conduct as no rule of observance could do.
But the world has been slow to perceive
this. The early Church almost split upon
some of the questions which grew out of it.
The New Testament word for religion was
dprja-KeCa, and its primary significance had
to do with external observance and worship.
St. James uses it with a fine insight into the
change wrought by the Gospel, making it
perfectly plain to his readers that it can never
become a Christian word except as its spiritual
content be discerned, and religion, ceasing to
be a thing of rules, maxims, and observances,
become the inspirer and regulator of conduct
through the heart.1 The tides of religious life
that have ebbed and flowed through the his-
1 See Fairbairn, Christ in the Centuries, pp. 171, 172, for a
discussion of Bprivicela.

78 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
tory of the Church serve to Ulustrate and
substantiate this claim. The great reformers
have been the men who touched the springs
of faith rather than those who laid down
rules of conduct. Regulation has always
proved untrustworthy when imposed from
without. It has been vital and therefore gen^
uinely effective only when it has resulted
from inspiration within. The preaching that
has seemed to be primarily ethical has often
proved less effectively ethical than the preach
ing that has been primarily spiritual. Indeed,
a case might be made out for the claim that
merely doctrinal preaching has proved as ethi-
caUy effective as any that directed attention
immediately to conduct. The great preachers
of the Enghsh Church in the eighteenth cen
tury were admirable expounders of the worth
of well-doing. The famous Deist, who con
fessed that he sent his servants to church
that they might learn not to cut his throat,
was not without some insight into human na
ture and the influence of ethical teaching on
it. Yet, after all is said, the real hope for bet
ter life lay quite as much in the field-preach
ing of the Methodists as in the excellent dull
ness of the pulpit homihes. The Evangelical

THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE 79
movement was largely instrumental in a re
formation of conduct because it made sin and
need felt. The contemporary ethical preach
ing was directed toward making virtue seem
desirable to men who were already very well
content with themselves. The Evangelicals
made men profoundly discontented with them
selves; and it is a commonplace of experi
ence that the " must " of a conscious need is
always more fertile in expedients and more
persistently powerful as a motive than the
" may " of mere comfortable opportunity.
The last five and twenty years of the nine
teenth century witnessed a considerable re
vival of ethical teaching and preaching. This
was needed and proved helpful. But those
who thought they saw in it the ultimate
form which rehgion was to assume are likely
to find themselves mistaken. The Church is
stiU something more than a philanthropic
club, and the art of the preacher wUl not
always be content to give first place to the
well-wrought homily. The frequent resort to
the homily on the part of preachers and a
certain demand for it on the part of the
people are quite as significant of a general
rehgious fogginess as of an awakening to the

80 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
need of better morals. The dissertation upon
conduct is always the easy thing. It makes
but moderate demands upon either preacher
or congregation. It seems to comport well
with the decencies of worship and religious
observance. It rarely arouses feeling to an
undue pitch ; it is never accompanied by hys
teria ; and it issues in something immediate
— something that the eye can see and the
hand handle. There is less sowing of winter
wheat, which must lie dormant for a season
and pass through strange transformation on
its way to fruition, than in the older preach
ing; and it is the thing which can still be
done while both preacher and hearer, writer
and reader, are in grave doubt as to whether
there be any sound foundation of spiritual
principle under their feet or not. This sort of
preaching has its gastronomic counterpart in
those predigested or partly cooked foods whose
virtues every newspaper exploits, quite uncon
scious that it arraigns at the same time the
common incapacity of our kitchens and our
stomachs. It is of course a fortunate thing
that men persist in good conduct even when
in serious doubt as to the doctrine which
underlies it. This persistence, however, is not

THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE 81
hkely to be indefinitely prolonged. The con
duct degenerates rapidly into mere observ
ance, unless the doctrine be articulate and
comprehensible. One need not have a very wide acquaint
ance, or be gifted with unusual powers of
observation, to discover that this is just the
case into which much of the doctrine that
men have been in the habit of regarding as
most vitaUy related to conduct has fallen.
The number of those who categoricaUy deny
the doctrines known as Christian is small.
But those who question their validity, cavU
at their basis in fact, and wonder at their
authority in the realm of action, are a mul
titude ; whether they are increasing or not, it
is beside our present purpose to inquire.
Our purpose leads us rather to note some
of the sources of this confusion. It is safe
to leave out of account the factitious doubt
which is but an expression of the unruliness
of human passion and its restiveness under
all restraint of principle. The most evidently
vahd principle of conduct wiU find occasional
contemners so long as there remains in man
a remnant of that childish unreason which
leads us to cry out upon what arraigns us at

82 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
the bar of our unwiUing judgment. There
is a demoniac element in us aU which would
raise its strident " What have we to do with
thee ? " against the presence of transcendent
worth, were it not muzzled by saner powers.
With this we are not dealing; but rather
with those questionings, sometimes welcomed
by human frailty and sometimes contended
with as the heralds of despair, which lead
men to doubt the validity of Christianity as
a Way of Life.
In point of fact, such questionings were
to be expected with the decline of the prin
ciple of authority. The genius of Western
Christendom for centuries occupied itself
with system-buUding. It built a Church after
the model of the Roman Empire, and con
structed a system of rehgious doctrine as
elaborate and weU defined as its system of
ecclesiastical government. In both these he
mispheres of its life " authority " was a great
word ; sometimes all the greater because,
like the sacred Name of Hebrew Scripture,
it was rarely uttered. No man objected to
authority. The ipse dixit of the CouncU or
the Bishop in matters ecclesiastic was recog
nized to be the normal as well as ultimate

THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE 83
solution of all vexatious questions. The same
general method obtained with reference to
questions in philosophy or natural science.
A great name was the most telling argument
that could be adduced to substantiate a po
sition. This reverence for authority grew
old slowly. Its- strength, even when threat
ened by age, enjoyed more than one period
of recrudescence. The New Learning did not
immediately undermine it, but merely sup
plied new intellectual pursuits for those whose
restless minds might have threatened the prin
ciple of authority. The discovery of America
invalidated the authority of old geographers ;
but it also opened new fields of material and
spiritual adventure. Even the Protestant Re
formation was less a rebellion against the prin
ciple of authority than an effectual protest
against a particular source of authority. It
was a revolution which succeeded in divid
ing the existing system, rather than in over
throwing it. Two systems resulted. The Pope
and the ecclesiasticism which he represented
remained at the head of one. In the other,
the aUegiance which had been the Pope's
was transferred to the Book. The notion of
authority vested in an earthly fountain-head

84 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
and exercised under a well-defined system
was stiU regnant. It would be unjust to
deny the deep insight of the great reform
ers and their perception of the power of a
Divine Spirit ever interpreting the truth to
men in terms of experience. Their visions of
this truth were, however, as fleeting as they
were inspiring, and the great body of their dis
ciples settled back into dependence upon an
earthly authority, which they connected with
a heavenly source by a doctrine of inspira
tion made to order. There was, to be sure, a
right of private judgment, but it was little
more than a right of interpretation. Its metes
and bounds were definite and often narrow.
To say all this is in no sense to behttle
the Reformation's place in the inteUectual
and spiritual history of Christendom. It was
an enormous step in the direction of free
dom. The forces resident in it were destined
to lead the world farther than the Reform
ers dreamed, though it took generations for
the real implications of the principles which
they estabhshed to appear. Indeed, they are
but dimly discerned yet by the masses of
men. Protestants have indignantly repeUed
the accusation of Catholics that the wild out-

THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE 85
breaks of fanaticism on the part of certain
of the earher Anabaptists and Quakers were
legitimate fruits of the Reformation. Yet
this assertion has enough truth to entitle it
to respectful consideration. The real condem
nation which it carries, however, belongs to
the Cathohc in quite as large measure as it
can to the Protestant regime. Such fanati
cism was the reaction of untrained and sternly
repressed minds, after sudden release. It
represented a hcense that was one day to
become liberty, and a despite of supreme
authority that through alternate experiences
of rebeUion and servitude must one day find
the golden mean of friendship. During the
last century we have seen this change passing
upon the notion of authority in every depart
ment of thought. The principles underlying
the art of education have experienced radical
transformation. Authorities have arisen and
faUen until, at the new century's beginning,
all authority has seemed to be at discount,
and pedagogy has become the toy of an em
pirical psychology.
Ever since the French Revolution, the source
of authority in government has been the play
thing of demagogues and the puzzle of philoso-

86 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
phers. The anarchist has categorically denied
its existence outside the impulse of his own
breast. The rare and occasional confessed
aristocrat has as categoricaUy asserted author
ity's derivation from some famUy or httle
group of families in each state, whose ances
tors won their right to its exercise on the
field or in the cabinet. The majority of men
have been content meanwhile simply to doubt
the principle of authority in government, re
cognizing any de facto master who might have
wisdom enough to use his power endurably.
In the realm of natural science it has been
the student's boast that the day of the great
est man's ascendency is briefer than ever be
fore. The newspapers and popular lecturers
still remind us from time to time of the pro
fessor who told his assistant to remove from
the library shelves every volume dealing with
his special branch of science which was more
than ten years old, and to consign it to the
oblivion of the cellar; inasmuch as nothing
of a decade's standing was worth reading
by a progressive man. The tendency of the
last two generations has been to arraign
systems, to discount authority, to hold tradi
tion in worst possible repute, and to exalt the

THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE 87
empiric and the opportunist. Let it be dis
tinctly understood that I am not decrying or
bemoaning this tendency. It is a fact of ex
perience to be recognized and assigned to its
place in the history of human progress. I
inchne to emphasize it here, because it sug
gests the further fact that the doubt which
these generations have cast upon systems of
Christian thought, and the uncertainty with
which they have regarded the relation of
Christianity to the conduct of hfe, have their
counterparts in other spheres of human ex
perience. When we come to inquire into the more
immediate causes of this doubt, they prove to
be so numerous and so closely intermingled
as to make specification difficult. It is scarcely
to be questioned, however, that the growth of
a scientific Bibhcal criticism has been a potent
factor in developing present conditions. It
was a shock to the popular estimate of the
Bible to treat the Scriptures as a literature
instead of a sacrosanct volume. Men now
hving no doubt remember the start of half-
pained surprise with which the orthodox
world greeted Stanley's reference to Abra
ham as a "sheik." To apply the terms of

88 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
common Eastern life to him seemed like a be
littling of his divine vocation. But the world
was to see greater things than these. It was
to see a searching inquiry instituted into the
extent and the worth of the Christian tradi
tion which hedged the sacred documents of
the new dispensation almost as closely as the
traditions of the Jewish fathers had ever
hedged the Law. Under such inquisition it
was to see considerable portions of this tra
dition break down. It was caUed upon to
formulate a new doctrine of Sacred Scripture.
This, to the man who had been used to treat
his Bible as an arsenal of proof texts, was
hard and painful work. He was generaUy in
clined to exaggerate the negative implications
of the demand, and, perhaps, to refuse to
honor it because it seemed to be so largely
negative. Nor should we forget how vehe
mently the non-Christian, to whose unbelief
the traditional view of the Bible was a rebuke
and an offense, seconded the protest of his
ultra-orthodox brother. Both argued from
the premiss that if the tradition went, aU
must go. Either the Bible must be sacrosanct,
or it must be profane. The man who touched
the Isaiah authorship touched the foundations

THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE 89
of belief; and if a flesh-and-blood prophet
were not swallowed by a Uteral fish, then must
our faith be vain.
It is idle to argue that this premiss is
absurd. That may be, but it is to be remem
bered that where feeling is involved, an
absurd premiss will often serve the purposes
of a very telling argument. An absurd pre
miss has once and again proved to be a stick
abundantly good enough to beat a so-caUed
" higher critic " with. A little time is needed
for the absurdity of premisses to make itself
evident to the man of the street. MeanwhUe
the beating may go merrily on, with his ap
proval rather than otherwise, since it pro
mises to silence a discordant voice and cast
out a fermenting leaven. Yet the voice per
sists. The leaven works. The man of the
street perceives at last that what he be
holds is something more than a squabble. It
is revolution ; and his imagination, true to
its nature, proceeds to an exaggerated esti
mate of the probable consequences. He for
gets that as revolution never changes the
genius of a people, so attack upon the forms
of religious conviction never eradicates the
conviction itself. Doubt and consequent

90 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
confusion may be introduced for a time. The
validity of great principles may temporarily be
called in question ; but the principles them
selves will persist in spite of all attacks upon
the forms in which they are commonly ex
pressed. Another fruitful source of confusion to the
rehgious thought of multitudes of people has
been the attempt to popularize the study of
comparative religion. It may be said that the
study of so abstruse a science can never be
popularized ; and in a sense this is true. But
it is also true that the results of this study are
sure to filter down into the hterature and
thought of the unlearned, either in the form
of rash hypothesis or of weU-substantiated
conclusion. In whichever form they come,
they are hkely to bring temporary confusion
with them. The average Christian thinks of
his religion as he thinks of his Bible, as
original in an exclusive sense. The discovery
of a parallel to any feature of either tends
at first to diminish its authority in his eyes.
The fact that Christianity comprehends the
theanthropic elements which characterize the
Aryan religions with the theocratic elements
which mark the Semitic religions is more

THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE 91
than a beautiful coincidence. It is signifi
cant of Christianity's divine commission ac
cording to the law of an endless life; it
prefigures its universal fitness to the needs of
men. This significance does not, however, he
upon the surface. The first thought of the
man to whom this message of the scholar is
new may very weU be that Christianity must
be less of a divine revelation than he has
supposed, since suggestions and premonitions
of its great doctrines have come to men of
other and prior faiths. It is disagreeable news
to him that there should be an Assyrian
tradition of creation and of deluge with which
every fair-minded scholar must consent to
compare Genesis. The thought of ethnic trin
ities comes perilously close to blasphemy.
The more devout he is, the more he feels the
obhgation to explain away aU adumbrations
of the great truth of incarnation previous to
its exemplification in Christ, and the less is
his willingness to admit that any word to
which Christ gave universal significance and
currency had ever found previous utterance
on the lips of some outstanding man reared
in an ethnic faith.
Yet how if he be forced finally to admit

92 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
these things? Then wUl come the pains
which accompany growth into a larger con
ception of the nature of Christianity and
the method of revelation. Often enough this
growth will at first seem hostile to develop
ment. The man's grip upon his faith as a
guide in matters of conduct will frequently
suffer in some degree during the process.
Under the strabismic influence of it, he may
conceivably join the short-sighted crew who
are ever arguing that if Christianity be not
absolutely unique, it cannot be authoritative ;
that if it prove to have some things in com
mon with the ethnic religions, then it can be
no better than they ; and that there is every
reason for supposing that each race's faith is
the one best fitted to its need. The non se-
quitur of such reasoning is egregious enough ;
but it suits the purposes of some who would
diminish the troublesome claims of Chris
tianity upon their personal allegiance; of
others who desire for any reason whatsoever
to antagonize modern scholarship ; nor is the
fallacy always discerned by the honest souls
to whom the faith of the fathers is ineffably
dear, who at the same time see that the dis
coveries of modern scholarship cannot be

THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE 93
ignored, and who are heart-sick at the appar
ent antinomy between the new science and
the old system. It is hard for them to per
ceive how a truth imperfectly apprehended
by man's reason can be the truth ; or how
error can under any condition find place in
the process of a divine revelation. They are
impatient of the method of growth and dis
dainful of God's habit of using imperfect
instruments. If space sufficed, it might be shown how
closely related all this doubt is to a dubious
apprehension of the fact of personahty — a
tendency to discount the worth of the per
son, and to resort to mechanical contrivance
for explanation of physical, mental, and moral
phenomena. It is a mistake to assume that
this lack of faith in the person is a result of
so-caUed scientific " materialism." Personal
ity is always at discount when men pin their
faith to a system, whether the system bear the
name of Calvin, or Comte, or Spencer. Dur
ing the last fifty years it has been revealed to
philosophers that their systems were partial.
Some of the more discerning among them
have perceived that their systems, from the
very nature of the case, must continue to be

94 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
partial. The essence of life and the springs
of power are not in them. The former is too
subtle, the latter too ebullient, to be confined
in any cage of mere dialectic. With this con
viction has naturaUy come a feehng of uncer
tainty and doubt, since serious men do not
transfer their allegiance easily. This doubt
has been most painful when it has hampered
religious faith and teaching. It has seemed
to be most hostile to life when it has threat
ened to divorce religion and morals. But
graduaUy we have been coming to see that if
aUegiance must be withdrawn from systems,
it is only that it may be transferred to that
which gave the systems all the life they ever
had and all the promise of continuance they
could ever boast. The new object is a Power.
I say " Power " father than " Person," not
because the latter designation is excluded,
but because it represents the goal which spir
itual experience attains as a reward of service.
One may, without fear of contradiction, affirm
that every man in the sphere of conduct has
experience of the Dynamic of Christianity ;
though of course it would be absurd to claim
that he always connects the source of his ex
perience with a system of Christian thought

THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE 95
or behef. Indeed, he may never realize in this
present life the personal attributes of the
Power which touches and influences him.
The realization of this is for him the fulfiU-
ment of the Beatific Vision.

THE SOCIAL UNREST
The student of the history of Christendom
finds few sadder chapters than those which tell
the story of the struggle of the poor for an
amelioration of their lot. There is a pathos
quite free from any taint of sentimentality
about their short and simple annals. The very
brevity and simplicity with which history ushers
in and dismisses the incidents of a peasant up
rising bespeak the dumbness of the multitude
whose desperation inaugurated it and whose
hopes were built upon it. In A. d. 287 the
Bagauds — peasants of Gaul — managed by
some herculean effort after organization to be
siege Autun for seven months and finaUy to
sack it. The Emperor Maximian succeeded at
last in breaking the power of the insurrection ;
but it was long before the old quiet of despair
ing poverty was restored ; and the misery of
the Gallic coloni and dedititii which caused
the outbreak is dumb to this day so far as any
really articulate utterance of itself goes.

THE SOCIAL UNREST 97
The Jacquerie of 1358, if not as sUent, is
stiU as incoherent. It has had, to be sure, a so-
called chronicler in Froissart. But Froissart is
in the highest degree uncritical. By his lack
of sympathy with the people, as weU as by his
ignorance, he was unfitted to teU the story of
their hopeless fight for betterment of hard con
ditions ; and since what the world thinks that
it knows is founded largely upon Froissart, the
commonly received history belongs to the vast
category of "knowledge which is not so."
The true story is sorry enough. The outbreak
took place on the 21st of May, and was over
by the 9th of June. Vengeance began at once,
and continued through August. The whole
affair was as bad and brutal as such outbreaks
always are, but the letters of amnesty of the
Regent of France issued on the 10th of August
have been preserved, and show pretty con
clusively the scope and range which Froissart
gave to a naturally active imagination.
So we have but the scantiest chronicle of
Wat Tyler's insurrection in 1381 and Jack
Cade's — which seems to have been mainly
political rather than economic and religious
— in 1450.
There are few chapters in the history of the

98 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
period immediately preceding the Reforma
tion in Germany which the student of the
life of the people would give more to hear
authoritatively and minutely told than that
which should set forth the story of the Bund-
schuh Insurrection. It broke out in 1492,
bearing upon its banner the " Bundschuh "
or peasant's clog. The wprld-old panacea for
such outbreaks — the sword — was tried upon
it, and it seemed to yield to treatment ; though
the cobbler's banner was not taken. This had
strange adventures on its journeyings through
the Black Forest in Joss Fritz's bosom until
it could be upreared again in 1514. Yet his
tory is almost silent concerning all that the
banner stood for. The hopes and fears which
it symbolized must be relegated to the hmbo
of unwritten epics. The sober historian has
httle hope of ever making them authoritatively
articulate. The uprising of the Kurucks or Crusaders
of Hungary in 1513 falls into the same cate
gory. We find the cause, or perhaps better,
the excuse, of their organization in the advent
of Cardinal Bacracz from Rome armed with a
Papal BuU against infidels. There is a glimpse
of the Transylvanian leader Dosza, under whom

THE SOCIAL UNREST 99
the peasants armed and attacked the nobles.
We know that he was captured and put to
death with torture ; but that is nearly all we
know. The causes of the desperate unrest, as
they arose out of the suffering of the poor,
whose spirit was oppressed but not yet broken,
can be but dimly discerned. There was no
chronicler to tell the story from the peasant
standpoint. The great revolt of the next decade is better
understood. It was in one sense a recrudes
cence of the old agitation for a better standard
of life that at the close of the preceding cen
tury had raUied the Dutch poor about banners
bearing the single word " bread " or " cheese."
In another, it was doubtless due to the new
spirit of independence fostered by the Re
formation. With some plausibility Erasmus
wrote to Luther, " You are now reaping what
you have sown." Yet upon the whole, the
movement was pohtical and social rather than
religious. It met the fate of its predeces
sors. The people had not yet found a voice,
and the sword has ever been the great argu
ment wherewith to meet the truth spoken by
an unready tongue. Luther tells us that in
Franconia, 11,000 peasants were slain ; in

100 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
Wiirtemberg, 6000 ; in Swabia, 10,000 ; while
in Alsace, the Duke of Lorraine was said to
have brought up the count to 20,000.1 The
comparative sUence of history is an enforced
one here, since dead men tell no tales. There
was no social science in those days, inasmuch
as he who stated and tried to demonstrate
even a simple social theorem rarely hved to
write his quod est demonstrandum.
But with the French Revolution the army
of the poor found a voice. Indeed, it may
well be questioned whether the most notable
result of that great social upheaval were not
this fact, that the man who thought himself
hardly used by society need never more be
either dumb or inarticulate. As respects effu
sion of blood, the Terror sinks into insig
nificance beside the Peasants' Revolt of 1524,
which cost twenty times as many lives. The
one hundred thousand, however, were mostly
dumb, whUe the five thousand whom the tum
bril carried to the guiUotine could speak or had
articulate friends, and those who sent them
there could reply. The incidents of the Re
volution are of vast interest and moment in
themselves considered, but the enormous vol-
1 Cf. F. Seebohm, The Era ofthe Protestant Revolution.

THE SOCIAL UNREST 101
ume of the literature which relates and dis
cusses them has a deeper cause ; for, as the
Reformation marked the close of the day
when Authority could dictate what a man
might think, so the Revolution closed the
day when Authority could bid a man be
dumb concerning what he thought. Since
that time men have spoken out what they
were wont to whisper in secret. Great store
of nonsense has been talked in consequence,
of course; but it has also foUowed that the
world has grown more rapidly acquainted
with the circumstances and the problems of
its own life in the last hundred years than
in the whole of the eighteen centuries pre
cedent to them. EspeciaUy have the poor
found voice. Even the " submerged tenth,"
though little given to hterary or oratorical
effort in its own behalf, has always, ere it
went down, found some bystander to hsten
to its cry and report its plight.
Hence has arisen the so-called Social Prob
lem. There is nothing new about it. Every
seer in every age has discerned its existence.
Moses voiced it to Pharaoh. Amos, groaning
in spirit over the land hunger of his day,
when the "poor were bought for sUver and

102 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
the needy for a pair of shoes," taught his
generation that its only safety lay in recog
nizing and solving it. Jesus intimated its
abiding character in his assurance that the
poor were ever with us ; for while there is
no element of real foretelling in this saying,
it is significant of a universal human expe
rience. Langland in his " Piers Ploughman "
has acquainted us with the misery of the Eng
lish peasant class in the fourteenth century ;
and the contrast between his own gaunt discon
tent and the sleek complacency of Chaucer is
a comment upon the social problems of their
time quite as enlightening and suggestive as
anything which either poet set down in black
and white.1 Yet these are mere occasional ut
terances of some outstanding prophet. They
scarce represent the word of the poor man
himself. That must still be inferred.
With the approach of the Revolution period,
however, some of the elemental factors of the
problem began to appear more clearly. Arthur
Young's " Journeys in France," published in
1793-94, and Sir Frederick Eden's " State of
the Poor," in 1797, gave pretty accurate and
clear-eyed glimpses of real conditions. At the
1 Cf. Green's Short History of English People, c. v. sec. v.

THE SOCIAL UNREST 103
same time, through a multitude of new avenues,
the voice of the poor began to reach the ears
of the world. Kant's famous waking from his
" dogmatic slumber " was no more real than the
change that passed over the masses of those
who had been hitherto subject to authority,
and who were wont to regard their social
status as fixed and permanent. The unnatural
ebullience of revolution was bound to subside ;
but as when a tidal wave wrecks a port, other
and lesser waves were equaUy bound to recur.
Equilibrium is as slow of reestablishment in
society as in water. The minor revolutions of
1830 and 1848 on the Continent, and the
great constitutional changes — revolutionary
in fact rather than name — of Parliamentary
Reform and the abolition of the Corn Laws
in England, as well as the vast increase of
America in wealth, power, and abUity to pro
vide opportunity for the poor man, have all
had their influence upon social conditions.
Each has been a factor in the restatement of
the problem.
It is worthy of note that with this new
freedom of utterance which has come to the
poor man, and with the increased attention
which the world has been willing to accord

104 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
to his words, a change has crept over his own
definition of his needs. Any one who reads the
story of the organization of labor may well
be struck with the fact that while the aims of
the thoughtful wage-earner during the first
half of the nineteenth century were largely
political, they have become, or are rapidly
becoming, economic. The fight for political
rights has been won. The recognition of the
poor man as a man, with all a freeman's rights,
has been accorded. Now he is turning his
attention to the organization of society, and
inquiring after the new economic privileges,
to the winning of which his political privi
leges may minister.1
Hence the present unrest. It seems to be
more pervasive and more generally recognized
than ever. The hterature to which it gives
rise covers our reading-tables. It is one of
the stock topics of discussion in debating
club, trades-union meeting, church convention,
and newspaper editorial. It forms one of the
most trusted weapons of the Opposition in
politics. Upon the strength of it the reformer
1 Cf . Fairbairn, Religion in History and Modern Life j Influ
ence ofthe InteUectual Movement; Mrs. Bernard Bosanquet
The Standard of Life ; Webb, History of Trades Unionism.

THE SOCIAL UNREST 105
fulminates his philippics against the present
order and his prophecies of judgment to
come. The rehgious sectary appeals to it as
a sure sign of the approaching end of the
present dispensation. The economic sectary
calls upon a trembling pubhc to observe that
the times present numerous conditions which
duplicate those that ushered in the Reforma
tion of the sixteenth century and the French
Revolution of the eighteenth. Precisely as
the medical quack makes gain of a nervous
public by calhng upon them through the
advertising columns of the newspapers to note
every irregularity of function, and to see in
it symptoms of grave physical disorder, so a
multitude of pohtical and economic quacks
parade their nostrums before a society that is
Ul at ease with itself, not very wise and judi
cial in diagnosing its own ailments, and a
good deal disposed to try experiments upon
its uneasy body.
Yet whUe every one talks about this problem
none appears to define it, for the excellent
reason that it proves itself to be essentiaUy
indefinable. It transcends all our efforts to
gather its known factors into a soluble equa
tion from which we may hope to derive its

106 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
unknown. This may seem to be a rather fatu
ous and disappointing conclusion at which to
arrive. It is not really so ; because this con
clusion is only a crude statement of the fact
that the experience of society is an experience
incident to its organic character. Society is an
organism instead of a machine. It is a growing
instead of a completed structure ; moreover,
its growth is not the mechanical growth of a
building whose waUs are rising by virtue of
what men bring to it from without, but it is
the outworking of an immanent or resident
Force, feeding upon such material as it can
reach and assimilate. Hence the problem of
society is as complex as the problem of life
itself. This problem wiU never be solved in
the sense that aU its component questions wUl
be answered, simply because each new genera
tion's experience wUl present new questions.
The hope for society as for the individual hes
in the discovery of a way of life, and in the
development of a Power that shall guide and
keep it in this way. A great deal that is said
about the ailments of society is as amiable
and well meant as the prayers of Kim's good
Lama. It proceeds upon the hypothesis that
society is bound to the Wheel of Things, and

THE SOCIAL UNREST 107
that its only hope lies in Nirvana. That is the
note of a decadent social faith. The man of
robuster and more wholesome fibre wUl main
tain that for society as for his individual hfe
the Wheel of Things may be expected to lead
to some goal worth attainment, if only the
right path and an adequate force be at hand.
There may be more or less jolting on the
road, to be sure, but that is incident to aU
journeying. It is therefore a very refreshing sanity that
Professor Peabody brings to the discussion of
the " Social Question " when he admits that
there is no social problem which can be differ
entiated from social problems.1 Of social
problems there is great store. Never before
were so many people awake to their existence.
Never before were so many people under deep
conviction that something must be done to
mend the social order. " The social questions
occur simply because a very large number of
people are trying in many different ways to
do what is right." 2 This very anxiety to do
right, however, sometimes blinds our judgment
as to accomplished progress and existing con-
1 Jesus Christ and the Social Question, p. 335.
« Id. p. 347.

108 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
ditions. The quack, to give a factitious im
portance to the need which his nostrum is to
meet, proclaims that things were never so bad
before ; that the gulf separating social classes
was never so deep and wide; that the rich
are growing richer 'while the poor are daily
sinking deeper into poverty's Slough of De
spond ; and that, if any one pretends to care
for the poor man's soul, it is only that he may
more conveniently exploit his body.
To aU this there is a plain historical answer to
be made. It may not be true that social unrest
to-day is less than it was at the beginning of
last century ; of this I shall speak a httle later.
But it is undeniably true that last century
ministered to the poor man's chance in the
world more purposefully and generously than
any of its predecessors.
In the first place, the century was marked
by the awakening of the conscience of Chris
tendom to social conditions and needs. Lord
Shaftesbury, whose theological and political
Toryism was noted in the Introduction, admi
rably exemplified this social renaissance. He
said very little about a social problem ; but
he was keenly alive to social problems. It has
grown to be the fashion to sneer at some of his

THE SOCIAL UNREST 109
methods and at many of his notions. Yet
the world could Ul have spared him. He really
accomplished much, and he exemplified more.
In an eminent degree he stood for the new
sensitiveness of the social conscience. In a
less degree he Ulustrated its enlightenment.
Conservative though he was in politics and
theology, he could not rest in his conserva
tism whUe men suffered ; neither could he rest
in any mere attitude of protest. He origi
nated or identified himself with many diverse
schemes of benevolence. Some of them were
wise and some were foohsh ; but there was
usuaUy oU enough in the lamps of the wise
to make a very hopeful and enhghtening
glow after time and the hour had snuffed
out the flickerings of the foolish. The secret
of his success lay in the fact that he was
always after something that should make the
permanent lot of the man he helped more
tolerable and his chance in hfe larger. With
characteristic Tory obstinacy he wrought at
one of the greatest tasks of the century —
" a definition of man that should take in the
downmost man." x
Toward a social hfe hved in the light of
1 Nash, Genesis ofthe Social Conscience p. 263.

110 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
such a definition conscience is still forcing
the world. It is beside the mark to object
that the world moves with very unwiUing
feet toward this goal. Conscience is often
obeyed so unwillingly that the restiveness
almost obscures the fact of obedience. None
the less, it is ever becoming a more persistent
and dangerous enemy to inhuman and unso
cial life. It was in response to the demands
of conscience, for instance, that slavery was
gradually abolished throughout Christendom,
in spite of what seemed to be the assured
impracticability of abolition when GranviUe
Sharp began his agitation. So any one who
wiU compare Eden's statistics of the income
and expenditure of the average laborer's
family in 1797 with those of the "Family
Budgets " gathered and arranged by the
Economic Club in 1896, must be convinced
of a change for the better in the poor man's
chance of livelihood.
It would be hard to parallel to-day the
story of James Strudwick and his wife Anne.
They hved together as man and wife for over
fifty years. For more than sixty years Strud
wick wrought upon one farm at a shilling a
day, continuing his labor until within a week

THE SOCIAL UNREST 111
of his death. They had seven chUdren, at
least six of whom they reared to become
heads of families in their turn. Yet, in spite
of many mouths and little means, they never
received a farthing from the parish. We are
not to suppose their lot to have been harder
than that of a multitude of families in
England, nor than that of some in America,
for they possessed rather an unusual capital
of character. Some of the miners of their
day hved in practical serfhood, being trans
ferable with the collieries or salt deposits in
which they worked. There were then no
legal safeguards thrown about child labor,
and early in the century children were drafted
from the workhouses and asylums of the
great towns for a service in the mills of the
north that was a virtual slavery. Indeed, it
was not until 1819 that Sir Robert Peel suc
ceeded in passing a biU which provided that
no child under nine should be employed in
a cotton factory, and no young person under
sixteen be allowed to work more than twelve
hours a day exclusive of meals.1
In the United States the unsuccessful at-
1 Cf. Mrs. Bernard Bosanquet, The Standard of Life,
especially the chapter, " A Hundred Years Ago."

112 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
tempt of artisans in 1791 to procure a shorter
day — their daily work then extending often
through thirteen hours — is significant, not
only of their rightful discontent with the con
ditions under which they worked, but of the
almost entire lack of sympathy on the part of
the general pubhc with their attempts at bet
terment. In 1825, again we find the ordinary
wages of labor astonishingly low, whUe the
attempts at organization were still treated by
the public with indifference, or with the cruel
prejudice which so often springs from an un
defined fear.1
In the early winter of 1902, the writer had
occasion to investigate the circumstances of
a laborer's famUy in a New England town.
Both man and wife were commonly regarded
as of less than ordinary intellectual capacity ;
both were accounted to be victims of bad en
vironment and worse heredity. Neither had
1 For a more detailed discussion of some phases of this
question see a series of articles by the Author, entitled " A
Century's Influence : (1) Upon the Conscience of Christen
dom ; (2) Upon the Poor Man's Chance of Livelihood ;
(3) Upon the Lot of the Dependent Classes ; (4) Upon the
Worth of Human Life ; (5) Upon the Church's Sense of
Responsibility ; " published in The Congregationalist and
Christian World, Boston, February-April, 1901.

THE SOCIAL UNREST 113
seemed to profit much by such educational
opportunities as had offered themselves. It
would be unfair to class them as criminals,
although it should be noted that the woman
had been in jaU for street-brawling. As com
pared with the Strud wicks, whose case is cited
by Sir Frederick Eden, they were distinctly
iU provided with the capital of character.
Yet on inquiry of the man's superintendent, it
was found that he had regular employment
and was counted a dependable workman. As
the superintendent spoke, he turned to a pUe
of time-cards near by and looked up the
amount of wages for November and December
— the two months immediately preceding the
investigation. The record showed $ 62 earned
in November and $64 in December, and it was
stated that these months were in no way ex
ceptional. It appeared further that the woman
added to the famUy resources by going out
more or less to service. After making every
allowance for the fact that the autumn of 1901
was a time of abundant work and good wages
— as weU as of high prices for all articles of
household consumption — no fair-minded man
can resist the force of the contrast between
this family's lot and that of the Strudwicks.

