ft; 
 
 THECONTINUtTYOFCHRISTtAN THOUGHT. 
 A Study of Modern Theology in the Light of its 
 History. i2mo, gilt top, $2.00. 
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS. In American Reli- 
 gious Leaders Series. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25. 
 
 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. i6mo, $1.00. 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK. 
 
RELIGIOUS PROGRESS 
 
 BY 
 
 ALEXANDER V. G. ALLEN 
 
 PROFESSOR IN THE EPISCOPAL THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL 
 IN CAMBRIDGE 
 
 WITHDRAWN FROM 
 UNIVERSITY OF REDLANDS LIBRARY 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 JAN2'3 4 1911 
 
/H1 
 
 Copyright, 1894, 
 BY ALEXANDER V. G. ALLEN. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A. 
 Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. 
 
READ BEFORE THE DIVINITY SCHOOL OF YALE 
 
 UNIVERSITY, IN MARCH, 1894 
 
 ARE DEDICATED TO 
 
 ELIZABETH KENT ALLEN 
 
 f OCTOBER 14, 1892 
 
 IN GRATEFUL AND SACRED 
 
 AND EVERLASTING REMEMBRANCE 
 
 QUONIAM APUD TE EST 
 FONS VITJE ; ET IN LUMINE 
 TUO VIDEBIMUS LUMEN 
 
 M124270 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 FIRST LECTURE. 
 
 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF 
 THE INDIVIDUAL. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. DEFINITION OF PROGRESS 9 
 
 II. WHETHER PROGRESS IN RELIGION is POS- 
 SIBLE 24 
 
 III. THE METHOD OF GROWTH BY REACTION . 33 
 
 IV. THE THEORY OF A UNIFORM DEVELOPMENT 43 
 V. THE CONCEPTION OF PROGRESS IMPLIED IN 
 
 CONSERVATISM 56 
 
 SECOND LECTURE. 
 
 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS IN THE ORGANIC LIFE OF 
 THE CHURCH. 
 
 I. AN ILLUSTRATION OF PROGRESS IN THE 
 CATHOLIC CHURCH OF THE EARLY CEN- 
 TURIES 78 
 
 II. THE RECONCILIATION OF HOSTILE ATTI- 
 TUDES IN THEOLOGY 89 
 
 III. THE APPEAL TO THE PAST IN ALL PROGRES- 
 
 SIVE MOVEMENTS IN THE CHURCH . . .112 
 
 IV. CONCLUSION 132 
 
RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 
 
Nihil sub sole novum, nee valet quisquam dicere : Ecce hoc 
 recens est. ECCLES. i. 10. 
 
 Haec dicit Dominus : State super vias et videte et interro- 
 gate de semitis antiquis, quae sit via bona et ambulate in ea. 
 JER. vi. 1 6. 
 
 Et dixit qui sedebat in throno: Ecce nova facio omnia. 
 REV. xxi. 5. 
 
RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 
 
 i. 
 
 In the Experience of the Individual. 
 
 I. 
 
 IENTLEMEN : I should like to ex- 
 press to you the pleasure it gives 
 me to be here, how it is at once a 
 privilege and an honor to stand before you 
 in this ancient institution. More than any 
 other college or university, Yale has been 
 the nursing-mother of great theologians. 
 There is, first of all, Jonathan Edwards, 
 who deserves the rank which has been as- 
 signed him by his admirers, as one of the 
 greatest as well as one of the best of the 
 sons of men, to whose theology full justice 
 has not yet been done, to which we may 
 yet return for inspiration and guidance 
 
io Religious Progress. 
 
 when we are able to shut our eyes, as we 
 may properly do, to his Inferno, for it was 
 but the negative side of his thought, by 
 means of which, and in comparison with 
 which, his lofty conceptions of God and 
 man stand out in strong relief. There is 
 Dr. Samuel Hopkins, with his seemingly 
 hard message of disinterested submission, 
 which, when rightly understood, bears 
 high testimony to the divine dignity and 
 capacity of human nature, to his own no- 
 bility of character as well. Dr. Emmons 
 was the author of a most extraordinary 
 theology, a system of sheer unqualified 
 pantheism, in which the intensity of a 
 tropical sun, shining in the noonday, 
 threatened to extinguish with its intense 
 heat and brilliancy all lower forms of life, 
 a theology preached with a living fire 
 which still burns in his sermons, a man 
 who surely ought to come up again for a 
 rehearing. Dr. Dwight was more moder- 
 ate and less eccentric, developing a theo- 
 logical system in his sermons before the 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 1 1 
 
 students, upon which in those trying times 
 men could rest and build. There was Dr. 
 Taylor, who led the way out of the diffi- 
 culties which then beset the doctrine of 
 original sin. Dr. Bushnell had a creative 
 mind of a high order, striking out a path 
 of his own, an innovator, indeed, turning 
 the mind of the churches into new direc- 
 tions, in order that they might escape the 
 wearisome confusion bred by the old con- 
 troversies, and yet aware also that the full 
 significance of the old doctrines had not 
 been measured. If he did not always solve 
 the issues which he raised, yet he never 
 failed to shed light upon them, revealing 
 by his personal disclosure of his own re- 
 ligious need the positive directions which 
 theology must take. And one other, also, 
 deserves to be mentioned in the same 
 honored list, the late Elisha Mulford, who 
 aimed to combine the old with the new 
 in living relationship, to whom the Nicene 
 Creed repeated the last and highest utter- 
 ance of the New Theology, who was true 
 
12 Religious Progress. 
 
 to his Puritan antecedents when he saw 
 in the Nation the Republic of God. 
 
 These men, all of them, and each in his 
 own way, labored for the advancement of 
 theology as a science. Whatever we may 
 think of their work, or whether we think 
 of it at all, they were possessed by one 
 common conviction, that the knowledge of 
 God, the most elemental and fundamental 
 of all knowledge, was capable of growth ; 
 that theology as a science admitted of 
 improvement and expansion. In speaking 
 to you on the subject of religious progress, 
 I am not out of harmony with this long 
 and honored descent of your own divines. 
 
 When I was invited to deliver these lec- 
 tures, I was reminded by Dr. Fisher that 
 Phillips Brooks had been in the habit of 
 coming here to address you. I cannot 
 hope to find you as he would have done, 
 and yet I have the assurance that the 
 thought I seek to express would have met 
 his approval. He believed in progress 
 with an earnestness of conviction which 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 13 
 
 few men can rival, -it might almost be 
 called an article of his creed. Out of his 
 many expressions on the subject, let me 
 quote these two characteristic utterances : 
 
 " It would be intolerable to us, if we could 
 not trace tendencies in our life. If everything 
 stood still, or if things moved only in a circle, 
 it would be a dreadful thing to live. But we 
 rejoice in life, because it seems to be carrying 
 us somewhere, because its darkness seems to 
 be rolling on towards light, and even its pain 
 to be moving onward to a hidden joy. We 
 bear with incompleteness, because of the com- 
 pletion which is prophesied and hoped for." 
 
 " Christianity is one and everlasting. Its 
 work of salvation for man's soul is the same 
 blessed work forever. But its relation to the 
 world's life at large must be forever changing 
 with the changes of that world's needs and 
 seekings. The larger applications of Christi- 
 anity must of necessity be readjusted, and in 
 their readjustments, its power may be tempo- 
 rarily obscured or unrecognized as it passes 
 into new forms of exhibition." 
 
1 4 Religious Progress. 
 
 In his devotion to progress as a princi- 
 ple, necessary to the symmetry and com- 
 pleteness of our spiritual consciousness, 
 Phillips Brooks was a child of his age. 
 For if there is one conviction, or any one 
 word, which more than another is charac- 
 teristic of the nineteenth century, it is 
 progress. It was not the custom of other 
 ages to talk of progress as we do to-day, as 
 if it were the motive and the test of life, 
 to be applied to all our institutions and 
 usages whether in church or state. In 
 other ages and even down to the close of 
 the last century, the past was for the most 
 part regarded as greater than the present, 
 as if in the nature of the case, the fathers 
 knew more or had done greater things 
 than their degenerate descendants. They 
 carried a heavier spear or wore a larger 
 armor than their children. The problems 
 which the great thinkers of distant ages 
 had been unable to solve, it was presump- 
 tion for their posterity to attempt to solve. 
 All this has been changed and even re- 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 15 
 
 versed by our conception of progress. It 
 is as though we had crossed some invisible 
 line, by which our outlook upon the world 
 had been modified. Our faces are now 
 set as if we would explore a territory hith- 
 erto unknown, or sound some greater 
 depth in the mystery of existence. There 
 has been something in the air, or in the 
 souls of men, in this modern day, a jubi- 
 lance and expectation, as if we had at last 
 learned how to live, as if it were in our 
 power to bring in the millennial age ; as if 
 all things were now possible to him that 
 believed. 
 
 The word progress is one of those great 
 words, summaries of a people's philosophy, 
 which we use the more freely just because 
 we take it for granted and do not think to 
 define it. Its power as a word is all the 
 greater because its meaning is vague or 
 indeterminable; indeed, in its vagueness \ 
 consists its power. In the days when tran- 
 scendentalism was in vogue in New Eng- 
 land, its disciples were fond of asking for 
 
1 6 Religious Progress. 
 
 a definition of life, but the strange unintel- 
 ligible jargon of the many ambitious an- 
 swers showed that the expression was 
 indefinable. So it is with progress ; or to 
 adopt the words of St. Augustine which 
 he used concerning the knowledge of God, 
 we know what it is, if we are not asked to 
 tell what it is, but if we are asked to tell 
 what it is we do not know what it is. But 
 we believe in it even though we are at a 
 loss to define it, and our best reason for 
 our belief is that we do believe. We some- 
 times argue that if one will take in the long 
 range of the centuries, or compare our own 
 time with the world of the Middle Ages, 
 there is evidence enough of the progress 
 of humanity. But this evidence appeals 
 only to scholars and students of history, 
 even if it were wholly satisfactory ; while 
 the conviction of progress is a great popu- 
 lar belief or enthusiasm, which has not 
 been caught from scholars, nor been gene- 
 rated by any elaborate retrospect or com- 
 parison. It is rather because we are look- 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 77 
 
 ing forward to some higher attainment 
 than the present, that we believe in prog- 
 ress, because we are stirred by some 
 divine unrest, or have had vouchsafed to 
 us some vision, or as if some special reve- 
 lation of the things which need to be done, 
 which can be done, for the perfecting of 
 the life of man. Whatever may be the true 
 ground of our conviction, it has come about 
 that the world's life and progress are al- 
 most one in their meaning, they are used 
 interchangeably as if they were synonyms. 
 If we have learned from the past, we have 
 also learned from our own experience, that 
 ideals cannot be destroyed, that they have 
 a tendency to persist and enforce their 
 claim, a tendency to fulfillment even though 
 we never witness their full realization. 
 
