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ESSAYS
Practical and Speculative

BY THE SAME AU

THOR
hurch.

Eighth

History of the American Episcopal C

edition, illustrated. 8vo, cloth,

$2.00.

A Year's Sermons. 12mo, cloth,

$1.25.

Sons of God. A series of Sermons.

12mo,

paper,

50 cents. Cloth,

$1.25.

Sermon Stuff. First series. 12mo,

cloth,

$1.00.

Sermon Stuff. Second Series. 12n

io, cloth, $1.00.
Publisher

THOMAS WHITTAKER,

2 & 3 BIBLE HOUSE, NEW YORK

ESSAYS

Practical and Speculative

BY
S, D. McCONNELL, D.D., D.C.L.

NEW YORK
THOMAS WHITTAKER
2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE
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Copyright, 1900
By THOMAS WHITTAKER

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TO MY GOOD OLD FRIEND
KOBEET W. GEANGE, D. D.,

THIS LITTLE BOOK

Note. — I hereby make my sincere acknowledgment to the New
World, the Churchman and the Outlook for their courteous permission
to reprint portions of this little volume which have already appeared
in their pages.

Contents

I. THE MORALS OF SEX  7
II. CHURCH AND CLERGY . . . .33
III. ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES . . 53
IV. BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW . . 75
V. THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY . . 89
VI. SCRIPTURE, INSPIKATION AND AUTHORITY, 107
VII. THE FALL, — UPWARD . . . 125
VIII. THE ROLE OF BELIEF  147
IX. GOD, EVEN OUR GOD  155
X. THE NEW SITUATION  169
XI. NATURE AND GOD  181
XII. EVOLUTION AND GOD  191
XIII. GOD MANIFEST  209
XIV. THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS . . . 233
XV. THE OTHER LIFE  255
XVI. THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH . . . 273

THE MOEALS OF SEX

THE MORALS OF SEX
Of all the Commandments in the Decalogue, the
most difficult to enforce and expound is the Seventh.
For the present purpose it is its exposition with which
I am concerned, and it is the clergy chiefly that I have
in mind in what I say. There are at least three rea
sons which make a discussion of the Law of Sexual
Morality pertinent to us professionally. First, as offi
cial teachers of righteousness and ministers of disci
pline we are continually called upon to apply and in
terpret the law. Second, we are confronted with a new
social and economic order which has introduced into this
region of morals quite new and very profound difficul
ties. Third, in common with Protestantism generally,
our Church is engaged in the attempt to formulate the
law of the case in a Canon of Marriage and Divorce.
These three reasons may also serve as the headings
for the divisions of what is rather a memorandum for
an argument than a symmetrical thesis.
I. "What, then, is God's law as to sex relation
ships ? Upon what sanction, human or divine, does
the law rest? Is the same law binding upon men
and women?
To these questions the Social Purity League would
9

10 THE MORALS OF SEX
give one answer. The average practicing physician
would give another. The law of the state is based
upon ideas differing from both replies. The Church
gives an answer differing somewhat from all of them.
What is the actual will of God and the will of Nature
on the subject? We may be certain that the two
wills will coincide. Usually if we can find out pre
cisely in any case what Nature wishes we may be
quite sure that we have found out what is the will of
God in that case. For Nature is God's way of ex
pressing Himself.
But in the case of sex relationships it may as well
be confessed that Nature does not seem to know her
own mind. This is the origin of the whole moral con
fusion upon the subject. In regard to other appetites
and desires Nature is a trustworthy guide. Their
existence is prima facie proof of their innocence.
They are warnings of needs. They protect them
selves against abuse by the sense of satiety. For
other moral prohibitions the reason is so evident in
the nature of things that the understanding is ready
to uphold the conscience in its mandates. But in the
case before us we cannot "follow the guidance of
Nature." The instant that proposal is baldly made,
all men see that it will not work. As a social rule, it
is condemned by the practically unanimous vote of so
ciety. And it is not civilized and Christian society
alone which condemns it. Unregulated intercourse at
will is not permitted even by the lowest savages.

THE MORALS OF SEX 11
Among the lower animals it is not possible. In men
it is physically possible, but it is limited and regulated
by social conventions. These limitations have the
force of law, and are maintained by an appeal to re
ligion. What then are they, and ought they to be ?
The first prohibition is of Adultery. What is
adultery? The legal definition is slightly different,
but the practical definition is : sexual connection with
another man's wife. In what does the wrong of the
action consist ? The first answer is, it is a wrong to
the woman's husband. This is the view which the law
takes of the matter. This was the view of the Old
Testament Scriptures. The adulterer was punished as
a thief. He had trespassed upon another man's prop
erty. This is the Common Law doctrine to this day
in Europe and America. The remedy for the " injured
husband," — the phrase is significant, — is sought by an
action to recover damages. Underlying it is the feel
ing surviving from ancient times that a wife is prop
erty. In quite modern practice has been introduced
a legal fiction to put the wife on the same legal stand
ing as the husband, and she has been allowed also to
sue for damages for " the alienation of the husband's
affections." Courts and juries have always found it
difficult, however, to assess the value of the thing
sought to be recovered.
But the punishment of the adulteress has always
been reached on other grounds. Her offence has been
estimated not by the damage inflicted upon the

12 THE MORALS OF SEX
wronged husband, but by the damage she has done to
society. She has "defiled the blood." Where so
ciety was organized, as in Israel, about the tribal
principle, it is easy to see why she was so sternly
dealt with for having " wrought confusion " in Israel.
But the same quality must always distinguish the
adulteress from the adulterer. The husband may
wander among harlots, and in the view of law, the
wrong which he does and which he incurs is personal
to himself. But for the wife to admit an intruder is
to confuse the inheritance. Her offence is against
her father, her husband's father, her children, against
the State. It vitiates, or at any rate renders uncertain,
the testaments of all who have preceded her and her
husband. In the sin of adultery the same judgment
has never been meted to the man and the woman, and
never can be. The implications of this we will meet
again when we come to consider the moral basis of
marriage and divorce. Practically, it is sufficient to
say at this point that the offence is one which has al
ways been so sternly condemned by all men that we
need not dwell longer upon it. Any man guilty of it
flies in the face of Nature, society and God, and
among the three he will find his punishment.
But what about commerce of the sexes which does
not involve the element of trespass and does not defile
the blood ? What is the absolute and ideal right ? Is
the law the same for all ? Should all be alike pun
ished for its breach ? Let us take this last question

THE MORALS OF SEX 13
first. Should the man and the woman be held to the
same accountability and be dealt with the same way ?
The answer is, they cannot be. The cry " the same
law of purity for both sexes," is both silly and mis
chievous. The champions of this crusade do not seem
to perceive that in the leveling process attempted the
woman is quite as likely to be dragged down as the
man is to be led up. Set the ideal of manly purity as
high as you will — as high as Christ does — but remem
ber that even then woman's purity must transcend it.
Nothing is gained by ignoring facts. Society judges
the woman's fault far more severely than it does the
man's, simply because it believes the fault to be far
more heinous in her than in him. One element in
guaging the gravity of an offence against a rule is the
consideration of the consequences of such offence. In
this offence the woman is defiled in the body, in her
emotional nature, in her affections, in her soul, to an
extent and in a way which is not true of the man. In
her case the consequences are conserved, retained,
transmitted. In his they come to an end. His of
fence may have a moral aggravation far beyond hers,
or it may not. But the same offence it is not, nor
can, nor ought society to deal with her as with him.
His penalty cannot be of the same kind as the one
meted out to her. If he be threatened with that
alone by well-meaning reformers and preachers, he
can well afford to smile in their faces. Nothing is
idler than the rhetoric about the injustice of the fact

14: THE MORALS OF SEX
that she is cast out to shame and cold while he is re
ceived to club and drawing-room. This has always
been society's method, and always will be. The fault
has demonstrated her to be incapable to discharge
her social duty, while it has not conclusively shown
his unfitness.
From this the law of sexual purity for women, and
the reasonableness of that law begins to appear. For
them the law is absolute chastity. No excuse or pal
liation will be admitted in the judgment of human so
ciety. God's judgments, we may well believe, will be
in many instances different. He can heed the plea,
"she sinned much because she loved much." But
society cannot. There is too much at stake. In her
person society itself is defiled by the offence, and is
compelled in self-defence to visit upon her a penalty
which does not fall upon her partner. This may be
called hard, unjust, unfair, atrocious, but that does
not change the fact. Beside that, a closer examina
tion of all the data would probably show that it is not
open to these charges. At any rate, it is the way
in which woman herself deals with her offending
sister. It is clear, therefore, that human society, presum
ably giving voice to the will of God, demands abso
lute continence (1) of all married men, under the
penalty which attaches to a broken oath; (2) of all
women, under the penalty which attaches to any act
which brings confusion into the social structure ; (3)

THE MORALS OF SEX 15
of all married women, under an additional penalty for
debauching posterity.
This leaves for consideration the case of those men
who have contracted no obligations, whose incon
tinence does not seem to them to carry with it any
evil consequence, whom society does not severely pun
ish, who find across their path only what seems to be
an arbitrary prohibition. What will keep them con
tinent ? What ought to keep them continent ? What
has Nature, what has God, what has the preacher to
say to the young man here ? There is no department
of morals where it is so difficult to speak honestly.
There is no place where conventional morality, both
in its teaching and result, or lack of result of its teach
ing, is so unsatisfactory. When the young man is
bidden, " thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou
shalt not commit adultery," he heeds. In all these
cases he sees both the reason for the prohibition and
the peril of the offence. But when he is bidden, " thou
shalt not commit fornication," he heeds little. He
knows that fornication is not adultery. The reasons
for its condemnation are not so evident. They lie so
deep down in the complex nature of things that he
doubts their existence. The torment of an appetite
which he knows to be " natural " drives him across a
prohibiting line which he suspects to be " artificial."
What shall the moralist, the physician, the priest
say to these ? It would surely be a great gain if they,
all three; can say the same thing. To the unmarried

16 THE MORALS OF SEX
American woman, little needs to be said. She is
chaste by habit, by tradition, by pride, by instinct, by
temperament, by physical nature. She needs little
exhortation. But what of the man ? How many are
continent between the ages of twenty and thirty-five ?
No one can say. Some are ; probably far more than
is often supposed. But more are not. They say,
when they speak at all on the subject, that it is " a
counsel of perfection" to which they are not equal.
They find no fault with the high demand which con
ventional morality exacts, but they regard it as im
possible of attainment. What considerations can we
urge to give vigor to the young man's will by which
he can bid his turbulent appetite come to heel?
Christianity provides the supreme truth. It tells him
that his body is the temple of a Holy Spirit. It warns
him against defiling the temple of the Holy Ghost.
It asks him if he will dare to "make the body of
Christ the member of a harlot." There are thousands
for whom this is sufficient. Their souls are inwardly
reverent, and they compel their reluctant bodies to be
at least outwardly respectful.
But there are tens of thousands to whom this is not
sufficient. For various reasons the spiritual dynamic
of Christianity does not touch them. Has the law of
purity any other hold upon them ?
There would seem to be at least two facts which we
can fairly urge to bid them pause. The one is the
peril to the body ; the other is the peril to the soul.

THE MORALS OF SEX 17
Let us not be misunderstood. We do not well to
flourish threats of death to the body or of damnation
to the soul. But there are a thousand ills which stop
far short of either dissolution or damnation, which are
nevertheless so grave that none but a fool will take
chances with them. Fear may be a low motive, but
the appeal to it is not unworthy. Indeed it probably is
in point of fact the most common of sanctions. The
man who buys sexual indulgence habitually, takes
risks of bodily damage which none but a fool would
incur. He imperils his subsequent life ; the health of
his wife who is to be ; the life and self-respect of his
unborn children. Does he smile and say, "I'll take
the chances " ? Would it not be well if we could per
suade the experienced physician to say to him : " I
have heard men say that ; and I have seen them after
ward, when they wished that they had at least died
before they were damned ! "
There is another penalty, however, about which
Nature is inexorable. It is none the less natural be
cause it happens to be a law of human nature. Why
is pure lust not immoral in a beast ? And why is it
immoral in a man? Because in the beast it is not
correlated with the affections, and in the man it is.
" Making a beast of one's self " is not a metaphor. It
is a scientific statement of a possibility. It is accom
plished by eliminating the humane element from any
human act and thus reducing it to the deed of an animal.
But this can only be done at the expense of the human

18 THE MORALS OF SEX
part of Nature. If it be done repeatedly, the humane
element is injured. If it be done habitually, the
humane element is destroyed. Nature is leisurely but
unerring in her revenges. If one should then be
counselled by the complaisant physician, who knows
only the body, to " seek health by the temperate grati
fication of an appetite," the religious adviser may be
allowed to intervene and say, "the doctor's advice
would, no doubt, be good if it concerned an appetite
which had in it no quality but physical. Your pre
scription would be well for a beast ; for a man it is
not well." Incontinence of the body means deteriora
tion of the soul. This would be just as true though
the Bible had never been written, and though there
were not a preacher of morality in the world. " The
house of the strange woman opens unto death, and
her paths unto the dead." The soul which goes there
sickens, and dies if it abides there. This is the price
which Nature fixes. Any cost of self-repression is
cheaper. In this, Solomon, Eobert Burns, St. Paul,
and the Great Physician agree.
I have not mentioned the crime of seduction in any
of its forms. The man who is capable of taking ad
vantage of youth, ignorance, inexperience, or of
woman's love for the gratification of his lust, or the
rare, but still existent, wanton woman who plays and
preys upon " the imperious instinct of man," are both
alike beyond argument. They are condemned al
ready.

THE MORALS OF SEX 19
" Who cast the devils from the Gaddarene,
Could hardly do so much for these I ween."
II. I said that we are confronted by a new social
and economic order which has greatly aggravated the
difficulties in this region of morals. In a simple social
structure each man and each woman is mated and
mated early. Physical appetite is transfigured by af
fection, and held in check by the responsibility of
parentage. But each generation the average age of
marriage is being pushed farther onward, and the per
centage of unmarried men and women increases.
Within the last fifty years the average age of mar
riage in New York State has been pushed upward, for
men from about twenty-two to about twenty-seven, and
for women from nineteen to twenty-four, as near as can
be deduced from the very imcomplete statistics.
Speaking generally two causes are at work to bring
about this result. First, the increasing exigency of
life, and second, the increasing personal independence
of women. Suppose the man is a professional man.
He leaves the preparatory school at nineteen, leaves
the university at twenty-two, leaves the technical
school at twenty-six. Assume for him at the outset
even more than average professional success. He
cannot and does not marry until he has passed thirty.
Suppose he goes at once from the public high school
at nineteen to learn a skilled trade or to go into busi
ness, he cannot get to the point when he can marry
and live in this city much earlier. Only the unskilled

20 THE MORALS OF SEX
laborer can marry shortly after maturity, because his
ability to support a family is at its best from twenty-
four to thirty-four, and rapidly declines thereafter.
The case of women is the same, with aggravating
circumstances. The butcher's daughter and the bak
er's now remain in the public school until nineteen or
twenty. I was present lately at the opening exercises
of a high school containing two thousand four hundred
young women, the majority of whom were older than
their grandmothers had been when their mothers were
born. Do not understand me to be making an argu
ment for " early marriages." I am not making an
argument at all. I am trying to make a diagnosis.
We are set to preach purity. To do so effectively we
must know to whom we are preaching. We are sur
rounded by thousands and thousands of unmarried
men and women who remain unmarried for a length
of time, far longer than has ever been known in any
other time and place. The men are journeymen
mechanics, clerks, commercial travellers, salesmen,
lawyers, engineers, doctors. The women are college
graduates, shop girls, factory girls, saleswomen,
stenographers, and myriads of young women living
aimless lives in dull homes, waiting while their bloom
fades for the man to speak, who cannot speak because
he cannot make a home to which to invite her.
But what of the " imperious instinct " meanwhile ?
Love of life and the instinct of generation are the two
elemental forces. Society has safeguarded life, made

THE MORALS OF SEX 21
it comfortable, lengthened it. Never was human life
so secure, so pleasant, so easy. American society has
certainly succeeded in its aim at " life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness." But does any one suppose that
the companion "instinct of propagation" can be
ignored, or forgotten or suppressed without it having
its revenges ? Does society do well to make individ
ual life easy and homes difficult ? After a young
man has lived for five years at a Mills' hotel, and a
young woman in a Young Women's Christian Asso
ciation boarding-house, will they be more or less likely
to combine their lives in the narrowness of a home ?
One is tempted to ponder upon the proverb that " the
wise ones of the world are kept busy undoing the
deeds of the good ones." The hard fact confronts us
that the sex instincts of nature are more and more
obstructed by the exigencies of human -society. Con
tinence is subjected to a longer and ever more severe
strain. Is it surprising that it breaks down ? What
reinforcement can the minister of religion bring to
the continent will which finds itself called upon to ar
bitrate between the law of the mind and the law of
the members, after the contest has been artificially
prolonged beyond the time which Nature has decreed ?
It may be well to say at this point that I assume the
appetite of sex to be just as legitimate and as noble as
any appetite whatsoever. Indeed one might say
much more. Whosoever shall penetrate the ultimate
mystery of sex will have gone far to know the es-

22 THE MORALS OF SEX
sential nature of God. Creation and procreation are
more nearly allied than are any other motions of the
Creator and the creature. The religion of Christ
ought by now to have recovered from the sickly taint
of asceticism with which the mumified corpse of dual
ism infected it in the Thebaid centuries ago. The
monk and cloistered nun have never been altogether
sane. Their confessions, their hymns and prayers,
their theology and casuistry proclaim them less than
Christian because less than human. I believe that we
will never be able to urge and interpret God's law of
chastity except as we honestly and reverently recog
nize the truth that " in God's image created He them,
male and female created He them." It may well be
that just now the most efficient way in which we can
preach personal purity shall be by addressing our
selves to the correction of some of those things in the
social and economic order which make impossible that
condition of things which God contemplated when He
promulgated His law.
III. We are concerned with the application of the
Christian law of sex relationships to divorce and remar
riage. This discussion usually commences with an
array of statistics to show the rapidly increasing num
ber of divorces. I will assume the figures. Let us
admit the extreme. In one state there is one di
vorce for every six marriages. In other states they
range from this downward to South Carolina where
there are none. The fact of consequence is that there

THE MORALS OF SEX 23
has been and is a rapidly increasing disposition to
break the bonds of matrimony when they begin to
chafe, — and in a less marked degree a disposition for
those thus made free to contract new alliances. There
is so little question of the facts that it would be time
wasted even to exhibit them.
But the second step in the discussion is usually to
argue that all this indicates a prevailing laxity of
sexual morality, and a perilous lowering of the ideal
relations of man and woman. This I believe to be an
error. A careful examination of the facts will show
that, taking the country as a whole, a slow but steady
advance in chastity has occurred much in the same
way as has occurred the advance in temperance. The
multiplication of divorces is not to be accounted for
by the division of the sum total of popular morality.
If this were the situation the Church's task would be
a very simple, even though not an easy one. But the
reasons are far more complicated. Speaking broadly,
it may truly be said that Christianity itself has caused
the present multiplication of divorces. Every intelli
gent student of Christianity has noted the way in
which it began almost at once to change the status of
woman in society. It began by crediting her with an
independent personality. But the accumulated tradi
tions of countless generations stood between her and
the conscious realization of her personality. In all
human society she stood in a position of less dignity
than that of a slave or even of a chattel. A bonds-

24 THE MORALS OF SEX
man or an ox had at least an individuality of its own.
The woman had not. She was an appendage of some
man — of a father, a husband, a brother, or even a son.
All law, all custom, all social order, all domestic life was ¦
built upon this conception of woman. Even St. Paul
asserts it and bases his dicta upon it. But what is of
more significance, this was woman's conception of her
self. And woman is, as Amiel says, " the very genius
of conservatism."
The glory of Christianity is that it has at long last
succeeded in bringing woman to conceive of her own
personality as Christ conceived of it. The process has
been a marvellously slow one. Indeed it is only
within our own time that the result has begun to
show in any large way. The phenomenon is not
fitly termed the " emancipation of woman." It is not
" emancipation." It is not " independence." It is a
coming to consciousness of self. The free woman in
Christ is not thereby set in opposition to men, or
transformed into a man in all save bodily function.
It has nothing to do with the " suffrage " or with the
" right to earn her own living." But this new-found
consciousness of absolute and underived personality
has given to her a new-found, and sometimes bewil
dering sense of her personal dignity and personal
sanctity. This is what we wish, what Christ in
tended, what we would not have turned backward.
But when this stage has been reached why should we
be amazed if she turn to society and ask, sometimes

THE MORALS OF SEX 25
tearfully and sometimes defiantly, " Am I a person ?
Am I not the owner of my own body ? Can Chris
tian law under any conceivable circumstances lay an
obligation upon me, or so construe any promise which
I have made, as to command me to give my body to
the embrace of any man against my will?" Thus
Christianity itself has led not a few women to the
point where their religion prompts them to take an
action the precise opposite to that which devout
women of an earlier stage would have taken. At that
earlier stage a devoted woman endured to her life's end
the approaches of a brutal or drunken or distasteful
husband because her religious sense bade her do so.
To-day her equally pious granddaughter utterly re
fuses such outrage of her personality because her
religious sense bids her so ! Divorce is just as likely
to be the result of a higher moral ideal as of a lower
one. We may as well face the fact that marriage is
coming more and more to be thought of as a mutual
contract between two self-contained persons than as
the absorption of the wife's personality by the hus
band's. And Christianity has done this by transform
ing the woman from a possession into a person. Do
we wish that undone ? If not, then all the exhorta
tion of the " conservative " — who is the man with his
eyes in the back of his head — all his exhortations to
bring back what he calls the "primitive basis of the.
marriage bond," is idle. The sacred marriage estate
lies before us, not behind. I am willing to say that

26 THE MORALS OF SEX
for one I believe that in most cases where divorces
are actually granted it is better upon the whole for
the state to loose the bans which have become fetters
than to hold them fast, — better for the men and
women concerned, better for society, better for pub
lic morals. In point of fact they never were those
"whom God had joined together." As to the re
marriage of the severed individuals, that is quite a
different question, and a far more difficult one, both
for the state and the Church. But this is the stage
at which the Church comes face to face with the
problem. Concerning a first marriage it would seem that the
Church could do no more than she has already done.
That is to warn the young man and maiden who ask
her benediction upon their vows that " if any persons
be joined together otherwise than as God's word doth
allow, their marriage is not lawful." Shall she at
tempt to pass judgment upon the facts in each in
stance ? If so, what is to be her measure or standard
of legality ? If by " God's word " here she mean the
written scriptures she simply cannot derive from them
a working statute. They were not written for such a
purpose. If she mean the ideal prerequisites and con
ditions of Christian marriage, as is the practical con
struction of the phrase, then she can do no more than
adjure them by the sober warning of judgment to
come, that " if there be any impediment they do now
confess it." The practical outcome of the common

THE MORALS OF SEX 27
admonitions of our more or less reverend fathers in
God that we should look with more care to the origi
nal marriages, seems to me to amount to this and
nothing more.
But what of the remarriage of those who have been
divorced? Shall the Church forbid it absolutely?
Shall she forbid it, with exceptions ? Shall she per
mit it absolutely ? Whichever she decides upon, what
shall be the ground upon which she shall rest her
decision ?
The real difficulty is with the last question. What
is the law which governs the Christian Church in this
cause? And where is it written? Many, possibly
most, will reply, the law is in the New Testament. I
think they are mistaken. Christ enunciated no law
of marriage and divorce. He did that which was
ultimately to make marriage a sacrificial symbol and
separation an impossibility, but not by dictating
statutes. He did for the .Seventh Commandment
what He did for the Sixth and the Eighth, and waited
for time to show the result. " Thou shalt not kill,"
says the law : Christ gives it the dynamic, " whoso
ever hateth his brother is a murderer." " Thou shalt
not steal " becomes dynamical through His, " love thy
neighbor as thyself." "Thou shalt not commit
adultery." "Whoso looketh with lust is an adul
terer." The attempt to extract a canon from the
words of Christ is the mediasval philosopher's task to
distill bottles full of elixir of life out of the morning

28 THE MORALS OF SEX
dew. "My words are spirit, and they are life."
When the exegete sets about with purblind eye to ex
amine the words through the opaque lens of learning
for the purpose of turning his rendering over to the
canonist to be written in the black letter of ecclesias
tical law, the Christian can only go about his business,
— and wait with what patience he can.
The history of the Christian society is the gradual
unfolding of the work of Christ in this cause as in all
others. The early Christians did not conceive polyg
amy to be inconsistent with their profession. As a
matter of expediency it was agreed that the clergy
must be monogamists. But there would have been no
meaning in the mandate, " let a bishop be the husband
of one wife," if the same rule had antecedently been
regarded as binding upon clergy and laity alike. And
how could the early Christians take that attitude hav
ing only the Old Testament in their hands, and the
New not yet written ? It may be a surprise to be re
minded that the Catholic Church has not to this day
officially pronounced that the possession of a plurality
of wives is per se a bar to membership. It is still an
open question whether a missionary in pagan land
may withhold baptism from a sincere convert until
he put away all his wives but one. As a matter of
fact Christ has eradicated polygamy as He has done
slavery by slowly producing individuals whose nature
is such that they cannot be either polygamists or
slaves. Can the same method be trusted to eradi-

THE MORALS OF SEX 29
cate the ancient custom of divorce ? Surely we must
think so.
But what can the Church do meanwhile ? I reply,
she may make such, and only such canonical regula
tions as are not for her ultra vires. Let me say here,
in passing, what has been often said by wise Church
men, that our Church is exposed to peculiar danger from
the lack of any judicial tribunal to determine the limit
of her right to legislate upon any cause. If a secular
legislature pass a law which it has really no power to
do, a supreme court so adjudges, and the law at once
becomes nul and void. In our Church the people are
only fairly well saved from such legislation by the fact
that what we call the common law of the Church is so
generally respected, and by the further fact that vio
lation of canonical law is so uncommonly easy and
free from danger.
From the beginning it has been admitted that the
Church may make such regulations for the conduct of
the clergy as she deems expedient, provided the com
mon rights of Christian people are not encroached
upon. Thus she has forbidden the clergy to bear arms,
to submit to the trial by combat, to marry, to engage in
unseemly avocations, and such like. All these regula
tions rest upon expediency, and are of their nature
transitory, local, may be modified, or revoked when
conditions change. On this ground I think the clergy
may well be instructed not to officiate at the remar
riage of any divorced person. If such a canonical

30 THE MORALS OF SEX
prohibition were passed I would cheerfully obey it.
I should vote for such a canon. Practically, I see no
other course open to the Church at the present stage.
•The clergy must either be left free to marry any and
all divorced persons or must be forbidden to marry any.
Discrimination is not possible for the obvious reason
that the Church possesses no machinery of her own by
which to ascertain the facts concerning any case of di
vorce, and she cannot commit her action to the formal
decisions of secular court without by that act com
mitting ecclesiastical suicide. Let the Church forbid
the clergy to remarry divorced persons ; — and let her
stop right there.
I say, stop right there, because the Church cannot
see her way any farther at present. No agreement
can now be reached as to what marriages God's word
doth allow, and what ones it doth disallow. Some
maintain that marriage is indissoluble for any cause ;
some that adultery by either party vacates it abso
lutely ; some that such breach of vow only releases the
other party to the extent of separation a mensa et
thoro ; some that the secular law fixes the status of
every individual in this regard so that the Church is
free to bless any marriage when the state pronounces
the parties marriageable. All appeal to the dicta of
Christ as recorded and interpreted in the New Testa
ment. Now, while this situation continues the Church dare
not go any farther in exercising discipline upon the

THE MORALS OF SEX 31
laity than she has already done in her rubrics. By
fundamental Catholic law and custom there are only
two offences for which a citizen in Christ's visible
Kingdom may be expelled. They are, first, notorious
uncharitableness : i. e., the demonstrated absence of
the Christian spirit ; and second, notorious evil living,
i. e., the demonstrated absence of the Christian con
duct. Under this later rubric the priest ex-communi
cates for a breach of the Seventh Commandment when
the offence has come to be common knowledge. He
needs no canonical permission to deal with an offence
whose definition has been already determined. What
then of the case of communicants who have been
legally divorced, let us say for desertion, and have
been remarried, let us say by a magistrate, who be
lieve that they have violated no law of God, and who are
living a sober life, and are regarded by the community
as upright men or women ? Shall the Church ex-com
municate them ? If so, on what ground ? Are they
adulterers ? Not unless the Church shall have by her
obiter dicta added to the definition of adultery. But
if the Church may arbitrarily label an action adultery,
and punish it under the Seventh Commandment, she
may with equal right label stock-broking theft, and
punish it under the Eighth Commandment, or pro
nounce a manager of the Brooklyn Eapid Transit
System a murderer, and ex-communicate him under the
Sixth. But are they " notorious evil livers " ? Clearly
not, for the Christian community in which they live

32 THE MORALS OF SEX
does not so regard them. What, then, shall the
Church do with them ? I answer, do what the Church
is commissioned to do ; exhort, teach, illuminate, — and
wait. But the kingdom of heaven is not to be taken
by violence, nor is the citizen to be expelled by vio
lence. The sons of thunder are not the apostles
whose proposed legislation the Master approves.
There are two quite distinct questions before the
Church now, and much depends upon this distinction
coming to be seen and acknowledged. The regula
tion of the action of the clergy is one thing: that
can be fixed arbitrarily, can be changed as conditions
change, need not rest upon any final declaration by the
Church of the intrinsic nature of the thing allowed or
forbidden. But the discipline of the laity is quite a
different thing. They have rights which cannot be
taken away by arbitrary statutes. " Let a man so ex
amine himself before he presume to eat of that bread
or drink of that cup," is the formula of the original
charter. Possibly he may eat and drink damnation.
That is his affair.
A great bishop said wisely that he had rather see
England free than sober. Better that the ecclesiastical
state should be free than that it should be beyond re
proach.

CHUECH AND CLEEGY

II
CHURCH AND CLERGY
No doubt the experience of every clergyman who
has a large acquaintance among his brethren is the
same as my own in one particular, that is, that we are
kept continually heart-sore by the stories which are
confided to us by men who are either out of work or
who are doing their work under conditions which
they feel to be hopeless.
For instance, here is a priest under forty, who was
for eight years the rector of a prosperous parish in a
southwestern state. His salary was satisfactory and
his work in every way to his liking ; he was recog
nized to be an able man in the Church and in the
community. His wife contracted malaria. Year by
year he saw himself being gradually closed in to an
awful dilemma. Either he must resign and go away,
facing the chances of starvation, or he must stay and
see his wife die. He resigned, as any honorable man
would have done. The question now is, What is
there for him to do ? I know that at this point there
are not a few who would make the suggestion, pri
vately, if not publicly, that he had no business ever to
have had a wife at all. This suggestion I will con
sider later on. 35

36 CHURCH AND CLERGY
Here is another instance : A man who has been
for ten years, and still is, rector of a church in a por
tion of a city from which the people are moving
away. When he began his work everything was
hopeful, and he did his duty with confidence in the
future. As the years passed on, however, confidence
gaye place to doubtfulness, doubt was succeeded by
fear, and fear gave place to despair. His brethren
of the clergy, to whom he has quietly talked of the
situation, have done their best again and again to se
cure some more hopeful field for him, but so far in
vain. There he is, a strong man, a good man, eating
out his heart in a task which is absolutely hopeless.
What can he do ?
Take still another case : Here is a man who came
into the Church four years ago from the Presby
terians. He is a scholar and a gentleman, and is a
distinct addition to the strength of the ministry as
a whole. He resigned the pastorate of a substantial
and prosperous church and came to us. He was able
to maintain himself and his family with some degree
of comfort during the dreadful year of quarantine
which our canons demand. Now he is ready and
capable of doing as good work as is to be found in the
Church. Is there any place for him ?
After being disturbed in mind for a long time by
these and similar concrete instances, I determined to
settle once and for all, to my own satisfaction, the
elementary question, i. e., Is there any place in the

CHURCH AND CLERGY 37
ministry for the men I have described ? In order to
do so, I sent to every bishop of a diocese or missionary
jurisdiction in this country the following letter :
"My dear Bishop :
" I beg that you will not think that I trespass when
I ask you to do me the great favor to tell whether or
not there may be in your diocese an opening at pres
ent, or in the near future, for a priest who seeks
work ? The man I have in mind is about thirty-five
years old, a gentleman, a Prayer Book Churchman, a
good preacher, and has been successful in his two
previous charges. He has a wife and two children.
I do not see how he could live upon less than $1,000 a
year, with a house.
" Is there a place in your diocese for such a man ?
Or have you a place where such a man might have
an assured, even if meagre, support for a couple of
years while he should make a position for himself !
" I am sorry to trouble you, but I would esteem it
a great favor if you will let me know, in a word,
whether or not such a place might be looked for with
you. Very sincerely yours,
" S. D. McCONNELL."
This letter was sent to about seventy bishops. I
have received replies from fifty-nine of them. These
included the Bishops of Maine, Yermont, Massachu
setts, Ehode Island, Connecticut, New York, Albany,
Long Island, Central New York, New Jersey, Penn
sylvania, Central Pennsylvania, Pittsburg, Delaware,
Maryland, Washington, Kentucky, Yirginia, Illinois,
Springfield, Southern Ohio, Missouri, Kansas, Ten
nessee, Georgia, Michigan, Milwaukee, Duluth, Min
nesota, Colorado and Nebraska and many others.