114 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
There was probably no opportunity in the
world at the close of the eighteenth century
for a man of this laborer's capacity and skUl
to make a living that would at aU correspond
with the return that his ordinary expenditure
of labor brought him in the first year of the
twentieth century.
If, turning from the case of the poor man's
chance of hvelihood, we direct our attention to
the lot of the dependent classes — the insane,
the criminal, and those whose poverty compels
them to rely in some degree upon corporate
rehef — we find a contrast between the begin
ning and end of the nineteenth century that is
quite as notable. The famous articles on Insan
ity and Mad-houses in the " Edinburgh " and
" Quarterly " Reviews of 1815, the former
written by Sydney Smith, vividly portray the
entire lack of system in some asylums and the
systematic brutality in others. It was not
until 1839 that John Conolly came to Han-
well and banished the strait waistcoat, nor
until the early '40' s that the agitation which
resulted in more humane and rational care of
the insane began in New England. A writer
in the "North American Review" of January,
1843, says that within three months he had

THE SOCIAL UNREST 115
found one man near Boston confined in a
cage about six feet square in a woodshed
open to the public road. In the next town he
found an unlighted shed, twelve by eight feet
in size, connected with the almshouse, and in
it a middle-aged man, nude and stark mad.
At the same period the cage for the insane was
no very extraordinary appurtenance to a New
Hampshire farmhouse. In contrast with aU
this, there are few more striking sights in New
England to-day than the great State Hospitals
where the insane are treated, if need be at the
pubhc expense, with the best appliances that
modern science has been able to suggest.
The trend of last century's endeavor to deal
with crime and the criminal was in this same
direction of a clearer recognition of his rights
and needs as a man. Some foohsh experiments
were tried, some failures were made, and the
problem as a whole was by no means solved.
But no inteUigent man doubts that the abo
lition of imprisonment for debt — in 1829
no less than three thousand persons are esti
mated to have been in confinement in Massa
chusetts alone for that cause — and the results
of the work of reformers like Fowell Buxton,
Alexander Maconochie, and Sir Walter Crof-

116 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
ton marked a distinct advance toward the an
swer of a most intricate and difficult question.
There has been similar progress in the esti
mate placed by society upon the worth of
human life. When, in 1810, Sir Samuel Ro-
miUy introduced into Parhament a bill abol
ishing the death penalty for shop-hfting, he
was opposed and his biU defeated on the
ground that only two years before he had
been instrumental in passing a biU abolishing
the death penalty for picking pockets, and
there was no telling where the thing might
end. One young man said to him frankly,
" I am against your biU ; I am for hanging
all." How well he expressed a common feel
ing in society is shown by the fact that when
the nineteenth century came in, more than two
hundred offenses were punishable with death
in England.
It is often insinuated that the tendency of
phUosophy during the nineteenth century has
been to lend us " Evil dreams;
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life."
Yet in point of fact, the individual life was
never held to be so precious in society's eyes

THE SOCIAL UNREST 117
before. ' This is due partly to a more sensitive
humanitarianism, and a keener feeling that it
is society's business to safeguard a man's right
to himself. The general revision of penal
codes, the elaborate regulation of traffic by
sea and land, as evidenced by such legislation
as that advocated by the late Samuel Plimsoll,
the Red Cross movement originating in M.
Dunant's experiences upon the field of Sol-
f erino, and the vast pains and expense to which
the United States goes to maintain its elabo
rate and efficient Life Saving Service, all indi
cate a new susceptibility of society to the fate
of the individual. Science and philosophy
have done much, also, to emphasize society's
solidarity. However distasteful Scripture may
be to our ears, the last century's experience
has forced us to beheve as never before that
we are members one of another. Tyranny in
China or Turkey in some degree disturbs and
oppresses Christendom. Unsanitary condi
tions in Cuban ports threaten the health and
prosperity of the United States. Now and
then signs appear that some glimmerings
of the truth that no nation can live to itself
commercially are penetrating the thick dark
ness of our legislative halls. The social

118 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
and religious missionary is more in evidence
than ever before both at home and abroad —
and the missionary, whether he represent a
church, coUege, social settlement, or trades
union, is always a sign of society's solidarity.
It would be, then, both dishonest and idle
to deny the advance of the average individual
during the last century. He has gained in
material possessions, and in opportunity and
range of life. If society's so-caUed problem
could be expressed in terms of the standard
of life of a century ago, there might be some
hope of its solution. But the standard of life
is an eternal variable. Man is the one un
satisfied creature, and the horizon of his ambi
tion increases as the square of the radius of his
opportunity. Instead of comparing his to-day
with his yesterday, he is prone to measure it by
yesterday's dream for to-day. As a contempo
rary poet puts it, he is like a man who, —
" dwelling in some smoke-dimmed town
In a brief pause in labour's sullen wheel, —
'Scaped from the street's dead dust and factory's frown, —
In stainless daylight saw the pure seas roll,
Saw mountains pillaring the pefect sky ;
Then journeyed home, to carry in his soul
The torment of the difference till he die." *
1 W. Watson, quoted in Spectator, November 23, 1901,
p. 800.

THE SOCIAL UNREST 119
It is in this " torment of the difference " that
the present social unrest largely lies. The
hungry man is by no means the most restless
man to-day. The agitator is not generally a
man who is in dire and immediate need. He
is the man who is very conscious of " the dif
ference.' ' This consciousness may simply rouse
him to envy, malice, and all uncharitableness.
It may appeal to his sense of justice. It may
open his eyes to certain definite and prac
ticable steps that can be taken toward the
amelioration of present faulty conditions. In
the first case he becomes a professional agi
tator, whose bitterness discounts his influence.
In the second he may become one of those
voices in the wUderness which haunt the souls
of a generation of men — and which generally
prove to be the forerunners of some gospel.
In the third he makes a mark, and leaves a
name as a practical reformer. He does not
solve the Social Problem ; but he rearranges
its factors. He does not assuage the unrest ;
but he soothes the immediate pain ; he satisfies
the day's hunger.
The unrest abides. It signifies a certain
inadequacy of human experience to meet the
desire of the soul. It portends the certainty

120 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
of further change. It bespeaks the need of
leadership. But more clearly than anything
else, it proclaims the fact that society is not a
machine, but an organism.1 Its problems are
the problems of hfe, not of mechanics. Its
future depends not upon a formula, but upon
an immanent force daUy adapting environment
to purpose — a force that shaU prove its per
manent adequacy to changed and changing
conditions. The answer to society's ever re
curring questions must be made not by the
ipse dixit of authority, nor in terms of a
phUosophical, economic, or theological sys
tem, but in the words of a hving and present
Power.
1 Cf. Herbert Spencer, The Dynamic Element in Life, a
chapter added to' the revised edition of the Principles of
Biology in 1898 ; and Mr. A. S. Pringle-Pattison's comment
upon it in the Quarterly Review, July, 1904, p. 263.

VI
THE THESIS
In the preceding chapters an endeavor has
been made to state a condition. We have
seen how 'slow the world has been to admit
the possibUity of growth in theology. Theo
logians of the ultra-conservative type, though
insisting upon the scientific character of the
ology, have seemed to regard it as the im
movable bed-rock upon which aU scientific
structure must be reared. Investigators might
mine into it ; they might quarry its material
for various purposes of buUding ; but the
stuff itself was the deposit of an age of reve
lation long since closed. The contemners of
theology — and they have been many during
the last half century — have also denied the
possibUity of theological development because
they have chosen to regard theology as mori
bund ; as destined to pass away ; as no longer
worthy the attention of the man of genuinely
scientific habit. Some of them have gone

122 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
farther, and maintained that religion was as
moribund as theology ; that it marked a mere
passing phase in human development, and
that the man of the present was outgrowing
it as certainly as the man of a remote past
outgrew the need and use of an arboreal
habitat. The man of the present appears,
however, to be impatient of this programme.
Rehgion is not so easily sloughed off. If he
rid himself of the faith that brings peace, he
is very likely to find himself in the clutches
of the superstition that brings fear.
Hence have foUowed the rather tantalizing
popular conditions sketched in Chapters III.
and IV. Men have found themselves unable
to abandon theological investigation and re
ligious observance without danger of surren
dering their highest prerogatives. They have
found themselves almost equally unable to
coordinate their fragmentary but precious
progress in these realms into a satisfying
experience. MeanwhUe their embarrassment
has been accentuated by analogous condi
tions in society (Chapter V.), where unde
niable pohtical and material progress finds its
footsteps dogged by persistent discontent.
Religious experience has continued in spite

THE THESIS 123
of the fond unwisdom of the devout and the
bitter contempt of the scornful. It has mul
tiplied the material of theology. Theology,
however, has been distrustful of her power
to use the material. Some few theological
masons were at hand ; but no architect has
appeared. Indeed, it is by no means certain
that he is wanted, since the true architect is
something of a prophet, and likely therefore to
be a disturber of systems and a deviser of new
types that sometimes refuse to harmonize with
those to which we have become accustomed.
A young clergyman spoke to me with enthu
siasm some years ago of the church in which
he had just begun to preach. " It was a gem
of a church ; the exact reproduction of  ,"
and he named a country church in another
land and belonging to a long bygone century.
AU the archaeologist and historian in his hearer
went out to meet the young rector's enthusi
asm, but the question would arise whether a
church in which service to God and man was
to be rendered to-day ought to be regarded
quite so exclusively as an article of vertu.
It's peculiar charm seemed to consist not in
its adaptation to present need so much as
in its suggestion of a former adaptation to

124 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
the need of another day. It is true that the
need is eternal; but it is equally true that
our attempts to meet it to-day, if they are to
have any measure of success, must be more
than copies.
The inadequacy of any formal system to
withstand the encroachments of time is be
coming ever more evident. We are reminded
of it by the periodic embarrassment of in
stitutions endowed and chartered to teach
certain doctrines. The trustees of lecture
foundations conditioned upon the promulga
tion of once well-established views, or even
upon the treatment of specified themes, are
sometimes driven to strange devices to obtain
competent lecturers and at the same time
escape misappropriation of funds. The even
tual impotence of the dead hand has been
among the hardest of lessons for the world
to learn. Pretty distinct glimpses of it have
reached the eyes of to-day, however. As a
result, the attitude of the world is half fear
ful and half expectant. Men are conscious of
transition. Some, as has been already inti
mated, look to see both theology and religion
go by the board altogether. Others look for
the advent of a new system-buUder — some

THE THESIS 125
philosophical or theological architect, who
shall devise a more lasting structure than
those which time and the hour have under
mined. The question which it is the purpose
of this chapter to raise is whether the day of
the system, phUosophical or theological, as a
completed structure has not gone forever, and
whether we are not in a position to welcome
something better and more vital as its substi
tute. In the realm of physical science no one
would dare any longer to proclaim himself the
professor of a system which should attempt
to compass the sum total of knowledge in
such fashion as to preclude investigation in
any direction or the influx of new light at any
point. We have passed from a mechanical
into a vital method in our " secular " learning.
To effect such a transition in theology would
once have seemed hke a going over to the side
of the agnostic. Yet the transition has been
made by a multitude of thoughtf id men, for all
that. They have seen that the agnostic had
something to teach them. He has generally
been bumptious, often ill-bred, and stiU more
often perhaps dishonest, in so far as he rejoiced
to misrepresent his opponent's views. He has

126 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
frequently been dogmatic in his agnosticism,
and so denied himself. Nevertheless, he has
brought his message to the world. It was
very largely a message of protest, and there
fore partial and temporary, but it needed to
be proclaimed. With it he was forever cudgel
ing dogma ; and dogma undoubtedly deserved
cudgehng. The agnostic's mistake has gener
ally lain in the fact that the play of his cudgel
has been directed to compassing dogma's death
instead of her humiliation. The sources of her
hfe were beyond his reach. The trappings of
her pride were not, and she was bound to prove
a more effective handmaid to the truth for hav
ing them stripped off ; since the dogma, which
when enthroned has so often proved to be a
tyrant over the household of faith, is nothing
after all but the hypothesis, which, sitting in
the place of a servant, has shown herself emi
nently fitted to the household's needs.
The ground of science is not merely the
principle of the Continuity of Nature. It
consists rather in an idea of nature itself.
It is a faith, which experience seems to fit,
that nature is self -consistent ; and that the
Dynamic of Nature — the Force which mani-

THE THESIS 127
fests itself in all nature's processes — is
rational, and so far forth personal. In the
light of this faith the investigator proceeds
with observation and experiment. He states
and tests his hypothesis in perfect assurance
that the processes of nature wiU verify and
indorse some hypothesis — either this or one
toward which the mistakes in this will direct
him. He is by no means disheartened because
he finds post hoc sometimes masquerading
in the garb of propter hoc. The fact that
the disguise so often succeeds for a time is
but an indirect testimony to the faith men
have and ought to have in a rationally or
dered universe. They are so sure that ade
quate cause exists for every event that it is
smaU wonder that they should be sometimes
led astray by the sanguine and premature
cry, " Lo, here ! " or " Lo, there ! " This faith,
even when buUding upon an inadequate
hypothesis, is never an object of contempt to
the really scientific man. It is always more
rational than the attitude of the unbehever
in nature's steadfastness and continuity of
process. The result of the great scientific renais
sance since Bacon's day has therefore been

128 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
twofold. The inductive method substantiated
man's faith in the rational character of the
Power which underhes and expresses itself in
the course of nature. It has, on the other
hand, warned us against too implicit faith in
any so-caUed system which claims to sum up
and comprehend nature. The arc of adequate
scientific investigation is not the arc of a cir
cle whose circumference we can describe and
whose content we can measure. It is rather
the arc of a parabola, whose law we may de
fine, but whose extent is beyond us, and
whose circuit is and must always remain open.
Only at infinity is the axis of experience fuUy
competent to determine the direction of the
hne of universal truth which there runs
parallel to it.
So with theology and the scientific ap
proach to it of recent years. The content
of revelation is not complete. The system
which describes and deals with it is and
must remain partial. There must be room
for growth, and glad expectation of it. The
real things to be sought are as clear concep
tions as possible of the source, the nature,
and the working method of this principle of
growth. The discovery of these things wiU

THE THESIS 129
meet the desire of a day eager for a recon
struction of systems better than anything else
can do. Such discovery wUl not always ful
fill the day's immediate expectation ; but it
will do something better by demonstrating
the fact that the expectation of a completed
system which shall withstand the wear and
tear of time is so meagre as to be unworthy.
The thing which the world has a right to
expect is the vision of a process and the intro
duction to a principle whose scope and power
shall be limitless. This is not to deny the
vahdity and use of systems. It is simply
to impugn the perpetuity of any one system.
A system of theology or philosophy is like
a deciduous tree. It has its seasons of um
brageous growth, when it impresses every
on-looker by its rich vitality. To this suc
ceeds the period when the signs of growth
disappear, and with the clearer definition of
trunk, branch, and twig it takes on a look of
wintry permanence. Another season of assimi
lation of new experience with its appeal to
the imagination comes, to be foUowed by a
second period of arrested development and
exacter definition, until at last the great cli
macteric of hfe is reached and passed. The

130- THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
system, hke the tree, may yet endure for gen
erations as a monument of vast interest and
usefulness. Its great significance has now be
come historical. It belongs to the past rather
than to the future. The violence of man or
the slow process of decay finally overthrows
it, and the places which knew it know it no
more forever. As a systematic arrangement
of material appealing to human attention and
sympathy, the thing is done ; but the vital
principle which gave this arrangement a real
though temporary vahdity is still extant, al
ready arraying itself in new forms, and pre
paring to render a further service.
It is in such a sense as this that we must
accept systems of theology or philosophy.
Not one of them that ever succeeded in con
centrating the serious attention of any consid
erable body of thoughtful men was probably
wholly false. Not one, merely as a system,
has ever shown itself to be completely and
permanently vahd. The time has come when
we should recognize this fact with glad resig
nation. We shall not be the poorer for it> if
it teach us that the secret of permanence in
philosophy and theology alike hes in a prin
ciple, not in a system. As the secret of adap-

THE THESIS 131
tation to a changing environment is the secret
of the life of a man ; or as the principle of
civic continuance is to be found in the intel
ligent exercise of human hberty ; so the secret
of a rational theology and a practical religion
lies in the possession of a principle of life,
resident in the world and especiaUy in man ;
rational in its ways and means of working ;
and purposeful, to this extent, at least, that
its outlook is manifestly, even though some
times mysteriously, upon the future.
Every candid and intelligent student of the
history of rehgion and of physical science
must be struck, I think, with the aversion
which men have shown to a belief in non-resi
dent causes. Their theory of life and change
has always tended to ground itself upon a
resident principle. There is profound signifi
cance in the readiness of primitive peoples to
believe in spirit-possession. Even the supersti
tion that leads such numbers in the present
day to have recourse to the wizard and clair
voyant, or to sit in gaping wonder whUe a
so-caUed medium summons the spirits of the
great departed to write bad poetry upon dirty
slates, or return silly answers to fatuous ques
tions, is not without its meaning. It all goes

132 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
to show how ineradicable is the tendency of
the human mind to find the invisible and in
definable Cause of things near at hand instead
of far away. Man is naturally a believer in
resident causes, and, at the same time, he is a
believer in a transcendent Cause. The appar
ent antinomy may plague him, but it persists.
The " Big Man " about whom the Fuegians
spoke to the inquirers of H. M. £>. Beagle,
the " Baiame " or " Mysterious Chief " of the
Australians,1 as well as the " Great Spirit " of
the North American Indians, are all exceed
ingly anthropomorphic ; but they are also tran
scendent. Their deity removes them from im
mediate and tangible contact with men, but
not altogether from some mysterious and im
mediate connection with the causes of events.
Their sons, or agents, or the spirits hostile to
them and with which they are at war, are
resident on earth, and through their interven
tion good or ill comes to pass.2 The Chinese
warping a house-boat through the primitive
lock on one of his canals divides his working
forces into two companies. One hauls the
1 Cf. Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Australia, chap
ter xviii.
2 " Anthropology — A Science ? " Quarterly Review, Jan-
nary, 1902.

THE THESIS 133
boat, the other beats tom-toms to fend off
the activity of the malignant spirits resident
in the neighborhood, whose presence would
invite disaster. The Indian is keen to make
distinction between his good and bad medi
cine. The negro, and not infrequently the
white man, cherishes his rabbit-foot. The
intelligent, and very hkely pious, inhabitant
of civilized communities likes better to see the
new moon over the right than the left shoul
der. He laughs at what he probably consid
ers the fossil footprint of an extinct supersti
tion. Yet he bears witness, in company with
his sign-fearing and magic-practicing brother,
to the tendency which all men feel to account
for events upon the ground of resident causes.
At the other end of the scale, the philo
sopher works out his theory of development.
Whether he beheve in a transcendent First
Cause or not, he founds his theory immedi
ately upon immanent or resident causes. He
is doubtless following a strictly scientific
method. Yet the impulse behind the method
is the same that actuated the African in de
veloping his theory of magic ; or the my-
thologist in ascribing a personal resident to
each constellation, grove, and mountain; or

134 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
the Lystran leaders, crying in view of an un
explained and startling event, " The gods are
come down to us in the hkeness of men."
When philosophy undertakes to organize
and correlate the diverse experience of men,
the relation between the magic-monger and
the scientist appears. The fact has to be
recognized that the human mind can reason
only upon the basis of immanent and resident
causes. It also becomes evident that the de
veloped human mind demands the unification
of these causes and their assignment to a com
mon source. Whether we call that source
" God," or the " Father of the Gods," or a
"Big Man," or a "Cosmic Force," the sig
nificant inclination to use the capital initial
recurs. The intelhgent demand for a recog
nition of this Ultimate Cause, immanent in
all subordinate causes and resident in all
events, will eventually prove, I believe, to be
irresistible. The comparatively recent doctrine of de
velopment known as Evolution has not only
emphasized the necessity and suggested the
method of unifying our knowledge in the
realm of physical science, but it has also gone
on to demand a similar unification of both

THE THESIS 135
theory and experience in sociology, psycho
logy, ethics, and religion. One of its most
important services has been rendered by its
claim that no realm of human thought is
foreign to its principle, and that its method
will upon investigation prove to be universal.
In view of the fact that Evolution won its
spurs and demonstrated its power in the do
main of physical science, it was scarcely to be
wondered at that ethics and theology should
have looked askance at it and been slow to
acknowledge its vahdity for them. They
might readily have been more hospitable to
it, however, had their ears been attentive to
the teaching of their own prophets, for Kant,
Goethe, and Tennyson had all more or less
explicitly forecast its coming. As has hap
pened before in great crises of history, how
ever, the foretold and hoped-for event, when
it came, made its advent in so unexpected a
quarter, and voiced its truth in such startling
and unwelcome words, that those who should
have been most ready to welcome it proved
to be its bitterest opponents. The "Origin
of Species" seemed to contradict all current
notions of creation, and the " Descent of
Man " threatened to rob humanity, not merely

136 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
of the doctrine of Divine Sonship, but even
of the poor distinction of total depravity.
Man was to be no longer great even as a sin
ner, but must be regarded simply as the last of
the beasts that perish. This was the fear that
men had of Evolution, with its demand for
the reorganization of every realm of know
ledge in accordance with its new principle ;
and the claim of some of the earlier evolution
ists, who were scarcely more clairvoyant than
their opponents, went far to justify the fear.
They appeared to imply, even if they did not
exphcitly claim, that the resident causes to
which development was due were resident in
events in such a sense that they might be con
sidered to be independent of, and, possibly,
even unrelated to, any Ultimate Cause or Rea
son. More than this, the great doctrine of
Natural Selection and the Survival of the Fit
test appeared to imply that all rational life
must of necessity be selfish ; and that success
in the strife after food, shelter, and such trains
ing of faculty as might enable a man to dis
tance his fellow at whatever cost to the latter
was the true object of life's best ambition.
They seemed to imply further that life was ex
clusively a thing of the present ; that the past,

THE THESIS 137
though the ladder by which man had climbed,
might be safely kicked away when he had
made good his foothold on the plane of
to-day ; and that the future (meaning by that
word the period beyond immediate experience
in this life) was to be disregarded entirely,
except so far as the contemplation of it might
serve to make him resourceful in delaying its
advent to the latest possible moment.
In point of fact, however, during all this
time Evolution was really elucidating two
principles, which, could they have been fore
seen, might very weU have mitigated, if they
did not end, this strife. The first of these
was that the attitude of any creature toward
the future is of vast moment in determining
his hold upon the present and his rank in the
scale of creation. In proportion as the parent
gave of his vital force to the sustenance and
the training of his offspring, the assurance
grew that the race in which this group of
parent and chUd was a social unit would make
good its claim to continued existence. With
the prolongation of infancy the creature rose
in the scale of creation. With the appearance
of man this prolongation of infancy appeared
to reach its normal climax ; but as man him-

138 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
self developed inteUectually and ethically, it
appeared that a yet further prolongation of
infancy must be provided for. The child was
now seen to be dependent upon the parent,
not merely for sustenance and shelter during
the period of youth's physical incompetence ;
he was further dependent for education and
ethical nurture, in view not merely of the
parent's personal experience, but of the re
corded experience of the race. In a new sense,
a regard for the future was forced upon every
normal human life. It became evident to far-
seeing men that life at its best involved an
investment of the present in the future.
While this has scarcely come to be recog
nized as a formulative principle in the doctrine
of Evolution, it can hardly be questioned that
its recognition is only a matter of time. The
moment this comes to pass, place will not only
have been found, but necessity wiU have arisen,
for the office of rehgion as voiced in the two
great commandments of Christianity. How
deep the significance of this evolutionary prin
ciple is for society, Mr. Kidd has lately sug
gested to us in a volume, the main conten
tions of which are- likely to abide, however
much we may deplore the author's lamentable

THE THESIS 139
style, or take issue with many of his argu
ments. The second principle elucidated, half in its
own despite, by Evolution was that the process
of development is not only orderly, it is pur
poseful. This is, of course, only to say that
the order of events in the universe, as viewed
from the standpoint of Evolution, seems to be
susceptible of scientific treatment. The very
phrases, " Natural Selection " and " Descent
of Man," imply that the development process
has a rationale. It is capable of apprehension
by a thinking man. Its law can be at least
approximately determined by observation, in
duction, and experiment. Now it is difficult
to convince men for very long that a develop
ment which is so orderly as to make a direct
appeal to the human mind, and which is so
consistent in the great sweep of its onward
march as to point to a generally continu
ous evolution of the higher from the lower,
is not the product of a Reason whose methods
it is within the power of human reason to
. follow with at least partial intelligence. The
whole process is so responsive to thought; the
events in it seem upon the whole to be so
subordinate to the rule of the human intellect ;

140 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
the regimen of reason seems to fit their case
so well, that it is impossible to doubt their
origin in reason. As I have before implied,
the doctrine of Evolution has given back to us
a teleology far richer than the somewhat me
chanical " Theory of Final Causes " which it
took away.
Here, then, the evolutionary hypothesis pro
vides us with a principle that is essentially
religious, for it is based upon the existence of
a " Cosmic Force " or " Power," which so far
as we can see is omnipresent. It is resident
in events. It is immanent in all departments
of hfe and experience. It is self-consistent in
its working. It appears to be future-regard
ing and purposeful in a large and comprehen
sive sense. Its methods seem to be rational
in that, as soon as discovered, they issue a
direct and immediate challenge to the human
intellect. AU this is only to say that the prin
ciple whose working we term Evolution is a
personal power. This has always been the
claim of religion. It wiU become, I believe,
no less really the assertion of science; for
science with an ever increasing certainty pro
claims the doctrine of one universal principle
of being, life, and development. It is impatient

THE THESIS 141
of any theory which would separate effect from
cause, or remove the principle of hfe and de
velopment out of the universe in which the
manifestations of its power appear ; or make
the processes of this power fundamentally irra
tional. We turn to the Christian religion to inquire
if there be any corresponding principle of
power, immanent, resident, future-regarding,
purposeful, and rational, working by means of
imperfect instruments upon obdurate material
for the attainment of large ends by means of
a process of development. I believe that we
find it in the often misunderstood and gen
eraUy neglected Doctrine of the Spirit.

VII
THE WITNESS OF SCRIPTURE
An intelligent man who should come to the
reading of the Gospels for the first time
and without theological predisposition would
doubtless be impressed with Christ's sense of
the partial nature of His own work in the
flesh. Early in the ministry He began to per
ceive and to teach that His bodUy presence
with the disciples was but an episode or inci
dent in the work of redemption. He looked
forward, and taught them to look forward, to
a chapter of experience very different from
that in which they then found themselves.
The shepherd was to be taken and the sheep
scattered. As a result of His mmistry — a min
istry that was directed to making life whole —
division was to appear between the world and
His disciples. It was to penetrate into fami
hes, to break up households, to visit hitherto
relatively contented communities with utter
unrest. Though a very Prince of Peace, He

THE WITNESS OF SCRIPTURE 143
saw with perfect certainty that His mission
was to be hke the coming of a sword and the
kindling of a fire among the conventions in
which men were making their homes. The
Gospel was to prove a death-dealing as weU
as a life-giving message. Its principle was a
principle of discord as truly as of order.
Or it was also an integral part of Christ's
teaching that the death and the discord were
to be capable of translation into terms of life
and peace. It is instructive to note the perti
nacity with which He clung to the things that
live and grow in illustrating the coming of
the Kingdom. The wheat sprouts secretly, un
noticed if not forgotten of the sower until
the blade appears. The leaven is hid in the
meal and works by a process which must have
been completely mysterious then, although
its method is partially discerned to-day. The
mustard seed, least among its fellows, becomes
greatest of herbs by the exercise of powers
which in a sense are resident, although their
source and method are alike beyond our ken.
In each case the discord-element appears. The
plow cleaves and overturns the sward in its
preparation of the earth for the seed, as the
hand of the bread-maker spreads commotion

144 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
and disarrangement through the mass of the
meal that every part may be leavened.
The disciples were eager to interpret their
Master's teachings into the vocabulary of the
present or the near future. He was repeatedly
obliged to tell them that this would not do.
The vocabulary of the present was not rich
enough to fit it for the task. Using that vo
cabulary, He was obliged to bury much teach
ing in it for the future to develop. Many of
His parables were cryptic utterances, whose
significance only became clear in the light of
later experience. His very presence in the
flesh was a hiding as well as a revealing of
the truth ; and it was one of the fundamental
necessities of His mission that He should go
away, and go by the door of supreme sacrifice.
No life ever needed a right perspective so
much, if it is to be understood. In a most emi
nent degree it was forward-looking and future-
regarding. Christ never cut loose from what
was vital in the past ; He fulfilled the past.
The present was intensely vivid to Him and
He lived in it. Yet the key to both past and
present was in the hands of the future.
Hence arose the expediency of His depar
ture. " The veU of flesh hung dark " before

THE WITNESS OF SCRIPTURE 145
the eyes of those who must see clearly if they
were ever to guide their feUows into a saving
knowledge of the truth. The message em
bodied in Christ's life and death was so vital as
to constitute a new epoch in divine revelation
and in human experience ; but it could only
be understood, Christ told his friends, through
the presence and interpretation of another
ira.pa.Kkv)To<;, or Helper, whose advent should
succeed His own departure. This Helper was
to be Lord of the Future. The New Dispen
sation was to be His rather than that of the
Man, Christ Jesus. He was to interpret the
revelation of Christ and to apply it to life.
He was to be the treasurer of truth, bringing
out of His treasury the new and the old, show
ing those hitherto hidden interrelations be
tween them which should give new significance
to both. It should be His to guide men into
all the truth. He should clear their eyes for
the discernment of eternal distinctions, convict
their hearts of sin and need, and win their hves
into consonance with God's wUl. In Him the
world was to know God forever as immanent
and executive.
In another chapter I shall attempt to show
how slow the Church has been to apprehend

146 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
this doctrine, to apply it to life, and to enjoy
its freedom ; as weU as to indicate its wealth
of significance for our present somewhat con
fused and troubled day. I pass on here, to
indicate very briefly the anticipation of it that
breathes through the Old Testament, and its
further amplification in the teachings of the
New. It was long ago remarked by Professor
Robertson Smith that the idea of the spirit
ual in the Hebrew Scriptures seemed to con
nect itself with the divine working rather than
with the divine nature.1
The Hebrew word, ruah, means in the first
place, breath of the atmosphere, or wind;
second, the breath of man ; third, the prin
ciple of vitahty, as when the spirit of Jacob re
vived upon learning that Joseph lived ; fourth,
the hfe of feeling, as when Pharaoh's spirit was
troubled at his inability to recall his dream ;
fifth, the spiritual element in human nature,
as when Moses implores Jehovah, " the God of
the spirits of all flesh," to appoint a leader for
Israel ; and sixth, the vital energy of the divine
1 Prophets of Israel, p. 61, quoted by Professor Swete in
Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible, art. " Holy Spirit." Those
familiar with this most suggestive article will note the in
debtedness of this section of the present chapter to it.

THE WITNESS OF SCRIPTURE 147
nature. This vital energy appears in the phe
nomena of human life. Ehhu exhorts Job to
hear him, because the Spirit of God had made
him and the breath of the Almighty gave him
life.1 It shows itself also in keeping, renew
ing, and withdrawing hfe. If the Almighty
should gather unto himself His Spirit and
His breath, aU flesh must perish together.2
The man who possesses exceptional power as
a leader is described as a man "in whom is
the Spirit."3 Even the craftsman's skiU of
Bezalel is referred to the special inspiration
of Jehovah. He is represented as called by
name, and "filled with the Spirit of God, in
wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge,
and in all manner of workmanship." * So the
Spirit of God might visit and make use of
men of doubtful life like Baalam or Saul, but
His abiding presence and power could only
be the possession of the man of character.
The Prophet was the man upon whom in
most eminent degree the Spirit of Jehovah
rested. " The true prophet is one who is lifted
up by the Spirit of God into communion with
Him, so that he is enabled to interpret the
1 Job xxxiii. 4. 2 Job xxxiv. 15.
8 Numbers xxvii. 18. 4 Exodus xxx v. 30-33.

148 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
divine will and to act as a medium of com
munication between God and men." J It
would perhaps be going too far to claim that
in the Old Testament the work of the Spirit
of Jehovah is made distinctively personal.
There is an approach to a distinction of per
son in the rare contrast between Spirit and
Word ; but upon the whole the Spirit of God
seems rather to be an expression for God im
manent and executive in the affairs of the
world. The thing that is reaUy notable is the
courage and consistency with which all energy
is referred to a divine source. God is in the
beginning. His Spirit broods and moves
upon the face of the waters. He breathes into
man the breath of life, and man in turn be
comes a living soul, capable of initiative, but
stUl dependent upon the divine sources of
power. In the common exercise of ordinary
human abilities the divine energy was so
thinly veiled as to be discernible to the really
clairvoyant eye ; while in all genius or emi
nent talent it stood forth immediate and efful
gent. " The Hebrew Scriptures — in contrast
to the timidity of many of their apologists —
emphasize the origin of human valour and
1 Hastings's Dictionary ofthe Bible, ii. 403.

THE WITNESS OF SCRIPTURE 149
justice, skiU, art, and wisdom, all common vir
tue and common knowledge — as by the in
spiration of Almighty God. The earth is
Jehovah's and the f uUness thereof. The Spirit
of man is the candle of Jehovah. By Him
kings reign and princes decree justice." x
As time went on, the Palestinian Jews di
vided into sects and grew subservient to cere
monial law. Under this change the larger
doctrine of the Spirit seems to have disap
peared. The Palestinian books in the Apocry
pha have but few references to the Spirit.
This was natural in view of the increasing
importance which the apocalyptic method was
assuming, since the artificiality of the hidden
and the occult is always at variance with the
simplicity which characterizes the Old Tes
tament idea of the Spirit. It was impossible
for a simple faith in the divine immanence
to coexist with the extraordinarily elaborate
angelology and demonology which the school
of the Pharisees early began to develop and
teach.2 1 G. A. Smith, Modern Criticism and the Preaching ofthe
Old Testament, pp. Ill, 112.
2 Cf. Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah,
Appendix XIII., and also Porter, art. "Apocrypha," in
Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible.

150 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
So much of the larger and more vital doc
trine as survived, appears to have taken refuge
among the semi-heretical Jews of Alexandria.
The book of Wisdom reflects and expounds
it. " For wisdom which is the worker of
aU things, taught me. . . . For wisdom is
more moving than any motion : she passeth
and goeth through all things by reason of
her pureness. For she is the breath of the
power of God, and a pure influence flowing
from the glory of the Almighty. . . . For
she is the brightness of the everlasting light,
the unspotted mirror of the power of God,
and the image of his goodness." x " For thine
incorruptible Spirit is in all things." 2 The
real universality of this doctrine, developing
as it does the inchoate universality of the Old .
Testament references to the Spirit, and look
ing forward to the explicit teaching of the
Gospel, is best brought out by Philo. As
Professor Swete has put it, " The Spirit comes
to all men, since even the worst of men have
their moments of inspiration, their glimpses
of better and higher things. ... Of the
ethical aspects of the Spirit's work in man,
PhUo has little to say, except that its f unc-
1 Wisdom vii. 22-26. 2 Wisdom xii. 1.

THE WITNESS OF SCRIPTURE 151
tion is to promote clearness of mental vision
and capacity for the inteUectual knowledge
of God, and that it fulfills this mission either
by purifying and elevating, or as in the case
of the prophet, by superseding the natural
faculties." 1
As we enter the realm of the New Testa-
ment, a change takes place in the terms used,
and we find the hitherto rare expression to
irvevfia to ayiov gaining a great preponder
ance. The Christian Church does not yet
seem to realize the important place which the
New Testament writers give to the work
of the Spirit as related to that of Christ; or
perhaps more exactly, the attempt to realize
it has been mechanical and unnatural, as
though both the Incarnation and the com
ing of the Holy Ghost were devices to which
God had been obliged to resort, instead of
great normal self-declarations of His nature.
In the view of the New Testament teach
ing, " The coming of the Spirit corresponds
to the coming of the Son, mutatis mutan
dis. . . . The Son came to unite Himself
to human nature, the Spirit came to inhabit
it. The Son came to tabernacle amongst men,
1 Dictionary ofthe Bible, art. " Holy Spirit," B : II.

