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In a few cases portions of the manuscript are missing; and such omissions are shown by asterisks. CONTENTS Pack The new Evangelism, and its Relation to Cardinal Doctrines 3 The Method of the New Theology, and some OF ns Applications ^ Survival of the Fittest . . o 87 The Third Kingdom .... "9 The Problem of Foreign Missions ..... 161 The Contribution of Science to Christianity . 205 Spiritual Diagnosis ^ The New Evangelism and its Relation to Cardinal Doctrines Paper read to Free Church Theological Society^ Glasgow I The New Evangelism: and its Relation to Cardinal Doctrines TT is no small heroism in these times to A deal with anything new. But this is a theological society; and I do not need to ask the protection of that name while I move for a little among lines of thought which may seem to verge on danger. One does not need to apologise for any inquiry made in a formative school of theology such as this; for in this atmosphere a seeker after truth is compelled to take up another than that provincial standpoint which elsewhere he is committed to. The question you will naturally ask at the outset is, What is the new Evangelism? Now that is a question that I cannot an- swer. I do not know what the new Evan- gelism is, and it is because I do not know that I write this paper. I write because I 4 THE NEW EVANGELISM ought to know, and am trying to know. Many here, and all the most earnest minds of our Church, are anxiously asking this question, and each who has once asked it feels it to be one of the chief objects of his life to answer it. Preachers, finding that the things which stirred men's minds two centuries ago fail to do so now, are compelled to ask themselves what this means. Do we need a new Evan- gelism, and if so, what? By the word Evan- gelism I do not mean to include merely, or even particularly, evangelistic work, evangel- istic meetings, or what is comprehended under the general head of revivalism. I mean the methods of presenting Christian truth to men's minds in any form. By the new Evangelism, so far as mere definition is concerned, is meant the particular substance and form of evangel which is adapted to the present state of men's minds. The new Evangelism, in a word, is the Gospel for the Age. To notice the outcry against the mere mention of a Gospel for the Age is unnecessary here. What do we want with THE NEW EVANGELISM 5 a new Gospel ? Can the Gospel ever be old ? might be asked elsewhere, for this is always cast in one's teeth when he raises those ques- tions, as if by speaking of a new Evangelism he was depreciating the old Gospel. Of course we do not want a new evangel, we state that out at once ; but an Evangelism is a different thing, and we do want that ; we want that at the present hour, almost above any reform of our time. I. The need of a new Evangelism. There are two general considerations which seem to me to prove the need of a new Evangelism. The first is the threatened decline of vital religion under present methods of preaching. If the Gospel be the power of God unto sal- vation, we are entitled to believe that wher- ever it is presented to men's minds it will influence and impress them. If men are not influenced or impressed under preaching, the only alternatives are, either that the Gospel in substance is not the power of God unto salvation, or that the Gospel in form is not presented to them so as to reach them. 6 THE NEW EVANGELISM Either the Gospel cannot save them, or the Gospel does not reach them. We, as Chris- tians, are shu;. up to the latter. The Gospel is not reaching men. There are hundreds of churches where the Gospel is not reaching men. Every third minister one meets con- fesses that. The Church, as a whole, admits, for instance, that she is rapidly losing hold of young men as a class. What does that mean } It really means that the Gospel, as presented to them, has ceased to be a gospel ; it is neither good nor new. It means that the active thinkers of a congregation, the most hopeful and eager, are failing to find anything there to meet their case. It is not simply that many of them object to religion naturally, which will always be the case, but that those who are looking for a religion do not find it. Many of ourselves know this by our own experience. How long did we not search ; on what diverse ministries did we not wait; to what endless volumes did we not turn; before finding a message which our faith could grasp or conscience rest on, and at the same time our intelligence re- THE NEW EVANGELISM 7 spect ? " I like Christianity," said Hallam, the subject of Tennyson's " In Memoriam," "because it fits into all the folds of one's nature." How long was it before we found a form of Christianity which fitted into any of the folds of our nature ? From the time they were Sabbath-school scholars onwards, it is the experience of thousands of young men that they find only misfit after misfit in the theological clothes in which they were asked to disguise themselves. If this has been the experience of men who were not simply passive (men who were not simply waiting until religion would, some day or somehow, seize hold of them), but who were searching for religion, what substance is there in the present form of it to captivate the ordinary run of men.? Our present Evangelism, as mere matter of fact, is not meeting the wants of the age. In 1847 Dr. Chalmers found — and the statistics almost paralysed him — that there were 30,cxx) people in Glasgow who did not go to church. Since then the Free Church has risen ; Baptists, Independents, Morisoni- 8 THE NEW EVANGELISM ans, and Wesleyans, have poured their new life into the city. The most complete evan- gelistic organisation in th^ kingdom, the Christian Union, has been at work. Have Chalmers* 30,000 been sensibly reduced .f* They have been increased exactly fivefold — out of all proportion to the increase of the population. Excluding 100,000 Roman Catholics, there are at present 150,000 non- church-goers in the city. The aspect of affairs in the English towns is notoriously worse. To take a single case. The popu- lation of Sheffield is 240,000. It has 60 churches. Allowing 1,000 sitters to each church there would only be accommodation to 60,000 people; not only, therefore, do 180,000 not go to church, but there is no accommodation for them if they were willing. What is the cause of this decline in vital religion ? Why is the Gospel not reaching the Age ? Because it is not the Gospel for the Age. It is the Gospel for former Age. Because, in the form of it as used, the Gospel is neither good nor new. It does not fit into all the folds of men's being. It is not in itself bad — but it is a bad fit. « I i THE NEW EVANGELISM 9 The second general consideration is based, not on the effects of Evangelism, but on its nature. The very nature of truth demands from time to time a new Evangelism. At the opening of this college, we heard (Prof. Bruce's introductory lecture) that a Scotch divine at the Presbyterian Council in Phila- delphia found himself rebuked for using the phrase, " Progress in Theology." Theology, he was eloquently reminded, was behind us. He was pointed to the Standards of his Church. There is no more unfortunate word in our Church's vocabulary than " Standard." A standard is a thing that stands. Theology is a thing that moves. There must be prog- resF in everything, and more in theology than in anything, for the content of theol- ogy is larger and more expansive than the content of anything else. I do not say we are to give up the idea involved in the word Standard. We certainly never can. But standards must move. The sole condition of having them with us at any particular place or time is that they should move with us according to place or time. The word 10 THE NEW EVANGELISM Standard, as applied to theology, is in some respects an unfortunate term. Buffon's Nat- ural History was a standard. Linnaeus' Vege- table System was a stand'^rd. But they are not standards now. They were places for the mind of Science to rest on in its onward sweep through the centuries ; but the perches are not needed there now, and they are vacant. These books stand like deserted inns on the roadside which gave hearty meals and shelter in their day, but which the race (with no disrespect to Linnaeus and Buffon) has long since passed. When the English fought Waterloo, they did not leave their standard at Bannockburn — they brought it up to Quatre Bras ; and if our standard was made for Holland, or Rome, or Geneva, we must bring it up to Germany, and Paris, and the Highlands. But there is something deeper than progress in theology; there is progress in truth itself. " Truth is the daughter of Time." It is surely unnecessary to insist on this, for it is true of all kinds of truth, in the natural as well as the spiritual sphere. Nature is all before our eyes, as THE NEW EVANGELISM u truth in the Bible is all before our eyes. But we do not see it all ; every day we are seeing more. The firmament was not all mapped by astronomers at once. Since Calvin's time many a new star has been dis- covered. The stars were there before. Space was there before, but a new order is seen in it, new material for thought, new systems, especially a new perspective. To take an- other illustration : when we were children we could not understand how, if God made the world, He had made it so ugly ; why every- thing in nature was brown, or dun, or green, and grey. Why was the sky not scarlet like the inside of our trumpet, or a good hearty blue, with unicorns on it like our drum? We thought, as we looked at the lichens and washed-out azure, that, by some oversight, God had forgotten to put the colour in. We know now why God did not put the colour in. We know that Nature wears the colour of the future. It is painted for the highest art. Vermilion is for the savage, blue with unicorns for the child, the neutral tints for the world's maturity — • the developed taste. The I 12 THE NEW EVANGELISM colour was in Nature all along, but the world's eye was not full grown. The Greeks had almost no colour-sense at all ; and if Mr. Ruskin sees what Homer did not see, it is not because it was not to be seen, but that the faculty was not developed. The higher art has grown ; it sees in the colouring of Nature a beauty which must increase till the evolution of mind and eye pronounces and sees all perfect. It is so with Truth ; the truth-sense, like the colour- s ense, grows. Truth has her vermilion, and her high art olives and sage-greens. " When Solon was asked," says Plutarch, " if he had given the Athenians the best possible laws, he answered