-SPIRITUAL RETURN OF CHRIST 
 WITHIN T^HE CHURCH 
 
 RiGHARD DE BARY 
 
 ii;:i;i[|iiii 
 
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 :^i;'i;i;. 
 
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 tibvaxy of t:he trheolo^ical ^tminaxy 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 The Estate of the 
 Rev. John B. Wiedin^rer 
 
 
 
 BV 5082 .D4 1907 
 De Bary, Richard. 
 The spiritual return of 
 Christ within the church 
 
 
 
 
 
 
yy-T^-vjftyV'i-'t-u^ 
 
 ^ 
 
THE SPIRITUAL RETURN OF CHRIST 
 WITHIN THE CHURCH 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ^^ETURN .^ 
 OF CHRIST WITHIN THE 
 CHURCH 
 
 PAPERS ON CHEISTIAN THEISM 
 
 BY RICHARD DE BARY 
 
 CHAPLAIN TO THE EARL OF SHAFTESBURY 
 
 " A crown of righteousness . . . unto 
 all them also who love His appearing." 
 2 Timothy iv. 8. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 K P. BUTTON AND COMPANY 
 
 1907 
 
Printed in Great Britain 
 
PUBLISHER'S NOTE 
 
 The book is an essay, or rather an adventure, in 
 Christian Mysticism bearing marks of close kinship 
 with the Theologia Germanica, but distinguished 
 from it, and still more from the writings of the 
 Spanish Mystics, St John of the Cross and St 
 Theresa, by the scientific basis of its metaphysics. 
 It is, indeed, a translation of the world-process, as 
 revealed by modern science, into the terms of a 
 theistic metaphysic. The laws of this process are, 
 for the author, but the modes of energy of the 
 Eternal Reason ; the sole purpose of that energy is 
 redemptive ; and Redemption means the guidance of 
 the whole movement of material life, by the Spirit or 
 Eternal Reason inherent in it, back to the ultimate 
 Rest in Unity which is the natural mode of the 
 Spiritual. 
 
 The book, then, is an attempt, very rare in modern 
 theology, to establish the vital connection of human 
 experience and the world-process as both of them 
 expressions of the Word or Eternal Reason of God. 
 Though the appeal is made to experience and history, 
 yet Realism is so extended into conceptions of the 
 Spirit World as to meet the Hegelian identification 
 of thought and things. But the treatment is not 
 philosophical, but mystical and religious. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Christian Doctors teach that Heaven is the fulfil- 
 ment of each man's Supreme Desire. As the best 
 minds of the Age are wont to place their Supreme 
 Desire in the life of Communion with Nature and 
 Mankind, with the sanction of the Doctors, it may 
 be prophesied that in the true Paradise, Communion 
 with Nature and Mankind will stand together with 
 the secured possession of God. 
 
 Communion with Nature must in a supreme sense 
 include the assured results from all that great Labour 
 of the adjustment of Man to his Cosmic environment, 
 which it has been the task of the present Scientific 
 and Industrial Age to fulfil. 
 
 If this be true, then the World-Stream itself, with 
 the sum of all its Sciences, Arts, Civilisations, and 
 Cultures, may be thought of as eddying towards 
 some future commingling with the Rivers of Paradise. 
 
 Or it may be said that the Blessed Sight of the 
 World-Ransom is only withheld from longing eyes 
 on account of the greatness of the Ransom's con- 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 taining Heart. The Saints themselves have been 
 accused of narrowness. Christian Communions only 
 too willingly delimit themselves, and are wont to 
 excommunicate one another. But may not all these 
 seif-belittlements of men be but part of their own 
 self-education unto seeing and acknowledging the 
 greatness of the all-containing Heart of God ? 
 
 If this be the case, there is a function to be exer- 
 cised here by the Christian Seer. From Redemption, 
 recognised by Faith, the Christian Prophet must 
 bear witness to the truth that the World-Ransom is 
 fulfilling itself unto Sight and Manifestation. It is 
 his duty to testify to the reality of the inclusion of 
 the World-Process within Redemption. 
 
 The Christian Seer must, then, be an Enthusiast for 
 that Blessed Vision of World-Atonement amid all 
 Social, Industrial, and Religious Conflicts, which 
 would prove itself to be agreeable to God's all- 
 containing Heart. He it is who is the " Theist," the 
 " God-Enthusiast," of whom mention is made in 
 pages that follow. The word " Theism," too, is used 
 throughout for this diviner view of the World-Process, 
 in which naturalness is taken as evidence for divine- 
 ness ; in which every true Artist is seen culling the 
 flowers of Paradise, because he sees Creation merely 
 without disguise. And every true Poet sings of God 
 only ; because beauty of Life is of the one rightful 
 evidence of God ; and every true Scientist is a Moses 
 of the Eternal Sinai of Atoms of Stars. The very 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 scepticism of the Modern World is as its penitential 
 retreat into the wilderness from before God's face. 
 Nature-Love and Nature- Worship are in a sense the 
 baptismal tears which will make hearts clean for a 
 Return to Him. 
 
 The Christian Seer is aided in this reconciling 
 function by the irresistible trend of all Scientific 
 Conceptions towards " Monism," the doctrine of the 
 living and rhythmic intercommunication of all things 
 in the Universe. Monism gives us the right to 
 measure the All by each single Unit out of which the 
 All is synthesised. The "electron" deciphers the 
 thunderstorm ; the multiple electron, called the atom, 
 deciphers Stellar Systems. In like manner may the 
 Christian Theist decipher the purpose of the Universe 
 by the Unit of the fact of Christ. Because each Unit 
 is in the All, therefore this One is in the All ; there- 
 fore the Cosmos itself is a Christly Universe, and a 
 Christ is latent in every particle of its being. 
 
 On the bounds, thus, of all scientific vistas a Divine 
 Majesty hastens again to greet the sight of mortals. 
 Yet no special authorising is now required to 
 announce His "Spiritual Return" to men. For, so 
 interpreted, does not all Nature foretell His Paradise ? 
 and may not every Christian who converses with you 
 be in like manner filled with the ghostly Pentecostal 
 Speech ? 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I 
 
 Theism, the Affirmative View of God and Man 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1. Theism is the Sovereign Affirmative Manner of 
 
 viewing Life ... ... 3 
 
 2. The Theist is the Universal Enthusiast for God . 4 
 
 3. Theism is the Supreme Consecration of our under- 
 
 standing of the Material Universe ... 6 
 
 4. Man's Moment of Failure is God's Moment of Re- 
 
 demption ...... 7 
 
 5. The Theist rejoices in Science as the beginning of 
 
 the Vision of God .... .8 
 
 6. Theism is the Supreme Reasonableness about all 
 
 things on Earth and in Heaven ... 9 
 
 7. By believing in God, the whole Universe comes into, 
 
 and dwells within our Soul ; and we experience in 
 ourselves all History till the end of Time . . 11 
 
 8. Religion is necessarily, absolutely and eternally, con- 
 
 ditioned by Morals ; but it is in itself the posses- 
 sion of the Kingdom of God around us, not merely 
 the way thither . . . . .12 
 
 9. The Kingdom of God is the Christ-like, and hence 
 
 God-like, control and disposition of the Universe . 1 5 
 
Xll 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 10. Christian Moral Theology is the ordering of the p^"^* 
 
 Universe according to the Precepts of Christ ; and 
 is based upon Man's Duty of making the Earth 
 minister to the Fatherliness of God . . 17 
 
 11. Three Social Witnessings of God : — 
 
 (i) Just and Fatherly Economics . . 19 
 
 (2) Social Ethics of Brotherliness . . 20 
 
 (3) Holiness of Exclusive Consecration to 
 
 Christliness, or Love of the Earth . . 21 
 
 PART II 
 
 The Cosmic Vision of Christ 
 
 1. The Spiritual Coming is no great wonder to those 
 
 who know both Christ's sympathy with God's 
 Creation, and hence also the Creation's responding 
 sympathy with Him . . . .25 
 
 2. We too, by union in sympathy with the Universe, 
 
 are prepared to receive the World's Christ . 26 
 
 3. The General Judgment will carry out Christ's Will, 
 
 because Christ, having first obeyed the Will of All, 
 
 is thus empowered to interpret the Whole of Things 27 
 
 4. Theism, summed up in brief, is the Rational Theory 
 
 that Goodness is the one ever-enduring created 
 Substantiality . . . . .28 
 
 5. The Theist delights more in all Science, Study, and 
 
 Investigation than anyone who ever doubted God 29 
 
 6. The intimate revealings of Music to the heart and 
 
 soul prove that the World is spiritual, and that it 
 
 is constructed so as to respond to personahty . 30 
 
COxNTENTS xiii 
 
 7. The evidence for the " Electrical Theory " of the con- i'aok 
 
 stitution of matter suggests how Spirit can control 
 the Material Universe as a mighty instrument of 
 Spiritual Power ..... 33 
 
 8. Our weak and ghostly surmisings of the Good grow 
 
 in time into the solid and real City of God . 34 
 
 9. Monism is the doctrine that in any particle of the 
 
 universe is the potential Everything in the 
 universe. The Theist is a Monist who says that 
 human personality is an essential and immortal 
 reality, and that if Christ was in the world, the 
 world was, and is, and will be, with Christ . 36 
 
 10. We can gather up a kind of essential and true Theo- 
 
 logy by that inner knowledge of the soul and life 
 called Psychology ..... 39 
 
 11. The World of Nature is filled with anticipations, 
 
 expectations, and forebodings of the World of 
 Grace ...... 42 
 
 12. Theism sees in Christ the native or pre-ordained 
 
 centre of Rest in the Sacred Harmony of His 
 Being ...... 43 
 
 13. When we begin to comprehend the place of Christ in 
 
 the world, we find ourselves very close in spirit to 
 
 the Apostles who saw and conversed with Jesus . 44 
 
 14. The Agony in the Garden was the Thought-Ransom 
 
 of the World ...... 45 
 
 15. The Science of Christ is not contrary to the Science 
 
 of the Universe ; for a certain simplification in 
 existing Scientific Conceptions would bring us 
 direct to Christ ..... 47 
 
 16. All which conforms to the Spirit and Likeness of 
 
 Christ is of the New Creation . , .48 
 
 b 2 
 
xiv CONTENTS 
 
 17. Our Soul's memories of the Beloved Dead are real ^^^^ 
 
 Courts and Shrines of the presence of the Dead, 
 and by the Voice of the Son of God the Dead 
 will arise again, not only in Him, but also in their 
 abiding-places in us . . . . .49 
 
 18. Christ's final appearance is in reality predetermined 
 
 by His power of persistence in Humanity, through 
 which great Reverberance He will outlive His 
 enemies and appear again . . . .51 
 
 19. Heaven is closely, and with perfect accuracy, por- 
 
 trayed in the inner pictures we all possess of bliss, 
 though it seems beyond all our imaginings that 
 these should ever be realised . . .52 
 
 20. Theism teaches that, if there be a Communion of 
 
 Saints, then the Beloved Dead will come to us 
 with as complete an invisible reality as the reality 
 of our own souls . • . . • 53 
 
 PART HI 
 
 The Church ; or, the Keeping of the King's 
 Likeness and Impression 
 
 1. The Church is a power which integrates and immor- 
 
 talises man ...... 59 
 
 2. The Church is the Angel or Messenger of the Son 
 
 of God . . . . . .60 
 
 3. The Church selects its Apostles in Christ's name 
 
 from men who faithfully represent their age . 62 
 
 4. Church History is a gradual ordering of the true and 
 
 living Impression of Christ in the Church, until 
 Christ is as plainly manifested as He once was to 
 His Apostles ...... 63 
 
CONTENTS XV 
 
 5 Unless Divine Providence has wholly ceased to be, f^*^* 
 the experience and activities of the Anglican 
 Church are necessarily a token of its segregation 
 by the Holy Ghost for the furtherance of the 
 hidden divine Design of Reunion . . .64 
 
 6. To conquer all, the Christian Saint must, in a sense, 
 
 first himself be subdued by all ... 66 
 
 7. The Churches, by the light of Nature, seem to see 
 
 clearly why they should disagree ; but by the light 
 of Grace the apparent reasons for division will 
 seem the necessary reasons why they should all 
 combine together again . . . .68 
 
 8. Conversions wrought by the Christ-like life of Chris- 
 
 tians are a precious gathering together of mankind 
 in Christ ; but all so-called Conversions from 
 one Communion to another, wrought through 
 Proselytism, are a mere scattering or dissipation 
 of the life of Christianity . . . .70 
 
 9. Church History is a great ordering of the Healing of 
 
 that Blindness of Vision which prevents Mankind 
 from seeing Christ in the Holy Ghost . . 71 
 
 10. The Church is a great and perpetual Covenant of 
 
 Loyalty . . . . . .75 
 
 11. Christ welcomed those who were Sinners by excess 
 
 of Sociability as persons who has misguidedly 
 sought His Kingdom . . . .76 
 
 12. The intense realism in which the Gospel speaks of 
 
 the Kingdom of Heaven . . . ,79 
 
 13. The Church is a great institutional and structural 
 
 acceptance by mankind of the gift and reality of 
 
 the Incarnation of Christ . . . .81 
 
 14. The Bible is deeply inlaid with an inspired Plan of 
 
 the Reunion of all the Spiritual Tribes of Israel 
 
 in a " City," that is, an institutional realisation . 82 
 
xvi CONTENTS 
 
 15. The Story of the finding of Christ in Prophecy is in page 
 
 a certain sense repeated in the history of our 
 comprehending Him . . . . S^ 
 
 16. Students of Christ's Humanity are the reconcilers of 
 
 the Church of Christ . . . ,84 
 
 17. Church Dogma preserves our contact with the New 
 
 Creation ...... 85 
 
 PART IV 
 The Genius of the "To Be" and the Book of Life 
 
 1. The Bible is truly inspired, because it was conceived 
 
 of and written down in the power of that Genius 
 
 of Reality which is the Holy Ghost . . 95 
 
 2. The Bible agrees with the very scheme of numbers 
 
 in which men and history are made ; and therefore 
 narrates and foretells all essential history , . 97 
 
 3. The Bible is the expression of the whole Substance 
 
 of things ; therefore it agrees with the heart of all 
 Science ...... 98 
 
 4. The Bible is not an Incarnation of God in the Flesh, 
 
 but the Birth of the entire Thought of God in the 
 letters and scriptures and individual thoughts of 
 mankind ...... 100 
 
 5. All revealed Dogmas are divine Affirmatives to 
 
 questions asked by the innermost nature and 
 framework of humanity .... 103 
 
 6. The Future is a living reality in so far as all the 
 
 Creation prefigures itself, and the way of life, by a 
 kind of Clairvoyance of its own deeds and char- 
 acter and tendencies. This indwelling of the 
 Future in the Now is a simile of what the Holy 
 Ghost is for God and Man . . . .105 
 
CONTENTS xvii 
 
 7. The Holy Ghost brings the assured presentiment of page 
 
 God's Conquest over Misery, Injustice, Sin and 
 Death, into the midst of all the imperfect strivings 
 of men . . . . . . 106 
 
 8. The Holy Spirit, abiding of Himself in what to us 
 
 is the Future, when He descends from thence to us 
 conforms our hearts to our eternal destinies . 1 10 
 
 9. The Holy Ghost solves the entire Problem and 
 
 Difficulty of the World which besets the Earth's 
 path, and having seen through to the End, is 
 empowered to lead men to all Truth, and conquer 
 the barriers on the Way of Life . . .110 
 
 10. The new Christly fullness of character can only come 
 
 to each one through his sympathies with the whole 
 of Nature and his brotherly compassion with every 
 single life . . . . . .112 
 
 11. The true Christ Lover gains perfect individual In- 
 
 spiration through perfect Submission to God's 
 Laws and Human Institutions . . .114 
 
 12. In the reign of the Holy Ghost, men will sum up all 
 
 the good things of the Past and be clothed anew 
 
 with the Mind of Christ . . . .116 
 
 13. The Kingdom of the Holy Ghost is only delayed, 
 
 awaiting on our perfect obedience to God and His 
 Church . . . . . .119 
 
 14. We can only increase our lives by sacrificing them, 
 
 for by Sacrifice we leave room within us for the 
 indwelling of the Spirit of Christ . . .120 
 
xviii CONTENTS 
 
 PART V 
 Christ, the Mystical Self of Men 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1. The Saints are the Mystical Sons of God . . 125 
 
 2. In St John's Apocalypse the "Parousia," or Last 
 
 Judgment, was rehearsed, and in a sense also 
 individually experienced by the Apostle . .127 
 
 3. Saints who love Nature are the mediums through 
 
 which Christ returns spiritually within Nature . 130 
 
 4. Church History is World-Education in the compre- 
 
 hension of Christ . . . . -131 
 
 5. Conversion is not the Christ-life itself; but it is an 
 
 inner absolution which frees men and suffers them 
 
 to begin to take up their Cross and follow Christ . 133 
 
 6. St Paul's Conversion possesses a Cosmic Realism 
 
 about it which sets it forth as a foreboding of the 
 future Sacred Interchange of Humanity with the 
 Life of Christ . . . . . i34 
 
 7. Sanctity is the one divinely real Art, for by Sanctity 
 
 man himself, and not a piece of wood or stone, is 
 fashioned into the expression of his great Design 
 of the sum of beauty . . . .136 
 
 8. St Francis was a true Doctor of the Truth of the 
 
 Fatherhood of God . . . . .137 
 
 9. The Holy Eucharist is the institutional predetermina- 
 
 tion of the Second Coming of Christ . .138 
 
 10. The work of the Holy Ghost in Souls causes Christ 
 to become visibly manifest through His Disciples 
 who receive Him in the Holy Eucharist . . 141 
 
CONTENTS xix 
 
 1 1. The Whole Church is a kind of bodily reality and p^ob 
 
 structural ordering of the living Impression of 
 Christ, who dwells in the Church . . .144 
 
 12. Because each and every spiritual reality possess a 
 
 bodily reality conjoined to it, the Church of Christ, 
 which is a spiritual fact, is a bodily reality too. 
 Since also it is a perpetuation of the Impression of 
 Christ that part of our sacred and united Thought- 
 World which is stamped with His spiritual Impres- 
 sion contains His bodily reality too . .145 
 
 13. In the Holy Eucharist there is the principle of a 
 
 changing of our minds and reasons in order that 
 they may see the Blessed Sovereignty of God in 
 all the Creation . . . . .147 
 
 14. Christ, though sacrificed for us, cannot yet assimilate 
 
 Himself to our inner being, unless we first of all 
 present our souls and bodies a living sacrifice to 
 Him ....... 148 
 
 15. The Holy Eucharist is the medium through which 
 
 the Spirit finally brings to pass the fulfilment of 
 the Promises of the Old and New Covenants of 
 God . . . . . . . 149 
 
 PART VI 
 Ten Instructions on Titles of Christ 
 
 1. "Dayspring" . . . . . .155 
 
 2. " Made of a Woman " ..... 156 
 
 3. "Great Prophet" . . , . .158 
 
XX 
 
 4 
 5 
 6 
 
 7 
 S. 
 
 9 
 
 10, 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Prince of Peace " 
 
 "Star of Jacob" 
 
 " Root of Jesse " 
 
 (The Second) "David" 
 
 " Servant " 
 
 " Messenger of the Covenant " 
 
 "Messiah" 
 
 PAGE 
 
 i6o 
 i6i 
 163 
 165 
 166 
 168 
 170 
 
 PART VII 
 
 Instructions on Scriptural Topics 
 
 I. Prophecy 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 175 
 
 2. Social Justice . 
 
 . 
 
 . 
 
 177 
 
 3. The Royal Prophet and the 
 
 Royal 
 
 Church , 
 
 178 
 
 4. Shepherd and Bishop of Souls. 
 
 . 
 
 .180 
 
 5. Poor in Spirit . 
 
 
 . 
 
 182 
 
 6. Mercy . 
 
 
 . 
 
 185 
 
 7. The Birth of Christ 
 
 
 . 
 
 186 
 
 8. The Shepherds . 
 
 
 . 
 
 189 
 
 9. The Manifestation 
 
 
 . 
 
 192 
 
 10. Carpenter at Nazareth . 
 
 
 . 
 
 194 
 
 II. The Empire of the Servant 
 
 
 . 
 
 196 
 
PART I 
 
 THEISM, THE AFFIRMATIVE VIEW 
 OF GOD AND MAN 
 
THEISM, THE AFFIRMATIVE VIEW 
 OF GOD AND MAN 
 
 " What is Paradise ? All things that are ; for all are goodly 
 and pleasant, and therefore may fitly be called a Paradise. 
 It is said also, that Paradise is an outer court of Heaven. Even 
 so this world is verily an outer court of the Eternal, or of 
 Eternity, and specially whatever in Time, or any temporal 
 things or creatures, manifesteth or remindeth us of God or 
 Eternity ; for the creatures are a guide and a path into God 
 and Eternity. Thus this world is an outer court of Eternity, 
 and therefore it may well be called a Paradise, for such it is in 
 truth." — Theologia Gennanica. 
 
 I. 
 
 Theism^ the rational belief in a Deity ^ is simply a 
 sovereign Affirmative Way of regarding the Sum 
 of Life. 
 
 Theism is the spontaneous acceptance of God by 
 the intellect. If we were all Theists there would be 
 no divisions of Christendom, because Theism is the 
 supreme brotherly and unitive force in thought, and 
 leaves no place for two Gods in the religion and 
 solemn worship of Man, nor for two mankinds in our 
 brotherly comprehension of the one mankind. 
 
 Theism is more than a philosophy ; it is a total 
 affirmative and brotherly attitude of mind towards 
 
4 THEISM 
 
 ourselves and the universe. It is not a new Science 
 of the Universe, but the introduction of the Style of 
 God in dealing with the existing Science : Theism is 
 the true Synthesis of all Sciences. 
 
 Theism is the simple recognition that Nature and 
 the Universe portend ** substance," that is, an eternal 
 and fraternal City ; that all things visible and invisible 
 mean God. 
 
 Philosophers count on artifice ; theists like 
 Shakespeare, Dante, and Isaiah talk in God's human 
 style and are not afraid that they may be wrong. 
 
 If we could but interpret Christ into plain language 
 of the Father, then the people of the abysses would 
 hear His voice in us and live. But we never can do 
 so until we talk in that great affirmative style of 
 Isaiah and Paul and John the Evangelist, in the 
 power of God and Man. 
 
 II. 
 
 The T heist ^ that is, the believer in God, or the Universal 
 Enthusiast for God, sees the entire Creation as a 
 Hymn of Praise to God ifi Paradise. 
 
 If I make my confession of faith saying, " I 
 believe in God ! " I include in that confession, my 
 faith in the final realisation of every natural impulse 
 of man. 
 
 If indeed I do so in every moment of my life, I 
 foretaste the truth of Paradise, for the whole of the 
 Heart's Desire is shown in every creature which God 
 has made ; and every creature that I am in contact 
 with yields me Him and a Vision of Blessedness in 
 Him. 
 
THE VISION OF GOD 5 
 
 It has been said that when we enter Paradise we 
 shall cease to believe Him, for then we shall see 
 Him. 
 
 What this really means is, that if we believed in 
 Him, our Vision of Him would be contingent upon 
 the conquest of our Belief 
 
 Faith transmutes the Universe into the Sight of 
 God : " I shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy 
 likeness." 
 
 Faith is this awakening and the beginning of the 
 Resurrection of the Dead to life ; because, through 
 Faith, man lays hold of immortality in every leaf and 
 flower and tree. 
 
 Faith is the Containing Wall of Paradise; which 
 with its strong Mouldings, and secure Foundations, 
 and crystal Gates, contains this Universe in the 
 beatific vision. 
 
 Beatific vision is the sight, as of the forest 
 of the oak trees in the single acorn. It is the 
 sight of the Universe in a God-given rule of 
 increase for ever. It is the presentiment that every 
 particle of life within us shall dwell in the New 
 Creation. 
 
 Belief in God is belief in the Style of God, that is, 
 in Life's lifelike ways of life, and in Life's lifelike 
 leading unto Life, in all the Universe. 
 
 Belief in God is the amazed perpetual discovery 
 of God in all that moves and breathes in the great 
 Whole of Things. 
 
 Belief in God only is not the final possession of 
 God ; because Faith teaches the grace of Charity, 
 through which Humanity, believing together in one, 
 and in brotherliness, is brave enough to say, " All 
 
6 THEISM 
 
 shall be saved together, or no one ever shall be 
 saved ! " 
 
 III. 
 Theistic unity of Matter and Spirit in God. 
 
 Let us willingly accept Materiality from the 
 material world, and scout a heartless Idealism, since 
 ordinary Humanity can in no sense live in a 
 Universe of merely ideal things. The Moral Good 
 consists in a unique and real recognition of materi- 
 ality in an eternally immaterial manner, a truth 
 which is symbolised in the words of the Christian 
 Creed, " I believe in the resurrection of the body." 
 
 Divide matter from spirit, and in Dualism you 
 have but two unrealities, which for the length of 
 eternity can never become realities. If, on the con- 
 trary, you retain the materiality of matter, and 
 recognise God to be the living Plan or Design of all 
 matter, then you possess the Real and the True, 
 namely, the Moral Good. Yet, to evoke the real from 
 the unreal Universe, is a task inconceivably beyond 
 Man, without a redemptive return of the intellect of 
 Man to God. 
 
 The intellect must retrace its path through its 
 failures unto its source and resource in God's Plan 
 of Things, and be renewed even as it was first designed, 
 by the redemptive action of the indwelling Christ. 
 Intellectual converts towards God are the Seers and 
 Prophets of mankind, because their sole burden is to 
 foretell the total ransom of the created Universe. 
 This ransom is, that God Himself be known as Father 
 to all, and that all His creatures know themselves as 
 children, and as the Single Family of God. 
 
TRANSCENDENT FAILURE AND SUCCESS 7 
 
 At the moment of 7nan's utter failure, then comes the 
 Opportunity of God ; and His character is such 
 that this opportunity is never missed by Him. 
 
 True Religion is a reversion to the predestined 
 success of God from out the many unsuccesses of 
 the Universe and Man. 
 
 From our own personal point of view, failures are 
 barriers to the goal of our life. If only the race of 
 men lives, and men themselves do not live, there is 
 no success in life. From the point of view of indi- 
 vidual men, the failure of God and the Universe to 
 Man himself would then be a transcendent one. If 
 God exists, in other words, it is inconceivable that 
 the individual man can perish. To say so would be 
 to deny the existence of God, which is indeed the 
 pledge of our own abiding. 
 
 In history there are innumerable failures, tran- 
 scendent of themselves ; but, because of God, there 
 is one transcendent but all-embracing success. 
 
 These transcendent failures are all individual men. 
 This transcendent success is the Christ of God. 
 
 The pitting of many failures against one success is 
 the history of God in Man, that is, the history of the 
 redemption of Man. 
 
 This history is necessarily quantitative, or timed 
 with times and placed with places. The Incarnation 
 did not transmute humanity by magic into a race of 
 angelic beings. It first tamed sinners, by under- 
 standing Sin as man masters electricity by under- 
 standing electricity. It then conquered Sin by 
 
8 THEISM 
 
 remoulding sinners, and the Universe, depraved by 
 Sin, into the likeness of that one Success of history, 
 the Son of God and Man. 
 
 The Theist^ out of the midst of the modern Scientific 
 Vision of the Oneness of the whole Universe^ 
 acknowledges the new significance of the old truth 
 that God is Father and Designer of Man. 
 
 In our new vistas of the earth and heavens, we 
 have scarcely dared to think of the truth that we are 
 still of the designing Thought and Might of God : — 
 " When the Lord turned again the captivity of 
 Zion, we were like them that dream." 
 
 Every cell within our bodies is His genius expressed 
 in us. If we despise the body, we blaspheme the 
 genius of God. 
 
 We may be ashamed of the body and of our origin, 
 but our Contriver has put His Mind into it, and has 
 set His Heart on it, and each cell within the body 
 stirs only through His electric, living breath. 
 
 Through faith, our bodies are in the peace of 
 Paradise regained. If we do not possess a Paradise 
 here and now, yet we are not far from Paradise ; for 
 within our bodies is its only origin, and the fountains 
 of living water are the material flow of our being 
 when the soul shall have assumed its own dominion, 
 and God has brought it to pass that in our own bodies 
 we shall rise again. 
 
 Moral life is the possession of God the Father, 
 because it alone reveals the secret through which we 
 
NEED OF APOCALYPTICISM 9 
 
 can possess bodies wherein may course the electric, 
 living breath of God. 
 
 Moral life is the possession of the universe through 
 the body which brings it near us, until every motion 
 of our lives is controlled by the divine whirlwind of 
 the Spirit. 
 
 Whithersoever then the New Knowledge may 
 lead us, we must remember that, now and for ever, 
 God is Father to Man, and that Man's body is the 
 place of the New Creation. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Theism is not the blind acceptance of Dogma, but is a 
 reasonable and helpful way of thinking about 
 Dogma in its significance to the intellectual and 
 moral outlook of mankind. 
 
 Christian Theism is that orthodox Vision of the 
 Universe in which All Things are seen as gathered 
 together in one in a greater fellowship by Christ ; and 
 Theism implies, though this has often been forgotten, 
 that Christ owns a gracious likeness to life and move- 
 ment everywhere, and is in living conjunction with 
 all that breathes and moves in the Universe. 
 
 A measure of judicious apocalypticism is a rightful 
 tonic in these days of timid apologies for Christ ; 
 especially as all the more important portions of the 
 New Testament stand or fall with the truth of the 
 unitive relationship of Christ with all that is within 
 the earth or stars. 
 
 Speaking in this religious logic, Christ is proved to 
 be the Son of God, because His personality, being 
 divine morally, is necessarily also divine substanti- 
 
 B 
 
10 THEISM 
 
 ally ; that is, in duration and persistence ; since 
 perfect moral life, in Theistic logic, is a form of 
 living movement in a personal scheme of restfulness 
 which has had no beginning and will have no end. 
 
 Theism, which makes spiritual things the heart of 
 earthly things, has been vastly accredited during the 
 last few years by the scientific announcement that all 
 the stellar universe consists in ordered whirls of 
 ether which are themselves all parts of a single 
 living whirl or movement, and are not dead matter 
 goaded into activity from without. 
 
 Every atomic whirl of " electronic " sub-whirls, and 
 every nebula of stars, for this reason, are related 
 to personality ; and are themselves incipient person- 
 ality ; because personality is the spiritual ingathering 
 of the movements of the world by a divine increase 
 or simplification into an initial state of repose. If 
 the music which is evoked from matter were not 
 conformable to personality, it could never affect 
 the emotions of the mind and soul of man. If 
 the animal world were not purposive of personality, 
 the body of man could not workably consort with 
 the spirit of man. 
 
 Personality is native to the Spheres, because in 
 the proper architectural movement of personality, all 
 the movement and the music of the Spheres are, in 
 a certain mathematical exactitude of manner, repro- 
 duced. Our organ of reason is far more accurate 
 in its making, than is the function of reason in its 
 use. This organ, the rational soul, is nothing 
 else but the devolution within us of the Plan of 
 the Universe from without While mind is a reflec- 
 tion of the Universe, in Theistic philosophy, the 
 
THE SOUUS GREATER FELLOWSHIP 11 
 
 reflection is of the same substance^ radically, as 
 the Universe itself. Hence the key to the dominion 
 of the Universe lies within us ; and hence also 
 the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, in no meta- 
 phorical use of the words. 
 
 vn. 
 
 To the Theist^ the Soul is a recapitulation of the 
 Universe and of all Spiritual History. 
 
 The soul, in a sense, is everything or it is nothing. 
 The soul itself is Paradise ; but that does not mean 
 that all men possess their souls ; for this possession 
 becomes our own only through the constancy of a 
 life of moral energy, aided by the Grace of Christ. 
 
 The soul holds every problem of life and death 
 in a concrete and God-given form of movement 
 within itself. Could we perfectly possess our souls, 
 the tempest of the raging of the elements would 
 have passed away. The soul, in its function of 
 Conscience, is itself a prophecy of the Last Judgment 
 of the Universe, and portends the Last and Dreadful 
 Day. The Moral Life is nothing else but the accept- 
 ance of eternity, through Conscience, from the soul. 
 What the soul teaches, the Universe teaches ; and 
 what the Universe teaches, is from the Reason of 
 God. What way of life the soul shows, God 
 eternally confirms ; and our claim to share in the 
 possession of the Kingdom, when sanctioned by 
 the soul, is sanctioned by the Judge of the Universe, 
 in whom all the Living and Departed Souls within 
 the Universe have their hope of life. 
 
12 THEISM 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Religion is neither Emotional Moral life, nor the 
 extension of Individual Conversion!, but it is the 
 Solemn and Institutional Restoration of the mind^ 
 soul, and body of Man^ and the enttire Creation^ 
 before the Throne of God. 
 
 In England, the United States, and elsewhere, a 
 problem which is continually discussed is whether 
 or no Holiness means Ethics ; whether, that is, the 
 essential character of Christ's Kingdom is the observ- 
 ance of a series of ethical precepts relating to how 
 men should lead abstemious lives, and deal with 
 one another ; whether, in fine, religion is solely a 
 pious emotion or sentiment, the exclusively earthly 
 purpose of which is to lead men to do what is 
 ethically right. Matthew Arnold popularised the 
 view that it was so, in his essays on St Paul and 
 Protestantism. He there expressed the opinion that 
 religion was " morality tinged with emotion " ; and he 
 chiefly distinguished Christ from Socrates, Confucius, 
 Moses, or Epictetus, by attributing to Christ a genius 
 for setting forth before the multitudes precepts like 
 the Golden Rule in a supreme Art, through which 
 their cherished and heartfelt emotions were touched 
 and aroused. At its lowest, the power of exciting 
 men to ideal morality by emotional means does 
 not allow for Christ's message anything new, nor 
 beyond the teachings of many non-Christian masters, 
 except a mere mastery in a New Art of moving men 
 to goodness. 
 
 But Art, such as that of Wagner's, even if it move 
 
EVANGELICAL FAITH 13 
 
 multitudes of men, does not create a New Universe 
 in which human and cosmic life are gathered together 
 in one in Christ. 
 
 So too, the danger of Evangelicalism is not in what 
 it does include, but in what it does not allow people 
 to include, within their conception of the Great Whole 
 of a Redeemed Universe. In refusing to admit the 
 sensible element of Redemption, Evangelicals are 
 in danger of making Redemption merely emotional 
 change. 
 
 They would, however, indignantly repudiate the 
 imputation that the only essential character of their 
 Religion was the morality it incited men to by 
 appealing to their emotions. The orthodox Evan- 
 gelicals seek to justify themselves in this repudiation 
 of the cosmic element in Religion, from the fact that 
 they describe Moral Change as the sign of Super- 
 natural Salvation. 
 
 While the doctrine that " Faith in Christ creates the 
 Moral Change " thus makes room for a transcendent 
 conception of Salvation, yet, so long as Faith is 
 entirely individualistic, and only concerns the Soul 
 and its Maker, the New Psychologists, or students of 
 the Comparative Science of Religion, are unable to 
 make any serious distinction between conversions 
 wrought at Evangelical Revivals and those wrought 
 by the innumerable other influences, such as friendly 
 personal influences, shocks, disasters, illnesses, or the 
 good example of other persons, none of which are in 
 themselves religious influences. In the Evangelical 
 Churches of to-day, vistas are opening of a Social 
 Conception of Religion which is far more Christ-like 
 in tone than the narrow Evangelical conception of 
 
14 THEISM 
 
 an individual ransom. But the rule obtains among 
 all the Protestant Churches, in the proportion in 
 which their Protestantism dominates them, that 
 Religion and Individualistic Morals are practically 
 identical, and that Churches are instruments whose 
 function is to create self-centred moral lives. 
 