152 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
the Spirit to dwell in them. But with each
coming a divine mission began which marks
a new departure in God's dealings with man
kind." I have already referred to the words of Jesus
in which He told those about Him of the
necessity for His departure. One of the most
conspicuous iUustrations of the divine poise
and balance with which He wrought appears
in His patience with the obdurate material
which He had to mould to His purposes. His
work was one for the introduction of which it
was needful that the divine should be trans
lated not merely into terms of the human, but
also, if we may so speak, into terms of the
corporeal. The Logos could never become
really articulate except by means of His body
— a body to be worn with toU and to be laid
aside with suffering. But it was equally true
that the Word could never become completely
articulate and intelligible while Jesus as a visi
ble bodUy presence strove to utter it to men
who tended to interpret everything in terms of
the temporal and earthy. They were not ready
yet to grasp the great distinction between the
personal and the corporeal. The presence of
their Master as a human figure before their

THE WITNESS OF SCRIPTURE 153
eyes rendered it practicaUy impossible that
they should attain to this distinction. AU that
Christ could do, so to speak, was to perform
the great deeds of objective ministry, and
to tell the disciples that the significance of
this ministry lay in the future. Yet in telling
them this He implied that they would be quite
as really under personal guidance then as now.
"When He, the Spirit of Truth shaU come,
He shaU lead you into all the truth."
It is worth while here to note the character
of this influence and guidance. The verb is
68T)yirjo'€i — a compound of 6Sds, a way, and
fiyioyuai, to lead — and the meaning hes suf
ficiently plain upon its face. This leadership
into the truth was to be a simple and natural
thing. There was to be no miraculous over
powering of a man and dragging him perforce
into the realm of truth ; but the process begun
by Jesus and hmited in a sense by His corpo
real presence was to go on. The obdurate and
intractable material among the disciples would
tend to remain obdurate and intractable ; but
by degrees it would be softened and moulded
to higher ends, as the guidance of the Spirit
of Truth continued. It is nowhere imphed by
Jesus that any sudden illapse of power was

154 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
to come upon His followers to clothe them or
their successors with the divine attribute of
omniscience, or to relieve them of the necessity
of following step by step into those realms of
. truth which were the Spirit's home and their
goal. There is here on the one hand no im
plication that the Spirit's guidance involved
the infallibility of the disciple who was led,
or on the other that the guidance of the Spirit
was to be confined to the group who then
listened to Jesus in that upper chamber, or to
their immediate successors.
The significance of this verb oSijy^cret grows
upon the reader as he ponders the phrase
immediately following its object — eis r-i)v
aXrjdeiav iracrav, "into aU the truth." There
is, it should be remarked, an alternative read
ing here with the preposition eV foUowed by
the dative ; but the two readings almost imply
each other. If we read the accusative with
eis, then it is into the depths of the great
realm of truth that the disciples are to be led;
if the dative with iv, then the thought would
seem to be of a leading to and fro through
truth's green pastures and beside the waters
of its comfort.
This was Christ's thesis as it is represented

THE WITNESS OF SCRIPTURE 155
in John xvi. 12, 13.1 What follows was in the
nature of an amplification of it. The Spirit of
Truth was not to speak from Himseh0 merely,
as though His presence and work represented a
breach in the continuity of God's self-revela
tion. There is no thought of a distinction in
the Godhead so objective as to need for its em
phasis the obscuration of its unity. The work
of the Spirit was to be immediately related to
the work of Christ the Saviour. The material
of truth was, so to speak, furnished by Christ.
The Spirit was to bring men to avail them
selves of the material, to build with it, to work
it over into such forms that life could be shel
tered and nourished by it. The Spirit, too, was
to reveal the architectonic plan for society
as men were able to receive it. He would open
their eyes to the real significance of their expe
rience. He would flood the stagnant shallows
of their lives with the full tides of His grace
and power. He would lead them to a con
templation of divine mysteries, especially as
revealed in Jesus ; but He would never leave
them to mere contemplation, even though they
1 For the relation between the Johannine and the synoptic
view, which must of course influence every student of these
passages, cf. Wendt, Teachings of Jesus, ii. 252 sqq.

156 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
might plead like Peter on the Mount to be per
mitted to build tabernacles and remain. The
Spirit's work does not end in passivity, be that
passivity never so ecstatic, but in service.
The more deeply the student ponders the
Johannine treatment of this great theme, the
more he inclines toward the use of some ten
tative formula to express the Trinitarian sug
gestions of it. To avoid certain shipwreck
upon the Scylla of definition and at the same
time to steer clear of the Charybdis of utter
vacuity and vagueness is no easy matter. It
would seem, however, that the narrator of this
discourse of Jesus was proceeding upon the
hypothesis that in the Father, God is ; in the
Son, He utters himself, thus becoming artic
ulate and intelligible to men ; while in the
person of the Spirit, He appears among men,
not merely articulate now, but executive —
working in, upon, and through them. It wUl
be objected in some quarters that upon the
forehead of such doctrine as this can be dis
cerned the Hegelian brand. To which the
grateful answer is to be made, that whatever
suspicion may still attach to the great name
of Hegel, it has, I beheve, forever lost its
damning power.

THE WITNESS OF SCRIPTURE 157
It wiU have been noticed that the passage
upon which comment has just been made is not
one of those containing the distinctive Jo
hannine term for the Spirit — 6 irapd,K\r)Tos.
This word appears four times in the Last
Discourse and nowhere else except in the
first Epistle of St. John, when it is apphed to
the glorified Christ exercising His mediatorial
office ; where it is translated " Advocate." The
verb TrapaKokica means to caU to one's side,
to summon, especiaUy for help, as an accused
man may summon counsel for his defense at
the bar. Hence Trapa/eA/jjTos means one who
pleads another's cause — an advocate. PhUo
uses it in the sense of intercessor. It is this
office that is designated by the references in
all three of the Synoptic Gospels to the help
which the Spirit might be trusted to render to
disciples when they were brought before rulers
and magistrates and knew not what to say ; al
though the Johannine word is not used. When
the translation " Comforter " is retained, it
must be with the understanding that it is used
in the older fashioned and general sense of
" comfort," as in the law which defines trea
son as giving " aid and comfort " to the
enemy. The King James translators of course

158 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
had this significance of " comfort " in their
minds, and their use of " Comforter " meant
not merely one who assuages grief and light
ens sorrow, but one who stands ready to give
aid and support aU along the line of human
need. It is to be noticed that in all the pas
sages where 6 Trapa/cX^Tos appears, it evidently
has a distinctly personal significance. He
comes forth from the Godhead as a source.
He is the Spirit of truth proceeding from the
Father, and the scope of His activity is as
wide as the realm of truth itself ; but His im
mediate and special work appears to be the tak
ing of the things of Christ and showing them
to men. Commentators of the last generation
used to ask whether this Helper might be ex
pected to add to the revelation made in Christ.
In the common acceptance of the question we
must answer, Yes, since the influences of the
Spirit are always revealing to men things that
at first thought they refuse to connect with
the teachings of Jesus. As the revelation pro
ceeds, however, the principles that govern
action under it find their source and their sub
stantiation in His Gospel. Almost every Johan
nine reference to the work of the Spirit not
only harmonizes with the theory of a progres-

THE WITNESS OF SCRIPTURE 159
sive revelation, but seems to demand it, if
we are to reach any adequate comprehension
of Christ's promise, or to enjoy the fruits of
His mission in any other than a narrow and
meagre way. The scope of the Spirit's work
is far more comprehensive than the Christian
Church has often been willing to recognize.1
One further fact brought out by a compari
son of the other passages relating to the office
of the Spirit with this which we are consider
ing must not be passed unnoticed. It has to
do with the method of the Spirit in accom
plishing His purpose. That purpose is no
thing less than the conquest of the world. The
method is summed up in the one pregnant
word i\ey)/eiv, to convince of wrong or error.2
" And when He shaU have come, He will con
vince the world of sin, of righteousness, and of
judgment. "3 The nouns stand in the Greek
without the article, and hence are to be taken
in their large and general significance. The
1 Whether or not it be His office to teach the facts of
history, I do not presume to say. But I wholly agree with
Godet's claim that it is His office to reveal the meaning of
the facts of history, which without the Spirit would be only
a frigid narrative incapable of creating or sustaining life.
Cf. Godet, Gospel of John, Am. trans., ii. 305.
2 Cf. Godet, ii. 309. 8 John xvi. 8, Godet's trans.

160 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
world is to be won, not by compulsion put
on outward freedom, but by the institution
of deep heart-searchings. Every revelation of
truth is to necessitate a breaking up and a
remoulding of men's thought upon these great
realities, with Christ's thought upon them as
the norm toward which each reorganization is
to effect a closer approach.
It is further to be noted that the instru
ments which the Spirit will use in applying
this method to a scheme of world-conquest
are men made in the image of God. "He
shall show you the way," Jesus says in effect,
"and you shall point it out to others. ' He shaU
take of mine and announce it unto you,' but
only that you may in turn pass it on to those
about you whose need to-day is what yours
was yesterday." Not bythe unutterable groan-
ings of nature ; not by cataclysmic force ; but
by wise, gracious, and loving influence of re
deemed lives inspired by sanctifying power,
shaU the Spirit do His work ; and the army
of men thus redeemed, thus inspired, thus at
work for the fulfillment of the Spirit's pur
pose, shall be the Church.
The candid reader of the Epistles can
scarcely escape the conclusion that their au-

THE WITNESS OF SCRIPTURE 161
thors were conscious of a divine presence in
the world ready to do for the individual be
liever and for the Church what Christ might
have been expected to do could He have
remained in bodily form with the disciples.
Neither St. Paul nor St. John enters upon any
elaborate attempt at definition. They were,
generaUy speaking, writing letters instead
of treatises upon systematic theology. Their
theory of Christianity's dynamic is implicit
rather than explicit ; and any modern doctrine
that should found itself upon nothing more
coherent than scattered proof-texts clipped
from their writings must remain more or less
a thing of shreds and patches. Professor
Sanday and Mr. Headlam have pointed out
with great discrimination the fact that there is a
difference in the doctrine of the two Apostles
corresponding to a difference in their experi
ences. Out of the intimacy of his personal
fellowship with Jesus, St. John thinks of the
Spirit as " another Parac^lete." St. Paul, who
had enjoyed no such knowledge of his Master
in the flesh, but who knew Him at first hand
in the spirit, is wont to refer to the work of the
Spirit as a continuation of the work of Christ
without any break except the corporeal disap-

162 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
pearance of the worker, or any change except
the change of growth and necessary adaptation
to new environment.1 The phenomenon of
Pentecost is to be regarded not so much as
the beginning of the Spirit's presence in the
Church as the beginning of His recognized
headship and authority.2 Pentecost brought
hght and power. The hght not only illumined
the future, but interpreted the past. It should
never be forgotten that our picture of the life
of Jesus is not the picture that the Twelve
saw in the days of their pilgrimage with Him,
so much as it is the representation of His hfe
and words as the Apostles saw them in the
hght of Pentecost's illumination. The signifi
cance of miracle, parable, personal rejection,
and sacrifice all waited for the Spirit's reve
lation. Yet this revelation was intended to do
more than confirm and guide the individual
behever. From Pentecost the conviction arose
and grew that the work of the Spirit had a cor
porate as well as an individual end. He was
to be the inspirer and leader not merely of the
disciples, but of the Church.
It is interesting to watch the growth of this
1 Cf. Sanday-Headlam, Romans, pp. 200, 201.
2 Cf. McGiffert, Apostolic Age, pp. 49, 50.

THE WITNESS OF SCRIPTURE 163
conviction in the writings of St. Paul. In the
earher Epistles the presence of the Spirit is
set forth as of eminent worth to the personal
hfe of the behever, endowing it with gifts
and graces and guiding it in the discernment
between true and spurious charismata. In the
middle section there is a far greater tendency
to deal with the Spirit's nature and His fun
damental relation to men. Here we discern
Paul's growing consciousness that the Spirit
is, and is to be, regnant in the whole dis
pensation, the first chapters of whose earthly
history he and his fellow disciples were then
making and recording. He is the great pur
veyor of grace to men. Wherever He walks
the earth, faith, hope, and love Spring up
to mark His steps. He will take up His abode
with men if they will have Him, and He will
consecrate their very bodies to holy ends and
uses. The man who walks in the Spirit shall
show the fruits of the Spirit. These shall
be of such a sort as to make him tolerant
of his fellows and tolerable to them, thus
introducing a heavenly comity into earthly
social life. The Spirit dwelling in a man shaU
establish a certain identity between the human
and the divine. The man thus inspired shall

164 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
understand as by instinct the things of God.
He shall love his fellows and order his life
according to a heavenly rule. Hence the poor
and unlearned, when reaUy imbued and inspired
with the Holy Spirit, shall be able to perceive
and effectively witness to matters which seem
insoluble or absurd mysteries to the wise and
great.1 It becomes evident, then, that the indwelling
of the Spirit as viewed from the standpoint
of the Epistles is eminently social in its re
sults. This conviction seems to have possessed
St. Paul in an increasing measure as time
went on. It is deepest in the later Epistles.
The Church is become more than a few groups
of individuals of similar behef and experi
ence. It is a new society establishing itself
in the midst of an old and moribund civili
zation. Its destiny is nothing less than the
ushering in of a new heaven and a new earth
wherein righteousness shaU dwell. The writer
of 2 Peter looked for the dawn of this new
day amid cosmic revolution and cataclysm.
Paul looked for cosmic revolution too ; but
the real secret of the new society lay beyond
1 1 Cor. xi. Cf. Matheson, Spiritual Development qf St
Paul, pp. 179 sqq.

THE WITNESS OF SCRIPTURE 165
all this. The ideal of the Church as a compre
hensive and eternally vital organization seems
to have been ever with him in the later days
of his apostleship. The union of believers in
the bonds of peace is to be the result of the
Spirit's indwelling.1 Individual grace has now
a more distinct and definite corporate pur
pose than ever;2 and significantly enough, it
is in the light of this corporate purpose, this
new social consciousness, that St. Paul writes
of the graces of individual Christian character
with the most eminent fehcity, freshness, and
power.3 We see, then, that the place accorded to
a doctrine of the Spirit in both Old and New
Testaments is at once larger and more vital
than students of the Bible have commonly
realized. " The Spirit " has always been an
expression for some form of the divine im
manence. The writer who used it has always
represented God as immediately present in
human hfe and the world of common affairs,
imparting skiU to the workman's fingers, wis
dom to the statesman's judgment, or eloquence
1 Ephesians iv. 3. 2 Ephesians iv. 7-12.
8 Cf . Hastings's Dictionary of ihe Bible, art. " Holy Spirit,"
ii. 410.

166 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
and cogency to the prophet's plea. This nor
mal self-revelation of God is overshadowed
rather than interrupted by the special revela
tion through Jesus Christ, — but only mo
mentarily, and as it were for the purpose of
a better understanding of normal methods.
So God is represented as speaking to Moses
face to face upon the mountain, that Moses
might have greater assurance and intelli
gence in interpreting the more commonplace
relations of the camp and plain ; and Jesus
takes his chosen companions to a summit
of transfiguration, that long afterward the
Spirit's teaching about His life and death
might have more significance and power.
Pentecost marked the recurrence to an old
and normal order of revelation quite as truly
as the estabhshment of any new order. It
did mark a new era, however, because from
this time on some men were to see that God
was in His world, — executive in it, — capable
of immediate perception by every intelhgent
being, — capable, indeed, of something hke
assimilation by every spiritually clairvoyant
soul. The Spirit in the world was to be the
inspirer and director of every honest search
after truth and every attempt to translate it

THE WITNESS OF SCRIPTURE 167
into goodness, in both individual and social
life. In the next chapter we shall inquire as to
the measure of recognition which the Chris
tian Church has seen fit to accord to this im
plicit revelation of Scripture.

VIII
THE WITNESS OF THE CHRISTIAN
CHURCH
When, under the influence of the new sci
ence of Comparative Religion, what may be
called the Natural History of Rehgion comes
to be written, we may expect to find that all
highly developed rehgions pass through a
common struggle between institution and
principle, body and soul, system and spirit.
This is equally true of philosophies, which as
soon as they are reduced to systems need to
be improved upon, broken up, and revived.
It is no less the experience of governments,
which never find written constitutions per
manently adequate to the reconciliation of
their principles with their circumstances.
The Parisian bookseller who answered the
inquiry for a copy of the French Constitution
with the statement that he did not keep peri
odical literature uttered words of truth and
soberness. All written constitutions must be

THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 169
instruments of periodic reissue or amend
ment, unless they are to become instruments
of tyranny.
An instructive historical parallel might be
drawn between the history of Christianity
and the history of the Platonic philosophy in
this respect. Both passed through a period
when asceticism and enthusiasm threatened to
become the dominant note of the Christian
and the Platonist, though neither the founder
of the religion nor the father of the phUo
sophy was an ascetic or an enthusiast.1 The
Christian Church was scarcely chartered and
established before it found itself involved in
this inevitable struggle. The vital and fruit
ful period of the old dispensation had come
to an end with the passing of the prophets.
The critical question for Christianity was
whether or not the prophetic spirit and office
were to be revived and retained. St. Paul
had recognized the prophet as worthy of all
honor, and in the famous treatise upon spir
itual gifts in his first letter to the Corinthians,
1 Cf. the suggestive rather than authoritative essay on
Plotinus in Vaughan's Hours with ihe Mystics, i. 83. Also
the more systematic treatment of his relations both to Plato
nism and Christian Mysticism in Inge, Christian Mysticism,
pp. 91-99.

170 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
had given him a place next to that of the
Apostles. As the Church developed institu
tionally, the prophet remained the free man in
it. His authority was immediate rather than
derivative. In the Didache (10) the prophet
is designated as the proper person to conduct
pubhc worship, and the only person who may
offer thanksgiving in such words as seem to
him to be fit, and without recourse to litur
gical forms.1 It was to be expected that
this would open the way for occasional ex
travagance and error. St. Paul accordingly
reminds the Corinthians in monitory phrase
that God is the author of peace rather than
of confusion, and that the true prophet is
always master of such measure of the Spirit
as is intrusted to him;2 but he was too
shrewd and wise not to see even in the occa
sional outbreaks of mantic frenzy the hyper
trophy of a real power placed at the disposal
of the Church.
The power was too immediate and genu
inely vital, however, to admit of easy regu
lation. Hence, as the institutional growth of
1 Cf . Gwatkin, art. " Prophet in the New Testament,"
in Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible.
2 1 Cor. xiv.

THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 171
the Church advanced, the prophet became
a thorn in the side of every organizer. The
Church had a great work to do. Thorough
organization, strict discipline, a clear recogni
tion of the metes, bounds, and responsibUi-
ties of every office, seemed to be indispensable
to its accomphshment. Thus in the realm of
belief fixed creedal forms were of value, that
it might be determined whether a man be
longed to the household of faith or not. The
Church saw its mission in the possible con
quest of the world for Christ. It saw the
model of organization in the Empire. It pro
ceeded to gird itself for the struggle by all
the methods known to wise and prudent men
in whom the spirit of leadership was mov
ing. The end determined the means. A vast
institution, with its hierarchies, its creeds, its
revelation contained in a sacred book, began
to take definite and permanent form. It
was admirably adapted to its work of con
quest ; admirably adapted to grow — but to
grow as an institution by a process of half-
mechanical accretion rather than to develop
according: to the law of an endless life. This
development was not to be foregone; but
it was to be accomplished with struggle and

172 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
difficult bursting of institutional bonds — the
age-old conflict between the orthodox and
the heretic.
A chief place among the protagonists in
this great drama must be accorded to the
Montanist. Fanatic though he was and narrow
too, as most fanatics are, stiU his shriU voice
testified to one truth that was vital and per
manent. His programme was in many respects
negative and hostUe to true development ; but
there was one positive element in it which
goes far to atone for aU the negations. The
Montanist steadfastly maintained that the
circle of revelation was by no means complete;
that the sum of revelation was not yet cast
up ; and that the avenues of revelation were
not yet closed. God's Spirit yet strove with
man ; spoke to him immediately ; guided his
endeavor, if he were willing to be led ; and
made each year of the Church's life richer in
knowledge than the last. It will be said in
reply that the Montanist was an ascetic and
an enthusiast ; that he had grotesquely Uteral
notions with reference to the " end of the
age" and the approaching reappearance of
the Lord ; that he threw common sense to the
winds in wooing martyrdom, and did despite

THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 173
to Christian charity in his treatment of those
who, under stress of persecution, had re
canted. All this is true, and it is further
to be alleged against him that even his exalta
tion of prophecy was vitiated by his reversal
of St. Paul's dictum, and that he thought of
the prophet as subject to the Spirit in a degree
that practicaUy suppressed his own personal
ity.1 Yet after all is said, the Montanist her
etic bore manful testimony to the rights of
the individual as opposed to the authority
of the Church ; and to the continuity of revela
tion as an experience of every man whose life
is open to the Spirit's voice. The Montanist
himself had his day, passed, and is remem
bered only as a name ; but by way of Tertul
lian his influence told upon Christendom.
It is interesting to note that the man who
gave to the Church the formula of apostolic
succession should himself have laid stress upon
an apologetic method which could afford to
leave it entirely out of account. But when at
his best, — for no man was ever subject to
greater vicissitude of spiritual experience, —
the impetuous Carthaginian defended more
significant things than apostolic succession.
1 Cf . Allen, Christian Institutions, pp. 99-105.

174 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
Unlike the earher Montanists, he accepted the
Church's organization. He was, however, in
no way reconcUed to the claim of the organized
and visible Church to an exclusive revelation.
There was danger lest the Church should ac
cept the doctrine that Heaven, open once for
the impartation of truth, was closed again;
and that truth itself was a deposit to be kept
intact and pure. Against such belittling —
for belittling it would eventually prove to be
— of the Church, the Bible, and the Christian
experience, Tertullian strove. Nor did he strive
altogether in vain. The Church reckoned with
him, and with the Montanists through him,
as she' often reckons with those whom she con
demns. While repudiating the heretic, she not
infrequently accepts the gist of his heresy,
translated into her own terms. Thus, ever since
the day of Gnostic and Montanist, the possi
bUity of contmued and immediate revelation
of the truth to men by the Spirit through a
multitude of varied avenues has been implicit
in the Church's doctrine. The periods in
which it has been recognized and acted upon
have been times of unrest, doubt, struggle,
bitterness, but none the less times of growth.
As Professor Allen has recently and eloquently

THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 175
put it, " The obscure prophet of Phrygia J had
raised the eternal question of the ages. On
the one hand, administration and order, the
weU-being of the Church in its collective ca
pacity, the sacred book, the oral voice of the
Master, the touch of the vanished hand, the
perpetuation as of a bodUy presence, some
physical chain, as it were, which should bind
the generations together, so that they should
continue visibly and tangibly to hand on the
truth and the life from man to man; and
on the other hand, the freedom of the Spirit,
and the open heaven of revelation, individual
opportunity for the fullest development and
expression, the transcendental vision, as with
St. Paul, who declares that ' though we have
known Christ after the flesh, yet henceforth
know we Him no more,' the vision by which
each soul may see Christ for himseh0 through
direct and immediate communion with the
Spirit of God, that Spirit whose testimony
within the soul is the supreme authority and
ground of certitude, who takes of the things
of Christ and reveals them to men with fresh
power and new conviction, who can at any
moment authorize initiations of change and
1 Montanus.

176 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
progress, which yet do not and cannot break
the succession of a continuous life of the Spirit
in the churches, — such were the terms of the
real issue between Cathohcism and Montanism,
which stiU wait, after eighteen centuries, for
some larger or final adjustment." 1
To revive this issue in every age that bade
fair to forget its existence, and to settle down
into contentment with the institutional and
conventional, has been the office of the long
and noble line of Christian Mystics. The in
tensely practical and busy day in which we hve
seems httle likely to find any place for, or to
show any sympathy with, the mystic. Nearly
half a century ago Vaughan pointed out — not
without some signs of satisfaction — that
Britain had been poor in mystics. As " Ath
erton " puts it : —
. " Our island would be but a spare contrib
utor to a general exhibition of mystics. The
British cloister has not one great mystical
saint to show. Mysticism did not, with us,
prepare the way for the Reformation. John
Wickliffe and John Tauler are a striking con
trast in this respect. In the time of the Black
1 Allen, Christian Institutions, p. 103. The whole chapter
on " The Ministry in the Second Century " is of distinct value.

THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 177
Death, the Flagellants could make no way
with us. Whether coming as gloomy super
stition, as hysterical fervour, or as pantheistic
speculation, mysticism has found our soil a
thankless one." x Yet this is but a partial and
rather shallow generalization. It is true only
from the standpoint of one who thinks of the
mystic as always standing apart from the com
mon affairs of life wrapt in his vision. The
great mystics have indeed seen visions and
dreamed dreams ; but ecstasy has been merely
the occasional experience of the occasional
individual. The great and mightily influen
tial rank and file have been quiet, industrious,
charitable, and sincerely pious folk, who did
their daUy work in the light of God's glory
shining upon them from the face of Christ,
and in the comfort of God's will interpreted
immediately to their hearts by the voice of
the Spirit.
There is contrast, as " Atherton " con
tends, between Wickliffe and Tauler ; but it
is incidental rather than essential, circumstan
tial rather than fundamental. Wickliffe was
almost as real a mystic as Tauler, but less of
a quietist. The notion that the mystic must
1 Hours with the Mystics, ii. 253.

178 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
needs be odd and grotesque in order to sub
stantiate his claim to membership in the
brotherhood is a mischievous one. The out
standing mystics have borne testimony to
strange experiences and walked in unconven
tional paths, it is true ; but even in their cases
there has been such a tendency on the part of
their biographers to emphasize, if not to ex
aggerate, this side of their lives that tradition
has become miserably warped and distorted.
We should probably find a woman of strong
good sense and hearty good humor, as well
as of extraordinary executive ability, if we
could pierce the veU of legend that hides as
well as canonizes St. Teresa. The practical
efficiency of Madame Guyon is as far beyond
question as her personal charm. The some
what dim figures of Eckhart and Tauler are
majestic rather than grotesque. Mohnos and
Fenelon were at home among courtiers in the
Vatican and at VersaiUes. The eccentricities
of George Fox have been remembered, while
the very practical means which he employed
to relieve the misery of those who were in jail
with him, and to provide for the necessities
of the poor, have been forgotten. Bunyan's
illapse of transient terror whUe beU-ringing or

THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 179
playing tip-cat has obscured his native shrewd
ness, his quaint humor, his years of peaceful
and devoted industry, in such degree as to
make him seem abnormal and half repulsive
to many a reader of his life who might well
have rejoiced in acquaintance with the man
himself — typical Enghshman as he really
was, after aU is said.
In an imaginary letter to Flaccus, Plotinus
is represented as contending that knowledge
has three degrees — opinion, science, and illu
mination. The means of opinion is sense ; of
science, dialectic; and of illumination, intu
ition, which is defined as absolute knowledge
founded on the identity of the mind knowing
with the object known.1
It is not to be supposed that this intuition
is necessarUy independent of sense and science.
The intuitive stage may properly enough be
reached by way of these prior stages. It is
the stage upon which the mind not merely
perceives and reasons, but identifies itself with
the material of experience. Christ seems to
have had something of this sort in His mind
when He uttered some of the more daring
and startling sayings about the identity which
1 Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics, i. 86, 87.

180 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
might exist between Himself and His disci-
CT
pies. " Whoso eateth my flesh, and drink
eth my blood, hath eternal life."1 "So he
that eateth me, even he shall live by me." 2
The words have been justified in the ex
perience of religion. Christianity has always
found some hves to whose general sense of
good it has appealed; but they have gone
no further than to approve it in a nerveless
and complexionless fashion. Others have seen
in it that which promised to advantage them
in such measure that they have been moved
to contend for it. They regard faith as a
source of comfort in grief, or of assurance in
prospect of death, or of physical and mental
serenity — a good policy, for life. Multitudes
doubtless accept faith upon these terms. It
is a perfectly reasonable course and beyond
carping criticism. But the fact remains that
rehgious influence reaches its highest poten
tial only in the man who feeds upon his faith.
He thinks less of the demands which religion
is hkely to make upon him, or of the benefits
which he is likely to reap from it — but he
ponders more upon its intrinsic necessity to
him. It is for him. He would be lost with-
1 John vi. 54. a John vi. 57.

THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 181
out it. The object of his faith is not so much
an entity apart from himseh*, beckoning or
commanding, as a Spirit with whose essence
his own is becoming identified.
Within this sense of immediateness are the
hidings of the Mystic's power. As Professor
Seth put it, " God ceases to be an object
and becomes an experience." 1 All great re
ligions as distinct from merely ecclesiastical
revivals have borne witness to the reality of
this distinction, and to the power which the
"experience of God" confers. This power
has shown itself to be strikingly independent
of ecclesiastical circumstance. The real Dy
namic of Christianity has once and again
proven itself to be a thing springing so directly
out of spiritual experience that everything else
can be treated with relative contempt.
The Reformation and Counter-Reformation
afford a case in point. Both were great reli
gious movements designed for diverse ends.
Both were religiously powerful in proportion
as they reahzed anew this experience of God.
Luther's interpretation of the Epistle to the
Romans was reaUy an emphatic statement of
the fact that salvation consisted in nothing
1 Cf. Inge, Christian Mysticism, Appendix A, p. 339.

182 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
less or else than this union of God and man
in the experience of faith. Man did not lose
his identity, to be sure. Yet the bond which
faith established was organic rather than
artificial or mechanical. The man justified
by faith was regrafted upon the divine stock ;
rearticulated as a branch to the vine, so that
one hfe current energized the whole organism.
The Reformation was fundamentally nothing
less than an assertion of the freedom and dig
nity that are man's prerogative because a
Spirit of Wisdom, Light, and Power — which
is none other than the Spirit of God Himself
— waits to take up His abode not merely
with him but in him, so soon as by the act of
faith he shall be reunited to the divine. This
freedom was not merely a right of private
judgment in the interpretation of Scripture.
Beginning the assertion of itself in the matter
of Scripture, it was bound to go further until
it claimed all regions of thought and conduct
for its province. This meant antinomianism
in some quarters. But sporadic anarchy is one
of the prices which, upon the present level of
human imperfection, we must pay for epidemic
freedom. Germany's freedom of thought, the
scope and daring of her scientific specula-

THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 183
tion, her rationalism as well as her profound
piety, are children of one family, — some nat
ural, some legitimate, but all of Reformation
blood. The Counter-Reformation had two objects,
or at least wrought two results. One was to
restore the states, the influence, the revenues,
and the prestige which Rome had lost. The
other was to bring back a better life to the
Church itself ; for the Reformation, so far
as Rome herself was concerned, issued in revi
val as truly as in schism. The fact that this
Counter-Reformation consented to use tbe In
quisition as an ally, and that the rise of the
Jesuits synchronized with it, should not blind
us to the fact that it was in a real sense a re
vival of piety. Spiritual force was developed
during this period in Seville and Toledo as
weU as in Wittenberg and Geneva. Persecu
tion had its way to a lamentable degree. One
cannot but wonder what Spain might have
become, could the legitimate fruits of the cul
ture of Salamanca and Alcala have ripened
and come to the harvest. That was not to be.
The " Index Expurgatorius " dealt out equal
intolerance to the work of the Arab Aver-
roes, the German Eckhart, and the leaders of

184 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
Spain's own contemporary thought hke Louis
de Leon.1 It was the privilege of the Inquisi
tion to debase and deform spiritual life ; but
it could not kill or altogether repress it ; and
among the strongest witnesses to the power
which the hfe of the Spirit is bound to exert,
even when deahng with obdurate material
and forced into grotesque and half repulsive
forms of expression, stand the lives of St.
Teresa and St. Juan of the Cross. There is
a curious coincidence between certain expres
sions of St. Teresa concerning belief in Christ
as the only ground of salvation, and Luther's
statement of his great thesis of Justification.2
But, interesting as the attempt might be, it
is no part of my purpose to expound the doc
trine of these famous Spaniards. I cite them
as examples of the fact that leadership in
the paths of effective piety was vouchsafed to
Romanists as really as to Protestants, though
I beheve in less degree during that particular
century. The power of the Church — and here I do
not mean temporal dominion, but a genuine
and legitimate spiritual authority — was mea-
1 Cf . Inge, Christian Mysticism, pp. 216 sqq.
2 Inge, op. cit., p. 222.

THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 185
sured less by the complexion of the dominant
dogma, than by the degree in which behevers
had experience of a spirit which seemed to be
the medium of their inclusion with the divine.
This experience might become exaggerated
and distorted in their description of it; it
might be very soberly and simply portrayed ;
widely diff erent means might be recommended
to others as likely to be instrumental in intro
ducing them to the same saving grace or know
ledge. AU these things were of relatively
minor import. The thing that gave authority
to the Church — Romanist, Lutheran, Re
formed — was the fact that in her some men
found, and other men perceived that they
found, an experience which proved to be a
practical salvation. It was an experience which
can be described only as an iUapse of a spirit,
not their own, which brought them into unity
with the source of life and goodness.
As though to remind us that the Dynamic
of Christianity is divinely impartial in the use
of its instruments and loves to confound little
men by an inclusiveness which they can neither
understand nor stomach, we are permitted to
see this same phenomenon in the Evangelical
Revival of the eighteenth and the Tractarian

186 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
movement of the nineteenth century in Eng-
gland. More delightful essays in Ecclesiastical
Biography than those contained in Sir James
Stephen's second volume bearing that title
may have been written ; and sprightlier ones
than those in which Mr. Augustine Birrell ex
ercises his nimble wit upon the Protestant Re
formation, Cardinal Newman, and the Chris
tian Evidences, — but I venture to doubt
whether they have been published. Both these
accomplished laymen, the one in the best style
of the Edinburgh Reviewers, the other in the
less impressive though more scintUlant manner
of the later English journalism, — studying
anything with Mr. Birrell is a little like view
ing a landscape by the light of rockets and
Roman candles, — have borne witness to the
profound and lasting interest exerted by reli
gious revival. It seems to be one of the things
that men can never let alone for very long.
They must hark back to it, if for no other
purpose than to explain to themselves, and
incidentally to others, that it is not, after all,
very significant. In saying this, I do not for
a moment imply that Sir James Stephen and
Mr. Birrell are to be numbered among those
who affirm by means of the pains they take

THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 187
to deny. The " Evangelical Succession " and
" The Clapham Sect " are tributes of honest
respect and affection. The essays of Mr. Bii-
reU upon religious leaders and movements are
as reverent and affectionate as circumstances
wUl permit them to be. Both bear witness,
however, to the fact that in the revival under
Wesley, Whitefield, and their successors, and
in the counter-revival under Keble and New
man, something came to pass for which mere
superficial circumstance faUs to account. We
have but half told the story, when we have
described the parsonage of Samuel Wesley
at Epworth and the remarkable family that it
sheltered ; or the inn at Gloucester, and the
train of events inaugurated by Whitefield's
birth there. As we go on to the formation of
the Methodist society at Oxford, the meeting
with the Moravians on the voyage to Amer
ica, even to the innumerable marchings and
countermarchings of the Great Itinerant over
England, the preaching to the Kingsbridge
coUiers, the stupendous labors as author,
editor, translator, organizer, and all the rest
of it, we are stiU conscious that we are in the
region of circumstance rather than of essence.
What we behold is, after all, to use Mr. Brier-

188 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
ly's suggestive phrase, but a " deposit of the
Unseen." J The end of the Evangelical Re
vival was httle less than social revolution, as
we trace it in the work of men hke Wilber
force and Shaftesbury. The means do not
seem to account for it. 2
The same condition fronts us as we examine
the so-caUed Oxford Movement, which bore to
the Evangelical Revival a relation comparable
to that connecting the Counter-Reformation
with the Reformation proper. It was a move
ment in reaction ; but it was also a movement
in advance. It damned the heretic and the
schismatic; but it caught something of his
fervor, and it did not altogether disdain his
methods. A wave of medievalism swept over
Oxford. There was an awakening of interest
in Church history ; in the world-old question
of the sources of authority; in hagiology; in
the Church itself as an institution ; in the
significance, and especially the material ad
juncts and instruments, of worship. In short,
it was a revival of ecclesiastical romanticism.
The leaders were men of singular charm, —
1 J. Brierly, Studies ofthe Soul.
2 Note also the repeated references to Wesley in Sir
George O. Trevelyan's American Revolution, pt. ii.

THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 189
the charm that almost always results when
great simphcity of hfe and manner and great
willingness to serve the poor and humble are
joined to great intellectual subtilty and a
high degree of intellectual cultivation. It is
safe to predict for Newman a long vogue.
Tract XC may die, — is, I suppose, dead, —
but as Mr. BirreU has said, it is almost the
only bit of its author's writing which we do
not, upon thinking of, wish to sit down with
and re-read.1
Yet it is hard to account for this vogue
upon any coldly rational basis. Newman's
dialectic is almost preternaturally trenchant
and agile. The reader rejoices in him as in
a sleight-of-hand performer whose processes
seem to be as simple and legitimate as his re
sults are amazing, — but he is a sleight-of-
hand performer still. The man of judicial
temper knows that the platform on which he
stands, and the apparently simple though
really complex paraphernalia which he brought
in with him at the beginning of the perform
ance, are genuinely significant features of it
aU. The whole thing is imphcit in them.
With Newman the premisses are everything,
1 Res Judicata;, Am. ed., p. 151.

190 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
and none probably knew better than he, that
the touch of a German scholar's little finger
would endanger his whole theological scheme.
Yet this is not to imply that Newman was
guilty of chicane. He was the exponent of a
genuine revival. He was genuinely possessed
of its spirit. With genuine singleness of
heart he sought its ends. The " Apologia "
is a true PUgrim's Progress, scarcely less fas
cinating than Bunyan's and to be treated with
kindred respect. It would be wrong to say of
the men whom he led to Rome that they were
perverts of his dialectic juggling, although
some of them doubtless fancied themselves to
be. The majority of them were honest con
verts to the reawakened religious spirit which
burned with so unmistakable a flame in New
man's life. This spirit was genuine, and be
yond the cavil of any but a bigot. The ques
tion may fairly be raised whether Hurrell
Froude — to cite the case of one of the most
brilliant, enthusiastic, and short-lived of the
Tractarians — did not effect as much for the
cause of rehgious progress by his brief and
erratic display of half-misguided energy, as
he could have done had he dawdled for two
or three score years over the walnuts and port

THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 191
of an Oxford common room, keeping a more
rational faith as a deposit, but never adven
turing anything in its behalf. The Oxford
Movement and its ritualistic appendix must
be judged in the light not merely of its irra
tional foundations and its innumerable acces
sory absurdities, but of its devotion to high,
if not the highest, ideals, its practical piety,
and its work among the poor.
If space sufficed, it would be interesting to
continue the discussion of these reawakenings
of the religious sense, especially as they have
been manifested in what are technically caUed
" revivals " or " missions " in Protestant and
Romanist churches alike. The great awaken
ing of the eighteenth century in New Eng
land, the revival period of the later fifties in
the nineteenth century, the extraordinary in
fluence exerted through such men as Moody,
Drummond, and a host of humble co-workers,
as the century drew toward its close, are aU
phenomena of extraordinary scientific inter
est. Such revivals bear every sign of being
secular, and so bound to recur. They speak
of a Power resident among men, and influen
cing them daily and ordinarily. They speak
further of a purpose and endeavor on the part

192 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
of this Power not to rest in the ordinary, but
to reach out after complete dominion. This
dominion is estabhshed by quiet and imper
ceptible degrees in part. It is no less truly
advanced by great and sudden conquests. Its
victories are won often by seemingly crude and
imperfect means. They are accompanied by
conflict with its attendant pains and penalties.
Dust and confusion sometimes hide the result.
Men not infrequently mistake the incident for
the essence, the circumstance for the end, in
estimating the effects of such religious re-
awakenings. Yet upon the whole, the history
of the Christian Church would seem to show
it to be under the influence of — perhaps it
would be more exact to say the crude and im
perfect instrument of — a Power which moves
upon bodies of men as a wUl makes its pre
sence felt upon subordinate wUls — not dis
daining their utterance of its behests, because
the behests are sometimes misunderstood and
always inadequately interpreted, nor the ser
vice of their hands, because the things the
hands buUd are made of wood, hay, and stub
ble, as well as of sUver and gold. The day wiU
declare the quahty of the structure, and the
Spirit is patient.

IX
THE WITNESS OF INDIVIDUAL
EXPERIENCE
In the last chapter we discussed the evidence
which the history of organized Christianity
affords to the existence of some Power or
Force resident among men, and working con
sistently and patiently through their crude
religious societies; disdaining none of them,
as it would seem, though naturally finding
some relatively efficient and others almost
hopelessly impracticable. In this chapter we
propose to discuss the testimony of individ
ual experience to the existence and imma
nence of this same Power.
A high degree of significance attaches to
the interest aroused by the recent attempts
of the so-called " new psychologists " to deal
with religious phenomena, especiaUy with
the phenomena of conversion. Many of these
attempts have been crude to the point of
absurdity. None of them has been really

194 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
adequate and satisfying. The method of the
questionnaire, with its invitation to introspec
tion, and its premium upon the testimony of
exaggerated self-consciousness, has been ludi
crously overworked. There has been a dis
tinct tendency, too, to estimate experience
in terms of the extraordinary and abnormal.
This is perhaps the chief criticism to be
made upon Professor James's " Varieties of
Rehgious Experience." It is true that he an
ticipates it in his preface, admitting that he
has "loaded his lectures with concrete exam
ples," and that he has " chosen these among
the extremer expressions of the religious tem
perament." No one who reads to the end of
his lectures — and most who begin are fain
to go on to the last page — would think of
accusing their author of intentionally cari
caturing any phase of religious experience.
Yet in point of fact, the impression which
they leave is that most of these particular
experiences have been arranged for inspec
tion by being reft from their proper environ
ment, or made abnormally significant by the
introduction of elements really foreign to
them. It is as legitimate as it is convenient,
when examining the structure of a slice of

THE WITNESS OF EXPERIENCE 195
tissue under the microscope, to throw its
minute conduits into high relief by filling
them with coloring matter. But the color
which is so essential to the picture is none the
less foreign to the structure of the tissue,
and is bound to mislead the student if not
duly allowed for. Now the souls which lend
themselves best to the purposes of the psy
chologist's syUabus are almost always those
whose experiences are more or less colored by
neurotic temperament, or sentimental habit,
or an exaggerated self-esteem. These acces
sories by no means invahdate the reality of
their rehgious experience, but they do influ
ence it, and hence are liable to mislead the
casual student into fancying that the abnor
mal color is native to the experience, and
one of the notes of it.
Yet the abnormal has significance ; and
where its exceptional character is due to the
quantity rather than the quality of the expe
rience, — to its intensity or range rather than
to its complexion, — the significance often
possesses very great and immediate value. In
reviewing the testimony presented in such
volumes as Professor Starbuck's "Psychology
of Religion," or Professor James's "Varieties

196 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
of Religious Experience," one is impressed
anew with the truth of ScheUing's theory of
the Iliad and the Odyssey of the human
spirit. " The spirit has its Iliad, its tale of
struggle with brutal and natural forces, and
then its Odyssey, when out of its painful
wanderings it returns to the Infinite." x It is
well said. The hidings of Homer's power lie
in the fact. that headstrong Achilles with his
sulkiness, his courage, his prowess in the
field, and world-faring Odysseus, 7roXuT/>o7ros
Kal iro\vp.r]TL<s, are congenial to our expe
rience. No one can recall the pages of Au
gustine's "Confessions," or Bunyan's "Grace
Abounding," without a glad recognition of
their genuine epic quality. Indeed, the aver
age reader may very well go further. The
most casual review of his own experience
will possibly convince him that his spiritual
struggles and the wanderings through which
he went before finding the place in the world
meant to be his home have been as really
epic. The range and scope of them seem
universal, although the physical man himself
may very likely always have walked a nar-
1 Cf. Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology,
p. 212.

THE WITNESS OF EXPERIENCE 197
row round ; for it sometimes chances that the
soul which makes its nominal dwelling-place
in a home-staying body is the widest and
most adventurous traveler. One of the reasons
why clergymen who really hold and use the
" cure of souls " often care so little for the
theatre is that the tinsel and pinchbeck of its
melodrama seem cheap and chUdish beside
the genuine comedy and tragedy in the ex
perience of human hearts. Farce accords weU
with the stage and justifies itself ; but serious
acting seems thin and inadequate, making its
appeal primarily to the man of smaU imagina
tion, who is content to rest in the form and
appearance of things.
It is interesting, and I think significant,
to note here the parallelism between this
experience of the human soul and Hegel's
philosophy of the Trinity. In his thought of
it, the doctrine of the Trinity was neither an
invention of schoolmen, nor a dogma of the
Church, nor an esoteric mystery whose terms
are partiaUy and miraculously revealed in
Scripture, but a form under which the divine
must exist and be perceived by men. This
existence is known to us first as pure Being
or Thought. Out of this Being is eternaUy

198 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
generated the object of His thought. It is
the Word wherein the Father utters himself,
— of one substance with Him, — begotten,
not made. But the Word cannot hve apart
from Him, — the differentiation is not a sepa
ration, — the particular is never to be set in
opposition to the universal. Hence, in the
eternal reconcUiation wliich takes place, in
the continuous and necessary return of the
Son to the Father, in the retranslation of
the Word into the divine Thought, we are
face to face with the movement of the Spirit.
This vast Iliad-Odyssey cycle is a universal
experience. AU true life of necessity — and
the higher the life the more cogent the ne
cessity — passes through its great secular
experiences of birth, consciousness of indi
vidual and hence partial existence, and return
into complete union with its source again.
So far forth, the deeper experience of religion
which involves conversion in the technical
sense is normal and to be expected. This does
not necessarily mean that the development
of spiritual self-consciousness and the process
of conversion must be attended with pain ;
it certainly does not mean that it must be at
tended with excitement. But men being what

THE WITNESS OF EXPERIENCE 199
they are, it is moraUy certain that both anx
iety and excitement will occasionaUy appear ;
precisely as pain and fear too often prove to
be the accessories of physical parturition.1
Yet however grotesque the forms which the
phenomenon of conversion may sometimes
assume, and however inadequate the scientific
attempts to investigate it may be, the
reahty of the phenomenon itself is beyond
dispute. It has been so many times dissipated
as a dream of overwrought imaginations only
to insist again upon recognition, that the
effort to get rid of it has grown wearisome.
It has thriven upon persecution ; it has re
fused to yield to ridicule ; it has held its own
against skepticism ; it has even survived in
difference and contempt. It is to be reckoned
with by every honest student of religious
1 Miss Frances Power Cobbe will not be suspected of over
much complaisance toward conventional religious experience.
Yet in this connection the reader will recall her lines : —
" God draws a cloud over each gleaming morn,
Would you know why ?
It is because all noblest things are born
In agony.
" Only upon a Cross of pain and woe
God's Son must lie ;
Each soul redeemed from sin and death must know
Its Calvary."

200 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
phenomena; and it has its message to the
seeker after the Dynamic of Christianity.
What this significance is may be discerned
by considering a few more or less typical in
stances of conversion. The first which I cite
is that of Henry Alline, the Nova Scotian
evangehst, whose experience is related at
length by Professor James.1 AUine seems to
have been a youth of distinctly estimable life,
and a leader among his fellows in the enter
prises of their simple and rather rude society.
Fond of games and dancing, he was quickly
susceptible to the presence and opinions of
his friends, although, as sometimes happens
with persons of neurotic temperament, the
susceptibUity was superficial rather than fun
damental. He was influenced to temporary
accord in matters of conduct, rather than to
a like way of thinking or to a hke scheme of
life. It was into the midst of this apparently
gay and thoughtless existence that conviction
of sin forced its way. Melancholy came with
it. Like most men of natural strength of
character and keen self-consciousness, Alhne
strove long and hard to hide the anguish of
his soul behind an untroubled front. He
1 Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 159, 173, sqq.

THE WITNESS OF EXPERIENCE 201
went his usual ways, led his fellows in their
wonted merriment, — taking care apparently
that it should always be innocent, — and kept,
as he says, his " round of duties." But he
knew no peace. He could scarcely find sur
cease of agony. " Stilh' all that I did or could
do, conscience would roar night and day."
The crisis came on the 26th of March, 1775,
and it was as momentous and real in the
sphere of individual experience as the date of
Lexington or Bunker HU1 in the annals of
national history. It had been a day of thrice
accentuated pain. Alhne had come in from
wandering in the fields and lamenting his
miserable estate, when his eye hghted upon
Psalm xxxvhi. in a torn Bible which lay upon
a chair near by. " It took hold of me," he
says, " with such power that it seemed to go
through my whole soul." After a httle, joy
took the place of sorrow, and peace — if a joy
which rose to ecstasy can be said to give
peace — succeeded to anxiety. The question
was settled forever. There was never again
any slightest doubt as to Whose he was or
Whom he served.
Those who are interested and expert in
nervous pathology will mark the chronology

202 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
of AUine's experience, — the profound depres
sion at sunset, the hyperesthesia of the later
evening, and the fear lest, after sleeping, the
depression would return. The sequence is
normal and doubtless significant ; but it ex
plains nothing. Had his case been merely
subjective and his experience naught but
the unrest produced by overwrought nerves,
we should expect either collapse, or a return
of depression, or a slow and gradual recovery
of tone. Nothing of the sort seems to have
occurred. Alline went through a crisis of the
soul as real and definite as any crisis in fever,
and through much sorrow entered into joy.
The scientific observer is almost compelled,
however sorely against his will, to have recourse
to the stated rehgious phrases. Here was a
return home after long wandering. It was a
new birth into a world so large that the old
world became relatively insignificant. The
experience bore to the man who passed
through it, and it bears to the candid student
of it, aU the marks of the definite influence of
one personahty upon another.
I cite a second case, differing in some respects
from the above, which feU under my own
observation. It was that of a boy born into a

THE WITNESS OF EXPERIENCE 203
weU-ordered Christian home. His training was
consonant with the best American traditions.
The home life was frugal, busy, and highly
inteUigent. Books and papers were abundant,
and the greater news of the day was discussed,
but both reading and talk maintained a pretty
clear distinction between the temporary and
the permanent. Although the family resources
were not so large but that strict economy
was practiced and taught, the best available
school and university advantages were put at
the disposal of the chUdren. Regular attend
ance upon Church and Sunday-school was
enjoined, yet in such a manner as to make
the boy feel that the injunction flowed from
the conviction rather than the whim or the pre
judice of his parents. It was distinctly repre
sented to him that possession of the whole
world would prove to be of smaU moment to
the man who traded the life of his soul for it ;
and that the truest culture of the soul depended
upon personal aUegiance to Jesus Christ. The
whole trend of the family influence went to
prove life to be an immensely solemn, but in
no sense whatever a sombre thing. It became
sombre only when some element of dishonor
in its relation to God or man was invited into

204 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
it. Much was made of the cleanliness of mindj
speech, person, and blood, to which a hearty
outdoor life of work and play ministers; and,
as in so many families where religion sweetens
the temper and whets the sense of proportion,
the intercourse of the home was hghtened
by the play of a very keen and abundant
humor. It was in the midst of this busy, wholesome,
and singularly unfettered life that this boy
(as I have heard him say) grew into the con
sciousness of his soul. It would be difficult to
enumerate the steps whereby he realized his
own individuality, and at the same time real
ized the necessity of identifying himself with
the universal. " Lost " is distinctly the word
to be used in any attempt to describe his
situation. It connotes nothing Dantesque,
but rather the deep concern and the keen
restlessness of a chUd astray and uncertain of
abUity to regain his home. The way of his
duty was not altogether obscure, but it was a
serious question whether he could bring him
self to take it, involving as such a course
threatened to do some slight measure of pub
licity. The Church stood before him as repre
senting the FamUy of Behevers. He knew

THE WITNESS OF EXPERIENCE 205
himself to be a behever. The battle was
fought over the question as to whether or not
he would join the FamUy. He has said that
he sometimes discussed the question aloud
"with himself," as the phrase commonly goes,
but reaUy with a Presence which was not quite
himself objectified, until at last he decided
upon his course of action, joined the Church
upon a day when it seemed as though the con
centrated gaze of men and angels must needs
shrivel his small soul, — and entered into
peace.1 It would be going too far to say that
this peace always continued unbroken. There
was occasional inward conflict over minor
matters consequent upon the main decision,
and there was one great intellectual struggle
years afterward which marked the hfe and
enriched the experience, but there was never
any real questioning of aUegiance. The later
struggles bore to the former a relation like
that of the War of 1812 and the RebeUion
to the War of Independence. The Revolu
tion ushered in a new national life ; the later
wars were activities of this new life which
1 The writer hopes it to be needless to say that this expe
rience is given with the full, albeit hesitant, consent of his
friend.

206 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
only developed and confirmed it. There was
something of proven worth to fight for; as
Odysseus after his return had to oust the suit
ors, but found his arm strengthened for the
conflict by a new realization of his home's
value and essential soundness.
Still another variant of this experience is
found in the case of a friend of the late Dr.
R. W. Dale, of Birmingham. Of exemplary
life, and reverent in his attitude toward re
ligion, although not counting himself or
counted by others to be a " religious " man,
his " call " came upon a quiet Sunday after
noon, as he lay in the sunhght upon a
high down overlooking the sea. No word
but " caU " seems equal to the experience.
Through the summer stUlness, and express
ing its message in terms of peace and beauty,
a Voice searched his heart. It was in some
sort consonant with Wordsworth's voice of
the sea : —
" Listen ! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder — everlastingly."
Yet it was a gentler and a more compelling
voice. It woke a soul and made a revela
tion. The man in a real sense found God

THE WITNESS OF EXPERIENCE 207
that day, turned toward Him, and entered
into a sacred fellowship wliich gave new sig
nificance to life.
It would be easy to multiply instances, and
to cite among them starthng revolutions of
thought and conduct. Professor James some
where says that reasons should be given why
men do pray rather than why they should
pray. Prayer is a phenomenon worth study.
So is conversion, whether it be sudden, vio
lent, and easUy objectified in all its stages, or
so gentle and gradual as scarcely to admit of
isolation and analysis. I have chosen to cite
instances of the quieter and more clearly
rational sort. Fundamentally, however, they
differ but little from the revivalistic and (to
use Professor James's unpleasant word) orgi
astic type. In them all appears the conscious
ness of self as somehow distinct from the
universal, and yet belonging to the uni
versal. An appeal is made to the soul to
return to its source and home, not by means
of surrender of individuality, but by such a
yielding of the will as shaU establish perma
nent and complete harmony. The individual
is to belong to and share in the life of the
universal as the branch is identified with and

208 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
shares the life of the vine. This appeal may
be voiced in terms as widely different as the
thunders of the law and the invitations of
grace ; but it is never impersonal. It comes
from a personal source. It makes direct ap
peal as from a person to a person. Not infre
quently the soul in its perplexity or hesitation
argues with " itself " aloud. Yet the argu
ment is not reaUy with itself. The protago
nist in these dramas is a Person distinct from
the hesitant and fearful, or perhaps obstinate,
self. Not merely a power but a Person, not
ourselves, making for righteousness is felt to
be dealing with us. Nor does He merely
come in from without as an external influ
ence. In the most normal cases He appears
as a universal Person resident within. It is
in the abnormal nature, in which the imma
nent forces are but half-recognized and devel
oped, or have been starved, that there is grave
conflict as with a power trying to force the
conquest of life's citadel.1
I pass on now to note another phenomenon
of the spiritual life scarcely less significant
than the phenomenon of conversion. Some
1 Cf. C. C. Everett's essay on "Mysticism," in Immortal
ity and Other Essays, pp. 70-74.

THE WITNESS OF EXPERIENCE 209
years ago the writer chanced to be present at
a rehgious service presided over by a man of
blameless character and somewhat rare spirit
ual insight. Most of those whom he addressed
were clergymen. The theme with which he
set himself to deal was the consecration of
Christian life. His scheme of rehgious ex
perience appeared to be something as fol
lows. A man was to expect conversion at
some period, and ought, if the conversion
were normal, to be able to designate the
time of it. This enrolled him as a Christian.
Beyond this there lay a Pentecostal oppor
tunity. Its relation to the former experience
was like the special iUapse of the Spirit
upon the Apostles, as compared with the
original caU which Jesus extended to them
when they first became disciples. This was
the " Second Blessing," or the " Baptism for
Service." It might be, indeed it ought to be,
as distinct and definite an experience as con
version. The notes of it were the incoming
of new hght, the baptism with new power,
and the perfect assurance of acceptance. It
was implied — though the speaker was him
self a notably humble and simple man — that
the experience gave further assurance of a

210 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
freedom from the power of sin that ap
proached, if it did not attain to immunity.
As his service drew to a close, the leader
asked all those among his hearers who had
attained to this experience of " Baptism with
the Spirit" to manifest it by some sign.
They were almost without exception devout
and faithful men. Yet the hoped-for response
to this invitation came from but one person,
and he, without invidious distinction, might
be reckoned among the lighter and less force
ful of the company. It is safe to say, how
ever, that no one present failed to feel some
thing of the significance of the appeal. The
sincerity and simplicity of the speaker gave
evidence of an underlying experience which
was as real as the honesty of the hearers
who declined to cram their own experiences
into his formula; but it was equally certain
that these men, most of whom were trained
in the study of spiritual phenomena, declined
to accept their leader of that day as a guide
into a universal or general experience. When
he spoke of a spiritual quickening as at the
instance of a person lending power and grace
to human life, he took them with him. This
was something of which they knew. But

THE WITNESS OF EXPERIENCE 211
when he attempted to treat this influence as
external to normal Christian hfe, coming
down from above, and leading the wiU cap
tive until the subject of this " Second Bless
ing" became a mere puppet in the Spirit's
hands, they balked.
In doing so they represented the better
sense of the Christian Church in every age.
Rehgion of the most spiritual type is suspi
cious of hierarchies of experience. The Spirit
has no inner circle of votaries. He is imma
nent in the world and in the life of man. All
genuine life is due to His effort to express His
presence and to accomplish His wiU — not
from without but from within. In this attempt
He daily wrestles with obdurate material.
This material is sometimes so obdurate that
the Spirit finds Himself incapable under pre
sent conditions of subduing it. It wiU not
lend itself to the expression of divine truth in
terms of goodness, or respond to revelation in
terms of love. This is the case of the " hard
hearted" man — the man who will not yield.
Sometimes he never yields. Sometimes the
obduracy is broken down by the shock of
catastrophe, sometimes it is softened in the
fires of affliction, until it lends itself to the

212 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
formative influences of this indweUing Power.
Here we have the case of marked and perhaps
spectacular conversion.
Again, as in the case of Alline, it is pos
sible to establish a category of conversions
which are painful to the subject, but not
revolutionary in the eye of the world. The
struggle here is of a sort that might very
well be borne easily by a coarser nature ; but
the material with which the Spirit deals is of
a fine and sensitive texture. It responds
quickly to what other men would caU slight
stimulus. It vibrates long. The man is so
highly organized that he is immediately and
sometimes painfully conscious of spiritual ap
peals to which his f eUows are blind and deaf ;
very much as the receiver of a Marconi in
strument is keenly alive to influences to which
everything else around is entirely obdurate.
Alline was like a man who is conscious that
his eye has capacity to see the rays beyond
the violet, but who dreads to open it to the
new revelation, or to develop the new power,
lest the well-known actinic properties of these
rays should somehow mark and change him.
The battle is fought out, — the new capacity
insists upon recognition and exercise, — the

THE WITNESS OF EXPERIENCE 213
natural, conservative elements in the nature
resist, but finally yield, and at once the man
takes on power and enters into relative peace.
He takes on power because he sees now where
other men are bhnd. He finds peace because
he discovers the new region of experience to
be one which fits his capacities. He has en
tered into the environment to which he is
adapted, that is to say, he lives in the scien
tific sense of the word. He is the convicter
and inspirer of other men in so far as he
leads them to seek a higher environment to
which their own latent powers wUl develop
adaptabUity. He may of course sometimes
partially misinterpret the message which has
changed his own life. He wUl certainly do so,
if he systematically disparage the simpler and
more commonplace revelations of ordinary
duty. Few men, however, who pass through
a great experience of conversion ever do this.
They reahze that the plain is as necessary as
the mountain to a wide field of vision. The
more frequent danger is that they may sepa
rate the two regions unduly, and attempt to
diff erentiate the principle of life which culti
vates the plain from that which inspires the
vision of the mountain-top.

214 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
Hence the latter two of my three examples
of conversion wiU generaUy be accepted as
the more normal. In the case of the boy, al
legiance to the higher life of which he had
grown conscious seemed to demand specific
and definite action. His general training had
been of so wholesome and devout a sort that
no revolutionary experience was demanded of
him. He was invited rather to take the con
sequences of the attainment of his spiritual
majority. In the case of Dr. Dale's friend,
the call was couched in very much the same
terms ; except that with him life had become
settled. It was a weU-ordered and, upon the
whole, practically devout life. He was simply
asked to recognize and own the divine source
of it.
It may weU be asked whether such cases
as these, and the ten thousand variants upon
them which might easily be cited, wiU submit
themselves to the rule of the evolutionary
hypothesis. Does their process accord with
the scheme of development ? The question is
a perfectly fair one and should be welcomed.
In the first place, few of those who have
studied psychical phenomena without preju
dice will venture to deny that conversion of

THE WITNESS OF EXPERIENCE 215
the genuine and thorough sort is a step in
development. It generaUy marks a deepening
and enrichment of experience, and an increase
of power. The converted man, however hum
ble and restricted in cultivation, means, and
knowledge of the world, is a larger man by
reason of his genuine "experience of reh
gion." Moreover, this development, where it
is genuine, is due to a resident, or, as I should
much prefer to say, immanent force. The
governing influence is not an external power
mechanically apphed, but one whose seat
seems rather to be within. As has been noted
before, the man's struggle is commonly said
to be "with himself." Yet it is as when
Jacob struggled with the angel, who repre
sented divine life and truth translated not
only into human, but into Jacobean terms.
Jacob's wrestling was with the personification
of his own conscience — the not-himself in
himself, which made for righteousness. So
the struggle of which converted men often
speak is with something more than mere ob
jectified self. They have met and striven with
the divine principle resident or immanent in
self. Moreover, the development which takes

216 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
place under the influence of this power in the
phenomenon of conversion is from incoher
ence to coherence. Conversion normaUy makes
for the integration of life in the individual
and in society. It is a return of the son who
wanders to his place in the home. It is a
restoration of the lost sheep to its orderly
position in the flock. It is a gathering of
the disjointed and heterogeneous individuals
who live selfishly and perhaps in strife, into
a family where they shaU feel toward one
another as brethren. These are stereotyped
terms ; but they accord so weU with expe
rience as to survive the process. They be
come common without ceasing to be sacred,
which is good proof that they express a
truth that is vital — how vital appears only
when we set the picture teaching of Jesus
beside the polysyUabic definition of Spen
cer,1 and observe that the definition of life
wrought out by the philosopher seems but a
1 In saying, this I am not unmindful of the limitations
of the Spencerian definition of Evolution and the extreme
vagueness of some of its terms. Since the present chapter
was written, we have been again reminded of this by Pro
fessor James's exceedingly clever, albeit somewhat cavalier,
review of Spencer's Autobiography in the Atlantic Monthly
for July, 1904. By " integration " I mean the development
(or reestablishment) of organic unity.

THE WITNESS OF EXPERIENCE 217
translation of the idea which lay at the centre
of Christ's teaching. Jesus distinctly taught
that hfe in the Kingdom of God was life de
veloped from fragmentariness to unity under
the impulse of a force resident or immanent
among men ; and that, moreover, this life
should bear the note of eternity because of its
power to adapt itself to environment. It was
the hfe fitted to dominate and feed upon cir
cumstance instead of being subdued to circum
stance's whim. It could distinguish between
accident and essence, moulding itself to the
divinely essential, and in turn moulding the
merely accidental.
One of the fundamental doctrines taught
by the founder of Christianity was the pre
sence of the Spirit. The divine Essence was
with men, making personal revelation of Him
self to their understandings, and personal ap
peal to their hearts and wiUs. This divine
hfe in the heart of a man and in the heart of
society was not in any sense alien to the prin
ciple of life which appears in what we caU the
physical or material universe. The Power
which works in the processes of nature, or ex
presses its thought in terms which we formu
late into the theorems of geometry or the weU-

218 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
attested laws of physics, is fundamentaUy
One. The resident or immanent Force which
moves in the evolutionary process, and forms
the central element in our definitions of Evolu
tion, is identical with the Power not ourselves,
making for righteousness, which students of
the phenomena of conduct are obliged to as
sume. We are driven to ascribe to this Power
certain attributes which are personal. Now
when we come to the experience of the de
veloping human soul, we find ourselves in
immediate touch with a Power which we
know to be personal in precisely the same
way in which we recognize personality in the
men and women about us. We do not need
to clothe a bare idea in a suit of attributes
in order to know a man when we meet him.
Like in us speaks to hke in him, and the
knowledge is immediate. So with the Ultimate
Force or the Universal Life with Whom our
souls have to do. We deal with Him as with
a person, by an instinct so quick and compel
ling as to make the processes of logic seem
slow and cumbrous. These processes of logic
are not ruled out. Any region whither they
cannot come is likely to prove an unwhole
some residence for men's souls. But they are

THE WITNESS OF EXPERIENCE 219
here as guests rather than as servants. Like
sappers and miners parading a weU-paved
city street, they are honorable and necessary
folk ; but not hkely to be pressed into ser
vice, because the way is so clear that no trav
eler can weU err in it.
This Dynamic of Christianity in the indi
vidual life is the Spirit of God. He is known
by those who have had deepest spiritual expe
rience as essentiaUy a Person, however varied
may be their attempts at definition. He is a
resident or immanent Force. His residence
makes for development. Under His influence
the individual at his best and highest feels
that he is at once more and less than an
individual. The man realizes himself to be
a member of another — he comes out from
God.1 The Spirit's residence also tends toward
universal harmony. Under His influence in
dividuals are led to perceive their mutual
relations and to fulfill their social duties.
They adapt themselves to the needs of the
common life. They tend under His continued
guidance to perceive the ultimate unities of a
real universe. They know at last that the
1 C. C. Everett, Immortality and Other Essays, pp. 62 sqq.

220 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
Ultimate Force of the philosopher, and the
resident force of the physicist and biologist,
and the immanent Spirit of the theologian,
are but different names, representing differ
ent glimpses, of one God.

THE NEW FREEDOM OF FAITH
When Christianity appeared and began to
claim the aUegiance of men, it held out two
definite promises to them. One was the pro
mise of freedom; the other the promise of
peace. Jesus told His disciples that they
should know the truth, and the truth should
make them free. He compared their freedom
to that which a loyal son enjoys in his father's
house, where he is not bound by petty rules
or ordinances, but is recognized as an heir
and prospective owner, who has right and
claim to the reasonable use of the resources and
opportunities of the home. Moreover, when
Jesus pronounced His benediction upon those
who were to carry on His work, it took the
highly significant form of the salaam — the
ascription of peace. If the heritage which He
was leaving to them meant anything, it was
that they had no longer cause to fear circum
stance. Their hearts were no longer to be

222 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
troubled. They were never again to be afraid.
They were not of the world, and the world
could harm none but its own. Beyond the
world they had no cause to fear, because
the mansions of the Father's house awaited
them. It is to be noted, however, that this freedom
was not to be conferred upon the disciples as
a deposit which they could hoard up and draw
upon. They were not to be taken out of the
world or isolated from the play of human
vicissitude. Their freedom and their peace
were to come through the possession of the
truth; and into the truth the Spirit was to
lead them. He was to take up His home in
them, abide permanently with them, speak
through their lips, and work by means of
their hands ; but in particular He was to en
due them with adequacy to circumstance.
The disciple's freedom and peace were to be
of the dynamic sort, like the freedom of a well-
found ship at sea, or the splendid confidence
of an eagle in the air. Neither is a spoiled
favorite of nature. The "attraction of gravi
tation " stands ready to sink the ship or dash
the eagle's life out against the earth beneath.
The storm lifts up its hand against both alike.

THE NEW FREEDOM OF FAITH 223
Yet both are so weU fitted to their several ele
ments that they translate the threat of gravi
tation into terms of stability, and make the
power of the storm serve them, whether they
scud before it, or beat up against it to their
desired haven.
St. Paul took up the same doctrine and incor
porated it into all his greater Epistles. The
behever was the true freeman. He was deliv
ered from the bondage of precept and custom
that he might hve his hfe according to its real
nature, moulding its activities to the norm of
a perfect man. This was not to be by giving
free play to passion and fleshly desire. To
give the body free rein was to turn hfe up
side down, to submit to tyranny of the most
degrading sort, and to invite an internecine
war in the members. The hfe which was to
be free and peaceful must be free from the
dominion of sin and the fear of death ; that
is to say, it must possess a resident or imma
nent force capable of adapting its activities
to its circumstances in the interests of harmo
nious and consistent existence. It was to go
on through life and death, things present and
things to come, subjecting circumstance to
the synthetic chemistry of the Spirit's touch,

224 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
which could extract from seemingly base
things the materials for the nourishment of
abiding life. This was not necessarUy to be
an easy process; but it was to be so sure a
process for the man who reaUy opened his
life to the entrance of the efficient Power as
to reheve him of fear and to clothe him with
peace. The presence of the Spirit was not to
involve such a usurpation of the agencies of
a man's personality as to render him immune
against temptation or free from blunders.
The best material which he could put at the
Spirit's disposal was hkely to remain more or
less obdurate and intractable ; but there could
be no question about the ultimate success of
hfe unless the man deliberately chose to be a
traitor. St. Paul felt so great a confidence
in his own committal of himself to One Who
held the secret of eternal life, that anxiety
about the casual incidents of earthly experi
ence seemed almost absurd.
Principal Fairbairn, in criticising the Nicene
theology, has said that " the Church, when it
thought of the Father, thought more of the
First Person in relation to the Second than of
God in relation to man ; when it thought of
the Son, it thought more of the Second Per-

THE NEW FREEDOM OF FAITH 225
son in relation to the First than of humanity
in relation to God." 1 He might have added
that the Church then and since has faded to
think of the Spirit at aU. Christ's fear, when
He told the disciples that it was expedient for
Him to go away lest the Comforter or Helper
come not, has been in some measure realized.
Men have been wont to think of the Spirit as
a divine influence coming into a man's heart
from a God who dwelt without, or let down
upon the world from a God who dwelt above,
— an influence sometimes with men and some
times absent, sometimes at work in the world
and sometimes quiescent or withdrawn. They
have thought of Him as bringing freedom
from sin by some cryptic process, and con
ferring peace as a sort of spiritual commodity
to be dealt out to Heaven's favorites. They
have undertaken to define His " office-work,"
to hedge His path, and straitly mark His
goings and methods. So technical and stilted
have been their phrases relative to His pre
sence and activity in the world, that the com
mon sense of many men has revolted. They
have come to think of the doctrine of the
Spirit as out of relation to common life, and
1 The Place of Christ in Modem Theology, p. 91.