that they were as good as the people could then receive." When we were given our system of truth, it was as good as the people could receive — perhaps as good as their teachers could give. But we can receive more now; our taste demands sage-green, and we cannot live on vermilion. If it be objected that this ar- gument renders the Bible itself effete, the answer is that the Bible is not a system. It THE NEW EVANGELISM 13 is the firmament; its truth is without foim, therefore without limit. It is a book of such boundless elasticity that the furthest gi'owth of.the truth-sense can never find its response outgrown. And it is in this elas- ticity that one finds a sanction for a new theology to be the basis of a new Evangel- ism. It encourages a new theology; the prospect and possibility of that is written in every epigram and paradox, in the absence of anything propositional or bound. The view we are to take, therefore, of the old theologies is not that they are false, but simply that they are old. Those who framed them did in their time just what we want to do in ours. The Reformation did not profess to create nev/ truth ; it was not a re-formation, but simply a restoration — a restoration of the first theology of the New Testament, as much of it as could then be seen. At the time, probably, it was a restor- ation, and had all the strengrth and grandeur of the first theology, with all its vividness and life. Probably it was suited to the wants of the time, and moved the hearts of preacher and people. r? 14 THK NEW EVANGELISM We, too, can still preach it, but to some of us it has a hollow sound. If we would confess the honest truth, our words for it are rather those of respect than enthusiasm ; wc read it, hear it, study it, and preach it, but cannot honestly say that it kindles or moves us. When we wish to be kindled or moved, driven perhaps to prove whether we are capable of being kindled or moved, we leave the restoration and go back to that which was restored. Restoration can only retain its hold vitally and powerfully for a limited time. It is essen- tially an accommodation for a certain age. If that age has changed, it no longer accom- modates me, it incommodes me. What was the new theology of the seventeenth century is the theology of the nineteenth century only on one condition — that the age has not grown. If it has, in the nature of things it no louGcer accommodates me. It is not bad, simply a bad fit. Tlie then new theology, the very adaptation possibly that was needed, becomes now old doctrine, a mere old skull, an old skull with the juices dry. This is the THE NEW EVANGELISM 15 source of what is called dry preaching. It is a once glorious truth disenchanted by time into a faded, juiceless form. Such then is the general efTect of Time on Truth. As the serpent periodically casts its skin, so Truth. The number of times it has cast its skin marks the number of stages in its forward growth. Many of the shelves of our theological libraries are simply museums of the cast skin of Truth. The living organ- ism has glided out of them to seek a roomier vestment. This is no disrespect, I repeat again, to the old ^heology. For the present vestiture in turn must take its place on the shelf. Nor does it imply that no beauty exists there, nor that to many some of the old doctrines may not prove even to-day a fountain of life. They do do so. Many volumes of theology have never been out- grown ; many of the Puritans, for instance, have not only never been outgrown, but it is difficult to conceive how they can be. To take again the analogy from colour. The sage-green does not necessarily destroy the vermilion, though it renders many of its i6 THE NEW EVANGELISM combinations old-fashioned. Some forms of truth in like manner may have reached their ultimate expression, certainly they may, though his is not so clear as that some have not. To sum up, the demand for a new theology, therefore, as the basis of a new Evangelism is founded- upon the nature of Truth. It is not caprice, nor love of what is new. It is the necessity for what is new. It is in the nature of things. I have next to bring some more specific charges against the old theology — the old theology, that is to say, as represented in the ordinary preaching of the day. And lest I should be accused of caricaturing the doc- trines in question, let me say that the render- ing which follows represents the impression made as matter of fact by these doctrines upon myself. I do not implicate the whole Evangelism, nor do I speak directly for any one else ; but I cannot more honestly illus- trate the teaching of what was to me the current Evangelism — the pabulum, namely, supplied by the ordinary country pulpit, by the evangelist's address, by the Sabbath- "¥ M THE NEW EVANGELISM 17 school teacher, and in a limited sense by re- ligous books and tracts — than by stating the sort of religious ideas which these fostered in myself. For convenience I select three as samples, taking them in theological order. I limit myself likewise to a very few sentences with regard to each, more particularly (i) as to the theological conception and (2) as to the ethical effect. (i) The conception of God as fostered by the old Evangelism. The chief characteristic of the conception of God to me was its want of characteristic. The figure was too vague for any practical purpose. It was not a character. One could form no intelligent figure of God, for so far as it could be formed it was the God of the Old Testament. The Incarnation, i. e., contributed nothing. The Old Testa- ment believer, I need not rf^'^^ind you, was very helpless as to a personal God. Each man, practically, had to make an image of God for himself. He was given a narrfe, and a set of qualities — Holiness, Justice, Wis- dom, and others, and out of this he had to i8 THE NEW EVANGELISM make God. The consequence was that the great majority made it wrong, and wor- shipped they knew not what. One great purpose of the Incarnation was to change all this. It is to give us a new, defined, intelli- gible Figure of God. " The Son of God is come," said John, who saw most fully the meaning of the Word made Flesh — " The Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding that we may know Himy The old Evangelism had little benefit here from the incarnation in this respect. It never got this understanding. God remained unchristianised in it. The Figure came no nearer. God remained Jehovah, the I AM that I AM. He was not God in Christ, God made intelligible by Christ, God made lovable by Christ, but God Eternal, Un- changeable, Invisible, therefore Unknowable; and in the nature of this cloud-God, the out- standing element was Vengeance — Anger, the ethical effect of which is obvious. A man's whole religion depends on his concep- tion of God, so much so that to give a man religion in many cases is simply to correct ■l! THE NEW EVANGELISM 19 his conception of God. But if man's natural conception of God, which is of a Being or of a P'orce opposed to him, a Being to be appeased, not corrected, his reHgion will be be a religion of Fear. God therefore was a God to be feared, an uncomfortable presence about one's life. He was always in court, either actually sitting in judgment or collect- ino: material for the next case. He was the haunting presence of a great Recorder, " Who was writing now the story Of what little children do." The reiteration that God was Love did nothing to dispel this terrible illusion. We cannot love God beca!ise we are told, for Love is not made to order. We can believe God's love, but believing love is like looking at heat. We cannot respond to it. To ex- cite love, we need a person, not a doctrine — a Father, not a deity. To be changed into the same image we must look at the glory of God, not in se, but in the face of Jesus. The old Evangelism was defective in not exhibiting God in the face of Jesus. It ex- ■■•■■liMHiliHIRIIl '' !t 20 THE NEW EVANGELISM hibited God in the nailed hands of Jesus; this is an aspect of God, an essential aspect, but not God. Next — (2) The conception of Christ. If the concep of God was vague, the conception of Chi . was worse. He was a theological person. His function was to ad- just matters between the hostile kingdoms of heaven and earth. I do not acquit myself of blame here, and I hope no one else has an experience so shocking, but until well on in my college course, and after hearing hundreds of ser- mons and addresses on the Person and Work of Christ, the ruling idea left in my mind was that Christ was a mere convenience. He was the second person in the Trinity, existing for the sake of some logical or theo- logical necessity, a doctrinal convenience. He was the creation of theology, and His function was purely utilitarian. This might have been theological, but it was not reli- gious. Religion said, " Christ our Lifer Theology said, " Christ our Logic'.' This is a painful confession, but it is far I II THE NEW EVANGELISM 21 I more painful to think of its basis. It is im- possible to believe that in these sermons I was not presented with the true aspects of Christ's life and character. But it is also almost impossible to believe that these were insisted on with anything like the same fre- quency or reality as the aspect I have named. What moves an attentive mind in a sermon is its residual truth, not the complementary passages, not the squarings with other doc- trines, but tl'at truth on which the whole theme is strung, the vertebral column which, though hid, is the true pillar of the rest. Now the residuum to me — and it is sur- prising how unerringly this betrays itself and stands nakedly out from all mere words — was always this. Whatever other points were thrown in, whatever devout expressions were mixed with it, whatever appeals to the affections, this was the prominent half- truth, and therefore whole error. This is the explanation, I think, of the fact, now pretty well acknowledged, that the old theology made almost nothing of the hu- manity of Christ. In such a body of divinity 22 THE NEW EVANGELISM clearly there was little room for so mundane a thing as humanity. The arrangements in which Christ played a part were looked at almost exclusively from the Divine and cos- mical standpoint. The question was, how God could forgive sin, and yet justify the sinner; how God could do this and that, as if we had anything to do with it. Such a divinity necessarily wanted humanity, the humanity of man as well as the humanity of Christ. Man was a cypher, the mere theo- logical unit, the x of doctrine (his character, his aims, his achievements, his influence, were neither here nor there) and an unknown