38 CHURCH AND CLERGY
They all reply that there is not now, or likely to be,
in the near future, any opening for such a man as I
described. The two exceptions are, one in a north
western diocese, where the bishop mentioned a vacant
parish which paid a salary of $1,200 a year. He said,
farther, that to his knowledge the vestry had more
than thirty candidates under consideration, and that
he himself had named three, none of which were
satisfactory to the vestry. The other vacancy was in
the diocese of Albany. If there is any better way in
which to secure an accurate statement of the exact
situation concerning supply and demand in the
Church, I don't know it. I have asked every bishop
in the Church if he knows of any place where a first-
rate man with a wife and two children, a man who
has been successful, who is a good preacher, a good
parish worker, a good citizen, and who resigned his
last parish for reasons which were perfectly satisfac
tory, can have a bare living for himself and his fam
ily. The reply is that there are just two such places
in the American Church, and that there are forty men
who want each of them.
The bishops in their replies have a uniform tone of
despondency which is most striking. One, the bishop
of one of the dioceses in Pennsylvania, says : " I have
nothing to offer suitable for a man with a family.
Indeed the ' family ' part is becoming more and more
a serious drawback." The Bishop of Massachusetts
writes : " One of the burdens of my life is writing just

CHURCH AND CLERGY 39
such letters as this. In to-day's mail, for instance, I
received this and another letter of similar purport. I
have been at my office two hours and have had two
clergymen in with the same request. I am sometimes
tempted to write an article and head it, ' What is the
matter with the Church ! ' " The Bishop of New
Jersey says : " There is not a vacant parish or mission
at this time in this diocese." The Bishop of Connec
ticut says : " Facts like these make one of the heaviest
burdens of this office." One of the oldest and most
distinguished bishops in the Church, whose name I do
not feel at liberty to mention, says : " It seems to me
that before a long time it will be found that we have
more men than places, more clergy, such as they are,
than supporting parishes. I say this partially because
some years ago I gave much time, effort and exhor
tation to the increase of the ministry. This is the
season of confession." The Bishop of Washington
writes : " The majority of the salaries in this diocese
are less than $700 a year. We have a splendid corps
of clergy doing most valuable work ; it is a constant
surprise to me that we could secure them on such
terms." In a majority of cases the bishops volunteered to say
that the average salaries of their clergy were from
$500 to $800 per year.
Now let us see precisely what the situation is. I am
not speaking at all of that more or less numerous body
of impracticable, incapable, restless clergy, who either

40 CHURCH AND CLERGY
have nothing to give to a parish which is worth pay
ing for or who will not remain long enough in any
one parish to let the people discover it. Nor do I
have in mind that practically exhaustless number
of clergymen of other churches who would gladly
enter our ministry if they were able to see any proba
bility of a livelihood therein. I speak of the support
which may be fairly counted upon by strong, earnest
and capable men. I asked for one such $1,000 and a
house for the support of himself and his family.
There are only two such places vacant at this moment
in the American Church, the bishops being the wit
nesses. Is the demand which I make for this man un
reasonable ? It is the wages of a carpenter, of a sales
man in a department store, less than that of a brick
layer. To qualify him to discharge the duties of his
office the Church required him to spend at least five
years, and more probably seven, in special preparation.
Nor, again, do I bring any accusation against the
laity for failure to do their duty ; I have no faith
in such accusations. I believe that the laity will pay
for the support of just so many and just such kind of
clergy as are needed to discharge the priest's office in
the Church of God. If for any reason the Church
sees fit by its methods to distribute the aggregate
amount contributed by the laity for this purpose
among more priests than are needed, there will be just
so much less for each one. If the Church retains in
her ministry men who do not actually give the goods

CHURCH AND CLERGY 41
which the laity have a right to expect, the laity will
decline to pay. Mere scolding or exhortation will
have no effect in the premises.
But if the facts are as I have stated, there are sev
eral classes of people who ought to know it. First of
all are the candidates for orders. If it be true, as I
believe it is, that the time has arrived when, generally
speaking, every young man entering the ministry must
expect to malce his own parish, and not to find one
ready to hand, it is clearly desirable that he should
have this fact drawn to his attention early.
The situation is new. Twenty years ago the aver
age young man ready to be ordained might fairly
take for granted that there was waiting for him
somewhere in the American Church a place either as
an assistant in a large parish or as rector in a small
one, or as missionary at some post where the Church
was ready to send him. At that date the bishops
were seeking for men. They were writing hither and
thither to inquire if one might perchance know of a
suitable man to fill such and such a vacancy. At that
date the missionary bishops used to visit the theolog
ical schools in order to secure, if possible, a promise
from members of the junior class that they would go
to their jurisdictions three years later. Now the whole
situation is changed. What has caused the change ?
What will cure it ?
These are large and very difficult questions. If I
venture to state some things which seem to me to be

42 CHURCH AND CLERGY
the causes, I trust that it will not be regarded as an
impertinence. It is only an expression of opinion,
after all, and one man's opinion is as free as another's.
If any one can point out causes which will appear
more real than those I suggest, I shall be only too
glad to withdraw my own and to accept his.
Probably the chief cause of the condition of things
now existing is one which is not confined to us. It is
operating with bewildering rapidity in the whole
United States. It is that sweeping change which is
going on in the religious habits of the people. For
many centuries the Church has encircled a multitude
of "nominal adherents," probably larger than the
number of the disciples. From Constantino's time
until within our own generation the Church has been
supported in large part by the money of those who
never were Christians. During many centuries, and
throughout the Christian world, this money came in
as the proceeds of a general tax levy. People paid for
the Church, just as to-day they pay for the public
schools, whether they cared or did not care to use it.
When Church and State were separated, as in the
United States, these same nominal Christians contin
ued for a long time to do from use and wont what
they had previously done by legal mandate. They at
tended church with more or less regularity, and they
contributed toward its support. Public opinion com
pelled them. To have no " church connection " was a
social stigma. So, too, to be an habitual non-church-

CHURCH AND CLERGY 43
goer gave suspicion of moral obliquity. There was a
feeling in the community that any man might reason
ably be called upon to help build or support a church,
whether he was a member of the church or not. The
banker, the politician, the society man, even the gam
bler in a mining camp, responded to this social coer
cion. They do so yet, but in a lessening degree. We
are within sight of the time when they will not do so
at all. When the Church asked for a complete sepa
ration from the State she did not altogether realize
how complete that separation would become. She
thought only of separating from institutions with
which she had no part. It ends by separating from
multitudes of people who had no part with her. Our
own Church will suffer more by this falling away than
will any other. We have had a far larger proportion
in the congregation who are not members of the
Church than has any other. They have been con
tributors, workers, vestrymen. But the time is in
sight when they will be so no longer. Their falling
away is not an apostasy. Nor is it the result of any
decadence in the morals of the people who once were
in our churches and now are not. It is simply due to
the fact that now society has taken the ground that
some " church connection " is not necessary to social
standing or to moral respectability. The Church is
rapidly returning to the position in which it was in the
primitive ages. Then, the most it hoped for was to
be let alone. Then Constantine came and gave it rich

44 CHURCH AND CLERGY
donations — but did not join it. Now he is about to
withdraw, and we will no more have the contributions
of him or his kind. That this change in the situation
has come about so suddenly will surprise no one who
studies the history of social movements. It is just the
action which Protestantism has been preparing for
during four centuries. It took a long time to get
ready for the movement. Our own generation will
probably be long enough for the action itself. This
goes far to account for the present excess of clergy
everywhere. The supply was adjusted to a condition
of things which endured up to hardly more than
twenty years ago, but which is well-nigh gone to-day.
It is with unfeigned reluctance and real trepida
tion that I go on to point out some causes of cler
ical indigence which, in my judgment, operate par
ticularly within our own Church. I know that many
will disagree with me, and that some may take um
brage. I can only plead that if what I say shall prove
to be the truth, it ought to be said. If it be not true,
it will hurt no one.
I would name, first, therefore, the enormous ad
vance of the "priestly" conception of the ministry
which has come in within the last quarter of a cen
tury. The " Oxford Movement " has something to its
credit, but it has much also to its debit side. Wher
ever it has gained control in any area, in that area
the clergy are poorly paid. And not only so, but in
the same places the gifts of the laity for Church propa-

CHURCH AND CLERGY 45
gation are most meagre. If any one will look over
the list of the parishes which sustain the Board of
Missions he will see the truth of this. There is only
one' conspicuous exception, and that a brilliant one,
where in a great parish the priests are paid by the
dead hand of men who while they lived, thought little
of priests. Speaking generally, the parishes and
dioceses wherein the " priestly " idea has been most
completely exploited are those where the laity are
least willing to give the priest a living salary. The
bishop of the diocese in which that idea has been al
lowed its freest course says, in his last convention ad
dress : " We have been in the diocese twenty years,
and in only a single instance has a missionary ap
propriation been voluntarily surrendered." Of course,
it is open to the priest to retort : " So much the more
shame to the laity for forgetting the apostolic in
junction that they who preach the gospel should live
by the gospel." Maybe so. But suppose the laity
should reply : " If you will try for a while to preach
the gospel we will try to see that you do live ! " A
man is only paid for. the thing which he does. If he
be thoroughly equipped to perform sacerdotal func
tions, an equipment procured, maybe, at great cost of
labor, of study and practice, and find that so small a
percentage of the community want the things which
he has to give sufficiently to pay for them, what is he
to say ? He may say : " They are precious things,
men ought to want them ; they ought to gladly wel-

46 CHURCH AND CLERGY
come and honor the man who brings them." Maybe
so, again. But it may be worth while to remind him
that the men to whom he would thus speak are not
within the sound of his voice. I am constrained to
believe that the exploitation of the priestly at the ex
pense of the prophetic side of the ministerial office,
with the dogmatism, pettiness, hardness, and super
ciliousness which so often attend thereupon, will go
far to explain why the laity are slow to pay living
stipends. Surely there must be some explanation of
the fact that so many priests of blameless hfe, of burn
ing zeal, of tireless activity, are so insufficiently main
tained while they do their offices.
The second cause in order, though possibly the first
in influence, is the spread of the " Free Church Idea."
It is a source of congratulation to the advocates of
that idea that something like eighty-five per cent, of
our churches are " free." The root principle of the
free church propaganda is that the attendant at a
Christian church cannot rightly have his attendance
made conditional upon his agreeing to pay any fixed
sum toward the support of the Church. This is the
heart of the contention. I do not propose to contro
vert the claim farther than to say that it seems to me
to rest upon an astonishing confusion of ideas. To
argue that because the gospel is free, therefore
churches should be free, is like arguing that because
water is free, therefore men should not be required to
pay taxes for the water they draw from the hydrant.

CHURCH AND CLERGY 47
But what I call attention to is the effect which has
been produced upon the people by twenty-five years'
preaching of this demoralizing error. I am quite
aware that experience has taught the folly of it in
many cases. In my own city two of the most con
spicuous "free" churches have abandoned their
theory, and a third and more conspicuous parish would
gladly do so if it could. But the mischief has been
done. For a quarter of a century the propaganda has
been carried forward. By sermons, episcopal charges,
addresses, tracts, periodicals, it has been dinned into
the people's ears that the Church ought to be free,
that to make any financial condition of attendance is
wrong, selfish, anti-Christian. Is it any wonder that
the people have come to believe what they have been
so diligently taught ? Is it surprising if they better
their instruction ? I would have it understood that I
am not making an argument for pewed churches.
The antithesis of the " free church " is not " the pew
church," it is any church wherein the attendant has
the amount which he shall pay for his place fixed for
him by the Church, and not left to his own whim from
day to day. It is probably true that there are few
really free churches — that is, churches which actually
depend upon the free-will offerings of the people at
the services. But that is not the point. The point is
that there are hundreds in which that is held before
the people as the ideal of what ought of right to be.
This is where the mischief is done. It is not that a

48 CHURCH AND CLERGY
free church here and there gives its priest a meagre sup
port and can rarely spare an offertory for any object
outside itself. It is that the people have their sense of
responsibility debauched by the display of a false ideal.
From the organization of the American Church up
to about twenty-five years ago, the missions started
almost invariably passed on, and passed on quickly to
become self-supporting parishes. A group of Church
people in a new town, or in a new portion of a city,
dreAv together, grew larger, built a church for them
selves, called a minister for themselves, and paid
for all themselves. When I say built a church for
themselves, I mean that. They were the owners, and
being the owners they could exercise hospitality. But
the visitor came within their gates as a visitor, and
not as one who, they feared, might rebuke them for
not waiving their own rights and declaring the house
free alike to all. But the simple fact is, that while
this way prevailed the Church did grow, it organized
new parishes, they became self-sustaining, and they
paid their clergy. Why is it that so many scores of
missions and parishes, started within the last quarter
century, remain a burden on the Church at large ? In
multitudes of towns and cities the conditions have been
far more favorable than were the early conditions of
the parishes which are now called upon to help them.
I believe that one will go far to explain the evils of
the present situation when he says that there has
spread abroad a well-meant but mischievous spirit of

CHURCH AND CLERGY 49
ecclesiastical communism which bids fair to convert
the churches, of this land into sturdy beggars. It is
paralyzing the efforts of the bishops, it is starving the
clergy and deteriorating the manly fibre of the laity.
And now, things being as they are, might it not be
wisest to look for relief to a celibate clergy? That
this idea is in the minds of many of the bishops is
evident from their replies. They are practical men
and are confronted with immediate necessities. It
should not be surprising if they snatch at the relief
which seems to lie nearest to hand. Certainly an un
married man can live upon less than can a family.
He can go where he is sent. He is more amenable to
discipline. These two considerations, a clergy more
easily maintained, and the bishop's desire to possess
the " power of mission," lead not a few of our bishops
(themselves having families) to look in this direction,
and lead a few of them to advocate that way.
They had better first count the cost. A celibate
clergy is an institution of quite incalculable potency.
It is the one thing which gives the Eoman Church its
power. Change that, and the Eoman Church would
fall to pieces. There is an army of loose-footed janis
saries who can never fix themselves by bonds of com
mon life and affection at any point in human society.
They are, therefore, always to be depended upon to
carry out the will of their superiors. But the hu
man soul cannot live without affection. The celibate
priest among us (I do not mean the unmarried priest,)

50 CHURCH AND CLERGY
gives his heart to his Order. It is true that he will
obey his bishop, provided his bishop be one of his own
kind, and provided farther that there be round about
him a discipline vigorous enough to protect the celi
bate from himself and to protect the Church from
complicity with him in his faults. If the Church
should determine soberly that a celibate clergy is the
practical answer to a practical problem, and should
adopt the system together with the discipline neces
sary to safeguard it, the most that could be said would
be that this Church would then be transformed into
something quite unlike to what it is now and ever has
been. A different kind of men would fill her ministry,
and the kind of laymen we have known heretofore
would disappear from her. Still, the new institution
might remain respectable.
But if, on the other hand, celibacy shall, unnoticed
and unregulated, come to prevail without that stern
discipline which in Eome avails at least to maintain
outward decency, then, and in that case, the clergy
and the laity of the type which have borne the
Church's fortunes thus far may quietly prepare for re
moval from an institution which should have so far
transformed itself that they could no longer recognize
it, or safely remain within it.
In any case, it may be well to be reminded that the
" Power of Mission," of which some bishops are dream
ing, is quite impossible. Beside the fact that it is not
Catholic, nor primitive, nor American, and beside the

CHURCH AND CLERGY 51
fact that neither clergy nor laity either would or
ought to submit to it, and beside the fact that many
bishops are utterly unfit to exercise it, this Church of
ours is barred from adopting it by the law of honor
and good faith. Among the list of "Fundamental
Eights and Liberties," unanimously accepted as the
basis upon which the Convention which framed the
Constitution should act, is the provision that the ap
pointment of clergy to cures should always rest with
the laity. For this Church that matter is settled, until
and unless she should be willing to break pledged faith.
But what, then ? Here there are but two places in
the United States at this moment open for a man who
cannot live upon less than a thousand dollars a year
and a rectory, while more than one-half of our clergy
receive less than that. What shall we do ?
I reply, first, realize the fact. Second, seek for the
cause. Third, let candidates for Orders know the
facts. This will be a fan to winnow them. Those
who are conscious of possessing the strength and
enthusiasm to go out and make a place, each man for
himself, will go, and will bless and be blessed.
Nor need we pass over silently the petition, " Send
forth laborers into Thy harvest." " Laborers " and
" clergy " are not synonymous. There be laborers
who are not clergymen ; and there be clergymen, I
trow, who are not laborers. Multitudes of laborers
are needed in every nook and corner of the vineyard,
but they need not be ordained.

ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINAEIES

Ill
ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES
If we were altogether without any system of theo
logical education, it would probably not be difficult
for wise men to put their heads together and arrange
one which would be satisfactory. Unfortunately,
however, we have one already occupying the ground,
but one which is confessed on all hands not to be
what we would be glad to have it. I do not think I
have ever heard any clergyman speak with entire con
tentment of our system of theological training. Nor
have I ever found one who has looked back upon his
own course in the seminary with the same satisfaction
with which he looks back upon his course in the uni
versity, or with which the lawyer or the doctor or the
engineer looks back upon his years in his professional
school. I therefore venture to criticise our present
system, because while I recognize distinctly that it
has in it many elements of good, and that there are
connected with it scholars and devoted men at whoso
feet I am not worthy to sit, nevertheless, I think it is
well that men should speak out frankly the things
which they think, and so give an opportunity to other
men who think differently to say their say with equal
plainness. 55

56 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES
The charges which I venture to bring against our
present system of training men for the ministry are,
first, that it does not tend to secure the right kind of
men ; second, that it does not train them efficiently
for the purpose they have in view ; third, that it costs
far too much money.
In looking about for the explanation of these evils,
which are, at least in part, acknowledged by every
one, the root of the matter would seem to be in the
fact of our general confusion as to precisely what the
ministry is. The Church, in the nature of the case,
can never prepare any man for the ministry unless
she have in mind precisely what the nature of the of
fice and work is for which she is trying to fit him.
What, then, are we attempting to produce in our
theological seminaries ? Is it masters of ritual cere
monial? is it directors of men's consciences? is it
forceful advocates ? is it skillful executives ? or is it a
combination of all of these ? It will be readily seen
that the method of training which would secure one
of these results is a method which cannot by any
possibility produce the others.
Now, to clear the ground here, let us look back to
the beginning and see what the idea of the ministry
was which was practically accepted and acted upon in
the earliest days of the Church. It is evident at a
glance that all those purposes named above, if they
were present at all in the minds of the earliest apos
tles, were present only as subsidiary to another pur-

ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 57
pose which was to be reached in a different way.
The earliest ministers of Christ regarded themselves
as the bearers of a very plain and simple message : it
was the declaration of the fact of the Cross of Christ
as a method of living, and of the Eesurrection as a
new motive for right living. The men themselves
were all men without special training as priests, dea
cons, pastors, or executives. It is a very significant
fact that from the " multitudes of priests " (and we
may add scribes also) "who were added to the
Church " not a single one appears to have entered its
ministry. Their previous training and qualification
for official work in an ecclesiastical organization seem
all to have gone for nothing, and a different kind of
men were selected, with different qualifications. And
we may say, in passing, that the success of the early
preachers of the gospel and administrators of the
Church was at least fairly good.
When we pass from the earliest days of the Church
into its patristic period, we find that exactly the same
ideas prevailed concerning the preparation for the
ministry. Justin Martyr, for example, was an Ori
ental Greek philosopher, and he passed at once from
his professional work to the work of the ministry.
Of the early education of Irenaeus nothing is known.
Cyprian was an educated Latin gentleman, knowing
no tongue but his own, and with no previous training
in technical theology. Origen was a lecturer of
theology at the age of eighteen; and when in later

58 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES
years he did subject himself to a regular course of
theological training, he unfortunately became a here
tic. Athanasius had a common school education, and
learned his theology himself. Gregory Nazianzen
had established his reputation as a grammarian,
mathematician, and rhetorician, and passed from that
at once into the ministry. Jerome prepared himself
by the study of the pagan Greek and Eoman classics.
Basil was a professional philosopher, Augustine a
professional rhetorician. Ambrose was a lawyer,
made a bishop eight days after he was baptized.
The only one among them all who seems to have had
a careful scientific theological training before be
ginning his ministry was Arius !
This general ideal of the preparation for the min
istry passed on into the Middle Ages. Alcuin was a
classicist. Anselm was a merchant ; Bernard had the
training of a knight and a noble. Thomas Aquinas'
preparatory studies were in Aristotle and Dionysius
the Areopagite. Calvin was a lawyer.
Among the masters of English theology the same
idea of preparation prevailed. Bishop Barrow was a
professor of Greek and mathematics, up to the time
of his ordination. Bishop Andrews was master of
Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. Jeremy Taylor won his
fellowship in the classics. And so generally.
When one looks for the reason of the wonderful
efficiency of the men whose names occur in this long
roll of apostles, fathers, and theologians, two or three

ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 59
explanations occur. The first and most evident one
is that their " vocation " to the ministry came to them
in every case when they were full-grown men, with
the knowledge of life and men, and with the oppor
tunity to accurately estimate their own powers.
They left their nets, their counting houses their
schools, — in which they had already attained success,
— and became the ambassadors of Jesus Christ.
The second is that they proceeded at once to use the
faculties and qualifications which they had already
possessed and had tried and tested in the actual con
duct of their lives.
The third is that they were chosen and called by the
bishops and the congregations, and were not volun
teers. Now, it is but fair to say that the operation of that
law which Mr. Spencer calls the " differentiation of
function " has had its place in the Church as well as in
society and in the physical world. To a certain point
the legitimate operation of this law upon the prepara
tion of men for the ministry of the Church must be
allowed. But our contention is that it has been per
mitted to operate to an extent which has practically
reversed or destroyed some of the fundamental princi
ples upon which the choice of men for the ministry
and their preparation therefor should proceed.
First of all, as things are with us, any man who ex
pects to be ordained priest at twenty -four must settle
his vocation not later than at the age of nineteen ; in

60 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES
other words, he must determine while he is yet a boy
whether or not he intends as a man to devote his life
to the ministry. This is the necessary condition of
things, of course, in every other profession. The de
mands of each profession have become so exacting that
the technical training therefor has been greatly
lengthened out ; so that any man who wishes to enter
the profession must determine upon it a long while in
advance. But the ministry will not stand upon the
ground of a " profession." It is not a profession : it is
a vocation. The whole theory of the Church is that
this vocation comes to a man when he is a man, and
comes to him with such imperious command that he
dare not refuse it. With us ninety-nine per cent, of
Christian men are practically forbidden to obey this
vocation. Not long ago one of the most eloquent and
devoted of our bishops made an address in my church
upon Domestic Missions. He closed with an impress
ive appeal to the men present, by their love of God
and of their country, to consider whether they might
not, — some of them at any rate, — like St. Matthew,
leave their counting houses and become ambassadors
of Christ. Now, suppose one of these men had taken
the bishop at his word. He is a lawyer, a merchant,
an engineer, an architect, a man of affairs, or a man of
leisure. His standing in the community is high. He
has shown by his success in business his ability to deal
with men and things. By his offer of himself he shows
his devotion. He is thirty-five years old and has a

ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 61
family which he rules well. The Church is praying :
" Lord, send forth laborers into Thy harvest." Here is
a laborer ready. He offers himself. What does the
Church say to him ? She says : My dear brother, it
will take you four years, at least, to be able to pass
the Standing Committee. It is enough for him. And
it ought to be enough. He turns away; and the
Church goes again upon her knees, and wails in solemn
litany : " Lord, send forth laborers into Thy harvest."
Then you can, if you will, set over against this the
fact that four hundred priests, who possess precisely
the learning in which our friend who sadly turns away
is wanting, are "unemployed" and can hardly get
their bread.
The explanation of all this is that, while we rightly
insist upon having " educated " men in the ministry,
we insist upon an artificial kind of education. Even
as late as fifty years ago the phrase " an educated
man " was one which was perfectly well understood.
It meant, with us, a man who had gone through col
lege, studied Greek, Latin, mathematics, natural philos
ophy, and the humanities. But since that time the
majority of educated men have not been trained along
these, but upon different lines. We continue to insist,
however, that for our purpose no man is an educated
man unless his education has been of this kind arbi
trarily decreed.
Side by side with this is the fact that the person
whose natural and inalienable right it is to make choice

62 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES
of fit men for the ministry has had his rights taken
from him and usurped by another power. Nowhere
else in the whole Church Catholic is the right of the
bishop to choose out fit persons for the ministry and
to pass upon their qualifications questioned. In our
American Church this power has been practically taken
from him and lodged in the hands of the Standing Com
mittee. In the whole transaction neither the bishop,
who should select, nor the congregation, who should
choose out, has any power. It is a matter between the
candidate for Orders and the Standing Committee.
Lest this assertion may be called in question, I ven
ture to condense from Title I. of the Digest precisely
what is the manner of procedure. When a man thinks
of " studying for the ministry," he is first directed to
consult his rector. If the rector thinks well of it, he
can go to the bishop. If the rector does not think
well of it, he can go to the bishop all the same. Upon
his arrival, the bishop is instructed to ask him, first,
whether he has ever applied elsewhere ; second, whether
he is ready to pass his examinations ; third, when and
where he was baptized, confirmed, and received his
first communion. If he is able to answer all these
inquiries satisfactorily, the bishop is canonically re
quired — to make a note of it. That is all. At
this stage the canons declare that in the absence of a
bishop the Standing Committee can do it all just as
well. But now the real business of the young man
commences. The bishop may know him, and love

ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 63
him, and be fain to ordain him, but that goes for noth
ing. He must now " apply to the Standing Commit
tee for recommendation to the bishop for admission as
a candidate." He must bring to the Standing Com
mittee a " testimonial." If he does not bring this tes
timonial, however, the canon is careful to say that the
Standing Committee can receive him all the same.
With the recommendation of the Standing Committee
in his hand the young man goes again to the bishop.
The canon evidently assumes that the bishop will obey
the godly admonition of the Standing Committee in
the premises, for at this point it declares that the
bishop shall require the young man to declare whether
he intends to become a candidate for priest's Orders
or for deacon's Orders only. If the latter, the
bishop may now accept him. If the former, the
bishop may not yet be trusted. He must now
inquire for the young man's diploma. If there is
any doubt as to its sufficiency, the bishop is advised
to submit it to the Standing Committee for their
consideration. If no diploma is forthcoming, the
young man must be turned over to the examining
chaplains. After all this the bishop may — not ordain
him, but admit him to be a candidate for ordination
at some future time.
The primitive and Catholic theory is that the bishop
in his quality of chief pastor shall be able to know
who are fit persons to enter the ministry ; and that in
the determination of this question, he shall cooperate

64 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINAEIES
with the congregation who personally know the man.
The organizing principle about which our Church re
volves is the episcopate ; and the one peculiar power
of the episcopate is the power of ordination. For this
we believe that office has a divine sanction. To insist,
therefore, that the bishop shall be forbidden to exer
cise the one function which is peculiar to him, without
the consent and recommendation of another power un
known both to the primitive and to the Catholic
Church, is simply a solemn trifling, which the world
will sooner or later find out. May we not hope that
the bishops may some time pluck up the courage to
resist that steady encroachment upon their inherent
prerogatives which has marked the action of that
house of clerical and lay deputies which now for some
time has strangely fancied that it is the Church ?
Another charge which may fairly be brought against
our present method is that it is inefficient even within
the arbitrary, artificial lines which it has set. There
are very few young men to whom it is possible to
secure a first-rate, or even a second-rate, university
education in the department of the humanities, and
still have the time and the money to spare for a three-
years' theological course. It is true that a large num
ber of our theological students write A. B. after their
names. From an examination of the catalogues of a
dozen of our seminaries I should think that about fifty
per cent, have the right to do so. A little closer ex
amination, however, will discover the fact that these

ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 65
bachelors' degrees have been conferred in large num
ber by small, ill-equipped, and unsatisfactory colleges,
which have arisen for the express purpose of provid
ing a short, cheap, and inadequate college training for
candidates for the ministry. I have no fault to find
with these colleges or with the spirit in which they
conduct their work. As things are with us, they
would seem to be a necessity. The time and expense
necessary for education in a first-rate college or uni
versity are beyond the unaided means of most candi
dates for the ministry. If the Church, therefore, in
sists that they shall have in advance a particular kind
of education, and will accept no other kind, it is but
natural and proper that she should provide the ma
chinery to give them this education. But the Church
should not allow herself to be deceived any more than
the world at large is actually deceived with regard to
the matter. The educated world is not deceived at
all ; it knows exactly what this collegiate education is
worth and what it is not. It may be alleged, without
much fear of contradiction, that the work done within
our theological seminaries themselves does not compare
in earnestness or efficiency with the work done in the
technical schools where men are being fitted for other
professions. In preparing this paper I have had be
fore me the rosters for the middle year of students
in probably our best divinity school, an average medi
cal school, and an average law school. In the medical
school the lectures which the students of that year

66 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES
are bound to attend take twenty-seven hours a week.
These lectures are upon the most exact subjects, which
require the utmost precision and accuracy of work.
In addition to these twenty-seven hours required at
least six more hours are bound to be spent in dis
section and at clinics. The authorities of the school
are bowelless. The student must do his work and pass
his examinations without any regard to his attractive
or unattractive personal qualities, or he cannot re
ceive his diploma. In the corresponding law school
the roster shows a requirement of twenty-nine hours a
week at lectures ; and the dean of the school informs
me that it is not possible for any student to pass his
final examinations and receive his degree unless he
adds to this at least ten hours a week. In both these
schools, — as I have had the opportunity personally to
observe, — the student is compelled to work, work,
work ; and his final passage depends upon whether he
actually has or has not done the work. In the corre
sponding divinity school the second-year men are
called upon to attend seventeen hours of lectures.
The studies with which they are engaged are not
studies of precision. It depends upon the student
himself largely as to how much or how little work he
shall perform. I am constrained to believe that he
works not much more than half as many hours during
his year as the student in either of these other schools,
and that his work is done with less than half the ac
curacy and thoroughness.

ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 67
The only consoling reflection at this stage is that
when one looks over the course of study set before the
student in some of our seminaries it is just as well that
he does not spend too much time upon it. For example,
in one of our most widely known schools the text
books in dogmatic theology for two whole years are
Pearson on the Creed, Percival's " Digest of Theol
ogy," and Butler's " Analogy " ; and for collateral
illumination the students are directed to the
" Summa " of St. Thomas, St. Leo on the Incarnation,
the " Catechetical Lectures " of St. Cyril of Jerusalem,
McLaren's " Catholic Dogma the Antidote of Doubt " ;
and the only book upon evidences is Paley's ! It is as
though the students at West Point should be loosely
trained in the use of crossbows and jingalls, and then
commissioned as officers in the United States Army !
But with the requirements being even what they
are, it is practically impossible for the great majority
of our theological students to provide for themselves
the expense which it entails. If, however, we accept
the decision of a boy of nineteen that he shall pre
pare himself, or be prepared, for ordination to the
ministry according to the requirements which the
Church establishes, it is but fair and right, from his
point of view, that the Church should provide for him
those means which it forbids him the opportunity to
earn for himself. No theological student, therefore,
need feel shame or humiliation in being aided by the
Church while he is pursuing his studies. But as to the

68 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES
effect of this assistance upon those who receive it, the
opinion of thoughtful and candid men is that, upon the
whole, it is bad. That, however, is a subject too
delicate to be entered upon here.
Another charge which may be brought against our
system is that it is disgracefully expensive. Our
"plant" for the education of the theological students
as compared with that for the education of lawyers or
doctors or even engineers is at least four times greater
in money value in proportion to the number of men
being trained by it. At a rough guess the property
of our eighteen theological seminaries may be put at
$6,000,000. There are in those seminaries about three
hundred students. At five per cent, upon the capital
invested, therefore, the cost to the Church annually
for the education of each student is $1,000. To this is
to be added the whole expense for the livelihood of
the student while in the seminary and the support of
the teachers who teach him. In those eighteen semi
naries the faculties, not counting the bishops, include
sixty-nine priests. Their support and salaries must be
added. There are about three and one quarter stu
dents to each professor. At the lowest calculation
upon this basis, it costs the Church $2,000 a year for
the education of each student. This is at least double
the cost for the education of students for other pro
fessions. Now, it ought to go without saying that there are
in our seminaries teachers, not a few, the peers of any

ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 69
teachers in any department of learning. There are
students as diligent and efficient and as capable as the
students in any other kind of institution of learning.
Everybody knows that this is true. But everybody
knows, or at least may know if he takes the trouble
to inquire, that, speaking generally, the facts of the
situation are as I have tried to set them forth.
What, then, has caused this unfortunate condition
of affairs, and what can be done by the Church to re
form it ?
The first cause would seem to be that we insist upon
an " educated " ministry without having clear notions
as to what kind of education is really the kind which
will produce the purpose we have in view. We have
insisted as essential that the preliminary education
shall include Latin and Greek and Hebrew. It is true
that there are provisions for exemptions in certain
cases from each of these ; but the simple fact that a
dispensation is required in any case is the proof that
in general the requirement is fixed. Now, it has
come about that the great majority of educated men
do not know Latin or Greek, to say nothing of He
brew. In any large university (the technical schools
being included in the university) it will be found that
the academic department is far smaller numerically
than the other departments. Even within the aca
demic department there are elective courses which do
not include Latin or Greek and hardly ever include
Hebrew. Are the men who pass through these uni-

70 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES
versity courses educated men or are they not ? They
are clearly so for every purpose except the ministry.
What is the explanation, then, of the fact that we in
sist upon a knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew
as conditions precedent for the study of theology.
The explanation is twofold. First, it is a survival
from a previous condition of affairs where this particu
lar kind of knowledge was the badge of an educated
man. In the second place, it is the unconscious in
fluence of a theory concerning the place of the Holy
Scriptures in the Christian economy which this Church
of ours does not hold. Within Protestantism gener
ally it is assumed that the Bible is the sole rule of
faith and practice. If this be true, then any man who
proposes to be a public teacher of Christianity must
be familiar most intimately with the authority. For
such a man the authority in its English guise is not
sufficient. He must be able himself to determine pre
cisely what the Holy Scriptures say and do not say
upon any question ; and this knowledge he can only
obtain for himself by being able to critically examine
the original. This theory of the place of the Holy
Scriptures the Catholic Church has never held and our
Church does not hold. Nevertheless, its influence has
obtained so widely that it has affected our practical
methods even though we disavow the theory itself. I
venture to say that the efficiency of the ordinary
Christian minister at the end of the nineteenth cen
tury depends hardly at all upon his knowledge of

ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 71
either Greek, Latin, or Hebrew ; and it is well that it
does not, for in the vast majority of instances he does
not possess this knowledge, and could not possess it to
the necessary degree even if he tried. Where any
question of Christian doctrine hinges upon a critical
interpretation of the text, it is necessary to call in the
services of an expert. Scholarship has become alto
gether too accurate and its demands too exigent to be
met and satisfied by amateurs.
But do not misunderstand me. No Church can sur
vive for any great length of time whose ministry does
not contain within it the very highest and best scholar
ship. But it does not at all follow that that scholar
ship should be equally distributed throughout the
whole ministry. The Eoman priesthood, — whose
efficiency no one will question, whatever he may think
of the end toward which this efficiency is directed, —
contains within it scholarship of the very highest
order ; but the priests who serve the Church in the
field of scholarship are not the same ones who serve
it in the field of its practical work. Our mistake, as
it seems to me, has been to insist that we should all
alike possess the same qualifications of scholarship.
The result has been that we leave our scholars no op
portunity for the perfection of their work ; and the
rest of us try to persuade ourselves that we are
scholars, when in point of fact we are not.
Now, in the face of all this, I venture to deliberately
express the opinion that for the ordinary Christian

72 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES
minister but little special theological training is need
ful. If we shall be able to recover the lost fact that
the ministry is intended to be recruited by men who
enter it in response to a vocation, and not from boys
who are artificially selected and especially trained,
the reason of this will become evident. If a mature
man who has been reared in a Christian community,
within a Christian Church, in a Christian family, has
obeyed his baptismal admonition to hear sermons all
his life long, does not then know what Christianity is,
we may fairly assume that he never will know. The
prerequisite knowledge for the ministry is of quite a
different kind. The gospel is not abstruse ; it is per
fectly simple. If it had been so complex and difficult
of comprehension, and difficult of accurate statement,
as is often now assumed, it never could have made it
self intelligible to the world. What is needed is
a knowledge not of the seed, but of the field. As a
seed of course it shares in the mystery which belongs
to all seeds and to all vital processes. But those mys
teries are, in the nature of the case, as insoluble to a
trained theologian as they are to your average Chris
tian. But it is absolutely necessary that the sower
who undertakes to plant the seed should be in posses
sion of at least such knowledge of the actual con
dition of the soil, surroundings, climate, seasons, and
temperature as it is possible for him to obtain.
Practically, therefore, the line of procedure would
seem to be to shorten the time which is expended

ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 73
upon technical theological training and greatly extend
the period of study in secular knowledge. The man
who enters the ministry should know something, at
any rate, of at least some department of human life,
whether it be business, letters, society, commerce, or
what not. He will be able to exercise his gifts as a
minister to advantage only in those surroundings
which he himself understands. But this kind of
knowledge is not obtainable in a theological seminary.
If a boy settles his vocation at nineteen and passes
through a Church college and immediately enters the
theological seminary, emerging therefrom at twenty-
three or twenty-four, this kind of knowledge he will be
compelled to attain after he has entered the ministry.
He will attain it then, if ever, under the greatest pos
sible difficulties, because whole fields of life which
under other conditions would be open to him for ex
ploration he will find closed.
It is very seriously to be doubted whether the now
practically universal custom of preparing all our can
didates for the ministry in seminaries has not been,
upon the whole, a serious detriment to the efficiency
of the ministry. I am inclined to think that, upon the
whole, it was more influential before there were any
theological seminaries. It must be remembered that
the seminary itself is quite a modern invention. In
our own Church in America it only reaches back to
1825, and in the Church of England no further than
to 1860. Previous to that time, and outside of that

74 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES
custom, the bishop received or declined to receive the
men who came to him as a postulant. The bishop's
judgment hinged upon the man's general learning and
capacity. If he were received at all, he was ordained
to the diaconate almost at once. During his diaconate
he learned the practical work of the ministry under
the direction of some mature and judicious priest. If
he became a specialist in any department of theolog
ical learning, he took up that specialty later on.
My own opinion is that our own ministry would be
benefited in the future by -closing the doors at once of
fifteen from among our eighteen seminaries. If the en
dowment and equipment of those closed could be
added to the three which might remain, and if from the
teaching corps now busy in them all could be culled a
sufficient number of men to teach those in the re
maining three far beyond that which they are now
taught, we would be likely to have within our
ministry a learning which we do not now possess.
We would then have a learned ministry to do those
things within the Church which it is the scholar's
function to do. We would also have a practical
ministry to do those things in the Church for which
high scholarship is not an equipment, but is really a
hindrance. We would thus be following in the line
of apostolic and Catholic custom, and we would have
the right to expect that efficiency and success which
God vouchsafes to His Church while the Church fol
lows along the lines of God's methods.