226 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
to be handed over as a pecuhar possession to
the revivahst, or to the fanatical followers of
obscure sects. Men easily lose vital faith in
the power which manifests itself solely or
mainly in extraordinary ways. They really
believe in the forces which are steadfast, con
tinuous, and applicable to the concerns of
every day and every man " by sun and candle
light." Hence it was with a deep insight into
human nature that Jesus economized His mir
acle working. Here too has lain the hidings
of Christianity's power. More than any other
rehgion it has shown the necessary interde
pendence of faith and good works — rehgion
and righteousness. Its central truths have
always been translatable into common good
ness. Its general influences have been ex
oteric instead of esoteric; they have made
for a community instead of a hierarchy of
disciples ; they have resolutely refused to be
cabined or confined within definite organiza
tions or statements of faith. They have always
been restless unless their course were free and
their opportunity universal. Nowhere has this
been truer than in the realm of the world's
thought concerning the Spirit. Nowhere, on
the other hand, has doctrine been more dis-

THE NEW FREEDOM OF FAITH 227
torted and belittled. Nowhere has it assumed
more fantastic shapes or subserved such fanatic
purposes. So far has this gone, that there has
come to be grave danger lest the teaching
which Jesus seemed definitely to regard as the
great doctrine of the future — the doctrine of
the growth of the Kingdom under the direc
tion of the Spirit — should be relegated to the
limbo of the irrational.
What has been written in this volume is
a protest against such a belittling of truth.
Vital doctrine is truth which is capable not
only of being seized with rapture by the im
agination, but of being apprehended in some
good degree by the reason and then translated
into terms of conduct. The doctrine of the
Spirit is of this sort. In its imperfect form as
the doctrine of the immanence of God, it has
long made its appeal to the imagination. It
has seemed good to men to think of God as near
at hand and not afar off. But even when they
have thought of Him as immanent, it has too
often been the presence of a royal guest in a
temporary residence which could never be his
home that they have pictured. " God in His
world " has represented a divine influence in
partibus infidelium. There is still an unnat-

228 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
ural separation between the universe and its
soul. The Christian doctrine of the Spirit would
fain reheve the human reason of this seeming
contradiction. Great doctrines are great by
reason of the clearness with which they discern
and define distinctions, as weU as by the co
gency with which they resolve apparent con
tradictions and coordinate separate realms of
knowledge and experience by their unifying
power. No doctrine can hope to solve all mys
tery or answer all conceivable queries. That
doctrine is most vital, and has the best claim
upon the faith of reasoning men, whose hori
zon of mystery incloses the largest area of
consistency. It is upon this basis that the
doctrine of the Spirit, as Christ taught it,
may lay claim to apprehension by man's rea
son as well as to the stimulation of his im
agination. It makes due distinction between
what we call "the material universe" and
God. But it unifies our knowledge by perceiv
ing the Spirit to inhabit the universe as an
immanent and vital Force. He is the soul of
it. So far from coming to consciousness in
the personality of man, His own personahty
is the ground and source of all feeling, know-

THE NEW FREEDOM OF FAITH 229
ledge, and will. His presence is discerned by
the component elements of the universe in
varying degree. What we rather blindly caU
" dead matter " knows His presence as force.
Gravitation is God's revelation of His presence
to a stone. The beasts know His presence so
far as their experience can translate the so-
called forces of nature into terms of their
partial hfe. Man knows Him not only as force,
though He is the source of it ; nor as wUl,
though aU wiU grounds its power of initiative
and choice in Him ; but as a Person, exercis
ing supreme reason in an orderly realm, and
exercising it in love, since its object appears
to be the coordination of all things into a
real universe; and love has no higher office
than the satisfaction of the right desires of
aU living beings by putting them into such
relations with one another that they shall en
joy freedom and be crowned with peace.
How far short of entering into their her
itage here believers often come is suggested
by the most casual study of the phenomena of
religious melancholy. Good people who knew
their faith to be genuine have sometimes
doubted with an awful seriousness whether it
were saving faith or not. No one else ques-

230 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
tioned their title to discipleship. But a dread
ful cloud of uncertainty as to the vahdity of
their " calling and election " shut the sunlight
from their sky. Different immediate causes
for such unhappiness appear to govern differ
ent cases. Yet the general ground of their
misfortune would seem to be a view of God
that made Him practicaUy impersonal. There
was no question in their minds about His
power in the universe, and they would have
been the first to deprecate any denial of His
reason and His love. But in point of fact He
was, in their thought of Him, little more than
the originator and engineer of a divine scheme.
As interpreted into terms of human experi
ence, His wiU was mechanical. Between the
heart of God and the need of man there was
interposed the barrier of a device for saving
men which wrought with a terrible certainty,
but with a no less terrible aloofness from the
circumstances of common human life. Much
was made of the work of Christ; but here
too the forms of speech used in its descrip
tion were largely impersonal — forensic, if
not mechanical. There must needs be a set
and formal procedure on the part of him who
would avail himself of Christ's sacrifice, and

THE NEW FREEDOM OF FAITH 231
it was possible that through ignorance or mis
fortune some man might miss a step in the
process and so invalidate the whole. Chris
tians stiU sometimes come perUously near
thinking and speaking of God as a being
from whom Christ came to deliver them.
It needs but a re-reading of the Gospels
to show how far removed this is from any
teaching that Jesus ever uttered. It was
impossible that men should come to their in
heritance of freedom and peace by any such
way as this. His thought of conversion and
the life of Christian service was that men
were to be the subjects of an experience
rather than the objects of a process. That
experience was to be an opening of the soul's
eyes to God's immediateness, and a yielding
of the wUl to the influences of a divine com
panionship. The knowledge of God as an
Holy Spirit was to crown all. God was to be
known as Creator. That was a necessity of
reason. He was to be known as translated
into terms of love, truth, and service in Christ.
That was a fact of human history. But the
knowledge of Him as a sacred and satisfying
Person, daily meeting human needs by em
powering and adapting men to their circum-

232 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
stances in the interests of an eternal life, was
to be an intimate and vital experience. By
introducing them into this the Son was to set
them free. The servant was to become the
friend, and the faith of the believer to be
lost in the sight of the companion.
It is in the light of this truth, shining upon
our experience of religion and illuminating
our scientific investigation of rehgious phe
nomena, that the real ground of theological
progress appears. True science is more than
logical ; it is biological, taking account of a
developing rather than a completely developed
world. A theological system whose watch
word is " back to Christ " is both unscientific
and anti-Christian. The word which Jesus left
the Church for the guidance of its hfe was
not " back to Me," but " on with the Spirit."
There was nothing in His teaching to justify
any attempt to cram the hfe of the second or
of the twentieth century back into the lan
guage or the experience of the first. No forms
which he established were fixed. Everything
was elastic. Only certain great vital principles
were implanted like leaven in the world's
life. This did not for a moment imply that
the life of the future was to be disorganized

THE NEW FREEDOM OF FAITH 233
and abnormal. It was most distinctly to sub
mit itself to law. But the law was to be the
law of the immanent Spirit's highly organ
ized and endless life rather than the norm of
an outgrown ordinance or dead formula.
It remains to point out some of the results
of this neglected truth when it is realized and
translated into terms of hfe.
1. It makes a man at home in the Present.
This is not to say that it gives him a sense of
the sufficiency of the Present to supply all the
needs of his soul ; but it does dehver him of
the haunting sense that he is born out of due
time. No one can read religious poetry, or
the extensive and always significant literature
of religious autobiography, without noting
the degree in which men have looked back
with pensive regret to some golden " age of
faith," or on with longing to some mUlennium.
This backward aspect is depicted in many
forms, from the nursery hymn, —
" I think when I read that sweet story of old,"
to Newman's exquisite, but highly imagina
tive picture of medieval piety in England,
beginning, " The fair form of Christianity
rose up and grew and expanded like a beau-

234 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
tiful pageant from North to South." x On
the other hand, the longing for the future is
voiced in the great medieval hymns, —
" O mother dear, Jerusalem,"
and " The world is very evil,
The times are waxing late;
Be sober and keep vigil,
The Judge is at the gate."
Indeed, this latter habit of representing the
present world to be a vale of tears, and our
experience in it as not merely a probation but
a dubious and sorry one, has been so frequent
among hymn writers as seriously to mar some
of our older hymn books. One suspects resig
nation of having achieved an undue eminence
among the Christian virtues. But it should
be remembered that this dissatisfaction with
present circumstance and suspicion of the
future among confessed behevers is as no
thing when compared with the lamentations
of the " agnostics " and the doubters. The
late Mr. Lejcky's
" How hard to die, how blessed to be dead,"
has been quoted in an earlier chapter.
1 Quoted at some length by Fisher, History of ihe Chris
tian Church, p. 236.

THE NEW FREEDOM OF FAITH 235
" The pageant of his bleeding heart " which
Matthew Arnold ascribed to Byron might as
weU be treated as autobiography. He loved
to think of himself as
" Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born."
In thus making his moan, Matthew Arnold
expressed a mood entirely consonant with re
hgious doubt, but it is never natural to faith.
It is to be noted, however, that the partial
faith which would rule God out of natural resi
dence in His world, and take no account of a
divine Spirit immanent in man and working
out His will by slow degrees in a developing
universe, has often produced an identical
suspicion of the Present as somehow thrust
in anomalously between a past whose life is
dead or dying and a future which no man
can determine, but which must be anticipated
with anxiety.
To aU this Christ's doctrine of the Spirit
is antipathetic. The man who has had ex
perience of the world's vital principle at
work in the development of the universe, and
most manifestly at work in the development
of the human soul, wiU be at home in the
Present. He wUl be no shallow proclaimer

236 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
or exploiter of the present as the best of
aU possible worlds. On the contrary, he
must beheve a better world to be possible
to-morrow unless the material with which the
Spirit has to work be so obdurate that the
pain of its subjection to the new and higher
purpose prove great enough to hide the fact
of progress. He will remember that the pro
cesses of increase and development are secu
lar. They observe periods which can be more
or less clearly discerned. There are spring
times of lush growth, midsummers when
growth halts that maturity may hasten,
autumns when fruits of development are
garnered for translation into new forms of
energy, and winters when all progress seems
to be suspended — winters of man's discon
tent, but which are none the less times of
especial susceptibihty to new impressions.
The seasons of the Spirit are often long.
They change so slowly that one man's single
day shows httle progress. But it is only the
pitiably short-sighted man who wiU therefore
deny the progress, or fancy that its verbs
have no present tense. " God has so arranged
the chronometry of our spirits that there
shall be thousands of silent moments between

THE NEW FREEDOM OF FAITH 237
the striking hours." 1 This is the true Oppor
tunism of Christianity. By means of the im
manence of divine Power a beheving man is
not only made equal to circumstance ; he
becomes its master ; he feeds upon it, and
assimilates it. It is this that makes him at
home in the Present, and reveals the deeper
significance of the old pagan maxim " Carpe
diem ; " of the Hebrew half-threat, half-
promise, " I wUl feed them with judgment; "
and of the Christian assurance, " AU things
work together for good to them that love
God." 2. This larger and more definite doctrine
of the Spirit gives a wholesome elasticity to
Christian institutions. It provides room for
growth in creeds, worship, sacraments, and
pohty. Now, as a matter of fact, there has
always been growth and development here ;
but to those who held to the doctrine of exact
delimitation of Christian faith by Christ and
the Apostles, or of an original " deposit of
faith " in the treasury of the Church, or to the
establishment of a norm of church govern
ment in the first century to which aU true
church organization in later centuries must
1 Martineau, Tides of the Spirit.

238 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
conform itself, such development has seemed
anomalous and puzzling. It is interesting to
note the unanimity with which ultra-orthodox
and ultra-heretic have agreed that doctrine
which has been developed and whose process
of evolution can be shown is thereby invali
dated as authority. Here Romanist and Uni
tarian have met together ; Burgon and Huxley
have kissed each other. Yet it needs only a
casual reading of the Gospels and Epistles to
show that such development is implicit in the
very nature of Christianity. The divine ele
ment was to be resident among beheving men,
always at work upon the more or less obdu
rate material which they presented, moulding
their experience of religion into new creedal
expressions, reorganizing their corporate hfe
in the Church, and ever assuring them anew
of the^power of initiative with which, as beings
made in the image of the Creator, they were
intrusted. This means that sometimes old
forms are to pass completely away, as the
observance of circumcision and the Jewish
ritual have passed. It also means that quite
as often old forms will be retained, but that
they wiU express a developed and therefore
varied message. This is particularly true with

THE NEW FREEDOM OF FAITH 239
reference to creeds. Every creed that has ever
commanded the aUegiance of devout and
earnest men is from that very fact a sacred
symbol. The Church of England does weU to
retain her Calvinistic Articles, though she
ought not to require absolute subscription to
them. She does weU to set beside these her
Arminian hturgy, although again she may go
too far in requiring the absolute subjection of
the service of public worship to it. These are
less contradictory than complementary of one
another. Their presence in the Prayer Book
relates the faith of the sons logically and le
gitimately to the faith of the fathers; but it
ought never to do so in such a way as to imply
that the faith of the sons is not at liberty to
profit by the additions and enrichments of
three and a half centuries of revelation.
So again with reference to the language
of the creeds. It has been held that but one
interpretation could possibly be put upon any
given phrase in a creed, and that whatsoever
was more than this savored of dishonesty.
But it is impossible to confine human speech
within such fetters. Language wiU not sub
mit to this slavery. Take, for instance, the
clause in the Apostle's Creed relating to the

240 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
Resurrection of the Body. Upon the wall of
Wickliffe's old church in Lutterworth there
is a fresco of the Resurrection in which bones
are flying through the air to meet their fellows,
as though Ezekiel's Vision were in process of
literal fulfillment. It stands for the crude
literalism of an unscientific day. A scientific
day ought therefore to discard both the crude
notion and the form of words which it misin
terpreted, some men would say. What, then,
is a modern believer to do? He holds in
stinctively to a faith in a life beyond the grave.
Proceeding upon his rational and spiritual
principle that he is under obligation to accept
the hypothesis whose horizon of mystery
includes the largest area of consistency, he
believes that this life is to be of the nature
of personal existence. I shaU stiU be I, then
as now. This means that the necessary appara
tus arid instruments of personal existence and
some sort of personal efficiency must be sup
plied. What these may be, we do not under
take or care to define; but they represent
exactly the office of the body. It is doubtful
if any form of words could possibly be devised
which could so cogently express the essence
of this great hope as those of the Apostle :

THE NEW FREEDOM OF FAITH 241
" We are sown a natural body, we are raised a
spiritual body." The clause in the Creed, " I
beheve in the Resurrection of the Body," is a
paraphrase of this. It is patient of several
interpretations. No doubt the average wor
shiper in Lutterworth Church when the fresco
was fresh upon its walls thought this material
istic interpretation of the clause to be the only
valid one. But is his crude and irrational
notion to bind aU later ages? Let us admit
that in his day the words meant what the
picture portrays, and that he would have felt
himself to be forcing them out of their nor
mal use in supposing them to mean anything
else. The spiritual body of which the Apostle
speaks might very weU mean to him only a
body of flesh and bones, somehow sanctified
and made immune against pain, age, and
death. It is quite as true, however, that to-day,
among intelligent people, the natural sense of
the Apostle's words and the Creed's echo of
them seem to be different. We do not care
to deny that the clause is patient of the Lut
terworth parishioner's interpretation, but we
should say that it required a large exercise
of its patience. A better Biblical exegesis and
a larger acquaintance with the physical frame-

242 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
work of the universe make a different inter
pretation of the words seem to be the natural
and reasonable one ; and this fact, so far
from invalidating the clause or proving its
unworthiness to find place in a great symbol
of Christian faith, adds rather to its signifi
cance. It is right that the creed of a spiritual faith
should be thus elastic and patient of such va
riation in the meaning of its terms as increased
revelation demands ; because a creed is not an
exact and ultimate definition of knowledge.
It is an endeavor to voice experience, past,
present, and to come. It is a statement of a
hope, or an hypothesis, or a conviction, which
makes such appeal to the minds, hearts, and
wills of those who confess it as to induce them
to accept it as the norm of life, and to attempt
its translation into terms of conduct. It is by
no jugghng with words that the man of the
Middle Ages and the man of the twentieth
century are enabled to confess their faith in
a future hfe in the same terms. Both use the
word "body." Both express the same inex
pugnable faith in some conscious and efficient
hfe beyond death. The difference in the in
terpretation of the words which they employ

THE NEW FREEDOM OF FAITH 243
to utter their rehgious conviction is no whit
greater than the diff erence which would exist
in their interpretation of the same word
"body" when used in its ordinary physical
sense, in view of the progress which the cen
turies have brought us in anatomy and physi
ology. It is into the expectation of such change in
Christian symbols as this that the true Dy
namic of Christianity introduces us. It makes
us at home in the present theological and
rehgious terminology, assuring us that it is
but an instrument of expression to be used,
added to, filled fuller of meaning, as under
the guidance of the resident divine Force in us
Christian experience expands. One secret of
the influence of the Ritschlian school in Ger
many lies in their recognition of this fact.
Instead of attempting to treat all theological
symbols as exercises in technical definition,
they have endeavored to see beneath the form
of them the vital experience which they at
tempt to portray; and in their preaching
and teaching they have striven to reinterpret
its value to the world. This is at once the
rational and the spiritual method. In the
process of it some phrases and symbols are

244 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
doomed to pass away altogether. They are
those which are merely formal ; husks, which
never held a kernel or a germ. Such symbols,
creeds, and institutions as have expressed ex
perience are likely to abide. Some wiU be
kept because of their historical significance ;
but more because they stiU speak to the heart ;
and when their terms are reinterpreted in the
Ught of later revelation, they prove their power
to utter the deep things of the Spirit.
This same freedom to live in the present
and to adapt Christian activity to its needs is
conferred upon the Church. Comparatively
young men can remember when churches of
different orders made much of the apostolic
sanction upon their respective forms of organi
zation and government. Congregationalists
sought to prove the autonomy of the individ
ual congregation. Presbyterians were instant
in their claims that the early Church knew,
loved, and used the elder and the presbyter.
Episcopalians cherished the apostolic succes
sion of their bishops. While Baptists claimed
the distinction of observing one of the sacra
ments as they believed the early Church ob
served it. All appealed to the New Testament
and more or less to the Fathers. All — with

THE NEW FREEDOM OF FAITH 245
the possible exception of the Episcopalians,
who had perhaps the best case, but spoUed it
by claiming too much — succeeded in substan
tiating a considerable part of their claims.
Yet in the Ught of Christ's teaching concern
ing the Spirit aU are ruled out of court, not
because the question of Church organization
is unimportant, but because the first century
does not claim jurisdiction in the matter.
Granting the Congregationalist's claim to au
tonomy, as proven in the practice of the early
Church, he is stiU at liberty to ordain a bishop
and an archbishop if, in the clearest light
which the Spirit sheds upon past experience
and present circumstance, bishops and arch
bishops seem best adapted to advance the
Kingdom of God. The Baptist may go on
immersing usque ad Tubam, if he please, but
if he be a true disciple, his practice ought to
base itself upon present expediency and adap
tation to the will of God and the need of men
to-day, rather than upon mere conformity to
the first century's fashion. The Episcopalian
wUl do weU to cherish and reverence his
bishops just so far as they serve the Spirit's
need and help the Kingdom's advance. He
wiU lay as little stress upon the form of apos-

246 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
tolic succession as may be, for while the fact
would have a certain historical significance if
it could be proven, it would carry no ultimate
authority. Appeal would still lie to the divine
Presence in the Church as foretold by Jesus,
but so often forgotten by His disciples.
3. This Dynamic of Christianity delivers us
equally from the fear and the pride of Reason
by exalting it into its true place as a chief
agent and instrument of the divine Spirit in
man. I doubt not that some orthodox reader
of this chapter, if any have been patient and
venturesome enough to go so far with me,
will lay the book down in disgust with the
sweeping verdict that it is nothing but a plea
for rationalism. On the contrary, it aims to
set forth a very sure defense and refuge
from that barren rationalism which sometimes
tries to identify itself with Christianity, and
sometimes is its open or secret foe. English
Deism in the eighteenth century was essen
tiaUy rationalistic. New England Calvinism
passed through stages of experience when it
was scarcely less so ; and fundamentally, in
deed, Calvinism is a rationalistic scheme. Uni
tarianism of the higher and .dryer type has
found its effectiveness hampered by the same

THE NEW FREEDOM OF FAITH 247
blight ; while German rationalism was long a
name wherewith to conjure an evU speU both
in England and America — not without some
justification. With the theory of rationalism the Chris
tian need have no quarrel for reasons to be
set forth in the concluding chapter upon the
Harmonies of Revelation. Toward its most
common practices, however, he is right in main
taining a pretty consistently hostile attitude ;
because with few exceptions, rationalism has
found its main employment in criticism. It
has often gone so far as to turn the office of
Reason completely upside down, giving to the
criticism of notions the chief place which
should be reserved for the interpretation of
experience. By a fine instinct the mass of
plain, every-day thinkers are sure to discover
and to revolt against this treatment. The
typical rationalist is like a too anxious parent,
who, for fear his child should incur risk of
infection or over-exertion, feeds him on a
meagre diet of sterilized food and distilled
water, whUe laying an embargo on sun, air,
and exercise. Unconsciously he exalts the
bacUlus or microbe into a god, and becomes its
prophet, proclaiming his devil-worship far

248 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
and wide; his boy meanwhile growing ane
mic and rickety under this negative regime,
unless. he have natural strength enough to
revolt against it and burst its shackles; in
which case he is hkely to go to the other
extreme and become intolerant of ordinary
hygienic precautions. So the rationalist is
forever probing the natural food upon which
men have stayed their spiritual hunger for the
germs of superstition, and urging his fellows
to abstain from religious work and worship
until the validity of all they do has been sub
mitted to a court of inquiry. The only gospel
in which he really believes is a writ of quo
warranto. He exerts his influence, and, let
it be added, almost always serves his day,
though in a very partial and negative fashion.
None the less, his day must be a short one,
simply because man craves generous suste
nance for hfe, and looks to find it in the kindly
fruits of the Spirit, while all the rationalist
has to offer is the sterilized product of his
syllogistic machine. Men trust their common
sense and the guidance of ordinary experience
to purge their faith of casual and incidental
error, very much as they trust their digestive
organs to reject and excrete such elements in

THE NEW FREEDOM OF FAITH 249
their generally wholesome food as are Ul
adapted for assimUation. The man who would
refuse to entertain or act upon a religious
faith untU he was absolutely sure that it had
been cleansed of every element of error,
would be as unwise as he who should refuse
to eat until convinced that every ingredient
of his food could be at once taken up by the
body and transformed into tissue.
Against such folly the voice of the divine
Resident in human life has always protested.
Human Reason is one aspect of that image
of the divine in man which testifies to his
sonship. It is a bond of union between
God and man. It is the means whereby man
interprets experience and makes revelation
intelligible. The mind and the heart are twin
apostles. like Paul and Apollos, one plants
and the other waters, but God gives the in
crease of knowledge and love. The growth
in experience toward which the offices of both
tend, and to which they are practically in
dispensable, comes from Him. Neither is an
inf aUible agent. Each is set to test the other's
work. Each is a servant of the Spirit ; or to
speak more exactly, the activity of Reason
is but a form or aspect of the activity of

250 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
the resident divine Force, struggling for re
union with its source. It is falhble, because
the human conditions which the Spirit re
spects, and the human speech which He
consents to use, and the human wiU whose
autonomy He guards as a sacred thing, are all
inadequate and partial when measured by the
task which is set them. Hence it comes to
pass that the modern sin against the Holy
Ghost is likely to take two apparently con
tradictory forms. He is in danger of com
mitting it who contemns Reason as though it
were in some sense hostile to Revelation, dis
trusting its verdicts and banishing it from
the temple as though at its best estate it
could approach only so far as some court of
the Gentiles. On the other hand, he is in
equal danger who, interpreting Reason to be
a sort of logic-chopping faculty, yet sets the
servant above his lord, by making its dogmas
supreme and bounding all human experience
by the limits of its sway. Life may be
maintained for considerable periods within a
stockade of syllogisms, but it can never be
adequately nurtured there. Under such con
ditions it is likely to be dwarfed on one side
and abnormally developed on the other. The

THE NEW FREEDOM OE FAITH 251
refusal to test the results of the dialectical
faculty's activity by Christian experience is
as narrow and subversive of sound scientific
doctrine as the refusal to test other revela
tions by the verdict of the Reason. The man
who recognizes the Force resident in human
life, and speaking through the human Rea
son, as one with the Power which reveals
Himself to the conscience and the heart,
founds the house of his faith upon the rock,
where no flood of seeming contradiction is
ever likely to rob him of his freedom or his
peace. 4. It foUows from what has just been said
that such a doctrine of the Dynamic of
Christianity must rid us of aU fear of the
results of historical or philosophical criticism ;
nor can the behever in it weU be confounded
by any new discovery in any field of science.
This fear has always been unworthy, but
never quite unnatural. The man whose faith
is comprehended and defined by the limits of
a system must needs look with apprehension
upon all criticism of it, and especially upon
any discovery which may threaten to develop
facts incompatible with its integrity. But the
man who is hving a life wherein a divine

252 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
Force is resident sees in every new result of
criticism simply a summons to partial re
arrangement of the material of experience,
and in every new discovery simply a new and
welcome opportunity. The progress of sci
ence, physical, historical, critical, delights and
animates him. It is a challenge to his love
of adventure. Even when it has happened —
as was the case during the latter half of
the nineteenth century — that the material
wrought out by investigators and discoverers
was so great as far to exceed his power to coor
dinate it, he suffers from no fear, but simply
as one embarrassed by the multitude of rather
crude riches. He realizes, if he be a man of
genuine spiritual insight, that he is hving
in a season of luxuriant growth, and that a
period of development and maturity is bound
to follow it. So far from being fearful of
the outcome, the soul that feels the Dynamic
of Religion wiU experience the exhilaration
of the pioneer looking out upon a newly
discovered region, which must be explored,
mapped, and subdued to the use and residence
of men.
Face to face with the recent scientific ad
vance, and the necessity of answering the

THE NEW FREEDOM OF FAITH 253
soul's questions about it, men may very weU
have been smitten into sUence for a time.
None but the man of little faith, however, is
described in Matthew Arnold's hnes : —
" The kings of modern thought are dumb ;
Silent they are, though not content,
And wait to see the future come.
They have the grief men had of yore,
But they contend and cry no more."
The sUence of the man of positive faith in the
Soul of the Universe is of the nobler type
of Keats : —
" Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise
Silent upon a Peak in Darien."
5. This Dynamic of Christianity confers
the freedom of faith upon every man who
faces toward truth and travels sturdily in
its direction. Here again it ministers to the
possession of that peace which Christ be
queathed to His disciples. A more adequate
discussion of this corollary of Christ's teach
ing concerning the Spirit in the world must
be referred to the concluding chapter. Let it
suffice here to say that this is by no means

254 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
to baptize a cheap and trivial doctrine of uni
versalism or eclecticism into the name of
Christ. It is rather to remember the deeper
significance of Jesus' own attitude toward
truth. All truth was sacred. It was always
and everywhere " of God " rather than " of
the world." The man who sought it with the
purpose of honestly applying it to life was
of the class who bring forth fruits meet for
repentance. He could not deliberately face
toward the truth in any department of human
experience without being " led by the Spirit,"
since to induce men to take that attitude is
one of the chief offices of God resident in
His world ; and the man who is led by the
Spirit is born of God and knoweth God.

XI
THE NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS
In the midst of the Peehte troubles of 1852,
when a change of party names was gravely
discussed by British politicians in the hope of
mollifying opponents, confirming waverers,
and possibly winning recruits, Sir James
Graham reminded his coUeagues of Paley's
maxim, " that men often change their creed,
but not so often the name of their sect." 1 It
is natural and on the whole commendable
that men should cling to significant terms
both in pohtics and in religion. There is ht
tle enough that is sacred in a word ; but as
the word passes into history it begins to con
note experience — and experience is always
sacred. Hence it comes to pass that language
almost insensibly changes its significance with
the march of human progress. A word may
be said to have two aspects. It appears in one
light to the man who sees in it a sign of his
i Morley, Life of W. E. Gladstone, i. 422.

256 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
experience ; it may look very different to his
fellow who regards it as the symbol of a scien
tific idea. Take for example the word " sun
rise." From time immemorial men have known
by trial what " suririse " is. They have looked
with longing for it through slow night-
watches ; they have buUt their plans upon the
unf aUing certainty of its appearance ; more or
less dimly they have felt its beauty and re
sponded to its exhilaration. From the days
when the Psalmist thanked God for the joy
ous outgoings of morning and of evening,
they have paid unconscious tribute to the prin
ciple of the Continuity of Nature whenever
they have used the phrase. Measured in terms
of common experience, the content of the word
has been practically a constant quantity.
On the other hand, when wise men — how
ever crude their wisdom — have undertaken
to account for the phenomenon and to frame
its definition, the story of the word has been
one of perpetual change. In the light of mod
ern knowledge ancient theory finds no stand
ing-ground. So completely does the planetary
hypothesis of to-day differ from the Aurora
myth, that the two may be said to have no
thing in common. Yet the plain man feels

NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS 257
no embarrassment in using his ancestor's
phrase. So much of the word's signification
as lies in the plane of experience defies the
tooth of time. To the man who would walk
or work in the hght, " sunrise " means just
what it meant to the pUgrim or the laborer
of a thousand years ago.
This is not at all to deny the practical signi
ficance of our progress in ideas. It would be
easy to gather a group of men with cameras
and spectroscopes and sextants who should be
hving witnesses to the fact that the sun's ap
pearance has a meaning in the realm of prac
tical experience to-day which is vastly wider
than of old time. None the less, " sunrise "
remains as legitimate a term as ever. Such
change as has passed upon it has simply made
it richer and more significant. It was born of
a mistaken notion that the sun climbed the
arch of heaven on man's behalf. It continues
with perfect propriety to serve the need of a
day when man knows that the revolution of
an insignificant planet is whirling him — an
insignificant speck upon it — out of shadow
into light.
As was intimated in the last chapter, reh
gion must^ take ungrudging account of this

258 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
fact. Men reproduce experience generation
after generation. Though the reproduction
be not exact, it is still real, with reference to
the things that are fundamental. Each gen
eration, however, meets life upon a larger
field than its predecessors knew, and therefore
adds something of its own to the heritage be
queathed to it. It is further true that vast
changes take place in the scientific treatment
of experience. As men ponder upon the phe
nomena of it in their endeavor to discover
its causes and to coordinate its results into sys
tems, the hypotheses advanced to account for
experience must differ, and differ very widely.
Men will change their theories more readUy
than their terms. They cling to terms be
cause these represent recurring experiences;
they change their theories because investiga
tion into unexplored quarters of their widen
ing field of experience presents new facts and
compels scientific rearrangement of old ones.
The definition of religious terms may be
said to be always a theological exercise. If it
is to be undertaken in a genuinely scientific
spirit, the facts just set forth must never be
forgotten. Terms are likely to persist because
they are the symbols of persisting experience.

NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS 259
Definitions are bound to change as time mul
tiplies and tests the theories advanced to ac
count for experience. Hence it foUows that
definitions have permanent value for what they
include rather than for what they exclude.
They must be framed with the expectation of
an increase of content. They must be regarded
as marking stages in a process of development.
Every definition meant to represent the con
tent of great and vital reahties must be
provisional. On the other hand, no statement
of faith which has moulded and formed the
thought and conduct of men through any
considerable period is to be treated as void
of truth. It wUl almost invariably yield sug
gestion to the reverent student. Reverence
for human experience, be that experience
never so bhnd and partial, is a prime requi
site to its interpretation. There is something
in it which wiU always escape the inquisition
of merely indifferent curiosity, as surely as
it wiU be warped and refracted by passing
through the medium of uncritical and unctu
ous sentiment. The verdict upon the Unita
rians,1 that they have often succeeded in
1 The reader will remember that the word used by Dr.
Fairbairn is not " Unitarian " but " Socinian."

260 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
criticism because they faUed in insight, has
application here. There is need of that fine
combination of qualities summed up in the
Scripture phrase "an understanding heart,"
if rehgious experience is to be rightly inter
preted or religious terms intelligibly defined.
1. There was a time when men seemed satis
fied to rest in a definition of God that simply
deified some process in nature which passed
their comprehension and of which they found
themselves the object. They were involved in
the process, and they worshiped the chief
apparent factor in it. The recurrence of the
day and the march of the seasons represented
such a process. Men naturally worshiped the
sun, therefore, and built up their sun myths
about it. They went on to personify their
objects of worship, because of an ineradica
ble instinct which ascribes all processes to
an ultimate cause possessing the characteris
tics of mind and wiU. Thus the worship of a
multitude of demiurges grew up. At last the
notion of monolatry or henotheism, the wor
ship of one God, to whom it behooved a people
to be true through good report and ill, was
wrought out in the experience of the Hebrews,
and was developed into a real monotheism by

NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS 261
the inspired genius of the prophets. The idea
of God connoted practically iUimitable force.
The experience of men, however, demanded
more than this to render their notion of the
universe rational. So the idea was advanced
to include the attributes of reason and love.
The great revelation made by Jesus, into the
depths of which we have yet made but partial
way, was that the idea of God can be properly
expressed in terms of human experience ; but
that human experience can never compass it
in such a degree as to deny it further growth
and development.
In the light of Jesus' teaching, there is
no need to shrink from the use of anthropo
morphic terms in the attempt to express our
idea of God. The true definition must be
big enough to include them, since intelligible
terms must reflect real human experience.
The trend of Christian thought has naturaUy
been toward a notion of God as the ground of
all experience ; the source of aU thought, will,
and feehng ; resident in His universe, and
yet transcending it; working in and through
man as the most highly developed agent
that life has revealed. God is the term men
use for the Fountain of Creative Force, for

262 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
the Source of Authority, and for the per
sonal object of supreme affection. It will be
objected that such an attempt at definition
lacks the fundamental note of a definition in
so far as it fails to delimit the idea, and to
mark bounds beyond which its content may
not pass. To which the only answer to be
made is that attempts to define a person always
have to reckon with the fact that personahty
refuses such delimitation. There are deeps in
it which pass our finding out unto perfection.
The definition which deals with a person must
always have room in it for growth. God, to
the Christian, has ceased to be a mere object,
and become an experience.1
It wiU be further objected in some quar
ters that such an approach to the true idea of
God must take undue account of, and accord
undue importance to, the ethnic rehgions.
But it is well-nigh impossible to take undue
account of the ethnic religions. Enormous im
portance attaches to them. Not one among
them which embodies the genuine experience,
or has called forth the devoted service of men,
is ever to be contemned or treated as though
1 Professor Seth, quoted by Inge, Christian Mysticism,
p. 339.

NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS 263
it had no significance to the Christian. They
all testify to the truth that we are " incurably
religious," and they chaUenge the Christian
to a comparison of experience. The Chris
tian need not shrink from the contest. He is
doing no least despite to the claims of Christ
in frankly admitting that the faith which fits
life best, by meeting its daUy need most di
rectly, by uttering its dicta to the reason and
the wUl with the greatest and most authorita
tive cogency, by offering to the adventurous
soul of man the largest field of spiritual
exercise, is the faith which must endure.
2. When we come, to question the Christian
as to the experience of God which his rehgion
has provided, we find three great correspond
ences existing between his faith and his life.
They may be rudely indicated by the foUow
ing formula : —
Man in the Making connotes the Father.
Man in the Marring connotes Christ.
Man in the Remaking connotes the Spirit.
The doctrine of the Trinity has survived
and is vital to-day because it expresses expe
rience. Any attempt at a definition of it must
be made in terms of life. Man as a rational
being, conscious of himself as the subject of

264 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
birth and growth, and observant of creation
as in process about him, is driven to a behef
in the existence of a Creative Force. The more
scientific man becomes, in his observation of
the facts of creation, and the more systematic
his arrangement of knowledge, the more in
evitably is he driven to the conclusion that
this Creative Force is rational and essentially
personal, in our ordinary understanding of
that word.
Quite as fundamental and general an ex
perience as that of the awakening of man's
scientific curiosity about the Whence and the
How of the world in which he finds himself
is his query concerning the Why and the
Whither of it, and himself in it. Here comes
in the experience of the marring of his peace.
He becomes conscious of himself in a new
sense. He knows himself now to be a person
in the sense in which Dorner loved to define
personality, "the ego as self-conscious spirit
moving toward the fulfillment of its existence."
With this new and higher realization of self,
trouble always comes. It never ministers to
peace at first. That question of fulfillment of
destiny is always puzzUng, and sometimes sad
dening. The destiny itself is a mystery, and

NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS 265
the way toward its fulfillment seems strewn
thick with obstacles. The man no sooner be
comes conscious of himself than he knows
his existence by himself to be partial, frag
mentary, difficult. His place in the world is
not commodious enough for his soul. If he
fit himself to it, and cut all his thoughts and
deeds by the measure of a possible threescore
years and ten, he knows he is dwarfing self
and somehow missing his chance. To use once
more the hard-worked cant phrase, he is out
of harmony with' his environment. In theo
logical language, he is under conviction of
sin. His life seems marred, and nothing can
restore its peace except coordination with the
general scheme of things which he knows as
the universe, and with the Power which under
lies and works through it.
In Christ, this Power seems to make a new
revelation to him. In Christ, God advances
toward him with overtures of peace — with
promise of at-one-ment. It is easy to state
this dogmatically; but as a dogma it can
exert no compulsion on the wiUs and lives of
men. The essence of the revelation appears
in the light of Christian experience. With a
singular unanimity men who have tried Christ's

266 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
Way of faith, hope, and love have found
themselves at one with God and His world.
I do not forget that they have often felt and
taught that the world was at enmity with God.
That, however, was the world of the imper
fect, the petty, and the partial, which is ever
arrogating to itself the place of the whole.
In the larger sense, Christ has brought them
peace and power as citizens of the Kingdom
of Heaven — that is, as men upon whom the
freedom of the universe has been conferred.
It is in this process of .rebirth into the
larger world — of endowment with a genuine
adequacy to circumstance, that man comes into
immediate consciousness of God as a Spirit,
pervading the universe, immanent in the world,
and speaking immediately to the soul of the
man himself. Through God, thus revealed
as Spirit, revelation becomes an immediate
and continuous experience. The so-called rev
elation of the past — the word of the Pro
phet, the burden of the Book, the dogma of
the Church — all has significance. Yet this
is not real, ultimate, essential revelation. It is
rather the vehicle or channel of it. It is that
through which the real revelation flows, or if
one please to change the figure, it is the body

NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS 267
of which the real revelation is born when
quickened by the Spirit's influence. The es
sence of the revelation is always delivered in
the divine Spirit's voice to the human spirit's
ear. The two are of one nature, and each can
understand the other.
3. It is at this point that we find ourselves
face to face with the necessity of defining sin.
This must be done with a fuU recognition of
the fact that evil is a mystery not yet to be
compassed and made plain in terms of human
experience. The mystery does not, however,
put us to any permanent confusion. It does
not compel us to any admission of dualism in
our thought of God. For much that is reck
oned to be evU we can find a rational place
in the universe upon the plane of our present
knowledge. It would be presumptuous to
say that we can find room and place for aU.
The problem of evU challenges us to further
adventure in the realm of thought. Sin, as
it appears in human life, is specificaUy and
definitely known. Like all spiritual experi
ences, it transcends the hmits of a snug and
handy definition ; but its fundamental charac
teristics may be pointed out.
Sin is the permission of disorder in the life

268 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
of the spiritual man. It might be said to be
the state or condition in which a man finds
himself when the dawn of self-consciousness
opens the eyes of his soul. He knows himself
to be an individual, and therefore partial in
himself. His powers are bound to prove in
adequate to circumstance unless he find place
for his partial life in the system of the whole.
The question as to whether he wiU do this, or
choose to remain in his anarchic individual
ism, is the question whether he wiU hve in sin
or turn out of and away from it. To become
conscious of his own partial and insufficient
life is to be convicted of sin. The old phrase
is marvelously expressive, and remains apt to
our modern use unless we insist upon making
it express an artificial sense of guilt. A clear
sense of guUt may or may not appear in a
man's conviction of sin. The divine Force
resident among men rarely fails to bring home
to the individual man the obligation which
rests upon him to coordinate the work of
his reason, his wiU, and his heart. To see the
thing that is true by the light of his reason,
to choose it as the thing to be done, and to
love it as a thing to be cherished, is to yield
life to the Spirit's guidance. This is to coor-

NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS 269
dinate the different activities in such a degree
as wiU permit Ufe's orderly development under
the influence of its divine resident forces. It
puts a man's body and physical powers into
right relations with the physical frame of the
universe, and his soul into harmony with the
creative and sustaining Power which animates
the universe. The man then becomes himself
a power for universal order and efficiency.
If, on the other hand, he wUlfully or care
lessly fail in this, he becomes an element of
disorder looking toward anarchy. In so far
as he uses his will to choose what his reason
refuses, or uses his reason narrowly and in
such domineering fashion as to rule all testi
mony of his heart out of court as irrelevant,
he is refusing to have a partial life made
whole ; he is choosing a life of sin, and com
mitting definite acts of sin. Sin is therefore
fundamentaUy a failure to institute and main
tain a correspondence between revelation and
life, — between the truth that is known and
the thing that is done.
We have seen that to become convinced of
the partial and unworthy nature of the life
lived as though its individual existence for a
few mortal years were all, is to be convicted

270 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
of sin. If this realization develop after years
of careless or wUlful living, in which oppor
tunities have been evidently wasted, the sense
of guilt often accompanies it, sometimes
appearing in almost overwhelming and heart
breaking measure. If, however, the life have
been upon the whole well trained and well
ordered, the sense of guUt is scarcely to be
expected. But whether it appear or not, the
conviction of sin is an experience which in
its essence must have been known to aU gen
erations of men who have reached the stage
of a weU-developed self-consciousness. The
vital question in it is, whether it will lead a
man to the search for, and the acceptance of,
a rational rehgion. Will this utterance of the
Spirit's voice, teUing him who he is and what
he needs, be met by a resolve on his part to
seek for peace in an ampler revelation ?
4. The etymology of the word "rehgion"
has been in doubt from the days of Cicero.
He thought of it as possessing fundamental
relation to the idea of conscientious perform
ance. The rehgious man was the man who gave
attention to the demands of the gods, going
over the ground of his duty to them again
and again, as diligent children might con a

NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS 271
lesson. The Fathers, including Augustine,
derived the word from a root meaning "to
bind," and emphasized the idea of obligation.
Probably they were right so far as the hteral
sense of the root-word goes. There is a ques
tion whether they were right in deriving from
it the obhgation idea upon which they put
such emphasis ; but whether they were right
or not, the student of to-day, in view of
human experience in the hght of Christian
revelation, would make a different applica
tion of this root idea. He inclines to regard
religion as the principle which binds the
elements of life together in such a way as
to give them coherence and wholeness. It
is the bond of union with God. It is no
less the bond of hfe's own unity. Under the
influence of religion the disjecta membra of
experience are coordinated and made efficient.
Its office may be rudely compared to that of
the tire, which binds the helpless conglom
erate of hub, spokes, and felloe into the effi
cient entity of the wheel; or of the hoops,
which hold the individual staves together
that the pail or cask may have content. A far
more significant figure is to be derived, how
ever, from the vision of Ezekiel, where the

272 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
word or breath of the Spirit comes upon the
heaps of dry and separated bones. At once
they are articulated, bone to his bone ; the
skeletons thus bound together are clothed
upon with flesh ; the principle of self-direct
ing life is breathed into each man's frame;
and the men themselves under its influence
stand up, no mere mass of unrelated indi
viduals, but an exceeding great army. Pure
religion and undefiled is, therefore, that bond
of perfectness and peace which binds a man's
life into coherence and efficiency in spite of
all the disintegrating influences of selfishness.
It joins men together in well-ordered soci
eties, and binds all to God in a true unity of
the Spirit.1
5. It is in the light of such a definition
of religion that the significance of salvation
appears. Men have questioned sometimes
whether there were any place or need for sal
vation in a system of thought which repre
sented God as immanent in the world and
in man, and which identified the so-caUed
" forces of nature " with His immediate resi
dent influences. In point of fact, there is the
largest possible place and need for salvation.
1 Ephesians iv. 3; Colossians iii. 14.

NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS 273
It is not so much a salvation from a future
as from a present heU. Indeed, it is not so
much a salvation from a fate, as to an op
portunity. Yet the one implies the other,
and the old-time preaching of heU was in no
sense irrational or needless ; though it was
too often iU-proportioned. There is signi
ficance in the fact that when Jesus is repre
sented in the Gospels as performing miracles
of healing, the verb o-«u£cu is repeatedly used.
In the King James Version it is sometimes
translated " to make whole," as when the
woman in the crowd says to herself, " If I
may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole "
(Mark v. 28). Again, after a work of healing
has been accomphshed, it is translated " to
save ; " " Thy faith hath saved thee ; go in
peace " (Luke vni. 50). " To save " is of course
its literal translation, but the salvation which
it portrays in these instances is the making
whole of an incomplete or partiaUy disinte
grated body, and the restoration of normal
function. Christian salvation is strictly anal
ogous. It is the restoration of the maimed
life, and the completion of the partial life in
such measure that the functions of faith, hope,
and love shall become normal. In the life of

274 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
the saved man the obduracy of the material
with which the resident Spirit must needs
work out His plans of peace and unity ceases.
The man becomes tractable and docUe to the
Spirit's influence.
6. In an earher paragraph the statement
was made that no article of a creed wliich has
seemed so great and vital as to enter deeply
into Christian experience would ever prove to
be without significance. Emphasis may pass
from it ; it may sink into relative oblivion ; but
it is not hkely to be completely superseded.
The question may properly be asked whether
this contention can be sustained with reference
to the Atonement. It is long since the doc
trine of vicarious atonement has stood in the
forefront of Christian teaching. Some men
deny it. Others neglect it as though it were
half obsolete. Is there place for it in the
thought of a man who believes the Dynamic
of Christianity to be God as a resident Force
in His world and in the life of man ? I should
unhesitatingly answer, Yes. Yet here again
it must be understood that atonement is to
be regarded as an experience and not as a
dogma. It is not a single act of Christ, done
once and forever upon the Cross, and to be

NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS 275
exactly defined in forensic terms. It certainly
cannot be represented by any crass notion of
so much suffering credited against a debt of
so much sin. That sort of commercialism may
weU be as abhorrent to the Christian as ever
the money-changers' tables in the Temple were
to his Master.
StiU, the fact remains that If we try to esti
mate our immediate knowledge and experience
of God in terms of the divine Spirit resident
in man, we find atonement to be His most ap
parent aim and purpose. In the definition of
rehgion, the fact was just emphasized that
if it meant anything, it meant a principle of
integration and harmony, — of vital and natu
ral union between the various activities and
powers of a man, between each individual man
and his neighbor, and between aU men and
God. This is practical and real atonement in
its most hteral sense. Christ's mission was to
accomplish this. The method was, in the most
hteral and natural sense, vicarious. He hved
and died for men. He spent Himself in their
behalf. He shed His blood in sacrifice, but
this was simply a rational consummation of
the course of life-giving which had marked
the whole ministry. It was not an act essen-

276 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
tially different from a hundred other acts of
sacrifice and love. When He felt that virtue
had gone out of Him to the shrinking and
fearful woman in the crowd, the experience
was essentially one with the experience on
Calvary. The latter was a supreme manifes
tation of the same sacrificial love which the
former evidenced in its proper degree. It
gave to the declaration of divine love the
greatest emphasis of which human terms are
capable. It is a belittling of Christ's sacri
fice to say that this atoning work was com
prised in a single act or experience of the Son
of Mary upon Calvary. The Sacrifice and the
Atonement must be coeval with man's partial
and separate existence upon the earth. None
can say when it began or when it shall end.
The experience of the man, Christ Jesus, was
the great pivotal chapter in it. His assur
ance that the work of the ages was to be
His own work carried on by the Spirit was a
prophecy that atonement was to be continu
ous. Experience has shown that atonement is
most efficacious when it is vicarious. It is not
irreverent to claim that wherever a man bears
hardness for the sake of his fellow, the work
of vicarious atonement appears in process. It

NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS 277
is not enough to say that this is simply a gra
cious echo or reflection of Christ's work. It
is His work in esse, as carried on by the
resident Spirit in the world. When Mazzini
said that there was one appeal to men wliich
he found never failed to win a response, —
the appeal " Come and suffer," — he bore
testimony to the fact that this Spirit does not
disdain residence in some men who are far
from thinking of themselves as Christians.
Wherever He abides as a ruhng principle of
hfe, something of the work of atonement goes
forward, and usually by vicarious method.
7. It is this fact that gives us a basis for
a definition of the Church. Ubi Spiritus, ibi
ecclesia. The question might fairly be asked
whether, since this httle book is based upon
a behef in the presence of the Spirit in aU
nature, and in aU men, the Church were not
already universal. To which it must be an
swered, — Yes, the Church is thus universal
in posse; but the Church appears in esse
wherever the Spirit's presence is owned and
admitted to be regnant in the thought and
conduct of men in such degree that the nat
ural fruits of the Spirit appear. Wherever in
any man's life " love, joy, peace, long-suffer-

278 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
ing, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meek
ness, self-control " appear, these fruits of the
Spirit afford unanswerable proof of His reg
nant presence. These are the true insignia of
church-membership. It is so evident as scarcely to need formal
statement, that where men are so effectuaUy
under the Spirit's guidance as to give this
evidence of His possession of their hves, they
will naturaUy associate themselves in local
bodies for work and worship. Their individ
ual preferences with respect to forms of wor
ship, modes of church-government, or the rel
ative emphasis to be placed upon minor points
of doctrine, will necessitate greater or less
variety in the constitution and management
of these local bodies. This variety may some
times become bewUdering ; it may often ap
pear, and sometimes prove to be, selfish, and
therefore disorganizing. Yet so long as it be
held subject to the cultivation of the fruits of
the Spirit, there is no real schism. " To bite
and devour one another" is to render the
structure of the local church obdurate to the
Spirit's influence, and to invite schism ; but
the presence of Presbyterian, Episcopalian,
and Quaker organizations in the same com-

NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS 279
munity is in itself no more proof of schism
in the body spiritual, than the presence of
clergymen, physicians, and merchants living
side by side is of schism in the body politic.
It would be possible thus to proceed through
the whole lexicon of theological and rehgious
terms, testing their received content by the
touch of human experience as guided by the
resident Spirit. We may be sure that aU which
have ever appealed to men's hearts, and exerted
a controUing influence upon their hves, would
prove to have significance, however obsolete
they may seem to be. Such a task is beyond
the scope of our present adventure; and this
chapter must close with a brief reference to
the new position of the Bible and the doc
trine of its inspiration.
8. Here, as so often elsewhere, we need to
remind ourselves again that the new view is
likely to prove but an old doctrine awakened
out of sleep. The notion of the hteral infal
libility of Scripture is no true Reformation
teaching. It represents rather the crust which
formed upon the Reformation experience when
men undertook to crowd that experience into
a snug and well-defined system.
In their protest against the authority of the

280 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
Church, the later Reformers found it con
venient to set up the ipse dixit of the Bible.
Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli had gone too
deep into the real Reformation experience
ever to give consistent assent to this new doc
trine ; but to their successors it seemed to be
the easiest and most direct way of thoroughly
systematizing the new thought. They forgot,
if they ever knew, that as soon as thought be
comes thoroughly, that is to say, completely
systematized, it faUs into a dogmatic slumber
in which men count it dead. In propound
ing the doctrine of Biblical infaUibility, its
sponsors did the immediately easy thing, for
getting that the truth, while it always proves
ultimately practicable, is by no means always
immediately easy. It loves to laugh at our
confident attempts to cram experience into a
httle system, and it is sometimes shockingly
contemptuous of our small consistencies. For
instance, the average man upon the street
will say that the shortest distance between
two points upon the earth which he exactly
east and west from each other is to be mea
sured upon the " straight " east-and-west line.
He treats it as a self-evident proposition, and
inclines to laugh at any other claim ; but

NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS 281
the navigator, knowing that this is never the
shortest distance except upon the equator,
sails forth upon his great circle arc with a
confidence which puts his uninstructed friend
to shame. The bane of science has always
been the number of thinkers who have in
sisted upon sailing on small circles because
smaU circles can be completed, while the
great circles of experience, the arcs of which
represent our most direct paths to ultimate
realities, are never quite closed.
The Bible is not so much a supernatural
and infallible code of Christian verities,1 as
a witness to man's experience of God. We
need have no hesitation in claiming for it the
place of a unique witness, because historicaUy
it has held a singular and unique place in
human life. By the same token we are as
sured of its " inspiration," and that in unique
degree. The rehgious experience which the Bible
sets forth is of the highest order. The story
of it is of the highest significance, and there
fore of the highest authority. But the author
ity consists in the aptness of this experience
to every man's need. The inspiration con-
1 Sabatier's Religions of Authority, p. 165.

282 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
sists in the voice which speaks through the
Bible story to our hearts. When those hearts
are not too heavy with faUure over fruitless
attempts to reconcile impossible theories of
Scripture, they own the Spirit's voice in it
as sheep own the voice of the shepherd. In
the utterance of this intimate and appeal
ing message, the divine Force resident in
human hfe uses imperfect means as readUy
and generously as He uses imperfect men in
advancing the cause of truth and of right to
day. He speaks through Bible history, but
nowhere vouches for its infallibility. He uses
the voice of Hebrew poetry, and the man who
cannot discern the note of inspiration in the
Psalms may well conclude that there are no
chords in his soul upon which any breath of
the Spirit can ever take effect. Just as im
partially, and with the same divine humility,
the Spirit avaUs Himself of the traditions,
legends, and perhaps the myths x of a highly
endowed people to interpret His message to
their hearts.
There need be no hesitation in admitting
1 I confess to a great skepticism about the presence of the
mythical. Tradition and legend abound ; but the mythical
seems antipathetic to the Hebrew genius.

NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS 283
this to be quite as true of the New Testament
as of the Old. The resident Force working
out His plan of religious development in the
life of the race disdains no ordinary human
methods of accomplishment. He loves the
normal as Jesus Himself, with His refusal
to grant signs and wonders to a sensation-
seeking crowd, always seemed to do. The
supra-normal appears from time to time, as
it always appears in every epoch-making
life. A great life is always a channel for the
introduction of strange experience, which the
majority of the men of the time treat with
skepticism. It was to be expected that the
greatest life would prove to be the channel
for the most striking and startling revelation.
The whole question of Miracle must be rele
gated to the concluding chapter. Yet it is,
however, too late in the day to deny miracles ;
just as it is quite too late to think of them
as contraventions of the order of the uni
verse. The greatest miracle is Christ's life
and death, and the outflowing of influence
into our experience from them. Let us admit,
and gladly, that the history of the first cen
tury has come down to us as other histories
have come; that tradition has played its

284 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
part, and that legend has here and there
brought its accretion. Criticism of the sane
and generous sort ought to be invited, rather
than shunned. It is hard to see what de
structive work it can do, except to the struc
ture of those who build their faith upon a
foundation of mechanical inspiration, instead
of upon the presence of God which, in greater
or less degree, every age has experienced.
The first century felt it in a unique measure,
as it seemed to be interpreted into its life in
the Person of Christ. The New Testament is
the attempt, and a most highly authoritative
attempt, to preserve that experience in a form
which shall make it applicable to the life of
every generation. Yet every century inter
prets and apphes the meaning of the New
Testament story in the hght of an experi
ence longer and richer by one hundred years
than that of its predecessor ; but no century
has succeeded in reading any vital factor out
of the Gospels and Epistles.
9. Just now the Gospels of the Infancy with
the story of the Virgin Birth are bearing the
brunt of a new inquiry among so-caUed ortho
dox Christians. Let us admit for the moment,
and solely for the sake of argument, that the

NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS 285
tradition incorporated in the early chapters
of Matthew and Luke proves to be legendary
in its character. Is it, therefore, to be re
garded as outside the pale of significant
Scripture, and preserved to the canon only
upon sufferance as a sort of historical curi
osity ? And shaU we, to be consistent, cut out
the words "conceived by the Holy Ghost"
from the Apostles' Creed ? I cannot think
so; because centuries of experience have
proven practicaUy beyond cavil the truth of
the Creed's declaration. The real central as
severation of the Creed is that Jesus Christ
was in the article of birth as truly as in the
article of death an incarnation of divine life
and love. He came upon a unique errand.
He was to fulfiU a unique destiny. The real
significance of the doctrine to the Church
and the world, and the ultimate meaning of
the words of the Creed, is simply an echo of
the angel's word to Mary, — " The Power
of the Most High shall overshadow thee."
The mere physical circumstances of incarna
tion are so absolutely irrelevant as to make
inquiry into them as unseemly in this case as
in the case of any other great life. If the
phrase in the Creed were to go, the experi-

286 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
ence of the Christian world would demand
the substitution of another. Even admit
ting the Gospel of the Infancy to be mere
legend, it is hard to see what phrase could
be substituted for "conceived by the Holy
Ghost," which would so exactly express the
conclusion thrust upon a man who beheves
in an orderly universe, the life of which
develops, and the history of which unfolds,
under the impulse of a resident personal
Force. Although extended reference to the greatly
vexed question of the Ultimate Source of
Authority must be left to the next chapter,
the trend of this wUl indicate the direction
in which the writer looks for its practical
answer. It is not to a book, or to a church,
or to a creed. It is not even to history in
the common acceptance of that word ; that
is, it is not to a mere pricis or brief of
human experience. It is rather to the voice
of the creative Power, immanent in the world,
speaking the language of the soul in terms of
conscience and reason. Since, however, the
language of the soul is an imperfect tongue,
and the individual soul's life is sure to be
inadequate for the utterance of the whole

NEW MEANING OF SOME OLD WORDS 287
truth, and too often obdurate to its transla
tion into goodness, other authorities have
their place and weight. Chief among these
stand the common conscience of beheving
people, the consensus of opinion among right-
minded men, the history of human experi
ence, and in particular the unique expression
of it found in Sacred Scripture, culminating
as it does in the life of Jesus Christ. He ex
pressed this truth of God's residence in the
world as it had never been expressed before.
He told His disciples that it was the Gospel
for the future. There are signs that the world
is at last opening its eyes to the significance
of His word.

xn
THE NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION
It seems a far cry now to the day when so
mUd a heresy as that of "Essays and Re
views " could shatter the peace of ecclesias
tical dovecots. In point of fact, however, but
two-score years have passed since the Judicial
Committee of the Privy Council reversed the
judgment against Rowland Williams and H.
B. WUson for their part in that rash enter
prise. This was on February 8, 1864. On
February 14, John Richard Green, the his
torian, wrote to his friend Boyd Dawkins that
there seemed now nothing remaining in the
formularies of the Church of England to re
strain freedom of thought. He fancied that
there would be an almost universal feeling of
dismay at the notion of a church attempting
to teach without authoritative and definite
standards of doctrine, and then adds, " If I
do not share these fears, if I exult at the
destiny which God has given to the Church
which I love, it is because I believe in the

NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION 289
Inspiration of the Church, in its guidance by
the Spirit of God." He goes on to note the
formal belief in such guidance which Christian
people generaUy admit in word ; maintains
that the voice of this Spirit must be sought
in the final utterances of the conscience of
Christendom ; and concludes : " That these
' voices of the Church ' do not point in a doc
trinal direction, but in directions moral, so
cial, pohtical, inteUectual, is a fact weU worth
noting. Another notable fact is the extreme
slowness with which ' Christian opinion ' forms
itself, — how many ages it required ere serf
dom became an acknowledged wrong, for
instance. The history of the Church is the
record of its education by the Spirit of God.
No wonder, then, that we are in some re
spects in a period of suspense now that we
see in part and prophesy in part I"1
It was the utterance of a true seer. That
phrase " period of suspense " admirably char
acterizes the forty years which have inter
vened. Those four decades have seen the rise
and the decline of an agnosticism the prin
cipal practical tendency in which was, in
homely phrase, " to let what we don't know
1 Letters of J. R. Green, ed. by Leslie Stephen, p. 140.

290 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
rule what we do know." This agnostic style
of thought held the germs of dissolution in
itself, and it had only to state its contention
fairly and squarely in order to supply its own
antidote. In its extreme and most consistent
form this was little less than an invitation to
men to permit the paralysis of what they
instinctively feel to be their highest facul
ties. James Russell Lowell was no partisan
of orthodoxy. He could be depended upon
to speak out frankly in behalf of the inde
pendent and natural man, in the best sense
of those two hard-used adjectives. It will be
remembered, however, that after reading the
late Sir Leslie Stephen's "English Thought
in the Eighteenth Century " he wrote : " I am
very much in the state of mind of the Bre
tons who revolted against the revolutionary
government, and wrote upon their banners,
' Give us back our God.' I suppose I am an
intuitionalist, and there I mean to stick. I
accept the challenge of common sense and
claim to have another faculty, as I should
insist that a peony was red though twenty
color-blind men denied it." x
1 Cf. editorial on "The Outgrown Agnosticism" in the
Boston Transcript of February 26, 1904.

NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION 291
The vogue of agnosticism was due largely
to the fact that it seemed to recognize the
suspense of the period to which Green re
ferred. Its inadequacy to meet the need of
the thinking world for more than one or two
hazy days lay in its faUure to trace this sus
pense to its true source. The world had grown.
It was becoming too big to be the creation of
some men's God. Hence the temptation to
fancy that unless this world of experience could
be kept within traditional hmits, aU faith
in God must go. The true antidote for the
fear lay in a perception of the truth that
every increase of knowledge in any depart
ment of human life, when rightly interpreted,
is really a revelation of God. It is significant
that Green implied this in saying that the
voice of the Spirit in the Church had uttered
His dictum in terms " moral, social, political,
intellectual," quite as often as in terms of
abstract doctrine. The fundamental fact is
that the source and ground of revelation are
one, although the channels through which
the revelation flows into the experience of
men may be so many and so diverse as to
seem contradictory.
The fear that has sometimes oppressed

292 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
good men untU it tempted them into courses
of reaction and obscurantism has been an
unworthy dread lest a discovery in the realm
of the " natural " might somehow contradict a
revelation in the realm of the " supernatural."
The mocking skepticism of a certain school of
naturalists, on the other hand, has had its
source in the claim that research into the
realm of the " natural " would eventually do
away entirely with experience in the realm of
the " supernatural." Great store of breath
and ink has been expended in attempts to
reconcile these two camps. The hostility has
persisted despite all temporary truces; and
rightly enough, because of the narrow and
partial outlook of both groups of combatants.
The research of neither has often gone deep
enough to discover the common truth which
supphes them both with all the really effec
tive weapons in their arsenals. The expected
reconciliation at which so many fatuous at
tempts have been made wUl never come as
the result of a compromise. It is to be no
armed peace. Its good fruits will not grow
in a field which Religion grudgingly makes
over to Science, and on which Science in
return pays contemptuous respect to Reli-

NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION 293
gion. AU jealous comparison of the relative
worth of the experience with which each deals
is beside the mark. The principle wliich gov
erns the value of both to human life lies too
deep for discovery by such methods as that.
This principle appears only with the recog
nition of the fact that there is no room in the
universe for a fundamental contradiction of
experience ; that all experience makes for the
discovery of truth ; and that aU truth is sacred
in proportion to its applicability to conduct.
These things seem so much like platitudes
that the pen almost balks at them. Yet in a
sense aU life consists in bringing thought and
conduct into vital relation to axioms, which
in the process must needs be stated and re
stated, line upon line, precept upon precept.
The thing that gave a real significance to
the late Professor Drummond's popular books
was his recognition of this fact of the con
tinuity of experience, and the fundamental
identity of the ground of experience. The
natural and the spiritual were not two distinct
spheres animated by two distinct principles
of hfe. One resident Force wrought in both
in accordance with one self-consistent purpose.
•Nor was there one principle of revelation in

294 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
the sphere of the spiritual and another in the
sphere of the natural. The source of life
and knowledge in both realms is identical.
It remains to inquire a httle more inti
mately into some of these new harmonies of
revelation which should appear as the old
dualism or pluralism gives place to faith in a
Spirit of aU truth, resident in the world and
in men. In the first place, what will be the
fate of " revelation " ? Timid souls have all
too often given themselves up to the fear that
"revelation" would be despoUed of reUgious
authority unless its method were more or less
involved in mystery. The mass of Christian
believers in the nineteenth century has been
almost as clamant for a sign as was the Gali
lean multitude in the first. Jesus was slow to
gratify curiosity then ; the Spirit as reaUy dis
trusts it now. The signs of the times and the
living parables of nature were the avenues
through which Christ loved to guide the truth
into the experience of those about Him. The
whole system of genuinely Christian thought
is built upon the principle that everything
known is revealed, whether it come by way of
a sudden voice from heaven or through toil
some human research. To the Christian who

NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION 295
believes in God resident and executive in
His world, every revelation is a discovery and
every discovery is a revelation. The Ten
Commandments, even upon the most hteral
interpretation of the splendid Exodus tradi
tion, were a discovery of Moses; and the
formula of the attraction of gravitation, with
its far-reaching influence upon our knowledge
of the material universe, was no less a revela
tion to Newton. The anthropomorphic finger
of God upon the tables of stone has obscured
the natural means of Moses' revelation as
effectually as the traditional apple upon the
mathematician's head has hidden the spiritual
significance of Newton's discovery.
It may well be true that some revelations
are more immediate than others in this sense,
that they involve a far less obvious display of
ordinary means, precisely as some discoveries
seem more intuitive than others because the
chain of reveahng events is hidden. In the
intercourse of person with person, heart some
times speaks to heart with such directness
that the idea of discovery is obscured in the
evident fact of revelation, whUe in the patient
investigation of what we so bhndly call ma
terial phenomena, the reverse is as often true.

296 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
But fundamentally there is an identity of
experience here, and to permit revelation to
rule discovery off its premises, or vice versa, is
to deny the presence of the Spirit in the world.
It follows that any real antinomy between
natural and revealed rehgion is false, and that
even a sharply defined distinction must prove
unworthy and misleading. Its only justifi
cation lies in the fact that there is a shade
of difference between the revelation which
smites the human heart with the compelling
impact of a " thus saith the Lord," and the
revelation which is seen to be implicit in the
structure of the universe. The former is often
sudden, and the latter gradual, in asserting
itself. The former may also relate itself more
immediately and explicitly to conduct than
the latter; it requires less translation in order
that its message may be expressed in terms of
goodness. Yet even here the distinction is
temporary and incidental rather than perma
nent and essential. Fundamentally, natural
and revealed rehgion are but different names
for the same appeal, directed in the former
case, it may be, a little more directly to the
intellect, and in the latter to the heart.
So by degrees, as Christianity matures and

NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION 297
bears fruit in a genuine faith in God as a Spirit,
we shall see the old and long emphasized dis
tinction between natural and supernatural
fade away. It can be maintained only upon
the hypothesis that God is not reaUy at home
in His world, and that He becomes execu
tive in it merely by fits and starts. The sole
excuse for the distinction is that it serves a
certain purpose in emphasizing the power of
initiative conferred upon aU persons. The pos
session of a wiU puts a person into the sphere
of the supernatural. He ceases to be the
plaything or tool of circumstance and becomes
the master, possibly the originator, of circum
stance. Wherever a wiU, divine or human, sets
itself to the fulfillment of a definite purpose,
and uses circumstance as its constructive ma
terial, there the " supernatural " may be said
to come into play. Yet it is doubtful if the
word does not cost more than it is worth. It
is anti-Christian in the sense that Christianity
has no real place for it or need of it. Christ's
thought of God the Spirit as the vital divine
Force in the world leading men into all truth
implies that all God's processes are natural,
inasmuch as Nature itself is but an inclusive
expression for the sum of them.