quantity, one of the parties in the proposi- tion. And it was not necessary for this theolodcal unit to have a humanitarian Christ, except as to the mere identity of flesh, and this was requisite only to complete the theological proposition. The emphasis on the humanity of Christ, which, happily, has now crept into our best teaching, marks more distinctly perhaps than anything else the dawn of the new Evangelism. Still, it must be confessed that • i I- THE NEW EVANGELISM 23 in influential quarters the revival of this doc- trine is viewed even yet with no inconsider- able alarm. The newer Lives of Christ, for instance, in which the humanity is consoicu- ously developed, are constantly assailed as Unitarian, and within the last fortnight a Life of Christ has been given to the world, from the preface to which one can almost gather that the author's object is to provide an antidote to the erroneous tendencies of these works. Men fail to see that it was God Himself who conceived this wonderful idea of a humanitarian Christ. When God does any- thing. He never does it by halves. When He made the word flesh, when He made Jesus a Man, He made a Man, and it is just because He carried out His idea so perfectly that Unitarianism is possible. When we say Man, then let us mean Man. It is a mis- taken scruple even to minimise His Human- ity. In our zeal for the doctrines of the Atonement we are really robbing God of His doctrine of the Incarnation. (3) A third point to notice is, The old 24 THE NEW EVANGELISM Evangelism in its conception of Salvation, and of religion generally. The characteristic to notice here is that relif>:ion wa.) not so much a question of character as of status, Man's standing in the sight of God was the great thing. Was he sheltered judicially behind Christ, or was he standing on his own merits ? This is a vital question to ask, certainly, but the way in which legal status was put sanctioned the most erroneous notions as to religion and life. Salvation was a thing that came into force at death. It was not a thing for life. Good works, of course, were permitted, and even demanded, but they were never very clearly reconcilable with grace. The prime end of religion was to get off ; the plan of salvation was an elab- orate scheme for ffettins; off; and after a man had faced that scheme, understood it, acquiesced in it, the one thing needful was secured. Life after that was simply a wait- ing until the plan should be executed by his death. What use life was, this one thing being adjusted, it were hard to say. It was not in the religious sphere at all. The 1 THE NEW EVANGELISM 25 world was to pass away, and the lust thereof, and all time given to it, all effort spent on it, was so much loss, like putting embroidery upon a shroud. When a preacher did speak of character, of the imitation of Christ, of self-denial, of righteousness, of truth and humility, the references theologically were not only not clear, but were generally introduced with an apology for enforcing them at all. Nine times out of ten, too, the preacher took them all back under the last head, where he spoke of man's inability and the necessity of the Holy Spirit. The ethical efifcct of even weakening the absolute connection between religion and morality is too obvious to be referred to, so I shall pass on. Having now given samples of the teaching of the old Evangelism, I need not take up the time to complete its circle of theology, for the doctrines indicated rule and colour all the rest. No doubt what has been said up till now is more or less commonplace to most of you, and (with regard to the more) I now proceed to attempt something more 26 THE NEW EVANGELISM constructive, for which, however, all that has gone before has been a somewhat necessary preparation. In what follows I can only hope to indicate what dimly seem to me to be the lines upon which a new, intelligent, and living Evangelism must be built up. II. What I am most anxious to do here is to arrive at principles. I make no attempt to sketch portions of a detailed theology, such as one might wish to see taking the place of some of the old doctrines. That will all come in time; i.e., if it ought to come. It is the principles w^hich are to guide us in constructing the new Evangel- ism that are the true difficulty. We have all our own opinion as to special points of contrast, and, as we think, of improvement ; but what outstanding general truths are to regulate the movement as a whole ? I fear I shall only have time to refer to two. (i) Perhaps the most important principle, in the first place, is that the new Evangelism must not be doctrinal. By this is not meant that it is to be independent of doctrine, but m ''%'. THE NEW EVANGELISM 27 simply that its truths as conveyed to tlie people are not to be in the propositional form. With regard to doctrine, to avoid misconception, let me say at once we must recognise it as one of the three absolutely essential possessions of a Christian Church. The three outstanding departments of the Church's work are criticism, dogmatism, and Evanselism. Without the first there is no guarantee of trvithj without the..se,CQad..there ijiJio defence of truth, and without the third tliexe. is. no propagation of truth. Criticism tlien, in a word, secures truth, dogmatism conserves it, and evangelism spreads it. Now, when it is said that preaching is not to be doctrinal, what is meant is this. When Evangelism wishes to receive truth, so as to expound it, it is to refer to criticism for information rather than to dogmatism. And when it gives out what it has received, it ir, neither to be critical in form, nor doctrinal. To deal with this in detail. When Evan- gelism wishes to receive truth in order to expound it, it is to refer to criticism for that 28 THE NEW EVANGELISM truth rather than to dogmatism. This sim- ply means that a man is to go to a reliable edition of the Bible for his truth, and not to theology. Why should he take this trouble } Does not theology give him Bible truth in accu- rate, convenient, and, moreover, in logical propositions ? There it lies ready made to his hand, all cut and dry ; why should he not use it.? Just because it is all cut '\rid dry. Just because it lies there ready made in accurate, convenient, and logical proposi- tions. You cannot cut and dry truth. You cannot accept truth ready made without its ceasino; to live as truth. And that is one of the reasons why the current Evangelism is dead. There is in reality no worse enemy under certain circumstances to a true Evangelism than a prepositional theology, with the latter controlling the former by the authority of the Church. For one does not then receive the truth for himself ; he accepts it bodily. He begins, set up by his Church with a stock in trade which has cost him nothing, !l)l THE NEW EVANGELISM 29 I ^g' and which, though it may serve him all his life, is just as much worth exactly as his belief in his Church. One effect of this is to relieve him of all personal responsibility. This possession of truth, moreover, thus lightly won, is given to him as infallible. There is nothing to add to it. It is a sys- tem. And to start a man in life with such a principle is a degradation. All through life, instead of working towards truth, he is working from it, or what he is told is it. An infallible standard is a temptation to a mechanical faith. Infallibility always paralyses. It gives rest, but it is the rest of stagnation. Men make one great act of faith at the beginning of their lives — then have done v/ith it for ever. All moral, in- tellectual, and spiritual effort is over; and a cheap theology ends in a cheap life. It is the same thing that makes men take refuge in the Church of Rome and in a set of dogmas. Infallibility meets the deepest desire of man, but meets it in the most fatal form. All desire is given to stimulate to action ; much more this, the deepest, — 30 THE NEW EVANGELISM the hunger after truth. Men deal with this desire in two ways. First, by Unbelief, — that crushes it by blind force ; second, by Infallibility — that lulls it to sleep by blind faith. The effect of a doctrinal theology is the effect of infallibility. The wholesale belief in a system, however grand it may be, grant even that it were infallible — the wholesale belief in this system as the start- ing point for a working Evangelism is not Faith, though it always gets that name. It is mere credulity. There is a vital differ- ence between Faith and credulity. Realise what it fully amounts to, and you will see how much, besides this, there is in the reli- gion of this country which falls before the distinction. There is no real religious value in this belief; for it is more belief in a Chuxxh than in truth. It is a comfortable, credulous rest upon authority, not a hard- earned, self-obtained personal possession. Truth never becomes truth until it is earned. The moral responsibility here, besides, is nothing. The Westminster Divines are responsible, not I. And anything which THE NEW EVANGELISM 31 destroys responsibility, or transfers it, can- not but be injurious in its moral tendency, and useless in itself. It may be objected, perhaps, that this statement of the paralysis, spiritual and mental, induced by infallibility applies also to the Bible. The answer is that though the Bible is infallible, the infallibility is not in such a form as to become a temptation. And that leads to a remark as to the contrast between the form of truth in the Bible and the form in theology. In theology, as we have seen, truth is propositional, tied up m neat parcels, systematised and arranged in logical order. In the Bible, truth is a foun- tain. There is an atmosphere here, an expansiveness, an infinity. Theology is essentially finite, and it only contains as much infinite truth as can be chained down by its finite words. The very point of it is. that it is defined, otherwise it is no use. To the practical question. There are few minds which can really take truth in this theological form. Truth is a thing to be slowly absorbed, not to be bolted whole. In 32 THE NEW EVANGELISM this country we have been so accustomed to get and give our truth in the propositional form, that many congregations do not recog- nise it if stated in the ordinary language of life. But this is the only living language. And the failure to catch sight of the truth when clothed in this language means that it has not been comprehended before as a sub- stance, but as a form. *' Two or three days ago, I dined," says Lynch in " Letters to the Scattered," " with a little child whose mamma had prepared for him a very wholesome and delightful pudding. ' What is in it ? ' said the child. ' There 's an Ggg in it,' said the mother. 