THE NEW THEOLOGY
 
 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 BY 
 R. J. CAMPBELL, M.A. 
 
 MINISTER OF THE CITY TEMPLE, LONDON 
 
 Wefa gorft 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1907 
 
 All rights rnerotd
 
 COWWGHT, 1907, 
 
 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1907, 
 Reprinted April, 1907. 
 
 Norfaoofi l^rtea 
 
 J. 8. Gushing <fc Co. Berwick & Smith Co. 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 THIS book has been undertaken at the request of 
 a number of my friends who feel that recent criticisms 
 of what has come to be called the New Theology 
 ought to be dealt with in some comprehensive and 
 systematic way. With this suggestion my own 
 judgment concurs, but only so far as my own pulpit 
 teaching is concerned. I cannot pretend to speak 
 for anyone else, and therefore this monograph 
 must not be understood as an authoritative exposi- 
 tion of the views held and expounded by other 
 preachers who may be in sympathy with the New 
 Theology. From its very nature, as I hope the 
 following pages will show, the New Theology cannot 
 be a creed, but its adherents have a common stand- 
 point. My only reason for calling this book by 
 that title is that a considerable section of the public 
 at present persists in regarding me as in a special 
 way the exponent of it ; indeed from the correspond- 
 ence which has been proceeding in the press it is 
 evident that many people credit me with having 
 invented both the name and the thing. It is of lit- 
 tle use objecting to the name, for to all appearance 
 it has come to stay and is gradually acquiring a
 
 VI INTRODUCTION 
 
 marked and definite content. So long as it is 
 clearly understood that this book is but an outline 
 statement of my own personal views, the title will do 
 no harm. The controversy which is not yet over 
 has been fruitful in misunderstandings of all kinds, 
 and a great many of the criticisms passed upon my 
 teaching have been wholly due to a mistaken notion 
 of what it really is. In so far as any of those criti- 
 cisms have been directed against me personally, 
 I have nothing to say ; I hope I can leave my vindi- 
 cation to the judgment of whatever public may 
 feel an interest in my work. The best rejoinder that 
 could be made to the various criticisms of the 
 teaching itself would be to publish them side by 
 side, for they neutralise one another most effectually. 
 But a better and more useful thing to do is to let 
 the public know just what the teaching is and leave 
 it to the test of time. I do not greatly object to 
 having it described as " new." The fundamental 
 principle of the New Theology is as old as religion, 
 but I am quite willing to admit that in its all-round 
 application to the conditions of modern life it is 
 new. I do not see why a man should be ashamed 
 of confessing that he does his own thinking instead 
 of letting other people do it for him. 
 
 This book, then, is not the author's Apologia pro 
 Vita Sua. It is intended as a concise statement of 
 the outlines of the teaching given from the City 
 Temple pulpit. It is neither a reply to separate
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 criticisms nor an ex cathedra utterance. I think 
 I am usually able to say what I mean, and in the 
 following pages my object is to say what I mean in 
 such a way that everyone can understand.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PACT 
 
 I. THE NAME AND THE SITUATION i 
 
 II. GOD AND THE UNIVERSE 16 
 
 III. MAN IN RELATION TO GOD .... 25 
 
 IV. THE NATURE OF EVIL 43 
 
 V. JESUS THE DIVINE MAN 68 
 
 VI. THE ETERNAL CHRIST 84 
 
 VII. THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD . 92 
 VIII. THE ATONEMENT. I. ASSOCIATION OF THE 
 
 DOCTRINE WITH JESUS . . . .no 
 IX. THE ATONEMENT. II. SEMITIC IDEAS OF 
 
 ATONEMENT 125 
 
 X. THE ATONEMENT. III. THE DOCTRINE IN 
 
 CHRISTIAN HISTORY AND EXPERIENCE . 139 
 XI. THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE . . .173 
 XII. SALVATION, JUDGMENT, AND THE LIFE TO 
 
 COME 200 
 
 XIII. THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD . 228 
 
 XIV. CONCLUSION 253
 
 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE NAME AND THE SITUATION 
 
 Religion and Theology. Religion is one thing 
 and theology another, but religion is never found 
 apart from a theology of some kind, for theology 
 is the intellectual articulation of religious experi- 
 ence. Every man who has anything worthy to 
 be called a religious experience has also a the- 
 ology; he cannot help it. No sooner does he 
 attempt to understand or express his experience of 
 the relations of God and the soul than he finds him- 
 self in possession of a theology. The religious ex- 
 perience may be a very good one and the theology 
 a very bad one, but still religion and theology are 
 necessary to each other, and it is a man's duty to 
 try to make his theology as nearly as possible an 
 adequate and worthy expression of his religion. He 
 will never succeed in doing this in a permanent fash- 
 ion, for the content of religious experience is, or 
 should be, greater than any form of statement. 
 But theology is everyone's business. We cannot 
 afford to leave it to experts or refrain from forming 
 our own judgment upon the pronouncements of
 
 2 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 experts. To speak of theology as though it had an 
 esoteric and an exoteric side, one for the man in the 
 study and the other for the man in the world, is 
 a practical heresy of a most dangerous kind. Neither 
 should theology be confounded with ecclesiasticism. 
 It is my conviction that the battle with ecclesiasti- 
 cism has long since been decided, and civilisation 
 has nothing to fear from the official priest. Those 
 who spend their time in protesting against sacerdotal 
 pretensions are only beating the air "We shall 
 never go to Canossa," as Bismarck said. No, the 
 real danger to spiritual religion, and therefore to 
 the immediate future of mankind in every depart- 
 ment of thought and action, arises from practical 
 materialism on the one hand and an antiquated 
 dogmatic theology on the other. I hope it will be 
 understood by readers of these pages that in any 
 references I may make to dogmatic theology I am 
 passing no reflection upon the scientific theologian 
 whose work is being done in the field of historical 
 criticism or archaeology or any of the departments 
 of scientific research into the subject-matter of re- 
 ligion. Most of my readers will understand quite 
 well what I mean. Everyone knows that, broadly 
 speaking, certain ways of stating Christian truth are 
 taken for granted both in pulpit and pew ; the popu- 
 lar or generally accepted theology of all the churches 
 of Christendom, Catholic and Protestant alike, is 
 fundamentally the same, and somehow the modern 
 mind has come to distrust it. There is a curious
 
 THE NAME AND THE SITUATION 3 
 
 want of harmony between our ordinary views of 
 life and our conventional religious beliefs. We live 
 our lives upon one set of assumptions during six 
 days of the week and a quite different set on Sunday 
 and in church. The average man feels this without 
 perhaps quite realising what is the matter. All he 
 knows is that the propositions he has been taught to 
 regard as a full and perfect statement of Christianity 
 have little or nothing to do with his everyday ex- 
 perience; they seem to belong to a different world. 
 He does not know how comparatively modern this 
 popular presentation of Christianity is. What is 
 wanted therefore is a restatement of the essential 
 truth of the Christian religion in terms of the modern 
 mind. 
 
 The New Theology and the Immanence of God. 
 Where or when the name New Theology arose I 
 do not know, but it has been in existence for at least 
 one generation. It is neither of my invention nor of 
 my choice. It has long been in use both in this 
 country and in America to indicate the attitude of 
 those who believe that the fundamentals of the 
 Christian faith need to be rearticulated in terms of 
 the immanence of God. Those who take this view 
 do not hold that there is any need for a new religion, 
 but that the forms in which the religion of Jesus is 
 commonly presented are inadequate and misleading. 
 What is wanted is freshness and simplicity of state- 
 ment. The New Theology is not new except in the 
 sense that it seeks to substitute simplicity for com-
 
 4 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 plexity and to get down to moral values in its use of 
 religious terms. Our objection is not so much to the 
 venerable creeds of Christendom as to the ordinary 
 interpretations of those creeds. And, creeds or no 
 creeds, we hold that the religious experience which 
 came to the world in Jesus of Nazareth is enough 
 for all our needs, and only requires to be freed from 
 limiting statements in order to lay firm hold once 
 more upon the civilised world. 
 
 The New Theology is an untrammelled return to 
 the Christian sources in the light of modern thought. 
 Its starting point is a re-emphasis of the Christian 
 belief in the divine immanence in the universe and 
 in mankind. This doctrine is certainly not new, but 
 it requires to be placed effectively in the foreground 
 of Christian preaching. In the immediate past the 
 doctrine of the divine transcendence that is, the 
 obvious truth that the infinite being of God must 
 transcend the infinite universe has been presented 
 in such a way as to amount to a practical dualism, 
 and to lead men to think of God as above and apart 
 from His world instead of expressing Himself through 
 His world. I repeat that this dualism is practical, 
 not theoretical, but that it exists is plain enough from 
 such statements as that of the present-day theologian 
 who speaks of God's "eternal eminence, and His 
 descent on a created world." This kind of theologis- 
 ing leads straight to the conclusion that God is to 
 all intents and purposes quite distinct from His 
 creation, although He possesses a full and accurate
 
 THE NAME AND THE SITUATION 5 
 
 knowledge of all that goes on in it and reserves to 
 Himself the right to interfere. In what sense lan- 
 guage like this leaves room for the divine immanence 
 it is difficult to see. The New Theology holds that 
 we know nothing and can know nothing of the In- 
 finite Cause whence all things proceed except as we 
 read Him in His universe and in our own souls. 
 It is the immanent God with whom we have to do, 
 and if this obvious fact is once firmly grasped it will 
 simplify all our religious conceptions and give us a 
 working faith. 
 
 The decline of organised Christianity. For 
 a generation or more in every part of Chris- 
 tendom there has been a steady drift away from 
 organised religion as represented by the churches, 
 and the question is being seriously asked whether 
 Christianity can much longer hold its own. Protes- 
 tant controversialists frequently draw attention to 
 the decline of church-going in Latin countries as 
 evidence of the decay of sacerdotalism, particularly 
 in the church of Rome. But outside Latin countries 
 it is not one whit more noticeable in the church of 
 Rome than hi any other church. The masses of 
 the people on the one hand and the cultured classes 
 on the other are becoming increasingly alienated 
 from the religion of the churches. A London daily 
 paper made a religious census some years ago and 
 demonstrated that about one-fifth of the population 
 of the metropolis attended public worship, and this 
 was a generous estimate. Women, who are more
 
 6 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 emotional, more reverent, and more amenable to 
 external authority than men, usually form the major- 
 ity of the worshippers at an ordinary service. Mr. 
 Charles Booth in his great work on the "Life and 
 Labour of the People in London " asserts that the 
 churches are practically without influence of any 
 kind on the communal life. This I believe to be an 
 exaggeration, but it will hardly be denied that the 
 average working, business, or professional man 
 looks upon the churches almost with indifference. 
 In many cases this indifference passes into hostility 
 or contempt. Intelligent men take little notice of 
 preachers and sermons, and the theologically- 
 minded layman is such a rarity as to be noteworthy. 
 Most significant of all, perhaps, is the fact that much 
 of the moral earnestness of the nation and of 
 social redemptive effort exists outside the churches 
 altogether. I am well aware that there is a great 
 deal of snarling criticism of the churches which springs 
 from selfish materialism, and I gladly recognise 
 that in almost any ordinary church to-day brave and 
 self-denying work is being done for the common good, 
 but this does not invalidate my general statement. 
 The plain, bald fact remains that the churches as 
 such are counting for less and less hi civilisation 
 in general and our own nation in particular. One 
 of the ablest of our rising young members of Parlia- 
 ment, a man of strong religious convictions and social 
 sympathies, recently declared that we were witness- 
 ing the melancholy spectacle of a whole civilisation
 
 THE NAME AND THE SITUATION 7 
 
 breaking away from the faith out of which it grew. 
 To be sure, the same thing has been said before and 
 has proved to be wrong. It was said in the eigh- 
 teenth century when men with something of the proph- 
 et's fire in them preached the gospel of the Rights 
 of Man, declaring at the same time that institutional 
 religion was at an end, utterly discredited, and im- 
 possible of acceptance by any intelligent being. 
 In France during the Revolution the populace turned 
 frantically upon the established faith, tore it to shreds, 
 burlesqued it, and set up the worship of the Goddess 
 of Reason, as they called it, typified by a Parisian 
 harlot. In England a devitalised Deism laid its 
 chilly hand not only upon the world of scholars and 
 men of letters, but even upon the church. An 
 English king is reported to have said that half his 
 bishops were atheists. And yet, somehow, religion 
 reasserted itself all over the civilised world. Napo- 
 leon with shrewd insight realised that the people 
 could not do without it, and so effected the Con- 
 cordat with Rome which has now been dissolved; 
 Wesley began the movement in England which has 
 since created the largest Protestant denomination 
 in the world; Germany produced a succession of 
 great preachers and scholars the like of whom had 
 hardly ever been known in Europe before. 
 
 Will religious faith regain its power? Will this 
 happen again? For assuredly Christianity has for 
 the moment lost its hold. Can it recover it ? I am 
 sure it can, if only because the moral movements
 
 8 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 of the age, such as the great labour movement, are 
 in reality the expression of the Christian spirit, and 
 only need to recognise themselves as such in order 
 to become irresistible. The waggon of socialism 
 needs to be hitched to the star of religious faith. 
 But have the churches spiritual energy enough to 
 recover their lost position? That depends upon 
 themselves. If they consent to be bound by dog- 
 matic statements inherited from the past, they are 
 doomed. The world is not listening to theologians 
 to-day. They have no message for it. They are 
 on the periphery, not at the centre of things. The 
 great rolling river of thought and action is passing 
 them by. Scientific scholarship applied to the study 
 of Christian origins is extremely valuable, but the 
 defender of systems of belief couched in the language 
 of a by-gone age is an anachronism and the sooner 
 we shake ourselves free of him the better. The great- 
 est of all the causes of the drift from the churches is 
 the fact that Christian truth has become associated 
 in the popular mind with certain forms of statement 
 which thoughtful men find it impossible to accept not 
 only on intellectual but even on moral grounds. 
 Certain dogmatic beliefs, for example, about the 
 Fall, the scriptural basis of revelation, the blood- 
 atonement, the meaning of salvation, the punish- 
 ment of sin, heaven and hell, are not only misleading 
 but unethical. What sensible man really believes in 
 these notions as popularly assumed and presented, 
 and what have they to do with Christianity ? They
 
 THE NAME AND THE SITUATION 9 
 
 do not square with the facts of life, much less do 
 they interpret life. They go straight in the teeth 
 of the scientific method, which, even where the 
 Christian facts are concerned, is the only method 
 which carries weight with the modern mind. The 
 consequence is that religion has come to be thought 
 of as something apart from ordinary everyday life, 
 a matter of churches, creeds, and Bible readings, 
 instead of what it really is, the coordinating 
 principle of all our activities. To put the matter 
 in a nutshell, popular Christianity (or rather 
 pulpit and theological college Christianity) does 
 not interpret life. Consequently the great world 
 of thought and action is ceasing to trouble about 
 it. 
 
 Theologians and preachers rarely realise the 
 situation. One would think that the men whose 
 business it is to teach religious truth would see this 
 and ask themselves the reason why. To an extent 
 they do see it, but they never seem to think of blam- 
 ing themselves for it except in a perfunctory kind 
 of way. They talk about religious indifference, the 
 need for better and more effective methods, and so 
 on. The professional theologian rarely does even as 
 much as this. He takes himself very seriously; 
 sniffs and sneers at any suggestion of deviation 
 from the accepted standards; mounts some denomi- 
 national chair or other and thunders forth his view 
 of the urgent necessity for rehabilitating truth in 
 the grave-clothes of long-buried formulas. I mean
 
 10 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 that the language he habitually uses implies some 
 kind of belief in formulas he no longer holds. He 
 hardly dares to disinter the formulas themselves, 
 that would not be convenient even for him, 
 but he goes on flapping the shroud as energetically 
 as ever, and the world does not even take the trouble 
 to laugh. Wherever and whenever religious agen- 
 cies succeed it is rarely because of the driving power 
 of what is preached, but because the preacher's 
 gospel is glossed over or put in the background. 
 We have popular services by the million in which 
 devices are used to attract the public which ought 
 not to be necessary if their framers had any real 
 message to declare. But they have not. Popular 
 pulpit addresses rarely or never deal with the funda- 
 mental problems of life. The last thing one ever 
 expects to hear in such addresses is a real living 
 representation of the beliefs the preacher professes 
 to hold. He makes passing allusions to them, of 
 course, such as appeals to come to the cross, and 
 such like, but they generally sound unreal, and the 
 pill has to be sweetly sugared. The ordinary way 
 of preaching the gospel is to avoid saying much 
 about what the preacher believes the gospel 
 to be. 
 
 To be sure there are many social activities in 
 connection with Christian churches. If it were not 
 for these the churches would have to be shut up. 
 They are quite admirable in their way, and often 
 produce excellent results, but they imply another
 
 THE NAME AND THE SITUATION II 
 
 gospel than the one supposed to be preached from 
 the pulpits. They ignore dogmatic beliefs, and 
 assume the salvability of the whole race and the 
 possibility of realising the kingdom of God on earth. 
 Wherever the churches are alive to-day, and not 
 merely struggling to keep their heads above water, 
 it is not their doctrine but their non-theological 
 human sympathy that is doing it. 
 
 This, then, is the situation. The main stream of 
 modern life is passing organised religion by. Where 
 is the remedy to be found ? 
 
 We seek to save religion rather than the Churches. 
 Let me say plainly that I do not think our object 
 should be to find a remedy which will save the 
 churches. That would be putting the cart before 
 the horse. What is wanted is a driving force which 
 will enable the churches to fulfil their true mission 
 of saving the world, or, to put it better still, will 
 serve to bring mankind back to real living faith 
 in God and the spiritual meaning of life. Hardly 
 anyone would seriously deny that the world is wait- 
 ing for this. Men are not irreligious. On the con- 
 trary there is no subject of such general interest 
 as religion ; it takes precedence of all other subjects 
 just because all other subjects are implied in it. 
 Religion is man's response to the call of the universe ; 
 it is the soul turning towards its source and goal. 
 How could it fail to be of absorbing interest ? What 
 is wanted is a message charged with spiritual power, 
 " Where there is no vision the people perish." Mere
 
 12 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 dogmatic assertions will not do. The word of God 
 is to be known from the fact that it illuminates life 
 and appeals to the deepest and truest in the soul of 
 man. That message is here now. It is being 
 preached, not by one man only, but the wide world 
 over. God has spoken, and woe betide the churches 
 if they will not hear. Religion is necessary to man- 
 kind, but churches are not. From every quarter 
 of Christendom a new spirit of hope and confidence 
 is rising, born of a conviction that all that is human 
 is the evidence of God, and that Jesus held the key 
 to the riddle of existence. Although this comes to 
 us as with the freshness of a new revelation, it is 
 not really new. It is the spirit which has been the 
 inspiration of every great religious awakening since 
 the world began. In this country and in other parts 
 of the English-speaking world that spirit is becoming 
 associated with the name the New Theology. To 
 associate it with any one personality is to belittle 
 the subject and to obscure its real significance. 
 There are many brave and good men in the churches 
 and outside the churches to-day, men of true pro- 
 phetic spirit, who would reject utterly the name 
 New Theology, but who are thoroughly imbued 
 with this new-old spirit and are leading mankind 
 toward the light. In the church of Rome the move- 
 ment is typified by men like Father Tyrrell, whose 
 teaching has led to his expulsion from the Jesuit 
 order, but not, so far, from the priesthood. The 
 present condition of the church of Rome is not un-
 
 THE NAME AND THE SITUATION 13 
 
 hopeful to those who believe as I do that that ven- 
 erable church has been used of God to great ends 
 in the past and that her spiritual vitality is by no 
 means exhausted. Father Tyrrell and such as he 
 are nearer in spirit to the New Theology men than 
 are the latter to those Protestants who pin their 
 faith to external standards of belief . It is a curious 
 but indisputable fact that the most extreme anti- 
 Romanist Protestants are themselves hi the same 
 boat with Rome : they insist on the absolute neces- 
 sity for external authority in matters of belief and 
 are unwilling to trust the individual soul to recog- 
 nise truth as it comes. In all the churches those 
 who believe in the religion of the Spirit should recog- 
 nise one another as brothers. In the church of 
 England a large and increasing band of men are look- 
 ing in this direction and are making their influence 
 felt. Of these perhaps the most outstanding is 
 Archdeacon Wilberforce, but he is by no means 
 alone. A movement has begun in the Lutheran 
 church. It has existed for a long time in French 
 Protestantism as represented by the late Auguste 
 Sabatier and his friend ReVille. In the congrega- 
 tional and other evangelical churches of England 
 and America the same attitude is being taken by 
 many who are not even aware that the name New 
 Theology is being apph'ed to it. In this country 
 the movement in the free churches is typified by 
 men like the Rev. T. Rhondda Williams of Bradford. 
 There are many Unitarians who are preaching it;
 
 14 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 indeed, there are some who would assert that the New 
 Theology is only Unitarianism under another name. 
 But, as I shall hope to show, this is very far from 
 being the case. It may or may not be professed by 
 exponents of Unitarianism, but it is not a surrender 
 to Unitarianism. 
 
 The New Theology is spiritual socialism. The 
 great social movement which is now taking place in 
 every country of the civilised world toward universal 
 peace and brotherhood and a better and fairer distri- 
 bution of wealth is really the same movement as that 
 which in the more distinctively religious sphere is 
 coming to be called the New Theology. This fact 
 needs to be realised and brought out. The New 
 Theology is the gospel of the kingdom of God. 
 Neither socialism nor any other economic system 
 will permanently save and lift mankind without 
 definitely recognised spiritual sanctions, that is, it 
 must be a religion. The New Theology is but the 
 religious articulation of the social movement. The 
 word " theology " is almost a misnomer; it is essen- 
 tially a moral and spiritual movement, the recog- 
 nition that we are at the beginning of a great religious 
 and ethical awakening, the ultimate results of which 
 no man can completely foresee. 
 
 And also the religion of science. Again, the 
 New Theology is the religion of science. It is the 
 denial that there is, or ever has been, or ever can be, 
 any dissonance between science and religion; it is 
 the recognition that upon the foundations laid by
 
 THE NAME AND THE SITUATION 1 5 
 
 modem science a vaster and nobler fabric of faith 
 is rising than that world has ever before known. 
 Science is supplying the facts which the New The- 
 ology is weaving into the texture of religious ex- 
 perience.
 
 CHAPTER H 
 
 GOD AND THE UNIVERSE 
 
 What religion is. All religion begins in cosmic 
 emotion. It is the recognition of an essential re- 
 lationship between the human soul and the great 
 whole of things of which it is the outcome and ex- 
 pression. The mysterious universe is always call- 
 ing, and, in some form or other, we are always 
 answering. The artist answers by trying to express 
 his feeling of its beauty; the scientist answers by 
 recognising its laws and unfolding its wonders; 
 the social reformer answers by his self-denying 
 labours for the common good. In each and every 
 case there is in the background of experience a con- 
 viction that the unit is the instrument of the All; 
 religion is implied in these as in all other activities 
 in which man aims at a higher-than-self. But re- 
 ligion, properly so-called, begins when the soul con- 
 sciously enters upon communion with this higher- 
 than-self as with an all-comprehending intelligence; 
 it is the soul instinctively turning toward its source 
 and goal. Religion may assume a great many dif- 
 ferent and even repellent forms, but at bottom this 
 is what it always is: it is the soul reaching forth 
 to the great mysterious whole of things, the higher- 
 
 16
 
 GOD AND THE UNIVERSE I'J 
 
 than-self, and seeking for closer and ever closer 
 communion therewith. The savage with his totem 
 and the Christian saint before the altar have this 
 in common : they are reaching through the things 
 that are seen to the reality beyond. 
 
 What the word "God" means. But what 
 name are we to give to this higher-than-self whose 
 presence is so unescapable? The name matters 
 comparatively little, but it includes all that the 
 ordinary Christian means by God. The word 
 "God " stands for many things, but to present-day 
 thought it must stand for the un-caused Cause of 
 all existence, the unitary principle implied in all 
 multiplicity. Everyone of necessity believes in 
 this. It is impossible to define the term completely, 
 for to define is necessarily to limit, and we are think- 
 ing of the illimitable. But we ought to under- 
 stand clearly that to disbelieve in God is an im- 
 possibility; everyone believes in God if he believes 
 in his own existence. The blankest materialist 
 that ever lived, whoever he may have been, must 
 have affirmed God even in the act of denying Him. 
 Professor Haeckel declares his belief in God on 
 every page of his " Riddle of the Universe," the 
 famous book in which he says that God, Freedom, 
 and Immortality are the three great buttresses of 
 superstition, which science must make it her busi- 
 ness to destroy. So far science has only succeeded 
 in giving us a vaster, grander conception of God by 
 giving us a vaster, grander conception of the uni- 
 c
 
 1 8 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 verse in which we live. When I say God, I mean the 
 mysterious Power which is finding expression in 
 the universe, and which is present in every tiniest 
 atom of the wondrous whole. I find that this Power 
 is the one reality I cannot get away from, for, 
 whatever else it may be, it is myself. Theologians 
 will tell me that I have taken a prodigious leap in 
 saying this, but I cannot help it. How can there 
 be anything in the universe outside of God ? What- 
 ever distinctions of being there may be within the 
 universe it is surely clear that they must all be 
 transcended and comprehended within infinity. 
 There cannot be two infinities, nor can there be an 
 infinite and also a finite beyond it. What infinity 
 may be we have no means of knowing. Here the 
 most devout Christian is just as much of an agnostic 
 as Professor Huxley ; we can predicate nothing with 
 confidence concerning the all-comprehending unity 
 wherein we live and move and have our being, 
 save and except as we see it manifested in that part 
 of our universe which lies open to us. One would 
 think that this were so obvious as to need no demon- 
 stration. But how do ordinary church-going Chris- 
 tians talk about God? They talk as though He 
 were (practically) a finite being stationed somewhere 
 above and beyond the universe, watching and worry- 
 ing over other and lesser finite beings, to wit, our- 
 selves. According to the received phraseology 
 this God is greatly bothered and thwarted by what 
 men have been doing throughout the few millenni-
 
 GOD AND THE UNIVERSE 19 
 
 urns of human existence. He takes the whole thing 
 very seriously, and thinks about little else than 
 getting wayward humanity into line again. To 
 this end He has adopted various expedients, the 
 chief of which was the sending of His only begotten 
 Son to suffer and die in order that He might be free 
 to forgive the trouble we had caused Him. I hope 
 no reader of these words will think I am making 
 light of a sacred subject; I never was more serious 
 in my life. What I am trying to show is that, re- 
 duced to its simplest terms, the accepted theology 
 of the churches to-day is pitiably inadequate as an 
 explanation of our relationship to this great and 
 mysterious universe. There is a beautiful spiritual 
 truth underneath every venerable article of the 
 Christian faith, but as popularly presented this truth 
 has become so distorted as to be falsehood. It 
 narrows religion and belittles God. It is dishonour- 
 ing to human nature, and is absolutely ludicrous as 
 an interpretation of the cosmic process. Of course, 
 the dogmatic theologian will maintain that this is 
 a caricature of the way in which the relationship of 
 God to the world is set forth in religious treatises 
 and from the Christian pulpit. But is it ? I think 
 I can appeal with confidence to the thoughtful man 
 who has given up going to church as to whether it 
 is or not. The God of the ordinary church-goer, 
 and of the man who is supposed to teach him from 
 study and pulpit, is an antiquated Theologian who 
 made His universe so badly that it went wrong in
 
 20 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 spite of Him and has remained wrong ever since. 
 Why He should ever have created it is not clear. 
 Why He should be the injured party in all the miser- 
 ies that have ensued is still less clear. The poor 
 crippled child who has been maimed by a falling 
 rock, and the white-faced match-box maker who 
 works eighteen hours out of the twenty-four to keep 
 body and soul together have surely some sort of a 
 claim upon God apart from being miserable sinners 
 who must account themselves fortunate to be for- 
 given for Christ's sake. Faugh ! it is all so unreal 
 and so stupid. This kind of God is no God at all. 
 The theologian may call Him infinite, but in practice 
 He is finite. He may call Him a God of love, but 
 in practice He is spiteful and silly. I shall have 
 something to say presently about the twin problems 
 of pain and evil ; but what so-called orthodoxy has 
 to say is not only no solution of them, it is demon- 
 strably false to the religion of Jesus. 
 
 Every man believes in God. For the moment 
 what I want to make clear is this. No man should 
 refuse to assert his belief in God because he cannot 
 bring himself to believe in the God of the typical 
 theologian. Remember that the real God is the 
 God expressed in the universe and in yourself. 
 The question is not whether you shall believe in 
 God, but how much you can believe about Him. 
 You may think with Haeckel that the universe is 
 the outcome of the fortuitous interaction of material 
 forces without consciousness and definite purpose
 
 GOD AND THE UNIVERSE 21 
 
 behind them, or you may believe that the cosmos 
 is the product of intelligence and " means intensely 
 and means good," but you cannot help believing in 
 God, the Power revealed in it. As I write these 
 words I am seated before a window overlooking 
 the heaving waste of waters on a rock-bound Cor- 
 nish coast. It is a stormy day. The sky is overcast 
 toward the western horizon; on the east shafts of 
 blue and saffron have pierced the pall of darkness 
 and flung their radiance over the spreading sea. 
 The total effect is strangely solemnising. The sug- 
 gestion of titanic forces conveyed in the rush of 
 wind and wave upon the unyielding cliffs, conjoined 
 to the majestic march of the storm-clouds across 
 the heaven from the west, is somehow elevated and 
 composed by the mystic light that streams from the 
 east. I have never seen anything quite like it 
 before. It tells me of a beneficent stillness, an 
 eternal strength, far above and beyond these finite 
 tossings. It whispers the word impossible to utter, 
 the word that explains everything, the deep that 
 calleth unto deep. So my God calls always to my 
 deeper soul, and tells me I must read Him by mine 
 own highest and best, and by the highest and best 
 that the universe has yet produced. Thus the last 
 word about God becomes the last word about man : 
 it is Jesus. Materialists may tell me that the uni- 
 verse does not know what it is doing, that it goes on 
 clanking and banging, age after age, without end 
 or aim, but I shall continue to feel compelled to
 
 22 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 believe that the Power which produced Jesus must 
 at least be equal to Jesus. So Jesus becomes my 
 gateway to the innermost of God. When I look at 
 Him I say to myself, God is that, and, if I can only 
 get down to the truth about myself, I shall find I 
 am that too. 
 
 What does the universe mean ? But why is 
 there a universe at all? Why has the unlimited 
 become limited? What was the need for the long 
 cosmic struggle, the ignorance and pain, the appar- 
 ently prodigal waste of life and beauty? Why does 
 a perfect form appear only to be shattered and super- 
 seded by another? What can it all mean, if indeed 
 it has a meaning? This is what thinkers have been 
 asking themselves since thought began, and I have 
 really nothing new to say about it. What I have -to 
 say leads back through Hegelianism to the old Greek 
 thinkers, and beyond them again to the wise men 
 who lived and taught in the East ages before Jesus 
 was born. It is that this finite universe of ours is 
 one means to the self-realisation of the infinite. 
 Supposing God to be the infinite consciousness, there 
 are still possibilities to that consciousness which it 
 can only know as it becomes limited. Any of my 
 readers to whom this thought is unfamiliar have 
 only to look at their own experience in order to see 
 how reasonable it is. You may know yourself to 
 be a brave man, but you will know it in a higher 
 way if you are a soldier facing the cannon's mouth ; 
 you will know it in a still different way if you have
 
 GOD AND THE UNIVERSE 23 
 
 to face the hostility and prejudice of a whole com- 
 munity for standing by something which you believe 
 to be right. Perhaps you have a manly little son; 
 he, like you, may believe in his sterling good qualities. 
 But wait till he has gone out to fight his way in 
 life; then you will realise what he is worth, and 
 so will he. It is one thing to know that you are a 
 lover of truth ; it is another thing to realise it when 
 your immediate interest and your immediate safety 
 would bid you hedge and lie. Do not these facts 
 of human nature and experience tell us something 
 about God ? To all eternity God is what He is and 
 never can be other, but it will take Him to all eter- 
 nity to live out all that He is. In order to manifest 
 even to Himself the possibilities of His being God 
 must limit that being. There is no other way in 
 which the fullest self-realisation can be attained. 
 Thus we get two modes of God, the infinite, per- 
 fect, unconditioned, primordial being; and the 
 finite, imperfect, conditioned, and limited being of 
 which we are ourselves expressions. And yet these 
 two are one, and the former is the guarantee that the 
 latter shall not fail in the purpose for which it be- 
 came limited. Thus to the question, Why a finite 
 universe? I should answer, Because God wants to 
 express what He is. His achievement here is only 
 one of an infinite number of possibilities. 
 
 " God is the perfect poet 
 Who in creation acts His own conceptions."
 
 24 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 This is an end worthy alike of God and man. 
 The act of creation is eternal, although the cosmos 
 is changing every moment, for God is ceaselessly 
 uttering Himself through higher and ever higher 
 forms of existence. We are helping Him to do it 
 when we are true to ourselves; or rather, which is 
 the same thing, He is doing it in us: "The Father 
 abiding in me doeth His works." No part of the 
 universe has value in and for itself alone; it has 
 value only as it expresses God. To see one form 
 break up and another take its place is no calamity, 
 however terrible it may seem, for it only means that 
 the life contained in that form has gone back to the 
 universal life, and will express itself again in some 
 higher and better form. To think of God in this 
 way is an inspiration and a help in the doing of the 
 humblest tasks. It redeems life from the dominion 
 of the sordid and commonplace. It supplies an 
 incentive to endeavour, and fills the heart with 
 hope and confidence. To put it in homely, every- 
 day phraseology, God is getting at something and 
 we must help Him. We must be His eyes and 
 hands and feet; we must be labourers together 
 with Him. This fits in with what science has to 
 say about the very constitution of the universe; 
 it is all of a piece; there are no gaps anywhere. 
 It is a divine experiment without risk of failure, and 
 we must interpret it in terms of our own highest.
 
 CHAPTER HI 
 
 MAN IN RELATION TO GOD 
 
 What is man ? So far we have seen that the 
 universe, including ourselves, is one instrument or 
 vehicle of the self-expression of God. God is All; 
 He is the universe and infinitely more, but it is only 
 as we read Him in the universe that we can know 
 anything about Him. We have seen, too, that it is 
 by means of the universe and His self-limitation 
 therein that He expresses Himself to Himself. Now 
 what is our relation to this process ? What are we 
 to think about ourselves? Who or what are we? 
 
 A witty Frenchman once sardonically remarked, 
 " In the beginning God created man in His own 
 image, and man has ever since been returning the 
 compliment by creating God in his." But what else 
 can we do ? It follows from what has already been 
 said that we know nothing and can know nothing 
 of God except as we read Him in the universe, and 
 we can only interpret the universe hi terms of our 
 own consciousness. In other words, man is a 
 microcosm of the universe. What the universe 
 may be in reality we do not know, though I am 
 not so sure as some people seem to be that appear- 
 ance and reality do not correspond, we can only
 
 26 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 know it in so far as it produces sense images on our 
 brain and enters into our individual consciousness. 
 The limits of my subject forbid that I should enter 
 into a discussion of philosophic idealism, but I 
 think I ought to confess at once that I can only 
 think ot existence in terms of consciousness: noth- 
 ing exists except in and for mind. The mind that 
 thinks the universe must be immeasurably greater 
 than my own, but in so far as I too am able to think 
 the universe, mine is one with it. All thinking 
 starts with a paradox, even the famous saying of 
 Descartes, "I think, therefore I am"; and my 
 paradox seems at least as reasonable as any other, 
 and has fewer difficulties to encounter than most. 
 I start then with the assumption that the universe 
 is God's thought about Himself, and that in so far 
 as I am able to think it along with Him, " I and 
 my Father (even metaphysically speaking) are one." 
 It cannot be demonstrated beyond dispute that 
 any two human beings think the same universe. 
 Strictly speaking, it is certain that they do not in 
 every detail. But the common dominator of our 
 experience, intellectual, moral, and spiritual, is 
 the assumption that in the main the universe is 
 pretty much the same for one man as it is for another. 
 When I speak of the rolling sea, my neighbour does 
 not understand me to mean the waving trees, but I 
 cannot prove that he does not. If he is consistent 
 in seeing water as trees and trees as water, his mind 
 must be constituted differently from mine and yet
 
 MAN IN RELATION TO GOD 2J 
 
 I may never know it. So, by an almost unperceived 
 act of faith, we have to take for granted that our 
 separate individualities meet and become one to 
 some extent in our common experience of this great 
 universe, which is at that same time the expression 
 of God. The real universe must be infinitely 
 greater and more complex than the one which is 
 apparent to our physical senses. This becomes 
 probable, even on material grounds, the moment we 
 begin to examine into the nature of sense perception. 
 The ear is constituted to hear just so many sounds; 
 beyond that limit at either end of the scale we can 
 hear nothing, but that does not prove that there are 
 no more sounds to hear. Similarly the eye can dis- 
 tinguish five or seven primary colours and their 
 various combinations; beyond that limit we are 
 colour-blind. But suppose we were endowed to 
 hear and see sounds and colours a million times 
 greater in number than those of which we have at 
 present any cognizance ! What kind of a universe 
 would it be then? But that universe exists now; 
 it is around and within us; it is God's thought about 
 Himself, infinite and eternal. It is only finite to a 
 finite mind, and it is more than probable that 
 spiritual beings exist with a range of consciousness 
 far greater than our own, to whom the universe of 
 which we form a part must seem far more beautiful 
 and fuller of meaning than it seems to us. Imagine 
 a man who could only see grey hues and could only 
 hear the note A on the keyboard. His experience
 
 28 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 would be quite as real as ours, and indeed the same 
 up to a point, but how little he would know of the 
 world as we know it. The glory of the sunset sky 
 would be hidden from him; for him the melting 
 power of the human voice, or of a grand cathedral 
 organ, would not exist. So, no doubt, it is in a 
 different degree with us all. The so-called material 
 world is our consciousness of reality exercising itself 
 along a strictly limited plane. We can know just 
 as much as we are constituted to know, and no more. 
 But it is all a question of consciousness. The larger 
 and fuller a consciousness becomes, the more it 
 can grasp and hold of the consciousness of God, 
 the fundamental reality of our being as of everything 
 else. 
 
 The subconscious mind. Of late years the 
 comparatively new science of psychology has 
 begun to throw an amount of valuable light upon 
 the mystery of human personality. As the result 
 of numerous experiments and investigations into 
 the normal and abnormal working of the human 
 mind, psychologists have discovered that a great 
 deal of our ordinary mental action goes on without 
 our being aware of it. This unconscious cerebration, 
 as it is called, can hardly be seriously disputed, 
 for every new addition to our psychological know- 
 ledge goes to confirm it. Hence we are hearing 
 a great deal about the subconscious mind, or sub- 
 liminal consciousness as some prefer to call it. Now 
 that our attention has been directed to it, we are
 
 MAN IN RELATION TO GOD 29 
 
 coming to see, as is usual with every new discovery, 
 that after a fashion we knew it all along. The sub- 
 conscious mind seems to be the seat of inspiration 
 and intuition. Genius, according to the late F. W. H. 
 Myers, is " an up-rush of subliminal faculty." We 
 have all heard of the distinguished lady novelist 
 who declares that when she has chosen her theme she 
 is in the habit of committing it to her subconscious 
 mind and letting it alone for a while. She is not 
 aware of any mental process which goes on, but 
 sooner or later she finds that the theme is ripe for 
 treatment; she knows what she thinks about it, 
 and the work of stating it can profitably begin. 
 Poets, preachers, and musicians can bear testimony 
 of a somewhat similar kind. The thoughts which 
 are most valuable are those which come unbidden, 
 rising to the surface of consciousness from unknown 
 depths. The best scientific discoveries are made in 
 much the same way; the investigator has an intuition 
 and forthwith sets to work to justify it. Reason, 
 by which we ordinarily mean the conscious exercise 
 of the mental faculties, plods along as if on four feet ; 
 intuition soars on wings. Truly astonishing things 
 are frequently done by the subconscious mind 
 superseding and controlling the conscious mind in 
 exceptional states of emotion, especially in the case 
 of people who are not quite normal; but there is no 
 one, however stolid and commonplace, who does 
 not owe far more to his subliminal consciousness 
 than he does to what he calls his reason; indeed
 
 30 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 reason has comparatively little to do with the way 
 in which people ordinarily conduct themselves, 
 although we may like to think otherwise. 
 
 Now what is this subconscious mind whose im- 
 portance is so great and of whose nature we know 
 so little ? That is a question upon which psychology 
 has not yet pronounced, but there are not a few who 
 regard it as the real personality. Evidently it is 
 not only deeper but larger than the surface mind 
 which we call reason. Our discovery of its existence 
 has taught us that our ordinary consciousness is but 
 a tiny corner of our personality. It has been well 
 described as an illuminated disc on a vast ocean of 
 being; it is like an island in the Pacific which is 
 really the summit of a mountain whose base is miles 
 below the surface. Summit and base are one, and 
 yet no one realises when standing on the little island 
 that he is perched at the very top of a mountain peak. 
 So it is with our everyday consciousness of ourselves ; 
 we find it rather difficult to realise that this conscious- 
 ness is not all there is of us. And yet, when we come 
 to examine into the facts, the conclusion seems 
 irresistible, that of our truer, deeper being we are 
 quite unconscious. 
 
 The higher self. Several important inferences 
 follow from this position. The first is that our 
 surface consciousness is somewhat illusory and does 
 not possess the sharpness and definiteness of outline 
 which we are accustomed to take for granted when 
 thinking of ourselves. To ordinary common sense
 
 MAN IN RELATION TO GOD 31 
 
 nothing seems more obvious than that we know most 
 that is to be known about our friend John Smith, 
 with whom we used to go to school and who has 
 since developed into a stolid British man of business 
 with few ideas and a tendency toward conservatism. 
 John is a stalwart, honest, commonplace kind of 
 person, of whom brilliant things were never prophe- 
 sied and who has never been guilty of any. His 
 wife and children go to church on Sundays. John 
 seldom goes himself because it bores him, but he 
 likes to know that religion is being attended to, and 
 he does not want to hear that his clergyman is at- 
 tempting any daring flights. He has a good-natured 
 contempt for clergymen in general because he feels 
 somehow that, like women, they have to be treated 
 with half-fictitious reverence, but that they do not 
 count for much in the ordinary affairs of life; they 
 are a sort of third sex. But, according to the newer 
 psychology, this matter-of-fact Englishman is not 
 what he seems even to himself. His true being is 
 vastly greater than he knows, and vastly greater 
 than the world will ever know. It belongs not 
 to the material plane of existence but to the plane of 
 eternal reality. This larger self is in all probability 
 a perfect and eternal spiritual being integral to the 
 being of God. His surface self, his Philistine 
 self, is the incarnation of some portion of that 
 true eternal self which is one with God. The 
 dividing line between the surface self and the 
 other self is not the definite demarcation it appears
 
 32 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 to be. To the higher self it does not exist. To 
 us it must seem that to all intents and purposes 
 the two selves in a man are two separate beings, 
 but that is not so ; they are one, although the lower, 
 owing to its limitations, cannot realise the fact. If 
 my readers want to know whether I think that the 
 higher self is conscious of the lower, I can only answer, 
 Yes, I do, but I cannot prove it; probabilities point 
 that way. What I want to insist upon here is that 
 we are greater than we seem, that we have a higher 
 self, and that our limited consciousness does not 
 involve a separate individuality. 
 
 Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; 
 
 The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 
 And cometh from afar. 
 
 Not in entire forgetfulness, 
 
 And not in utter nakedness, 
 
 But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
 
 From God who is our home. 
 
 The great poets are the best theologians after all, 
 for they see the farthest. The true being is con- 
 sciousness; the universe, visible and invisible, is 
 consciousness. The higher self of the individual 
 man infolds more of the consciousness of God than 
 the lower, but lower and higher are the same thing. 
 This may be a difficult thought to grasp, but the time 
 is rapidly approaching when it will be more generally 
 accepted than it is now. 
 
 The unity of humanity. Another inference from
 
 MAN IN RELATION TO GOD 33 
 
 the theory of the subconscious mind is that of the 
 fundamental unity of the whole human race. Indeed 
 all life is fundamentally one, but there is a kinship 
 of man with man which precedes that of man with 
 any other order of being. Here again the spiritual 
 truth cuts across what seem to be the dictates of 
 common sense. Common sense assumes that I and 
 Thou are eternally distinct, and that by no possibility 
 can the territories of our respective beings ever be- 
 come one. But even now, and on mere everyday 
 grounds, we are finding reason to think otherwise. 
 You are about to make an observation at table and 
 some member of your family makes it before you; 
 you are thinking of a certain tune and someone begins 
 to hum it; you have a certain purpose in mind and, 
 lo, the same thought finds expression in someone 
 else, despite all probabilities. Oh, you may remark, 
 This is only thought transference. Precisely, but 
 what are you except your thought? All being, 
 remember, is conscious of being. The infinite 
 consciousness sees itself as a whole; the finite 
 consciousness sees the same whole in part. Ulti- 
 mately your being and mine are one and we shall 
 come to know it. Individuality only has meaning 
 in relation to the whole, and individual consciousness 
 can only be fulfilled by expanding until it embraces 
 the whole. Nothing that exists in your consciousness 
 now and constitutes your self-knowledge will ever 
 be obliterated or ever can be, but in a higher state of 
 existence you will realise it to be a part of the univer-
 
 34 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 sal stock. I shall not cease to be I, nor you to be you ; 
 but there must be a region of experience where we 
 shall find that you and I are one. 
 
 The Self is God. A third inference, already 
 hinted at and presumed in all that has gone before, 
 is that the highest of all selves, the ultimate Self 
 of the universe, is God. The New Testament speaks 
 of man as body, soul, and spirit. The body is the 
 thought-form through which the individuality finds 
 expression on our present limited plane; the soul 
 is a man's consciousness of himself as apart from 
 all the rest of existence and even from God it is the 
 bay seeing itself as the bay and not as the ocean ; the 
 spirit is the true being thus limited and expressed 
 it is the deathless divine within us. The soul there- 
 fore is what we make it; the spirit we can neither 
 make nor mar, for it is at once our being and God's. 
 What we are here to do is to grow the soul, that is to 
 manifest the true nature of the spirit, to build up that 
 self-realisation which is God's objective with the 
 universe as a whole and with every self-conscious 
 unit in particular. 
 
 Where, then, someone will say, is the dividing 
 line between our being and God's? There is no 
 dividing line except from our side. The ocean of 
 consciousness knows that the bay has never been 
 separate from itself, although the bay is only con- 
 scious of the ocean on the outer side of its own being. 
 But, the reader may protest, This is Pantheism. 
 No, it is not. Pantheism is a technical term in
 
 MAN IN RELATION TO GOD 35 
 
 philosophic parlance and means something quite 
 different from this. It stands for a Fate-God, a God 
 imprisoned in His universe, a God who cannot help 
 Himself and does not even know what He is about, 
 a blind force which here breaks out into a rock and 
 there into Ruskin and is equally indifferent to either. 
 But that is not my God. My God is my deeper 
 Self and yours too; He is the Self of the universe 
 and knows all about it. He is never baffled and can- 
 not be baffled ; the whole cosmic process is one long 
 incarnation and uprising of the being of God from 
 itself to itself. With Tennyson you can call this 
 doctrine the Higher Pantheism if you like, but it is 
 the very antithesis of the Pantheism which has 
 played such a part in the history of thought. 
 
 Its relation to free will. But then, another will 
 remonstrate, it does away with the freedom of the 
 will. Well, here is a slippery subject sure enough, 
 and one upon which more nonsense has been talked 
 probably than any other within the range of phil- 
 osophical or theological discussion. Have I any- 
 thing new to say about it? Probably not, but I 
 think I can focus the issue and show what we must 
 recognise in order to have a rational grasp of the 
 subject. Thinkers have talked too much in the past 
 about the separate faculties of human nature as 
 though they could be divided into Reason, Feeling, 
 Action, and so on. But they are beginning to talk 
 differently now. They are coming to see that a 
 human being cannot be cut up like that. The
 
 36 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 Reason is the whole man thinking, judging, com- 
 paring. Feeling accompanies Reason and is never 
 found apart from it, for reason implies consciousness, 
 and without consciousness nothing that can properly 
 be called Feeling exists. The will is simply the whole 
 man acting. 
 
 Now I will frankly confess that in strict logic I can 
 find no place for the freedom of the will. I will defy 
 anyone to do so if he knows much about the laws of 
 thought. But, as the late Mr. Lecky said in his " Map 
 of Life," and Mr. Mallock has since pointed out in 
 "The Reconstruction of Belief," we are compelled 
 to overleap logic when considering this matter. No 
 argument will convince us that we have not some 
 power of individual self-direction and self-control. 
 The most thoroughgoing determinist that ever lived 
 forgets his determinism even while he argues about 
 it. It must be amusing even to himself to see how 
 he enjoys scoring off his opponent, thus taking for 
 granted in the heat of controversy the very freedom 
 he sets out to deny. The assumption at the bottom 
 of every vigorous argument is that the other party 
 might have held other views, and ought to have 
 held other views than those assailed. The position 
 of the determinist in effect is this : You must believe 
 you have no freedom to choose anything, otherwise 
 you are to blame for choosing wrongly. Of course 
 the consistent determinist would evade this reductio 
 ad absurdum by saying that he is as much neces- 
 sitated in blaming his opponent for holding wrong
 
 MAN IN RELATION TO GOD 37 
 
 views as the opponent is for refusing to give them up. 
 He might also tell me that I am arguing for free 
 will in an obscurantist fashion by admitting at the 
 outset that in strict logic I can find no place for it. 
 But I am not arguing for free will at all. I am simply 
 showing that by the very constitution of our minds we 
 cannot avoid taking some measure of free will for 
 granted. Even the determinist who scouts this view 
 and calls it absurd is by his own action a convincing 
 demonstration of its truth. 
 
 Only the Infinite has perfect freedom. But this 
 contention is something more than mere logic chop- 
 ping. It points to a truth too high for a finite mind 
 to grasp, namely, that whatever our moral freedom 
 may be, it must consist with the all-directing uni- 
 versal will. There is no such thing as perfect free- 
 dom in a finite being. Perfect freedom belongs only 
 to infinity; finiteness implies limitations. Popular 
 theology usually assumes, or appears to assume, 
 that every individual is a perfectly free agent able at 
 all times to distinguish and to choose between the 
 higher and the lower, and as liable to choose the one 
 as the other. There is another kind of theologising, 
 of course, which speaks of the weakened or corrupted 
 will due to our fallen nature, that I must let alone 
 for the present. What I want to point out is that 
 there is not, and never has been, an act of the will 
 in which a man, without bias in either direction, has 
 deliberately chosen evil in the presence of good. 
 Under such circumstances no being in his sober
 
 38 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 senses would ever choose evil; enlightened self- 
 interest alone would forbid the possibility of such a 
 choice. Freedom of the will in this sense has never 
 existed. The truth is that we should not be conscious 
 of the possession of a will but for the conflict between 
 desire and duty, or the necessity of choosing between 
 one impulse and another. After all, the moral 
 choices of life are but few in number. The things 
 we go on doing day by day are the things that for 
 the most part we know we must do, and we scarcely 
 reflect upon the matter. When some question 
 emerges which demands a moral choice we know it at 
 once by the fact that we have to take our limitations 
 into account. Something has to be overcome if the 
 higher is chosen, and, without that overcoming, 
 there is no real assertion of the will. It is no heroism 
 in me to avoid getting drunk, but it may mean a 
 tremendous assertion of the moral reserves in some 
 poor fellow who knows the power of the drink craving. 
 The same observation holds good of all human life. 
 My weak points are not my neighbour's, and his are 
 not mine. Neither of us is in a position to estimate 
 the other's strength of will, but we both know that in 
 our own case an absolutely unfettered moral choice 
 has never been made. But for our limitations and 
 imperfections we should know nothing whatever 
 of the choice between right and wrong. Free will, 
 in the sense of unlimited freedom of choice, does not 
 exist. The only freedom we possess is like that of 
 a bird in a cage; we can choose between the higher
 
 MAN IN RELATION TO GOD 39 
 
 and the lower standing ground, a choice called for 
 by the very fact that we are in prison, but we cannot 
 choose where the cage shall go. 
 
 No doubt these considerations will meet with 
 the disapproval of some people who think themselves 
 orthodox. They will object to being told that every 
 man has a higher self than that of which he is im- 
 mediately conscious; that fundamentally the indi- 
 vidual is one with the whole race and with God; 
 that no one possesses absolute free will. To them 
 it may seem an absurdity to maintain these positions. 
 But if they say so, they will convict themselves of 
 absurdity, for, with the exception of the last, Christian 
 doctrine already affirms the.n all of Jesus. Accord- 
 ing to the received theology, Jesus was God, and yet 
 He did not possess the all-controlling consciousness 
 of the universe. He was also man, and yet He was 
 before all ages. All creation proceeds from and 
 centres in Him, and yet He was able to limit Himself 
 in such a degree as to be ignorant of much that was 
 going on in His own universe. If so-called ortho- 
 doxy finds it no difficulty to assert these things as 
 being true of Jesus, it will not find it easy to show 
 good reason why the same should not be true of all 
 humanity. For the moment I neither assert nor 
 deny the uniqueness of Jesus. All I am concerned 
 to show is that if it is not intellectually impossible to 
 affirm certain things about the consciousness of Jesus 
 and the limitation of His true being in His earthly 
 life, it is not impossible to affirm them of mankind.
 
 40 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 Some of my critics have contended that this view 
 of the relationship of man to God hails not from 
 Palestine but from Oxford and is an outcome of the 
 philosophy of T. H. Green. But I think it can 
 be shown that its pedigree is considerably longer 
 than that. Whether it hails from Palestine or not, 
 it is explicitly stated in the fourth gospel: "He 
 that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how 
 sayest thou then, Shew us the Father? Believest 
 thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in 
 me ? The words that I speak unto you I speak not 
 of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, He 
 doeth the works. Believe me that I am in the Father, 
 and the Father in me." Those who object to my 
 statement of the fundamental identity of God and 
 man will have to explain away such passages as 
 this, and there are plenty of them. But, it may be 
 urged, this is meant to apply only to Jesus. That 
 I do not believe; I think the exceedingly able writer 
 of the fourth gospel knew better; but for the moment 
 I will not contest the point. Granted that it does 
 apply only to Jesus, what then? The very things 
 which the critics declare to be impossible of person- 
 ality in general in relation to God, they are affirming 
 already of at least one personality, that of Jesus. 
 If Jesus was God and yet prayed to God, if His con- 
 sciousness was finite and yet one with the infinite, 
 it is clear that in this one instance the seemingly 
 impossible was not impossible. Those who insist 
 upon the fundamental distinction between human
 
 MAN IN RELATION TO GOD 41 
 
 personality and the being of God are thus on the 
 horns of a dilemma. Present-day orthodoxy can- 
 not consistently attack this position. The only 
 telling criticism that can be directed against it is 
 that which proceeds from the side of scientific 
 monism. A thoroughgoing monist might reasonably 
 contend that up to a certain point I have been arguing 
 for a monistic view of the universe, in company with 
 practically the whole scientific world, and have then 
 given the case away by admitting a certain amount 
 of individual freedom. I confess it looks like it; 
 I have had to face the antinomy. I see that there 
 is no escape from the assertion of the fundamental 
 unity of all existence, and yet by the very constitution 
 of the human mind we are compelled to take for 
 granted a certain amount of individual initiative and 
 self-direction. I think of the human will much as 
 I do about the mariner's compass. It is well known 
 that the needle does not always point steadily and 
 consistently to the pole; its tiny aberrations have 
 to be taken into account. But these are no real 
 hindrance to the sailing of the ship, and the compass 
 itself cannot run away. 
 
 Again, some of my friends have been pointing 
 out that, while the New Theology regards all man- 
 kind as " Being of one substance with the Father," 
 our consciousness of that being is our own. I 
 freely admit this while maintaining that there is no 
 substance but consciousness. What other kind of 
 substance can there be ? Therefore I hold that when
 
 42 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 our finite consciousness ceases to be finite there will 
 be no distinction whatever between ours and God's. 
 The distinction between finite and infinite is not 
 eternal. The being of God is a complex unity, 
 containing within itself and harmonising every form 
 of self-consciousness that can possibly exist. No 
 one need be afraid that in believing this he is as- 
 senting to the final obliteration of his own personality; 
 if such obliteration were possible, our present per- 
 sonality could possess no permanent value even 
 for God. No form of self-consciousness can ever 
 perish. It completes itself in becoming infinite, 
 but it cannot be destroyed.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE NATURE OF EVIL 
 
 The problem not insoluble. Before going on to 
 say more about human personality, especially the 
 personality of Jesus, it is requisite that we should 
 determine our atcitude toward a great question 
 which in manifold forms has beset the human in- 
 tellect ever since the dawn of history, namely, the 
 the problem of evil. It is still the fashion to declare 
 this problem insoluble, but I have the audacity 
 to believe that it is not so; mystery there may be, 
 but it is not chiefly mystery. I will even go so far 
 as to assert that the problem had been solved in 
 human thought before Christianity began. What 
 I have to say about it now is ancient thinking con- 
 firmed by present-day experience. 
 
 Evil is a negative, not a positive term. It denotes 
 the absence rather than the presence of something. 
 It is the perceived privation of good, the shadow 
 where the light ought to be. "The devil is a vac- 
 uum," as a friend of mine once remarked to the no 
 small bewilderment of a group of listeners in whose 
 imagination the devil was anything but a vacuum. 
 Evil is not an intruder in an otherwise perfect uni- 
 verse; finiteness presumes it. A thing is only seen 
 
 43
 
 44 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 to be evil when the capacity for good is present and 
 unsatisfied. Evil is not a principle at war with good. 
 Good is being and evil is not-being. When con- 
 sciousness of being seeks further expression and 
 finds itself hindered by its limitations, it becomes 
 aware of evil. 
 
 A little reflection ought to convince anyone that 
 this is the true way to look at the question of evil. 
 Instead of asking how evil came to be in the universe, 
 we should recognise that nothing finite can exist with- 
 out it. Infinity alone can know rothing of evil be- 
 cause its resources are illimitable and if I may be 
 permitted the expression every need is supplied 
 before it can be felt. Evil and good are not like 
 two armies in deadly conflict with each other for 
 the possession of the city of God. We ought not to 
 say that when one is in the other is out, but rather 
 when one is the other is not. The very word "good " 
 implies evil. One is positive and the other negative. 
 Good only emerges in our experience in contrast with 
 evil, and the ideal existence must be that in which 
 good and evil are both transcended in the life eternal, 
 when struggle and conflict are no more. In our 
 present state of existence evil is necessary in order 
 that we may know that there is such a thing as good, 
 and therefore that we may realise the true nature 
 of the life eternal. Look at that shadow on the pave- 
 ment cast by the row of houses between your vision 
 and the rising sun. Until the sun made his presence 
 felt, you did not even know there was a shadow.
 
 THE NATURE OF EVIL 45 
 
 Presently as the light giver climbs beyond and above 
 this temporary barrier you will watch the shadow 
 shrink and disappear. Where has it gone? If it 
 were an entity in itself, it would have moved off 
 somewhere else, but you are well aware that it has 
 not done so, for it never had any real existence; 
 real as it seemed, so real that you were able to give 
 it a name, it never did more than show the place that 
 needed to be filled with light. When the light came 
 the shadow was swallowed up. So it is with every 
 kind of evil, no matter what. Your perception of 
 evil is the concomitant of your expanding finite con- 
 sciousness of good. The moment you see a thing 
 to be wrong you have affirmed that you know, how- 
 ever vaguely, what is required to put it right. Even 
 when evil comes in the form of a calamity that 
 lessens and diminishes your previous experience of 
 good, as in an earthquake or a pestilence, this state- 
 ment as to its true nature is in no way invalidated. 
 It is not a thing in itself, it is only the perceived 
 privation of what you know to be good, and which 
 you know to be good because of the very presence 
 of limitation, hindrance, and imperfection. 
 
 The relation of evil and pain. But to most 
 minds evil is almost synonymous with pain, at any 
 rate in our experience it is associated with pain. 
 When men begin questioning the goodness of God 
 because of the evil of the world, they usually mean 
 the pain of the world. Perhaps their thought about 
 sin is to some extent an exception; sin and pain are
 
 46 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 not necessarily immediately associated in the theo- 
 logical mind. But what is pain ? Properly speak- 
 ing it is not in itself evil, but rather the evidence of 
 evil, and also in a different way the evidence of good. 
 Pain is life asserting itself against death, the higher 
 struggling with the lower, the true with the false, 
 the real with the unreal. When a baby cries for 
 food he does so in unconscious obedience to the 
 law of life ; a stone does not cry for food. When a 
 strong man suffers in the grip of a fell disease, the 
 life within him is fighting for expression against 
 something that seems to be extinguishing it. The 
 suffering is caused by the effort of the life to retain 
 its hold on the form, and yet if the disease succeeds 
 in breaking the form it has only released the life 
 to find expression in some higher form. When a 
 guilty man suffers the tortures of remorse, it means 
 that the truth within him is declaring itself against 
 the falsehood, although it does not follow that it will 
 immediately conquer. This is what pain is: it is 
 life pressing upon death, and death resisting life. 
 If a traveller falls asleep in the snow, or a sailor is 
 nearly drowned, the process of recovery is always 
 painful because the returning life has to overcome 
 death. Carry the same principle through the whole 
 range of human experience, physical, mental, and 
 moral, and it will indicate the real significance of all 
 the pain which has ever been endured or ever will 
 be endured by mankind. 
 Still this would not satisfy everyone who feels
 
 THE NATURE OF EVTL 47 
 
 compassion for cosmic suffering. Professor Huxley 
 has told us that there is no sadder story than the 
 story of sentient life upon this planet, and in so 
 saying he has the testimony of modern science behind 
 him. A vast amount of attention has been directed 
 to this phase of the subject within the past fifty 
 years. We seem to be more sensitive to the presence 
 of pain as well as more sympathetic than our fathers 
 were, and this tendency shows itself in a recognition 
 of the solidarity of humanity with the lower creation. 
 Theology has had practically nothing to say about 
 the suffering or even about the significance of the 
 myriad forms of life which exist below the human 
 scale. But why ought they to be ignored ? Indeed, 
 how can they be ignored? The theology that has 
 nothing to say about my clever and loyal four-footed 
 companion, with his magnanimity, his sensitive 
 spirit, and even his moral qualities, omits something 
 of considerable importance to a thorough and con- 
 sistent world- view. "Not a sparrow falleth to the 
 ground without your Father," said one who spake 
 as never man spake. I think it was Schopenhauer 
 who once remarked, "The more I see of human 
 nature the more I respect my dog." Now the 
 New Theology finds no difficulty in recognising the 
 importance of the brute creation, for it believes in a 
 practical recognition of the solidarity of all existence. 
 There is no life that is not of God, and therefore no 
 life can ever perish, whatever may become of the 
 form. If we can explain human suffering, the same
 
 45 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 explanation covers the suffering of all sub-human 
 life. 
 The true extent of the problem of pain. But 
 
 the problem is not so large as it looks. When we 
 hear of a terrible event like the Jamaica disaster, 
 we are apt to jump to the conclusion that the amount 
 of suffering in the world is specially and enormously 
 greater because of it. But that is not so. Our 
 standard of measurement is a false one. The amount 
 of pain endured depends upon the consciousness 
 enduring it and upon its capacity for looking before 
 and after. Besides we only suffer individually, 
 and therefore all the pain of the world is comprised 
 within the experience of the being who suffers most, 
 whoever that may be. We ought to estimate the 
 actual amount of cosmic suffering by the intensity 
 of the suffering borne by any one individual at any 
 one time. We are not immediately conscious of 
 all the woe of the universe; we are each of us con- 
 scious of our own, even though it may be caused by 
 sympathy with others; and the world's woe taken 
 as a whole is not greater than the amount borne by 
 him whose consciousness of it is greatest. This is 
 what we may call the intensive as contrasted with 
 the extensive observation of the problem of pain. 
 It is a kind of barometrical measurement. We do 
 not gauge the weather by adding together the figures 
 of all the storm-glasses in the world; the rise or 
 fall of the mercury in any one of them, especially 
 the best one among them, comprehends the whole.
 
 THE NATURE OF EVIL 49 
 
 Here is the problem of pain in a nutshell. The 
 whole appalling tale of cosmic suffering can be 
 compressed within the limits of the individual con- 
 sciousness which has endured the most. 
 
 The purpose of pain. Nor is there the slightest 
 need to be afraid of it. Theologians may tell us 
 that we should never have known anything about it 
 but for man's first disobedience, and humanists 
 may maintain that it is impossible to reconcile it 
 with belief in the goodness of God ; but they are both 
 wrong. There are some things impossible even to 
 omnipotence, and one of them is the realisation of 
 a love which has never known pain. If creation 
 is the self-expression of God, pain was inevitable 
 from the first. For what is the nature of God? 
 According to the Christian religion it is love. And 
 what is love? Here is another slippery word which 
 has had some contradictory connotations in the 
 course of its history. Some time ago Mr. G. Bernard 
 Shaw delivered a lecture at the City Temple on the 
 " Religion of the British Empire," in the course 
 of which he said that, if I knew as much about 
 stage-plays as he did, I should distrust the word 
 " love," for it was bound up with an amount of false 
 and gusty sentiment. He himself preferred the word 
 " life" to express what I meant by the word " love." 
 But love is too good a word to be given over to the 
 sentimentalists, although Mr. Shaw was perfectly 
 right as to the way in which it has been misused. 
 Love is life, the life eternal, the life of God. Jesus
 
 50 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 and His New Testament followers used both terms 
 as expressive of the innermost of God. The life of 
 God is such that in the presence of need it must 
 give itself just as water will run down hill; this is 
 the law of its being. Where no need exists, that is, 
 where life is infinite, love finds no expression. To 
 realise itself for what it is, sacrifice, that is self- 
 limitation, becomes necessary. Love is essentially 
 self-giving. It is the living of the individual life 
 in terms of the whole. In a finite world this cannot 
 but mean pain, but it is also self-fulfilment. " Who- 
 soever shall save his life shall lose it, but whosoever 
 will lose his life shall find it." This profound saying 
 of Jesus is older even than Jesus; it is the law of 
 God's own being, the law of love, the means to the 
 realisation of the life eternal. It is so plain and 
 simple, and withal so sublime, that we cannot but 
 see it to be true, and can do no other than bow 
 before it. The law of the universe is the law of 
 sacrifice in order to self-manifestation. In this 
 age-long process all sentient life has its part, for it 
 is of the infinite, and to the infinite it will return. 
 When, therefore, you feel compassion for the rabbit 
 which is being killed by the weasel, or the stag 
 that falls before the hounds, you can remember 
 at the same time that this is not meaningless cruelty, 
 but the operation of the same law that governs the 
 highest activities of your own soul. You are right 
 to feel the compassion; you were meant to feel it; 
 and there is good reason why you should, for the
 
 THE NATURE OF EVIL 51 
 
 suffering is real enough to awaken it. But do not 
 forget that the suffering is not quite what it appears 
 to you; it is only yours as it enters into your own 
 consciousness and you suffer along with the actual 
 victim. Compassion in such a case is the initial 
 impulse toward self-offering, the desire to take the 
 victim's place. But the suffering of the rabbit or 
 the stag is to be measured by the consciousness of 
 the rabbit or the stag, not by yours. In the slaugh- 
 ter nothing perishes but the form, the life returns 
 to the Soul of the universe. 
 
 The nature of sin. What, then, is sim ? In 
 the light of the foregoing considerations that ques- 
 tion should not be difficult to answer. Some of 
 my recent critics have been declaring that I deny 
 the existence of sin, and am teaching that as there 
 is no sin there is no need for Atonement. This 
 looks like wilful misrepresentation, for my words 
 on the subject have been clear enough and I have 
 nothing to un-say, but perhaps it would be better 
 to allow that the critics have made the mistake 
 of rushing into print without carefully examining 
 the utterances which they denounce. Let me say, 
 then, that sin is the opposite of love. All possible 
 activities of the soul are between two poles, self 
 on the one hand and the common life on the other. 
 Everything we can think or say or do is in one or 
 other of these directions; we are either living for 
 the self at the expense of the whole, or we are ful- 
 filling the self by serving the whole. Sin is there-
 
 52 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 fore selfishness. If the true life is the life which is 
 lived in terms of the whole, then the sinful life is the 
 life which is lived for self alone. No man, however 
 depraved, succeeds in living the selfish life all the 
 time; if he did he would sink below the level of the 
 brutes. Sin makes for death; love makes for life. 
 Sin is self- ward; love is All- ward. Sin is always 
 a blunder; in the long run it becomes its own pun- 
 ishment, for it is the soul imposing f etters'upon itself, 
 which fetters must be broken by the reassertion of 
 the universal life. Sin is actually a quest for life, 
 but a quest which is pursued in the wrong way. 
 The man who is living a selfish life must think, if 
 he thinks about it at all, that he can gratify himself 
 in that way, that is, he can get more abundant life. 
 But in this he is mistaken; he is trying to cut him- 
 self off from the source of life. He is like a man 
 seated on the branch of a tree and sawing it off 
 from the trunk. But when theologians talk of the 
 wrath of God against sin, and the wrong which 
 sin has inflicted upon God, they employ figures of 
 speech which are distinctly misleading. In fact, 
 they do not seem to have a clear idea as to what 
 sin really is. They use vague language about it 
 as though it were some kind of corporate offence 
 against God of which the whole race has been 
 guilty without being able to help it, and which no 
 individual can escape although he is as much to 
 blame as if he could. But sin has never injured 
 God except through man. It is the God within
 
 THE NATURE OF EVIL 53 
 
 who is injured by it rather than the God without. 
 It is time we had done with the unreal language 
 about the Judge on the great white throne, whose 
 justice must be satisfied before His mercy can 
 operate. The figure contains a truth which every- 
 one knows well enough, but it is not easy to recognise 
 it under this form. 
 
 The Fall. The theological muddle is largely 
 caused by the inability of many people to free them- 
 selves from archaic notions which have really noth- 
 ing to do with Christianity, although they have 
 been imported into it. The principal of these, in 
 relation to the question of sin, is the doctrine of 
 the Fall. This doctrine has played a mischievous 
 part in Christian thought, more especially perhaps 
 since the Reformation. In broad outline it is as 
 follows: Man was created originally innocent and 
 pure, for what reason is not quite clear, but it 
 is said to be for the glory of God, but by an act 
 of disobedience to a divine command he fell from 
 his high estate and in his fall dragged down the 
 whole creation and blighted posterity. Things 
 have been wrong ever since, and God has been angry 
 not only with the original transgressor but with all 
 his descendants. God is a God of righteousness 
 and therefore in a future world He will torture every 
 human being who dies without availing himself 
 of a certain " plan of salvation " designed to give 
 him a chance of escape. This is a queer sort of 
 righteousness ! The plan of salvation consists in
 
 54 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 sending His own Son a Son who has existed 
 eternally, which the rest of us have not to live 
 a few years on earth and go through a certain pro- 
 gramme ending with a violent death. In considera- 
 tion of this death, God undertakes to forgive His 
 erring children, who could not help being sinners, 
 and yet are just as much to blame as if they could, 
 but only on consideration that they " believe " 
 in time to flee from the wrath to come. If they 
 happen to die half a minute too late, repentance 
 will be of no avail. 
 
 Dogmatic theologians must really excuse me for 
 paraphrasing their words in this way. I know they 
 do not put the case with such irritating clearness, 
 but this is what they mean. Their forefathers 
 used to put it plainly enough. Turn up John 
 Knox's " Confession of Faith," for instance, and it 
 will be found that my statement of the case is mild- 
 ness itself compared to his; John saw no necessity 
 for mincing matters. It may be contended that no 
 orthodox theologian of any repute now believes 
 in an actual historical fall of the race. Perhaps 
 not, but theological writers go on using language 
 which implies it and so do preachers of the gospel. 
 I do not mean that they are dishonest, but they 
 cannot get their perspective right. They think 
 that by giving up belief in a historical fall of the race 
 they would have to give up a great deal more. 
 Without the Fall they do not know what to say about 
 sin, salvation, the Atonement, etc. They are mis-
 
 THE NATURE OF EVIL 55 
 
 taken in this supposition, as, I trust I have already 
 shown to some extent when discussing the question 
 of sin, and as I shall hope to show more clearly still 
 when we come to deal with the Atonement. What 
 I now wish to insist upon is that it is absolutely im- 
 possible for any intelligent man to continue to believe 
 in the Fall as it is literally understood and taught. 
 The Genesis account. It is popularly sup- 
 posed that the doctrine is derived from the book 
 of Genesis, but that is hardly the case. No 
 doubt the Genesis myth about Adam and Eve 
 in the Garden of Eden forms the background of it, 
 but it is not consonant with the doctrine itself. 
 The Genesis narrative says nothing about the ruined 
 creation or the curse upon posterity. There is no 
 hint of individual immortality, much less of heaven 
 and hell; no Christ, no cross, no future judgment, 
 no vicarious Atonement. It is a composite primi- 
 tive story. A careful examination of its constitu- 
 ents will show that more than one account of the 
 event has been drawn upon to supply materials for 
 the narrative as it now stands. The legend was 
 in existence as oral tradition ages before it became 
 literature. How old it may be we have no means 
 of knowing with certainty, but the parallel stories in 
 other Semitic religions are of great antiquity and 
 had originally no ethical significance whatever. The 
 Genesis story of the Fall exercised no influence upon 
 Old Testament religion; it is scarcely alluded to in 
 the best Old Testament writings, some of them earlier
 
 56 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 probably than the Genesis account itself. It was 
 not until after the great captivity that it showed 
 any tendency toward becoming an article of faith. 
 At the time when Jesus was born it had passed into 
 the popular Jewish religion. There is a psycho- 
 logical reason for the gradual transformation of a 
 primitive legend into a religious dogma. The Jewish 
 nation has fallen upon evil days. For generations 
 after the great captivity they had been ground under 
 the heel of a succession of foreign masters. Under 
 the cruel rule of Antiochus Epiphanes, about the 
 middle of the second century B.C., their very religion 
 seemed likely to be crushed out by merciless perse- 
 cution. It was no wonder that the serious minds 
 of the day became inclined to look upon the present 
 as being but the ruin of the past, the sorry remainder 
 of what had once been an ideal world. This ten- 
 dency showed itself in various ways, the chief of 
 which was a looking back to the great days of David 
 and Solomon as the period of Israel's brightest 
 splendour and prosperity. Of this I must say a little 
 more presently when we come to consider the genesis 
 of the idea of the kingdom of God. Another way in 
 which the same tendency showed itself was that of 
 taking the legend of the Fall more or less literally. 
 A suffering generation could hardly help thinking 
 of their woes as being the result of some primitive 
 act of transgression. This is the way in which the 
 rabbis came to speak of the Fall as being an actual 
 fact of religious and ethical importance.
 
 THE NATURE OF EVIL 57 
 
 The doctrine transferred to Christianity. A 
 
 similar set of political and social conditions carried 
 the doctrine over into Christianity, chiefly through 
 the influence of the apostle Paul who had received 
 a rabbinical training. Not only Hebrews but Greeks 
 had begun to feel that the world was decaying and 
 perhaps nearing the end. They idealised the past 
 and contrasted it with the present. All civilisation 
 lay under the dominion of Rome, and Rome herself 
 was subject to a military dictator. The heart of the 
 world-wide empire was a hotbed of corruption where 
 every form of vice took root and flourished. The 
 Greek thinkers and scholars despised their masters, 
 but their own heroic days were gone and they were 
 helpless to cast off the yoke. They had no Pericles 
 now, no Leonidas, no Miltiades. Gone were the 
 men of Thermopylae, Marathon, and Salamis. 
 These were lesser, darker days. With a sure instinct 
 men were ceasing to feel any confidence in the future 
 of this pagan civilisation. It had its great ele- 
 ments, but the signs of disruption were already 
 apparent and no one could foresee what would take 
 its place. The mood of the time is reflected in the 
 pages of Tacitus and Juvenal. Into this atmos- 
 phere came Christianity with its doctrine of the holy 
 love of God and its adoring faith in Jesus. But 
 both Judaism and Hellenism had already the ten- 
 dency to look back toward a better and happier 
 time and to think of the present as a fall from it. 
 Paul felt this like everyone else, and forthwith took
 
 58 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 some kind of a fall for granted when unfolding his 
 system of thought. It is doubtful whether he took 
 the Genesis story literally or not, and he certainly 
 made Adam the type of the unideal or earthly man 
 who had become estranged from God. He was too 
 great a man to be pinned down to mere literalism 
 in a question of this kind, so in his use of the terms 
 supplied by the rabbinical version of the legend he 
 glides easily into the statement of the obvious truth 
 that the Adam, or lower man, or earthly principle in 
 every human being, needs to be transformed by 
 the uprising of the Christ or ideal man, within the 
 soul. " For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ 
 shall all be made alive." "The first man is of the 
 earth earthy: the second man is the Lord from 
 heaven." 
 
 Here, then, we have the origins of the doctrine 
 of the Fall. Right through Christian history the 
 tendency has run to look upon the world as the ruins 
 of a divine plan marred by man's perversity and 
 self-will. It is time we got rid of it, for it has 
 had a blighting, deadening influence upon hopeful 
 endeavour for the good of the race. It is not in- 
 tegral to Christianity, for Jesus never said a word 
 about it and did not even allude to it indirectly. 
 It implies a view of the nature and dealings of God 
 with men which is unethical and untrue. Surely, 
 if God knew beforehand that the world would go 
 wrong, the blame for catastrophe was not all man's. 
 If He were so baffled and horror-stricken by the
 
 THE NATURE OF EVIL 59 
 
 results as the dogmatic theologian makes out, He 
 ought to have been more careful about the way 
 He did His work at the beginning; a world which 
 went wrong so early and so easily was anything 
 but " very good," although He pronounced it to be 
 so according to the Genesis writer. Besides, why 
 should a trivial act of transgression have sent it all 
 wrong? We take leave of our common sense when 
 we talk 
 
 Of man's first disobedience and the fruit 
 Of that forbidden tree. 
 
 To be sure Milton did not believe it himself when 
 he wrote that line, but his Puritan associates and 
 Catholic ancestors did, and orthodoxy professes to 
 do so still, though it does not know quite how to 
 put it without falling into absurdity. Again, why 
 should God feel Himself so much aggrieved by 
 Adam's peccadillo ? If it were not for the theological 
 atmosphere which surrounds the question, we should 
 see at once that it was ridiculous. Why should the 
 consequences continue through countless genera- 
 tions? Remember this was supposed to be the very 
 start of humanity's career. What a dreary, hope- 
 less outlook was left to it ! The notion is incredible, 
 and most of the clear-headed men who hold it would 
 scout it without discussion if they heard of it now for 
 the first time. As it is, however, they go on talking 
 of the " awful holiness " of God, the offence against 
 the divine majesty, and so on. But what is this 
 divine holiness? I can well remember that as a
 
 60 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 child I used to tremble at the thought of it, for some- 
 how, like a good many other people, I had been taught 
 to think of the divine holiness as synonymous with 
 merciless inflexibility. But holiness, righteousness, 
 justice, mercy, love, are but different expressions of 
 the same spiritual reality. One might go on mul- 
 tiplying these considerations for ever, but there is no 
 need to do so. Sufficient has been said to demon- 
 strate the fact that the doctrine of the Fall is an 
 absurdity from the point of view both of ethical 
 consistency and common sense. 
 
 Science and the Fall. After this it is almost 
 superfluous to point out that modern science knows 
 nothing of it and can find no trace of such a cata- 
 clysm in human history. On the contrary, it asserts 
 that there has been a gradual and unmistakable rise ; 
 the law of evolution governs human affairs just as 
 it does every other part of the cosmic process. This 
 statement is quite consistent with the admission that 
 there have been periods of retrogression as well as 
 of advance, and that the advance itself has not been 
 steady and uniform from first to last; there have 
 been long stretches of history during which humanity 
 has seemed to mark time and then a sudden out- 
 burst of intellectual activity and moral achieve- 
 ment. It could hardly be maintained, for instance, 
 that the Athens of Socrates was not superior to the 
 France of Fulk the black of Anjou, or that the As- 
 syria of Asshur-bani-pal was not quite as civilised 
 as the Germany of the ninth century A.D. Alfred
 
 THE NATURE OF EVIL 6l 
 
 Russel Wallace has shown in his popular book, 
 "The Wonderful Century," that the latter half of 
 the nineteenth century witnessed a greater advance 
 in man's power over nature than the fifteen hundred 
 years preceding it. There are some people who 
 maintain that while the material advance is unques- 
 tionable, the intellectual advance is on the whole 
 more doubtful, and that, morally speaking, human 
 nature is no different from what it ever was. But 
 I do not think any serious historian would say this. 
 Intellectually, the average man may still be inferior 
 to Plato, though even Plato did not understand 
 the need for exact thought as modern philosophers 
 do, but civilisation as a whole has produced a 
 higher level of intellectual attainment than had been 
 reached by Plato's world. A civilisation in which 
 four-fifths of the people were helots kept in ignorance 
 in order that an aristocratic few might enjoy the 
 benefits of culture was not equal to ours, great and 
 glaring as the defects of ours may be. Again, while 
 it is only too sadly true that modern civilisation con- 
 tains plenty of callous selfishness, gross injustice, 
 and abominable cruelty, it can hardly be denied that 
 these relics of our brute ancestry are universally 
 deplored, and that society recognises them to be 
 inimical to its well-being and seeks to get rid of them. 
 Thank God, as Anthony Trollope said, that bad as 
 men are to-day they are not as men were in the days 
 of the Caesars. 
 
 If the New Theology controversy had arisen a
 
 62 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 few hundred years ago, theological disputants would 
 not have wasted time in writing newspaper articles; 
 they would have met in solemn conclave and con- 
 demned the heretic to be flayed alive or hung over 
 a slow fire or treated in some similarly convincing 
 manner. Of course it is remotely possible that some 
 of them would like to do it now, but public opinion 
 would not let them; things have changed, and the 
 change is in the direction of a higher general moral- 
 ity. If any man feels pessimistic about the present, 
 let him study the past and he will feel reassured. 
 Those who maintain that society is not morally 
 better but only more sentimental, beg the question. 
 What they call sentimentalism is greater sensibility, 
 greater sympathy, a keener sense of justice. What 
 is the moral ideal but love? Every advance in 
 the direction of universal love and brotherhood is 
 a moral advance. The sternness of Stoicism or 
 Puritanism was an imperfect morality. The gran- 
 deur and impressiveness of it were due to the fact 
 that Stoics and Puritans for the most part took 
 their ideal seriously; they aimed at something high 
 and dedicated their lives to it. This dedication 
 of the life to something higher than self-interest 
 is of the very essence of true morality, and its highest 
 reach is perfect love. We are a long way from 
 that yet, although the ideal was manifested two thou- 
 sand years ago. The average man to-day is certainly 
 not nobler than the apostle Paul, nor does he see 
 more deeply into the true meaning of life than did
 
 THE NATURE OF EVIL 63 
 
 John the divine, but the general level is higher. 
 Slowly, very slowly, with every now and then a 
 depressing set-back, the race is climbing the steep 
 ascent toward the ideal of universal brotherhood. 
 
 It is sometimes maintained by thinkers who ac- 
 count themselves progressive that the law of evolu- 
 tion holds good of mankind so far as our physical 
 constitution is concerned, but that a special act of 
 creation took place as soon as the physical frame 
 was sufficiently developed to become the receptacle 
 of a higher principle, and that then, and not till 
 then, " man became a living soul." But it is im- 
 possible to square the circle in this way, and to 
 contrive to get the doctrine of the Fall in by the back 
 door, so to speak. The idea in the minds of those 
 who hold this view appears to be that the tenant 
 of the body which had been so long in preparation 
 was a simple but intelligent and morally innocent 
 personality who forthwith proceeded to do all that 
 Adam is credited with and therefore spoiled what 
 would otherwise have been a harmonious and or- 
 derly development; what we now see is not evolu- 
 tion as God meant it, but evolution perverted by 
 human wrong-headedness. But this theory con- 
 tains more difficulties than the older one it aims 
 to replace. It makes God even more incompetent 
 then the traditional view does. For untold ages, 
 apparently, He has been preparing the world for 
 the advent of humanity, only to find that the mo- 
 ment humanity enters it the whole scheme is spoiled.
 
 64 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 But we need not seriously consider this view; the 
 facts are overwhelmingly against it. The history, 
 even of the most recent civilisations, is, compara- 
 tively speaking, only as old as yesterday, whereas 
 the presence of human life on this planet is traceable 
 into the almost illimitable past. But the farther 
 we go back in our investigation of human origins 
 the less possible does it appear that the primitive 
 man of theological tradition has ever existed. The 
 Adam of the dogmatic theologian is like the economic 
 man of the older school of writers on political sci- 
 ence, the man who always wants to buy in the 
 cheapest market and sell in the dearest, and whose 
 one consistent endeavour is to seek pleasure and 
 avoid pain; he has never existed. 
 