BEOAD CHUECHMEN, AND NAEEOW

IY
BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW
Mr. Balfour in his late very remarkable book
has, if not for the first time, at any rate with unprec
edented clearness, pointed out the double function
which creeds play in the religious economy. In the
first place they are formulations of truth ; and in the
second place they serve as the platforms around
which societies are organized. To be more specific :
the propositions of the Council of Trent, the XXXIX.
Articles and the Westminster Confession were each
and all drawn up originally with the single purpose of
expressing accurately and sufficiently the contents of
the Christian Truth. In each case the organization
which thus expressed its mind was already in ex
istence and strong in its self-consciousness. In each
case the organization honestly tried to state the truth
as it saw the truth. But the instant such a formulary
had been promulgated and had been accepted by the
mind of the church, its intrinsic value as a statement
of the Truth of Christ began to wane, and it began to
be thought of as the symbol, the badge, the banner,
the platform of a society. Before formulation its
terms were things to be sought for diligently and
humbly. After formulation the same terms became
77

78 BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW
things to be fought for to be maintained against all
comers, to suffer martyrdom for, and to persecute for.
Year by year and generation by generation there
gathered about each venerable symbol a mass of
sentiment, devotion, reverence and sense of " loyalty "
which resents any suggestion of modification. Thus
the symbols which were originally the product of an
open-minded search for truth have come to be the
jealously guarded possession of a conservatism which
takes no account of truth.
Such is the situation to-day. The problem is : How
to procure the restatement of those phases of the
truth of Christ which it has been discovered that the
formularies stated wrongly, and to do this in the face
of that unreasoning and jealous " loyalty " to the for
mularies considered as banners of a society. The
problem takes different forms in different churches,
but it is substantially the same everywhere. In the
church of Eome, for example, there is really but one
article of faith, that is to say, the principle of the
authority of the Church. Tens of thousands of lib
eral Catholics question its truth, but the great ma
jority maintain it because of their devotion to the
organization. Among the Congregationalists the
controversy has raged about an abstract doctrine or
hypothesis concerning the future life. One class of
men, following moral analogy and logical necessity,
have announced their belief in a probation which does
not close when life ends, but is continued beyond the

BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW 79
grave. Another and probably larger class oppose
this, not because it is unreasonable, but because it is
contrary to the accepted doctrine. In the Presby
terian church the battle rages. One class asks con
cerning certain matters, " What is true ? " Another
and far larger number asks, " What do the standards
of the church say ? " And now the storm-centre
seems about to shift itself to the Protestant Episcopal
church. What form will it there assume ?
Before proceeding to reply to that question it may
be well to point out why it is that this sort of diffi
culty has arisen all around just now, rather than fifty
or a hundred years ago ? The explanation is very sim
ple. From the time the fathers fell asleep all things
continued as they were until about the middle of the
present century. Since that time more and greater
changes have occurred in the actual conditions of hu
man life than in the two thousand years which pre
ceded. We are literally living in a New World. It
is precisely true to say that if an educated man who
died in 1850 were to revisit the earth to-day great
areas of its thought, its customs, its language, would
be unintelligible to him. He would find whole
libraries in the physical sciences written in English,
but which would be to him but jargon. In philoso
phy he would discover that what he had regarded as
postulates have been dismissed as illegitimate deduc
tions. So the necessity has arisen to examine the
formularies of religious doctrine in the light of the

80 BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW
truth which shines to-day. The proposal to do so is
sternly forbidden for fear it may damage the organi
zations which have grouped themselves about these
formularies. In the Episcopal church the men who ask " What is
true?" have been denominated "Broad Churchmen."
Those who ask " What is proper for us to believe ? "
have been classed under various terms. But if the
two classes have been isolated and described in the
Episcopal church alone it is not because the distinc
tion exists there alone. It underlies all denominational
distinctions. The truth is there are only two kinds of
churchmen possible, Broad and Narrow. These two
divisions exhaust the subject. Those who dislike for
any reason to be called " broad," and prefer to label
themselves "high" or "low," simply hide their heads
in the sand. The antithesis of Broad is Narrow, and
so it will remain.
Is there likely to be a lining up on either side of this
distinction ? If so, just what form is the contest
likely to take ? and what is likely to be the effect
upon the Episcopal church ?
A thing which attracted much attention in this
direction was the promulgation a few years ago by
the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal church of a
letter in which they defined the doctrines of the In
carnation and of Inspiration. They premised that
they did so because they had reason to believe that
these doctrines are widely questioned within the

BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW 81
church. They did not enter upon any attempt to
show the intrinsic truth of the two doctrines, but only
to point out that they have been received, and that
this church has in no wise ceased to demand subscrip
tion thereto. Of course this deliverance of the bishops
had no ecclesiastical authority, not having been put
forth by the House of Bishops in their official ca
pacity ; nevertheless, any deliverance of the bishops
carries with it great weight and influence. By not a
few it was deemed an end to controversy upon the
subject-matter with which it deals. But it is well to
ask, how did it come to be issued ? It is of the nature
of an open secret that it was set forth at the urgent
instance of two bishops above all other men. The
significant thing is that one of them, the Bishop of
Springfield, would probably be ranked as the
"highest," and the other, the Bishop of Western
Michigan, as the " lowest " on the bench. What drew
these brethren into such unity upon this point ? The
answer is, in the one case it was apprehension about
the integrity and symmetry of the ecclesiastical or
ganization ; in the other case it was apprehension
about the integrity and symmetry of a system of
theology. It has chanced that the shifting of time
has brought two "schools" within the Episcopal
church to occupy temporarily the same position and
enter into a tacit league, offensive and defensive,
against a third " school." The interest of the first is
Church qua church ; of the second is Doctrine qua doc-

82 BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW
trine ; of the third is Truth qua truth. The league of
the first two is ill-omened, whether one thinks of the
future or of the past. As to the future magna est
Veritas, et prevalebit. If one recalls the past it is dif
ficult to repress a smile when one beholds the " Cath
olics " posing as the champions of the XXXIX.
Articles, and the " Evangelicals " standing up for the
sanctity of the Traditions of the Elders !
Nevertheless, these two schools have joined in an ap
peal to the Church to speak authoritatively upon the
question of the nature and obligation of creed-subscrip
tion. They have elicited a reply in a formula which
will live to plague both them and the Episcopate for
many a day : " Fixedness of interpretation is of the
essence of the creeds, whether we view them as state
ments of fact, or as dogmatic truths founded upon
and deduced from these facts and once for all deter
mined by the operation of the Holy Ghost upon the
mind of the church " ! It would be difficult to frame
a more blindly obscurantist phrase. The important
question for the American Episcopal church, and for
the public in so far as it is concerned with the church,
is, Does the temper and sentiment of the phrase above
quoted express the actual attitude of the clergy and
people of the church ? It is not easy to answer this
question. A church does not always know its own
mind, any more than an individual does. Twenty-five
years ago, Bishop Colenso was deposed for teaching
doctrines which are to-day accepted by every bishop

BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW 83
on the bench. Dr. Smith and Dr. Briggs were de
posed for teaching doctrines which in twenty years
more will be accepted without question by the General
Assembly. This utterance of the bishops has received
the unqualified indorsement of the denominational
press of the Episcopal church. It is also accepted by
very many without thought simply because it is sup
posed to be the formal deliverance of the House of
Bishops. If its opposite had been set forth, these per
sons would have accepted that with equal loyalty. It
is also accepted enthusiastically by the " Catholic "
party because it appears to indorse their characteristic
contention as to the " authority " of the church.
This party, which twenty years ago fought a brave
battle for toleration and standing ground within the
church, which they then claimed to be catholic enough
to embrace all who could say the Apostolic Creeds,
have dreamed lately of taking possession of the house,
and making it too strait for the class who were the
champions of their own liberty at a time when they
were not able to maintain it themselves.
One might raise at this point a question of honor
and gratitude, but it will probably be more to the pur
pose to pass to the question, Is the Catholic party
likely to succeed ? On general principles one would
say not. The Episcopal church has had rather a long
history. More than once the attempt has been made
to narrow it so as to exclude or eject a " school." The
attempt has never succeeded. Not only has it never

84 BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW
succeeded, but in every case where it has been tried
the outcome has been to bring forward and give dom
inance to the school which it had been proposed to
crush. In the case before us there are several evident
reasons why the attempt is foredoomed to failure, and
this in spite of any temporary advantage which it may
gain. First of all there is the glaring incongruity be
tween the theoretic catholicity and the practical de-
nominationalism of a party which adopts this policy.
The people may be let alone to discern this inconsist
ency and to deal with it. In the second place, there
is a reason to which one refers with hesitation. Pos
sibly it may be enough to say that with half a dozen
exceptions neither the men of learning, of influence, of
reputation nor of ability are to be found in the so-
called " Catholic " party. It possesses a strong esprit
du corps and adroit managers, but not many scholars,
preachers or men who in any way touch the public.
There are some of the first rank who were at one time
counted within it, but who have either outgrown it,
or have been " read out " of it. A party which sys
tematically ejects its strongest men would not seem
to have much hold upon the future. But the third and
chief reason is that it is part of a movement which has
passed its period of highest strength. That revival of
the principle of ecclesiastical authority, which set in,
in the early years of this century, has moved from
east to west in much the same manner as a freshet
moves from north to south clown the Mississippi. This

BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW 85
last phenomenon begins by the myriad little streams
pouring their swollen currents into the head waters of
the great river. When it is high water at St. Paul the
river has not yet risen at St. Louis. By the time when
it is high water at St. Louis the freshet has passed St.
Paul, and the streams have ceased to feed it. In the
stream of ecclesiasticism, it was high water at Oxford
forty years ago. Twenty years ago, the flood was at
its height at New York and Philadelphia. To-day, the
height of the freshet is at the longitude of Milwaukee
and Springfield. It is no longer being fed from the
original streams. Even its stored-up waters have been
sluiced off by Dr. Gore and his collaborators into other
channels. Judging from the despondent tones of the leaders
of the Catholic party, it would appear that they do
not look to the future with much hope. Says Dr.
Dix : " The recent startling appearance of pantheistic
teachers in our church in the person of liberal theolo
gians, so called, the open denial of several of the facts
stated in the creed, the contemptuous repudiation of
the authority of our church, the substitution of ideas
derived from the philosophy of evolution for the doc
trine of the gospel as this church has received the
same, and the avowed determination to throw the or
dination vow to the winds, and freely to proclaim
whatever views the individual minister may evolve
from year to year and from day to day, out of his own
consciousness, — these signs of the hour increase. It

86
looks as if society was preparing to rise up in general
revolt agamst the gospel as we have learned it from
the Apostles of Jesus Christ and the church which He
has made the witness and keeper of His revelation. If
it does, so much the worse for society." Stripped of
rhetoric, this plaint means that there are men in the
Episcopal church who categorically deny that " fixed
ness of interpretation is of the essence of the creeds ; "
and that there are so many of them that another class
has become alarmed, not to say despondent. So there
are. What, then, is the attitude of " Broad " Church
men toward formulated doctrine ? And what do they
propose to do ? In the first place, they subscribe con
amove to the Catholic creeds. They recite them in
public. They teach them in private. But having
done so, they conceive that they have discharged their
obligation. They proceed to interpret the articles of
the creeds in the light of to-day. They do not believe
that the Holy Spirit has been absent or inert since the
date of the Council of Nice or Constantinople. They
believe that Copernicus and Newton and Darwin have
thrown light upon the complex equations of God and
man as really as have Athanasius or Thomas Aquinas
or St. Bernard. They hold it to be disloyalty to God
to shut their eyes to the light which comes from any
quarter. If accepting it thankfully means disloyalty
to the Church, then so much the worse for the Church.
They think they are most loyal to the Church when
they are most loyal to its Master. When they are

BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW 87
pressed to say whether or not they believe that the
Faith could endure in case it should appear that any
particular article of the creed should be shown to be
contrary to fact, they reply that that is an academic
question which they do not care to discuss. If they
are pressed to say whether or not they believe in some
secondary article of doctrine, such, for example, as
" Inspiration of Scripture," the propitiatory doctrine of
the Atonement, or the doctrine of Apostolic Succes
sion, they reply that they do not think it worth while
to answer categorically until they first know more pre
cisely what their interrogator means by the terms he
uses. But they will resist with all their might any
proposition to make the church more exclusive and
select by the adoption of more refined and minute
statements of doctrine. They sincerely believe that
they are the friends and not the enemies of the church.
Their apprehension for her is not that she may become
too loose in her teaching, but that she may be beguiled
or bullied into taking the dogmatic attitude of a
sect. One thing, however, Broad Churchmen will not do,
they will not become an organized party. They will
make no attempt to secure control of the " machine."
They will do their duty as it is given them to see it,
each in his own lot. If the machinery of the church
should ever pass into hands hostile to them, they will
regret it for their own sakes, but they will regret it
a thousand times more for the sake of the church. As

88 BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW
to this contingency they are not alarmed. They do
not think that the church is in peril of committing
suicide. Suicide it would be, they are persuaded, for
the church to permit herself to become the narroAv,
petty, unlovely, and impotent thing which ecclesiastics
and dogmatists would make of her.

THE NEXT STEP IN CHEISTIANITY

THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY
Yery different notions are entertained by thought
ful men about the nature and person of Jesus Christ. It
is generally agreed, however, that no one will appear
whose authority could be more trustworthy in the
sphere of Eeligion. What He did not know, in that
department, is generally conceded to be either not
worth the knowing, or not possible to be known. It
is generally conceded, also, that He Himself, and His
deliverances, have never been more than partially
comprehended. He declared more than once that
His nearest and most sympathetic friends did not un
derstand Him. It is clear that they did not ; and
that, in some particulars, they strangely misconceived
Him. But, all the same, they were deeply impressed
by Him. The same has been true of "Christendom"
for now these nearly twenty centuries. He has been
the most considerable influence which has shaped and
colored the movement of humanity. He continues to
be so, as is evident to any one who simply looks
about him. His name is in point of fact "exalted
above every name."
Judging simply from the facts which are equally
accessible to every one, it seems pretty plain, first,
91

92 THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY
that men will not get on without a Eeligion ; and
second, that there is no other Eeligion available ex
cept Christianity.
A few people, it is true, are experimenting with
Swedenborgianism, and Compteism, and Buddhism,
and " Christian Science," but these may be dismissed
as une quantite negligable.
From all that one can see, Christianity, in some
form, is likely to remain the Eeligion of the enlight
ened world.
Christianity in some form ; but in what form ?
Yiewed from the outside, no institution has under
gone such startling transformations as has Christianity.
One who looked at it casually in the first century, say
at Antioch, and again in the fourth, at Constantinople,
in the fourteenth in Eome, and in the nineteenth in
New York, would find great difficulty in identifying
it. Will any of these forms be abiding ? Or, will
the Christianity of the future take on an aspect as
markedly different from any of these as they are from
each other ?
I venture to think that this last is true ; and that it
is a truth the importance of which can hardly be es
timated. The great metamorphoses which Christianity has
experienced have not been very many, but they have
been very marked, and they have each and all been
characterized by two features: they have been com
paratively sudden, and they have not been recognized

THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY 93
by the people who were living when they occurred.
The phases through which Christianity has passed
have been substantially these three : viz, the Dog
matic, the Ecclesiastical, and the Mystical (or " Evan
gelical "). What will the next one be ? I venture to
think that it is very near, if not already here, though
unrecognized. This paper is an attempt to identify
it in the midst of many phenomena which, without
the clue, seem meaningless and hopeless. The im
portance of doing this, if it can be done, is obvious.
But, to do so, it will be necessary briefly, to review the
past. It was both inevitable and right that Christianity
should at first put on a dogmatic dress. The little
group of men who had been profoundly impressed by
the person and words of their Judean Master, pro
posed to themselves to be missionaries. But this fact
made it necessary that they should cast, in some port
able and transmissible form, their beliefs about the
person and doctrine of their Principal. This was not
easily nor readily done. It is clear, from the record,
that their Master was one of the most perplexing
characters imaginable. Beside that, the impression
which He left upon them was the result of years of
companionship. For them to state clearly just what
the impression was, was not easy. It did not get it
self done completely for several centuries. Much con
ferring with one another, and much interchange of
opinion by converts drawn from different provinces

94 THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY
were necessary to formulate a working creed. It was
an absolutely necessary thing to do ; but it was also
natural that, when the Christian Community had
been engrossed for three or four centuries in formu
lating their belief, they should come into the habit of
thinking that accurate belief, and an accepted way of
stating that belief, were the most important of all pos
sible things. Christianity came, in their minds, to be
identified with Doctrine. A large section of Chris
tendom stopped at that point, and has ever since re
fused to move. The Eastern Church rests in Ortho
doxy. She takes that word for her official title.
And so she sits a spectacle in her Basilica. Old she
is, but not venerable. Her hair is hoary, but the fire
of youth is gone from her leaden eyes. Wrapt in her
embroidered vestments, she slumbers on, as powerless
to touch or be touched by the life of the men and
women of Eussia and Greece, as the mummy of Seti
is that of the Fellahin of Egypt.
But the Western Church, with its creed in its hand,
passed on into the next phase. It became a great
Organization. It inherited the constructive spirit of
the Great Empire, and bettered its instruction. It
identified Christianity with a Church. For the first
four centuries, all revolved about Doctrine. For the
next ten, all revolved about Organization. Slowly
and powerfully the structure was builded. No insti
tution, probably, has ever been formed of as intract
able material, under as unfavorable circumstances, or

THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY 95
has commanded the unqualified services of so many
generations of astute and earnest men. Within its
walls, and guarded by its ever watchful sentinels, the
theological system builders continued to elaborate
their endless schemes of dogma. They overlaid the
Missionary Creeds, and buried them out of sight under
a grotesque mass of derivative doctrines. But it was
the Churchmen, and not the Theologians, who guided
the movement of Christianity during this period.
But, long before the period ended, their task had also
been completed. The simple missionary Organization,
which had been necessary to carry the simple Mission
ary Creed, was overlaid and buried out of sight in the
mighty structure of the Eoman Church.
Then came the third phase, known popularly as the
Reformation. The phrase is misleading. It was not
a reformation, but a new step. It was the successful
issue of a long series of efforts, made by the most
earnest, sagacious, virile and devout men in the West
ern Church, to carry their religion from the region of
dogma and organization into the realm of personal
experience. Jerome of Prague, Arnold of Brescia,
Wyckliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin, Colet, More, Cranmer,
George Fox, Tauler, William Law, John Wesley, all
sought the same end. In the modern cant they would
all be called "Evangelicals." The secret spirit which
they all held in common was the belief that Christian
ity is essentially the establishment by the individual
of a conscious, personal relation with God. This idea

96 THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY
of " conversion " is the differentiate of Protestantism.
In American Christianity it has held, until lately, the
central place.
Now, it will be observed that each of these phases
is an advance upon the one which preceded it. No
one of them was possible until the one which went be
fore had been measurably accomplished. Each one
was entered upon unconsciously. Each was strenu
ously opposed at its beginning by the mass who
fancied their own stage to be final. Each, when it be
came an accomplished fact, reacted upon and modified
what had gone before.
At present there are unmistakable signs on every
hand that a farther step is about to be taken. What
will it be ? That it will still be Christianity no candid
man can doubt. But it is equally plain that it will
be as unlike any phase of it heretofore seen as these
have been and, in their survivals, are unlike each
other. It is clear, in the first place, that Christianity has
already broken out of the bounds which have long
contained it. It has broken out of the old bounds of
Doctrine ; out of the Church ; and will no longer sub
mit to conventional " Experiences." There is not a
single " Confession of Faith " which serves to express
the actual belief of even the most conservative mem
bers of the ministry of any church which is supposed
to accept such a Confession. They are all in the same
boat. The Decrees of the Council of Trent, the

THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY 97
XXXIX. Articles, the Westminster Confession, that
of Augsburg or Dort, while they all retain a place of
quasi authority in the several churches, have become
powerless to hold the real belief of even the clergy.
That this convicts the clergy of insincerity will only
be alleged by the shallow and the ignorant. A pro
found change has come about against which they are
helpless. They are honestly trying to readjust the
conditions with earnestness and singleness of heart.
Some think to find relief by formally abolishing
doctrinal formulas which have ceased to be credible.
Some think to find it by " revising " so as to accommo
date the doctrinal statements to the actual beliefs cur
rent. Both methods will fail, though it is not in my
way, in this paper, to say why. I am only concerned
to point out the fact that religious belief has broken
out of the formulas which once contained it.
In the second place, functions which once belonged
to organized Christianity have, one by one, been taken
in hand by others. Notable among these are Educa
tion and the Administration of Charity. Only one
branch of the church now makes any serious claim of
right to control the machinery of education. And, in
the United States at any rate, a constantly increasing
number of her adherents either make this claim half
heartedly under the pressure of their priesthood, or re
fuse to make it altogether. In the distribution of their
alms rich men do not now, as once, make the Church
their almoner. Wise men bring gold, frankincense

98 THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY
and myrrh to the King, but they appoint their own
agents for its distribution. To speak of those near at
hand and notable, I name the Girard College, the
Mills Hotel, the Williamson School, the Drexel Insti
tute, and the secular societies for the organization of
charity. In the third place, good men are, in an increasing
number of cases, unmoved by the conventional " ex
periences " of religion. A century ago " The Great
Awakening" swept over America like a spiritual
cyclone. So sturdy a man as Benjamin Franklin
could not keep his feet against it. The masses were
swept by it into a religious frenzy. Fitful gusts,
more local and less intense, have been present ever
since. But men are less impressible by them. Twenty
years ago Mr. Moody, the Evangelist, could produce
" conversions " almost at will. Mr. Moody before he
died became the Educator.
What do these changes mean ?
What is to be done ?
To these questions some can give a short and easy
answer. " It means," say they, " that we are in a day
of apostasy. It is all due to the hardness of men's
hearts. We live in the midst of a stiff-necked and re
bellious generation." But when these are called upon
to say what should be done, they give different
answers. The Theologian says, " let us restore to its old com
pleteness our Confession, bating of it no word or

THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY 99
phrase; and, if we must perish, let us fall like our
fathers — with the old blue banner in our hands."
The Ecclesiastic says, " let us restore the Church
of that period when it had the power to guide the
steps and control the conduct of all men."
The Evangelical says, " let us pray."
They all misread the situation. It has always been
true, of course, that a large portion of the community
have been indifferent or hostile to Christianity. They
are "irreligious" men. They are, therefore, usually
thought of as immoral men ; for religion and morality
are, in the common mind, so intimately associated that
they are thought of as present or absent together. If
this were the only class to be considered the case
would be very simple. But a large, and increasingly
larger, proportion of good men cannot any longer be
called Christian, if to be a Christian means any one or all
of those things, which it has, thus far, been officially de
fined to mean. They are good men and women, tried
by any test which may fairly be applied to goodness.
They are sober, kindly, earnest, sympathetic, clean,
charitable. But they are " unsound " in doctrine ; they
are not " church-members " ; they are not aware of
having undergone any subjective " experience." This
class is increasing at a rate which few realize.
Says that Presbyterian, the late Dr. Bruce, Professor
of New Testament Exegesis, in the Free Church of Glas
gow : " I am disposed to think that a great and steadily-
increasing portion of the moral worth of society lies

100 THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY
outside the Church, separated from it, not by godless-
ness, but rather by exceptionally intense moral
earnestness." The leadership of science and art is already almost
entirely in the hands of men who have broken with
organized Christianity. They are the guides and
pioneers in political and social reforms. They are a
large minority — promising soon to be a majority — in
the management of charitable and reformatory insti
tutions. They are the professors in colleges and the
teachers in normal schools. They are kind husbands,
faithful wives, good sons, daughters, friends. What
is their relation to Christianity ? The answer is, they
are Christians in fact y but they are waiting for Chris
tianity to pass into a new phase which will include
them inform.
Like every household, the Church is confronted at
times with the necessity of house cleaning and rear
rangement of furniture. During the disturbance of this
process a considerable number of the family and rela
tives prefer to live out of doors. They will not do so
permanently. They do not wish to do so. One may
venture to say, also, that they "would play a more
honorable part if they remained in the house and lent
a hand, and gave their opinions concerning the proper
rearrangements, rather than to stand critically outside,
waiting till the task be done. But things are as they
are. And they can truthfully retort that their sugges
tions of change in doctrine or discipline were not well

THE NEXT STEP IN CHEISTIANITY 101
received when they did remain within. But will the
Christian society of the future be such as will be able
to embrace them ? I think it will, and for this reason :
The formal statement of Christian doctrine, and the
organization of the Christian church, are always de
termined by the actual beliefs and practices which
precede the formal action. Laws in the religious
sphere are analogous to laws in the political sphere ;
they are but the expression of antecedent habits.
What, then, are the present habits of the religious
world which will, by and by, find formal expression ?
Their general drift may be seen in two or three strik
ing phenomena.
1. The altogether unprecedented interest now
manifest in the person and teaching of Jesus Christ.
Booksellers tell me that there are only one or two
books in the English tongue of which so many copies
are sold as of Ben Sur. Those who have read it
know that this is not on account of its literary excel
lence, great as that is, but because of the way in
which it introduces Jesus. Dr. Farrar's Life of
Christ is one of the few books of which it pays to
produce cheap and popular editions. Now, hardly
any Life of Christ can be found which dates back
more than fifty years. They are all the product of
the nineteenth century. They have all been written
in response to the increasing desire of the community
to know just who and what Jesus was, and just what
He did and said.

102 THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY
2. The enormous popularity of what one may call
the " Drummond Literature." The late Scotch Pro
fessor's "Natural Law in the Spiritual World,"
and "The Greatest Thing in the World," and such
like, have been hailed by millions as the statement
they earnestly desired. With all their shallowness,
and forced analogies, they do answer the present de
sire to express Christianity in terms of actual life.
3. The strenuous attempt to apply the teaching of
Jesus to the problems of conduct. John Fiske,
Tolstoi, Henry George, Powderly, Leo X., and Mr.
Bellamy, have all formally essayed to point out how
this can, or ought to be, done. Mr. Fiske, in his
" Destiny of Man," says, in effect, that this is already
within the possibility of practical life. Mr. George
always describes himself as, above all things else, a
Christian. " Christian Socialism " has become a
phrase to conjure by. The Christian Churches all
acknowledge, in a way, their obligation to ease the
burden of human living. A conservative Churchman
of fifty years ago, who went regularly on Sunday to
hear a doctrinal thesis in a Church which was shut up
and deserted all the rest of the week, would be dumb
founded if he could re-visit the old holy place and find
built on to it a dispensary, a kitchen, a social hall, a
lyceum, and, mayhap, a stage.
The change which has come about in the actual
thought about religion, may be strikingly seen in the
fact, that the motive of the Order of the Knights of

THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY 103
Malta, which existed for the " defence of the Faith,"
and of the Jesuits which existed for the " defence of
the Church," have become unintelligible or offensive ;
whereas, a Catholic Total Abstinence Society or a
Young Man's Christian Association seem natural and
fitting. The machinery for " Eevivals," also, which even a
generation ago could be set up and worked with
na'ievete, is now clearly in its decadence.
Facts, all pointing in the same direction, might be
multiplied indefinitely. But to what do they point ?
To this : Christianity has passed through the phases
of Dogmatism, Ecclesiasticism and Experimentalism,
and is now seeking to express itself in the region of
conduct. " But," it will be protested, " Christianity always
has affected men's conduct, this has been its glory,
that it has made men good."
This claim is true, but it is not true in the sense in
which it is made. The present Archbishop of Canter
bury feels called upon to warn the Church of Eng
land that it has never "received a shadow of com
mission to set forth as Doctrine and Worship that re
ligion which began as Morals and Social order." It is
true that Christianity was at first set forth as a " life."
The " Faith " which it demanded was not an intel
lectual but a moral possession. But when Theology
began to dominate, the quality of the " life " deterio
rated. So far as temper and character are concerned

104 THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY
there could hardly be a more violent contrast than
that between the men who formed the first Council at
Jerusalem and those who discussed the refinements
of Theology in the fifth century or the sixteenth.
Where the theological spirit has been in control, it
has sharply drawn a dividing line across the area of
thought, calling one portion "sacred" and another
" profane." Where Ecclesiasticism has controlled, it has por
tioned out conduct into " religious " and " secular " ; so
that the Sicilian bandit, who pays punctiliously his
duties to the Church, is not conscious of any incon
gruity as he crosses himself and mutters an Ave while
he goes forth to rob.
Where Evangelicalism has prevailed it has drawn
the sharpest possible distinction between "religion"
and " morality," making everything of the one, and
speaking contemptuously of the other. Luther did
not hesitate to say that " a Christian cannot if he will
lose his salvation by any multitude or magnitude of
sins unless he ceases to believe ; for no sin can damn
him but unbelief alone."
So that while it is true in the main that Christianity
has always had its effect to improve the quality of
men's lives, it is also true that it has not always set
this before itself as its main purpose. It has been
thought of as a device to secure " salvation." Now,
the interest for " salvation " is surely receding behind
the interest for " conduct." The appeal is about to be

THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY 105
taken to life. Christianity will more and more con
cern itself with living.
But in doing so it will not revise nor formally
abolish its previous methods. What is superfluous in
them will be allowed to be quietly forgotten. It can
not subsist without a Creed, an Organization and an
Act of Choice by the individual. It gained each one
of these essentials, as we believe, under the guidance
of that Spirit of wisdom with which its Founder im
bued it. The reality of its life in the past has been
vindicated by the fact that it has passed on from phase
to phase even though the mass of its adherents bade it
rest upon each in turn as a finality. But the Creed
will be short, broadly marked, portable. The Organ
ization will be no more complex than is necessary to
carry the creed abroad. The initial Experience will
be nothing beyond the sincere desire for right conduct.
All will issue in, and be tried by their issue in right
living. For this purpose and by this means Jesus will
become more and more available. In this way Chris
tianity will be seen to be both far easier and far more
difficult than it has appeared since the Apostolic days ;
easier because more intelligible by the moral nature
to which it addresses itself, and more difficult, because
that manner of life which He taught and exemplified
is only possible to supreme faith.