 If we widen Ethics from the Individualism of 
 Conversion to the Collectivism of the observance of 
 the Golden Rule of Christian conduct between all 
 men, all classes of society and all nations, we 
 certainly reach to the great and eternal condition on 
 the part of man without which there can be no 
 genuine religion of Christ. But this Human Alliance 
 in brotherly kindness transcends Matthew Arnold's 
 mere emotionalism, since it is the human term of an 
 immortal Alliance between God and Man, including 
 that total cosmic change in man which Christ meant 
 by the Coming of the Kingdom of God. This 
 Coming of the Kingdom follows upon conversion to 
 the observance of the Ethics of Christ, as the Descent 
 of the Holy Ghost followed the conversion of the 
 Disciples and Apostles by the life and preaching of 
 their Master. 
 
 The True Religion, therefore, is a power which 
 converts men to worship God the Father in just 
 Economics ; to love the Son of God and all mankind 
 in the Christian Moral law ; and finally, which gathers 
 up the expression of the entire cosmic life in the 
 mind, and soul, and body of the Saints of God in 
 the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost ; and thereby yields 
 back the sensible and spiritual unto the power of the 
 immortalising Sovereignty of God. 
 
SOCIAL DUTY 15 
 
 IX. 
 
 Moral Theology imperatively requires that no individtial 
 man^ woman, or child should be left iincared for 
 by the Commonwealth ; but it leaves the Method 
 of Social Redemption free to each one's own best 
 individual judgment. 
 
 The relationship of the Sciences of Economics and 
 Sociology with any conceivable embodiment of the 
 True Religion is an obvious and permanent one, and 
 is as follows : — • 
 
 The moral activities of every worshipper of the 
 true God are required, by the very nature and truth 
 of God, to be directed in a voluntary manner towards 
 a reasonable and complete restoration of humanity 
 into some state of Natural or Social Blessedness, in 
 which every human being is cared for in regard to 
 the necessities of bodily life. 
 
 Conversely, no one can claim to be a worshipper of 
 the true God who does not take a voluntary part in 
 shaping Human Society in accordance with the 
 eternal Law of its economic well-being. 
 
 These obligations commit no one to Socialism, 
 unless the individual concerned belongs by conviction 
 to the number of those who believe that Socialism is 
 the righteous economic goal of existing Human 
 Society. For a similar reason they commit no one 
 to Individualism, nor to any other System. But they 
 do require of every Christian that he should study 
 the Law of Social Blessedness, and devote his time 
 and energies to its fulfilment. In the Middle Ages 
 there was a Feudal System which took into account 
 
16 THEISM 
 
 every man, woman, and child in the Christian 
 Commonwealth. The basal Moral Law of the 
 Christian Commonwealth of to-day requires that, 
 in an equal manner, no individual man, woman, or 
 child should be left outside of the Commonwealth, 
 either in a socialistic manner of inclusion, or through 
 some intensive type of individualism ; so that there 
 should remain no exceptions whatever. Or, other- 
 wise, it requires that Christians should create a New 
 Feudalism which would solidify the interests of the 
 people of the Abyss with the people of the Front 
 Ranks of Society. 
 
 No one and no creature should be left out, or 
 God ceases to be the God of the Worship of Man. 
 Any economic system, for instance, which leaves the 
 least of men without housing, or occupation, or contact 
 with the resources of Nature, is a direct war against 
 the fulfilment of the Fatherly Will of God. Moreover, 
 it cuts off God from His own Paradise, which is the 
 delight of exercising His Fatherliness and Fatherly 
 Will towards every creature ; for there can be 
 no full Paradise to God if one single creature is 
 left unprovided for, and if God's own delight is not 
 fulfilled in their delight. 
 
THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD 17 
 
 X. 
 
 The Kingdom of God in relation to the distribution of 
 earthly goods ^ is founded on inner moral co7tversion 
 to the Recognition that there is a Sovereignty 
 of God in the whole material Universe, and that 
 the purport of this Sovereignty to us is, that, by 
 putting in force a just system of economics we 
 should facilitate the observance of the Moral 
 Teaching of Christ. 
 
 When Christ said, " Seek ye first the Kingdom 
 of God and His justice, and all these things 
 shall be added unto you," His words bear witness 
 to the social inclusiveness of His Vision of the 
 Kingdom of God. 
 
 The word " Kingdom," in the East, says the great 
 Orientalist, Gustav Dalman, never signified a terri- 
 tory or place ; but rather, the power, control, or 
 dominion which extended over territory and place. 
 The words " Sovereignty of God," therefore, are a more 
 closely literal translation of the terms in its Eastern 
 usage than " Kingdom of God." In a free paraphrase 
 the meaning of the sentence might thus be rendered : 
 " Seek you therefore the secret of the Sovereign Rule 
 of God in Heaven, which also should obtain on 
 Earth, with the justice which belongs to His sovereign 
 rule; and all the needs of earthly life, without 
 further concern by you, will ever be supplied for, 
 or added unto you." In Christ's teaching, this rule 
 of the Sovereignty of God is viewed as having 
 already extended itself everywhere in the Universe 
 ever since the Creation ; but in the conscious life 
 
 C 
 
18 THEISM 
 
 of man, the seeking for and finding of the Kingdom 
 related to the seeking for and finding of that divine 
 view-point of Human Life's environment, through 
 reaching which, the natural resources of the earth 
 would be utilised in perpetually just laws of distribu- 
 tion. It was as though a wise man should tell a 
 master of a vineyard whose family were oppressed 
 with anxiety on account of poverty from bad harvests, 
 " Seek everywhere until you find out the secret of 
 the fruitful growth of the vine, and you and all 
 your house shall be blessed." 
 
 Now, evidently in so far as Christ's Kingdom 
 meant a communion of men in which His Spirit 
 ruled, it was not the same thing precisely as the 
 rule by which man's physical life endures ; but God's 
 Sovereignty, on the contrary, had immediate relation- 
 ship with man's physical needs, as the whole of 
 the Gospels testify. For practical purposes, the 
 seeking and finding of God's Sovereignty was the 
 seeking and finding of a general law, dominating 
 in Economics, whereby Christ's ethical Teachings 
 might be practised and His Kingdom won, without 
 too engrossing an absorption over physical needs. 
 It was therefore the discovery of some secret of 
 a divine justice in Economics, facilitating the practice 
 of Christ's commandments, and thereby making 
 ready for the fulfilment of His promises about the 
 Coming of the Reign of the Spirit of God. 
 
 If men have not loved one another in Christ, 
 the deep-seated reason why they have not done 
 so is to be found in their prior refusal to worship 
 God the Father by acknowledging that they are 
 but Stewards of His vineyard, the earth, through 
 
RELIGION AND ECONOMICS 19 
 
 which He has willed from everlasting to provide 
 for all the material wants of men. 
 
 XL 
 
 There are Three Witnesses of God: in Sound Economics, 
 which make room for this Fatherly Beneficence ; 
 in Social Ethics, which brings Christ to Man ; 
 and in Holiness, which brings Man into the like- 
 ness of Christ. 
 
 I. Economics 
 
 There is a convergence of tendencies in the Social 
 World centring aroicnd the Church of Christ, whose 
 Slimmed effect is to secure the provision of the means of 
 subsistence for the ever-increasing population of the 
 World in at least the miftimum amount required to 
 make reasonably easy the observance of the Moral Law ; 
 and this movement, or law, is a practical demonstration 
 of the truth that God is Father to man. 
 
 The productivity of Nature is essentially bound up 
 with the productivity of God. If I sow my wheat- 
 field with tares, I must not blame God that there is 
 not enough wheat. Or, if God sends labourers into 
 His vineyard of the earth, and I close the door to 
 them, and say there is no place for them to work in ; 
 it is God Himself whom I have shut out from His 
 vineyard rather than only man. God does not say 
 that men should not own the earth under His owner- 
 ship of the earth ; but if men do hold God's fields in 
 trust for God, they must allow God to enter therein 
 and give place to work in for all whom He has sent 
 into His vineyards and His fields. The blood of 
 
20 THEISM 
 
 everyone who dies because he has not been allowed 
 *' place to work " in God's vineyard, is upon every evil 
 Steward of the Land of God. How can God be 
 Father to man if He be inhibited from giving His 
 increase to the labours of man ? In every outcast 
 whom Christian Society has given no place to work 
 in, it has prevented God's fatherly beneficence to 
 man from coming into effect. 
 
 2. Ethics 
 
 There is a Law in operation in the World — creating 
 tendencies and radiating influences ; seated in the 
 Church of Christ ; through which Christian Ethics 
 tends to conciliate and unify mankind; inaugurating 
 Charity between Men and Nations ; revealing through 
 institutional means the Brotherhood of Man and pre- 
 paring the way, by Peace and Good Will on Earth, for 
 the Co77iing of the Holy Spirit through the Church on 
 all the World. 
 
 In a holy fraternity with the natural reason of 
 Man, Christ solved many of our problems, besides 
 unveiling His own mysteries. The Sermon on the 
 Mount is mostly Human Reason, not the Revelation 
 of God. As such, Christ has left us to continue His 
 Sermon on the Mountain for every new occasion 
 until the end of time. All our best Social Ethics of 
 the day are a perpetuation of the human reasoning 
 of Christ. It avails little to the Church of Christ to 
 offer up its gift upon the Altar, unless the members 
 of the Church of Christ are first reconciled with all 
 their brother men. The Holy Ghost who is on high, 
 above every Altar of the Church has delayed until 
 now from sending down His universal Pentecost — 
 
THE LAW OF HOLINESS 21 
 
 the Spiritual Coming of Christ — until men shall 
 learn to come to Him in the human brotherhood of 
 the Human Christ, upon which coming to the Altar, 
 reconciled with all men, the Holy Ghost will send 
 down His blessing upon the Sacrifice, and the long- 
 delayed Kingdom of the Holy Spirit will arrive. 
 
 3. Holiness 
 
 There is a Law in operation — conditioned in its 
 operation by the progressive establishment of satisfactory 
 economic conditions which make life bearable; conditioned 
 by the applied Christian ethics which make brotherhood 
 a fact ; attractijig individuals to live superhuman 
 liveSy which, in turn, radiate their light and power in 
 the mission of the Church to the World, consolidating 
 her Citizenship with a supernatural bond, expa?tding 
 her Empire, and beginning the transformatio7t of the 
 World into the conscious sovereignty of the Spirit of 
 God. 
 
 Worse than any Schism between the branches of 
 the Church, is the Schism within the Church between 
 the would-be Saintliness of some, and the Law of the 
 Fatherly Sufferance of all men so to live that they be 
 not prevented by their surroundings from the observ- 
 ance of the Teachings of Christ. The would-be Saint 
 who does not interpret God's Fatherhood to man in 
 just economics, nor interpret Christ's Sonship in the 
 world by universal fraternity with all men, is either 
 mocking God or else he disbelieves that the Holy 
 Ghost is in eternal union with the Father's reign of just 
 economics and the Son's reign of Brotherhood among 
 men. Christ will not return to the earth in a spiritual 
 manner with thousands of His Saints, until the con- 
 
22 THEISM 
 
 ditions which have been set from eternity upon the 
 way of His appearance have been fulfilled ; 
 
 Until His Saints, accepting all the living knowledge 
 of His Universe, shall see in the New Heavens 
 revealed by the Natural Science of God's Creation 
 the Reign of the Reason of God ; 
 
 Until they render bodily acknowledgment to God's 
 Fatherhood in economic justice to all humanity ; 
 
 Until they fraternise with all sorts and conditions of 
 men ; in all consciences, and in all faiths, and with all 
 hopes. 
 
 The times and moments which the Father has set 
 within His power are nothing else but the times and 
 moments it will take mankind to understand the 
 conditions which must be fulfilled before the Son 
 shall appear in His Kingdom in that spiritual manner 
 which shall rehearse the Final Judgment of the 
 World. 
 
PART II 
 
 THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
 " We which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord 
 shall not prevent them which are asleep. 
 
 "For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a 
 shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of 
 God : and the dead in Christ shall rise first : 
 
 "Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up 
 together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air : 
 and so shall we ever be with the Lord." — St Paul. 
 
 I. 
 
 The spiritual Coming of Christ is not His bodily 
 Apparition in the Worlds but it is His Coming 
 through our comprehensive seeing of Him in 
 Heaven and Earth, through all that exists therein. 
 
 There is often much mystery expressed about a so- 
 called Second Advent of Christ ; but from the 
 Theistic point of view, this truth, at least in its 
 spiritual expression, is devoid of mystery. If Christ 
 be the Reason of God, how can He help but appear 
 some day from behind the clouds ? The doctrine of 
 the Spiritual Advent is the mere assertion that at a 
 certain moment of history, mankind's consciousness 
 of Christ will grow to a point of intensity which will 
 make it a spiritual Second Coming of Christ. For, 
 
 25 ^ 
 
26 THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
 in reality, the only Second Coming concerning which 
 we can know anything, must come from the filling up 
 and making whole of our consciousness of the First 
 Advent. The " Second " Advent is the recoil of our 
 consciousness of the First, and our recognition that 
 all the beings, personalities, and objects of our inner 
 Faith-World tend, by a necessary law of things, 
 to embody themselves in time in outward events of 
 human history. There is, within our minds, that 
 which is in solidarity with the fact of Heaven. 
 Therefore, Christ reigning in our Heaven is Christ 
 reigning in our minds ; and Christ reigning in our 
 minds is not far away from Christ so appearing to us 
 from the clouds of Heaven. 
 
 II. 
 
 Christ being the Omnipresent Reason of God, returns 
 to us in Reality after He returns to us in 
 Thought. 
 
 Christ is that Reason of God whose effective 
 laws in the Universe are the subject of all Scientific 
 Research. Christ is the Model after which Man 
 was made, and towards which all movements in 
 human history converge. Christ is the central 
 Heart of all the graces and adornments of Human 
 Culture. 
 
 With the aid therefore of all Science to under- 
 stand His Omnipotence ; with the aid of all History 
 to understand His Character ; and with the aid of 
 all Culture to understand His Grace, may not His 
 New Disciples rediscover the apostolic consciousness 
 toward Christ? Seeing once again His brightness 
 
THE GENERAL JUDGMENT 27 
 
 in all the heavens, and retracing His footsteps in 
 the ways and lanes of every city, and amid all 
 the people — may they not have joy showing forth the 
 beneficence of His Face ? The angel at the Ascension 
 said, that as He had once gone on His way towards 
 the cloudy places of Heaven, so some day would 
 He leave the cloudy places of Heaven and return 
 to the clear places of our earth. We are told else- 
 where that, in those days, wherever we shall raise the 
 stone, we shall find Him ; and where every woodman 
 shall cleave the wood, there also shall Christ be 
 found. 
 
 III. 
 
 The General Judgment is in a sense always going 
 OHy and we may spiritually enter into its presence 
 and be renewed by the controlling force of its 
 Realism. 
 
 Unless we examine our Consciences in the light 
 of the General Judgment, we can never understand 
 the simplicity of the Mind of Christ, nor the single- 
 ness of the claim of the Reason of God within 
 Him to control the earth and stars. The instinct 
 of the great preachers of repentence, like Savonarola, 
 were not altogether at fault when they foretold the 
 General Judgment. Repentance is a spiritual and 
 near rehearsal of the maybe far-off General Judg- 
 ment ; and Repentance is so because the Future 
 of the World exists, in a sense, Here and Now, 
 as foretold within our souls. 
 
 Also by perfect faith in Christ we can forestall the 
 End of All Things. Anyhow, the Science, Philosophy, 
 
28 THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
 and Culture of the day are only seen in their right 
 perspective when we have weighed them in the balance 
 over the depths of the abyss, and seen them in the 
 light of their consummation in Christ's final Judgment 
 of the world. What is needed therefore is a spiritual 
 rehearsal of that Judgment, and a return from thence 
 to thoughts of earth, with a re-found simplicity of 
 mind, and a penitential singleness of heart. With 
 these gifts we shall be able to approve the fact which 
 most concerns us, namely, the fact that we are 
 members of the Living Body and Soul of Christ 
 in the Church of Christ, and know and realise 
 that His Church is the Great Simplification, in 
 a living form, of all that is in the earth, or under 
 the earth, or in the stars. 
 
 IV. 
 
 A right Theism^ or Rational Theory of God, teaches 
 the essential and ultiinate control by Moral 
 Goodness of all physical reality, and thus explains 
 how Christ is the deepest Motive Force in History. 
 
 All the current sayings about the unique power 
 and influence of the moral personality of Christ in 
 impressing men's minds and moving their hearts, 
 are true, but are much more true than they who 
 utter them suppose. They are true in the substan- 
 tial reality of God's Sovereign Rule, which causes 
 physical reality to cohere with moral facts within a 
 single and eternal scheme of Being. 
 
 If Christ rose from the dead in hearts and in souls, 
 He necessarily arose again from the dead in physical 
 
A SPIRITUAL ORDER 29 
 
 fact ; because all soul-facts are, in one term, 
 necessarily also physical facts. 
 
 What then is the goal of the Incarnation in history ? 
 Redemption was no mere artifice for making men 
 into angelic beings ; it was the implantation of the 
 Reason and Power of God into actual history : over- 
 ruling existing plots of Earthly Kingdoms in an 
 easy, gracious, and lifelike manner ; until Humanity 
 having mastered its environment in political and re- 
 ligious experience, and in the Science of everything 
 in Earth and Heaven, should at a certain moment of 
 history discover that its Motive Power within all 
 movements is its Redeeming God. All science is 
 thus Science of Christ, and all knowledge of Nature, 
 Knowledge of His place in and with Nature, and all 
 knowledge of Man, Knowledge of His Human Soul, 
 which is the radiative force of whatever is good in 
 Man. 
 
 V. 
 
 If all the Laws of the Universe which Science 
 discovers are laws of the Reason of God, and are 
 therefore ^'statutes''' and ^testimonies " ^' comijiand- 
 7nents" " ordinances" and " laws " of the Heavenly 
 Christ, then scientific t J linkers deserve the 
 blessings of the 1 1 gth Psalm. 
 
 Believers in the true Theistic view of the Universe, 
 re-found from Isaiah, John the Evangelist, Augustine, 
 Francis, Aquinas, are likely to constitute a new 
 spiritual Order rather than a new Sect, because 
 through aid of this divine view-point in things the 
 possibilities of a new sectarianism will have definitely 
 ceased. 
 
30 THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
 Having reached the Theistic point of view, there 
 can be no further trouble, neither, from the pressing 
 critical questions of the day. To the Theist, all 
 Science is Science of God. 
 
 Men like Darwin and Herbert Spencer were they 
 who, to the true Theist, more than any others in the 
 nineteenth century, meditated day and night on 
 the Law of the Lord and loved His testimonies. 
 The new Order of Christ would, in duty bound, love 
 Nature and the Science of Nature equally with their 
 most confirmed naturalistic devotees. They would 
 be the positivists of God. Having discovered in 
 what manner the Universe is founded upon the 
 Tables of His eternal Sinai, the Reign of Law, His 
 rule of Stable Motion in any possible stellar universe, 
 they will see that the principle of the Stable Motion, 
 in which the Universe moves towards its eternal 
 resting-place, is the Divine Reason of the Godhead 
 which reigns in Christ. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Music could not exist for us in this or that renderings 
 unless it already pre-existed in an unrendered 
 state in every particle of the Universe. The 
 universal modulation of material being evoked 
 in Music finds a response in the Heart of Man. 
 The Universe then is strung upon chords of 
 essential personality ^ and is as the Music unto the 
 Eternal Reason of God. 
 
 No wonder that the Shepherds heard music around 
 Bethlehem. This Universe is all Music which 
 surrounds the Face of Christ. Music is the personal 
 
MUSIC, A SPIRITUAL REALITY 31 
 
 melody and harmony in every two islets of being in 
 the great ethereal sea, in so far as they are strung 
 together in the great Psaltery of the Word of God. 
 
 The only essential person within the Universe is 
 the Word, the Reason of God ; just as the only 
 essential person belmid the Universe is God the 
 Father, and before the Universe is God the Holy 
 Ghost. 
 
 The Theist says that spirit and matter are in 
 reality one, and that whatever is in the lowest thing 
 of the universe is in the highest object seen and 
 known, and whatever is in the highest object is 
 foreboded in the lowest object. 
 
 Now it is just because the structure of all things 
 that are microcosmic and macrocosmic agree with 
 personality, that we know that a Son of God exists. 
 For the Universe agreed with the nature and 
 essence of personality before ever a human being 
 existed ; and the great stamping Power that stamped 
 it so was the Person of God the Son. 
 
 The effluence of this great reality of the Universe 
 in which every particle of the Universe strikes a 
 personal chord, is Music. The entire Universe agrees 
 with the soul, because it is made for the soul, and 
 because it portends and prophesies soul. Music, in 
 itself a mere bodily quiver of material elements, 
 since it also affects the soul of man, proves that the 
 Movement of the Universe is itself spiritual and 
 personal, and demonstrates the living Reason of 
 God. 
 
 Before therefore Man existed, his Model existed 
 in the Eternal Son of God ; and every movement in 
 the world was unto an expression of Him in Man, 
 
32 THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
 and unto an expression of Him as God-made 
 Man. 
 
 Is this man-centred pride ? Do the stars exist for 
 man ? Maybe not ; but, nevertheless, Man is the 
 resting-place of the stars, for Man is but the embodi- 
 ment of the stars and all the Universe, in the 
 beginnings of their rest. Personality in Man is but 
 the earth and air and sea simplified in one ; its 
 movement is their movement, its light is their light, 
 its fire is their fire. The poet rightly speaks of the 
 " Sky- and Sea-line of her Soul." 
 
 Because Man reveals the Universe, and forebodes 
 the Goal of the Universe, the Universe reveals the 
 Son of God. 
 
 For if the Universe were personal in every atom of 
 its existence before Man came, the Personality 
 which made it personal, and which in time revealed 
 Itself to Man, was an Eternal Person, the Goal of 
 the work of the Creating God. 
 
 Whence is the shepherding interest of some 
 Power in Man, in history ? except it be some model 
 Son of God who is in Man, and above Man, and 
 whose eternal arms are below, supporting Man ; and 
 into the likeness of whose form the nations are 
 controlled and over-ruled. 
 
 Each man is the close-tissued likeness of the Son 
 of God and Man. 
 
 Should there be on earth a perfect " son of man," 
 that " son of man " would indeed very likely become 
 a saintly manifestation of the Son of God; for the 
 transition between the two would seem to be too 
 divinely and congruously facile a thing that it should 
 not come to pass. 
 
THE CONTROL OF ENERGY 33 
 
 The Son of God is in principle the Everything in 
 the Universe, and the Everything in the Heart 
 of Man. Should the Heart of Man become, by 
 sympathy, like unto that Everything within itself, by 
 the Power of the Holy Ghost, then the Son of God 
 would indeed be newly manifested in a Saint of 
 Christ, endowed also with a true soul, and body, and 
 heart of Man. 
 
 vn. 
 
 The Sword of our control over Material Forces is 
 cleaving the way for the fulfilment of the Incarna- 
 tion. The Single Energy of the Worlds ?iamely^ 
 the Electric Energy^ reveals the Reason of God 
 which in the Tables of its Law controls this 
 Energy in the living Structure of the Universe. 
 
 Scientists are the veritable angels of the Reason 
 or Word of God, since the sum of their labours is 
 that they have but caused His presence to be 
 witnessed to, in the predestining Power of those Tables 
 of the Law unto which Man, and Life, and Trees, 
 and Stones, and the Universe, have been called from 
 eternity to conform. 
 
 In a true sense also, the Angel-Scientists of Christ 
 control His Single Energy, His Lightning,^ and 
 bear that Archangel's Sword of Lightning in their 
 right hand to clear the way before Him. Philosophy 
 is no longer conjecture about realities, but a 
 discipline of the mind to comprehend the inter- 
 actions of the laws which contain the sum of God*s 
 
 ^ Electricity, in rest or action, we are told now in every 
 text-book, is "all the material universe." 
 
 £ 
 
34 THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
 electric Might. If we comprehend His Niagara of 
 Energy, we can harness its forces to work with us. 
 In this friendly and apprehensive sense, then, the 
 Servants of Christ are to take to themselves the 
 Science which is the Knowledge of the practical 
 control of His Energy, the purposeful control of His 
 Lightning. 
 
 And if all energy is of One Power, so is all Power 
 directed by the single Reason of God seated in the 
 midst of the World and of every particle within the 
 World. Nor could the Returning of the Son of Man 
 be heralded by any other power than that of 
 Lightning; because no other power exists than the 
 electric Might which is shown in Lightning, and all 
 Lightning, therefore, reveals the Son of God and Man. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 As the Eternal Thought of God^ namely^ the Word 
 of God, is of the same substantial reality zvith God 
 the Father, so is all our World of Thought and 
 Striving, namely, the Word of Man, through Christ, 
 eq^ially a Substantial World, that is ultimately, 
 a Real Paradise. 
 
 A former generation of Anthropologists, and 
 Herbert Spencer, were wont to trace the origin of 
 religions to a belief in Ghosts. St Peter's Basilica 
 and the living Christianity of to-day would, if that 
 were true, prove that more romantic realities were 
 the outcome of Ghosts than we were wont to suppose. 
 Theism, at least, allows that thoughts are the thread 
 of life of ultimate things; and even this belief is 
 
CHRISTIAN MONISM 35 
 
 hopeful enough without romancing as much as 
 Herbert Spencer. 
 
 The fault of the Haeckels and Spencers is that 
 they are not consistent. Having as " monists " made 
 all things one, and utterly denied that there is 
 any purely ideal " substance," that is, any World of 
 Thoughts which is not part of the real " substance " of 
 that World of Things we daily experience ; they pro- 
 ceed to condemn as mere mentality the Gods, heavens, 
 hells, and spirits which do not concur with their 
 own predilections. A consistent Haeckel would be 
 a more powerful defender of Christ as the Substance 
 of the heart of man's Universe than were Augustine, 
 Albertus Magnus, or Aquinas. For none of these 
 Christian thinkers could marshal such an array of 
 evidence to prove that Thoughts become Things, and 
 hence that it is reasonable to say that the Word be- 
 comes Flesh, as Haeckel or Spencer could. So great 
 is the array of evidence from the Monists (that is those 
 who say that all the Universe is in every person, and 
 every person in all the Universe), that were Thomas 
 Aquinas among us to-day he would probably say, 
 that once w^e could see Christ in all things only 
 by faith, but that now we could see Him almost as 
 He is, namely, almost as in that Blessed Vision of 
 Christ in the Universe and the Universe in Christ, 
 which is the delight of the Eternal Paradise. 
 
36 THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
 IX. 
 
 Nearly every scientific thinker of to-day believes in 
 what he calls " Monism^' fiamely^ that the entire 
 Universe coheres together in a single rhythmic 
 whole. The Theist^ however^ is the only consistent 
 '* Monistl' because if there is but 07ie Reality in 
 the movement of there must be one Goal to, 
 the Universe ^ and this he finds in the Son of God 
 and Man. 
 
 The teaching that all things vibrate together in 
 Spiritual Oneness, supplies us with a beautiful con- 
 ception of the Atonement as the actual struggle 
 of the Son of God to give us peace. This view 
 of the Atonement is not a new one nor an unscriptural 
 one. It is reached merely by mentally simplifying 
 the existing Orthodox and Scriptural views by aid 
 of logical inferences drawn from the fact of the 
 Spiritual Unity of All Things. 
 
 Because the human soul, ever since it was a soul, 
 was a kind of living response to, and a latent power 
 over the Universe within man, the soul's content 
 was the Universe ; but the soul's environment was 
 God, who is beyond the Universe. The soul's 
 native impression from this environment which gave 
 it its beauty was its state of original grace. 
 
 Man is a creation of God ; but his moral life is 
 a joint-creation by God and Man. A Scheme or 
 Plan of this joint-creation was the Goal of History ; 
 and this Plan was, in a sense, mathematically 
 complete in the beginning in human nature, just as 
 
CHRISTIAN MONISM 37 
 
 the whole Table of all the Material Elements is latent 
 in each little corpuscle which, by a mere process of 
 multiplication in the rhythmic degrees of the " Periodic 
 Law," makes up this or that material "element." 
 This Scheme or Plan of history was conformity 
 to that divine Model of movement in rest, namely, 
 the Son of God. The overcoming of a million 
 obstructions on the way thither towards Him, is 
 what colours human personalities in their infinite 
 possibilities or varieties of beauty of character. 
 
 The plot of every life was the Son of God, 
 approachable in a proper and unique manner by 
 each soul. Hence if error or defection came, only 
 He could disentangle or reverse it who Himself 
 was the sole solution of the plot. 
 
 Sin is miscreation, the personal refusal to create 
 with God, and the infamy of abusing His own 
 creative power to contort and miscreate His "com- 
 manded good." Sin contorts God's mathematics of 
 the movement and single moral course of life. For 
 the individual. Sin is a transcendent evil (besides 
 affronting God), because Sin is an undoing of the 
 Universe ; and any possible Moral Ransom can 
 only happen by a real making up of the Universe 
 again. 
 
 Now if Sin were only an error and not a mis- 
 creation or a misgenation, there had been need 
 only of a Prophet ; not of a Redeeming God. A 
 miscreation is a real creation made by a human 
 deflection in the work of the omnipotence of God. 
 Humanity thus carries with it the substance of 
 its Sin. Truth alone cannot redeem mankind ; 
 only a Force equal to that which causes Man to 
 
38 THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
 live can do so. The thought that we are to suffer 
 in consequence of an original or hereditary Sin 
 which we, as individuals, have not committed, need 
 not trouble us as implying the endurance of a 
 seemingly unnecessary evil ; for if there were no 
 transmission of the substance of the Past Sin of 
 Humanity into the Present, those who lived in 
 a former Age could never be redeemed in a later 
 Age. Hereditary Sin is a token of the fact that 
 Humanity is of one substance ; and that, in a sense, 
 the effect of Redemption is in all or none, together, 
 throughout Place and Time. 
 
 For the same reason, when the moment of Redemp- 
 tion came, there could be no sudden transmutation of 
 Humanity into a race of angels. In some sphere or 
 other each individual man must live through the whole 
 experience of Man in History. Redemption could 
 be looked forward to as the linking of many indi- 
 viduals through the Redeemer to the Goal of Spiritual 
 History. But those who were not one in a spiritual 
 compassion with the Redeemer, had to undergo 
 purgation. They had to suffer with Humanity, until 
 its Goal were reached, because they were part of 
 Humanity, and could not be saved in isolation ; 
 because they could not even exist apart from that 
 with which they were inseverably one. 
 
DIVINE PERSONALITY 39 
 
 X. 
 
 Theology relates to truths which are often far more 
 obvious truths than is generally supposed. What- 
 ever Theology may have said about Christ as Man 
 or God must be interpreted in the light of the 
 general truth that as Man He was as we are^ but 
 that His Humanity was more real than ours is, 
 and His Divinity the objective realisation of our 
 subjective Hope. 
 
 The scholastic teaching about the perfect know- 
 ledge of the Human Soul of Christ is founded on a 
 simple reality. Christ, by perfect moral correspond- 
 ence with His soul, possessed His soul, and thus also 
 the knowledge which is of the soul. The Soul itself 
 reflects the Universe, because the Soul is the expres- 
 sion of the Universe devolved within us ; and all this 
 Universe were ours, as perfect knowledge and perfect 
 power, had we but the moral energy to take it to 
 ourselves and use it, as the Kingdom prepared for us 
 in the " foundation of the world." 
 
 When now we ask what the Divinity of Christ is in 
 the logic of the Theistic argument, we must reach the 
 answer by a process of excision rather than by a 
 process of addition. 
 
 Perfect personality is a model form of living move- 
 ment in perfect simplicity, reverberating its Past in 
 its Present, and hence without a past ; and forelaying 
 its Future, and hence without a future ; but holding all 
 things in a substantial Now. Cut away, thus, mentally, 
 the limitations of human personality, and you have a 
 conception of Divine Personality. In any case, 
 
40 THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
 Divine Personality is infinitely responsive to human 
 personality ; for the human is planned upon the 
 nature of the divine. 
 
 Christ, however, did not merely " act the man " ; 
 He was infinitely sincerely man. How, then, was 
 His personality God? Personality from this view- 
 point of the Spiritual Oneness of Nature contains the 
 movement of the Universe gathered from material 
 reality into the restful simplicity of spiritual reality. 
 The Spiritual Creation only differs from the Material 
 Creation in so far as the Spiritual Creation is a 
 gathering together of the Material Creation into a 
 state of restfulness. In our personalities the entire 
 movement of the World is reproduced in Memory, 
 which makes the Past Present; in Understanding, 
 which vouches for the present actuality of all around 
 us ; and in Will, which bears us towards and relates 
 us with the Future. But on account of the observed 
 fact that reason, the note of personality, coheres 
 together in all who possess reason, and is thus 
 founded upon a single reality, it is right to say that 
 there is only one personality strictly speaking within 
 the universe, namely, that Spiritual Reality which is 
 the Spring of the World's energies, and which im- 
 presses itself as the Reason of God upon the whole 
 Life and Movement of the Creation. 
 
 Now, Christ's divine Personality was this model 
 divine Movement towards Rest in the Universe and 
 in Human History. His divine Consciousness, there- 
 fore, was no conflicting movement to His human 
 Consciousness, itself more restfully reposeful in 
 eternity than any mere human consciousness ever 
 could have been. What has been called the Kenosis, 
 
CHRISTOLOGY 41 
 
 or the reputed ignorance of Christ as Man, is really 
 an evidence of the naturalness of the flow of Christ's 
 human Reason within, and unto, the divine forms of 
 knowledge which were embodied in Him as the 
 Reason of God. His human Reason followed its 
 essential way through the limitations of the Mind of 
 the Epoch ; but Christ's divine Reason, ruling already 
 in the very structure of Man, and in every particle of 
 being in the Universe, was so possessed by Christ, 
 that it was the very person or inner self of Christ. 
 Therefore this divine Reason controlled in inner 
 spontaneity that which in Christ's human Reason 
 was taken from the Mind of the Time, to signify 
 some truth beyond the reach of this Mind of the 
 Time. 
 
 The Creed says that Christ was perfect God and 
 perfect Man, and that He was gifted with a rational 
 soul. Unless then we destroy the very nature of 
 Reason, which is the movement of the understanding 
 from unknown truth, through correct premises to 
 known truth, Christ Himself, as Man, daily learned 
 new truths in accordance with that divine decree 
 which is from the very Reason of the Universe. 
 Christ's human Reason concurred with His divine 
 Reason by the abundance of its power, and not by 
 artifice. This divine Reason was itself the gracious 
 Reality of the Reason which sustains everything 
 which is ; and therefore His Hypostatic Union 
 brought Christ nearer to the Heart of Nature than 
 any other individual in human history ever approached 
 thereto. 
 