 Divine immanence and its Fall. Besides, we 
 do not want him to exist. The Fall theory is not 
 only impossible in face of the findings of modern 
 science; it is a real hindrance to religion. So far 
 from having to give it up because science would 
 have nothing to say to it, the difficulty would be 
 to retain it and yet have anything like a rational 
 view of the relation of God and the world. It has 
 already been stated that the starting-point of the 
 New Theology is a recognition of the truth that God 
 is expressing Himself through His world. This 
 truth occupied a place in religious thought ages 
 before modern science was thought of; science 
 has confirmed it, but has not compelled us to think 
 it; if science had never existed, it would still remain
 
 THE NATURE OF EVIL 65 
 
 the only reasonable ground for an adequate ex- 
 planation of the relation of man to the universe. 
 It simplifies all our questionings and coordinates 
 all our activities. There is not a single one in the 
 whole vast range of human interests which it does 
 not cover. There is nothing which humanity can 
 do or seek to do which is not immediately dependent 
 upon it. The grandest task and the lowliest are 
 both implied in it. It declares the common basis 
 of religion and morality. Religion is the response 
 of human nature to the whole of things considered 
 as an order; morality is the living of the individual 
 life in such a way as to be and do the most for 
 humanity as a whole ; it is making the most of one's 
 self for the sake of the whole. Morality is not self- 
 immolation. To jump off London Bridge would 
 be self-immolation, but it would not be an act con- 
 ducive to the welfare of the community; it might 
 indeed be a very selfish and cowardly act. True 
 morality involves the duty of self-formation and 
 the exercise of judgment and self-discipline in order 
 that the individual life may become as great a gift 
 as possible to the common life. It will therefore 
 be seen at once that there is a vital relation between 
 morality and religion; the one implies the other 
 even though the fact may not always be recognised, 
 and both are based upon the immanence of God. 
 
 The truth beneath the doctrine of the Fall. 
 But never yet has a particular doctrine or mode 
 of stating truth held its own for any length of time
 
 66 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 in human history unless there was some genuine 
 truth beneath it, and the doctrine of the Fall is no 
 exception. It does contain a truth, a truth which 
 can be stated in a few words, and which might be 
 inferred from what has already been said about the 
 relationship of man and God. The coming of a 
 finite creation into being is itself of the nature of 
 a fall, a coming down from perfection to imperfec- 
 tion. We have seen the reason for that coming 
 down; it is that the universal life may realise its 
 own nature by attenuating or limiting its perfec- 
 tion. If I want to understand the composition of 
 the ordinary pure white ray, I take a prism and break 
 it up into its constituents. This is just what God 
 has been doing in creation. Our present conscious- 
 ness of ourselves and of the world can reasonably 
 be accounted a fall, for we came from the infinite and 
 unto the infinite perfection we shall in the end re- 
 turn. I do not mean that our present consciousness 
 of ourselves is eternal; I only assert that our true 
 being is eternally one with the being of God and 
 that to be separated from a full knowledge of that 
 truth is to have undergone a fall. But this fall 
 has no sinister antecedents; its purpose is good, 
 and there is nothing to mourn over except our own 
 slowness at getting into line with the cosmic pur- 
 pose. Another way of describing it would be to 
 call it the incarnation of God in nature and man, a 
 subject about which I must say more in another 
 chapter. This view of the meaning and significance
 
 THE NATURE OF EVIL 67 
 
 of the Fall can be traced in all great religious litera- 
 ture. Perhaps one of the best statements of it 
 that has ever been made is the one set forth by Paul 
 of Tarsus in the eighth chapter of his letter to the 
 Romans: " For I reckon that the sufferings of this 
 present time are not worthy to be compared with 
 the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the 
 earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the 
 manifestation of the sons of God. For the crea- 
 ture was made subject to vanity, not willingly, 
 but by the reason of him who hath subjected the 
 same in hope, because the creature itself also shall 
 be delivered from the bondage of corruption into 
 the glorious liberty of the children of God. For 
 we know that the whole creation groaneth and 
 travaileth in pain together until now." Passages 
 like this make it impossible to believe that Paul 
 was ever really tied down to the literal rabbinical 
 view of Adam's transgression and its consequences; 
 and these words are a clear statement of the truth 
 that the imperfection of the finite Creation is not 
 man's fault but God's will, and is a means toward 
 a great end.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 JESUS THE DIVINE MAN 
 
 The centrality of Jesus. All that has been said 
 hitherto is but a preparation for the discussion of 
 the greatest subject that at present occupies the field 
 of faith and morals, that of the personality of Jesus 
 and His significance for mankind. It has been 
 repeatedly pointed out both by friends and foes of 
 the New Theology that the ultimate question for 
 the Christian religion is that of the place occupied 
 by its Founder. Who or what was Jesus? How 
 much can we really know about Him? What 
 value does He possess for the religious conscious- 
 ness to-day? All other questions about the Chris- 
 tian religion are of minor importance compared 
 with these, and if we are prepared with an answer 
 to these we have by implication answered all the 
 rest. Christianity is in a special sense immediately 
 dependent upon its Founder. No other religion 
 has ever regarded its founder as Christians regard 
 their Master. Christianity draws its sustenance 
 from the belief that Jesus is still alive and impact- 
 ing Himself upon the world through His followers. 
 Other great religions trace their origin to the teach- 
 ing and example of some exceptional person; Chris- 
 es
 
 JESUS THE DIVINE MAN 69 
 
 tianity does the same, but with the added conviction 
 that Jesus is as much in the world as ever and that 
 His presence is realised in the mystic union between 
 Himself and those who know and love Him. If 
 this be true, it is a fact of the very highest impor- 
 tance and one which can neither be passed over nor 
 relegated to a subordinate position. Christianity 
 without Jesus is the world without the sun. If, 
 as I readily admit, the great question for religion 
 in the immediate future is that of the person of 
 Jesus, the sooner we address ourselves to it the 
 better. 
 
 Before discussing what theology has to say of Him 
 let us note in general terms what the civilised world is 
 saying, theology or no theology. I suppose the most 
 out-and-out materialist would admit that in the west- 
 em world the name of Jesus exercises an influence to 
 which no other is even remotely comparable. Perhaps 
 he would even go so far as to admit that there is no 
 name anywhere which means so much to those who 
 hear it. It is not merely that the strongest civilisa- 
 tion on earth reverences that name, but that there 
 is no other civilisation which can produce a parallel 
 to it. The nearest approach to it is that of Gautama, 
 and I think it would be generally admitted that the 
 influence even of this mighty and beautiful spirit 
 has never possessed the immediacy, intensity, and 
 personal value which distinguish that of Jesus. 
 It might be maintained with some show of reason 
 that the civilisation of Christendom, although it is
 
 7O THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 now being copied by non-Christian communities 
 such as Japan, is not necessarily the highest because 
 it happens to be the strongest, and that it is even 
 regarded with contempt by the best representatives 
 of some more ancient faiths. Still that is not quite 
 the point. The point is that the name of Jesus, 
 which stands for a moral ideal which is the very 
 negation of materialism, commands a reverence, and 
 indeed a worship, the like of which no other has ever 
 received in the history of mankind. It is no use 
 trying to place Jesus in a row along with other 
 religious masters. He is first and the rest nowhere ; 
 we have no category for Him. I am not trying to 
 prove the impossible, namely, that Christianity is 
 the only true religion and the rest are all false. We 
 shall get on better when that kind of nonsense ceases 
 to be spoken. All I am concerned to emphasise is 
 that somehow Jesus seems to sum up and focus 
 the religious ideal for mankind. His influence for 
 good is greater than that of all the masters of men put 
 together, and still goes on increasing. It is a notable 
 fact that although churches and creeds are losing 
 their hold upon the modem mind, the name of Jesus 
 is held in greater regard than ever. We have heard 
 of a meeting of workmen cheering Jesus and hissing 
 the churches. In our day most people are agreed 
 than in Jesus we have the most perfect life ever ex- 
 hibited to humanity. It is not only Christians who 
 take this view; everyone, or nearly everyone, does 
 so. Some years ago a book was published which
 
 JESUS THE DIVINE MAN 71 
 
 bore on the title-page the question, " What would 
 Jesus do ? " The book was not very well written, 
 and I do not think the writer would have claimed that 
 it contained anything original, but it had an enormous 
 sale simply because of its attempt to answer the 
 question on the covers. The most unlikely people 
 bought and read it, people who never went to church 
 and would not dream of doing so. From indications 
 such as these one is justified in asserting that our 
 western civilisation has accepted as true that, no 
 matter who Jesus was, His character represents the 
 highest standard for human attainment. In seeking 
 moral excellence the individual and the race are thus 
 moving toward an ideal already manifested in 
 history. The most effective taunt that can be levelled 
 at inconsistent Christians is that they are unlike their 
 Master. Criticisms of the character of Jesus are now 
 few in number, and usually take the form of de- 
 claring that it is impracticable or impossible, not that 
 it is undesirable or imperfect. Some, no doubt, 
 would maintain that perhaps the real Jesus did not 
 answer to the ideal which Christians have formed of 
 Him, but that is another question. Here we are 
 now face to face with the unescapable fact that the 
 greatest moral and religious force in the world is 
 embodied in the name of Jesus, and this by general 
 consent. 
 
 The Jesus of traditional theology. But what has 
 traditional Christian theology to say about Jesus? 
 Here we enter a region in which the ordinary man
 
 72 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 of the world does not live and is never likely to live, 
 but we cannot afford to ignore it. According to the 
 received theology, Jesus was and is God and man 
 in a sense in which no one else ever has been or ever 
 will be. As the shorter catechism has it, following 
 the language of the ancient creeds, " There are three 
 persons in one God, the same in substance, equal in 
 power and glory," and Jesus is the second of the 
 three. This kind of statement cannot but be confus- 
 ing to the ordinary mind of to-day if only because the 
 word " person " does not mean to us quite the same 
 thing that it meant to the framers of the ancient 
 creeds. Strange as it may seem to some of my 
 readers, I believe what the creeds say about the person 
 of Jesus, but I believe it in a way that puts no gulf 
 between Him and the rest of the human race. This, 
 I trust, will become clearer as we proceed; it seems 
 to me to be implied in any real belief concerning the 
 immanence of God. I think even the A thanasian creed 
 is a magnificent piece of work if only the churches 
 would consent to understand it in terms of the old- 
 est theology of all ! But, according to conventional 
 theology, the second person in the Trinity, who was 
 coequal and coeternal with God the Father, laid 
 aside His glory, became incarnate for our salvation, 
 was born of a virgin, lived a brief suffering life, 
 wrought many miracles, died a shameful death, 
 rose again from the tomb on the second morning after 
 He had been laid in it, and ascended into heaven in 
 full view of His wondering disciples. In fulfilment
 
 JESUS THE DIVINE MAN 73 
 
 of a promise made by Him shortly before the cruci- 
 fixion, and repeated before the ascension, He and the 
 Father conjointly sent the third person in the Trinity 
 to endue with power from on high the simple men 
 wl ose duty it now became to proclaim the gospel of 
 salvation to the world. Jesus is now on the throne of 
 His glory, but sooner or later He will come again to 
 wind up the present dispensation and to be the Judge 
 of the quick and the dead at a grand assize. 
 
 There is a sense in which all this is true, but it is 
 commonly expressed in such a way that the truth is 
 lost sight of. Literally understood it is incredible. 
 The only way to get at the truth in everyone of these 
 venerable articles of the Christian faith will be to 
 shed the husk, and that we must do without hesi- 
 tation or compromise. A more accurate historic 
 perspective would save us from the crudities so often 
 preached from the pulpits in the name of Christian 
 truth, crudities which repel so many intelligent men 
 from the benefits of public worship. There never 
 has been the slightest need for any man of thoughtful 
 mind and reverent spirit to recoil from the funda- 
 mentals of the Christian creed. Rightly understood 
 they are the fundamentals of human nature itself. 
 
 Godhead and manhood. The first in order of 
 thought is that of the Godhead of Jesus. As regards 
 this tenet I think it should be easily possible to show 
 that the most convinced adherent of the traditional 
 theology does not believe and never has believed what 
 he professes to hold. The terms with which we
 
 74 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 have to deal are Deity, divinity, and humanity. A 
 good deal of confusion exists concerning the inter- 
 relation of these three. It is supposed that humanity 
 and divinity are mutually exclusive, and that divinity 
 and Deity must necessarily mean' exactly the same 
 thing. But this is not so. It follows from the first 
 principle of the New Theology that all the three are 
 fundamentally and essentially one, but in scope and 
 extent they are different. By the Deity we mean 
 and I suppose everyone means the all-controlling 
 consciousness of the universe as well as the infinite, 
 unfathomable, and unknowable abyss of being 
 beyond. By divinity we mean the essence of the 
 nature of the immanent God, the innermost and all- 
 determining quality of that nature; we have already 
 seen that according to the Christian religion the 
 innermost quality of the divine nature is perfect love. 
 Show us perfect love and you have shown us the 
 divinest thing the universe can produce, whether it 
 knows itself to be immediately directed and controlled 
 by the infinite consciousness of Deity or whether 
 it does not. It is clear, then, that although Deity 
 and divinity are essentially one, the latter is the lesser 
 term and is dependent for its validity upon the former. 
 Humanity is a lesser term still. It stands for that 
 expression of the divine nature which we associ- 
 ate with our limited human consciousness. Strictly 
 speaking, the human and divine are two categories 
 which shade into and imply each other; humanity is 
 divinity viewed from below, divinity is humanity
 
 JESUS THE DIVINE MAN 75 
 
 viewed from above. If any human being could 
 succeed in living a life of perfect love, that is a life 
 whose energies were directed toward impersonal 
 ends, and which was lived in such a way as to be and 
 do the utmost for the whole, he would show himself 
 divine, for he would have revealed the innermost of 
 God. 
 
 Now let us apply these definitions to the person- 
 ality of Jesus. Granted that the devotion of Chris- 
 tians has been right in recognising in Him the one 
 perfect human life, that is, the one life which con- 
 sistently and from first to last was lived in terms of 
 the whole, what are we to call it except divine? 
 In a sense, of course, everything that exists is divine, 
 because the whole universe is an expression of the 
 being of God. But it can hardly be seriously con- 
 tended that a crocodile is as much an expression of 
 God as General Booth. It is wise and right, therefore, 
 to restrict the word " divine " to the kind of conscious- 
 ness which knows itself to be, and rejoices to be, the 
 expression of a love which is a consistent self-giving 
 to the universal life. " God is love; and he that 
 dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him." 
 General Booth is divine in so far as this is the govern- 
 ing principle of his life. Jesus was divine simply 
 and solely because His life was never governed by any 
 other principle. We do not need to talk of two 
 natures in Him, or to think of a mysterious dividing 
 line on one side of which He was human and on the 
 other divine. In Him humanity was divinity and
 
 76 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 divinity, humanity. Does anyone think that this 
 brings Jesus down to our level? Assuredly it does 
 not; we are far too prone to be ruled by names. To 
 the ordinary Christian this explanation of the divinity 
 of Jesus may seem equivalent to the denial of His 
 uniqueness, but it is nothing of the kind. I have 
 already devoted some little space to emphasising 
 the obvious fact that it is impossible to deny the 
 uniqueness of Jesus; history has settled that question 
 for us. If all the theologians and materialists put 
 together were to set to work to-morrow to try to show 
 that Jesus was just like other people, they would not 
 succeed, for the civilised world has already made up 
 its mind on that point, and by a right instinct 
 recognises Jesus as the unique standard of human 
 excellence. But this is not to say that we shall never 
 reach that standard too ; quite the contrary. We must 
 reach it in order to fulfil our destiny and to crown 
 and complete His work. To stop short of manifest- 
 ing the perfect love of God would be to fail of the 
 object for which we are here and to render the 
 advent of Jesus useless. Christendom already knows 
 this perfectly well, although it has not always suc- 
 ceeded in expressing it with perfect clearness. "Be- 
 loved, now are we sons of God, and it doth not yet 
 appear what we shall be, but we know that when He 
 (or rather it) shall appear, we shall be like Him." 
 In our practical religion we all, even the most re- 
 actionary of us, regard the divinity of Jesus just in 
 this way. It has no other value. We talk of imitat-
 
 JESUS THE DIVINE MAN 77 
 
 ing Him, conforming to His likeness, showing His 
 spirit, and so on. When we want a model for 
 courage, fidelity, gentleness, humility, unselfishness, 
 we promptly turn to Jesus. Even in our relations 
 with God we try to follow His lead; instinctively 
 we range ourselves with Him when we address the 
 universal Father; until we come to creed-making 
 we never think of putting Him on the God side 
 of things and ourselves on another. Catholic or 
 Protestant, orthodox or unorthodox, Unitarian or 
 Trinitarian, we all accept in practice the identity of 
 the divine and human in Jesus and potentially 
 in ourselves. But you make Him only a man ! 
 No, reader, I do not. I make Him the only Man 
 and there is a difference. We have only seen perfect 
 manhood once and that was the manhood of Jesus. 
 The rest of us have got to get there. 
 
 Jesus and Deity. This brings us to the further 
 question of the Deity of Jesus. As a matter of fact, 
 as I have already indicated, this question, too, has 
 long been settled in practice. If by the Deity of 
 Jesus is meant that He possessed the all-controlling 
 consciousness of the universe, then assuredly He was 
 not the Deity for He did not possess that conscious- 
 ness. He prayed to His Father, sometimes with 
 agony and dread; He wondered, suffered, wept, and 
 grew weary. He confessed His ignorance of some 
 things and declared Himself to have no concern with 
 others; it is even doubtful how far He was prepared 
 to receive the homage of those about Him. If there
 
 78 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 be one thing which becomes indisputable from the 
 reading of the gospel narratives it is that Jesus 
 possessed a true human consciousness, limited like 
 our own, and, like our own, subject to the ordinary 
 ills of life. Once again everybody knows this after a 
 fashion. The most determined of so-called orthodox 
 controversialists would hardly try to maintain that 
 the consciousness of Jesus was at once limited and 
 unlimited. To do so would be an impossible feat; 
 if Jesus was the Deity, He certainly was not the whole 
 of the Deity during His residence on earth, whatever 
 He may be now. But, it may be objected, in His 
 earthly life He was the Deity self-limited: "He 
 emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant," etc. 
 Quite so, but see where this statement leads. The 
 New Theology can consistently make it, but it is 
 difficult to see how that newer theology which calls 
 itself orthodoxy manages to do so. Does the self- 
 limitation of Jesus mean that the Deity was lessened 
 in any way during the incarnation ? Why, of course 
 not, we should all say; the Deity continued with 
 infinite fulness unimpaired above and beyond the 
 consciousness of Jesus. Then are we to understand 
 that this self-liniitation of Jesus meant that the eternal 
 Son, or second person in the Trinity, the Word by 
 whom the worlds were made, quitted the throne of 
 His glory and lived for thirty-three years as a Jewish 
 peasant? I think the dogmatic theologian would 
 have some hesitation in giving an unqualified affirm- 
 ative to this question, for the difficulties implied
 
 JESUS THE DIVINE MAN 79 
 
 in it are practically insurmountable. Was the full 
 consciousness of the eternal Word present in the babe 
 of Bethlehem, for instance? If not, where was it? 
 Questions like these cannot be answered on the 
 lines of the conventional Christology. The plain 
 and simple answer to all of them is to admit that the 
 Jesus of history did not possess the consciousness of 
 Deity during His life on earth. His consciousness 
 was as purely human as our own. Any special in- 
 sight which He possessed into the true relations of 
 God and man was due to the moral perfection of His 
 nature and not to His metaphysical status. He was 
 God manifest in the flesh because His life was a con- 
 sistent expression of divine love and not otherwise. 
 But He was not God manifest in the flesh in any way 
 which would cut Him off from the rest of human 
 kind. According to the received theology, Jesus 
 and Jesus only, out of all the beings who have ever 
 trodden the road which humanity has to travel, 
 existed before all ages. We live our threescore 
 years and ten and then pass on into eternity; He 
 was eternal to begin with. He comes to earth with 
 a hoary antiquity behind Him, a timeless life to look 
 back upon; we have just fluttered into existence. 
 Surely any ordinary intelligence can see that this 
 kind of theologising puts an impassable gulf at once 
 between Jesus and every other person who has ever 
 been born of an earthly mother. Certainly it does, 
 the theologian may declare, and rightly so, for that 
 gulf exists; He assumed human nature, but He was
 
 80 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 eternally divine before He did so, and we are not. 
 I do not need to refute this argument; the trend of 
 modem thought is already doing so most effectually. 
 It is a gratuitous assumption without a shred of 
 evidence to support it. Besides, unfortunately for 
 this kind of statement, the scientific investigation of 
 Christian origins, and the application of the scien- 
 tific method to the history of Christian doctrine have 
 shown us how the dogma of the Deity of Jesus grew 
 up. It was a comparatively late development in 
 Christianity, and its practical implications never 
 have been accepted, although at one time there was 
 a danger that the winsome figure of Jesus would be 
 removed altogether from the field of human interest 
 and regard. The Jesus of Michael Angelo's " Last 
 Judgment " is a terrifying figure without a trace of the 
 lowly Nazarene about Him, and yet this was the 
 Jesus of the conventional Christianity of the time. 
 It was through this dehumanising of Jesus in Chris- 
 tian thought and experience that Mariolatry arose 
 in the Roman church. Could anything be more 
 grotesque than the suggestion that the mother of 
 Jesus should need to plead with her son to be merciful 
 with frail humanity ? And yet this is what it came to ; 
 the figure of Mary was introduced in order to preserve 
 a real humanity in our relations with the Godhead. 
 All honour to those who have called us back to the 
 real Jesus, the Jesus of Galilee and Jersualem, the 
 Jesus with the prophet's fire, the Jesus who was so 
 gentle with little children and erring women, and
 
 JESUS THE DIVINE MAN 8l 
 
 yet before whom canting hypocrites and truculent 
 ecclesiastics slunk away abashed. Upon this re- 
 covered Jesus the world has now fixed its adoring 
 gaze, and it will not readily let Him go again. 
 
 Divine manhood and Unitarianism. But then, 
 someone will protest, this is sheer Unitarianism 
 after all; you do not believe in the Jesus who is the 
 object of the faith of Christendom, but in one who 
 was only a man among men; you do not think of 
 Him as very God of very God. Not so fast; we are 
 busy with names again. Most of us have a tendency 
 to think that if we can get a doctrine labelled and 
 pigeonholed, we know all about it, but we are gen- 
 erally mistaken. This is not Unitarianism, and I do 
 believe that Jesus was very God, as I have already 
 shown. We have to get rid of the dualism which will 
 insist on putting humanity and Deity into two sepa- 
 rate categories. I say it is not Unitarianism, for 
 historic Unitarianism has been just as prone to this 
 dualism as the extremest Trinitarianism has ever 
 been. Like Trinitarianism it has often tended to 
 regard humanity as on one side of a gulf and Deity 
 as on the other; it has emphasised too much the 
 transcendence of God. The sentence quoted above 
 from an orthodox Trinitarian divine about " God's 
 eternal eminence and His descent on a created 
 world " might just as well have been employed by an 
 out-and-out Unitarian. Modem Unitarianism is in 
 part the descendant of eighteenth- century Deism 
 which insisted upon the transcendence of God almost
 
 82 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 to the exclusion of His immanence; it thought of 
 God as away somewhere above the universe, watch- 
 ing it but leaving the machine pretty much to itself. 
 Unitarianism in the course of its history from the first 
 century downward has passed through a good many 
 phases. Present-day Unitarianism is preaching with 
 fervour and clearness the foundation truth of the 
 New Theology, the fundamental unity of God and 
 man. But it does not belong to it exclusively, and 
 I decline to be labelled Unitarian because I preach it 
 too. The New Theology is not a victory for Uni- 
 tarianism. If ever the English-speaking commu- 
 nities of the world should come to be united under 
 a single flag, would it be just and wise to call them 
 all Americans? No doubt some of our American 
 cousins would like to think so, but there is enough 
 of virility and solid worth on the British side of 
 the question to make that description impossible. 
 The title would be a misnomer, and in fact an ab- 
 surdity. The case in regard to the connection of the 
 New Theology with Unitarianism is not dissimilar. 
 It is only sectarian Unitarians who would try to 
 claim it for their own denomination; the best and 
 most outstanding exponents of Unitarianism would 
 not wish to do anything of the kind, for they know 
 well enough that historically speaking they have not 
 consistently stood for it any more than any other 
 denomination. The New Theology does not belong 
 to any one church but to all. For my own part I 
 would not even take the trouble to try to turn a
 
 JESUS THE DIVINE MAN 83 
 
 Roman Catholic into a Protestant. Let every man 
 stay in the church whose spiritual atmosphere and 
 modes of worship best accord with his temperament, 
 but let him recognise the deeper unity that lies below 
 the formal creeds. The old issue between Uni- 
 tarianism and Trinitarianism vanishes in the New 
 Theology; the bottom is knocked out of the con- 
 troversy. Unitarianism used to declare that Jesus 
 was man not God; Trinitarianism maintained that 
 He was God and man ; the oldest Christian thought, 
 as well as the youngest, regards Him as God in 
 man God manifest in the flesh. But here emerges 
 a great point of difference between the New The- 
 ology on the one hand and traditional orthodoxy on 
 the other. The latter would restrict the description 
 "God manifest in the flesh" to Jesus alone; the 
 New Theology would extend it in a lesser degree to all 
 humanity, and would maintain that in the end it 
 will be as true of every individual soul as ever it was 
 of Jesus. Indeed, it is this belief that gives value 
 and significance to the earthly mission of Jesus; 
 He came to show us what we potentially are. This 
 is a great and important issue, which requires to be 
 treated in a separate chapter.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE ETERNAL CHRIST 
 
 IN the course of Christian history a good deal of 
 time has been occupied in the discussion of the meta- 
 physical question of the complex unity of the divine 
 nature; and the result has been the doctrine of the 
 Trinity, a conception which, it has been claimed, 
 at once satisfies and transcends the operations of 
 the human intellect. Most non-theological modem 
 minds are, however, somewhat suspicious of the 
 doctrine of the Trinity ; it seems rather too speculative 
 and too remote from ordinary ways of thinking to 
 possess much real value. But this is quite a mistake. 
 We cannot dispense with the doctrine of the Trinity, 
 for it, or something like it, is implied in the very struc- 
 ture of the mind. It belongs to philosophy even more 
 than to religion, and to the sphere of ethics not less. 
 I daresay even the man in the street knows, quite 
 as certainly as the man in the schools, that a meta- 
 physical proposition underlies the doing of every 
 moral act, even though it may never be expressed. 
 All thinking starts with an assumption of some kind, 
 and without an assumption thought is impossible. 
 This is just as true of the strictest scientific processes 
 as it is of deductive reasoning, and indeed it is 
 
 84
 
 THE ETERNAL CHRIST 8$ 
 
 interesting to watch the way in which within recent 
 years idealistic philosophy and empirical science 
 have joined hands. Does physical science, then, 
 imply the doctrine of the Trinity? Yes, unques- 
 tionably it does, after a fashion, for it starts with 
 an assumption which takes it for granted. Perhaps 
 this would be news to Professor Ray Lankester, 
 and such as he, but I think I could convince them 
 that I am right if I had them face to face. To use 
 the mind at all we have to assume this doctrine even 
 though we may not actually formulate it. Chris- 
 tianity did not invent it; it clarified and defined it, 
 but in principle it is as old as the exercise of human 
 reason. 
 
 The basal assumption of thought. After mak- 
 ing a comprehensive assertion of this kind I suppose 
 I am bound to justify it, and I do not shrink from 
 the task. I say that all thinking starts with an 
 assumption of some kind, and exact thought requires 
 that that assumption shall be the simplest possible, 
 the irreducible minimum beneath which we cannot 
 get. Now when we start thinking about existence 
 as a whole and ourselves in particular, we are com- 
 pelled to assume the infinite, the finite, and the ac- 
 tivity of the former within the latter. In other words 
 we have to postulate God, the universe, and God's 
 operation within the universe. Look at these three 
 conceptions for a moment and it will be seen that 
 every one of them implies the rest ; they are a Trinity 
 in unity. The primordial being must be infinite,
 
 86 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 for there cannot be a finite without something still 
 beyond it. We know, too, that to our experience the 
 universe is finite; we can measure, weigh, and ana- 
 lyse it an impossible thing to do with an infinite 
 substance. And yet if we think of infinite and finite 
 as two entirely distinct and unrelated modes of 
 existence, we find ourselves in an impossible position, 
 for the infinite must be that outside of which nothing 
 exists or can exist; so of course we are compelled 
 to think of the infinite as ever active within the 
 finite, the source of change and motion, the exhaust- 
 less power which makes possible the very idea of 
 development from simplicity to complexity. If the 
 universe were complete in itself, change would not 
 occur, and a cosmic process, evolutionary or other- 
 wise, would be inconceivable. Here, then, we have 
 the basal factors of any true theology, philosophy, 
 or science. Readers of HaeckePs " Riddle of the 
 Universe " will note that that eminent materialist, 
 who professes to do away with the very idea of God, 
 takes these factors for granted; and yet I suppose 
 he would object to being told that he believes in 
 the doctrine of the Trinity. But he does, for he begins 
 by assuming infinite space filled to the farthest with 
 matter ponderable and imponderable, and forthwith 
 proceeds to weigh, measure, and divide the latter 
 as though it were finite ! Here are two terms of the 
 doctrine of the Trinity at once. We get the third 
 as soon as Professor Haeckel sets to work to explain 
 the cosmic process, for as he does so he is all the
 
 THE ETERNAL CHRIST 87 
 
 while taking for granted that the infinite is pressing 
 in and up through the finite, evolving beauty and 
 order, light and life. 
 
 The moral basis of the doctrine. But it may be 
 contended that these bare bones of the doctrine of 
 the Trinity are not the doctrine as it enters into 
 spiritual experience. I admit the fact while assert- 
 ing strongly that but for this framework of intel- 
 lectual necessity the doctrine would be unknown 
 to faith and morals. It is sometimes stated that the 
 doctrine of the Trinity was formulated in order to 
 account for Jesus, but that is only incidentally true. 
 Its framers took the materials for it over from Greek 
 thought, and even Greek thought probably in- 
 herited it from an older civilisation still, if indeed 
 there were any necessity to inherit it. I contend 
 that if we had never heard of the doctrine in con- 
 nection with Jesus, we should have to invent it now 
 hi order to account for ourselves and the wondrous 
 universe in which we live. 
 
 Unquestionably, however, it is from the point of 
 view of religion and morals that the doctrine has 
 most significance, and therefore has become indis- 
 solubly associated with the personality of Jesus ; and 
 it is easy to see how this has come about. Thinkers 
 have always been compelled to construe the universe 
 in terms of the highest known to man, namely, his 
 own moral nature. It was natural, therefore, that 
 while they thought of the universe as an expression 
 of God, they should think of it as the expression of
 
 88 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 that side of His being which can only be described 
 as the ideal or archetypal manhood. The infinite 
 being of God is utterly incomprehensible to a finite 
 mind, and in regard to it the most devout saint is as 
 much an agnostic as the most convinced materialist. 
 But we are justified in holding that whatever else 
 He may be God is essentially man, that is, He is the 
 fount of humanity. There must be one side, so to 
 speak, of the infinitely complex being of God in 
 which humanity is eternally contained and which 
 finds expression in the finite universe. Humanity 
 is not a vague term; we have already seen something 
 of what it is. We ought not to interpret it in terms 
 of the primeval savage, or even of average human 
 nature to-day, but in terms of what we have come 
 to feel is its highest expression, and that is Jesus. 
 If we think therefore of the archetypal eternal divine 
 Man, the source and sustenance of the universe, and 
 yet transcending the universe, we cannot do better 
 than think of Him in terms of Jesus; Jesus is the 
 fullest expression of that eternal divine Man on the 
 field of human history. Here, then, we have the 
 first and second factors in the doctrine of the Trinity 
 morally and spiritually construed. 
 
 The divine Man. The idea of a divine Man, 
 the emanation of the infinite, the soul of the universe, 
 the source and goal of all humanity, is ages older than 
 Christian theology. It can be traced in Babylonian 
 religious literature, for instance, at a period older 
 even than the Old Testament. It played a not unim-
 
 THE ETERNAL CHRIST 89 
 
 portant part in Greek thought, and Philo of Alexan- 
 dria, a contemporary of Jesus, works it out in some 
 detail in his religio-philosophic system, which aimed 
 to combine the wide outlook of Greek culture with 
 the high seriousness of Hebrew religion. It is a true, 
 indeed an inevitable, conception, if we hold anything 
 like a consistent view of the immanence of God in 
 His universe. With what God have we to do except 
 the God who is eternally man? This aspect of the 
 nature of God has been variously described in the 
 course of its history. It has been called the Word, 
 the Son, and, as we have seen, the second person 
 in the Trinity. For various reasons I prefer to call 
 it or rather Him the eternal Christ. I do this 
 because, for one thing, the word " Christ " is a 
 living word with a clearly marked ethical content 
 and a great religious value. Originally, of course, 
 it was but the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Mes- 
 siah, and meant the " anointed one," the person 
 chosen for a special divine work. But in the New 
 Testament, especially the writings of St. Paul, as 
 well as all Christian history through, it is associated 
 on the one hand with the personality of Jesus, and, 
 on the other, with the fontal or ideal Man who con- 
 tains and is expressed in all human kind. Accord- 
 ing to the New Testament writers, Jesus was and is 
 the Christ, but in His earthly life His consciousness 
 of the fact was limited. But, as we have come forth 
 from this fontal manhood, we too must be to some 
 extent expressions of this eternal Christ; and it is
 
 QO THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 in virtue of that fact that we stand related to Jesus, 
 and that the personality of Jesus has anything to 
 do with us. Here is where the value of our belief 
 in the interaction of the higher and the lower self 
 comes in. Fundamentally our being is already one 
 with that of the eternal Christ, and faith in Jesus 
 is faith in Him. Jesus is not one being and the 
 Christ another; the two are one, and Jesus seems to 
 have known it during His earthly ministry. He 
 lived His life in such a way as to reveal the very essence 
 of the Christ nature. He is therefore central for us, 
 and we are complete in Him. Here is the goal of 
 all moral effort Christ. Here, too, is the highest 
 reach of the religous ideal Christ. " For the life 
 was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear wit- 
 ness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was 
 with the Father, and was manifested unto us." 
 
 The Christ of St. Paul. I am persuaded that we 
 have here the key to the Christology of that great 
 thinker and preacher, the apostle Paul. It is this 
 ideal or eternal Christ who is the object of his faith 
 and devotion. He even goes so far as to warn his 
 readers not to dwell too much upon the limited earthly 
 Jesus, but upon His true being in the eternal reality : 
 " Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the 
 flesh; yea, though we have known Christ after the 
 flesh, yet now henceforth know we Him no more." 
 He does not say, "To me to live is Jesus," but, 
 "To me to live is Christ." If ever there was a 
 Christian who really loved Jesus with passionate
 
 THE ETERNAL CHRIST 9! 
 
 and whole-hearted devotion, it was the apostle 
 Paul, but he says almost nothing about the earthly 
 ministry of his Lord. He seems to have had a vivid 
 impression as to what the character of Jesus was 
 really like, and he gave himself up to the worship 
 of this with all his heart ; but he does not draw for 
 us any of the beautiful gospel pictures of the Jesus 
 in the peasant's dress who taught on the hillsides 
 of Galilee, went about doing good, was a welcome 
 guest in the home at Bethany, lived a true human 
 life, and died a shameful death. Paul always thought 
 of Him, and truly, as the Lord who came down from 
 heaven, but he does not draw a sharp line of distinc- 
 tion between Him and the rest of humanity. He 
 calls Jesus " the first-born among many brethren." 
 He speaks of the summing up of all things in Christ, 
 and of the final consummation when God shall be 
 all in all. Here is the New Theology with a ven- 
 geance. Paul requires to be rescued from the in- 
 adequate and distorting interpretations his thought 
 has received in the course of its history. He brought 
 this conception of the eternal Christ into Christianity 
 from pre-Christian thought, saw it ideally revealed 
 in Jesus, and then bade mankind respond to it and 
 realise it to be the true explanation of our own being. 
 Sometimes he appears to deviate from this view, and 
 to say things inconsistent with it, but that we need 
 not mind; he saw it, and that is enough. It forms 
 the foundation of his gospel.
 
 CHAPTER VH 
 
 THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD 
 
 Jesus all that Christian devotion has believed 
 
 Hun to be. So far we have seen that the personality 
 of Jesus is central for Christian, faith. We deny 
 nothing about Him that Christian devotion has ever 
 affirmed, but we affirm the same things of humanity 
 as a whole in a differing degree. The practical 
 dualism which regards Jesus as coming into human- 
 ity from something that beforehand was not human- 
 ity we declare to be misleading. Our view of the 
 subject does not belittle Jesus but it exalts human 
 nature. Let this be clearly understood and most of 
 the objections to it will vanish. Briefly summed up, 
 the position is as follows : Jesus was God, but so are 
 we. He was God because His life was the expression 
 of divine love; we too are one with God in so far 
 as our lives express the same thing. Jesus was not 
 God in the sense that He possessed an infinite con- 
 sciousness; no more are we. Jesus expressed fully 
 and completely, in so far as a finite consciousness 
 ever could, that aspect of the nature of God which 
 we have called the eternal Son, or Christ, or ideal 
 Man who is the Soul of the universe, and "the light 
 that lighteth every man that cometh into the world; " 
 
 92
 
 THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD 93 
 
 we are expressions of the same primordial being. 
 Fundamentally we are all one in this eternal Christ. 
 This is the most difficult statement of all to make 
 clear, for the average westerner cannot grasp it; it is 
 different from his ordinary way of looking at things. 
 The best way of demonstrating it, as I have already 
 shown, is to draw attention to the fact that Christian 
 orthodoxy has all along been affirming the mystic 
 union between Christ and the soul, and that the 
 limited earthly consciousness of Jesus did not prevent 
 Him from being really and truly God. Why should 
 we not speak in a similar way about any other human 
 consciousness? If we could only get men to do so 
 habitually and sincerely, it would be the greatest 
 gain to religion that could possibly be imagined. 
 In the third chapter I have pointed out that psy- 
 chological science is doing much to help us toward 
 this realisation. We are beginning to see, however 
 hard it may be to understand it, that our limited 
 individual consciousness is no barrier to the true 
 identification of the lesser with the larger self. What 
 Christian doctrine, therefore, has been affirming of 
 Jesus for hundreds of years past is receiving impres- 
 sive confirmation from modern science and is being 
 seen to be true of every human being that is, the 
 lesser and the larger are one, however little the earthly 
 consciousness may be able to grasp the fact. To me 
 this is a most helpful and inspiring truth, one of the 
 most important that has ever found a place hi Chris- 
 tian thought; it elucidates much that would other-
 
 94 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 wise be obscure. It enables us to see how the human 
 and divine were blended in Jesus without making 
 Him essentially different from the rest of the human 
 race; it enables us to realise our own true origin 
 and to believe in the salvability of every soul that 
 has ever come to moral consciousness. If this truth 
 will not lift a man toward the higher life, I do not 
 know one that will. It is the truth implied in all 
 redemptive effort that has ever been made, and in 
 every message that has ever gripped conscience and 
 heart; it is, as the Nicene creed has it, " the taking 
 of the manhood into God." 
 
 The preeminence of Jesus. Lest anyone should 
 think that this position involves in the slightest degree 
 the diminution of the religious value and the moral 
 preeminence of Jesus, let me say that it does the very 
 opposite. Nothing can be higher than the highest, 
 and the life of Jesus was the undimmed revelation 
 of the highest. Faith to be effective must centre on 
 a living person, and the highest objective it has ever 
 found is Jesus. He is no abstraction but a spiritual 
 reality, an ever-present friend and guide, our brother 
 and our Lord. No one will ever compete with Jesus 
 for this position in human hearts. When I speak 
 of the eternal Christ, I do not mean someone different 
 from Jesus, although I certainly do mean the basal 
 principle of all human goodness; Jesus was and is 
 that Christ, and we can only understand what the 
 Christ is because we have seen Him. Whole- 
 hearted faith in Him has proved itself to be the most
 
 THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD 95 
 
 effective means to the manifestation of our own 
 Christhood. 
 
 Jesus and the incarnation. This thought at once 
 opens up another great question to which we have 
 already alluded, that of the incarnation of this eter- 
 nal Christ or Son of God in the finite universe. 
 According to the received theology the incarnation 
 of God in human lif e was limited to the life of Jesus 
 only, and through Him to mankind. I purposely 
 say popular theology because the best Christian 
 thought has always known better. Popular theol- 
 ogy has it that Jesus, the only-begotten eternal Son 
 of God, took human flesh and a human nature, was 
 conceived by the Holy Ghost in the womb of a virgin, 
 and was born into the world in a wholly miraculous 
 way a way which stamps Him as different from all 
 that were ever born of woman before or since. It 
 seems strange that belief in the virgin birth of Jesus 
 should ever have been held to be a cardinal article 
 of the Christian faith, but it is so even to-day. There 
 is not much need to combat it, for most reputable 
 theologians have now given it up, but it is still a 
 stumbling-block to many minds. Perhaps, there- 
 fore, a brief examination of the subject may not be 
 altogether out of place. 
 