'Where's the egg ? ' asked the child, after close and incred- ulous inspection. ' It is mixed with it,' she explained. " There are many grown men and women," adds Lynch, " that unless they see the very form of a doctrine will not believe they can have the nutriment of it. They ask, ' Where 's the egg ? ' and if you say it is mixed with it — the doctrine of Atonement, or of Justification, or Sanctification — and s e d- e 5> is It, hd THE NEW EVANGELISM 33 was diffused through the whole of what was said, they shake their heads suspiciously. They will have nothing to do with such preaching, or such books, or such people." There is nothing truer, certainly, than that in this country people at once suspect adul- teration if you do not present them with the actual egg, shell and all. But what I am try- ing to show is that this demand is a mistake, and defeats its own end. The truth is Na- ture never provides for man's wants in any direction, bodily, mental, or spiritual, in such a form as that he can simply accept her gifts automatically. She puts all the mechanical powers at his disposal, but he must make his lever. She gives him corn, but he must grind it. She prepares coal, but he must dig it ; and even when she grows him apples and plums, ready-made fruits, he has at least to digest them, and in most cases he had better cook them. A law of nature like this, we are justified in carrying by analogy into the region of the spiritual. A man can no more assimilate truth in infallible lumps than he can corn. Though it be perfect, infallible, 3 lii! 34 THE NEW EVANGELISM I yet he has to do everything to it before he can use it. Corn is perfect, all the products of Nature are perfect, and perfection in Na- ture corresponds to infallibility in truth. But perfect though they are, few of the products of Nature are available as they stand. So with Truth. Man must separate, think, pre- pare, dissolve, digest, work, and most of these jhe must do for himself and within himself. [If it be replied that this is exactly what the- ology does, I answer, it is exactly what it does not. It simply does what the green- grocer does when he arranges his apples and plums in the shop-windows. He may tell me a Magnum Bonum from a Victoria, or a Baldwin from a Newtown Pippin ; but he does not help me to eat it. His information is useful, and for scientific horticulture ab- solutely essential. Should a sceptical po- mologist deny that there was such a thing as a Baldwin or mistake it for a Newtown Pippin, we should be glad to refer the said pomologist to him. But if we were hungry, and an orchard were handy, we should not trouble him. This brings us THE NEW EVANGELISM 35 'g us back to the original proposition then, that the new .vangeHsm as a provision for the huneer of men's souls is not to be doctrinal. Their truth is to be given them, not in infal- lible lumps, but as a diffused nutriment. Truth is an orchard rather than a museum. Dogmatism will be very useful to us when scientific necessity makes us go to the mu- seum. Criticism will be very useful in seeing that only fruit-bearers grow in the orchard and neither weeds nor poisonous sports. But truth in infallible propositional lumps is not natural, proper, assimilable food for the soul of man ; and therefore a propositional theol- ogy is not the subject-matter of Evangelism. (2) So much for exposition of the nature of the truth with which Evangelism is con- cerned. The second principle to which we now turn refers to a matter of equal mo- ment — the faculty which deals with truth. And I might sum up what is to be said under this head in this proposition — The leading Faculty of the new theology is not to be the Reason, The previous proposition deals with the form of truth. This is meant 36 THE NEW EVANGELISM :!'!'! ill I*! ii to elucidate the principle of arriving at truth. It is a deeper question, and strikes at a fundamental difference between the old and the new theology. The old theology was largely a product of reason. It was an elaborate, logical con- struction. The complaint against it is that, as a logical construction, it was arrived at by a faculty of the mind, and not by a faculty of the soul. On close scrutiny it turns out to be really nothing more nor less than rationalism. The doctrine of the Atonement, for in- stance, and the whole federal theology is an elaborate rationalism. The common way of presenting salvation is the most naked syllo- gism : " I believe. He that believeth hath everlasting life, therefore I have everlast- ing life." I do not pause to point out that a theology of this sort may be re- ceived by any one without any spiritual efifect whatsoever being produced. It does not take a religious man to be a theologian ; it simply takes a man with fair reasoning powers. This man happens to apply these I I THE NEW EVANGELISM 37 ing ese powers to doctrinal subjects, but in no other sense than he might apply them to astronomy or physics. I knew a man, the author of a well-known orthodox theological work which has passed through a dozen editions, and lies on the shelves of all our libraries. I never knew that man to go to church, nor to give a farthing in charity, though he was a rich man, nor to give any sensible sign whatever that he had ever heard of Christianity. It is equally unnec- essary to point out that if reason is the exclusive or primary faculty in theology, theology itself breaks down under rigid tests at almost every point. Its first prin- ciple, for example, that God isy contains a distinct contradiction, as has been repeatedly pointed out. Many philosophers, therefore, in being presented with theology as the expression of the Christian religion, have had no alternative but to become atheists. The reasoning faculty then cannot be the organ of the new Evangelism, for its conclu- sions are philosophically assailable. But I am not dealing here with philosophy, and it 38 THE NEW EVANGELISM ;mii IS not to be understood that I am using terms — Reason, for instance — in any particular philosophical sense. I am looking at the ques- tion exclusively from its practical side. And the question I ask myself is, " When I appre- hend spiritual truth, what faculty do I em- ploy .? " When I say it is not the reason, I do not purposely make the distinction between the Understanding and the Reason, which Kant and his followers, for example, do in philosophy, and Coleridge in religion, making the Understanding the logical faculty and the Reason the nituitive faculty. I use the word in its ordinary working sense, mean- ing by it, if you like, the logical understand- ino: of the writer's mind. What faculty do I employ, then, in ap- prehending spiritual truth ? What is the primary faculty of the new Evangelism if it is not the Reason.? Leaving philosophical distinctions aside again, I think it is the Imagination. Overlook the awkwardness of this mere word, and ask yourself if this is not the organ of your mind which gives you a vision of truth. The subject-matter of the THE NEW EVANGELISM 39 new Evangelism must be largely the words of Christ, the circle of ideas of Christ in their harmony, and especially in their per- spective. Sit down for a moment and hear Him speak. Take almost any of His words. To what faculty do they appeal.? Almost without exception to the Imagination. And this is the main thing I wish to say to-night. I do not merely refer to His parables, to His allusions to nature, to the miracles, to His endless symbolism — the comparisons be- tween Himself and bread, water, vine, wine, shepherd, doctor, light, life, and a score of others. But all His most important sayings are put up in such form as to make it per- fectly clear that they were deliberately de- signed for the Imagination. You cannot indeed really put up religious truth in any other form. You can put up facts, information, but God's truth will not go into a word. You must put it in an image. God Himself could not put truth in a word, therefore He made the Word flesh. There are few things less comprehended than this relation of truth to language. 40 THE NEW EVANGELISM M, 1 r i i I!!! ** Was stets imd aller Orten Sich ewig jung enveist 1st in gebundnen Worten Ein ungebundner Geist." The purpose of revelation is to exhibit the mind of God — the ungebundner Geist. The vehicle is words, gebundnen Worlen. What words? Words which are windows and not prisons. Words of the intellect cannot hold God — the finite cannot hold the infinite. But an image can. So God has made it possible for us by giving us an external world to make image-words. The external world is not a place to work in, or to feed in, but to see in. It is a world of images, the external everywhere revealing the eternal. The key to the external world is to look not at the things which are seen, but in looking at the things which are seen to see through them to the things that are unseen. Look at the ocean. It is mere water — a thing which is seen ; but look again, look through that which is seen, and you see the limitlessness of Eternity. Look at a river, another of God's images of the unseen. It is also water, THE NEW EVANGELISM 41 of ,ter, but God has given it another form to image a different truth. There is Time, swift and silent. There is Life, irrevocable, passing. But the most singular truth of this, as sug- gested a moment ago, is the Incarnation. There was no word in the world's vocabulary for Himself. In Nature we had images of Time and Eternity. The seasons spoke of Change, the mountains of Stability. The home-life imaged Love. Law and Justice were in the civil system. The snow was Purity, the rain. Fertility. By using these metaphors we could realise feebly Time and Eternity, Stability and Change. But there was no image of Himself. So God made one. He gave a word in Flesh — a word in the Image-form. He gave the Man Christ Jesus the express image of His person. This was the one image that was wanting in the image-vocabulary of truth, and the Incarna- tion supplied it. God had really supplied this image before, but man had spoilt it, disfigured it to such an extent that it was unrecognisable. God made man in His own image ; that was a 42 THE NEW EVANGELISM Mill word made flesh. From its ruins man might have reconstructed an image of God, but the audacity of the attempt repelled him, and for centuries men had forgotten that the image of God was in themselves. How, then, do you characterise that irrev- erent elaboration of theology which attempts to show you in words what God has had to do in the slow unfolding of Himself in his- tory, and by that final resort, when words were useless, of incarnating