 Tennyson still remains, after all, the 
 most representative voice of this convic- 
 tion, so that his words lose nothing by 
 their familiarity. It is the argument from 
 the indestructibility of the ideal, which 
 evokes enthusiasm : 
 
1 8 Religious Progress. 
 
 " Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping 
 
 something new: 
 That which they have done but earnest of the things that 
 
 they shall do: 
 
 For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, 
 Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that 
 
 should be." 
 
 The poet was impressed by the circum- 
 stance that change change in itself and 
 almost for its own sake is the evidence 
 that we are in motion toward some greater 
 good ; that the old order requires to be 
 changed if it would stand the test of prog- 
 ress, whether in its institutions, its doc- 
 trine, creed, or cultus, civil or social ar- 
 rangements. It is like a journey where 
 we know that we are advancing to our 
 goal, because the scene is always changing, 
 each moment disclosing something new. 
 If the scene remained the same or were 
 repeated at intervals, we should infer that 
 we were standing still or moving in a cir- 
 cle. Whether the change means anything 
 better in the immediate present, or whether 
 it is an improvement in itself, is not the 
 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 19 
 
 question. The point is that we accept the 
 change because it is change, and because 
 of the larger trust in some distant good 
 which beckons us onward, as if this faith 
 were the substance of things hoped for and 
 the evidence of things not seen. 
 
 If we have any misgivings about the 
 reality beneath the change, the same poet 
 has expressed them for us. There were 
 moments in his experience when order fes- 
 tered and things seemed out of joint. He 
 became tired of modern civilization, till he 
 even longed for quiet and rest in some 
 spot which no intellectual or scientific ac- 
 tivity could penetrate, where commerce 
 was unknown, the low range of savage 
 existence. He saw that the increase of 
 knowledge was not followed by the in- 
 crease of true wisdom, which still lingered 
 in the rear ; he feared that the individ- 
 ual might wither, for the sacrifice of his 
 interests was threatened by this mighty 
 movement, which only contemplated the 
 good of the whole. It might be that 
 
20 Religious Progress. 
 
 the steamship, the railway the thoughts 
 that shake mankind were not, after all, 
 contributing to true happiness. But out 
 of this skepticism or depression he rallied 
 in the name of progress, and as the heir 
 of all the ages : 
 
 "Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward 
 
 let us range. 
 Let the great world spin forever down the ringing 
 
 grooves of change. 
 Through the shadow of the globe, we sweep into the 
 
 younger day : 
 Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." 
 
 There were sensitive souls in the early 
 years of this century who felt the chill as 
 they passed through the shadow of the 
 globe, when, to the ardent emotions bred 
 by the passionate belief in human perfecti- 
 bility, there succeeded a collapse of hope. 
 Wordsworth was one of those who, having 
 shared in the thrilling expectancy of the 
 hour, experienced the sad mood of the re- 
 action, and yet without yielding his faith 
 in progress. In his mature years, at the 
 age of forty, he spoke of " the heart -cheer- 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 2 1 
 
 ing belief in the perpetual progress of the 
 species towards a point of unattainable per- 
 fection." When we seek for the grounds 
 of his conviction, it appears as if a first 
 principle, or as some intuitive idea, for 
 which no evidence is forthcoming, in which 
 one ought to trust, despite all appearances 
 to the contrary. " Let us allow and be- 
 lieve," so he writes in 1809, " that there is 
 a progress in the species towards an unat- 
 tainable perfection, or, whether this be so 
 or not, that it is a necessity of a good and 
 greatly gifted nature to believe it." He 
 meets the objections which he felt, and the 
 skepticism in his own soul, by dwelling on 
 the thought that progress is not neces- 
 sarily constant, either in virtue or intel- 
 lectual qualities, or in the most valuable 
 indispensable department of knowledge. 
 " The progress of the species is not like 
 a Roman road which goes straight to its 
 goal, but rather like a winding river, fre- 
 quently forced to turn backward in order 
 to overcome obstacles which cannot be 
 
22 Religious Progress. 
 
 directly eluded, but always moving with 
 an additional impulse, conquering in secret 
 great difficulties, and, whether we can trace 
 it or not, gaining strength every hour for 
 the accomplishment of its destiny." 
 
 The faith of Wordsworth in human 
 progress possesses the greater significance 
 because he lived through an age of depres- 
 sion and of reaction engendered by the 
 failure of the French Revolution, when, 
 despite all that tended to doubt and dis- 
 couragement, he maintained his faith un- 
 shaken. He lived to see that faith become 
 the inspiring motive in every department 
 of human activity. I will not even at- 
 tempt to enumerate the rich and varied 
 results of progress which go to make our 
 modern civilization in the political or social 
 or industrial order, the improvements in 
 methods of education, the discoveries of 
 science, the new branches of inquiry which 
 are so full of promise for the future, all 
 of which make the nineteenth century the 
 most memorable, because the most pro- 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 23 
 
 gressive age in the world's history. Nor 
 in these later years has there been any 
 relaxation of effort in order to the aboli- 
 tion of old abuses or the bringing in of 
 better ways ; but rather as time has ad- 
 vanced has the conviction spread and deep- 
 ened that still greater changes are needed, 
 to which the race of man is equal, to which 
 it is pledged and consecrated by its faith 
 in progress. Hence we labor, as if all sin 
 and suffering and evil could be overcome 
 and banished if only right methods could 
 be made to prevail. There has been so 
 much encouragement in what has been ac- 
 complished that many begin to feel as if 
 we were on the threshold of still greater 
 discoveries ; that as yet only the basis has 
 been laid for some higher civilization, of 
 whose beneficence we can form no ade- 
 quate conception. 
 
24 Religious Progress. 
 
 n. 
 
 But the popular belief in progress does 
 not go unchallenged. There are grave 
 doubts as to its reality, misgivings, deep 
 questionings in the minds of those who 
 seek to analyze the constituents of the 
 problem of human life. There are many 
 who turn away in weariness from the noisy 
 declamation which magnifies in grandilo- 
 quent words the progress of the age, who 
 doubt whether every change is an improve- 
 ment, who recognize that our complicated 
 civilization involves greater evils than the 
 simpler forms of earlier ages, who discern 
 dark portents in the future, from which 
 they see no means of escape. There are 
 others who have had to fight their way 
 through the pessimism of Schopenhauer, 
 and, if they have escaped his conclusion, 
 yet feel the soreness of the struggle 
 through which they have passed, so that 
 their optimism, their hope for the future 
 of mankind, is more sober and subdued. 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 25 
 
 The speculative difficulties which embar- 
 rass thoughtful minds as they reflect on 
 the nature of progress come to a focus, as 
 it were, in the sphere of religion ; for the- 
 ology alone professes to enlighten us on 
 the whence and the whither, to reveal with 
 authority the laws which ought to govern 
 conduct, and to initiate us into the methods 
 by which humanity shall fulfill its calling. 
 But the picture which the religious world 
 presents is not altogether clear or encour- 
 aging. Does the Church gain an increas- 
 ing light into the nature of God and his 
 relations to men ? Does it prosecute its 
 work with increasing success ? How far 
 does the cultivation of morality and holy 
 character, and the spirit of brotherly love 
 keep pace with the advances of material 
 civilization ? Do erroneous views and su- 
 perstitions tend to disappear ? And if unity 
 is the badge of a well-established science, 
 how far does theology merit recognition 
 as a science, in view of the wide variety 
 of opinion in the religious world ? 
 
26 Religious Progress. 
 
 To questions like these different an- 
 swers will be returned. However hopeful 
 may be our attitude, yet as we scan the 
 horizon in search of evidence for religious 
 progress, we are forced to confess that 
 there is much which seems to contradict 
 our hope. The old errors still exist and 
 show no traces of weakness, but, on the 
 contrary, they seem to have taken a new 
 lease of life. In some respects a retro- 
 grade tendency appears, as in the re- 
 version, in our own day, to theories of 
 Christian certitude or defences of the 
 faith, which learning and scholarship unite 
 in rejecting as untenable. Even religious 
 persecution has not wholly passed away, 
 and though its forms may have changed, 
 yet the religious conflicts of' the present, 
 the ostracism of good men for heresy, still 
 remind us of an age which we had fondly 
 thought to have disappeared, never to 
 return. 
 
 It was this feature of the religious world 
 which led Macaulay to deny that any prog- 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 27 
 
 ress could be traced in religious history. 
 The familiar essay in which he gave utter- 
 ance to this conviction was written in 1840, 
 not far from the time when Tennyson 
 wrote his " Locksley Hall." Macaulay 
 had been browsing over Ranke's " His- 
 tory of the Popes " till his mind was so 
 powerfully impressed with the long dura- 
 tion of the papacy, and not only with its 
 duration but with its dominion, which 
 seemed to him still unshaken, that he was 
 led to utter the depressing prophecy which 
 has afforded such comfort to our Roman 
 Catholic brethren, that their Church 
 might be destined to witness the end of 
 all other forms of Christian organization : 
 " She may exist in undiminished vigor 
 when some traveler from New Zealand j 
 shall in the midst of a vast solitude take 
 his stand upon London Bridge to sketch 
 the ruins of St. Paul's." 
 
 Macaulay did not form this opinion with- 
 out some evidence, or at least some show 
 of reasoning. He pointed out that there 
 
28 Religious Progress. 
 
 are branches of knowledge with respect to 
 which the law of the human mind is prog- 
 ress. In mathematics, and in the experi- 
 mental sciences, what was once acquired 
 could not again be lost, for people, as he 
 remarks, do not react against established 
 scientific theorems, such as Harvey's doc- 
 trine of the circulation of the blood. But 
 with regard to religion, the case, he says, 
 is different. Socrates knew as much of 
 natural theology as Paley, and was just as 
 well circumstanced for knowing all that 
 was to be known ; in the Book of Job, 
 they talked with as much skill about the 
 problems of life as they do to-day. Re- 
 vealed religion also, he thought, no more 
 than natural religion, could be called a pro- 
 gressive science. A Christian of the fifth 
 century, with a Bible in his hands, other 
 things being equal, is on a par with a 
 Christian of our own day ; the discov- 
 eries of civilization have no bearing what- 
 ever on religious doctrines ; there was 
 Sir Thomas More, who went back to the 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 29 
 
 belief in transubstantiation, when all the 
 world was rejecting it, and he was a man of 
 eminent talent ; no learning or sagacity 
 affords security against the greatest errors) 
 on religious subjects ; Bayle and Chilling- 
 worth became Roman Catholics from sin- 
 cere conviction ; and the great Dr. Johnson 
 was a believer in miracles and apparitions. 
 "For these reasons," he exclaims, "we 
 have ceased to wonder at any vagaries of 
 superstition. . . . During the last seven 
 centuries the public mind of Europe has 
 made constant progress in almost every 
 department of secular knowledge. But in 
 religion we can trace no constant prog- 
 ress. The ecclesiastical history of that 
 long period is the history of movement to 
 and fro." 
 