SCEIPTUEE, INSPIEATION AND AUTHOEITY

YI

Ten years ago Professor Thayer, of Harvard,
spoke thus to his hearers :
"But inquirers, you tell me, demand certainties.
They clamor for immediate and unequivocal answers.
" Doubtless, and overlook the fact that Divine Wis
dom rarely vouchsafes such. If God's Book had had
the average man for its author, no doubt it would
have abounded in direct and categoric replies to all
questions. The most complicated problems of time
and eternity would be solved by a process as simple
as the rule of three ! But, alas ! impatient souls, His
people do not get into the promised land that way."
Nothing is more pathetic than the centuries-long
reluctance of Christians to admit the elemental truth
of their Master's teaching. He came to set His peo
ple free, but they shrink from the responsibility of
freedom. He assured them that they were no longer
servants, but children ; whereupon they long for the
minute directions which a master gives to a slave.
In a word, they have persistently sought for an
"Authority." It is so much easier to live by rule
than to live by spirit. At least it seems to be easier.
In point of fact, the distinguishing feature of the
religion of Christ is that it vacates all external mas
tership, turns the individual soul in upon itself, and
109

110 SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHOEITY
declares that by so doing it will find itself face to face
with God. It has been well said that of the words
which express religion, neither the verb "to love"
nor " to believe " has any imperative mood. Chris
tianity is loving and believing. In neither can any
" Authority " coerce, not even God ! One loves the
things which he himself finds lovable ; he believes the
things which for him are believable. In the presence
of an Authority he may be silent, or he may lie to the
authority, or he may lie to himself, but the absolute
situation remains unchanged.
There have been three conspicuous pretenders to
the monarch's throne — the Church, the Bible, and
Eeason. To speak more accurately, they have not
been pretenders so much as they have been worthy
monarchs whose sceptres have been thrust into their
reluctant hands by prophets who have known the
Master's wish in the case, but have yielded to the
people's cry, " Nay, but we will have a king over us."
Each of these has in turn played the tyrant, but it
has always been because the people would have it so.
Dr. Martineau has championed the cause of Eeason as
the legitimate occupant of the throne as against the
claims of the Church and the Bible. Cardinal New
man has fought for the authority of the Church. A
hundred Protestant champions have maintained the
Westminster dictum that " the Scriptures of the Old
and New Testament are the only rule of faith and
practice." With all reverence, I believe and say that

SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND. AUTHORITY 111
the Master would have cried, " A plague on all your
houses ! " I would not be misunderstood. The
Church, the Bible, and Human Eeason all have their
necessary place and function in the economy of
Christ's religion. But that function is not properly
stated by the word "authority." Authorities they
are not. Guides, interpreters, if you will, but mas
ters, no.
Four centuries ago a large and influential portion
of Christendom revolted against the tyranny of the
Church. They did not thereby cease to be Christians,
nor did they cease to be Churchmen. They simply
asserted that they who had been made free men in
Christ Jesus were not to be brought into bondage by
any spiritual master. A large portion of the Chris
tian world believed then, and believes yet, that this
revolt was a rebellion against God. They cannot
think of it as a Eeformation. They see in it a form
of that same lawlessness which caused Satan to be
cast out of heaven. This is fundamentally the ques
tion at issue between Protestantism and Papalism.
Strictly speaking, Eome has only one doctrine ; that
is, Submit yourself to authority. Protestantism is
essentially the assertion that the Christian is the
friend of the Master, and no longer a servant who
knoweth not what the master doeth. This position
was consistently and valiantly maintained by the
early Eeformers. So far as obedience to the Church
is concerned, they have not yielded yet. Obedience

112 SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY
to the Churches' commands, as commands, cannot to
day be secured in any portion of Protestantism. It is
every year becoming more difficult to secure by
Eome. But the burden of freedom is very onerous. Be
fore the second generation of the Eeformers had
passed away, a movement had set in which had for its
unconscious purpose to set the Bible upon the same
throne of authority from which the Church had been
rudely thrust. The Bible was less fitted for that
office than the Church had been, nor had it thereto
fore been regarded in that aspect by Catholic tradi
tion. But the people had begun once more to cry,
"Nay, but we will have a king over us." It was then
that the doctrine of " Inspiration " began to be ex
ploited. The Bible was first enthroned as "author
ity," and thereupon its "inspiration" was urged to
establish its legitimacy. The whole development of
the dogma lies within the seventeenth and the first
half of the eighteenth century, as any one who will
take the trouble may read. During that time the
Literal Scriptce were confirmed in a position which
they have held until our own time. The Bible came
to be called the "Word of God." It became a pal
ladium and a charm. The theologian thought of it as
a complete and final transcript of God's law and pur
pose. The common people adored it as a fetich. It
came to be kissed in the courtroom as the sacred
thing which alone could invoke truth. It was ap-

SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 113
pealed to as not only the ultimate but the immediate
arbiter in every question of faith and conduct. With
out its presence in its entirety it was believed that no
people could know God. By its distribution it was
believed that that gospel could be spread abroad
whose Founder had decreed that it should be propa
gated only by the contact of living man with living
man. It came to hold the place in Protestantism
which the Koran holds in Islam. And all this with
out its own consent, and even against its plain pro
test !
Just now a large portion of the Protestant world is
disturbed by what it thinks to be a breaking away
from the authority of the Bible. Is the apprehension
justified ? What has caused the fear ? What will be
the outcome of the movement ? Of the ultimate issue
there can be little question. The servant will be
handed down out of the seat of the king. The Scrip
tures of the Old and New Testament are the product
of that long and wide movement toward God, at the
centre of which stands " God manifest in the flesh."
The Church is that great company of faithful people,
from every age and every clime, organized and un
organized, conscious and unconscious, who, by
thought, word, and deed, contributed to the bringing
in of the kingdom of God. The Bible is the litera
ture of a movement. The movement produced the
literature, and not conversely. The movement is
superior to the literature and controls it. The litera-

114 SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY
ture gains its peculiar character from the unique
quality of the movement. The movement is the mas
ter and the Book is the servant. Within a certain
very circumscribed area inside the Church, and within
about three centuries of time, the servant has been
unwisely elevated into a position to which it never
claimed title. This action has been confined solely to
a portion of Protestantism within Great Britain and
the United States. The task now is to remove the
Bible from the unwarranted place assigned to it, and
to do this in such manner that it will not suffer
diminution of the honor which belongs to it of right
and in its own place. But the task must be done.
Two classes of people within the nominal frontier
of Protestantism fiercely oppose the doing of it.
These are, first, the extreme Protestants, whose whole
fabric of religious thought is so based upon the idea
of an infallible written revelation that they cannot
conceive the fabric standing when the foundation
should be withdrawn. The other is a comparatively
small group of Churchmen who are so enamored of
the very principle of authority in religion that they
cannot abide question of any authority, even though
it be one of which they themselves take small heed.
These two join their voices in an outcry against the
same kind of dealing with the Scripture which has
been freely allowed always and everywhere within
the universal Church, with the exception of the limited
time and area above mentioned. But the majority is

SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 115
against them. All Catholic tradition is against them.
The Bible itself refuses to side with them. The re
sult is foregone.
But what, then, becomes of the " Doctrine of In
spiration " ? To this I reply, The Catholic Church has
no doctrine of inspiration. It has what it believes to be
a fact. But it has never defined the fact or elevated it
into a dogma. Only within the limited time and area
before mentioned has this been done. Hence it hap
pens that only within that area is the present perplex
ity felt. The Eastern Church cannot comprehend the
difficulty. The Eoman Church is untouched by it.
The Anglican Church is disturbed by it only to the
extent to which she has informally committed herself
to a Protestant dogma. Officially she does not recog
nize any dogma of inspiration. She is content with
stating what books are included within the sacred
writings, and with declaring that no belief is to be
exacted as a condition of membership in the Church
which is not recognized in them.
That the threescore little books bound up together
in our Bible possess a unique quality has always been
recognized by those who were qualified to discern
that quality. It is because they possessed this qual
ity that they survived while their contemporary
writings have perished. But the name by which this
quality shall be called is quite another matter. The
word " inspiration " suited the fact well enough so
long as the word retained its original indefiniteness of

116 SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY
connotation. It is a serious question now, however,
whether it can be happily employed within the area
where it has been so long misemployed. It misleads.
By ancient and universal usage, " inspiration " was
credited to certain men who spoke or wrote. By
local and modern usage, inspiration is attached, not to
the men, but to the thing spoken or written. A legiti
mate metonymy has created an illegitimate dogma.
That certain men of old spake as they were moved by
the Holy Ghost is beyond question. But the impulse
of the Spirit of Ploliness is a moral and not an intel
lectual one. It does not guarantee accuracy, but it is
recognized by the moral sense of the hearer. This is
why the words of some men have survived and are a
living force in the moral movement of the race. The
men were inspired.
But what authority shall decide which men have
been inspired, and what writings possess the unique
quality due thereto ? I reply, no external decision
can determine. No decree, no council, no obiter dicta,
can attach the label " inspired " to any book with the
certainty that it will adhere. The final appeal is to
the Christian consciousness. When that has spoken,
a General Council can but register its decree. It may
be that in certain instances its voice has not been
waited for, or that it has been constrained by ecclesi
astical pressure, or that a judgment has been made by
a passing authority against its silent protest. No
doubt. But the simple fact that a literature frag-

SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 117
mentary, incomplete, undistinguished by literary skill
or intellectual brilliancy, has remained through the
centuries a constant, living stimulus and corrective to
the world's conscience, establishes its origin from the
Spirit of Holiness. It is true that the Church lived
for several centuries without it; that it would not
perish were the Bible to be lost. This is but to say
that salvation is not made contingent upon the ability
to read and write. But when all is said, the fact still
remains that the writings which we call sacred are
sacred. Not because they burst into the world
through any earthquake of divine visitation, not be
cause they are sent forth by any mighty blast of
ecclesiastical wind, but because in them speaks the
still, small voice, at the sound of which every true
prophet and man of God covers his face. What au
thority they possess rests upon this fact. The capac
ity to inspire is the only and the sufficient evidence of
inspiration. But this quality which they possess, they possess in
unequal degree. Whether or not any may perchance
be included in the canon which possess it not at all
only time can show. But this would require long
time. Even a possession of twenty centuries' tenure
does not establish an indefeasible title. And a Gen
eral Council in the thirtieth century would have just
the same power to pronounce the Christian judgment
in the premises, and, if need be, to reverse a previous
judgment that a Council of the fifth century had to

118 SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY
reverse one of the third. There is no such thing as
prescriptive right in the kingdom of Christ.
If it be objected that this way of thinking vacates
the Holy Scriptures of all divine authority, two an
swers are forthcoming. The first is that this is the
way in which the Church throughout all the centuries
and to-day has regarded and does regard them. The
only exception in time is the three centuries last past,
and in space is a portion of the Protestant world of
Great Britain and the United States. The other an
swer is, It does vacate them of all authority except
this intrinsic power to mspire. It rests content with
the doctrine of the Apostle that " every God-breathed
writing is profitable for teaching, reproof, correction,
and instruction in righteousness."
In righteousness; not in science, not in history,
not in geography or ethnology. To this, which is es
sentially the Catholic doctrine of Holy Scripture,
what can criticism or scholarship do? What if it
should appear that the human race began ages before
Eden, or that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, or
that there were two Isaiahs, or that the gospel which
goes by his name was not written by the beloved dis
ciple ? Proof of these things would no more touch
the intrinsic quality by which the books live than the
discovery that the alabaster box had been carved at
Babylon and not in Jerusalem would affect the fra
grance of the precious nard contained therein.
We have come to a time in the history of the

SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 119
Christian world when nothing but realities will be
tolerated. Only those things can be accepted as
sacred which awake the sense of reverence. Only
those things are inspired which can themselves inspire.
There need be no fear to submit the Christian Scrip
tures to this test ; nor need any one f utilely imagine
that he can secure exemption for them from this test.
I would add a word, moreover, about the attitude
of Churchmen toward this question of Holy Scripture.
One looks with a mixed feeling of amazement at the
spectacle of the Bishops of Springfield and western
New York joining their voices in the outcry against
Dr. Briggs. One is tempted to invoke the dead
tongues of Newman or Ewer or De Koven to warn
them that they are shouting with the wrong side.
Even their rage at Broad Churchmen ought not to
seduce them to tear down their own house. The gov
erning principle of that which is called the Higher
Criticism is the belief that the literature of the historic
Church is the product of the historic Church. But
this is also the Catholic doctrine of Holy Scripture.
The High Churchman ought to see that if the ipsis-
sima verba of the canon be erected into an authority
which may not be canvassed without sacrilege, the
real foundation for the Church's order and structure
will be vacated. This was the contention of the
Elizabethan High Churchmen against the Puritans.
This was Hooker's ground in his reply to Travers and
Cartwright, and he writes this for the heading of his

120 SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY
second book : " Concerning their position who urge
reformation in the Church of England, namely, that
Scripture is the only rule of all things which in this
life may be done by men." This was the position of
Seabury and Hobart and Bishop Hopkins. None of
these men, I can but believe, would have permitted
themselves to be so infatuated with the principle of
" authority " as to allow themselves to become the
allies of the descendants of the Westminster General
Assembly. The question of Holy Scripture is one which the
High Churchman who knows the ground upon which he
stands is not vexed by. It does not touch him, so
long as he keeps out of questionable company. It is
open to him to say to the scholar, " God speed you,
lay bare the truth, analyze the documents, identify
the authors, fix the dates, lay bare contradictions,
convict the spurious if there be such, take the books to
pieces and arrange the parts in chronological order if
you can. None of these conclusions can touch the
thing for which we use and revere the literature of
the kingdom of God."
But if neither the Church nor the Bible nor the
reflective Eeason are authorities before whom the
soul must bow itself, then where is a master? At
this point we want to examine more carefully the
word used. There is a fatal confusion in the popular
use of the word " authority." I have used the word
throughout in its etymological sense. An authority

SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 121
is a master who can get himself obeyed under pen
alty. In the region where this discussion moves, only
a de facto sovereign is worth considering. A mere de
jure authority is of no consequence. Now, in most
of the discussion concerning the " Seat of Authority
in Eeligion," men have been content with spinning
academic arguments to prove the legitimacy of this or
that "authority." One has been content to prove
that men should " hear the Church " ; another, to
prove that " the Scripture is the only rule of faith
and practice " ; another, " that men should be gov
erned by the deliverances of right Eeason." They
are beautiful arguments, but they are like the fine
spun pleas of the nonjurors for the " divine right" of
the impotent Stuarts. What is wanted is an author
ity which can get itself obeyed under penalty. And
that is precisely what none of those above mentioned
can do. My quarrel is the same with the bibliolater,
the ecclesiastic, and the rationalist. They all, and all
alike, sit down satisfied when they have reached an
authority which in their opinion ought to be final.
What difference whether it ought to be or not, if it is
not? The real vice of all these champions of " authority "
is that they cannot admit the reality of God govern
ing directly. They have the feeling that a moral
cause can go before the Almighty only on appeal
from a lower court. The contention of Jesus is that
God has original jurisdiction, and that He has ma-

122 SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY
chinery for communicating His judgments. This is
what the Jews could not take in. They lived by
"authority." The priest, the lawyer, and the scribe
spoke to them the final word. When Jesus bade them
venture immediately into the presence of God their
Father, they were shocked and scandalized. His dis
ciples, however, gathered courage to follow Him, and
so were made free men in Christ Jesus. In the cen
turies since, they have always tended to grow weary
of the burden of liberty, and to turn to the eccle
siastic, the scribe, and the logician, begging to be
ruled. The real authority in the moral sphere is the actual
concurrence of the will of God with the moral con
sciousness of the individual. Whenever this concur
rence is reached in any particular case, the individual
recognizes it. He may not obey it, but that is be
cause he prefers to bear the penalty rather than to do
God's will, but he knows that the King has spoken.
He knows it just as the organ-builder knows that a
pipe speaks the right note. He may be long in find
ing the note. He tries it with the octaves above and
below ; he tries it with other stops and combinations.
For a time there are discords and vibrations. But at
last the pipe gives the sound which the tuner has been
striving for. When it once speaks aright, there is no
longer any doubt. The music, the organ and the ear fit
together, and the player has the same certitude of mu
sical truth that he has of his own being. The author-

SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 123
ity has spoken. In the moral sphere one who seeks
finality in truth and duty brings a question before
the Eeason to test its reasonableness ; before the
Bible to see whether or nut it accords with the moral
movement of the kingdom of God ; before the Church
for the contemporary opinion of the brotherhood of
righteousness. He seeks for the harmonious testimony
of all the parts of the whole great organ of life that his
voice is attuned to the music of God. When he has
found it, he is satisfied, for he knows what is truth
and what is duty.
The Church, the Bible, the Eeason, are ushers to
bring the soul into the presence of the King. Who
asserts for them an authority of their own wrongs
both them and their Maker.

THE FALL —UPWAED

YII
THE FALL, — UPWARD
A well-known writer in a well-known Eeview
lately made this statement :
" It is easy to see that the ' New Theology ' is about
prepared to join hands with Darwinianism, and oblit
erate the doctrine of the Fall as underlying the fact
that ' the Word was made flesh.' "
It is the peculiarity of the " New Theology " that no
one is officially authorized to speak for it, but I ven
ture to think that the above statement will be silently
admitted by those who are under its influence as being
substantially true. I venture also to say why this
judgment is accepted by those in whom it has reached
the distinctness of a judgment.
The existence of moral evil is not denied by any.
There are in the field three theories as to its origin
and nature. Of course these theories are not held dis
tinctly and unmixed. The same person may, and, in
point of fact, often does, hold mutually antagonistic
fragments of different theories in doctrine and philos
ophy and may be as strenuous in support of one part
of his contradictory creed as of another. But in the
case before us the three theories are easily separable,
in thought at least. 127

128 THE FALL, — UPWARD
(1) The first is that of what for convenience' sake
may be called " orthodoxy."
According to it there was, long ago, a primeval
world which was a paradise. It had a genial climate
and a fertile soil. No ice-bound oceans or burning
deserts, no thorns or brambles, no predacious beast or
pestilential wind, were there. The world was young
and wholesome. No nerve had ever thrilled with
pain, nor any living creature looked upon the face of
death. The plains were smiling with perennially
golden grain, and the forest bountiful with pendent
fruit. In this Paradise God walked, and was lonely.
In it He set the newly fashioned Adam, the first indi
vidual of his race. Into his arms He graciously gave
the maiden Mother of us all. He created them im
mortal. Their wisdom was transcendant ; their inno
cence absolute.
But with Adam God made a covenant. The matter
of the agreement was, that perfect obedience and un
broken righteousness would be rewarded by continual
bliss, and warranty against pain and death ; and that
for disobedience the punishment should be capital.
The parties to the agreement were God of the first
part, and Adam the party of the second part. Adam
did not enter into the covenant for himself alone, but
as the representative of all his race yet unbegotten.
They were to have their chance in him, and to stand
forfeit if he failed. (Whether the covenant were to
remain in force eternally, or whether, after a certain

THE FALL, — UPWARD 129
time passed in obedience, he was to have been con
firmed in an indefeasible right, does not appear.) The
simple test for the first man's power of moral endur
ance was to be his abstention from a certain attractive
kind of fruit in the garden where he dwelt. An in
sidious tempter appeared from some unknown and un
suspected quarter, enlisted the more pliable nature of
Eve on the side of disobedience, and through her broke
down the moral resistance of man. He failed in the
test, and catastrophe unspeakable was let loose ! Smit
ten suddenly with shame and pain, the offenders crept
away already moribund. The voice of God rolling in
thunder discovered their hiding-place. The flashing
lightning of an offended heaven burned between them
and their bower. The jealous earth shot up from her
bosom the " upas and the deadly nightshade " among
the kindly forest, and choked the wheat with thorns
and brambles. The wild beasts, filled, for the first
time with cruel rage and hunger, rent and devoured
one another. The natures of the offenders themselves
underwent a sudden ferment, which left them trans
formed and totally depraved. Their unborn children
not only inherited the taint, but were bound by all the
penalties appended to the original contract broken by
their father and representative. Thus death physical
and moral, the depravity of every son of Adam, and
all the thousand ills that flesh is heir to, both in this
world and in any world yet to come, are all the out
come of that transaction which, in popular religion and

130 THE FALL,; — UPWARD
in technical theology, is named "The Fall." Most
Continental and American theology is based upon this
notion. So unconventional a thinker as Dr. Bushnell
has a strange chapter induced by the theory. If death
literally came by Adam, how then to account for its
undoubted dominion over the lower animals for asons
before Adam was made ? The " dragons weltering in
their prime " lived by tearing one another, and were
so equipped by nature that they could not live other
wise. Dr. Bushnell, seeing this difficulty, hits upon
the ingenious theory of what he calls " The anticipa-
tive consequences of sin." 1 That is, the sin which was
to be, cast its shadow backward, and covered the earth
from its beginning !
The theory before us cannot be more clearly stated
than in the words of the " Larger Catechism " ap
pended to the Westminster Confession of Faith : " The
' Fall ' brought upon mankind the loss of communion
with God, His displeasure and curse, so that we are by
nature children of wrath, bond slaves to Satan, and
justly liable to all punishment in this world and the
world to come."
Now, whence came this notion ? In the Old Testa
ment there is no allusion to it whatever. There every
case of moral obliquity is referred to the deliberate
and wanton choice of the person offending. His fault
is never modified, or the quality of his guilt deemed to
be affected, by his relation to Adam. He is in every
1 Nature and Supernatural, ch. vii.

THE FALL, — UPWARD 131
case accounted worthy or blameworthy, not for what
he is qua man, but for what he does of his own
choice.1 The "Fall" is never referred to by Jesus in any
form. If His words and precepts stood alone in the
New Testament the transaction would be overlooked
completely. He concerns Himself with the springs of
human conduct as they exist now. He uncovers and
fortifies new and obscured motives. He refers
righteousness to the indwelling of the Spirit of God,
but never refers sin to the indwelling of the spirit of
Adam. In the Apocalypse, which unfolds the last scenes in
the drama of humanity, there is no reference to a
great catastrophe at its beginning, and the denouement
would seem to be incompatible with such a first act.
The Catholic Creeds are entirely silent concerning
it. The Articles of the Christian Faith, assent to
which is a condition precedent to membership in the
Christian Church, have nothing whatever to say con
cerning the transaction known as the "Fall."
From all this it seems evident, that if the "New
Theology " sits somewhat loosely to this theory, it
does not thereby argue itself to be irreverent toward
the highest authority or indifferent to fundamental
truth. The portion of Christian Scripture by which the
'Edersheim: "Life of Christ," vol. i., book 1. "It is entirely un
known also to Rabbinical Judaism."

132 THE FALL, — UPWARD
theory has been always upheld is St. Paul's Epistle to
the Eomans, the fifth chapter, beginning at the
twelfth verse. To the untheological reader the mean
ing is sufficiently evident. The propagandist of the
new Faith declares that his principal, Jesus of Naz
areth, is of divine origin, and has moral relations
with every human being. But, just as all men are af
fected by the character and actions of their original
ancestor " Adam," so the whole race stands affected
by the character and actions of the Second " Adam."
This seems to be all that the writer had in mind. He
is concerned with the position of Jesus, and only uses
the accepted story of Adam as an illustration and
analogy, good for what is good. But instead of being
allowed to remain in the subordinate position of an
analogy, it has unfortunately been elevated into a
capital position among Christian dogmas.
The history of the dogma is, in rough lines, easily
traced.1 It was developed by that great system
builder, Augustine. It passed, together with the rest
of his theology, into general acceptance in the Western
Church. It was elaborated into curious detail during
the busy idleness of the scholastic period. Dante
popularized the story of the Edenic Paradise for the
Latin races, as did Milton for the English-speaking
people. Luther, the Augustinian monk, brought the
theory with him from his cloister. Calvin accepted it
from his master Augustine, and made it the starting-
1 Hagenbaeh : " History of Doctrine," p. 59.

THE FALL, — UPWARD 133
point of his system. Through these various channels
it has come since the Eeformation into the popular
mind to be the accepted Christian teaching concerning
the moral status of man.
That the theory, both in itself and in its conse
quences, is entirely untenable would seem to be evi
dent from merely stating it. It is so well intrenched,
however, that more than this is necessary. To any
one who has come under the influence of that mode
of thinking known as evolutionary, such a castas-
trophe as that of the " Fall " is a priori incredible.
Such a thing is out of analogy, both natural and spir
itual. On the face of it (if it be so read), it is a case of
sudden and violent degradation interjected between
two periods of steady progress. Up to the date of
the " Fall," and from that date forward, the progress
is undenied. Instances of degradation, both in in
dividuals and families, are very common, but they dif
fer from this alleged one in that they are slow, final,
and irretrievable. Their subjects are left stranded on
one side of the stream of progress. There is no
farther use for them, and they cease to be. The Mil-
tonic " Fall," on the other hand, is sudden, inconclu
sive, and the penal cause assigned is no sufficient
rationale in the absence of any moral or religious ob
ligation to accept the fact. The "total depravity"
supposed to have been the consequence of this trans
action is not a fact, and never has been. A human
being without inherent moral goodness — inherent in

134 THE FALL,— UPWARD
the same way as his humanity itself — is something no
one has ever seen. It has been imagined in technical
theology, but its actual counterpart is to be looked for,
not in any man or woman, but in Mephistopheles or a
Houyhnhnm. Apart from the somewhat artificial
language of the pulpit, neither the idea nor the fact
ever occurs.
The associated dogma of inherited guilt is practi
cally obsolete also. True, it survives in the standards
of some Christian bodies, but it has ceased to be a
conviction to which one may appeal to influence con
duct. What preacher would dare to assert boldly,
"You deserve to be damned for your share in
Adam's act of disobedience " ?
The dogma is no longer held on the authority of
Augustine, or rejected with Pelagius ; it has simply
fallen out of sight in consequence of its intrinsic un
worthiness and essential immorality. The "New
Theology " does not accept it or reject it ; it passes it
by- (2) The theory has in some quarters been rudely
displaced by another, which seems to be radically op
posed to it. Indeed, the place occupied by it is the
one most strenuously fought for by all the forces at
present in the field. The Theist, the Secularist, the
Evolutionist, or the Christian, — whichever one is able
to capture and hold this ground, — possesses the key to
the battle of modern thought. What is the ground
and origin of human Bight and Wrong? Whoso

THE FALL, — UPWARD 135
holds the key to this will win the battle. For, prac
tically, men value morals above all else. It is ad
mitted on all hands that the sense of right and wrong
does exist, and that it is, in its degree, at any rate, the
distinguishing mark of man. But the real question is,
" Whence comes it, and in what consists its binding
force ? " Those of the extreme Eight say it is an
original endowment of man from God, formerly per
fect, but now shattered and untrustworthy. Those of
the extreme Left say, without hesitation, that it is a
faculty which has been slowly developed in man out
of the interaction of himself and his fellows with their
surroundings. In the crude barbarianism which they
consider to be the original status of the race, certain
actions were quickly found to tend to the general wel
fare, while certain other actions were found to work
detriment to the tribe. The first sort of course
tended to the popularity, and the second brought pain
or danger to the individual producing them. The
glow of satisfaction produced in the doer of helpful
things encouraged him to the habit of such actions.
Murder, theft, adultery, having been found to be dan
gerous to the community, were warmly reprehended.
This public sense of dislike to the deeds reacted upon
the individuals who felt it, gradually became fixed in
each one, and was transmitted to his descendants. It
had its origin in the public weal. It emerges, how
ever, generations afterward, in a permanent faculty,
which " had lost its memory and changed its name."

136 THE FALL, — UPWARD
Nor has it remained the simple faculty it was when it
first became self-conscious. Long afterward it, in Mr.
Matthew Arnold's happy figure, came to be touched
by the fire of Emotion, and burst into the flame of
Eeligion. Since the death of the late Professor Clif
ford, this theory has not had another so able and un
compromising an advocate. With certain modifica
tions due to his more cautious and judicious habit of
mind, it is the doctrine of Mr. Herbert Spencer. In
popular scientific periodicals it is assumed to have
been demonstrated. It has found a lodgment in
the text-books of schools. It is the basis of action
for " Societies for Ethical Culture." The theory is
claimed to be, in Professor Clifford's language, "a
scientific basis for morals." That very prevalent
habit of mind which abhors an unsolved problem as
nature abhors a vacuum, receives and rests upon it
with peculiar satisfaction. Wherever this theory and
the popular notion of the " Fall " are sole rivals claim
ing entertainment by educated men, this one is almost
certain of a welcome.
And this, notwithstanding the fact that it is at
tended by the very gravest difficulties, both scientific
and moral. The more sober-minded evolutionists,
whether Christian or Secular, do not accept it. They
do not consider it scientific. The facts in the case
cannot be coordinated under it. The savage state
where the conscience is supposed by the holders of it
first to emerge is precisely the place where the pos-

THE FALL, — UPWARD 137
sessor of moral sensibility would be most unfit to sur
vive. Where might is right, right is doomed to death.
Among unmoral creatures, any variation in the direc
tion of morality tends toward the extinction of its
possessor. The faculty coming into existence there is
compelled by the exigency of the case to commit hari-
kari. It is " too good to live." " The survival of the
fittest" is an irrefragable law, which may not be
suspended even in the interest of moral theory.
Then, again, the induction upon which its advocates
base the scientific theory of morals is open to the
grave suspicion of having been arranged in the inter
est of the theory. In the nature of the case the facts
are difficult to come by, and one cannot help suspect
ing that the same skill (as of Sir John Lubbock, e.g.)
which arranges them in one way could just as easily
sort and arrange them so as to produce an entirely dif
ferent result. Within the historic period, at any rate,
there has not as yet been forthcoming any instance of
a tribe or people making moral advance without the
aid of light brought to them ab extra. In many in
stances a very high degree of civilization has been at
tained to by their unaided development. A Yenus di
Milo, and a code of Eoman Law, have proven them
selves to be within reach, but not a Sister of Charity,
or a John Baptist.
Present facts are also against the theory. There is
no constant relation between knowledge and goodness,
nor is there any evidence of a tendency now on the

138 THE FALL, — UPWARD
part of the vicious to learn righteousness by the bit
terness of their experience in sin. The theory, indeed,
is discredited by the eagerness with which the chronic
wrongdoer accepts it. Anarchists, Socialists, Inger-
sollites, — the whole ignoble company of questionable
morality — hail it as truth. One cannot avoid the
feeling that it is, at least in part, welcome because it
lightens the stress of moral obligation. The charge of
Lacordaire would seem to be at least colorable, that
" it consoles us for our vices by calling them neces
sities, bringing in as a witness to this a corrupt heart
disguised in the mantle of science."
(3) But the two theories above indicated are not
the only claimants to a hearing upon the question of
the moral progression of man. A third, contained
compendiously in Genesis ii. and iii., and writ large in
the whole Christian Scriptures, we believe.
The story in Genesis is too familiar to need rehears
ing. It will suffice to point out that it assumes to be
a distinct account of a veritable occurrence. It is
sharply separated from what precedes and follows in
the narrative, though evidently related to both. Like
the portion of the story which precedes it, it moves with
majestic stride, an aeon in a paragraph, with space for
a year of God's days between verses. It is couched in
a language so oriental and so poetic that even
Augustine warned against dangerous literalness
here. The first chapter, and to the fourth verse of the

THE FALL, — UPWARD 139
second, sketches the whole of creation, from the chaotic
nebulous mist to the introduction of the creature fash
ioned in the image of God, which is called " Adam,"
i.e., man. This sketch is the mighty frame into which
all that comes after is to be fitted. This having been
completed, it proceeds to recount the history of the
creation in which the whole long-drawn movement has
culminated. It refers most briefly to the preparation
of the earth to his use,1 connects him as to his physical
side with matter,2 endows him with life,3 and then
enters upon the history of the development of man's
moral and religious life, which is the subject matter
of the Old and New Testament Scriptures. This
progress is conceived to be by a series of continually
recurring selections. The first of these is recorded in
the story before us. There is no intimation there that
" Adam " and " Eve " were the absolute beginning of
the race. There is nothing in the word Adam to in
dicate whether it means man, or is a proper name for
an individual. It may mean either. In point of fact,
it is used in both senses — as the word " day " is used
both for the whole time covered by the creative proc
ess and for one of its periods. For the writer of
Genesis, having for his purpose to narrate the moral
development of the race, it was sufficient to begin
where that began. To this end he states that God
took a man and a woman, — {i.e., a family), — set them
in circumstances where the new faculty with which
'Gen. ii. 5. 2Ib. 7. 3Ib. 7.

140 THE FALL, — UPWARD
He had endowed them would have its proper and
necessary environment. That this selection left to the
natural process of degradation those who were not
chosen would seem probable from the following con
siderations :
1. It is in the analogy of God's method of dealing
with men since history has recorded the same. Thus
Genesis occupies itself only with the fortunes of Seth
and his line. Cain, his brother, is permitted to wander
to the land of Nod,1 where he founded a nation, — a
nation which passed through the stages of pastoral
life,2 concentration in cities,3 developed the industries,
blossomed into art, burst into music,4 and then passed
forever out of sight and hearing. Abraham is selected
from his Acadian followers, while they are left to com
plete the cycle of a civilization untouched by any di
vine Spirit, and then sink into their decay. Isaac is
taken, and Ishmael is left. Jacob is chosen, and Esau
rejected, — and so following. " One shall be taken, and
the other left " seems to have been the method of
God's procedure always. Selection implies a cor
responding rejection. The Bible is as remorseless as
science itself. For the purpose of Scripture, moral fit
ness is the test. The calling of Adam would seem to
be only the first of many such selections, not differing
in kind from that of Abraham.
2. In certain obscure nooks and corners of the
earth, there exist small groups of creatures, which,
¦Gen. iv. 16. 2Ib. iv. 20. 3Ib. iv. 17. *Ib. iv. 22.

THE FALL, — UPWARD 141
while among men, seem not to be of them.1 They
have in their persons and their languages traces of
better days. They seem to have been left stranded
by the stream of development. So low in the scale of
intelligence, so destitute of moral sense, are they, that
it is difficult for one to look upon them and believe
that they belong to the race which has the first Adam
at its start and the second Adam at its culmination.
3. Traditions of the " Fall " are only found among
those whose ancestry can be traced to a common
origin, or who have come in contact with the race of
Adam at some point in their history.
A family is chosen by God, and led by His provi
dence into a fertile and well-watered country,2 rich in
gold and precious stones,3 surrounded by the flora and
fauna4 which are the concomitants always of civiliza
tion.5 In these surroundings occur that chapter in
human history, which, whether relatively or absolutely
the beginning, is, at any rate, a supreme epoch. It is
the beginning of human religion.
The story sounds far away, and strange. To one
who is accustomed to the precision of modern scien
tific statements, it even seems grotesque, — an echo of
the childish stories of a youthful world ! Taken
1 For example : the Bushmen, the Australian aborigines, the
Veddahs of Ceylon, etc. ,
2 Gen. ii. 8. 3 Ib. ii. 11. * Ib. ii. 9, 20.
5 It seems hardly necessary to point out that "Garden " in this con
nection is a misleading term. The idea of extremely limited space,
which the word conveys, is foreign to the story. "Paradise," in its
classical use, is better. The idea is, an expanse of park-like territory.