the Word, giving us the manifestation of a living God in a liv- ing Word. These doctrines stand apart. They are above words. It is a mockery for the Reason to define and formulate here, as if by heaping up words she could drive the truth into a corner and dispense it in phrases as required. It is just as clear, as a simple question of rhetoric, that Christ's words were positively protected against the mere touch of reason. They were put up in such form in many cases as to challenge reason to make beginning, middle, or end of them. Try to reason out a parable. Try to read into it the- ology, as our forefathers often did ; or dispen- THE NEW EVANGELISM 43 sational truth, as certain erratic theologians do to-day, and it becomes either utterly con- temptible or utterly unintelligible. You sec a parable, you discern it ; it enters your mind as an image, you image it, imag- ine it. I am the Bread of Life. With what faculty do we apprehend that ? We look at it long and earnestly, and at first are utterly baffled by it. But as we look it grows more and more transparent, and we see through it. We do not understand it ; if we were asked what we saw, we should be surprised at the difficulty we had in defining it. Some image rose out of the word Bread, became slowly living, sank into our soul, and vanished. The peculiarity of this expression is that it is not a simile. " I am like bread." Christ does not say that. I am bread — the thing itself. And that faculty, standing face to face with truth, draws aside the veil, or pierces it, seizes the living substance, absorbs it; and the soul is nourished. Besides the parable, the metaphor, and the metaphor which is no metaphor, Christ has two other favourite modes of expression. 44 THE NEW EVANGELISM ;.l V,ril 1 I ' ' 1 'I'll' i These are the. axiom and the paradox. The axiom is the basis of certainty ; the reason is inoperative without it, but it is not appre- hended by reason. It is seen, not proved. Again, therefore, we are dealing with the Imagination. The paradox is the darkest of all figures. " He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life shall find it." What can reason make of that } It is an utter blank; it absolutely repels reason. But for that very cause it is the richest mine for the imagination. It is not the darkest figure, but the lightest, because the rays come from exactly opposite sides, and meet as truth in the middle. The shell of words, once burst, reveals a whole world, in w^hich the illuminated mind runs riot, and revels in the boundlessness of truth. Had the reason been able to sink its shaft, it might have brought up a nugget. Theol- ogy would have gained another proposition, another neat parcel, and there would have been the end of it. As it is, it is without end, limitless, infinite truth, incapable in that form of becoming uninteresting, unreal, in- THE NEW EVANGELISM 45 ihaft, Iheol- ition, I have thout that [1, in- cluded in a human phrase. It is this sense of depth about Christ's words which is the sure test of their truth. They shade off, every one, into the unknown, and the roots of the known are always in the unknown. Omnia exeunt in mysterium. Dogma is simply an attempt to undo this. It takes up the sublimest truth in its fingers with no more awe than an anatomist lifts a muscle with his forceps, turns it about, dissects it, determines the genus and species of the organism to which it belongs, and marks it down " described " for all future time. We know all about it — all about it. We see the whole thing quite clearly ; it is as simple as the frog's muscle. The new Evangelism can never deal with truth in this way. It will never say that it sees quite clearly. It may remain ignorant, but it will never presume to say there is no darkness, no mystery, no unknown. It will sound truth, it will go fathoms further perhaps thaii the reason can go, but it will come back saying we have found no bottom. It is not all as clear as the old theology; it has that dimness of an TTT 46 THE NEW EVANGELISM 'I ' I ' older theology which sees through a glass darkly, which knows in part, and which, because it knows in part, knows the more certainly that it shall know hereafter. The want of apprehension of the quality of truth by much of the propositional theol- ogy is in nothing better evidenced than by this mistake as to its quantity. It robbed it at once of the infinite and the supernatural. The soul-food was taken out of the truth, and the husks thrown to the intellect. As £. faculty, then, the reason is not large enough to be the organ of Christianity. It has a very high and prominent place to play in Christianity, hut prima /acie it lacks the first and the second qualities of a religious faculty. The first of these qualities is that just men- tioned, largeness and penetration. The second is universality. All men cannot rea- son, but all men can see. In the rudest savage and in the youngest child, the imagination is strong. And Chris' 'addressed His religion to the most unlettered, to the youngest child. He boldly asserted that His religion was for the youngest child. He directly appealed I III! 1* THE NEW EVANGELISM 47 again and again to the child-spirit. " Except ye become as a little child, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." To object to this that Christ was speaking to the Oriental mind is of course beside the mark. Christ was not an Oriental speaking to the Oriental, He was the Son of Man speaking to man in the universal language of truth. I have already apologised for using this word Imagination, but I think I have made clear the idea. I am not concerned longer, there- fore, about retaining it. I am not sure that it is the right word. You might perhaps prefer to call it faith or intuition, or the spirit of discernment, or a subjective idealism, but the name is of no moment. The idea I have tried to make clear is that this is the faculty which works with the eyes, as contrarted with reason, which works with the hands. The old theology manipulates truth, the new is to discern it. As preachers our aim must be, not to prove things, but to make men see things. This conclusion with regard to the faculty of the new Evangelism is derived simply ,1 1 I! ■.',: 48 THE NEW EVANGELISM I'! i'ii'i I Hlli::l from observation. It contains the crucial point of the whole question, and I have little more to say except in support of it. But I need scarcely remind those of you who are in any way conversant with Ger- man philosophy that distinctions closely cor- responding to this have been drawn in philosophy, and long indeed before the German philosophers arose. The later form of this philosophy filtered into English liter- ature early in this century, and at once awakened profound interest, and, it is fair to say, alarm. Through such men as Cole- ridge and the Hares it was easily traced to its source in Schelling and Kant. But that Schelling and Kant, Fichte and Hegel had differentiated this faculty, or something like this faculty in the philosophical sphere, was against it. The new influence for the time was quenched. The unfortunate thing with the English neo-Platonists was that they paid too little attention to the practical as- pects of truth. Had Coleridge done this, had Maurice and Hare done this more, we should have been farther on to-day with the lillUII THE NEW EVANGELISM 49 ime th ney as- lis, we the ■ii new Evangelism. These men, and espe- cially Coleridge, were far too transcendental in their metaphysics to be the prophets of the new Evangelism, but with many other errors they held the germ of a very great truth. With Coleridge the imagination was a synthesis of the reasoning power and the sensing power. His definition is "that reconciling and mediatory power, which, incorporating the reason in images of sense, and organising (as it were) the flux of the senses, by the permanent and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a sys- tem of symbols harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors."^ Again he says^ " the grounds of the real truth, the life, the substance, the hope, the love, in one word the faith, these are derivatives from the practical, moral, and spiritual nature and being of man." I do not stop to inquire here as to where 1 " Statesman's Manual," p. 229, vide Rigg, '• Modern Anglican Theology," p. 15. ""Aids," p. 141. 50 THE NEW EVANGELISM ^M, II'' l|i'i; lii'- ir' i ''' Coleridge's version of " the Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world " le^ds. The new Evangelism doubt- less will have its apologetics when it exists. Nor do I enter upon the question as to how far this light exists in every man, or how far it is true that those only who are born again can see the kingdom of God. These are particular applications which may just now be passed over. But I should like to go on with the general subject by adding another quotation, this time from science, bearing upon the general subject. In 1870 Professor Tyndall wrote an address entitled, " On the Scientific Use of the Im- agination." The motto or text of this ad- dress is taken from a paper read before the Royal Society some years ago by its then president. Sir Benjamin Brodie. It says : " Physical investigation, more than anything besides, helps to teach us the actual value and right use of the imagination — that wondrous faculty which . . properly con- trolled by experience and reflection becomes the noblest attribute of man ; the source of ii ' THE NEW EVANGELISM 51 of poetic genius, the instrument of discovery to science, without the aid of which Newton would never have invented fluxions, nor Davy have decomposed the earths and al- kalies, nor would Columbus have found another continent." Then Tyndall goes on to say : " We find ourselves gifted with the power of forming mental images of the ultra-sensible ; and by this power, when duly chastened and controlled, we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of the senses. There are Tories even in Science who regard Imagination as a faculty to be feared and avoided rather than employed." But " Imagination becomes the prime mover of the physical discoverer. Newton's pas- sage from a falling apple to a falling moon was at the outset a leap of the Imagination. In Faraday the exercise of this faculty pre- ceded all his experiments. ... In fact, without this power our knowledge of Nature would be a mere tabulation of co-existences and sequences." If Tyndall claims so much for the scientific use of the Imagination, what may we not claim for the religious use 52 THE NEW EVANGELISM 1,1 of it? What is not possible to an Imagina- tion guided by reason and illuminated, as we hold it may be, and is, by the Spirit of God ? " Without this power," we might almost paraphrase from Tyndall, " our know- ledge of religion must be, or is, a mere tabulation of co-existences and sequences." There is one preacher to whom, from his printed sermons, I have many times been much beholden and from whom I also quote a sentence. I do not stay to characterise the sermons of Horace Bushnell, but he has long been to me a representative man of the new Evangelism, although I knew nothing of him, of his life, of his methods of thought or work. But the other day he died, and his life was written. There I have found, to my great amazement, that Bushnell's method of looking at truth is defined by himself as an exercise of the Imagination. He has actually published an article, which appears in America bearing this title, " The Gospel n Gift to the Imagination." Permit me to quote a sentence or two from the biography. Bushnell is speaking in propria wm THE NEW EVANGELISM 53 persona. " The Christian Gospel is picto- rial. Its every line or lineament is traced in some image or metaphor, and no inge- nuity can get it away from metaphor. No animal ever understood a metaphor. That belongs to man. . . . All the truths of re- ligion are given by images, all God's reve- lation is made to the imagination, and all the rites, and services, and ceremonies of the olden times were only a prepara- tion of draperies and figures for what was to come, the basis of words sometime to be used as metaphors of the Christian grace. 