^'J 
 
 n/ 
 
 BX 5937 .H85 T43 1902 
 Huntington, William Reed, 
 
 1838-1909. 
 Theology's eminent domain 
 
Theology's Eminent Domain 
 And Other Papers 
 
BRIEFS ON RELIGION 
 
 BY WILLIAM R. HUNTINGTON, D.D. 
 
 12mo, paper, 25 cents, six copies $1.00 ; clotli, 
 50 cents each, six copies $2.00. 
 
 1. Psyche : A Study of the Soul. 
 
 2. Four Key-'words of Religion: An 
 
 Essay in Unsystematic Divinity. 
 
 3. The Spiritual House : A First Lesson in 
 
 Architecture. 
 
 4. Popular Misconceptions of the Epis- 
 
 copal Church. 
 
 6. A Short History of the Book of Com- 
 mon Prayer. 
 
 6. Theology's Eminent Domain and 
 Other Papers. 
 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER 
 
 Publisher 
 2 AND 3 Bible House, New York 
 
Theology's x^.,,. 
 Eminent Domain 
 
 AND OTHER PAPERS 
 
 BV 
 
 WILLIAM REED HUNTINGTON D.D. 
 
 Rector of Grace Church New York 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER 
 
 2 AND 3 Bible House 
 
Copyright, 1902 
 By THOMAS WHITTAKER 
 
Prefatory Note 
 
 Most of the papers here collected have been 
 already in print, but in various connections. 
 For permission to reprint " Ecclesia Media- 
 trix," " The Style and Temper of The Book 
 OF Common Prayer " and " How the Episco- 
 pal Church is Organized," the author is 
 indebted respectively to the courtesy of the fol- 
 lowing publishers : E. B. Treat & Co., Charles 
 Scribner's Sons, and Bemrose & Sons, London. 
 
 W. K. H. 
 
Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 I. 
 
 Theology's Eminent Domain . • . . 9 
 
 II. 
 EccLEsiA Mediatrix 25 
 
 III. 
 
 Why Nine Divinity Schools in Tokyo ? . . 47 
 
 IV. 
 
 A Cosmic View of the Atonement . . .61 
 
 V. 
 
 The Style and Temper of The Book of Common 
 
 Prayer 79 
 
 VI. 
 
 How the Episcopal Church is Organized . . 99 
 
 VII. 
 On THE Firing-Line of Christendom , . • "S 
 
I. 
 
 THEOLOGY'S EMINENT DOMAIN. 
 
Let our first point be a distinction between 
 science and " the sciences." Science may be de- 
 fined as the knowledge of facts ^lus the knowl- 
 edge of the laws according to which the facts 
 coexist, interact and follow one another. " The 
 sciences," on the other hand, are the several 
 groups into which, for lack of the power of uni- 
 versal grasp, man has sorted out his knowledge ; 
 for we know in parts as well as in part. Theo- 
 logians have always claimed for their study, that 
 it is scientific in its character ; but supposing the 
 claim conceded, does it necessarily follow that 
 theology is one of the sciences ? By no means. 
 Theology must be scientific or it is nothing ; and 
 yet theology is not a science. There is no para- 
 dox here. Theology is scientific, not because the- 
 ology is a science, but because theology is science, 
 and nothing less. Theology is, by strict defini- 
 tion, the knowledge of the things of God. But 
 if God is, then there is nothing, whether in the 
 seen or the unseen universe, that does not stand 
 related to Him. Hence, for the theologian, I 
 speak not now of others, for the theologian him- 
 
 11 
 
12 THEOLOGY'S EMINENT DOMAIN. 
 
 self, theology ought to be nothing else than the 
 science of sciences, the universal science neces- 
 sarily including all special forms of knowledge 
 " as the sea her waves." 
 
 The intelligent theologian of the present, in- 
 stead of looking askance at the natural sciences, 
 so-called, wondering what ugly thrust they next 
 meditate, will boldly claim them all as his feu- 
 datories and set himself to exacting service at 
 their hands. Astronomy, Geology, Physics and 
 the rest, — what ought they to be to the right- 
 minded Christian thinker, but only so many 
 helps towards the better understanding of that 
 first sentence of the Creed, " I believe in God the 
 Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth " ? 
 Theology is not a segment of the circle of the 
 sciences ; it is the point above the circle from 
 which the whole area is swept. 
 
 For many years an unseemly conflict has been 
 waging, — I will not be so inexact as to say be- 
 tween science and religion, but between certain 
 scholars of repute— as to the possibility of our 
 having any theology at all. In this controversy, 
 the theologians, as I venture to suggest, have 
 made the double mistake of claiming for them- 
 selves at once too little and too much. They 
 have claimed for themselves too much, whenever 
 they have asserted a right to block, by an appeal 
 to authority, whether ecclesiastical or scriptural, 
 the freest possible inquiry into the secrets of the 
 
THEOLOGY'S EMINENT DOMAIN. 13 
 
 universe. They have claimed for themselves too 
 little, in so far as they have failed to insist with 
 sufficient emphasis upon the right of theology to 
 eminent domain. To be content with anything 
 less than supremacy is fatal to theology. She 
 signs her own death-warrant when she writes 
 herself down as one among many sciences ; when 
 she confesses that there are any lines of enquiry 
 that have no interest for her. It is the blunder 
 of timidity for her to undertake to compound 
 with her assailants for decent recognition as a 
 poor relation. Let her rise to her full stature, 
 and without fear assert her just prerogatives of 
 motherhood and queenship. 
 
 But, in these days, assertion unsupported does 
 not re-seat banished monarchs on their thrones. 
 "We must look into the question of right. What 
 is it that essentially differences theology from 
 any one special science among the many ? Is 
 it that theologians employ a logical method 
 unlike that in common use among scientific en- 
 quirers ? Some have thought so. It is not un- 
 common to hear it said that since theological 
 reasoning is deductive and scientific reasoning 
 inductive, misunderstandings between the users 
 of the two processes are inevitable. But surely 
 this is a most hasty judgment, for nothing can be 
 more easily shown than that the two classes of 
 reasoners employ both methods interchangeably, 
 as the occasion may require. The discovery of 
 
14 THEOLOGY'S EMINENT DOMAIN. 
 
 the planet E'eptune was as beautiful an instance 
 of what may be done by deductive reasoning as 
 could possibly be imagined ; while again the 
 most profound view of the dogma of the Trinity 
 is that which sees in it the result of a process of 
 induction worked out by the collective mind of 
 the Church with the statements of Scripture and 
 the phenomena of consciousness for data. The 
 formula was accepted as the only one that reason- 
 ably accounted for all the facts. It is plain, 
 then, that this easy and shallow classification 
 will not aid us in finding the precise point at 
 which theological science and the several sciences 
 part company. 
 
 But if the difference between the two sorts of 
 reasoning lie not in the manner, is it to be sought 
 for in the matter ? Is it the fact that two well- 
 defined districts of thought can be set apart as 
 belonging the one to scientific, the other to theo- 
 logical inquirers ? Here again we shall be 
 obliged to answer, ]^o. The very cause of the 
 heat that has arisen between the theological and 
 the anti-theological writers is, that their fields of 
 inquiry to a great extent coincide. Each is try- 
 ing to prove the other a trespasser upon marches 
 that really belong to both. There is no such 
 rigid boundary-line between the spiritual and the 
 natural as will permit our ranging the theologians 
 all on one side, and the men of science all on the 
 other. Coleridge endeavored to found a philos- 
 
THEOLOGY'S EMINENT DOMAIN. 15 
 
 ophy of inspiration upon such a distinction ; but 
 even his great powers were unequal to the task. 
 The farther we penetrate into the borderland 
 between the seen and the unseen, the material 
 and the immaterial, the more evident does it be- 
 come that no great gulf breaks up their conti- 
 nuity. It is, moreover, very interesting to notice 
 that the antagonism to which I have alluded is 
 much more marked in connection with the mixed 
 than in the case of the pure sciences. There is no 
 strife between Geometry and Christianity ; the 
 Gospel has no controversy with the Calculus; 
 but Geology has been at war with Genesis ever 
 since that science came into being, and many a 
 recent invective against theological narrowness 
 would lose half its force, had the Church never 
 persecuted astronomy in the person of Galileo. 
 All this grows out of the fact that theologians 
 and naturalists have so much, rather than so lit- 
 tle, subject matter in common. Who can fail to 
 trace a certain intellectual resemblance between 
 the Calvin of the sixteenth century and the Dar- 
 win of the nineteenth ? Parallel phenomena 
 suggested to the one thinker his doctrine of the 
 salvability of the few, and to the other his law 
 of the survival of the fittest. 
 
 Theology and philosophy do but echo one an- 
 other. The evolution controversy now engrossing 
 the attention of the naturalists is only the old 
 strife between creationism and traducianism 
 
16 THEOLOGY'S EMINENT DOMAIN. 
 
 under a new name. With the triumph of " the 
 primordial germ " will come back the Augustin- 
 ian doctrine, that we all sinned in Adam by 
 actual presence in his personality. Modern stu- 
 dents of nature seldom speak of the Mosaic cos- 
 mogony with overmuch respect, and yet it is as- 
 tonishing to notice what a passion for world- 
 making they often exhibit themselves. If 
 Moses's account of the origin of things be a tax 
 upon faith, what shall we say of Lord Kelvin's ? 
 No, men cannot help thinking upon these sub- 
 jects and cannot help reasoning about them ; the 
 mind demands some theory of beginnings ; and 
 doubtless new cosmogonies will be forthcoming, 
 yearly, while the world lasts. It is plain there- 
 fore that we cannot segregate a certain number 
 of facts and say peremptorily, either to the the- 
 ologian or to the naturalist, " Hands off ! " 
 
 Where then are we to find the differentia of 
 theology ? Not, it would seem, in the logical 
 method employed, nor yet in the subject of in- 
 quiry. Where then? In the postulates, I an- 
 swer, from which theology starts. In every effort 
 of human thought, the reasoner must have some- 
 thing to lean his back against, otherwise he gets 
 no purchase. This backing is the postulate, or 
 conceded truth, from which his argument starts. 
 All the sciences have their postulates ; some 
 more, some less. The pure sciences have but 
 one, namely, the accuracy of the laws of thought. 
 
THEOLOGY'S EMINENT DOMAIN. 17 
 
 This much must be conceded, or Euclid himself 
 is impotent. The mixed sciences require at least 
 two further postulates,, which are the reality of 
 the external world and the general credibility of 
 human testimony. To these, theology adds still 
 other two, which are peculiarly her own, namely, 
 the existence of a personal God, and the reality 
 of a moral distinction between right and wrong. 
 God and conscience, these are the distinctive pos- 
 tulates of theology. No man is obliged to accept 
 them. They do not compel assent, for, if they 
 did, they would be axioms and not postulates. 
 And yet, from the moment of our acceptance of 
 them, all our serious thinking, if it be consistent 
 with itself, becomes ipso facto theological. With 
 them for implements, theology has been, these 
 many centuries, building her temple ; using for 
 material the facts of consciousness, the facts of 
 nature and the facts of history ; casting away as 
 rubbish, now and then, what for a time had 
 seemed permanent portions of the fabric, but pre- 
 serving, all the while, certain grand lines of sym- 
 metry and strength by which men have been 
 able to take knowledge of the building that it is 
 of God. 
 
 Consider the grounds of our religious convic- 
 tions. As Christian men, we accept the Catholic 
 creed, — why ? Because the articles of it have all 
 of them been demonstrated beyond the possibil- 
 ity of cavil ? No, there is not one of them that 
 
18 THEOLOGY'S EMINENT DOMAIN. 
 
 admits of demonstration in the strict sense of the 
 word ; but we accept the Creed because, starting 
 from the belief that God is, and that He is right- 
 eous, we have been led, taking everything into 
 account, to find in its pregnant sentences, alto- 
 gether the likeliest answer to the questions of 
 the mind and of the heart. " Of the heart," I 
 say, as well as " of the mind," for while theology 
 rightly refuses to be relegated to *' the region of 
 emotion," she is quick to insist that in any scien- 
 tific study of man, any accurate inventory of his 
 belongings, not only his power to think and 
 know, but also his instincts of love, worship and 
 obedience must find room. 
 
 Note, now, another point. It is only from the 
 vantage ground of theology that the correlation 
 of the various parts of human knowledge can be 
 effected. The system is not heliocentric until 
 you have enthroned Deity at the heart of things. 
 In their several lines of activity, the sciences can 
 push ahead without the aid of the postulates of 
 theology. Experience shows this. Undevout 
 astronomers have lived who were perfectly sane. 
 La Place had "no need of the hypothesis of 
 God." But when it comes to unifying the vari- 
 ous branches of human knowledge, bringing his- 
 tory and art and language into harmony with 
 their half-sisters among the sciences called nat- 
 ural ; when it comes to ranging in jast order the 
 grades and levels of the mind's acquirement, then 
 
THEOLOGY'S EMINENT D03IAIN. 19 
 
 is seen, plainly enough, the need of some point 
 that shall answer to the apex of the pyramid. 
 Theology supplies this want ; and by so doing 
 enables the eye to look down quietly on all the 
 slopes of truth. 
 
 It is obvious to remark that, if this be the true 
 state of the case, then there are, in fact, no 
 "limitations of scientific and theological in- 
 quiry " that can be called " mutual," since it is 
 impossible for the whole to be bounded by any 
 of its parts. One can speak with propriety of 
 the mutual boundary, say of Scotland and of 
 Great Britain, for the coast line of the northern 
 kingdom is a common, not a mutual frontier. So 
 with the sciences ; they have their mutual limita- 
 tions among themselves when they happen to lie 
 adjacent, but of no one of them can it be said, 
 that between it and theology there are limita- 
 tions mutual, for the realm of theology is not 
 that of a science; it is science, — science so suffused 
 and transfigured by the light within, that her 
 face doth shine as the sun, as her raiment is 
 white as the light. 
 
 I began by contrasting science and the sci- 
 ences ; let me end by setting over against one 
 another, theology and the theologies. True 
 theological wisdom lies in the just distinguish- 
 ment of Avhat is permanently essential from what 
 is transient and accidental in religion. The 
 Eoman Catholic usage of dividing doctrine into 
 
20 THEOLOGY'S EMINENT DOMAIN. 
 
 that which is de fide and that which is not, is, in 
 principle, profoundly philosophical. It answers 
 to the distinction men of science draw between 
 the grand generalizations which have stood the 
 test of universal application through long periods 
 of time, and the crude conjectures of the passing 
 hour. 
 
 The present is preeminently a time for theolo- 
 gians to bend all their energies to the task of 
 determining how much of Christian doctrine is 
 essential to the perpetuity of Christian faith. 
 Sentimentalists assert that none is ; but thinking 
 men know better. Dogmas there are, which, for 
 the Christian to surrender, will be to acknowl- 
 edge that Christianity is dead. Which are 
 these? That is the question of questions for 
 theology to-day. Kome has decided upon her 
 criterion, and must abide by it. It remains for 
 those who believe that the end is not yet, to 
 labor patiently and humbly, waiting for "the 
 consolation of Israel." Perchance God will show 
 us, by and by, that His truth is larger and more 
 satisfying than either the Koman or the anti- 
 Roman statement of it. We have no occasion to 
 be troubled with the thought that broken theol- 
 ogies lie scattered all along the Church's line of 
 march ; so do broken sciences. It is idle for 
 divines and naturalists to recriminate upon this 
 point. Alchemy and astrology, once studied as 
 science in the universities of Europe, fairly offset 
 
THEOLOGY'S EMINENT DOMAIN. 21 
 
 the superstitions charged upon the Fathers and 
 the laborious trifling of the Schoolmen. 
 
 The question of real moment is, whether 
 modern research has arrived at, or is likely to 
 arrive at, results utterly irreconcilable with the 
 first principles of Christian faith, subversive not 
 alone of this or that system of theology, but of 
 theology as such, the logical contradictories of 
 God and conscience. If such be the case, then 
 there is indeed ground for alarm, yes, for terror. 
 There is no new religion ready to take the place 
 of the old one, and the gloom that must presently 
 settle on the world will be the blacker, in propor- 
 tion as the glare of the explosion that brought 
 down the citadel was bright. Happily, we need 
 not torment ourselves with any such apprehen- 
 sions. The alarmists on both sides have done 
 their best, or their worst, and still two facts con- 
 front us ; the Church stands firm, though quiver- 
 ing, while knowledge grows "from more to 
 more " each day we live. The lesson for us all 
 to lay to heart is the homely one of moderation, 
 intellectual temperance, a grace always difficult 
 of exercise to ardent souls, but a condition indis- 
 pensable both to the making and the keeping of 
 peace. 
 