 The judgment of Macaulay, even if su- 
 perficial or erroneous, like so many other 
 conclusions which he reached, has still a 
 representative character. Numerous illus- 
 trations could be adduced in our own 
 experience to confirm the line of argu- 
 
jo Religious Progress. 
 
 ment which he adopted. The nineteenth 
 century abounds in these instances of re- 
 version to old errors, to what were sup- 
 posed to be extinct beliefs. The old 
 heresies have a singular way of reappear- 
 ing, so that there is hardly any religious 
 conviction of the past which does not still 
 find credence. One often hears among the 
 clergy the same melancholy conclusion that 
 progress is not the law of the religious 
 world. Isolated as they too generally are 
 from the world of thought, preoccupied 
 supremely with the practical interests of 
 their profession, hearing at a distance the 
 confused rumbling of a world's commotion, 
 they come wearily to the conclusion that 
 the old errors obey a certain law of perio- 
 dicity, the old heresies are doomed ever 
 and anon to reappear, as though we were 
 treading in an endless circle. 
 
 And again, Macaulay was right, to a cer- 
 tain extent, in feeling that there was some 
 difference between the spheres of religion 
 and of material civilization, so that the 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 31 
 
 same law did not prevail alike in both. 
 He did not see wherein the difference lay, 
 but rather blindly assumed that because 
 religion did not follow the method of prog- 
 ress in the natural sciences, therefore the 
 law of progress did not apply to religious 
 knowledge. Many others have drawn the 
 same conclusion from the same premises. 
 The brilliant results achieved in the posi- 
 tive sciences, the firm step, the forward 
 movement from one point in advance to 
 another, the security of attainment be- 
 yond the power of modification by per- 
 sonal taste or preferences, these things 
 afford a striking contrast to the religious 
 situation, which, to the gaze from without, 
 resembles a seething confusion of contra- 
 dictory opinions, where no opinion is in 
 the nature of the case absurd, and all 
 opinions are alike lacking in the authority 
 of demonstrated truth. 
 
 In speaking to you on the subject of reli- 
 gious progress, I have no theory to advo- 
 cate, nor am I so presumptuous as to think 
 
32 Religious Progress. 
 
 of demonstrating the existence of any law 
 or method under whose uniform operation 
 the phenomena of religion are included. 
 There are many attempts at a philosophy 
 of history, each of which may have its pe- 
 culiar merits, contributing something to 
 our knowledge of the ways of the Spirit in 
 the life of humanity, while yet no one of 
 them nor all taken together are adequate 
 to the solution of the mysterious problem 
 of the spiritual life. I do not intend to 
 add another to these many efforts to ex- 
 plain the genesis of religion, or the method 
 of its growth, but shall be content with 
 the more modest task of calling attention 
 to certain demonstrated tendencies in reli- 
 gious thought or experience, which may 
 throw some light on the situation of the 
 religious world, when they are viewed to- 
 gether as parts of a larger whole. In 
 this first lecture I propose to treat the 
 subject of religious progress in its rela- 
 tions to the individual man, to trace the 
 ruling ideas or motives in accordance with 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 33 
 
 which men act in the present as they have 
 in the past, methods with whose work- 
 ings we ourselves are familiar, for we, too, 
 have followed them in our own religious 
 development. In my second lecture I shall 
 consider the subject of religious progress 
 as it appears in the organized forms of 
 Christianity, in the Christian Church con- 
 sidered as a whole, where other methods 
 prevail, where the individual contradictions 
 are merged in a larger unity, the orchestra, 
 as it were, of the religious life of humanity 
 where dissonance contributes to a richer, 
 more universal harmony. 
 
 in. 
 
 In the life of the individual there are 
 three distinct tendencies, whose action, 
 whether separately or in combination, en- 
 ters into the vital movements of religious 
 thought and experience. We may call 
 them tendencies, forces, attitudes, or mo- 
 tives, the name is unimportant if we can 
 get some clear conception of their nature 
 
34 Religious Progress. 
 
 and operation. They take their origin as 
 so many different answers to the supreme 
 problem in religion, how is the past re- 
 lated to the present ; how is the old truth 
 by which men have lived in the past re- 
 lated to the new truth which calls for alle- 
 giance in the present ? 
 
 The first of these tendencies to which 
 I ask your attention is the impulse, every- 
 where and at all times manifest, to reject 
 the old belief or practice in order to the 
 reception of some new truth. There is a 
 certain order of minds upon which truth, 
 when revealed, seizes with irresistible force, 
 impelling them, if they would realize its 
 possession, to reject with vehemence their 
 former belief, as if the rejection of the old 
 were indispensable to the acceptation of 
 the new. The process of appropriating the 
 new idea seems to require, as if by some 
 necessary law of the working of the human 
 mind, this bitter antagonism to one's ear- 
 lier attitude, as if the old neutralized or 
 contradicted the new conviction, as if the 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 35 
 
 old must therefore be utterly false, a 
 delusion from which one must be emanci- 
 pated at any cost. It becomes a duty to 
 distinguish sharply between the old and 
 the new, while the attempt to reconcile 
 them seems like a weakness if not a sin. 
 Like the pearl of great price, when a man 
 becomes aware of its existence, he must 
 sell all that he has in order to secure it. 
 Only in this way, when the soul, as it were, 
 is swept clean and free from its former 
 occupants, can the new spirit enter in and 
 take possession. Otherwise no footing 
 could be gained for the new conception ; 
 it would perish in the monotony of intel- 
 lectual dullness which sees no differences, 
 or is incapable of drawing distinctions. 
 
 Those who are acted upon in this way 
 by the contact of new truth may become 
 the world's reformers ; they are the stuff 
 out of which martyrs are made ; they would 
 gladly go to the stake for their convictions. 
 They are not confused by seeing more 
 than one side of a question, that weak- 
 
36 Religious Progress. 
 
 ness which palsies so many souls for ac- 
 tion. They are often vigorous and power- 
 ful spirits burning with the fires of zeal, 
 attracting followers, becoming founders of 
 new sects, and making the world different 
 from what they found it. 
 
 Such is the motive in the familiar pro- 
 cess which we call the storm and stress in 
 the intellectual and spiritual experience of 
 young men, the motive by which they 
 come to the knowledge of themselves, or 
 enter upon their new inheritance. There 
 is a moment when what they have been 
 taught or have received in youth is called 
 in question ; when they can see only the 
 contrast and opposition between the dead 
 tradition of their earlier years and the liv- 
 ing freedom which the new conviction of- 
 fers. The same motive is revealed, also, 
 in the first instinct of a converted man, 
 leading him to renounce not only what was 
 evil in his old life, but all its associations 
 as well, however innocent, to the end that 
 he may become a new man in Christ 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 37 
 
 Jesus. Nowhere is this more effectively 
 illustrated than in Bunyan's " Pilgrim's 
 Progress," where Christian sets forth on his 
 memorable journey, leaving his home, his 
 wife and children, his whole world, be- 
 hind him, as the indispensable condition 
 of attaining a new life. It was in this 
 mood that so many in the ancient church 
 condemned and rejected with abhorrence 
 the old heathen world, its art, its litera- 
 ture, its philosophy, as well as its immoral 
 and vicious customs, as if all alike were 
 totally corrupted, or like salt which had lost 
 its savor. For this reason St. Augustine 
 was led, after his conversion, to assert the 
 doctrine of the total depravity of human 
 nature, in order to make more emphatic 
 the vital difference between the natural 
 man and the soul which has been renewed 
 by divine grace ; and again, to make his 
 sweeping condemnation of all heathen vir- 
 tues, as if but splendid vices. 
 
 It is a peculiarity of religious controver- 
 sies that they magnify distinctions and 
 
38 Religious Progress. 
 
 exaggerate differences, to the ultimate ad- 
 vantage, it may be, of the truth, but in the 
 immediate moment causing great confu- 
 sion, while each of the combating parties 
 proclaims the attitude of the other to be 
 false. The late Dr. Pusey, referring to 
 the teaching of his eminent contemporary, 
 Mr. Maurice, declared that they worshiped 
 different Gods. In the bitterness of the 
 strife between Calvinist and Arminian in 
 the last century, the Calvinistic deity was 
 proclaimed to be identical with the Armin- 
 ian devil, while to the Calvinist it seemed 
 better that the throne of the universe 
 should be vacant than that it should be 
 occupied by such a pitiful nonentity as 
 the Arminians worshiped. 
 
 In the greater revolutionary epochs of 
 history, or in moments when the transi- 
 tions of life are most apparent, in those 
 days of the Lord which the prophet de- 
 clared were not days to be prayed for or 
 desired, those men assume the leadership 
 who have broken most violently with the 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 39 
 
 old and corrupt order ; who will make no 
 compromise, but insist on the divine judg- 
 ment in the destruction of the ancient 
 usage or institution. Such was Luther, 
 though but for a short moment in his 
 career ; such was Calvin with his impla- 
 cable hatred against Rome ; such was also 
 Knox, the most radical of all the reformers, 
 who held that " the Church of Rome was 
 not merely corrupt, but was abandoned to 
 evil ; it was not the church of God but the 
 church of the devil, and must be wiped 
 off the face of the earth." To these re- 
 formers, in that great hour, despite their 
 intolerance and their iconoclasm, the world 
 is owing, as it also acknowledges, a great 
 obligation ; for without them the step 
 could not have been taken by which hu- 
 manity advanced into freedom and light. 
 In these instances, and others which might 
 be given, there is a revelation of the work- 
 ings of the human soul, and therefore of 
 the manifestation of God in history. He 
 taketh away the old that he may bring in 
 the new. 
 