42 THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
 XL 
 
 Nature is the Shadow of the Substance of the Grace of 
 God. All God's ways are not after the manner of 
 man-invented artifice^ but all rhy^ne together in 
 concord^ Nature concurring with Grace and Grace 
 with Nature^ except that Grace alone is the 
 Substantial World. 
 
 The Incarnation is more easily thinkable by aid 
 of the inspired prophetic consciousness of an 
 universal Sovereignty of God. This human con- 
 sciousness of a possible Reign of Eternal Justice in 
 the World was a worthy sphere of operation of the 
 mental term of the person of Christ, just as His 
 human heredity (nature) was a worthy sphere of 
 the operation of the moral term. 
 
 Granted this "prepared place" for the Incarnation, 
 and take away the chance of human imperfect 
 personality entering, then the Model Personality, 
 namely, the Divine Personality, can easily be thought 
 of as entering there instead of human personality. 
 
 This Personality is all-knowing and all-mighty, not 
 as man might conceive of omniscience and omni- 
 potence, but in that gracious life-likeness in which 
 God may be trusted to manifest them. The divine 
 Science and Power come because this Personality is 
 literally the Modelling Movement of the Cosmos. 
 This Science, however, is not a graceless conscious- 
 ness of alien things and events ; no more than this 
 Power is a Disruptive Force. Because Christ is 
 native to the divine Scheme of Things, being 
 Himself the incarnate divine Scheme of Things, 
 
REALITY OF THOUGHT 43 
 
 He IS more with the movement of the Universe 
 than any other being in the Universe. His divine 
 Science is His feeling of the Goal of the Universe in 
 every incident of His earthly Life within the Universe. 
 His divine Power is the power of the Divine Scheme 
 to control the Human Scheme and " be cleared when 
 it is judged." 
 
 xn. 
 
 Theism makes the best Thoughts of Man through Christ 
 the centre upon whicJi the whole of Physical 
 Reality converges. 
 
 Theism is not an attempt to constrain the infinite 
 realities of God and man within arbitrary intellectual 
 systems of Thought. It is the reasonable view of the 
 Universe to take, to say that God chooses the 
 Thought of Man as the line of, the light of, His New 
 Creation, and therefore that all essential Human 
 Thoughts concur with Divine Realities, through 
 Christ. 
 
 If Christ rose again from the Dead in hearts and 
 souls, as the Idealist so often tells us, He also 
 necessarily arose again, the Theist adds, in physical 
 fact ; because physical facts are necessarily part 
 and parcel of supreme soul facts. Moreover, when 
 Christ ascended into Heaven, that Heaven, if, as we 
 may suppose, it was within His human soul, was no 
 unreal or unobjective place. Rather, where Christ 
 is, there is the only real and objective place. Christ's 
 human soul is the converted Universe, the Universe 
 converted within His personal scheme of rest. Our 
 souls are virtual replicas of the Universe; but 
 
44 THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
 without Him, on account of Sin, they could not 
 endure for ever. Only in Him is Mankind gathered 
 in one; and through Him Man will live while He 
 lives, though outside the Body and Soul of Christ, 
 called also the Church of Christ, no body nor soul of 
 man can ever live onwards and endure. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 Theism being a rational theory about the substantial 
 reality of religious truths those who approach faith 
 in Christ with a right theistic preparation fina 
 Him to be as real to thejfi as the Apostles found 
 Him in their own Age, 
 
 I ask for a fellowship of Christians who will take 
 at its precise value the teaching which they uphold. 
 The daily life of Christians is the sacramental life of 
 the Church. How little the Sacraments may mean 
 to individuals, all the world knows ; how much they 
 may mean in the sacrament of spiritual restitution to 
 us of an apostolic consciousness of Christ living on 
 the earth, it is given to no one to know. 
 
 The Goal of the World's History, which is the 
 " Coming again of the Son of Man " (alluded to in the 
 Prayer of Consecration as our being made " partakers 
 of His most blessed Body and Blood "), is all prefigured 
 to the world in that Holy Sacrament in which, in a 
 spiritual manner, the Second Advent is fulfilled in 
 us. 
 
 The main value of Theism is that its acceptance 
 intellectually obliges everyone to put a scientific 
 substantiality into their words. It obliges people, in 
 
MENTAL REDEMPTION 45 
 
 other words, to mean precisely what they say. 
 Theism teaches not one jot or tittle of anything 
 which is doctrinally new. Its aim is spiritually to 
 revolutionise humanity through teaching a true 
 appreciation of what it has long since possessed. In 
 a secondary sense, however, all who receive Christ 
 with the apostolic consciousness of the presence of 
 Christ, will become His apostles and His messengers 
 in all the highways and byways of the world ; and 
 in this conservative sense there will be a new or 
 renewed dispensation of the Holy Ghost. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 The Agony in the Garden relates to an enduring 
 dispensation of God in spiritual history^ whereby 
 a Thought-Ransom precedes the actual divine 
 accomplishment of Redemption. If each particle 
 in the Creation is represented in every otJier particle ^ 
 so is each soul represented in every other soul^ 
 and hence Christ's mental Co7iflict with Sin 
 embraced every soul, and, in a certain sense, is ever 
 going on. 
 
 The Agony in the Garden may be taken as the 
 Mental Redemption of Mankind, which it would be 
 difficult for the exponents of mere Idealism to prove 
 was not enough. As Prophet of Humanity, Christ 
 grappled with Sin and all its effects at Gethsemane ; 
 and mentally saw through to an eternal release. 
 All souls have a real presence in each soul, but only 
 Christ, by divine energy, so possessed His human 
 
46 THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
 soul that He could meet and see and converse there 
 with every human soul. In the soul of Christ was 
 therefore present the substance of all the souls of 
 mankind. In His state of agony and mental anguish 
 in the Garden, Christ comprehended the dark outlines 
 and various shades of all the fearful miscreation which 
 had come to Him in lieu of the beauty of the joint- 
 creation between Man and God, the moral and real 
 life in that Covenant whereby man moves towards 
 his eternity concurrently with God. Into the place 
 of all this evil substance or miscreation, the Redeemer 
 devoted Himself, first, to know how each sinner 
 might be sympathetically interpreted as a subject 
 for his Redeeming Love. There is an uncertain 
 psychic law whereby a friend, at the moment of his 
 death, is said to enter in a real presence within our 
 souls. Be that as it may, there is a very certain law 
 whereby the Redeemer began to be present to the 
 conscience of all Humanity by His death, and from 
 the moment of His death. 
 
 By His agony in the Garden, Christ had brought 
 all Suffering Humanity to Himself within His soul. 
 By His passion and death. He " crossed over," in 
 His substantial presence, to all mankind. From 
 henceforth the Church of Christ is this living 
 persistence of the Body and the Soul of Christ in 
 the body and soul of Humanity. Christ now 
 remodels Humanity in the beauty of Grace, and 
 composes it in rest; as He has already moulded 
 the movement in the Universe in the beauty of 
 Nature. Because also He is Lord of both the 
 Universe and of Humanity, in His Church He is 
 remodelling and reforming both Man, and the 
 
THE OLD AND NEW CREATION 47 
 
 Universe itself, into the likeness of the New 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 XV. 
 
 All Science is making zvay for such a clear definition 
 of the meaning of the Reason of God which was 
 Incarnate in Christy that the same Science will 
 shoiv forth His fudgment on the Living and the 
 Dead. 
 
 John, the Apostle, saw Christ's place in the Uni- 
 verse by intuition. The movement of knowledge in 
 history is towards the recovery of the Apostolic 
 Consciousness of Christ in a didactic way. If Coper- 
 nicus and Galileo discovered the place of the earth 
 in the stellar universe, that was one stage towards 
 discovering Bethlehem in the midst of the Stars. If 
 Newton discovered the cosmic laws of motion, he 
 discovered the movement in the world impressed on 
 it by the living Plan of movement which is the 
 Person of Christ. 
 
 If Joule and others discovered the law of the Con- 
 servation of Energy, they discovered part of the 
 scheme which feeds the New Creation. 
 
 If Darwin discovered Evolution, and if Spencer 
 synthesed the truth of Nature as the knowledge of the 
 Movement of Universal Energy in degrees of integra- 
 tion, this Evolution was directed by the Mathematical 
 Models of energy which we now know predetermine 
 the nature of life ; also was it directed by what is 
 called the Periodic Law, which, existing in itself in 
 Reason only, yet preordains the material Elements 
 in every world of Stars. 
 
48 THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
 Now these Models of Movement in Energy, before 
 they exist in actual energy are the expression of the 
 Reason of God. 
 
 Natural Selection is the destruction of Movements 
 which do not concur with God's Rule and Numbers 
 in the Elements, and with God's requirements from 
 the Animal World. 
 
 The destructive terrors of Natural Selection are a 
 foreboding of the Judgment of this Reason of God, 
 when It shall appear before all men to give the 
 Freehold of Its sovereignty to the Good, and deprive 
 the Wicked of any place within Its Book of Life. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 All Fait h^ through Christ, is the beginning of the 
 Resurrection. 
 
 What is Faith ? 
 
 Faith is the revulsion of humanity against death, 
 and the attempt to live without death. 
 
 Life revolts from death, or it would not be life. 
 Life in man revolts from death in its transcendent 
 environment ; in all that its reason or conscience 
 knows. 
 
 But this revolt is ineffectual unless a Power which 
 is Lord of Life and Death impels the revulsion 
 against Death with a superhuman strength which our 
 ever-dying life itself is incapable of. Unless Christ 
 has risen from the dead, then our faith is vain. But 
 because He has risen. He has sanctioned the entire 
 faith of the Human Race. 
 
 All faith, then, in a sense, is faith in Christ, be it 
 
FAITH 49 
 
 near or far ; and all faith in Christ is then, too, an 
 initial rising from the dead. 
 
 Every moment of our lives, of ourselves, we are 
 dying and spending our lives beyond the power of 
 recovery by aid of any principle of strength within 
 us. Yet Faith is the daily and hourly recovery from 
 death, by aid from a Power which is greater than 
 Death. 
 
 Faith takes every action which it inspires, and 
 makes it deathless. Where Nature scatters Life, 
 Faith gathers and assumes Life. 
 
 Faith is the power to give or direct our lives in the 
 direction of One who is capable of accepting the 
 gift. 
 
 On account of what He will do in the days before 
 us even though our actions be inglorious, yet is man- 
 kind through Christ justified by faith alone, and not 
 by the works of man. 
 
 xvn. 
 
 Our very subjectivities^ such as our living memories of 
 deceased persons^ are the definite earthly resting- 
 place of the New Creation. 
 
 Perducant te in civitateni sanctam, novam ferusalem. 
 
 Comte could not imagine how the deceased heroes 
 of Humanity could possess anything more than a 
 subjective presence in the memories of those who 
 cherished them. But, granted even that, and if the 
 force value of identity is conceivable as being re- 
 enacted in the strange and infinite subjective 
 universe, I do not see why we should not say that 
 
 G 
 
60 THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
 memories of the deceased within us contain the real 
 presences of the deceased. 
 
 May not " Mediumship " and " Hypnotism " be a 
 disordered application of a divine law which, itself, is 
 orderly, creative, and purposive? If the subject be 
 argued out to a finish on the theistic theory of energy 
 as God's energy, added to that of psychological 
 investigation, the living may, it is conceivable, first of 
 all during life, control the thought of themselves in 
 other persons, though rather through the modelling 
 force that all realities have over ideas, than in any 
 mysterious manner. When, however, death occurs, 
 there is a snapping of this control, and in that case 
 the memory of the deceased lives by itself; a truth 
 confirmed by the authority of visions at the moment 
 of decease, and of the reputed "spirit mediums" who 
 accept control from the subjective memories of other 
 persons. 
 
 In Frederick Myers' great work on The Survival of 
 Human Personality after Bodily Deaths there is 
 abundant evidence to prove the existence of quasi- 
 mechanical reverberances of memories of deceased 
 persons ; proof, in other words, of the existence of 
 everything about human survival except the one thing, 
 namely, the moral substantiality of departed persons. 
 At least, however, Myers convincingly disproves 
 Comte's hypothesis that memories of the dead are 
 less than real energies or things. 
 
 Who shall say that these very mechanical reverber- 
 ances of the dead are not, in a sense, appertaining to 
 those " graves " or " monuments " in which departed 
 personalities rest, until they shall all " hear the voice 
 of the Son of God and live " again ? 
 
THE "PAROUSIA" 51 
 
 Such is the least of hopes ; but is not the greatest 
 of hopes, the hope that all the dead who die in Christ 
 are slowly filled with the transcendent moral, and 
 hence also cosmic energy of the Son of God, and 
 there and then likewise begin to abide in Him ? 
 
 And if each man has a " Subliminal Self," which is 
 a universe itself in miniature, may not the mighty 
 single mind of the Church of God possess, in an 
 analogous manner, a mighty universe of its own, 
 which, by the creative energy of God, is fashioned 
 without hands into the New Jerusalem ? 
 
 xvin. 
 
 The reason why there fuust be a Final Apparition or 
 Judgment ; called in the New Testament^ the 
 " Parousial' or Last Things. 
 
 To the Theist, all things are believed to exist in 
 personal form ; that is, he sees that the movement 
 of cosmic Energy and Life, did it reach the point 
 towards which it tended, would either terminate 
 in personality or express personality. The Christian 
 calls this personal proportion of the Universe the 
 Reason of God, and says that it was incarnate in 
 Christ. 
 
 Christ, in His apocalyptic or ultimate place in 
 History, belongs to the Future, because He is an 
 incarnation of this eternally modelling movement 
 in history. In so far as anything is spiritually 
 durable, it is so because He is the actual movement in 
 it, as in all things, towards their final state of rest. 
 He has modelled all life and shaped it towards peace. 
 
52 THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
 if ever it is to reach peace ; nor can any World, 
 nor Life, nor Being within the World, enter upon 
 its rest until it has come to its rest in Him. 
 Therefore Spiritual History is a struggle of all 
 souls to reach His peace. 
 
 Christ will appear in the World as Judge, because 
 He is one with the Reason of God in the Universe ; 
 and this Reason of God, from whose rule no particle 
 of being in the World can get away, is destined, 
 of its very nature, to come through with all its work 
 in the Universe, and be manifested through all the 
 Wide World when this work is done. 
 
 XIX. 
 
 Heaven is begotten in our inner World of Thought^ 
 Hope, Love^ Desire ; all of which we iinagine 
 are a Shadow-Land^ until the Spirit through 
 the Word of God causes them to be eternally real 
 and true. 
 
 Heaven simply means that our inner universe of 
 thought, vision, dream, hope, aspiration, prophecy, 
 desire, expectation, possesses a solemn and substantial 
 reality in the Heart and Mind of God. 
 
 Saintliness does but replace a substantial for an 
 unsubstantial Universe ; or at least it replaces 
 one for an Universe which is unsubstantial for 
 us. 
 
 Prayer moves the mountain forces of the Universe 
 in our inner control of them into the sphere of 
 the sovereign rule of Christ as God and Man. 
 
 By Christ as the Reason of God, all things 
 
THE iNEW CREATION 53 
 
 " consist " and are what they are in Nature ; by 
 Christ as God and Man, all things " consist " and 
 are gathered in one for Man in Grace. 
 
 This is possible only because having once agreed 
 together in the Reason, the Word of God; if 
 they are brought together again by the Word made 
 Flesh for Man, the operation whereby this is done 
 is natively proper to the One who so brings it 
 to pass. The New Creation is identically the same 
 work in power, authority, control, and sovereignty, 
 as the Old Creation ; and the Creation of an 
 Universe for Man, namely Heaven, is work of the 
 same Workman, as is all the process of the unfolding 
 of the Natural Universe. 
 
 If Christ did not model and control Nature, He 
 could not model and control Grace. But by the 
 Incarnation He has brought His controlling power 
 over the Universe into the Heart of Man ; and 
 through His Church, and through His Grace, He 
 models and controls the Universe within the Heart 
 to make it a Heaven, that is a reality for Ever. 
 
 XX. 
 
 The Dead are living with the Living because all things 
 consist and persist together in Christ. 
 
 Theism teaches that all worlds are God's World, 
 all strengths are God's Strength; all life is God's 
 possession ; all interrelations of things are mediated 
 through Him ; and all manifoldness is one in Him. 
 Theism teaches that each human life is represented 
 in every other human life, as indeed each material 
 
54 THE COSMIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 
 particle is represented in every other material particle 
 of the Universe. Theism teaches that each soul 
 thus possesses a living presence of all humanity 
 within itself 
 
 A person whom we know, on dying, still lives in a 
 real presence within us through a mysterious soul- 
 reverberance. The same soul-reverberance resounds 
 from all the dead whom we have not known, through 
 the dead we have known, and extending backwards 
 to others ever since the beginning of the world. If 
 our moral energies were perfect and divine, we could 
 find all humanity, past, present, and to come, within 
 us. And they would not be pictures of other 
 persons, but real presences of other persons. If this 
 be not true, then Theism, the view which links all past 
 existences together in real existences in the present, 
 is totally false ; and there could be no basis for the 
 Redemption. Coming as Redemption did before the 
 goal of history had been reached, it redirected the 
 great Communion of all humanity towards restfulness 
 in God. Yet this divine consolidation, the Scriptural 
 Restitution of all things, must remain in conceal- 
 ment in what is called the Church, until, in the Pauline 
 phraseology, the times of the nations shall have been 
 fulfilled. 
 
 Redemption wrought a consolidarity of all the 
 fortunes and lives of humanity past, present, and to 
 come, gathering together what was forgotten, 
 encircling in its living arms all present lives, and 
 joining all souls, until that Future when the self- 
 consciousness of all humanity shall have grown 
 complete. 
 
 At a certain moment of history the civilised nations 
 
"THE RESTITUTION^^ 55 
 
 are sure to come to Christ ; when His own moral 
 energy shall have entered into every soul ; when, in 
 communion with all humanity, He shall have relived 
 in every human life, remoulding men unto the likeness 
 of each man's proper conscience, and each man's 
 proper soul — unto which likeness no one elsewhere 
 could have attained — saving in this world, purifying 
 and enlightening in the underworld. 
 
PART III 
 
 THE CHURCH; OR, THE KEEPING 
 
 OF THE KING'S LIKENESS AND 
 
 IMPRESSION 
 
 H 
 
THE CHURCH; OR, THE KEEPING 
 
 OF THE KING'S LIKENESS AND 
 
 IMPRESSION 
 
 "The Anointing which ye have received of Him abideth in 
 you, and ye need not that any man teach you, but as the same 
 Anointing teacheth you of all things, and is Truth, and is no 
 lie ; and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in Him." — 
 St John. 
 
 I. 
 
 Religion is a cosmic movement of the Universe towards 
 God. While Ethics and Morality are the 
 inexorable conditions, yet conduct^ of itself with- 
 out the recreative energy of Religion, yields no 
 substantial change over the body and soul of Man. 
 
 If religion were only ethics, then the mere publication 
 of the Sermon on the Mount throughout the world, 
 without the Coming of the Holy Ghost on the 
 Disciples, would be the whole of the Religion of Christ. 
 The Church Catholic has ever been a radical contra- 
 diction to this view. The Church is neither a 
 system of sound Economics nor a mere Society or 
 club for the promotion of goodness. Sound Eco- 
 nomics and sound Social Ethics are the two stern 
 and inexorable conditions of the Church's triumph in 
 the world ; but they do not make up the fact of its life. 
 
 59 
 
60 THE CHURCH 
 
 The Church of Christ is either a power integrating 
 and immortalising man, and using Economics 
 and Ethics as a means to this sovereign end ; or 
 its claim to be supernatural has no justification. 
 
 In the scheme of Christian evidences, firstly, the 
 fact that the Creation can supply the wants of man is 
 necessarily bound up with the truth that there is a 
 God who is Father to men. And after this the Life 
 of Christ may reveal and demonstrate the social 
 reality of the Brotherhood of Men. But, in fine, 
 unless a new power had now been brought into 
 the world through Christ, called in Theology the 
 Holy Ghost, and had revealed Itself in a God- 
 made solidarity of Mankind, then the evidences for 
 Catholicity would have broken down. For there 
 can be no Divine, or Catholic, Church which is not 
 in effect a Transcendent Communion of all the 
 peoples, races, tongues, religions, civic ideals, social 
 aspirations of the whole of mankind, sealed in a New 
 and Eternal Covenant which shall bring down 
 Heaven to reign on Earth and transform the Earth 
 itself into a Social Paradise. 
 
 II. 
 
 The Church is the Angela or Messenger, through which 
 the Son of God constantly visits Men and visits 
 
 Nations. 
 
 To Christians, it is the most interesting fact in 
 current history that Christ dwells in the world in an 
 ever-living communion amid Human Society, and 
 that He is restless in His missionary enterprise until 
 
CHRIST IN THE CHURCH 61 
 
 He has sweetly won by His influence and power every 
 soul and every nation. To bring comfort and power 
 to all men, Christ has sent His Angel-Church to 
 bring His Power in contact with His World, to leaven 
 all the World with the ferment of the Holy Passover 
 of all His Creation unto God. 
 
 He brings His Church into well-defined relationship 
 with Human Life and Society, and with the environ- 
 ment of all the Universe. Through His Church, 
 Christ lives in intimate union with Humanity which 
 is twice His own, and with the Cosmic Life which 
 belonged to Him from the beginning, since He is one 
 with the Reason of God. This Holy Reason of the 
 Universe most appropriately uses His sensible 
 Universe wherewith to communicate His Divine 
 Mysteries to Men. 
 
 In His Church, Christ fulfils human aspiration and 
 desire through the multitude and efficacy of His gifts. 
 There is no human problem which He has not taken 
 to Himself power to solve, nor human anxiety which 
 He is not compassionate enough to allay. There is 
 no truth of which He is not the interpretation, no 
 Goodness with which His Heart does not agree, no 
 Social Justice in humanity whose sword it is not His 
 to wield. He is attracted to all mankind in His 
 Church's missionary enterprise, ever willing and ready 
 to expand with His Church. His Life is the 
 Sovereign Mission of God to men ; He is Beauty to all 
 their vision ; a Divine Reason speaking to human 
 reason ; a Heart revealing truths to hearts. Christ 
 in His Church is the Compliment to the Creation of 
 God, the final harvest of all that is sown on earth 
 and He is ready during the course of history to offer 
 
62 THE CHURCH 
 
 through Himself the gifts of all the World to the 
 Father and Creator from whom they all descended. 
 
 in. 
 
 When in the ordinary course of history new vistas are 
 breaking upon the spiritual eyesight of men^ it is 
 then the moment when the Church should send 
 forth her teachers to interpret these vistas. 
 
 A great object of the Church as an educational 
 body is to train individuals in the major prophetic 
 stamp of a St Paul or a St Francis. The immediate 
 chances of her success depend upon her taking into 
 her life characters of the human immortality of 
 Isaiah, Jeremiah, St Paul, St Augustine, or St Francis. 
 Since these individuals may only be looked for in 
 crucial periods of history, the destinies of the 
 Church of God are conditioned very straitly by the 
 necessities of place, time, and the growth of the 
 world. The term of our present era will probably be 
 the call of many all-sympathetic men within the 
 bosom of the Church, and their new mission will lie 
 in working with the Church for the ingathering of the 
 world. In that day we may expect the miracle of 
 Pentecost to be renewed, and the Church to renew 
 her triumphs of the Apostolic Age. These new 
 Apostles will not be separators from the Church, but 
 thorough and entire co-operators with the Church, 
 and through them the divisions and schisms of the 
 Churches will probably be healed. 
 
CHURCH HISTORY 63 
 
 IV. 
 
 Church History is the direction and convergence of the 
 Universe towards seeing the Face of Christy and 
 imploriiig therefrom perpetual light and blessing. 
 
 The Impression of the Spirit of Christ came to 
 St Paul through St Stephen, and indirectly through 
 the original witnesses, the Apostles and Disciples of 
 Christ. Theistically speaking, the control of St Paul 
 by the Spirit of Christ was a spiritual Second Advent 
 of Christ. The problem, at least of the Church, is 
 clearly exemplified in the instance of St Paul, because 
 the vivid human reality of the Impression which 
 belonged to those who had seen Christ, and is 
 accurately preserved in the first three gospels was 
 necessarily absent from St Paul, who, as he himself 
 said, only sought for and found, the Crucified, and 
 Risen, and Heavenly Christ. 
 
 Herein the meaning of the probationary or sacra- 
 mental period of Church History is marked for its 
 goal. The Church must, at all hazards, retain the 
 whole Impression of the person of Christ, until the 
 period when the Church can totally reconstruct in 
 living consciousness the earthly Christ. Church 
 History is therefore a definite movement of mankind 
 towards the repossession of the Apostolic Conscious- 
 ness of Christ. While the Kenans and other 
 " artists " of the Gospel were totally at fault in their 
 idealisations of Christ in Galilee ; in spite of them- 
 selves, they were, nevertheless, instruments of a 
 reconstruction of the Apostolic Consciousness. 
 
 No one can say when the simple realism of that 
 
64 THE CHURCH 
 
 Apostolic Consciousness of our Saviour will have 
 reached completion. The fact, at least, that there 
 was such a necessary period of History to be faced, in 
 which the ever-present Christ could not be conceived 
 of with the whole apostolic consciousness, is a justifi- 
 cation of all the intervening events of Church History. 
 There is no need for explaining, or explaining away, 
 the faith and sorrows of the Saints and of all the 
 Church of God. But there is need to affirm con- 
 clusively that their faith in Christ, and in the Church, 
 was true in an accuracy which was scientific and 
 absolute. 
 
 We can condone with the great wounds and 
 schisms of the Church, if God has chosen them as 
 the means through which mankind shall repossess 
 the blessed face of Christ, even as the Apostles were 
 wont to see His face. 
 
 As with the Apostles of Christ, so in the Apostle- 
 Churches of Christy there are special characters 
 related to the special destiny of the Churches in 
 the Final City of God, The Holy Ghost has 
 segregated and trained the Anglican Church 
 not to contradict the Roman or other Churches, 
 but to supplement the other Chmxhes as St Paul 
 supplemented Peter and the original Twelve. 
 
 The Historic Church in England is, in many 
 senses, the Church of the Great Apostle of the 
 Gentiles. 
 
 The Apostles of the Lamb, whose names are 
 embedded in the foundations of the Final City of 
 
THE ANGLICAN CHURCH 65 
 
 God, are a Prophecy and a permanent Life-Likeness 
 to, the procession of the Churches of the Apostolic 
 Succession from Christ during history. 
 
 Of the essential " Peter," which is the Church of 
 Rome, let those who are of the Communion of Peter 
 speak for themselves. 
 
 Besides Peter and others of the Twelve, there 
 was an Apostle who was called by the Holy Ghost 
 later than the rest of the Apostles ; the manner 
 of whose calling was proper to himself; who once 
 was not known by the other Apostles, who once 
 resisted other of the Apostles, but who was called 
 from eternity that the Son of God might supple- 
 ment the Gospel of the Law through him by the 
 Gospel of the eternal Grace of God. 
 
 In like manner, there is an Apostle-Church in 
 history whose calling is in many ways proper to 
 itself; which God once segregated from the other 
 Apostle-Churches ; which has not always been 
 known by other Apostle-Churches ; which, overruled 
 by the Task-Master, once resisted other of the 
 Apostle-Churches ; which, nevertheless, is ordained 
 by the Task-Master to set forth His Grace amid 
 the New Times, and among the New Peoples, that 
 God may supplement His Catholic Church of Law 
 by His Catholic Church of the eternal freedom 
 of His Grace. 
 
 The divine showings for the Mission of the 
 Church of England appear in the very nature of 
 a reasonable belief in God. Controversy speaks of 
 the isolation of the Church of England as though 
 there were no Ruler of the Universe who necessarily 
 preordained this Segregation or Separation, unto 
 
 I 
 
66 THE CHURCH 
 
 the training for some greater Coming Together 
 again. 
 
 If the Reformation, on both sides, was mostly 
 a whirlwind of terrible Sin and Sacrilege and 
 Plunder and Slayings of the Saints; yet did God 
 reign in the whirlwind and the thunder and the 
 lightnings ; and through perils and many tribulations 
 He set apart for Himself, and tried, and proved 
 His Apostle-Church. 
 
 God gave the Going Away from forced Union 
 by Law, not as some supposed, that Men might 
 glory in being separate ; but that there might be 
 some day a Returning Together in a Spiritual Union 
 by Grace which should endure for ever. 
 
 The destiny of the Historic Church in England 
 is to prove that if you try to force men to unite, 
 they are very likely to divide ; but that if you 
 leave everyone free to separate, they will probably 
 seek how they may come together, and obey together 
 in one ; in fine, to prove that those whom no man 
 could constrain in one by the Law of Man, can be 
 gathered together into a Final Spiritual Catholic 
 Church by the Free Grace of God. 
 
 VL 
 
 To conquer all^ we must be conquered by all. 
 
 Christendom has hardened itself with prejudice. 
 Catholic Saints who are prejudiced against Puritan 
 Saints should learn to love them, and to include the 
 Puritan point of view within their own. They 
 cannot conquer them otherwise than by being 
 
THE TRUE CATHOLIC 67 
 
 conquered by them. The New Saint must recognise 
 that a fellow-man's sincere religion is a synonym for 
 his soul, nor can the Saint love souls without loving 
 the sacred possessions of every soul. If the Catholic 
 recognises the Wesleyan, he has expanded Catholicism 
 into Wesleyanism, and incidentally converted Wesley- 
 anism to Catholicism wholesale. The Catholic Saint 
 may feel that in suffering conversion to John Wesley 
 he is endangering his own soul ; but unless his faith 
 triumphs over his feelings, he is no saint nor hero. 
 The Saint is one who gives his soul to gain his 
 soul, and only he who ventures all will win all. As 
 Ecclesiastes says : " He that observeth the winds, 
 shall not sow ; and he that regardeth the clouds, shall 
 not reap." 
 
 The true Catholic follower of Jesus Christ in the 
 Twentieth Century must seek for direct Communion 
 with Catholics everywhere; and, without losing an 
 iota of his Catholicism, should suffer himself to be 
 converted to Methodism ; to Congregationalism ; to 
 the Religion of the Friends ; and to the Evangelical 
 Faith. 
 
 Someone must make the venture of being conquered 
 by all, in order to conquer all. A monk once broke 
 into the arena of the Colosseum during a gladiatorial 
 display, and suffered death in order successfully to 
 bring the shedding of human blood to an end. 
 Controversy which is the denial of one Christian's 
 faith by another Christian, is a greater evil than 
 shedding blood in gladiatorial contests ; and there is 
 an imperative demand upon the Christian conscience 
 that the spiritual slaughter should terminate. 
 
 No careful thinker is likely to deplore any rich 
 
68 THE CHURCH 
 
 variety of Ideals within Christendom ; only would he 
 deplore the fact that there are so few. Baptist, 
 Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Evan- 
 gelical, are far too nearly alike to let us suppose that, 
 together, they could form more than a small portion 
 of the Catholic Whole. What is wanted is that a 
 Catholic Saint should, at least on the spiritual side 
 (and without exclusive committal to self-exclusive 
 ordinances like adult baptism), become a Baptist, 
 a Congregationalist, a Presbyterian, an Evangelical, a 
 Methodist, at least in all their spiritual practices and 
 ideals. 
 
 VII. 
 
 The Incarnation reveals the manner of that Divine 
 Visitation which Right Reason tells us will 
 overtake the whole of the Creation. Christ 
 safeguards the channels of the authentic trans- 
 mission of His power. 
 
 The agnostic asks — Where does what we call the 
 Incarnation, come in ? 
 
 I should ask rather — In what manner should we 
 conceivably leave it out ? 
 
 When floods denude the covering of a mountain, 
 they leave the architectural rocks behind. Human 
 error and sin, by their self-destructiveness, could but 
 reveal the basal rocks of God which checked their 
 further devastations. No true prophet, if he saw 
 even into one pebble rightly, could fail to see aught 
 but the fact that a Messiah would come to judge the 
 world. The hidden truth alone that His Judgment 
 purported Love and Mercy, belonged to one of those 
 
THE "DISCIPLE-CHURCHES^^ 69 
 
 blessed realities called divine revelations, in which 
 God is vindicated as greater than man. For the 
 World itself, unaided by this divine Affirmative, could 
 never have foreseen that its impending correction 
 should have been manifested as an exclusive Plan of 
 Love. 
 
 The Disciple-Churches who to-day dispute among 
 themselves as to which is greater or less in God's 
 Kingdom, are subject to the proverbial rebuke that 
 their Master administered to their spiritual forbears. 
 A Church's exclusiveness is not from its divineness, 
 but from its human jealousies and from the self- 
 complacency of its members. It is impossible for 
 one Church to claim pre-eminence over other Churches 
 out of any inspiration from the Spirit of the Son of 
 Man. 
 
 The anxieties of a Newman about the valid trans- 
 mission of God's Power in history were anxieties 
 which took no account of any inclusive Plan of Things 
 in conformity to Christ. Newman correctly saw that 
 Theism required the reality of an Apostolic Succession 
 and of an embodied Earthly Sovereignty of the 
 Invisible Christ. But he overlooked the Inclusive- 
 ness of Christ when he began to be anxious about 
 the place of this or that Church which had retained 
 the Institutions of this Transmission. The Master 
 is either with all of His Disciples or He is with 7ione 
 of them ; and He is with each of them in the exact 
 institutional manner in which each has retained His 
 Faith. The Anglican Continuity, whereby Anglican 
 Priests receive the very Impression which Christ 
 breathed upon the Apostles in Palestine, is valid, for 
 the plain reason, that, being a work of this inclusive 
 
70 THE CHURCH 
 
 Spirit of Christ, it was taken from the Future by the 
 Spirit as well as sent onwards by Christ unto the 
 Future. 
 
 It is inconceivable that any consecrating Bishops 
 who were the links in the predetermined chain of this 
 transmission could have thought and intended 
 anything which, to the Reason of God, who sustains 
 everything^ could not have been the medium through 
 which His great Passing Through was continued 
 in the World. 
 
 vni. 
 
 Proselytism between members of bodies who equally 
 confess Christy is rash and immoral. 
 
 All attempts of one body of Christians to under- 
 mine the faith of another body of Christians are 
 necessarily immoral ; because they are breaches in 
 that moral compact between man and man on 
 which order and social morality are founded. 
 
 They may, further, be sins against the Holy Ghost ; 
 because unless the assailant of another's faith is 
 in the Counsels of the Holy Ghost, it is highly 
 probable that he may be assailing the workings of 
 the Spirit of God. 
 
 Who has usurped from Christ His right to know 
 His own, and to abide with them ? God, and not 
 the controversialist, is the arbiter of that which 
 belongs to the Church of God. 
 
 The only valid arguments of one Church against 
 another Church are spiritual collective existence, 
 and spiritual collective persistence, without words. 
 Only God creates and perpetuates His creations. 
 
THE "VERA EFFIGIES" 71 
 
 The fact of the Living Church in any land, is the 
 argument of God that this is His Church in that 
 land. To assail the faith of other Christians, is to 
 attempt to mount upon the throne of God and 
 forestall His General Judgment on the Churches 
 of the Living, and on the Churches of the Dead. 
 
 IX. 
 