 The theologians must learn to look upon the 
 naturalists as their allies, rather than their an- 
 tagonists, and this too, whether the naturalists 
 care to be so regarded or not. Truth is truth, 
 
22 THEOLOGY'S EMINENT DOMAIN. 
 
 however and whencesoever obtained ; and we 
 can never have occasion to be either afraid of it 
 or unthankful for it. The naturalists, in their 
 several departments, are, to borrow Bacon's fine 
 phrase, " the merchants of light." If we obey 
 the traditional saying of our Lord, " Be ye skil- 
 ful money-changers," we shall not be too proud, 
 but only too glad to buy of them such merchan- 
 dise as they have to sell. Theologians ought to 
 discern in their own inherited formulas, larger 
 meanings than they have been accustomed to see 
 there. The agency, for instance, ascribed in 
 Scripture to the Son of God in the work of crea- 
 tion, ought to be studied in the light of our 
 modern knowledge of the extent of creation. 
 We ought, if I may so speak, to read the Incar- 
 nation into IS'ature, thus making Christ the inter- 
 preter of God's unwritten as well as of His 
 written Word. The fresh hymns of the early, 
 and more especially the Eastern Church, breathe 
 this spirit in a wonderful degree ; and this, per- 
 haps, is one secret of their recent return to favor. 
 Our implicit beliefs have depths of which our ex- 
 plicit beliefs are no measure. 
 
 On the other hand, having confessed our own 
 short-comings, we may fairly ask of the men of 
 science that, in arguing with us, thej^ treat our 
 two postulates with respect, or, failing to do so, 
 at least give a reason for such disregard. It is 
 far more common with the anti-theological wri- 
 
THEOLOGY'S EMINENT DOMAIN, 23 
 
 ters, as everybody who is familiar with the con- 
 troversy knows, to assume that these postulates 
 are irrational, than it is to attempt proving them 
 to be so. If the existence of a God be not a 
 demonstrable point, far less, let them remember, 
 is his non-existence demonstrable. And, further, 
 it seems only reasonable to ask that investigators 
 abstain from exulting over conclusions confess- 
 edly tentative, not final, but which, if given forth 
 as the dicta of science, are sure to unsettle and 
 distress multitudes who are themselves incapable, 
 either of following the argument, or of criticising 
 the inference. Certainly, no special glory can 
 accrue from tossing shells into the quiet homes 
 of non-combatants. 
 
 It is easy to declaim against " teleological con- 
 siderations " ; easy to laugh at Dr. Paley and the 
 antiquated science of the Bridgewater Treatises ; 
 but, after all, what have you gained when you 
 have persuaded men that there is no trace of 
 conscious purpose anywhere in the universe ? 
 Would it be really a ground for merriment, were 
 the voice of supplication to be effectually silenced 
 on the earth ? " Living forces " will prove, with 
 the bulk of men, but a poor substitute for a liv- 
 ing God. 
 
 The mansion is a marvel of architecture. 
 The grounds have been exquisitely laid out. 
 Koom follows room in endless succession ; and 
 from the walls the faces of a score of generations 
 
24 THEOLOGY'S EMINENT DOMAIN. 
 
 look down on us from underneath trophies of the 
 chase and of the fight. Here and there are 
 shelves crowded with all the learning of the past, 
 and through the windows we catch glimpses of 
 lawn, and lake, and woodland, shot across by the 
 slant rays of the autumn sun. But what is the 
 secret of this strange silence everywhere ? Why 
 are the eyes of the servants cast down as we 
 meet them ? "What makes the foliage of the 
 avenues droop as if in sorrow, and the very at- 
 mosphere to weigh heavily on us as we walk and 
 are sad ? Why is there no sign or sound of joy ? 
 The reason is ample ; the master of the house, 
 they tell us, is lying dead. 
 
11. 
 
 ECCLESIA MEDIATKIX. 
 
II. 
 
 ECCLESIA MEDIATKIX. 
 
 Cheistianity is something more than a form 
 of thought : it is a way of life. More strenu- 
 ously dogmatic than any other religion that has 
 ever been, it is nevertheless persistent in refusing 
 to be shut up to dogma, as if that were all. It 
 owns a shepherding as well as an indoctrinating 
 function, and proposes not only to instruct but 
 to gather the souls of men. Its aim is the " mak- 
 ing ready a people " quite as much as the elab- 
 oration of a self -consistent theology, for it is of 
 the essence of the thing to be social. The other 
 participants^ in this discussion appear to me to 
 leave this feature of Christ's religion too much in 
 the shadow. They have laid the main stress 
 upon the intellectual relief afforded by the sev- 
 eral systems of belief they so ably represent, and 
 have touched lightly, if at all, upon the value of 
 the structural element in religion, the effort 
 Christ's Gospel is forever making to get itself 
 adequately clothed upon and housed. I shall, 
 
 ^ This paper was originally contributed to a " Symposium ' ' on 
 the relative merits of the various religious denominations in 
 the United States. 
 
 27 
 
28 ECCLESIA MEDIATRIX. 
 
 therefore, win at least the credit of sounding a 
 fresh note when I frankly avow that I am an 
 Episcopalian, or, to use the broader word, a 
 "Churchman," not merely because I "like the 
 forms," but because the Episcopal Church has, to 
 my thinking, better adaptability to the role of 
 reconciler, more of the qualifications of a peace- 
 maker among alienated brethren, than any other. 
 In this conviction I may, of course, be utterly 
 mistaken. My interpretation of what has been, 
 my analysis of what is, and my horoscope of 
 what is to come, may all of them be hopelessly 
 at fault ; but we are speaking out our minds in a 
 free and friendly way, and each man's exhibit of 
 reasons must pass for what it is worth. No one 
 of us arrogates to himself infallibility, or would 
 be likely to find disciples if he did. 
 
 Let me safeguard myself at the outset against 
 a possible and only too probable misinterpreta- 
 tion of my purpose. I am not setting out to 
 prove that there can be no kingdom of heaven 
 until all men have turned Anglican; my more 
 modest ambition is to show that, once the desira- 
 bility of organic unity has been conceded, there 
 are substantial reasons for treating with respect 
 certain constructional features that belong to the 
 Episcopal Church, not by virtue of any superior 
 sanctity on the part of her present adherents, 
 but, as we may say, providentially, by inherit- 
 ance. Holding, as I do, with Dr. Dollinger, 
 
ECCLESIA MEDIATRIX. 29 
 
 that " the want of a people's church is a want 
 that cannot be supplied by anything else," I find 
 myself constrained by motives of patriotism, as 
 well as of religion, to cast in my lot with that 
 one of the forms of organized Christianity in 
 America that seems to me to offer the most feasi- 
 ble basis for reunion. 
 
 Undoubtedly the popular conception of church 
 unity is one that answers to the phrase Irish pol- 
 iticians have of late made so familiar — " a union 
 of hearts." "We are assured with vehemence that 
 what is wanted is a Christian, in contradistinction 
 to a Church, unity — a community of feeling, a 
 oneness of sentiment, as contrasted with any such 
 unity as is organic, visible, known and read of all 
 men. It is because I believe the setting of these 
 two things thus sharply in contrast to be thor- 
 oughly unphilosophical that I am a churchman. 
 In the Apostles' Creed " The Communion of 
 Saints," or common fellowship of believers, is the 
 complement of the phrase " The holy Catholic 
 Church." The two expressions make one article 
 of faith, precisely as the two lobes make one 
 brain. A fellowship of believers who are one 
 in heart and mind can never rightly rest con- 
 tent until it has translated itself into a visible 
 fact as to which there can be no manner of 
 mistake. When the American people was bat- 
 tling for its life forty years ago, did anybody 
 imagine that it would have been a satisfactory 
 
30 ECCLESIA MEDIATRIX. 
 
 conclusion of the strife for North and South to 
 have agreed that thenceforth they would be one 
 in feeling and sentiment, but organically sepa- 
 rate ? This solution of the problem was, as a 
 matter of fact, frequently urged during the con- 
 flict, but never accepted, for the simple reason 
 that on the part of the North it would have been 
 a yielding of the main point. Church and State 
 are in many points unlike, but, in this particular 
 point of structure, are they so unlike that unity 
 must mean one thing in the one sphere and some- 
 thing utterly different in the other ? The truth 
 is, a mighty impulse towards a better unity than 
 has ever been, is making itself felt throughout 
 Christendom. God Himself seems to have been 
 making ready for it by quickening the means of 
 communication between place and place, by 
 breaking down the barriers which diversity of 
 manners and of language has created, and by 
 bringing people everywhere more effectually face 
 to face and hand to hand. Moreover, this eager 
 desire for unity will not be satisfied with any- 
 thing short of the real thing. No mere hand- 
 shaking on platforms, coupled with effusive offers 
 of an " exchange of pulpits," under stress of deep 
 emotion, and in the face of admiring audiences, 
 will meet the grand emergency or satisfy the 
 ardent longing of God's people to be one. What 
 is wanted is something more and better than 
 " league," " alliance," or " confederation " — 
 
ECCLESIA MEDIATRIX. 31 
 
 namely, unity. Again, let me insist that I am 
 far from supposing that the Episcopal Church 
 precisely as it is, unchanged in even the slightest 
 line or feature, is adequate to the supply of this 
 great national need. I only claim for it a special 
 fitness for the task of meditation. 
 
 The three divisions into which all church life 
 naturally falls are doctrine, discipline, and wor- 
 ship. It is an ancient classification, with no 
 charm of novelty, and yet I know of none other 
 under which we should be more likely to do our 
 thinking to good purpose. To begin, then, with 
 doctrine. 
 
 In what mood are thoughtful Americans at 
 the present time contemplating the whole subject 
 of Christian doctrine ? And is there anything in 
 the position taken by the American Episcopal 
 Church with respect to dogma that ought spe- 
 cially to command confidence and win allegiance ? 
 It will scarcely be denied that, in common with 
 the other civilized nations of the world, we are 
 passing through a season of unwonted agitation 
 in the field of religious thought. I purposely 
 avoid the overworked phrase " a period of transi- 
 tion," for the reason that all periods are periods 
 of transition, and it is not to be expected or to 
 be desired that we should ever reach the period 
 of immobility. But that ours is, if not a faith- 
 less, then certainly a faith-questioning, genera- 
 tion, who can deny? Everything, without dis- 
 
32 ECCLESIA MEDIATRIX. 
 
 tinction, goes into the crucible to be tried by 
 fire. The world of thinking men seems to have 
 resolved itself, for the time being, into a great 
 debating society, and from the roll of possible 
 subjects of discussion nothing is excluded. Ke- 
 view vies with review, essayist with essayist, 
 symposiarch with symposiarch, in setting forth 
 new readings of old creeds. Accepted beliefs 
 are challenged with an unreserve as bold as the 
 haste with which new ones are welcomed is 
 indecent. The healthy radicalism, which is so 
 named because it treats the plant through the 
 roots, gives place to an unhealthy radicalism, 
 Avhich is so named because it pulls up the plant 
 by the roots. The result is something very like 
 a panic, under stress of which some religious 
 minds have betaken themselves to a cloud-land 
 of uncertainty, a misty region of half-belief, 
 where nothing is asserted with heartiness and 
 nothing denied with vehemence, while others 
 have sought refuge upon what they trust will 
 prove the firm standing-ground of papal infalli- 
 bility. But has it really come to this in Chris- 
 tendom, that sober-minded men and women must 
 make their choice between believing everything 
 and believing nothing; between wholesale cre- 
 dulity and stolid incredulity ; between drugging 
 the intellect into a dead sleep of acquiescence 
 and letting it run wild in the intoxication of a 
 freedom wholly without limit ? 
 
ECCLESIA MEDIATRIX. 33 
 
 The historic church of the English race says, 
 and since the daj^s of the Keformation has always 
 said: "No; there is no such hard necessity of 
 choice. God has not thus given us over to the 
 * falsehood of extremes.' Discrimination is the 
 master-word that is to help us out of our per- 
 plexity. We are to distinguish, carefully and 
 critically to distinguish, between those truths 
 which attach to the essence of the religion of 
 Christ and cannot be surrendered without shiver- 
 ing the church to splinters, and those other and 
 less important articles of faith about which men's 
 minds are always liable to change, partly as a 
 result of the inevitable law of action and reac- 
 tion, and partly in consequence of the fresh dis- 
 coveries of unsuspected or only half-suspected 
 truths which almost every morning brings to 
 light." 
 
 The churchman finds this needed summary of 
 essential truths in that simple form of words 
 which has stood the brunt of fifty generations of 
 criticism — the Apostles' Creed. He plants him- 
 self upon that strong confession which begins, 
 " I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker 
 of heaven and earth," which goes on to say, " I 
 believe in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord," 
 and which ends with "the Life everlasting." 
 These statements, he reasons, make the basis of 
 Christianity — not men's argumentations about 
 them, but the statements themselves. I rest my- 
 
34 ECGLESIA MEDIATRIX. 
 
 self on them. If they go by the board, Chris- 
 tianity goes too ; but while they stand the Church 
 stands. While faith in them survives, faith in 
 much else that is good and precious will live on 
 too. 
 
 Is not this a sensible position ? The Koman- 
 ist, indeed, strives to turn it by challenging us 
 to show cause why we should draw the line at 
 this point rather than at another — why we should 
 accept the Apostles' Creed, and refuse to accept 
 the doctrinal decrees of the Council of Trent and 
 the creed of Pope Pius lY. But our answer is a 
 sufficient one. We are content with those few 
 dogmas upon which the common sense (using the 
 phrase in its large philosophical, rather than its 
 colloquial, signification) of the people of God, of 
 " holy Church throughout all the world," has set 
 its seal. 
 
 Again I ask. Is it not an admirably chosen 
 position ? Does it not seem as if this Church had 
 been guided by more than human wisdom when, 
 in that crisis of her destiny, the Eeformation, 
 she wrote this simple creed upon her chancel 
 walls, made the repetition of it a part of her 
 daily worship, insisted upon its being taught to 
 every little child within her borders, and required 
 assent to it as the condition precedent of sharing 
 in her sacramental privileges ? Moreover, is it 
 not a doctrinal position that ought preeminently 
 to commend itself to a community torn and dis- 
 
ECCLE8IA MEDIATRIX. 35 
 
 tracted as ours is by the many voices of this 
 modern world? Does it not offer us just what 
 we want — firm anchorage, and yet rope enough 
 to let the ship rise and fall with the tossing 
 waves? Without the grip of the anchor the 
 vessel would presently drift upon a lee shore; 
 without the play of the rope it would be pretty 
 sure to founder. What we really need is a firm 
 grasp upon essentials, and a wise liberty in all 
 things else. The American mind is too religious 
 to rest content with treating as an open question, 
 to be re-discussed every few days, or, still worse, 
 every Sunday, such momentous matters as the 
 existence of a God and the reality of a life to 
 come. 
 
 On the other hand, the American mind is too 
 intelligent a mind to be willing to accept the 
 utterances of a foreign ecclesiastic as its inspired 
 standard and unerring rule in matters of faith and 
 morals. We have high authority for believing 
 that wisdom and understanding, counsel and 
 knowledge, are gifts of the Holy Ghost to man. 
 Surely we put them to their best use when we 
 discriminate between the thing that must be and 
 the thing that need not necessarily be, between 
 the meat and drink that are essential to the soul's 
 healthy life and those other foods of which we 
 cannot know with certainty whether they are 
 helpful or harmful, safe or perilous. 
 
 3o much for doctrine. I pass to polity. 
 
36 ECCLESIA MEDIATRIX. 
 
 It is plain beyond all question that the thought 
 of governance entered into and made a part of 
 Christ's purpose with respect to his Church. 
 " Feed my sheep," said He, and in so saying im- 
 plied the whole duty of caring for the flock. 
 But who shall exercise this power of governance ? 
 In what hands is the authority vested ? Is the 
 right absolute, or has it limits? and if it has 
 limits, what are they ? It is, of course, easy to 
 escape the embarrassment such questions occa- 
 sion, by denying that God ever meant his Church 
 to take on visible form or possess outward organ- 
 ization. If the true conception of the Church 
 be that which makes of it a disembodied spirit, 
 why, then, all questions of vesture and drapery 
 vanish out of sight. But if, with St. Paul, we 
 believe that there was meant to be the " one 
 body " as well as the " one spirit," why, then, we 
 cannot so easily wave aside, as a thing of no im- 
 port or value, this matter of governance or 
 discipline. 
 
 Constitutional episcopacy, as it is coming to be 
 called, takes hold upon the far past by its rever- 
 ent solicitude to preserve continuity with the 
 ancient Church through transmitted holy orders ; 
 while at the same time it takes hold upon the 
 living present by its frank recognition of the 
 right of the whole Church, laity as well as clergy, 
 to have a voice in the making of the laws, and 
 by its ready willingness to receive and to abide 
 
ECCLESIA MEDIATRIX. 37 
 
 by those principles of representative government 
 which have wrought such woaders in the modern 
 state. To many minds the mention of the 
 episcopate as a form of church polity is suggest- 
 ive of absolutism. All that is Puritan in the 
 American character (and much that is best in 
 American character fairly claims that epithet) 
 rises up in protest at the very mention of the 
 "lord bishop," because it thinks that it sees in 
 him the symbol of arbitrary power. But fair- 
 minded Americans, let us hope, will not be long 
 in discovering that, under a constitutional epis- 
 copacy, the lord bishop, as an irresponsible func- 
 tionary, has no place. May we not also hope 
 that, this prejudice once removed, the practical 
 genius of our people will be quick to discern the 
 immense advantages that attach to a recognition 
 of the principle of headship or superintendence 
 in such work as the Church of Christ in this land 
 has been set to do ? 
 