40 Religious Progress. 
 
 This method of religious progress which 
 invokes reaction as its agent in the indi- 
 vidual, or inspires a revolution, when 
 adopted on a larger scale, must be recog- 
 nized as one of the constituent elements 
 of religious history ; but, taken by itself as 
 the only agent of reform, it has grave defi- 
 ciencies. It is a violent method of gaining 
 a hearing or a reception for new truth, or 
 of eliminating the evils and abuses of cus- 
 tom grown hard by age and precedent. 
 When successful, it forces the church to 
 compromises and readjustments ; when it 
 fails it is stigmatized as heresy ; for heresy, 
 if a definition of the word be possible, is 
 identified with the passionate advocacy of 
 some hitherto unknown or unappreciated 
 / aspect of the truth, generally coupled with 
 a denial of that prevailing view which 
 seems to stand in the way of its accept- 
 ance. But heresy has had its place and 
 function within the church. It would be 
 no unprofitable chapter in the history of 
 Christian doctrine, which should consider 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 41 
 
 the heresies by themselves in the contri- 
 butions they have made to the fuller devel- 
 opment of Christian truth. In our own 
 age, we may admit our indebtedness to 
 heresy for the original advocacy of the 
 great principle that the Bible is to be re- 
 garded as literature, as written by men of 
 like passions as we are, though the affirma- 
 tion was needlessly attended by the denial 
 of its inspiration or revelation. It was 
 heresy which first asserted the competence 
 and authority of the human reason, while 
 the principle of church authority was re- 
 jected as having no relation to the reason. 
 It has advocated the sanctity of human 
 nature, the perfect humanity of Christ, and 
 the doctrine of the divine unity, but with 
 the indignant denial of original sin and the 
 truth of the incarnation and the doctrine 
 of the Trinity. In order to gain a hearing 
 for the conviction that there is truth in 
 other religions than the Christian, heresy 
 has been willing to deny that Christianity 
 was the absolute religion. It has forced 
 
42 Religious Progress. 
 
 the religious world to recognize the value 
 of scientific methods and results, but with 
 the corresponding negation of any validity 
 in theology as a science. If evolution were 
 true, the doctrine of creation was false. 
 
 In all these cases there have been vio- 
 lent commotions which have convulsed 
 the religious world. And, indeed, this 
 method of progress seems to imply that 
 the sphere of religion must of necessity be 
 a theatre of constant agitation and conflict, 
 just as war has hitherto been regarded as a 
 necessary accompaniment of an expanding 
 civilization. Is there, then, no other way 
 of religious progress by which the read- 
 justments that the time demands may be 
 more quietly accomplished, some method 
 by which the individual may grow into the 
 larger truth without the indignant renun- 
 ciation of the old faith ? 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 43 
 
 IV. 
 
 There is another theory concerning 
 progress, according to which it is con- 
 ceived as a uniform movement forward and 
 upward, so that each age prepares the way 
 for that which follows ; that which comes 
 later in time being for that very reason 
 higher, truer, more complete than that 
 which preceded it. At no point in the 
 process should any violent break with the 
 past be allowed, for the old should grow 
 evenly and naturally into the new. There 
 was not only a relative truth in ancient in- 
 stitutions and doctrines, but when they 
 are superseded it is because they have I 
 ministered to their own displacement, be- 
 cause their spirit has passed over into the 
 later and larger institution, which conserv- 
 ing the essence of the old adjusts it to the 
 new environment. Nor can the old be 
 superseded until it has done its work, yield- I 
 ing up its vital truth to its successor. 
 
 Such was Pascal's doctrine of the colos- 
 
44 Religious Progress. 
 
 sal man, which I venture to give in his 
 own words, familiar as they are, and often 
 quoted : 
 
 " The whole succession of human beings 
 throughout the whole course of ages must be 
 regarded as a single individual man, continu- 
 ally living and continually learning. And that 
 shows how unwarranted is the deference we 
 yield to the philosophers of antiquity. For as 
 old age is that which is most distant from in- 
 fancy, it must be manifest to all that old age 
 in the universal man should not be sought 
 in the times near his birth but in the times 
 most distant from it. Those whom we call 
 the ancients are really those who lived in the 
 I youth of the world and the true infancy of 
 man ; and as we have added the experiences 
 of the ages between us and them to what they 
 knew, it is only in ourselves that is to be found 
 that antiquity which we venerate in others." 
 
 Such has been the theory which has 
 underlain the study of history since the 
 days of Schleiermacher. Indeed, it may 
 be said to have given birth to the modern 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 45 
 
 historical method, which is distinguished 
 from earlier methods by its attempt to 
 penetrate into the inner meaning of events 
 or doctrines, with the sole purpose of 
 reaching the truth which they embodied, 
 and of exhibiting this truth in its organic 
 relation to human progress. For after the 
 crude controversies of the last century, 
 the vision began to dawn upon far-seeing 
 minds that some definite purpose ran 
 through human affairs ; that, instead of 
 moving blindly to and fro, humanity was 
 acting as if under the guidance of an in- 
 telligent will to the accomplishment of 
 some vast beneficent end ; that enough 
 was discernible to indicate such an in- 
 creasing purpose, though the goal might 
 be still remote and hidden from view. 
 This is the doctrine of development which, 
 on its religious side, assumes with Lessing 
 that God is educating the human race just 
 as children are trained by tutors and gov- 
 ernors, or by the experience and observa- 
 tion of life. We may connect this doc- 
 
46 Religious Progress. 
 
 trine with the words of Christ, which He 
 spoke of the Spirit, He shall lead you 
 into all truth. "If that Spirit," said 
 Bishop Thirlwall, "by which every man 
 spoke of old is forever a living and present 
 Spirit, its later lessons may well transcend 
 its earlier." 
 
 It is well to remember that this doc- 
 trine of development had been announced 
 and had become the working principle of 
 historical investigation long before it was 
 applied by Darwin to the physical order. 
 Perhaps, also, it is better to retain the 
 word development as standing for the law 
 of progress in humanity; since the word 
 evolution may carry ideas which are true 
 of the order of outward nature, but which 
 do not apply to the spiritual world. 
 
 It would seem as if a doctrine of prog- 
 ress like this, at once so rational, so ele- 
 vating, so practical, would find universal 
 acceptance, becoming a law to the indi- 
 vidual for self-cultivation, as well as to 
 statesmen or reformers, who are called to 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 47 
 
 guide the destinies of a people. As an 
 historical method, it has redeemed and 
 justified the course of the ages behind us ; 
 it has not only enabled the past to live 
 again so that we may understand and ap- 
 propriate its truth, but it has pointed out, 
 also, its deficiencies, and shown how they 
 may be supplemented or corrected. The 
 study of the past may give direction for 
 the future, affording us a chart by which 
 we may guide our movement over the 
 otherwise trackless ocean of human exis- 
 tence. When we know how the race of 
 man has traveled before us, we know 
 something of the route to be followed as 
 well as of that to be avoided. Instead 
 of breaking with the past by revolution, or 
 by violent reactions, we have the order of 
 beautiful and symmetrical growth. Cul- 
 ture and the slow but sure process of edu- 
 cation will become powerful agencies for 
 promoting true reform. In the light of 
 the growing truth, whatever is irrational, 
 or superstitious, or false, would be doomed 
 to fade away and disappear. 
 
4$ Religious Progress. 
 
 At this point, however, we confront one 
 of the most perplexing anomalies in hu- 
 man experience. While it may be that 
 in the normal moods of human society 
 a gradual progress by culture and educa- 
 tion is the true method to be followed, 
 so that the old shall grow into the new 
 without the evils which wait upon revo- 
 lution or commotion, yet not only has 
 this method not prevailed in the past, but 
 there have been crises in history when its 
 application would have been impossible. 
 There is one man to whom we invariably 
 revert when we think of a great oppor- 
 tunity which was lost for gradual reform. 
 Erasmus, who stood for this principle in 
 the age of the Reformation, deprecated a 
 religious revolution as an incalculable in- 
 jury to the cause of human progress, and 
 sought to avert it by doing all in his power 
 to enlighten the world of his time, in the 
 hope that evils and abuses would quietly 
 disappear, while the general order of the 
 church would remain. But when Luther 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 49 
 
 arose, the star of Erasmus went down. 
 If Erasmus could have had his way, there 
 would have been no break with the me- 
 diaeval church, and, as some regard it, the 
 sin of schism would have been prevented. 
 There are many scholars who take this 
 view ; indeed, it has almost come to be 
 known as the scholarly attitude toward 
 the Reformation. 
 
 In the words of Clough in his "Amours 
 de Voyage" : 
 
 Luther, they say, was unwise : like a half -taught Ger- 
 man, he could not 
 
 See that the old follies were passing most tranquilly out 
 of remembrance ; 
 
 Leo the Tenth was employing all efforts to clear out 
 abuses 
 
 Jupiter, Juno, and Venus, Fine Arts and Fine Letters, 
 the Poets, 
 
 Scholars and Sculptors and Painters were quietly clear- 
 ing away the 
 
 Martyrs and Virgins and Saints, or, at any rate, Thomas 
 Aquinas ; 
 
 He must forsooth make a fuss and distend his huge 
 Wittenberg lungs, and 
 
 Bring back theology once yet again in a flood upon Eu- 
 rope : 
 
50 Religious Progress. 
 
 Lo, you, for forty days from the windows of heaven it 
 
 fell ; 
 Waters prevail on the earth yet more for a hundred and 
 
 fifty; 
 Are they abating at last ? The doves that are sent to 
 
 explore are 
 Wearily fain to return at the best with a leaflet of 
 
 promise, 
 Fain to return as they went to the wandering wave-tost 
 
 vessel, 
 Fain to reenter the roof which covers the clean and the 
 
 unclean. 
 Luther, they say, was unwise ; he did n't see how things 
 
 were going. 
 