'Christ is God's last metaphor! ' the express image of God's person ! and when we have gotten all the metaphoric mean- ings of His life and death, all that is ex- pressed and bodied in His person of God's saving help, and new-creating, sin-forgiving, reconciling love, the sooner we dismiss all speculations on the literalities of His incar- nate miraclee. His derivation, the composi- tion of His person, His suffering, plainly transcendent as regards our possible under- standing — the wiser we shall be in our 54 THE NEW EVANGELISM ii' I discipleship. ... If we try to make a sci- ence out of the altar metaphors, it will be no gospel that we make, but a poor dry jar- gon — (rather) a righteousness that makes nobody righteous, a justice satisfied by in- justice, a mercy on the basis of pay, a penal deliverance that keeps on foot all the penal liabilities." One passage more. " There Is no book in the world that contains so many repugnances or antagonistic forms of asser- tion as the Bible. Therefore, if any man please to play off his constructive logic upon it, he can easily show it up as the absurdest book in the world. But whosoever wants, on the other hand, really to behold, and re- ceive all truth, and would have the truth- world overhang him as an empyrean of stars, complex, multitudinous, striving antagonisti- cally, yet comprehended, height above height, and deep under deep in a boundless score of harmony — what man soever content with no small rote of logic and catechism, reaches with true hunger after this, and will offer himself to the many-sided forms of the Scripture with a perfectly ingenuous and ill,! THE NEW EVANGELISM 55 sci- receptive spirit, he shall find his nature flooded with senses, vastncsscs and powers of truth such as it is even greatness to feel." Gentlemen, after the old Evangelism, this is a new world to live in. There is air here. Take the Gospel as a gift to the Imagina- tion, and you are entered into a large place. It is like a conversion. We read the Bible before with a key. A lamp was put in our hands with which to search for truth — rather to search for Scripture proofs of a truth thrust down our throats. We were not told the Bible was the lamp. I once saw an hotel-keeper on a starlit night in au- tumn erect an electric light to show his guests Niagara. It never occurred to the creature that God's dim, mystic starlight was ten million times more brilliant to man's soul than ten million carbons. When will it occur to us that God's truth is Light — self-luminous; to be seen because self-lumi- nous.? When shall we understand that it has no speech nor language, that men are to come to the naked truth with their naked eyes, bringing no candle.? The old theol- V\ '< 56 THE NEW EVANGELISM 'I'll 1 ogy was luminous once. But it is not now. " Election," says Froude in " Bunyan," " Election, conversion, day of grace, coming to Christ, have been pawed and fingered by unctuous hands for near two hundred years. The bloom is gone from the flower. The plumage, once shining with hues direct from Heaven, is soiled and bedraggled. The most solemn of all realities have been de- graded into the passwords of technical the- ology." It is from this that we are to emancipate ourselves, and, God helping us, others. We have a Gospel in the new Evangelism which for a hundred years the world has been waiting for. We have a Gospel which those who even faintly see it thank God that they live, and live to preach it. But I am not quite done yet. What will be, what are, the main hindrances to the acceptance of the new Evangelism? They are mainly two. (i) Unspirituality and (2) Laziness. (i) All formal religions are efforts to escape spirituality. It matters not what the form is — ritual, idols or doctrine, the s>- THE NEW EVANGELISM 57 essence of all is the same — they are devices to escape spiritual worship. The carnal mind is enmity against God — hates any spiritual exercise or effort. This is at the bottom of the perpetuation of the old theol- ogy. There is nothing a man will not do to evade spirituality. Do we not all know moods in which we would rather walk twenty miles than take family worship? And there are moods in which men find it of all efforts least easy to come into contact with living truth. This is always difficult : to know His doctrine, a man must do the will of God. The supreme factor in arriv- ing at spiritual knowledge is not theology, it is consecration. But for years and years — and it is one of the saddest truths in this world — a preacher may go on manipulating his theological forms without the slightest exercise of religion, unknown to himself, and unnoticed by his people. The second obstacle is laziness. To make doctrinal sermons requires no effort. A man has simply to take down his Hodge, and there it is. Every Sabbath, though not i^'ili! 58 THE NEW EVANGELISM i: !:■;; J, .ii formally expressed, he has the same heads. And the people understand it, or at least they understood it twenty years ago, when he preached, and preached well and with real heart, in the bloom of his early ministry. But for years now he has been a mere mechanic, a repeater of phrases, a reproducer of Hodge. And the people — they too are spared all effort. They are delighted with their minister. He in these days preaches the Gospel. A caution may be necessary. In His exhaustless wisdom, in speaking on these subjects the Lord Jesus said: "No man having tasted the old wine straightway desireth new." We can speak of these things broadly to one another here, but we cannot with too much delicacy insinuate the new Evangelism upon the Church. The old is better, men say ; and if any man really feels that it is better, I do not know that we should urge it upon him at all. There are many saints in our Churches, and if the old wine is really their life-blood, we can but wish them God-speed with all humil- THE NEW EVANGELISM 59 ity. Younger men will come to us, too, when our wine is old and the sun has set upon our new theology; but to the many who are waiting for the dawn, and these are many, our evangel may perhaps bring some light and fulfil gladness and liberty. Least of all have we anything to do with wilfully destroying the old. Christ was never destructive in His methods. It was very exquisite tact, a true understanding of men and a delicate respect for them that made Him say, " I came not to destroy but to fulfil." :i ;i ■? m I ,:^^^'' I ! !'^ l-il ■■; ! 1 1 !'i ■■:■■ The Method of the New Theology, and some of its Applications i Address delivered at Theological Society of F. C College^ Glasgow, Jan., 1892. H of The Method of the New Theology, and some of its Applications T SHALL begin by congratulating you, and A myself, on the free theological atmosphere in which it is the lot of this society to do its work. Never has there been fresher air in that dusty realm than there is to-day ; and if we pay the price for our freedom in bewilder- ment or doubt, in the suspicion of our ene- mies, in the helplessness of our wisest friends to give us certainty, we have at least the sympathy of the best around us, and the stimulus of working in an age when theology is no longer stagnant, but the most living of all the sciences. Of what we seem to be leaving behind us we can speak without panic or regret. Much of what has been in faith or practice is visibly passing away. 64 THE METHOD OF But there is little trace in this process of deliberate destruction ; it resembles rather a natural decay. And it is the beauty of this change, and the guarantee of its wholesome- ness, that it has worked without serious violence, that it has come, as all great king- doms do, almost without observation. Though this may appear to us a crisis, it is well to remind ourselves that to true thought crisis is chronic. There is nothing superior about ourselves that we shall have the privilege of thinking in a new way about theology. It is the world that progresses. Modern thought is not a new thing in his- tory, nor is it an unrelated thing. It is simply the growing fringe of the coral reef, the bit of land far out, in contact on the one hand with the unexplored sea — the bit of land far out in the ocean of unexplored truth — on the other with the territory just taken in, and the place, in short, where busy minds are making the additions to what other busy minds have built through the ages into the growing continent of knowledge. After all, it is only the old reef that we extend ; it is THE NEW THEOLOGY 65 on the past we build ; and the man who ig- nores the continuity of the past, and attempts to raise an island of his own, may be sure that the world's lease of it will be very short. New ideas are, in the main, a new light on old ideas, and nothing is gained by a ruthless handling of the older gospel which our fathers held and taught, and which for the most part made them better men than their sons. But what is this newer theology, and what is the direction of the movement where changes and perturbations come home to us in such a society as this with so great an interest? To some the new theology is a rearrange- ment of doctrines in a new order, a bringing of those into prominence which