 The virgin birth not demonstrable from Scrip- 
 ture. The virgin birth of Jesus was apparently 
 unknown to the primitive church, for the earliest 
 New Testament writings make no mention of it. 
 Paul's letters do not allude to it, neither does the
 
 96 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 gospel of St. Mark. " In the fulness of time," says 
 the great apostle, " God sent forth His Son bom of a 
 woman." He was " of the seed of David according 
 to the flesh," but nowhere does Paul give us so much 
 as a hint of anything supernatural attending the mode 
 of His entry into the world. Mark does not even tell 
 us anything about the childhood of the Master; his 
 account begins with the baptism of Jesus in Jordan. 
 The fourth gospel, although written much later, 
 ignores the belief in the virgin birth, and even seems 
 to do so of set purpose as belittling and materialising 
 the truth. The supposed Old Testament prophecies 
 of the event have nothing whatever to do with it. 
 The famous passage, " Behold a virgin shall conceive 
 and bear a son, and shall call His name Immanuel," 
 is a reference to contemporary events, and the word 
 translated " virgin " simply means a young woman. 
 It is a prophecy of the birth of a prince whose work 
 it should be to put right for Judah what the reigning 
 king Ahaz had been putting wrong. The story in the 
 seventh of Isaiah is as follows : Ahaz, a rather weak 
 ruler, was greatly concerned by the news that Rezin 
 king of Syria and Pekah, king of northern Israel, 
 had formed an alliance against him and were march- 
 ing on Jerusalem. In his extremity this monarch 
 of a petty state turned toward the mighty ruler of 
 Assyria, the greatest military power in the world, 
 and asked his help against the combination. Isaiah, 
 statesman as well as prophet, saw that this was a 
 wrong move. Assyria was aspiring to universal
 
 THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD 97 
 
 dominion, and to form an alliance with the military 
 master of that mighty state would be to supply him 
 with an excuse for further interference. The policy 
 of Ahaz was therefore as suicidal as that of John 
 Balliol when he called in Edward the First to ad- 
 judicate on his claim to the crown of Scotland, or 
 the policy of Spain when she called hi Napoleon. 
 Sargon, king of Assyria, was overturning thrones in 
 all directions, profiting by the divisions and jealousies 
 of his foes. The great empires of Egypt and Baby- 
 lonia went down before him as well as the smaller 
 states. The condition of things in this ancient 
 world was just like that of Europe at the beginning 
 of the nineteenth century when the star of Napoleon 
 was in the ascendant. For Ahaz to turn for help to 
 Sargon was to court disaster in the end. Isaiah 
 saw this and went out to meet Ahaz one day " at 
 the end of the conduit of the upper pool in the high- 
 way of the fuller's field " a vivid descriptive 
 touch. The king was apparently preparing to stand 
 a siege in his capital and was making sure of the 
 water supply. Isaiah's remonstrance was in sub- 
 stance: You need not take so much trouble with 
 your preparations; Syria and Israel will have more 
 than enough to do presently to defend their own 
 borders from Sargon. Besides, men like Rezin and 
 Pekah are not men to be afraid of hi any case ; they 
 have neither strength nor skill. But do not for 
 heaven's sake call in Sargon; if you do you will 
 supply him with an excuse for meddling and we shall
 
 98 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 never get rid of him. This was good counsel, but 
 Ahaz was too short-sighted and panic-stricken to 
 take much notice of it, so in oriental fashion Isaiah 
 goes on to paint a picture of future disaster. The 
 land, he says, will soon be laid waste, and future 
 generations will rue the policy now being determined 
 upon. In the end, of course, things will come all 
 right, for God will not abandon His people. A better 
 and wiser prince shall arise who shall restore pros- 
 perity to Judah. That prince is not yet born, but 
 when he is, his name shall be called Immanuel, 
 God with us. In another place he describes him as 
 Wonderful Counsellor, Divine Hero, Father Ever- 
 lasting, Prince of Peace. " Butter and honey shall 
 he eat," because there will be nothing else left after 
 Assyria has swept over the country, but the disci- 
 pline may have good results in the end, and will serve 
 to bring Judah to her senses. 
 
 There is something strikingly modern about all 
 this, and it is a good example of the way in which 
 the same conditions arise over and over again in 
 the course of human history. It is plain to be seen 
 that the prophecy here indicated was only the shrewd 
 common sense of a wise and patriotic man who loved 
 his country and believed in God. But what on earth 
 have his words to do with the birth of Jesus ? It is 
 only by a very long stretch of the pious imagination 
 that they can be held to apply to Christianity at all. 
 They have an interest of their own, and a very con- 
 siderable interest, too, even from the point of view of
 
 THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD 99 
 
 religion; but Isaiah would have been considerably 
 astonished to be told that they would have to wait 
 seven hundred years for fulfilment. To a certain 
 extent they were fulfilled soon afterward in the 
 advent of the well-meaning but not very brilliant 
 king Hezekiah. I have dwelt upon this passage at 
 some length because it is a fair example of the way 
 in which Old Testament literature has been pressed 
 into the service of Christian dogma. What I am 
 now saying, as I need hardly point out, is not my 
 ipse dixit; expert biblical scholarship has been saying 
 it for a long time, but somehow or other its bearing 
 upon generally accepted dogmas is not popularly 
 realised. It can hardly be maintained that Chris- 
 tian preachers who know the truth about these matters 
 and refrain from stating it plainly are doing their duty 
 to their congregations. No Old Testament passage 
 whatever is directly or indirectly a prophecy of the 
 virgin birth of Jesus. To insist upon this may seem 
 to many like beating a man of straw, but if so the 
 man of straw still retains a good deal of vitality. 
 
 The virgin birth in the gospels. The only two 
 gospels in which the virgin birth is alluded to are 
 Matthew and Luke, and the nativity stories contained 
 in these are very beautiful, especially those peculiar 
 to Luke. But the two gospels are mutually con- 
 tradictory in their account of the circumstances 
 attending the miraculous birth. Each contains a 
 genealogy which professes to be that of Joseph, not 
 of Mary, and these are inconsistent with each other.
 
 100 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 What has the genealogy of Joseph got to do with the 
 birth of Jesus if Jesus were not his own son? The 
 conclusion seems probable that in the earlier ver- 
 sions of these gospels the miraculous conception 
 did not find a place, or else that two inconsistent 
 sources have been drawn upon without sufficient 
 care being taken to reconcile them. But this is 
 not the only discrepancy. Matthew gives Bethle- 
 hem as the native place of Joseph and Mary, Luke 
 says Nazareth. Matthew says not a word about the 
 census of Cyrenius as the motive for the journey to 
 Bethlehem, but leads us to suppose that the holy 
 family were already in residence there. Then 
 again he tells us of the coming of the wise men from 
 the East, their public inquiry as to the whereabouts 
 of the holy child, the jealousy of Herod, the massacre 
 of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt. Luke 
 says nothing about these things, but gives us an 
 entirely different set of wonders, including the 
 attendance of an angelic host and the annunciation 
 to the shepherds. So far from recording any mas- 
 sacre, or any hasty flight, he tells us that some time 
 after His birth the babe was taken to the Temple 
 at Jerusalem to be presented to the Lord, and that 
 afterwards He and His parents " returned into 
 Galilee to their own city Nazareth." According to 
 Matthew Nazareth was an afterthought and only 
 became the residence of the holy family after the 
 return from Egypt. These accounts do not tally, 
 and no ingenuity can reconcile them. The nativity
 
 THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD IOI 
 
 stories belong to the poetry of religion, not to his- 
 tory. To regard them as narrations of actual fact 
 is to misunderstand them. They are better than 
 that ; they take us into the region of exalted feeling 
 and give us a vision of truth too great for prosaic 
 statement. Christianity would be poorer by the 
 loss of them, but they are not indigenous to Chris- 
 tianity. They have their parallels in other religions, 
 some of them much older than the advent of Jesus. 
 The beautiful legends surrounding the infancy of 
 Gautama, for example, are startlingly similar to 
 those contained in the first and third gospels. Like 
 Jesus, the Buddhist messiah is stated to have been 
 of royal descent and was born of a virgin mother. 
 At his birth a supernatural radiance illuminated 
 the whole district, and a troop of heavenly beings 
 sang the praises of the holy child. Later on a wise 
 man, guided by special portents, recognised him as 
 the long-expected and divinely appointed light- 
 briiiger and life-giver of mankind. When but 
 a youth he was lost for a tune and was found by his 
 father in the midst of a circle of holy men, sunk in 
 rapt contemplation of the great mystery of existence. 
 The parallel between these legends and the Chris- 
 tian version of the marvels attending the birth of 
 Jesus is so close as to preclude the possibility of its 
 being altogether accidental. There must have been 
 a connection somewhere, and indeed there is no 
 need to think otherwise, for nothing is to be gained 
 or lost by admitting it.
 
 102 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 Christianity not dependent on a virgin birth. 
 But why hesitate about the question? The great- 
 ness of Jesus and the value of His revelation to 
 mankind are in no way either assisted or diminished 
 by the manner of His entry into the world. Every 
 birth is just as wonderful as a virgin birth could 
 possibly be, and just as much a direct act of God. 
 A supernatural conception bears no relation what- 
 ever to the moral and spiritual worth of the person 
 who is supposed to enter the world in this abnormal 
 way. The credibility and significance of Chris- 
 tianity are in no way affected by the doctrine of 
 the virgin birth otherwise than that the belief tends 
 to put a barrier between Jesus and the race and to 
 make Him something which cannot properly be 
 called human. Those who insist on the doctrine 
 will find themselves in danger of proving too much, 
 for, pressed to its logical conclusion, it removes 
 Jesus altogether from the category of humanity 
 in any real sense. Like many others, I used to 
 take the position that acceptance or non-acceptance 
 of the doctrine of the virgin birth was immaterial 
 because Christianity was quite independent of it, 
 but later reflection has convinced me that in point 
 of fact it operates as a hindrance to spiritual religion 
 and a real living faith in Jesus. The simple and 
 natural conclusion is that Jesus was the child of 
 Joseph and Mary and had an uneventful childhood. 
 
 The truth in the doctrine of the virgin birth. 
 And yet, as with every tenet which has held a place
 
 THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD 103 
 
 in human thought for any considerable length of 
 time, there is a great truth contained in the idea of 
 a virgin birth. It is the truth that the emergence 
 of anything great and beautiful in human character 
 and achievement is the work of the divine spirit 
 operating within human limitations. This idea 
 is very ancient, and there is no great religion which 
 does not contain it in some form or other. One 
 form of it, for example, can be discerned in the 
 Babylonian creation myth with its parallel hi the 
 book of Genesis. The home of the primitive Chal- 
 deans, the stock whence Israelites, Babylonians, 
 Assyrians, and other Semitic communities sprang, 
 was in the low-lying territory surrounding the 
 Persian gulf. During the rainy seasons these lands 
 were flooded by the overflow of the great rivers. 
 The sun of springtime, rising upon this mass of 
 waters which stretched in every direction as far as 
 the eye could see, drew forth from their bosom the 
 life and beauty of summer flowers and fruit. From 
 observation of this regularly recurring phenomenon 
 the primitive Semites constructed their creation 
 myth, one version of which appeared in the first 
 chapter of the book of Genesis, a version much later 
 than the Babylonian, but an outgrowth of the same 
 idea. They thought of a primeval waste of water 
 covering everything. As the writer of the Genesis 
 account has it: "The earth was without form and 
 void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep." 
 In the Babylonian version this primeval water was
 
 IO4 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 personified as a woman Tiamat. They thought 
 of the sun of heaven as impregnating this virgin 
 matrix with the seeds of cosmic life quite an 
 accurate conception from the modern point of view. 
 Later on this idea became spiritualised in a much 
 higher degree. The religious mind came to re- 
 gard the physical, mundane, or distinctively human 
 principle as the matrix upon which the spirit of 
 God brooded, bringing to the birth a divine idea. 
 And this is perfectly true too, as anyone can see. 
 Nothing great and noble in human experience can 
 be accounted for merely in terms of atoms and mole- 
 cules. That is where materialism always comes 
 to grief, for on its own premises it cannot account 
 for the emergence of intelligence and all the higher 
 qualities of human nature. A divine element, a 
 spiritual quickening, is required for the evolution 
 of anything Godlike hi our mundane sphere; it 
 is a virgin birth. Lower acting upon lower can 
 never produce a higher. It is the downpouring 
 and incoming of the higher to the lower which pro- 
 duces through the lower the divine manhood which 
 leaves the brute behind. This is the sense in which 
 it is true that Jesus was of divine as well as human 
 parentage. We do not account for Him merely by 
 saying that He was the son of Joseph and Mary 
 and the descendant of a long line of prophets, 
 priests, and kings; we have to recognise that His 
 true greatness came from above. 
 True of all higher human experience. The
 
 THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD IO$ 
 
 same thing holds good in a lesser degree of every- 
 thing worthy of Jesus in human experience. We 
 do not account for any man's goodness or greatness 
 by pointing to his ancestry. Heredity may account 
 for a great deal, but it is inadequate as an explana- 
 tion of genius or high moral achievement. If we 
 go back far enough, we shall find that our ancestry 
 was barbarous, and, judging from its tendencies, 
 not at all likely to produce the Christ-man of future 
 ages. Wherever the Christ-man appears, we have 
 to acknowledge that the principal factor in his 
 evolution is the incoming of the divine spirit. It 
 is only another way of stating what has already 
 been stated above, that the true man or higher self 
 is divine and eternal, integral to the being of God, 
 and that this divine manhood is gradually but surely 
 manifesting on the physical plane. The lower can- 
 not produce the higher, but the higher is shaping 
 and transforming the lower; every moral and spirit- 
 ual advance is therefore of the nature of a virgin 
 birth a quickening from above. The spiritual 
 birth described in the conversation between our 
 Lord and Nicodemus as given in the third of John 
 is, properly speaking, a virgin birth. " That which 
 is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of 
 the spirit is spirit." " Ye must be born anew," 
 or, literally, " quickened from above." Every man 
 who deliberately faces towards the highest, and 
 feels himself reenforced by the Spirit of God in so 
 doing, is quickened from above; the divinely human
 
 Io6 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 Christ is born in him, the Word has become flesh 
 and is manifested to the world. 
 
 Human history one long incarnation. If now 
 we can turn our thoughts away for a moment from 
 the individual to the race and think of humanity 
 as one being, or the expression of one being, we shall 
 read this truth on a larger scale. All human his- 
 tory represents the incarnation or manifesting of 
 the eternal Son or Christ of God. The incarnation 
 cannot be limited to one life only, however great 
 that life may be. It is quite a false idea to think of 
 Jesus and no one else as the Son of God incarnate. 
 It is easy to understand the loving reverence for 
 Jesus which would lead men to regard Him as being 
 and expressing something to which none of the rest 
 of us can ever attain, but in affirming this we ac- 
 tually rob Him of a glory He ought to receive. 
 We make Him unreal, reduce His earthly life to a 
 sort of drama, and effect a drastic distinction in 
 kind between Him and ourselves. If He came from 
 the farther side of the gulf and we only from the 
 hither; if we are humanity without divinity, and 
 He divinity that has only assumed humanity, per- 
 fect fellowship between Him and ourselves is im- 
 possible. But it is untrue to say that any such 
 distinction exists. Let us go on thinking of Jesus as 
 Christ, the very Christ of glory, but let us realise 
 that that same Christ is seeking expression through 
 every human soul. He is incarnate in the race in 
 order that by means of limitation He may manifest
 
 THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD 107 
 
 the innermost of God, the life and love eternal. 
 To say this does not dethrone Jesus; it lends sig- 
 nificance to His life and work. He is on the throne 
 and the sceptre is in His hand. We can rise toward 
 Him by trusting, loving, and serving Him; and by 
 so doing we shall demonstrate that we too are Christ 
 the eternal Son. 
 
 To think of all human life as a manifestation of 
 the eternal Son, renders it sacred. Our very struggles 
 and sufferings become full of meaning. Sin is 
 but the failure to realise it; it is being false to our- 
 selves and our divine origin; it is the centrifugal 
 tendency hi human nature just as love is the cen- 
 tripetal. There is no life, however depraved, which 
 does not occasionally emit some sign of its kinship 
 to Jesus and its eternal sonship to God. Wherever 
 you see self-sacrifice at work you see the very spirit 
 of Jesus, the spirit of the Christ incarnate. I find 
 it everywhere, and it interprets life for me as noth- 
 ing else can. Take up any work of fiction, no 
 matter what, and you will find the author instinc- 
 tively preaching this truth. Look into any common- 
 place, everyday life, no matter whose, and you will 
 find it exemplified. Many a selfish bad man has 
 one tender spot in his nature, his affection for his 
 child, and for the sake of that child he will deny 
 himself as he has never dreamed of doing for any- 
 thing else ; so far as that one influence is concerned 
 he actually reverses the principle which governs the 
 rest of his life. I have read of an African negress
 
 108 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 who on one occasion was beaten nearly to death 
 by the brute to whom she was slave and paramour. 
 Her murderer, for such he was, was arrested and 
 placed on trial for his misdemeanour, in accordance 
 with the rough justice of the white man in his deal- 
 ings with the native. In the night the poor dying 
 woman crawled painfully to the tree against which 
 the ruffian lay bound, cut his cords, and set him free. 
 It was her last act in this life; in the morning she 
 was found lying dead on the spot whence the prisoner 
 had fled. This particular story may or may not 
 be true, but the same kind of thing has been true 
 a million times in human history. What was the 
 spirit in this benighted woman of the African wilds 
 but the Christ spirit, the self-giving spirit seen with 
 such unique sublimity in the life of Jesus? 
 
 Look abroad all through the world, look back 
 upon the slow, upward progress of humanity to its 
 home in God, and you will read the story of the 
 incarnation of the eternal Son. Never has there 
 been an hour so dark but that some gleams of this 
 eternal light have pierced the murky pall of human 
 ignorance and sin; never have bitter hate and 
 fiendish cruelty gone altogether unrelieved by the 
 human tenderness and self-devotion that testify of 
 God. Indeed without the limitation, the struggle, 
 and the pain, how would this Christ spirit ever have 
 known itself ? Granted that self -surrender had never 
 been called for by the conditions of life, granted that 
 our resources had always known themselves in-
 
 THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD 109 
 
 finite, and that which is worthiest and sublimest 
 in the nature of God and man alike could never 
 have been revealed. This is why the eternal Son 
 has become incarnate; this is what we are here 
 to do, and upon the faithful doing of it depends 
 our experience of the joy that the world can neither 
 give nor take away. The life and death of Jesus 
 are the central expression and ideal embodiment 
 of this age-long process, a process the consummation 
 of which will be the glorious return and triumphant 
 ingathering of a redeemed and perfectly unified 
 humanity to God. " And when all things shall be 
 subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself 
 be subject unto him that put all things under him, 
 that God may be all in all."
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 THE ATONEMENT 
 
 I. Association of the Doctrine with Jesus 
 
 Importance of the subject. This brings us to 
 a subject, which, more than any other, with the ex- 
 ception of that of the person of Jesus, has come 
 under discussion at the present time. In the course 
 of Christian history it has created a more extensive 
 literature than probably any other doctrine. I 
 mean the subject variously known as Salvation, 
 Redemption, Atonement, and with which the terms 
 Forgiveness, Expiation, Reconciliation, Ransom, 
 Justification, Propitiation, Satisfaction, Sanctifica- 
 tion, and such like have been commonly associated. 
 The Christian doctrine of Atonement, as we may 
 call it for convenience, bulks so large in Christian 
 thought that all others may be held to be dependent 
 upon it, even that of the person of Jesus; for, 
 according to the received theology, Jesus became 
 incarnate for our redemption, and that redemption 
 can only be accomplished by one who is very 
 God. 
 
 The need for an adequate explanation. But 
 
 there is no subject upon which modem Christian 
 
 no
 
 THE ATONEMENT III 
 
 thought is less coherent than this. We are con- 
 stantly hearing the statement that a rational theory 
 of the Atonement is badly wanted, or that it is our 
 duty to preach the fact without a theory, or that 
 the Atonement is such a mystery that no theory is 
 possible and we must just accept it on faith. This 
 confession of helplessness shows that there is some- 
 thing seriously wrong with the conventional presen- 
 tation of the doctrine. But I do not think the 
 Atonement is such a very great mystery>after all, and 
 it ought to be possible to get at the heart of it with- 
 out stultifying the intellect. Anyhow, let us try. 
 
 The usual theological method of expounding it. 
 As a rule treatises on the Atonement begin with 
 an examination of the Scripture passages which are 
 supposed to have a bearing upon it. Then follows 
 a careful examination and criticism of the various 
 theories of it which have successively held the field 
 during its history; the author concludes by giving 
 us his own. I do not propose to follow that method, 
 for it does not possess a living interest for the mind 
 of to-day; the psychological should take precedence 
 of the historical. I do not feel called upon to take 
 the doctrine of Atonement for granted and then 
 proceed to try to find a place for it in Christian 
 experience. On the contrary, I prefer to take human 
 nature for granted and inquire whether it needs 
 anything like a doctrine of Atonement. If it does 
 not, let the doctrine go; if it does, let us see that 
 the doctrine is presented in a reasonable fashion.
 
 p 
 
 112 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 If it cannot be presented reasonably, it is not wanted. 
 But I think it is wanted, and more than wanted; 
 it is already taken for granted by everyone who 
 thinks seriously about life, whether it is called by 
 its theological name or not. 
 
 Outline of present-day accepted belief in regard 
 to it. Before I proceed to attempt to justify 
 these statements let me ask my readers to call to 
 mind the outline of what they have been taught 
 in reference to this great fundamental of the Chris- 
 tian faith. Part of it has already been indicated, 
 for it was hardly possible to avoid it when con- 
 sidering such a subject as that of the nature of evil 
 or the divinity of Jesus. Roughly stated it is as 
 follows: Our fallen humanity is separated from 
 and under the displeasure of God. God longs to 
 save us from our sin, but justice demands that He 
 must punish us. The world is already an unhappy 
 place because of sin, but what we endure here is 
 nothing to what we shall have to endure presently 
 when we cross the river of death; we shall all go 
 to hell, a place of never-ending torment, unless some 
 means can be found of justifying us before God ere 
 we pass over. This means has been found in the 
 self-devotion of the second person in the Trinity. 
 The sinless Son of God took upon Himself the like- 
 ness of sinful humanity, was born into this world, 
 lived here for a few years, suffered a violent death, 
 and then reascended to His Father to make unceas- 
 ing intercession for mankind. It was the dying of
 
 THE ATONEMENT 113 
 
 the death that was the all-important thing. It was 
 in consideration of this death that God agreed to 
 pardon sin. Jesus was put to death because God 
 had arranged that He should be put to death, and 
 because Jesus was willing to be put to death, in 
 order that a satisfactory offering might be made to 
 divine justice for the sins of the world. God had 
 to punish someone before he could be free to forgive 
 His erring children, and therefore with the consent 
 of Jesus He punished Him. The whole scheme 
 was prearranged in heaven, cross and all, and 
 therefore Jesus was not taken by surprise when the 
 end came; He was, in fact, a party to it, and His 
 murderers were in a sense only the instruments 
 of a beneficent, foreordained plan. God accepts 
 this sacrifice as a full and complete equivalent 
 for all that humanity deserves, but we must individu- 
 ally appropriate it by faith or it will not avail for 
 us ; we shall go to hell all the same. If on the other 
 hand we do claim the benefit of this finished work, 
 the merits of the Redeemer are imputed to us; we 
 are held to be justified before God, and are gradu- 
 ally sanctified by the Holy Spirit operating within 
 our souls and fashioning us into the moral likeness 
 of our Lord. 
 
 Conventional view both true and false. To 
 say that these statements are wholly untrue is 
 impossible, for they everyone contain a truth of 
 considerable value, but as popularly stated they are 
 misleading. This view of the Atonement is unethi-
 
 114 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 cal, and, in my judgment and that of many others, 
 has wrought a good deal of mischief in the past and 
 bewilderment in the present. Some readers of 
 these pages will no doubt find fault with me for 
 stating it so baldly, and will maintain that no front- 
 rank theologian or preacher would enunciate it in 
 these terms to-day. Once again I can only repeat 
 that they use language which implies it, and it 
 seems impossible to resist the conclusion that they 
 are driven to use the vaguer language because of 
 their own feeling that the balder statement, which 
 their predecessors made without hesitation, is 
 intellectually and morally impossible, and yet they 
 do not know what to put in its place. They are 
 reluctant to give up the belief that in some way or 
 other the death of Jesus on Calvary actually effected 
 something in the unseen by making God propitious 
 toward us and removing the barrier which pre- 
 vented Him from freely forgiving human sin. Of 
 course they add other and valuable elements in their 
 discussion of the theme, but this is their central idea 
 and they seldom get away from it. The typical 
 theologian never seems to think of looking at the 
 death of Jesus from the purely human point of 
 view, and yet surely this is the only legitimate thing 
 to do when trying to get at the heart of the subject. 
 It is what we should do in any other case of a like 
 kind ; we should never dream of doing anything else. 
 We have no business to begin speculating upon 
 transcendental questions until we have examined
 
 THE ATONEMENT 115 
 
 the purely human causes of such an event as the 
 crucifixion of Jesus. When an adherent of the 
 so-called orthodox view of the doctrine of the Atone- 
 ment is pressed to say just what he supposes the 
 death of Jesus to have effected in the mind of God 
 so as to free humanity from its curse, he usually 
 takes refuge in phrases about the " mystery of the 
 cross," and so on. He does not say in plain lan- 
 guage exactly what he means, for the truth is he 
 does not know; he only believes what he has been 
 told, and has persuaded himself that it is of the ut- 
 most value to Christian experience, which it is not 
 and never was. The doctrine as popularly held 
 is not only not true but it ought not to be true; it 
 is a serious hindrance to spiritual religion. Why 
 in the world should God require such a sacrifice 
 before feeling Himself free to forgive His erring 
 children? And why should it be regarded as in 
 any real sense a substitute for what is due from us 
 or any equivalent for what we should otherwise 
 have to bear? Once more, perhaps, the dogmatic 
 theologian will pull me up sharply and say that I 
 am misrepresenting him, but I think I am on fairly 
 safe ground in declaring that this is what the ordi- 
 nary man in the pew as well as the man in the street 
 understands by the saving work of Jesus, and he 
 does so because of the language of the pulpit backed 
 by the theological college preceptor. If this is the 
 Atonement, there is little wonder that thoughtful 
 minds will have nothing to say to it and that so 

 
 Il6 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 many good people are puzzled to know what to 
 think about it. 
 The human causes of the crucifixion of Jesus. 
 
 If the death of Jesus took place under similar 
 circumstances to-day, we should be in no doubt as 
 to what to call it. It was a barbarous and wicked 
 murder instigated by base and unscrupulous men 
 who wanted to get rid of a dangerous teacher. 
 We do not need to search far in order to find reasons 
 for the tragedy. There were reasons enough in the 
 antagonism which had long existed between Jesus 
 and the ecclesiastical rulers of Judea. Jesus held 
 and taught a certain ideal concerning human life 
 and its relation to God. At the beginning of His 
 brief public ministry He seems to have thought that 
 His invitation to men to realise their divine sonship 
 would meet with a ready response, and that therefore 
 the kingdom of God would without great difficulty 
 be established upon earth through the working of 
 the spirit of love in human hearts. At first He gained 
 an extensive hearing because the Jewish people were 
 willing and ready to listen to any teacher who would 
 hold out to them some hope of a better and happier 
 day. Consequently He was for a time extremely 
 popular, and even the Pharisees deliberated as to 
 whether He might prove to be the long-expected 
 leader who should restore the kingdom to Israel. 
 But this attitude soon changed. People and rulers 
 alike became disappointed with Jesus. They were 
 looking for a kingdom which should come by force,
 
 THE ATONEMENT 117 
 
 and Jesus for one which should come by love. 
 They wanted material benefits forthwith, while to 
 Jesus these were altogether a secondary matter. 
 Then, too, He became an inconvenience. His stand- 
 ard of rectitude was exacting. He saw through 
 the hypocrisies and villanies of many of those who 
 posed as the guides and directors of the nation, and 
 He was not silent about them. He spoke out without 
 fear or hesitation. What other people had been 
 thinking and dared not say He said without pausing 
 to consider what the consequences might be. No 
 wonder the ecclesiastics came to feel that He must 
 be silenced at any cost. It can hardly be supposed 
 that people in general were offended by His plain 
 language concerning those in high places, but 
 then they wanted Him to do something besides 
 talk. They wanted to see Him drive out the 
 Roman without delay and inaugurate the era of 
 power and plenty. Jesus saw well enough what the 
 end of all this must be. He must either temporise 
 a little, or go away and hide, or go straight on doing 
 His work until the night came and He could work 
 no more. He decided for the last-named course, 
 leaving the results to God. It was in the line of His 
 duty to go up to Jersualem for the feast of the Pass- 
 over, so to Jerusalem He went. He could hardly 
 have been under any delusion as to what awaited 
 Him there. The crowds in the capital were very 
 excited about Him; His name was on every lip, and 
 there were many who would have declared for Him
 
 Il8 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 at once if He had only offered Himself as the national 
 champion against the foreigner. But by this time 
 priests, Pharisees, and scribes understood that, in 
 their sense of the word, a national champion He 
 would never be. The crisis was reached at the 
 cleansing of the Temple. The moral greatness, the 
 tremendous impressiveness, of the personality of 
 Jesus were never more clearly demonstrated than on 
 this occasion. There was no earthly reason why 
 dove-sellers, money-changers, priests, and Temple 
 officials should be driven pell-mell out of pre- 
 cincts they had come to look upon as their own, except 
 that they were overawed by the stern majesty of 
 this wonderful Galilean. For a brief hour Jesus 
 was master of the situation; the next day He was 
 arrested. The thing had to be done secretly and 
 quickly, but those who planned it calculated rightly. 
 No sooner was Jesus made a prisoner than the popu- 
 lace turned against Him and clamoured for His 
 destruction. Those who know something of mob 
 psychology will readily understand this. Human 
 passion easily swings from adoration to hate, as 
 history has shown over and over again. If a strong 
 man fails in a conflict of forces in a time of great 
 public excitement, he is rarely allowed to sink quietly 
 into oblivion; the mob turns upon him with the 
 savagery of a wild beast. Napoleon was one day 
 driving through the streets of Paris amid cheering 
 crowds. One of his suite remarked to him that it 
 must be gratifying to see how his subjects loved him.
 
 THE ATONEMENT 1 19 
 
 "Bah !" said the Emperor, "The same rabble would 
 cheer just as madly if I were going to the guil- 
 lotine." He was right. It was just the same with 
 this Jerusalem crowd. The populace thought 
 that the Jesus who had seemed so strong was not 
 so strong after all, and therefore their base fury 
 vented itself upon Him just as priests and Pharisees 
 had foreseen. 
 
 These were the immediate causes of the death of 
 Jesus. His execution was a judicial murder done to 
 gratify sacerdotal spite and popular passion, and the 
 men who took part in it were guilty of what has proved 
 to be the blackest deed in history. The same type 
 of man exists to-day, as he has existed in every age, 
 and if Jesus came again without saying who He 
 was, history would repeat itself. I do not suppose 
 His enemies would nail Him on a wooden cross, 
 public opinion would forbid that now, thanks to 
 nineteen centuries of His gospel, but they would 
 find some means of making Him suffer, and they 
 would invoke His own name to justify them in doing 
 it. 
 
 The reason why there was no supernatural in- 
 terference. But is this all that can be said about 
 the matter? Where does God come in? Why 
 was a crime of this sort ever permitted? Why 
 has the memory of it actually become a religious 
 dogma ? Other people have been put to death quite 
 as unjustly, and the results, though great, are not 
 to be compared with those which have followed from
 
 I2O THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 the death of Jesus. Why is this? As we have al- 
 ready seen, the popular view of the doctrine of 
 Atonement presumes that this foul deed was in some 
 way, as the scripture has it, by "the determinate 
 counsel and foreknowledge of God." Was it really 
 so? Was the whole dreadful drama merely a 
 programme to be gone through in all its appointed 
 stages, ending with the cry of the victim, "It is 
 finished " ? 
 
 There is one sense, and only one, in which such 
 a deed can be said to have been by the determinate 
 counsel and foreknowledge of God, and that is that 
 God did not interfere to save Jesus from the last 
 dread ordeal. He allowed wickedness to do its 
 worst, and thereby made the disinterested nobleness 
 of the character of Jesus all the clearer. In such 
 a time as that in which Jesus lived such a life as His 
 was sure to end on a Calvary of some kind, unless He 
 ran away from it, or God supernaturally intervened 
 to save Him. Neither event happened. If Jesus 
 had shrunk from the full consequences of His actions; 
 if He had temporised, concealed Himself, tried to 
 gain time, or adopted any other subterfuge or ex- 
 pedient in order to save His life that life would 
 not have the moral power it possesses or shine with 
 such glorious lustre in the world to-day. Super- 
 natural interference would have dimmed the moral 
 beauty of the faith, courage, and perfect self-devotion 
 of Jesus. The moral worth of any act of self-sacrifice, 
 no matter on what scale it is performed, is depend-
 
 THE ATONEMENT 121 
 
 ent upon the fact that it is done without regard to 
 consequences. If we could see with absolute clearness 
 the sure and certain result of any action, if we could 
 know, as unquestionably as that two and two make 
 four, that it would always pay to do the right thing, 
 the very soul of goodness would have gone out of it. 
 It is just because we do not know, save with the 
 deeper knowledge that contradicts appearances, 
 the knowledge that is rightly termed faith, that an 
 unselfish action is in accord with the general lightness 
 of the universe, and therefore must prevail in the end, 
 that there is anything praiseworthy in it. The 
 determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God were 
 that this should be fully demonstrated in the ex- 
 perience of Jesus, as it has been in the experience of 
 many a one of His followers since. Once more there- 
 fore we come to the last word of the cosmos, manifes- 
 tation by sacrifice; and the experience of Jesus is the 
 sum and centre of it all. The reason why the name of 
 Jesus has such power in the world to-day is because 
 a perfectly noble and unselfish life was crowned by 
 a perfectly sacrificial death. Both were needed; 
 either without the other would have been incomplete. 
 Many a British soldier has died as brave a death as 
 Jesus, but none have ever lived the life of Jesus. 
 The life and death together were a perfect self- 
 offering, the offering of the unit to the whole, the 
 individual to the race, the Son to the Father, and 
 therefore the greatest manifestation of the inner- 
 most of God that has ever been made to the world.
 
 122 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 It makes the sacrifice unreal to speak of it as though 
 Jesus knew the end from the beginning and foresaw 
 every stage in the programme before He came to it. 
 He did not; He shrank from the shameful end just 
 as we should have done, and prayed to God to save 
 Him from it. An immense amount of pious nonsense 
 has been spoken and written about our Lord's 
 agony in Gethsemane. We have been told that in 
 this dreadful hour the sorrow of Jesus bore no relation 
 to his physical death, but was caused by His myste- 
 rious self -identification with all the sins of mankind, 
 past, present, and to come. To add to the horror 
 God the Father turned His face away from Him, 
 treating Him as though He were indeed the embodi- 
 ment of all the guilt of mankind, the scapegoat 
 driven into the wilderness. I have never been able 
 to read this kind of thing without an inner protest 
 against the unreality of it; it precludes the possibility 
 of understanding Jesus or entering sympathetically 
 into an experience in which to a greater or less degree 
 every noble soul has sooner or later to share with 
 Him. The only way to explain Gethsemane is to 
 approach it from the purely human point of view, 
 as we have already done with the causes which led 
 up to the crucifixion. Let us try to put ourselves 
 in the sufferer's place, a perfectly legitimate and right 
 thing to do. How would any of us have felt in the 
 circumstances of Jesus? Suppose that you had 
 laboured consistently and whole-heartedly, in season 
 and out of season, to get men to realise their divine
 
 THE ATONEMENT 123 
 
 sonship and live the life that is life indeed. Suppose 
 you had seen your hopes perish one by one, and that 
 materialism, selfishness, and hypocrisy seemed to 
 have become all the stronger for your protest. Sup- 
 pose you saw evil gathering head against you, that 
 you found yourself left utterly alone, and that even 
 God seemed to be silent in this hour of tragic failure. 
 Here are your enemies triumphant at the gate, 
 thirsting for your blood. Beyond that gate, be- 
 trayal, torture, and public shame are waiting for 
 you. In the background of all stands the cruel 
 gibbet to which your own countrymen, the people 
 you have loved with an all-absorbing love, shall 
 presently commit you. Tell me what you would pray 
 in like circumstances. Your agony would be just 
 as great as that of Jesus, though perhaps your prayer 
 would lack His magnificent faith and ungrudging 
 self-surrender. Jesus went to His death having 
 nothing to rely upon except His inner conviction that 
 God and the cause of truth were one, and that some- 
 how or other in the end that would be made plain 
 to Himself and all the world. It would have been 
 the same no matter what had been the particular 
 death that Jesus died. His murderers might have 
 taken His life in any one of a thousand ways and the 
 ultimate result would have been just as we see it 
 now. They might have hanged, drowned, or burnt 
 Him, in which case the stake or the hangman's rope 
 would have become the symbol of the world's re- 
 demption, but, after the fashion of their time, they
 
 124 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 crucified Him; it was the worst they could do, and 
 they wanted to do the worst. At Calvary perfect 
 love joined issue with perfect hate, perfect goodness 
 with perfect wickedness, and became victorious 
 by enduring the worst and remaining pure and 
 unchanged to the last. 
 
 The moral outcome. But it was not the last 
 after all; the world had still to reckon with God. 
 That life and death have become a moral force, a 
 spiritual dynamic greater than any before or since, 
 just because of the completeness of the self-offer- 
 ing that culminated on Calvary's cross. I must not 
 anticipate what I have to say about the resurrection 
 further than to remark that more came out of the 
 tomb of Jesus than ever went into it. When all 
 seemed lost this buried life arose in power in other 
 lives that up till then had never fully known its 
 divine greatness and spiritual beauty. 
 
 This is the truth about the death of Jesus, and 
 nothing needs to be added to show how great an 
 event in the dealings of God with men it must have 
 been. It was both simple and sublime. Theological 
 word-spinning only serves to obscure its true sig- 
 nificance. Show to the world the real Jesus; tell 
 men how it came about that He had to die, and they 
 cannot help but love Him.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE ATONEMENT 
 
 II. Semitic Ideas of Atonement 
 
 Atonement in history. What, then, has this death 
 to do with the Atonement? A great deal; but the 
 best way to answer the question will be to obtain 
 a clear idea as to what the Atonement really means 
 and always has meant to Christian experience, 
 notwithstanding the tortuous ways in which the 
 doctrine has been articulated. I am convinced that 
 underneath every genuine attempt to explain the 
 Atonement which has ever held the field for any 
 length of time in Christian history the same truth is 
 always to be found. It is so even with the statement 
 of it which is supposed to be orthodox to-day, but 
 which is quite modem after all, and is practically 
 discredited by all thoughtful minds. The mental 
 dialect changes from one generation to another, but 
 truth does not. As a matter of fact, statements of 
 truth are but conventional symbols at the best, 
 and possess only the ethical and emotional value 
 associated with them in our minds. This is why 
 venerable propositions which seem obscurantist to 
 
 us originally possessed vital significance to their 
 125
 
 126 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 framers; the ethical and emotional content were 
 greater than the form of statement, as they always 
 must be. Every one of my readers is no doubt 
 aware of the power possessed by some particular 
 landscape or piece of music to awaken certain emo- 
 tions in the heart or bring back the memory of certain 
 events to the mind. The same scene or song might 
 not do this for anyone else because the associations 
 are different. It is much the same with the forms 
 in which religious truth is stated from age to age. 
 The form is no more the truth than the landscape 
 is the emotion or recollection it excites ; it is only a 
 symbol for the truth. To grasp this clearly should 
 not only make us more tolerant of archaic confes- 
 sions of faith, but should help us to realise that truth 
 is one even under apparently contradictory forms of 
 statement. It is our duty in religion as in everything 
 else to endeavour to express the content of spiritual 
 experience in the forms which best accord with the 
 mental dialect of our own day. I repeat, therefore, 
 that underneath every one of the principal forms of 
 statement in which the doctrine of Atonement has 
 been presented in the past the same truth is to be 
 found. It is an interesting historical and psycho- 
 logical study to try to find out what it is. 
 
 Atonement in the Old Testament. As I have 
 already said above, it is usual for writers on 
 the Atonement to begin by taking scripture for 
 granted and presenting an examination of the prin- 
 cipal passages in which the Atonement is thought
 
 THE ATONEMENT 127 
 
 to be presumed or declared. But if what I have just 
 said be true, we have to get behind even the language 
 of scripture and ask how the writers of the Old and 
 New Testaments came to use these particular symbols 
 and what they originally meant. The word "atone- 
 ment" is not an exact translation of any one Old 
 Testament term, but connotes a group of related 
 religious ideas. In its Christian use other elements 
 enter into it from Greek thought which are not to be 
 found in the Old Testament. But the Old Testa- 
 ment source of the ideas as well as the term is much 
 older than the Greek, and therefore we are right in 
 looking to the Old Testament for the origin of the 
 doctrine which has taken such an important place 
 in Christianity. But here again modem research 
 has opened up an enormous field of investigation. 
 Israel was a member of a vast family of nations all 
 of which had sprung from one stock, and of which 
 the Babylonians and Assyrians were the most pow- 
 erful representatives. The Israelites were, politically 
 speaking, a comparatively insignificant folk sur- 
 rounded by mighty empires which had attained a 
 a high degree of civilisation. The excavations which 
 are now proceeding in oriental lands, especially the 
 territories occupied by ancient Assyria, Babylonia, 
 and Egypt, are bringing much valuable and interest- 
 ing matter to light. We find that the civilisation 
 of these peoples was much older than up to now 
 scholars have believed. The communities inhabiting 
 the land of Canaan, for example, had developed a
 
 128 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 complex political and commercial organisation long 
 before the Israelitish invasion; Canaan was in fact 
 the highway along which passed the commerce of 
 Egypt with the mighty nations to the north. The 
 painstaking efforts of expert explorers are bringing 
 vast forgotten literatures to light and reconstituting 
 for us the religious ideas and modes of life of these 
 people of the ancient world. One result of these 
 researches has been to prove that Hebrew religious 
 ideas were closely allied to those of other Semitic 
 peoples, and even the way in which they were ex- 
 pressed owed not a little to older civilisations. In 
 nothing was this more clearly the case than with the 
 ideas included afterward in the doctrine of Atone- 
 ment. The word translated Atonement in our ver- 
 sion of the Old Testament scriptures played an impor- 
 tant part in the Old Testament sacrificial system, 
 and this again was closely connected with Semitic 
 modes of worship in general. 
 
 The Day of Atonement. There was one great 
 day in the Jewish religious year called the Day of 
 Atonement, when a special ritual was gone through 
 and special offerings made to God on account of 
 the sins of the people as a whole. The ceremonial 
 was very elaborate and the occasion was observed 
 with great solemnity by the whole nation. As 
 described in the Old Testament the prescriptions 
 for this Day of Atonement, the Good Friday of the 
 Levitical system as it has been called, probably 
 owe a good deal to Babylonian influences. It
 
 THE ATONEMENT 1 29 
 
 should be remembered that the outstanding event 
 in later Jewish history was the carrying away of the 
 flower of the nation by Nebuchadnezzar into Babylon, 
 where they remained for more than two generations. 
 It is quite likely that, in spite of their exclusiveness 
 and their hatred of their conquerors, the Jews may 
 have borrowed some of their religious ritual from the 
 Babylonians, but, whether they did or not, the ideas 
 underlying their respective modes of worship were 
 much the same. Primitive religious sacrifice among 
 Semitic peoples appears to have been mainly of a 
 joyous character; worship and sacrifice went hand in 
 hand. The worshippers were accustomed to offer 
 to their gods sacrifices of everything which the vota- 
 ries themselves valued, the fruits of the earth, their 
 material possessions, their flocks and herds, the 
 prisoners they had taken in war, and occasionally 
 even the children of their own body. It was only on 
 great and solemn occasions, such as the necessity 
 for staying a pestilence, or averting defeat in war, 
 that the offering of the more terrible kinds of sacrifice 
 was made. It would be instructive, therefore, for us 
 to inquire what were the underlying ideas assumed 
 in Semitic religious sacrifice. 
 