 This opinion of scholars, which regards 
 it as a mistake that Luther, and not Eras- 
 mus, should have led the Reformation, is 
 rather an inference from a certain theory 
 of progress than a conclusion based upon 
 the full knowledge of things as they are. 
 I am inclined to hazard the statement that 
 no one familiar with all that preceded or 
 followed the protest of Luther, no one 
 acquainted with the history of the age of 
 the Renaissance and of the Catholic or 
 Counter-Reformation, can come to any 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 57 
 
 other conclusion than that Luther was 
 divinely called and impelled to his task. 
 Even had there been no Luther, there was 
 Henry VIII. and the national movement 
 in England, which alone would have been 
 sufficient to arouse the Inquisition or to 
 generate a Loyola ; in a word to give Spain 
 the opportunity which she coveted. In 
 this view your own distinguished teacher 
 of church history concurs, whose book on 
 the Reformation entitles him to speak with 
 authority. We may and we must hold to 
 the doctrine that religious reforms are 
 better accomplished by the gradual process 
 of education and enlightenment ; but we 
 must admit that there come moments in 
 history when this method does not avail, 
 the birth-hour of great institutions which 
 are to remould the fortunes of society. 
 Fortunately, these crises are exceptional 
 and rare ; only these two, clearly demon- 
 strated to be such, the age of the Protes- 
 tant Reformation, and the age of the 
 coming of Christ, of which the words were 
 
52 Religious Progress. 
 
 spoken, " I am not come to send peace on 
 earth, but a sword," and "A man's foes 
 shall be they of his own household." 
 
 The conception of progress, as an even 
 or uniform development by means of cul- 
 ture or enlightenment, encounters other 
 obstacles than those afforded by the ano- 
 malies of history. It is a conception pecu- 
 liarly liable to be misunderstood, often, 
 indeed, so greatly perverted as to become 
 untrue. 
 
 It is misinterpreted when it is so con- 
 strued as to teach that every change is a 
 direct advance, so that what is latest in 
 time is for that reason superior to what 
 has gone before. Wordsworth's illustra- 
 tion needs to be kept in view that the 
 stream often turns backward in its course 
 in order to escape some obstacle which 
 hinders its direct movement. History is 
 full of instances of this reversion of the 
 current. There may be cases where it 
 does not return to its normal path until 
 after the generations have passed away. 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 53 
 
 A recent writer in a valuable book on the 
 growth of the spirit of Christianity makes 
 the ancient church of the first five centu- 
 ries correspond to the period of the child- 
 hood of the faith, the Middle Ages to its 
 youth, the Reformation to its mature man- 
 hood. But in reality the Middle Ages was 
 in most important aspects so far inferior 
 to the ancient church, in what concerns 
 civilization or intellectual culture or theo- 
 logical insight, that it sat devoutly at the 
 feet of the earlier age, as its blind, submis- 
 sive pupil. The Protestant Reformation 
 did not at once issue in the happy results 
 which had been anticipated, but on the 
 contrary so great were the evils attending 
 its course that we can hardly wonder many 
 should have reverted fondly to the age 
 before Luther arose as a more favorable 
 moment to the higher interests of life. 
 Undoubtedly, when we take the long sur- 
 vey of the centuries the advance is clear ; 
 but to demonstrate it at every stage of the 
 movement is not possible. 
 
54 Religious Progress. 
 
 And again, the comparison of Pascal 
 which makes the life of humanity as a 
 whole follow the stages of growth in the 
 individual from childhood through youth 
 to maturity, valuable as are the elements 
 of truth it may contain, is often so misin- 
 terpreted as to neutralize its meaning. 
 What is the meaning of those words of St. 
 Paul, " When I became a man I put away 
 childish things " ? Surely not that every 
 belief or institution which had its rise in 
 the early stages of the history of the race 
 is for that reason discredited, and its rejec- 
 tion demanded by the later age which has 
 entered upon the inheritance of manhood. 
 It is a popular fallacy, with which any true 
 doctrine of progress must contend, that if 
 a belief or practice can be traced to a re- 
 mote origin, or the stages of its growth be 
 shown, it ought no longer to commend it- 
 self to the present enlightened age. So a 
 recent writer has remarked that "To see 
 the process of the formation of a doctrine 
 is already to behold its dissolution." An 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 55 
 
 eminent preacher not long ago gave as his 
 reason for ceasing to administer the Lord's 
 Supper that it went back for its rude be- 
 ginnings to the savage custom of feeding 
 on the flesh or drinking the blood of an 
 enemy slain in war. 
 
 The lamentable result of these misappli- 
 cations of a great principle is to leave the 
 spirit no rest or sure foundations. For 
 nothing can be permanently attained so 
 long as the primary obligation is to be 
 always looking out for something new. 
 Hardly have we reached a position in 
 which our feet may securely stand when we 
 are called on to renounce it, if we would 
 not be denounced as laggards, traitors 
 to the principle of progress. No validity 
 must be recognized in what has been 
 accomplished lest it should interfere with 
 the new light which may break in on us 
 from some unexpected quarter. All things 
 must remain in a fluid state, the chaos of a 
 perpetual becoming: History vanishes in 
 a panorama of dissolving views. If there 
 
56 Religious Progress. 
 
 is to be a creed at all, it must be revised 
 each day, as we rise in the morning, in 
 order to be in harmony with our latest 
 mood, the last new book, the most recent 
 scientific discovery. Hence the present is 
 no more our own than the past, and we 
 sail into the misty future without chart or 
 compass. 
 
 v. 
 
 There is a third conception of the nature 
 of true progress which makes it consist in 
 a constant struggle to regain or adhere to 
 that which is old, which assumes, as its 
 ruling idea, that the new is false ; only that 
 which can be shown to be old is true. To 
 seek for new truth is to endanger the basis 
 of the religious life or the foundations of 
 religious certitude. 
 
 Such an attitude often deserves to be 
 condemned as a blind conservatism, op- 
 posed to real progress, the refuge only of 
 those who rest on custom and do not wish 
 to be disturbed, the bulwark of religious 
 indifference on the one hand or of a timid 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 57 
 
 and skeptical but persecuting ecclesiasti- 
 cism on the other. " Since we are un- 
 able," said the pagan Cecilius, in the 
 apology of Minucious Felix, " to know 
 anything of that world which is above the 
 senses, since philosophy has still to search 
 for the secret of things, that which we 
 had better do is to hold by the Gods of 
 the fathers." In the same fashion, accord- 
 ing to the Koran, the advocates of the old 
 idolatries of Arabia answered the new 
 prophet : " We have found our fathers 
 practicing this worship and we are guided 
 by their steps." To Mohammed in his 
 disappointment Allah gave reassurance, 
 it had always been so ; no prophet had 
 ever been sent who had not met the same 
 reply. Nor had the reply come from the 
 poor and ignorant but from the wealthier 
 classes ; " We have sent no warner unto 
 any city but the inhabitants thereof who 
 lived in affluence said, * Verily we believe 
 not that with which ye are sent.' ' 
 
 It is also characteristic of this attitude 
 
5# Religious Progress. 
 
 that while it rejects every change as an in- 
 novation, and regards every innovation as 
 evil, because endangering the truth which 
 should be unchangeable, yet it is not inca- 
 pable of receiving new truth ; only, when 
 it does so it immediately proceeds to call it 
 old, to assert that it has always been an 
 integral part of the immutable heritage. 
 It has devious ways of incorporating the 
 new with the old leaven, while also it may 
 turn and rend those who are so unfortunate 
 as to be its heralds. 
 
 The principle which lies beneath this 
 attitude toward progress is that divine 
 revelation has once for all imparted the 
 full truth by which men may live ; that, 
 therefore, the highest duty, the most sol- 
 emn obligation, is to hand it on un- 
 changed, unimpaired, from generation to 
 generation. It is also assumed that there 
 is an evil and downward tendency in hu- 
 man nature, whose effect is to pervert the 
 truth by overlaying it with additions, cor- 
 rupting it by complications, till at last it 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 59 
 
 becomes so obscured as to need a repro- 
 clamation in its original simplicity. The 
 philosophy of history, to minds in this 
 condition, is summed up in the necessity 
 for a series of prophets, who appear at 
 intervals as they are needed, whose func- 
 tion is always to announce the old truth 
 which was from the beginning. Such was 
 the rude philosophy of Mohammedanism. 
 The prophet of Islam had not been sent 
 to announce new truth, but to clear away 
 the obstructions, the many dogmas of the 
 Christian Church, which prevented the old 
 truth from being clearly discerned. He 
 freely admitted the credentials of the He- 
 brew prophets who had preceded him ; he 
 had no fault to find with the teaching of 
 Christ, that in itself was true, but it 
 had been overlaid, complicated by the false 
 teaching of apostles, or the definitions of 
 councils, till it was no longer capable of 
 being understood or obeyed, and must 
 therefore be reasserted in its first purity 
 and with a deeper emphasis. All the 
 
60 Religious Progress. 
 
 prophets, according to Mohammed, when 
 rightly interpreted, had proclaimed the 
 same immutable truth, by the recognition, 
 indeed, of which, they were known to have 
 a prophetic calling. 
 
 How often have we heard this view pre- 
 sented in Christian circles, as if the only 
 explanation needed for the complex phe- 
 nomena of religious history, that each 
 successive dispensation or epoch ends in 
 failure because of the fatal activity of hu- 
 man error. God makes his covenant with 
 Adam only to be defeated by human wick- 
 edness. He renews his covenant with 
 Noah, with Abraham, with Moses, but 
 each successive mission of the divine love 
 is defeated by the growing evil, until at 
 last He comes to the rescue, when things 
 are at their worst, in the mission of his 
 Son. There are those to-day who seem 
 to make it an act of obligation to believe 
 that the Christian dispensation is already 
 doomed to failure, the faith is to grow 
 cold and almost disappear from the earth 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 61 
 
 in order to the preparation for the second 
 coming of the Son of Man. 
 
 Principles may be true, though we may 
 greatly differ as to their application. We 
 shall readily admit, I think, this tendency 
 to deterioration which waits upon all re- 
 ligious institutions. In their first procla- 
 mation religious motives are spontaneous 
 and free, more pure, more rational, than in 
 their later history, when they are apt to 
 degenerate into a hard literalism, sup- 
 ported by tradition rather than by reason, 
 corrupted by cant, bolstered up by verbal 
 commentators ; so that they who would 
 escape their dark shadow must needs go 
 back in the interest of truth and freedom 
 to their first proclamation. 
 