142 THE FALL, — UPWARD
broadly, however, it manifests an insight which on
any theory, save the Christian, it would be folly to
look for in such an early time. It rests morality upon
those clear foundations where the broad communis
sensus of intelligent and upright men instinctively
look for it. It declares :
1. A personal God who can speak.
2. A human faculty which can hear.
3. A power of will which can choose.
4. That the essence of wrongdoing consists, not in
damage to the community, but in disobedience to God.
This new family of Adam, alone of all creatures,
having reached the stage of knowing right and wrong,
have their newborn faculty nourished and developed
by food convenient, and in a fit environment. In the
garden of the world they feed upon the fruit of the
" tree of knowledge of good and evil." " Forbidden "
fruit it is indeed, — food which may be eaten only at a
dreadful risk. Knowledge brings judgment always,
and must pay the price of its being. When moral
faculty rises to the state of self-consciousness, brute
like innocence is left behind forever. The way of re
turn is closed as by Cherubim with fiery swords.
Profound degradation is possible- thereafter, but not
along the lines by which the creature came. He can
move downward but not backward. His fellowship
is no longer with the gentle creatures of the garden,

THE FALL, — UPWARD 143
whose nature he heretofore shared, but with their
Maker and their God.
" And the Lord God said : Behold the man is be
come as one of us, to know good and evil. And now,
lest he put forth his hand and take of the tree of life
and live forever, — therefore the Lord God sent him
forth from Eden ; and He placed at the East of the
garden Cherubim, with flaming sword which turned
every way."
"And so I live, you see,
Go through the world, try, prove, reject,
Prefer, still struggling to effect
My warfare ; happy that I can
Be crossed and thwarted as a man ,
Not left, in God's contempt, apart,
With ghastly, smooth life, dead at heart,
Tame in Earth's paddock as her prize ! "
Of the outcome of the transaction, there can be no
doubt. It was clearly great gain, — maybe a falling
short of the best then possible, but clearly a rise above
what went before. Something better still did come
into the field of moral vision, even then. The " Tree
of Life," the possibility of immortality, was there.
But it came into sight only, a long way off, and out
of reach. Only as a memory and a hope did it survive
in the tedious steps of progress, until, in the fullness of
time, the perfect Man " brought life and immortality
to light."
Moreover, there comes crawling upon the stage, the
wily, ignoble representative of moral Evil. When

144 THE FALL, — UPWARD
man emerges as a moral being, he must take his place,
perforce, in the league of spiritual states. He has
thenceforth to do with many interests. He is a " be
ing of large discourse, looking before and after." It
is no fantastic oriental conceit which introduces Satan
to the first man who could comprehend his forked
speech. That man must confront the Eternal Nay in
virtue of his station. The doctrine of supernatural
evil is developed in the Christian Scriptures pari
passu with the process of redemption. The Christian
smiles when he hears the fact of such existence called
in question. He is quite aware that in the Secular
Creed there is no Prince of Darkness. But he knows
also that there be a thousand things not dreamed of
by that philosophy. He reads hopefully the obscure
prophecy of better things to be attained through much
pain, by the seed of the woman, and he knows that
much of that evil is neither brute nor human. If it
were, he should despair of the race at the outset. His
solace and his ground of hope, when the brute within
him is turbulent and the spirit of man is overladen,
is the consideration that "it is not I, but sin that
dwelleth in me."
The first of these theories, briefly sketched, is pro
pounded by the popular and so-called " Orthodoxy " ;
the second by the Secular Science ; the third by the
Christian Scriptures. The first is moribund. The
second is dangerous. The third is substantially true.
Make what allowance one will for the obscurity, the

-UPWARD 145
puerility, of the story, the fact still remains, that the
moral progress of the race has been but the develop
ing of the picture there sketched in broad outline.
He whose way of thinking has been most profoundly
impressed by the great thought of Evolution compre
hends it best. He finds himself caught in the sweep
of a majestic movement similar in kind to that which
he has followed from the monad to the man. Here
again, as at other times, the progress halted, either
helpless or at fault, and God vouchsafed the gift of
a new motive force. Here His Gift is nothing less
than the inbreathing of His own spirit. It endows
its recipient with that Divine quality in virtue of
which he is capable, under suitable conditions, of
being "born again." It accounts for the complex
and contradictory impulses which contend in the
arena of the soul. It accounts for the old man as
well as the new. It tells him the name and origin
and limitation of the strange tempter which whispers
in the secret chambers of his heart. It brings him
in sight of immortality, and bids him long and
strive mightily therefor. It bids him work amid
briers and thorns ; but when he lifts up his face he
hears that " he has become as one of us." It binds
him to God. It gives him sanction for conduct, and
hope for infinite progression. It sets him in the sweep
of a dramatic movement. It accounts for the faults
of the patriarch, for the faith of the apostle, and the
faultlessness of the Perfect Man.

THE EOLE OF BELIEF

YIII
THE ROLE OF BELIEF
It is high time that we Christians ask ourselves so
berly, " Just what do we believe ? — and just why do
we believe it ? " It will not do to reply that we be
lieve what the Christian Church has always believed ;
for that is not true. Let one undertake the study of
the religious life of the United States, for instance, be
ginning, let us say at 1825, and he will have no great
difficulty in setting down item by item what were the
beliefs generally held at that date. There was prac
tical unanimity as to what was called " the essentials
of Christian truth." Even the violent storms of con
troversy which swept over the surface of society did
not disturb the beliefs which lay below. The "Chris
tian System" was quite sharply conceived. There
were a few infidels who attacked it with clumsy op
position. There were a few Unitarians who sought to
modify its theological statements in one particular.
There were large numbers respectfully indifferent to
it. But the System itself was conceived of alike by
all. The everyday creed of the everyday man would
have run something thus :
" I believe that there is a God.
" I believe that He made the world, out of nothing,
149

150 THE ROLE OF BELIEF
by a series of fiats, in six natural days, four thousand
and four years ago.
" I believe that He made Adam and Eve out of the
dust of the earth.
" I believe that in Adam's fall we sinned all.
" I believe that Jesus Christ, the second person of
the Trinity offered Himself to the angry first person
of the same Trinity to be a victim to appease the just
wrath which could in no other way be satisfied.
"I believe that by His suffering and death that
wrath has been turned aside from such persons as will
avail themselves of the substitute thus offered for
them. " I believe that all those who do thus avail them
selves will go when they die to a heaven where they
will be forever happy ; while those who do not avail
themselves of it will be sent to hell where they will
be forever miraculously kept alive so that they may
endure endless torment.
" I believe that if people are good they will be ever
lastingly rewarded, and that if they are bad, they will
be everlastingly punished.
" I believe all this because the Bible says so.
" I believe the Bible because it is an inspired revela
tion of God's will and purpose concerning men."
Concerning these articles there was practically no
diversity of opinion. They were assumed almost as
axioms. Superimposed upon these was a mass of dog
mas which were believed with almost equal unanimity.

THE ROLE OF BELIEF 151
The descent of the whole human race from a single
pair of progenitors ; the universality of the Noachian
Deluge; the immediate divine institution of the
" Mosaic System " ; the literal fulfillment of the
Prophecy ; the literal infallibility of the Bible.
Above and beyond all these there was an indefinite
mass of " denominational doctrines," ranging from the
most exalted philosophical tenets, such as foreordina-
tion, to the paltriest detail of denominational practice,
such as the Amish tenet that hooks and eyes and not
buttons ought to be used to fasten Christian men's
clothes. This is a very bald but a true statement of the actual
belief of the people of this country at the end of the
first quarter of this century. Of course every item of
this creed was challenged by somebody, but the thing
to be noted is this : there were no other religious be
liefs generally extant. It is true that the Episcopa
lians kept on repeating their Apostles and Nicene sym
bols, but there were few of them and even they, for
the most part had for their week day and working
doctrines about the same that other people had.
Such was the theological situation in 1825. Any
one who will take the trouble to read through piles of
old sermons, tracts, controversial pamphlets, and such
like can reconstruct it for himself. Another quarter
century passed, and the peoples' beliefs remained un
changed. Still another passed bringing us to 1875,
and signs of change begin to appear. The change

152 THE ROLE OF BELIEF
came much later in this country than in Europe.
During the twenty years between 1850 and 1870 the
people of this country had their minds and hearts filled
with questions of another sort. They were in the
shadow of the over gathering clouds of war, or they
were dazed by its flashing lightning and rolling thun
der, or they were gathering themselves up slowly from
the prostration in which the tempest left them. During
this period their religion was largely emotional. It
expressed itself in passionate cries to God the Deliv
erer. The immediate stress of living was so exacting
that men had little energy and less inclination to ex
amine the contents of their faith.
But forces had meanwhile begun to be dimly felt
which were destined, during the quarter century now
drawing to a close, to revolutionize the religious be
lief of the people. German students had begun that
criticism of the Bible which has compelled not only a
new definition of Inspiration but an altogether dif
ferent way of esteeming and using the sacred books.
The new science of Geology had gone far enough to
forecast the destruction of the accepted Biblical
Chronology and to indefinitely expand each of the
Creation Days. The new Historical Method had gone
far enough to set the ancient Bible stories side by
side with ancient legends. The Doctrine of Evo
lution had won its way so far as to compel a new defi
nition of Creation. The modern passion of philan
thropy had begun to modify the theology of the

THE ROLE OF BELIEF 153
Atonement by its deeper feeling of God's love and its
higher estimate of man's worth.
Few realize how profound and far reaching has
been the revolution in religious belief during our own
generation. Luther or Calvin, Anselm or Thomas,
even Augustine or Pelagius, could they have come
alive in 1850 and learned the English tongue would
not have found anything strange or unintelligible in
the religious speech of the people. But if they had
postponed their revisitation until now they would
find themselves hopelessly bewildered, they would
find people treating as palpably false things which they
assumed to be palpably true. They would find that
man's conception of God and theology was changed
because the conception of the universe and its science
has changed.
Who to-day believes that God created the universe
in six natural days by immediate command ? or that
Noah's Flood was universal ? or that the Holy Scrip
tures are a literal and infallible rescript of God's word ?
or that the Hebrew System was delivered all in a piece
to Moses ? Or- that the work of Christ is to be ex
plained by calling it an equivalent in pain paid to
cancel God's bond of justice ?
We had better face the facts. The conditions of
living are changed, and the change has come with
amazing suddenness. On the physical side of life as
great a change has occurred between the time of
George Washington and to-day as between his time

154 THE ROLE OF BELIEF
and that of Cyrus. But life is of one piece. It is
idle to suppose that it may be transformed in its arts,
its mechanics, economics, science, ethics, and remain
untouched in its religion. It is not to the point to de
clare at this stage with whatever solemnity that
" Christ is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever."
Of course He is. God is changeless. So is nature.
But it does not follow that yesterday saw the whole
of God ; or that the adjustments which it achieved to
the side of God which it saw are the final ones.

GOD, EYEN OUE GOD

IX
GOD, EVEN OUR GOD
The only starting-point to religious belief is the
fact of the moral sense. The only means of transit
from the closed ring of Nature to anything which
may lie above, or outside of, or beneath Nature, is to
be sought for here. The everyday man believes that
the mandates of conscience are obligatory. The man
dates themselves may be confused or may be hurtful,
judged from the standpoint of human good. They
may be regarded or disregarded, obeyed or disobeyed,
as the case may be. But the individual never really
doubts that it speaks with authority. " We ought to
do this, we ought not to do that." These distinctions
are felt to proceed from some source either within or
without, which has a right to speak. The faculty by
which one distinguishes between right and wrong is
as obvious a fact as is the existence of the faculty by
which one distinguishes between sweet and bitter.
The power to distinguish is taken as sufficient evi
dence that the distinction itself is a real and valid
one. What is the ground and origin of right and
wrong ? Whoso holds the key to this will win the
battle. It is admitted on all hands that the sense of
right and wrong does exist. But the real question is
157

158 GOD, EVEN OUR GOD
whence comes it, and in what consists its binding
force ? Some will reply " It is an original endowment
vouchsafed to man by God, and is a possession pe
culiar to man." Many, on the other hand, assert and
believe that it is a faculty which has been slowly de
veloped in man out of the interaction of himself and
his fellows with their surroundings. In the crude
barbarism which they conceive to be the original
status of the race, certain actions were quickly found
to tend to the general welfare, while certain other
sorts of action were found to work detriment to the
tribe. The first sort, of course, tended to popularity,
and the second brought pain or danger to the indi
vidual producing them. The glow of self-satisfaction
produced in the doer of helpful things encouraged
him to a habit of such actions. Murder, theft,
adultery, having been found to be dangerous to the
community were warmly reprehended. This public
sense of dislike to such deeds reacted upon the indi
vidual who felt it, and gradually became fixed in each
one and was transmitted to his descendants. It had
its origin in the public weal. Generations afterward
it emerges as a permanent faculty which has lost its
memory and changed its name.
It is contended also that at least the rudiments of a
moral sense are discernible in animals much below the
rank of man. This opinion seems to be steadily gain
ing ground among those who have the right to an
opinion on the subject. No one can read the account

GOD, EVEN OUR GOD 159
of the patient experiments and observations conducted
upon the lower animals by Mr. Darwin, Mr. Eomane,
or Sir John Lubbock, without being impressed with
the feeling that the actions of the animals which they
describe are not different in kind from the actions of
men which are determined upon by means of the moral
sense. This conviction has caused grave disquiet in
the minds of many religious people. It seems at first
sight to break down the last barrier of distinction be
tween man and beast. It appears to degrade the con
science from its high status as the voice of God to the
unreasonable instincts of the brute. I think the dis
quiet is unwarranted. Whatever may be the final de
cision as to the origin of the moral faculty, the really
important thing to be considered is the fact of its
present existence. Is the validity of my decision be
tween the morality of two actions rendered any the
less trustworthy because my dog is capable of making
decisions which seem to spring from the same motive ?
The reply is, They are no less trustworthy than are
the deliverances of my mathematical faculty although
a crow is competent to count three. Whatever the
faculty shall be seen to come from, or, — to speak more
accurately, — by whatever method God has brought it
into being, the faculty is here, and men do trust it.
That is sufficient. But why do they trust it ? Why
is right bounden and wrong banned ? It can only be
because there is some fundamental and eternal dis
tinction to which the moral faculty makes its appeal. It

160
seems to me as unreasonable to think that the faculty
of conscience should have been developed if there be
no objective fact for it to deal with, as it would be to
suppose that the faculty of sight should have been de
veloped if there were no such thing in the physical
universe as light. The conscience leads to something.
But to what ? The general reply is " To God." But
really one is not very much farther along when he has
made this reply, for the question at once comes up
"What does one mean by God." Here is where a
confusion exists which renders valueless an enormous
amount of thought and speech concerning religion.
It is thoughtlessly assumed that all who say "God"
mean by it the same thing, that God is a well defined
object, like the sun, for example, and that whenever
His name is spoken the word connotes the same thing
for all men. No mistake could be greater. It is
probably the fact that no two men now and within
Christendom have in mind precisely the same thing
when they use the word " God." And it is still more
evident that the use of this word has changed enor
mously during the progress of the centuries past. In
understanding the Bible for example, much perplexity
would be avoided if this simple fact were borne in
mind. It is true, of course, that the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob,— the God of the living and the dead,
— is in His own person unchangeable. But it does not
follow that Abraham's conception of God was the
same as Jacob's, or that Jacob's was the same as

GOD, EVEN OUR GOD 161
Isaiah's, or that Isaiah's was the same as that of St.
Paul. One has only to read the earlier parts of the
Old Testament to see that the na'ive conceptions of
Jehovah which were entertained by those who wor
shipped Him were such as would be now unsatisfac
tory even for a Christian child. To their thought He
was the God of gods. But the gods over whom He was
supreme were thought of by them as actually existing
personages. Their God was conceived of as differing
from these in certain things, but also as like to them
in many other things. Says Professor Piepenbring :
" They represented Him to themselves under the
form of man. According to the Biblical narratives
God visits Abraham with two companions ; He accepts
the hospitality that the patriarch offers Him ; He con
verses with him and Sarah, then goes away toward
Sodom, accompanied by His host, to whom, on the
way, He makes known His purpose to destroy the
guilty cities. He forms man out of the dust of the
ground, as an artist would do ; He breathes into his
nostrils the breath of life; He plants a garden in
Eden ; He takes a rib of the man to make the woman,
and carefully closes up the flesh in place of it ; He
rests from the work of creation when He has finished
it. After the fall He appears in the garden of Eden ;
He walks through it ; He calls Adam and Eve ; He
informs them of the penalties that will overtake them ;
then He makes them garments of skin and clothes
them. He closes the door of the ark upon Noah.
He smells the pleasant odor of the burnt-offering that
the latter offers Him. He engages in a hand-to-hand
conflict, like a man, with Jacob. He attacks Moses
in the night and attempts to kill him ; He speaks to
him as one person to another ; He buries him after his
death ; He pronounces the ten words of the decalogue,

162 GOD, EVEN OUR GOD
and engraves them on tables of stone. He raises His
hand to take an oath. It is only necessary to read a
few pages of the prophets or the Psalms to be con
vinced that God is regarded as possessing all the mem
bers and functions of the human body. He is even
said to hiss, to cry, to laugh, to sleep and awake.
" It is clear that in the prophets and the Psalms
these expressions belong to the poetic style. But
originally, and even at a later date in the mouth of
the people, they were not merely rhetorical ; they cor
responded to the imperfect ideas that were current re
specting the Deity. When the narratives of the Pen
tateuch, from which we have taken the examples
above cited, were composed, they were taken in their
literal signification. We think that even at the time
when the original narrators borrowed them from
popular tradition to stereotype them in writing, they
were still generally taken in this sense."
It required two thousand years for the Hebrew
people to work out its conception of God. That proc
ess was for them, as it is for all people at all times,
at once a discovery and a revelation. God's revela
tion of Himself always lies open before the eyes of all
men. Nevertheless, He is hid from all men until
they discover Him for themselves. God teaches men
religion as wise men teach their children knowledge.
That is, they put their children in the way to learn for
themselves. The obstacle in the way of imparting all
knowledge, whether by the Father in heaven or the fa
ther on earth is not that he does not possess the knowl
edge, but that the pupil can only take it in and make
it his own by his own labor, thought and experience.
The Old Testament is the fragmentary and incomplete

GOD, EVEN OUR GOD 163
record of the multitudinous ways in which the men of
old felt after God if haply they might find Him,
though He was not far from every one of them. In
his " God and the Bible " Mr. Matthew Arnold has
traced this process and well summed up its result.
Probably no man will do it better or more truly for
many a day to come. In his well-known phrase " A
Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness,"
he sums up the faith of Israel. Unfortunately he
stops at that point, forgetting that the Christian
world has passed immeasurably beyond that formula.
"God, who in times past, in divers parts and in
sundry manners spake by the prophets, hath in the
last days spoken by His Son."
But Mr. Matthew Arnold is not the only Christian
man who stops content with the Hebrew God. Most
of the confusion and doubtfulness into which the
Christian world has fallen would have been avoided if
the God of popular belief had come to be the God of
our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. I am led to be
lieve that the God of popular thought is the God of the
Hebrews, and not even their truest thought of Him.
He is an oriental potentate, the King of Kings and
Lord of Lords. He sits upon a throne in some remote
heavenly palace, magnifical exceedingly, but far, far
away. He is the Supreme Euler, who conducts the
affairs of the universal empire, administers justice, ex
alts and casts down, rewards and punishes according
to his own arbitrary decrees. Says Mr. John Fiske :

164 GOD, EVEN OUR GOD
" I remember distinctly the conception which I had
formed when five years of age. I imagined a narrow
office just over the zenith, with a tall standing-desk
running lengthwise, upon which lay several open
ledgers bound in coarse leather. There was no roof
over this office, and the walls rose scarcely five feet
from the floor, so that a person standing at the desk
could look out upon the whole world. There were
two persons at the desk, and one of them — a tall,
slender man, of aquiline features, wearing spectacles,
with a pen in his hand and another behind his ear —
was God. The other, whose appearance I do not dis
tinctly recall, was an attendant angel. Both were
diligently watching the deeds of men and recording
them in the ledgers. To my infant mind this picture
was not grotesque, but ineffably solemn, and the fact
that all my words and acts were thus written down,
to confront me at the day of judgment, seemed natur
ally a matter of grave concern.
" If we could cross-question all the men and women
we know, and still more all the children, we should
probably find that, even in this enlightened age, the
conceptions of Deity current throughout the civilized
world contain much that is in the crudent sense an
thropomorphic. Such, at any rate, seems to be the
character of the conceptions with which we start in
life, although in those whose studies lead them to
ponder upon the subject in the light of enlarged ex
perience, these conceptions become greatly modified."
I incline to think that the conception of God which
has been until lately generally current, is derived
from the Hebrew prophets, from the habit of thought
and speech which belong to monarchy, from Milton
and Dante, and but little from Moses or St. Paul. Until
lately this conception of God produced no intellectual
distress. It satisfied the sense of reverence, it stirred

GOD, EVEN OUR GOD 165
a feeling of awe, it provided potent sanctions for con
duct. But it did all these because it fitted in with
the accepted ideas concerning nature and man.
" God " and " Nature " are correlative terms. They
must be adjusted to one another. If anything occurs
to seriously modify the contents of either term the
equation is thrown out of joint. Doubt, distress, per
plexity must prevail until the equilibrium shall be
restored. This is precisely what has occurred.
Within a generation has transpired the greatest men
tal revolution within the history of human thought.
The whole conception of Nature has been trans
formed. Its origin, its laws, its methods, its goal, are
thought of from a new standpoint. But as a conse
quence the old idea of God and the new idea of Na
ture are out of joint. Nature has been rationalized,
Christianized, but the popular God remains the He
brew Yaveh.
This change in the situation has been powerfully
hastened, if not produced, by the spread of the
doctrine of Evolution. The popular thought about
God is in process of change. Until lately men
thought of Him as having His seat at some re
mote and inaccessible region in space and time.
From there He emerged at a definite point in the past
and caused a universe to be where before emptiness
had been. During a "Creative Week" He labored
like a cunning artificer, finished His work, pronounced
it very good, rested and withdrew. Orthodoxy was

166 GOD, EVEN OUE GOD
alarmed and indignant when first called upon to ex
pand these creative days, first into centuries, and
then into asons. It piques itself upon having been
able to effect this extension without disaster to itself.
But the average educated man has since some time
abandoned this way of thinking altogether. He has
come to believe that time with God is all of one
piece, that He works continually, and that He works
not from without but from within, that He is not re
mote or apart from the universe and never has been,
that He is in and behind and through all things, proc
esses and forces, not identified with them, but ap
prehensible apart from them. So far as men are now
theistic they think of God immanent. That is to say,
they do so in every sphere except the sphere of
technical Theology. But the formulated Theology of
Western Christendom was builded about the other
mode of conceiving God. The decrees of Councils
have this in common, they think of a transcendent
and not an immanent God. The Evolutionary phil
osophy can only conceive of God immanent. It
thinks of Him as bearing, in a way, the same relation
to the universe that the soul does to the body. The
soul is not the body, nor is it the product of the body,
nor is it to be thought of as ceasing with the destruc
tion of the body. But it is, so far as we can know,
conditioned in its manifestation upon the body. So
men- are steadily coming to think concerning God.
They can no longer think of Him as " coming " to the

GOD, EVEN OUE GOD 167
universe as from a distance. No more do they
identify Him with the universe. They see that in
His essence He must transcend the universe as mind
transcends matter. But they see Him in the universe
or they do not see Him at all. They are impatient of
the little definitions of the little catechisms which de
scribe Him as "a spirit, infinite, eternal and un
changeable in being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice,
goodness and truth." Possibly they have no better
definition to offer, but only a more reverent silence.
Nevertheless, they must think of Him in terms which
fit with their thought of Nature. Probably Mr.
Fiske in his luminous little book on " The Idea of
God," has said it as well as the current thought about
God is likely to be said for a long time to come.
It may as well be confessed that this way of con
ceiving God is unsatisfactory to many and irritating
to not a few. It is not nearly so clearly cut, sharply
defined and easily presentable in thought as the one
which it supersedes. That one is simple, portable, al
ways available for the practical needs of teacher or
exhorter. It is charged against this one that it is
vague, elusive, and in places inconsistent. To this
charge two retorts are possible. The first is, this is
the God of St. John, St. Paul and Jesus. The second
is, it is better to conceive vaguely of a true God than
precisely of a false one. But the fact remains that a
man born and reared under the evolutionary way of
thinking about God, man, and nature, — that way which

168 GOD, EVEN OUR GOD
has possession of the centres of learning, which is in
the text-books of public schools, and which colors pop
ular speech, — can no more rest content with the cur
rent notion of God than he could present Him under
the figure of Buddha or the " oiled and curled Assyrian
Bull." Science is slowly but firmly escorting that
simulacrum of a divinity to the frontiers of the uni
verse. God is not the mighty ruler sitting upon a re
mote throne outside nature, making incalculable in
cursions from thence within its realms, and retiring
again to the high seat. We do not ask who shall as
cend into heaven and bring Him down, or who shall
descend into the abyss to bring Him up. For we know
that He is most nigh. " Closer is He than breathing,
and nearer than hands or feet." Shall we thrust Him
farther away in order that we may distinguish His out
lines more closely ? Shall we not rather go on serenely,
unmindful of the scorn of those who so adore definite-
ness of doctrine that they will worship no God that
cannot be defined ?
"Oh where is the sea," the fishes cried?
As they swam the crystal clearness through ;
" We've heard from of old of the ocean's tide,
And we long to look on the waters blue.
The wise ones speak of an infinite sea,
Oh who can tell us if such there be? "
The lark flew up in the morning bright,
And sung and balanced on sunny wings ;
And this was its song ; " I see the light ;
I look on a world of beautiful things ;
But flying and singing everywhere
In vain I searched to find the air."

THE NEW SITUATION

THE NEW SITUATION
We are confronted with a situation. Practically
all under forty years of age have been educated under
the domination of the New Learning. Their teachers
and their text-books have been for the most part silent
concerning religious belief. When they have not been
silent they have been Agnostic. The newspapers,
magazines, periodicals which they read give but little
space to the discussions of religious problems. When
they do deal with these it is usually to point out some
alleged incompatibility of religion and science, or to
harmonize some such antagonism. So it has come
about that this is characterized as an " Age of Doubt."
It would be more accurate to characterize it as an age
of uncertainty, hesitation, perplexity. For doubt in
the realm of religion usually carries a connotation of
antagonism. That is not the mark of the doubt of to
day. It is not so much doubt as doubtfulness. The
steadily deepening moral earnestness has brought mul
titudes to be at once more willing and less able to re
tain many things " which have been most steadfastly
believed amongst us." Take them altogether, people
were never so well disposed to believe the truths of
Christianity, and never so perplexed as to precisely
171

172 THE NEW SITUATION
what those truths are. There is a widespread distaste
for what is called dogma. Doctrinal sermons are lis
tened to with impatience, if hearkened to at all. Doc
trinal treatises have no charm for the multitude.
Time was when they had. When one looks over faded
pamphlets which preserve the sermons to which mul
titudes of people eagerly listened half a century ago,
his wonder is not at their inconclusiveness, but their
dullness. But they did not seem dull then. Why do
they now ?
Eightly or wrongly, the impression is abroad that
Christ has been lost in Christianity. The person has
been hidden by the theology. The truth has been over
laid and obscured by the creeds. The cry of the
time is " Back to Christ." The titles of the books
which serious-minded persons are reading are but vari
ations upon this theme. But who is this Jesus ? What
does He stand for ? What does His life signify ? The
reply to these questions must needs constitute a creed.
Why then not take the dogmas which have been so la
boriously constructed by the Church in the ages past,
press them upon the people, fortify them by argument,
defend them against opposition, prove them by Scrip
ture, and so bring men to belief ? I reply, because the
thing is impossible. It is true that many think it is
possible. They would reply to questions by more
strenuous assertion. " Dogma the Antidote for Doubt,"
is the happy title of a treatise by a venerable bishop
who may be taken as the representative of those who

THE NEW SITUATION 173
are of his way of thinking. But the world's reply,
while in its present mood, is in the words of Henry
Ward Beecher, " Dogma is the skin of truth stuffed
and set up in a museum."
The time is certainly fitting for the modest attempt
here made, that is, to disentangle those beliefs which
are fundamental and essential from those which are
secondary, incidental or paltry. The everyday man
stands appalled and disheartened at what he has come
to think the complexity of the articles of the Christian
Faith. He is urged to believe, but then he is urged to
believe so many things that he hesitates, not so much
at their difficulty as at their mass. A few years ago
that monster of learning, the Eev. Dr. Schaff, essayed
the task of gathering together and printing "The
Creeds of Christendom." Three great octavo volumes
of nearly a thousand pages each were the result of the
attempt. Many of them are now unintelligible. Still
more are obsolete. But the impression left upon the
mind of the average man who sees the work is that
Christian truth is an enormously complex and difficult
thing. When he observes farther that each Confession
of Faith is repudiated by the adherents of all the other
confessions, he is led to ask in the temper of Pilate
" What is Truth ? " Now if such a man could be
brought to see that these highly elaborated systems
are but the personal opinions of individuals at differ
ent times throughout the Christian centuries, and that
they are of no obligation except such as their intrinsic

174 THE NEW SITUATION
reasonableness may carry, he will feel a great sense
of relief. Mr. Huxley very properly resented an ex
pression used by Principal Wace in a controversy with
him. " The word infidel, perhaps, carries an unpleas
ant significance. Perhaps it is right that it should.
It is and ought to be an unpleasant thing for a man to
have to say plainly that he does not believe."
Fair-minded men will side with Mr. Huxley.
Whether belief should have praise, or disbelief odium,
depends altogether upon what the thing is for which
belief is asked. Most men to-day are believers, un
believers, doubters and seekers, all at once. They
have a right to ask of the Christian Church, — What,
precisely, are the things for which you ask credence ?
and, How far is membership in your society dependent
upon assent to those things ?
What has Church membership to do with belief in
doctrine ? It is right to say at this point that I approach
this question from the point of view and with the pre
possessions of a member of the Protestant Episcopal
Church, or as we prefer to think of it, the Anglo-
Catholic Church. The general attitude of this Church
toward Doctrine is one which is a puzzle to multitudes
outside, and often little understood, even by her own
members. The contribution which this Church has
to make toward clearing up the religious perplexities
of the time is not any neat, coherent, bundle of
dogmas, but a practical method of dealing with
dogmas. This is really the feature of that Church

THE NEW SITUATION 175
which ought to arrest attention. For instance, she
includes in her membership and in her Ministry those
who, so far as doctrine is concerned, are Calvinists and
Armenians, believers in the Eeal presence and Zwing-
lians, believers in the Yerbal Inspiration and those
who regard the Bible as literature, believers in Eternal
punishment, and Universalists, Evolutionists and
special Creationists. All these, and men with all sorts
and shades of prepossessions and beliefs, dwell to
gether in the same ecclesiastical society and with
rare exceptions, no one ever thinks of questioning an
other man's right of citizenship. This practical
policy is the rational outcome of her fundamental
conception of what the Church of Christ is. She be
lieves it to be, like the State, an ordinance of God for
all men. The condition of membership in it must
therefore be easy and simple. It is meant to be
Christ's Institute of Eighteousness. It must be
easily accessible to sinners — intellectual as well as
moral sinners. Any condition of membership which
she might make would be null and void in so far as
they go beyond the conditions which the Master has
laid down. It is only on this ground that member
ship in the Church can be pressed on any one as a duty.
The policy of the Eoman Church is, as we believe,
indefensible, because she urges Church membership as
a duty, while she at the same time erects conditions
which are intellectually intolerable. Protestantism,
on the other hand, has multiplied the doctrinal condi-

176 THE NEW SITUATION
tions precedent so enormously, that it has practically
ceased to insist upon Church membership as a duty,
and only offers it as a privilege to a select few. That
this is the situation is easily discovered. Let a
stranger who is willing and anxious to cooperate with
the Christian Society and to join in her Sacraments,
but who says frankly that he does not believe in the
dogmas of Papal Infallibility, or the Immaculate
Conception, ask for Confirmation at the hands of
a Eoman Bishop, and see whether or not he will be
received ? Let the same man apply for membership
in a Protestant Church, saying at the same time that
he does not believe in the Inspiration of the Bible, or
generally in the particular Confession of Faith about
which that denomination is organized, and see whether
he will be admitted ? It is not at all to the point to
inquire whether these doctrines alluded to are true or
untrue. The point is that a Church is acting ultra
vires when it makes any such beliefs a condition of
membership, or of admission to its Ministry. Any
one who is a disciple of Christ has a right to mem
bership in His Church. However feeble his belief,
however erroneously he may conceive of Christ's
power, however he may stand in need of instruction
and development, he has a right to membership in the
Society. He is not called upon to seek it as a favor.
He stands to the Church as he does to the State. One's
political opinions may be ever so wrong, or ever so op
posed to those generally held by the people of his own

THE NEW SITUATION 177
country, but he may not be outlawed for opinions.
He can only be refused citizenship or be disfranchised
for conduct.
This is the view of the Church, practically, though
not very consistently acted upon by the Anglo-Cath-
olic Church. It is greatly to be desired that the
" Club " idea of the Church should be dislodged from
the popular mind. " What must I believe if I join
your Church ? " is the way the ordinary man speaks.
" If he don't believe what his Church holds he ought
to get out of it," is the way the newspaper expresses
the popular notion. But apply the same theory to
citizenship in the State, and one sees its absurdity. If
the Church be a divine institute in which membership
is obligatory upon every disciple of Christ, then no
conditions can be made, or should be regarded if made,
save those which He Himself laid down. The unpar
donable offence of dogma is when it thrusts itself into
a place of authority to which it has no title. The
question is not concerning its truth or falsity, but its
function. This Church repudiates the claim of author
ity for all dogmatic statements which go beyond the
range of recognized facts. The facts upon which
Christianity is based she believes to be real facts, and
its phenomena real phenomena, but the relation of
these to each other and to the new truth constantly
being uncovered, are open to be constantly re-stated
in the language of successive generations. When tra
ditional statements cease to be intelligible they be-

178 THE NEW SITUATION
come to all practical concern, false. If they be still
insisted upon they become stumbling stones and rocks
of offence. It is distressingly apparent that this has
come to be the fact.
" The religious world is given to a strange delusion.
It fondly imagines that it possesses a monopoly of
serious and constant reflection upon the terrible prob
lems of existence ; and that those who cannot accept its
shibboleths are either mere Galios caring for none of
these things, or libertines desiring to escape from the
restraint of morality. It does not appear to have
entered the imaginations of these people that outside
their pale, and firmly resolved not to enter it, there
are thousands of men, — certainly not their inferiors in
capacity, character, or knowledge of the questions at
issue, — who estimate the purely spiritual elements of
the Christian faith as highly as they do, but who have
nothing to do with the Christian Churches, because in
their profession of belief on the evidence offered,
would be simply immoral." l
It is not wise to dismiss this as a railing accusation
brought by an adversary. It is a mere statement of
fact made by a man who had a trick of knowing facts
when he saw them. Moreover, what he says is true.
" I certainly believe that there are many more un
polished diamonds hidden in the churchless mass of
humanity than the church-going part of the com
munity has any idea of. I am even disposed to think
1 Huxley : Science and Christian Tradition, Appleton, p. 140.