 Underlying ideas in Semitic sacrifice, i. The 
 solidarity of man with God. In the first place 
 there was the idea of community of life between the 
 worshipper and his god. It is doubtful how far 
 this can be pressed, but it is clear that in the Semitic 
 mind there was always a conviction that the deity
 
 130 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 of the clan or tribe was the giver as well as the sus- 
 tainer of its life. This did not apply to the minor 
 divinities, the demons of wood and stream, but to the 
 tribal deities, the Chemosh of Moab, the Dagon of the 
 Philistines, the Jehovah of Israel. Probably the 
 Philistines were not Semites, but no doubt ancient 
 worship in general took for granted this community 
 of life between any particular people and their deity. 
 In the offering of the best of their possessions to 
 the god the worshippers thought they were rendering 
 to him of his own. As he was at once the giver and 
 the guardian of life, they felt bound to render him the 
 best of the fruits of life. This was a true thought, a 
 principle essential to all true spiritual life, and 
 implied in all spiritual aspiration. The reader will 
 have already seen that it is fundamental to the New 
 Theology. However crude and even repellent some 
 of its expressions may have been in ancient modes of 
 worship, it is the same truth all ages through the 
 truth that God and man are essentially one. 
 
 2. The solidarity of the individual with the com- 
 munity. A further idea underlying primitive sacri- 
 fice was that of the solidarity of the individual with 
 the community as a whole. In the Chaldean tribes 
 out of which Israel arose personality as we know it 
 had not even emerged. Readers of the Old Testa- 
 ment will not need to be reminded that in the earlier 
 stages of Israel's existence as a people the whole 
 nation was repeatedly said to be punished for the 
 behaviour of individuals, and families perished for
 
 THE ATONEMENT 131 
 
 the transgression of a father, as in the case of Achan. 
 No particular attention was ever paid to the individ- 
 ual as such. A man had no life of his own, and no 
 value, apart from the life of the community. He 
 belonged to it, not to himself. Hence, when any 
 communal act of worship was performed, when any 
 tribal sacrifice was made to the deity, the organic 
 unity of the individual with the whole was specially 
 emphasised. Physically and spiritually the unit was 
 held to belong to the whole, and to exist for the sake 
 of the whole. Here again we have a great truth, the 
 foundation truth of all morality, and a truth which 
 reaches its highest in the life of Jesus. The deepen- 
 ing of individual self -consciousness, and the increased 
 perception of individual value, have neither weakened 
 nor destroyed it, for it is written in the very consti- 
 tution of the universe. Mankind is fundamentally 
 one; here is morality. We are individually fulfilled 
 in God; here is religion. These are the cognate 
 ideas underlying all modes of sacrificial worship, 
 ancient or modem. These are the ideas which find 
 elaborate ceremonial expression in the Israelitish 
 Day of Atonement as described in the Old Testa- 
 ment. The main purpose of these observances 
 was the desire to assert as solemnly and emphatically 
 as possible the essential oneness of the community 
 with God, and of every individual with all the rest. 
 Everything which tended to separate between 
 Israel and her God was ceremonially put away on 
 this great occasion. From the religious point of
 
 132 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 view it was the beginning of a new year. The 
 Babylonian new year began about the same time. 
 It was supposed that a man's good or evil fortune 
 was appointed on new year's day and settled past all 
 possibility of revision on the tenth day after. The 
 intervening nine days were therefore kept as a sort 
 of Lenten season; the tenth day was the grand 
 occasion for the making sure of the harmonious 
 relations of the community with the deity. It will 
 be seen, therefore, that psychologically the idea of 
 Atonement takes precedence of the idea of sin. 
 Most westerners are accustomed to think exactly 
 the reverse, and that is why the various theories 
 of Atonement which have appeared and disappeared 
 in the course of Christian history have so generally 
 obscured the truth. The root principle of Atone- 
 ment is not that of escaping punishment for trans- 
 gression, but the assertion of the fundamental 
 oneness of God and man. This may or may not 
 be accompanied by feelings of guilt and contrition, 
 but it is the very marrow of religion. Atonement 
 implies the acting-together of God and man, the 
 subordination of the individual will to the universal 
 will, the fulfilment of the unit in the whole. 
 
 Sense of sin not originally essential to atone- 
 ment. It ought to be recognised that in Semitic 
 modes of worship the idea of sin did not originally 
 hold the place it has since come to hold in the Chris- 
 tian consciousness. The Babylonian and the early 
 Israelite were greatly afraid of offending God, but
 
 THE ATONEMENT 133 
 
 they do not seem to have thought of such a transgres- 
 sion as being morally culpable. The profound sense 
 of sin which characterises so many of the psalms 
 and prophetic writings of the Old Testament was a 
 comparatively late development. The primitive 
 Semites had a markedly anthropomorphic idea of 
 their deities. They thought of any divine being as 
 more or less like an ordinary man and liable to take 
 umbrage at little things. It was even possible to 
 offend him without knowing it, and therefore to be 
 left without protection against the ills of life. It was 
 to make sure of smoothing away all possible mis- 
 understandings that covering sacrifices were offered 
 from time to time ; but the offering of these sacrifices 
 did not necessarily mean that the worshipper thought 
 he had done anything to be ashamed of and which 
 required to be put right. He was simply treating his 
 god as he would have treated a powerful earthly 
 patron or potentate, that is, he was apologising for 
 anything he might have done to alienate his favour. 
 This notion of the necessity for placating God is to be 
 found in close association with the worthier spiritual 
 instincts to which I have already referred, and it has 
 not even yet disappeared from our thinking. Un- 
 biassed readers of the Old Testament will find abun- 
 dant justification for this statement. We are told 
 repeatedly therein that the anger of the Lord was 
 kindled against Israel or against this or that indi- 
 vidual, and that the whole community had in con- 
 sequence to humble itself before Him in order to
 
 134 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 avert plague, or pestilence, or some other form of 
 general calamity. Not only was Jehovah thought 
 of as a kind of larger man who was at once protector 
 and tyrant to his people, he was but the God of 
 Israel in contradistinction to the gods of other na- 
 tions, one God out of many. It was only gradually, 
 and after the lapse of ages, that Israelites came to 
 think of their God as the God of the whole earth and 
 a being who must be worshipped in righteousness. 
 Irsael was fortunate in possessing what other nations 
 had not in the same degree, a succession of specially 
 inspired men, teachers of moral and spiritual truth 
 called prophets. The best of these for no doubt 
 the generality of them spoke only the language of 
 their time earnestly protested against material 
 ideas of sacrifice and inadequate notions about God. 
 They declared that God and the moral ideal were one 
 and that the best way to serve the former was to be 
 true to the latter. True sacrifice, they maintained, 
 was of a spiritual kind and ought never to be thought 
 about in any other sense. Thus in the fifty-first 
 psalm the writer, one of the prophetic school, thus 
 contrasts mere ceremonialism with spiritual worship : 
 
 Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it; Thou 
 delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God 
 are a broken spirit. A broken and a contrite heart, O 
 God, Thou wilt not despise." 
 
 Or take the prophet Micah, chapter vi., verse 6. 
 Here is a reference to human sacrifice, to which the
 
 THE ATONEMENT 135 
 
 Israelites were prone from time to time, following 
 the example of their neighbours : 
 
 Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow my- 
 self before the Most High God ? shall I come before Him 
 with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old ? Will the 
 Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thou- 
 sands of rivers of oil ? shall I give my firstborn for my 
 transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ? 
 
 And the answer of the prophet is: 
 
 He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and 
 what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and 
 to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? 
 
 Here we have a declaration in unmistakable terms 
 that the moral ideal and the religious ideal are one, 
 and that to worship God properly the worshipper 
 must treat his fellow-men properly. We now get 
 the idea that sin against God is not something into 
 which a man may fall without knowing it, but the 
 living of a selfish life. 
 
 Atonement never an equivalent for penalty. 
 We ought to recognise too that the sacrifices of the 
 Day of Atonement were never held to secure a com- 
 plete amnesty for all kinds of sin. If a man com- 
 mitted theft or murder, he had to bear the appro- 
 priate penalty of his misdemeanour because he had 
 been guilty of an action directed against the well- 
 being of the community and the community had to 
 take measures to protect itself; the Day of Atone- 
 ment availed nothing hi such a case. Here is where
 
 136 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 many who see in the Old Testament sacrificial 
 system a type and anticipation of the one perfect 
 sacrifice of Jesus frequently go wide of the facts. 
 The Day of Atonement was a ceremonial and sym- 
 bolical assertion of the willingness of the individual 
 and the nation to fulfil their true destiny by being 
 at one with God. If some particular man had been 
 so living as to cut himself off from the communal 
 well-being, he had to suffer. 
 
 The significance of the blood. Many people seem 
 to think that some actual saving efficacy was sup- 
 posed to attach to the shedding of the blood of the 
 victims offered on the altar of sacrifice, but that never 
 was so. No doubt in the ignorant popular mind 
 material sacrifices came to be looked upon as pos- 
 sessing some virtue in themselves, but the intelli- 
 gence of the nation never regarded them in this way. 
 In the offering of a victim the worshipper symboli- 
 cally offered himself. The Semites thought that the 
 life of any organism was in the blood. Thus in 
 Numbers we read, "The life of the flesh is in the 
 blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar 
 to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood 
 that maketh atonement by reason of the soul (or 
 life)." When, therefore, a man offered the blood of 
 a victim upon the altar, he was symbolically declaring 
 his recognition of the truth that the individual life 
 belongs to the whole and must give or pour itself 
 out to the common life and to God the source of all. 
 Only in this way could individuality realise itself;
 
 THE ATONEMENT 137 
 
 apart from the whole it was meaningless and value- 
 less. 
 
 The truth beneath all sacrifice, however barbarous. 
 This helps us to see how, even underneath the most 
 horrible and repellent modes of ancient religious 
 sacrifice, there was something essentially great and 
 noble. When a heathen mother passed her child 
 through the fire to Moloch, did the sacrifice cost her 
 nothing? To be sure it did. It must have been 
 much harder to give her baby than to give herself. 
 She did it because she had been taught to believe 
 that to give one's best and dearest possession for 
 the life of the whole was an action acceptable to 
 God and worthy of our relationship to Him. We 
 have deepened and purified that ideal, but we have 
 not lost it ; we never can. As time went on men came 
 to see that there was a higher way of giving the self 
 to the whole than that of immolating a physical life, 
 and a better way of symbolising that offering than by 
 shedding the blood of bulls and goats; but the 
 essential truth beneath all the intricate sacrificial 
 systems of ancient Israel and her neighbours is one 
 that can never perish. 
 
 To sum up. Atonement is the assertion of the 
 fundamental unity of all existence, the unity of the 
 individual with the race and the race with God. 
 The individual can only realise that unity by sac- 
 rificing himself to it. To fulfil the self we must give 
 the self to the All. This is the truth presumed in all 
 ancient ideas of Atonement. The idea of placating
 
 138 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 a manlike God for offences committed against his 
 dignity has been a concomitant of this perception, 
 even a hindrance to it, but it has never wholly ob- 
 scured the truth itself. That truth is constant 
 and essential to all religion and morality, and is the 
 coordinating principle to all between them.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE ATONEMENT 
 
 III. The Doctrine in Christian History and 
 Experience 
 
 Antiquity of the essential truth. From what has 
 now been said it will, I hope, be clear that the 
 roots of the Christian doctrine of Atonement lie far 
 back in history, especially Semitic history mediated 
 through the Old Testament, and that its fundamental 
 truth is one with which the world can never dis- 
 pense; it is both simple and sublime. Nothing 
 worth doing in human history has ever been done 
 apart from it or ever will be. It is no paradox to 
 say that even a morally earnest agnostic believes 
 in the Atonement; at any rate he believes in the all- 
 essential truth without which there would never have 
 been such a thing as a doctrine of Atonement. 
 
 No consistent theory hi the New Testament. 
 But now we come to the consideration of this truth 
 as it has passed over into Christianity. I do not 
 propose to give an accurate and exhaustive analysis 
 of the principal things that have been said about it, 
 from the writings of St. Paul downwards; that would 
 only be wearisome to my readers and lead to no 
 139
 
 140 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 particular result. But if I have succeeded in making 
 clear the psychological necessity for the existence of 
 the idea of Atonement, it will serve us as a guiding 
 principle when we come to consider it in relation to 
 the sacrifice of Jesus. Many exegetes have under- 
 taken to show that the various New Testament 
 writers held one and the same theory of the relation 
 of the death of Jesus to the forgiveness of sins; 
 never was a task more hopeless. The Pauline, 
 Petrine, and Johannine theories, and that of the 
 writer of the epistle to the Hebrews, are not mutually 
 consistent, and Paul is not always consistent with 
 himself. The principal thing they have in common 
 is their belief that the death of Jesus was of vital 
 efficacy in the doing away of sin. The symbolism 
 in which they set forth this truth is borrowed mainly 
 from the Old Testament, and we have already seen 
 what underlay that symbolism even in its earliest 
 use. Old Testament language about sacrifice sup- 
 plies the mental dialect of the New, and now that 
 we have the key to it we need neither be puzzled 
 nor misled by it. Beneath all that the New Testa- 
 ment writers have to say about the death of Jesus 
 there is the same grand old spiritual truth of Atone- 
 ment which makes religion possible. Before we 
 resume our examination of the connection between 
 the death of Jesus and the doing away of sin, let us 
 look for a moment at what post-apostolic thought has 
 had to say about it. 
 The Fathers. From the beginning of the second
 
 THE ATONEMENT 141 
 
 century onwards the Fathers of the church and their 
 theological successors attempted a variety of explana- 
 tions of the way in which the death of Jesus achieved 
 potentially the redemption of mankind. It is not 
 easy to say just when one period of Christian thought 
 closes and another begins; but, broadly speaking, 
 we can for convenience classify them into the period 
 of the Fathers, the mediaeval period, the Reformation 
 and afterwards up to the eighteenth century, and 
 the period of modem thought. The Fathers may 
 be divided into two groups, the ante-Nicene and the 
 post-Nicene writers, and also into the Greek and 
 Latin Fathers. But as I am not writing for theo- 
 logical students, I will not attempt any further 
 analysis of the various patristic schools. Those 
 who wrote previous to 325 A.D. belong to the ante- 
 Nicene group; those who wrote after that date, to the 
 post-Nicene group. The ante-Nicene writers, gen- 
 erally speaking, avoid giving any theory of the atone- 
 ment at all; but two of their greatest thinkers, 
 Origen and Irenaeus, held that mankind had fallen 
 under the dominion of Satan, and that Jesus by 
 His sufferings paid a ransom to Satan in order that 
 we might be freed from his power. Post-Nicene 
 Fathers for the most part adopted this view without 
 attempting to justify it. Amongst their statements 
 we find the ideas that the Atonement was a ransom 
 to Satan and also a sacrifice to God, but they offer 
 no explanation of the necessity of either. Later 
 on Augustine anticipated subsequent Christian
 
 142 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 thought by maintaining that the atoning work of 
 Jesus was part of an eternal purpose. 
 
 Anselm and after. The scholasticism of the 
 Middle Ages finds its first important expression in the 
 illustrious Anselm, an acute thinker and a beautiful 
 soul. Anselm rejected the idea of a ransom to 
 Satan, declaring that Satan had no rights over 
 humanity; in place of this notion he put forward the 
 theory that Jesus made to God an infinite satis- 
 faction for an infinite debt. According to this theory 
 the majesty of God had suffered indignity because 
 of human sin, and yet man was unable by himself 
 to offer an adequate satisfaction for the offence. 
 Hence the eternal Son of God became man in order 
 that He might offer the only satisfaction that could 
 be considered adequate. This theory did not go 
 unchallenged. Abelard, for example, asked the very 
 reasonable question how the guilt of mankind could 
 be atoned for by the greater guilt of those who put 
 Jesus to death. Abelard's famous opponent, Ber- 
 nard of Clairvaux, also repudiated Anselm's main 
 contention and fell back upon the theory of a satis- 
 faction to Satan. 
 
 Reformation theories. At the time of the Refor- 
 mation the question of the Atonement formed the 
 subject of considerable controversy, and, on the 
 whole, the Reformers were less reasonable than the 
 Catholics, as is the case to some extent even to-day. 
 The Roman Catholic doctrine of Atonement is 
 much nearer to the truth than conventional Protes-
 
 THE ATONEMENT 143 
 
 tant statements about the "finished work" and so 
 on. One considerable section of sixteenth-century 
 Protestantism held and taught the doctrine of the 
 total depravity of human nature, and insisted on the 
 idea that Jesus bore the actual penal sufferings of 
 sinners. Calvinists held that these sufferings had 
 value for the elect only. Against these views So- 
 cinianism arose as a protest, but tended to reduce 
 the Passion of Jesus to a sort of drama enacted by 
 God in the presence of humanity in order to excite 
 men's contrition and win their love. 
 
 The modern lack of a theory. Modem evangelical 
 thought has done very little with all these theories 
 except to make them impossible ; it has no consistent 
 and reasonable explanation to put in their place. 
 The popular kind of evangelical phraseology is that 
 which continues to represent Jesus as having borne 
 the punishment due to human sin; salvation is 
 spoken of as though it meant deliverance from the 
 post-mortem consequences of misdoing. 
 
 More about sin. In all these theories it is evident 
 that the death of Jesus is closely connected with the 
 forgiveness of sin and that the forgiveness of sin is 
 the vital element in the Atonement. In order to 
 understand the truth about this let us return to what 
 has already been said on the subject of sin and pursue 
 it a little farther. I have already pointed out that 
 sin is selfishness pure and simple, and that that defi- 
 nition will cover all its manifestations. There is no 
 sin that is not selfishness, there in no selfishness that
 
 144 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 is not sin. All possible activities of the soul are 
 between selfishness on the one hand and love on the 
 other. If people would only accept this simple ex- 
 planation of a great subject, it would get rid of most 
 of the confusion of thought that exists in regard to it. 
 The life of love is the life lived for impersonal ends; 
 the sinful life is the life lived for self alone. The life 
 of love is the life which does the best with the self 
 for the sake of the whole; the sinful life is the life 
 which is lived for the self at the expense of the whole. 
 The desire for gratification at some one else's cost, 
 or at the cost of the common life, is the root principle 
 of sin. Sin against God is simply an offence against 
 the common life ; it is attempting to draw away from 
 instead of ministering to the common good. The 
 sinful man thinks it will pay him to be selfish; his 
 impulse is to suppose that he can gain more happiness, 
 can drink more deeply of the cup of life, by doing it 
 at the expense of other people. We all do it more 
 or less, and yet the world might have learned by 
 this time that selfishness does not pay ; the thoroughly 
 selfish man is an unhappy man, for he has not drawn 
 upon the source of abiding joy. Like love, self- 
 ishness is a guest for life, but whereas love obtains 
 more abundant life by freely giving itself, sin loses 
 hold on life by trying to grab and keep it. Every 
 man is seeking life and seeking it in one or other 
 of these opposite ways; he is either fulfilling the 
 self by serving the whole, or he is trying to feed the 
 self by robbing the whole. But life is God, and
 
 THE ATONEMENT 145 
 
 there is no life which is not God. God is the life 
 all-abundant, the life infinite and eternal, the life 
 that never grows old, the life that is joy. Every 
 man, consciously or subconsciously, wants that life; 
 he is wanting it all the time. Why does the man of 
 business spend so many hours in his office in the 
 effort to make money? It is because money repre- 
 sents power, power that can purchase " more life 
 and fuller." Probably he does not want it all for 
 himself ; he works for love of his family or love of 
 the community, and his desire to serve them makes 
 his work gladder, so that already he has more abun- 
 dant life than he would otherwise possess. Analyse 
 human action, no matter what, and it will be seen 
 to point in one or other of these two directions, self- 
 ward or all-ward. If the former, it will shrivel the 
 soul, it makes for death ; if the latter, it will expand 
 the soul, it makes for life. This is a spiritual law 
 which knows no exception; hi the long run the loving 
 deed brings larger life and joy, the selfish deed 
 brings pain and darkness. " Be not deceived, God 
 is not mocked; whatsoever a man soweth that shall 
 he also reap. He that soweth to the flesh shall of 
 the flesh reap corruption, but he that soweth to the 
 spirit shall of the spirit reap eternal life." 
 
 It is evident from the foregoing that even the sin- 
 ful life is a quest for God, although it does not know 
 itself to be such, for hi seeking life saint and sinner 
 alike are seeking God, the all-embracing life. And 
 the sinner must learn that to seek life selfishly is to
 
 146 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 lose it; to seek it unselfishly is both to gain and to 
 give it. The good man and the bad man are seek- 
 ing the same thing in opposite ways. 
 
 During the recent New Theology controversy 
 the editor of the British Weekly, in the course of an 
 attack upon my teaching, printed a number of ex- 
 tracts from my sermons in order to convince his 
 readers that that teaching was objectionable and 
 false. In every case the extract was carefully re- 
 moved from its context and therefore conveyed 
 quite a misleading impression to the mind of the 
 reader. One of these extracts was from a sermon 
 on "More Abundant Life," preached in the City 
 Temple on Sunday morning, March 18, 1906. As 
 this extract has been widely circulated, perhaps I 
 may be pardoned for giving it here along with the 
 context. All that the editor chose to print was a 
 part of the paragraph in which sin was described as 
 a quest for God, and yet he must have known per- 
 fectly well that to take that paragraph out of its 
 setting was to do an injustice both to the preacher 
 and to the subject. 
 
 Observe the sharp antithesis between the " thief or 
 the robber" on the one hand, and the "Good Shepherd" 
 on the other. These two stand for two opposing ten- 
 dencies that have run through all nature and all human 
 life. All nature through, all history through, two con- 
 flicting tendencies have been discernible. These are 
 ever at war, and they ever will be until the whole world 
 has been subdued to Christ, and is filled with the fulness
 
 THE ATONEMENT 147 
 
 of the life of God. These two tendencies we may de- 
 scribe as the deathward and the lifeward respectively. 
 The words are not very satisfactory because the death- 
 ward tendency masquerades as the lifeward tendency, 
 and the lifeward tendency, before fruition, looks like 
 the deathward one. In nature, as Romans viii. tells 
 us, "We know that the whole creation groaneth and 
 travaileth in pain together until now." Nature is cruel, 
 "red in tooth and claw." The deathward tendency is 
 what I may call the selfward tendency in the upward 
 struggle of all organic forms, that is, one organism 
 only exists at the expense of other organisms. Yet at 
 a certain stage in evolution this principle of the survival 
 of the fittest at the expense of the rest gives way to a 
 counter principle, that of the fitting of as many as pos- 
 sible to survive. The thief tendency gives way to the 
 shepherd tendency, self-love to mother-love, the struggle 
 to survive to the struggle for the life of others. I do not 
 pause at the moment to account for these two antithetic 
 tendencies, there they are; all through the history of 
 this sad old world of ours these two tendencies have 
 been in sharp conflict. Both are cosmic, both probably 
 resolvable in that higher unity which is too mysterious 
 for us to penetrate, but to our minds they are in flagrant 
 opposition to each other. The thief cometh to steal and 
 to kill and to destroy; mother-love, Christ-love, that it 
 may give life, and that more abundantly. 
 
 In human history the antithesis is even more plainly 
 marked. From one point of view, history is little else 
 than the story of the crimes and follies of mankind. If 
 it were entirely that, the study would be too saddening 
 to enter upon; but it is not all of that character, and yet
 
 148 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 it is sufficiently so to cast a shadow over the optimism 
 of any man who investigates human evolution as told in 
 song and story. The principle that "they should take 
 who have the power, and they should keep who can " 
 has ruled in human concerns from the dawn of history 
 until to-day. It is strong enough in our midst even now. 
 Our industrial system is founded upon it, and is essen- 
 tially unchristian. Commercialism is saturated with it; 
 all men suffer from it, but often they know not how to 
 get free from it. Ruskin has a grimly amusing para- 
 graph on the parallel between an earlier civilisation and 
 that of to-day, and the identity in principle of the self- 
 ward tendency in both. In mediaeval times, as he would 
 say, the robber baron was wont to possess himself of a 
 mountain fortress, whence he swooped down upon hapless 
 passers-by to rob them of their possessions and their 
 lives. To-day the successful financial magnate does 
 the same by effecting corners in corn and such like. 
 The great writer adds, with characteristic irony, "I 
 prefer the crag baron to the bag baron." Yet with all 
 this we see at work in history another tendency which 
 we can recognise as plainly as the former, but which 
 fills us with great hope for the future of humanity, it 
 is that which is summed up in the one word "Christ." 
 That word stands all the world over for the things that 
 make for more abundant life. Just as in the text the 
 word "thief" stands for everything that makes for sepa- 
 rateness, selfhood, cruelty, so the word " Christ " stands 
 for everything that makes for union, mutual helpfulness, 
 brotherly kindness. The thief stands for the tendency 
 to grasp and draw inward, and the Christ stands for the 
 tendency to give, and live outward. The former ten-
 
 THE ATONEMENT 149 
 
 dency is what I call the deathward deathward for all 
 else but itself; and the Christ is the lifeward, life for all 
 else but itself. Yet curious inversion of earlier ex- 
 perience the deathward tendency results in death to 
 itself in the spiritual region, and the lifeward tendency 
 results in life to him who gives life. "I have power to 
 lay it down, and I have power to take it again." I want 
 you to realise here, then, that the Christ in humanity 
 is the life-giver of the soul. They who are possessed of 
 the Christ spirit are they who have and can give the more 
 abundant life. 
 
 We have briefly examined the two tendencies of which 
 I have spoken; have you realised that in the things of 
 the spirit the deathward tendency is what we call sin? 
 Sin is selfishness ; it is the attempt to misuse the energies 
 of God; it is the expansion of individuality at the 
 expense of the race. I do not know that you can arrive 
 at a much more thorough explanation of the nature 
 of sin than that. Men blunderingly attempt to classify 
 virtues, and think of sin as simply the failure to attain 
 them. It is not that, it is something deeper; sin is the 
 attempt to minister to self at the expense of that which 
 is outside self. It lives by death to others, or seeks to 
 do so. 
 
 When I was away a few weeks ago I paid a visit to 
 Monte Carlo to see what it was like, and went into the 
 famous gambling saloon, and stood for a while looking 
 at the faces of the players. I could not see anything 
 very different from what I see now ; the people who were 
 engaged in that all-engrossing pursuit might have been 
 in church, they were so quiet, so orderly, and so appar- 
 ently passionless. Yet I felt it may have been a
 
 150 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 preacher's prejudice that the moral atmosphere of 
 that place was one in which I did not want to remain ; 
 there was something bad there, and I think I could 
 discern what it was. The gambler is essentially a man 
 who is trying to get something for nothing ; he is drawing 
 to himself that which he supposes will give him more 
 satisfying and abundant life. Let who will suffer; it is 
 not his concern. What is lifeward for him may be 
 death ward for them ; he is willing that it should be so 
 that is the sin. Sin is always a mistake, a soul's 
 mistake; it is the carrying up into the spiritual region 
 of that stern and terrible law of the physical world, the 
 survival of an organism at the expense of its fellow. 
 That law is reversed in the spiritual world ; it is replaced 
 by something else. If a soul is to gain more abundant 
 life, it must rise above the desire to grasp and hold. The 
 gambler is selling that beautiful thing which came fresh 
 from the hand of God, and is at once God's life and his ; 
 he is destroying the present possibility of attaining to 
 that higher life which is the destiny of the soul. The 
 Christ in him can find no expression. And yet, my 
 friends, realise this, however startling it may seem, sin 
 itself is a quest for God a blundering quest, but a 
 quest for all that. The man who got dead drunk last 
 night did so because of the impulse within him to break 
 through the barriers of his limitations, to express himself, 
 and to realise more abundant life. His self-indulgence 
 just came to that ; he wanted if only for a brief hour to 
 live the larger life, to expand the soul, to enter untrodden 
 regions, and gather to himself new experience. That 
 drunken debauch was a quest for life, a quest for God. 
 Men in their sinful follies to-day, and their blank atheism,
 
 THE ATONEMENT 151 
 
 and their foul blasphemies, their trampling upon things 
 that are beautiful and good, are engaged in this dim, 
 blundering quest for God, whom to know is life eter- 
 nal. The roue you saw in Piccadilly last night, who went 
 out to corrupt innocence and to wallow in filthiness of 
 the flesh, was engaged in his blundering quest for God. 
 He is looking for Him along the line of the wrong ten- 
 dency; he has been gathering to himself what he took 
 to be more abundant life, "but sin, when it hath con- 
 ceived bringeth forth death" death to the sinner as 
 well as to his victim, death of what is deepest and tru- 
 est in the soul. Yet I repeat it all men are seek- 
 ing life, life more abundant, even in their selfishness and 
 wrong-doing, seeking life by the deathward road. 
 
 " Whatever crazy sorrow saith, 
 No life that breathes with human breath 
 Has ever truly longed for death. 
 'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, 
 O life, not death, for which we pant, 
 More life and fuller than I want." 
 
 On the following Sunday I preached a sermon 
 entitled the " Nature of Sin," in which the same point 
 was reemphasised with even greater distinctness, 
 as the following extract will show : 
 
 I think I startled some of you last Sunday morning 
 when I happened to remark that sin was, after all, a 
 quest for God a mistaken quest, but none the less 
 a quest for God, for all that. I want to explain to you 
 to-night somewhat more in detail what I mean by this, 
 because the more clearly we can see the truth the more 
 clearly we can perceive sin to be a soul's blunder. There
 
 152 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 are two tendencies discernible throughout nature and in 
 human history. These two tendencies are essentially 
 opposed, are ever in conflict, and ever will be until the 
 whole world is subdued to Christ, and God is all in all. 
 I called them last Sunday morning from the pulpit the 
 deathward and the lifeward respectively. The terms are 
 not very satisfactory, because the deathward tendency 
 usually masquerades as the lifeward, and the lifeward 
 often looks like the deathward. That is why sin is ever 
 possible. A man thinks to get something by it, and 
 though he finds out his mistake afterward, yet he sup- 
 poses it to be for him the lifeward road. On the other 
 hand, the utterly unselfish deed often looks as though it 
 were a deed that would bring destruction upon the doer. 
 Not so. Jesus Christ saw right to the heart of things 
 when He said, "He that loveth his life shall lose it, and 
 he that loseth his life for My sake the same shall find it." 
 If you substitute for the words "for My sake," "for 
 truth's sake," or "for life's sake," you will get just the 
 same meaning, "he that keeps back his life shall 
 lose it, and he that gives forth his life shall find it." 
 
 Here, then, are two tendencies sharply contrasted. 
 Now observe their operation in nature and in human 
 experience. You are all aware of, and frequently have 
 been saddened, no doubt, by what you regard as the 
 cruelty of nature. There is a tragedy under every rose 
 leaf, there is unceasing conflict to the death going on in 
 every hedgerow. Nature is indeed cruel. I have often 
 watched, during this winter which is now drawing to 
 a close, the little birds feeding outside the window of my 
 breakfast room in the morning. Like many of you, 
 we put out a few crumbs for these feathered friends who
 
 THE ATONEMENT 153 
 
 share the same garden with ourselves, and I have always 
 noticed that there is a battle royal fought round those 
 crumbs. There is enough for everyone, and yet the 
 instinct of these little creatures is to try and grab and keep 
 all, each one for itself. The instinct of the lower creation 
 appears to be that a form can only preserve itself, and only 
 expand and express itself, at the expense of other forms. 
 It is a stern and terrible law, as you well know. Forms, 
 by a slow, upward progress hi the unfolding of the purpose 
 to which nature exists, have become what they are at the 
 expense of earlier and weaker forms. There is a ten- 
 dency to grasp and hold, a tendency to kill and to de- 
 stroy, and this, to some minds, appears to be the strong- 
 est tendency in nature or in man. I question it, in 
 fact, I deny it, and I want that you and I should arrive 
 at the same conclusion respecting it. For there is an- 
 other tendency observable working from the very earli- 
 est throughout the processes of nature, too. It is that 
 which Henry Drummond describes as the struggle for 
 the life of others. If you like, we will call it mother- 
 love. I saw it illustrated only yesterday. A mother 
 sheep, standing in her place amongst the flock, was sur- 
 prised with the rest at the incursion of a mongrel dog. 
 The flock fled instantly, but the ordinarily timid mother 
 stood her ground. The reason was not far to seek. 
 There was a little lamb cowering behind her, and she, 
 overcoming her natural instinct of self-preservation, 
 turned her face to the dog to draw his attention, if possible, 
 to herself and deflect it from her young one. Now, that 
 instinct represents the tendency of which I speak, the 
 antithetic tendency to the other already described. It 
 is the stronger of the two. It indicates the goal toward
 
 154 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 which nature herself is moving. " The whole creation 
 groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now," 
 but mother-love is a prophecy of a higher yet to be. 
 It is the forth-going instinct, the allward, lifeward 
 tendency. 
 
 Now turn to humanity. I think you will agree with 
 me that right through human history the same two 
 tendencies are observable. The farther back we go, 
 the stronger seems the selfward tendency. The natural 
 state of uncivilised man is a state of war. Man in primi- 
 tive communities only exists and flourishes by destroy- 
 ing other communities. A most curious thing it is, too, 
 that apparently our domestic and civic virtues have grown 
 out of this state of war. A man used to carry his wife 
 off by main force. She become his property. He exerted 
 his brute force, he magnified his own personality, as it 
 were, in crushing other personalities. His children 
 were in his hands for life and death. If he afterwards 
 learned to love them, it was in contradistinction to the 
 children that were not his. That which was his, so to 
 speak, gratified his egotism; and, although a more 
 beautiful relationship grew out of it, such was the un- 
 promising beginning. To-day when you hear a man 
 speaking loudly about " my country," or " my family," 
 or " my society," as the case may be, you may be perfectly 
 sure that he is projecting himself into his patriotism, or 
 into his loyalty to family or society; and indeed this was 
 the lowly beginning of what has come to be an excellent 
 virtue. We have had to learn benevolence by concen- 
 trating unselfish attention upon the few rather than the 
 many. The farther back you go in history, the sterner 
 does the operation of that law appear, and the less prom-
 
 THE ATONEMENT 155 
 
 ising the future of mankind. If people tell me the world 
 is not getting better, I suggest that it might be worth 
 their while to read a chapter of mediaeval or primitive 
 history. In the " Odyssey," for instance, Homer sketches 
 for us the career of a strong and remarkable man. His 
 hero, supposed to be a paragon of virtue, is capable of 
 things you would call scoundrelism to-day. He and his 
 band of storm-tossed companions land upon an island 
 of the Grecian Archipelago and find a city there. They 
 promptly sack it and kill all the inhabitants men, 
 women, and children. It seemed to be the proper thing 
 to do, and found its way into verse, and they boasted 
 about such heroic exploits. It was brutal murder, and 
 the men who were capable of it were nothing more or 
 less than pirates. Yet that stern, terrible tendency thus 
 illustrated is just one with that inscrutable law under 
 which nature herself has come to be what she is. It is 
 what I call the selfward tendency, the desire to grasp 
 and keep at the expense of other individualities other 
 societies than our own. 
 
 But in history, and from those very earliest times 
 down to our own, another tendency has shown itself 
 at work, a counter tendency. The two have been so 
 intertwined frequently as I have indicated in showing 
 where patriotism comes from that it has been diffi- 
 cult to dissociate them; but they are quite distinct. 
 Take, for instance, the magnificent devotion of Arnold 
 von Winkelried on the field of Sempach. Switzerland 
 has not existed as a political unit for many centuries, but 
 during that time her roll of heroes has been large. In 
 the formative hour of Swiss independence, when that 
 tiny folk were struggling for their liberty against the
 
 156 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 overweening power of Austria, it must have seemed a 
 hopeless undertaking this group of mountaineers 
 against the chivalry of an empire. The great battle of 
 Sempach was fought. The Swiss, armed with nothing 
 but their battle-axes, hurled themselves in vain all day 
 long against the serried ranks of Austrian mail-clad 
 warriors, armed with spears, through which the shepherd 
 men could make no way. They fell before them, but 
 could not pass through them, till Winkelried called to 
 his countrymen, "Provide for my wife and children and 
 I will make a way," and, rushing unarmed upon the 
 spearmen of Austria, clasped in his embrace as many 
 of them as he could and bore them to the earth. A 
 dozen spears passed through his body, but through the 
 gap his devotion had made, his countrymen leaped to 
 victory. That one act made possible, humanly speaking, 
 the Swiss independence, which is an object-lesson for 
 us to-day. Such acts as these form part of the cherished 
 lore of nations. We feel they are the light-centres of 
 the world. Something tells us that an act like that, the 
 giving of a life for the sake of an ideal, a cause, a country, 
 was a great thing. It represented the counter tendency 
 to what was going on at that moment. In that very 
 battle Austria was trying to grasp and hold, Switzerland 
 was trying to get free and live her own life, and here was 
 a man who, for the sake of his country's ideal, gave all 
 that he had his life. Will you tell me where to look 
 for the focus and centre of that ideal? I know what 
 your answer would be. It was at Calvary. The one 
 thing which, consciously or subconsciously, men have 
 recognised in Jesus that has given Him His supreme 
 attraction for the world, is this He was absolutely
 
 THE ATONEMENT 157 
 
 disinterested. It is the disinterestedness of Jesus, His 
 utter nobleness, His power of projecting Himself into the 
 experience of others, and trying to lift humanity as a 
 whole to His experience of God, that gave Him His 
 power with mankind. Jesus not only proclaimed, but 
 lived, the counter tendency to the law of sin and death. 
 
 Now, when we have brought the two together, you see 
 the essential distinction between working for self and its 
 deathward look, and working for all with its lifeward 
 gaze. These two are antithetic, and must be in opposi- 
 tion until the latter absorbs the former, and God is all 
 in all, and love reigneth world without end. 
 
 We are now able to see what sin is more plainly than 
 before. Sin is the tendency to grasp and draw inward, 
 and everything that feeds that tendency makes for death. 
 Sin is the expansion of the individuality at the expense 
 of the race ; sin is acting on the belief that the soul can 
 increase at another's cost, can increase by destroying 
 what is another's good. Apply that explanation or 
 definition of sin to what you know about life, and you 
 will soon see when a man is facing the deathward road, 
 and how differently he acts when he is choosing the life- 
 ward road. There are men in this congregation who 
 do not realise, as they should, that lifewardness is God- 
 wardness ; but so it is. The soul and the source of all 
 things is God, and, consciously or unconsciously, all 
 men are seeking God in that they are seeking self-ex- 
 pression, seeking life. The man, for instance, who is 
 trying to become rich is a man who is seeking to express 
 himself, seeking power, seeking life, seeking to thrust 
 through the barriers that surround the soul. They are 
 all doing it; the veriest materialist among you is seeking
 
 158 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 by his daily activities more abundant life. The young 
 man here who feels a burning ambition within his heart, 
 a desire to exploit the world and make a name for himself, 
 to occupy a high station, is not conscious of anything 
 essentially unworthy. It all depends on what he does with 
 the impulse. What you are seeking, young man, is more 
 abundant life, and that is equivalent to seeking God. 
 Life is God. "Every good and every perfect gift is 
 from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights." 
 And when the tendency goes round and works havoc 
 and ruin in the world, it still remains a quest for God, 
 although a blundering one. It is a misuse of divine 
 energy. The man who got drunk last night and gratified 
 his lower nature in that delirious hour would be surprised 
 if you were to tell him when you see the result that he 
 was really seeking God, but so it is. He wants life, and 
 thinks he can get it this way. This is the reason why 
 morbid excitement and the craving for amusement have 
 such power in human lives to-day. Your roue in Picca- 
 dilly who went out to destroy innocence was seeking life 
 while spreading death. It seems almost blasphemy to 
 say it, but he was seeking God and thinking O wof ul 
 blunder ! that he would find Him by destroying some- 
 thing that God has made beautiful and fair. So with 
 all acts of selfish gratification of which men are capable 
 they are the turning of the current of divine energy 
 the wrong way, and seeking self-gratification at the ex- 
 pense of something else that God has made. It is a 
 failure to see that we only obtain life by giving life. 
 When an engine goes off the line there is a smash, as a 
 rule, and the greater the power that was driving the en- 
 gine, the worse is the wreck when it leaves the line.
 
 THE ATONEMENT 159 
 
 The lightning directed rightly becomes the luminant by 
 which we look on each other's faces to-night. That 
 same power might have brought havoc and destruction 
 if it had not been harnessed in the service of man. And 
 so with the power that God has given you ; all desire for 
 self-expression, all seeking of which you are conscious 
 for larger and better and richer life, is God-given; but 
 it may mean ruin and destruction unless you see that it 
 is yours, not that you may draw inward, but that you 
 may give outward, yours not to keep and hold, but yours 
 wherewith to bless mankind. Sin is the tendency to 
 keep for self that which was meant for the world. "The 
 wages of sin is death," the death of soul. He who is 
 guilty of sin is guilty of soul murder. "All they that 
 hate Me love death," and he that spreads pain and ruin 
 over other lives in the gratification of his own lower in- 
 stincts is using something which is God-given yea, 
 which is essentially God's own life in the wrong 
 way. The only hope for him is to realise that no act of 
 sin was ever yet worth while, that it does punish itself, 
 must punish itself, for it shrivels and fetters the soul. 
 No eleventh-hour repentance will ever save you, and no 
 cowardly cry for relief will ever bring God's forgiveness 
 into your soul, until you have realised that sin and selfish- 
 ness are one, and that what you have failed to give forth 
 of love and service represents the measure of your soul 
 poverty. 
 
 Even at the risk of prolixity and repetition I have 
 thought it right to insert these lengthy extracts from 
 sermons which have been animadverted upon. My 
 readers will be able to judge of the fairness of the
 
 l6o THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 criticism which, by abstracting a few lines, strove 
 to make it appear that my teaching denied the reality 
 of sin. Here are the actual words seen in their 
 proper setting. If one were on the lookout for a 
 good illustration of the sinfulness of sin, perhaps 
 the controversial methods of the editor of the British 
 Weekly might furnish it. This kind of criticism is 
 on a par with that of the gentleman who once startled 
 an audience by declaring, " The Bible says there is 
 no God." He was right, of course, if it be legitimate 
 to suppress the former part of the passage, "The 
 fool hath said in his heart there is no God." 
 