 There is a deep root of truth, also, in 
 the demand for the unchangeable, the im- 
 mutable, as the final word in religion. We 
 cry out for the eternal which changes not, 
 as the last resort of our being, as when we 
 are wearied with speculation which calls 
 all things in question ; when we are tired 
 
62 Religious Progress. 
 
 of incessant change, which masquerades 
 under the name of progress ; when we 
 become hopeless after long gazing into a 
 blank and empty future. In the crises 
 of our being we fall back upon those 
 undefined, mysterious instincts, postulates 
 of our nature which are most simple, 
 most universal, whose traces go back to 
 the remotest ages. Even in the social 
 order this motive may act most power- 
 fully, as in the utterances of Burke in his 
 "Vindication of Natural Society" against 
 the leaders of the French Revolution : 
 " It is the lapse of time which consti- 
 tutes the most solid of all claims, not only 
 to property, but to that which secures 
 property the State ; the world would go 
 to pieces if the practice of all moral duties 
 and the foundations of society rested upon 
 having their claims made clear and demon- 
 strated to every individual." So, also, in 
 the ecclesiastical order, St. Augustine, in 
 his great work on the " City of God," char- 
 acterizes the earthly city as affected by 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 63 
 
 change, mutation, and decay ; while the 
 city of God is the one and the same un- 
 changeable purpose which runs through ' 
 human history from its first beginning. 
 
 It was under the influence of this mood 
 that Bossuet wrote his "Variations of Pro- 
 testantism," assuming as axiom that truth 
 has but a single aspect, that simplicity 
 and unchangeableness are the marks by 
 which it is known. But the Latin Church, 
 which has accepted his method as conclu- 
 sive, has no monopoly of this conviction. 
 The same feeling led Richard Baxter, the 
 most sturdy of Protestants, towards the 
 close of a life passed in agitation and con- 
 troversy, to put his faith in those simple, 
 unchanging truths regarding which men are 
 more generally agreed, and to deem those 
 principles as more uncertain about which 
 there was greater difference of opinion. 
 
 We get an illustration of the same mood 
 in the burial service of the English Church, 
 which long since ceased to express the 
 passing changes of religious experience or 
 
64 Religious Progress. 
 
 aspiration, which offers comfort by remind- 
 ing us of the common lot, repeating the 
 sad wail of humanity over the common fate. 
 England's great poet, when he took his 
 leave of a sorrowing people, turned to 
 Shakespeare for comfort, as if he found 
 support in the veriest commonplaces, the 
 reflections which come without effort to 
 all alike, the oldest, simplest utterances of 
 natural religion : 
 
 " Fear no more the heat of the Sun, 
 
 Nor the furious winter's rages, 
 Thou thine earthly task hast done, 
 Home art gone and ta'en thy wages." 
 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold, the prophet of 
 change and reform, sought the final con- 
 solation in the permanence of nature : 
 
 " But let me be, 
 
 While all around in silence lies, 
 Moved to the window near, and see 
 Once more before my dying eyes, 
 
 " Bathed in the sacred dews of morn, 
 The wide aerial landscape spread, 
 The world which was ere I was born, 
 The world which lasts when I am dead." 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 65 
 
 The words of Scripture occur to us in 
 this connection, of which a beautiful in- 
 stance is the QOth Psalm, the prayer of 
 Moses, the man of God, where the trust in 
 God's immutability is the deepest current 
 of the soul : 
 
 " Before the hills in order stood, 
 Or earth received her frame, 
 From everlasting thou art God, 
 To endless years the same." 
 
 From the influence of this deep instinct 
 in our nature, which in the midst of change 
 calls for that which is permanent, few can 
 claim to be exempt. The reactionary 
 ecclesiastic, declaring that variation is the 
 badge of error, while sameness is the mark 
 of the truth, is not so far away, as to the 
 principle at issue, from a religious agitator 
 like Theodore Parker, who began his ca- 
 reer as a reformer with his sermon on the 
 "Transient and the Permanent in Reli- 
 gion." That which is old, that which 
 powerfully affected our early years, may at 
 any moment reassert its control, until 
 
66 Religious Progress. 
 
 under its dissolving charm the accretions 
 of our middle age, the nice distinctions of 
 controversy, the differences which were 
 magnified till they assumed a vital impor- 
 tance, these all fade away into insignifi- 
 cance or nothingness. The late French 
 historian, M. Renan, who renounced Chris- 
 tianity for the scientific interpretation of 
 life, seems to have had this distrust of 
 himself. When he reached the age of sixty 
 he proposed to stereotype his thought, put- 
 \ ting on record those opinions formed and 
 held in his best moments, before disease 
 or age had weakened his powers. 
 
 According to the theory of progress to 
 which I first alluded, it is the differences, 
 the distinctions which are important, and 
 to these even what claims to be permanent 
 must, if necessary, be sacrificed. But here 
 the differences and distinctions are of no 
 avail ; it is the old, the common, the 
 unchangeable, which is to be desired, 
 wherein lies also the basis of certitude. 
 In opposition to those who assert the value 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 67 
 
 of theological distinctions, or who would 
 justify religious differences, finding in 
 these very differences some essential ut- 
 terance of the divine revelation, the posi- 
 tion is assumed that all religious systems 
 are true where they agree, all alike untrue 
 or doubtful where they differ. " Somehow 
 it has come to be taken for granted," said 
 the late Mr. Maurice, " among scholars as 
 well as in the popular literature of the day, 
 that the various theological characteristics 
 of the religions of the world must yield and 
 disappear ; that when they are gone there 
 will survive something of a very general 
 character, some great ideas of what is good 
 and beautiful, some excellent maxims of I 
 life, which may very well assimilate, if they 
 be not actually the same, with the essential 
 principles contained in all other religions, 
 and which will also, it is hoped, abide for- 
 
68 Religious Progress. 
 
 VI. 
 
 It has been my endeavor to present 
 these divergent and contradictory theories 
 of religious progress in an impartial man- 
 ner, and as fairly as if I were an advocate 
 of each ; while, at the same time, I have 
 stated the objections to each one of them, 
 the perversion into which each may de- 
 generate, as any sincere opponent might 
 do. But I have not found it possible to 
 make myself an advocate of any one of 
 them to the exclusion or condemnation of 
 the others. To my mind they appear as 
 alike legitimate, as having been justified 
 by the experience of history, while, also, 
 they have ministered to evil results when 
 pushed too far, or when any one of them 
 has been enforced to the rejection of the 
 others. If the effect of my statement is 
 to produce a hopeless sense of complexity 
 and confusion, so that life or progress 
 seems like a process in which no law of 
 unity could prevail, does not real life or 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 69 
 
 progress, as we actually know it in the 
 world around us, produce the same im- 
 pression ? Not only do we everywhere 
 perceive these varying motives in opera- 
 tion, but they have subtle ways of com- 
 bining, of modifying each other, of shading 
 off into each other, till it is hard to dis- 
 tinguish them, and men may even pass 
 from the influence of one motive to that 
 of its opposite, as from reaction to con- 
 servatism, without being aware of any vio- 
 lent wrench in their experience. Indeed, 
 when we come to analyze our own con- 
 sciousness, or to define the methods by 
 which our own development has been at- 
 tained, are we not baffled by the lack of 
 consistency which is revealed, the contra- 
 dictions which we are unable to harmonize ? 
 It is because these conflicting motives 
 may all unite in the experience of one 
 individual that we know they stand some- 
 how related to unity, as if necessary ele- 
 ments in one organic process. We grow 
 by means of these antagonisms within us, 
 
70 Religious Progress. 
 
 so that a life in subordination to one of 
 these motives alone becomes shallow, or 
 one-sided and incomplete. A man who 
 has not detected within himself the pre- 
 sence of these contradictory forces has 
 missed the larger interpretation of life, 
 and can neither understand himself nor 
 the world around him. While we are 
 aiming at consistency, as if it were an 
 intellectual or moral ideal, we may only 
 be reducing our personality to a smaller 
 stature. On the one hand, a man may 
 feel that he must always abide by the 
 violent reactions of his youth against the 
 teaching of his fathers ; and if he succeeds 
 in maintaining this attitude, we speak of 
 him as a man who has not grown, though 
 others may admire him for his consistency. 
 And on the other hand, one may react 
 against the teaching of his childhood ; but 
 when years have passed away be able to 
 recognize in it a new meaning and a deeper 
 value, reconciling without difficulty the 
 new truth which he has reached with the 
 
The Experience of the Individual. 71 
 
 old truth which he once thought he had 
 abandoned forever. Thenceforth, he may 
 have learned that there is a higher mode 
 of human development, and strive always 
 to hold the old and the new in vital or- 
 ganic relationship. 
 
 In this first lecture I have been dealing 
 with my subject mainly from the point of 
 view of the individual man. The motives 
 which I have traced first began to operate 
 powerfully in the age of the Reformation, 
 when what we call individualism first ap- 
 peared as one of the forces of history. The 
 period of the Middle Ages knew little or 
 nothing of the inward personal conflict 
 which marks the modern world, nor did it 
 have that exuberant variety of religious 
 faiths which has since grown up. Author- 
 ity, or the sense of solidarity, kept the indi- 
 vidual in subjection, making impossible 
 the full expression of the content of the 
 human soul. It is a common complaint 
 to-day, that individualism has gone too far, 
 to the neglect of the opposite factor, the 
 
72 Religious Progress. 
 
 truth which is held by th^ whole family of 
 humanity, in solidarity. In my second 
 lecture I propose to treat of religious prog- 
 ress as manifested in the larger organic 
 body which we call the Church, whose life 
 may be more unconscious, not subject to 
 the possibility of self-direction as is the 
 individual, a life which goes deeper than 
 theories and has the power of reconciling 
 the conflicts of the schools. 
 
II. 
 
 Religious Progress in the Organic Life of the 
 Church. 
 
 ENTLEMEN : In my first lecture, 
 I dwelt upon three forces or ten- 
 dencies which are closely related 
 to religious progress. We may discern 
 their agency in those periods of the 
 Church's history when great adjustments 
 are in process whose end is the enlarge- 
 ment of the life of humanity. We see 
 them clearly in the ancient Church, when 
 Christianity was adjusting itself to Jewish 
 religion on the one hand, or to the civiliza- 
 tion of the Graeco-Roman world on the 
 other. Again in the Protestant Reforma- 
 tion some of the Reformers were bent on 
 discarding every trace or relic of the age 
 that was going out, rebuilding the ecclesi- 
 astical fabric from the foundation with new 
 material ; others would have compromised 
 
74 Religious Progress. 
 
 between the old and the new, retaining as 
 much as possible of the old form, but ani- 
 mating it with a new spirit ; but the Church 
 of Rome could find no other principle of 
 guidance than to reject everything which 
 the Reformers demanded simply because 
 they wanted it, surrounding the tenets of 
 the Middle Ages with a brazen wall, so 
 that henceforth it would be impossible to 
 touch the doctrines of the Church with 
 the destructive hand of change. And 
 once more, these same motives have ap- 
 peared as vital forces in our own age, 
 which is one of restless movement caused 
 by many and diverse influences, the final 
 outcome of which we are as yet unable to 
 determine. 
 