 Every incident of Church History has its place in the 
 architectural plan of the World's total realisation 
 of the Presence of Christy and in the elapse of every 
 moment of time in the History of the Church one 
 of the veils which are between us and the face of 
 Christ is taken away. 
 
 In order that the whole Impression, the Vera 
 Effigies, the true and perfect likeness of the Lord, 
 be recovered again, so that the spirit of Christ, as 
 St Paul taught, may change the beholders of Christ 
 into the likeness of what they behold, and into 
 Christ-men such as the Apostle Paul himself was, 
 the following conditions have to be complied with 
 in that literalness and inerrancy which is required 
 for effecting any such, or parallel, psychological 
 changes in human personality. 
 
 Firstly, it is necessary to have preserved in a 
 literal and well-defined and dogmatic manner, the 
 total world-significance of Christ. This has been 
 done by the Catholic Creeds, and by the Ecclesiastical 
 definitions of dogma. These definitions have been 
 assailed as legalistic and unspiritual. But they 
 professedly are not intended to supplant the inspired 
 
72 THE CHURCH 
 
 revelation of Christ in the Gospels. They are, in 
 a sense, legal or juristic ; but they are so for the 
 supreme purpose of preserving the spiritual fortunes 
 of the world, namely, the Whole of Christ. The 
 Holy Spirit worked upon the Mind of the Church 
 in these definitions through mankind's instinct for 
 holding fast whatsoever of worth is entrusted in 
 its possession. The definitions of dogma have the 
 precise value with which the Church has invested 
 them, though it is highly likely that the ultimate 
 reason for all these definitions is not yet manifest. 
 
 Secondly^ no one can be perfectly impressed with 
 the Spirit of Christ who is not in active union 
 with the Church throughout the world. In modern 
 language, he must wholly accept the Historic Church 
 of his land ; but be a complete Reunionist, elsewise 
 in desire ; including within his living sympathy 
 not only the orthodox Churches of the East and 
 West, but the whole of Protestant Christendom. 
 This condition is psychological, and therefore inex- 
 orable. In other words, characters as Christ-like 
 as Paul, without this living inclusiveness towards 
 alK Christians, simply will not appear. St Paul 
 and St Francis of Assisi were such passionate 
 realists that they are psychologically unimaginable 
 as Protestants ; but, none the less, from the hearts 
 of their Catholicism they both embraced an essential 
 good of Protestantism more firmly even than 
 Protestants themselves. 
 
 Thirdly^ before Christ can be interchanged with 
 His own disciples, and through them enter, in the 
 plenitude of His Spirit, into the world, it is neces- 
 sary that some men should have been perfectly 
 
SYMPATHY WITH LIFE 73 
 
 trained in the wholeness of these Messianic 
 sympathies with life. This requirement is a hard 
 one, but an exorably necessary one. Sympathy and 
 universal compassionateness with life were native 
 to Christ, whose Godhead was the Reason itself of 
 God in all the Universe ; but with His followers the 
 acquisition of these virtues has taken them more 
 than a thousand years to accomplish. At the 
 present day we possess many models and instances 
 of the clearness and the fire of this major sympathy 
 with life. Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Rossetti, 
 Patmore, were true Seers of the Second Coming of 
 the Lord ; because they saw the beauty of the 
 environment of the New Christ, in which His new 
 earthly footsteps are to have their way paved for 
 them. We must add to the Nature-lovers the list 
 of lovers of humanity, from Francis of Assisi, Dante, 
 Shakespeare, Jean Francois Millet ; and the reformers 
 of human conditions, from Las Casas through Shaftes- 
 bury, Ruskin, William Morris, Tolstoi, Frederick 
 Denison Maurice, Kingsley, and the Christian 
 Socialists. Add to these all other humane and noble 
 lovers of humanity, reformers, seers, social prophets ; 
 all those who are restless until mankind has found 
 its rest. Through the influence of these leaders 
 our social sympathies have been quickened, or set 
 on fire. Their passion for humanity is a genuine 
 prophecy of the approaching kingdom of Fire, of 
 the day when their world-wide sympathies and love 
 of human life will have found its requisition in a 
 new race of Christ-men like St Paul. To these 
 very sympathies the Christ-men will have added 
 the authority which comes from obedience to the 
 
 K 
 
74 THE CHURCH 
 
 Church, and from the presence of the living Saviour 
 within the Church, which the Holy Spirit through 
 the Church will give to them. 
 
 But when Orthodoxy shall have been illumined 
 with the human light of cultivated sympathies ; 
 when obedience to the Church shall have become 
 gladdened with the social reformers' living com- 
 passionateness for man, then the days of the " peda- 
 gogue " to Christ shall have come to an end, and we 
 shall have arrived at the eve of the awful Pentecost, 
 in which the Holy Ghost will give to individual 
 men the manifest personal presence and the 
 implanted Sacred Heart of Christ. 
 
 This is the Third Kingdom, the impending Reign 
 of the Holy Ghost, the Coming of the Universal 
 Pentecost, in which Christ will not speak in parables 
 and enigmas, but will take away hearts of stone, 
 and so converse heart to heart with men, that in 
 power and might and influence, as once happened 
 in the instance of St Paul, He will have perfected 
 to Himself His true Disciples. 
 
 Instead of opposing the Church, the new apostles 
 will be as devoted to its interests as was the great 
 prototype of the members of the Kingdom of the 
 Holy Ghost, St Paul himself. But, at the same 
 time, the Church will in that day palpitate with 
 human sympathies and compassionateness towards 
 all men. Her members will individualise Christ : 
 that is, they will not be contented with quoting the 
 Gospels ; they themselves will be inspired by the 
 Spirit to speak in the authority and inspiration in 
 which Christ spoke. There will be a bearer of and a 
 mouthpiece to Christ in every city and village, and by- 
 
A COVENANT OF LOYALTY 75 
 
 way and plain. The prophecies about the universal 
 outpouring of the Spirit will be literally fulfilled. 
 There will be a virtual renewal of the Apostolic Age, 
 and as keen an intuition] into the Risen Christ as 
 there was with the Apostles during the Forty Days 
 before the Ascension, or on the occasion when Paul 
 conversed with Him in rapture, face to face. 
 
 The Church is equally a Covenant of Mutual Loyalty 
 between man and man^ as it is a Covenant of 
 Mutual Loyalty between God and Man. 
 
 On its human side it may well be said that the 
 Church which Jesus Christ founded for the realisa- 
 tion of the Kingdom of God was, in truth, a new 
 and eternal covenant of loyalty to one another, to be 
 inaugurated between all men. 
 
 It is to be recalled that Hosea had once summed up 
 the whole duty of religion as '' hesed" ; which means 
 the " loyal affection," " brotherly kindness," or " loving- 
 kindness," of men between one another. This idea 
 was the expansion of the idea of the " sentiment of 
 the kind " (that is of relatives) to all the Nation. 
 
 In a sense, Christ closely applied Hosea's doctrine ; 
 though He did not set to it any national limitations. 
 It was the reality of this Friendship which was to be 
 the conductive medium of that Spiritual Second Com- 
 ing which would make real and substantial all hoped- 
 for things. In the delights of self-consecration in 
 service for one another, men were to expect, to look 
 for, to see the approach of, to receive, to possess the 
 
76 THE CHURCH 
 
 Kingdom, the Kingdom which, awaiting this mediation, 
 had been prepared for them within the very founda- 
 tions of the World. 
 
 But the really important point is that the Church 
 of Christ, on its human side, meant nothing else 
 whatever except a well-organised system of loyal 
 friendship and vowed co-operation. The Apostles, 
 in other words, were required to preach throughout 
 the world that all men were to be reconciled with one 
 another, and to organise a loyal covenant of friend- 
 ship. In so far as they were Evangelisers, they were 
 ministers of nothing else but this Church or Covenant 
 of loyal friendships. It is one thing to say, first of 
 all, that there is to be a Church with its Faith, 
 Worship, and Discipline, and that one of its precepts 
 is that men should love one another. It is a vastly 
 different thing to say that Christ discovered and 
 proclaimed a new sense of loyalty between men : that 
 He explained this more in actions than in words ; 
 that the words He did say are explained and inter- 
 preted by His acting the part of loyalty in what He 
 did ; that He founded thereby a new and eternal 
 covenant of loyalty between men, and called this 
 covenant His Church ; that when death became 
 inevitable, He chose to turn it into a symbol of the 
 world-wide fraternisation, and made it a pledge of 
 His own assured faith that His interpretation of the 
 conditions that would entail the divine completion of 
 the Kingdom by the Spirit, was the only true one. 
 
CHRISTLY FRIENDSHIP 77 
 
 XL , ^ 
 
 Sinners by excess of Sociability were loved by Christ 
 as 7ne7i who had misguidedly sought for His 
 Kingdom. 
 
 A startling feature, in the way in which the actions 
 of Jesus speak of the nature of the Kingdom, is His 
 real friendship for, not mere condescension towards, 
 publicans and sinners. We receive here a suggestion 
 of something totally distinct from the conventional 
 love of souls among the Christian saints. Christ 
 appears to love the sinner for the rather astonishing 
 reason that, in falling into sin, He regards the sinner 
 as merely having sought for the Kingdom in an 
 unenlightened or uninstructed way. This leniency 
 to the sinner, however, in no sense extends to the 
 proud or self-righteous, or to those who are incon- 
 siderate of others ; it only includes the sinners who 
 sin out of an excess of humanity. 
 
 If the "wine-bibbers" and those who "love much," 
 have sinned in the esteem of Jesus, their instinct was 
 right, but, by misguidance, they unwaringly found 
 evil spirits rather than the Spirit of God. For them, 
 if they would but renounce sin — the error, that is, 
 which led them into the hands of the demons — they 
 might find what they had really unwittingly sought 
 for within the precincts of the Kingdom of God. 
 They would find there the substantial possession of 
 what their false conviviality merely gave them an 
 illusory and shadowy possession of; or, of what their 
 misguided love was merely the mocking caricature. 
 
 And we are not left altogether to surmise, in 
 
78 THE CHURCH 
 
 attempting to unravel what would be the immediate, 
 as apart from the ultimate, benefits which the out- 
 casts and sinners would receive. It has been already 
 noticed that a great part of Christ's Conception of 
 the Kingdom was His interpretation of what might 
 be called Friendship in a transcendent sense. This 
 theological interpretation of Friendship is a leading 
 feature of the Gospels which the most illiterate of 
 readers or hearers cannot fail to recognise. But the 
 important point, over and above the mere recognition 
 of the fact that Jesus gave people the impression 
 that He had entered upon a transcendent and 
 eternally loyal Friendship for them, was that, more 
 or less, He considered the establishment of this 
 Friendship as the whole of the initial or human side 
 of the True Religion. 
 
 The proof that a transcendent sense of Loyal 
 Friendship is of the real commencement of the 
 Kingdom of God, arises mostly from the haunting 
 impression we receive throughout the Gospels that 
 the power of Jesus came from the way in which He 
 impressed men that His friendship for them was 
 divinely loyal, and indestructible. For this reason, 
 it is quite easy to understand that those who were 
 sinners out of their desire for sociability, would have 
 soon felt assured that they were likely to find a 
 greater satisfaction from their admittance into a 
 community founded upon the divinely consecrated 
 loyalty of all its members one for another, than they 
 were in the uncertain sense of friendship which arose 
 from conviviality or free love. 
 
 It was congruous, therefore, that He whose 
 Kingdom was an Alliance of Divine Friendship, 
 
REALISM IN THE GOSPELS 79 
 
 covenanted through the earth, but reaching beyond 
 the stars, should have felt especially drawn to those 
 who had sought Him, although they had not yet 
 known Him ; and whose ill-fortune was that they 
 had been ensnared while on their quest. 
 
 Likewise was it congruous that Christ should have 
 felt repelled by those sinners whose sin symbolised 
 a rooted aversion from that brotherly consideration 
 for other men which, in all history, is a movement 
 towards His New and Eternal Covenant between all 
 men, and between God and men. -^ 
 
 XII. 
 
 The Kingdom of zvhich Christ spoke is a Substantial 
 Reality^ inclusive of all the materiality of the 
 material Universe. 
 
 The words of the Gospel, however, show the 
 Kingdom as something more than a mere ethical 
 union of men ; — altJiougJi Social Ethics^ as has been 
 shozvn, on the human side, strictly conditions the 
 Kingdom; — nor is the kingdom a forcible substitu- 
 tion of a new kind of theocracy for an old kind. 
 The words of the Gospel show that the Kingdom was 
 a substantial reality, capable of being treated of in 
 language which is applicable to real material things. 
 The Kingdom, in the first place, is something which 
 can be " announced " ; that is, as some substantial 
 event, the tidings of which can be made known as 
 a definite message. It is something which may be 
 " expected " or " looked for " ; which may be " near 
 at hand " ; which may " appear " ; which may " be 
 
80 THE CHURCH 
 
 seen " ; which may actually " come." It is something 
 which may be " striven for," " sought for," " asked 
 for " ; something to which men can " attain " ; it 
 is something which may be " given," " received," 
 " accepted," or " taken possession of." It is some- 
 thing which has been " made ready " or " prepared," 
 and to which men may " belong " ; to which men may 
 be " invited." It is something which can be " taken 
 away," or " closed against " ; from which one can 
 " go out," or be " cast from " ; something which, in 
 fine, is so real that one can " sit at table in," or " eat 
 bread in " ; " drink wine in " ; something in which 
 one may be "the greatest or the least in."^ 
 
 These customary evangelical words agree together 
 in several respects, namely, in their simplicity, their 
 directness, their realism, and their implication that 
 the Kingdom is a substantial world. The very 
 essence of familiarity applies to them. They seem 
 to refer to a world just the same as the world in 
 which we live, but as after having undergone a trans- 
 formation which, even if it be terrifying in the actual 
 crisis in which it is to happen, nevertheless is some- 
 thing in the long run which will have added 
 nothing more than a hitherto unrevealed Realism 
 to the Idealism of Life. 
 
 We gather the impression that the material things 
 of the world will be raised up to a kind of universal 
 consecration, and will become equal with spiritual 
 things. We gain confidence in these suggestions by 
 recalling Christ's references to the lilies of the field, 
 
 ^ For the precise meaning of the corresponcfing Greek and 
 Aramaic words, see G. Dalman's Words of Jesus (Eng. trans.), 
 p. 1 02 ff. 
 
DIVINE REALITY 81 
 
 to the birds of the air, and by His other respectful 
 references to Nature as though it were a sacred and 
 integral part of the Heavenly Sovereignty of God. 
 We feel that when parables are taken from Nature, 
 they are taken from Nature not merely because they 
 are fitting, but because the whole of Nature itself 
 has a secret affinity with the Kingdom of Heaven 
 and the ways of that Heavenly Sovereignty, through 
 which God is All in All. 
 
 xni. 
 
 The TJieistic Measure of the Christian Conmiunions^ 
 taught by the Incarnation, is to the effect that 
 Divine Reality supplements the faith-conceptions 
 of every Communion of Christians about itself 
 
 The first great humanisation of a living doctrine 
 of God is not to be found in any mere System of 
 Thought, but in the fact of the Incarnation, which 
 teaches us a true Theism as well as reveals to us 
 a Redeeming God. 
 
 The Theist, so instructed, has a reasonable belief in 
 God which teaches how the divine reality of Substance 
 may supplement the human reality of physical and 
 psychological facts. Hence the actual living Tradi- 
 tions of every Communion of Christians are a fair 
 indication of the manner, with its limitations, in 
 which God, in all likelihood, is wont to deal with 
 such a Communion. 
 
 England's opportunity for realising the whole 
 application of the Theism taught by the Incarna- 
 tion, through the very fact of England's diversity of 
 
 L 
 
82 THE CHURCH 
 
 religious view, yet partial consentience in faith 
 about an Over-ruling God, is altogether a unique 
 one. An important point in this Theism is, that its 
 thorough acceptance renders religious controversy 
 an impossibility. To the true Theist, every Church 
 or Institution proves its claim to the divine attribute 
 of substance by what it manifestedly shows itself to 
 be. A Church which does not recognise the sub- 
 stantial fact of psychological continuity, called 
 Apostolic Succession, delimits itself in so doing. 
 The believer in Apostolic Succession merely brings 
 into consciousness the truth of the mathematical 
 necessity of physical continuity ordained throughout 
 God's Universe for the reaching of every purpose 
 at which God aims. The Nonconformist is, of 
 course, allowed equally to prove his own position 
 with the hearty good-will of the truly theistic 
 Churchman ; for God, the Theist knows, is the only 
 Arbiter of Substance, and human controversies are 
 waste of words. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 The Bible describes history as a Great Reconciliation 
 of all the Spiritual Tribes of Israel 
 
 It is distinctly a Biblical hope to aspire to a recon- 
 ciliation of the Churches with one another in some 
 institutional recognition of the Humanity of the 
 Christ. The David whose character and work type- 
 fied the Humanity of the Messiah in prophecy was 
 the Shepherd or Gatherer of the Tribes of Israel ; 
 and, all through Prophecy, the Second David is repre- 
 
BIBLICAL REUNION 83 
 
 sented as the Healer of the unfriendliness between 
 Israel and Juda ; the Shepherd of the dispersed 
 tribes and the Creator of a world-wide Ethical 
 Alliance, as well as the founder of a divine Church. 
 
 Moreover, in the Bible's own plan of Reconciliation 
 there is set forth no uniformity, nor absorption of all 
 the tribes of Israel by any specially privileged 
 tribe. This suggested Ethical Alliance of all 
 Churches in the acknowledgment of the Messiah's 
 Humanity, does not signify the absorption of all 
 organisations in one organisation ; but rather a 
 perfect equality of treatment for all ; and the cessation 
 of envy and the spirit of aggression of one branch of 
 the Church against another branch of the Church : 
 
 " Ephraim shall not envy Juda 
 And Juda shall not vex Ephraim." 
 
 The last chapters of the Bible, which expressly 
 speak of the Future Church of Christ on earth, 
 confirm the status of equality between the spiritual 
 tribes of Israel in their corporate allegiance with the 
 Church of Christ. They are each to preserve their 
 autonomy and their distinctive names : 
 
 "And names written (on the gates) 
 Which are the names of the twelve tribes of the 
 children of Israel." 
 
 The foundations of the Great City of God which 
 has come down to remain on earth are compacted in 
 like manner, of the work of each single apostle of 
 Christ : 
 
 " And the walls of the City had twelve foundations, 
 And in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb." 
 
84 THE CHURCH 
 
 XV. 
 
 The History of our Possession of Christ in the Church 
 is in some sense foreboded in the history of the 
 Prophecy of Christ. 
 
 If there was a goal to Jewish History, we may 
 hope that there is a goal or term to the history 
 of Christian controversies. The reconciliation of 
 Christendom must be worked out first of all in the 
 mind of individual Christians. There is a need 
 that some Saint should interpret the Divisions of 
 Christendom, from the point of view of the Wounds 
 of Christ inflicted on account of Sin but likewise 
 overcoming Sin. It is necessary to measure, weigh, 
 understand, feel with all these Divisions ; thus to 
 know and realise the horror of them ; then to live 
 over again in spirit their occasioning events ; and in 
 sorrow and affliction live in spirit unto the faith 
 of their reconciliation. 
 
 The true Saint sees the hand of God everywhere, 
 and perseveres through dullness until brilliance from 
 the Spirit reappears. His victories are for the 
 comprehensiveness, the major faith of Christ : — 
 
 " Learn from fears to vanquish fears ; 
 To hope, for thou dar'st not despair ; 
 Exult, for that thou dar'st not grieve ; 
 Plow thou the rock until it bear ; 
 Know, for thou else could not believe ; 
 Lose, that the lost thou may'st receive." 
 
STUDENT OF CHRIST 85 
 
 XVI. 
 
 Reconcilers of religious divisions must learn their 
 methods by studyi^ig Chrisfs Humanity^ as an 
 Art or Craft which pupils study from one of the 
 Masters of their A rt or Craft. 
 
 One way towards Reconciliation seems easy, direct, 
 and methodic. Among all the Churches in the land, 
 let classes be formed for systematic students of the 
 Humanity of Christ ; that is, classes of pupils, or 
 disciples, of Christ as Master of inclusiveness, and of 
 compassionateness for all sorts and conditions of 
 men. These students must not mainly learn from 
 books and theologies, but they must chiefly, inspired 
 of His compassionateness, study methodically and 
 immediately from life. Each of them must be 
 inclusive, in the systematic sense of going out and 
 becoming one in spirit with the religion of Churches 
 other than their own. Not lessening, yea rather, 
 increasing, their loyalty to their own religious faith, 
 let these students of Christ endeavour, by close and 
 systematic partaking in the faith and piety of the 
 members of other Churches for a stated time, and in 
 a determinate manner, then, through their first- 
 hand information and sympathetic insight, become 
 Apostles of Reconciliation, leading towards some 
 ordering or shepherding of all the Churches in a 
 federacy as to all things in which they are one as 
 men. 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 XVII. 
 
 Church Dogma preserves our co7itact with the New 
 Universe^ achieved by Christ. 
 
 Recent critical study of the dogmatic definitions 
 of the General Councils has proved to be a con- 
 vincing apologetic for the Historic Creeds. 
 
 It is becoming known that the basal conceptions 
 in the minds of the Ecumenical Fathers were not 
 really metaphysical, but rather juristic. Nothing in 
 history is subject to such revolutionary changes as 
 metaphysics ; nothing is more persistent than the 
 juristic conceptions on which both Imperial Roman 
 and also Modern, Rights of Property and Common 
 Law are based. 
 
 Regarding the dogmas of the Trinity and of the 
 Incarnation, it was a classical representative of 
 Roman juristic conceptions at their best, namely 
 Tertullian, who pointed out the eternal common 
 sense which must direct our apprehensions of the 
 contents of the Christian Revelation. 
 
 When Tertullian, with his juristic common sense, 
 was met by the problem which references to different 
 " persons " in one God necessarily presents, he went 
 to the Roman possessional ideas of "substance," as 
 still exemplified in the phrase, " a man of substance," 
 and argued that as several men may be owners 
 in the same " substance " or " substantial posses- 
 sions," so may the Three Divine " persons " be said 
 to be owners of an equal divine substance (nature), 
 and yet remain distinct in themselves as persons. 
 
DOGMA OF LIFE 87 
 
 This clear view of the subject passed over to 
 Greece, and won the day at Niceea and Chalcedon, 
 where it was decided that the Son was of the same 
 substance, or nature (homoousion) with the Father ; 
 that is, that He owned or shared in the possession 
 of the creative omnipotence of the Godhead equally 
 with God the Father of Heaven and Earth. 
 
 Though the word " substance " is only used here 
 in a very technical sense, yet the development of 
 the definitions of all the Christian dogmas, in the 
 Church of the Fathers, closely followed this pre- 
 cedent of taking the common-sense juristic concep- 
 tion of religious truth as the possession of, or loss of, 
 a substantial reality which had an immediate or 
 practical value touching the life or death of the 
 soul and body of man. 
 
 So understood, dogma relates to the supreme, 
 substantial, and cosmic possessions of humanity ; 
 possessing which, we live, and losing which, we 
 cannot help but die. 
 
 Although Dogma relates to the New Life of 
 Regeneration, we may, for the purpose of clearness, 
 consider humanity without reference to the Fall, 
 after the manner of the Scotists, and then refer the 
 needful credenda of faith to the necessity there is 
 for being in contact with realities, on the part of 
 man, and without which contact with the divine, 
 man can never be real nor live otherwise than in 
 mere appearance. 
 
 This being so, it would follow that the insertion of 
 the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed has 
 some justification. For even if we eliminate, ex 
 hypothesis all reference to the Fall, the Trinitarian 
 
88 THE CHURCH 
 
 formulas of this Creed contain an acknowledgment 
 by the believer of that Reality which is Man's tran- 
 scendent environment within and beyond the Cosmos. 
 
 If belief in Life is really a contact with Life, and if 
 refusal to believe in Life means the cutting away of 
 personality from the substance of Life and its eternal 
 possessions, it cannot be offensive to say that the 
 unbeliever in the essential Life of Humanity cannot 
 possess the essential Life of Humanity. Under 
 these circumstances, the damnatory clauses of the 
 Athanasian Creed are merely a statement of the 
 obvious truth that you cannot have and not have at 
 the same time; though allowance must be made 
 for the naif way of recording the apprehensions 
 of the realities of Religion in the Early Middle 
 Ages. 
 
 According to what I have suggested, Man, even 
 had there been no Fall, could not have lived without 
 Dogma ; because Dogma was his mental contact 
 with Divine Reality, and was the sole medium in the 
 form of Faith with his relationship with Eternal Life 
 by a co-operating will. 
 
 St Irenaeus forcibly sets down the common-sense 
 point of view with regard to the realities of Sin and 
 the Atonement. Irenaeus is often called naif, and he 
 is accused of credulity ; but his naivete seems to 
 have been the very occasion of his having preserved 
 certain primitive conceptions of Dogma which, had 
 his mind been more philosophic, there would have 
 been much less chance of his having preserved. 
 
 His vivid references to God as the Master-Work- 
 man, exercising His skill in the Creation ; attempting 
 to " make Man " during the whole lifetime of Man, 
 
TEACHING OF IREN^EUS 89 
 
 but requiring Man's incessant, childlike adaptability, 
 in order that each life might express and glorify the 
 Master-Workman's skill — are an accurate religious 
 expression of the doctrine of Evolution. 
 
 Moreover, Irenseus, through these conceptions, sets 
 forth a common-sense view of the Fall and Atone- 
 ment, and of the New Creation. Without Tertullian's 
 acumen, he at least apprehends the realism of primitive 
 Tradition sufficiently to set forth the truth of Dogma, 
 if not as the mind's contact with the " substance " of 
 Life, at least as relating to an essential quality of 
 " substance," namely, " force." 
 
 If Creation was an act of Infinite Power, and was 
 hence conceivable as the setting in motion so much 
 " force," the Fall, in the " Apostasy " of Satan and 
 Man, is the misdirection of "force" from the line 
 of the divinely established Law. 
 
 Sin was therefore an infinite entanglement, a vast 
 and eternal Apostasy from Law, 
 
 In the midst of a universe of Sin, the Workman 
 still loved His Creation, and sent His Son with a 
 creative power equal to His own to restore beauty and 
 order to the Father's Masterpiece. 
 
 Every moment of the Life of Christ was a spiritual 
 forcing back of all the misplaced energies of evil. 
 The " Apostasy " was undone ; the reign of terror, 
 misery, pain, suffering, anguish, death, was accepted 
 by Christ and endured ; and, by the transcendent 
 divine power which was in Him, while it was endured, 
 it also was undone. 
 
 Since all Evil was a misplacement of spiritual 
 force which left results as misplacements of material 
 force in human Suffering and Death, so, granted an 
 
 M 
 
90 THE CHURCH 
 
 infinite power of endurance in Christ, spiritual forces 
 which misdirect Life towards Death could be re- 
 directed towards Heaven ; and, by His endurance of 
 Suffering and Death, He could redirect Human 
 Death towards an Immortal Life. 
 
 His very naif idea of " cheating the Devil " is thus 
 seen to be based on a certain apprehension of a truth. 
 Redemption transmutes and re-interprets the old and 
 fallen World. The tendencies of the forces and 
 energies of Evil are turned backwards, since they 
 are the food of the Restoration ; and the Devil is, to 
 use the phrase, " cheated of his own." 
 
 If no one between St Paul and St Augustine seems 
 to have set forth the telling personal point of view 
 of Sin, Irenaeus, at least, is the author of helpful 
 views which are based instinctively upon psychologi- 
 cal law. He teaches us the objective reality of Sin, 
 because to him Sin is taken as a destructive spiritual 
 force which only an incarnate Deity could master. 
 We thus have a foundation for the Christian doctrine 
 of Sin and Redemption in the conception of impulsive 
 movements of spiritual force with an outlying sphere 
 of physical force. 
 
 Grace, to Irenseus, is a transcendent spiritual power 
 put forth by God, whose effects are the New Creation 
 of the Universe. In this New Universe, Jesus Christ 
 is the Second Adam, and the Blessed Virgin the 
 Second Eve, or "pure earth." 
 
 In like manner, the faithful tradition of Catholic 
 Christendom, from first to last, has implied a 
 Theism in which the Earth itself is held to be the 
 sacred and inalienable possession of God. God 
 possesses "substance" of Himself; and because the 
 
THE PLACE OF EVOLUTION 91 
 
 World was derived from Him, the Universe is there- 
 fore the Kingdom of God. It is true enough to 
 speak of " Evolution," then, if we speak of Evolution 
 as the movement within or unto the Kingdom, that 
 is, the Rule of the Sovereignty of God. 
 
 If, as we now know, the path of Evolution has 
 been ever strewn with disaster, yet this doctrine of 
 the New Universe, namely, of the Coming of God 
 in Man, is precisely a recognition of the fact of 
 what is called the "Struggle for Existence," and 
 all the Cosmic evils in its train. 
 
 The movement of the New Universe is a necessary 
 parallel to the movement of the Old (call that what 
 the Naturalists will) ; for, otherwise. Redemption 
 could not traverse the whole Creation. Redemption 
 has all a Universe to redeem ; and in its tran- 
 scending struggle for Life with Death, we need not 
 lose faith if Life's Conquest over Death has some- 
 thing of the slowness of the Creation, in a process 
 which is not only equally as great, but which, even 
 must, in its outward aspect, show this or that analogy 
 to the mutterings and conflicts of that process of 
 Creation which by some is termed the " Evolution 
 of the World." 
 
PART IV 
 
 THE GENIUS OF THE "TO BE" 
 AND THE BOOK OF LIFE 
 
THE GENIUS OF THE "TO BE" 
 AND THE BOOK OF LIFE 
 
 "And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that 
 heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And 
 whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely. . . . 
 
 " And if any man shall take away from the words of the book 
 of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the Book 
 of Life and out of the holy city, and from the things that are 
 written in this Book."— St John. 
 
 I. 
 
 The Bible is the heralding of tJie everlasting City from 
 the Spirit who dwells in the eter7ial To Be, arid 
 who sends His Words from thence into the midst 
 of the Now. 
 
 How should I read the Bible ? 
 
 There are two creations of God ; this visible 
 Universe and the word and substance of the Holy 
 Scriptures ; and of these the Holy Scriptures are the 
 more real of the two. The Bible is concerned with 
 persons and events, and with the knowledge of a 
 God who has filled these persons and events with 
 eternal light ; so that our life gravitates around the 
 Scriptures, and they make our lives real. 
 
 They are faithful portraits and character-sketches 
 
 95 
 
96 GENIUS OF THE "TO BE^^ 
 
 of ourselves, written by the hand of God. The more 
 we try to escape from the Bible, the more, in truth, 
 we prove the Bible, for with our lives we do but 
 write its words again. 
 
 The Bible knew us before we were born. It 
 knows what will become of us. It recalls what we 
 were, knows what we are, and with infallible 
 accuracy, divines what we shall be, and strives 
 within our thoughts that the Future which it 
 divines for us shall come to pass. 
 
 The Bible is not a separate creation derived from 
 the Church of God ; rather the Bible itself is the 
 Church of God in that manner in which God first 
 speaks to man before He comes to man in a real 
 and ordered way ; and all things of which it speaks 
 in the mind of man God will surely bring to pass 
 and fulfil in the heart, soul, and whole bodily reality 
 of mankind. 
 
 The Church, as we see it at present, is the partial 
 expression in bodily form of the message of the 
 Bible. The final and absolute realisation and fulfil- 
 ment of that message awaits the resurrection of the 
 body and the descent from God of the new City of 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 If the message of the Bible is not to be realised 
 by a practical fulfilment of it in the presence of a 
 real Christ, and in a real Church of Christ, then the 
 message is proved vain, and is not any longer to be 
 regarded as the Spirit's heralding of the new Heaven 
 and the new Earth which God will make. 
 
FREEWILL AND GRACE 97 
 
 IL 
 
 The Bible reveals the Structural Plan of Human 
 History^ whose truth first we believed in^ but now 
 we see. 
 
 Once we believed in the Bible through faith ; 
 to-day also we begin to believe in the Bible accord- 
 ing to sight. 
 
 Other literatures interpret past events or present 
 history. Shakespeare was the genius of the every- 
 day of human life. 
 
 History and politics, novels, science and art, reveal 
 the past and interpret the present of man, but the 
 Bible alone in Literature is showing itself to be the 
 storehouse of the science of the incalculable future 
 of humanity ; that future — that " To Be " which is 
 the outcome of the human Freewill co-operating 
 with and conditioned by the Grace of God. The 
 political economy of Mill and the sociology of Comte 
 alike admitted a constructive Science of Man, which 
 might have been true but for the fact that both 
 equally ignored that which human Science of itself 
 could never properly take into account, namely, the 
 incalculable adventurous element of Freewill in 
 human individuality, and also the incalculable adven- 
 turous element of the Grace of God. 
 
 Only a Divine Science could forecast the future 
 of Freewill; only Divine art could guide Freewill 
 into its right course in spite of itself. 
 
 This is the problem which the Bible solves and 
 is solving : — 
 
 " Granted that all the Nations will go along their 
 
 N 
 
98 GENIUS OF THE *'T0 BE^^ 
 
 own untrammelled ways, from which it would seem 
 that no power could turn them aside : how, when 
 all plays have been played, and all free courses have 
 been run, and the Nations have reached the term of 
 their several possibilities, could it be brought about 
 that mankind should achieve its predestined goal, and 
 enter, in an evening of light, into the perfect 
 measurement and form of the Humanity of Christ ? " 
 
 The Bible is the revelation of that structural plan 
 of God through which the Nations, in endeavouring 
 to wander away, cannot help but come together at 
 the end of their wanderings, and become the single 
 Family of the reunited Children of God. 
 
 All of its histories are, as it were, written backwards 
 in a vision of the World from the End of Time. The 
 Bible knows that there will be only one supreme 
 reality left some day in the unfolding of human 
 destinies, and that is that Brotherliness of Man which 
 was ordained by Christ in His New Commandment, 
 and which is pictured in its fulfilment as the New 
 Jerusalem, the social, earthly, fraternal, but eternal, 
 Paradise. 
 
 HI. 
 
 A/l Science is Science of God ; and the Bible is not a 
 text-book of Science such as any Sciefitist can 
 inake^ but it is the source of our inspiratio7i in 
 research and the means whereby we see that all 
 Nature is of God, and that the Science of Nature is 
 truly the Science of the Nature that God has made. 
 
 Science of Nature is science of His making of 
 
THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE 99 
 
 Nature. Physics, biology, astronomy, psychology, 
 ought to thrill us with delight. Who would not go 
 into the Government House and learn how the great 
 engines of Kingdoms and Empires are driven by their 
 engineers ? 
 
 In like manner, by physics and natural science we are 
 made privy to the secrets of God our King, and learn 
 the inner workings of His Kingdom in the Universe. 
 
 When the Bible was quoted against Galileo, the 
 error was not in the Bible nor in the Science of 
 Galileo ; but in the mind of those who thought that 
 these two were not one and the same. 
 
 The Bible is not a text-book, but a living Spirit, 
 trumpeting the Creation of the Earth and Heaven, 
 and preparing a way for the lightnings of Christ 
 when He shall come and judge the World. 
 