 Another point connected with discipline is that 
 which touches upon the nurture of children. By 
 admitting children to holy baptism this church 
 fully commits itself to the logical result that the 
 little ones so received are actually and really 
 made members of Christ's body and heirs pre- 
 sumptive of the kingdom of heaven. In other 
 words, we believe that, in a Christian land, chil- 
 dren ought to be brought up as Christian chil- 
 dren from the start. We would not have them 
 
38 ECCLESIA MEDIATRIX. 
 
 treated as " strangers and foreigners,'* but from 
 the cradle upward we would see thrown around 
 their path all the safeguards and all the encour- 
 agements and all the helps the Church can give. 
 We interpret the Saviour's words, " Suffer little 
 children to come unto Me," as giving us a Avar- 
 rant to take them to Him in the only way that 
 it seems possible to do so, now that He is with- 
 drawn from our sight, and, having brought them 
 to Him thus, we believe that He does not blame 
 our faith. 
 
 In reply to Baptist objectors, we insist that 
 the burden of proof is on them, and not on 
 us. In the Jewish church, of which our Lord 
 was by circumcision a member, the right of little 
 children to a place within the fold had always 
 recognition. We reason that, had our Lord in- 
 tended, in the founding of his Church, to depart 
 from so firmly established a precedent or to 
 withdraw so ancient a privilege. He certainly 
 would have said so in unmistakable terms. In 
 this recognition of the great law of continuity, 
 churchmen account themselves to be in harmony 
 with the best thought of to-day, whether in the 
 churches or without. Surely the lambs need 
 the shelter of the fold at least as really as the 
 sheep. I can readily understand the flat denial, 
 on philosophical grounds, that " any " shelter or 
 resting-place in the nature of a fold is essential 
 to the well-being of the human family. But 
 
ECCLE8IA MEDIATRIX. 39 
 
 shepherds, ancient and modern, I suspect, would 
 all agree that if any one portion of the flock more 
 than another needed and had a right to the protec- 
 tion of the fold, it must be the lambs. I recall 
 the little folds of stone that dot the hillside pas- 
 tures of the Scotch Highlands, and I remember 
 thinking, as I looked at them, how very hard and 
 cold and unattractive they appeared — how it 
 seemed as if the sheep might almost as well be 
 left to wander about among the stones and take 
 their chances, as seek refuge within such cheer- 
 less walls. And so, no doubt, it seems to some at 
 times — probably to our Baptist friends at all 
 times — as if the Church's nurture of children 
 were a work so inadequately performed as to 
 make it almost valueless. And yet I suspect that 
 in those poor huts, built up of broken bits of rock, 
 the life of many a little creature, brought in 
 from the driving snow or the chill wind, has been 
 kept from utter perishing, preserved until the 
 passing of the tempest — saved, though only just 
 saved. Even so, while we can see easily enough 
 how poorly Christ's ideal of what his sheepfold 
 was meant to be is carried out in fact, there is 
 still ground for hope that even under the most 
 meagre, the most utterly inadequate, administra- 
 tion of the affairs of the flock, some blessings are 
 attained that would not otherwise have been 
 had, some shelter extended that else would have 
 been missed, and that the fold has its value. 
 
40 ECCLESIA MEDIATRIX. 
 
 Doctrine and polity disposed of, there remains 
 the matter of worship. Churchmen believe that 
 the public worship of Almighty God ought to be 
 distinguished from the ordinary actions of our 
 lives by a special regard on our part to dignity 
 and reverence. They consider that if beauty 
 and majesty have any rightful place in the affairs 
 of men, that place is preeminently to be sought 
 in the sanctuary. Hence they are accustomed to 
 invest their worship with as much solemnity as 
 possible. They distinguish between what is ap- 
 propriate to private devotion and what belongs 
 to the worship of the great congregation. The 
 temper of the Book of Common Prayer, which is 
 the churchman's manual of worship, is alike un- 
 friendly to tawdry and vulgar showiness in cere- 
 monial on the one hand, and to utter bareness 
 and rawness on the other. A " lowly pomp," a 
 simple majesty, a decent reverence — these make 
 the golden mean in worship, and it is these which 
 it is the aim of the Prayer Book to secure. There 
 is the less need of my dwelling upon this depart- 
 ment of our general subject, because the signs 
 are abundant that the American people are com- 
 ing into sympathy with Anglican ways of looking 
 at the matter ; for the question, How shall we 
 worship ? is one that is answering itself before 
 our eyes and to our ears. All around us are evi- 
 dences, to which the most unwilling can scarcely 
 be blind, that the architecture, the music, the 
 
ECCLESIA MEDIATRIX. 41 
 
 commemorative days and seasons, and the ritual 
 worship, hitherto associated with the old Church, 
 are meeting with more or less acceptance among 
 our fellow-Christians all about us. 
 
 And I note this in no sneering or bitter spirit, 
 but simply as making for my argument. It 
 ought, I think, to be a ground of gratitude and 
 satisfaction to every right-minded churchman to 
 observe these approaches, ill-contrived and gro- 
 tesque as they sometimes are, to the form of a 
 worship rich and full. All such indications of a 
 better understanding and a more cordial agree- 
 ment among Christians are to be welcomed as 
 possible harbingers of an abiding peace. More- 
 over, it must never be forgotten that in 1888 the 
 entire Anglican communion, at the lips of its 
 assembled bishops, pledged itself not to insist 
 upon uniformity of worship as a condition prece- 
 dent to church unity. 
 
 Here I rest my argument. What I have 
 claimed for the Episcopal Church as precious in- 
 heritances, making for unity, are these : (a) a 
 simple, straightforward Creed, (b) a reverent, 
 heart-satisfying worship, and (c) an ancient polity, 
 whereof the memory of man runneth not to the 
 contrary. Surely this is a happy combination. 
 Surely the American people, beset on the one 
 hand by the solid ranks of Koman absolutism 
 and harassed on the other by the scattered sharp- 
 shooters of the liberal camp, may well think twice 
 
42 ECCLE8IA MEDIATRIX. 
 
 before refusing to accept it as the true rallying 
 point of a nation whose life is still, in the main, 
 a continuation of English history. Taking the 
 Christian people of this land in the mass — and 
 the truest definition of the American Church is 
 that which affirms it to be made up of the whole 
 company of the baptized of whatever name); it is 
 probably true of its several divisions that no one 
 of them is entirely in the right upon all points, 
 and no one of them upon all points entirely in 
 the wrong. 
 
 It is clearly desirable that those who are more 
 in the right and less in the wrong than others 
 should come to the front; but which these are 
 can be known only by the test of time. God, by 
 some sifting process of his own, will ultimately 
 sever the evil from the good and manifest his 
 Church. Meanwhile, to those who cannot help 
 thinking that the line taken by Episcopalians in 
 the movement for the promotion of church unity 
 has savored of arrogance I would commend a 
 single thought. Much as we reverence the mem- 
 ory of those stout English hearts who witnessed 
 to the sincerity of their convictions by crossing 
 the ocean to plant what they accounted a purer 
 faith in this American soil, heartily as we may 
 respect their opinions and highly as we may honor 
 their judgment, there is a court of appeal which 
 has a still stronger claim on our regard, and that 
 is the English race spread over the whole world. 
 
ECCLESIA MEDIATRIX. 43 
 
 Let US not forget that we are members also of 
 that. For combined mental and moral and bodily 
 force the race in question stands confessedly in 
 the foremost rank of human kind. Now, instead 
 of going back to fight over again the half- 
 forgotten battles of two centuries ago, instead 
 of disputing about the relative amount of injury 
 endured by Puritans under Archbishop Laud on 
 the one hand and by churchmen under Oliver 
 Cromwell on the other, is it not the more philo- 
 sophical and every way the better course for us 
 to look at general results as they have been 
 reached up to this time, and to consider what 
 they suggest ? Doing this, we find the fact to be 
 that more people of English stock have chosen 
 to abide by that presentation of the religion of 
 Christ which is embodied in the uses and methods 
 of the Episcopal Church than have chosen to cast 
 in their lot with any other single body of be- 
 lievers. In other words, the main principles 
 which find expression in the Book of Common 
 Prayer (I speak not of details) are the main 
 principles upon which a plurality of the English- 
 speaking people has settled down as the result 
 of the great battle with Eome. Can we be fairly 
 charged with disloyalty to American traditions, 
 if we lift up our eyes from the limited horizon of 
 our own local history and let them take in the 
 far wider sweep covered by the experience of our 
 race ? Or, to put it in another way, is it likely 
 
44 ECCLESIA MEDIATRIX. 
 
 that that religion will prove otherwise than help- 
 ful to the souls of men, of which it can be said 
 that, more than any one competing form of faith, 
 it has commended itself to the mind and con- 
 science of the world's dominant race ? Again I 
 ask, Why should we renew the controversies of 
 two or three hundred years ago ? Let the dead 
 bury their dead, and let us judge matters of the 
 living present on their own merits, unbiassed by 
 inherited prejudice. Most of us consider it fool- 
 ish on the part of a portion of our fellow-citizens 
 annually to celebrate the battle of the Boyne. 
 Equally idle is it to wrest from the grave the 
 religious enmities of the days of the Stuart kings. 
 The Puritan of those days thought the Church- 
 man arrogant and overbearing ; the Churchman 
 thought the Puritan crotchety and sour. The 
 Puritan accused the Churchman of laxity of 
 morals ; the Churchman retorted with the charge 
 of hypocrisy and cant. But what concern have 
 we with these old recriminations ? 
 
 The objections of the Puritans to the Episco- 
 pal Church (I mean the old, the original, objec- 
 tions) are practically outlawed by the statute of 
 limitations. Lapse of time has emptied them of 
 their force, as anybody can see by simply read- 
 ing for himself what the Presbyterians had to 
 say in the way of complaint at the Savoy Con- 
 ference in 1662. Some of the objections were 
 trivial at the start, and are now universally ac- 
 
ECCLESIA MEDIATRIX, 45 
 
 knowledged to have been such. Others of them 
 came from the connection between Church and 
 State, which, happily, in this country has no ex- 
 istence. The question for us is. Has the Episco- 
 pal Church of to-day, as a matter of fact, large 
 store of blessing in its hands for the people of 
 the Eepublic? For one, I honestly and ear- 
 nestl}^ believe that it has ; and, so believing, 
 abide in charity and hope, a Churchman. 
 
III. 
 
 WHY NIKE DIVINITY SCHOOLS IN 
 TOKYO ? 
 
III. 
 
 WHY NINE DIVINITY SCHOOLS IN TOKYO? 
 
 At the start, I feel bound to put in the best 
 justification I can, for having anything at all to 
 say on the subject which it is proposed to dis- 
 cuss. When a foreigner who, pencil and " pad " in 
 hand, has traversed so much of the United States, 
 east of the Mississippi, as is easily reachable by 
 palace-car in a month's vacation, returns to his 
 own land and proceeds through the medium of 
 some popular monthly to give his countrymen 
 trustworthy information with respect to America 
 and its inhabitants in, say, three thousand words, 
 leaded type, we smile. We cannot help it. Of 
 how much sorer condemnation ought he to be 
 thought worthy who, never having so much as 
 set foot on a heathen shore, undertakes to in- 
 struct his fellow-Christians as to the prospects, 
 perils and true interests of foreign missions ! 
 'Not that my convictions with respect to the 
 question involved are halting or unsettled ; not 
 that my heart is not in it, or that I am taking up 
 the subject in a purely perfunctory way : pray 
 do not draw any such inference or inferences 
 from this deprecatory preface. I only wish to 
 
 49 
 
50 WHY NINE DIVINITY SCHOOLS IN TOKYO f 
 
 have it distinctly understood that I speak from 
 an avowedly theoretical point of view. With 
 respect to certain propositions bearing upon the 
 matter in hand, I am indeed fully persuaded in 
 my own mind; but who am I, a stay-at-home, 
 that I should presume to criticise the methods of 
 the men in the field, I who have never done any- 
 thing for the cause more arduous than the making 
 of an address or the taking up of a collection ? 
 But I do not intend to criticise the methods of 
 the men in the field, not I ; what I really desire 
 to criticise, in so far as my words prove to be 
 critical at all, is the philosophy of missions held 
 and propagated by brother stay-at-homes, to wit, 
 my fellow-members of boards, societies, commit- 
 tees and the like, cis- Atlantic and cis-Pacific peo- 
 ple, every one of them, like myself. In this there 
 will be no presumption, though there may be a 
 large incompetency. 
 
 As a basis of fact from which to start out 
 upon our theorizing, suppose we take the state 
 of things ecclesiastical now existent in the city 
 of Tokyo, Japan. Tokyo, the capital of the 
 Mikado's empire, has a population of about a 
 million and a half, and, therefore, counts as one 
 of the chief cities of the non-Christian world. 
 At no single spot on the earth's surface is it, 
 perhaps, more important that the gospel of Our 
 Lord Jesus Christ should be forcibly and per- 
 suasively presented than in Tokyo. But whether, 
 
WHY NINE DIVINITY SCHOOLS IN TOKYO? 51 
 
 as a matter of fact, it be forcibly and persuasively 
 presented or not, it is at least multitudinously set 
 forth. Nine theological schools, representing as 
 many conceptions and embodiments of the Chris- 
 tian religion are there. The Eoman Catholics 
 have a seminary ; the Protestant Episcopalians 
 have a seminary ; the American Presbyterians, 
 North, have a seminary ; the Evangelical Asso- 
 ciates have a seminary ; the Congregationalists 
 have a seminary ; the Canadian Methodists have 
 a seminary ; the German Evangelical Protestants 
 have a seminary ; the Disciples of Christ have a 
 seminary ; the American Baptists have a semi- 
 nary. 
 
 It sounds, in the reading, like the portion of 
 Scripture appointed for the Epistle for All Saints' 
 Day, does it not ? And yet the twelve tribes 
 there numbered enjoyed a coherence and a certain 
 unity in diversity, to which these rival divinity 
 schools of modern Japan can lay no claim. Nine 
 centres, and nine sorts of theological instruction ! 
 Think of it ! New York, twice as large as To- 
 kyo, and nominally Christian already, gets on 
 with fewer. The question confronts us, is such a 
 state of things, or is it not, an impediment to the 
 progress of Christianity? I believe that it is, 
 and I proceed to give my reasons for such be- 
 lief, humbly submitting them to your judgment 
 and discussion. 
 
 To state first the lowest consideration of all, 
 
52 WHY NINE DIVINITY SCHOOLS IN TOKYO f 
 
 I maintain that such a modus vivendiy for it 
 deserves to be called by no better name, is un- 
 economical, that it involves a ruinous and inex- 
 cusable waste of force. Whatever, as American 
 citizens, we may think of the trusts, so-called, we 
 can scarcely question that like the corporations, 
 their forerunners, they have come to stay, and 
 they stay because they save. The law of parsi- 
 mony, to use a technical phrase of the schools, 
 is as inexorable in the social sphere as it is in 
 the logic of research. If twenty manufacturing 
 plants can turn out all the structural steel that 
 is needed for a given market, to maintain one 
 and twenty is a mistake. The superfluous plant 
 counts not merely as zero, but as a negative 
 quantity, in the summing up of results. It is 
 not only not a gain, it is a loss. 
 
 In the present state of religious thought the 
 world over, three variant presentations of Chris- 
 tianity are perhaps inevitable, though even this 
 is to be deplored ; but nine is three times three. 
 The three irreconcilable, or apparently irrecon- 
 cilable, positions are that of the Koman Catholic, 
 who insists upon such an historic continuity as 
 links itself indissolubly to the Papal See; that 
 of the Anglican who, equally with the Koman 
 Catholic, emphasizes historic continuity, but who 
 holds that it can be secured independently of the 
 Latin succession; and that of the Protestant, 
 pure and simple, who in his philosophizing upon 
 
WHY NINE DIVINITY SCHOOLS IN TOKYO? 53 
 
 the subject attaches to historic continuity little 
 or no value. To have narrowed down the almost 
 countless tints and shades of the ecclesiastical 
 spectrum to these three primary colors, is no 
 slight gain, for, from the point of view of the 
 Church economist, it would be far less wasteful 
 to maintain three well-manned Divinity schools 
 in a town than nine poorly manned ones, far 
 more gratifying to the religious sense to build 
 and to behold three stately churches than to 
 establish and support nine puny ones. But I 
 hasten to get away from this phase of the sub- 
 ject, partly for the reason that the arguments 
 pro are so evident and the arguments contra are 
 so feeble that to do more than simply state the 
 case is a waste of time, and partly because one 
 cannot help feeling that the dignity of the whole 
 discussion is lowered by permitting money con- 
 siderations to intrude. Most of us who are here 
 gathered were yesterday morning reading to our 
 several congregations the seventeenth chapter of 
 the Gospel according to St. John. How it would 
 have marred the sublimity of that ardent inter- 
 cession had there occurred in it the faintest ref- 
 erence to the economical advantages likely to 
 ensue upon the granting of the prayer "That 
 they all may be one ! " Why prayed He that 
 they all might be one ? Was it in order that the 
 balance-sheet of Christendom might make a bet- 
 ter showing ? No, nothing like that, but rather, 
 
54 WHY NINE DIVINITY SCHOOLS IN TOKYO f 
 
 first, that there might be the joy which inheres 
 in unity as such. " That they all may be one as 
 Thou Father art in me and I in Thee, that they 
 also may be one in us " so becoming sharers in 
 our blessedness ; and then, further, in order that 
 an incredulous world, seeing from without the 
 beauty of a house at unity in itself, might repent 
 and believe and enter in. All very different this 
 from a finance committee's budget. Haste we 
 then to depart out of those precincts of the 
 temple where the money-changers have their 
 tables, and to get a little nearer, if we may, to 
 the holy place, where contacts are less sordid, 
 and values are reckoned according to the shekel 
 of the sanctuary. 
 