THE NEW SITUATION 179
that a great and steadily increasing portion of the
moral worth of society lies outside of the Church,
separated from it not by Godlessness, but rather by
exceptionally intense moral earnestness. Many, in
fact, have left the Church in order to be Christians."
It may be well at this point to call attention to
what we mean by belief. The formula is, " I believe."
We do not say " I know." We do not know. Not a
few are needlessly distressed because while they can
demonstrate the reality of what they believe in other
spheres, they cannot altogether state the ground of
their religious beliefs, or convince others of their re
ality. It is one thing for one to be able to give a
reason for the hope which is in him, and quite a dif
ferent thing to make another man believe the same
thing. The best that one can attain to in this region
is the possession of " a reasonable, religious and holy
hope." If a man can but justify to himself the es
sential reasonableness of his beliefs, it is enough. But
this justification is reached only to a very limited ex
tent through processes of logic. Emotion, affection,
experience, are quite as potent, and quite as legit
imate agents as reason. Doctrine is nothing more
than the attempt to express belief in terms of the un
derstanding. That is the reason of the adoption of the method
which I have determined to follow. The attempt
has often been made to take the articles of the Cath
olic Creed one by one and establish them in the court

180 THE NEW SITUATION
of reason. Classical instances of this sort are such as
" Pearson, on the Creed," and " Liddon, on the Di
vinity of Jesus Christ." Such arguments have a place
and use. They clarify and fortify belief in those
where it is already present. But it is to be greatly
doubted whether they have ever produced belief
where it is lacking. What I seek is at once more mod
est and more difficult. I would induce belief in those
who are hesitating, doubtful, perplexed, and unable
to believe. To do this one must commence with an
appeal to those realities which come within the
everyday experience of the everyday man. If these
experiences, when drawn out into consciousness and
formulated in intelligible propositions, should show
even a likeness to the statements of the Catholic
Creeds, it will be just so much gain to the Truth
and to the Church.

NATUEE AND GOD

XI
NATURE AND GOD
To what then are we as Christians and as Church
men committed ? I reply, in general, we are com
mitted to a belief in the reality of religious phe
nomena. That is to say, we believe that the facts
and forces which we talk about and claim to deal
with in our religious life, are real facts and real
forces, that they are not mere sentiments or ideas to
which no objective facts correspond. We hold them
to be something far more than creations of fear and
figments of fancy, or formless clouds of emotion.
When we speak such words as " God," " Duty,"
" Eevelation," " Providence," " Immortality," " Eter
nal Life," we believe that we are handling real things
and not imaginary things. This is really the point
at which the religious man and the non-religious man
diverge. The latter shuts himself within what he
calls "Nature," while the former claims both the
right and the power to step outside this circle and to
move in a region which he still calls natural, but
which the non-religious man calls " supernatural." It
ought to be said in passing that this antithesis of
natural and supernatural is, strictly speaking, illegit
imate. The actual antithesis is between the real and
183

184 NATURE AND GOD
the unreal. Whatever is is natural. In the plane where
it has its existence its very being vindicates its natu
ralness. The fundamental question about that whole
set of phenomena which are called supernatural is not
" Do they exist outside of Nature ? " but " Do they
exist at all ? " This is the crux.
There are two ways at present current of thinking
about the universe : One of them is the way which
is familiar to religion, and the other to science. Per
haps the scientific way will be called to mind more
vividly by a simple mention of a few of its repre
sentative names than by an attempt to define it.
There are two or three such names which have been
heard now for nearly a generation from the pulpit,
and in the religious press, and in all discussions about
religion, until their very mention may provoke a
smile. The reason why the names of Huxley, and
Tyndal, and Spencer have been so frequently used is
not so much on account of what the intrinsic force of
what they have said or written, but rather because
they stand as convenient symbols to represent a way
of looking at things. This way Mr. Balfour has called
" Naturalism." That general conception of the universe is, roughly,
that actual existence ends with those things, facts, and
forces which either come within the perception of the
senses, or can be logically derived therefrom. Nat
uralism takes its stand in the centre of a wide circle.
That circle includes within it Nature, to the utmost

NATURE AND GOD 185
conceivable limit of space. Within that ring it con
ceives to be at work a complex machinery of matter
and force. Whether there be any existence within
this circle which science cannot deal with, it does not
pretend to say. What it alleges is that when men
keep to the field of Nature their feet are upon the
ground and they move with a sense of security. It
approves of the dictum of Kant that existence is an
island, shut up within Nature as in intangible bar
riers. It is the country of truth, but it is surrounded
by a broad and stormy ocean, the proper place of illu
sion, where many a fog bank, and many an ice-berg
give false promise of new countries, incessantly de
ceiving mariners, who are ambitious of new discovery,
with mighty hopes, and involving them in adventures
which can never be abandoned, and yet which can
never be concluded. This naturalistic way of regard
ing existence has come to be very common. Within
a generation the frontiers of nature have been almost
immeasurably extended. Places where mystery
lurked once, have now been illuminated by the search
light of science. The result has been to create what
may be called credulity as toward the natural, and
skepticism as toward the supernatural. It is more a
temper or disposition of mind in the community than
an intelligent or reasoned conviction. Nevertheless,
it exists, and indeed, is the outstanding fact with
which the religious man has to deal. It is by no
means confined to scholars or scientific men. The

186 NATURE AND GOD
business man, the professional man, the mechanic, are
all alike under its influence. They say, " When we
are dealing with the things of Nature we feel sure
about 'them ; when we are asked to consider the things
of another world, we are unable to think or act with
certitude." We who are Christians feel the force of this very
keenly. We, too, are under the influences of the
spirit of the Age. Nevertheless, we have convictions
concerning the unseen things which are quite as deep
and real, and affect our practical conduct as much as
do our beliefs in the reality of the things which we
touch, and taste, and handle. How then, shall the
Christian believer who is not a fanatic or dreamer, or
idealist, justify, — not alone to the world about him,
but to himself, — the existence of his faith ? We be
lieve in existence in two planes. We believe that they
are both equally natural. We have in mind that they
are apprehended by different methods and that they
operate in different ways, but we insist upon their
actual existence. How shall we adjust our religious
belief to our scientific creed ?
Several methods have been tried with very unsatis
factory results. One of them is to apportion existence
into two provinces over one of which Eeason rules
and over the other Faith. Says Mr. Balfour :
"This method consists in setting up side by side
with the creed of natural science, another and supple
mentary set of beliefs which minister to the needs and

NATURE AND GOD 187
aspirations which science cannot meet, and which may
speak amid silence which science is powerless to
break. The natural world and the spiritual world are
in this view each of them real, and each of them ob
jects of real knowledge. But the laws of the natural
world are revealed to us by the discoveries of science,
while the laws of the spiritual world are revealed
through the authority of inspired witnesses, or di
vinely guided institutions. The two regions of knowl
edge lie side by side, and contiguous, but not con
nected, like empires of different races and language,
which own no common jurisdiction, nor hold any in
tercourse with each other, except along a disputed and
wavering frontier."
This method has attractions for very many, but is
not without the gravest practical difficulties. It calls
upon Eeason to deal with natural facts and upon
Faith to deal with spiritual facts. It sets these two
powers of the soul over against each other. It pro
poses to parcel out the universe between them. It re
sents as an intrusion the entrance of either one of
these faculties into the domain of the other. It thinks
that for this world the wisest mode of procedure is to
open one's eyes and keep one's mouth shut, while the
proper attitude toward the facts of the other world is
to shut one's eyes and open one's mouth and swallow
whatever faith may place within it. The trouble with
this scheme is that human nature is all of one piece.
Eeason and Faith are not two separate faculties like
hearing and seeing, taking cognizance of different
class of phenomena. Each one of them is the action
of the whole personality. If the religious faculty be

188 NATURE AND GOD
nothing better than credulity plus hysterics, its de
liverance will neither be responsible nor respected.
All that any man really believes must be capable
of being brought into some unity. The human
soul must always experience a feeling of distress
at any attempt to create within it a perpetual schism.
Naturalism and orthodoxy are alike ill-advised when
they insist upon this division of territory. What we
call faith cannot be done without by a scientific in
vestigator. What we call science cannot be done
without by a believer. As Mr. Balfour again says
" there are many persons, and they are increasing in
number, who find it difficult or impossible to acquiesce
in this division of the ' Whole ' of knowledge into two
or more unconnected fragments. Naturalism may be
practically unsatisfactory, but at least the positive
teaching of Naturalism has secured general assent,
and it shakes every instinct for unity to be asked to
patch and plaster this accepted creed with a number
of propositions drawn from an entirely different source
and on behalf of which no such common agreement
can be claimed."
Nor has Professor Drummond's effort to confuse
the natural and the spiritual worlds been more satis
factory. At first sight one is likely to be taken
by the brilliancy of his argument. A more careful
reading, however, usually leaves upon one the impres
sion that he has reached his conclusions by means of
the ambiguity of his definitions.

NATURE AND GOD 189
Here then is the situation : We move within the
ring of naturalism. Its diameter has been enormously
extended. In space its frontier has passed out of view
beyond where old Bootes leads his leash or Sagit
tarius draws his bow in the South. In depth it pene
trates below the deepest discovery of microscopic life.
In height it overarches and essays to include within
it the moral sense of man. But at every point where
one approaches it with the desire to escape its bound
aries, he finds himself confronted with the legend
"No thoroughfare."
Is there any divine voice ? Is mere interpenetrat
ing it any divine energy ? How shall one pass from
the things which are seen to the things which are un
seen ? As we have observed, one cannot send Faith
out in quest of discoveries while Eeason stays at home
and manages the affairs of the household. Where
then shall we seek for the path of exit from Nature
and of entrance into Eeligion ? It would seem to be
plain enough that if any such gate is discoverable it
must be one which can be discerned from the side of
Nature. Of course there is a conception of divine revelation
which is not disturbed by the present situation. It
thinks of God as coming from the outside, of His own
motion, and by arbitrary methods, breaking into
the territory of the natural for the purpose of pro
claiming His truth. The part of humanity has been
and is to sit still and wait. God will rend the

190 NATURE AND GOD
heavens and come down. Men have but to hearken
and do. This conception is eminently simple, but un
fortunately the facts of nature and of revelation are
against it. God has found men only when men have
sought God. Eevelation and discovery are reverse
and obverse. If God is to reveal Himself He must be
sought for. But where? And how? Along what
path shall one travel, and what shall he accept as his
guide ?
The consensus of the religious world has practically
agreed here. The wicket gate which leads out into
the celestial country is Conscience.

EVOLUTION AND GOD

XII
EVOLUTION AND GOD
Twenty years ago my attention was for the first
time seriously engaged with the doctrine of Evolu
tion. Up to that time I had thought of it, in a gen
eral way, as being a proper theme for jesting. I had
contributed my poor quota of jokes upon the Dar
winians who " sought their ancestors in the zoological
garden instead of the Garden of Eden." I had
thought that a sufficient answer to the Theory, for
practical men, was to be found in the fact that
monkeys have tails and men do not.
But the rapid spread of the theory, and its sober
entertainment by men of whose sanity, at any rate, I
could not doubt, led me to look at it more seriously.
For several years thereafter, I devoted what time I
could spare from the duties of a parish priest in a
country cure to the reading of every available book
which had up to that time appeared in French or
English bearing with any directness upon the subject.
It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that
whether true or false, the theory must have the closest
possible relation to my religion.
When I first came to see what the theory involved,
it seemed incompatible with my Christianity, or, in-
193

194 EVOLUTION AND GOD
deed, with the honest possession of any religious faith
whatever. My mind revolted against it. It appeared
to me to be one of those strange mental crazes which
Bishop Butler thought could now and then envelop a
generation in the same way that a temporary insanity
sometimes seizes upon an individual. The theory
seemed to me to be unworthy of man and to leave no
place for God. It was apparently without sufficient
proof for its alleged facts. It appeared practically
dangerous to persons and to society in that it trans
ferred duty to a new, untried, and insecure basis. It
seemed to dethrone all familiar and intrenched au
thority for conduct, and to leave those who sincerely
accepted it free from the sanctions which I conceived
to be necessary to insure righteousness.
Since then, like most intelligent men of our genera
tion, I have read and thought much upon the same
theme. Indeed, it would be impossible for any one
whose life brings him in contact with the movements
of thought, to be untouched by that idea which is
now, and has been for more than twenty years, the
dominant one.
The result has been that familiarity insensibly re
moved the horror which its strangeness caused me.
Now, I have come to accept it as being in the main
true ; and I have found that it does not produce at all
the effect upon my religious faith or morals, or those
of others who receive it, which I apprehended. Such
a reversal of judgment, made soberly and deliberately,

EVOLUTION AND GOD 195
is something which a man must justify to himself.
From a somewhat extensive and intimate acquaint
ance among clergymen, I have found that the number
of those who have passed through a similar experi
ence is very large. I have, therefore, made my " con
fession," because I know that in the main I speak for
many besides myself.
I do not stop now to define the doctrine of Evolu
tion. Any one who does not know what it is cannot
be told in the compass of an essay. It is a theory of
phenomenal existence deduced from the observed
facts of existence. It has pushed itself forward by
force of its sheer reasonableness, until it now domi
nates every department of secular science. I do not
think it would be possible to find a single person who
has been educated in the physical sciences within the
last twenty years who is not an Evolutionist. Its
scientific opponents died a royal death in Professor
Agassiz— but they are dead. It has in a generation
rendered obsolete whole libraries of apologetics.
Bishop Butler's postulates are now the subject matter
of "The New Evidences." It has produced a new
Psychology, a new moral Philosophy, a new Anthro
pology, and is now working a revolution in The
ology. It cannot be otherwise. " Science " and " Ee
ligion " cannot be kept apart. Human nature is not
constructed with bulkheads. The contents of one
compartment flow into and color the contents of

196 EVOLUTION AND GOD
every other one. The dreariest of all failures have
been the attempts to "reconcile" "Eeligion" and
" Science." Truth is one and needs no mediator. So
much as I may possess of Eeligion and of Science are
identical. I cannot distinguish between them even in
thought. I think in a certain direction and for con
venience' sake call it a religious act ; I move in an
other direction and call the action moral; and in
a third and call it scientific. In very truth the
terms might be used interchangeably. If my religion
be honest and spontaneous, it has, therefore, a scien
tific quality. That is to say, it is a procedure which
receives the sanction of my whole being, and justifies
itself in the same scientific way as does the truth that
two and two make four. This identity is so complete
that everything which changes or modifies my con
ception of the material universe changes also my con
ception of the spiritual universe, and vice versa. As
thoughts of the two emerge, they mingle with and
color one anether at the very fountain-head before
they flow into consciousness. I find, therefore, in my
self, what occidental Christendom is finding in itself,
that the contents of my religious belief have become
penetrated and saturated by a thought of the material
universe which came to me later in time than did the
contents of my faith.
Theology and Anthropology are correlatives. One's
thought of what God is is dependent upon what he
thinks man and the universe to be. If either side be

EVOLUTION AND GOD 197
changed without a corresponding modification in the
other, the equation is thrown out of balance, and one
experiences a strange sense of distress. Such a
change has occurred in our time.
Whence and how came the things which we see ?
The heavens and the earth and the sea ? The teem
ing life of plant and brute and man? Most of us
were reared to think of them as the cunning work of
a great Artificer, each of them fast set in that order
or place or nature in which it was placed at that time
a few thousand years ago when "Creation" was
ended. We unconsciously thought of the Creator as
independent of his creation. We thought of creation
as complete. Things were, as to their essential na
tures, such as they had been at the beginning ; and
such they would remain until the great Builder should
reappear as the great Destroyer. We have found
that the facts are not thus. The universe of to-day is
not that of yesterday, the universe of to-morrow will
not be that of to-day. All things are moving, chang
ing, transforming themselves. When Mr. Darwin
showed that in the animate world species were not
fixed and final, but fluid and plastic, he destroyed at
a stroke the old conception of creation. If his read
ing of the facts be true, we are now in the midst of
the creative process. The movement which we see,
and of which we are a part is not different in kind
from that "creation" which we had fancied ended
long ago. The mechanical notion of the universe and

198 EVOLUTION AND GOD
of God's relation to it is rapidly disappearing. The
terms which were in use a generation ago are no
longer heard. Doctor Paley's " watch " has been
laid away. People no longer speak of " mechanism "
and "adaptation" and "design." They speak of
" organism " and " development " and " growth " and
evolution. The way of thinking about nature has
changed. At this point I wish to say that I am intentionally
avoiding the technical terms and phrases of philoso
phy and metaphysics. My purpose is to set forth the
changes which Evolution has caused in the common
thought about God and religion, and not the changes
in those theories with which philosophies deal. The
two things are not the same. There may be twenty
theories about God, held by different philosophers in
the same community, at the same time. But the
community itself has a notion of its own which may
be different from any or all of them.
Western Christendom, since Augustine's time, has
had its own notions about God and Nature, both of
which notions it accepted at his hands, not because
they were true, but because they were easily present
able in thought. Its theology, its anthropology, and
its science have been until lately adjusted to one an
other. The theory of evolution has destroyed the
adjustment. The current notions about God and the
new thought about nature cannot get on together.
According to the average man, the points at which

EVOLUTION AND GOD 199
God and nature touch each other are Creation, Eeve-
lation, Incarnation, Miracles, and Judgment. Besides
this there is a shadowy thought of a Divine superin
tendence of affairs called Providence; but this is
usually conceived of in such a vague and contradic
tory way, that the notion will not yield up its con
tents to analysis. Now, these terms do not connote
the same things to an Evolutionist that they do to an
immediate Creationist. I have already quoted Mr.
John Fiske's confession of his own youthful concep
tion of God as a celestial timekeeper noting in a vol
ume all a boy's deeds.
I am quite aware that it may be said that the
youthful philosopher's idea of God was a better and
safer one than the one for which he exchanged it in
his mature years. I will not quarrel with that. It
may be so, conceivably. But I wish to point out that
the child of an Evolutionist, belonging to a generation,
and reared in a community where the new thought of
nature and man prevails, could no more present to
himself thus his idea of God than he could present
Him under the figure of the Buddha or Baal. That
way of thinking which we term evolution has changed
all this. It dominates contemporary literature. It has
possession of the centres of thought. It is at home in
the university. It is in the school-books which our
children use. It colors popular speech. It has re
corded itself permanently in the structure of the
human mind. The notion of the transcendental God,

200 EVOLUTION AND GOD
the great Artificer, the great Wonder-worker, the
great Judge, which has obtained in Western Christen
dom for fourteen hundred years, can no longer hold
its place. Science has escorted this simulacrum of a
Deity to the frontiers of his universe, and, with many
expressions of consideration, give him his conge.
That what I say is a true statement of the situa
tion, I bring three representative witnesses to testify.
First, the secularist and agnostic, Mr. Samuel Laing :
" There are two theories of the universe which are
in direct conflict : the one that it was created and is
upheld by miracles — that is, by a succession of second
ary supernatural interferences by a Being who is a
magnified man, acting from motives which, however
transcendental, are essentially human ; the other that
it is the result of Evolution acting by natural laws on
a basis of the Unknowable. Both theories cannot be
true." The second witness is Professor Le Conte, the de
vout Christian and distinguished man of science :
" If the sustentation of the universe by the law of
gravitation does not disturb our belief in God as the
sustainer of the universe, there is no reason why the
origin of the universe by the law of Evolution should
disturb our faith in God as the Creator of the uni
verse. . . . But it is evident that a yielding here
implies not a mere shifting of line, but a change of
base ; not a readjustment of details, but a reconstruc
tion of Christian theology. This, I believe, is indeed

EVOLUTION AND GOD 201
necessary. From the point of view of Science some
very fundamental changes in traditional views are al
ready plain. Of these the most fundamental are our
ideas concerning God, Nature, and Man, and their re
lations to one another."
The third witness is that group of English clergy
who have brought their testimonies together in that
volume called " Lux Mundi," under the editorship of
Dr. Gore, Principal of Pusey House, Oxford :
" God's immanence in nature, the ' higher panthe
ism,' whioh is a truth essential to true religion as it is
to true philosophy, had fallen into the background.
Slowly but surely the [opposite] theory of the world
has been undermined. The one absolutely impossible
conception of God in the present day is that which
represents Him as an occasional visitor. Science has
pushed [that] God farther and farther away, and at the
moment when it seemed as if He would be thrust out
altogether, Darwinism appeared, and under the dis
guise of a foe did the work of a friend. It has con
ferred upon Eeligion an inestimable benefit by show
ing us that we must choose between two alternatives.
Either God is everywhere present in nature or He is
nowhere. We must return to the Christian view of
direct Divine agency, the immanence of Divine power
in Nature from end to end, or we must banish Him
altogether. It seems as if in the providence of God
the mission of modern science is to bring home to us
[this conception of God]. We are not surprised,

202 EVOLUTION AND GOD
therefore, that one who, like Professor Fiske, holds
that ' the infinite and eternal Power that is manifested
in every pulsation of the universe is none other than
the living God ' should instinctively feel his kinship
with Athanasius."
How, then, will the Evolutionist conceive of God
and His relation to Nature ? I reply that, in the first
place, his notions will not be nearly so clearly cut,
sharply defined, and easily presentable in thought as
those which have been current. It will be charged
against them that they are vague, elusive, and in
places contradictory. And the charge will be true.
But to it two retorts are available. First, that this is
true also of Job and Isaiah, of St. Paul and St. John
the Divine ; and the second is that it may be better to
conceive faultily of a true God than to conceive accu
rately of a false one.
The Evolutionist believes that he sees things in the
very act of becoming. They are being transformed
before his very eyes. He has discovered that the
physical forces which he sees at work are transmut-
able, and are, therefore, one. He expects that the
vital and psychical forces which he sees to be also at
work will be found ultimately to be identical with
them. He is not able to distinguish between " nat
ural " and " supernatural." There is one energy and
only one. It manifests itself in the attraction of
gravitation ; as vital force it holds organized matter
together in living things ; it " wells up in ourselves in

EVOLUTION AND GOD 203
the form of consciousness." It enfolds and interpene
trates them all, and in it all things live and move and
have their coherence. It is Wisdom, for it is the sub
jective side of what we see objectively as design ; it is
Righteousness, for it harmonizes with moral conscious
ness ; it is Goodness, for it is felt whenever the sense
of sonship is awakened with its attendant affection.
" But," it is asked, " is this eternal, all-embracing,
all-penetrating Energy a Person? Can it say It "
To this I answer, Yes and No. If men would stop
for a moment to examine what they mean by the sort
of "personality" which they usually predicate of
God, they would not use the term as glibly as they
often do. By personality they mean the power to
distinguish in self-consciousness between the subject
who thinks and other existences which have an in
dependent subsistence. That idea of " personality "
attributed to God means Dualism. The Evolutionist
conceives differently of God. He thinks that all
things are one in Him. When He thinks, wills, feels,
the whole universe is involved in the act both as sub
ject and object.
The human brain is a highly organized mass of
matter in a certain condition called living. As
sociated with it is thought, will, emotion. The two
things manifest themselves concomitantly. As
thought is to the human brain, so is God to the uni
verse. Symmetrical and orderly movement in the
molecules of the brain is at once the sign and the con-

204 EVOLUTION AND GOD
sequence of thought. The devout evolutionist sees in
the infinitely complex but harmonious movement of
the universe the sign of the indwelling God. He can
not think of God coming into the universe from with
out to create, to regulate, to deliver. He does not
ask, Who shall ascend into heaven to bring Him
down? for he knows that He is always here. He
reverently waits and watches to see the Divine ideas
express themselves in terms of life and matter. He
believes that the sum total of things as it exists at
any one moment is the best expression of God's
thought at that moment possible; but that it must
give place to the next one which speaks still more
perfectly. He does not sharply distinguish be
tween the Eevelation which is accomplished by one
means and that accomplished by another, calling the
one Divine and the other Natural. He sees develop
ment both in the book of grace and the book of na
ture. Both of them uncover God " multifariously and
f ragmentarily " as men become able to see. He waits
with confident expectation the " fullness of time " for
the Perfect Man, and is not surprised to find that He
and God are one. He sees a Divine quality not only
in all perfect things completed, but in the slow proc
esses by which they reach completeness. He is not
surprised at the crude religion and faulty morals of
Patriarchs, and is not perplexed in the presence of
goodness in the pagan world. He agrees with Justin
Martyr, as quoted approvingly by those devout

EVOLUTION AND GOD 205
Evolutionists, the authors of "Lux Mundi," that
"those who lived under the guidance of Eternal
Eeason, as Socrates, Heracleitus, and such like, are
Christians, even though they were reckoned to be
atheists in their day." He does not believe that the
" Kingdom of Heaven cometh with observation." He
does not think it true to say, " Lo, here is Christ, or
lo, there!" He believes that God manifest in the
flesh has taken up into Himself all things ; that the
whole phenomenal universe together and in its myriad
parts is moving, changing, transforming itself, and
recombining, not blindly and without a goal, but by
orderly methods, which it is the function of science to
discover and formulate, toward that harmonious
equilibrium of spiritual and natural harmony for
which no phrase stands so fittingly as that of the
Master, "The Kingdom of God."
Now, I am painfully alive to the fact that this
whole way of thinking and speaking seems to many
to be vague, elusive, and unsafe. It is beyond all
comparison easier to think of the world as created at
a definite moment of time so many centuries ago, by
the hand of a God who appeared out of the immensity
to do that task ; that He then fashioned cunningly all
living things in genus and species as they are now ;
that man rebelled against Him at once, and were all
abandoned by Him to their fate, except a certain few
whom He looked down upon from above and gathered
out from their fellows into a commonwealth with

206 EVOLUTION AND GOD
which alone He held relations ; that, at a definite
point centuries thereafter, arbitrarily chosen, He re
appeared to select other some, absolutely a great mul
titude, whom no man can number, but relatively an in
significant number from the teeming myriads of men ;
that, with these exceptions, a rebellious and blighted
world is abandoned by its Maker to its own purpose
less confusion, waiting for its end to be accomplished
in one dread catastrophe.
This conception of God and the world is simple,
portable, always available for the practical needs of a
teacher or exhorter, easy to state and easy to receive.
It is the theology of the Salvation Army. It obtains
commonly among Eoman Catholics and Methodists.
It is what newspaper writers have vaguely in mind
when they are moved to deliver themselves on ques
tions of theology. It was the theology held in com
mon by Jonathan Edwards, and Luther, and the
doctors of Trent, and Calvin, and Thomas Aquinas,
and Augustine. It may be the true one ; but I do not
think so. It was not the theology of that sweet
soul, Pelagius, or Origen, or Justin Martyr, or
Clement, or Paul, or John; nor, have I so learned
Christ. Says the Popular Science Monthly : " Two things
are evident, first, that the traditional religion has lost
its hold on most scientifically educated men ; and,
second, that such minds will not be content without
some religion." Such are the great mass of the minds

EVOLUTION AND GOD 207
with which we have to do. What shall we say to
them of God ?
Bishop Huntington thus quaintly says, or sings :
" The Parish Priest
Of austerity
Climbed up a high church steeple,
To be nearer God,
So that he might hand
His word down to His people.
" And in sermon script
He daily wrote
What he thought was sent from heaven,
And he dropped this down
On the people's heads
Two times one day in seven.
" In his age God said:
' Come down and die; '
And he cried out from the steeple,
' Where art thou, Lord? '
And the Lord replied,
'Down here among my people.' "

GOD MANIFEST

XIII
GOD MANIFEST
I suppose that all intelligent men do, in a way, be
lieve in God. It is difficult to see how phenomena
can be thought of at all without having at least in the
background of one's mind the consciousness of some
sort of existence which is not phenomenal. Avoiding
the language of metaphysics, I do not see how one can
observe reasonableness in the sequence of things with
out tacitly assuming a Eeason which lies behind
things, and who is in some way the cause of things.
In a word, and speaking for myself alone, I find it im
possible to believe in a heaven and an earth without
believing in a Creator of the heavens and the earth.
I know that some men are capable of doing so, but I
am not. Of course I do not conceive of Him as hav
ing completed His creation at some time in the past
and from the outside. Creation and Providence seem
to me to be the same thing. Or, to speak more
accurately, Creation, so far as one can see has been in
progress, and is in progress, and will be eternally.
Chance and progress, integration and disintegration
and reintegration, even in the natural universe is
" eternal." At least it is so to all practical purposes.
For the phrase " eternal " is but a symbol, like the
211

212 GOD MANIFEST
Algebraic. One thinks the series of changes back
ward or forward to the point where his mind falters
and stops. What lies beyond he labels with the
symbol of an unknown quantity and calls it " eternal."
No two men mean the same thing by the word.
Much vain disputation would have been saved both in
Philosophy and Theology if men had always borne
this simple fact in mind. They have wrangled over
the questions as to whether matter is eternal, or
whether future reward or penalty shall be eternal,
forgetting that ex vi termini they have not been able
to define eternal.
It is not until we reach this point that my dis
tinctively Christian belief begins. So far I only be
lieve in God because I find my mind so constituted
that it refuses to rest upon the universe as a finality.
But thus far, and by these methods we have not
reached the Christian God. That there is something
behind the phenomena which we see, seems to be an al
most unanimous conviction. The mind refuses to rest
upon the universe as a finality. I cannot think of
phenomena without passing on to think of a sub
stance, a sub-stans as a background for the things
which are seen. I think it must be intelligent because
I shrink from the thought of intellectual confusion at
the inmost heart of things. I think it is good, partly
because I see that evil seems to have within it a
quality which tends to destroy itself, but chiefly be
cause the most imperative and categorical of all my

GOD MANIFEST 213
faculties seem to declare it. I " ought " is what I owe.
But owe to what? to whom? The moral sense is
the rift in the encircling wall of Nature through
which noble souls have always gone out in confidence
to seek God. From Isaiah and Epictetus to Carlyle
and Amiel the burden of the prophet and the faith of
the righteous man has always been that there is " a
power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness."
But is this the last word ?
"I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope through darkness up to God,
"I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I blindly feel is Lord of All,
And faintly trust the larger hope.''
Is this all ? Natural science and secular philosophy
sadly answer, yes. Thirty-six years ago in the first
volume of his magnum opus their fittest spokesman
declared, " The Power which the Universe manifests
to us is utterly inscrutable." : The same depressing
conclusion is reaffirmed in the final volume issued yes
terday.2 At this point we are arrested by the voice of Jesus
Christ offering to uncover the eternal secret of God.
Why should we heed Him rather than another ?
1 Herbert Spencer : Forst Principles.
* Synthetic Philosophy, Vol. iii.

214 GOD MANIFEST
This is the parting of the ways. Multitudes of
intelligent men, not ignorant of the course of human
thought, have parted company with their scientific
friends, and hearken unto Christ. Two men are in
the same laboratory, the same school, the same business,
equally familiar with the world's knowledge. The
one sees in Christ the fullness of the Godhead bodily.
The other sees in Him but the noblest of the world's
dreamers. But why should I heed Jesus Christ rather than an
other man upon such a matter ? And the answer I
give myself is something like this :
I believe in Jesus Christ to begin with, because He
has been able to get Himself so widely believed in. I
find- Him to be at this moment the most striking per
sonality in the world. More men do actually listen to
Him when He speaks about God than to any other.
He has held ground and steadily gained ground
through so many centuries ; His teaching has evidently
given satisfaction and rest to so many ; and among
these have been included such numbers of those who
bear every mark of seekers after the truth, that I must
needs join myself to them, at least to listen. I lay
emphasis here upon the distinctness of His present
personality. I am not concerned yet with the agencies
by which I am introduced to Him. The record of His
life in the gospels may be ever so inaccurate. His
early disciples may have misapprehended Him greatly.
The Church may be built around a caricature of His

GOD MANIFEST 215
teachings. All this does not yet affect the case. We
may think lightly of all such discrepancies if all we wish
for is an open path to the mind of Christ. Only the
craving for an explicit and final " authority " makes
them serious. The path is open enough. There is a
lifelikeness about His figure as it is now conceived by
the world which seems to me to be unmistakable.
There is a verisimilitude and coherence in His teach
ing which is sufficient to vindicate its historical ac
curacy. When I listen I am convinced that " never
man spake like this man " upon those subjects with
which He concerns Himself. I am arrested first by
what He says ; and then by the effect of His teaching
upon His own life and destiny.
He begins by saying, " I am the Son of Man " — an
oriental form of speech intimating his preeminent pos
session of those qualities which belong to humanity.
As one of his contemporaries would have said when
wishing to assert his love of peace, " I am the Son of
peace ; " or another vaunting his valor would say, " I
am the son of war," so he at the very beginning chal
lenges attention to the essential nature of Man. He
declares that when the consciousness of humanity is
carried to the ultimate power it becomes conscious of
Divinity. He applies to himself the two phrases Son
of Man and Son of God as interchangeable. He ap
peals directly to human consciousness as the witness
of God's essential fatherhood. He was the first to
take his stand upon this fundamental rock. He stood

216 GOD MANIFEST
upon it, and allowed all contradictory forces to break
themselves against him. He said in effect :
" One is your father, even God. It is not His will
that a hair of your head should be lost. You may
trust Him absolutely, not only to do wisely by you,
but to do lovingly by you. The forces of the universe
are dominated by good will. The essential nature of
God is not might, nor wisdom, but love. God is love.
This is the fundamental fact of existence and always
has been. Even in eternity God was moved by that
imperious instinct of propagation whereby love ex
presses itself among all living things. God is from
eternity, father and son. Ye are His offspring. The
universe is the Father's child. Wherever any atom of
it rises into self-consciousness it becomes aware of its
kinship with God. This is its most primal instinct.
Whenever it comes to itself it says, ' I will arise and
go to my Father.' "
Jesus claims a unique and exceptional clearness of
vision for Himself here. He asserts that men are not
alive to what is the fundamental fact concerning them
selves, their descent from God. He does see it dis
tinctly, it is the fact which governs His conduct. He
asserts that He discerns it because He is the " man most
man." At this point arises the inquiry, how did He
come to see that which other men do not see, or see so
dimly ? Was it in virtue of any peculiar quality or gift
belonging to Him which is wanting in other men ? I de
fer for the present the attempt to answer this question

GOD MANIFEST 217
farther than to call attention to the uncompromising
way in which He called upon all to see and act upon
the fact exactly as He saw and acted upon it.
He roundly asserted to men and women at all stages
of moral and intellectual acuteness or obtuseness, —
" Ye are the children of your Father who is in heaven ;
His dominant quality is paternal affection ; this affec
tion wraps you round about and can no more be de
tached from you than can a mother's love from a suck
ing child ; if you will only open your eyes you will see
that this is true ; if you will act upon it practically you
will discover that even those forces which bring you
into distress bend to it and are to be interpreted by it.
I do so."
From this ground of truth He goes on to announce a
practical corollary, — "If ye are all children of one
father ye are therefore brethren of one another. Then
you must act accordingly."
Men have been accustomed to act upon the theory
that beyond certain very narrow limits, they cannot
trust their fortunes to the operation of the sense of
humaneness, that is of mutual kinship, with its corre
sponding affection. They have looked upon the mass
of men as strangers from whom little or nothing of
good was to be expected. Each has been habitually
on the alert to guard himself and his own interests, to
protect those by resenting all attack, and if need be by
destroying the aggressor. He says, " In My kingdom
which is the regime of God men will not act so. If

218 GOD MANIFEST
any man love father or mother or sister or brother
more than Me he is not worthy of Me. If any man
take up a sword, he shall perish by the sword."
Now, it is abundantly evident to thoughtful men
that this is true. Even wise men do not fight. Any
scheme of life which revolves about the principle of
selfishness is self-destructive. It moves in a vicious
circle from which it never can escape. Nature red in
tooth and claw with ravin is the standing parable of
its truth. If a strong man armed keep his house, the
strength of his fortification challenges the strength
and resources of the robber. If a nation build up an
armament against another nation, it is answered by a
corresponding armament. Each one must of necessity
add force to force in the titanic rivalry until the burden
of the armor become crushing. Then it must fight for
the opportunity to disarm. When, finally, one stands su
preme, overlooking its shattered rivals, its very atti
tude evokes enemies, and again begins the horrible
cycle. But men while seeing this have thought that
it was just one of the world's conditions which must
be accepted and within whose bloody frontier they
must pass their existence either in actual or possible
violence. Jesus says, — "You must disarm without
waiting for your neighbor to lay down his weapons.
Take the attitude of a little child who ventures into
the arena with a smile. At first you may be trampled
upon or hurled violently out of the way with damage
to yourself, for the lust of blood is strong upon the

GOD MANIFEST 219
gladiators and they are urged upon one another by the
world's clamor. But do not fear. Not a hair of your
head shall be wasted. If you are smitten on the one
cheek turn the other ; if your brother curse you bless
him ; if he take your coat offer him your cloak ; only
by acting so can you uncover and set in play that
force which in .the long run is the only potent one to
which your fortunes may be safely tied, the power of
love." Now, it is obvious that all this is true, and also that
the world is slowly coming to see that it is true and
to act upon it. The slow but steady gentling of man
ners is but the slow conquest of Jesus' theory of life
over its rival theory.
But He does not shut His eyes to the immediate con
sequence of this mode of life to those who adopt it. It
will bring a cross. Indeed, He calls His theory the
way of the cross. 'This, in His mind, is that " doctrine
of the cross " which His followers, having their minds
filled with the Hebrew and Pagan ideas upon which
they had been reared, quickly transformed into the
theory of " Expiation." He proposed not to bear the
•cross for the people, but that they should each take up
his own cross and follow in His steps. But He always
declares that that way life lies, and death the other
way. I have stated in the last paragraph what seems to
me to be the points which give the elements of the
orbit of Jesus' teaching in that portion which touches

220 GOD MANIFEST
upon human living. These are, the paternal love of
God ; the kinship of men ; and the Doctrine of the
Cross. Are they the dicta of a man ? or of a God ? or
of a God-man ? This last alternative has long been a
phrase to conjure by. Blind orthodoxy has mumbled
it as the pagan, suckled in a creed outgrown, mutters
his Earn ! Earn ! Earn ! But on the other hand it has
served wise and holy men as the fittest short term
they could apply to Jesus Christ. It is a condensation
of the phrases by which He habitually describes Him
self, Son of God and Son of Man. These terms upon
His lips seem to be the expression of a complex ex
perience in His own consciousness.1
When His sense of being as a man is most intense
He speaks with the most profound sense of Divinity.
Yet there is clearly no trace or suggestion of mental
disturbance. One has only to listen to His serene self-
contained lucid speech to feel that "this madness
would gambol from." What will account for this
strange sense of oneness with God ? There is nothing
in it which resembles the " God-intoxication " of the
oriental enthusiast. Nor is there anything which calls
to mind Socrates' familiar daemon. While His con
sciousness was complex it was clearly single. What-
1 But little study seems to have been given to the psychology of
Jesus. So far as I am aware but one extant book deals with the pe
culiar psychological processes in Him which are indicated by His dis
courses, replies and actions, and this book not successfully.
See Bernard; Mental Characteristics of Jesus. Also Canon Gore ;
Dissertations.