 The Bible is like some mighty statesman, whose 
 purpose is the building up of the million-folded 
 Holy City of God, in place of the sparsely-peopled 
 Eden of the Past ; and all this shall be when God 
 shall, indeed, have made the Earth. 
 
 The Theist, that is the intellectual Man of God, 
 loves Nature, and hugs the Science of Nature, as an 
 inner inspection of the Action of God. 
 
 Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Darwin, 
 are Angels of the Resurrection ; for they have seen 
 how God is making the things which are about to be. 
 
 They are all also Biblical men, interpreting God's 
 Radiance, and the dust that He will gather together 
 into life. When they have done interpreting the 
 Heavens and the wide Earth and Sea, the Bible 
 will place these within the palm of your hand, and 
 you then shall live again. 
 
100 GENIUS OF THE " TO BE " 
 
 Human knowledge is scattered as the dust around 
 the earth. Divine knowledge is gathered into this 
 one little Treasure House of the Bible. This all 
 means that out of these toiling cities, and fields, and 
 roadways the Dead shall be gathered, to rise again. 
 Because God once made the Earth in Nature, He 
 will therefore make the same Earth again in Grace. 
 
 IV. 
 
 /// what manner it is true to say^ as some Reformers 
 taught, that the Holy Scriptures are a virtual 
 Incarnation of the Holy Ghost in Human Letters. 
 
 What every reader seeks for in reading the 
 Scriptures is that the Light of the Holy Ghost 
 should be given to him in an equal manner to that 
 in which it was given to the inspired writer himself 
 The Bible, rightly read, in other words, should 
 inspire individual men in as clear and forcible a 
 manner as that in which the Holy Ghost inspired 
 King David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Daniel. 
 
 When the doctrine of Private Interpretation 
 was first broached, it was said that the Scripture 
 was written in such a simple form of language that, 
 being translated into the vernacular, every man 
 who read or heard the Word, understood the message 
 of Eternal Life contained in it, and was guided 
 by the Spirit which inspired the Holy Scriptures 
 to apply them for his own Salvation. 
 
 This doctrine of a virtual incarnation of the 
 Spirit in the letters of the Bible is the partial 
 apprehension of a great and everlasting truth. 
 
PRIVATE INTERPRETATION 101 
 
 It is undoubtedly the final purpose of the Holy 
 Spirit, inspiring the Scriptures, to bring the Revela- 
 tion which they contain, in an individual form, to 
 every man. 
 
 Since the Outpouring of the Spirit, though 
 unlimited in the intentions of God, was yet markedly 
 limited from the beginning by reason of the finite 
 capacity of the Early, and all other. Christians ; 
 the Divine Energy of the Spirit, therefore, con- 
 centrated Itself in creating helps to individual 
 interpretations for the purpose of bringing to pass 
 the Church's life-likeness to its Master. 
 
 The Energy of the Holy Ghost thus synthesised 
 itself in the definitions of ecclesiastical dogmas 
 by the Councils of the Fathers in the Early 
 Church. 
 
 Among all those men also who possessed the 
 native capacity for seeing and understanding the 
 Scriptures, illumination from on High was freely given 
 in accordance with their human capacity. To the 
 lawyer's mind of Tertullian, inspiration was individu- 
 ally given to conceive of dogma as "a sacred trust 
 confided to the Church. To Athanasius was given 
 power to understand from the Scriptures the 
 Place of Christ in the Cosmos. Augustine's experi- 
 ence of Evil had given him all the greater capacity 
 for receiving individual illumination about the 
 Scriptures ; and, in many instances, of so reading 
 them as though he were the inspired writer receiv- 
 ing them for the first time from the Holy Ghost. 
 
 The Confessions of this Prophet of the Western 
 Church are a model of the legitimate type of 
 Private Interpretation of Scripture. No book is more 
 
102 GENIUS OF THE "TO BE" 
 
 personal, more individual, more a converse immediate 
 unto God, of one apart from all, yet inclusive of 
 all. The Confessions of Augustine are a life-story 
 which, itself, is an inspiration from Inspiration, a 
 revelation from Revelation, an entire personalisation 
 of the Sacred Scriptures as a present experience, 
 unique of its kind, and separate from that of anyone 
 else. 
 
 All the Saints and Mystics of the Undivided 
 Church, in so far as their lives are recorded to 
 us in detail, are instances of luminous individual 
 interpretation of Scripture. God's Law inspires them 
 in all that they think and do. If they write like 
 Caedmon, Bede, St Patrick, St Bernard, Richard 
 and Hugo St Victor, St Gertrude, and St Melchtilde, 
 St Thomas of Aquin, Dante, Thomas a Kempis, 
 St Catherine of Siena, their writings are one vast 
 and more or less detailed vision of the reality of 
 the Revelation of the Holy Scriptures, made present 
 and ever living to them through the Objective 
 Church. 
 
 They ever conceive of the Church as a blessing 
 which gives them Freedom of Interpretation, not 
 a curse which takes their individual rights away. 
 
 So, equally, through fellowship with the Living 
 Church of God, shall the Reign of Private Inter- 
 pretation come to pass for all the World. 
 
DOGMA AN AFFIRMATIVE 103 
 
 V. 
 
 Men deny this or that Dogma or all Dogmas^ because 
 they erroneously regard a Dogma as a Negative ; 
 whereas it is in every instance an Affirmative to 
 some question which all men desire to be answered 
 as " Year 
 
 When the Reformers started upon a career of 
 individual interpretation, they attempted to reach the 
 Promised Land without regard to the fulfilment of 
 the Logic of Faith. They chose the course of 
 individual negations of Received Dogmas, rather than 
 that of personally idealised affirmations of these 
 same Dogmas, which would have been their right 
 course to follow. 
 
 Whatever a Reformer wrote of value was in con- 
 formity with the universal dogmas of Catholicism. 
 What Luther meant by Justification by Faith would 
 have been a noble intuition into certain great truths 
 of the Catholic Scriptures, if it had not been set forth 
 in contradiction to the Holy Ghost in other aspects 
 of the Faith of the Christian Commonwealth. 
 
 Nevertheless, there is no going backwards in the 
 Advance Movement of the Reign of the Spirit of 
 God among the followers of Christ. The Sins of the 
 Reformation Period, and its innumerable denials of 
 that Common Faith through which Individual Faith 
 is won, have been made by the Spirit of God the 
 occasion of a greater good than could have happened 
 without them. 
 
 Without the Reformation and Protestantism, we 
 
104 THE GENIUS OF THE "TO BE" 
 
 could never have had such powerful and individual 
 reasons, tested by personal experience, for accepting 
 the common bond of dogma as the Charter of Faith 
 which sets the individual free. 
 
 In the Catholicism of the Future, every one will 
 obey the Decrees of the Teaching Authority of the 
 Church, because everyone, from reading history, or 
 by his own individual experience, will know for 
 certain, that, in no other manner can he secure the 
 right to Private Judgment and personal Illumination. 
 
 For the same reason coercive religious politics, 
 which is the supreme creator of infidels, will have no 
 further reason for existence. Men object to the 
 Catholic Faith because they object to the coercive 
 religious, or even secular, politics with which it has 
 been associated. When it is generally understood 
 that the Catholic Faith is the unique guarantee of 
 Individual Freedom in Faith, and of the right to 
 Private Judgment in the Interpretation of the Scrip- 
 tures, the Promised Reign of the Spirit of God will 
 not be far away. 
 
 We are not called upon to imitate the peculiarities 
 of the Saints, but to imitate the freedom of the Saints, 
 in personalising the Holy Scriptures, and in person- 
 ally interpreting the significance of the Life of Christ. 
 
 Before we can understand the Saintly Life, we 
 must understand the intellectual principles through 
 which Saintly Life is conceivable. These are, in the 
 first case, a voluntary and entire and unquestioning 
 acceptance of the whole Catholic Faith as the medium 
 of the permanent Inspiration of the Scriptures, by 
 the Holy Ghost, to each individual man. In the 
 next case, we must accept that sacramental medium 
 
THE HOLY GHOST 105 
 
 of the perpetuity of Christ by the Holy Ghost which 
 also is given us by the Church of God. 
 
 At length the Church and all its Saints will appear 
 as the Great Affirmative of the Freedom and the 
 Ransom won by Christ for men, and in the Freedom 
 of Christ all men shall themselves become free. 
 
 VI. 
 
 What we call the Future^ is sijnply the looking forward 
 of the Universe to the Holy Ghost. The Holy 
 Ghost, that is, functions in the Universe frojn the 
 End of the Universe ; and all that He conceives in 
 TJiought or Being in Time, is predestined to 
 remain for ever. 
 
 The Holy Ghost is to us the eternal Future of 
 God, the eternally Future God, who sends from the 
 Future His Angels unto the Now. The reason why 
 what He conceives of in thought or being — of thought 
 which predestines being — will live for ever, is because 
 He Himself is the Forever, and descends from the 
 Forever; and what He conceives in Time, He 
 conceives through Time unto His eternal To Be. 
 
 How, then, can the Spirit of God foretell the To 
 Be? Because He Himself can foretell Himself, who 
 is the To Be, when He comes from thence into the 
 Now. 
 
 How, in like manner, can the Spirit of God conceive 
 a Future One in Time ? Because if He conceives a 
 child, that child can only be the Eternal Future Child. 
 Because He Himself comes from the Eternal Future, 
 and He conceives only unto Himself. 
 
 O 
 
106 THE GENIUS OF THE "TO BE^^ 
 
 Searching and feeling the earth, and all that is in 
 the earth, the Holy Spirit conceives eternal thoughts 
 in minds that count upon Him, and conceives the 
 Immortal Son of God in the human heart which most 
 desires Him. 
 
 He conceived eternal Thoughts in the minds of all 
 the Prophets and in the minds of all who love the 
 Prophets, until the End. 
 
 He conceived the eternal Son of God in the Virgin 
 Mary and in the hearts of all who since then have 
 loved the Coming of the Son of God. 
 
 VII. 
 
 If we could understand the Natural Truth of one 
 particle of the Universe^ we could prophesy the future 
 history of every particle in it as a Whole. In like 
 manner^ the Holy Spirit^ searching into the depths^ 
 foretells the eternities ; first of all ^ the unmeasured 
 failings of the Heart of Man^ and secondly^ the 
 unmeasured success of the Grace and Love of God. 
 
 The Kingdom of God is built up through all 
 places and times in the Universe by the eternal 
 vision of purpose, through the Reason of God, and 
 by the eternal execution of this purpose by the 
 power of the Spirit of God. 
 
 The Spirit of God brooded over the abyss during 
 what we call geological eras — the record of whose 
 incredible ruin is embedded in the rocky strata of 
 the earth — until the first perfect triumph of the 
 Lord and Giver of Life in the appearance of the 
 moral creation. 
 
THE PROPHETS 107 
 
 The Life of Humanity became an abyss too, upon 
 which the Spirit of the Resurrection brooded again 
 in the Law-giving, and in all Prophecy. 
 
 Prophecy is universally related to the final triumph 
 of the Kingdom of God in the World. The Spirit 
 of God spoke by the mouth of the prophets. There 
 were greater, and more humane, and more enlight- 
 ened, nations than Israel. But Israel among all 
 others was consecrated to the Future of Humanity ; 
 and, through the Power which is eternally building 
 up triumph from ruin, in the visions of Amos, Hosea, 
 Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others, it reached 
 forwards in advance towards the very goal of human 
 history. 
 
 Amos, the Seer of Justice, was empowered to speak 
 of that eternal righteousness and justice which, 
 through him, for the first time was applied equally 
 to the favoured as to the unfavoured races, and 
 which righteousness is of the very Character of 
 God. 
 
 The Spirit showed Hosea, the Seer of Love, 
 through the parable of loyal human affection against 
 faithlessness, how Love would conquer Death, even 
 if the way of repentance in fallen Israel were hidden 
 from the Seer's eyes. 
 
 Micah, in the Spirit, was the Seer of the Triumph 
 of Lowliness, and foresaw that the World would 
 be redeemed through what was foreboded in the 
 calling of David of Bethlehem from the lowly office 
 of tending the flocks. 
 
 Isaiah lived in the Spirit in the Messianic Age, 
 and foresaw the conversion of Humanity within the 
 likeness of the spirit of a little child, and how all 
 
108 THE GENIUS OF THE "TO BE" 
 
 people would be reunited in the spirit of this leader- 
 ship. 
 
 Jeremiah foresaw, in the Spirit, the reign of the 
 new and eternal Covenant, in which filial piety would 
 be taken as the guide towards blessedness, yielding 
 for humanity a filial relationship with God. 
 
 Daniel foresaw, in the Spirit, how the beast-like 
 characteristics of ancient and many modern nations 
 would cause their ruin, and how, at length, in place 
 of the reign of brute force, Humanity should be 
 ruled in the likeness of the Son of Man. 
 
 Joel foresaw, in the Spirit, the Days of Promise, in 
 which the Holy Ghost would be poured out on all 
 flesh. 
 
 In each of these instances what strikes us most is 
 the incredible and insuperable obstacles in the way 
 of the looked-for triumph. 
 
 Who but the Spirit of God could have dictated 
 the triumph of Social Justice in the Age of Amos ? 
 or who else but the Creative Spirit of God could 
 have foreseen, in an Age of hatred and deathliness 
 like that of Hosea, the triumph of Love securing 
 deathless life? 
 
 While the Assyrians were enslaving or torturing 
 the peoples, who could have foreseen the leadership 
 over the nations of a little child, but the Spirit 
 speaking through Isaiah? 
 
 Or, in an age of Babylonian conquest, who else 
 could have predicted empire to the Servants rather 
 than the Lords of earthly might ? 
 
 The Biblical definition of the Holy Ghost is written, 
 therefore, in the same characters from the beginning 
 to the end of the Bible. It is the Power which 
 
OFFICE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 109 
 
 foresees a divine destiny to the Creation, which no 
 creature could have foreseen for itself; and the 
 Power which descends upon the creature, and which, 
 breaking through all obstacles, leads the creature into 
 its place within the Kingdom of God. 
 
 The office of the Holy Spirit in the Old Dispensa- 
 tion was to create a People of Destiny, a People of 
 the Future, a People of Vision, a People who lived 
 to bring the Vision of a Messianic Kingdom into 
 effect. 
 
 The Holy Ghost always seems to come as it were 
 out of the Future. Aspiration and desire are human ; 
 so is longing for an ideal. But the theological 
 virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love, which set forth 
 these aspirations, desires, and ideals in a real king- 
 dom of Heaven, are the beginnings of the New 
 Creation of God. The Sum of what the Holy Ghost 
 taught to the Israelites through the Prophets, was 
 the use of these three divine virtues in response to 
 the cravings of man. 
 
 As the Epistle to the Hebrews teaches, it was Faith 
 which triumphed over the dead-weight of evil and 
 prepared the way for Christ. 
 
 All the Bible is the history of Faith, Hope, and 
 Love pitted against the Wisdom, Power, Skill, Greed, 
 and Inhumanity of the World ; and all the Bible is 
 the Song of Triumph, in which obstacles are made 
 as the steps of the ladder towards the Eternal 
 Kingdom. 
 
110 THE GENIUS OF THE "TO BE'^ 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The function of the Holy Ghost is to lead meji onwards 
 towards their destinies. 
 
 In the New Testament the Holy Spirit is revealed 
 as the Executive Power which brings man into 
 contact with his destiny. It was the Holy Spirit 
 who brought about the Incarnation in the womb 
 of Mary ; which led Jesus in His work ; which 
 descended on Him in Baptism ; which came upon 
 Him in preaching ; through which He cast out 
 devils ; and concerning which the object of all 
 rightful prayer is, that He should descend in like 
 manner upon every one who prays. 
 
 It is the Spirit which triumphs over Death, by 
 causing Christ to rise to life after dying; which 
 transforms the weak and failing apostles into men of 
 authority and power ; which makes Christ perpetually 
 present in the Church ; which sends Him into the lives 
 of individual men ; and, finally, which will bring 
 Christ a second time in His visible presence in 
 the world : As St John says, it is the Spirit which, 
 at the consummation, will say to the Lord Jesus, 
 " Co7ne ! " thereby bringing about the dawn of the 
 closing Era of the world. 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Holy Spirit is the Conqueror of the historical 
 
 barriers which hold back the Disciples fivm their 
 
 Master, and prevent them from enjoying Liberty 
 
 in Him. 
 
 The Spirit of God is the power which overcomes 
 
HUMAN DESTINIES 111 
 
 the obstacles in perpetuating the Church, and in 
 spreading and expanding salvation to all men. 
 
 The obstacles are overcome through the preserva- 
 tion and acceptance of a common Divine Faith, 
 and through the embodiment of, and obedience to, 
 the Divine Will ; but the goal of obedience of 
 faith is freedom of sight, and the goal of obedience 
 of will is freedom in possessing God. 
 
 The necessity for continuity and unity thus 
 creates a series of obstacles against, or checks upon, 
 individual religious freedom. It is the function of 
 the Holy Ghost in the individual not to lead the 
 individual into independence from the Church ; but 
 to use the individual's dependence on the Church 
 as the instrument through which the freedom of the 
 self-same individual is obtained. 
 
 As the Spirit of God gives Life in spite of Death, 
 and Love in spite of Hatred, and Faith in spite 
 of Unbelief, and Hope in spite of Fear ; so too, 
 Its obedience and discipline are the instruments of 
 freedom rather than the destroyers of religious 
 freedom. 
 
 So too, by the functional power of conquest 
 inherent in the Holy Ghost, in spite of heresy and 
 schism, there can be no looking backwards in the 
 history of the Church of God. 
 
 The goal of Church History, as St Paul taught, 
 is the universalisation of Christ; the bringing of 
 Christ unto each individual life ; and the making 
 of the invisible Christ to live in as real a spiritual 
 presence in the Church as though He lived in 
 actual visible presence there. 
 
 To man, this universalisation of Christ seems an 
 
112 THE GENIUS OF THE *'T0 BE" 
 
 utter impossibility; nevertheless, every movement 
 in Church History has no other significance than 
 as a step towards the mighty Spirit of God's triumph- 
 ant universalisation of Christ. 
 
 X. 
 
 TJie plenitude of tJie Greater Life of Grace, which 
 was spoken of in Scripture iji a unique sense 
 as the Pleronia of Christ, zvill only be received 
 in the measure whicJi is their due by ine7i, when 
 men have first learned to live the Greater Life 
 of Nature in the gi^eater sympathy with Man- 
 kind. 
 
 In the Christian Scheme of Life, it appears that 
 the gift of the Spirit of God in its plenitude is 
 withheld until each man becomes universalised, that 
 is, drawn out from his own self and put into vital 
 relationship with all good men, past, present, and yet 
 to come. 
 
 Because we are related to the departed Saints 
 by the law of the communion of Saints, these 
 Saints possess a more abundant life from us, and 
 so likewise have we ourselves from them. Because 
 we are in communion with the rest of the Church 
 of God on earth, we aid others, and others aid us. 
 Because we are related with the Future, our way 
 thither is the more securely ascertained, and the 
 Kingdom of the Future is forestalled for us in the 
 Kingdom of the Now. 
 
 Social Science more and more recognises that 
 the perfect " Individual " is the man with the most 
 
THE UNIVERSAL PENTECOST 113 
 
 universally human and sociable mind. What Social 
 Science dimly sees, the Church of God takes for 
 granted, and works upon, as an integral law of our 
 being, from the first to the last. 
 
 What, then, may we assume to happen when, as 
 in the modern instance of the Irvingite Church, 
 its members declare that the day of Universal Pente- 
 cost is about to arrive, and that all men are about 
 to receive the Holy Ghost? We may be well 
 assured that all Sects have had some reason for 
 their existence, in the imperfections of the members 
 of the Church of God. But since the Universal 
 day of Pentecost can never come except through aid 
 of the representation of the whole of mankind in an 
 institutional manner to us, these schisms, immediately 
 their upholders recognise that there is a place for all 
 men in the Historic Church of God, become deliberate 
 retardations of the date of the Advent of the Day of 
 the Lord. 
 
 We may here make a distinction between the 
 gift of the Spirit as a limited means of grace, and 
 Its gifts in a total and transforming sense. God in 
 His mercy gives His Holy Spirit to all who seek 
 for or pray for It ; but the gift is limited by the 
 self-limitations on the part of the recipients. If God 
 had not made concord with Humanity a condition 
 of our receiving the plenitude of His gifts, it might 
 all be otherwise. But both the laws of society, 
 as discovered by reason, and the laws of God, working 
 through the Churches, require that we should be 
 all things to all men before God can become All 
 Things to us. 
 
 The times and moments of the Divine Life within 
 
 P 
 
114 THE GENIUS OF THE "TO BE" 
 
 the Church are set to the working of the Grace of God 
 by the limitations of capacity on the part of man. 
 Upon all these limitations being removed, the way 
 is made ready for the total outpouring of the 
 Spirit. 
 
 XL 
 
 There are many cases of Individual Inspiration, 
 through the Church, recorded in Church Histoiy ; 
 and in the future Days of Promise, the Gift of 
 Individual Inspiration throughout the Church will 
 be universally bestozved. 
 
 The early Christians, wandering through the Cata- 
 combs in the bowels of the earth, and liable at any 
 moment to be apprehended or ensnared by their 
 pagan enemies, were wont to sing the psalm, " Dominus 
 regit me " (" The Lord is my Shepherd "). Who can 
 doubt but that the Holy Ghost actually spoke to 
 them through these sacred words, and as it were, 
 inspired this psalm anew to convey a special message 
 to the oppressed Christians, signifying that Christ 
 was their Ruler, their Shepherd, here and now ; and 
 would bring them to pastures and into ultimate safety, 
 for the purpose of the triumph of His Church in the 
 World ? 
 
 Another noted instance of individual inspiration is 
 St Bernard's Commentary on the Song of Songs, 
 which exerted so deep an influence on the Church of 
 the Middle Ages. While it is denied by critics that 
 the Canticles was an allegory in the first instance, it 
 is probable that it at least was dealt with as an 
 
INDIVIDUAL INSPIRATION 115 
 
 allegory by the Jewish Synagogue. The Christian 
 Church always took it to be such ; but in St Bernard's 
 Commentaries there is a vivid individual treatment, 
 in which its allusions are interpreted in the spirit of a 
 new tenderness and emotion which no one had ever 
 discovered in Canticles before. Who shall say that 
 these tender allusions to the love between Christ and 
 the Soul, unrevealed before Bernard's time, were not 
 a special and individual inspiration communicated to 
 St Bernard, of an authorative new meaning placed 
 by the Holy Ghost on the words of Canticles, but 
 according with, not denying, the interpretation 
 generally given by the Church as handed down from 
 the Jewish Church ? 
 
 Another noted instance of inspiration through the 
 Church is the attribution to Christ of the beautiful 
 phrase, The Desire of the Nations shall come. There 
 is no truer prophecy than that which visualised 
 human cravings, aspirations, and wants in a picture of 
 their summed fulfilment through a Divine Man, and 
 then said that this Divine Man would actually appear 
 in the world. Yet the Revised Version significantly 
 gives what purports to be the original words of the 
 text of Haggai, " The desirable thiiigs of all nations 
 shall come " ; that is, " the silver and gold and 
 treasures of the surrounding nations shall be brought 
 together for the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the 
 Temple." Unto the translator of the Septuagint, or 
 the other individual who first saw the meaning of the 
 text in the newer and deeper sense of regarding the 
 Messiah as sent by God to fulfil in Himself the 
 prayers of all the peoples, a new or individual inspira- 
 tion of a text of Scripture was vouchsafed, whose 
 
116 THE GENIUS OF THE ''TO BE" 
 
 revelation was afterwards accepted by all the Church 
 of God. 
 
 What happened in these instances shall be of 
 universal occurrence in the Days of Promise which 
 are before us. The Holy Ghost will speak anew to 
 the heart of every man by the mouth of the Holy 
 Prophets, and proceeding through the Moral Law of 
 God the Father, and through the Authority coming 
 from submission to the Church of Christ, the Holy 
 Ghost will teach each man new interpretations of 
 mysteries through the old words, applied in new 
 senses to new lives and their new environments. 
 Thus the Holy Scriptures will be to each one a 
 living Oracle of God, telling us new truths, opening 
 new vistas of the Kingdom, interpreting us history in 
 a new meaning, revealing our own characters and 
 souls in a hitherto undivulged light. It will be as 
 though each of the Prophets had risen from the dead 
 and conversed with us, and as though the whole 
 pageant of the religious history of the World, and of 
 Redemption, had been enacted only and solely for 
 each of us. 
 
 xn. 
 
 The Holy Ghost is the great Recapitulator of the 
 Mercies to Humanity i^i Mercies to Individual 
 Men ; but the media of the New Freedom of the 
 Spirit are the Old Obediences, which are 7tot to 
 be undone. 
 
 In the Church of God, since the Age of Revelation, 
 the Spirit of God is performing a work which is 
 
THE KINGDOM OF THE SPIRIT 117 
 
 parallel to, but more advanced than Its work during 
 the time of the preparation for, and founding of, 
 the Church. 
 
 The Spirit in the Church is for ever prophesying 
 anew by the mouth of the Holy Prophets ; the 
 Spirit is ever singing a New Song in the hearts 
 of believers in the words of the Old Songs which 
 It first conceived in the heart of the Psalmists of 
 God. 
 
 Since all the work of the Church effected through 
 the Holy Ghost is definitely brought to a conclusion 
 by the Holy Ghost, it has been supposed that 
 there will ensue a period of complete salvation 
 among members of the Church, which will be a 
 Kingdom of the Holy Ghost. 
 
 This Kingdom of the Spirit has been pictured 
 as a Sovereignty, in which Christ will speak to 
 and direct each individual soul ; and it has been 
 mistakenly added that in days of the rule of that 
 Sovereignty, the Holy Ghost will so instruct men 
 individually, that there will be no further need 
 either to believe in dogma nor obey the authority 
 of the Church. 
 
 On account of this misinterpretation of doctrine, 
 the Montanists, Joachimites, Anabaptists, Friends, 
 Irvingites, and many others have believed that a 
 Third Dispensation of pure Religious Individualism 
 would succeed the Orthodox Collectivism in Faith 
 and Discipline, whose acceptance was required of 
 Christians with one mind and one heart. 
 
 There is an element of truth in the thought that 
 there are Days of Promise before the Church in 
 which the Holy Ghost will consummate His Kingdom 
 
118 THE GENIUS OF THE "TO BE" 
 
 in individual souls. But the idea that the Dispensa- 
 tion of the Holy Spirit shall happen in independence 
 of the Church, is an absolute error, contradicting 
 not only the entire revelation of the Holy Spirit 
 in the Bible, but also the Church's Teaching about 
 the nature of the Spirit of God, and of Its perpetual 
 procession from the Father and the Son. 
 
 The Reign of the Spirit will consist not in defiance 
 of the Church, but in so perfect an obedience to 
 the Church that obedience will stimulate freedom 
 rather than take freedom away. The great musician 
 is free in his creations through aid of the restrictions 
 of bars, and octaves, and harmonies, the observance 
 of the rules of which to perfection constitute his 
 strength. The artist, in obeying the rules of per- 
 spective ; in faithfully obeying Nature as his inspira- 
 tion ; and the laws of beauty, colour, and proportion 
 in composition ; gains the freedom which is the 
 mastery in his art. That poet alone is great, master- 
 ful, and free who is minutely obedient to the laws 
 of harmony, sound, and versification. 
 
 Likewise, the Holy Ghost in the individual soul 
 sets Faith and Obedience of Mind and of Will to 
 the Church as the restrictions through which alone 
 the soul rises in the Spirit's might, triumphant, 
 masterful, and free. 
 
SERVICE IS FREEDOM 119 
 
 XIII. 
 
 The basis of the doctrhic of tJie Moral Requirement 
 of Obedience is in the very Life of tJie Godhead. 
 
 The Holy Ghost is thus the individualising prin- 
 ciple in the experience of the life of every Christian. 
 
 As has been alluded to previously, the teaching 
 of the ]\Iontanists and Joachimites, and Anabaptists 
 and Irvingites, about a Third Kingdom, in which 
 the Holy Ghost would resume to Himself from the 
 Church the authority formerly exercised vicariously 
 in His name by the Church, and through His 
 indwelling would make each soul of man an individual 
 and autonomous Church to itself, are a contorted 
 statement of a supreme truth. The Reign of the 
 Holy Ghost is distinct from the Reign of the 
 Father and the Son, just as His personality is 
 equally distinct from that of the Father and the Son. 
 
 But all these were in error in their belief that the 
 distinctness of the new kingdom of the Spirit, which 
 is to extend its dominion over the world, meant 
 that this New Kingdom was to be in the least degree 
 separate from the Church of Christ. As the Holy 
 Ghost proceeds eternally from the Father and the 
 Son, so equally must the Life of His Kingdom 
 remain in eternal dependence upon the Kingdom 
 of Christ, namely, the Church, and of God the Father, 
 namely, the Moral Law. 
 
 That in yielding obedience is to be found the 
 only perfect freedom, may sound a paradox or a 
 mystery ; but it is a myster\' resting upon the basic 
 life of the Godhead, in which the free Spirit of 
 
120 THE GENIUS OF THE "TO BE" 
 
 God itself is eternally bound, and is still eternally 
 free ; and is divinely bound in the order of its 
 procession to the Father and the Son. It cannot, 
 then, surprise us that, in true religious freedom, 
 the life of unique individualism is dependent upon 
 persistent obedience to the Divinity, and to the 
 Collective Will of humanity organised in the Church 
 of God, 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Sacrifice is the Gate to Life^ and not to Death. The 
 Intellect^ no less than the Wi/I, is only truly 
 free through Sacrifice, The New Jerusalem is 
 the City of all who have performed their Spiritual 
 Sacrifice in union zvith the Paschal Sacrifice of 
 Christy who is called the Lamb of God. 
 
 An intelligent worship of God, securing blessedness 
 for the worshipper, is the inner reality expressed in 
 all Christian Institutions, which are simply acts of 
 Sacrificial Worship cast into an ordered form. To 
 believe with the Church, that is, with mankind in 
 solidarity, is an act of sacrificial worship or obedience 
 of the mind. To accept the rule of the Church is 
 an act of sacrificial worship of the will. Christian 
 Individualism enters, immediately the whole of our 
 assent to dogma become an individual, a self-coloured, 
 a self-characteristic, assent. It enters when our 
 submission to the Church's ordinances is intelligent, 
 voluntary, personally thought-out, and interpreted 
 — in a word — when our submission is individual and 
 free. 
 
UNION OF HEAVEN WITH EARTH 121 
 
 Our obedience and our freedom now become one 
 and the same ; for we now are wont to exercise our 
 individual freedom with the Church rather than 
 against the Church. 
 
 Such freedom is inspired and aided by the mighty 
 Spirit of God, who sheds upon our minds and souls 
 some of the beauty proper to the Church of Christ. 
 
 Moreover, the very colour and characteristics of 
 our own individuality are impressed upon the 
 memory and substance of the Living Church. 
 Although this Holy City descends from Heaven to 
 Earth, it is nevertheless a divine remaining-place for 
 every name, and every character, and every individual, 
 which have been offered in spiritual sacrifice to God, 
 in real community of thought and action, with the 
 sacrifice of the Lamb of God whose Bride is the New 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 Q 
 
PART V 
 
 CHRIST, THE MYSTICAL SELF 
 
 OF MAN 
 
CHRIST, THE MYSTICAL SELF 
 
 OF MAN 
 
 " Now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether 
 it be by life or by death. 
 
 "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. . . . 
 
 " I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart and 
 to be with Christ ; which is far better. 
 
 " Nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for yon." 
 —St Paul. 
 
 I. 
 
 The Mystical^' Sons of God'' are they zuho report all 
 the advancing Knowledge of the Universe^ and 
 all the advancing aspirations of the Heart of Man ^ 
 before the Throne of God. 
 
 Filial Piety towards God of the type truly named 
 " Catholic," is the acknowledgment of the sonship 
 of the entire Creation, in a common brotherhood of 
 all that is in the earth and stars, along with our own 
 sonship of God, revealed in Christ. 
 
 Mystical piety has been called the one orthodox 
 individualism; and in all instances of its genuine 
 development it is so clear-cut and precious that its 
 possession compensates Churchmen for their absence 
 of individual freedom in defining theological dogmas. 
 
 They who claim the individual right to interpret 
 
 125 
 
126 CHRIST, THE MYSTICAL SELF OF MAN 
 
 the Scriptures may be right or wrong ; but in exer- 
 cising this right they have to content themselves 
 with a mere multiplicity of interpretations of Scrip- 
 ture, a mere diversity of theological opinions, and 
 with a series of scarcely varying religious Sects ; 
 while, of rich individual Ideals of life they own but 
 few, and are wont to preach a religion of a dull and 
 conventional mediocrity. 
 
 Christian Mysticism was that beautiful flower of 
 personal life which sprang up out of the midst of 
 Christian uniformity. In its normal state it never 
 broke away from the bonds of Church Unity, and 
 received as much encouragement from Orthodoxy 
 on account of its healthful individualism, as heresy 
 received discouragement on account of its diseased 
 individualism. 
 
 The eternal Charter of Mystical Piety (which is 
 thus the same thing as Catholic Individualism) is 
 the orthodox dogma of God the Holy Ghost. All 
 the dogmas of the Church differ from each other, not 
 only as theological statements about different truths 
 of God, but also as including allusions to different 
 phases of the life of humanity, to the secret of which 
 each dogma of the Church affords the exclusive 
 Key. 
 
 The Scriptural mark in evidence of individual 
 experience of the mystical Sonship of God, revealed 
 in the dogma of the Holy Ghost, is that the whole 
 life of its favoured recipient is as the singing of the 
 New Song, commanded in the Bible by the Holy 
 Ghost, in honour of the new Glories of the Creation, 
 and of the Redemption, newly revealed in every new 
 Era of Mankind. 
 
THE NEW SONG 127 
 
 "I will create," says God in Isaiah, "a New 
 Heaven and a New Earth." The Song of the New 
 Heaven is a recording of the vision of the Word of 
 God in that Sevenfold New Heaven which the 
 angels of Natural Science have revealed to a Seven- 
 fold New Earth of the social aspirations of to-day. 
 
 He who is the true mystical Son of God is known 
 through that whereby the Spirit reveals to him the 
 Universe and Man anew in the Reason of God. 
 The mystical Son of God is he who loves Nature in 
 that greater vision of Nature of the modern intellect ; 
 it is he who loves Humanity upon the vistas of every 
 current and living hope, ideal, and prophecy, within 
 the living Hearts of Men. 
 
 II. 
 
 In what manner St John did not " taste death^^ until 
 he saw the Son of Man cojiiing in His Kingdom, 
 
 A French Abb6 has written a learned commentary 
 on St John's Gospel, in which he concurs with the 
 opinion of many critics outside the Church that none 
 of the Gospel was written by St John. 
 
 If that be true, the significance is totally different 
 from what the Abb6 seems to suppose. We are all 
 wont to call St Paul an example of a Christ-man who 
 had not seen Christ; but these critics would make the 
 writer of the Fourth Gospel a Christ-man of a more 
 remarkable type than was St Paul. 
 
 Christ said during His lifetime : " There be some 
 standing here which shall not taste of death, till they 
 see the Son of Man coming in His Kingdom " (Matt. 
 xvi. 28). 
 