 Let me recapitulate these various ten- 
 dencies once more. There are those who 
 maintain that a retrograde evil tendency 
 inheres in all human effort, in human 
 thought and speculation, which obscures 
 or makes void the truth ; that in order to 
 hold firmly to the divine revelation we are 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 75 
 
 continually called to remove these accre- 
 tions and complications of human perver- 
 sity. Truth is simple and error is com- 
 plex ; truth is always and everywhere the 
 same, while error stands condemned by its 
 variations ; truth must always be sought 
 in the past rather than the present age, 
 and that which is new cannot be true. On 
 the other hand stands the reformer with 
 his new truth, which, as he claims, is in 
 antagonism to the old belief, and necessa- 
 rily involves the destruction of the old in- 
 stitution ; the aim of progress is to get 
 rid of the old as the obstacle which pre- 
 vents the regeneration of the world, as if 
 in order to the reception of Him who de- 
 clares, "Behold, I make all things new." 
 And then there are those who would medi- 
 ate between these contradictions, who feel 
 competent to throw light on the situation 
 or give direction for the course to be fol- 
 lowed. The past is not wholly wrong, nor 
 is the new complete in itself. There is a 
 gradual advance from the old to the new. 
 
7<5 Religious Progress. 
 
 Let revolution at all hazards be avoided as 
 destructive of true progress. Culture will 
 bring about the desired end ; the process 
 of education is slow but sure, and will re- 
 move the evil. The law of progress is 
 here conceived as a regular and even ad- 
 vance, a movement forward, always for- 
 ward and upward, just as the law of 
 growth in the sphere of organic life in the 
 external world. If it is not so, or has not 
 been so in the world of human affairs, it 
 ought to be so ; the business of the thinker, 
 or of him who would be the leader, is to 
 make human progress conform to its di- 
 vine law. 
 
 But now we all feel, I think, that no one 
 of these attitudes, nor all of them taken 
 together, quite describe the actual situa- 
 tion as we know it. In the light of his- 
 tory, or of our own experience, there is 
 something wanting to them, there are po- 
 tencies at work of which these theories 
 contain no hint. In the processes of ac- 
 tual life, there is some larger utterance of 
 
The Organic Life of the Cburch. 77 
 
 the voice of the Spirit in man which does 
 not greatly care for speculation, but asks 
 chiefly for the super-essential bread upon 
 which the soul may feed ; there is a rec- 
 onciling power in life which builds the 
 institution under which we live, without 
 regard to intellectual consistency, and to 
 this end makes compromises or bridges 
 the abysses and contradictions of human 
 philosophies. In the light of this great 
 reality of human life as it is in this world, 
 the theories which I have described, when 
 rigidly held, assume a doctrinaire aspect, 
 as if properties of the schools, but not 
 the supreme motive of an organic spir- 
 itual order. They enter, indeed, into the 
 process of life, but not as theories to be 
 consistently maintained, rather as if al- 
 lowed to contribute their quota, as they 
 are able, to the great result. 
 
j8 Religious Progress. 
 
 i. 
 
 Let me ask you to go back for a mo- 
 ment to the ancient Catholic Church for 
 an illustration of what I may call the 
 larger way of the spirit of life as con- 
 trasted with individual motives of self- 
 development, or theories about what the 
 need of the world requires. There is a dis- 
 tinct advantage in reverting to this distant 
 time, for there the picture is complete, 
 and we can also view it dispassionately, 
 unmoved by the sympathies or the preju- 
 dices of the present hour. By the Catholic 
 Church, I mean the Church of the early 
 centuries which called itself catholic, as 
 in the creeds. It was not the same as 
 the Apostolic Church, or that of the gen- 
 erations which immediately followed, but 
 it succeeded that Church, and, as it were, 
 - i; splaced it. It is not the same as the 
 Roman Church, for that did not appear 
 equipped for its peculiar work until much 
 later, until the Catholic Church had ful- 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 79 
 
 filled its task and passed over into other 
 forms. Nor do I appeal to the Catholic 
 Church, as an ideal for our own age. It 
 long ago disappeared, superseded by other 
 phases of Christianity. But in its own 
 day it accomplished a great mission, and ^ 
 many of its solutions of religious problems 
 we still retain as a valuable part of our 
 spiritual heritage. 
 
 In this ancient Church was solved the 
 conflict between Peter and Paul, between 
 the apostle to the Jews and the apostle to 
 the Gentiles. No doubt the contradiction 
 or antagonism between them has been 
 greatly exaggerated, as by the Tubingen 
 school ; but all will admit that the antago- 
 nism did exist to a certain extent, that the 
 original twelve apostles showed no incli- 
 nation to break with Judaism, but rather 
 regarded Christianity as if its continuation 
 or completion. They still continued to 
 worship in the temple, maintaining ami- 
 cable relations with the Jewish Church in 
 Jerusalem. St. Paul, on the other hand, 
 
8o Religious Progress. 
 
 in his earlier years, at least, broke vio- 
 lently and completely with Judaism, affirm- 
 ing that it had been superseded by the 
 faith in Christ, teaching as in the Epistle 
 to the Galatians, that any one who would 
 possess the spirit of Christ must be eman- 
 cipated from obedience to the ceremonial 
 law, the beggarly elements, as he called 
 them, of bondage to Jewish formalism. 
 
 The issue raised by St. Paul was taken 
 up by the schools of the second century, 
 in the great speculative inquiry, how Ju- 
 daism was related to the Christian Church. 
 Three different answers were given to the 
 question. In the first place, it was main- 
 tained by Marcion, one of the most in- 
 fluential men of his time, that Christianity 
 and Judaism had nothing whatever in com- 
 mon. Christianity was something new, un- 
 known before, with no preparation for its 
 advent, an abrupt revelation, as it were, 
 from the heavens. So vast was the differ- 
 ence between the two religions, so vital 
 the distinction between Gospel and Law, 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 81 
 
 between mercy and justice, that they could 
 not have had a common author. If the 
 one came from a good deity, the other 
 must have come from an imperfect, if not 
 an evil deity. So far did Marcion carry 
 his repugnance to Judaism, that he re- 
 jected the Old Testament, and in form- 
 ing a Canon of the New Testament, he 
 retained only the Epistles of St. Paul, 
 together with the Gospel according to St. 
 Luke, as written by one of Paul's disciples. 
 Nor was Marcion alone in this estimate 
 of Jewish scriptures and ceremonial. The 
 unknown author of the important Epistle 
 to Diognetus held a similar view, as also 
 the author of the Epistle of Barnabas, 
 both of which treatises were highly es- 
 teemed and are included among the writ- 
 ings known as the " Apostolic Fathers." 
 If this judgment about Judaism had pre- 
 vailed, the two religions would have been 
 severed and the Old Testament have been 
 lost to the Christian Church. 
 
 On the other hand were the represen- 
 
82 Religious Progress. 
 
 tatives of what is known as the Pseudo- 
 Clementine school, in whose writings 
 Peter rather than Paul is regarded as the 
 apostle of genuine Christianity, and ac- 
 cording to which there is not only no op- 
 position between Christianity and Judaism 
 but there is no difference between them, 
 the two religions are identical. In the 
 attitude of this school we have an illustra- 
 tion of the conviction that the substance 
 of religious truth does not vary with time, 
 that religion is founded in the immuta- 
 bility of the divine will. If what the de- 
 cree of Jehovah had once ordained were 
 to be rejected, the basis of all religious 
 faith would be removed. The ingenuity 
 of these writings known as the Clemen- 
 tines is displayed in a fantastic way in 
 working over the contents of the two re- 
 ligions, eliminating from them that which 
 is distinctive of each, until the desired 
 identity can be established in the common 
 residuum which is left, the one true re- 
 ligion which was from the beginning. Be- 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 83 
 
 tween this school and that of Marcion 
 there was bitter antagonism, which it did 
 not seem possible to overcome. 
 
 There was a third attitude for whose 
 representative we may take Basil eides, one 
 of the Gnostic philosophers, who aimed to 
 look deeply into the religious wants of his 
 age. In his spirit he was almost a modern, 
 for he had caught the idea of uniform law 
 pervading all ranks and stages of the crea- 
 tion. All things, according to his philoso- 
 phy, were developing from beneath up- 
 ward, in one vast ascending movement. 
 Christianity, as he believed, was the abso- 
 lute or perfect religion, but the religions 
 which had preceded it were not in oppo- 
 sition to it as the false to the true, but 
 rather imperfect revelations, serving the 
 purpose of an earlier stage of development 
 and preparing the way for the highest 
 truth. His idea was a true one, but his 
 application of it was unfortunate, a sort 
 of speculative exposition of religious his- 
 tory to meet the exigencies of his theory. 
 
84 Religious Progress. 
 
 According to his system, a deity who was 
 ignorant and of low degree had reigned 
 over the world from the time of Adam 
 until Moses ; then had appeared a higher 
 deity who proclaimed the Mosaic Law ; and 
 at last the highest God had spoken in the 
 revelation brought by Christ. 
 
 Each of these three attitudes contained 
 a truth ; but each was inadequate, and all 
 alike were rejected by the Catholic Church, 
 which was also exercised by the same prob- 
 lem, and determined it by the power of a 
 living faith. Peter and Paul were there rec- 
 ognized as having a common authority and 
 as joint founders of the Church. In this 
 reconciliation, or compromise as it is called, 
 no effort was made to harmonize Law and 
 Gospel, but both were sanctioned as mak- 
 ing up the new faith, and the recognition 
 of a difference between them gradually 
 faded away. What the true relation was 
 between Judaism and Christianity, or the 
 relative authority of Jewish and Christian 
 scriptures, the Church did not determine 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 85 
 
 then, nor has it been determined to this 
 day. But in the retention of the Old Tes- 
 tament by the Catholic Church we may see 
 the working of the principle that Christi- 
 anity is old, going back, as the Pseudo- 
 Clementines held, to the Patriarchs, even 
 to Adam ; there is the recognition of the 
 permanent, unchanging truth which was 
 from the beginning. 
 
 If, however, the Church, by accepting 
 the Old Testament as having the authority 
 of Scripture, seemed to commit itself to 
 the position that the divine will is unalter- 
 able, that what God has once decreed for- 
 ever remains binding on the conscience, yet 
 also it did justice to the principle for which 
 Marcion contended, -- that Christianity 
 brought to the world a change, something 
 that was new. It regarded the Jewish 
 scriptures, indeed, as containing a divine 
 revelation ; but, then, what innovations it 
 approved, what contradiction of the teach- 
 ing of those scriptures, till their authority 
 might almost seem to be set at naught! 
 