 I maintain then, secondly, that not only is 
 the denominational method of administering mis- 
 sionary interests uneconomical but that it is also 
 unapostolic. All effort to spread the Kingdom 
 of Christ in these latter days professes to pattern 
 itself after the examples and precedents of the 
 first age. What Paul essayed to do and did as 
 propagator of the faith, that ought we also to 
 undertake. What Barnabas accomplished, that 
 should we too attempt. What Titus found effect- 
 ive, that must we duplicate. Bravo ! But are 
 we, as a matter of fact, walking in the footsteps 
 of Paul, Barnabas and Titus when we plant our 
 nine divinity schools in Tokyo? Is there the 
 slightest hint in the Book of the Acts of the 
 
WHY NINE DIVINITY SCHOOLS IN TOKYO? 55 
 
 Apostles that those men did things in that way ? 
 I shall be reminded that Paul and Barnabas had 
 a sharp contention, and possibly the " tendency- 
 theories " of the Germans may be put in evidence 
 against me, as going to show that even between 
 Peter and Paul there was not that cordial coop- 
 eration in the promotion of missionary work 
 which might have been desired, but, after all nec- 
 essary concessions and allowances shall have been 
 made, it will be diflSicult, I fancy, to show that 
 anything distantly resembling our modern multi- 
 plex scheme for the propagation of the faith ex- 
 isted in the Apostolic age. The " sharp conten- 
 tion " just referred to did not result, so far as I am 
 informed, in any such scandal as the setting up of 
 rival altars in the same town. Barnabas sailed 
 for Cyprus and Paul went journeying through 
 Syria and Cilicia. It was unfortunate, but it was 
 not schism. The Cypriots and the Cilicians did 
 not proceed to perpetuate the quarrel by endow- 
 ing opposition divinity schools in one of the cities 
 of the Levant. As for St. Paul, he made his 
 views upon the subject of sectarian rivalry so 
 plain in his first letter to the Corinthians that to 
 cite him as a witness in favor of our present 
 method of prosecuting missionary work would 
 mean taking a most foolhardy risk. He had 
 heard with sorrow that there were divisions 
 among them, — so he wrote. Some of Chloe's 
 people had told him about it, and he was deeply 
 
56 WHY NINE DIVINITY SCHOOLS IN TOKYO? 
 
 pained. The fact that a group of them had done 
 him what they had meant to be the honor of 
 naming their little fragment of Corinthian Chris- 
 tianity after him did not help matters in the 
 least. He would much rather they had not done 
 it. To have them all speak the same thing, to 
 have them all perfectly joined together in the 
 same mind and in the same judgment — if they 
 wanted to know what would please him, that was 
 what would please him. They must not imagine 
 that he was envious of Cephas or jealous of 
 Apollos — nothing of the sort. They and he 
 were fellow-ministers, not rival leaders of hostile 
 followings. Let the Church in Corinth realize 
 that it was the Church in Corinth, and drop this 
 undignified business of propagating the King- 
 dom, earth-worm fashion, by abscission. Is it 
 likely, I ask, that a man who could thus think 
 and write, would, if he were alive to-day, look 
 with complacency upon the spectacle of nine 
 theological schools in Tokyo ? And yet of these 
 nine schools there is probably not one where the 
 professor of ecclesiastical history and the pro- 
 fessor of pastoral care would not gladly unite in 
 testifying that of all the men who have ever 
 lived, the one whose opinion as an expert in the 
 matter of missionary enterprise ought to have 
 most weight was St. Paul. 
 
 I have been speaking of the denominational 
 method of promoting foreign missions as un- 
 
WHY NINE DIVINITY SCHOOLS IN TOKYO? 57 
 
 economical and unapostolic. It remains that I 
 speak of it as unstatesmanlike. Do not hastily 
 charge me with Erastianism because of my 
 making this consideration the climax of my argu- 
 ment. Freedom is one of the great gifts of 
 Christ, and it is his gift to peoples as well as to 
 individuals. How to build up in heathen lands a 
 strong, self-respecting, well-compacted, beneficent 
 national life, this is a problem not unworthy of 
 the best thought and effort of the Christian 
 Church. Great efforts are making nowadays 
 throughout Christendom, — have been making for 
 a century and more, to exalt the secular State. 
 We are assured that the time has come for strip- 
 ping from the framework of civil administration 
 the last fragment of the drapery of religion. 
 Let not a fringe or a tassel remain. But what if 
 it should turn out, upon closer investigation, that 
 religion instead of being only the drapery, is 
 really a part of the very flesh and bones of that 
 organism we call the State? What if a more 
 careful analysis of the constitutions, written or 
 unwritten, of the foremost nations of the world, 
 should make evident the fact that these are all 
 of them inwrought with and elaborated out of 
 ideas essentially religious ? When a State votes 
 to abolish the distinction between right and 
 wrong, and deliberately asserts the non-binding 
 character of contracts, then, but not till then, 
 will it have earned a right to the title atheistic. 
 
58 WHY NINE DIVINITY SCHOOLS IN TOKYO f 
 
 Without such recognitions as those which I have 
 just named, unity in a State is out of the ques- 
 tion, the forms of government may for a time be 
 maintained by force, but real oneness there is not 
 and cannot be. Well then, if it be true that re- 
 ligious ideas are and must necessarily be a prime 
 ingredient in the mortar which cements the 
 foundation-stones of States, is it not supremely 
 important that the character and quality of those 
 ideas should be of the best? If regenerated 
 China and Japan and India are eventually to be 
 built up into great self-governing powers, if they 
 are to become nations in the best sense, have we 
 of the West no interest in the sort of religion 
 that shall enter into the primary structure of 
 their governmental system, the bed-rock of their 
 constitutions ? Of course we have. The English 
 liberationists talk of sloughing off the Church 
 from the State as if it were the simplest thing in 
 the world, but when the time for disestablish- 
 ment comes, it will probably be discovered that 
 in the formation and the unifying of what we 
 now know as England the Christian Church had 
 priority of all other forces, and helped more than 
 all other forces to bring the end to pass. But 
 that was because in those days the impact of the 
 Christian Church upon the disordered life of man 
 had the telling power which unity confers. Let 
 the Christian Church of the present speak with 
 one voice to the peoples now in ferment over the 
 
WHY NINE DIVINITY SCHOOLS IN TOKYO? 59 
 
 question, What shall our civil structure be? 
 Out of what sort of material shall we build up 
 the civilization of the future ? and there will be 
 results the like of which no " European concert " 
 has so far been able to effect. It is said, Oh, you 
 need not worry over the demoralizing effect of 
 sectarian Christianity upon the heathen mind. 
 They are used to that sort of thing in their own 
 religions, they have been sect-ridden for genera- 
 tions, they are accustomed to it, and therefore 
 they expect it. 
 
 I asked a highly intelligent Parsee woman 
 whom I was privileged to meet the other day, 
 whether this were really so. She replied, in 
 substance, that doubtless the statement was cor- 
 rect so far as the unintelligent, low-caste part of 
 the population were concerned, but that the 
 thinkers and scholars among the orientals met 
 such arguments with a sneer. " Compose your 
 own differences," they would say, " before j^ou 
 come to us with the offer of a new religion. 
 When you can agree among yourselves as to 
 what you really mean, we will listen and not till 
 then." Can we wonder at the rebuff ? Would 
 not this be our own primary answer to nine 
 angels from heaven preaching to us nine other 
 gospels than the one first delivered ? It is a 
 makeshift apologetic which seeks to justify the 
 coat of many colors in which we approach the 
 heathen by urging that we need not fear causing 
 
60 WHY NINE DIVINITY SCHOOLS IN TOKYO f 
 
 scandal among people as rainbow-hued as our- 
 selves. 
 
 You say, But what is the remedy ? I answer, 
 No man knows certainly. It is ground where 
 we must feel our way in patience, in courage and 
 in humility. Only this I would like to urge, 
 namely that we bend all our energies (and by 
 " we " understand all people in this land who 
 have named the name of Christ and who believe 
 in missions), that we bend all our energies to the 
 building up in Asia, and so far as practicable in 
 Africa, united native churches conterminous geo- 
 graphically with the areas held together under 
 definite civil sovereignties. This will mean grant- 
 ing to the missionaries in the field a much larger 
 freedom of action than has been hitherto con- 
 ceded to them, and w^ill also mean, by parity of 
 reasoning, a greater curtailment of the powers 
 of " boards " and " committees " than is likely to 
 be quite acceptable to the members of the same. 
 But the question is not, How may we swell the 
 volume of the Annual Eeport ? The question 
 is, How may we most quickly win the world for 
 Christ ? 
 
rv. 
 
 A COSMIC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT. 
 
lY. 
 
 A COSMIC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT. 
 
 We have to do with that great doctrine of 
 which the Gospel is a synonym, the Eucharist a 
 paraphase, and the Cross a sign. 
 
 Shall I begin by formulating it ? Such might 
 seem to be my obvious duty as a participant in 
 this discussion, for of all the vain uses to which 
 the mind may lend itself, none is vainer than de- 
 bate over an ambiguous thesis. And yet, how 
 shall any man of his own motion, and out of his 
 own head, venture to do what "Holy Church 
 throughout all the world" has never done — 
 namely, to set forth, in precise theological terms, 
 the Christian doctrine of the Atonement. Mi- 
 nute definitions of the dogma there have been 
 without number, some of them backed by more, 
 some by less, of recognized authority, but no- 
 where, save in the few broken words, " Who for 
 us men, and for our salvation came down from 
 heaven," "was crucified for us under Pontius 
 Pilate," " suffered," " was buried " — nowhere 
 save here can the voice of the Church universal 
 be justly said to have set forth any credenda of 
 Atonement. 
 
 63 
 
64 A COSMIC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT. 
 
 In making our estimate of the doctrine, there- 
 fore, and attempting our statement of it, the first 
 resort must be to the words of Christ and His 
 apostles ; the second to such sources of light as 
 the writings of the great interpreters, understand- 
 ing by the phrase not those only who have toiled 
 laboriously at the text of Holy Scripture, but 
 those as well whose path of search has lain 
 among the thoughts and intents of the heart. 
 
 Looking earnestly to these authorities for help, 
 I find that in order justly to apprehend the 
 Atonement of the Son of God, we must study it 
 both as a process and as an act, the act an act 
 accomplished, the process a process still unfold- 
 ing ; and I further find that the key to a right 
 understanding alike of the finished act and of 
 the continuous process is the word "reconcilia- 
 tion." 
 
 The Westminster revisers have done good 
 service to popular theology by substituting for 
 " atonement," in the only passage in our English 
 New Testament where the word occurs, this 
 more intelligible equivalent — " reconciliation." 
 I say "more intelligible equivalent"; for al- 
 though Atonement, when we dismember it, is 
 seen to be nothing else than at-one-ment, or the 
 setting at one of those who, before, were set 
 asunder, yet so accustomed have we become to 
 the use of atonement in its secondary sense of 
 amends or expiation, that the meaning which 
 
A COSMIC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT. 65 
 
 Tyndale (the reputed coiner of it) meant the word 
 to carry to the eye has become hopelessly ob- 
 scured. 
 
 Look now at reconciliation as such, and with a 
 careful eye to seeing just what it presupposes, 
 and how much it involves. 
 
 Every reconciliation involves, for example, 
 action between persons ; and, furthermore, it 
 presupposes such persons to have been originally 
 friends. To speak of reconciling two conflicting 
 statements, or of being reconciled to a bereave- 
 ment, is to use language of metaphor. Every 
 genuine reconciliation is a personal matter ; it is 
 the coming back into council or intercourse of 
 those between whom the social tie once existed, 
 but who are held by it no longer. 
 
 How much theologians, if they would, might 
 learn from children and their ways ! The first 
 impulse of an angered child is to assert non- 
 intercourse against the playmate who has 
 wronged or hurt him. "What play is to children, 
 council or society is to their elders. And for 
 two men who have mutually forfeited one 
 another's favor, to be brought back into society 
 and friendliness, is the resumption of council or 
 reconciliation. 
 
 This is reconciliation looked at as a process, 
 but it is to be noted that in every such process 
 there occurs a certain culmination, which we may 
 name the reconciliatory act. To this act there 
 
66 A COSMIC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT. 
 
 may have been much that led up ; from it there 
 may be much to follow ; nevertheless we do dis- 
 tinguish a climax in the process as definite as 
 that moment of chemical union wherein two sub- 
 stances hitherto distinct merge into a product 
 which is the " new thing " it was proposed to 
 make. Time was needed to bring the two sub- 
 stances into proper contact ; more time will be 
 needed to enable the one new substance to pass 
 out of solution into visible crystalline form ; but 
 in the moment ( and it is, even to the eye of 
 science, a most mysterious moment ) — in the 
 moment of transformation we have what answers 
 to the reconciliatory act. 
 
 Again, every reconciliation of whatever sort, 
 the need of which has been occasioned by a fault 
 or wrong, costs suffering ; it is not achieved with- 
 out pain somewhere ; nor can Ave by any means 
 be certain that the pain or the suffering in a 
 given case will be confined to that party to the 
 controversy which was originally to blame. 
 Even in the most conspicuous instances of what 
 we call free forgiveness there exists this element 
 of cost. The forgiveness is " free " in the sense 
 of being voluntary, not in the sense of being in- 
 expensive. If I may again so soon recur to 
 analogies drawn from the natural order, I would 
 say that there seems to lie hidden here a certain 
 subtile law of equivalence, whereby it holds good 
 that just as the arrest of motion develops heat, 
 
A COSMIC VIEW OF THE AT0NE3IENT. 67 
 
 SO the sudden checking of indignation at the dic- 
 tate of love engenders suffering. 
 
 Eeligious teachers who recognize no sacrificial 
 character in the sufferings of Christ are fond of 
 bringing up in evidence, as against this doctrine 
 of the costliness of forgiveness, the parable of 
 the Prodigal Son. 
 
 We have here, it is urged, at-one-ment without 
 a trace of suffering on the part of the at-one- 
 maker. So, indeed, it might seem were no ac- 
 count to be taken in studying the parable of 
 those pregnant words " and had compassion." 
 Yet Ave can conceive, can we not ? of fathers 
 who, under the like conditions, would have had 
 no compassion; and the distance between 
 these two attitudes of heart — the compassionate 
 and the compassionless — is only to be measured, 
 I submit, in units of self-sacrifice. " He ran and 
 fell on his neck and kissed him." There we have 
 the reconciliatory act, but how little we know of 
 its accompaniments ! Possibly, could it have 
 been given us to look into his face as he thus 
 went to meet his returning penitent, we should 
 have discerned there a momentary likeness to 
 that great Keconciler whose visage was so marred 
 more than any man. Certainly we can have small 
 respect either for the virility or for the father- 
 liness of the parent who, without effort, pardons 
 the child who has outraged the family honor. 
 To forgive is something loftier than to condone. 
 
68 A COSMIC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT. 
 
 The one is done without effort, the other requires 
 effort, and in all effort there is an element of 
 pain. Yes, it is a law of ethics, as sharply de- 
 fined as any law of physics, that the deeper the 
 injury the costlier the pardon. 
 
 In the light of this simple analysis of reconcili- 
 ation as such, look next at the Christian doctrine 
 of the Atonement, and see how large it is. 
 
 We began by assuming that a true reconcili- 
 ation must always mean an at-one-ment of per- 
 sons, not of abstractions, not of attributes, but 
 of persons. In the eye of the New Testament 
 teachers God is personal and man is personal, 
 and between God and man personal relations 
 may and do exist. 
 
 The drift of modern thought being largely in 
 the direction of belief in a power unseen, to 
 which can be assigned with safety only the twin 
 attributes of strength and ingenuity, we need not 
 be at all surprised at the lofty unconcern with 
 which, to-day, in very many influential quarters, 
 the Christian doctrine of the Atonement has 
 been set aside. Still, when we consider that if 
 " personality " is to be banished from the vocabu- 
 lary of religion, such words as " love," " tender- 
 ness," " compassion," " sympathy," " forgiveness," 
 must be fellow-exiles, we shall, perhaps, feel all 
 the more drawn to the Christian doctrine of the 
 Atonement for the very reason that so intensely 
 personal a character attaches to it. 
 
A COSMIC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT. 69 
 
 But not only as respects this entrance into it 
 from both directions of the element of personality 
 does the Atonement conform to our standard of 
 what a reconciliation ought to be and to include ; 
 we are further to observe that the doctrine takes 
 for granted the existence of a primal amity be- 
 tween God and man antedating the alienation. 
 Keconciliation, as we have seen, is the renewal, 
 not the beginning of concord. The child to 
 start with is in the father's house, or, in theolog- 
 ical phrase, there lies behind original sin, original 
 righteousness. 
 