128 CHRIST, THE MYSTICAL SELF OF MAN 
 
 This is a difficult text, unless the very simple 
 explanation is given that it refers to St John's sight 
 of the Return of Christ recorded in the Apocalypse, 
 and to St John's vision of the place of Christ recorded 
 in the Fourth Gospel. St Matthew himself, in a sense, 
 saw Christ again, when he was inspired to write his 
 Gospel ; but St John is specially marked out by Our 
 Lord, in a tradition recorded in the 2ist chapter of 
 the Fourth Gospel, where Christ says to Peter : " If I 
 will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee ? " 
 (verse 22). 
 
 While the John of the Gospels is not recorded as 
 giving evidence of the great insight and culture of 
 the writer of the Fourth Gospel, nor even of the 
 ability and genius for writing the Apocalypse, yet it 
 is conceivable that Christ foresaw an impending 
 recoil in St John's remembrance of his Master which 
 was about to be the occasion of the Disciple's vision 
 of His Lord in that Glory which is indeed everywhere 
 of Christ, and in that Second Coming of the Lord 
 which is always beginning to be. 
 
 In this case the whole of the amazing consciousness 
 of Christ recorded in the Apocalypse, in the Fourth 
 Gospel, and in the Epistles, may, in all likelihood, 
 have been the expression of the Spiritual Return of 
 Christ to St John. The question, then, of the setting 
 together of the present form of the Fourth Gospel 
 does not concern us, for in any case its entire inspira- 
 tion would have been apostolic. 
 
 If, however, the Fourth Gospel is a creation of the 
 Sub-apostolic Age, this would point to a miracle 
 which would transcend the conversion of St Paul. 
 For its creator would have been a veritable second- 
 
THE RETURN TO ST JOHN 129 
 
 self of the Messiah, being possessed of the Messianic 
 consciousness of the transcendent power of God in 
 Man, in a manner the like of which history shows not 
 the least signs of another instance. 
 
 Hoping as we do for " all things " through Christ, 
 we may dare to look forward to interpreters of our 
 Lord's Mind and revealers of His Authority and 
 Power of equal literary inspiration with the Writer 
 of this Gospel, before the end of time. But this is 
 not conceivable before the Age of the Holy Spirit 
 shall have arrived ; and, even then, such an event 
 could only happen in the way of making spiritual 
 transcriptions from the Gospels. 
 
 I do not, then, so much object to the conclusions of 
 the critics, as to the remarkable want of spiritual 
 imagination in which they draw those conclusions. 
 If they say that the Fourth Gospel is entirely the 
 result of a New Inspiration, let them accept the 
 conclusions as to the possible inspiration of Humanity 
 which this result would entail. It would point to a 
 remarkable Return of Christ to human consciousness 
 nearly one hundred years after His lifetime. On 
 the whole, it seems more credible that St John 
 should himself have experienced a great spiritual 
 recoil, which would have made our Lord's prophecy 
 in the Gospels definitely fulfilled when St John saw 
 Christ coming in the Glory of His Kingdom, and 
 gave a limited human utterance to this great spiritual 
 event in the Apocalypse, the Fourth Gospel, and in 
 the three Epistles attributed to him. 
 
130 CHRIST, THE MYSTICAL SELF OF MAN 
 
 in. 
 
 Every Saint who loves all Nature and respects all 
 Meny allows Christ to hasten His approach to 
 bless the World. 
 
 Men of the Spirit were men who felt towards their 
 fellows in a noble and universally human manner. 
 St Paul was equally sympathetic towards man and 
 towards the Spirit of God, and by his practical com- 
 prehension of the virtue of the Son of God, he greatly 
 aided in shortening the times which separated the 
 world from the day of the Coming of the Lord. 
 St Francis, in his human attitude of sympathy 
 towards Nature, hastened on the day of the recon- 
 ciliation of all things, and of all men, in the Sacred 
 Passion of Christ. In the like manner, a Shelley, 
 whose humanly catholic sympathies with the Universe 
 were supplemented by the divinely catholic sym- 
 pathies of the Cross, would bring the world very near 
 the precincts of the Visible Return of Christ. 
 
 There is order and process in the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, as there is order and process in the 
 Kingdoms of the Earth. There are many who belong 
 to the Church of God who yet have not prepared 
 themselves to receive the plenitude of the Spirit of 
 God. 
 
 Not that God is arbitrary in His gifts of grace. 
 While grace is freely given, it is given in exact 
 proportion as our own hindering self-limitations are 
 removed from us. If I am compassionate only to 
 ten men, then I have limited myself from receiving 
 the Spirit of God beyond the small proportion that 
 
THE SPIRITUAL INTERCHANGE 131 
 
 my narrow Christianity stands for. But if I am com- 
 passionate with all men of all creeds, of all races, of 
 all countries, of all climes, of all conditions of life ; 
 and also obey the Church as the symbol and medium 
 through which the gifts of the Spirit come ; then the 
 Spirit of the Lord will rest upon me in the pleni- 
 tude of His healing might ; and through my mere 
 acceptance of all things in the world as reconciled in 
 Christ, the Spirit of God will bring back the might of 
 Christ to conquer the world. 
 
 IV. 
 
 God acts through the laws of the Universe^ because 
 the laws of the Universe are God's laws : There- 
 fore the consummation of the Kingdom, proceeds 
 through the operation of universal aud eternal 
 lawSy to break which would destroy the character 
 of God. 
 
 Why were there no other St Pauls after the first 
 one? Why, to use the Apostle's own phraseology, 
 did not Christ return to the world among St Paul's 
 contemporaries, or on a subsequent day, and repro- 
 duce the mystery of the alter- Christus in the Disciple, 
 in a Kingdom of the Holy Ghost, amid those who 
 left all to follow their Master and were faithful to 
 Him even in martyrdom? Of the thousands and 
 millions of devout Christians, why were there, with 
 a possible exception of St Francis of Assisi, no 
 examples of Spiritual Interchange? 
 
 The answer must proceed from a religious, or 
 " Theistic," psychology. All saintly lives were in a 
 
132 CHRIST, THE MYSTICAL SELF OF MAN 
 
 sense attempted interchanges of human personalities 
 with that of Christ, and the whole of Christian 
 Mysticism was the flower of the partial attainment 
 of this holy interchange. Yet in each instance of 
 mystical intercommunion, the inexorable law of 
 psychology came into effect that the Holy Spirit's 
 operation was limited by both the intelligence and 
 the character, in other words, the humanity, of the 
 recipient. Had not this been true likewise of every 
 page of the inspired text of the Holy Scriptures ? 
 
 As the Bible is to be studied as the education of 
 humanity in comprehending the thought of Christ, 
 so is the history of the Church to be studied as the 
 ordered and methodic education of humanity in 
 comprehending the possession of Christ ; and the 
 amount of the immaturity of this education, none of 
 which, received through definitions of dogmas or a 
 growing appreciation of the Christ of history, is ever 
 lost to the world, is the inexorable limitation on the 
 human side of an operation of a Power which, in 
 itself, is illimitable and divinely free. 
 
 It was possible to St Paul to receive a kind of 
 total impression of Christ's personality without the 
 intervening World-Education which was necessary 
 to those who were not near enough to receive such 
 a whole impression. To the rest, Christ was only 
 known discursively, through symbols, images of 
 speech, and partially apprehended accounts of His 
 Life and Character, until such time as when, the 
 Gospel of the Lord having been preached to and 
 made at home with every creature, the education in 
 the comprehension of Christ the Lord shall have 
 grown complete. 
 
CONVERSION 133 
 
 V. 
 
 The ordinary conversion is only the beginning of the 
 life of Grace. Perfect conversion embraces our 
 relation to the Universe. It is a Substantial 
 Change^ a?id hastens the Day of the Lord. 
 
 Verbalism is a serious menace to the Church of 
 Christ. If the beginnings of religious experience are 
 described in words which lead men to suppose 
 that they have reached the End of this experience, 
 the incentive to advance thither will be taken away. 
 A corrective of Verbalism may be studied in the 
 life of the Apostle of the Gentiles. 
 
 St Paul's experience of the Supernatural was all 
 in the nature of the interchange of his personality 
 with that of Christ. This first happened when the 
 Apostle was smitten with the light of Christ's 
 personality on the road to Damascus. In whatever 
 way the impression of Christ's personality may have 
 first come to him, St Paul's vivid assurance of the fact 
 of the Resurrection of Christ from the grave, seems to 
 have been solely founded on his own real experience 
 of the presence of a personality more masterful than 
 his own, which at times so controlled his life that 
 Paul's own personality became the mere instrument of 
 Christ's. When the Apostle writes that he himself 
 lives not, but Christ is as the changeling who has 
 come to live in his place, and bring forth judgment 
 on the world, he is not writing of conventional 
 morals, or of the fact that he is living the converted 
 life. He is, on the contrary, speaking of an actual 
 
134 CHRIST, THE MYSTICAL SELF OF MAN 
 
 interchange of personality with Christ, which more 
 than anything else in the New Testament brings us 
 near the goal of history and explains the Parousia. 
 The terrors of the light on the road to Damascus 
 were a rehearsal to St Paul of what is to happen on 
 the Day of the Lord. The spiritual Second Coming 
 of Christ meant, in his teaching, the real interchange 
 of Christ's heart with the hearts of men, since the 
 Apostle never forgets that to see Christ is to change 
 into His likeness. 
 
 VI. 
 
 St PmiVs Conversion possessed a Cosmic Realism about 
 it which sets it forth as a foreboding of the future 
 Sacred Interchange of Humanity with the Life of 
 Christ. 
 
 The tremendous impression of a personality as of 
 Christ's, greater than one's own, in such a manner 
 that it assails, conquers, subdues, and is interchanged 
 with, the lesser personality, is a veritable coming of 
 the Holy Ghost to the individual soul. It is only 
 modern psychology which has made the realism of 
 St Paul's experience intelligible. Cases of the altera- 
 tion of personality, and of the interchange of person- 
 ality, are well known to psychologists, and add their 
 testimony that St Paul never spoke about mere 
 moral changes in his life, such as happened to his 
 converts, but about realistic psychological changes ^ 
 which amounted to a true interchange of personality. 
 
 ^ The first suggestion, or impression of Christ on St Paul, 
 probably came through the saintly death of Stephen, and from 
 him backwards to those who had known Christ. 
 
ST PAUL AND CHRIST 135 
 
 As to what this interchange effected, the life of 
 St Paul must speak for itself. Not only was his 
 personality in one sense not absorbed ; but it remained 
 or became one of the most powerfully marked human 
 personalities in history. St Paul, it should be said, 
 attained to that particular aspect of Christ which 
 was the compliment to St Paul himself. His was an 
 individualistic taking to himself of the personality of 
 Christ ; the Apostle being, as it were, the understudy 
 of the chief person in the Christ Play, who retained 
 nevertheless all his own characteristics, interpreting 
 or rendering Christ's character while preaching to the 
 Gentiles. 
 
 Ordinary conversions are blessed realities ; but 
 are only the beginnings of that New Universe of 
 Redemption which is as great as the Old Universe of 
 the Creation. In a certain sense St Paul forestalled 
 the long experience of Humanity in reaching, through 
 the whole of its knowledge and power, towards an 
 interchange between its own mind, soul, and body, and 
 that of its Redeemer. 
 
 St Paul, therefore, is one whose experience is rather 
 of the Future than of the Past. He is " conversion " 
 terminated in "substantial change," and therefore 
 converts to Christ must see how they too must 
 experience the conversion of the whole Cosmos within 
 their own conversion, or otherwise they can never be 
 the instruments through which Christ in them is 
 shown forth before all men and all worlds. 
 
136 CHRIST, THE MYSTICAL SELF OF MAN 
 
 VII. 
 
 The Saints zvere not only Good Men^ but also Artists 
 of Reality^ in the manner in ivhich they set forth 
 in the World the So?t of God. The chief Lesson of 
 the Saints is that we be as original as the Saints 
 in following Christy in a vianner proper to our- 
 selves. 
 
 In Saintly Mysticism the " Manifest " Presence of 
 Christ has flowed in many beautiful ways out of the 
 Real Presence. The best known of these are the 
 instances of the Stigmata of St Francis ; the mani- 
 festations of the Sacred Heart in the instance of 
 St Catherine of Siena, St Teresa, and Blessed 
 Margaret Mary Alacoque. To attempt to copy liter- 
 ally the type of Devotion which ensued from visions 
 like those of the Sacred Heart, would be a fatal error ; 
 but the principle remains valid, that the Devotion to 
 the Sacred Heart stands for an aspiration towards 
 making manifest the hidden Presence of the God- 
 man ; and it would be well if the spiritual energies 
 of the Church were turned in thought and prayer 
 towards a vivid conception of the Divine Man clothed 
 with the whole world's new experience of what is 
 best in Humanity, and made ever-living by the 
 Immortal Spirit of God. 
 
 The Sacramental Presence of Christ in the Church 
 is an unceasing Fountain of Life which is destined to 
 flow without fail until the re-enactment of the Times 
 of Christ upon Earth, though in the glory of universal 
 recognition rather than in the former humiliation. 
 
 We must approach His new manifestation through 
 
ST FRANCIS 137 
 
 the Science of His Saints rather than through that 
 of Worldings. 
 
 They who attempt to imitate the Saints are no 
 Saints, because the Saints imitated no other Saints, 
 but only the Son of God. As each Saint both 
 conceived of Christ, and also manifested Christ, in a 
 manner proper to himself; so they who understand 
 the Saints will conceive of Christ in a manner proper 
 to themselves, and manifest Him in a manner which 
 shall thrill the hearts of the Age in which we live 
 with a Melody proper to themselves alone. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 St Francis understood that because we can call God^ 
 " Our Father I''' this implies that, through Christ, 
 God will call all ifiankind some day, '* My Son I " 
 
 To me, Francis of Assisi is the greatest of Doctors 
 of the Mediaeval Church. He was the pathfinder 
 who discovered that Christian humility might dare 
 to simplify all theology and all religion as the 
 " Conformity," the personal life-likeness to the earthly 
 Christ. 
 
 In the illusion of this Life-and-Passion-Play, the 
 whole earth was his scene of Palestine ; and Francis 
 himself, more crucially than is ever acted at Ober- 
 Ammergau, took the part of the " Christus " in a life- 
 long " Miracle Play." He had comprehended what was 
 the simplest and singlest of " Messages " that Heaven 
 had ever sent to Earth. He knew that the Gospel 
 was not philosophy nor theology ; but God, through 
 His Son, speaking Himself to the heart of man, with 
 
 S 
 
138 CHRIST, THE MYSTICAL SELF OF MAN 
 
 the directness and intimacy of a lover to a beloved, 
 of an intimate friend to an intimate friend. A new 
 significance in daily usages and customs of social life 
 to him stood in the place of philosophy and theology, 
 and sometimes even of oral teaching. The religion 
 for mankind then grew to be a life-long act of filial 
 piety learned of Christ towards God. In the mysti- 
 cal friendship that identified him with the Son of God, 
 he reverenced Nature with a holy passion, with a 
 son's reverence for a loving Father's handicraft. He 
 respected humanity, and all individual men, as of the 
 joint heirship, called with him, to the Messianic Feast 
 of the History of the World. He and they were of 
 faith's brotherhood with the eternal Son of God. 
 St Francis knew, because we can dare to pray to God 
 as " Our Father ! " that this implies the hope that 
 some day God will call humanity, "My Son ! " 
 
 IX. 
 
 TJie Holy Eucharist was intentionally instituted to 
 be the nieditun of the Parousia. 
 
 No one has ever more intimately associated 
 together Faith and Life, Doctrine and Deeds, than 
 Christ. In order to worship Him with the com- 
 manded worship of our minds, we should know 
 what we are about when we approach His Holy 
 Table. We go there not for an indefinite but for 
 a well-defined purpose ; a purpose being a tendency 
 to an object, a clear and final cause. The clear 
 and final cause of our approach to the Holy Table 
 is that we may so partake of the substance of His 
 
BELOVED DISCIPLES 139 
 
 own spiritual Being, and the life-characteristics of 
 His Life revealed in the Gospels, that we may come 
 therefrom nourished by sacred assimilation into His 
 True Disciples ; spiritually sitting with His original 
 Disciples at Table with Him ; taking to heart the 
 Last Discourses recorded in the Gospel of St John, 
 and putting them into practice by becoming His 
 Beloved Disciples one and all. It does not suffice 
 us to say in general that we are partaking of the 
 Bread of Immortality, unless we are interested 
 enough to learn of His own words what the thought 
 and life of the Perpetual Communion between our- 
 selves and Him, entailed through His Gift of Himself 
 to us, ought to be. 
 
 We are called to be branches of Himself who 
 is the True Vine of the World's Life. We are 
 bidden to be as lifelike — which He was — as the Vine's 
 branches are lifelike, and similar to the Vine Tree. 
 We are called to be so lifelike unto Him in heart, 
 soul, and mind, that we pray and worship, not in 
 our own heart, mind, and soul, but in the very 
 mood in which, in heart, mind, and soul He the 
 Law of Life has prayed before us ; so that He 
 may pray in us and we pray in Him. It is this 
 prayer of ours, in His prayer for the Kingdom, 
 referred to in John xv. 7, which shall assuredly 
 be heard. 
 
 Bishop Westcott recognised this supreme truth 
 in his commentary on this text, where he says : 
 " According to the true reading, [' Ye shall ask 
 what ye will '] is equivalent to ' Ask whatsoever ye 
 will.' The petitions of the true disciples are echoes 
 (so to speak) of Christ's words. As He has spoken 
 
140 CHRIST, THE MYSTICAL SELF OF MAN 
 
 so they speak. Their prayer is only some fragment 
 of His teaching transformed into a supplication, and 
 so it will necessarily be heard." 
 
 The Evangelical does not object to be taken back 
 to Palestine to be with Christ as in His fellowship 
 with men during all His lifetime. The true Catholic 
 doctrine of the Eucharist meant that we could 
 walk nigh to Christ even with Peter, James, and John. 
 Because scarcely anyone ever thought that Catholic 
 doctrine meant the secret of walking with Christ, 
 therefore its so-called Sacramentalism had fallen into 
 disfavour. 
 
 The requirements on our part for rightly and 
 worthily participating in the Messianic Feast of 
 the Holy Eucharist, and of our becoming thereby 
 as the Apostles who reclined with Christ at the Last 
 Supper, are, first, that we should recognise that Christ 
 is wholly and entirely present there ; and secondly, 
 that with our hearts, souls, and minds we should 
 wholly and self-sacrificially worship Him. 
 
 The Holy Eucharist is, and ever was, a reciprocal 
 Sacrifice, and without the sacrifice of ourselves 
 to Christ, the Sacrifice of Christ to us is of no 
 avail. 
 
 True sacrificial worship consists in the Sacred 
 Interchange of a life from God to Man, and of a life 
 from Man to God. 
 
 The meaning of the saying of St Ignatius of 
 Antioch, that he was as the Holy Bread to Christ, 
 was that the Eucharist consisted not only in bringing 
 Christ as Bread to us, but in the transmutation of 
 ourselves into a living Sacrament, as of Bread, to 
 Christ. 
 
THE SACRAMENTS 141 
 
 X. 
 
 TJie Second Coming of Christ in a spiritual and real 
 manner is effected in the Mission of the Holy 
 Ghost added to, and working through^ and along 
 with, the Sacramental Christ. 
 
 It avails nothing that we should know the Scrip- 
 tures, unless we also possess the real Christ, who is 
 witnessed to in them. 
 
 The purpose of the Holy Ghost in relation to 
 Christ, is to perpetuate His Real Presence in the like 
 manner as — in relation to the Scriptures — the 
 purpose of the Holy Ghost is to perpetuate Inspira- 
 tion to each individual Soul. 
 
 The purpose of the Holy Ghost, in relation to 
 Christ is, in fine, to make Christ's Invisible Presence 
 in the World equally real, in effect, to what His 
 Visible Presence would have been in history, had it 
 not been taken away from men by His Death. 
 
 There is no conceivable, or at least recorded, way 
 in which the perpetuation of the real Christ is possible 
 except in some type of Sacramental System. The 
 reason of this must be found in the desire of Man, and 
 of the Spirit of God in Man, to see and acknowledge 
 and possess Christ in a perfectly equivalent manner 
 to that in which He was seen, acknowledged, and 
 possessed, by His Disciples during His Earthly Life. 
 
 The Sacraments are mediums of the perpetuation 
 of the invisible Christ until His visible Coming 
 Again. 
 
 To understand their value, consider the vast 
 implications in the three hundred references to 
 
142 CHRIST, THE MYSTICAL SELF OF MAN 
 
 the Second Coming of Christ in the mind of 
 the writers of the New Testament. It was the 
 general belief that the appearance of Christ in 
 " Glory," that is, in recognition, would so touch the 
 hearts of the Christian World which perpetually 
 mourned His staying away, that all Christians would 
 be quickened with immortal bodily life. 
 
 We may think in other terms to-day ; but the belief 
 itself is equally existent, that were the humble Man 
 of Galilee again to walk the Earth, the heart of 
 all humanity would be quickened as though with 
 lightning. 
 
 Those who talk of the Spiritual Presence of Christ 
 in the Soul and of the mere subjective Presence of 
 Christ in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, have no 
 expectations of any such transformation of Human- 
 ity in this manner, by His virtual or real bodily 
 Return. 
 
 This teaches the fact that all men are agreed upon 
 the infinite difference between a person's presence in 
 thought or commemoration, and a person's presence 
 in actual life. The Receptionist wants the whole 
 Christ of Palestine as much as the Sacramentarian 
 does, but he dare not, as a Receptionist, believe in it. 
 Those, however, who, believing in the Real Presence, 
 retain the principle through which they are able to 
 conceive of a Return of Christ out of the midst of 
 His Church, should loyally retain those tangible 
 symbols expressive of what, in the desire of the 
 world. His Real Presence must, for ever, mean to the 
 world. 
 
 The foundation of the Sacramental Life is in the 
 whole Earthly Life of the Son of Man. Therefore 
 
SACRAMENTAL LIFE 143 
 
 the Sacramental Life makes way for an equal earthly 
 manifestation in the Second Coming of Christ. 
 
 Christ's bodily presence in Palestine was the 
 supreme type of sacramental power for all Time, 
 and our Sacraments are a mere gathering -up the 
 crumbs of its remembrance. Whosoever befriended 
 Christ as man, like the Magdalene, and the Woman 
 with the precious ointment, were given, along with 
 His human Sympathy, His divine Redemption. 
 The remission of sins went together with the paraly- 
 tic's taking up the bed and walking. The healing of 
 the leper was the sacrament of the cleansing the 
 leprosy of Sin. The friendship of the Lord with 
 Martha and Mary was solidly one with the entrance 
 of Martha and Mary into immortal Life. On the 
 harp of the senses the Immortal David charmed his 
 hearers to sing the praises of the redeemed within 
 His Kingdom. When He loved the Disciple, then 
 Love immortalised the Disciple, and impressed him 
 with memories of the whole history of the Word made 
 Flesh. The Holy Church in the Primitive Ages was 
 nothing but the spiritual perpetuation of the impres- 
 sion upon hearts and lives of the bodily, inclusive of 
 the spiritual, Presence of the Lord. Christ once 
 delegated His power through the breathing of the 
 Spirit of His fellowship upon the Church ; but, in 
 the Age of the Holy Ghost, He will resume the 
 same to Himself again in a more manifest way 
 which will recall to all men the "days of the Son 
 ol Man." 
 
144 CHRIST, THE MYSTICAL SELF OF MAN 
 
 XL 
 
 The Prayer-Book and the Bible teach the Substantial 
 Return of Christ through the Church. 
 
 " The Body and Blood of Christ, which are verily 
 and indeed taken and received by the faithful^ 
 
 The Book of Common Prayer contains the doctrine 
 of the Return of Christ in a more comprehensive 
 manner than that in which I have ventured to express 
 it. But no Prayer-Book avails us anything until we 
 first learn that God owns all the substance of the 
 Universe, and that His truth, to us, carries with it all 
 the substance of the Universe in its possession. 
 Before we argue about Church doctrine, we ought 
 to reason a little about Nature and its God. 
 Theism, or the Knowledge of God by Reason, shows 
 the Substance behind the Shadow in all that God has 
 made. Theism thus makes every precious word 
 revealed by Grace more precious to Humanity than 
 ever it was before. The Bible is proved to be, not 
 Science, but more than Science, namely — the Sub- 
 stance which is the Goal of Science. 
 
 The disputes between Sacramentarian and Recep- 
 tionist are really based upon contending theories of 
 God, and not upon the meaning of texts. If this 
 Universe is God's Universe, it is perfectly certain 
 that He uses His own possession, namely, His physical 
 world, in an analogous manner in Grace to what He 
 does in Nature. It is in Christ as the Reason of God, 
 that all things " consist," or stand together in one. 
 There is but one Universe even as there is but one God. 
 
THE SPIRITUAL IMPRESSION 145 
 
 Therefore every word we use about God must have 
 the total reality of the Universe within its meaning. 
 Christ comes through Sacraments, wJiich themselves 
 are part of the U?iiverse, because the whole Universe 
 is His ; and He comes with the total reality of the 
 Universe, because His greater coming by Grace 
 cannot be in a less real manner than the lesser 
 coming by Nature. The Prayer-Book must refer to a 
 Real Presence and a real Return of Christ through 
 the Sacraments, because it would have to destroy the 
 Universe itself before it could set forth the manner 
 of His Coming in any other than a substantial way. 
 
 xn. 
 
 Because each and every spiritual reality possess a bodily 
 reality conjoined to it, the Church of Christ, which 
 is a spiritual fact, is a bodily reality too. Since 
 also it is a perpetuatiofi of the Impression of Christ, 
 that part of our sacred and united Thought- 
 World which is stamped with His spiritual 
 Impression contains His bodily reality too. 
 
 The One who is moving slowly through History, 
 at length to be crowned and to judge the world, is 
 being borne unto His Kingdom within the Church of 
 God. The Church, as St Paul taught, is itself the 
 real Body and the Soul of Christ, who is living in 
 hidden communion, in this His bodily dwelling, with 
 all the goodness of Mankind : encouraging all human 
 effort, inspiring what is good and gracious in Song, 
 Art, and Culture ; and moulding Civil Life and Social 
 Reform towards their Ideals. The Church of Christ 
 
 T 
 
146 CHRIST, THE MYSTICAL SELF OF MAN 
 
 has the Real Presence of Christ, because the Church 
 of Christ is the Real Presence of Christ. Holy 
 Orders and the other Sacraments do not so much 
 bring Christ to humanity as they bring Humanity to 
 the pre-existing Christ. From the Theistic view- 
 point, the physical realism of the Apostolic Succession, 
 the realism of entering the Covenant through the 
 Cleansing Water, the realism of consecrated Bread 
 and Wine, are as necessary to the existence of a 
 Living Church as the visible Universe and bodies 
 are necessary, from the view-point of right reason, to 
 the existence of man. 
 
 Let us remember that the invisible Presence only 
 is ours because Mankind refused to allow place for 
 the visible Christ ; and the slaying of the Earthly 
 Christ has necessitated the Sacramental Christ. 
 
 Thus it is that the manner of this Sacrament, 
 recalling our treatment of our Master, shows forth 
 the Death of Christ — since there is now no Visible 
 Christ — until His coming again. For the same 
 reason, there is necessarily the juristic realism of 
 Creeds and definite Dogmas, because the prophetic 
 presence of the Teacher was disallowed when Man- 
 kind refused to hear Him speak. Dogma but tells 
 us the single fact, but the whole fact, of what Christ 
 is to Man. In the Day of Judgment, History and 
 the Universe will be seen to be the Dogma of the 
 Son of God and Man, and Creeds will be necessary 
 then no longer. 
 
THE REAL PRESENCE 147 
 
 XIII. 
 
 Christ, living in the Eucharist, fills our Understanding 
 with a Vision of the Sovereignty of God in the 
 proposition in which we understand the place of 
 God's Sovereignty, namely, the Natural Science 
 which reflects the Reason of God iji the Creation. 
 
 Christ, to the intellect, is the Reason of God ; He 
 is the Model of the life and movement of the 
 Universe ; He is the modelling Power which has 
 wound up the original energies of Things ; He is the 
 Hope, the Glory, the Destiny of mankind. 
 
 Through His precious Wine in the Eucharist we are 
 filled with the understanding at God's Reign within 
 the Universe. 
 
 The Eucharist is then very near to that blessed 
 Vision which makes their Paradise to all who share 
 in its sight, and which the Saints on earth have 
 ever prayed to possess. 
 
 For in the Holy Eucharist the Source of Paradise 
 has already been in us ; though we have not yet 
 possessed Paradise. We must first understand the 
 Universe in the measurements of the Natural Science 
 of God's Creation, before we can possibly conceive how 
 Christ reigns there as the Reason of God. 
 
 But when we have measured all the heights, and 
 sounded all depths, in the great World, then Christ 
 within us shall show our minds His Reign. 
 
 The Church does not then magically evoke Christ 
 upon the Altar; rather it lifts up the gates which 
 prevent us from everywhere possessing Him. How 
 could there be no Real Presence in the Consecrated 
 
148 CHRIST, THE MYSTICAL SELF OF MAN 
 
 Bread and Wine, when He reigns in real presence in 
 all the Universe? Or is the Eucharist the only- 
 portion of the Cosmos where Christ the Son of God 
 is not ? True, outside the Holy Bread and Wine it 
 is not given us to receive Him. But this is so not 
 because He reigns not elsewhere, but because in 
 this one place the Gate which elsewhere closes Him 
 from us is momentarily raised, that the King of 
 Glory may enter us in the measure in which the 
 mind, heart, and soul of man have elected to concur 
 with, and receive Him. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 The Holy Eucharist being the fact of the Sacred 
 Interchange betwee7t Man and Christy is absolutely 
 conditioned as an Interchange by the measure in 
 which Man gives himself away to Christ. 
 
 Between God and Humanity there is an everlasting 
 give and take. Man is asked to sacrifice all for God, 
 without knowing whether there will ever be to him a 
 return. But God graciously gives back to man not 
 only Man's Humanity again, but God's own Godhead 
 too, in so far as it is communicable to man. 
 
 And divinity is communicable to man in an 
 unthought-of degree ; God may give Himself to us in 
 the exact proportion in which we are suffered to, and 
 consent to, give ourselves to Him. In the Bread of 
 the Altar we receive God, but the effect of the recep- 
 tion is only unmeasured if we first give ourselves as a 
 joint sacrifice with the first Sacrifice. 
 
 As we are sacrificed, and die, in our wills, to God ; 
 
THE DIVINE COVENANT 149 
 
 so, the Son of God having died for us, our own life is 
 replaced by that Gift, in which, by yielding His Life, 
 it was yielded to us as the Bread of our lives. 
 
 XV. 
 
 TJie Holy Eucharist is the Touching Medium throtigh 
 which the Promises in the Eternal Covefiant 
 between God and Man^ contained in the whole of 
 the Old and New Testaments^ are brought to pass. 
 
 It often takes mankind centuries to understand a 
 single word of God, for the simple reason that such 
 a word may relate to some process in the transmuta- 
 tion of the whole Created Universe. 
 
 We should not lament that Christians are not yet 
 one in the understanding of what the institution of the 
 Eucharist meant. Those who have meant most by 
 it, in one sense, have but too often meant the least by 
 it in another sense. All men's affirmatives about 
 the Holy Eucharist are wholly true : all men's 
 denials about the Holy Eucharist are wholly untrue. 
 
 The Eucharist must necessarily finally mean, not 
 the mere change of one inactive substance into 
 another inactive substance, but the totally living, 
 and morally active, change of the substance of the 
 body and soul of humanity into the substance of the 
 Body and Soul of the Second Man, morally inspired 
 and wholly controlled by the Conscience of the 
 Living Christ. 
 
 If the Eucharist is a human institution, it bears 
 with it no substantial charge. If it be a divine 
 institution, this means that it is a substantial change ; 
 
150 CHRIST, THE MYSTICAL SELF OF MAN 
 
 because divine means substantial ; and what is 
 substantial is exclusively divine ; and what is not 
 substantial change is in no case divine change. 
 
 Granted these obvious facts, then the meaning of 
 the Holy Eucharist is made clear through every 
 word within the Old Testament, and through every 
 word within the New Testament. 
 
 The Holy Eucharist is the beginning of the con- 
 summation of the Old and New Covenant between 
 deathless God and deathful Man, in which the Body 
 and Blood and Conscience of the New Creation of 
 Humanity are substantially interchanged with the 
 Body and Blood and Conscience of the old and 
 former things. 
 
 The physical realism of Bread and Wine is simply 
 the touching medium through which we, with the 
 Apostles as at the Last Supper, touch, receive, and 
 take, the Living Christ, who was present with the 
 Apostles, and through which, in no conceivable 
 manner, He is less really present to us than He was 
 to His Apostles. 
 
 The Holy Eucharist does not mean that by 
 receiving it, grace is stored up for us in heaven, while 
 we remain unchanged on earth. It means, when we 
 first have grace to see, that thereby the Conscience 
 of Humanity is made nigh unto that Conscience of 
 God which once judged the World in Christ. It 
 means that, during the change, the Passing Over of 
 Immortal Life happens, whose consummation is the 
 Coming of the Son of Man again to judge the World. 
 
 It is true that mankind may yet take centuries 
 before this total Biblical reality of the Holy Eucharist 
 is understood. 
 
THE NEW CREATION 151 
 
 The New Creation in the New Covenant is that 
 joint-creation in which man, being free, must freely 
 concur with the Creating God. The history of the 
 Holy Eucharist in the Church of Christ is the 
 history of the free concurrence of humanity with 
 the covenanted gift of God. Although the entire 
 Scriptures mean nothing else but the Coming of the 
 Son of man to change the heart and soul and body 
 of man into His likeness who was the Second Man ; 
 yet, so great is the significance of this the Covenant 
 of the Word of God, that man delays in understanding 
 and accepting; and God delays His New Creation, 
 pending on the choice and free concurrence of the 
 mind and heart of man. 
 
 But when the Prevailing Word of God shall have 
 won mankind to understand the one meaning of 
 its Promise, then the Angel of the Covenant shall 
 quickly come to His Temple in the Holy Eucharist ; 
 and to the very letter of this Promise, given to all 
 mankind in every word of the Old and New Testa- 
 ments, He shall search consciences and give us a New 
 Earth and a New Heaven. 
 
PART VI 
 
 TEN INSTRUCTIONS ON TITLES 
 OF CHRIST 
 
TEN INSTRUCTIONS ON TITLES 
 OF CHRIST 
 
 I. 
 
 Dayspring. 
 
 Science, Literature, Research, Culture, and Human 
 Nature advance towards new outposts every year 
 and every day. Life moves not towards darkness, 
 but towards the sunrise. 
 
 This is because all human knowledge is knowledge 
 of the humanity of Christ. 
 
 To know all is not to gain all ; to see is not to 
 have, nor is it to become. But Christ alone is 
 being as well as seeing^ possession as well as longing ; 
 and through Him alone thought becomes life. 
 