suit the need and temper of the age, and an allowing of others to sink into shadow because they are either distasteful to this generation or rest on a basis which it will not honour. We are told, for example, that the accent in the modern gospel is placed no longer upon faith, but rather upon love. We are told by others that what they see is the intricate 5 66 THE METHOD OF theology of Paul beginning to give place to the simpler theology of John, or both being for the time forgotten in the still simpler Christianity of Christ. To others the change is from the great Latin concep- tion of the Divine Sovereignty of Augustine and Calvin to the earlier Greek theology, with its emphasis on the imm- nee of Christ, or to its renaissance in the nine- teenth century presentation of the incarna- tion, and the Fatherhood of God. But, important as these characterisations are, to contrast the subject-matter of the new and the old Evangelism is not enough. In a theological society we must get down to principles, and I wish in a word to state what seems to me the essential nature of this change, and to illustrate its practical value by plain examples. The real contrast between the new and the old theology is one of method. The way to make a sermon on the old lines, for example, was to take down Hodge, or by an earlier generation Owen, and see what the truth was, then to work from that — to pro- THE NEW THEOLOGY 67 claim what Hodge said, to expound, assert, reiterate, appeal in the name of Hodge and anathematise and excommunicate everybody who did not agree with Hodge. The new method declines to begin with Hodge, or Owen, or even Calvin. It does not work from truth, but towards truth. It aims not at asserting a dogma, but at unearthing a principle. With all respect to authors, it yet declines authority. These are two at least of its more obvious marks — it does not only allow, but insists on the right of private judgment, and it declines authority. These propositions mean practically the same thing, and so far from being novelties are of the first essence of Protestantism. It is only to reassert these propositions in a different form to say that another char- acteristic of the new theology is its essential spirituality. We are accustomed to hear it opposed on spiritual grounds, but its spiritu- ality is really its most outstanding feature, and as contrasted with some at least of the old theology it has the exclusive right to the name. The mark of the old theology 68 THE METHOD OF was that it was made up of forms and propo- sitions. Filled no doubt with spirit once, that spirit had in many instances wholly evaporated, and left men nothing to rest their souls on but a set of phrases. The task of the newer theology has been to pierce below these phrases and seek out the ethical truth which underlay them : and having found that, to set up the words and phrases round it once more if possible ; and where not possible, to set up new phrases and a more modern expression. It is of course because men have been accus- tomed to these old forms that they fail to recognise the truth when clothed in other expression, and therefore raise the cry of heresy against all who take the more inward or spiritual view. TwQ .clas^^3 in. the community must of necessity, and always, oppose the new foun- datiori — the Pharisee who is not able to see spirit for forms, and the lazy man who will not. take the trouble to see spirit in form. It is always easier to assert truth than to ex- amine it, to accept it ready made than to THE NEW THEOLOGY 69 verify it for oneself, and we must always have a class who are guilty of these intellectual sins, who mistake credulity for faith and superstition for knowledge. The calm way in which these men assume that they are right and put all the rest of us on our de- fence is a miracle of effrontery, a miracle only exceeded in wonder by the tolerant way it is submitted to. I am not sure but that if Christ were among us He would not denounce the Pharisee as He did of old. But it is not enough to say that the new theological quest is a movement in the direction of spirituality. What is that spiritu- ality ? Is it a mere vagueness, a substitution of the shifting sand of the mysterious, and the undefined for the buttressed logic of the older doctrines ? On the contrary, it is the most definite thing in the world. Instead of relaxing the hold on truth, the new method makes the grasp of the mind upon it a thousand times more certain. Instead of blurring the vision of unseen things, it ren- ders them self-transparent; instead of making acceptance a matter of mere opinion, or of 70 THE METHOD OF upbringing, or of tradition, it forces truth on the mind with a new authority — an authority never before to the same extent introduced into theological teaching. That authority is the authority of law. The basis — like the basis of all modern knowledge — of the coming theology is a scientific basis. It is a basis on great ethical principles. It is not a series of conceptions deduced from another central conception or grouped round a favoured doctrine of a favourite Divine — a CaWimsm^ a Lutheran^V^^, an Arminian2>»^, or any conceivable zsm. It is a grouping round law, spiritual, moral, natural law, a structure reared on the eternal order of the world, and therefore natural, self-evident, self-sustaining and invulnerable. This method, dealing as it does with law and spirit, ignores nothing, denies nothing, and formally supplants nothing in the older subject-matter ; but it tries to get deeper into the heart of it, and seeks a new life even in doctrines which seem to have long since petrified into stone. This was largely Christ's own method. He dealt with prin- iil! THE NEW THEOLOGY 71 ciples — His teaching was mainly excava- tion — the disinterring of hidden things, the bringing to light of the profound ethical principles hidden beneath Rabbinic subtleties and Pharisaic forms. The Reformation — Protestantism — these were large attempts in the same direction, and modern thought is the heir to this spirit. Being a process of growth, and not a series of operations upon specific theological posi- tions, this method is in the best sense con- st! uctive. It can never destroy except empty forms. To be negative, to oppose or de- nounce time-honoured doctrines is poor work — poor work which unfortunately many minds and pens and pulpits are continually trying to do. The only legitimate way to destroy an old doctrine is Christ's way to fulfil it. Instead of busying themselves about its death and calling their congrega- tions ostentatiously to attend the funeral, the new theology will invite them rather to witness anew the resurrection of the undying spirit still hidden beneath the worn-out body of its older form. 72 THE METHOD OF K As an illustration of what I mean, I pro- pose to select one or two Christian doctrines which in their current forms have lost their power for thinking men, and try to show how these may live once more and play a powerful part in current teaching. One c* two of the greatest Christian truths have already been so abundantly re-illuminated and re-spiritualised by modern literature and preaching that one need only name them. An admirable case is the doctrine of inspira- tion. It is idle to deny that the authority of the liible was all but gone within this gen- eration. The old view had become abso- lutely untenable, misleading and mischievous. But from the hands of reverent men who have studied the inward characters of these books, we have again got our Bible. The theory of development, the study of the Bible as a library of religious writings rather than as a book ; the treatment of the writers as '\ authors and not as pens ; the mere discovery that reli2:ion has not come out of the Bible, but that the Bible has come out of religion : \ these announcements have not only destroyed THE NEW THEOLOGY n i with a breath a hundred infidel objections to Scripture, but opened up a world of new life and interest to Christian people. So thoroughly has the spiritual as opposed to the mechanical theory of inspiration im- bued all recent teaching that the battle for Scotland at least may be said to be now won. If there is anything further to be said on the subject, indeed, it is to caution ourselves against going too far or being very positive. Modern criticism in this country, espe- cially of the Old Testament, is not in a good way. The permission to embark upon it at all is sudden, and very few men are suffi- ciently equipped for a responsible recon- struction. Probably in Old Testament criticism there are not ten competent ex- perts in the country, and tnese are all more or less disagreed, and, what is more, afraid to announce their disagreements lest the others should turn and rend them. One of the greatest of these ten has just written an im- portant book. I happen to know that it is being handed about among the nine for a review in a certain high-class theological ? ( I- 74 THE METHOD OF monthly, and not a man of them will touch it. Hasty conclusions as to authorship or canonicity are as foreign to the scientific spirit as the old dogmatism. Guinness Rogers has well pointed out that in the far future, when English has become a dead language, almost no internal evidence would allow the literary critic to allocate the author- ship of John Gilpin, e.g., to the melancholy recluse who wrote the Olney hymns ; and in dealing with questions of Biblical authorship the minute scholarship of this day, based on favourite words and particular styles of thought, is often in danger of ignoring such broader facts as the versatility of human na- ture, the changing moods of thinkers, the contradictions which Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde exhibit within the same man's soul at the same period or at contrasted periods of his life of which history can keep no cognisance. This remark applies with even greater force to the subject-matter of the Books. We have treatises written, for instance, on the theology of Peter. Men talk of the ■ THE NEW THEOLOGY 75 Petrine conception of this and the Petrine presentation of that; they contrast the Petrine standpoint with the Pauline and the Johannine, and even go the length of fixino- the proportion in which the various theolo-f. cal truths were held in the Petrine system The absurdity of all this may be seen from a single fact. The entire Petrine remains that have come down to us and upon which all these elaborate structures are reared amount to a page or two, all that the apostle ever wrote or all that is left to us. They could be read to congregation in exactly half the time that it would take a minister