 It is time we had done with unreal talk about sin. 
 Sin is the murder spirit in human experience. 
 " Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer. If 
 a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he 
 is a liar : for he that loveth not his brother whom he 
 hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not 
 seen ? " Strong language, but I suppose the man 
 who first used it must have known what he was talk- 
 ing about. Pomposity is sin, because it is egoism; 
 self-complacency and contemptuousness are sin 
 for the same reason. Cupidity is sin whether in a 
 burglar or a Doctor of Divinity. A bitter, grasping, 
 cruel, unsympathetic spirit is sin, no matter who 
 shows it. The scribe and the Pharisee are too much 
 with us, and the religious ideal needs to be rescued 
 from their blighting grasp to-day as much as ever it 
 did. Of all forms of sin an arrogant, malignant, 
 self-satisfied assumption of righteousness is the worst
 
 THE ATONEMENT l6l 
 
 and the hardest to eradicate, as Jesus found to His 
 cost. The terrible damning lie which is stifling 
 religion to-day is the lie which crucified Jesus, the 
 lie that spiritual pride can ever interpret God to 
 a needy world. There is something grimly amusing 
 in the suggestion that prosperous people should pay 
 for sending gospel missions to the poor. If sin is 
 selfishness, the poor had better missionise the rich. 
 Imagine how it would be if things were reversed in 
 this way, and a mission band of earnest slum dwellers 
 took their stand in Belgravia and began a house- 
 to-house visitation, with all the theological terms 
 carefully eliminated from the mission leaflets they 
 thrust under the doors or handed to the powdered 
 footmen. Instead of, " Flee from the wrath to come," 
 etc., they might have : " Don't be selfish ! it is hurting 
 you and your neighbours and making you unhappy. 
 Don't pretend ! It is poor business in the end. 
 Try to do as much as you can for other people and 
 you will know what God is." The attempt would 
 be startling and unwelcome, but it would be far less 
 impudent than the religious exhortations of the pros- 
 perous to the poor commonly are. For the truth is 
 that if sin is selfishness, and it is nothing else, 
 the degraded habits of people at the lower end of the 
 social scale are no more sinful than the ordinary 
 behaviour of most of their preceptors at the other 
 end. Most of the talk about sin is unreal; that 
 is the trouble; so verily the publicans and harlots 
 go into the kingdom of heaven before us. In church
 
 162 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 a man will profess himself to be a miserable sinner, 
 but if we were to address him in the same way out 
 of church he would sue us for libel if he thought we 
 meant it. For heaven's sake let us have done with 
 the sham of it all and face the truth. What mankind 
 is suffering from is selfishness. Get rid of that and 
 there would be little left to trouble about. 
 
 Atonement and sin. It should now be plain 
 why the doctrine of Atonement has been so closely 
 associated with the doing away of sin ; it is because, 
 as we have seen, the root idea of Atonement is the 
 assertion of the fundamental oneness of man with 
 man and all with God. Sin is the divisive separating 
 thing in our relations with one another, and with God 
 the source of all, so the assertion of our oneness 
 involves getting rid of sin. If we ask how this is to 
 be done, the answer is simple enough : the only way 
 to get rid of selfishness is by the ministry of love. 
 What is it that is slowly winning the world from its 
 selfishness to-day and lifting it gradually into the 
 higher, purer atmosphere of universal love ? There 
 is but one thing that is doing it, and that is the spirit 
 of self-sacrifice. Wherever you see that, you see the 
 true Atonement at work. There can be no doubt 
 about the final issue, for behind the spirit of love is 
 infinity, whereas the spirit of selfishness is essentially 
 finite. On the field of human history the death of 
 Jesus is the focus and concentrated essence of this 
 age-long atoning process, whereby selfishness is being 
 overcome and the whole race lifted up to its home in
 
 THE ATONEMENT 163 
 
 God. Until Jesus came no self-offering had been so 
 consistent and so complete. No selfish desire could 
 find lodgment in His pure soul. He showed men the 
 ideal life by living it Himself, the life which was per- 
 fectly at one with God and man. In a selfish world 
 that life was sure to end on a Calvary of some kind, 
 but the very fact that it did so demonstrated the 
 completeness of its victory over all considerations 
 of self-interest. Selfishness lost the battle by seeming 
 to gain it. God was behind the life of Jesus just 
 because it was the life of perfect love, the life which 
 was a perfect gift to the whole, therefore that life 
 immediately arose in power in other lives and has 
 gone increasing its benevolent sway over human 
 hearts ever since. This is the Atonement and it is 
 rightly associated with the cross of Jesus in the minds 
 of men, for the cross is the sum and centre of it all. 
 The increasing Atonement. But the Atonement 
 to be effective has to be repeated on the altar of human 
 hearts, and so it is, to a far greater extent than most 
 people stop to think. The same spirit that was in 
 Jesus and governed His whole career was the spirit 
 of the true humanity, " The light that lighteth every 
 man that cometh into the world." The spirit of 
 Jesus was the spirit of Christ, the ,ideal or divine 
 manhood as it exists eternally in God. But that 
 ideal or divine manhood, that Christ nature, is also 
 potentially present in every human being. What 
 needs to be done is to get it manifested or brought 
 forth into conscious activity. The immediate effect
 
 164 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 of the life and death of Jesus upon His followers 
 was to make them more or less like Him, and to fill 
 them with a similar desire to get men to live the 
 life of love which is the life of God. They felt them- 
 selves inspired by the same spirit, the Holy Spirit 
 of truth and love, and exalted above all fear for their 
 own safety and all desire to live for themselves alone. 
 They loved their Lord so much that their lives be- 
 came one with His in the work of saving the world. 
 They could see no difference between serving their 
 Master and serving mankind. This love force of 
 theirs, this intense loyalty to Jesus, was, and still is, 
 the redeeming thing in the life of mankind. There 
 is not and never has been any other Atonement. 
 The divine power that is breaking down selfishness, 
 and transforming human desires in accordance with 
 the eternal truth of things, is the spirit of self-sacrific- 
 ing love. It is but a step from sinner to saviour. 
 To cease to be a sinner is perforce to be a saviour. 
 To escape from the dominion of selfishness is forth- 
 with to become a power in the hand of God for the 
 uplifting and ingathering of mankind to Himself; 
 this is the Atonement. 
 
 Ask yourself whether this is not so. What other 
 force for good is there in the world to-day than the 
 spirit which governed the whole life of Jesus and 
 rendered Him willing to brave the worst that evil 
 could do in His desire to get men to realise the true 
 life? There is no other. If you want to see the 
 Atonement at work, go wherever love is ministering
 
 THE ATONEMENT 165 
 
 to human necessity and you see the very same spirit 
 which was in Jesus, the spirit which heals and saves. 
 Dogma is doing nothing to save the world; the gospel 
 of self-sacrifice is doing everything. Show me a 
 Christlike life and I will show you a part of 
 the Atonement of Christ. Show me a noble deed 
 and I will show you something worthy of Jesus. 
 His self-offering, and the love and devotion it awoke 
 in human hearts, are a perpetual sacrifice, a cumula- 
 tive assertion that in the presence of need love can 
 never do anything other than give itself until the need 
 is supplied and love is all in all. There is even a 
 possibility of substitution here. Vicarious suffering 
 willingly accepted becomes irresistible in the long 
 run as a means of lifting a transgressor out of the 
 mire of selfishness. Many a noble wife has saved 
 her husband by remaining at his side and patiently 
 accepting the disabilities caused by his wrong-doing. 
 It is even possible in such a case for the saviour to 
 bear more than the sinner, and for the sinner to be 
 relieved of some of the consequences of his sin; 
 he would have to suffer more if there were no loving 
 helper to stand by him. But to speak of one as 
 bearing another's punishment is untrue; such a 
 thing cannot be. All that love can do is to share to 
 the uttermost in the painful consequences of sin and 
 by so doing break their power What other Atone- 
 ment is needed than this? It requires no defence, 
 and a child could understand it. Everyone already 
 believes in it, whether he stops to think about it or
 
 1 66 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 not. While I am writing these words a fierce storm 
 is raging outside. This is the second day we have 
 had of it, and there seems likely to be some loss of 
 life on the dangerous rocks outside the bar which 
 forms the entrance to the bay below. A visitor 
 has just been telling me of a wilder storm in this 
 same bay some years ago, and of which he says 
 to-day's gale reminds him. On that previous oc- 
 casion three ships were wrecked together within a 
 few yards of this house. It must have been a dread- 
 ful, awe-inspiring scene. No boat could live on the 
 surf, so every survivor had to be dragged ashore with 
 ropes fastened to the cliffs and hauled by willing 
 hands. Hundreds of townspeople and fisher folk 
 came pouring over from St. Ives and all the hamlets 
 round about in order to take part in the work of 
 rescue. According to my informant the scene was 
 enough to stir any heart, and even grown men were 
 crying with excitement and compassion as some of 
 the poor fellows in the rigging of the doomed vessels 
 were washed away before they could be got ashore. 
 The few who were actually snatched from the jaws 
 of death found no lack of willing helpers as one by one 
 they were passed insensible into the kind keeping of 
 the many who stood waiting for an opportunity to 
 be of service. No one grudged anything; every home 
 and every bed would have been cheerfully placed at 
 the disposal of the shipwrecked mariners if they had 
 been wanted. Brave women, the wives and daugh- 
 ters of men who were risking their lives on the sea
 
 THE ATONEMENT 167 
 
 every day, willingly encouraged their husbands and 
 sons in battling against the tempest in the endeavour 
 to save other husbands and sons whom they had 
 never seen or heard of until that hour of distress and 
 need. And what a fight it was to be sure ! Never 
 was a braver. Again and again these humble Cor- 
 nish heroes dashed into the raging billows to grasp 
 and guide the ropes that bore a flickering human life, 
 and every time they returned with their helpless 
 burden a cheer went up from the watchers that 
 drowned for a moment the violence of the blast. 
 No one thought of enquiring into the theology of 
 saviours or survivors. No doubt there were some 
 among the former who were oftener to be found at 
 the public-house bar than at church, but no one 
 could have distinguished them from the orthodox 
 Christians who fought the waves shoulder to shoulder 
 beside them; they were there to save life, and in doing 
 so their deeper manhood shone out with divine 
 splendour. But the most of the rescuers were good 
 sound, earnest Methodists who perhaps believed, or 
 thought they believed, in the eternal damnation of 
 the unregenerate. But what became of their doctrine 
 in the face of an urgent human need and the call 
 for self-sacrifice to supply that need ? It was utterly 
 forgotten. There is both humour and pathos in the 
 fact that these convinced believers tugged and tore 
 at the ropes, and freely jeopardised their own lives 
 in a magnificent endeavour to save perishing bodies 
 from temporal water. There is the truth for you,
 
 1 68 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 the real Atonement. The heart creed is usually 
 better than the head creed, and in great moments 
 buries the latter out of sight. Here was the spirit 
 of Christ, the true and eternal manhood, the spirit 
 that seeks to save at its own cost. Here was the 
 instinctive perception of the fundamental oneness 
 of all life and the recognition that the godlike thing 
 is to seek to deliver life from the clutch of death. 
 
 All men instinctively believe in the Atonement. 
 This is the deepest and truest impulse of the human 
 heart, as all men already know if they would only 
 trust their better nature to tell them what God wants 
 from his children. Here is an explosion in a coal- 
 mine, and forthwith every mother's son above 
 ground volunteers to go down into the choke-damp 
 to snatch his buried comrades from the sleep of death. 
 A few months ago one such disaster took place in a 
 Durham colliery. Most of my readers will remember 
 that in the newspaper reports of the incidents that 
 took place at the pit mouth were the following: A 
 father who was brought to the surface was asked 
 whether he lost hope during the long hours of his 
 imprisonment below without food or light. " No," 
 was the reply, " for I knew my boy would be in the 
 rescue party, and that nothing would turn him back 
 until he found his father, dead or alive." The suffra- 
 gan bishop of the diocese, along with a number of 
 other clergymen and nonconformist ministers, re- 
 mained all night amid the scene of sorrow at the pit 
 mouth, doing his best to comfort the mourners as
 
 THE ATONEMENT 169 
 
 their loved ones were brought up dead. As morning 
 broke he mounted a heap of cinders and, without 
 making any attempt to conceal his emotion, spoke 
 a few manly words of brotherly exhortation and 
 Christian love to his deeply moved congregation of 
 toilers and sufferers. One poor woman, with un- 
 conscious irony, exclaimed to the bystanders: ' He 
 doesn't seem like a bishop ! He is just like one of 
 ourselves." That servant of God has never preached 
 the Atonement more effectually in all his life by 
 getting together of man and man, and man and 
 God, through the spirit of self-sacrifice. He stands 
 in the true apostolic succession, the succession of 
 men like Saul of Tarsus, the erstwhile persecutor, 
 who, under the inspiration of the love of Jesus, 
 lived to say, " Who is weak and I am not weak? 
 Who is offended and I burn not? " 
 
 Go into any home where the spirit of self-sacrificing 
 love is trying to do anything to supply a need or save 
 a transgressor, and you see the Atonement. Follow 
 that Salvation lassie to the slums, and listen to her as 
 she tries to persuade a drunken husband and father 
 to give up the soul-destroying habit which is such a 
 curse to wife and child, and you see the Atonement. 
 Go with J. Keir Hardie to the House of Commons 
 and listen to his pleading for justice to his order, 
 and you see the Atonement. Hear the prayer of 
 mother-love for the erring, wandering son, and you 
 have the Atonement. See that grey-haired father 
 patiently pleading with selfish, hot-headed youth,
 
 170 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 or yielding up his own hard-won possessions to pay 
 the gambler's debts and save the family name, and 
 you have the Atonement. Nothing can stir the 
 human heart so much. All the great deeds of his- 
 tory derived their inspiration from it; all the little 
 heroisms of our common everyday life are the dec- 
 laration of it. There is not a single one of all our 
 thoughts and activities but has some relation to it; 
 we are either living for ourselves individually and 
 separately or we are living for the whole. If the 
 former, we are the servants of sin; if the latter, our 
 lives are already part of the Atonement. 
 
 Jesus and the Atonement. It is easy to see how 
 much the world owes to Jesus in this regard. I 
 cannot tell what the world might have been if there 
 had never been a Jesus, but certain it is that the 
 sacrificial life and death of Jesus have meant the 
 inpouring of a spirit into human affairs such as 
 had never been known in the same degree before. 
 Here for the first time men saw a perfect manifesta- 
 tion of the life that is life indeed, the life that pleased 
 not itself, the life that entered into and shared human 
 disabilities as though they were its very own, the life 
 that in the presence of selfishness must inevitably 
 become sacrifice, the life of Atonement. In a sinful 
 world that life had to come to a Calvary, but in so 
 doing in refusing to shield and save itself it became 
 the greatest moral power and the greatest revelation 
 of God that the world has ever known. What we 
 succeed in doing some of the time, Jesus did all the
 
 THE ATONEMENT 171 
 
 time; when all men are able to do it all the time 
 the Atonement will have become complete and love 
 divine shall be all in all. "Thou hast conquered, 
 O Galilean ! " cried Julian the apostate; and Chris- 
 tian faith can reverently add 
 
 " Jesus is worthy to receive 
 Honour and power divine ; 
 And blessings more than we can give 
 Be, Lord, forever thine." 
 
 Faith in Jesus is faith in the Atonement and faith in 
 our own Christhood. It means the upraising of the 
 true We, the eternal life, within our own souls. 
 Until His spirit becomes our spirit, His Atonement 
 has done nothing for us, and when it does we, like 
 Him, become saviours of the race. It must be so, for 
 the spirit of love is the same both in God and man; 
 in the presence of need, no matter what the need may 
 be, that spirit must continue to give itself without 
 stint until the need is supplied and all that would 
 tend to separate between the individual soul and the 
 eternal perfect whole is done away. 
 
 But then, someone will say, what has the death of 
 Jesus effected in the unseen so as to make it possible 
 for God to forgive us ? Nothing whatever, and noth- 
 ing was ever needed. God is not a fiend but a Father, 
 the source and sustenance of our being and the goal 
 of all our aspirations. Why should we require to 
 be saved from Him? 
 
 Divine satisfaction in Atonement. But in what 
 sense is the death of Jesus a satisfaction to the Father ?
 
 172 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 In no sense at all, except that the sacrifice of Jesus 
 is the highest expression of the innermost of God that 
 has ever been made. If it affords an artist satis- 
 faction to express himself in a beautiful picture, or 
 a great thinker to express his noble thought in a 
 book, surely the highest satisfaction that God 
 can know must be his self-expression in the self- 
 sacrifice of his children. At its best, the intensest 
 joy that can be known is the joy of giving one's 
 self for the good of the whole. In everything grand 
 and good in human thought and achievement God 
 is doing just this. It is the satisfaction he receives 
 from the Atonement and the only one.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 Atonement and New Testament language. It 
 will have been observed that in my examination of 
 the subject of the Atonement I have said almost 
 nothing about the New Testament evidence for the 
 doctrine. This, I admit, is an entire departure from 
 the method usually followed by those who write upon 
 it, and may be thought by some to vitiate my whole 
 argument. But the omission is of set purpose, for 
 I am convinced that New Testament language about 
 the Atonement, especially the language of St. Paul, 
 has been, and still is, the prolific source of most of 
 the mischievous misinterpretations of it which exist 
 in the religious mind. To an extent this is the 
 same with the Old Testament, but to a far less 
 degree, for the language of the Old Testament is only 
 liable to misapprehension when interpreted by the 
 New. In a previous chapter I have endeavoured to 
 show the imperishable truths which underlie Old 
 Testament symbolism in regard to the Atonement, 
 and I trust I have shown that these truths are as 
 fresh and indispensable to-day, and play as great a 
 part in human affairs as they ever did. But before 
 I proceed to say anything about the New Testa-
 
 174 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 ment symbolism, which has been largely derived from 
 the Old, let us consider the question of the authority 
 of scripture as a whole. 
 
 Tendency to bow to external authority. There 
 is always a tendency in the ordinary mind to rely 
 upon some form of external authority in religious 
 as in other matters. With one man it is the authority 
 of an infallible church; with another the authority 
 of an infallible book; with another the authority of 
 some infallible statement of belief which ought to 
 hold good for all time, but never does. At the best, 
 external authority is only a crutch, and at the worst 
 it may become a rigid fetter upon the expanding 
 soul. The true seat of authority is within, not 
 without, the human soul. We are so constituted as 
 to be able to recognise, little by little, the truth of 
 God as it comes to us. It may come from any one 
 of a thousand different quarters, but to be recog- 
 nised and felt as truth it must awaken an echo 
 within the individual soul. If it does not awaken 
 such a response, it is of no effect so far as the 
 growth of the soul is concerned. What is true in 
 this book will not be received as true by the readers 
 merely because I say it, but because they feel it to be 
 true and cannot get away from it. Why should we 
 be afraid of trusting the human soul to recognise 
 and respond to its own truth? All truth is one, 
 and all earnest truth-seekers are converging upon one 
 goal. It is the divine self within everyone of us which 
 enables us to discern the truth best fitted to our
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE 175 
 
 needs, and this divine self is, as has already been 
 pointed out, fundamentally one with the source of 
 all truth, which is God. 
 
 If men could only come to see this more clearly 
 and to trust their own divine nature to enable them to 
 follow and express the truth as well as to receive 
 it, they would not suffer themselves to be hampered 
 by formal and literal statements of belief whether 
 hi the church, the Bible, or anywhere else. But 
 this is what they seldom do. Your devout Anglican 
 or Roman Catholic will tell you that the church 
 teaches this or the church teaches that: as though 
 that fact ever permanently settled anything. One 
 cannot really begin to appreciate the value of united 
 continuous church testimony until one is able to 
 stand apart from it, so to speak, and ask whether 
 it rings true to the reason and the moral sense. 
 Suppose the Christian church enjoined or permitted 
 rape and murder, would the devout Catholic be- 
 lieve and obey? " But it is inconceivable that the 
 church could ever do that," he might answer. Yes, 
 but suppose it did, would he obey ? If not, why not ? 
 He would not obey because he would know quite 
 well that the higher law within his heart would for- 
 bid and render impossible any such obedience. That 
 is all the answer I want. Why should we not apply 
 it all the way round ? The real test of truth is to be 
 found in the response it awakens within the soul. 
 
 The supposed authority of the letter a great hin- 
 drance to truth. Now one of the greatest stumbling-
 
 176 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 blocks in the way of many devout and intelligent 
 minds to-day is that of the supposed binding authority 
 of the letter of scripture. When a good man hears 
 some inspiring or common-sense statement of truth, 
 for instance, that of universal salvation, he 
 often replies in some such way as the following: 
 " Yes, I know it seems very plausible, and my heart 
 desires to believe it; but then, you know, it says in 
 the scripture, 'These shall go away into everlasting 
 punishment, but the righteousness into life eternal.' 
 I cannot get behind that." He will go on stringing 
 together, passage after passage, often without the 
 slightest suspicion that the original meaning had 
 nothing whatever to do with the subject under dis- 
 cussion ; as, for example, that well-known sentence in 
 Ezekiel, " The soul that sinneth, it shall die." What- 
 ever Ezekiel originally meant by that saying, and it 
 is well worth examination, he was not thinking 
 of a modern revival meeting. The plain, average, 
 level-headed business man of religious tempera- 
 ment will sometimes bother himself in this way until 
 he thinks of giving up religion altogether. The 
 letter of scripture often seems to say one thing and 
 the Christlike human heart another. Take, as one 
 example out of many, that pungent passage in Psalm 
 cxxxvii, " Happy shall he be that taketh and dash- 
 eth thy little ones against the stones." That passage 
 does not breathe the spirit of Jesus, nor is it true to 
 the best in human nature; no follower of Jesus wants 
 to see a little one dashed against a stone. But even
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE 177 
 
 to do justice to a passage of this kind we have to get 
 into intellectual and moral sympathy with the man 
 who wrote it. It was written by one of the poor 
 Jewish prisoners carried away captive into Babylon 
 by Nebuchadnezzar six centuries or more before 
 Jesus was born. Try and picture the scene. Across 
 eight hundred miles of desert that melancholy pro- 
 cession winds its way, leaving the highland home 
 behind and going into slavery in the cruel city of 
 the plain. One by one the weakest fall and die; 
 and where a baby is left without a mother, or the 
 mother cannot walk with the weight of the helpless 
 child, the cruel Babylonian ruffians riding at the 
 side will snatch it from the anguished bosom and 
 dash its brains out against the rocks. Should we be 
 likely to forget that if we had ever formed part of 
 such a procession of prisoners of war ? Hence when 
 Psalm cxxxvii came to be written by some poor 
 suffering father who had lost maybe both wife and 
 child, he gave vent to his feelings in one of the most 
 plaintive patriotic songs ever sung : 
 
 By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down yea, we 
 wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps 
 upon the willows in the midst thereof, for there they 
 that carried us away captive required of us a song ; and 
 they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us 
 one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's 
 song in a strange land ? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, 
 let my right hand forget her cunning. ... O daughter 
 of Babylon, who art to be destroyed ; happy shall he be
 
 178 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy 
 shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against 
 the stones ! 
 
 One can feel deep sympathy with this unknown poet 
 and his suffering people without adopting the absurd 
 view that this passage represents God's word to our 
 souls. It is a cry of suffering mingled with a desire 
 for vengeance, and that is all. But when a preacher 
 declares that he takes his stand and bases his gospel 
 on the infallible Book, he is either a fool or a 
 rhetorician. 
 
 Belief in the infallible Book impossible. There 
 are many good people who maintain that they be- 
 lieve the Bible from cover to cover, and they seem to 
 think that this is something to be proud of. But they 
 credit themselves with an impossible feat; no one 
 can believe contradictions, in the sense of accepting 
 them, whether intellectual or moral. The very same 
 people who will read with unction the most sanguin- 
 ary exhortations from scripture are usually people 
 who themselves would not hurt a fly. The Bible 
 is not like a parliamentary blue book, an exact and 
 literal statement of facts; it represents for the most 
 part what earnest men belonging to a particular 
 nationality in a bygone age thought about life in 
 relation to God. Many good people talk as though 
 the Bible were written by the finger of God Himself 
 and let down from heaven; on the other hand there 
 are those who think that when they have shown the 
 inconsistencies of scripture, they have destroyed
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE 179 
 
 its value. But they are both mistaken. The Bible 
 is not one book, but a collection of books, a slow 
 growth extending over centuries. It has come to be 
 reverenced not because of any supernormal attesta- 
 tions of its authority, but because we have found it 
 helps us more than any other book. The fact that 
 the best part of it was written by good and serious 
 men, men who were living for the highest they were 
 able to see, does not necessarily give binding author- 
 ity to the opinions of these men. I question whether 
 we should ever have heard of the Old Testamemt 
 if it had not been for Jesus, and the New is only 
 a statement of what some good men thought about 
 Jesus and his gospel at the beginning of Christian 
 history. Jesus knew and loved the Old Testament 
 scriptures, but whenever He found a statement therein 
 that jarred upon His moral sense, He rejected it in 
 the name of the higher truth declared by the Spirit 
 of Truth within His own soul : "Ye have heard that 
 it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; 
 and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the 
 judgment. But I say unto you that whosoever 
 is angry with his brother without a cause " and 
 even " without a cause " seems to have been inter- 
 polated in later days " shall be in danger of the 
 judgment." " Again ye have heard that it hath been 
 said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear 
 thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths. 
 But I say unto you, Swear not at all, neither by the 
 heavens, for it is God's throne, nor by the earth, for
 
 180 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 it is His footstool. Let your communication be Yea, 
 yea, nay, nay; for whatsoever is more than these 
 cometh of evil." " Ye hath heard that it hath 
 been said, Thou shalt love thine neighbour and hate 
 thine enemy : but I say unto you, Love your enemies, 
 bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate 
 you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and 
 persecute you." Jesus knew what He was doing. 
 In all these instances He was quoting from the 
 Old Testament, and deliberately superseding in the 
 name of truth certain prescriptions of the very law 
 which He said He had come to fulfil. Everyone 
 was taken by surprise at His daring to do this. Mat- 
 thew vii. 28, 29, says, " And it came to pass, when 
 Jesus had ended these sayings, that the people were 
 astonished at His teaching; for He taught them as 
 one having (in Himself) authority, and not as the 
 scribes." No doubt some people would say to-day 
 that this authority came from His Godhead. But 
 the people on the hillsides of Galilee knew nothing 
 about the Godhead of Jesus. To them He was a 
 heaven-sent teacher, a great and inspiring master, 
 whose words carried weight. His authority, there- 
 fore, must have been self-evident in contradistinction 
 to that of the scribes, who always began their dis- 
 courses by saying, "It is written." They never 
 seem to have thought of appealing to anything else 
 than the authority of the letter. But we see that 
 Jesus, notwithstanding His reverence for the scrip- 
 ture, handled it with perfect freedom. His author-
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE l8l 
 
 ity was that of the Spirit of God speaking within 
 His own soul, the only authority that has ever mat- 
 tered in the history of religious thought. He did 
 not deny the authority of Scripture, but He claimed 
 to be able to see when it rang true to His own inner 
 experience and when it did not. 
 
 The true seat of authority. If we could grasp 
 this principle clearly and strongly, it would give us 
 a new and higher sense of freedom and of con- 
 fidence in the word of God as declared in the Bible 
 and revealed in human hearts. God has never 
 stopped speaking to men. He speaks through us 
 collectively and individually. "The word is very 
 nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thine heart, 
 that thou mayest do it." If we are only in earnest 
 to listen for the divine voice and to trust it when we 
 hear it, we shall not listen in vain. To realise that 
 God is speaking to us just as He spoke to earnest 
 souls in the days of old will send us to the sacred 
 scriptures with an even greater appreciation and 
 reverence for the men of whose experience they are 
 the expression. But they will no longer bind us; 
 they can only help and encourage us. We shall feel 
 that these men of faith of an earlier day and a differ- 
 ent race were our brothers after all, men who lived 
 a life much like our own, and who were trying to 
 understand God as we are trying to understand Him. 
 The Bible is not infallible for the simple reason that 
 the human nature, even of wise and great men, is 
 not infallible. It helps us because these men were
 
 1 82 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 struggling with the same problems as ourselves, 
 and therefore what they have to say about them is 
 valuable. But the best of them had their limitations 
 and shortcomings. They did not know all the truth 
 that was to be known, but they kept their faces to 
 the light. If we allow ourselves to be fettered by 
 their actual words, we shall be in danger of losing 
 sympathy with them in the spirit which animated 
 those words. We are writing a Bible with our own 
 lives to-day, a Bible which may never be read in its 
 fulness by human eyes, but every letter of which is 
 known and read in heaven. Every noble life is a 
 word of God to the world; every brave, unselfish 
 deed is a ray of eternal truth. Our characters ought 
 to become living epistles known and read of all men 
 while we strive to express the best that God has 
 given us to see ; for the same eternal Spirit of Truth, 
 the Spirit who has been the teacher of all the Elijahs, 
 Isaiahs, and Pauls of history is with us to-day as He 
 was with them. 
 
 The unity of truth. But, someone will remon- 
 strate, What then are we to believe ? For by speak- 
 ing in this way you erect as many standards of truth 
 as there are individuals. What the ordinary man 
 wants is to be told just what to believe, so that he 
 can settle down and be at rest. It is small comfort 
 to tell him that every scripture statement may be 
 more or less fallible, and that he must trust to his 
 own perception, or perhaps to his own fancies, as to 
 what is true. I know all that kind of argument. It
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE 183 
 
 is as old as, or older than, Christianity itself. It was 
 used in all sincerity against Jesus by some earnest 
 people of His time. It was used again at the Ref- 
 ormation. It is still used by sacerdotal controver- 
 sialists, and looks very plausible on the face of it. 
 A devout and earnest Roman Catholic will tell you 
 that in Protestantism there are a thousand different 
 creeds, all claiming to be authoritative, and that the 
 principle of private judgment can only lead to intel- 
 lectual and moral chaos. Your Protestant literalist 
 will tell you that the Romanist criticism has a good 
 deal in it, and that you must have a final standard 
 of authority, either the infallible church, the infalli- 
 ble Book, or the infallible Confession of Faith. But 
 notwithstanding the dogmatists the supposed infal- 
 lible Confession of Faith is almost universally dis- 
 credited, and common honesty is compelling Prot- 
 estants to abandon the theory of an infallible Book. 
 The supposed infallible church has by no means 
 been invariably self-consistent. Besides, the impor- 
 tant point is this; no man really believes or can 
 believe a thing until it becomes, so to speak, part of 
 himself. Holding propositions is not necessarily be- 
 lieving them, no matter how tenaciously they may be 
 adhered to. But all truth is really one and the same. 
 I may be unable to take exactly my neighbour's 
 point of view about some aspects of it, but if we are 
 both in earnest and faithful to what we have seen, we 
 shall arrive in the end at the same goal. Religious 
 thinkers and teachers are never really so far apart as
 
 184 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 seems to be the case. It is in the expression of the 
 truth that they differ, not in the truth itself. Lan- 
 guage is never more than approximately convenient 
 expression of the reality it is meant to declare. The 
 man of the future will realise this better than the 
 man of the present or the past. He will replace 
 all external authority by the principle of spiritual 
 autonomy. He will no longer be afraid of trusting 
 the human spirit to recognise and respond to truth 
 from whatsoever source it may come, for he will know 
 that that spirit is one with the universal Spirit of all 
 Truth, and needs not to look beyond itself for any- 
 thing stronger or more divine. He will know that 
 the Spirit of Truth in himself is the Spirit of Truth 
 in all men, and that therefore in the end all men 
 must know, and be, and do the Truth. 
 
 The New Testament and the Atonement. Now 
 let us apply this principle to the New Testament 
 writings about the redeeming work of Jesus. The 
 same principle, of course, would apply to anything 
 that the New Testament has to say about the gospel 
 of Jesus, but perhaps the failure to recognise it has 
 done more mischief in connection with the doctrine 
 of Atonement than in anything else. At present 
 Paul's opinion on this great subject is by many 
 people supposed to be decisive: Paul says this, and 
 Paul says that, and when Paul has spoken, there is 
 no more to be said. But why should it be so ? Paul's 
 opinion is simply Paul's opinion, and not necessarily 
 a complete and adequate statement of truth. It is
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE 185 
 
 entitled to be considered weighty because it is the 
 utterance of a great man, and a great seer of truth, 
 as well as being the earliest writing on the subject 
 which we possess. Any man of the moral and intel- 
 lectual eminence of Paul is entitled to reverence 
 when he speaks, whether his views are in the Bible 
 or not. It is one of the ironies of history that the 
 words of this Paul who strove so hard against liter- 
 alism and legalism in his day have since come to be 
 regarded as a sort of fixed and final authority for 
 Christian thought. He would be the first to denounce 
 it. To him the Spirit of Christ operating within the 
 individual soul was the true guide in matters of faith. 
 He even made a point of the fact that in thinking out 
 the truth about Jesus and His gospel he had " con- 
 ferred not with flesh and blood." 
 
 Inconsistency of New Testament writers with one 
 another. Again, it is somehow taken for granted 
 that Paul and all the other New Testament writers 
 agree together in their theology of the Atonement. 
 That is quite a mistake, and the curious thing is that 
 people should have been so slow in finding it out. 
 It may be instructive to some to give a brief survey 
 of the main points in Paul's theory of the Atonement, 
 and compare them with some of the others. 
 
 The fundamental principle of its Atonement always 
 the same. It would simplify our acquaintance with 
 Paul's modes of reasoning if we could recognise 
 that the truth of Atonement which he has to declare, 
 and which he associates so closely with the life and
 
 1 86 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 death of Jesus, is in principle precisely the same as 
 that which the writers of the Old Testament had in 
 mind. What that was we have already seen. It 
 was the assertion of the fundamental oneness of 
 God and man, and the means to it was the principle 
 of self-sacrifice. This is just what St. Paul set him- 
 self to proclaim to the world, and to him the whole 
 process centred in Jesus, just as it does for Christian 
 experience. But to his presentation of the subject 
 Paul almost of necessity had to bring the whole 
 apparatus of his rabbinical training. This it was 
 which supplied him with the most of his figures, 
 symbols, and illustrations; but his gospel was no 
 more dependent upon these than as I trust I have 
 shown in a previous chapter the ancient spiritual 
 truth of Atonement depended upon Semitic ritual 
 sacrifices. Paul's thought-forms were supplied by 
 the Old Testament and his Pharisaic education, 
 just as the forms in which we ordinarily express our 
 thoughts to-day belong to the mental atmosphere of 
 our time. Most of the allusions in a Times leading 
 article, for example, would be lost upon an English 
 reader five hundred years hence unless they were 
 carefully explained. To me one of the most remark- 
 able things about Jesus is the fact that He was able 
 to escape so completely the mental environment of 
 the time in which, and the people among whom, 
 He lived His earthly life. How He managed to 
 deliver His peerless teaching while making so little 
 allusion to current Jewish modes of thought and
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE 187 
 
 worship is a mystery, and marks His greatness as 
 perhaps nothing else does. It was utterly different 
 with Paul; he spoke the language of his time, and 
 never tried to do anything else. When, therefore, 
 we want to get at what he meant about the death of 
 Jesus, we have first of all to get behind the symbolism 
 by which he illustrates it, and even when we have 
 done this we have to make allowance for some 
 limiting Pharisaic conceptions about justice and the 
 punishment of sin. Every now and then he breaks 
 through these and rises into a rarer, purer region 
 without troubling about consistency. Paul never 
 dreamed that he was writing theological treatises 
 which would be numbered off into chapters and 
 verses and lectured upon in class rooms, or perhaps 
 he would have been more careful about being exact. 
 How many of us could afford to have our letters, 
 written at different times and to different readers, 
 analysed and dissected and taken as a full and per- 
 manent statement of our thought upon any particular 
 subject or group of subjects ? 
 
 Paul's view of the death of the Saviour and the 
 forgiveness of sins. The first important thing 
 to be noted in Paul's thought about sin and salva- 
 tion is his view that there was a vital connection 
 between the death of the Messiah and God's forgive- 
 ness of sins. But we should be mightily mistaken 
 if we were to understand this view to be the same 
 as that of a modern evangelical who talks about the 
 " fountain filled with blood," for it was quite differ-
 
 1 88 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 ent. The modern evangelical, of so-called orthodox 
 opinions, believes that Jesus died to save all men 
 from hell ; but this was not what Paul was thinking 
 about at all. According to Paul, the wages of sin 
 were actually and literally death. But for sin there 
 would have been no death, and to break the power 
 of sin would also be to break the power of death. 
 But in this Paul was wrong, in company with a good 
 many of his contemporaries, and there is no reason 
 why we should not frankly say so, for, as we shall 
 presently see, the great apostle did not confine him- 
 self to the literal statement of this view, but gave 
 it also a mystical form in which it becomes indis- 
 putably true. In his thought the Messiah of Jewish 
 national expectation was the head and representative 
 of the nation in its relation to God. For ages men 
 had been dying because of sin "in Adam all 
 die " and so when the Sinless One came into 
 human conditions and in the likeness of sinful flesh, 
 He also had to pass through death. But there was 
 a difference between His death and all other deaths 
 in that, being sinless, death could not hold Him, and 
 so He rose again from the tomb triumphant over it. 
 His triumph then becomes potentially the triumph 
 of humanity "in Christ shall all be made alive " 
 if only we unite ourselves to Him by faith. God 
 will remit the death penalty to all who are " in 
 Christ " and " justified by faith" ; that is, we shall all 
 rise from the dead as He rose. Apparently Paul's 
 belief was that no one would ever have died but for
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE 189 
 
 the sin of Adam, a taint which has affected all 
 Adam's descendants. Death in his view was 
 synonymous with annihilation. 
 
 The next thing to be noticed is the juridical nature 
 of Paul's conception of the relationship of man 
 and God. God is a lawgiver and man a trans- 
 gressor, a rebel against his sovereignty. In accord- 
 ance with God's law of righteousness sin is punish- 
 able by the death of the whole race. "The wrath 
 of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodli- 
 ness and unrighteousness of men." But when the 
 eternal Son of God, the head and representative 
 of the race, submits to this penalty and in so doing 
 acknowledges the righteousness of God, justice is 
 satisfied. " If one died for all, therefore all died." 
 Those who claim by faith the benefits of Messiah's 
 submission to death on behalf of the race are at 
 peace with God. Henceforth they are not to live 
 to themselves, but unto Him who died for them and 
 rose again. 
 
 Anyone who reads Paul's words without dogmatic 
 prejudice will see that this is not the present-day 
 doctrine of Atonement. It takes for granted certain 
 ideas which were current among the Jews of Paul's 
 day, but which have since sunk into the background 
 of Christian thought or been abandoned altogether. 
 Paul's use of them in the framing of his theology 
 is ingenious but not convincing, and was not essen- 
 tial to his gospel; in fact the juridical and the ethical 
 elements in Paul's teaching stand in irreconcilable
 
 1 90 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 contrast. His theology is saved by his mysticism, 
 for no sooner has he enunciated these unbelievable 
 propositions about the death penalty of sin, the judi- 
 cial sovereignty of God, justification by faith, the 
 imputed merits of the Redeemer, and such like, 
 than he proceeds to use them as symbols to illustrate 
 a subjective change in the sinner and a mystical 
 union between the soul and Christ. He does this 
 so beautifully that the reader can hardly discern 
 where Paul quits the region of literalism and takes 
 us into that of mysticism. Hence he talks about 
 dying with Christ, being crucified with Christ, dying 
 to sin, and so on, evidently meaning that the whole 
 redeeming process has to take place within the soul 
 of the sinner who seeks God. Even the conception 
 of the resurrection ceases to be literal and becomes 
 the uprising of the divine man within the human soul 
 by faith in the risen Lord. " If any man be in Christ 
 there is a new creation; old things are passed away; 
 behold all things are become new." "There is 
 therefore now no condemnation to them which are 
 in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh but after 
 the Spirit." We see from these expressions that in 
 practice Paul transfers the whole drama of redemp- 
 tion from without to within the individual soul. 
 What a pity it is that his interpreters in Christian 
 history have so seldom thought of doing the same ! 
 The Hebrews theory. The epistle to the He- 
 brews belongs to quite a different category from the 
 writings of St. Paul. The dominant thought in
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE 191 
 
 this epistle is that of salvation by sacrifice, a per- 
 fectly true and spiritual idea, as we have already 
 seen. The writer, like Paul, employs Old Testament 
 symbolism, but in quite a different way. Probably 
 this is due to the fact that he was an Alexandrian 
 Jew whose thinking was shaped under the influence 
 of Philo, whereas that of Paul was governed by the 
 rabbinical schools of Palestinian Judaism. At this 
 time Alexandria was the greatest intellectual centre 
 in the world, a meeting place for Greek thought 
 and Hebrew religion as represented by Philo. The 
 influence of Alexandria is plainly to be seen in the 
 epistle to the Hebrews, which, possibly, was written 
 by the learned and courtly Apollos. Like Paul, 
 the writer thinks of salvation as getting right with 
 God and living a holy life, but he omits all reference 
 to a judicial penalty, or the necessity for escaping 
 annihilation by faith in the substitutionary work 
 of a sinless Redeemer. In his view Christ is from 
 first to last the priestly representative of the race, 
 making a sacrifice to God after the Old Testament 
 fashion, but in a more perfect way. He regards the 
 Old Testament sacrificial offerings as being but the 
 types and shadows of the one perfect and eternal 
 offering which humanity through Christ is making 
 to God. Most of my readers will at once admit 
 that this is not fanciful, although the language in 
 which it is expressed is so different from our own; 
 it is quite faithful to the spiritual meaning of Old 
 Testament sacrifice. When, therefore, this writer
 
 IQ2 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 refers to the offering of the blood of Christ, he is 
 thinking not only of Calvary, but of all that Calvary 
 symbolises, the perfect spiritual offering of man- 
 kind to God, the sacramental realisation of our 
 oneness with Him. This view is not worked out 
 with the moral intensity which characterises St. 
 Paul's, but it is unassailably true once we get the 
 writer's point of view. As a theory it is quite differ- 
 ent from Paul's, unless we are content to shed Paul's 
 literalism, get rid of all thought of an angry God 
 and a physical death penalty for sin, and betake 
 ourselves instead to the inner spiritual region where 
 self-sacrifice is realised to be the means of saving, 
 not only the individual, but the whole race, by uniting 
 it to the source of all being. 
 