 If thought had no goal of thought which is beyond 
 thought, then thought would be all in vain, for it 
 would not end in creation, which is life. But Christ 
 has made all human thinking to be Prophecy, because 
 He is the Goal of the Thought of the World, and He 
 will quicken our thought into His New Creation, the 
 incarnate Word of our sight and of our desire. Our 
 thoughts define our wants, not our holdings. But 
 thoughts shall all become true things, because Christ 
 is our Word ; that is, all that we can think or read 
 
 155 
 
166 TEN INSTRUCTIONS 
 
 of; He is Thought descending out of Thought's 
 realm into Life's realm, and becoming incarnate in the 
 Flesh. 
 
 If there were no Christ, the world would be con- 
 stantly arising towards new vistas of life, but new 
 realities of nothing else but new pain, because its 
 action could never reach its sight. 
 
 Christ is Man's Sight become Creation. The sight 
 of all yesterdays becomes the creation of all to-days, 
 the sight of all to-days becoming the creation of all 
 to-morrov/s. 
 
 He alone is Dayspring ; because no one else who 
 ever lived changed want into achievement, sight into 
 creation, thoughts into lives, dreams into events. 
 
 At the term of the night of every want of every 
 man, Christ is the sunrise : out of the depth of every 
 People's night He is the Dawn of Day. At the goal 
 of the world's painful thinking and uncertainties, 
 Christ is the final Sun which is, in hidden ways, 
 coming round the dark world until it rise and renew 
 the glory of the earth. 
 
 II. 
 
 Made of a Woman, 
 
 Would that every woman to-day aspired, as every 
 Jewish woman did in the past, to become mother of 
 the world's Anointed King. 
 
 In the Days of Promise which are before us, that 
 which was once true for the world as one, will then 
 be true for each individual person within the world. 
 
 Woman is fitted, by the birthright of endowments 
 
MADE OF A WOMAN 157 
 
 which God has given her, to be the mother of, and 
 the trainer of, the World's Desire. The Virgin of 
 Nazareth was fitted for her calling, not otherwise, 
 than because she responded to the native grace of 
 womanhood more than any other woman. 
 
 All women equally with her, though each in her 
 peculiar way, are born to be mothers of the King. 
 The Virgin of Nazareth was not the least natural, 
 the least womanly, of all woman ; she was rather the 
 most natural, the most womanly, of all women ; 
 therefore she was blessed among women more than 
 all the rest. 
 
 Women worship their Lord who gave them their 
 endowments and their native grace, if they are loyal 
 to their womanly birthright of caring for the advent 
 of the King ; aspiring in a spiritual, but real manner, 
 so to bring Him forth from imprisonment by unfaith 
 in those whom He would so fashion in His own 
 image and likeness that they would be His brothers 
 in all human ways. 
 
 Unlike Jewish Mothers, among whom only one was 
 blessed with perfect divine fruitfulness, to-day, on 
 account of the One whom one brought forth, every 
 woman may so let Christ's Redemption through faith 
 grow into effect, that every child may become a Son 
 of God. 
 
 The mother who, by faith, can see a Christ-man in 
 her own son, will treat her son with the reverence 
 with which Mary treated her own Son, Christ. Then 
 indeed Christ's Redemption of His image in each of 
 us would come forth within each child, and Christ 
 would so live in him, that he would be a messenger 
 of the Messiah in the World. 
 
158 TEN INSTRUCTIONS 
 
 We need Christ-men not less to-day than formerly, 
 but more so, many times over, and more so in mani- 
 fold ways. We need a thousand anointed kings of 
 His Servant Kingship ; in a thousand states of life, 
 in all trades and occupations, in the hearts of cities 
 also, and on the expanse of every plain. 
 
 Motherhood shall learn its divine functions, and its 
 faith-evoking power ; and then the new generations 
 of Christians shall grow up first with the life-inspiring 
 thought that they are messengers of Christ's Messiah- 
 ship. 
 
 In that day every Christian will be clothed with the 
 Royal Priesthood, to show the praise of Christ, and 
 zealous to bring to pass among all sorts and conditions 
 of Men the Reign of the Holy Ghost. 
 
 III. 
 
 Great Prophet. 
 
 All the prophets of the past foretold Him ; but so 
 great a prophet is He that He must needs have all 
 flesh to declare in how great a manner and in how 
 many thousand living individuals His Prophecy is 
 true. 
 
 It is for the annunciation of the manifoldness, and 
 the great comprehension of His Prophecy, in the 
 latter days, that the Spirit of the Lord shall be 
 poured out upon all flesh. Unless the sons and 
 daughters of all whom we know, and who are around 
 us, prophecy, and unless our old men dream dreams 
 and our young men see visions, no power can testify 
 
GREAT PROPHET 159 
 
 to the abounding manner in which Christ is the life's 
 prophet of every individual man. 
 
 The sons ol^ man are thus the Sons of God, and 
 Christian communions are all part of the radiance of 
 His Church ; they may have erred, but now He has 
 made them His because He needs them to take to 
 themselves of the abundance of His manifold out- 
 pouring. 
 
 In every sense, the testimony of Jesus is the spirit 
 of prophecy. If we speak of Him we needs must 
 foretell what is to be, because truth about Jesus 
 Christ is truth about that which is to happen to all 
 the world. Through Him, every moment of the 
 world's spiritual history has an individual meaning to 
 each of us. Because each of us bears Him within us, 
 therefore is each of us the centre of the world and 
 king. Because He is in each one of us, and as He is 
 all to all men in one, therefore all that has happened 
 in the world relates to us. Because He is within us 
 all, this world is beloved by Him and we shall reign 
 with Him. 
 
 Each of us must therefore prophesy, because His 
 Prophecy has shown us all destinies from the separate 
 point of view of our own individual life. If we have 
 yielded our life receptive to His workmanship, He 
 has made it resplendent with new tidings of separate 
 joy from His place within us, to all the world without 
 us. 
 
160 TEN INSTRUCTIONS 
 
 IV. 
 
 Prince of Peace. 
 
 There are wars and rumours of wars throughout 
 the land, which are the conflicts from the clashings of 
 interests, the rivalries and recriminations of parties, 
 the mutual excommunications of Churches, the cleav- 
 ages of society, the struggles of men with their 
 environment. The Prince of Peace is nevertheless 
 within all strivings, and is yet beyond them. The 
 strategy of other princes leads to further wars. His 
 strategy alone has comprehended all wars and 
 reaches to beyond the name of War. 
 
 If Humanity did not sound greater depths than 
 ever we knew or suspected, then all wars, through 
 their superficiality, would have ended before now. 
 But our vital interests touch the sun and moon, and the 
 stars of heaven are our souls' environment, and part 
 of our consciences touch the very confines of hell. 
 
 We fight againt one another because we do not 
 know the depths of one another ; nor can we ever 
 even disentangle ourselves. The Prince of Peace 
 pardons all sides because He alone comprehends all 
 sides, and loves men in their eternal reconciliation. 
 
 If we love the Prince of Peace, we in principle love 
 our enemy too, and are at peace with him ; for the 
 Prince knows the enemy's point of view and agrees 
 with it, and pardons him ; and we, knowing not the 
 enemy's point of view, can neither agree with it nor 
 seemingly pardon him. 
 
 Nevertheless, knowing the Prince of Peace, and 
 
PRINCE OF PEACE 161 
 
 daily learning of His inclusiveness and His com- 
 passionateness, we may expect quickly that the 
 enemy, in Him, may be revealed as friend ; and after 
 war there will be peace into the depths such as could 
 never have been without the war. 
 
 The wars of the world, and the conflicts of religion, 
 are as the strategy through which the Prince of Peace 
 directs the world towards His Jerusalem. 
 
 In His present Heart exists already the future goal 
 of the world. If we draw near to Him in the midst 
 of the world, we see the strategy of Kings, and the 
 peace beyond the present conflicts unveiled within 
 His Heart. 
 
 Because He understands the secrets of hearts, He 
 sees when and how other men shall also see and 
 pardon one another. Because He foresees this Pardon 
 and Himself has travelled thither, He returns to us 
 from the Goal of the World and tells our hearts to be 
 at rest. For by the Spirit of God He has brought back 
 our future Destiny to us from the End of the World, 
 and shows us, here and now, that out of wars and 
 conflicts He has comprehended peace. 
 
 Why should we kick against the pricks? There 
 cannot be any total breaking away among men. He 
 has ensnared all enemies to work unwittingly for one 
 another. Why, then, should we not at once proclaim 
 His forgiveness, and suffer that His peace ensue ? 
 
 V. 
 
 Star of Jacob, 
 
 Our star is our bright assurance in Heaven of our 
 Destiny here upon earth. Through one Israelite, 
 
 X 
 
162 TEN INSTRUCTIONS 
 
 our Lord, we are given Jacob's inheritance as though 
 we also were Israelites, and the Star of Jacob is 
 thereby the Star of Destiny to each of us. 
 
 If one man in the world were born with a horoscope 
 of Life and all the rest with horoscopes of Death, it 
 would be well for these others if their lives were so 
 interchanged with the life of the Lord of Fortune 
 that all might equally claim His horoscope of Life 
 for each of themselves. 
 
 Christ is the gift of Destiny to the world and to each 
 individual man. As every great conqueror trusts in 
 his star, so may we trust our star, and with more 
 assurance than they. 
 
 With so great a task, a life-mission, a destiny, hath 
 the Star of Jacob gifted us, that each man may 
 become a great conqueror in His name. Without 
 Christ, there would be but one world common to all ; 
 but as a crystal may be surprisingly bisected into an 
 almost infinite number of crystals of the same shape, 
 so Christ, coming to each man, has divided the world 
 into millions of worlds, that in Him each man may 
 own a world. 
 
 If we fight ourselves, and make our lives thereby 
 receptive to His skill and workmanship, whose instru- 
 ment is the dictates of our own humanity, then God 
 the Creator has added a new element of life and 
 beauty to His Creation, and secretly yet effectively 
 His likeness in us through our prayer and the beauty 
 of living impresses itself upon all the world. 
 
 Every child of God fills the earth with new 
 treasures, which are brought into effect by faith 
 through his child-like conformity to God. 
 
 In order that we may live for ever, we must first 
 
ROOT OF JESSE 163 
 
 live for all, and become compassionate of all. Being 
 won over by all, we thus shall win all ; and when we 
 may have seemed to have passed away, our star will 
 have arisen, and it will conquer the world and leave 
 an abiding-place for us. 
 
 Our Heaven is with our Master, and He and 
 consequently Heaven, abide within the heart of men. 
 There is no place for anyone there unless they also 
 have learned to love and serve men. 
 
 When we have made ourselves not to need, but, 
 through our helpfulness, to be needed by all, then is 
 our star arisen ; and we shall pass spiritually into all, 
 and in the regions of eternity administer for ever to 
 human life. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Root of Jesse. 
 
 Each of us is of the human lineage of the King 
 who is to be. He came once in the line of descent 
 from Jesse. But to-day each of us is of the human 
 lineage from which He shall descend into His 
 Second Coming forth into the world. Every time 
 we yield our lives in perfect submission to His Will, 
 He is born of us. If anyone had yielded himself in 
 absolute obedience to His Fiat, He would have 
 before now come again to judge the world. 
 
 For before we saw Him He saw us ; but before we 
 saw Him we made no response to Him. To see 
 Him is to suffer His response in us to arise, and 
 sway us into that which He would see. In the like- 
 ness of what He wills to see in us, He makes us : 
 though we ourselves see and cannot make. When 
 
164 TEN INSTRUCTIONS 
 
 He sees us in the sight of His kingly eyes, we are 
 chosen from our lowly estate, and made His com- 
 panions and His friends, and then His resting-places. 
 
 We are peers and kings with Him. In appearance, 
 it is we who still shall walk about the world : but in 
 truth it will be He who walks instead of us, and we 
 shall have been assumed into His earthly paradise, 
 which is reunion with Him here below. 
 
 The final catastrophe foretold in prophecy is to take 
 place, not within the skies, but within the body of 
 Man, whose elements have been drawn from the 
 stars. 
 
 We shall all pass away and He shall take our place. 
 Of the substance of our being, He will be born again as 
 Man, only because our wills shall have so yielded to 
 His forming Spirit that He shall fashion us into the 
 likeness of Himself. 
 
 Sacrifice your life and heart to Him to-day with a 
 wholly instructed yielding of your will in His enlight- 
 ment, and to-day will happen the Advent of the 
 Judge. Let, therefore, your interest in Him be instant, 
 for each of you may wholly bring about His reign. 
 
 But in truth, no one perchance may be found with 
 faith, and the spirit of sacrifice, and vision enough, 
 to suffer Christ to come in place of himself and 
 reign. 
 
 Before the Last Day, let each life, however, rehearse 
 His Second Coming here and now. Eat, drink, 
 breathe, think, talk, walk, work, love, and go to rest 
 in Christ. If you retain aught of yourself in doing 
 so, then He has not altogether returned into the world. 
 
 But the great illumination which shall be with you, 
 and through you to all humanity, if you suffer the 
 
THE SECOND DAVID 165 
 
 divine Son to live, and love, and walk, and labour, as 
 though in place of you, will be a true rehearsal of 
 the Judgment Day, and a faint reflection to you and 
 to all men of the awful meaning of the Final and 
 Whole Event. 
 
 VII. 
 
 The Second David. 
 
 The Second David of Prophecy was incarnate 
 Loyalty to men ; the Restorer of a Capital City 
 to Humanity, and the Reconciler of Humanity with 
 itself 
 
 Therefore all human friendliness, all social service, 
 all organised charity, all federations of Churches and 
 States all unions of Labour, all Brotherhoods, all 
 Leagues and Associations of friendliness, will ter- 
 minate in a David's Realm, in which all Humanity 
 will be united in one human Covenant, ruled and 
 shepherded by David their King. 
 
 There is that in each of us which one day will 
 all come together, and out of which David will appear. 
 David sprung up from the midst of the people ; 
 he was not forced upon them from above. 
 
 David is growing up, therefore, out of all the 
 organisations of Brotherhood existing in the world. 
 He is not the Rule, accepted by some and enforced 
 on the unwilling rest. He is all that we now are, 
 but much more so than now. That which is least 
 among associations is the least to be despised. 
 A great and world-wide Church must not con- 
 demn a free and local Church ; nor must the 
 least of congregations despise the membership of 
 
166 TEN INSTRUCTIONS 
 
 the great Ecclesia. Wherever two or three men 
 agree together, from the midst of them the ruler 
 of the thousands of Israel is going forth. 
 
 The Capital City of the New Israel, unlike the 
 old city, is not established in any one single place. 
 The New Jerusalem coming down now on all the 
 world, is all sealed and secured alliances between 
 men and nations, and all organised brotherhoods, 
 which can be brought about with us across the 
 world. No place on earth need be beyond Jerusalem, 
 if only the sealed Alliance of ourselves, the Spiritual 
 Tribes of Israel, is carried thither. 
 
 Let all of us, then, dispose of our lives as individual 
 stones for the building-up of the walls of David, 
 and of repairing the rents thereof. No new tribes 
 are to take the place of the old. But all existing 
 tribes, bodies, communities, and churches must be 
 imbued with the spirit of proportion and of reason- 
 ableness, and see what is their own separate position 
 within the walls of the New City. For immediately 
 humianity has learned that its strength and spirit 
 may be incarnate in the order and rule of a single 
 city, the New David whose Kingdom is within us 
 will proceed to give His people a New Jerusalem 
 fresh from the Hand of God. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Servant} 
 
 Everyone of us should perchance go into service 
 to a master, in order to understand how our Master 
 went into service for Man. 
 
 ^ See also under the title, The Empire of the Servant^ p 196. 
 
SERVANT 167 
 
 The secret that Christ revealed was this : — Within 
 every human heart burns a hope and a desire ; 
 within every mind there shines a vision of its fulfil- 
 ment; within every will waxes strong a command- 
 ment that what the heart desires and decrees should 
 be fulfilled. 
 
 Servants are scientific obeyers of commandments 
 given, and rules of work decreed. If we, through 
 actual service, learn how to read the highest mind 
 of humanity, and to obey and practise its best 
 will, we are fit to be neophytes or apprentices of 
 Christ 
 
 Christ is a great apprehension of the desires, 
 the needs, the hopes of man. He sweetly listened 
 to the commandment of every heart. When His 
 hearing had been perfected, He said : Behold I come ! 
 He strictly obeyed the higher will of men, and 
 fulfilled the decrees of every human heart ; He 
 laboured and toiled day after day, obedient to the 
 call of all men. 
 
 Such is the new Kingship, foretold indeed in 
 prophecy, but never hitherto seen in life. It is at 
 once the most divine, yet most human function of 
 the Lord's ways. It required a God to conceive of 
 the plan of, and execution of, so simple, so practical, 
 so sacrificial a conception of ruling the earth. Every 
 Christian having seen the Master can imitate His 
 Master's Servantship to men. 
 
 We must methodically, advisedly, systematically 
 listen to, and learn by heart, what all the world is 
 praying inwardly that some one would do. That 
 would be the Science of Christ, as of one listening 
 to the commandment of every heart. 
 
168 TEN INSTRUCTIONS 
 
 We must put ourselves under the conditions of 
 service, accepting and executing orders as every 
 servant or employee in the world does to obey this 
 commandment. That would be the Art of Christ. 
 
 Then we must set forth and obey the world, 
 setting before our lives the decrees of the lowest 
 of men, ordering them by system, investigating and 
 checking all that we learn, so that we may know 
 for certain that the orders we believe ourselves to 
 have received are correctly given us. Then we must 
 obey morning, noon, and night, in thinking, in 
 acting, every day, and all our lives. We must be 
 the veritable servants of the world, in regard to 
 the inmost hopes and desires of the world. 
 
 It is a mere incident ; though this should not 
 concern us, that perfect service means perfect 
 empire over the* world ; for so it was foretold by 
 the Prophet, who said that the Servant should rule 
 the peoples in the Master's sight. 
 
 IX. 
 
 / Messenger of the Covenant. 
 
 As is the Minister of the Altar to those who have 
 been waiting to be joined in Holy Wedlock, so is 
 Christ in regard to ourselves and the object of our 
 desire. 
 
 Without Him man is more hopeless than were the 
 Israelites under Pharoah, or in the Desert without 
 the Angel who ministered to them God's Covenant 
 of Redemption. 
 
MESSENGER OF THE COVENANT 169 
 
 Life is beset with checks and tragedies, lost hopes 
 and dashed expectations. Success to the heart's 
 desire, achievement, attainment of bliss and happi- 
 ness, are as an eternally fleeting bride whom men 
 have wooed in vain to win. 
 
 Christ is the Messenger who brings to pass the 
 Covenant for ever between ourselves and our heavenly 
 bride. 
 
 Through Him, and no other, we find our best 
 selves — our lost selves — which for ever had eluded 
 us. 
 
 Visions of greatness, of nobility, of character, of 
 inward kingship, of a life worth living, of a power 
 to reach the goal, have flitted before us since our 
 childhood. They were an unending mirage, until 
 He brought our souls to us through His new and 
 eternal Covenant in which He wedlocked us with 
 them. 
 
 The Covenant does not exist in sealed and inacces- 
 sible archives ; it is written and sealed and made 
 effective only in our inward, feeling selves. 
 
 Our individual life is the experience of, the descrip- 
 tion of, the definition of, the delineation of, the vision 
 of, the achievement of, the Covenant between God 
 and Man. His covenant is concluded within the 
 living body and within the living soul of man : Life, 
 breath, thought, heart, purpose, soul, love, consum- 
 mation, are covenanted to us for all eternity by His 
 Redemption, wrought thus within the midst of our 
 lives. 
 
 If His Redemption has not yet altered the world 
 and changed the hearts of all men, it is simply 
 because our sensitive souls have not suffered the 
 
 Y 
 
170 TEN INSTRUCTIONS 
 
 thought of Him to become individually incarnate 
 within ourselves. He is a Messenger, which word 
 also means an *' Angel," in the sense in which the 
 Thought of Him may become an individually and 
 separately real messenger within each of our souls. 
 Such a vision of Him in us is a pure " messenger " of 
 Him, an Angel of His Presence. But because He 
 thinks with our thought of Himself, what He thinks 
 is not Idea, but Life. The Angel of the Presence is 
 within us, and alive. If we have given place to Him 
 by believing that He is within us, He will work 
 within us the great and terrible Deed of Redemption, 
 as has been told to us by the prophets of old, and 
 He will covenant us for eternity with our Heart's 
 Desire. 
 
 X. 
 
 Messiah. 
 
 The Messiah is the living executant of the prayer 
 and prophecy of all the people of the world. Nothing 
 else than that is the World's Messiah. Whoever is 
 not the people's Goal of prayer will not be the 
 people's anointed King. 
 
 Shakespeare created a character and thoughts 
 worthy of Julius Cassar ; but no one has ever 
 dramatised the character of the World's Messiah. 
 We could not have imagined His thoughts, nor 
 pictured His life, except the story of the original had 
 been preserved. Nor can anyone imagine a Second 
 Christ, unless he also has thought with Christ and 
 been with Him. 
 
MESSIAH 171 
 
 So long as there is an unfortunate life lived in the 
 world, the Messiah is yet to come. 
 
 This being so, whoever says now that the Messiah 
 lias come, and that therefore He will 7iot come, 
 makes His coming worse than His not having come. 
 
 Those Jews who look forward to the coming of the 
 Messiah in the Future are not in error, but are in 
 truth. 
 
 It is less wrong to deny the truth of an event in 
 history, which, if true, can never be undone, than it is 
 so to harden ourselves to the Future that by unfaith 
 we postpone the coming of the Day of the Lord. 
 
 Since there was but one Messiah, and one Atone- 
 ment, and one sufficing Sacrifice, how, then, can the 
 perfect be perfected more, or the past Advent become 
 the future Advent of the Lord ? 
 
 The Second, or rather the Spiritual, Advent is less 
 His coming to us ; it is rather our going forth unto 
 Him. All the world to-day is going towards its 
 Messiah ; students, prelates, pastors, priests, profes- 
 sional men, mechanics, labourers, are interested in 
 Christ and are going thither. If He were only a man, 
 their thought of Him would remain a sacred memory ; 
 but because He is more than man, our universal 
 thought of Him will put on indestruction, and 
 become a living /act^ and He will walk about the 
 world. We shall see Him, then, in the glory of all 
 things that are about us. 
 
 Christ is everyone's thought of a Good Man become 
 the living actuality of that Good Man of which they 
 thought. He is each one's particular thought of what 
 He is and what Good is, only He is more. The 
 Messiah stands at the goal of the thought of every 
 
172 TEN INSTRUCTIONS 
 
 man, woman, and child in humanity. Going thither 
 will seem like Christ coming from heaven and 
 coming a Second Time now to judge the world. 
 In reality, this Spiritual Second Coming is but our 
 quickened knowledge of His First Coming to Redeem 
 Mankind. 
 
PART VII 
 
 INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIPTURAL 
 TOPICS 
 
INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIPTURAL 
 TOPICS 
 
 I. 
 
 Prophecy. 
 
 " The lion hath roared, who will not fear ? The Lord God 
 hath spoken, who can but prophesy?" — Amos iii. 8. 
 
 Prophecy is no mere prediction. It is the first 
 manifestation of the Spirit of God in the achievement 
 of the predetermined task. 
 
 Its divine author is the Creative Spirit of God ; 
 and the evidence of this authorship is in the impossi- 
 bihty of the achievement by man of the task set forth 
 in the prophecy and in the humanly insuperable 
 obstacles, extending for centuries, which lie before its 
 accomplishment. 
 
 Its human author is the individual man with all 
 his own personal characteristics rather intensified 
 than diminished. 
 
 Contrast Amos with Rosea ; Isaiah (first half) with 
 Daniel ; Isaiah (second half) with Jeremiah ; Micah 
 with Ezekiel. 
 
 The prophet sees the divine event beginning 
 before his eyes. He sees it, in the Spirit, unfolding 
 itself unto its triumph and completion. 
 
 176 
 
176 INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIPTURAL TOPICS 
 
 Hosea out of his own love and loyal affection for 
 his own people, foresaw the conquest of Death by- 
 Life. Isaiah, from the momentary peace after the 
 Invasion of Judea, foresaw the age-long triumph of 
 the Prince of Peace. The Isaiah of the later Visions 
 foresaw the Empire of the Servant conquering the 
 farthest islands, out of the minor incident of the 
 recall of Israel under Cyrus. 
 
 The Prophet cannot help but prophesy. Every 
 prophet speaks in his own tongue ; and if all the 
 prophets see the same event, they all report it truly 
 in a style and in imagery which is different and 
 characteristic in each instance. 
 
 Prophecies are infallibly true, because they impar- 
 tially record the creative, and hence triumphant, 
 power exhibited within a certain event of history. 
 Every divine event in history perpetuates itself for 
 ever ; and its effects last throughout secular history, 
 and are not undone in eternity. Every divine event 
 characterises itself in the beginning, in some greater 
 or less degree, with marks about which will remain 
 with it for ever. 
 
 Redemption from Egypt is an eternal characterisa- 
 tion of all future dealings of God. Hence the Seer 
 of the Apocalypse foresees the redeemed, in the future 
 ages of the Church, singing again the Canticle of 
 Moses composed on the occasion of the first 
 Deliverance. 
 
 Prophets are therefore rather inspired witnesses of 
 some historical manifestation of the eternal character 
 of God, than men merely gifted with the faculty of 
 prevision. They foresee the Future with infallible 
 precision, because God makes them see the Present 
 
SOCIAL JUSTICE 177 
 
 in the eternal light. They foresaw Christ in all ; 
 because Christ was hidden in all humanity. They 
 foresaw nothing else but Christ, because all human 
 history means Christ ; and no events of history mean 
 anything which is not unfolded, revealed, manifested, 
 and completed in Christ. 
 
 11. 
 
 Social Justice. 
 
 "With righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove 
 with equity for the meek of the earth." — Isaiah xi. 4. 
 
 In the ancient world of tyranny, oppression, cruelty, 
 injustice, and the enslavement of nations, the torture 
 of captives, and the affliction and plunder of the 
 poor, only the Creative Spirit of God could have 
 foreseen the conquest of the world in the name of 
 Social Justice. 
 
 The Prophecies and Psalms are filled with aspira- 
 tion for Social Justice and equity, peace, and the 
 forthcoming of prosperity for the poor and the 
 meek. 
 
 This aspiration centred around the thought that 
 the First David had arisen from among the people ; 
 and the "Goings forth" of the David, whose first 
 anticipation the Son of Jesse was, belonged to the 
 ever-to-be-renewed divine Decree of the World's 
 Redemption. 
 
 In the same lowly manner, from the same lowly 
 city, a Leader of the Lowly would regenerate human 
 
 Z 
 
178 INS^rRUCTIONS ON SCRIFl^URAL TOPICS 
 
 society within the rule of justice, mercy, and of whole 
 consideration for all. 
 
 We have to go back to prophecy continually to 
 understand in what way we are to conceive in our 
 minds of Christ. We cannot understand Him 
 unless we are poor in spirit and love the meek- 
 hearted, and then love Him and pray for Him as 
 a David Arising and Coming for ever out of the 
 heart of all the poor and meek who are now with 
 us. 
 
 If we desire Him with the desire of all the prophets, 
 then the desire of the prophets will be fulfilled for us. 
 For when we have so understood Him, in a moment, 
 in the twinkling of an eye, He will come to us ; and, 
 girded with His strength, we ourselves shall judge 
 the poor with righteousness, and reprove with equity 
 for all the meek who are around us. 
 
 III. 
 
 The Royal Prophet^ and the Royal Church. 
 
 "And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse 
 and a Branch shall grow out of his roots ; and the Spirit of 
 the Lord shall rest upon him." — Isaiah xi. i, 2. 
 
 The Scriptures glory in the royal descent of 
 Christ, and in the royal glory of His chosen 
 Sanctuary. Isaiah relates the Messiah, in nearly 
 every instance, to the House of David. He also 
 sees the living God in the Temple rather than in 
 the Wilderness (vi. i). His God dwells in Mount 
 Sion (viii. 18), which is also the place of His 
 
THE ROYAL CHURCH 179 
 
 Name (xviii. y). The fire of God is in Sion, and 
 His furnace is in Jerusalem (xxxi. 9). 
 
 Yet was Isaiah the sternest champion of the 
 lowest classes and of spiritual religion. It was he 
 who taught there would be a new age in the world, 
 in which mercy, truth, righteousness, should be uni- 
 versal ; and the world be led and ruled by the 
 spirit of tenderness as though by a little child. 
 To him earthly continuities through human times 
 are the Sacrament of the Spiritual Descent of God 
 with Man ; and the one earthly Holy Place is the 
 Sacrament, through which all the world becomes a 
 holy place. 
 
 We learn from this that, in God's decrees, spiritual 
 kingship, the power of leading humanity by infinite 
 gentleness, and lovableness grows out of the king- 
 ship of external authority and force ; and the 
 spiritual worship grows up out of the centre of temple 
 worship. The visible authority of the Church is the 
 perpetual starting-ground of the spiritual authority 
 of the Church. The ritual worship of Christian 
 temples is the framework of their worship in spirit 
 and in truth. If there were no particular symbols 
 of religion, and no earthly presence-chamber of the 
 King of Heaven, there would be no conception of, 
 or actuality of, the spiritual presence either. The 
 worship which is neither on Mount Gerizim, nor 
 at Jerusalem, is rooted in a worship which lasted a 
 thousand years in visible temples. And as humanity 
 is always beginning de novo, we must all retain our 
 Sions and visible temples of God, and see that our 
 spiritual worship grows out of them, and not away 
 from them. 
 
180 INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIPTURAL TOPICS 
 
 God first of all gave a temple on Mount Sion ; then 
 He removed His presence (Ezek. x. i8) and the 
 temple was destroyed. For a brief while He gave 
 Ezekiel a spiritual temple and deigned Himself 
 to fill it with His presence (xliii. 2-6). Then He 
 rebuilt the temple under Zerubbabel. But in the 
 New Testament He shows how the true temple 
 is the spiritual body of man, in which is tabernacled 
 the immortalising Spirit of God. Christ never 
 refused to worship in the Temple. It is only in 
 the New Jerusalem that there is no temple, because 
 the Body of Christ the Lamb of God is the temple 
 therein. Churches are given to us in order that the 
 whole of our life and being may be formed by God into 
 an ever-living temple filled by His presence for all 
 eternity. The heavenly Jerusalem is the glorified 
 counterpart from the Earthly Jerusalem of bodily 
 life. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Shepherd and Bishop of Souls. 
 
 " For ye were as sheep going astray ; but are now returned 
 unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls." — i Peter 
 ii. 25. 
 
 Could we but see the soul, we should see it to be 
 ever moving fast along. Standing, or sitting, or 
 sleeping, or working, we may during half an hour 
 pass through many moods or states of mind and 
 temper ; and these changes are real transformations 
 and movings about in the Invisible World ; or else 
 we may travel in thought through Thought's Uni- 
 
SHEPHERD OF SOULS 181 
 
 verse. Some think there is no space or time in the 
 soul ; in reahty there is a more real space and time 
 within the soul than without the soul ; only that this 
 great expanse of dreadful space is our own and no one 
 else's ; and our soul's duration is measured by its own 
 acts and by its conscience, which is as a spiritual 
 film of a camera registering in an infallible record 
 every act we do. 
 
 If we had no Shepherd of our souls, we should be 
 lost in the dark universe of our ineffectual inner life ; 
 we should hunger in the spiritual desert, and thirst in 
 a parched interior world. Millions of souls are dying 
 in the dark, and hungering and thirsting for the food 
 and drink of souls ; and they who own the souls live 
 a bodily life and intoxicate themselves with worldli- 
 ness to keep the thought of their inner falsity and 
 ruin away. But for each of us the only true world is 
 the world within us, wherein are the gates of heaven 
 and hell, and which alone will last for ever. That we 
 may be inwardly guided, fed, and given to drink, we 
 must have a Pastor, or lose our way irrecoverably. 
 We are led through this dark world of ourselves by 
 Jesus. There are many places of sighs, of regrets, of 
 testifying-actions remaining in their effects, that we 
 would fain be delivered from. Jesus carries us in His 
 arms from out of the pit ; He leads us inwardly from 
 the brink of the precipice. He banishes from our 
 midst the phantoms of our past sins. He knows that 
 we are a dark night within without Him ; but He is 
 to us a lantern in the way. He nourishes our souls ; 
 that is, He gives us ever new vital thoughts on which 
 the life of the soul subsists. He gives us the waters 
 of refreshment, that is, the emotion which quickens 
 
182 INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIPTURAL TOPICS 
 
 and inspires our thoughts with the spirit of tender- 
 ness and consideration towards what seems in the 
 eyes of the world of no account, but which is, in the 
 inward universe, of the vastest worth. We learn of 
 the Shepherd a new valuation of every action ever 
 conceived of in the heart of man. That which was 
 hard and repugnant, now we glory in ; that which 
 seemed soft and pleasurable, now we loathe. The 
 former reputed path to pasture, now, we know, leads 
 to the wilderness. The former reputed path to the 
 desert, now, we know, leads to refreshment, light, and 
 peace. Finally, every habit and custom of our lives 
 is shapen by Him and is His own, whereby we shall 
 live for ever; because the habits and virtues of our 
 lives are the habits and virtues of the immortal 
 Shepherd Christ. Because we live, we know that He 
 lives ; and because He lives, we know that we shall 
 live ; because the meaning of His pastorship is that 
 He is giving us life from Life. 
 
 Blessed are the Poor in Spirit ^ for theirs is the Kingdom 
 of Heaven. 
 
 The poor man has few or no earthly goods; the 
 poor in spirit may or may not own riches ; only that 
 he has given away all that he did possess, and 
 received back all that he does possess, in the trustee- 
 ship of the Kingdom of Heaven. 
 
 Poor in spirit (that is, all-bounteous within his 
 heart), he has given all away ; rich in spirit (that is. 
 
BLESSED ARE THE POOR 183 
 
 from out of the heart of others), he has received all 
 that he now owns. He gave all in spirit to Christ's 
 Kingdom, and when he received back of his goods 
 as Christ willed, he received back with them a share 
 in the Kingdom, the Commonwealth of Christ. 
 
 To make oneself poor in spirit, is not to refuse to 
 give one's possessions in a literal way ; it is a true 
 surrender of one's possessions, but in such a manner 
 that they are received again on the perpetual con- 
 dition of detachment. 
 
 Before you give your goods, see that your goods 
 are precious goods, and loved and prized by you ; for 
 unless your gifts are of goods which you value in 
 your heart, they are not precious gifts to others, and 
 tokens to others of your heart. 
 
 If you give your possessions to another and despise 
 what you give away, you give him no love betokened 
 in the gift ; you have given in the letter only, and 
 have not won the heart of him to whom the gifts are 
 given. 
 
 A man may enter a monastery, and bestow all his 
 goods to the poor, and yet in spirit he may have 
 given nothing whatsoever away ; nor yet, in truth, 
 have made himself poor ; for those things which he 
 gave away were no living tokens to others that he 
 gave himself with them. 
 
 He alone is poor in spirit who has given to others 
 all which he himself loves ; because one's love is one's 
 heart, one's spirit, one's soul ; and if he has given in a 
 full heart, a ready spirit, and a whole soul, even should 
 he receive back again, he is poor in spirit, in the 
 wisdom of the Kingdom. 
 
 Our sin is not that we value earthly goods too 
 
184 INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIPTURAL TOPICS 
 
 much ; but rather that we do not value them enough, 
 and at their high and proper worth. Earthly goods 
 are precious to us and to God, when they are made 
 the Sacraments which carry the Love of Christ to all 
 men and from all men. 
 