 God creates man in His own image, and the 
 workmanship is pronounced good. But man — 
 how, when or where, the traditions of his race 
 only imperfectly inform us — fell out of this right 
 relation. Whether in this world or in some other 
 world than this, we cannot certainly know, there 
 came to pass alienation, a break, severance be- 
 tween the spirit that is in us and the God who is 
 a Spirit. This spoiling of the fatherly relation 
 spoiled also of necessity the brotherly relation as 
 well, so that there grew to be a need, not only of 
 an at-one-ment between God and man, but of an 
 at-one-ment also between man and man. 
 
 To bring to pass the far-reaching, all-embra- 
 cing reconciliation that was demanded, the initia- 
 tive must come from above ; there must be a 
 motion of heaven to help earth, since no effort of 
 earth to scale heaven could suffice. It was need- 
 
70 A C0S3IIC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT. 
 
 ful that the power of God should be present to 
 heal so great a hurt, and in the person of a Son of 
 God it came. 
 
 But not without suffering could the end be 
 brought to pass, and suffering on that side where 
 no blame was. The Helper who consented to be 
 born into this lower life to set us right must 
 needs become closely acquainted with grief. 
 Having loved His own that were in the world, 
 He must love them to the very end of loving — 
 that is, to the death. Hence that culmination to 
 which the gospel writers see fit to give up so 
 large a portion of their story. Surely, they 
 would never so closely have concentrated our 
 attention on the cross had not the death that was 
 died there been indeed a " precious " death. 
 
 At this point it becomes possible to bring out 
 clearly the contrast already hinted at between the 
 Atonement as a process of reconciliation, and that 
 special crisis in the Atonement which we may 
 name the reconciliatory act, the Sacrifice. 
 Failure to note this distinction, and to allow for 
 it, has been the cause of much perplexity of 
 mind. 
 
 The Atonement, in the largest sense, is, as we 
 have seen, a movement of enormous range look- 
 ing towards unity. But just as the fortunes of a 
 long campaign, that has for its final object the 
 pacifying of a continent, are sometimes seen to 
 hinge upon a single battle fought out upon a 
 
A COSMIC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT. 71 
 
 definite field, so in the long struggle which is to 
 end in the unification of the people of God, we 
 discern a decisive hour. 
 
 The agony and passion are the death-struggle 
 out of which our Head and Leader emerges into 
 peace. '^ It is finished " ; when those words were 
 spoken the sacrifice was complete, but day by 
 day, and year by year, and century by century, 
 and age by age, the world is living into the 
 reconciliation that was then made secure. 
 
 And yet in our efforts after clearness let us be- 
 ware of trying to be too clear. With respect 
 both to the process and to the act we are, and, 
 under the limitations of this life present, must 
 always be, to a great extent agnostic. Of the 
 process we know not when it began or when 
 cometh the end. Of the act we know only the 
 revealed side. The half hath not been told us. 
 Cloudland is charged with fire, not only at the 
 moment when our eyes see the flash, but all 
 through the progress of the storm. The streak 
 of light is but the quick and passing manifesta- 
 tion of an energy ever present. So with the 
 Atonement. We see the altar, we see the victim, 
 we are witnesses to the death, but what is going 
 on beyond that darkened sky we see not. 
 " There they crucified Him " — that we can 
 understand. It is an event in time. But of the 
 mysterious title, '' Lamb slain from the founda- 
 tion of the world," who shall say what that 
 
72 A COSMIC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT, 
 
 means ? It carries us out into the un visited 
 region of eternity. 
 
 During the last half century two forces have 
 been operative in Anglican theology to depress 
 the doctrine of the Atonement. High Church 
 and Broad Church, in so many points mutually 
 antagonistic, have been at one in this, that they 
 have agreed to exalt the dogma of the Incarnation 
 above the doctrine of the Atonement. The In- 
 carnation, we have been told, both by the school 
 of Pusey and by the school of Maurice, covers 
 and comprehends the Atonement as the greater 
 includes the less. 
 
 Undoubtedly the Incarnation has this larger 
 reach, if by the Atonement we understand, as the 
 Evangelicals of fifty years ago seem to have done, 
 only the sacrifice upon the cross, only the recon- 
 ciliatory act. But if, as I have ventured to sug- 
 gest, the true conception of the Atonement is 
 that which sees in it the reconciliation of all that 
 is discordant in the universe of God, it will fol- 
 low that instead of speaking of the Atonement 
 as subsidiary to the Incarnation, our wiser course 
 would be to afiirm that the Word was made flesh 
 and dwelt among us in order that, in the ful- 
 ness of times, God might reconcile all things to 
 Himself. 
 
 I proceed to state, in fewest possible words, 
 some of the difficulties the modern mind en- 
 counters in the doctrine of the Atonement, and 
 
A C0S3nC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT. 73 
 
 to set over against them the special reasons why, 
 in spite of the difficulties, the doctrine ought to 
 have given to it, in our teaching and preaching, 
 greater prominence than of late years it has en- 
 joyed. 
 
 The difficulties may be classified as ethical, 
 sentimental and historical. 
 
 The ethical difficulty finds utterance in the 
 familiar question. How can the sufferings of an 
 innocent being in any sense pay the penalty of 
 another's guilt ? This ought to be met by clearly 
 marking the distinction between bearing the 
 penalty and bearing the burden of the world's 
 sin. The penalty He did not bear, the burden He 
 did. Moreover, we are to remember that He 
 suffered in two capacities : on the one hand as 
 representing the Father, on the other hand as 
 representing the family. We are habituated to 
 the use of the word " vicarious " in connection with 
 the Atonement, but have we duly weighed this 
 thought, that Christ is vicar of God as well as 
 vicar of Man ? Vicariously He suffered for us 
 through the keen sense of shame whereby the in- 
 nocent member of a dishonored household bears 
 the burden of his brethren's fault; but vicari- 
 ously also He suffered in behalf of God that He 
 might give us the supreme proof of love. This 
 is not Patripassian doctrine ; it is the truth which 
 the Patripassianist misstates. 
 
 The sentimental difficulty is felt by those to 
 
74 A COSMIC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT. 
 
 whom any recognition of a tragic and awful ele- 
 ment in religion is distasteful. They prefer a 
 Saviour who comes by water only to one who 
 comes by water and blood. The answer to this 
 is, that say what you will, and do what you 
 will, human life is tragic, that this is not a rose- 
 water world, that song-birds and rainbows are far 
 from exhausting the imagery of nature, and that 
 a religion, in order to meet the deeper needs of 
 the human soul, must recognize the mystery of 
 pain, must tune at least a portion of its music in 
 the minor key. 
 
 The historical difficult}^ is by far the most 
 formidable of all. Assuming the development of 
 man to have started from some form of brute 
 life, the anthropologist insists, and with logical 
 cogency, that for a creature so originated educa- 
 tion rather than reconciliation is the one thing 
 needful. To which the answer is, that the last 
 word on evolution has not been spoken and is not 
 likely to be spoken for a long while to come. 
 Were it to be proved, as certainly it has not yet 
 been proved, that the evolution of man had been 
 an unbroken evolution from zero, it would have 
 to be conceded that in such a process atonement 
 could have had no place. But what if the evolu- 
 tion of man on earth began, not with zero, but at 
 some point reached by the way of a previous dev- 
 olution? In other words, what if the begin- 
 nings of the Atonement had their rise in times 
 
A COSMIC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT. 75 
 
 and amid scenes of which we know by record or 
 by tradition absolutely nothing ? 
 
 Over against the difficulties, set now the strong 
 points of the doctrine of the Atonement. 
 
 In the first place, it stands for the truth, to 
 which I just made reference, that there is that in 
 God which answers to what, among ourselves, 
 we call " the heart." The human mind is at 
 present deeply engrossed in the study of physical 
 phenomena. The laws that concern mass and 
 force and structure are studied with a diligence 
 unprecedented. But natural science has as little 
 power to answer as it has permanently to divest 
 of interest the question. Does God love us ? It 
 is the high function of the naturalist to report 
 to us the methods of the Divine intellect, but 
 what we really most desire to know about God 
 is — Has He or has He not a heart ? As a matter 
 of fact, no doctrine has ever been so potent to 
 persuade men of the reality and of the fervency 
 of the love of God as the Christian doctrine of 
 the Atonement. Yes, fervency, for it may well 
 reconcile us to the breakdown of some of the old 
 teleological arguments, if we consider that, after 
 all, the God of Paley and of the Bridgewater 
 Treatises was only, at best, " the benevolent 
 Deity," whose proper shrine is the turf-altar, and 
 whose only eucharist that of the vineyard and 
 the harvest-field. This was not enough. 
 
 There is in the heart of man the longing 
 
76 A COSMIC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT. 
 
 for a sort of love towards God and from God, 
 wholly beyond that natural affection which rain 
 from heaven and fruitful seasons evidence on the 
 one side and have power to inspire on the other. 
 There is in us a reaching after the love which 
 " many waters cannot quench." This we find not 
 "in flower, or star, or insect's wing," or any- 
 where, until we come into the hallowed area 
 swept by the light from the cross. None save 
 Christians, and of them none, thus far, save the 
 elect few, have ever loved God passionately. 
 Only the Christian doctrine of the Atonement 
 can beget a Wesley or a Faber, a St. Catharine 
 or a St. Theresa. 
 
 Again the doctrine of the Atonement may be 
 said to deify unselfishness. 
 
 The schoolmen used to distinguish between 
 efficient causes, formal causes, and final causes ; 
 but it is most noteworthy that in the sacrifice 
 which lies at the heart of the Atonement these 
 three agree in one — unselfishness. See if this be 
 not true. 
 
 By an ** efficient cause " we understand the 
 force that brings any given result to pass, the 
 spring and fount from which a consequence has 
 flowed. What is the efficient cause in the Atone- 
 ment ? Listen to the voice of Jesus Christ : 
 
 "God so loved the world that He gave His 
 only -begotten Son " — unselfishness. 
 
 By a "formal cause" we understand that 
 
A COSMIC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT, 77 
 
 which makes a thing what it is, differencing it 
 from all things else — in a word, its law of being. 
 What is the formal cause in the Atonement? 
 Hear again the authoritative words of Christ 
 enunciating the law of sacrifice : 
 
 " Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground 
 and die, it abideth alone, but, if it die, it bringeth 
 forth much fruit " — unselfishness. 
 
 By a " final cause " we understand the end or 
 ultimate purpose for the sake of which a thing is 
 done or suffered — in a word, the object to be 
 gained. What is the final cause in the Atone- 
 ment ? Attend to the thing spoken by Paul : 
 
 " He died for all, that they which live should 
 not henceforth live unto themselves " — unselfish- 
 ness. 
 
 This exhibition of the Atonement as a process 
 which, having its rise in the unselfishness of 
 God, moves onward to the accomplishment of 
 unselfishment in every creature of God, leads me 
 to speak, last of all, of the dignity which the 
 doctrine imparts to the life of man upon this 
 planet by giving it dramatic oneness. Alone 
 among sacred books, the Bible supplies us with 
 the data for a rational and coherent philosophy 
 of history. 
 
 Studied from the standpoint of the cross, the 
 drama of human life, with its store of struggle, 
 sorrow, guilt, defeat and victory, is seen to have 
 design, an ordered movement, an assured result. 
 
78 A COSMIC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT. 
 
 To the non-Christian thinker, history is more 
 like the endless fairy-tale which one child tells 
 another in the twilight, an incoherent, rambling 
 narrative, which might be carried on forever and 
 not be finished, or broken off short and not be 
 spoiled. 
 
 How much more august, and for that very 
 reason how much more probable, the Christian 
 statement of the case ! Earth is the stage ; to 
 the nations have been assigned their parts ; the 
 action centres in a hero whose name is Son of 
 Man, while from the overhanging edges of the 
 world looks down the cloud of witnesses. And 
 so " the riddle of the painful earth " is read. 
 
Y. 
 
 THE STYLE AND TEMPEE OF THE BOOK 
 OF COMMOJST PRAYER. 
 
THE STYLE AND TEMPEE OF THE BOOK OF 
 COMMON PEAYER. 
 
 It is much to be deplored that eulogists of the 
 Book of Common Prayer are, as a rule, so indis- 
 criminate in their praise. To read some of the 
 encomiums upon our " incomparable liturgy," one 
 might almost infer that the doctrine of verbal 
 inspiration, driven from biblical precincts, had 
 taken up its abode in the Anglican formularies 
 of worship. 
 
 Of course there are inequalities of style in the 
 Prayer Book, and divers varying grades of liter- 
 ary excellence. What student acquainted with 
 the history of the book could expect to find 
 things otherwise ? As well go through the Pitti 
 and the UflHzi affirming that all the Eaphaels hap- 
 pened upon possessed one and the same artistic 
 value simply because signed by the same hand ; 
 as well insist that " The Surgeon's Daughter " 
 was as good a novel as " Ivanhoe," or " Troilus 
 and Cressida " as great a play as " Hamlet," or 
 " The May Queen " as fine a poem as the " Ode 
 on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," as try 
 to make it out that in point of loftiness, dignity, 
 
 81 
 
82 THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. 
 
 and fervor all portions of the Common Prayer 
 are of a piece. The General Exhortation and 
 the General Confession, for instance, stand next 
 to each other in the Offices of Morning and 
 Evening Prayer; they are so near that they 
 actually touch ; yet is the one as far removed 
 from the other in style-value as copper is from 
 gold. 
 
 The notes of the style of the Common Prayer 
 are three, — simplicity, majesty, and tenderness. 
 Of course I do not mean that we everywhere 
 find these characteristics conjoined ; it is not to 
 be expected or desired that we should ; all I say 
 is that they are noticeable features when we look 
 at the book as a whole with a view to appraising 
 its value and fixing its place. The simplicity is 
 almost everywhere present; the majesty comes 
 out whenever it is a question of addressing the 
 Throne ; the tenderness reveals itself in all that 
 is said of God's disposition towards the penitent 
 soul, and in every reference to the sorrows and 
 calamities of the mortal lot. 
 
 The simplicity of the language may be ac- 
 counted for on more grounds than one. A chief 
 reason for putting forth the book at all had been 
 the demand for a worship which the common 
 people could understand. As in the case of the 
 translated Bible, the object was to get as far 
 away from the Latin tongue as possible. This 
 explains, perhaps, the marked contrast as respects 
 
THE BOOK OF COMMON PRATER. 83 
 
 the proportion of Saxon to Latin derivatives, be- 
 tween the Bible and Prayer Book on the one 
 hand, and on the other not a few of the master- 
 pieces of English letters produced at the same 
 period. The secular authors, even though wri- 
 ting English, were not wholly loath to have the 
 gold thread of their latinity reveal itself pretty 
 freely in the texture of their homespun; but 
 Tyndale and Cranmer had another aim in view 
 altogether, being more anxious that the plough- 
 boy should understand them than that the ear of 
 the university don should detect nothing amiss. 
 Take as an illustration the following prayer from 
 the Matins of Edward the Sixth's First Book. I 
 have chosen it almost at random : — 
 
 " O Lord, our heavenly Father, Almighty and 
 everlasting God, which hast safely brought us to 
 the beginning of this day ; defend us in the 
 same with Thy mighty power ; and grant that 
 this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any 
 kind of danger ; but that all our doings may be 
 ordered by Thy governance to do always that is 
 righteous in Thy sight, through Jesus Christ our 
 Lord." 
 
 Here out of seventy-one words, only three — 
 namely, *' defend," ''ordered," and " governance " 
 — are Latin derivatives. It is probable that an 
 analysis of the whole book would show a similar 
 ratio. 
 
 Another guarantee of simplicity was supplied 
 
84 THE BOOK OF COMMON PBAYEB. 
 
 by the healthy realism characteristic even of 
 those corrupt forms of devotion which Cranmer 
 and his colleagues had before them as working 
 models in their task of reconstruction. Super- 
 stitious as many of the old formularies were, they 
 could not be charged with indifference to things 
 in the concrete. Hence we find throughout the 
 Book of Common Prayer a careful avoidance of 
 figurative speech, and a jealous clinging to what 
 is substantive and real. An exception should be 
 made with respect to such imagery as has the 
 sanction of the Bible writers, — though even this 
 is very sparingly employed ; but of metaphors 
 not Scriptural, there are, in the most ancient and 
 best-beloved portions of the book, very few in- 
 deed. The Litany, which a justly honored and 
 beloved Presbyterian divine, the late learned 
 Dr. Shedd, once told me he regarded as the most 
 wonderful compend of intercessory prayer to be 
 found in the whole range of devotional litera- 
 ture, — the Litany is devoid of figurative language 
 altogether. It might seem, at first, as if this 
 banishment of trope and figure, simile and meta- 
 phor, must involve a costly sacrifice of beauty, — 
 but no, that does not follow. Massiveness has a 
 beauty of its own. The interior of Durham 
 Cathedral is severe, profoundly so ; nothing could 
 be further removed from those tremendous pillars 
 and those solemn Norman arches than the airy 
 grace of the churches which exemplify the deco- 
 
THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. 85 
 
 rated Gothic of a later period ; and yet it never 
 occurs to anybody to speak of Durham as lacking 
 the element of beauty. It is a grave and serious 
 beauty which reveals itself under that high vault, 
 but it is beauty. A liturgy which is to live on, 
 from generation to generation, must possess the 
 sort of beauty which wears. What is fascinating 
 upon occasion does not necessarily meet our every- 
 day need. Eloquent prayers, tense with imagina- 
 tive thought and vibrant, in a good sense, with 
 poetic feeling, are, as a rule, eloquent only for 
 once. Try to repeat them and they pall. The 
 most marvelous burst of eloquence I ever listened 
 to in my life was the extemporaneous prayer 
 made by Phillips Brooks at the Harvard Com- 
 memoration in 1865. Even the splendors of 
 Lowell's Ode paled, for the moment, in the pres- 
 ence of that flame. It was the very utterance for 
 which the great occasion called. But it, or any 
 adaptation or paraphrase of it, would be simply 
 preposterous in a liturgy. You may reply that 
 if this be so, its being so is the condemnation of 
 liturgies. Yes, perhaps so, if the conditions 
 which made that prayer possible could be counted 
 upon to reproduce themselves every Sunday of 
 the fifty-two that punctuate a year, and you were 
 sure of having a poet-orator in every pulpit. 
 