 The Johannine theory. There is a certain 
 similarity between the view of Atonement set forth 
 in the epistle to the Hebrews and that contained 
 in the Johannine writings. It is easy to understand 
 why this is so when we recognise that both are domi- 
 nated by Alexandrian modes of thinking. These 
 Johannine writings the fourth gospel, the three 
 epistles ascribed to St. John, and the book of Reve- 
 lation are all that have come down to us of what 
 was at one time, no doubt, a considerable literature. 
 How much the apostle John had to do with it cannot 
 be determined with any certainty, but it is clear 
 enough that these writings are not all from one hand, 
 and that they are much later than the work of St. 
 Paul. The all-important conception in the Johan-
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE 193 
 
 nine writings is that salvation is secured by the union 
 of the individual soul with the eternal Christ, or 
 Logos, or Divine Man of pre-Christian thought and 
 experience. Here again we have a perfectly true 
 and necessary idea, an idea implied in all spiritual 
 experience worthy of the name; but as the root 
 factor in a presentation of the doctrine of Atone- 
 ment, it differs widely from Paul's way of putting 
 things. When the Johannine writers speak of the 
 blood of Christ, they mean the outpoured, forthgiven 
 life of the eternal Son of God, the ideal humanity, 
 perfectly and centrally expressed in Jesus of Naza- 
 reth. There is not from beginning to end a hint or 
 a suggestion in these writings that a sinless being 
 was tortured in order to appease the wrath of God 
 against guilty ones, or that the penalty of sin in a 
 world to come will be remitted to a penitent sinner 
 in consideration of his faith in such an arrangement. 
 Underlying unity. This is by no means an ex- 
 haustive examination of New Testament teaching 
 on the subject of Atonement, but it should be suffi- 
 cient to show two things: first, that the theories 
 of the New Testament writers concerning the re- 
 deeming works of Christ are not, taken literally, 
 mutually consistent; secondly, the truth implied 
 in all the theories is precisely that truth of Atone- 
 ment which we have already seen to be implied in 
 all religion. The great thing which impressed the 
 primitive Christian consciousness in regard to the 
 life and death of Jesus was that this life and death
 
 194 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 were the most complete and consistent self-offering 
 of the individual to the whole that had ever been 
 made. In this self-offering was the one perfect 
 manifestation of the eternal Christ, the humanity 
 which reveals the innermost of God, the humanity 
 which is love. To partake of the benefits of that 
 Atonement we have to unite ourselves to it; that is, 
 to employ the mystical language of St. Paul, we have 
 to die to self with Christ and rise with Him into 
 the experience of larger, fuller life, the life eternal. 
 It is just the same truth under every one of these 
 different theories, but if we persist in regarding them 
 literally we shall miss it, for by no kind of ingenuity 
 can we square the theory of St. Paul with that of 
 the other writers; the way of putting it is different. 
 But once we see what the essential truth of Atone- 
 ment is, we are no longer bound by the intellectual 
 symbolism of Paul or Hebrews or any other author- 
 ity; we can get beneath the symbol to the thing 
 symbolised. The Pauline principle of dying with 
 Christ, the Hebrews idea of the eternal sacrifice 
 manifested in time, the Johannine thought about 
 the outpoured life of the eternal Christ, are all one 
 and the same. Jesus did nothing for us which we 
 are not also called upon to do for ourselves and one 
 another in our degree. Faith in His atoning work 
 means death to self that we may live to God; as 
 selfhood perishes on its Calvary, the Christ, the true 
 man, the divine reality, in whom we are one with 
 all men, rises in power in our hearts and unites us
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE 195 
 
 to the source of all goodness and joy. Institutional, 
 forensic, external, the Atonement never has been 
 and never will be. But vicarious suffering, willingly 
 accepted, is the great redeeming force by which 
 the world is gradually being won to its true life in 
 God, for vicarious suffering is the expression of 
 the law that in a finite world the service of the whole 
 involves pain, although it is also the deepest joy that 
 the human heart can know. The sacrifice of Jesus 
 is the central and ideal expression of this principle 
 on the field of time, but it only possesses meaning 
 and value as it is repeated in our lives; the Christ 
 has to be offered perpetually on the altar of human 
 hearts. There is no justification except by becoming 
 just, and no imputed righteousness which means 
 availing ourselves of merits that are not ours. We 
 are " justified by faith," indeed, but only in the 
 sense that no man can become good without believ- 
 ing in goodness, and no man can really believe in 
 the Christ revealed in Jesus without gradually 
 becoming like Him. Here is Atonement, Justifica- 
 tion, Sanctification, and all else that is needed to 
 unite mankind to the life eternal which is to know 
 God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. 
 
 No Old Testament prophecy of Atonement of 
 Jesus. It can hardly be necessary to point out 
 that there is therefore no direct reference in the Old 
 Testament to the atoning work of Jesus. All the 
 beautiful passages with which we are so familiar, 
 and which have become the language of devotion
 
 196 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 in reference to such sacred seasons as Christmas 
 Day and Good Friday, can only be associated with 
 Jesus in an ideal sense. The noble fifty-third of 
 Isaiah, for example, and all similar passages about 
 the prophetic conception of the suffering servant of 
 God, have, literally understood, nothing whatever 
 to do with Jesus. But the striking thing about such 
 passages is that the men who wrote them were able 
 to realise and express the very essence of the spiritual 
 Atonement, the giving of the individual for the race. 
 The pathetic and inspiring description, " He was 
 despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and 
 acquainted with grief, and we hid as it were our 
 faces from him, he was despised and we esteemed 
 him not. Surely he has borne our griefs, and carried 
 our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, 
 smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded 
 for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniqui- 
 ties: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; 
 and with his stripes we are healed," is perhaps the 
 grandest presentation of the atoning life, the Christ 
 man, that exists in literature. The ideal fulfilment 
 of it was Jesus, as primitive Christianity quickly 
 saw ; but had the original writer no specific example 
 in mind belonging to his own day when he wrote? 
 To be sure he had ; the case of Jeremiah would fur- 
 nish it if no other. This brave and faithful advocate 
 of the moral ideal, after standing alone in his resist- 
 ance to the materialising tendencies of his time, 
 was scorned and hated by his fellow-countrymen,
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE 197 
 
 flung into prison, beaten, tortured, and probably 
 murdered in the end. He shared the captivity of 
 the Jews under Nebuchadnezzar, a captivity against 
 which he had warned them in vain. " Despised 
 and rejected of men," he died, but in later days 
 his name came to be reverenced as perhaps none had 
 ever been before. For centuries afterwards he was 
 referred to by the returned exiles as the prophet, in 
 contradistinction to all other prophets. He had 
 lived the atoning life and died a sacrificial death. 
 It was not wonderful that the author of the fifty- 
 third of Isaiah should have such a noble example 
 in mind when he penned his deathless words, but 
 these words were meant to have an impersonal 
 meaning too. They stand as a description of the 
 ideal manhood, the true servant of God, the saviour 
 of the race in any and every generation. This 
 kind of manhood, just because it is the true man- 
 hood, the eternal or divine manhood, must inevitably 
 suffer in a selfish world, but these sufferings are 
 never in vain; they are the Calvary from which 
 the eternal Christ rises in redeeming might over the 
 power of sin and death. Let any man ask himself 
 what it is that is saving the world to-day, and gradu- 
 ally but surely lifting it out of the mire of ignorance 
 and wickedness, and he cannot find a better answer 
 than the fifty-third of Isaiah. It tells of Jesus, but 
 it tells also of all the sons of God who in the spirit 
 of Jesus have ever given their lives in the service of 
 love.
 
 1 98 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 When we go to the Bible in this common -sense 
 way, entering with understanding and sympathy 
 into the thoughts and aspirations of the men who 
 wrote it, it becomes a living book, and a real help 
 in our endeavour to live our lives in union with 
 Jesus Christ. But to regard it as a sort of official 
 document written by the finger of God, of equal 
 authority in every part, and containing a full and 
 complete statement of the propositions we must 
 accept in order to make sure of salvation, is ham- 
 pering and belittling to the soul. God inspires 
 men, not books ; and He will go on inspiring men to 
 the end of time, whether they write books or not. 
 I do not know anything which is such a serious hin- 
 drance and stumbling-block to spiritual religion 
 to-day as this supposed authority of the letter of 
 scripture. If only the average Protestant could 
 emancipate himself from this intellectual bondage, 
 the gain to truth would be immeasurable. I do 
 not suppose there is a single man who reads these 
 words who would make light of the religious opin- 
 ions of a pious mother, but would he allow them to 
 fetter him in the exercise of his own mature judg- 
 ment ? But surely your own mother stands as near 
 to you as men who wrote centuries before she was 
 born. If God spoke to the hearts of men centuries 
 ago, He can and does speak to them now. If He 
 spoke to Isaiah, He can and does speak to you. If 
 your mother's way of stating truth is not necessarily 
 yours, no more is Paul's. The deeper unity of the
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE 199 
 
 spirit forbids this blind obedience to the letter. 
 Therefore, knowing quite well what use hostile 
 reviewers will make of this sentence, I close by 
 solemnly adding: Never mind what the Bible says 
 if you are in search for truth, but trust the voice of 
 God within you. The Bible will help you in your 
 quest, just as any good man might be able to help 
 you ; but you must judge, test, and weigh the various 
 statements it contains, just as you would judge, 
 test, and weigh the opinions of the best friend you 
 ever had. Nothing can make up for this quiet and 
 assured confidence in the Spirit of Truth within 
 your own soul. If God is not there, you will not 
 find Him in the Bible or anywhere else.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 SALVATION, JUDGMENT, AND THE LIFE TO COME 
 
 The inwardness of Salvation and Judgment. 
 We come now to the consideration of a group of 
 subjects which are usually treated in quite separate 
 categories. I mean the punishment of sin, the nature 
 and scope of Salvation, Resurrection and Ascension, 
 Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. The reason why 
 I feel that these subjects ought not to be treated 
 in separate categories is because they are all de- 
 scriptions of states of the soul and imply each other; 
 they are inward, not outward, experiences. This 
 statement will, I trust, become clearer as we 
 proceed. 
 
 So far we have examined pretty thoroughly the 
 nature of sin and its effects in the world, but have 
 said very little as to its penal consequences, and yet 
 the consideration of these consequences has been the 
 determining factor in most of the theories of Atone- 
 ment, ancient or modern, which have occupied the 
 field of human thought. It is true, as I have said, 
 that the idea of Atonement is not necessarily as- 
 sociated with that of sin, and actually precedes it both 
 historically and psychologically, but it cannot be 
 gainsaid that in Christian thought the desirability 
 
 200
 
 SALVATION, JUDGMENT, THE LIFE TO COME 2OI 
 
 of finding some means of escaping or minimising 
 the punishment of sin has tended to overshadow 
 everything else in popular presentations of the 
 Atonement. But what is the punishment of sin, 
 and who administers it? What is the Judgment 
 and when does it take effect? How does Salvation 
 stand related to punishment and judgment? What 
 has Death to do with the matter? What are we to 
 understand by Heaven and Hell, and what is the 
 bearing of either upon Salvation and Judgment? 
 Everyone knows how popular evangelical theology 
 would answer these questions. Sin, we are told, will 
 be punished in a future life by the committal of the 
 impenitent soul to everlasting torment. Salvation 
 is primarily a means of escaping this, and secondarily 
 being conformed gradually to the moral likeness 
 of the Saviour. Judgment is a grand assize, which 
 will take place when the material world comes to an 
 end; Jesus Christ will be the Judge, and will ap- 
 portion everlasting weal or woe, according as the 
 soul has or has not claimed the benefit of His re- 
 deeming work in time to profit by it. Death is the 
 dividing line beyond which the destiny is fixed eter- 
 nally whether we die old or young. Heaven is the 
 place into which the redeemed enter whether 
 after death or after judgment has never been clearly 
 settled there to praise God eternally in perfect 
 happiness; Hell is the place of never ending torment 
 to which unbelievers are to be consigned. 
 Now it does not require a very profound intel-
 
 202 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 ligence to see that popular theology is a mass of 
 contradictions in regard to these things. By eternal 
 the ordinary Christian usually means everlasting; 
 why should punishment be everlasting? The worst 
 sin that was ever sinned does not deserve everlasting 
 punishment, and I have never yet met the Christian 
 who would really and truly be willing to see a fellow- 
 creature undergo it. There is no understandable 
 sense in which justice could demand such a terrible 
 sentence, even if it involved no more than everlasting 
 unhappiness ; how much more unthinkable it becomes 
 if the punishment is to be everlasting, fiendish tor- 
 ment! If Salvation is first and foremost deliver- 
 ance from this punishment, how is it that it does not 
 take effect immediately ? Justice would suggest that 
 it ought to do so, for some sinners live a merry life 
 until the eleventh hour, and then give God " the last 
 snuff of the candle " as Father Taylor put it, whereas 
 others repent early but never manage, all through 
 a long life, to escape the suffering caused by their 
 own deeds in youth. In some cases, at any rate, 
 on this side of the grave, Salvation does not involve 
 the least remission of penalty, while in others ap- 
 parently no penalty will ever be endured either on this 
 side of death or on the other. The poor drunkard 
 who repents does not find that repentance gives him 
 back his wrecked constitution, but the selfish, grasp- 
 ing, cruel-hearted wrecker of homes and lives may 
 just be in time with his trust in the " finished work," 
 and go right home to glory while his victims struggle
 
 SALVATION, JUDGMENT, THE LIFE TO COME 203 
 
 and suffer on amid the conditions he has made for 
 them on earth. Curious justice this ! 
 
 Christian thought never quite consistent about 
 Death and after. There is no need to labour the 
 point; popular evangelical views of the punishment 
 of sin are incredible when looked at in a common- 
 sense way. But they are even more chaotic on the 
 subject of death and whatever follows death. It does 
 not seem to be generally recognised that Christian 
 thought has never been really clear concerning the 
 Resurrection, especially in relation to future judg- 
 ment. One view has been that the deceased saint 
 lies sleeping in the grave until the archangel's trump 
 shall sound and bid all mankind awake for the great 
 assize. Anyone who reads the New Testament 
 without prejudice will see that this was Paul's 
 earlier view, although later on he changed it for 
 another. There is a good deal of our current, every- 
 day religious phraseology which presumes it still 
 
 " Father, in thy gracious keeping 
 Leave we now thy servant sleeping." 
 
 But alongside this view another which is a flagrant 
 contradiction of it has come down to us, namely, 
 that immediately after death the soul goes straight 
 to heaven or hell, as the case may be, without waiting 
 for the archangel's trump and the grand assize. 
 On the whole this is the dominant theory of the situ- 
 ation in Protestant circles, and is much less reason- 
 able than the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, however
 
 204 THE NE W THEOLOGY 
 
 much the latter may have been abused. But under 
 this view what is the exact significance of the Judg- 
 ment Day and the physical Resurrection? One 
 would think they might be accounted superfluous. 
 What is the good of tormenting a soul in hell for 
 ages and then whirling it back to the body hi order 
 to rise again and receive a solemn public condemna- 
 tion ? Better leave it in the Inferno and save trouble, 
 especially as the solemn trial is meaningless, seeing 
 that a part of the sentence has already been under- 
 gone, and that there is no hope that any portion of 
 it will ever be remitted. Truly the tender mercies 
 with which theologians have credited the Almighty 
 are cruel indeed! It is difficult to speak with pa- 
 tience of the solemn, non-committal way in which 
 many present-day theological writers discuss ever- 
 lasting punishment. Many of them have an "open 
 mind" on the subject, whatever that may be, and 
 warn the rest of us not to dogmatise on the great 
 mystery. It does not seem to occur to them that the 
 Christian fundamental of the love of God renders 
 the dogma of everlasting punishment impossible, for 
 it implies that God will do the most for the being that 
 needs the most, and surely that must be the most 
 unhappy sinner. Others speak of a " larger hope," 
 a second opportunity for accepting divine grace, and 
 so on. But these theories do not meet the case at 
 all. While sin remains in the universe, God is de- 
 feated; everlasting punishment involves His ever- 
 lasting failure. How often we hear preachers
 
 SALVATION, JUDGMENT, THE LIFE TO COME 205 
 
 speaking about the obdurate human will, which to all 
 eternity may go on resisting good. There are not 
 a few who defend the abstract possibility of ever- 
 lasting punishment by insisting that it is impossible 
 to coerce the will, and therefore that to endless ages 
 a soul may go on choosing evil and rejecting good. 
 But this is an entirely new argument; it implies that 
 a sinner might choose the good on the other side of 
 death, and that if he does not he continues eternally 
 to pass sentence upon himself, God being helpless in 
 the matter. This is not the way in which advocates 
 of everlasting punishment used to talk. It is a little 
 more hopeful than the conventional dogma, for 
 it makes the sinner to some extent his own judge 
 and executioner, and places stress on the undoubted 
 truth that if a man keeps on doing wrong things 
 he becomes hardened. I have heard this view 
 defended in private by a bishop, who apparently 
 never saw that in adopting it he had given up entirely 
 the orthodox Protestant view that there is no chance 
 for a man after death, and that the thing which 
 determines our post-mortem destiny is not our con- 
 duct, but our belief. Repentance at the eleventh 
 hour, however bad the previous life may have been, 
 is, according to the theology of this particular bishop, 
 enough to secure admission to heaven. If, therefore, 
 a power of eternally choosing evil remains on the 
 further side of the great change, surely there is some 
 hope that that power might not continue to be 
 exercised. But if not, what becomes of the whole
 
 206 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 fabric of popular Protestant theology concerning 
 the plan of salvation, the Judgment Day, and the 
 atoning merits of the Redeemer? 
 
 No, this kind of incoherent theologising will not 
 do. No one really believes it, and the churches 
 will have to give up professing to believe it. In our 
 ordinary everyday concerns we take quite a different 
 view for granted all the time, the view that " What- 
 soever a man soweth that shall he also reap." The 
 harvest may be long in coming, but it comes at last. 
 Neither do we choose our friends on account of their 
 chances of heaven or hell. We like or dislike a man 
 because he deserves to be liked or disliked, and not 
 because he believes something that will get him into 
 heaven. Neither, thank God, do we want to see 
 even the wicked left to the consequences of their 
 wickedness; we want to see them helped to live dif- 
 ferently, and it is hardly probable that this impulse 
 of our better humanity will change after death. 
 Love cannot be false to itself; in the presence of 
 need it must of necessity keep on giving itself until 
 the need is satisfied and the victory won. 
 
 But if popular theology concerning the last things 
 is untrue, or at least misleading and inadequate, 
 what is the truth? Do we want a different set of 
 terms or not ? I think not, but we want a different 
 perspective. These terms ought to be construed as 
 states of the soul, rather than as external conditions. 
 Let me try to explain what I mean. 
 
 The true Salvation. In the first place if sin is
 
 SALVATION, JUDGMENT, THE LIFE TO COME 207 
 
 selfishness, salvation must consist in ceasing to be 
 selfish, that is, it represents the victory of love in the 
 human heart. This may be represented as the up- 
 rising of the deeper self, the true man, the Christ 
 man in the experience of the penitent. We may 
 even go so far as to say that this can come about, and 
 does come about, without any strongly marked feel- 
 ings of contrition or sudden change of attitude. 
 Wherever you see a man trying to do something for 
 the common good, you see the uprising of the spirit 
 of Christ; what he is doing is a part of the Atone- 
 ment. In church or out of church, with or without 
 a formal creed, this is the true way in which the 
 redemption of the world is proceeding. Every 
 man who is trying to live so as to make his life a 
 blessing to the world is being saved himself in the 
 process, saved by becoming a saviour. Ordinary 
 observation ought to tell us that untold thousands 
 of our fellow-beings, even among those who never 
 dream of going to church, are being saved in this 
 way. This is the true way to look at the matter. 
 The Christ, the true Christ who was and is Jesus, but 
 who is also the deeper self of every human being, 
 is saving individuals by filling them with the unself- 
 ish desire to save the race. It is this unselfish desire 
 to minister to the common good which is the true 
 salvation. I do not mind what name is given to it so 
 long as it is recognised for what it really is ; there is 
 no stopping-place between sinner and saviour. This 
 is the way in which men like Robert Blatchford of
 
 208 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 the Clarion are being saved while trying to save. 
 Conceive how differently such a man might have 
 lived his life. He might have lived it so as to be of 
 no use to anyone, or indeed in such a way as to be 
 a hindrance rather than a help to poor overburdened 
 humanity. It matters comparatively little that this 
 man should think he is destroying supernaturalism 
 and scoffs at the possibility of a future life. His 
 moral earnestness is a mark of his Christhood and 
 his work a part of the Atonement. Not another 
 Christ than Jesus, mind! The very same. Mr. 
 Blatchford may laugh at this and call his moral 
 aspirations by quite a different name. Well, let 
 him; but I know the thing when I see it. This is 
 Salvation. 
 
 Conversion. But in the history of mankind the 
 change from selfishness to love, from darkness to 
 light, from death to life, has often meant something 
 much more pronounced than this. A man may have 
 been living a bad life, and become suddenly impressed 
 by some appeal to his better nature made in the 
 name of God. He may have felt humiliated and 
 distressed by his new-found consciousness of sin. 
 He may have prayed earnestly for forgiveness, and 
 felt that forgiveness has come and that the peace 
 of God has entered into and possessed his soul. 
 He has deliberately and solemnly consecrated his 
 life to Jesus and feels that henceforth he is, as it 
 were, in a new world. This change is rightly termed 
 conversion, a turning round and going right. Such
 
 SALVATION, JUDGMENT, THE LIFE TO COME 209 
 
 a man may be able to say with St. Paul, "To me 
 to live is Christ," and the words would be literally 
 and grandly true. After this he may go on believing 
 all kinds of things about verbal inspiration, the pre- 
 cious blood, the fate of the impenitent, and I know 
 not what else, but the quality of the new life is al- 
 ways the same; it is dominated by the spirit of love 
 instead of the spirit of selfishness; it is harmony 
 with God. Often this change is very complete and 
 beautiful, but in every case it involves a long and 
 slow ascent to the stature of the perfect man in 
 Christ Jesus. It is no delusion, either, that hi the 
 endeavour to live the new life divine help is forth- 
 coming. The Holy Spirit of truth and love is ever 
 present with a child of God to guide him to higher 
 and ever higher heights of spiritual attainment. 
 Without this blessed religious experience, the expe- 
 rience of those who are " called to be saints," this 
 world would be a poor place to live in. I may per- 
 haps be pardoned for adding that in my judgment 
 even the earnest redemptive endeavours of men like 
 the editor of the Clarion have indirectly been made 
 possible by it. Take out of the world what Chris- 
 tian saints have owed to their fellowship with Jesus, 
 and there would be very little of hope and inspiration 
 left. Still, what I want to emphasise here is the 
 fact that, however crude the various theologies may 
 have been in which this experience has clothed it- 
 self , it is always the same; it represents the victory 
 of love in the human heart.
 
 210 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 Salvation and penalty. But does this kind of 
 salvation do away with the penal consequences of 
 past sin? If not, what is its relation to them? To 
 answer these questions we must look a little more 
 closely into the nature of such penal consequences. 
 Perhaps it would help to clear up the subject if 
 I were to say frankly before going any farther that 
 there is no such thing as punishment, no far-off 
 Judgment Day, no great white throne, and no Judge 
 external to ourselves. I say there is no punishment 
 of sin in the sense in which the word "punishment" 
 is usually employed. We are accustomed to think 
 of punishment as a sentence imposed by some au- 
 thority from without and containing within itself some 
 element of vengeance for wrong-doing. But in the 
 divine dealings with men such punishment has never 
 existed and never will. What has already been 
 said in a previous chapter on the subject of pain 
 should help to make this statement plain. We have 
 seen that pain is life pressing upon death and death 
 resisting life. If there were no life, there would be 
 no pain. We may say therefore that pain is life, 
 or some finite expression of the universal life, seeking 
 to burst through something that fetters and hinders 
 it. Apply this to the region of morals and let us see 
 how it works out. If a man has been living for self, 
 he has been making a mistake and preparing for 
 himself a harvest of pain, for sooner or later the divine 
 life within him, the truer, deeper self, will assert 
 itself against the decisive efforts of sin. It is just
 
 SALVATION, JUDGMENT, THE LIFE TO COME 211 
 
 as impossible for a man to go on eternally living 
 apart from the universal life as it is for a sand castle 
 to shut out the ocean; the returning tide would 
 break down the puny barriers and destroy everything 
 that tends to separate between the soul and God. 
 For, after all, what is our life but God's? To try 
 to keep it for ourselves is like trying to catch and 
 imprison a sun ray by drawing the blinds. To save 
 the self we must serve the All. When, therefore, 
 we remember that the spirit of man and the spirit 
 of God are one, we know of a surety that the infinite 
 life behind the human spirit will assert itself ir- 
 resistibly against the endeavours of sin to enclose that 
 spirit within finite conditions. The essence of sin 
 is the declaration, "Mine is not thine, and I shall 
 live for mine alone." This is trying to live for the 
 finite; it is enclosing the soul within barriers; those 
 barriers must be broken if the soul is to be saved, 
 and broken they will be just because the deeper 
 self of every man is already one with God. In the 
 stable-yard of my house there was at one time a 
 tree, which was cut down and the place where it grew 
 covered with flagstones and a wall built round it. 
 But the roots of the tree were not removed, and 
 so that buried life has reasserted itself, the flag- 
 stones have been shattered, and now the wall is 
 coming down. Here is a figure of our moral ex- 
 perience. A man may go on living for self all 
 through a long career; he may bury his better 
 nature deep underneath the hard shell of material-
 
 212 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 ism and self-indulgence, but it is all in vain; sooner 
 or later, on this side of death or on the other, that 
 buried life shall rise in power and all barriers be 
 swept away. This uprising of the Christ in the 
 individual soul, for such it is, must inevitably mean 
 pain to the man whose true life has been entombed 
 in selfishness. The pain may begin here or on the 
 farther side of the change called death, but it is 
 itself not a mark of death, but of life. The fact that 
 a soul can suffer proves its salvability beyond dis- 
 pute. An everlasting hell is in the nature of things 
 a contradiction, for the finite cannot eternally bar 
 the way of the infinite reality whose uprising is the 
 cause of its pain ; if it could, it would itself be infinite, 
 which is absurd. Sin is essentially the endeavour 
 to live for the finite, the separative, the divisive, as 
 opposed to the infinite, the whole-ward, the All. 
 Which will win in this encounter ? 
 
 The real judge. And who, pray, is the judge ? 
 Who but yourself? The deeper self is the judge, 
 the self who is eternally one with God. The pain 
 caused by sin arises from the soul, which is potentially 
 infinite and cannot have its true nature denied. 
 If you go and live over a sewer, you will be ill. Why ? 
 Because you were never meant to live over a sewer. 
 The evil therein attacks you, and the life within you 
 fights to overcome it, and in the process you have 
 to suffer. It is just the same with your spiritual 
 nature. You cannot continue to live apart from the 
 whole, for the real you is the whole, and, do what
 
 SALVATION, JUDGMENT, THE LIFE TO COME 213 
 
 you will, it will overcome everything within you 
 that makes for separateness, and in the process 
 you will have to suffer. This is what the punish- 
 ment of sin means. It is life battling with death, 
 love striving against selfishness, the deeper soul 
 with the surface soul. It is our own spiritual nature 
 that compels us to suffer when we sin, and there is 
 no escaping the sentence; if we sin we must suffer, 
 for we are so constituted that what sin does, love 
 with toil and pain must undo. No eleventh-hour 
 repentance can evade this issue; in fact, it may be 
 the beginning of it. If we have been treading a 
 wrong road, repentance is turning round and taking 
 the way back. If we have been living a false life, 
 repentance is the beginning of the true, and just in 
 proportion as the false has been accepted, so will 
 the true find it difficult to destroy the lie. You are 
 the judge ; you in God. If you have failed to achieve 
 that for which you are here, you will have to achieve 
 it here or elsewhere, and the correction of your 
 failure will inevitably mean pain. 
 
 " The tissues of the life to be, 
 We weave with colours all our own; 
 And in the field of destiny 
 We reap as we have sown." 
 
 There is nothing horrific about this law of the 
 spirit. In a true and real sense it is our own law; 
 ive make it. Being what we are, we cannot let our- 
 selves off. Pain is at once the consequence of sin
 
 214 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 and the token of our divine lineage. But there is 
 nothing individualistic about this sinning and 
 suffering. All the love in the universe comes to 
 the help of the soul that tries to rise. It will even 
 enter the prison house along with it and accept 
 the cross in the endeavour to hasten the emancipation 
 of the sinbound soul. In fact, it must do so, for 
 as long as there is any sin to be done away, love 
 cannot have its perfect work. This it was which 
 brought Jesus to earth, and this it is which turns 
 every follower of Jesus into a saviour. Love must 
 strive and suffer with sin until God is all in all. 
 
 The spiritual resurrection. It follows from 
 this that the true resurrection is spiritual, not mate- 
 rial, and this is the sense in which the word is most 
 frequently employed in the New Testament. In 
 the fourth gospel Jesus is represented as saying, 
 " I am the resurrection, and the life : he that believ- 
 eth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live : and 
 he that liveth and believeth in me shall never die." 
 This is a great saying, and the writer of this par- 
 ticular gospel meant every word of it in the sense I 
 have just indicated. He makes the eternal Christ 
 the speaking terms of the earthly Jesus and tells us 
 that the uprising of this eternal Christ within the 
 soul of the penitent sinner is the real resurrection. 
 
 The resurrection of Jesus. But this subject 
 of the resurrection demands a further examination. 
 We have already seen how inconsistent popular 
 Christian doctrine is about the matter, and yet
 
 SALVATION, JUDGMENT, THE LIFE TO COME 215 
 
 Christianity started with the belief in a resurrection 
 of our Lord, a belief which has continued down to 
 the present day. What are we to say about this? 
 We may as well admit at the outset that the gospel 
 accounts of the physical resurrection of Jesus are 
 mutually inconsistent and that no amount of in- 
 genuity can reconcile them. Matthew speaks of a 
 Galilean appearance, and says nothing about the 
 ascension. Luke says a great deal about the 
 Jerusalem appearances, nothing about Galilee, and 
 tells us that the ascension took place from Bethany. 
 The end of St. Mark's gospel has been lost, and the 
 last few verses are a summary of the accounts in 
 the other gospels concerning the post-resurrection 
 appearances of the Lord. John's version is, of 
 course, less historical than the synoptists, and puts 
 the last appearance at the sea of Tiberias. A minute 
 discussion of the problem thus raised would be 
 unprofitable for our present purpose, but I hope 
 we can take for granted the broad fact that without 
 a belief in a resurrection of some kind Christianity 
 could not have made a start at all. It is almost 
 indisputable that in some way or other the dis- 
 ciples must have become convinced that they had 
 seen Jesus face to face after the world believed 
 Him to be dead and buried. The earliest apostolic 
 utterance on the subject in the New Testament 
 is the familiar passage from i Cor. xv: "For I 
 delivered unto you first of all that which I also 
 received, how that Christ died for our sins accord-
 
 2l6 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 ing to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and 
 that he rose again the third day according to the 
 scriptures: And that he was seen by Cephas, then 
 of the twelve: After that he was seen of above five 
 hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater 
 part remain unto this present, but some are fallen 
 asleep. After that he was seen of James; then of 
 all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me 
 also, as of one born out of due time." This state- 
 ment is clear enough and almost unquestionably 
 authentic. It places beyond doubt what the apos- 
 tolic church thought of the resurrection of Jesus. 
 The little group of disciples must somehow have 
 become convinced that their Master was not really 
 dead, but alive and reigning in the world unseen, 
 interested as much as ever in the work His followers 
 were doing, and spiritually present with them in 
 the doing of it. This conviction had immediate 
 and important spiritual results. It gave these simple 
 men a new and greater confidence in Jesus and in 
 the power of the life He had lived. They saw that 
 this life was, after all, the strongest thing in the uni- 
 verse. They realised that in the end nothing could 
 stand against them; evil could do it no real harm, 
 for God was behind it. Even before the crucifixion 
 they had looked upon Jesus as the Son of God in a 
 higher and more spiritual sense than that title had 
 been used before, but now henceforth they thought 
 of Him as such in a higher way still. According to 
 Paul He was " declared to be the Son of God with
 
 SALVATION, JUDGMENT, THE LITE TO COME 217 
 
 power by the resurrection from the dead." If we 
 try to put ourselves in the place of these first Chris- 
 tians, we shall realise better the effect of the resur- 
 rection upon their feelings and behaviour. Let us 
 suppose that we had known Jesus in the flesh, that 
 we had learned to understand a little of the moral 
 and spiritual beauty of the ideal revealed in His life, 
 and that afterward we had seen Him die in blood 
 and shame; I think it would have taken a good deal 
 to convince us that evil had not gained the day. 
 Now suppose after this we had absolute proof 
 I will not say how that our Master was still alive, 
 and that His spirit was with us and helping us, 
 would it not make a very great difference to our 
 outlook upon life and our confidence in God? We 
 could not but feel the littleness of the power that 
 had tried to destroy Jesus, and we should not be 
 afraid of it any more. This is precisely what ap- 
 pears to have happened in the experience of these 
 Galileans. Defeat and failure were somehow turned 
 into victory and success; they had seen Jesus again. 
 Theories of resurrection. But how are we to 
 account for this new-found confidence of theirs 
 that they had really once more looked upon the face 
 of Jesus? The subject has been discussed so ex- 
 haustively that no possible explanation of it has been 
 left altogether untouched. Such a unique event as 
 the raising of a physical body from death is one 
 which the average western mind of the present day 
 would reject as incredible if we had never heard
 
 21 8 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 it before, consequently there exists a widespread 
 tendency among liberal Christians to try to account 
 for primitive Christian belief in the resurrection of 
 our Lord in some other way. Thus we have the 
 hallucination theory, the apparition theory, the 
 swoon theory, and others of a similar character. I 
 should suppose that most thinkers who take the 
 point of view of the New Theology would hold one 
 or other of these explanations or some modification 
 of them, but I confess I have never been able to do 
 so. It seems to me that no such explanation of the 
 universally held Christian conviction that the physi- 
 cal body of Jesus actually rose from the tomb is 
 sufficient to account for it. The passage already 
 quoted from i Cor. xv is alone enough to illustrate 
 this statement. It is clear that the earliest Chris- 
 tians were absolutely certain that the body of Jesus 
 after the resurrection was the body of Jesus as they 
 had known it before, although apparently it pos- 
 sessed some new and mysterious attributes. In 
 my judgment, also, insistence upon the impossibility 
 of a physical resurrection presumes an essential 
 distinction between matter and spirit which I cannot 
 admit. The philosophy underlying the New The- 
 ology as I understand it is monistic idealism, 
 and monistic idealism recognises no fundamental 
 distinction between matter and spirit. The funda- 
 mental reality is consciousness. The so-called ma- 
 terial world is the product of consciousness exer- 
 cising itself along a certain limited plane; the next
 
 SALVATION, JUDGMENT, THE LIFE TO COME 219 
 
 stage of consciousness above this is not an absolute 
 break with it, although it is an expansion of expe- 
 rience or readjustment of focus. Admitting that 
 individual self-consciousness persists beyond the 
 change called death, it only means that such con- 
 sciousness is being exercised along another plane; 
 from a three-dimensional it has entered a four- 
 dimensional world. This new world is no less and 
 no more material than the present; it is all a ques- 
 tion of the range of consciousness. It is this view, 
 the view that matter exists only in and for mind, that 
 leads me to believe that less than justice has been 
 done by liberal thinkers to the theory of the physical 
 resurrection of Jesus. What is the physical but the 
 common denominator between one finite mind and 
 another ? It is a mode of language, an .expression 
 of thought as well as a condition of thought. Imag- 
 ine a being free of a three-dimensional world trying 
 to converse with a being still limited to a two- 
 dimensional world, and we have a clew to what I 
 think may have happened after the crucifixion 
 of Jesus. The three-dimensional body would be- 
 have in a manner altogether unaccountable to the 
 two-dimensional watcher. The latter, knowing only 
 length and breadth, and nothing of up or down, 
 would see his three-dimensional friend as a line 
 only. The moment the three-dimensional solid 
 rose above or sank below his line of vision, it would 
 seem to have disappeared like an apparition, al- 
 though as really present as before. To the two-
 
 220 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 dimensional mind it would seem as though the solid 
 were a ghost. Does this throw any light upon the 
 mysterious appearances and disappearances of the 
 body of Jesus? The all-important thing after 
 Calvary was to make the disciples aware, beyond 
 all dispute, that Jesus was really alive, more alive 
 than ever, and that His murderers had been helpless 
 to destroy Him. When we remember that to the 
 ordinary Jewish mind the thought of personal 
 immortality was anything but clear, and that to 
 many of them death was synonymous with anni- 
 hilation, we can see how enormous was the change 
 that had to be wrought hi the mental attitude of 
 those who had seen Jesus die a violent and bloody 
 death. To see Him return triumphant was the one 
 thing required to counteract their feeling that all 
 was lost, and the best means of demonstrating this 
 victory over death was to enable them to behold 
 Him in the body with which they were already 
 familiar and which they loved so well. For, after 
 all, that body was but a thought-form, a kind of 
 language, a mode of communication between mind 
 and mind; it was no more and no less a thought-form 
 than an apparition would have been, and, from 
 the point of view of monistic idealism, it is no more 
 difficult to believe in the reanimation of a physical 
 body than in the use of any other thought-form to 
 express a fact of consciousness. Here, then, we have 
 a being whose consciousness belongs to the fourth- 
 dimensional plane adjusting Himself to the capac-
 
 SALVATION, JUDGMENT, THE LIFE TO COME 221 
 
 ity of those on a three-dimensional plane for the 
 sake of proving to them beyond dispute that 
 
 " Life is ever lord of death, 
 And love can never love its own." 
 
 This seems to me the most reasonable explanation 
 of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, and 
 the impression produced by them on the minds of 
 His disciples. Most of my New Theology friends 
 will probably reject it at first sight, but at least it 
 is consistent with the philosophic position assumed 
 throughout this book, and seems to me to present 
 fewer difficulties than any other in face of the New 
 Testament accounts. But no theory of the resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus is absolutely indispensable or of first- 
 rate importance; the main thing to be agreed upon 
 is that Christianity started with the belief that its 
 Founder had risen from the dead in order to demon- 
 strate that death has no power to destroy anything 
 worthy of God. In consonance with this idealistic 
 view of the subject the ascension becomes under- 
 standable; it simply means that when Jesus had 
 done what He wanted, the body was dissipated. 
 No doubt primitive Christian thought naively re- 
 garded heaven as a place above the sky to which 
 the physical body actually went, and Hades, or the 
 under-world, as the place from which the spirit 
 of Jesus returned to reanimate it before ascending 
 to the abode of the Father. Plainly enough this 
 is what Paul thought about it, but such a conception
 
 222 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 is now impossible to anyone; it could only exist 
 under a geocentric view of the universe which has 
 long since passed away. But when Paul speaks 
 even about the resurrection of the saints, this is 
 what he means. All the good who have died are 
 waiting in the under-world, the shadowy home 
 of the departed, in a state of existence which 
 is only a sort of dream or sleep compared with 
 that which they have left. From this under-world 
 Jesus returned, " the first-fruits of them that slept." 
 All who believe hi Him will do the same sooner or 
 later, will resume their physical bodies, and, like 
 Him, ascend to the world above the sky. But seeing 
 this geocentric cosmogony has been impossible for 
 centuries past, why should we go on trying to squeeze 
 Paul's language so as to mean something else than 
 what it meant at first? Granted that he was right 
 in believing, in company with all the rest of the 
 primitive church, that Jesus showed Himself to the 
 disciples after His crucifixion, what more do we need ? 
 Paul's theory as to the resurrection of every physical 
 body is just nonsense in the light of our larger 
 knowledge of the universe and its laws, and we may 
 as well say so. 
 
 Paul's mystical view of resurrection. But we 
 should do Paul an injustice if we were to limit the 
 value of his utterances by his views about the resur- 
 rection of the human body. I have already pointed 
 out that Paul employs physical symbols in a mys- 
 tical way, and in nothing was this more so than in
 
 SALVATION, JUDGMENT, THE LIFE TO COME 223 
 
 his use of the idea of a resurrection. With him, 
 as with the writer of the fourth gospel, the spiritual 
 resurrection was the uprising, going-forward, issu- 
 ing-forth, of the Christ or divine man within the soul. 
 When he speaks in this way he allows the thought 
 of a physical resurrection to drop out of sight. 
 Thus he writes : " If we have been planted together 
 in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in the 
 likeness of His resurrection." "That I may know 
 Him and the power of His resurrection, and the 
 fellowship of His sufferings, being made conform- 
 able unto His death; if by any means I might attain 
 unto the resurrection of the dead." " If then ye 
 be risen with Christ seek the things which are above, 
 where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. . . . 
 For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God." 
 Even if this last sentence is not Paul's own it has 
 a distinctly Pauline ring. In his maturer thought 
 the great apostle seems to have escaped the limita- 
 tions of his early Pharisaism. He ceases to speak 
 of the sleep or the under-world, and begins to think 
 of death as the gateway to the immediate presence 
 of his dearly loved Master. " For I long to depart 
 and to be with Christ which is far better." Here, 
 surely, we are listening to the voice of Paul the aged. 
 The moment we succeed in disentangling ourselves 
 from all literal and limiting New Testament state- 
 ments about the connection between sin and physi- 
 cal death, the physical resurrection, the distant 
 Judgment Day, and such-like, we find ourselves in
 
 224 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 a position to appreciate the beautiful spiritual 
 experience in which these very terms become sym- 
 bols of inner realities of the soul. Till we can do 
 this, New Testament language is sure to be a hin- 
 drance to any true apprehension of the moral value 
 of the gospel of Christ. The only salvation we need 
 trouble about is the change from selfishness to love, 
 " We know that we have passed from death unto 
 life because we love." This change is equivalent 
 to a resurrection, the uprising of the eternal Christ 
 within us. It is also an ascension, the uplifting 
 and uniting of the soul to the eternal Father. But 
 such a resurrection and ascension may be preceded 
 by a great deal of pain when the soul is shedding the 
 husk of selfishness. There is no dodging the con- 
 sequences of sin; that is absolutely impossible. 
 A saviour may suffer with and for the sinner, but 
 the sinner must suffer too. The suffering is not a 
 mark of God's anger, but of his love; so far from 
 salvation being a means of screening us from it, 
 the pain is a means by which the salvation takes 
 effect. It is the true self asserting its dominion 
 over the false. Heaven and hell are states of the 
 soul, and the latter implies the former. It is life 
 that suffers, not death. When a guilty soul awakens 
 to the truth, hell begins, but it is because heaven 
 wants to break through. The aim and object of 
 salvation are not the getting of a man into heaven, 
 but the getting of heaven into him. There is noth- 
 ing horrifying about the law of retribution, although
 
 SALVATION, JUDGMENT, THE LIFE TO COME 22$ 
 
 it is inexorable in its operation. It is an evidence of 
 our divine origin, our own true being asserting itself 
 against the fetters of evil. But it is the Christ that 
 saves us, not the retribution; the retribution only 
 shows that the Christ is there, and that from the 
 Calvary caused by sin, and from the tomb in which 
 the true self lies buried, He will rise in glorious 
 majesty hi the soul and unite us in the bonds of 
 love to the eternal divine humanity which is God. 
 Physical death of minor importance. It follows 
 from what has now been said that all these familiar 
 terms imply each other, and that death, judgment, 
 heaven, and hell cannot properly be regarded as 
 the " Last Things." They are all here now, here 
 within the soul, just as infinity and eternity are here 
 now. It is not a matter of hither and yonder, but 
 of higher and lower. Physical death is not the 
 all-important event which theologians have usually 
 made it out to be; it is only a bend in the road. 
 My own impression is that when we individually 
 pass through this crisis, we shall find the change to 
 be very slight. It will mean the dropping of the 
 scales from the eyes, and that is about all. The 
 things we have been living for on this side will only 
 profit us in so far as they have gone to the building 
 up of a Christlike character. If a man has been 
 living for false and unworthy ideals, he will quickly 
 find it out; the only possession he can take to the 
 other side of death is what he is. Belief in the 
 atoning merits and the finished work of a Saviour 
 Q
 
 226 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 will not compensate for wasted opportunities and 
 selfish deeds; these latter will light the fires of 
 retribution as the soul awakes to its true con- 
 dition, and then, and not till then perhaps, will 
 the indwelling Christ obtain His opportunity. Nor 
 will the absence of a formal creed shut any good 
 man out of heaven; it is impossible to shut a man 
 out from what he is. What we sow we reap, and 
 we do so just because of what we fundamentally 
 are. Every road to evil ends in a cul-de-sac. Sooner 
 or later every soul will have to learn that it is no use 
 kicking against the pricks; we must learn by the 
 consequences of our mistakes that, being what we 
 are, the children of the Highest, we cannot perma- 
 nently rest in anything less than the love of God. 
 Salvation and Atonement are just as operative on 
 the other side of death as on this. The blind soul 
 goes on for a while in its blundering selfishness, and 
 the Christ spirit, the spirit of universal love, goes on 
 seeking to win it to the truth. In the end the truth 
 must prevail if only because we shall have to learn 
 that the lie is not worth while. 
 