GOD MANIFEST 221
ever its component elements may have been they were
perfectly fused in a single personality.1 Whenever He
thought, moved or acted, one feels that it was the ac
tion of the whole being. But it is equally clear that
He claimed an essential Divine quality for His words
and person which has no parallel among men. The
consensus of human judgment has dismissed as a mad
man or as a blasphemer every other man who has so
much as intimated a similar claim. It is very note
worthy that both these explanations of His character
were given during His life ; and that they were both
rejected by a community which knew Him well and
was hostile to Him. His own explanation of His God-
consciousness would seem to be plain enough, whether
or not it be accepted as true to the facts of the case.
He asserts with much iteration that it was due to His
mode of living ; and that it was open to any other who
chose to follow Him. He first uncovered and then
resolutely followed that moral energy in Himself which
He asserted to be pre-potent, that motive which ex
presses itself in thought as an absolute confidence
in God's fatherliness, and in action by living in love
with one's fellows. His outward life would seem to
be but the exemplification of the fortunes of one who
has achieved such an inward triumph. The force of
things as they are lays upon such a one a cross ; it
'I need hardly point out that the term "personal" as used in
speaking of the Trinity, for example, has little in common with the
term "personal " as used in common speech.

222 GOD MANIFEST
leads him to death ; but cannot break the continuity
of his existence through and after death, for the rea
son that the force to which he has adjusted himself is
more persistent and more potent than the environment
which contains him.
Here many notions very common among Christian
folk must be definitely abandoned. To think of Him
as a self-conscious personality " coming " to this out
lying world from the seat of God's eternal power re
mote in space, and incarnating Himself in the form of
man with an independent self-conscious human soul, is
in fact not to think at all. To accept such a piece of
mental imagery and call it a " mystery " is unworthy.
Men are prone to sit down at the border of what they
choose to call holy ground under the pretense of tak
ing off their shoes when their real motive is intellectual
indolence. There is a candor and f orthrightness about
the New Testament Scriptures which invites to an
examination not only of what Jesus is, but of how He
came to be what He is.
Let one in this reverent and fearless mood open the
gospels and he will find himself at home. He will be
met at the threshold with the challenge Behold the
Man ! If he look upon Him long enough, steadfastly
enough, and with sufficiently clear sight he will be
likely to cry, " My Lord, and my God ! "
He was a man, a Hebrew, a Nazarene, born A. U.
C. about 746. His roots were in the crumbling gen
erations. He was a rod of the stem of Jesse. Heredity

GOD MANIFEST 223
and environment wrought in and upon Him as well as
another. Of His early life absolutely nothing is
known. Of His youth a single incident is told which
may very well have happened, or may equally well
have been a pious imagining thrown backward upon
His early life from later years by those who loved His
memory. He comes upon the stage as a man in ma
ture life, in response to the summons of a prophet who
sternly preached the gospel of Eepentance. To this
preaching He at first responds, but after a little pro
nounces it to be inadequate. He lays His axe to the
root of the tree. He substitutes for John's gospel the
gospel of the New Life. Eepentance may indeed rid
the soul of parlous stuff, but it will give no guarantee
of future purity. It opens no spring of spiritual life.
It is a mechanical process of cleansing. What is
needed is a vital process of growth. The prophet who
had made experiment of his own medicament was the
first to acknowledge this. He foretells the decadence
of his own gospel and the increase of the new one.
And Jesus declares that great as is the Prophet of Ee
pentance the least in the kingdom of life is greater
than he.
That Jesus had slowly and painfully wrought out
His spiritual discovery is plain. He had in the new
life achieved consciousness of His divinity and rec
ognized the secret voice of God saying, " Thou art My
well-beloved Son; this day have I begotten Thee."
But He held it yet unstably and in spiritual tumult.

224 GOD MANIFEST
It must be tested before He could definitely entrust
His fortunes to it. Nothing could be more psycho
logically accurate than the story of the Temptation in
the desert. The firstborn as well as all his brethren
must face temptation solitary. In the secret place of
his innermost life he must make trial of his new felt
divinity. Will he satisfy his hunger for bread or his
hunger for righteousness ? Will he commit his destiny
to those forces which build up the kingdom of the
world and the glory of them ? Or will he serve the
eternal force which stirs within him ? Will he cast
himself down from the spiritual elevation where he is,
trusting that somehow God will bring his life to a
right issue ? The threefold aspect of His Temptation
is not exhaustive but it is typical. It attacked His
slowly achieved but distinct consciousness of His divine
nature. From that time on His life was a constant
temptation. His theory of living was tested by the
reactions upon it of social life, of religious institutions,
of political arrangements. John, preaching the gospel
of Eepentance, could withdraw from all these and fight
his barren battle as well in the wilderness as else
where. Jesus' Way could only be tested by living,
and is possible only in the midst of life. After His
final storm of doubtfulness and hesitation had subsided
He walked serenely into the market-place, the syna
gogue, the home, the firstborn of a new race, and, in
consequence, the firstborn of the sons of God. Trust
ing Himself to the heavenly arms which He believed

GOD MANIFEST 225
to be about Him, He appealed unhesitatingly to the
good, will of men. The result of His experiment is re
corded in the gospels. At once He called for followers.
The condition which He exacted was that each of
them should discover within himself the same confi
dence in God's essential fatherliness, and the same in
expugnable good will to men which was in Himself.
The Sermon on the Mount was His address to the lit
tle forlorn hope. Some of them it frightened. They
went backward and walked no more with Him. The
author of Ecce Homo has pointed out with transcend
ent subtilty and truth the way in which His " Call "
acted as a winnowing fan in His hand. It winnowed
ruthlessly. He was seeking for seed from which
should spring a new race of men, and would have none
except such as possessed the principle of life in it.
That He selected wisely, the issue has shown, for each
little one has become a thousand. But it was clear to
Him from the first that the conditions of life were such
that, until they should be changed, it would be impossi
ble for any one acting as He proposed to retain his hfe.
He called his working theory of life by the short
word " Faith." Hardly any word in human speech has
since been so misused. What He meant by it is clear.
He meant that act of the will by which one determines
to live by the rule of love and trust. Whoever wills so
possesses Faith in proportion to the strenuousness of
his determination. "Believing in Him" meant the
moral conviction that His " Way " was a right and prac-

226 GOD MANIFEST
ticable way. The word in religious speech has almost
entirely lost its original connotation. It has come to
be practically synonymous with credulity in one con
nection, and with religious emotion in another. One
can see even in the later Epistles, especially those of
St. Paul, the beginning of this change of use. With
Jesus, " believing " simply meant the willingness to ad
venture in this world upon a mode of life under the
domination of divine and human love. The difficulty
and painf ulness of such a life are so great that one will
only adopt it under the light of a moral illumination
equivalent to being born again. He who has achieved
it has, in Jesus' phrase, " come to himself." That is,
he has discovered what is the essential and constant
quality in his own nature.
The outcome of this life of faith in the case of
Jesus is well known. His way was in the face of all ac
cepted manners. He exasperated alike the moralist,
the ecclesiastic, and the conventionally religious man,
the sociologist and the magistrate. If He was right
they were wrong. If His kingdom were to prevail
theirs must needs perish. The world was not without
a morality. It had a method of conduct evolved from
the experience of the race, stated in terms of juris
prudence, sustained by immemorial custom, fortified
by religious observance and ecclesiastical ritual. The
representatives of every one of these turned upon
Him. He did not attack them or propose any reform
for them. He bore Himself toward them all much as

GOD MANIFEST 227
a man would bear himself toward the fantastic ar
rangements of a village of lunatics in which he found
himself living. Actions which seemed to them
natural and therefore bounden, He declined altogether
to perform. His notion of nature was not theirs.
Conduct which seemed to them unnatural and impracti
cable He demanded and showed. With an amazing
appearance of simplicity He assured them that their
laws were unrighteous, their ritual irreligious, their
ethics immoral, their church a synagogue of satan. He
tested all men and all institutions by their actual effect
upon the lives of men. He pronounced them and theirs
ungodly because He found them to be inhuman. The
Church existed for its own aggrandizement. The State
had no ruth. The rich had no bowels of compassion.
He turned away from them all in a sort of divine
rage, after heaping maledictions upon them which they
never forgave. He discovered that they were all so
committed to their mode of living that there was
no hope of their accepting His mode. Then He
turned to the people, the common people, the average
man, who then as always simply accepts existing con
ditions of life without deliberately giving bonds to
them. These were sufficiently free to adopt His life
of Faith if they chose. At first they heard Him
gladly. His display of the beatitudes which lay far
along in the path to which He invited them was allur
ing. But when they confronted the Cross which
those must needs carry who trod that path, they fell

228 GOD MANIFEST
away. Only a few, whose natures were remotely
akin to His own walked with Him. Evil and selfish
men shrank from Him as driven by a magnetic repul
sion. Among all His followers was not one who
would not antecedently have been pronounced good.
Even the Magdalene was already sick of her sin into
which she had been drawn by the excess of her love.
It could not be said of her, — "Thy sin's not acci
dental ; 'tis a trade." The malefactor who hung upon
the neighboring cross was a misguided patriot, brave
and devoted enough to have struck a blow in insurrec
tion against that tyranny which his countrymen con
tented themselves with safely cursing. He drew to
Him the pure, the tender, the generous, the brave, the
spiritually minded. They who had ears to hear heard.
For the rest, having ears they heard not, and seeing
they did not understand.
He bade those who chose to share His life of Faith
become in every particular like Himself. When
they were struck with the sight of His moral exalta
tion, He bade them surpass the moral point at which
He was, and to be perfect even as their Father in
heaven is perfect. When they marvelled at some of
His mighty works he assured them that it was possi
ble for them to do even greater works than these. At
every point of His own development He paused to as
sure His hesitating disciples that the way was as open
for them as for Him, and to bid them " follow Me."
He declares Himself to be the manifestation of God in

GOD MANIFEST 229
man. The burden of His work and life is that if a
man will unhesitatingly follow the divine nature which
is in him he will come into his own natural inheritance
of powers undreamed of and amazing.
That He found Himself able to perform "many
mighty works " seems unquestionable. It is possible,
to be sure, to disentangle the person of Jesus from the
whole " miraculous " setting in which the gospels
frame Him. Unitarianism and soi disant "Liberal
Christianity " has essayed the task to do so. They
pique themselves somewhat upon their success. But
the figure thus separated out, and to which they point
saying Ecce Homo, is so wan, pallid, vague and unsub
stantial that it arouses in the passer-by but a languid
interest. It is easier, upon the whole, to admit the
fact of His strange works than it is to account for the
historical Christ without them. It may well be that
some "signs" are attributed to Him in the gospel
record which He did not do ; and that some marvellous
things which He did do have perished from memory.
Indeed, this would seem to be the testimony of the
gospels themselves. But that He possessed and exer
cised occult powers appears true. And it seems
equally true that in varying degree, His disciples did
the like. It is interesting, but not obligatory, to ex
amine and come to a definite belief concerning this
one or that among His miracles. The essential thing
is to find some intelligible rationale of His seemingly
unique powers.

230 GOD MANIFEST
Unthinking traditionalism here looks upon Jesus as
God masquerading in human guise. God is for it the
antithesis of " Nature." Wherever He appears in na
ture a circumference of disturbance surrounds him.
Natural processes are interrupted, set aside, or turned
backward at will. If He appear in the " person " 1 of a
man, it is still not a man but God who acts. But this
conception empties Jesus' nature of all significance
and meaning. It was not His explanation of His
power, nor does the record of His mighty deeds fit this
conception. He speaks and acts constantly as though
He conceived what we call " supernatural " powers to
be intrinsically natural to any man who would live as
He lived. When He walks upon the water He chides
His friend Peter for sinking. When the disciples con
fessed their inability to heal a lunatic, He upbraided
them as a faithless and perverse lot. He asserts in
general that " all things are possible to them that be
lieve." If in any instance a disciple makes assay of
his " supernatural " power and fails, Jesus ascribes the
failure to lack of " Faith." Let us now recur to His
definition of Faith. We will see that it has nothing in
common with that credulity which is content to
stupidly walk blindfold ; nor with that imaginary act
of the will by which it offers to coerce the understand
ing into accepting as true that at which the under
standing rebels. It denotes a working theory of life.
It is the fact of submitting one's self unreservedly to
1 Latin persona, i. e., a mask.

GOD MANIFEST 231
the goodness of God, and living in inexpugnable love
for one's fellows. Such a manner of life, He teaches,
will, if persevered in, uncover in the individual adopt
ing it potentialities which are intrinsically " natural "
to men, but which seem " supernatural " to the majority
because their mode of life has no place in it for their
exercise. It is a peculiarly Christian faculty only, as
He asserts in varied phrase, because Christians alone
are really humane ; and belongs to Him in complete
ness because He is preeminently the Son of Man. It
is an appanage of the Christian mode of living. Even
John the Baptist "did no signs." John was not a
Christian. He was the consummate fruit of the world's
mode of living. His Baptism of Eepentance did, and
can, wash the soul of many foul spots. But the
Christian life is the reopening of clogged fountains in
the essential nature of man.
Were the miracles of Jesus the works of God ? or of
a man ? I reply, his assumption is that they were of
God because they were the natural expression of what
He asserts to be the divine quality inherent in man.
In Him, this divine faculty had become self-conscious,
and by so doing had come to recognize its oneness with
the God-father. For this reason He found it natural
for Him to think and act in such ways as we are ac
customed to think natural only to God.
His powers were not absolute or without limit.
They found the frontier of their exercise at the limit
of human capacity. There were places and occasions

232 GOD MANIFEST
where " He could not do many mighty works." The
limits which concluded His knowledge concluded His
power. Of a certain thing He said that "no man
knoweth it, not even the Son, but the Father." In a
word, from a human child He increased in wisdom
and- stature and in favor with man and God until He
touched the circumference of human capacity, and
" manifested " all of God which Humanity is capable
of expressing. What more could He? He is, for
men, the perfect expression of God. He manifests
all of God that man can contain, or can see. His
contention is that He reaches that divine fullness of
life by carrying to its ultimate the essential nature
and faculty of man. He bids men follow Him. St.
Paul sees " the measure and stature of a perfect man
in Christ." He is the "firstborn among many
brethren." By the will of a man He overcame the
obstacles to the development of a man, and having
done so discovered that He was the Son of God.
Then He turns to His brethren and bids them come
to themselves, and by so doing discover their common
kinship with God.
Thus He becomes to us Jesus, the Christ, the an-
nointed one, His only Son, our Lord.

THE DOCTEINE OF THE CEOSS

XIY
THE DOCTRINE OE THE CROSS
It is because it is of the essential nature of God to
bear the Cross that men assume it whenever they
awake to their own divineness. It is not easy to ac
count for the strange reluctance to associate the idea
of suffering with God. More sober thought would
show that it must perforce be the constant fact and
habit of his existence. His life must be an eternal
pang as well as an eternal ecstasy. Suffering is the
correlative and background of love for any inferior by
any superior personality. If the lover love more than
the loved he must suffer in the loving. If the lover
be wiser than the loved he must bear solicitude and
pain for the ignorance of the loved. If he be better
than the object of his affection he must carry the heavy
load of sorrow for the frailties of the loved. Pain is
the sad necessity of parentage. At such time as the sons
of God shouted together for joy their Father's burden
began. \ Creation involves suffering for God. The
father sitting in his house and aware moment by mo
ment of the doing of his prodigal child must bear in
his heart the aching agony of a yearning love which
is compelled to bide the time of its fruition. The
whole creation groaning and travailing in pain to-
235

236 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS
gether must fling the shadow of its agony across the
face of the All-Father. " Crucified from the founda
tion of the world " is not a phrase coined in the busy
idleness of philosophy, but the scientific statement of
an eternal fact. It is the concomitant of Creation in
the experience of God. Now it has been said above,
creation is to all practical purposes eternal. That is
to say, for all human uses thought itself is conditioned
upon phenomena. Metaphysics may fancy that it
can conceive of God existing in serene absoluteness
before the universe was, or as independent upon all
phenomena. But if the content of such fancy be
carefully examined it will be found to be empty. It
will be found to contain symbols and not realities.
God, for us, is expressed in terms of Creation. There
are no other terms, or, to speak more accurately, we
cannot affirm or deny that there are any other terms.
Jesus' assertion is that Creation and the Cross flow
simultaneously out of the essential quality of God
which is Love. St. Paul intimates that they will
ultimately be absorbed together " when the Son also
Himself shall be subject to the Father, that God may
be all in all." Between these two termini the
whole drama of existence is concluded. Within this
span is to be sought, if anywhere, the nature of God
and the destiny of man. Jesus' doctrine of the Cross
is therefore identical with His doctrine of God. He
bears His cross, and bids men observe Him the
while, declaring that he that hath seen Him hath

THE DOCTEINE OF THE CEOSS 237
seen the Father. For fatherhood and pain, love and
cross-bearing are bound up together. The crowning
fact of His life stands as the convenient expression
for the whole of it. His nativity, baptism, fasting
and temptation, His agony and bloody sweat, His
cross and passion are all suffrages in the litany of His
life. " The Cross " is the portable formula for their
totality. In this supreme fact He claims to be the
manifestation of the Father. He declares, in effect,
that suffering is the penalty of loving; that it is
the expression of loving ; that it is the weapon
of love ; that by it love conquers ; that this is
true for men because it is true of God, and be
cause men share the nature of God being His
offspring. While He lived, a few who were near
to Him believed Him. But even their belief seems to
have been produced more by the contagiousness of
His personality than by a clear apprehension of His
Truth. Those in the wider circle who gathered about
Him soon deserted Him. Even the most intimate
group were in the end staggered at the actual cruci
fixion, though they had in their theory accepted it as
the legitimate outcome of His Way. His reappear
ance brought them together again, but in a perplexed
and bewildered mood. He had given them a truth
concerning the fundamental fact of existence ; a way
of procedure which He Himself walked in, and which
He declared to be intrinsically Life ; but they were
slow of heart to believe that the obligation of all

238 THE DOCTEINE OF THE CEOSS
these was in the nature of things. It has often been
asserted that His disciples received from Him His
Truth in formal propositions, apprehended it clearly,
and passed it on unimpaired to their successors. The
record itself shows that this was not true. They
comprehended Him but partially. In great part they
misconceived Him altogether. They were far more
clear as to His Way than they were concerning His
truth. They could and did adopt that mode of living
which was His, and which led them as it had Him to
the cross or to the lions. But of the Truth upon
which His Way was based they had but partial un
derstanding. Indeed, He Himself affirms that they
were not equal to it, and that it could only be made
known slowly by the operation of the spirit which He
would leave behind Him. The facts of Christianity
came first ; the theory followed haltingly. He had
previously announced as the law of the case that " he
that doeth My will shall learn of My Doctrine
whether it be of God."
But the life of Jesus Christ is an event in time. Of
necessity it had relations to the time when, the place
where, and people in whose presence it was lived.
All these helped in some ways and in others hindered
the clear shining of His light. How they helped has
often been remarked upon, how they hindered has
been but little noticed. The movements of human
history prepared a way before Him, but they also
placed obstacles in the path which were as real as

THE DOCTRINE OF THE CEOSS 239
those which had previously barred His coming. His
Truth was conditioned by the capacities of those to
whom it was spoken. The hearts of many were
turned to Him, but the minds even of these were
largely preoccupied with ways of thinking foreign to
His way. After He had gone His followers essayed
to formulate and champion His Truth. To do so they
expressed it in the terms with which they were fa
miliar. In some ways these terms were inadequate,
in some ways they were faulty. Human speech had
to be dealt with as the missionary in our day is com
pelled to deal with the meagre languages of the pagan
tribes to whom he wishes to preach. Their vocabu
lary had no words for his ideas. He has to re-create a
language before he can impart his message. If he try
to use the terms they have his message is cramped
within them or defiled by them.
The fatal though unavoidable error was the attempt
to express Jesus' Doctrine of the Cross in the termi
nology of the Hebrew ideas of sacrifice. His doctrine
of God crucifying Himself was wide as God. Their
notion of " expiation " was narrow as Judaism. His
Truth came down from God. Theirs came up through
fetishism from primitive savagery. His was the ex
pression of God's true disposition. Theirs was the
expression of human fear and cunning. " I am from
above, ye are from beneath," was His dictum to the
Jews. But, unfortunately, the Hebrew sacrificial
terms had a certain superficial fitness when applied to

240 THE DOCTEINE OF THE CEOSS
Jesus' life. There was blood in both. There was
pain in both. Thus their essential antagonism was
obscured. St. .Paul the theologian of the early Church
strains to make the imagery of expiation fit with
Jesus' Truth and is constantly perplexed and perplex
ing.1 His clear conception of the spirit of Christ
strives to find expression in the terms of his inherited
thought, and bursts the formulas which still constrain
it. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews con
cludes it altogether within those formulas.2 The in
stinct of the early Christians refused to accept those
statements, and the Epistle found no place in the New
Testament Canon until that instinct had been dulled.
But the Hebrew thought of expiation, which was itself
a survival from an early savagery, thus became the ac
cepted vehicle for the expression of Jesus' doctrine of
the Cross. The ancient Liturgies embody the idea
because they were ancient. Formulated by those who
were reared in Judaism, or in Paganism, whose idea
of expiation they expressed they have perpetuated the
confusion which has for so many centuries obscured
the central Truth of Jesus. The same Hebrew-
Pagan rationale of Christ's work early became fixed
in Christian Theology. The Catholic Creeds do not
contain it, and to this fact above all else they owe
their universal acceptance. But in the more formu
lated " Systems " it has been for fifteen centuries the
1 Pfleiderer; Influence of St. Paul, etc., passim.
2Rendal; Theology ofthe Hebrew Christians.

THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 241
organizing principle. Chrysostom, Augustine, Thomas
and Anselm, each in his own time and sphere of in
fluence formulated it and fixed it more and more
firmly in the popular Christian mind. It finds at once
its simplest and most naive expression in the Eoman
Mass. It is equally present, though mixed with other
elements, in the Anglican Communion Office. It is
the underlying theology of the Salvation Army. But
the Christian consciousness has never been easy under
it. Whenever " the spirit of life which was in Jesus
Christ " has been strong, this pagan conception of God
and His attitude toward men has receded. It has
failed signally as a motive power for righteousness of
life. Where it has been presented by the missionary
as the " good-news " of Jesus it has appealed to a mer
cenary motive, and led those who accepted it to attempt
to escape from a threatened peril. For such security
they have been willing to pay only a minimum of
self-sacrifice, and to accept but a formal restraint upon
conduct. To make the appeal successful it has been
necessary to depict in lurid and fear compelling
colors the torments of hell. In all its transmutations
the idea has remained in substance the childish at
tempt of the savage to placate or buy off the wrath
of a maligant and offended god. This is equally true
whether the victim be thought of as a breadfruit
offered by a squalid Papuan, a bull by a Judean priest
upon a brazen altar, or a Man at Golgotha by the un
witting plebescite of a race. The essence of all is the

242 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS
same. It is the proposal to purchase from the Al
mighty by gifts a release from the penalty of wrong
deeds. Many influences are now at work to banish
and drive away this ancient superstition to that evil
place of ignorance and fear from which it first
emerged. In the first place, the origin and growth of
the idea of Sacrifice has begun to be studied.1 It has
but lately dawned upon us that races of men are upon
earth now at every stage of development. There are
still Edens in which Adams are even now beginning
to know good and evil. The counterparts of Abraham
and Moses and David and Ezra live and have lived at
many places. At a certain primitive stage of progress
this notion of expiation begins to show itself always.
It marks a stage of intellectual and moral forwardness.
It is of the world's childhood. It gathers about it
self a cult. It starts with the raw meat proffered to
an obscure idol, and survives in the adult race until it
be outgrown. So far from being a system revealed to
Israel from above, it is seen to be a common trait of
all people at a certain stage of their immaturity.
Again, and more specifically, the more careful
study of the Bible has made it evident that the Sacri
ficial System did not in point of fact hold the place
in Hebrew history which has been traditionally
assigned to it.2 This is purely a question of fact.
•Spencer; Data of Ethics, Lubbock; Primitive Races, Quatrefages;
Tlie Human Species, etc., etc., etc.
2 Colenso ; Wellhausen; Robertson Smith ; Driver ; Briggs, eto., etc.

THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 243
From investigation it thus appears to be demonstrated
that Moses, instead of being the founder of a complex
and symmetrical system of Sacrificial Eitual did but
limit within the narrowest bounds possible to him a
habit of belief and worship which his people had in
common with all peoples of like time and progress.
Like all prophets he strove to lift them to a higher
and truer idea of their real relation to God; and,
like all wise men he allowed some things " owing to
the hardness of their hearts." It now appears that
the System attributed to him was not in fact intro
duced in his time nor for many centuries afterward ;
that it cannot claim either his sanction or the sanc
tion of God ; that the line of development in which
he and the Prophets who succeeded him strove to
lead this people, was one which was obstructed at
every step by the survival of this Pagan ideal; and
that, finally, the gorgeous Sacrificial System itself
came into existence as a recrudescence of a creed
outworn. So far, then, from being the " ante-type "
of Christian worship, it seems to have been but a
pseudo development which perished of its own faulti-
ness. Jesus was "priest of the order of Melchisedek
which is king of peace." Moses and the Prophets, not
Aaron and the Prophets, are in the line of His ascent.
Again, the generation which has thus come into the
truth in the study of Anthropology and Biblican Crit
icism is the same one which has displayed an alto
gether unique solicitude to discover the secret of

244 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS
Jesus' power and to translate His spirit into actual
life. It is most significant that the interest of the
Christian world has turned away from the study of
formal Theology to the study of the Life of Christ.
It seems to be becoming convinced that a false start
has been made long ago, and seeks to regain that
place where the paths diverge in order to follow the
true one under the guidance of Jesus. The religious
thought of our time is determined to find its way back
past the Tridentine or Eeformation System, past the
medieval traditions, past the Catholic Creeds, refuses
to pause with Paul, clamors for the very words of the
Master. It "would see Jesus." The names most
widely known in the Christian world of this age
whether among scholars or people are, Strauss, Bauer,
Keim, Edersheim, Farrar, Stalker, Drummond, Bruce,
Brooks. And all for the same reason. They intro
duce their readers directly to Christ. They have the
zeal of a first quest. If Christendom really believed
that it had already in possession His secret this interest
could not be awakened. The most epoch making
book in the religious world for centuries is Ecce Homo.
Every fresh attempt to learn Christ's secret is inspired
really by the deep conviction that for some reason and
in some way it has been lost or overlooked. Can it
be true that this is the situation ?
It is certainly the fact that each denomination of
Christians believes that every other one has in some
way missed the Truth as it is in Jesus. The Catholic

THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 245
believes this of the Protestant. The Protestant
believes this of the Anglican ; the Anglican believes
this of both ; and the Oriental believes this of all.
May it be that what they all believe is true ? Does
not the very existence of the belief vindicate its cor
rectness ? While they all agree substantially upon
the facts of Jesus' career and receive the same record
of His word, they disagree utterly upon the true
significance of these deeds and the interpretation of
these words. What will account for these disagree
ments but the theory that they have all alike misin
terpreted Him ? And if this be true, or if it be only
partially true, what remains to be done but to go back
to the beginning and start afresh? This may be a
humiliating thing to do. For great multitudes of
Christians it may be an impossible thing to do.
Nevertheless, it would seem that we have come to the
place where no other course is open.
When we come to see that the whole nexus of sac
rificial ideas are but the survival of Paganism, and
Judaism, that its underlying idea is false and immoral,
unworthy of man and untrue of God ; when we see
that the Sacrificial System was an intrusion into the
course of Hebrew development and an obstacle to its
natural movement ; when we see that the Prophets
denounced it as paltry and hurtful ; when we see that
Jesus held aloof both from its facts and its phrases ;
when we see how and when and why it fastened itself
upon the Christian Society, surely we must be ready

246 THE DOCTEINE OF THE CROSS
to abandon it, and to seek some truer rationale of the
burdened life and painful death of Christ. It may be
as well to confess that the task will not be an easy
one. For in Epistles and Missals, in Liturgies and Con
fessions and Summse, the substitutionary idea holds the
field. They all reek of blood ! They all conceive of
salvation as a commercial transaction. It is a com
modity bought with a price. But then, Jesus' real
doctrine of the Cross is also entangled with them all.
This has given them their viability. The task now is,
in a word, to disentangle the Cross from the Altar.
What, then, is Christ's Doctrine of the Cross ? It
cannot be more simply stated than in His own phrase ;
— " If any man is willing to come after Me, let him
take his cross and follow Me ; for whosoever would
save his life shall lose it, and whosoever is willing to
lose his life shall find it." All His words are but the
expansion of this which He announces as an eternal
truth. It is true, He says, of Himself, of men, and of
God. The starting-point of His doctrine is the fact of
pain and evil in the world. Heretofore, He says, when
men have tried to resist evil, they have tried to beat it
back as they would repel a hostile foe, by force. Ee-
sist not evil. To attempt escape from it by resistance
is as futile as to try to cure a burn by applying fire.
His Sermon on the Mount is His Pronunciamento.
Let evil break itself against you ; do not break your
self against it, is His secret. And this whether evil as
sails in the form of pain or of wrong. If it be pain,

THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 247
turn upon it with love for God, and its sting is gone.
If it be wrong, turn upon it with love for men, and
the wrongdoer will be disarmed. Says Mr. John
Fiske, "In the cruel strife of centuries has it not often
seemed as if the earth were the prize of the hardest
hearts and the strongest fist ? To many men the
words of Christ have been as foolishness and a
stumbling-block, and the Ethics of the Sermon on the
Mount have been openly derided as too good for this
world. In that wonderful picture of modern life
which is the greatest work of one of the greatest seers
of our time, Yictor Hugo gives a concrete illustration
of the working of Christ's method. In the saint-like
career of Bishop Myriel, and in the transformation of
his life-work in the character of the hardened outlaw,
Jean Yaljean, we have a most valuable commentary
upon the Sermon on the Mount. By some critics who
would express their views freely about Les Miserables,
while hesitating to impugn directly the authority of
the New Testament, Monseigneur Bienvennu was
unsparingly ridiculed as a man of impossible goodness,
and a milksop and fool withal. But I think Yictor
Hugo understood the capabilities of human nature and
its real dignity better than these scoffers. In a low
state of civilization Monseigneur Bienvennu would
have had small chance of reaching middle life. Christ
Himself, we remember, was crucified between two
thieves. It is none the less true that when once the
degree of civilization is such as to allow this highest
type of character, distinguished by its meekness and
kindness to take root and thrive, its methods are in
comparable in their potency. The Master knew full
well that the time was not ripe, that He brought not
peace but a sword. But He preached, nevertheless,
that gospel of great joy which is by and by to be
realized by toiling humanity, and He announced ethical
principles good for the time that is coming. The