to deliver a half-hour's sermon. Think of the absurdity of judging a man's theology, or the propor- tion m which he held its various parts, by half a sermon, and you will never again hear the word Petrine without a smile. The men, and especially the Germans, who allow mternal evidence — not seeing its exces- sive Hmitations — to be abused in this way r -e the true literalists, and their pro- vincial an- lysis can only hinder the victory of a spiritual cause. If the new theology 76 THE METHOD OF is the scientific spirit, that class of work is its stultification. But to pass on to another instance. The unearthing of the tremendous ethical prin- ciple underlying the atonement is now restor- ing that central doctrine to theology just when in its mechanical forms it was on the point of being discredited by every thinking mind. The Salvation Army preacher, it is true, still preaches it as a syllogism, and pays the penalty in the utter apathy or mysti- fication of his hearers, at least on that point. But no man who preaches the spirit of it, instead of the phrases of it, will lose his audience. The man who makes words, even Bible words, the substitute for thought, can never be understood of the common people at the present day. There is nothing the street preacher needs to be warned against with more earnestness than the mechanical preaching oi the syllo- gisms of the atonement. One listens often and with admiration and respect to the pow- erful way the street preacher brings home the great facts of personal sin to the crowd THE NEW THEOLOGY 77 around him, to his almost melting appeal for instant decision to this offer of salvation — nearly always in my experience glowing with real enthusiasm and backed with an almost contagious faith and hope. But when he tries at that point to answer the simple in- quiry, How? when he stands face to face with the question of the drunkard, leaning against the lamp-post, " What must I, the drunkard, standing here to-night in Argyle Street, do to be saved ? " he takes refuge in some text or metaphor, a proposition, and passes on. What I complain of in Gospel addresses is that many have no Gos- pel in them, no tangible thing for a drowning man to really see and clutch. "They break down at the very point where they ought to be most strong^ and luminous. To tell the average wife-beater to take shelter behind the blood or to hide himself in the cleft is to put him off with a phrase. I do not object to these metaphors, I believe in metaphors. I go the length of holding that you never get nearer to truth than in a metaphor; but you have not told this man the whole truth about 78 THE METHOD OF your metaphor, nor have you touched his soul or his affections with what lies beneath that metaphor; and it falls upon his ear as a tale he has heard a thousand times before. It is not obstinacy that keeps this poor man from religion — it is pure bewilderment as to what in the world we are driving at. The new theology when it preaches the atone- ment will not be less loyal to that doctrine, but more. It will not take refuge in the poor excuse for slipshod preaching and un- thought-out doctrines that w^e must wait for God's light to break. God's light breaks through some men's preaching, through some clear, honest, convincing statement of truth, and not occultly. Faith cometh by hearing, and if our plan of salvation is not telling upon our audience it is blasphemy to blame God's spirit. The blame lies in our own spirit and in our offering words instead of spirit, and in our neglect to spend time and thought, in trying to get down to the professed meaning and omnipotent dynamic of the law of Sacrifice. If a man has not something more to say THE NEW THEOLOGY 79 about the atonement than the conventional phrases let him be silent. By introducing the words from time to time he may earn the cheap reputation of being orthodox; but it 's for him to consider whether that is an object for which his conscience will let him work. There are thousands of tender and conscientious souls now in our midst who cannot find that foothold on the conventional doctrine which they are led to believe their teachers have, and without which they feel theniselves excommunicate from the work of the Church and the fold of Christ. If we see no further behind these words, let us say so, and not keep up this fraud, or preach these words, until we have sunk our spirits in them and can teach them with vital force and truth. Gentlemen, I do not for a moment mean that we are to treat our congregations to dissertations on biology. Nature -human nature — are to be to us but discoveries of things as they are, the expression of prin- ciple, the theatre on whose stupendous stao-g 8o THE METHOD OF each can see with his own eyes the great laws act. And this leads me to a final statement. We have seen that the method of the new Evangelism is to deal with principles. The mental act by which we are to search for truth, truth being in this spiritual form, is not therefore to be so much the reason, but the imagination. We are to put up truth when we deliver truth to others, not in the propositional form, but in some visual form — some form in which it will be seen with- out any attempt to prove. Truth never really requires to be proved. The best you can do for a law is to exhibit it. Gentlemen, as a preparation for the work of the new Evangelism in which you are to spend your lives, I commend you to the study of the principles of the laws of God in nature, and in human nature: the develop- ment of that seeing power, as opposed to mere logic, which discerns the unseen through the seen. About the greatest thing a man can do, Ruskin tells us, is to see somethinsf, and tell others what he sees. THE NEW THEOLOGY 8l The Gospel as Christ gave it was a gift to the seeing power in man. His speech was almost wholly addressed to the imagination, to the imagination in its true sense, and this, which is the highest language of science, is also the language of poetry and of the poetry of the soul, which is religion. Unless we can fill the new theology with what the soul sees and feels, and sees to be true and feels to be living, it will be as juiceless and inert as the old dogmatic. For it is only a living spirit of truth that can touch dead spirit, and the test of any theology is not that it is logically clear or even intellectually solid, but that it carries with it some sanctifying power. These examples of the rejuvenescence of old truths under the more spiritual treatment of an ethical theology are more or less obvious. 1 wish in the time that remains to apply the method a little more in detail to one particular department of theology, which is perhaps less intruded upon by modern teachers. The revolt of the moral sense of this country against the doctrine of a physical 82 THE METHOD OF ■'i! I hell, and the appeal to a Judgment Day, has lately led to almost complete silence on the whole subject of eschatology. Is this great theme or any part of it — say the conception of a Day of Judgment — not capable of a deeper ethical treatment? if the Divine judgment upon sin lies in the natural law of heredity, may we not find among the laws of the moral world some larger and more uni- versal principle of judgment which shall restore the appeal of these forgotten dogmas to their place in religious teaching? It is quite clear we must discuss this or remain silent. No man can now say such words to his people as these — I quote from no less an authority than Jonathan Edwards, — "The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider or some loath- some insect over the fire, abhors you. It is nothing but His Hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment ; it is to be ascribed to nothing else that you did not go to Hell last night; and there is no other reason why you have not dropped into Hell since you arose in the morning. . . . There 4 i Ip ^ V THE NEW THEOLOGY s, is nothing else to be given as a reason why you clo not this very moment drop down into rlcll. *■ That kind of thing is not over, thoui;h zae may hear little of it. Many of you have seen some, at least, of tiie great classical pictures of the Last Judo-- ment. Here [in the next chapter] is Rul kins account of the greatest of them all, the Last Judgment of Tintoretto, which hangs on a well-known church wall in Venice, in tull view of the congregation. ^ Guinness Rotrcrs' •' Pmconf r^^ n i- • ^^ogyr p. 150. rcsent-Day Religion and The- IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (AAT-3) 1.0 I.I 11.25 ■ 50 ™^^ ifiKam f ^ IIIIM it lis IIIIIM 1.8 1.4 IIIIII.6 ^ V] v: y i v 4^ o #> * ^9) N^ «>\/^q\ <^ '^^'^ % vV i Survival of the Fittest Formed part of preceding address ,/^ Survival of the Fittest pERHAPS the most weird picture in ^ " Modern Painters " is the description of Tintoretto's " Last Judgment." Dante in poetry, Giotto, Orcagna, and Michael Angelo on canvas, have spent their imaginations on the unimaginable theme; but Tintoretto alone, says Mr. Ruskin, has grappled with this awful event in its verity: " Bat-like, out of the holes and caverns and shadows of the earth, the bones gather, and the cla}-- heaps heave, rattling and adhering mto half-kneaded anatomies, that crawl and startle, and struggle up among the putrid weeds with the clay clinging to their clotted hair, and their heavy eyes sealed with the earth darkness yet, like his of old who went his way unseeing to Siloam Pool; shaking "fiat 88 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST off one by one the dreams of the prison- home, hardly hearing the clangour of the trumpets of the armies of God, blinded yet more, as they awake, by the white light of the new Heaven, until the great vortex of the four winds bears up their bodies to the judgment seat; the firmament is all full of tnem, a very dust of human souls, that drifts, and floats, and falls in the interminable, inevitable light ; the bright clouds are dark- ened with them as with thick snow, currents of atom life m the arteries of heaven, now soaring up slowly^ farther and higher, and higher still, till the eye and the thought can follow no farther, borne up, wingless, by their inward faith and by the angel powers in- visible, now hurled in countless drifts of horror before the breath of their condemna- tion." ^ Such is the picture, " not typically nor symbolically," Mr. Ruskin tells us, "but as they may see it who shall not sleep, but be changed." That artist and critic have drunk in the spirit of their dreadful subject may be un- ^ " Modern Painters," vol. ii., p. 183. !> SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 89 questioned. That pictures of the Last ]ud