 I spoke of majesty of speech as characterizing 
 more particularly those portions of the Common 
 Prayer in which we are invited to draw near to 
 
86 THE BOOK OF COMMON PBAYEB, 
 
 God for purposes of adoration. I had especially 
 in mind the usage which there obtains, of linking 
 some attribute with the name of Deity in the 
 opening sentence of every prayer, and thus im- 
 parting a certain sublimity to the very act of 
 crossing the threshold of worship. *' O God, who 
 showest to them that are in error the light of Thy 
 truth ; " " O Almighty God, who alone canst order 
 the unruly wills and affections of sinful men ; '^ 
 " O God, who never failest to help and govern 
 those whom Thou dost bring up in Thy steadfast 
 fear and love ; " " O God, who hast prepared for 
 those who love Thee such good things as pass 
 man's understanding," — these are illustrations of 
 what I mean. We shall all of us agree that there 
 is a quiet dignity about this method of approach- 
 ing the Most High in worship which, without 
 argument, commends itself to a reverential mind. 
 But not only in the prayers, — majesty is the distin- 
 guishing mark of the praises as well. The Te 
 Deum is majestic : " We praise Thee, God, we ac- 
 knowledge Thee to be the Lord." The Gloria in 
 excelsis is majestic : " O Lord God, Lamb of God, 
 Son of the Father, that takest away the sins of 
 the world, have mercy upon us." The Ter sanctus 
 is majestic : " Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of 
 Hosts, heaven and earth are full of Thy glor3^ 
 Glory be to Thee, O Lord, Most High." 
 
 The other characteristic named was tender- 
 ness. The tone of the Prayer Book in its ap- 
 
THE BOOK OF C03IM0N PRAYER. 87 
 
 preaches to the human soul is gentle, winning, 
 compassionate. There is nothing anywhere be- 
 tween the covers that even remotely resembles 
 gush. There is no shilly-shallying with the awful 
 fact of sin. In the office for the visitation of the 
 sick there is no suggestion that opiates are a good 
 substitute for a quiet conscience, and in the office 
 for the visitation of prisoners the words addressed 
 to criminals under sentence of death are in re- 
 freshing contrast to the maudlin sentimentalism 
 which, with a strange perversity, too often seeks 
 to divert sympathy from the person wronged and 
 to transfer it to the unrepentant doer of the 
 wrong. For tenderness of this morbid type, the 
 Prayer Book has no indulgence ; but towards all 
 who sorrow, and for all who " suffer according to 
 the will of God," its tone is everywhere gentle, 
 sympathetic, pitiful, compassionate. It not only 
 asks that the merciful Lord will strengthen those 
 who do stand, it pleads with Him to comfort the 
 weak-hearted and to raise up those who fall ; it 
 remembers all who are in danger, necessity, and 
 tribulation, all sick persons and young children, 
 the prisoners and the captives, the fatherless and 
 the widowed, and all who are desolate and op- 
 pressed. Simplicity, majesty, tenderness, — ^yes, 
 these are certainly the features that we should 
 wish to see looking out upon us from a manual of 
 worship, a book purporting to teach us how to 
 pray. 
 
88 THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. 
 
 Having discussed style, we pass next to the 
 more difficult question of doctrine. What is the 
 theology of the Book of Common Prayer? 
 Pray observe that this is a matter quite apart 
 from the Thirty-nine Articles of Keligion. The 
 Thirty-nine Articles bear an important doctrinal 
 relation to the Church of England and to the 
 American Episcopal Church ; but we are not dis- 
 cussing these Churches, we are discussing the 
 Prayer Book, and the Articles are no part of the 
 Prayer Book, they make a book of themselves. 
 The theology of the Prayer Book must be 
 gathered from within its own covers. If we look 
 there to find a system of theology thoroughly 
 well bolted and riveted, we shall look in vain ; 
 but this is by no means an admission that the 
 language of the formularies is that invertebrate 
 and undogmatic thing which some would like to 
 see it made. Far from it ; for not only are the 
 ancient creeds, in one or other of their authenti- 
 cated forms, made a frequent feature of worship, 
 the very prayers themselves are redolent of 
 dogma. And yet it is rare indeed to hear any- 
 body, except an extreme liberal, complain of the 
 dogmatic feature of the Prayer Book worship as 
 a grievance. And why ? Simply because the 
 dogma has been, if I may be allowed to coin a 
 word, devotionalized. In liturgies, as elsewhere, 
 much depends upon the way of putting things. 
 By way of illustration, suppose we take some 
 
THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. 89 
 
 orthodox statement of doctrinal truth and lay 
 alongside of it a devotionalized form of the same 
 thought. We are bent, for example, upon setting 
 up a barrier against the arch-heretic Pelagius and 
 his vicious doctrine of human merit. Yery well, 
 here is one way of doing it, the systematic way : 
 " Albeit that good works, which are the fruits of 
 faith and follow after justification, cannot put 
 away our sins and endure the severity of God's 
 judgment, yet are they pleasing and acceptable 
 to God in Christ; but works done before the 
 grace of Christ and the inspiration of His Spirit 
 are not pleasant to God." This of course throws 
 the mind of the listener into a critical and argu- 
 mentative mood at once ; but attend to the same 
 thought in the attractive form in which it comes 
 wooing us through the lips of prayer on the 
 Fifth Sunday after Easter : " O Lord, from whom 
 all things do come ; grant to us Thy humble 
 servants, that by Thy holy inspiration we may 
 think those things that are good, and by Thy 
 merciful guiding may perform the same, through 
 Jesus Christ, our Lord." 
 
 Most will agree, I think, that the liturgical 
 method of inculcating the truth is, for the ordi- 
 nary lay mind, at any rate ( and the laity are 
 much in the majority ), the more persuasive of 
 the two. I do not for a moment pretend to 
 affirm that the Prayer Book is always equally 
 felicitous in its attempts to clothe the hard 
 
90 THE BOOK OF C03IM0N PRAYER. 
 
 skeleton of dogma with the warm flesh and blood 
 of a personal devotion. There are marked ex- 
 ceptions. The opening invocations of the Litan}^, 
 and the Proper Preface, so-called, for Trinity 
 Sunday in the Communion Office are well-meant 
 endeavors to fasten the Nicene dogma in the 
 affections of the worshippers ; but the same end 
 would have been more effectively served, and the 
 purposes of devotion far better met, by-a few quo- 
 tations from that strangely neglected liturgical 
 treasure-house, the Kevelation of St. John the 
 Divine. There need have been no real fear that 
 the interests of Trinitarianism would suffer. The 
 Prayer Book is Trinitarian through and through, 
 warp and woof. You would have to put it 
 under axes and hammers, as was once done in 
 Boston, to get the Trinitarianism out of it. 
 
 Again, the theology of the Prayer Book is 
 preeminently a biblical as contrasted with a 
 systematic theology. In saying this I do not 
 mean to assert that the Prayer Book is always 
 true to the teachings of Holy Scripture ( though 
 personally I believe it so to be), for that, indeed, 
 would seem too much like begging the question ; 
 but what I mean is that the Prayer Book ever 
 shows itself more solicitous that its utterances 
 shall square with the utterances of the proph- 
 ets, the apostles, and our Lord Jesus Christ 
 than that they should be absolutely con- 
 sistent in their relations to one another. In a 
 
THE BOOK OF COMMON PBAYEB. 91 
 
 " system," whether of theology or of philosophy, 
 the great point is to avoid self-contradiction. 
 All things must hang together logically ; there 
 must be no broken link in the coat of mail, no 
 gap between gorget and cuirass where-through 
 the point of sword or lance may pierce. But the 
 Bible writers do not seem to have felt this sort 
 of anxiety. First they stated one truth, and 
 then they stated another ; and the listener was 
 left, (notably in the case of the Sermon on the 
 Mount, the most divine of all discourses upon 
 ethics,) to discover for himself the articulation of 
 the truths enunciated. If they seemed to him 
 contradictory, so much the worse for him. 
 
 I have already once referred to the doctrine of 
 merit by way of illustration ; let it again serve 
 us as a case in point. What a very Arminian 
 sound, to speak theologically, has the following 
 sentence from the Apocrypha which the Prayer 
 Book orders to be read at the Offertory, or Alms- 
 gathering: "Be merciful after thy power, if 
 thou hast much give plenteously, if thou hast 
 little do thy diligence gladly to give of that 
 little, for so gatherest thou thyself a good re- 
 ward." Here there seems to be a very evident 
 eye to some recompense for our deserts. On the 
 other hand, Calvin himself would have been sat- 
 isfied with the predestinarian import of a petition 
 which occurs in the very same office, later on, 
 where the order of request is that the suppliants 
 
92 THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. 
 
 may be given grace to do such good works as 
 have been '' prepared " for them " to walk in." 
 
 Another striking instance of the Prayer Book's 
 utter indifference to logical consistency, when it 
 is a question of faithfully reflecting the teach- 
 ings of Holy Scripture, is afforded by its escha- 
 tology. With respect to the great central verity 
 of the resurrection to eternal life, there is no un- 
 certain sound ; but as to lesser points, and es- 
 pecially as to the temporal relations between 
 death and the judgment, we find in the Prayer 
 Book the same ambiguity that perplexes us in the 
 New Testament. How much better this than an 
 attempt to be wise above what is revealed ! 
 
 It remains to say something about the sacra- 
 mental aspects of the theology of the Common 
 Prayer. It is here that we come into closest con- 
 tact with that great doctrinal quarrel which un- 
 derlay the whole sixteenth century movement. 
 On its political side, the Eeformation was a pro- 
 test against absolutism centred at Kome ; on 
 its doctrinal side, it was a protest against an 
 overstrained and exaggerated sacramental system, 
 or, as Froude bluntly puts it, an assertion on the 
 part of the laity of their own intrinsic spiritual 
 rights. 
 
 The attitude of the Prayer Book towards 
 Roman error under this head is not so much po- 
 lemical as it is independent and self-respecting. 
 Those were not the days when Anglicans waited 
 
THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, 93 
 
 with bated breath to hear what Kome might have 
 to say as to the validity of their orders. The 
 men who framed the Prayer Book had a mind of 
 their own, and did not think it necessary to cross 
 the mountains to search out what was Catholic and 
 primitive. It is true that a slight panicky feel- 
 ing betrays itself in the famous suffrage of King 
 Edward's Litany, "From the tyranny of the 
 Bishop of Eome and all his detestable enormities, 
 Good Lord deliver us " ; but this is offset by the 
 courage and good sense which Elizabeth showed 
 in expunging the supersensitive clause while as 
 yet the embers of the fires which her sister had 
 kindled at Smithfield were scarcely cold. 
 
 The unquestioned prominence which the Book 
 of Common Prayer assigns to sacramental doc- 
 trine and sacramental practice is not adequately 
 explained by the hypothesis of a sort of half-way 
 covenant with Kome. This is a method of deal- 
 ing with the fact more popular than profound. 
 Journalists and litterateurs may be pardoned for 
 taking that view, but serious-minded theologians 
 will scarcely be content with it. The true expla- 
 nation of the emphasis that the Prayer Book lays 
 upon sacramental obligation and sacramental 
 privilege is to be found in a conviction towards 
 which many independent lines of present-day 
 thought converge ; namely, the conviction that 
 religion is, after all, far more an affair of per- 
 sonal allegiance and personal intercourse than 
 
94 THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, 
 
 it is the acceptance of a syllabus of sacred truths, 
 however well authenticated or accurately dove- 
 tailed. St. Paul's aspiration was not " that I 
 may know about Him," it was " that I may know 
 Him." 
 
 It might seem to be expecting a great deal of 
 a Church to ask it to retain within its confines 
 two such contrasted and apparently irreconcil- 
 able minds as Pusey and Maurice. Yet each of 
 these two men is found exalting to a very lofty 
 place in his religious system the sacrament of the 
 body and blood of Christ. What worthier ex- 
 planation can we frame for the occurrence of so 
 unlooked-for a truce between hostile tempera- 
 ments than to suppose that both men have dis- 
 covered the emptiness of mere intellectuality in 
 religion, and, weary of what one of them was so 
 fond of stigmatizing as " a Gospel of notions," 
 are fleeing, hungry and thirsty, to the presence 
 of the personal, the true, the living Christ. 
 
 The truth is, that so far from carrying any 
 taint of Eoman error, the Prayer Book Office for 
 the Holy Communion is probably, of all the for- 
 mularies which the book contains, the one least 
 obnoxious to such a charge. The doctrine of the 
 Eucharist was known to be the critical point in 
 the Eeformation's line of defense, and it was 
 guarded with a corresponding jealousy. That 
 the Prayer Book Office still retains this bulwark 
 character is sufficiently evinced by the fact that 
 
TEE BOOK OF COMMON PBAYEB. 95 
 
 those who seek to make it do duty as High Mass 
 are compelled to mutilate and dislocate it before 
 it can be forced to lend itself to their questiona- 
 ble purpose. 
 
 I have spoken of the history and of the char- 
 acteristics of the Prayer Book ; bear with me a 
 little longer until I shall have said a few words 
 about its possibilities in years to come. 
 
 I hold the Common Prayer to be the common 
 property of the whole English-speaking race. It 
 was originally promulgated with the intention 
 of its being that. By what disabling statute 
 or repealing clause, I should like to ask, has 
 right of ownership been since limited to any 
 narrower constituency? There are, to be sure, 
 certain corporate bodies that hold the book in 
 trust, as it were, for the several nationalities into 
 which the Englishry of the sixteenth century 
 has, under God's providence, wonderfully devel- 
 oped, — there is a standard edition according to 
 the use of England, another according to the 
 use of Ireland, and another according to the 
 use of the United States ; but on the book's 
 title-page, high up above these particulars of 
 lesser moment, stands the generous and inclusive 
 superscription, " The Book of Common Prayer, 
 and Administration of the Sacraments and other 
 Rites and Ceremonies of the Church." What 
 Church ? England's Church ? Ireland's Church ? 
 No ; — the Holy Catholic Church, the Congrega- 
 
98 THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. 
 
 tion of Faithful Men, the Body of all those who 
 have been baptized into the Holy Name. Do 
 not imagine that I am about to close a cool sur- 
 vey with a perfervid rhapsody. I have no ex- 
 travagant expectations for the future of the 
 Prayer Book in this country, though in common 
 with many others I entertain some, perhaps not 
 wholly unreasonable hopes. In the light of the 
 post-Keformation history, covering now almost 
 four centuries, it does not seem likely that litur- 
 gical worship will ever again become universal 
 throughout Christendom, least of all that it will 
 do so in a country like this. If the Church to 
 which an eminent Presbyterian divine once gave 
 the felicitous title of '' The United Church of the 
 United States " ever grows into reality, the prob- 
 ability is that we shall see within its borders 
 public worship conducted with high ritual, with 
 low ritual, and with no ritual, by liturgy or by 
 directory, according to the needs, demands, and 
 aptitudes of particular communities. 
 
 The Church of England is the only national 
 Church in Christendom that ever undertook to 
 enforce absolute uniformity in public worship, 
 and England's attempt has been a conspicuous 
 failure. Ritualists and Evangelicals succeed in 
 making one and the same liturgy speak in very 
 different tones ; while non-conformity, standing 
 beyond the pale altogether, contrives to say its 
 prayers without the help of any book at all, and 
 
THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. 97 
 
 yet keeps up, strange to say, a fair show of good 
 works. 
 
 But let that pass. What I am seeking to 
 emphasize in these closing words is the common 
 and undivided interest which all English-speak- 
 ing Christians already possess in the ancient 
 Common Prayer if they have a mind to claim it. 
 There are no copyright restrictions hedging the 
 book ; no ecclesiastical treasury derives a royalty 
 from its sale. Why should not congregations of 
 whatever name that feel the need of a liturgy 
 take it and use it, or so much of it as they care 
 to use, instead of setting committees at work 
 compiling formularies which after all would have 
 to shine mostly by borrowed light? Scruples 
 about the ordination service need not be an 
 obstacle ; for no more than the Thirty-nine Arti- 
 cles is the Ordinal a part of the Prayer Book. 
 The Prayer Book proper ends with the Psalms of 
 David, as a glance at its table of contents will 
 show. And these are the words with which it 
 ends : " Let everything that hath breath praise 
 the Lord." 
 
VI. 
 
 HOW THE EPISCOPAL CHUKCH IS 
 OEGANIZED. 
 