 Give the gift of all your possesssions in spirit 
 every day upon the plate of offering to their Maker ; 
 and receive them back as He shall consign them 
 through you, in your prayer, either to your fellows or 
 to yourself. 
 
 If now I love my possessions in true detachment, 
 and give them as the sacrament of my love to 
 others, I shall win those unto whom I give, not by 
 that which is given, but by my love betokened 
 by my gift. I have enriched the others as well as 
 myself; because as these others are now my friends, 
 I share their possessions with them, which they either 
 ascribe to me if they should use them, or consecrate 
 for me by accepting at least the friendship which the 
 gifts betoken, if they should refuse them. 
 
 To make oneself poor of goods which one despises 
 and counts for naught, can never in spirit join 
 together men in one ; whereas to make oneself poor 
 of that which one treasures and apprises, cannot ever 
 sever men, but by its placing of one's token of what 
 is loved joins in one those who once were separate. 
 
 To become poor in spirit is not the easy labour of 
 giving away, but the difficult art of giving away one- 
 self, even if that which was given away returns unto 
 him who gave. 
 
BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL 185 
 
 VL 
 
 Blessed are the Merciful^ for tJiey shall obtain Mercy, 
 
 We must not only practise mercy, we must become 
 His mercy unto all whom we know. We must seek 
 for those whom we know not, and bring His mercy 
 to the islands. 
 
 Fellowship with our Lord is fellowship with Him 
 in His mercy to all mankind. 
 
 If we say we believe in Him, and do not spread 
 mercy in all our footsteps, we are not of His fellow- 
 ship and His friends. If we are all mercy to all man- 
 kind, then are we His disciples, and His friends in 
 the fellowship of setting forth His mercy and His 
 love. 
 
 Mercy is not a set of outer actions, but an inner 
 spirit and a lively fire. Mercy inflames thought, 
 shines in the eyes of Mercy, inflames the head in all 
 its thinking ; dictating to the breast the ways of life 
 in all acting. 
 
 He who is merciful anticipates forgiveness by pre- 
 venting injuries ; because the would-be injurer, know- 
 ing and seeing forgiveness before the trespass, is 
 disheartened from the trespass and the sin. 
 
 Mercy is not condescension, nor is it only pity for 
 others who are low. Mercy divines good in a heart 
 under all the weight of all its sins ; and by its straight 
 appeal to the good in every being, so comforts men 
 in their fight for goodness, that evil thoughts and evil 
 desires are taken as by a sword and slain. 
 
 Mercy, in your eyesight, and in your heart, pierces 
 the integuments of evil like an angelic sharp spear, 
 
 2 A 
 
186 INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIPTURAL TOPICS 
 
 and delivers the goodness, too often imprisoned, but 
 latent in every heart. 
 
 Mercy makes men good in spite of themselves. 
 Many men know not that God has created good 
 within them. They judge themselves far more 
 severely than God, their Father, judges them. 
 
 Mercy is the Champion of the workmanship of God, 
 who made no heart of the Creation utterly corrupt ; 
 and who does but ask of His creature that it should 
 see His worth in itself and vindicate Himself where 
 they vindicate themselves. God in His mercy has 
 delivered us ; and we in our mercy have delivered 
 God in His handicraft in man. If we have shown 
 mercy to God's humanity, shall not we obtain mercy, 
 who have proved the Champions and Loyalists of 
 that which He has made, and also set His Heart 
 upon to see it brought to Him. 
 
 VII. 
 
 The Birth of Christ. 
 
 Though we are wont to call it supernatural, yet 
 we have an instinct within which bids us see in the 
 birth of the God-man as an infant, the viost natural 
 event in human history. Its correspondence with 
 our native instincts is the eternal and triumphant 
 demonstration of the truth of the Incarnation. 
 
 That we can expect a Messiah in an infant indis- 
 tinguishable from other infants, also proves our 
 native esteem for infancy, and the native nearness 
 of the child with the Kingdom of Heaven. 
 
 Every infant is born near paradise, and yet we 
 
THE BIRTH OF CHRIST 187 
 
 feel that no infant can quite pass the thin partition 
 wall without aid of a power more than that of man. 
 The life of everyone from infancy is a gradual 
 falling away from promise. Christ alone reached 
 to and fulfilled the eternal promise of every child. 
 This is the truth so beautifully celebrated in the 
 Gospels, and so clearly seen by the Evangelists. 
 
 Thereby, thirty or more years afterwards, St Peter 
 called Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God. If even 
 this chief Apostle did not recognise this divinity 
 before then, how closely and perfectly must He 
 not in all things have been a true man. 
 
 With this slight difference, that, with the falling 
 away of all others from the calls of true humanity, 
 Christ persevered in faithful accord with all its 
 dictates ; He differed in nothing outwardly from 
 anyone else. 
 
 Yet that small perseverance in true humanity was 
 an infinite act, for it was the new creation of heaven 
 and of earth, and it required as great a divine power 
 as the first creation. Moment by moment in that 
 sacred cradle, humanity was being re-created within 
 the perfect likeness of God. 
 
 We likewise know that we are the promise of 
 something infinitely better than ourselves. This 
 fact makes us intimately familiar with all the 
 prophets of Israel who foresaw a Messiah. We are 
 each also prophecies of Him. The world would not 
 be interested in religion and religious history, unless all 
 religious history written in the Bible were within 
 us. The Moralists gave morals, but they did not 
 save the world. Salvation is more than morals, and 
 more than the spiritual life. It is something as 
 
188 INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIPTURAL TOPICS 
 
 real as this real Infant, which is certainly more than 
 moral actions and spiritual presences. Our salvation 
 must embrace the flesh, as, by the birth of the Babe 
 of Bethlehem, the sovereign power of God embraced 
 it. Unless, besides being moral and spiritual, our 
 bodily life is reborn within the Kingdom, our souls 
 and minds can never remain therein. 
 
 To-day is born to us a Saviour. But instinctively 
 we all perceive that if He were anything more than 
 our wholly effected selves, then this Child could not 
 be Saviour to us. The great truth of the Incarnation 
 is this, our morality, our spirituality, our faith, our 
 hope, our love, must become flesh before they can be 
 saved, and we ourselves with them ; and thus, when 
 we contemplate its meaning, the life of the God-man 
 seems to be nearer to us than we ourselves are to 
 ourselves. Other persons may allure us to the With- 
 out, but He allures and saves us to the Within. To 
 save us means to make us true to ourselves. No one 
 knows us better than we ourselves do, except He who 
 made us ourselves. To-day, the obstacle between what 
 we ourselves are, and what our lives are ineffectually 
 felt to be promises of, is taken away for ever. This 
 world, for the first time in its history, becomes an 
 entire success. So great have been our failures, and 
 those of the whole of history, which is one gigantic 
 process of failure too, that at length we have failed 
 into success ; for by weakening towards humility, we 
 have grown obedient and pliable to the Creative 
 Hand. When wax is softened by the heat, it will 
 take any shape whatever. Were there no hand to 
 remodel it, it would forthwith melt away. When the 
 aspirations of humanity were about to melt away, a 
 
THE SHEPHERDS 189 
 
 Child was born in whom they are re-shapen in accord, 
 not with anything foreign, but with themselves. This 
 Babe is in a sense the only Babe of the world. He is 
 the only true Babe of all the mothers of the world, 
 and all the others are but changelings except in so 
 far as they are true to Him. But they are all 
 true in Him. Whosoever loves This, loves all, for all 
 only are born in His birth ; and whosoever loves any 
 babe, even if he knows it not, loves this Babe of 
 babes, in whom lies all the subsistence of the rest. ^ 
 
 VHI. 
 
 The Shepherds. 
 
 This is a lesson to theologians and the authorities 
 of the Church. When the things of the Spirit have 
 embraced the actualities of the flesh, then it is as easy 
 to preach the mysteries of the kingdom, as to tell a 
 Shepherd thelnews of a neighbouring event. There are 
 men who are learned in argument, and who can hold 
 their own in controversy ; much more, there are also 
 Disciples of the Master, whose life and being diffuse 
 the peace and goodwill of the Salvation of God. 
 The first may hold their own in debate, the second 
 alone are conquerors of other men. 
 
 In the veneration paid to the child Jesus by the 
 Shepherds there are two triumphs, and since their 
 first beginning the like occasion has always, and will 
 always, result in equal triumphs. The showing of 
 the Holy Infant was the triumph of the power of 
 God, and the justification of His ways with men. 
 
190 INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIFPURAL TOPICS 
 
 The recognition by the Shepherds was the triumph of 
 the intuition of all simple-minded men who are, now 
 and for ever, carried away by these divine realities 
 which are set forth in the sincerity which conforms 
 every breath of one's being to the divinity. Holiness 
 is usually looked upon as aloofness and exaltation. 
 But wherein was the aloofness of the Child of all 
 the Holiness that ever was? For He was set forth to 
 the simple shepherds in a manner not in the least 
 conceivable degree different from that in which a 
 mother, at any time, shows her new-born child to 
 friendly well-wishers. The aloofness of Holiness is 
 evidently an imperfection of Holiness, and not its 
 true adornment, for the Holy One of Israel was 
 reserved in no aloofness at all from the tender and 
 friendly and worshipful gaze of the lowly shepherds. 
 Consider, O Christendom, whether thou hast taken 
 to heart this lesson of the divine way of the setting 
 forth of God to man. What of the pomp of your 
 churches, the fashionableness of your congregations, 
 the exaltedness of your officials, the aloofness of your 
 enclosed nuns and monks. By no monastic enclosure 
 was the Babe of Bethlehem reserved from the gaze 
 of the people of the hillside; by no convent grille 
 was the first of holy virgins kept from holy equality 
 with all the friendly citizens around the manger. 
 Nor were the hearts of the simple won by the exhibi- 
 tion of mighty pomp of authority and power, but by 
 the exhibition of that divine authority and power 
 which comes when all these pomps are removed 
 away from sight. This is no proud condemnation of 
 the authority which God has set forth in His Holy 
 Church ; but only an appeal to the divine manner in 
 
THE SHEPHERDS 191 
 
 which the Son of God, the Source of all authority, 
 has established His authority for ever among men. 
 Let the modern Jerusalem of all priests and hier- 
 archies be converted to the divine ways of the Lord 
 its God, and then the peoples will flock to her from 
 afar. We should not pray that those in authority 
 should have less influence and authority than they now 
 possess, we should pray that these may be immeasur- 
 ably increased in that they take to themselves the 
 cloak of power from Him in whose hands it is all held 
 in its primal source. If we pray that the Spirit of the 
 Lord may come with might upon the bishops, priests, 
 and pastors of the Church ; if we pray that all teachers 
 may learn from the first of Teachers His way of 
 teaching ; we are to pray in union with them, and are 
 not to set up ourselves in schism and separation 
 against them. We should conserve and amplify their 
 power, authority, and influence in the light of the 
 way in which the Holy Infant carried the conviction 
 of His might, and authority, and power to save them, 
 into the hearts of the Shepherds. 
 
 But, more than in anything I can say, is the ever- 
 fresh and ever-appealing significance of the story of 
 how God first won hearts through His helplessness 
 more triumphantly than ever in the past He had won 
 them by an apparent exhibition of His might. The 
 truth is, that the force which could rend the heavens 
 is only apparent power ; but the force which was in 
 the likeness of a helpless babe had indeed come to its 
 true and perfect symbol, and began forthwith to 
 gather up human hearts and souls for all eternity. 
 
192 INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIPTURAL TOPICS 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Manifestation to the Wise Men. 
 
 Christ said to Pilate, "Thou sayest that I am 
 a king " ; and here we find wise Rulers coming to 
 learn the secrets of His Kingship, and to proffer Him 
 their gifts. It is indifferent to us whether these 
 Magi came from the East, the South, or whether 
 they are to be imagined as having come, as it were, 
 out of a Dream of our own, or of a future day. They 
 stand for the earthly wisdom and power of all ages. 
 Just as spiritual salvation was first announced to 
 the Shepherds, so is temporal salvation now announced 
 to the Magi. 
 
 We are all learning to-day that if Christ's Kingdom 
 is not, in its origin, of this world, it is, none the less, 
 a power in temporal affairs equally as it is in 
 spiritual gifts. Our Christian Socialism is a scanty 
 recognition of the whole Kingship, in which Christ 
 was King. I cannot altogether join with those 
 who speak of the " humiliation " of Christ. Is it quite 
 sure that He was ever humiliated ? It is quite true 
 that the romantic St Francis of Assisi saw in Christ's 
 apparently lowly surroundings a humiliation of 
 Christ as Man, from kingship, to the state of a 
 servitor ? To this Saint the social lowliness of Christ 
 was a blessed sequence to His first descent from 
 heaven to earth. But in my inmost heart, I cannot 
 help feeling that both the becoming Flesh, itself, and 
 the becoming Flesh in abject poverty, were rather 
 glorifications than humiliations. Be that as it may, 
 
THE WISE MEN 193 
 
 St John's Gospel, in which all Christ's life is set 
 forth as a glorification, allows us to think in some 
 such manner. Before we were wise, we used to 
 think of kingship as power and leadership resting 
 upon the right to constrain, and decorated with 
 the solemn baubles of authority and office. Then 
 came a time in which Republicans vaunted the power 
 of the people, and asserted the same in Revolution. 
 But in so far as they appealed to brute force, they 
 never ruled the hearts of men. Now, we have grown 
 weary of crying down the authorities, and rulers and 
 kings. All that we ask for is essential wisdom in their 
 leadership ; and all the world will most willingly follow 
 in their way. Before God's eternal sight of humanity, 
 and in the eyes of all who with the Wise Men have 
 come to the Holy Infant for secular guidance, 
 ostentatious exaltedness is the real humiliation of 
 true humanity ; and the simplicity without adorn- 
 ment, of Bethlehem, is the true state of exaltation. 
 A king by his authority and force of arms might 
 obtain a kingdom or rule an empire. But only 
 in absolute fraternisation with, and joint leadership 
 of, their humanity, can he create for them and 
 for himself a happy and enduring commonwealth. 
 "Sovereignty" must be preserved intact; but no 
 sovereignty can save society unless it enters, in 
 intensive fraternisation, within the sphere of every 
 man, woman, and child within its realm. If they 
 knew this, then all the leaders of Society would glory 
 in nothing else but in the amount of their ordered 
 fraternisation. They would not bestow their goods 
 on the poor ; they would simply delight in cultivating 
 that exquisite flower, humanity, in a business-like 
 
 2 B 
 
194 INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIPTURAL TOPICS 
 
 cultivation of industrial and agricultural co-operation, 
 through which the various classes would indeed 
 stand together in one fraternal, and therefore 
 Christian Commonwealth. 
 
 Carpenter at Nazareth. 
 
 The Gospels write mostly about three years of the 
 life of the incarnate Reason of God. 
 
 The rest of His words and deeds, are they not 
 written in the lives of every mechanic or artisan, 
 and even in the lives of every man and woman 
 and child who was ever a wayfarer in the world? 
 
 No sage at Nazareth ever suspected that the Son 
 of God was their carpenter in executing orders to 
 repair their lintels, or saw their wooden shelves, or 
 mend their broken railings. 
 
 If the Son of God was here indistinguishable from 
 man, may not man himself become indistinguishable 
 from the Son of God. The story of the daily labourer 
 is the unwritten Gospel of Jesus Christ; for if we 
 know the workman's story, we know the Gospel 
 of Jesus Christ before He was manifested to the 
 world. 
 
 The Son of God — or what is indistinguishable 
 from Him — is working at the docks and on the 
 railway. The Son is hauling wood ; driving carts ; 
 stocking furnaces ; building houses ; tending mills ; 
 working at looms ; mending roads. The Son of God — 
 or what is indistinguishable from Him — is ploughing 
 
CARPENTER AT NAZARETH 195 
 
 the fields ; raising the stone ; cleaving the wood. 
 The Son is in the forest and upon the plain. The 
 Son of God toils in the vineyards, and walks on 
 the highways and byways, and enters every house 
 where men are living. 
 
 For if the Reason of God, who was also Himself 
 the Son of God, toiled as an artisan without any 
 human recognition of His Sonship, must there 
 not be something exceedingly agreeable between 
 the Son and human work, so as to make it possible 
 for the Son of God to be indistinguishable from a 
 workman ? And if the workman is so near the 
 heart of the Son, that the Son could enter his heart, 
 unawares to the comrades of the Son of God in 
 Nazareth, are not these comrades themselves very 
 near to a Son of God who was in fact indistinguish- 
 able Himself from them ? Is there not a possible 
 "little more" within them which, being passed, would 
 make them Sons of God too ? 
 
 The framework, the body, the heart of humanity, 
 are the tools of God. If the arm swings with the 
 purpose of God as well as that of the human over- 
 seer, the human arm is swinging for the purpose 
 of the New Creation. 
 
 Man is a Son of God ; or, at least, I mean that 
 man is with God and of God. The New Creation 
 is the old day's work with the new chrism of a 
 consciousness of God. The New Creation is with 
 the toil of every labourer, the craft of every carpenter, 
 the skill of every manufacturer. 
 
 God is not a strain upon man ; a duty, power, 
 authority, which can be a motive or cause for rest- 
 lessness. God is not a chain, or a restraint, or an 
 
196 INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIPTURAL TOPICS 
 
 unnatural attitude of mind, or a supranormal heart 
 in Man. 
 
 Before Christ, God was supernatural to man. By 
 the incarnation He alone is the natural thing to 
 man. Christ is your native self He is your 
 unstrained being. He is your inner privilege to 
 remain yourself He is your freedom from constraint ; 
 your own autonomy or self-sovereignty. He is your 
 unfettered state of mind ; your human against your 
 inhuman heart. 
 
 If life recognises Life in the world, then life knows 
 God in the world. If mind sees Mind in the world, 
 then mind sees God in the world. If the heart sees 
 the Heart within itself, it sees the Heart of God 
 within itself, and within the Universe and beyond 
 the Universe. The Son of God and Man is but the 
 sum of all things in their state of Rest. 
 
 XI. 
 
 T/ie Empire of the Servant. 
 
 Nothing has so beautifully anticipated our modern 
 practical thoughts of a religion embodying itself 
 in acts of social service to men as the prophecies 
 of the Servant of the Lord, in Isaiah xl.-lxvi.^ Here 
 for the first time in the Bible, Service of God for 
 the World becomes the leading thought commended 
 to the believers in the true God. Hitherto Service 
 
 1 The author is called the Second Isaiah, or the Isaiah of 
 Babylon, because these prophecies are set in an historical 
 environment of a hundred and fifty years' later period than 
 that in which Isaiah of Jerusalem prophesied. 
 
THE EMPIRE OF THE SERVANT 197 
 
 of God had consisted in worship of God, or 
 obedience of the Statutes and Commandments of 
 the Thora; and a servant of God has been one 
 who thus worshipped and obeyed within the narrow 
 limits of Jewish national life. But in this portion 
 of Scripture, " Servant of God " means one who is 
 serviceable to God in the divine scheme of the social 
 regeneration of all nations. As a human servant 
 receives orders from his master, and carries them 
 out with obedience and fidelity within the extent 
 of the master's rule, so in Isaiah's conception of 
 religion, the Servant of Jehovah is he who renders 
 Him service in the world, His dominion ; he who 
 obeys His orders for the furtherance of His beneficent 
 rule ; he who identifies his will with that of the 
 Divine Spirit, in order that, as a faithful servant, 
 his own work may become equivalent with God's, his 
 Master's, work. 
 
 The Book of Isaiah, in contrasting the empire 
 of the Servant with that of the empire of the King 
 of Babylon, reviewed in its earlier chapters, calls to 
 mind Daniel's great characterisation of the Kingdom 
 of the Saints, contrasted with the kingdoms which 
 ruled by brute force and oppression. The King 
 of Babylon is called the " Oppressor " (Isaiah xiv. 4). 
 He is the man who caused the kingdoms to tremble ; 
 who made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed 
 its cities ; and who when he had taken captives, would 
 not open the house of his prisoners (Isaiah xiv. 16, 17). 
 It would seem that the portrait of the "Servant" 
 in the later chapters of Isaiah had been sketched in 
 an intended contrast to that of the King of Babylon. 
 It was the social injustice of this tyrannical rule 
 
198 INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIPTURAL TOPICS 
 
 to all the lesser nations, not merely the misfortunes 
 it entailed upon Israel, which fired the indignation 
 and wrath of Isaiah. The spectacle had been 
 witnessed to of great armies proceeding year by 
 year from Babylon, bent upon pillage and conquest, 
 and the reductions of all peoples to tribute and 
 slavery. The idea of an empire, a world dominion, 
 a lordship over other lands, so different from a 
 mere local sovereignty, had thus forcibly impressed 
 itself upon the minds of all who lived in that era. 
 What Babylon had been in a brutish sense, the 
 Second Isaiah conceived that Israel might become 
 in a human sense. Babylon, the tyrant, had at least 
 been the object-lesson inspiring the concept of a 
 counterpart to Babylon, an empire of the Servant : 
 an empire in which, through the eminence of its 
 service for God to all nations, it should take the 
 place over an empire which inhumanly and impiously 
 tyrannised over them. As has often since happened, 
 world-transformations had opened up new vistas 
 of spiritual prophetic vision. Hence entered the place 
 for an empire ruling in the efficacy of its human 
 appeal, the title of whose rulers came to them from 
 the spirit of the meekness, and gentleness, and 
 docility through which they showed their willingness 
 to serve the peoples. 
 
 This concept of a spiritual empire of service to 
 God for the world is the first great prevision of a 
 beneficent Christian Civilisation embodied in a world- 
 federation, or in a community of dominant Christian 
 nations whose title to sovereignty over others exists 
 in their readiness to establish justice, to spread light, 
 and to bring freedom to the oppressed. 
 
THE EMPIRE OF THE SERVANT 199 
 
 The word " Servant," used so many times by 
 the Second Isaiah, is to be understood in its context 
 in relation to the theology of this prophet. This 
 theology includes the most highly developed con- 
 ceptions of monotheism in the Old Testament. To 
 some other prophets of monotheism the Gods of 
 the Gentiles may have been taken as subordinate 
 powers, or evil spirits, who, within certain limits, 
 held sway over the fortunes of nations. In this 
 portion of Isaiah, nations are instruments of one 
 and the same sovereign divine rule. The reputed 
 gods of the Heathen are not only not gods nor 
 demons ; they are " nothings " and " nothingness." 
 Evils exist through men's declension from good. 
 In spite of evil, the God of Israel, who is the saving 
 God of all peoples, disposes evil for good purposes. 
 God, as alone might have been inferred from the 
 Book of Ezekiel, does not wish merely to assert 
 His sovereignty. His *' Holiness," in other nations. 
 He wishes to save all the world, to establish social 
 justice, to bring men to the light, to free the 
 oppressed. 
 
 It is to execute this beneficent will of tbe great 
 Master of the earth that Israel had been predestined 
 from the beginning and called to be the " Servant," 
 through whom the beneficent will of the world's 
 Master might be in time accomplished. If the word 
 " servant " is used in several varying characterisa- 
 tions, this is to be accounted for by the historical 
 fact that Israel, during history, had fulfilled its life- 
 destiny in varying decrees of completeness. And 
 where in several lyrical poems of the greatest beauty, 
 the prefigurement is made of one, or of a few, among 
 
200 INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIPTURAL TOPICS 
 
 whom the Spirit of Service of God to others had 
 become the vital passion of their lives, the thought 
 of a Servant of the Lord reaches to the climax of 
 its perfect ideal embodiment. 
 
 The broad and restricted senses in which the 
 designation " Servant " is applied, now to the whole 
 people, now to the ones who are the true embodiment 
 of the ideal of service, appear on reference to several 
 texts. 
 
 In chapter xlvi. is a lyrical poem, in which Israel 
 is declared to have been named the servant from 
 the first moment of its conception as a nation. 
 
 In chapter xlL, verses 8, 9, it is written that, in 
 spite of the captivity in Babylon and the dispersion, 
 Israel has not been cast away, but is still the 
 " Servant " of God ; that Jacob is the chosen of God, 
 and that the whole of the seed of Abraham are 
 the friends of God; that they will be gathered 
 together from the ends of the earth for the per- 
 formance of this service. 
 
 In chapter xlii,, verses 18, 19, complaint is raised 
 that the nation is blind and deaf to the great destiny 
 for which God has prepared it as Servant, in the 
 world, to Him. 
 
 In chapter xliii. it is declared that the blind 
 who are now made to see, the deaf who are now 
 made to hear, are to be called as witnesses to the 
 unity and sovereignty of God, and as the " Servant " 
 by whose instrumentality it shall be known that 
 there is no saviour to the world but the God of 
 Israel. 
 
 In chapter xliv. it is declared that, to fulfil 
 the Master's task, Israel shall even now be freed 
 
THE EMPIRE OF THE SERVANT 201 
 
 by the " Shepherd " Cyrus, and shall be restored to its 
 native land, upon which Jerusalem and the temple 
 shall be rebuilt. 
 
 In chapter xlix., following upon the words of the 
 lyrical poem previously quoted, a distinction arises 
 between Israel as a whole, and the elect ones of 
 Israel over whom the Spirit of Service for God to the 
 world has first taken possession. These elect ones 
 are, in a restricted manner, the " Servant " to Israel 
 itself ; and having fulfilled this service, they, and the 
 Nation with them, are to become the *' Servant " 
 to the Gentiles, through whom the knowledge and 
 salvation from God the Master of all nations is to be 
 made known to the ends of the earth. 
 
 From this restricted sense of the word it is in- 
 telligible in what sense the Spirit of Jehovah, 
 embodied in one or more elect servants, represents 
 the final triumphant advance of the Divine Empire 
 of Service from Israel among all the nations. 
 
 In chapter xlii. is the lyric of this transcendent 
 mission of a people of God, the Servant of the true 
 God among all the rest of the peoples, and in every 
 age of the World's history. It is the " new song " 
 (verse lo), setting forth the divine justification of the 
 election of Israel to pre-eminence, in its call to shape 
 the destinies of the history of the world. It is 
 a declaration of that in which the people, or any 
 individual Israelite by implication, or any other 
 nation or any individual of any nation, shall be as 
 one of whom it may be said that God shall make it 
 known that in such a one " His Soul delighteth." 
 This prophetic song is therefore no less a revelation 
 of the heart of the true religion of all times, than it is 
 
 2 c 
 
202 INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIPTURAL TOPICS 
 
 a revelation of the essential character of the true God 
 as He who wills the achievement of the enlightenment 
 and the freedom of the world. To fulfil the imperial 
 mission of Service to God in the Kingdoms of the 
 World, the " Servant " must accept the yoke of 
 obedience to the will of this true God, in the spirit of 
 which obedience the just judgment of God shall be 
 brought by Israel to the Gentiles (verse i). The nation 
 which is " bruised " he shall not " break " ; where the 
 smouldering hope of life remains, he shall not quench 
 this hope ; until in the execution of a just judgment 
 what was " broken " shall have been made whole 
 again, and the smouldering hope of the nations 
 kindled anew into a brilliant flame. His task of 
 service shall not be fulfilled until the whole earth shall 
 have been helped by his setting forth of the prophetic 
 "judgment," and until the furthest islands shall have 
 accepted his beneficent law (verse 4). The "Servant" 
 has been chosen from the People of the Covenant in 
 order that he may, in turn, become the covenant for 
 all the peoples ; that is, in order that the promises of 
 the Covenant may be made to include the whole world 
 without any reserve (verse 6). 
 
 The three noteworthy effects of the extension of 
 this Covenant to the Gentiles are : — 
 
 1. That, thereby, the "Servant" shall establish an 
 empire or universal dominion founded upon universal 
 justice between nations and between men (verses i, 3,6). 
 
 2. That, thereby, the " Servant " shall be elevated 
 to be a model, a standard, a pattern, and an exemplar, 
 and hence a " light " to the Gentiles (verses 6, 7). Isaiah 
 reveals him as the great missioner of the true God. 
 
 3. That, thereby, the " Servant " shall secure the 
 
THE EMPIRE OF THE SERVANT 203 
 
 freedom of all captives, equally those who have been 
 enslaved politically, as those who have been enslaved 
 by error (verse 7). In this willingness to liberate 
 politically, no less than spiritually, is the note in 
 which the empire of the people of the true God is to 
 be known from the Babylonian empires of every age, 
 whose characteristic note is that they enslave men 
 and will not free them. 
 
 With these necessary varying qualifications of the 
 word " Servant," as one called but not hearing ; blind 
 and unseeing his destiny ; tardily awakening to the 
 call ; receiving it in the person of representatives 
 who stand for the truth and life of what all have been 
 called upon to undertake ; and thus of the " Servant " 
 in the act of the fulfilment of his mission in a perfect 
 sense ; the scriptural use of the word regains a 
 remarkable consistency through which unity and 
 intelligibility redound upon whole compositions of 
 Isaiah xl.-lxvi. In the prophecy. Hi. 13-liii., where the 
 segregation of the " Servant " from the nation seems 
 to be most emphasised, the reason is to be discovered 
 in the fact that experience had taught that one who, 
 like Jeremiah, had responded to the universal call of 
 all Israel to become the " Servant of God," was 
 destined to undergo a bitter course of opposition, and 
 was fated to suffer martyrdom. However personal this 
 prophecy is in its characterisations, the fact of the 
 national representativeness of the " Servant " is not 
 lost sight of in such unmistakably clear passages 
 about the national future as that in which reference 
 is made to the " Servant " as " seeing his seed," and 
 to ''his days being prolonged " (liii. 10). 
 
 Since this prophecy has been applied to Christ, 
 
204 INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIPTURAL TOPICS 
 
 not only by Christ Himself in the Gospels, but by 
 the whole of Christian Tradition, it remains to suggest 
 in what particular manner Christ was a " Servant " in 
 the sense implied in the Second Isaiah. 
 
 In the first place, the whole of the Second Isaiah is 
 a " national " not a " messianic " prophecy. Messianic 
 prophecies, in the original sense of the word, are 
 those relating to an " Anointed King." A " messiah," 
 the only " messiah " in this portion of the Book of 
 Isaiah, is Cyrus, who is called " my anointed Cyrus," 
 or literally, " my messiah Cyrus." Therefore these 
 are in no sense prophecies which predict the advent 
 of a king of the House of David in whose life the 
 prediction is fulfilled and thereby terminated. 
 
 In the second place, though these chapters of Isaiah 
 are a national prophecy, they are such of the Nation 
 only in a transcendent sense. Beyond Israel, beyond 
 humanity, we reach to the conception of the embodied 
 Spirit of God in Israel, in mankind ; an embodiment 
 which transcends any partial and imperfect historical 
 realisation of this divine ideal. We are brought 
 before a living picture of the social, the world-serving, 
 the world-enlightening, the world-freeing embodi- 
 ment of the religion of the true God, in all places and 
 in all times. Applied, therefore, to Jesus Christ, the 
 general characteristics of the " Servant " belong to 
 Him, not as of the details of individual biography, 
 but as of His representative biography. The 
 prophecy is of the Christ-like spirit of Christ, in so 
 far as all Humanity may become like to Christ ; of 
 Christ as the representative Israelite ; and, beyond 
 Christ Himself, of every one who has become a 
 true Israelite in the right of succession in spiritual 
 
THE EMPIRE OF THE SERVANT 205 
 
 heredity from Israel. In this sense the prophecies of 
 the " Servant " anticipate the religious spirit of men 
 of God like Francis of Assisi, and also the modern 
 practical conception of Christian religion as service 
 for God to men. 
 
 But as individuals who are so minded are only the 
 harbingers of a Christian Civilisation which the 
 whole people of God are called upon to assume, the 
 prophecies of the " Servant " forebode ultimately the 
 advent of a great Christian people, of a great nation 
 or federation of nations, who, having once and for 
 all renounced the principles of warlike aggression and 
 arrogance in dealing with others, shall have earned 
 their title to empire and dominion and leadership amid 
 the rest of the nations by their practical exemplifica- 
 tions of the spirit of Service of God to the nations, 
 through establishing justice in international dealings, 
 through spreading light in their exemplification of 
 liberality, and by setting free the peoples who are 
 deprived of their due liberty in every part of the 
 Christian and Heathen World. 
 
 These prophecies are, in fine, the prediction of an 
 era in which, for the first time in history, a Christian 
 Nation — not only a few elect souls — shall have 
 become a true Disciple, in a corporate sense of the 
 word, of the Master Christ, in the pre-eminence of its 
 service to others, in acting justly towards weak 
 nations, in the education of the heathen, and in 
 bringing freedom to the farthest parts of the 
 world. 
 
 Therefore Christ stands here as the representative 
 of the Nation ; as the Soul of Israel ; as the perfect 
 Israelite ; as the exemplification of that spirit which 
 
206 INSTRUCTIONS ON SCRIPTURAL TOPICS 
 
 should have characterised the whole Nation, in that it 
 had been called to be the Servant of the Lord. 
 
 These prophecies of Isaiah are therefore not so 
 much about the individual Christ, as about the 
 Christ-like spirit itself, and the Christ-like spirit 
 exemplified in the great company of all who are 
 in genuine fellowship with Christ. Since the national 
 or corporate meaning of the word " Servant " is never 
 here lost sight of, these prophecies forebode an 
 eventual Civilisation in which some nation, as a 
 whole, shall have taken this lead in exemplifying 
 service to the world in the characteristic way enun- 
 ciated by the prophet. This service is the creation 
 of humane relations between the peoples ; it is the 
 refusal to oppress the weak ; it is the light to the 
 heathen, of an exemplary national conduct, and of 
 missionary and educational effort ; it is the apostolate 
 of brotherly love sent to all countries, and even to 
 the isles and to the ends of the earth. 
 
 In his vision of the philosophy of history, the 
 prophet foresaw that, until the whole earth were 
 converted by the preaching of the Servant, there 
 would evermore be Babylons in the world, because 
 Babylonian arrogance and presumption had first 
 reigned within the human heart. History would 
 repeat itself, because the heart of the Oppressor would 
 again create the oppressive rule, because the heart of 
 the Friend of God, who had been called the Servant of 
 God, would again be set in opposition to all the 
 Oppressor's ways. But when at length a new people 
 of God, a Spiritual Israel of the Future, should have 
 entered into fellowship in the spirit of the Servant 
 represented in the meekness and humanity of Christ, 
 
THE EMPIRE OF THE SERVANT 207 
 
 the day of the long-delayed victory of the true God 
 would have dawned on the world. God said to this 
 prophet : " I will create a New Heaven and a New 
 Earth." " Heaven " to the Hebrews meant the 
 prospects of life in social blessedness substantially 
 stored for them in the future, the outlook which cheered 
 the life of the present. The " Earth " meant happi- 
 ness, knowledge, freedom brought from the heavenly 
 storing-place into the present time. The Christian 
 nation of the future which shall have learned to base 
 its Home and Foreign policy upon this conception 
 of the pre-eminence of service among the other 
 nations, shall have become the " Servant " through 
 whose instrumentality the power of God will have 
 created this New Heaven and New Earth. 
 
PKINTED BY 
 OLIVKR AND BOYD 
 
 EDINBURGH 
 
1 1012 01007 0268 
 
 
 If;-, x^i^^^