298 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
This is not to deny what is commonly meant
by the supernatural. It certainly is not to
deny the miraculous. The opening twentieth
century has had too large experience of the
miraculous to be skeptical about it ; but the
rule of faith is that, as experience goes on,
the realm of the natural grows. The thing that
once appeared to be so out of the course of
events as to confuse our endeavors to account
for it is bound eventually to find its place as
an element in the circle of our larger know
ledge. The so-caUed supernatural is but the
supra-normal. It is not beyond nature, but
simply beyond our experience of nature. It is
not an interference with the orderly process
of the divine activity, but rather the glimpse
of new and unsuspected divine resources. The
province of faith in a God who is a resident
spiritual Force in the universe is to enlarge
the realm of the normal until it shall suffice to
morrow to include the supra-normal of to-day.
Take, for instance, the case of the long
distance telephone, through which a conver
sation is maintained over a space of two hun
dred miles. The quick alternation of question
and answer is an absolutely supernatural oc
currence to the man who sees in it the travel

NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION 299
to and fro of sound-waves. It is not merely
supra-normal ; it is abnormal, making an ap
parent breach in the so-called law of nature
which indicates the rate at which sound-waves
travel through air or copper wire. Upon the
plane of the man who is conversant with the
normal conduct of sound-waves but ignorant
of the rules governing electrical disturbance,
this apparently instantaneous transit of sound
is as flat a contradiction of the continuity of
nature as any loitering of sun and moon over
Aijalon. If he be a man of little scientific
faith, he denies the fact on the ground of his
regard for a well-established rule of acoustics.
If his faith be adequate, he calmly investi
gates, and a new scientific revelation is vouch
safed to him. It was rashly announced the
other day that the discovery of radium was
likely to make a serious breach in the law of
the conservation of energy ; but the announce
ment savored strongly of scientific superstition.
The law of the conservation of energy is but
an expression in physical terms of the omnipo
tence and omnipresence of God. It is a recog
nition of the essential soundness of the uni
verse, or of the oneness of the universe, to
put it tautologically. It registers the faith of

300 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
science in a Power which animates creation,
not fitfully and spasmodically, but with con
stant and unfaUing adequacy. Experience
may demand modification in the form of the
law ; but the central truth which it strives to
express is an almost instinctive utterance of
both religion and physical science. It is the
cry of heart and flesh alike for the hving —
that is, the adequate and constant — God.
It wUl of course be objected that this is
pantheism. To which the instant answer must
be made that it is as far as possible from being
a pantheism which makes personality a late,
perhaps a last, product of a world process.
Personahty is primary and fundamental. The
Soul of the Universe must be thought of as
a Person, if He is to be rationaUy regarded
at all. To say that this confession of faith
in a resident executive Spirit is to make a
god of the material universe is like saying
that because I rejoice to hear my friend's
footfaU and to recognize his face, therefore
the face and the feet with their fellow mem
bers comprise my friend. They are but signs
of his presence and agents of his will. There
is no discernible element of reason, feeling, or
will in the physical components of them, and

NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION 301
yet they are the daUy tools for expressing and
giving efficacy to reason, feeling, and will.
We pass on to note the exaggerated anti
nomy between the physical and the spiritual.
As an antinomy it is false. The physical is
but an expression of the spiritual. The poets,
big and little, have always felt it, and thereby
estabhshed their claim to the divine afflatus.
A century has passed since Coleridge wrote :
" And what if all animated nature
Be but organic harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast one intellectual breeze,
At once the soul of each, and God of all." 1
It seems but day before yesterday since T. E.
Brown, the gifted Manx schoolmaster, put the
same truth in far less conventional form : —
MY GARDEN
A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!
Rose plot,
Fringed pool,
Ferned grot —
The veriest school
Of peace; and yet the fool
Contends that God is not —
Not God I in gardens when the eve is cool ?
Nay, but I have a sign;
'T is very sure God walks in mine.
1 Quoted by Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, p. 404.

302 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
The curse of dualism in both rehgion and
physical science has been that it has always
incited its Votaries to take sides as between
the physical and the spiritual. Asceticism has
resulted in one case, materialism in the other.
Both are essentially counsels of fear. One
undertakes to deny the use of the physical,
the other the existence of anything except
the physical. The so-called Christian Scien
tist, with his theoretical denial of the exist
ence of matter, or pain, or sin, is the modern
protagonist of the former school. He does
not go to the length of preaching asceticism,
but he should do so in order to be consistent.
Nor does the materialist commonly carry out
his phUosophy to its gross and hopeless con
clusion. Yet the old gibe that in his expla
nation of experience he is like a nurse who,
having attempted to bathe a child, throws
away the child with the water, has its apph
cation. Precisely as the ascetic disdains God's
physical means of self-revelation, so the mate
rialist disdains the reveahng Spirit Himself.
Neither has a sufficiently ample conception of
the universe, and the range of possible human
experience, to make his thinking adequate to
the larger demands of life. Neither can quite

NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION 303
slake the human thirst for a consistent me
dium in which to hve. To each we can use the
words of the woman of Samaria, " Sir, thou
hast nothing to draw with, and the well is
deep." x
What we caU the physical is but a sign to
our senses of an underlying reality. The
would-be materialist is himself one of our best
witnesses to the truth of this affirmation. In
a rather bumptious and sophomoric little book
entitled " New Conceptions in Science," Mr.
Carl Snyder has a chapter upon "How the
Brain Thinks." It is distinctly materiahstic
in the ordinary sense of that term ; but none
the less interesting and suggestive. The most
suggestive thing in it, however, is the conclu
sion at which the author arrives. After point
ing out that thought or consciousness may
" be defined in physical terms as the stimula
tion of a relatively wide area of the brain,"
he goes on to show that this stimulation can
be effected only by means of so-called " asso
ciation fibres." Without these "association
fibres " there can be no consciousness. When
they are present, the currents or waves which
1 Cf. A. H. Crauford, Enigmas ofthe Spiritual Life, p. 72.
A singularly suggestive volume.

304 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
pass along them are, as in the case of the
twitching which can be induced in the legs
of a dead frog, electric in their nature. This,
according to Mr. Snyder, is sufficient evidence
that conscious life is to be defined in terms
of " association fibres " and a " variation of
electric potential." He is not, however, willing
to be counted a " crass materialist," and pat
ronizingly notices Huxley's unholy alliance
with Bishop Berkeley in an endeavor himself
to escape the epithet. " For this," he con
cludes, " there is no need now. There is no
' dead ' matter. In some degree all matter
lives." 1 It is a pregnant conclusion; admirably
illustrating the way in which men who dis
trust everything but the " physical " yet read
into their conclusions in the realm of the
"physical" the elements which, when devel
oped, account for the "spiritual." As Mar
tineau once put it, " With a germ, if you can
secure it, no doubt a great deal can be done,
and it is a clever device of the physical ex
pounder to pack one, unnoticed, into every
atom in readiness to yield what he wants be
yond mere mechanical phenomena. . . . We
1 Snyder, New Conceptions in Science, pp. 268-270.

NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION 305
know of germs only as the product of perfect
beings." 1
It might as weU be admitted first as last
that the physical and spiritual represent but
different aspects of one inclusive experience.
Christ seemed so to regard it. The material
world in which He found Himself was all
ahve, and "every common bush on fire with
God." The physical is the temporary form
which the eternal Energy assumes in the
working out of transcendent purposes. It
can never comprehend or include, nor, on the
other hand, can it ever exist without, the spir
itual. The world passeth away — the form
is ever changing — but the Energy which is
its ground and reason abideth forever.
Some years have now elapsed since very
much has been said upon the subject of
"natural goodness." But there was a day
when characters of the Sydney Carton type
in fiction raised grave questions in the breasts
of conscientious and faithful people. What
was to be said about the generosity, some
times reaching to the point of self-immola
tion, depicted in these lives? How was it to
1 Hours of Thought, ii. 112.

306 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
be accounted for in view of their occasional
apparent divorce from religion, and their fre
quent divorce from orthodoxy ? By what
standard was the efficient goodness of one
of Bret Harte's Argonauts to be judged?
What standing in the light of the Gospel
had Mr. John Hay's conclusion concerning
Jim Bludso, the rough but heroic engineer,
who held his burning boat against the river-
bank until the last passenger escaped?
" He seen his duty, a dead sure thing, —
And went for it there and then ;
And Christ ain't going to be too hard
On a man that died for men."
The question, to be sure, was rather an aca
demic one in so far as these characters in
fiction were concerned ; but it had an imme
diately practical side. For these figments of
imaginative brains sometimes materialized
into solid flesh and walked our streets. The
problem of their fate as men of God or chU
dren of the devU was awfully and patheti-
caUy real to people who, humbly rejoicing in
their own faith in God as revealed in Jesus
Christ, yet trembled for their friends, be
cause these friends, though good men and
women, showing the fruits of the Spirit in

NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION 307
their hves, seemed to give no sign of the
technical experience of conversion. Here stood
the Scripture, " There is none other name
under heaven given among men whereby we
must be saved ; " here, too, were the evident
fruits of the Spirit. How were they to re
solve the contradiction ? We all know the
old phrase about the " uncovenanted mercies"
to wliich such souls were commended; but
we forget, or perhaps incline to be a little
contemptuous of, the deep searchings of heart
and the fervent prayer which their lot called
forth. The contradiction is resolved only when
we realize that all goodness is of one funda
mental sort ; it springs from one source ; it is
instinct with one hfe ; and looks toward one
goal. The Spirit to whom Christ introduced
the disciples was to lead men into all kinds of
truth and right living. He was to prove Him
self the great Dynamic of Goodness in the
world, despising no instruments because of
their imperfections, and being balked by no
conventions of men. He was to be as ready
as Jesus Himself to sit at meat with publi
cans and sinners. The ultimate question which
was to decide a man's fate was whether or no

308 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
he accepted the Spirit of Goodness in such a
degree as to make it the reaUy efficient force
in his life. The moment that this came to
pass he was a saved man. A long and ardu
ous journey might weU remain before this
new force in him should gain the upper hand
over the evU self in such degree as to give
him the joy of conscious and fuU discipleship.
But the journey was begun ; and it was none
the less in the right direction and sure of its
goal because it sometimes missed the conven
tional halting-places by the way.
When, for instance, Carlyle spoke of his
"conversion," men have generally taken it
for granted that he used the word in a sense
quite different from that in which it is com
monly received. Yet the difference is one of
form rather than of substance. Any man is
converted when a great effluence of the Spirit
of all Truth takes such possession of him as to
become dynamic in his hfe, coordinating his
scattered and hitherto aimless activities and
enduing his personahty with coherence and
force. This is as far as possible from saying
that he at once becomes a perfect instrument
in the Spirit's hands. Nothing is more char
acteristic of the Genius of Christianity than

NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION 309
His catholicity. He uses, with an ingenuity as
divine as His charity, all sorts and conditions
of imperfect means. He manages to make
the most absurdly inadequate provision of
loaves and fishes serve for a multitude, and
then deigns to coUect even the fragments
which the multitude He has just fed are
ready to contemn.
"I am aware," says Burke somewhere,
" that the age is not what we all wish, but
I am sure that the only means to check its
degeneracy is heartily to concur in whatever
is best in our time." It is an inspired utter
ance, instinct with the divine charity of the
Spirit. The method of development through
a resident and immanent Force which ever
endeavors to make the best out of that which
has the savor of health and life in it is the
way of the Kingdom's advance. There are not
two kinds of goodness. There are not two
sorts of truth. Wherever goodness appears
there the Spirit hves, and wherever truth
is uttered there the Spirit speaks.
Hence it follows that we have no cause to
fear the approach of honest criticism to any
of our sacred writings. Criticism of the gen
uine sort is a simple endeavor to get at the

310 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
thing that is, and to make it unmistakably
plain. Its method may be blundering and
fatuous, to be sure, and so far forth there is a
place and a call for the criticus criticorum ;
but the one ground that the critic of the
critics should forever eschew is the claim that
the Scriptures are sacrosanct and therefore
exempt from the critical approach. To claim
an inspiration for them that makes them a
magic means of communicating divine truth
is to put a slight upon the work of the Spirit
to Whom it was Christ's mission to introduce
men. All inspiration which reveals the truth
and enables a man to communicate it is of
one fundamental sort. There is no question
but that Holy Scripture brings truth into
such vital relation to the mind, heart, and
wUl as to minister to salvation. In a sense
that is unique the message of Scripture has
proven itself to be an integrating and co
ordinating force in human life. It has
made for oneness in thought and conduct.
Wherever its immediate influence has seemed
for the moment to be divisive and disinte
grating, it has been only by way of prepara
tion for a unity that should be real instead
of superficial and formal. In this positive

NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION 311
and constructive ability which it has shown
to reveal truth in terms of goodness hes the
evidence of its inspiration. The fruits of
the Spirit grow in the soil which Scripture
teacliing has cleansed, enriched, and planted.
Hence we argue that Scripture lives with the
Spirit's life ; the message of Scripture inteUi-
gently and generously construed is the Spirit's
message, and thus authoritative. On the other
hand, we forget one of Christ's greatest and
most significant words when we proceed to
deny a cognate and legitimately related inspi
ration to other and later writings. The divine
Presence was to be immediate and appreci
able in a new sense after Christ's reveahng
sojourn with men. He was to be known as
the Helper or Comforter — practically a new
name for deity. Is it to be supposed that
He would no longer use the written word as
a means of translating His message to the
heart? The notion that inspired writing
ceased with the composition of the Fourth
Gospel is altogether out of harmony with
that Gospel's teaching. It is as mechanical
and irreverent as the notion that the Fourth
Gospel's own claim to inspiration is immedi
ately dependent upon its exact date and

312 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
authorship. Inspiration is too subtle and per
vasive a matter to be confined to one century
or one group of men. All great writers who
have reached the hearts and beneficently in
fluenced the conduct of men have known in
some measure the self-same Power at work
in and through them which wrought by the
hands of Isaiah and Paul.
The reader may recall the admirable criti
cism of Dickens by Thackeray in which this
doctrine is implicit. It occurs at the close of
the lecture upon " Charity and Humor," and is
too long for quotation ; but I cuU a sentence
or two. " As for the charities of Mr. Dickens,
multiplied kindnesses which he has conferred
upon us all ; upon our children ; upon people
educated and uneducated; upon the myri
ads here and at home,1 who speak our com
mon tongue ; have not you, have not I, all
of us reason to be thankful to this kind
friend, who soothed and charmed so many
hours, brought pleasure and sweet laughter
to so many homes ; made such multitudes of
children happy; endowed us with such a
sweet store of gracious thoughts, fair fancies,
soft sympathies, hearty enjoyments ? There
1 This lecture was first delivered in America.

NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION 313
are creations of Mr. Dickens's which seem to
me to rank as personal benefits; figures so
delightful, that one feels happier and better
for knowing them, as one does for being
brought into the society of very good men
and women. The atmosphere in which these
people live is wholesome to breathe in ; you
feel that to be aUowed to speak to them is a
personal kindness ; you come away better for
your contact with them; your hands seem
cleaner from having tbe privilege of shaking
theirs. ... I may quarrel with Mr. Dickens's
art a thousand and a thousand times, I de
light and wonder at his genius ; I recognize
in it — I speak with awe and reverence — a
commission from that Divine Beneficence,
whose blessed task we know it wiU one day
be to wipe every tear from every eye. Thank-
fuUy I take my share of the feast of love and
kindness which this gentle, and generous,
and charitable soul has contributed to the
happiness of the world. I take and enjoy my
share, and say a benediction for the meal." 1
This is not to ascribe to " David Copper-
field " the spiritual significance of the Epistle
1 W. M. Thackeray, Works, Biographical Edition, vii.
724, 725.

314 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
to the Galatians. But it is to advance the
claim, and that upon the highest authority,
that in so far as the modern master of fiction
proved his possession of a special commission
to proclaim the worth of peace and good-wiU
to men, his inspiration is of the same funda
mental nature as that which gave iUumination
and authority to St. Paul.
Scarce any question has seemed more vital
to thoughtful men during the last four hun
dred years than the inquiry into the Ultimate
Source of Authority. It has not always been
clearly and succinctly stated. Yet it underlay
the Reformation ; and it has been implicit
in every great theological and ethical con
troversy since. The three quarters in which
this ultimate authority has been sought and
wherein it has been supposed by some to
reside have been the Church, the Bible, and
the Reason. Each has been made to claim
the right of ipse dixit by disciples who loved
it not wisely, but too weU, to gain any
exact notion of its scope and office. The
Romanist has accepted the authority of the
Church only to be driven to bolster it up
by the sorry expedient of papal infallibUity.
Too many a Protestant, departing in some

NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION 315
measure from the purpose of the first genera
tion of reformers, has looked to the Bible for
the last and authoritative word, forgetting
that the Bible is a literature of beginnings.
In so far as he has become a bibliolater he
has been threatened with confusion by every
new discovery in the realm of Biblical science.
No man more than he would have cause to
dread the reappearance of the lost Book of
Jasher, or the discovery of a genuine and
hitherto unknown saying of Christ.
The rationalist has been quite as narrow
and inadequate in his treatment of the Reason
as his fellows in their view of Church and
Book. Using it, and philosophizing about it,
as though it were nothing more than a faculty
of ratiocination, or a device for grinding out
syllogisms, he has sought in it an authority
practically as external as Church or Book
could be. With a fine contempt for the " su
perstitions " of his brethren, he has ground
his logic-chopping machine only to discover
its product to be so meagre and jejune that
men would not feed upon it. Under the
regime of the rationalist, as in Thomson's
" City of Dreadful Night," Faith is poisoned,
Hope starves, and Love suffers violence.

316 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
What shall we say to these things ? Is the
search for authority vain ? Is life to struggle
on without direction ? Is the deep longing of
the human heart for an infallible guide and
stay to be treated like the demon in the para
ble, turned out into desert places and left to
wander there until perchance it find evil com
pany and come back to make its old home
worse than ever? No, not while Church,
Bible, and Reason remain. For the truth is
that man's dependence upon these three au
thorities has been wrong only in so far as
it has been ill-proportioned and exclusive.
There is authority in the Church, inasmuch as
the Church comprehends the Christian expe
rience of nearly twenty centuries. There is
authority in the Bible, and very great author
ity. For the Bible, more than anything else,
fixes the Christian tradition ; in the most suc
cinct and intelligible form it hands down to
us from Christ the secret of turning truth
into goodness ; and it opens a veritable way
of salvation. Evangelist is stUl, and bids fair
always to be, the best guide to the Wicket
Gate, through which men on the way to the
Celestial City need to pass. The Bible is a
chief servant of Christianity ; but " the ser-

NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION 317
vant need not be perfect ; it suffices that she
be faithful." J
Again, every authoritative word of life to
a man must be interpreted by his Reason be
fore it can be translated into an act. But the
Reason is more and better than a device for
the making of syllogisms. Its conclusions in
the realm of faith and conduct are safe only
when feeling and wUl bring their sympathetic
assistance to the intellect. Let us grant that
they have no power to set a verdict arbitrarily
aside. They do have power, however, to order
a reexamination of the evidence with especial
reference to its completeness and adequacy.
The Ultimate Source of Authority is not an
objective thing. It has never been fixed, codi
fied, and finished. Christ's enunciation of the
Law of Love was but the statement of its
principle. He seemed to shrink from explicit
dicta upon specific acts. Some of His most
gracious and significant words were wrapped
up in cryptic forms, so that the living kernel
might seem the better worth having in con
trast with the husk which must be reft away.
Indeed, it might be claimed without extrava
gance and irreverence that He thought of His
1 Sabatier, Religions of Authority, p. 162.

318 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY
own human body as such a husk, which must
needs be removed before His permanent and
abiding Spirit could have scope.
In the Spirit of unity and power, which
coordinates and integrates all being into a
universe, the ultimate Source of Authority is
to be sought. Not until this Spirit is found
out unto perfection can the Source of Author
ity be comprehended in its fullness. But just
because of this same Spirit's immanence, au
thority fitted to, and adequate for, the guidance
of life is always at hand. It is imphcit in the
experience of men. The conscience of Chris
tendom, educated by the Bible, by the expe
rience of the Church, by the partial light
issuing from the ethnic faiths and applied
to specific cases of conduct by the human
Reason acting with a f uU consciousness of its
limitations, cannot go far wrong. If it be true
to itself, it will not miss the mark.
But this thing is to be noted. The author
ity exercised by the conscience of Christen
dom is never a complete and fixed quantity.
Nor is it ever based merely upon the author
ity of the past. It is future-regarding. It
considers precedent, but it does not regard
precedent as its master. It counts upon an

NEW HARMONIES OF REVELATION 319
increasing revelation. It welcomes new expe
rience and the new duties which it wUl bring.
Its animating principle is the Golden Rule.
Its norm is the law of an endless life. Its
apphcation to specific conduct is to be rever
ently ordered by that chief practical charisma
of the Spirit known as Common Sense.

APPENDIX
SYNOPSIS OF ARGUMENT
Lsr this brief statement of the Dynamic of Chris
tianity I have asked my readers to proceed upon
the principle that the influence of Christ in the
world is a phenomenon worth accounting for ; that
theology, viewed as the study and explanation of
Christian experience, makes a legitimate demand
upon the attention of thinking men ; and that a total
conception of the universe which may minister to
that coherence of life and thought which we call
peace is to be ardently desired. (Cf. Sabatier,
Eeligions of Authority, pp. 377, 378.)
With a view to the discovery of the underlying
principle which has given to Christianity its tre
mendous vitality and its singular applicability to
an ever-changing environment, I first developed
the premiss that the Science of Christian Expe
rience must take impartial account of facts, not
merely with willingness, but with the same avidity
which marks other sciences. (Chapter I., Intro
duction.) It must keep a multitude of its conclu
sions open. It must expect and welcome change
and development.
This introduction was followed by a chapter de
signed to characterize the attitude of last century

322 APPENDIX
— especially that portion of it which has elapsed
since the promulgation of the Doctrine of Devel
opment — toward the subject-matter of our dis
cussion. At its close some special reasons were
cited to justify a confident and expectant attitude
on the part of the theologian of to-day. (Chap
ter II., The Zeitgeist.) I then proceeded to note the
material with which our inquiry would be forced
to deal. Three chapters were given to a consider
ation of the present status of thought among the
rank and file of intelligent people upon the Science
of Religious Experience, or Theology (Chapter
III., The Present State of Theological Thought
among the People), upon religion as life's guide
and inspiration (Chapter IV., The Religion of the
People), and upon the relations of men to one
another in society (Chapter V., The Social Unrest).
The result of this inquiry served to emphasize the
almost paralyzing incoherence of popular thought
upon these great matters which at the same time
absolutely refuse to be banished from men's minds.
They represent some of life's most immediate and
insistent interests. They are restive under the ipse
dixit of external authority ; yet the problems which
they present have a singular affinity for Chris
tianity. Wisely or unwisely, men are always feel
ing that there is balm in Christianity's Gilead for
their religious and social wounds if only they could
get it applied. As Professor Peabody has put it,
"This is one of the most surprising traits of the
Gospel. It seems to each age to have been written

APPENDIX 323
for the sake of the special problems which at the
moment appear most pressing." (Jesus Christ and
the Social Question, p. 74.)
It seemed worth while, therefore, to look into the
teachings of Christ for some central principle vital
enough to be the resident force in a permanent and
ever-developing influence upon life. The hypothe
sis upon which the remainder of the discussion has
proceeded is that this principle is to be found in
Christ's doctrine — sometimes neglected almost to
the point of oblivion, and sometimes maltreated
into shapes of wild superstition — of the Spirit.
(Chapter VI., The Thesis.) In the chapters fol
lowing, this thesis was tested by the Christian
tradition as comprised in the Bible (Chapter VII.,
The Witness of Scripture), by the corporate expe
rience of the Church (Chapter VIII., The Witness
of the Christian Church), and by the testimony of
individuals concerning the moving springs of their
own religious or irreligious lives (Chapter IX.,
The Witness of Individual Experience). Our in
vestigation appeared to go far to validate the claim
that in this doctrine of the Spirit as the immanent
or resident Force in the universe, the Ground of
phenomena, physical and spiritual, the Revealer of
truth in every department of experience, we have a
vital and coordinating principle, which puts the
phenomena of the religious life and of physical
science into natural and harmonious relation.
The concluding chapters were devoted to a con
sideration of some changes in popular definition

324 APPENDIX
and some new harmonies of revelation which must
be expected and ought to be welcomed as the re
sult of this closer application of the Genius of
Christianity to our thinking and doing. Chapter
X. set forth the new freedom which this Dynamic
of Christianity confers upon faith. This principle
is one adapted to deliver men from fear and to
clothe them with peace. It is a doctrine of uni
versal religious application. Its truth not only
makes appeal to the imagination, but is capable of
apprehension by the reason and of translation into
terms of conduct (pp. 221-233). More specifi
cally : —
(1) It makes men at home in the present (pp.
233-237). (2) It gives wholesome elasticity to their insti
tutions, affording adequate room for growth in
creeds, worship, sacraments, and polity (pp. 237-
246). (3) It exalts Reason into its true place as a
chief agent of Revelation (pp. 246-251).
(4) It enables us to welcome the results of his
torical and philosophical criticism (pp. 251-253).
(5) It makes clear the real religious status of
every man who loves the truth and tries to do it
(pp. 253, 254).
Chapter XL, entitled The New Meaning of Some
Old Words, developed the thesis that all words
are sacred in proportion as they have come to con
note genuine experience. In view of the principles
already established, all of Religion's definitions

APPENDIX 325
must be framed and its words used in expectation
of an increase in content. Then followed the appli
cation of this principle to such terms as God (p.
260), the Trinity (p. 263), Sin (p. 267), Religion
(p. 270), Salvation (p. 272), Atonement (p. 274),
the Church (p. 277), the Bible and Inspiration
(p. 279), and a brief discussion of the permanent
significance of such a doctrine as that of the Vir
gin Birth (p. 284).
The concluding Chapter XII., on the New Har
monies of Revelation, emphasized the fact that the
source and ground of all knowledge is One, and
that every increase in knowledge is a revelation ;
discovery and revelation being but different terms
for different aspects of the same experience (pp.
294-296) ; so with " natural " and " revealed " reli
gion (p. 296) ; so also with natural and supernat
ural (pp. 296, 297), and the place of miracle (pp.
298-300). There is no room in the universe for
any fundamental contradiction of experience, and
everywhere the physical is but an expression of
the spiritual (pp. 300-305). (Cf. the significance
of " natural goodness," pp. 305-309.) The Ulti
mate Source of Authority is not an objective thing,
fixed, codified, and finished ; but really existent in
the Spirit of Unity and Power (pp. 314-319).
I am as far as possible from claiming that this
principle is new, or even that its enunciation is
original; but however old the truth, its restate
ment will never be hackneyed or out of date as
long as men insist upon its practical neglect.

326 APPENDIX
Objection will be made that the endeavor thus
to coordinate our thinking upon " religion " and
" science " looks in the direction of pantheism ;
but it has already been noted that while pantheism
as commonly understood practically denies person
ality, the doctrine of a Resident and Executive
Spiritual Power makes personality fundamental.
Some will say that the positions taken here are
destructive of much that has been counted vital
and distinctive in Christianity. To which the only
answer that need be made is that every item of
genuine Christian experience is held to be signifi
cant and therefore sacred ; that no great doctrine
which has moulded life is valueless or without
vital meaning, and that such rearrangement of
ranks as reinforcements necessitate is in reality a
constructive process, even though the old alignment
suffer. If our discussion signify anything, it is that
there is room in the Christian conception of the
universe and man's place in it for all truth ; that
the old distinction between sacred and secular
truth has no foundation ; that revelation and dis
covery are but different aspects of the self-mani
festation of one efficient and self-consistent Power ;
and that all life lived in the light and use of truth
is sacramental.

INDEX

INDEX

Abraham, 87.
Achilles, congenial to our ex
perience, 196.
Agitator, the, one conscious of
"the difference," 119; and
the reformer, 119.
Agnostic, the, his fight against
dogma, 125, 126.
Ahriman, 50.
Allen, A. V. 6., his Continuity
of Christian Thought quoted,
32, 33, 39; cited, 301; his
Christian Institutions cited,
173 ; quoted, 175.
Alline, Henry, the case of the
conversion of, 200, 212.
Alsace, peasants slain in, 100.
America, new era of theological
development in, 11-15; dis
covery of, 83 ; provides op
portunity for the poor man,
103.
Amos, the prophet, voiced the
social problem, 101.
Amusements, 60.
Anabaptists as a fruit of the
Reformation, 85.
Anarchist, his notion of author
ity, 85.
Anarchy, sporadic, one of the
prices we pay for epidemic
freedom, 182.
Anthropology, 19.
Anthropomorphic conception of
the deity, 132.
Apocrypha, the, has few refer
ences to the Spirit, 149.
Apostles' Creed, clause relating

to the resurrection of the
body, 239, 240 ; clause " con
ceived by the Holy Ghost,"
285.
Apostolic succession, 173.
Argument from design, its treat
ment by evolution, 41, 42.
Aristocrat, his notion of author
ity, 86.
Aristodemus confuted by Soc
rates, 1.
Arminian liturgy of the Church
of England, 239.
Arnold, Matthew, cited on con
duct, 72 ; quoted, 235, 253.
Article IX. of the XXXIX. Ar
ticles, 59.
Aryan religions, elements of, in
Christianity, 90.
Asceticism, 169, 302.
Ashley, Lord. See Shaftesbury,
Lord.
Assertion, dogmatism of, 20.
Astronomy, 19.
" Atherton," in Hows with the
Mystics, quoted, 176.
Atonement, the, 14, ^65 ; larger
meaning of, 274^-277.
Augustine, his derivation of
word religion, 271.
Authority, its place in the
Church, 82, 83 ; its place in
the Reformation, 83, 84, 101 ;
change passing upon the no
tion of, 85, 86; effect of
French Revolution on govern
mental, 85, 101 ; ultimate
source of, 286, 314-319.

330

INDEX

Autun, besieged by the Ba-
gauds, 96.
Averroes, mentioned, 183.
Bacon, Francis, mentioned, 127.
Bacracz, Cardinal, and the Ku-
rucks' uprising, 98.
Bagauds, uprising of, 96.
Baptism for service, 209.
Baptists, 244.
Baur, F. C, his book sealed to
many English readers, 11.
Berkeley, Bishop, 304.
Bible, the divine and human
element in, 52, 53 ; infallibil
ity of, 53, 279-282 ; traditions
of, questioned, 88, 284; au
thority in the, 316. See Scrip
tures.
Biblical criticism, Bushnell
and, 14 ; a cause of doubt in
religion, 87.
" Big Man " of the Fuegians,
132, 134.
Bildad, 27.
Birrell, Augustine, his essays,
186; cited, 189.
Black death, the, 176, 177.
Bludso, Jim, 306.
Book, the, made the head of a
system, 83.
Bosanquet, Mrs. Bernard, The
Standard of Life cited, 104,
111.
Bossuet, questions Leibnitz on
the variableness of the Pro
testant churches, 33.
Boswell, James, on the Presby
terians, 47 ; his life of John
son quoted, 47.
Brain, secretes thought as the
liver secretes bile, 29.
Bridgewater Treatises, 42.
Brierly, J., quoted, 188.
Brown, T. E., quoted, 301.
Browning, Robert, his comment
on the prologue of Genesis,
24 ; his The Ring and the Book

quoted, 24, 71 ; and Goethe,
compared, 24, 25.
Bundschuh insurrection, 98.
Bunyan, John, mystic, 178 ;
mentioned, 190; epic quality
of his Grace Abounding, 196.
Burgou, mentioned, 238.
Burke, Edmund, quoted on the
age, 309.
Bushnell, Horace, his place in
the new era of theological
development, 13-15 ; his Life
by T. T. Munger quoted, 14,
15; quoted, 67.
Butler, Samuel, mentioned, 42.
Buxton, Fowell, mentioned, 115.
Byron, Lord, 235.
Cade, Jack, his insurrection,
97.
Calvin, 93, 280,
Calvinism, 48 ; its influence
on American theological
thought, 11, 12 ; rationalism
of, 246.
Calvinistic articles of the Church
of England, 239.
Carlyle, Thomas, Sartor Resar-
tus quoted, 4 ; and Kant, 9 ;
his conversion, 308.
Carton, Sydney, 305.
Catholicism, real issue between
Montanism and, 175, 176.
Cause, a transcendent, man a
believer in, 132.
Cause - and - effect habit of
thought, 15,
Causes, man a natural believer
in resident, 131, 132.
Chaucer, mentioned, 102.
ChUd labor, reformation of, in
the last century, 111.
Chinese, superstition of the, 132.
Christ Jesus, the partial nature
of His work, 142; His life was
future-regarding, 142, 144 ;
expediency of His departure,
144, 145, 225 ; His references

INDEX

331

to the Holy Spirit, 145,229;
His difficulty in interpreting
the Word to His followers,
152 ; development theory
found in His teachings, 217 ;
taught the presence of the
Spirit, 217, 232 ; saving power
of, 230; His idea of conversion,
231 ; atonement through, 265 ;
infancy and virgin birth of,
284.
Christian, the modern, is a dual
ist in philosophy, 50 ; finds
antinomy between nature
and the supernatural, 50-52 ;
his attitude in regard to the
Bible, 52; his attempt to
frame a doctrine of God, 53 ff.;
of the Kingdom of God, 56-
62 ; difficulties presented to
him in the church, 56-62.
Christian Endeavor, Society of,
44.
Christian growth, 14.
Christian Scientist, 302.
Christianity, is a living organ
ism, 21 ; Romanes on, 37, 38 ;
practical, of the time, 42 ;
modern organization under,
43-45 ; its struggle with reli
gious observance, 76; elements
of Aryan and Semitic religions
in, 90; and ethnic religions,
91, 92; Platonism and, 169;
three degrees in, 180 ; pro
mised freedom and peace,
221 ; interdependence of faith
and good works in, 226.
Church, the Christian, full of
youthful vigor, 42; various
organizations under, in the last
century, 43-45 ; lack of sys
tem in theological thinking
among members, 50 ; the dis
tinctions of sects in, 56-58 ;
the need of union in, 58 ; and
the world, 58-62; system-
building in, 82, 83 ; the place

given to authority, 82 ; as an
article of vertu, 123 ; slow to
apprehend the doctrine of the
Holy Spirit, 145, 146, 151 ;
Holy Spirit works throughithe,
160 ; the witness of the, 168-
192; asceticism and enthusi
asm in, 169; the prophet's
place in, 169, 170 ; and reve
lation, 172, 174 ; and indi
vidual rights, 173 ; is under
the influence of a resident
Power, 192 ; its organizations,
how affected by the larger
doctrine of the Spirit, 244,
245, 278.
Church of England, its liturgy
and creed, 238 ; and freedom
of thought, 288.
Church of Rome, Macaulay on,
1, 18 ; built on system, 82,
171.
Church's Sense of Responsibil
ity, article upon, cited, 112 n.
Cicero, his idea of religion, 270.
Clairvoyant, the, 131.
Clifford, W. X., theologian and
scientist, 17.
Cobbe, Frances Power, quoted,
199 n.
Cobbler's banner, the, 98.
Colenso, Bishop, his Higher Crit
icism of the Bible, 3; his book
disapproved of by Lord
Shaftesbury, 8.
Coleridge, S. T., his influence on
theological thought, 4, 9 ;
quoted, 301.
Colossians, Epistle to, cited,
272.
Common sense, 319.
Comte, Auguste, mentioned, 19,
23, 93.
Conduct, the office of religion to
regulate, 73 ; how affected by
religious doubt, 73 ; ita rela
tion to faith, 74, 75, 78, 92 ;
its degeneration into observ-

332

INDEX

ance, 74 ; regulation must
come from within, 78 ; refer
ence to underlying doctrine,
80. '
Congregationalist and Christian
World cited, 112 n.
Congregationalists, 244.
Conolly, John, banished the
strait waistcoat, 114.
Conscience, its influence on the
social problem, 101.
Conscience of Christendom, arti
cle upon cited, 112 n.
Consecration of Christian life,
209.
Conservation of energy, the law
of, is an expression in phy
sical terms of the omnipre
sence of God, 299.
Constitutions, periodic amend
ment of, 168, 169.
Continuity, its principle becom
ing to Theism, 40.
Continuity of nature, 126.
Conversion, religious, 60, 308 ;
scientific attempts to investi
gate it, 193, 200, 207; is a nor
mal experience, 198; excite
ment of, 199 ; reality of, 199 ;
typical instances of, 200 ff.,
214 ; immanent Power recog
nized in, 208, 215 ; character
of the experience, 212, 213 ;
accords with doctrine of evolu
tion, 214.
Conviction of sin, 265, 268, 270.
Copperfield, David, 313.
Corinthians, 1st Epistle to the,
cited, 164 n.
Corn laws in England, 103.
Cosmic Force, 134 ; evolutionary
theory based on the existence
of a, 140.
Counter - Reformation, 181 ;
wrought two results, 183.
Crauford, A. H., his Enigmas
of the Spiritual Life cited,
303.