YL 
 
 HOW THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IS ORGANIZED. 
 
 When the little groups of Church of England 
 men scattered along the Atlantic seaboard under- 
 took, at the close of the war that had severed 
 them from the mother-country, to gather up such 
 fragments of organization as remained, it was 
 not so much zeal for *' autonomy " that impelled 
 them as it was the simple wish to keep alive the 
 old ideals of character and worship to which by 
 education they were attached. They were not 
 in very buoyant spirits and had few corporate 
 hopes. Autonomy was forced upon them. They 
 accepted it as one of the by-products of the war. 
 The severance of the political tie that had 
 bound the colonies to the British Crown, in- 
 volved, or was held to involve, a like breakage 
 of the thread which through the Bishop of 
 London had given them their rather tenuous 
 connection with the English Church. Action of 
 some sort they were driven to ; it was swim or 
 sink. Among the leaders of the day were two 
 men, strikingly contrasted in physique, in tem- 
 perament and in opinions; William White of 
 Pennsylvania and Samuel Seabury of Connecti- 
 
 101 
 
102 HOW THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IS ORGANIZED. 
 
 cut ; the one a latitudinarian in theology and a 
 republican in politics, the other a sturdy high- 
 churchman, more of the Caroline than of the 
 Georgian type, who, to the day of his death, 
 made no secret of his devotion to the "lost 
 cause." To these two minds was mainly due, 
 under God, the shaping of so much of the Eccle- 
 siastical policy of the new-born Commonwealth 
 as concerned the Anglican portion of its people. 
 It was a most suggestive blending of influences 
 and, as the event has proven, a most healthful. 
 Seabury looked out for hierarchical rights and 
 sacramental orthodoxy. White saw to it that 
 the mechanism of the Church, on its legislative 
 and disciplinary side, should be in reasonable 
 harmony with the newly established civil order. 
 The fifth paragraph of the Preface to the Prayer 
 Book (which it was one of the first acts of the 
 nascent Church to revise and to set forth) pic- 
 tures the situation perfectly, even if in rather 
 clumsy English, — " When, in the course of Di- 
 vine Providence, these American States became 
 independent with respect to civil government, 
 their ecclesiastical independence was necessarily 
 included ; and the difl^erent religious denomina- 
 tions of Christians in these States were left at 
 full and equal liberty to model and organize 
 their respective Churches and forms of worship 
 and discipline, in such manner as they might 
 judge most convenient for their future pros- 
 
HOW THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IS OBQANIZED. 103 
 
 perity; consistently with the constitution and 
 laws of their country." 
 
 About the same time with their adapted 
 Prayer Book, the fathers of the American Epis- 
 copal Church, set forth a written Constitution, 
 embodying such first principles as they con- 
 sidered essential to the right ordering of ecclesi- 
 astical life. Later still, a certain quasi sanction, 
 the force of which has ever since been in dispute, 
 was given to the Anglican Articles of Eeligion, 
 their number having been first reduced from 
 XXXIX to XXXYIII and certain clauses, sup- 
 posed to be inconsistent with democratic condi- 
 tions, expunged. The Articles, therefore, may 
 be dismissed from consideration as having little 
 to do with autonomy. The real stress falls on 
 the Constitution. 
 
 Virtually this document, the Constitution, car- 
 ries with it the Prayer Book as well, since in its 
 eighth Article the Church's formularies of wor- 
 ship are safeguarded with the utmost care. 
 Whoever, then, would intelligently study Ameri- 
 can ecclesiastical autonomy should take for his 
 manual the Constitution of 1789, as the same has 
 been, from time to time, amended and made 
 operant, through what Congress calls "appro- 
 priate legislation," in the shape of canons. 
 
 The limits prescribed for this paper shut out 
 all historical data, save such as are absolutely 
 essential to a right understanding of the way in 
 
104 HOW THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IS ORGANIZED, 
 
 which autonomy works. I have been asked, and 
 compliance is no hardship, to combine, if possible, 
 a minimum of theory, with a maximum of facts. 
 It is quite possible ; and I proceed. 
 
 I. Units of organization, — The units of organ- 
 ization under autonomy are three in number — (a) 
 the parish, or individual cure ; (b) the diocese, or 
 group of parochial cures, presided over by a 
 bishop, and (c) the national church, made up 
 of an aggregation of all the dioceses and mis- 
 sionary jurisdictions included within the geo- 
 graphical limits of the United States. 
 
 The governing and legislative powers of these 
 several ecclesiastical entities are as follows : (a) in 
 the case of the parish, the rector, wardens and 
 vestrymen, a body which numbers, in all, ten or 
 twelve persons, and meets as often as it sees fit ; 
 (b) in the case of the diocese, the bishop and the 
 Diocesan Convention, which last meets annually, 
 for a session of two or three days, and varies in 
 size according to the number of parishes repre- 
 sented; (c) in the case of the national church, 
 the General Convention, a body which meets tri- 
 ennially, for a session of three weeks, and legis- 
 lates, within the limits of the Constitution, for 
 the whole church. The General Convention is 
 made up of two houses ; a House of Bishops, in 
 which every bishop has a seat, and a vote ; and a 
 House of Clerical and Lay Deputies, in which 
 every diocese is entitled to representation by not 
 
HOW THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IS OBOANIZED. 105 
 
 more than four clergymen and four laymen. 
 Under this arrangement, the bishops hold in 
 virtue of their order, while the clerical and lay 
 deputies continue in office only as they secure, or 
 fail to secure, reelection by the dioceses from 
 which they are sent. The will of the diocese in 
 this regard is expressed through its Convention 
 which, as the triennial interval draws towards its 
 close, determines who shall represent it in the 
 larger synod. 
 
 An important factor in diocesan life is the 
 body known as the Standing Committee. This 
 consists of six or eight members and is chosen 
 annually by the Diocesan Convention. In all but 
 two of the dioceses (Connecticut and Maryland) 
 the Standing Committee is composed of clergy- 
 men and laymen in equal numbers. In the two 
 dioceses named, the committee is wholly clerical. 
 The Standing Committee is a council of advice to 
 the bishop ; it passes judgment on the testimon- 
 ials of fitness presented by candidates for holy 
 orders; and, in the case of elections of bishops 
 that take place when the General Convention is 
 not in session, or is not presently to convene, it 
 is the mouthpiece of the diocese as respects 
 approval or disapproval of the sister dioceses' 
 choice. Without the consent of the major num- 
 ber of the dioceses no bishop can be lawfully 
 consecrated. An increasing number of church- 
 men complain of this last requirement as a hard- 
 
106 HOW THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IS ORGANIZED. 
 
 ship, and use it as an argument for a " provincial 
 system." 
 
 II. Metes and hoii7ids. — In the case of the 
 l^ational - Church, there is no boundary question 
 to cause controversy ; the Church's area is con- 
 terminous with that of the Eepublic. Diocesan 
 lines were originally identical with State lines, 
 Virginia constituting one Episcopal jurisdiction, 
 Maryland another, Pennsylvania another, and so 
 on; but, as the Church increased in numbers, 
 this simple arrangement was outgrown, and there 
 are now in the single State of New York no 
 fewer than five dioceses, with the prospect of 
 more to come in the near future. The method of 
 organizing and setting off new dioceses is pre- 
 scribed by the Constitution. The lines of a 
 diocese usually coincide with those of some con- 
 geries of counties, and when once agreed upon 
 are as fixed and definite as it is possible to make 
 them. It is otherwise with the parish. Theoretic- 
 ally the parish, like the diocese, is a geographical 
 entity ; really and in fact it is only a geographical 
 expression. I know of only one large city in the 
 Union that possesses carefully drawn parish bounds 
 and lives up to them, — the city of Washington. 
 In other cities a parish means, to all intents and 
 purposes, the people who habitually frequent and 
 help to maintain a particular place of worship. 
 Sometimes this collection of people is the purely 
 personal following of a popular preacher, some- 
 
HOW THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IS ORGANIZED. 107 
 
 times it is held together by the more reputable 
 bond of historical associations, as for example in 
 the case of Trinity Church, New York; St. 
 Paul's, Baltimore, and Christ Church, Phila- 
 delphia ; but whatever the secret of the cohesive 
 power that binds the parishes into oneness it cer- 
 tainly is something other than the fact that they 
 all of them live within specified territorial limits. 
 In the rural districts, the theory is that if there 
 be, in a town or village, only one Episcopal 
 church, the whole area of such town or village 
 constitutes the rector's parish. This theory is 
 effective as against clerical intrusions, making it 
 easy for a country parson to inhibit all invaders 
 of his territory ; but it sometimes gives occasions 
 to droll misunderstandings between zealous young 
 rectors and the townspeople, who are theoretic- 
 ally their "parishioners." A clergyman of my 
 acquaintance having undertaken to visit all the 
 families resident in his village on the hypothesis 
 that to him, as the duly appointed priest, they all 
 belonged, was discouraged to see confronting 
 him, when his knock was answered by one of the 
 cottagers, a door-mat with this inscription skil- 
 fully inwrought, — " We are Baptists." No doubt, 
 however, despite such occasional acerbities, much 
 good often comes of the country clergyman's fos- 
 tering the notion that all the people of the town 
 or village have such lot and part in him as the ten 
 tribes claimed in David. The theory cannot, for 
 
108 HOW THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IS ORGANIZED. 
 
 obvious reasons, be as successfully worked in 
 America, as it can be in England, where it has law 
 back of it, but the mere attempt to work it does 
 good by suggesting that the territorial parish is 
 the thing that should be, even though the con- 
 gregational parish be the thing that is. 
 
 III. Qualifications of Voters. — In the parish, 
 those, as a general rule, are allowed to vote 
 who either own or hire pews, or, if the church 
 be a "free and open" one, statedly contribute 
 through the offertory, or otherwise, towards 
 the maintenance of public worship. In some 
 parishes the right to vote is conceded to all 
 " adherents," in others it is limited to the bap- 
 tized, possibly in some (I cannot speak with 
 certainty) to communicant members of the 
 Church. Only in sporadic cases is "female 
 suffrage " recognized. For the most part, the 
 right to vote is only exercised annually when 
 the wardens and vestrymen are chosen. 
 These officials constitute a sort of executive com- 
 mittee who are alike a council of advice to the 
 rector and a board of control responsible for the 
 temporalities of the cure. At the annual' meet- 
 ing are also chosen (unless local usage remits 
 the matter to the wardens and vestrymen) those 
 who are to represent the parish in the Diocesan 
 Convention. In the case of a vacancy in the 
 rectorship, usage varies as to the method of fill- 
 ing it ; sometimes the parish-meeting " calls " the 
 
HO W THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IS ORGANIZED. 109 
 
 new minister and fixes his salary, sometimes the 
 wardens and vestrymen do it. In the latter 
 event, care is commonly taken to make sure that 
 the person called is likely to be acceptable to the 
 whole constituency. In the Diocesan Conven- 
 tion the bishop presides, and the clergy and lay 
 representatives sit together constituting one 
 chamber. Actually, however, the body is bi- 
 cameral, since it is always possible to call, at the 
 close of a debate, for " a vote by orders," in 
 which case the clergy vote by themselves, and 
 the laity by themselves, while a concurrence of 
 both orders is essential to an affirmative result. 
 In the General Convention, electoral provisions 
 even more conservative protect things as they 
 are ; for this legislature is actually tri-cameral, 
 each one of the three orders possessing a veto 
 against the other two. When we add to this the 
 further consideration that no single General Con- 
 vention can alter so much as one jot or one tittle 
 of either the Constitution or the Prayer Book, 
 every proposition of change being required to 
 run the gauntlet of two successive Conventions, 
 so as to allow the proposal to seethe in the mind 
 of the Church during a whole triennium, it will 
 be acknowledged that " autonomy " is not such 
 a menace to conservatism as might appear. 
 With respect to eligibility for lay-membership in 
 the House of Deputies, stricter rules apply than 
 in the case of the parochial and diocesan councils. 
 
110 HOW THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IS ORGANIZED. 
 
 No layman may sit as the representative 
 of a diocese, unless he be a communicant mem- 
 ber of the Church. The House of Deputies, as a 
 matter of fact, compares favorably, for intelli- 
 gence and ability, with any senate whether civil 
 or ecclesiastical that convenes in the United 
 States. It is largely composed of professional 
 men of high standing, and shows a judicial tem- 
 per not easily disturbed. To ^'stampede" the 
 house would be an arduous undertaking. Ob- 
 struction, though sometimes practiced, is held to 
 be bad form. 
 
 One criticism often passed upon the legislative 
 methods of the American Episcopal Church has 
 a weight more apparent than real. I refer to 
 the fact that in the General Convention every 
 Diocese has voting power equal to that of every 
 other. There is no proportional representation. 
 In the House of Bishops, the Bishop of IS^o-man's- 
 land, can balance by his ballot the vote of the 
 Bishop of Washington or the Bishop of New 
 York, while in the House of Deputies, the repre- 
 sentatives of three skeleton dioceses can, by the 
 simple device of agreeing to call for " a vote by 
 dioceses and orders," block the wishes of a vast 
 majority of the communicants of the Church. 
 It might naturally be supposed that much harm 
 would flow from such an adjustment of voting 
 powers, but thus far such has not been the case. 
 In the long run, the voices of those best entitled 
 
HOW THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IS OROANIZED. Ill 
 
 to be heard prevail. Moreover if E'o-man's-land 
 happens to possess a particularly able prelate 
 why should the fact he represents only a few 
 sheep in the wilderness deprive him of his just 
 right to exert influence ? 
 
 lY. The Judiciary. — The really weak point 
 in American autonomy may be sought and will 
 be found in its machinery of discipline. The in- 
 ability of an ecclesiastical court, in a country 
 where Church and State have been declared 
 separate, to compel the attendance of witnesses, 
 is a serious bar to the successful administration 
 of justice, and is rapidly forcing the conclusion 
 that in all cases where criminal intent is involved 
 it will be wiser to accept the findings of the civil 
 courts and to let it rest at that. In questions of 
 doctrine and ceremonial, the case is, of course, 
 different, since with these the civil courts have 
 nothing to do, and the summoning of witnesses 
 is more likely to fetch them. As things are, the 
 canons of the several dioceses provide for the 
 establishment of courts of first instance for the 
 trial of ecclesiastical causes. A general canon of 
 the whole Church prescribe the mode of trying a 
 bishop. Another set of jural difiiculties arises 
 out of the non-existence of any court of appeal. 
 Under " autonomy " there is nothing that cor- 
 responds to the United States Supreme Court, no 
 tribunal exists, that is to say, competent and 
 empowered to determine which canons passed by 
 
112 HOW THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IS ORGANIZED, 
 
 the General Convention are constitutional and 
 which are not. To be sure public opinion 
 adjudicates the matter in the end, but suitors 
 grow weary of waiting for so dilatory a judge. 
 Moreover, it does seem to be a real and not a 
 sentimental grievance, that under autonomy as 
 it is, a clergyman may in one diocese be tried and 
 disciplined for some offense or fancied offense 
 against canon or rubric, for which in another 
 diocese, of a different complexion, he would not 
 be so much as indicted. Some hold that all this 
 will be remedied when a "provincial system" 
 shall have been hammered out, other some (per- 
 haps more sensibly) aver that the same beatitude 
 which applies to the country without annals 
 awaits the Church which is destitute of courts. 
 Warned against theorizing, I forbear to express 
 any opinion on the point. 
 
 To sum up this brief and sadly defective expo- 
 sition of the practical workings of a non-estab- 
 lished Anglicanism, I would urge that while 
 there may be much to be said against autonomy 
 there is more to be said for it. Until the King- 
 dom of God shall come, we need not look to find 
 any scheme of ecclesiastical administration flaw- 
 less. It is easy to legislate in such a way as to 
 avoid certain errors of our neighbors, but that is 
 small comfort if, in doing so, we blunder into 
 other difficulties wholly our own. In two con- 
 trasted systems of polity the weak points of the 
 
HOW THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IS ORGANIZED. 113 
 
 one usually lie precisely opposite the strong points 
 of the other. Appoint bishops, and Favoritism ! 
 is the cry ; elect them and the caucus becomes a 
 menace. Insist that lay courts shall try spiritual 
 causes, and you write yourself down an Erastian ; 
 insist that only spiritual courts shall have juris- 
 diction, and you invite the taunt. How shall the 
 grace of Orders qualify a man to weigh evi- 
 dence ? 
 
 Under autonomy we worry along very comfort- 
 ably in America,* agreeing to leave many points 
 open, and recognizing much neutral ground. 
 The tripartite division so often prophesied as 
 sure to happen to the Church of England in the 
 event of disestablishment does not happen to us. 
 High, low and broad we dwell together in unity, 
 comforting ourselves with the reflection that if 
 Cephas, Paul and ApoUos could do it, so can we. 
 
 * This paper, under the title "Autonomy in the United 
 States," originally appeared in "The Church and Reform," 
 a collection of Essays "relating to reform in the government 
 of the Church of England." London, Bemrose and Sons, 
 1902. 
 
VII. 
 
 01^ THE FIEING-LIlSrE OF 
 CHEISTEJSTDOM. 
 
YII. 
 
 ON THE FIEING-LINE OF CHEISTENDOM. 
 