 Evidence for immortality of the soul. No doubt 
 there are some readers of these pages who profess 
 themselves agnostic or indifferent with regard to 
 the question of immortality, and I am not going 
 to argue with them. It seems to me probable that 
 before very long it will be impossible to deny it. 
 The mass of evidence for the persistence of individual 
 self-consciousness after death is increasing rapidly
 
 SALVATION, JUDGMENT, THE LIFE TO COME 227 
 
 and is being subjected to the strictest scientific 
 investigation. Men like Sir William Crookes and 
 Sir Oliver Lodge, men whose words are entitled 
 to respect from the point of view of modern science, 
 have publicly admitted the importance of such 
 evidence; before long the scientific world in general 
 will have to take it into consideration. But to me 
 such evidence does not greatly matter, and I know 
 very little about it at first hand. I build my belief 
 in immortality on the conviction that the funda- 
 mental reality of the universe is consciousness, and 
 that no consciousness can ever be extinguished, 
 for it belongs to the whole and must be fulfilled in 
 the whole. The one unthinkable supposition from 
 this point of view is that any kind of being which 
 has ever become aware of itself, that is, has ever 
 contained a ray of the eternal consciousness, can 
 perish.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 
 
 Order of the subject. From the consideration of 
 the true significance of such terms as Salvation, 
 Judgment, Heaven, and Hell, we now turn to one 
 which might be thought to occupy a relatively in~ 
 ferior position and to precede them in order of time. 
 But if we have been right in holding that such terms 
 as we have already examined represent states of the 
 soul beginning here and now, we have considered 
 them in their rightful place, for now we have to see 
 how these states of the soul find expression in human 
 institutions. In a word, I wish to devote some space 
 to the consideration of the great subjects of the 
 Church and the Kingdom of God in relation to one 
 another. What is the Church? Where did the 
 idea spring from? What had Jesus to do with it 
 originally ? What is the Kingdom of God, and how 
 do the various Christian societies which call them- 
 selves churches stand in regard to it to-day? To 
 answer any of these questions we must try to place 
 ourselves to some extent in the intellectual and moral 
 atmosphere of those amongst whom the ideas first 
 arose. Let us take the Kingdom first. 
 
 Origin of the idea of the Kingdom of God. At 
 228
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 22Q 
 
 the time when Jesus came every person of Jewish 
 nationality was looking for the establishment of 
 what had come to be called the Kingdom of God. 
 For many generations the Jews had been a subject 
 race. There had been one brief period of national 
 splendour and prosperity, namely, the reigns of David 
 and Solomon. After generations were inclined to 
 idealise these two reigns, especially the former, and 
 to look upon them as a kind of golden age. David 
 they looked upon as an ideal monarch; they called 
 hun a " man after God's own heart," and the im- 
 agination of poet and prophet loved to dwell upon 
 his winsome personality. They thought of him as in 
 a special way the king chosen by God, and the Israel 
 of his time as a true kingdom of God, a kingdom 
 of righteousness, peace, and plenty under the favour 
 of the Most High. The real Israel of David's day 
 was far different from this, but compared with the 
 days that followed it was indeed a time of unexam- 
 pled greatness. A similar tendency to idealise the 
 past is observable in nearly every nation which has 
 entered upon a period of suffering or misfortune, 
 as we can see from the legends about King Olaf and 
 Frederick Barbarossa. But Israel always looked 
 upon herself as in a special way a theocratic kingdom, 
 a chosen of God. At its best this idea was a fine one, 
 one, it led to the thought of a special spiritual voca- 
 tion for the sake of the other nations of the earth; 
 at its worst it meant the assertion of national privi- 
 lege and contempt for everything which was not
 
 230 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 Jewish. After the great captivity in Babylon the 
 Jews were never without a foreign master, and the 
 northern kingdom of Israel disappeared from history. 
 But in quite a remarkable way Jewish poets and 
 preachers united to keep alive the popular belief 
 that God would yet " restore the kingdom to Israel." 
 Hence there grew up a firmly held conviction that 
 God would sometime raise up a prince born of 
 David's line who with supernatural help, and with 
 a strong hand, would drive out the invader and 
 establish a kingdom which should outshine even that 
 of David himself. This was the root idea of the 
 kingdom of God, as we meet it in the New Testa- 
 ment, and as it is described in some of the most beau- 
 tiful passages of the Old. 
 
 The Messiah of Jewish expectation. As time 
 went on this idea was deepened and clarified and 
 became more and more associated in popular ex- 
 pectation with the advent of the Messianic deliverer 
 whose work it should be to inaugurate it. At the 
 time when Jesus was born this expectation had be- 
 come very keen. Everyone was thinking of it, from 
 Pharisees and Scribes downward. At the moment 
 the foreign master was the Roman, whose rule, 
 though milder than that of the Ptolemies, was quite 
 severe enough; the people were impoverished and 
 unhappy. What they were looking for was a Mes- 
 siah, a transcendent but quite human personality of 
 royal descent, who should expel the Roman eagles 
 and inaugurate suddenly and completely an era of
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 231 
 
 peace and prosperity the like of which had never 
 been known before, a true kingdom of God. One 
 extension of this idea was that Israel should replace 
 the Roman empire as the suzerain of all the other 
 nations of the earth. " Arise, shine; for thy light 
 is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. 
 For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, 
 and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall 
 rise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. 
 And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings 
 to the brightness of thy rising. . . . And the sons 
 of strangers shall build up thy walls, and their kings 
 shall minister unto thee: for in my wrath I smote 
 thee, but in my favour have I had mercy on thee. 
 Therefore thy gates shall be open continually; they 
 shall not be shut day nor night ; that men may bring 
 unto thee forces of the Gentiles, and that their kings 
 may be brought. For the nation and kingdom 
 that will not serve thee shall perish; yea, those na- 
 tions shall be utterly wasted. . . . The sons also 
 of them that afflicted thee shall come bending unto 
 thee; and all they that despised thee shall bow 
 themselves down at the soles of thy feet; and they 
 shall call thee, The city of the Lord, The Zion of 
 the Holy One of Israel." This fine passage shows 
 pretty clearly what was the general idea as to the 
 nature of the anticipated kingdom of God. It 
 meant that the Jewish Messiah was to take the place 
 of Caesar and reign with undisputed sway from his 
 capital of Jerusalem.
 
 232 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 But we should do an injustice to the subject if 
 we failed to allow for the fact that according to the 
 prophetic ideal this kingdom was to be a blessing 
 to the world, and to abolish all violence and oppres- 
 sion; the kingdom of God was to be a kingdom of 
 universal peace and joy, a kingdom of righteousness 
 based on social justice. It was because of this wide- 
 spread expectation that the austere preacher, John 
 the Baptist, obtained his hearing in the wilderness 
 of Judea. All John had to preach about was the 
 kingdom of God, which he declared to be near at 
 hand. He believed that he had been sent to herald 
 the coming of the Messiah, and from his words we 
 can gather what people thought about the Messiah : 
 " Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly 
 purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; 
 but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable 
 fire." According to the Baptist, the Messiah would 
 spare no kind of sham or hypocrisy; he would root 
 out and utterly destroy every kind of social evil, 
 no matter what. John insisted that it would be of 
 no use for Jews to imagine that simply because they 
 were descendants of Abraham they would escape 
 this general visitation; hence his words to the Phari- 
 sees were particularly scathing: "O generation of 
 vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath 
 to come ? " It is clear, therefore, that, in the opinion 
 of the man who has now come to be regarded as the 
 forerunner of Jesus, the kingdom of God was to be 
 an earthly kingdom, was to come suddenly, and was
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 233 
 
 to be inaugurated by a sort of general judgment or 
 clean sweep of all the elements that made for oppres- 
 sion, cruelty, foul living, and pretentiousness of every 
 kind. It had not the remotest reference to a world 
 to come or a Divine Redeemer whose principal duty 
 it should be to suffer and die in order to secure a 
 blessed immortality for those who believed in Him. 
 
 Jesus' idea of the kingdom. How far Jesus 
 shared these ideas at the commencement of His own 
 ministry it is impossible to say, but it seems clear that 
 He was attracted by the moral earnestness of John 
 and wished to associate Himself with those who were 
 looking for a kingdom of God which should mean the 
 establishment and realisation of the moral ideal in 
 all human relations. But at the baptism a purpose 
 long forming in his mind appears to have taken 
 definite shape. He felt Himself called to preach the 
 good news of a kingdom which could begin at once 
 in the heart of any man who was willing to become 
 the instrument of divine love and the expression of 
 the ideal of human brotherhood. He went into the 
 wilderness to think this out and then came back to 
 teach it. I do not think He imagined that it could 
 be realised quickly and easily, but it seems fairly 
 obvious that at first He expected that men would 
 be so glad to hear about it that they would hasten 
 to avail themselves of it. All through His ministry 
 He spoke of little else, and it was because of what 
 He had to say about the nature of the kingdom that 
 His followers were attracted to Him. Hence, too,
 
 234 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 we have the deathless teaching preserved for us in 
 the synoptical gospels: " Blessed are the poor in 
 spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. . . . 
 Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." 
 The meaning of Jesus is perfectly clear and perfectly 
 simple. It is that if a kingdom of universal brother- 
 hood is ever to be realised on earth, it can only come 
 by the operation of universal good will. This has 
 been much too simple for most of the theologians, 
 and so they have endeavoured to twist and torture it 
 out of all recognition. As time went on, however, 
 Jesus came to see that it would not be realised as 
 quickly as even He had thought. Men could not 
 or would not understand ; they were looking for a 
 kingdom which should mean plenty to eat and drink, 
 and universal dominion for the sons of Abraham. 
 Even His most immediate followers were unable 
 to divest themselves of this notion, and it is plain 
 enough that they went on hoping even to the end 
 that Jesus would head a revolt and establish a king- 
 dom in which they themselves would hold positions of 
 dignity and importance: "Grant that we may sit, 
 the one on thy right hand and the other on thy left 
 in thy kingdom." The striking rebuke which Jesus 
 administered to these pretensions, by setting a little 
 child in the midst of the jealous men, will never be 
 forgotten while the world lasts. Jesus did believe in 
 an earthly kingdom of righteousness, peace, and 
 joy, but it is evident that He would have nothing to 
 say to violence as a means of realising it. He even
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 235 
 
 believed that the kingdom had already come in the 
 heart of any man who was desirous of being at one 
 with God and man and denied himself in the effort 
 to do it : " And when he was demanded of the Phari- 
 sees, when the kingdom of God should come, he 
 answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh 
 not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo 
 here ! or, lo there ! for, behold, the kingdom of God 
 is within you." 
 
 Early Christian idea of the kingdom. An im- 
 portant fact, which I do not think is generally rec- 
 ognised, is that the first Christians thought almost 
 precisely what the Jews did about the kingdom of 
 God. Most people are accustomed to think of Chris- 
 tianity as having been from the first a religion which 
 had principally to do with getting men ready for the 
 next world. We can hardly think about it apart 
 from ecclesiastical buildings, choirs, baptisms, con- 
 firmations, prayers for the sick and dying, and so on. 
 So much have we been accustomed to think of it in 
 this way that the average man reads his New Testa- 
 ment with these assumptions in the background of 
 his mind. But this is certainly not New Testament 
 Christianity. The apostles and their followers be- 
 lieved like the Jews in the sudden establishment of 
 an ideal commonwealth upon earth. This was how 
 they understood the Lord's prayer, " Thy kingdom 
 come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." 
 They did not even wish to separate from Judaism, 
 and it is clear from Paul's letters that there was at
 
 236 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 one time a great danger that the new faith might 
 become a mere Jewish sect. The Christians differed 
 from the Jews, not in then* ideal concerning the king- 
 dom, but in their greater moral intensity and enthu- 
 siasm, as well as in their profound conviction that 
 the Lord Jesus was God's chosen instrument for 
 realising this kingdom, and that He would presently 
 return to earth and do it. Any unbiassed reader of 
 the New Testament can see for himself that the primi- 
 tive Christians lived in hourly expectation that this 
 was what would happen. Of course they also be- 
 lieved in their Master's continual spiritual presence 
 with them, but the dominant thought in their minds 
 was that of a dramatic second coming and the inaugu- 
 ration of a reign of righteousness and universal peace, 
 the making of a beautiful world, something like the 
 Utopia of Mr. H. G. Wells. Nor was this altogether 
 a delusion. If it had been, Christianity would soon 
 have died. But, on the contrary, it lived and grew 
 because of the great truth behind this belief, namely, 
 that the Spirit of Christ working in the hearts of 
 men is gradually producing this ideal kingdom in 
 our midst. If, with this view of the character of 
 early Christianity in our minds, we go afresh to the 
 gospels or to the letters of Paul, we shall find it abun- 
 dantly confirmed. There is no getting away from 
 it. All the earnestness and enthusiasm of these first 
 Christians were centred upon the belief in the near 
 advent of a divine kingdom upon earth with Jesus 
 as its head. This belief even affected the practice of
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 237 
 
 these early Christians in regard to the disposal of 
 their property. To understand this, let us put our- 
 selves in their place and ask what we should do if we 
 were possessed by the conviction that the whole exist- 
 ing social order might come to an end to-morrow 
 morning or next week, and that after that no child 
 of God would ever want for anything. I think we 
 should be sure to feel that the holding of personal 
 property would not matter much. If, hi addition to 
 this, our hearts were filled with a divine enthusiasm, 
 an overmastering love for Jesus and for all our 
 brethren, we should not want to keep anything back 
 that could serve to make anyone happier for the short 
 time that intervened before the glorious coming of 
 the Lord. This was just how the primitive Chris- 
 tians felt. They had no organised economic sys- 
 tem ; no one was compelled to give anything, but 
 under the pressure of the new spirit they willingly 
 gave everything. What did it matter ? they thought; 
 they were only like pilgrims within sight of home, 
 or watchers waiting for the morning. 
 
 Origin of the idea of the church. Where, then, 
 did the idea of the church come from ? It is as plain 
 as anything can be that the primary interest of early 
 Christianity was the kingdom of God. It took the 
 conception over from Judaism with a deeper moral 
 content derived from the preaching and the life of 
 Jesus. Its first adherents did not even know that 
 they had a new religion; they only thought they 
 had found the true Messiah, although the Jewish
 
 238 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 nation as a whole had rejected Him. What they 
 wanted above everything was to see the kingdom 
 come upon earth, and we now know that they were 
 mistaken in imagining that it would be established 
 speedily and suddenly by the visible second coming 
 of Jesus on the clouds of heaven. But seeing that 
 they were thinking of it in this way, how did the church 
 arise and why? 
 
 It is doubtful if Jesus ever used the word " church," 
 for the two verses in Matthew in which He is credited 
 with it are probably of late date and point to a time 
 when the ecclesiastical organisation was fairly well 
 established. Still the word itself has an interest 
 and a history of its own apart from its Christian use. 
 The ecclesia, as most of my readers may be aware, 
 was the assembly of the citizens of any Greek city- 
 state. It was the custom for the whole body of the 
 members of a Greek self-governing community to 
 be called together from time to time for the transac- 
 tion of public business. This assembly was the final 
 authority in matters affecting the communal wel- 
 fare, and even after the various Greek states became 
 absorbed in the Roman empire this custom was 
 allowed to continue. It was the policy of the Romans 
 to permit a large measure of self-government to their 
 subjects of any alien race, and therefore the ecclesia 
 of any particular city-state continued to be sum- 
 moned as usual to decide upon matters of local im- 
 portance. There is a reference to this in the nine- 
 teenth chapter of the Acts, where we read that the
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 239 
 
 preaching of Christianity in Ephesus caused a riot 
 which the town clerk a thoroughly typical town 
 clerk ! succeeded in allaying by reminding the 
 demonstrators that if they had any real cause for 
 complaint, the matter ought to come before the regu- 
 lar ecclesia. This properly constituted ecclesia to 
 which the level-headed town clerk referred was the 
 general assembly of the citizens for the transaction 
 of public business. 
 
 It was quite natural that the primitive Christians 
 should have come to adopt this word, and to an ex- 
 tent this very idea, as a convenient description of the 
 new Christian community. After the departure 
 of their Master the Christians held together, and 
 wherever their missionaries went, new communities 
 sprang up, animated by a spirit of loyalty to Jesus 
 and a desire to realise His ideal for mankind. It was 
 quite natural, too, that the apostles should recognise 
 all these communities as being in reality one com- 
 munity for fellowship of faith and love; it was the 
 ecclesia, or assembly, or society of Jesus, the begin- 
 ning of the church of Christ, as it soon came to be 
 called. There was no elaborate organisation; noth- 
 ing could have been simpler. Every Christian seems 
 to have thought that as it would not be long before 
 the Master came again, the wise and right thing to 
 do was for His followers to hold together and witness 
 Him to the world, until that great event took place. 
 
 Church only exists for the sake of the kingdom. 
 But how far did Jesus foresee and intend this? It
 
 240 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 is difficult to say, but his choice of twelve apostles 
 whom He carefully trained to continue His work 
 is evidence that He contemplated the formation of 
 some kind of society to give effect to His teaching. 
 The number twelve points to the probability that 
 He thought of this society as a kind of new Israel, 
 a spiritual Israel, which should do for the world 
 what the older Israel had failed to do, that is, bring 
 about the kingdom of God. I have already pointed 
 out that in my judgment Jesus did not believe, as 
 His contemporaries did, that that kingdom could 
 be established suddenly from without, but held 
 that it could only be achieved by spiritual forces 
 working from within. His ecdesia has lived and 
 grown. It has survived for nineteen centuries, and 
 is likely to survive for many centuries more. It 
 has played a leading part in the making of modern 
 civilisation. But it is no longer a unity, and many 
 different theories exist as to its meaning and worth. 
 The sacerdotal theory. Broadly speaking, how- 
 ever, there are two outstanding views as to the 
 scope and function of the ecdesia, or church of 
 Jesus. One is the sacerdotal, and the other is 
 what, for want of a better name, I may term the 
 evangelical. In outline the former is as follows: 
 before Jesus finally withdrew His bodily presence 
 from His disciples He formally constituted a reli- 
 gious society to represent Him on earth. This 
 society was to be the ark of salvation, the " sphere 
 of covenanted grace." Its principal work was to
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 241 
 
 call men out of a lost and ruined world and secure 
 for them a blessed immortality; those who were 
 members of this church, and only they, were certain 
 of heaven. Membership therein was clearly denned; 
 the gateway was baptism. Those who were baptized 
 in a proper way, even though they were unconscious 
 infants, were members of the church of Christ and 
 all others were outside. Within this sacred society 
 souls were to be trained in lightness of living, and, 
 to an extent, made fit for heaven. The Holy Spirit 
 abiding in this society would sanctify the individual 
 members and guide them into all the truth. It is 
 even held that Jesus definitely appointed the way 
 in which this church was to be governed. Its affairs 
 were to be managed by a threefold order, bishops, 
 priests, and deacons. But here a division has taken 
 place amongst the sacerdotalists themselves owing 
 to the necessity of finding some final authority, some 
 living voice, within this visible society to which 
 appeal in the last resort could be made. Romanists 
 have found this in the bishop of Rome whom they 
 regard as the episcopal successor of the apostle 
 Peter. Devout Anglicans take their stand upon the 
 faith as defined by the first four general Councils, 
 while in administrative matters they regard the bishop 
 as independent. The Greek church also insists upon 
 its autonomy. 
 
 This sacerdotal view has exercised enormous influ- 
 ence in Christian history, and I have sufficient of the 
 historic imagination to be able to say that at certain
 
 242 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 times it has undoubtedly worked on the whole for 
 good. But did Jesus really found a church of this 
 kind? I am quite sure He never thought of such 
 a thing, and historical criticism of Christian origins 
 does not leave the sacerdotalist much to stand on. 
 Jesus appointed neither bishop nor priest, and never 
 ordained that any merely mechanical ceremony 
 should be the means of admission to the Christian 
 society or be necessary to the eternal welfare of any- 
 one. In the early church the bishop or elder was 
 the president of the little Christian society meeting 
 in any particular locality. Primitive Christian or- 
 ganisation was anything but rigid and formal, and 
 was as far as possible from the sacerdotal model. 
 I do not say that the sacerdotal mode of organisa- 
 tion which gradually grew up was wholly mis- 
 chievous, nor do I say that the primitive Christian 
 organisation would be the best under all circum- 
 stances. All I maintain is that in founding His 
 new society Jesus did not ordain any particular 
 form of organisation. 
 
 The evangelical theory. The other view of the 
 meaning of the word "church " to which I have 
 already referred, is that it is the totality of the fol- 
 lowers of Jesus. Under this view organisation is 
 a secondary matter. There are many reasons why 
 Christian societies should organise themselves dif- 
 ferently from one another. Temperament plays a 
 great part in the matter. But theories of church 
 government have ceased to be the burning questions
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 243 
 
 that they once were. Most sensible men are now 
 satisfied that forms of government matter much less 
 than the kind of life which nourishes in the society 
 itself. 
 
 What the church exists for to-day. But what 
 does the church exist for, using the word hi its primi- 
 tive sense? What ought it to exist for to-day? 
 What is the justification for all the vast number of 
 Christian organisations which exist throughout the 
 world? This is a subject upon which a clear note 
 needs to be sounded, for a great deal of mental 
 confusion exists in regard to it. Two inconsistent 
 views of the work of the church, as well as of the con- 
 stitution of the church, have come down the ages 
 together and exist side by side hi the world to-day. 
 The first is that the chief business of the church is to 
 snatch men as brands from the burning and get them 
 ready for a future heaven. The Fall theory has had 
 much to do with this. The assumption behind it is, 
 as we have seen, that the world is a City of Destruc- 
 tion, as Bunyan calls it. It is a ruined world, a 
 world which has somehow baflfled and disappointed 
 God, a failure of a world which, when the cup of its 
 iniquity is full, will be utterly destroyed as a general 
 judgment. When that dreadful day comes it will be 
 bad for all those who are outside the fellowship of 
 Christ, for, like those who have died without availing 
 themselves of the means of salvation, they will be 
 relegated to everlasting torment in the world unseen. 
 This view of the fate of the world as being at enmity
 
 244 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 with God, and of the duty of the church to persuade 
 as many as possible to believe something or other 
 in order to secure salvation in a future and better 
 world, has been held by sacerdotalists and non- 
 sacerdotalists, Catholics and Protestants alike. It 
 is still implied in most of our preaching and in the 
 hymns we sing. I admit that there is a certain truth 
 in itj the truth that man is constituted for immortality 
 and ought not to live as if this world were all that 
 mattered. But on the whole, it has been thoroughly 
 mischievous, and there is nothing which is acting 
 as a greater hindrance to the spirituality and use- 
 fulness of the churches to-day. It is based on an 
 entirely false idea as to the relation of God and the 
 world. 
 
 To save the world* But alongside of this view a 
 far higher and nobler one has been present to the 
 minds of Christians in every century, namely, that 
 the work of the church is to save the world and to 
 believe that it is worth the saving. If what I have 
 already said be true, this is the idea which was in the 
 mind of Jesus when He founded His ecclesia. To 
 Him the purpose of the ecclesia was to help to realise 
 the kingdom of God by preaching and living the 
 fellowship of love. Ever since His day those who 
 have been nearest to Him in spirit have been going 
 forth into the dark places of the earth trying to win 
 men to the realisation of the great ideal of a universal 
 fellowship of love based on a common relationship 
 to the God and Father of us all. This is what
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 245 
 
 Augustine aimed at in his City of God. It was what 
 Ambrose had in mind when he excommunicated the 
 emperor Theodosius for having ordered a cruel 
 massacre of some of his rebellious subjects. It was 
 the ideal of the mighty Hildebrand, grim and ar- 
 rogant though he was, when he compelled princes to 
 bow their haughty necks and do justice to the weak. 
 It was what Bernard of Clairvaux meant to declare 
 when he defied the cruel and sensual king of France 
 to approach the altar of Christ. Savonarola realised 
 it for a brief moment in Florence, Calvin in Geneva, 
 the Covenanters in Scotland, the Puritans in England, 
 the Pilgrim Fathers in America. They all failed 
 because the world can never be saved by the im- 
 position of ideal institutions from without and by 
 force; it can only be by the spirit of Christ working 
 from within. But to some extent they all succeeded, 
 too, for the world is a better place to live in because 
 of the gradual and cumulative redemptive effort 
 of the Christian ecclesia, the Church of Jesus. On 
 the other side of the ledger we have to set many 
 things that ecclesiasticism has done, cruel perse- 
 cutions, infamous tortures, burnings and massacres, 
 devastating wars, and fierce religious hatreds. 
 But these things have never belonged to Jesus; they 
 are the very negation of His spirit. The true church 
 of Christ in any and every age consists of those and 
 those only who are trying like their Master to make 
 the world better and gladder and worthier of God. 
 The word " church " has become so hateful to
 
 246 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 many because of the admixture of other ideals with 
 this that I sometimes wish something could be done 
 either to get rid of it or to change it for another which 
 shall fully and clearly express what Jesus really 
 came to do. I maintain that the church has nothing 
 whatever to do with preparing men for a world to 
 come; the best way to prepare a man for the world 
 beyond is to get him to live well and truly in this one. 
 The church exists to make the world a kingdom of 
 God, and to fill it with His love. No greater mistake 
 could be made than to estimate the church of Jesus 
 by ecclesiastical squabbles and divisions, or even 
 by Psalm-singing and go-to-meeting talk. Look 
 for the spirit of Jesus at work, and you have found 
 the church too. 
 
 Modern industrialism and the church. Judged 
 by this standard where are the churches to-day? 
 We have seen that the only gospel which Jesus 
 had to preach was the gospel of the kingdom of 
 God; everything He ever said can be included un- 
 der that head. His Church, or Christian society, or 
 whatever else we like to call it, has no meaning unless 
 it exists for the realisation of the kingdom of God. 
 We cannot state this too strongly. The whole of the 
 other-worldism of the churches, the elaborate para- 
 phernalia of doctrine and observance, is utterly 
 useless and worse than useless unless it ministers to 
 this end. Unless it can be shown that I am wrong 
 in this supposition and I think that will be pretty 
 hard to do a fairly good case could be made out
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 247 
 
 for burning down most of the theological colleges 
 in the land and sending the bright young fellows in 
 them to do some serious work for the common good. 
 For it must be confessed, as I said at the beginning, 
 that the churches are to a large extent a failure. 
 We cannot but recognise, for one thing, that our 
 modem civilisation, with all its boasted advance on 
 the past, is still un-Christian. It puts a premium 
 upon selfishness. Modem industrialism is cruel 
 and unjust and directly incites men to self-seeking. 
 The weak and unfortunate have to go to the wall; 
 little mercy is shown to the man who is not strong 
 enough to fight his way and keep his footing in the 
 struggle for existence. We are all the time making 
 war upon one another, man against man, business 
 against business, class against class, nation against 
 nation. We talk of our freedom, but no man is 
 really free, and the great majority of us are slaves 
 to some corporation, or capitalist, or condition of 
 things, which renders the greater part of life a con- 
 tinuous anxiety lest health or means should fail 
 and we should prove unequal to the demands made 
 upon us. If a man goes under, his acquaintances 
 will pity him for five minutes and then forget all 
 about him. There is no help for it; they cannot do 
 anything else, they have their own living to get. 
 They are like soldiers in the heat of battle ; they must 
 not pause to mourn over a fallen comrade or they 
 may soon be stretched beside him. I do not mean, 
 of course, to make the foolish statement that present-
 
 248 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 day industrialism is unrestrainedly individualistic: 
 thank God it is not that. But the principle of com- 
 petition still exercises a sway so potent as to stamp 
 modern social organisation as un-Christian. We may 
 just as well recognise that fact and state it plainly. 
 The glaringly unequal ownership of material wealth 
 is anti-social; it is good neither for the rich man nor 
 for the poor, for it is to the interest of every man that 
 the body politic should be healthy and happy. 
 That so large a number of our total population should 
 have to exist upon the very margin of subsistence 
 is a moral wrong. We have no business to have any 
 slums, or sweating dens, or able-bodied unemployed, 
 or paupers. Poverty, dulness of brain, and coarse- 
 ness of habit are often found in close association. 
 Some amount of material endowment is required even 
 for the development of the intelligence and the train- 
 ing of the moral faculties. Wealth possesses no 
 value in itself; it only possesses value as a means 
 to more abundant life. If there is one thing upon 
 which Christianity insists more than another, it is 
 the duty of caring for the weak and sinful, but at 
 present this duty is only recognised to a very limited 
 extent. 
 
 Christianity and Collectivism. In what I am 
 now saying I am well aware that I have come to a 
 phase of my subject which thousands of my country- 
 men are stating so clearly and forcibly as to compel 
 attention ; but what I want to show is that the present 
 unideal condition of the civilised world is an indict-
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 249 
 
 ment of the churches and their conventional doc- 
 trines. We seem to have forgotten our origin. I 
 have long felt, as I suppose every Christian minis- 
 ter must feel, the antagonism between the Christian 
 standard of conduct and that required in ordinary 
 business life. There is no blinking the fact that the 
 standard of Christ and the standard of the commer- 
 cial world are not the same. Our work is to make 
 them the same, and to that end we must destroy 
 the social system which makes selfishness the rule 
 and compels a man to act upon his lower motives, 
 and we must put a better in its place. We must 
 establish a social order wherein a man can be free 
 to be his best, and to give his best to the com- 
 munity without crushing or destroying anyone else. 
 In a word we want Collectivism in the place of 
 competition; we want the kingdom of God. Char- 
 ity is no remedy for our social ills and their moral 
 outcome ; the only remedy is a new social organisation 
 on a Christian basis. I do not believe that any form 
 of Collectivism, as a mere system superposed from 
 without, can ever really make the world happy; 
 it must be the expression of the spirit of brotherhood 
 working from within. Neither do I feel much faith 
 in any sudden and cataclysmic reformation of society. 
 The history of Christendom proves that no institution 
 can be much in advance of human nature and sur- 
 vive. Covenanters and Puritans found that out when 
 they tried to make men godly by Act of Parliament; 
 Savonarola found it out when the wild passions of
 
 250 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 the Florentines, restrained for a brief hour, broke 
 their chains and destroyed him; the Christians of 
 New Testament times found it out when their 
 beautiful experiment of social brotherhood came 
 to an end in the^horror and darkness of the break- 
 up of Jewish national life. But at least we can 
 recognise the presence of the guiding Spirit of God 
 in all our social concerns and work along with it 
 for the realisation of the ideal of universal brother- 
 hood. We can show men what Jesus really came 
 to do, and, as His servants, we can help Him to 
 do it. We can definitely recognise that the move- 
 ment toward social regeneration is really and truly 
 a spiritual movement, and that it must never be 
 captured by materialism. I deplore the fact that, 
 for the moment, the main current of the great 
 Labour movement which, perhaps more than any 
 other, represents the social application of the Chris- 
 tian ideal, should appear to be out of touch with 
 organised religion. This cannot continue, for I ob- 
 serve^ that the men who lead it are men of moral 
 passion, and often men of simple religious faith. 
 It could hardly be otherwise. It seems to me in 
 the nature of things impossible to sustain a belief 
 in the moral ideal without some kind of belief in 
 God, and assuredly God is with these men in the 
 work they are doing and have yet to do. In fact, 
 the Labour Party is itself a Church, in the sense in 
 which that word was originally used, for it repre- 
 sents the getting-together of those who want to 
 bring about the kingdom of God.
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 251 
 
 The New Theology and Collectivism. The New 
 Theology, as I understand it, is the theology of this 
 movement, whether the movement knows it or 
 not, for it is essentially the gospel of the kingdom 
 of God. No lesser theology can consistently claim 
 to be this; systems of belief which are weighted by 
 dogmatic considerations have not and cannot have 
 the same power of appeal. This higher, wider truth, 
 which sweeps away the mischievous accretions which 
 have made religion distasteful to the masses, is 
 religious articulation of the movement toward an 
 ideal social order. This fact ought to be realised 
 and brought home to the consciousness of the earnest 
 men who are labouring to redeem England and 
 the world from the power of all that tortures and 
 degrades humanity and stifles or destroys its best 
 life. 
 
 This, then, is the mission of the New Theology. 
 It is to brighten and keep burning the flame of the 
 spiritual ideal hi the midst of the mighty social 
 movement which is now in progress. It is ours to 
 see God in it and help mankind to see Him too. 
 It is ours to show what the gospel really is and has 
 been from the first. We shall not suffer the world 
 any longer to believe that Christianity and dogma 
 mean the same thing. Our business is to show that 
 the religion of Jesus is primarily a gospel for this 
 life and only secondarily for the life to come. We 
 have to demonstrate that material things have 
 spiritual meanings, and that wealth has value only
 
 252 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 as it ministers to soul power. We have to make clear 
 to the world that the reason why we want to lift 
 any man up and give him a chance of a better and 
 happier life here is because he has an immortal 
 destiny and must make a beginning somewhere if 
 he is to reach the stature of the perfect man at last. 
 We believe that faith is the one indispensable quali- 
 fication for this work, as for any work that is worth 
 the doing, or ever has been worth the doing, in the 
 history of mankind. It is the victory that over- 
 cometh the world.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 A personal word. The task which has occupied 
 the greater part of my winter resting time has now 
 been accomplished, as far as opportunity affords. 
 What has been said in these pages is no more than an 
 outline statement of the teaching which has been 
 given from the City Temple pulpit ever since I came 
 into it. There is not a single thought in this book 
 with which my own people are not already quite 
 familiar, and chapter and verse for it can be pro- 
 duced from my published sermons which have been 
 appearing week by week for years past in the Chris- 
 tian Commonwealth and other periodicals. If 
 space had permitted, I should like to have said much 
 more, for necessarily many phases of the subject 
 have had to be left untouched; it has only been 
 possible to deal with those of fundamental im- 
 portance. For example, I should like to have in- 
 cluded some examination of the great question of 
 Miracles, the place of Prayer in Christian experience, 
 and the value and significance of Biblical Criticism. 
 But as it has not been possible to do this I must add 
 a word or two to indicate my position in regard to 
 these matters. 
 
 253
 
 254 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 Miracle. It seems probable that before long we 
 shall see a rehabilitation of belief in the credibility 
 of certain kinds of miracle, and that this rehabili- 
 tation will proceed from the side of psychical science. 
 Already there are signs that this rehabilitation is on 
 the way. The power of mind over matter is being 
 recognised for therapeutic purposes, for instance, 
 in a way hitherto undreamed of, and is receiving a 
 large and increasing measure of attention from the 
 medical profession. This appears to me to throw 
 a considerable amount of light upon the healing 
 ministry of Jesus, which, as the late Professor 
 A. B. Bruce has pointed out, rests upon as good 
 historical ground as the best-accredited parts of the 
 teaching. Given a time and a mental atmosphere 
 in which men expected miracles of this sort, and given 
 a personality of such wonderful magnetic force as 
 that of Jesus, such miracles would be sure to happen. 
 That they did not happen apart from such conditions 
 is evident from such hints as the statement that, 
 " He could do no mighty works there because of their 
 unbelief." There are other kinds of miracle recorded 
 in scripture which are not so easily credible, but I 
 am not always prepared to brush them aside as mere 
 childish fancies. As a rule it will be found that they 
 belong to the poetry of religious experience, and that 
 some valuable truth is contained in this particular 
 form of statement. To this order belong the ac- 
 counts about the horses and chariots of fire on the 
 hillside round about Elisha, the whirlwind in which
 
 CONCLUSION 255 
 
 Elijah ascended to heaven, and Jesus walking on the 
 sea. These accounts are forms in which the oriental 
 imagination is, even to-day, wont to clothe truths 
 too great for prosaic statement; they are poetry, 
 not history, and the western mind ought to make al- 
 lowance for the fact. Sometimes we can discern in 
 scripture records of an event, which to the stolid 
 western imagination seems utterly incredible, a 
 genuine historical truth. Such, for instance, are 
 the passage of the Red Sea a stirring and dra- 
 matic incident, thoroughly well told and Joshua 
 commanding the sun and moon to stand still. In the 
 latter case we have two lines of poetry from a book 
 which has been lost, and a comparison with similar 
 poetry in almost any literature gives us a clew to its 
 meaning. The poet represents the old warrior as 
 declaring in magnificent style that the sun of Israel 
 shall not go down, and that day and night shall be 
 alike to him until her enemies are discomfited. 
 Any reader with a shred of sympathetic imagination 
 ought to be able to feel the force of the sentiment 
 which provoked this utterance without either ac- 
 cepting or rejecting it as a literal statement of fact; 
 the best things which have been written in the books 
 of the world are seldom literal and exact statements 
 of fact. It has been well pointed out that myth 
 and legend are truer than history, for they take us to 
 the inside of things, whereas history only shows us 
 the outside. 
 Prayer. Prayer is a vital necessity to religious ex-
 
 256 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 perience, and without it no religious experience has 
 ever existed or ever can. It is not primarily petition 
 but communion with God. Our intercourse with 
 our friends does not chiefly consist in asking them 
 for things ! But when communion does become 
 petition, there is a real place for it as well as for the 
 answer to such prayer. It is not too much to say 
 that no true prayer has ever gone without its answer. 
 This is quite consistent with the assertion that prayer 
 does not change God ; it only affords Him opportunity. 
 It is impossible to improve on what God already 
 desires for us before we pray, but upon our prayer 
 depends the realisation of that desire. Everything 
 that the soul can possibly need is present before- 
 hand in the eternal reality, and the prayer of faith 
 is like going into a treasure-house and bringing forth 
 from what is contained therein all that the soul needs 
 day by day. Prayer, therefore, cannot be too definite, 
 but it should be as unselfish as the worshipper can 
 make it in order that the highest can operate in 
 response. The same law holds good in this as in 
 all other activities of the soul; selfishness draws 
 away from the source of life, whereas love is instantly 
 at one with infinity. I question whether many 
 people realise the enormous value of definite and 
 systematic prayer; it is the secret of all spiritual 
 power. Everything that we can possibly want is 
 waiting for us in the bounty of God, and what we 
 have to do is to go and take it. "Believe that ye 
 have received them and ye shall have them."
 
 CONCLUSION 257 
 
 The Bible and the young. One thing that ur- 
 gently needs to be done for the young people in our 
 Sunday-schools and various Christian societies all 
 over the world is to issue a series of well-written 
 popular manuals presenting in succinct form the best 
 results of Biblical Criticism. The way the Bible is 
 taught to young people at present is most regrettable, 
 for in after years it leads them to doubt and distrust 
 the very foundations of Christianity. If the teachers 
 only had a little more intelligent acquaintance with 
 the sources of the scriptures, this danger would be 
 avoided and the Bible would become a far more in- 
 teresting and helpful book both to young and old. 
 At present it is interpreted by many people in a way 
 which is an insult to the intelligence and harmful 
 to the moral sense. Will anyone seriously main- 
 tain that the trickeries of Jacob and the butcheries 
 following the Israelitish invasion of Canaan, not to 
 speak of the obscenities which are to be found in so 
 many parts of the Old Testament, are healthy reading 
 for children or a mark of divine inspiration? Is it 
 not time we adopted the more excellent way of facing 
 the truth about the Bible records and presenting 
 what is valuable in such a way as to help and not to 
 hinder the growth of a true knowledge of the rela- 
 tions of God and man ? 
 
 In conclusion, let me say emphatically that no one 
 but myself is responsible for a single word in this 
 book. Among the many wild and unjust criticisms 
 which have been published concerning my views,
 
 2$8 THE NEW THEOLOGY 
 
 none is wider of the mark than that I have borrowed 
 from this man or that in my statement of them. I 
 am not conscious of owing a scintilla of my theology 
 to any living man. In so far as it coincides with 
 anyone else's views I am thankful, for it shows that 
 the same eternal Spirit of Truth is speaking to others 
 than myself. But I hope I may be permitted to say 
 with due humility that in thinking out my position, 
 " I conferred not with flesh and blood." Perhaps 
 some people will maintain that this makes my teach- 
 ing all the worse, but if so I cannot help it. It can 
 hardly be denied that in its main bearing, to say 
 no more, it is seen to be rising spontaneously in every 
 part of the civilised world. Again, no thinker can 
 ever succeed in completely closing the circle of his 
 system of thought, and I cannot claim to be an ex- 
 ception. But I trust it will be seen that what is 
 contained in this book is at least a self-consistent 
 whole: every arc of the circle implies every other. 
 It only remains to reiterate my conviction that the 
 movement represented by the New Theology is only 
 incidentally theological at all; it is primarily a moral 
 and spiritual movement. It is one symptom of a 
 great religious awakening which in the end will re- 
 inspire civilisation with a living faith in God and the 
 spiritual meaning of life. If what I am trying to do 
 can contribute in any way toward this grand result, 
 I shall be humbly thankful to the Giver of all good.
 
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