248 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS
great originality of His teaching, and the feature
which has given it its hold upon men, lay in the dis
tinctness with which He conceived a state of society
from which every vestige of strife, and the behavior
adapted to ages of strife, shall be forever and utterly
swept away. Through misery which has seemed un
endurable, and toil that has seemed endless, men have
thought on that gracious life and its sublime ideal, and
have taken comfort in the sweetly solemn message of
peace on earth and good will to men."
All this is true and admirable' ; but much more is true.
Jesus announced His ideal of life, not at all as the
practical solution which a wise man might give to the
problem of conduct. He announced it as the very
Word of God. He declares that light and life and
wisdom are the fruit of love ; and this because God
has made things so, and because He is so Himself.
"If ye believe in Me, keep My commandments. I
have but one commandment : — thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind,
and thy neighbor as thyself." To obey this com
mandment is equivalent to taking up the Cross.
Love, the Cross, and Life, are the motive, the means,
and the end of existence for all who share the nature
of God. Whether it be in the person of Jesus Christ
against whom Hebrew malignity wrecked itself, and
became forever after impotent; or Stephen against
whom Pharisaic hate destroyed itself; or Poly carp
whose love quenched provincial rage ; or Telemachus
against whom luxurious cruelty broke itself ; or of
that innumerable multitude out of every tribe and

THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 249
tongue and kindred under heaven who by patient
continuance in well doing have won their enemies, by
these and by their method have been won the only
permanent triumph so far gained.
The Cross of Christ is not an isolated monument ris
ing out of the confused and purposeless waves of life's
ocean whereto shipwrecked mariners may cling for
refuge. It is the sailing directions by which the
voyager guides his craft throughout his whole course.
Not they who " look only to the Cross for salvation,"
but they who " take up the Cross and follow Him "
are Christians. The first is a mercenary sentiment
which defeats itself ; the second is the divine mode of
life for men. He that saveth his own life, shall lose
it ; and he that loseth his life for My sake and the
gospel's shall save it."
For the gospel's sake. This was His motive. For
its sake He laid down His life. He declared that His
laying it down was an act of deliberate choice. " I
have power to lay it down, and I have power to take
it up again." It is an area where no compulsion can
operate. Every man has the same power to lay down
his life, and if he repent the determination when he
begins to feel the cost, to take it up again. Jesus laid
down His life before the world's evil for it to work its
will upon. He steadfastly refused to save it by taking
it out of the way of the world's evil. It was easy to
see what the immediate result would be. " He must
go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things, and be

250 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS
killed." Of course He must. He had started upon a
Way which led there naturally. He must follow it to
the end, or else abandon it and turn back. The com
pulsion is always from within. The hard and unrea
sonable conditions of life may hold the witless rustic
Simon the Cyrenian and compel him to bear a cross.
But such a misfortune is an isolated incident without
spiritual consequences. Jesus' Doctrine of the Cross
is this : — God suffers because God is Love : men are
the sons of God, inheriting His nature; they come
into their inheritance and become masters of life only
through Love ; and the Cross is the necessity of Love.
And so, He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was
crucified, died, and was buried.
We have seen above that Jesus' Way led Him into
the possession of a more abundant and potent life
than any other has shown. This brought Him into
relation with the physical environment of life. The
fountain of living flowed so abundantly in Him that
it was at least once able to pour itself over "the
wheel broken at the cistern " in the body of his dead
friend Lazarus, and set it moving again. It flowed so
purely that it was able to distil clean blood into
leprous veins. When " virtue went out of him " it
staunched the unclean wasting of an inform woman's
life ; lifted the paralytic who could by no means raise
himself up ; clarified the thick humors of the blind ;
brought vigor to the distorted legs of the cripple;
woke the little maid from the sleep of syncope into

THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 251
the fresh joy of living. And, in a measure, His dis
ciples did the like. They all did it by touch, by im-
partation, by contagion. Was this " Natural " ? or
" Supernatural " ? I reply, the antithesis is not legiti
mate. He assumes that these and greater works than
these were natural to men of their sort. They but
acted in character. His " Disciples " were men who
by following Him had also become partially conscious
of like endowments. These powers, He declared, be
long to the real nature of man. They are unsus
pected, latent, to all practical purposes non-existent in
the ordinary man. They are awakened into con
sciousness and quickened into potency by moral
processes. He calls this moral process Faith, and
refers to it as His " Way." " Oh ! ye of little faith,"
He cries to them when they stand helpless in the
presence of the epileptic whose father begged for
cure. "These signs shall follow them that believe,
they shall cast out devils, they shall speak with new
tongues, they shall take up serpents, if they drink any
deadly thing it shall not hurt them, they shall lay
hands on the sick and they shall recover." That is to
say, the new type of man whom he reveals and who
is produced from the ordinary type by His Way shall
be, to such extent as He pursue that Way, freed from
certain physical limitations, and possessed of physical
potencies quite unique. They will have life and have
it more abundantly. This life will naturally safe
guard its possessor against many ills, and he will be

252 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS
able to share his abundance — at a cost to himself —
with the needy. He does not intimate that they will
be freed from the constant laws of growth, decay and
dissolution. But that by becoming preeminently
humane they will be able to resist such evils as flesh
is not heir to but stands exposed to while it starves
outside its legitimate inheritance. He says to the
sick of the palsy, " Thy sins be forgiven thee." He
associates physical disease with moral lesion. Moral
purity is, to His mind, the prophylactic against dis
ease. It is also the vix medicatrix. According to
the record, those nearest to Him, and while they were
sustained in their moral exaltation by His presence
and contagion, found themselves possessed of strange
powers, to their exceeding great amazement. " Lord,
even the devils are subject to us," they report upon
their return from an excursion. The same " signs "
showed themselves in a few after he passed away.
But they became more and more infrequent, and
finally passed away as the Christians declined from
their high moral exaltation and Christianity became a
" Eeligion " instead of a new power of living. Their
places came to be occupied by the fantastic " miracles "
of the middle ages. When the Church as an organiza
tion fell away from His Way its members began to
lack His Life. It took up the sword instead, and all
unconsciously committed spiritual suicide.
But for one who held steadfastly to His Way of the
Cross the issue was Life, a life which physical dissolu-

THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 253
tion was powerless to touch. Therefore, He rose
again from the dead. To such an one death is an
incident, an episode. He has anticipated it. The
life which was in Him had been strong enough to
build up for itself a spiritual body, organized in ad
vance in sufficient stability to survive the shock of
physical dissolution. The life had become the seed
from which springs the new body. The body is
not that body which shall be but some other and
"God giveth to every seed its proper body." So
Jesus reappeared in a body ; in His own body ; in the
body which belonged to Him in that stage and progress
of Life. From the record it is plain that it both was
and was not " that body which had been." Physical
identification is only possible where physical tests can
be applied. In the nature of the case the laws of
matter, as we know matter, are not available here.
It is conceivable, and indeed likely, that the distinc
tion of " material " and " spiritual " which we make
between the life which now is and that which is to
come, is an unwarranted one. Probably they are
both conditioned by matter. Many things indicate
that we are on the brink of discoveries in matter
which will compel a readjustment of all our defini
tions.1 But at all events, no question of material
identity as we now conceive of matter has any place
in the doctrine of the resurrection. Jesus' career is
consistent throughout. By the perfection of His
1 Dolbear ; Matter, Ether and Motion.

254 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS
humanity He became conscious that He was the Son
of God. By taking up God's manner of life in His
person of a man He found the Cross upon Him as
upon the Father. By walking steadfastly in the Way
of the Cross He found Himself filled with an inex
pugnable Life. By the power of the life which was
in Him He passed through the shock of dissolution
undisturbed. Being then free from the conditions of
material existence He moved without let or hinder-
ance alike into hell and into heaven. In all alike He
was a Son of Man and a Son of God, and manifested
the inherent nature and capabilities of both.

THE OTHER LIFE

XV
THE OTHER LIFE
It would hardly be too much to say that belief in a
future life came into human thought as a result of the
career of Jesus. While it is true that a vague, form
less, phantasmal notion of the persistence of the indi
vidual after death did obtain in places before him, and
has been entertained beyond his sphere of influence,
still it is true historically that the belief in a future
life owes all its clearness, form, and practical effi
ciency to the contribution which he made to it.
Before him the belief, where it amounted to a belief,
was practically inoperative on account of its vague
ness. In the Homeric poems, for example, the ghosts
of the departed were thought of as thin shadows of
their former selves, shivering in the twilight of the
Underworld. Even Achilles, to whom is assigned
the kingship among the shades, is represented as
declaring that he would " rather be the meanest slave
on earth." When Yirgil depicts the condition of the
shade of Anchises, his picture is indeed more definite
than that drawn by Homer, but it is doubtful if its
very distinctness does not introduce a grotesque ele
ment which makes it all the more difficult to receive.
The immortal dialogue in the Phsedo shows Socrates
257

258 THE OTHER LIFE
and his friends groping in the same vague shadow.
In the master's mind was alternately " faith crossed
by doubt and doubt crossed by faith." His abstract
argument for immortality seems conclusive enough
qua argument, but it eludes all attempt to picture
before the imagination the concept with which the
argument is concerned. The same helplessness marks
the thought of future life in those places where it
appears in the Old Testament. It may be said with
out much fear of successful contradiction that no
appeal is ever taken in the Old Testament from the
life which now is to that which is to come. No possi
bility of either bliss or calamity there is ever urged as
a motive to modify conduct here. And this, notwith
standing that a vague belief in the fact of a continued
existence beyond the grave was widely entertained.
The reason is plain. The belief lacked form. The
question, " with what body do they come ? " remained
unanswered. Lacking an answer to this the belief in
" immortality " remained an inoperative fancy. The
transcendent influence of Jesus here is owing to the
fact that He has supplied a thinkable form for what
was before an elusive even though persistent instinct.
It is well to learn once for all that no conscious
being can exist, or be conceived of as existing, except
as such a being express itself in terms of matter. For
consciousness is not possible to any subject except as
such personality is reflected back upon itself from
something different in kind from itself. That from

THE OTHER LIFE 259
which alone such reaction can come to Spirit is Matter.
In each personality the spirit asserts its being in self-
consciousness, but this consciousness of self is simply
the expression in terms of spirit of the constant law
that action and reaction are equal and in opposite
directions. The spirit can only arouse consciousness
of self by pressing against something which is not
spirit. It acts outwardly from its own centre, and the
reaction is consciousness. The spirit can only be
aware of itself in its successive moments through the
medium of a body.1 Jesus has made the belief in
immortality available by giving it a body. This
opens the question " How are the dead raised up, and
with what body do they come ? " There has been a
strange hesitation in accepting the answer which St.
Paul gives to the question. His reply is, substantially,
fvrst, that the body that shall be is not materially
identical with the body which now is ; and
Second, that there is provision in the universe to
furnish forth the spirits which live with bodies com
posed of matter spiritual.2 With the first of these
1 If it be objected that this reasoning implies the eternity of the
physical universe as the condition of God's self-consciousness, it is
sufficient to reply that so far as our capacities of thought are con
cerned this is true. Whether it be true "absolutely" or not, one
cannot either affirm or deny, for he cannot formulate to himself the
alternative proposition. One cannot think of God without having
in his mind the material universe as a background against which
he sets the concept of God. If any one doubt this, let him make
the experiment.
» 1 Cor. xv. 35-50. '

260 THE OTHER LIFE
statements the modern world is in hearty agreement.
It is so evident that " flesh and blood cannot inherit
the kingdom of God," that the world of to-day will
sooner throw away all belief in a future existence
than entertain the crude notion of a physical resur
rection. The qualities of the human body have come
to be well understood, and it is seen that immortality
is not only not one of them, but that it is something
which cannot be impressed upon it.
The beliefs concerning the future of death which
have long held the field are three. Either men have
tried to think of disembodied spirits as passing on and
enduring ; (Plato, Augustine, Spinoza, Fiske,) or, they
have thought that the spirit and the body break up to
gether and go out together into chaos ; (Moleschott,
Yirchow, Heackel, Burmeister, Darwin,) or, they have
thought of the material body being regathered after
disintegration and endowed with immortality, (Cur
rent, so-called " Orthodoxy "). This last has come to be
the belief of the great mass of Catholics ; probably
also that of the rank and file of Protestants. A little
steady reflection will show that none of them can be
the truth. To consider them in their order, a " disem
bodied spirit " is simply an unthinkable pseudo-concept.
And again, the quality of immortality cannot be pre
dicted of a physical body. And finally, to think of the
personality ceasing with the dissolution of the body is to
conceive so palpable a violation of the constant law of
the persistence of force that it is becoming increasingly

THE OTHER LIFE 261
hard to believe it. One can see what the physical en
ergies of a man are, or at least, how they act and into
what they are transformed when death intervenes.
They can be weighed, traced, accounted for in terms
of physics. But the psychic energy which has been
implicated with them demands equally honorable treat
ment. If that energy be quenched it must needs be
by a force which is akin to it. When it disappears its
exit must be accounted for in terms of some equiv
alence. It is difficult to think that the psychic energy
which has taken to itself a natural vesture moulded to
its uses, and renewed so many times in the course of
life, will suddenly find itself shivering in naked im
potence to clothe itself and perish for want of a gar
ment. It is easier to believe, in the abstract, that
there is a spiritual body as there is a natural body ;
and that as we have borne the image of the earthly
we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. The
difficulty all along has been to conceive of a body fit
ted for the next stage of the soul's existence. There
are many indications that physical science itself is
about to bring relief to our thought.
One of the results of the modern study of Physics
is that it has compelled us to reopen our accepted def
initions of Matter. It is being found not to be the
" gross stuff " which Plato miscalled it. The studies
of Lord Kelvin, Hemlholtz, Langley, Dolbear, and
Tesla and a host of others have transformed our
conception of the material universe. There is the

262 THE OTHER LIFE
matter which we see, feel, touch, weigh, of which our
senses take cognizance ; and there is also the ethereal
matter with which all space is filled, with which our
world is interpenetrated, which obeys laws of its own,
and which mocks at the limitations of our physical
laws. For an instance, let one reflect what happens
when light passes through a block of glass. Light is
a specific form of undulation in a material medium.
The waves start from the sun millions of miles away,
chase one another through what we mistakenly have
called " empty space," and sweep through the mass of
glass, one of the densest forms of matter, as water
flows through a sieve. The waves are propagated
through a material medium. The ether which trans
mits them, and which transmits another wave form
called magnetism, and still another called heat, is at
once dense and tenuous, potent and subtile. Matter it
is, demonstrably, but matter of a sort which defies all
our definitions. But it is clearly stuff of such a char
acter that if by any means a body might be fashioned
of it for a human spirit, such an embodied and con
scious personality, while still in the sphere of Nature,
would be in a region which, as related to the one in
which we move, might fairly be called supernatural.
It would not be unclothed but clothed upon. A new
mode of existence would be opened up to such a per
son. It would be a materially conditioned existence
of course, but as we have seen, no other mode of ex
istence is conceivable.

THE OTHEE LIFE 263
There is a strange tendency to miss what is the real
question at stake in all our discussion concerning a
future life. It is not the question of absolute immor
tality. Absolute immortality can never be predicted
of anything but God the Absolute. The simple prob
lem before us is to find some bridge by which to pass
from the life that now is to a succeeding one. That
one may not, and by all analogy will not, be endless
or indefeasible. The question of its duration and of
its conditions will arise only for those who are in it if
any such there can be. But at present one can only
feel like a man crossing a quaking bog, his only task
being to find a new standing ground as he feels sink
ing under him the last tussock in sight.
The possibility to survive the shock of physical dis
solution and to move on in a continuous existence is
spoken of in the New Testament as Life. It is de
scribed as " eternal," with reference not to its duration
but to its quality. It is not conceived of as the com
mon and natural element of all men, but as something
which is to be striven for strenuously, and which may
be attained, or may not, as the case may be.
The notion that every human being is compounded
of a " body " which is perishable and a " soul " which
is intrinsically immortal, is a Pagan idea which finds
no shadow of support in the Christian Scriptures.
They speak of eternal life not as an endowment but an
achievement. Jesus reiterates this (Matt. xvi. 25 ;
John xi. 25, iii. 15, v. 24, iii. 5-7, etc., etc., etc.). St.

264 THE OTHEE LIFE
Paul explicitly asserts his own uncertainty as to his
own immortality, and prays " that by any means he
might attain to the resurrection of the dead, not as
though he had already attained." (Phil. iii. 11.) The
problem is then to find a physical basis for the spirits'
life beyond that point where matter, as we usually
conceive of it, becomes no longer available, and to as
certain what is the nexus between the spirit and such
a body. It is indeed only the question of the revela
tion of mind and matter carried one stage farther than
the one in which we now live. The general principle
to be used in its solution is the dictum of St. Paul that
" God giveth to every seed its proper body."
The spirit is the Seed. His contention is that the
strange potency of the seed to take to itself fitting
matter in which to express itself is a potency which is
constant and perdures in every region where life
exists. As there is one kind of flesh of beasts and an
other of man, so there are bodies terrestrial and bodies
celestial. That is to say, as each form of life in the
ascending scale through the fishes, the birds, the
mammal and the man " finds itself " in a body of fit
ting matter, so, the same law is continued onward
into the next ethereal stage. Conscious existence is
everywhere conditioned upon matter. The soul must
have a body, else it ceases to be a soul. The human
spirit in building up for itself a physical body uses
something, more or less, of every element. The body
of man is the epitome and recapitulation of the ma-

THE OTHEE LIFE 265
terial universe as the soul is of all orders of all ante
cedent forms of life. As the body is closely com
pacted together in the womb it passes stage by stage,
through every step of past cosmical history. The
man is the microcosm of the life and the matter thus
far developed. He attains his development by proc
esses of which he himself is largely unconscious.
That is, where he attains at all to the measure of the
stature of a perfect man. But long before this proc
ess reaches completion, it would seem that a new
process may set in which has its issue in a life which
in common speech is called Eternal. " Are there few
then that be saved ? " It would seem so, both by the
analogy of Nature and by the words of Jesus. " For
strait is the gate and narrow the way that leadeth unto
Life and few there be that find it ; for wide is the gate
and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and
many there be that go out thereat." Life climbs up
slowly through its ascending orders until self-conscious,
moral beings such as man is reached. When these pass
the purely animal stage so far as to be morally self-
conscious, each one becomes capable of beginning the
process of building up for itself a body of such stuff as
will abide. Jesus brings life and immortality to light
by pointing out the condition upon which perduring life
depends ; and by displaying in His own person an
actual instance of such a life. According to Him it
is contingent upon Moral conditions. He endorses
that human instinct which has always associated

266 THE OTHEE LIFE
eternal life with goodness and eternal destruction
with moral badness. He points out that this is true
for a reason so simple that it has seemed incredible.
Sin, in its last analysis is suicide. It is living to the
present environment at the expense of the next one.
It is an arrest of development which is punished with
degradation. All those actions which men agree to
call morally evil may be reduced to two, which are
essentially one. They are either Lust or Murder.
All those multiform immoralities which revolve about
the fact of sex are forms of the attempt to express the
sense of living in the terms of flesh. "For lust,
when it hath conceived bringeth forth sin, and sin
when it is finished issues in death." It does so be
cause it withdraws the vital energy which would else
be employed in building up the spiritual body, and dis
sipates it upon that form of matter which is in its na
ture capable of but transiently expressing the life of
the spirit. On the other hand, all those forms of
wrong which are called by such names as covetous
ness, dishonesty, hate and theft, are but rudimentary
forms of murder. " He that hateth his brother is a
murderer," for " hateth any man the thing he would
not kill ? " He taketh a life who taketh that which
doth sustain the life ; " and ye know that no murderer
hath eternal life in Him." Because all life is so
bound up together, the living spirit who makes a
murderous thrust at another pierces his own soul.
Action and reaction are equal and in opposite direc-

THE OTHER LIFE 267
tions. It is perillous even to trip up one of the little
ones. We come back then to the dictum of Jesus that
persistence of living is contingent upon a certain
mode of living. As St. Paul put it, " he that soweth
to the flesh shall of the flesh reap destruction ; and he
that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap life
everlasting." That is to say, continuity of existence
is dependent upon moral achievement. As the spirit
is the substans which determines the form of the
physical body, so it is conceived to determine the
form and vitality of the body which shall be. As
every act of self-consciousness is the occasion of
complex changes in the molecules of the natural
body, so it may be thought that concomitant
changes are produced in the spiritual or ethereal
body which may be built up simultaneously.1
But the condition of the forming of that body is not
what the champions of the theological doctrine of " Con
ditional Immortality " have supposed. It is not con
tingent upon the transfer to the soul of any magic
1 It will be noticed that this way of thinking is substantially that
hesitatingly put forth by Stewart and Tate in "The Unseen Uni
verse." Mr. John Fiske in criticising that book says, that "the
weakness of their theory lies in the fact that is thoroughly materialistic. ' '
It is materialistic, but in this I conceive its strength to be. Mr. Fiske
opposes to it the pseude concept of a life of pure immortal spirit. It
is because that concept is practically impossible that the religious
world has fallen back upon the gross thought of "the resurrection of
the flesh." It has thus been caught upon the dilemma of either be
lieving an incredible thing, or abandoning altogether the belief in a fu
ture life.

268 THE OTHEE LIFE
"grace." It is not dependent upon Baptism. It is
not contingent upon act of so called "faith." The
continuity of life is contingent upon the actual ex
istence of life. The man who is not really living now
cannot possibly live hereafter. Jesus' assertion would
seem to be sufficiently explicit, "except a man be
born again he cannot enter into the kingdom of God."
He is not forbidden to do so, but he cannot. " Except
ye eat My flesh and drink My blood ye have no
life in you ; " and then He proceeds at once to say that
eating His flesh is " doing His will." But what was
and is His " will " ? What other than the irrefragable
determination of the whole nature toward goodness ?
The Christian doctrine is that every man is in very
fact the architect of his own eternal destiny. There
are two kinds of life possible to every man who has
arisen to the stage of moral self-consciousness, the life
to the flesh and the life to the spirit. The first of
these two modes of vital energy produces the physical
body which is conducted within what we know as the
laws of matter. The second carries its personality
over into a further stage whose mode can only be
guessed at, or constructed out of analogies. To this
end the flesh is impotent it is the spirit that quickeneth.
One might say that the spiritual body is in the natural
body as the natural body in the womb. At a certain
stage it is natural for it to be " quickened." (1 John v.
21, vi. 17, viii. 11 ; Eph. xi. 5 ; Col. xi. 13.) It may
fail in this and so miscarry. It may come to the birth,

THE OTHER LIFE 269
and then perish at any stage before maturity. Bearing
in mind the two well-known facts, first, that no human
soul can exist at any stage without a body ; and second,
that being born does not give any guarantee of con
tinuing in life, and with the light which Jesus' career
and teaching throw upon the problem, we may look
steadfastly toward the life which is to be. It is the
passage from one kind of a materially conditioned
state to another state similarly conditioned. What
ever significance the appearance of the risen Lord
may have beside, this is palpably the first one. It
demonstrates the possibility of a kind of human life
so potent and tenacious that it can go on expressing it
self in a body after it has passed the frontier of what
we know as matter.
How is such a passage effected ? It would seem, by
all analogy, that by many it is not effected at all.
Many are dead while they live and they must surely
remain dead when they die. By many others it is
probably achieved so incompletely that they pass into
the next stage as Eichard complained that he had
been thrust into this, " scare half made up." It is at
tained by those in whom the spirit has antecedently
gathered to itself a form built up of some substance
which can be the physical basis of the next one. Prob
ably, if by any means we attain to the resurrection of the
dead we will find the change to be much smaller than
we imagine. But the essential mystery must be the
same "there" as "here." The nexus between

270 THE OTHER LIFE
psychical and physical energy, between thought and
matter, between soul and body, can never be stated.
For, being a phenomenon which concerns both mind
and matter it can never be stated in terms of either
one. The sum of our information would seem then to
be that if one be " born again " and if the spiritual
body which such birth compels be sufficiently devel
oped, it passes with the spirit into the new life as the
natural body arrived with it into this one. The
natural life is the period of gestation for the spiritual
life. The spiritual body is in embryo. Where it is
sufficiently developed to perdure the shock of physical
dissolution, then by death it is born into a new en
vironment. Of course, all language is inadequate in
this discussion. But the metaphor used by St. Paul
has become classic. The physical body is the seed
which encloses a germ. It must die and unwind its
integuments. From it the spiritual body springs. In
any case the seed must perish. This would seem to be
true of men as it is of wheat or any other grain. But
whether it shall arise into a renewed life depends upon
its own vital energy. The chrysalis may arise a
winged and decked citizen of the air, it may dis
integrate in a silken shroud from which nothing comes,
or it may emerge a puny weakling only to flutter for
a little while in its new home before it perish finally.
This is the second death.
For all this Jesus stands ; for the belief that each
man born into the world is capable of being born

THE OTHER LIFE 271
again ; for the truth that the new birth is correlated
with moral energy; that physical death is only an
episode in the career of such a twice-born man ; that
the hold of such a newborn soul upon the material
universe is so strong as to bend fit matter to its need
at every stage of its progress ; of all this Jesus is the
revealer and the instance.
It will be seen that there is no room in this concep
tion of " the Life of the world to come " for either the
modern Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, or the Protes
tant belief that the article of death fixes indef easibly
the destiny of every man.1
1 1 am aware that Anglicans entertain some notion concerning an
"Intermediate State," but the contents of that belief is so obscure
that it is difficult to ascertain with precision what it is.

THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHUECH

XVI
THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH
The Holy Catholic Church is an article of faith only
and not a demonstrable fact. The only reasonable at
titude toward it is the same as that toward God, the
Incarnation, the Eesurrection, or the Future Life.
The Holy Catholic Church is not a thing which has
been seen, or which can be seen now, but an ideal fact
toward which Christ's disciples move and by which
they are moved. The Church is happily defined as
" the blessed company of all faithful people ; " but in
asmuch as there have never been any people altogether
faithful there has never been the Church of which
very great blessedness could be predicated.
It is not uncommon to find people who hold this
article of the creed in quite a different way from what
they do the others. They are somewhat shocked and
scandalized when they are reminded that the Church
is a belief and not a demonstrable phenomenon. They
had supposed that it was the latter. The fact that
they were not able to point to it and say — " there is
the Church which satisfies the definition," does not
disturb them. Such Churchmen have the curious
power to personify an abstraction in the religious
sphere as similar persons have in the political sphere.
275

276 THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH
In the one they call the creation of their fancy The
Church ; in the other they call it The State. There are
many persons who actually believe in a democracy
who still speak of a " State " to which, in their opinion,
many of the ordinary functions of society should be
intrusted, forgetting that they themselves are the
State. In like manner many think of the Church.
To it they attribute the qualities of holiness, wisdom,
purity, and other transcendental attributes, forgetting
that they themselves are the Church.
The Church, in point of fact, has never been either
one, holy or catholic, but it has nevertheless held
within it these ideals as goals toward which it has
moved. They are ideals which no other institution
known among men has ever seriously set before itself.
It seems clear that Jesus proposed to convey His
influence forward in time and outward in space by
means of an organization. His favorite phrase was
"My Kingdom." It is quite true that His formula
The Kingdom of Heaven was His expression for a
regime of holiness. It meant that condition of human
society which in His Way of living should be uni
versally adopted. But it seems equally plain that His
hope was to bring in the universal Kingdom toward
which He looked by first setting up a small and per
fect organization into which could be gathered those
few who were ready to begin at once the new manner
of life. He proposed that the little flock would
gradually expand in numbers, and grow more and more

THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 277
pure in quality, until it should absorb and assimilate
the race. The marks or " notes " of this Society were
to be, unity of feeling and purpose, purity of life and
thought, and complete hospitality for all who were
willing to adopt this way of life. That is to say, it
was to be One, Holy, Catholic. The three permanent
institutions which He Himself established within the
Society corresponded to this purpose. The Lord's
Supper is the symbol of unity ; Baptism with water is
the symbol of holiness ; Preaching is the symbol and
instrument of Catholicity.
It is easy to see that He proceeded after the most di
rect and straightforward manner to attain this end. He
surrounded Himself with a small but very compact
body of men and women who are from the first spoken
of as His disciples. The test of admission which He
applied was the most rigorous conceivable. In the
language of the Baptist, He winnowed them as with a
fan. " If ye will do My will " was His test. We have
already examined at length what His will was. This
test did not address itself to any intellectual or social,
or even to any conventionally religious qualities. He
did not attempt any hard and fast delimitations of
His Society. He was content to let any one join it
who would. But He set free a force within it whose
potency He serenely rested upon to either transform
or eject every one who came within its influence.
Sometimes it did the one, sometimes it did the other.
Of one man it is accurately stated that " He went out

278 THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHUECH
from us because He was not of us, for if He had been
of us He would no doubt have remained with us." But
the Society was sufficiently compact and its frontier
sufficiently defined from the beginning for the pur
pose it had to subserve. The history of the Christian
Church is a strange story, not so much on account of
its romantic fortunes, but because there has wrought
within it and upon it a force which has no analogy in
any other organization. It is not surprising that Gib
bon misinterpreted it. Its actual existence has so
little corresponded to its own ideal, while at the same
time, it has held so tenaciously to its ideal, that men
have been puzzled. It must be borne in mind that it
began not as it would, but as it could. The material
upon which the ideal began its work was most un
promising. It would be hard to conceive of a pre
vious training more unsuited to their ultimate purpose
than was that of the Twelve. All their habits of
thought, all their prejudices and preconceptions, all
their environment were unfavorable. And the larger
company of the disciples were like them. Eeared in
Hebrew exclusiveness they were to become the
apostles of humaneness. Themselves the product of a
religion which looked chiefly upon ceremonial purity,
they were to become the ensamples of ethical holiness.
Full of the spirit of prejudice and caste they were to
be the champions of universality. It is not to be
wondered at that they fell far below the ideal of
Christ's Society. That they did fall far short of it is

THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHUECH 279
evident to any who reads the record without pre
judice. Both probability and fact warn us against looking
to "The Primitive Church" as the realization of
Christ's ideal. It was not that, and it is evident that
He did not expect it to be. The Church is an organ
ism and follows the law of all organisms. Its nor
mal type is to be sought for not at its beginnings, but
after it has had time and opportunity to develop. It
is because men have thought of it as a mechanical
structure that they have so largely fallen into miscon
ception concerning the Early Church. But the thought
of our day is becoming biological here as everywhere,
and replacing the mechanical modes which have pre
vailed. The difference between an organization and an
organism is vital. If the Church were an artificially
manufactured structure it would be at its best at its be
ginning. If on the other hand it be a living organism
its perfection of existence must be looked for after it has
had time to grow. It may be said in passing, that all
questions concerning the divine right of Episcopacy or
of the Papacy or of any other method of organization,
or concerning the mode of Baptism, and all like con
tentions, have their rationale in that mechanical con
ception of the Church which is becoming more and
more powerless to hold men's thoughts. Whenever
the Church comes to be conceived of as living, all these
questions recede or take an altogether different form.
Prescription ceases to impress with a sense of obliga-

280 THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHUECH
tion. We become easy when history uncovers defects
which would otherwise strain our faith. The actual
present condition of things becomes intelligible, and
our hope for the future revives. When one looks
abroad upon the Church to-day it is hard to discern its
unity. In fact it is not one. Nor can one candidly say
that it is either holy or catholic. If we must sup
pose that at any point in its history it has been all
these, then we must say that it has ceased so to be.
And with that conviction dies all hope for its future.
For a living organism which has once been defeated
in its purpose of life dies. And it is never resuscitated.
If the Church ever displayed the note of Unity,
when was it ? Certainly not in the Apostles' time.
" One said I am of Paul, and another I am of Apollos,
and another I am of Cephas." The Jews and the
Hellenists were at odds within the Church from the
very beginning. Nor was it about trivial matters
they disagreed ; it was about questions which touched
the very fundamentals of the Faith. It was concern
ing the essential quality of human nature, as between
Paul and James. It was about the catholicity of
Christianity, as between Paul and Peter. It is
seriously to be questioned whether they were agreed
as to the nature of Christ Himself. Was it in " the
period of the Councils " ? — or in the " time of the
Fathers " ? I have read the Fathers, both post — and
ante-Nicene. At one time I thought to find in them
a picture of life and action of a holy, united and

THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 281
catholic Church. I have not found in them either
unity of conception concerning the Church, or con
spicuous holiness of thought, or any real idea of cath
olicity. I know that wise and good men have found
all these things there, but I have not been able to do
so. And I have been forced to the thought that those
who have found these notes present have done so
because they have brought them with them. What
Council is there which did not rise out of antecedent
lack of unity as its occasion ? And what Council can
be pointed to as one which secured unity as a result
of its deliberations or its canons? What is Nice?
or Chalcedom ? or Constantinople ? or Florence ? or
Trent ? or the Vatican ? To ask these questions is to
answer them for any one who holds by facts and not
by theories. At no point in her career has the Church
been able to give anything like a unanimous reply to
any question of either Doctrine or Discipline. The
dictum of Vincent of Lerins " Quod semper, quod
vhique, quod ab omnibus" is the most impotent of
fetiches. Of course, if it only means to say that
everybody is wiser than anybody, nobody will ques
tion it, and in that case it need not be quoted in Latin.
But if it be offered as a practical test of any single
dogma or custom, there is not one which can endure
it. No one can be instanced which has been held
" always, everywhere, and by everybody." Even at
those times when the outward organization has been
most powerful and when a large unity of action has

282 THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH
been practiced, there have been flying columns which
refused to march with the main body, and declined to
take their orders from the recognized authority.
And all that has been said concerning the note of
Unity is equally true as to the notes of Holiness and
Catholicity. They have never been exhibited.
And yet I believe in one, holy, Catholic Church. I
believe in it. If it were a matter of experience, or if
it were demonstrable by any process it would not
rightfully have a place in the creed. One does not
say credo of things about which he can say scio. But
I am quite aware that the contents of my belief are
not the same as that of many of my brethren. They,
fondly as it seems to me, believe in a perfect Church
which has been and is lost; while I believe in one
which never has been, but surely will be. My faith
looks to the future, not to the past, howeyer sacrosanct
that past may be thought to have been. Not that I
am unmindful of the past. It is only by examining
the path of evolution of a living organism that one
can give any forecast of its future. The history of
the Church, whether written in the Old Testament or
in the New, or in the Fathers or Decrees of Councils,
is "profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correc
tion, for instruction in righteousness."

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