 Half-informed people are under the delusion 
 that interest in foreign missions is declining. 
 They have noticed, perhaps, that this or that mis- 
 sionary society is in debt, or is finding it hard to 
 secure properly equipped workers, and they have 
 drawn the hasty conclusion that under the scourge 
 of ridicule, or because of an eclipse of faith oc- 
 casioned by Biblical criticism, archaeological re- 
 search, study of comparative religion, or what 
 not, the missionary cause is on the very brink 
 of collapse. They were never more mistaken in 
 their lives. This is not the iron, it is the golden 
 age of missions. The view-point from which we 
 study and estimate the work of missions has in- 
 deed shifted, but it has shifted wholly for the 
 better. A larger conception of the end and aim 
 of missionary effort than ever before possessed 
 the mind of Christendom is steadily gaining 
 ground. It has dawned upon us that the unifica- 
 tion of mankind was the great thought that lay 
 behind Christ's " other sheep I have," and Paul's 
 " we both have access ; " and while we are no 
 whit less eager for the conversion of individuals 
 
 117 
 
118 ON THE FIRING-LINE OF CHRISTENDOM. 
 
 than of old, we see plainly that individualism is 
 not the whole of it, but that God is interested 
 and means us to be interested, in peoples as well 
 as in people ; and in replanting with better seed 
 the burned-over tracts, quite as much as in the 
 rescue, here and there, of a brand from the burn- 
 ing. Having, by exploration, at last discovered 
 just how large this tenement-house we call the 
 world really is, and how many families inhabit 
 it, we are waking up to the importance of " tene- 
 ment-house reform," and to so much of our 
 activity in that direction as deals with the more 
 distant rooms and least accessible passage-ways, 
 we give the name of ^' Foreign " Missions. The 
 adjective is a little misleading ; for, all the while, 
 it remains true that the better-lighted and better- 
 swept portions of the building are by no means 
 so well swept or so well lighted that any of the 
 tenants can afford to boast. The whole popula- 
 tion of the house has common interests and com- 
 mon perils. Diphtheria on one floor may pres- 
 ently mean scarlet fever on the next, and, if the 
 healthy families would keep their health, it will 
 be wise for them not to grumble over such bet- 
 terment taxes as are levied for the good of all 
 concerned. 
 
 According to the most trustworthy of attain- 
 able statistics, there are in the world, at the 
 present time, upwards of seven hundred and fifty 
 millions of "heathen." This does not include 
 
ON THE FIRING-LINE OF CHBISTENDOM. 119 
 
 Hebrews and Moslems, for Hebrews and Moslems 
 worship the same God that we do, — namely, the 
 God of Abraham, — though with widely different 
 notions as to his nature, his purposes, and the 
 true way of serving Him. By the " heathen," 
 strictly so named, we mean idolaters and panthe- 
 ists. Among the seven hundred and fifty millions 
 of these, there are laboring to-day about fifty 
 thousand Christian missionaries — men and 
 women. But what are they among so many ? 
 Yery few, it must be confessed — very few, in- 
 deed ; scarcely as many as go to make the stand- 
 ing army of a third-rate power. The question 
 is, Who is using them ? Who has them in his 
 hand ? Whose purpose are they helping to ful- 
 fil ? If God is on their side, they are a majority, 
 however slender their ranks may look to com- 
 fortable critics sitting at home in Bank-of-Eng- 
 land chairs and viewing them afar off. The 
 mistake most people make with respect to the 
 whole matter of foreign missions is that of 
 scanning the thing through a monocle instead of 
 with a field-glass. They take too narrow views 
 altogether, and content themselves with looking 
 a few yards ahead, when they ought to be sweep- 
 ing the horizon. The Christianizing of the 
 world is only another name for the civilizing of 
 the world, and the victory of the Cross is only 
 another name for the reconciliation of mankind. 
 My thesis is this — that God is using the Chris- 
 
120 ON THE FIBING-LINE OF CHRISTENDOM, 
 
 tian nations very much as, in the former time, 
 He used the Jewish people, with an ulterior view 
 to the well-being of the entire race ; and that the 
 evidences of the Divine purpose are to be sought, 
 not only in Holy Scripture, though they are 
 abundant there, but also in post-Christian and 
 contemporary history. When we go to the Bible 
 to find out the real missionary motive and the 
 real missionary purpose, we discover that what 
 lies back of the whole thing is a grand plan of 
 God for knitting all kindreds and families and 
 tongues into one rightly adjusted and well-com- 
 pacted whole, the members of which shall cease 
 to bite and devour one another, as did those 
 " dragons of the prime " which held possession of 
 this planet before man came here, and whose in- 
 stincts and appetites man has in some measure 
 inherited, but, instead of this, shall labor intelli- 
 gently and conscientiously for one another's 
 good. Beneath the surface of the Old Testa- 
 ment this splendid anticipation runs like a 
 smouldering fire, revealing its presence only here 
 and there, and now and then, in psalm or 
 prophecy ; but in the New Testament, and espe- 
 cially in the writings of St. Paul, the prince of 
 missionaries, it blazes forth with an energy noth- 
 ing can repress and a brilliancy nothing can 
 quench. Of all the strange blunders ever made 
 by theologians, perhaps the strangest has been 
 that of interpreting St. Paul as an exclusionist — 
 
ON THE FTBINO-LINE OF CHRISTENDOM. 121 
 
 as one who would have few to be saved, and 
 come to the knowledge of the truth. On the 
 contrary, it was just because his sympathies went 
 out so widely as they did ; just because he was 
 eager to break down partition walls, and to 
 throw the door of God's temple as wide open as 
 he could, — it was just for this that he suffered 
 persecution. The men who hounded Paul to his 
 death belonged to the very same class that had 
 crucified his Master. It was not the officials of 
 the Koman Empire who were his bitterest adver- 
 saries ; it was his own countrymen. They availed 
 themselves, to be sure, of the forms of the Eo- 
 man law, and therefore, every now and then, in 
 the Acts and the Epistles, we catch glimpses of 
 the lictors and the fasces ; but Paul's real 
 enemies, his determined and desperate antago- 
 nists, were his own people. What business had he, 
 they asked, to interest himself in the heathen, — 
 aliens, outsiders, foreigners, barbarians, heretics, 
 dissenters ? And so they persecuted him, liter- 
 ally, from city to city, plotted his capture, 
 planned his death. And yet his grand thought, 
 inspired of God, survived all their machinations, 
 and never was more active as a moving force in 
 human society than it is to-day. For only look 
 and see in what a wonderful manner the Provi- 
 dence of God is opening doors hitherto tight- 
 shut, and making paths where, up till now, the 
 foot of man has never trod ! Look at Africa, 
 
122 ON THE FIRING-LINE OF CHRISTENDOM. 
 
 entered at a score of points by the pioneers, the 
 sappers and miners, of Christendom ! Look at 
 China, reluctantly taking down the bolts and 
 bars that for thousands of years have held her 
 heavy doors fast-shut in the face of the out- 
 sider ! Ah, but, you say, all this is simply the 
 greed and craft of the merchantmen. It is 
 covetousness, not faith, that lies back of this tre- 
 mendous pressure which is forcing the gates of 
 those walled coasts, opening those sealed conti- 
 nents. 
 
 True and not true — true superficially, not true 
 profoundly ! It is quite true that, at present, the 
 emperors and prime ministers and foreign sec- 
 retaries are all for conquest and for trade — for 
 conquest for the sake of trade. When a magnifi- 
 cent harbor on the China coast is seized and 
 occupied because forsooth a few missionaries 
 owning civil allegiance to the power making the 
 seizure have been maltreated, nobody is hood- 
 winked. We all know what it means ; we all see 
 that the Christian Church is being used as a cat's- 
 paw for a purpose, and that purpose one of terri- 
 torial aggrandizement and commerical profit. 
 In fact, this whole business of the protection 
 of missionaries by gunboats and Gatlings is 
 both ludicrous and mortifying. Not by such 
 methods or with such backing did the first apos- 
 tles of the faith essay the conversion of the 
 world. They took their lives in their hands, and 
 
ON THE FIBINQ-LINE OF CHRISTENDOM. 123 
 
 were content that so it should be. But while the 
 Church disowns these naval and military guaran- 
 tees of her safety, and while she joins with the 
 world in quietly smiling at the somewhat noisy 
 tone of her would-be defenders among the kings of 
 the earth, she is not blind to the wonderful op- 
 portunities which commerce and conquest are 
 putting within her reach. " That is not first 
 which is spiritual, but that which is natural " (or, 
 more literally, animal), "and afterwards that 
 which is spiritual." Grant that the motives 
 which are impelling the western nations to the 
 partition of Africa and of China are so question- 
 able that we must needs, if we are candid, assign 
 them to the low level of the natural or the ani- 
 mal,— nevertheless, afterwards cometh the spiri- 
 tual. Trade follows the flag ; yes, but the human 
 heart follows the cross. :^ot seldom, perhaps 
 oftenest, the cross has been earlier upon the 
 ground than the flag. But be that as it may, it 
 is a shame and disgrace to Christendom if any- 
 where it plants the flag and is careless whether 
 the cross be planted by its side or not. Surely 
 a most Christian poet was the man who 
 sang: 
 
 " Fly, happy, happy sails and bear the Press ; 
 Fly, happy with the mission of the Cross, 
 Knit land to land and blowing havenward, 
 With silks and fruits and spices clear of toll, 
 Enrich the markets of the Golden Year." 
 
124 ON THE FIRING-LINE OF CHRISTENDOM. 
 
 So interpreted, the Golden Year becomes only 
 another name for " the acceptable year of the 
 Lord." It may be said, in reply to my plea for 
 missions as a civilizing agency, that in the case of 
 Japan we see an instance of a nation becoming 
 civilized before it has been Christianized. The 
 more intelligent among the Japanese have, we 
 are told, thrown aside their superstitions, given 
 up their old mythology, but without, thus far, 
 putting any religion whatever in the place of 
 what has been discarded. They have ceased to be 
 heathen in their beliefs, without becoming Chris- 
 tian. Yes, but we must give Japan time. ISTo 
 nation can live and flourish, for more than a gen- 
 eration or two, without a religion. Japan will 
 discover this. Just now the leading minds of 
 that country are engrossed with the task of 
 mastering and assimilating the immense amount 
 of new knowledge which has been put within 
 their reach through intercourse with the western 
 peoples — such knowledge, I mean, as can be 
 gathered at universities, in observatories, and 
 schools of applied science. For the present, 
 Japan thinks, just as college-bred India thinks, 
 that this is enough. But give Japan time. 
 It is not so very long ago since we our- 
 selves were finding it difficult not to be a little 
 owerawed, just a bit intimidated, by the threat 
 that modern discovery would presently make 
 Christian believing an impossibility. In the 
 
ON THE FIRING-LINE OF CHRISTENDOM. 125 
 
 sixties and the seventies the assaults upon the 
 stronghold of the faith were frequent and deter- 
 mined. Our religion was put upon the defensive, 
 and, in cultivated society, it required some 
 courage to stand squarely up to what fealty to 
 Chirst demanded. Of late there has been a 
 marked change. It has come to be seen that 
 mere discovery in the range of things natural 
 brings no real message of comfort to the failing 
 heart of man — rather the reverse. The millen- 
 nium of universal happiness, rapturously prophe- 
 sied by the earlier seers of the new order, has 
 been indefinitely postponed. Increase of knowl- 
 edge has, if anything — certainly in the case of 
 the best minds and hearts — brought increase of 
 sorrow, rather than increase of joy ; and men 
 have been reluctantly driven back to the conclu- 
 sion that, if satisfaction for our deepest needs 
 is not to be found in the religion of Jesus Christ, 
 it is to be found nowhere. But Japan has not 
 got so far as this. It has progressed far enough 
 to discern the folly of the old idolatries, and far 
 enough to be able to appreciate the value of the 
 new industrial methods and scientific processes, 
 but not far enough, quite yet, to have learned 
 the utter emptiness, the dreary futility, of 
 agnosticism. By and by, and perhaps before 
 very long (for they are a quick people), the 
 Japanese will learn, what we have been learning 
 during the last twenty years, that material prog- 
 
126 ON THE FIBING-LINE OF CHRISTENDOM, 
 
 ress, unaccompanied by growth in spiritual in- 
 sight, is a questionable blessing, and that unless 
 it can find some ground for doing justly and 
 loving mercy better and firmer than a mere 
 acquaintance with the laws of nature can show, 
 a nation, no matter how well equipped with iron- 
 clads and locomotives, is in a bad way. Japan 
 will find this out, as it has already found out the 
 other and less important points ; and, when that 
 happens, it will be made plain to everybody that 
 that empire is no exception to the rule that civili- 
 zation is dependent upon Chris tianization. Ke- 
 member, it was a Christian nation that first opened 
 Japan. From that opening dates the beginning of 
 the empire's forward movement ; so that, even in 
 this apparently exceptional case, we discern the 
 indirect influence of Christian thought, the un- 
 noticed potency of the cross. ^ 
 
 ' In the preface to a suggestive little book entitled ' ' Bushido: 
 The Soul of Japan, ' ' the author, Dr. Inazo Nitobe, acknowl- 
 edges that he can find, as a Japanese, no better basis for 
 morals than that supplied by chivalry, as this is known and 
 practiced in the Mikado's Empire. He writes : 
 
 ' ' About ten years ago, while spending a few days under the 
 hospitable roof of the distinguished Belgian jurist, the lamented 
 M. de Laveleye, our conversation turned during one of our 
 rambles, to the subject of religion. ' Do you mean to say,' 
 asked the venerable professor, ' that you have no religious in- 
 struction in your schools ? ' On my replying in the negative he 
 suddenly halted in astonishment, and in a voice which I shall 
 not easily forget, he repeated, ' No religion ! How do you im- 
 part moral education ? ' The question stunned me at the time. 
 I could give no ready answer, for the moral precepts I learned 
 in my childhood days, were not given in schools ; and not until 
 I began to analyze the different elements that formed my moral 
 
ON THE FIRING-LINE OF CEBISTENDOM. 127 
 
 To sum up, the world is drawing itself, or 
 rather is being drawn, by the strong grasp of 
 God's compelling purpose, into unity ; and al- 
 though the nations cannot, yet, so much as under- 
 stand one another's speech, they are beginning to 
 realize kinship; back of the many languages 
 they recognize the one blood. It is the glory of 
 foreign missions, so-called, to be contributory to 
 this process by which God is reconciling his 
 world, not only to Himself, but to itself. For- 
 eign missions represent the peaceable side of the 
 movement. They aim at securing " the heritage 
 of the heathen," not by methods of conquest and 
 spoliation, but by persuasion, conversion, trans- 
 formation. While merchants and traders are 
 carrying their doctrines of profit and loss, sup- 
 ply and demand, and while viceroys and com- 
 manders are carrying their schemes for political 
 and territorial exploration, the missionaries are 
 carrying the far more important, even if less 
 keenly appreciated, principles of peace and good- 
 will. And it is high time. Watchful observers, 
 like Mahan, for instance, have noted the point 
 
 notions, did I find that it was Bushido that breathed them into 
 my nostrils. 
 
 ' ' The direct inception of this little book is due to the frequent 
 queries put by my wife as to the reasons why such ideas and 
 customs prevail in Japan. 
 
 " In my attempts to give satisfactory replies to M. de Laveleye 
 and to my wife, I found that without understanding Feudalism 
 and Bushido, the moral ideas of the present Japan are a sealed 
 volume. ' ' 
 
128 ON THE FIRING-LINE OF CEBISTENDOM. 
 
 that the trusteeship of the high explosives 
 which at present rests in the hands of Christen- 
 dom, is gradually ceasing to be our monopoly. 
 Kecent events in the far East, and notably the 
 war between China and Japan, have caused a 
 rude awakening in the minds of Western states- 
 men. It is now perceived that there is nothing 
 to prevent heathendom from coming into posses- 
 sion of those treasures of physical force which it 
 was given to Christendom to discover. It fol- 
 lows that the knowledge of the power of God's 
 works, so significantly given to us in advance of 
 others, will avail us nothing unless we use our 
 advantage righteously. Heathendom outnum- 
 bers Christendom by many millions. Suppose 
 the non-Christian peoples acquire the armament 
 of the Christian peoples without acquiring those 
 principles for which the despised missionaries 
 stand, what then ? Would a subversion of our 
 present-day civilization be, in that event, such a 
 very unlikely thing ? Might there not come 
 upon the vineyards and olive-yards of our self- 
 complacent and somewhat over-secure modern 
 life an overthrow similar to that which buried 
 Europe under a lava-bed of barbarism for cen- 
 turies ? You say that this is a selfish appeal to 
 motives of self-preservation, and that the con- 
 tingency of which I have been speaking is too 
 remote to deserve a moment's consideration. 
 Yery true ; but it all goes to help my purpose. 
 
ON THE FIRING-LINE OF CHRISTENDOM. 129 
 
 which is to bring out into plain sight those 
 grander and more august aspects of foreign mis- 
 sions which are so liable to be neglected and for- 
 gotten, while people are puttering over insignifi- 
 cant questions of receipts and expenditures, 
 which really have nothing to do with the main 
 point. Fire the heart of the Church with a mag- 
 nificent conception of what the conversion of the 
 world to Christ really means, and the Church 
 will give to foreign missions, as it has never 
 given before. 
 
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