Creation, Assyrian tradition of,
91.
Creed of the Church of England,
239.
Creeds, 239-243 ; elasticity of,
239; those that express ex
perience will abide, 244, 274.
Criminal, the, work done in the
last century for, 114.
Crofton, Sir Walter, mentioned,
116.
Cure of souls, 197.
Custom finds worshipers among
theologians, 34.
Dale, R. W., case of the friend
of, 206, 214.
Darwin, Charles, his Origin qf
Species and Descent qf Man
mentioned, 135.
Darwin, Erasmus, 17.
Dawkins, Boyd, letter of J. R.
Green to, 288.
Dead hand, the impotence of
the, 124.
Death penalty, change of senti
ment in regard to, 116.
Deed, the, its place in the
thought of the nineteenth
century, 23, 24 ; emphasized
by the church, 45.
Definitions mark stages in a pro
cess of development, 259.
Deism, 41, 53 ; rationalism of,
246.
Deluge, Assyrian tradition of,
91.
Dependent Classes, Upon the
Lot of the, article cited, 112 n.;
work of the nineteenth cen
tury for, 114.
Destiny, fulfillment of, 264,
265.
Development, Doctrine of, its
apostles' attitude toward the
theologians, 34 ; feature of
purposef ulness in, 139. See
also Evolution, Doctrine of.

INDEX

333

Devil, theory that the earth be
longs to the, 59.
Dickens, Charles, Thackeray on,
312.
Divine Spirit. See Holy Spirit,
Spirit.
Dobson, Austin, his Prayer of
the Swine to Circe quoted, 68.
Doctrine, relation of conduct to,
80 ; built on system, 82.
Dogma, theology bound by, 31 ;
attacked by the agnostic, 126 ;
as a servant, 126.
Dorner, his definition of person
ality, 264.
Dosza, Transylvanian leader,
98.
Doubt, religious, its effect upon
conduct, 73; factitious, 81;
Biblical criticism a cause of,
87-90 ; study of comparative
religion a cause of, 90 ; mis
apprehension of personality
closely related to, 93.
Dualistic philosophy, 50 ff., 122.
Dunant, J. H, Red Cross Move
ment due to experiences of,
117.
Drummond, Henry, 191; source
of his popularity, 293.
Dutch, uprising of the, 99 ; the
number slain, 100.
Dyke, Henry van, his term
" cureless melancholy of dis
illusion," 68.
Eagle compared with Christian
freedom, 222.
Ecce Homo, disapproval of, by
Lord Shaftesbury, 8.
Eckhart, 178, 183.
Eden, Sir Frederick, his State of
the Poor cited, 102, 110 ; men
tioned, 113.
Edershelm, his Life and Times
of Jesus the Messiah cited, 149.
Edwards, Jonathan, mentioned,
12.

Eliphaz, 27.
Empiric, the, exalted in last two
generations, 86.
England, new era of theological
development in, 9-11 ; opposi
tion to German thought, 10.
Enthusiasm in the Christian
Church, 169.
Ephesians, Epistle to the, cited,
165, 272.
Episcopalians, 244.
Erasmus quoted on the rise of
the Dutch, 99.
Erskine, Thomas, influence of,
in theological thought, 4;
his Kingdom of Christ men
tioned, 4.
Ethnic religions, importance at
tached to, 260.
Ethnic trinities, 91.
Evangelical, not bound by tradi
tion, 2.
Evangelical preaching, 78, 79.
Evangelical Revival, its force
spent, 9.
Everett, C. C, his Immortality
and other Essays cited, 208,
219.
Evil, problem of, 267 ; present
in all ages, 27.
Evolution, Spencerian definition
of, cited, 216.
Evolution, Doctrine of, 14;
growth of its acceptance
through its theological signi
ficance, 17 ; its first effect on
theological systems, 28-30,
135; attitude of Protestant
theologians toward, 32; its
method an aid to theology,
40-42; and doctrine of final
causes, 41, 136 ; substantiates
theology, 41; gives us a larger
teleology, 42, 140; demands a
unification of knowledge, 134;
its method is universal, 135 ;
its attitude toward the future,
137 ; holds process of develop-

334

INDEX

ment to be purposeful, 139;
reasonableness of, 139, 140 ;
based on the existence of a
cosmic force, 140 ; provides us
with a principle essentially
religious, 140; and religious
conversion, 214; found in
Christ's teachings, 217.
Exodus, Book of, cited, 147.
Experience, 258, 298 ; God as
an, 262, 263 ; the power of the
Church lay in spiritual, 184,
185.
Ezekiel, vision of, 240, 271.
Fairbairn, A. M., his Christ in
the Centuries cited, 77 ; his Re
ligion in History and Modern
Life, and Influence of the Intel
lectual Movement, cited, 104;
his The Place of Christ in
Modern Theology cited, 26, 196;
quoted, 224 ; his use of word
Socinian, 259.
Faith, the new freedom of, 221-
254 ; interdependence of good
works and, 226 ; a saving, 229.
Faith, Christian, its relation to
conduct, 74, 75, 78, 92; not
content with observance, 74.
Fall, the, 14.
Fanaticism, how a fruit of the
Reformation, 84, 85.
Father of the Gods, 134.
Fathers, Pilgrim, ultra-Calvin
ism of, 11.
Faust, his translation of St.
John's Gospel, 22.
Fenelon, 178.
Fiction, theological topics in re
cent, 62-67 ; use of, in theo
logical discussion, 63.
Final causes, doctrine of, treat
ment of, by evolution, 41.
First cause, 133.
Fisher, G. P., address of, cited
40 ; his History of the Chris
tian Church, 234.

Fiske, John, 27; a theologian
as well as scientist, 18, 35 ;
his Cosmic Philosophy men
tioned, 18.
Flaccus, letter to, 179.
Flagellants, 177.
Force is the presence of God,
229.
Force, ultimate, 28.
Formality in religion, 74, 75.
Fox, George, mysticism of, 178.
Franconia, peasants slain in, 99.
Frederic, Harold, his Theron
Ware cited, 6.
Freedom, promised by Christian
ity, 221 ; as taught by the
Apostle Paul, 223, 224.
French constitution, the, as pe
riodical literature, 168.
French Revolution, effect of, on
governmental authority, 85 ;
the poor found a voice with
the, 100, 101.
Fritz, Joss, 98.
Froissart, as chronicler of the
Jacquerie, 97.
Froude, Hurrell, his work, 190.
Froude, J. A., 9.
Future, the place given it by
evolution, 137, 138.
Genesis, Book of, 53 ; Brown
ing's comment on the prologue
of, 24.
German influence on theological
thought, 3, 4, 9, 11.
Germany, traits in, that are born
of the Reformation, 182, 183.
Gillen. See Spencer and Gil-
len.
Gnostic, the, upheld continuity
of revelation, 174.
God, as the Ultimate Cause, 134 ;
Spirit of, 147, 229; Holy Spirit
an expression of His imma
nence, 165, 227-229; as an ex
perience, 181, 262 ; as a person,
229, 231, 300 ; attempt to de-

INDEX

335

fine, 260-264 ; revelation of,
as Spirit, 266.
Godet, F., his Oospel qf John
cited, 159.
Goethe, mentioned, 135 ; his
Faust quoted, 22, 23, 25 ; his
forecast of the philosophical
temper of the nineteenth cen
tury, 23, 24, 135 ; and Brown
ing compared, 24, 25.
Good works, interdependence of
faith and, 226.
Goodness, all, springs from one
source, 301.
Gore, Bishop, 35.
Gosman, Alexander, address of,
cited, 40 n.
Governments, experience strug
gle between system and spirit,
168.
Graham, Sir James, 255.
Gravitation, law of, 50 ; is God's
revelation of His presence to
a stone, 229.
Gray, Bishop, his criticism of
Colenso, 8.
Green, John Richard, his Short
History of the English People
cited, 102 ; letter to Boyd
Dawkins, 288.
Greene, G. A., quoted, 68.
Guyon, Madame, 178.
Gwatkin cited, 170.
Hamilton, William, quoted, 36.
Hardy, Thomas, more preacher
than novelist, 63, 64 ; his Tess
ofthe D'UrbervUles cited, 64 ;
Jude the Obscure cited, 64 ; his
treatment of fate and passion,
64, 65 ; his God, 65.
Harte, Bret, 306.
Hastings, James, his Dictionary
of the Bible cited, 146, 148,
165, 170.
Hay, John, his Jim Bludso, 306.
Headlam, cited, 161, 162.
Hebrew Scriptures, all energy

referred to a divine source in,
148.
Hegel, 156 ; influence of, in new
era of theological thought, 10 ;
anecdote of Comte and, 10;
reception of his philosophy in
England and Germany, 10, 11 ;
and Strauss, 10, 11 ; his philo
sophy of the Trinity, 197.
Hegelianism has lost its damning
power, 156.
Henley, W. E., quoted, 69.
Historic method adopted in the
ology, 40.
History, the Spirit in, 159 n.
Hodder, Edwin, his Life and
Work of the Earl of Shaftes
bury quoted, 8, 9.
Holy Ghost, the modern sin
against the, 250.
Holy Spirit, Christ's references
to, 145 ; His work in the world,
145, 157-159, 166; anticipa
tion of, in the Old Testament,
146-151 ; meaning and use of
the Hebrew word, 146, 147;
lack of mention of, in the
Apocrypha, 149 ; presentation
of, in the New Testament,
151 - 165 ; character of His
influence and guidance, 153-
159 ; works through men, 1 60 ;
always an expression of divine
immanence, 165, 227-229 ;
personality of, 231. See Spirit.
Holy Spirit, doctrine of the, 141,
145 ; Christian Church slow to
apprehend, 145, 146, 151 ; sur
vival of, among the Alexan
drian Jews, 150; Johannine
treatment of, 155, 156-159,
161 ; Pauline, 161 ; as the doc
trine of God's immanence,
227 ff. See Spirit, the larger
doctrine of the.
Homer, the hidings of his power
196.
Homily, weakness of, 79, 80.

336

INDEX

Hosea, Book of, cited, 75.
Human spirit, the Biad and the
Odyssey of the, 196, 198.
Huxley, T. H, theologian and
scientist, 17 ; mentioned, 238,
304.
Idea of Divinity, 28.
Iliad, the, of the human spirit,
196, 198.
Imprisonment for debt, abolition
of, 115.
Incarnation, doctrine of the, 91,
284r-286.
Independents occupied with doc
trinal controversy, 4.
" Index Expurgatorius," 183.
Individual, the life of the,
guarded by modern society,
116, 117; advance of, during
the last century, 118; rights
of, upheld by the Montanist,
173; in religious conversion,
207, 208.
Individual experience, witness
of, 193-220.
Infancy, prolongation of, impor
tance of, in evolution of man,
137, 138.
Inge, his Christian Mysticism
cited, 27, 169, 181, 184, 262 ;
quoted, 52.
Inquisition, the, 183, 184.
Insane, the, work done in the
last century for, 114.
Inspiration, doctrine of, 84,
279 ff.
Inspiration of the Bible, 279-
311.
Institutionalism, conflict be
tween science and, 15.
Intuition, 179.
Isaiah-prophecies, 53 ; quoted,
75 ; authorship, 88.
Jacob, 146 ; wrestling with the
angel, 215.
Jacquerie, outbreak of the, 97.

James, WUUam, his Varieties of
Religious Experience, 194 f. ;
case cited by, 200 ; on prayer,
207; his review of Spencer's
Autobiography, 216.
Jefferson, C. E., address cited,
44 n.
Jesuits, rise of the, 183.
Job, Book of, cited, 147.
Johannine treatment of the doc
trine of the Holy Spirit, 155,
156-159; compared with the
Pauline, 161.
John, Gospel of, cited, 155;
quoted, 180.
Johnson, Samuel, on the Pres
byterians, 47.
Johnson's Universal Encyclo
pedia cited, 50.
Jonah, Book of, 53.
Jonah, experience of, 88, 89.
Joss Fritz, 98.
Jowett, Benjamin, his theology
disapproved of by Lord
Shaftesbury, 8.
Judaism, formalism and real
religion in, 74r-76 ; Sabbath
of, 76 ; laws of, 76.
Jude the Obscure, theological as
pect of, 64.
Kant, Immanuel, 9, 17, 103, 135.
Keats, John, quoted, 253.
Keble, John, mentioned, 187.
Kidd, Benjamin, mentioned, 138.
Kim, Kipling's, 106.
Knowledge, said to have three
degrees, 179.
Kurucks of Hungary, uprising
of, 98.
Labor organization, 104: pro
gress of, in the last century,
112.
Laborer's family in New Eng
land, story of, 112.
Langland, WUliam, his Piers
Ploughman cited, 102.

INDEX

337

Last Athenian, theological as
pect of, 63.
Law, 28 ; of the scribes and of
Christ, 76, 77.
Laws, natural, supposed to be
opposed to divine, 50 ff.
Lecky, W. E. H, quoted, 67,
234.
Lectures, courses founded on
antiquated views, 124.
Leibnitz, on the eternally vari
able church, 33.
Leon, Louis de, 184.
Lewes, Mrs., her translation of
Strauss's " Leben Jesu," 30.
Life Saving Service, 117.
Logos, 152.
Lorraine, Duke of, mentioned,
100.
Lowell, J. R., quoted on Ste
phen's English Thought in the
Eighteenth Century, 290.
Luther, Martin, mentioned, 99,
100, 184, 280; his interpre
tation of the Epistle to the
Romans, 181.
Lying Prophets, theological as
pect of, 65 ; quoted, 65, 66.
Macaulay, T. B., his essay on
Von Ranke's History qf the
Popes, 1, 4 ; quoted, 2 ; on
theology not a progressive
science, 1, 2, 6, 15, 18.
Maconochie, Alexander, men
tioned, 116.
Malachi, Book of, cited, 75.
Man, superstition of, 18, 133 ;
the one unsatisfied creature,
118 ; a natural beUever in
resident causes, 132 ; beUeves
in a transcendent Cause, 132.
Marconi instrument mentioned,
212.
Martineau, James, quoted, 237,
304.
Materialism, 302.
Matheson, George, his Spirit

ual Development of St. Paul,
164.
Maurice, F. D., his influence in
new era of thought, 4.
Maurice, the elder, 3.
Maximian, Emperor, 96.
Mazzini, G, quoted, 277.
McGiffert, A. C, his Apostolic
Age cited, 162.
Medicine, 19.
Medium, so-caUed spirit, 131.
Method, 28.
Methodist preaching, mentioned,
Mill, James, his misrepresenta
tion of reUgion, 3.
Miracle, 14, 28, 52, 283, 298.
Missionary work, growth of, in
the last century, 44 ; the mis
sionary a sign of society's
solidarity, 1 18.
Missions, Catholic, speak of a
Power resident among men,
191.
Modern Christian thought. See
Christian, the modern.
Molinos, 178.
Montanist, the, 172, 173; real
issue between the Catholic
and, 176.
Montanus, 175.
Moody, D. L., mentioned, 191.
More, Sir Thomas, 1.
Morley, John, his Life of W.
E. Gladstone cited, 255.
Moses, mentioned, 146, 166;
voiced the social problem to
Pharaoh, 101.
Mysticism, Christian, 75 ; the
office of, 176 ; lack of, in Bri
tain, 176, 177 ; grotesqueness
of, exaggerated, 178 ; sense of
immediateness in, 181 ; ' ' ex
perience of God " in, 181.
Nash, H. S., his Genesis of the
Social Conscience quoted,
109.

338

INDEX

Natural, the, and the supernat
ural, 50-52, 292, 297.
Natural goodness, 305.
Natural selection, growth of
its acceptance through its
theological significance, 17 ;
seemed to demand a selfish
Ufe, 136 ; to make life a thing
of the present, 136.
Nature, 14; seeming antinomy
between tiie supernatural and,
51 ; force manifested in, is
rational, 127 ; investigator
in, who is inspired by faith,
127._
Negation, dogmatism of, 20.
New meaning of some old words,
255-287.
Newman, Cardinal, 39, 186,
187 ; quoted, 63, 233 ; his
vogue, 189 f.
Newton, Sir Isaac, spiritual
significance of his discovery,
295.
Nicene theology criticised, 224.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 39.
Nonconformist, the, an anti
quarian, 3.
Non-resident causes, aversion to
the belief in, 131.
Novel, the theologian as lay fig
ure in the, 6 ; the theological,
considered, 62-67.
Numbers, Book of, cited, 147.
Observance, and conduct, 74,
76 ; faith not content with,
74.
Odysseus congenial to our ex
perience, 196.
Odyssey, the, of the human
spirit, 196, 198, 206.
CEdipus quoted, 36.
Old Testament, anticipation of
the Holy Spirit in, 146-151.
Opportunist, exalted in the last
two generations, 86.
Ordo ordinatus, 13.

Ormuzd, 50.
Oxford Movement, the so-called,
188-191.
Paley, WilUam, argument from
design, 1 ; treatment which
his argument received from
evolution, 41 ; his maxim,
255.
Pantheism, 53, 300.
irapt£fcA.])Tor, 145.
Parliamentary Reform, 103.
Paul, Apostle, 314 ; quoted, 63 ;
his treatment of the doctrine
of the Holy Spirit, 161-165 ;
on prophets, 169 f . ; his doc
trine of freedom, 223 ; and
Apollos, 249.
Peabody, F. G., his Jesus Christ
and the Social Question
quoted, 107.
Peace, promised by Christianity,
221 ; given through truth, 222,
253.
Peasants, early uprisings of, 96-
99; the numbers slain, 99,
100.
Peasants' Revolt of 1524, the
slain in, 100.
Pedagogy the toy of an empiri
cal psychology, 85.
Peel, Sir Robert, legislation of,
111.
Penal codes, revision of, 117.
Pentecost, 162.
Persecution, 183.
Person, God as a, 229, 231.
Personality, worth of, set aside
for mechanical contrivance,
93 ; of the Holy Spirit, 231.
Peter, Apostle, cited, 164.
Pharaoh, mentioned, 101, 146.
Philo, 150, 157.
PhUosophical systems must con
tinue to be partial, 93, 130.
Philosophies, all pass through
struggle between system and
spirit, 168.

INDEX

339

PhUpotts, Eden, the theological
aspect of his novels, 65 ; his
Lying Prophets quoted, 65,
66.
Physical, the, and the spiritual,
301-305.
Platonism, paraUel between his
tory of Christianity and his
tory of, 169.
Plimsoll, Samuel, legislation
advocated by, 117.
Plotinus, mentioned, 27, 169 ;
cited, 179.
Poe, E. A., his Pit and Pendu
lum mentioned, 19.
Poetry, recent, theological topics
in, 67-71 ; expression of un
rest in, 68-70, 233 ; longing
for the future in religious, 234.
Poor, the, pathos of their lot,
96 ; early uprisings of, 96-99 ;
found a voice with the French
Revolution, 100-103 ; Moses
and Amos on, 101 ; in the
time of Chaucer, 102.
Poor man, the, his political
rights are won, 104 ; is search
ing for economic privUeges,
104; the last century gener
ous to, 108-114 ; his chance
of livelihood considered, 110-
114.
" Poor Man's Chance of Liveli
hood, Upon the," article cited,
112 n.
Pope, the head of a system, 83.
Porter, F. C, cited, 149.
Power, its place in the thought
of the nineteenth century, 23,
24 ; exists, 45 ; search for some
other than the influence of
Jesus Christ, 61 ; as a new
object of allegiance, 94 ; must
be factor in the answer to the
social question, 120 ; evolu
tionary theory based on the
existence of a, 140 ; attributes
of, 140 ; is personal, 140, 218 ;

reUgious revivals speak of a,
191 ; the Christian Church is
under the influence of, 192 ;
recognized in phenomena of
conversion, 208 f., 215; which
moves in evolution, is identi
cal with that which makes for
righteousness in man, 218.
Preaching, ethical, compared
with spiritual, 78-80 ; revival
of, in the nineteenth century,
79, 80 ; weakness of, 79, 80.
Presbyterians, 244 ; occupied
with doctrinal controversy, 4.
Present, Christian man at home
in the, 233-237; agnostic's
view of, 234, 235.
Priest, the, his conflict with sci
ence, 15, 16.
Pringle-Pattison, A. S., cited,
120.
Private judgment, right of, 84,
182.
Professor, who read nothing of a
decade's standing, 86.
Prophet, especiaUy imbued with
the Spirit of God, 147 ; the, in
early church, 169.
Protestant Church, variableness
of, 33.
Protestant theologians, their at
titude toward the doctrine of
evolution, 32, 33 ; power of
adaptation of, 33.
Psalms of David as sung in New
England village, 57.
Psychologist, his study of reU
gious phenomena, 193-195,
200.
Pusey, E.B., Lord Shaftesbury's
letter to, quoted, 8 ; bis oppo
sition to German theological
thought, 11.
Quacks, political and economic,
105, 108.
Quakers, as a fruit of the Re
formation, 85.

340

INDEX

Radium, 299.
Raikes, Robert, his organization
of the Sunday-school, 43.
Rational, spiritual as, 52 ; Crea
tive Force is, 264.
Rationalism, and Christianity,
246 ; German, 247 ; the meth
ods of, 247-249. _
Reason, human, is the chief
agent of the divine Spirit in
man, 246, 249.
RebeUion, the, mentioned, 205.
Red Cross movement, 117.
Reformation, the, and the Re
naissance compared, 25, 26 ;
its attitude toward authority,
83, 84 ; principles of, but yet
dimly discerned, 84 ; fanati
cism how a fruit of, 85 ; and
the Counter-Reformation, 181;
its connection with the doc
trine of the Spirit, 182; its
assertion of freedom, 182.
Regeneration, 60.
Reign of Terror, the slain in,
100.
Religion, facts of, have a claim
upon men, 39 ; the, of the
people, 72—95 ; confusion of
thought in, 73, 81 ; its office
the regulation of conduct, 73,
77; doubt in, 73, 82, 87;
faith in, 74, 78 ; observance in,
74, 76 ; f ormaUty and mysti
cism in, 74, 75 ; made real in
the Hebrew prophets, 75 ;
Pharisaic and Christian, 76,
77 ; significance of the word,
77, 270; as moribund, 122;
system-building in, 82, 83 ;
Biblical criticism a source of
doubt in, 87-90 ; study of com
parative religion a source of
doubt in, 90 ; secret of, lies in
a principle of life, 131 ; prin
ciple of, must be rational and
with an outlook upon the fu
ture, 131 ; evolution gives us a

principle essentially reUgious,
140 ; experience of, in conver
sion, 198 ; interdependence of
righteousness and, 226 ; de
finition of, 272 ; natural and
revealed, 296.
Religion, study of comparative,
90.
Religions, all feel struggle
between system and spirit,
168.
Religious conviction, persistence
of, 89.
ReUgious experience, Professor
James on, 194 ; the abnormal
in, 195.
Religious melancholy, 229.
ReUgious Significance of Recent
English Verse, essay on, cited,
71 n.
Renaissance, the, and the Re
formation compared, 25, 26.
Resident causes, man a natural
beUever in, 131-133.
Resurrection of the body, 240-
242.
Revelation, 2, 28; case where
the content of, was fixed, 12 ;
continuity of, upheld by the
Montanist, 172, 174 ; of God
as spirit, 266; the new har
monies of, 288-319 ; every dis
covery is a, 295.
Revival, evangeUcal, of the
eighteenth century, 185-188.
Revivals, reUgious, speak of a
Power resident among men,
191.
Revolution, the, mentioned, 205.
Revolutions of 1830 and 1848,
had their influence on social
conditions, 103.
Robert Elsmere, theological as
pect of, 62.
Robinson, John, his saying that
more truth might yet break
out from the Word of God,
12, 13.

INDEX

341

Romanes, G. J., his record of
his attitude toward reUgion,
35-39; his Thoughts on Reli
gion quoted, 35-39 ; his Can
did Examination of Theism
mentioned, 36 n.
RomiUy, Sir Samuel, his bills
abolishing death penalty for
certain felonies, 116.
Ruah, meaning of the word, 146.
Rydberg, Victor, theological
aspect of his Last Athenian,

Sabatier, his Religions qf Au
thority cited, 281 ; quoted,
316 f.
Sabbath of the Scribes and of
the Christians, 76.
Sabellianism, 55.
St. Augustine, quoted on un
rest, 69.
St. John, Gospel of, Faust's
translation of, 22.
St. Juan of the Cross, 184.
St. Paul's, ruins of, imagined by
Macaulay, 1, IS.
St. Teresa, 178, 184
Salvation, 272, 273.
Sanday, Professor, cited, 161,
162.
ScheUing, his theory of the Biad
and the Odyssey, 196.
Schleiermacher, 9.
Science, seeming conflict be
tween theology and, 15, 30-
34, 40, 251-253, 292 ; what it
owes to theology, 16-18 ; in
vestigation in, compared to
the arc of a parabola, 128 ;
teaches one universal principle
of being, 140.
Scriptures, traditions of, ques
tioned, 88 ; inspiration of, 91 ;
witness of the, 142-167 ; have
nothing to fear from criti
cism, 309, 310 ; message of,
ia the Spirit's message, 311.

Second Blessing, the, 209.
Seebohm, F., his The Era of the
Protestant Revolution cited,
100.
Semitic religions, elements of,
in Christianity, 90.
Sense as a degree of knowledge,
179.
Seth, Professor, quoted, 181 ;
cited, 262.
Shaftesbury, Lord, his opinion
on theological development,
7, 8 ; Life and Work of, by Ed
win Hodder, quoted, 8, 9 ; his
disapproval of Ecce Homo, Co
lenso, and Jowett, 8 ; his letter
to Pusey quoted, 8 ; opposi
tion to German theological
influence, 11 ; what he accom
plished and what he exem
plified, 108 f . ; mentioned,
188.
Sharpe, Granville, mentioned,
110.
Ship, compared to Christian
freedom, 222.
Sin, 267 ; conviction of, 268,
270.
Sin against the Holy Ghost,
250.
Smith, Goldwin, his writings on
Old Testament topics men
tioned, 6.
Smith, G. A., his Modern Criti
cism and the Preaching qf the
Old Testament quoted, 149.
Smith, Robertson, his Prophets
of Israel cited, 146.
Smith, Sydney, his article on in
sanity and Mad-honses in the
"Edinburgh " cited, 114.
Snyder, Carl, his New Concep
tions in Science quoted, 303 f.
Social problem, the, arising of,
101 ; voiced by Moses, 101 ;
its existence discerned in every
age, 101 ; in the time of Lang-
land and Chaucer, 102 ; can-

342

INDEX

not be differentiated from
social problems, 107, 108 ; the
work of conscience in, 110.
See Poor man, the ; Society.
Social unrest, 96-120, 122 ; per
vasiveness of the question of,
104, 105 ; is indefinable, 105 ;
lies largely in the " torment of
the difference," 119.
Society, is an organism, not a
machine, 106, 120 ; is the out
working of an immanent force,
106; soUdarityof, 117.
Socrates confuting Aristode
mus, 1.
Speech, freedom of, since the
French Revolution, 101.
Spencer, Herbert, mentioned, 93;
his Principles of Biology cited,
120 ; his Autobiography re
viewed, 216 n.
Spencer and Gillen, their Na
tive Tribes of Australia cited,
132.
Spirit, working of the, in man,
211, 225, 238, 249, 250; sea
sons of the, 236 ; human rea
son is a chief agent of, 246,
249 ; God revealed as, 266.
Spirit of God, Old Testament
references to, 147 ; is the dy
namic of Christianity in the
individual life, 219; is one
with Ultimate Force, 219,
220, 229; personaUty of,
231.
Spirit, the larger doctrine of
the, 227-229 ; makes man at
home in the present, 233-237 ;
gives an elasticity to Christian
institutions, 237-246 ; makes
reason a chief agent of the
Divine Spirit in man, 246-
251 ; rids us of fear of criti
cism, 251-253 ; gives freedom
of faith through truth, 253.
Spirit-possession, primitive be
lief in, 131.

Spiritual, as rational, 52 ; exag
gerated antinomy between the
physical and, 301.
Spiritual experience, the power
of the church lay in, 184,
185.
Stanley, A. P., his reference to
Abraham as a sheik, 87.
Starbuck, Professor, his Psycho
logy of Religion, 195.
Stephen, Sir James, his essays,
186.
Stephen, Leslie, 290.
Strauss, David Friedrich, his
Leben Jesu mentioned, 3 ;
the Frankenstein of Hegelian
ism, 10, 11 ; brought German
influence in theology under
suspicion in England, 10, 11.
Strudwick, James and Anne, the
story of, 110, 113.
Submerged tenth, have found
voice, 101.
Sunday-school, inception and
growth of, 43.
Sunrise, significance of the
word, 256.
Supernatural, the, 14, 28 ; the
natural and the, 51, 292, 297 ;
is beyond our experience of
nature, 298.
Superstition, tendency of men
to cherish, 18, 133.
Survival of the fittest, 29.
Swabia, peasants slain in, 100.
Swedenborg, Emanuel, antici
pated the nebular hypothesis,
17.
Swete, Professor, cited, 146;
quoted, 150.
Swinburne, A. C, quoted, 67, 68.
Symbols, Christian, those that
express experience are Ukely
to abide, 244.
System-building, of Western
Christendom, 82, 83 ; of the
Reformation, 83 ; arraign
ment of, in the last two gen-

INDEX

343

erations, 86, 87 ; some look
for new, 124, 129.
Systems, inadequacy of, against
time, 124, 129 ; question
whether their day is not past,
125 ; of theology compared
to a tree, 129 ; struggle be
tween spirit and, 168.
Tauler, John, mentioned, 176,
178 ; contrasted with John
Wickliffe, 177.
Teleology, a larger place found
for, by evolution, 42, 140.
Telephone, long distance, 298.
Tennyson, Alfred, his " infant
crying in the night," cited,
67; quoted on faith, 71;
prophet of idea of evolution
in theology, 135 ; quoted,
116.
Terms persist because they are
symbols of experience, 258.
TertuUian and the Church, 173 f .
Tess of the D' Urbervilles, theolo
gical aspect of, 64.
Thackeray, W. M., on Dickens,
312.
Theatre, the, 197.
Theism, principle of continuity
becoming to, 40.
Theological thought, the present
state of popular, 47-71.
Theologian, the, as a novelist's
lay figure, 6; his rights re
cognized by the apostles of
the doctrme of development,
34.
Theology, Macaulay on its not
being a progressive science,
1, 2, 6, 15, 18 ; based upon
revelation, 2 ; German influ
ence in, 3, 4, 9-11 ; slow dis
semination of the results of
investigation in, 5 ; attitude
of the " man of letters " to
ward, 5, 6 ; new era of theo
logical development, 9 ff. ;
seeming conflict between sci

ence and, 15, 30 ff. ; advan
tage to science from, 16-18 ;
as intolerant of development,
18, 20, 121 ; as capable of
development, 19, 21 ; confu
sion of, in the nineteenth
century, 26; importance of
its place in modern thought,
26, 27, 34, 39, 49, 62 ; relation
of new principles to, 27 ; early
effect of the doctrine of evo
lution on, 28-30 ; and dogma,
31 ; grounds for the confident
and expectant attitude of, 34-
45; its adoption of the his
toric method, 40 ; method of
development theory an aid
to, 40-42; substantiation of,
by evolution, 41, 48 ; fashion
in, 48 ; lack of system in, 50,
62 ; in recent fiction and
poetry, 62-71 ; use .of fiction
in discussion of, 63 ; as mori
bund, 121 ; material of, mul
tiplied by reUgious experi
ence, 122, 123; agnosticism
and, 125 ; system of, must
remain partial, 128 ; systems
of, compared to a tree, 129 ;
secret of its permanence Ues
in a principle, 130 ; progress
of, through recognition of the
Spirit, 232, 233.
Thesis, the, 124-141.
Thirty-nine Articles, 59.
Thompson, Francis, quoted,
69.
Thomson James, quoted, 64;
his City of Dreadful Night,
315.
6pn<riceia, 77.
Tintoretto, his Judgment Scene
mentioned, 13.
Total depravity, 59 ; doctrine
of, overstates a great truth,
59.
Tractarian, not bound by tradi
tion, 2.

344

INDEX

Tractarian movement of the
nineteenth century, 185, 186.
Tradition, finds worshipers
among theologians, 34 ; in Ul
repute in last two genera
tions, 86.
Transcendent Cause, a, man a
believer in, 132, 134
Transubstantiation, Sir Thomas
More's faith in, 1, 2.
Tree, systems of theology and
philosophy, compared to a,
129.
Trevelyan, Sir George O., on
Wesley, 188 n.
Trinitarian, danger for the, 54 ;
the " mere logicker," 54 ; his
Sabellianism, 55; difficulties
of the, 55.
Trinity, conception bordering
on tritheism, 14 ; Hegel's
phUosophy of the, 197 ; doc
trine of the, expresses experi
ence, 263.
Tritheism, 54.
Truth, freedom of faith given
by, 222, 253 ; search for, is the
leading of the Spirit, 254.
Tubingen School, works of, are
sealed books to many English
readers, 11.
Tuckney, 52.
Tulloch, John, his Religious
Thought in Britain quoted, 3.
Tyler, Wat, his insurrection, 97.
TyndaU, John, theologian and
scientist, 17.
Ultimate Cause, demand for a
recognition of, is irresistible,
134
Ultimate Force and Immanent
Spirit are one, 220.
Ultimate source of authority,
286, 314-319; is found in the
Spirit, 318.
Unitarian, and Deist, 53 ; and
Pantheist, 53.

Unitarianism, rationalism of,
246. _
Unitarians, 3.
Unknowable, the, 29.
Vaughan, R. A., his Hours with
the Mystics cited, 169, 179.
Vital energy of the divine na
ture, 147 ; in aU energy,
148.
Wage-earner is seeking for eco
nomic privUeges, 104.
War of 1812 mentioned, 205.
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, her Rob
ert Elsmere cited, 6 ; theolo
gical aspect of her Robert Els
mere, 62, 63.
Watson, W., quoted, 118.
Webb, Sidney, his History of
Trades Unionism cited, 104.
Wendt, H. H., his Teachings qf
Jesus cited, 155.
Wesley, John, mentioned, 187,
188 n.
Wheel of things, idea that soci
ety is bound to, 106, 107.
Whichcote, quoted, 52.
Whitefield, George, mentioned,
187.
Wickliffe, John, mysticism of,
176; contrasted with John
Tauler, 177 ; his church in
Lutterworth, 240.
WUberforce, WUliam, men
tioned, 188.
Williams, Rowland, his part in
the heretical Essays and Re
views, 288.
WUson, H. B., his part in the
heretical Essays and Reviews,
288.
Wisdom, Book of, quoted, 150.
Witness of Scripture, the, 142-
167.
Word, the, Christ's difficulty in
interpreting to his followers,
152.

INDEX

345

Word of God, Robinson's say
ing that more truth might yet
break out from, 13.
Words, the new meaning of some
old, 255-287 ; significance of,
255.
Wordsworth, WiUiam, his influ
ence in new era of thought,
41 ; quoted, 206.
World, the, and the church, 58-
62.
Worth of Human Life, Upon
the, article cited, 112 n.

Wurtemberg, peasants slain in,
100.
Young, Arthur, his Journeys in
France cited, 102.
Young Men's Christian Associa
tion, 43.
Young Women's Christian Asso
ciation, 43.
Zeitgeist, the, 22-46.
Zophar, mentioned, 27.
ZwingU, Ulrieh, 280.

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