86 Religious Progress. 
 
 One of the mightiest innovations which 
 was sanctioned a revolution it might be 
 called was in changing the name of 
 Deity, by which also was expressed, better 
 than Marcion had done, the wide difference 
 between the old religion and the new. In 
 the Old Testament Jehovah had been the 
 name by which God had declared his will 
 to be known ; in the new dispensation the 
 name of God is the Father, the Son, and 
 the Holy Ghost. And another change 
 wrought by the Catholic Church under the 
 consciousness of a divine warrant, as if God 
 were again speaking from the heavens, 
 was the abolition of the Jewish Sabbath 
 and the substitution for it of the Christian 
 Sunday. Whatever appropriations from 
 Jewish ceremonial the Church may have 
 afterwards adopted, as in her sacerdotal 
 institutions, there was henceforth no dan- 
 ger that the Church would revert to Juda- 
 ism, or that the gulf which separated the 
 religions would be overcome. 
 
 But in the vast sweep of the living forces 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 87 
 
 of the time, we can also discern another 
 motive, the Church acted upon the prin- 
 ciple that the old prepares the way for the 
 new. Tertullian almost anticipated that 
 theory of progress by which the lower gives 
 birth to the higher in accordance with some 
 uniform order or law. The age of the 
 Father prepares the way for the dispensa- 
 tion of the Son, and this in turn yields to 
 the age of the Holy Spirit, childhood, 
 youth, and manhood, that, said Tertullian, 
 is the philosophy of the world's spiritual 
 history. Hence, in accordance with this 
 principle, he and others of his time be- 
 gan to search in the Old Testament for 
 traces of the preparation for the advent of 
 Christ. There is nothing more impressive 
 and beautiful in the history of religious 
 thought than the way in which the early 
 Catholic Church proceeded to make the 
 conquest of another religion, appropriat- 
 ing its sacred books and yet maintaining 
 itself in its distinction and superiority as [ 
 the conqueror over the conquered. It fairly 
 
88 Religious Progress. 
 
 honeycombed the Jewish scriptures with 
 the Christian interpretation. The Jehovah 
 of the Old Testament was resolved into 
 the Christ of the new age, so that Christ 
 appeared as speaking there on every page, 
 in every chapter, and every leading event ; 
 every prominent personage, every devout 
 experience or aspiration, as in the Psalter, 
 or every utterance of hope, as in the pro- 
 phets, became a type, a forerunner, a pro- 
 phecy of Christ. 
 
 We may be sometimes tempted, in the 
 light of modern Biblical criticism, to smile 
 contemptuously at the headings of the 
 chapters, as in the old English Bibles, 
 which see Christ in the Canticles, where it 
 was never meant that He should be, or in 
 so many other places where the allegorical 
 interpretation misses the historic fact. 
 The " higher criticism " is right in main- 
 taining how indispensable it is that we 
 should trace clearly the human element, 
 the actual historical circumstance, and not 
 lose it by merging it in some unreal or 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 89 
 
 fanciful recognition of the divine. But 
 the higher criticism can never destroy that 
 power of faith, which sees life as an or- 
 ganic whole, where that which has been 
 and that which is point away from them- 
 selves to some mystic meaning in events, 
 which we cannot understand or measure 
 at the moment, suggestions that we are 
 always moving about in worlds not real- 
 ized. 
 
 ii. 
 
 The method by which the Catholic 
 Church of the early centuries dealt with 
 the antagonisms in its bosom, while it may 
 not furnish a law of religious progress, 
 does yet point to a principle always to be 
 discerned in operation, wherever we may 
 turn in the religious world. That princi- 
 ple is the acceptance of contradictions 
 whether they can be intellectually recon- 
 ciled or not ; the tacit approval of both 
 sides in a controversy, rather than the 
 enforcement of some via media between 
 them ; as though truth did not lie, as has 
 
90 Religious Progress. 
 
 been fondly supposed, midway between 
 two extremes, but was rather constituted 
 by the union of opposite propositions as 
 together combining in a living whole. The 
 doctrine of the via media has never been 
 a working principle in theology. Just as 
 any one may recall in his own experience 
 what it is to have a leading or primary 
 sympathy with one side of a controversy, 
 and at the same time a certain subordinate 
 sympathy with the other, so in the larger 
 collective life of the Church, the final re- 
 sult of a long controversy has been the 
 sanction practically extended to both par- 
 ties, neither of which, compete afterwards 
 as they may, can ever attain exclusive 
 supremacy. As regards the doctrine of 
 the Person of Christ, so long and angrily 
 discussed in the ancient Church, the final 
 verdict of the Christian consciousness 
 maintains the apparently contradictory 
 conclusion that He is one and the same 
 with the Father, while yet distinct from 
 and different from the Father ; or in regard 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 91 
 
 to the operation of divine grace in human 
 salvation, debated so bitterly between 
 Augustine and Pelagius, the Church has 
 practically settled down in the conviction, 
 that the work is of God and also of man. 
 No via media, however subtly constructed 
 or nicely balanced, possesses such living 
 power of reconciliation and harmony as 
 this union of conflicting and opposite 
 truths. 
 
 It is a lesson which we are slow to learn, 
 that opposites are closely, even vitally 
 related ; that hostile attitudes which seem 
 irreconcilable may both be true. Our own 
 experience or the experience of history 
 may reveal to us the ease, the naturalness 
 of the transition from one extreme to 
 another. It would almost seem as if, in 
 the sphere of religion, each attitude was 
 seeking its opposite in order to supplement 
 its own deficiency. The Roman Catholic 
 Church, which dreads secularism as its 
 greatest foe, is nearer to it in its own 
 essential principle than it imagines, as if 
 
p2 Religious Progress. 
 
 one of its functions was to prepare its 
 members for graduation into the larger 
 world. The late Blanco White is an illus- 
 tration of the process by which a gifted 
 spirit, having exhausted all that Rome can 
 give, seeks to complete its life by traveling 
 till it can go no further in the opposite 
 direction. He experimented at first with 
 Newman's via media of Anglicanism, then 
 he tasted the cool rationalism of Whately, 
 then moved on to Unitarianism, which he 
 finally left for what seemed like a barren 
 and dreary waste, the open world in its 
 separation from the Church, where a man 
 must make a religion, if he is to have one 
 at all, out of devotion to purely secular 
 interests. On the other hand, the late 
 Dr. Brownson traveled in the opposite 
 direction from a world disorganized as it 
 seemed to him, from the transcendentalism 
 which divinizes an imperfect humanity, 
 till he finally reached an ultramontanism 
 so extreme and destructive as to go beyond 
 the Vatican or the leaders of the Society 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 93 
 
 of Jesus. It is a striking circumstance 
 which has often been noted, that while 
 John Henry Newman went to Rome, his 
 brother Francis, whose mind was of a simi- 
 lar type, passed over to what is called infi- 
 delity, to what, however, was as sacred to 
 him as ecclesiasticism was to his brother. 
 The saintly George Herbert of Bemerton, 
 who idealized every accident, as it were, 
 in the faith and worship of the Church of 
 England, had his counterpart in his brother 
 Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who became a 
 pioneer of natural religion or the deism of 
 the eighteenth century. The connection 
 is so close between these apparently hos- 
 tile attitudes that it is sometimes hard to 
 detect the difference in principle which 
 separates them. To secularize the divine 
 is the policy of Rome ; to divinize the secu- j 
 lar is the motive of its most extreme antag- 
 onist. But if one is true, so also is the 
 other. The reconciliation lies in adopting 
 both ; then they modify each other, with 
 the result of a larger, completer truth. 
 
94 Religious Progress. 
 
 Among the Protestant churches the 
 same tendency is apparent. There is con- 
 stant moving to and fro, and in search of 
 some attitude which is in flat contradiction 
 to the principle of the denomination which 
 is abandoned. Mr. Gladstone has lately 
 made an effort to show that most of those 
 who deserted the Church of England for 
 the Roman communion, at the time of 
 the Tractarian controversy, such as New- 
 man and Manning, Wilberforce and Faber, 
 came originally of Low Church or evan- 
 gelical antecedents, exchanging the famil- 
 iar formula of " no priest, no sacrifice, no 
 altar," for the blindest devotion to priest- 
 hood and hierarchy. Congregationalists 
 \ or Presbyterians when they enter the Epis- 
 copal Church are apt to become the most 
 ' uncompromising High Churchmen. The 
 descendant of the Quaker makes the most 
 | devoted of Ritualists. The Methodist who 
 abandons his fold, who previously had found 
 his chief social excitement or happiness in 
 the Church, looks with a more kindly eye 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 95 
 
 on the amusements of society which he had 
 been taught to denounce as evil. The dif- 
 ference is not so great between the Univer- 
 salist who denies the existence of a place 
 of endless punishment and his opponent 
 who affirms such a belief as if almost es- 
 sential to salvation. For so easy is it to 
 change one's belief on this subject, that 
 the affirmation or the denial may stand for 
 methods of religious training, so that if a 
 man cannot serve God and obey his law 
 under the incentive of love, he turns back 
 to the incentive of fear. No one who has 
 experienced the process of conversion, by 
 which a revolution is wrought in the soul 
 from sin to holiness, from the love of self 
 to the love of God, can ever fail to be pro- 
 foundly grateful ; and yet happy also is he 
 who has never known the necessity of con- 
 version, but . has grown under Christian 
 nurture into the divine love, and who can- 
 not point to the time when he did not feel 
 as if he were the child of God. 
 
 In some of the controversies which have 
 
9$ Religious Progress. 
 
 convulsed and divided the religious world 
 time may be needed, and the long lapses of 
 time, before the issue is clear. Then it 
 may be revealed that there was an element 
 of truth in the cause which was defeated, 
 which for ages had lain under the ban of 
 condemnation. The heretic Nestorius 
 was deposed and excommunicated because 
 he denounced the favorite designation of 
 Mary as the " Mother of God " (0eoTo/cos). 
 When a thousand years had passed away 
 and the theologians of the Reformation 
 came to their task, they unanimously re- 
 jected the word from their confessions of 
 faith ; the Church of England, also, omitted 
 the word in her Articles of Religion, and 
 it was dropped silently and without a pro- 
 test from her liturgy and other ritual 
 offices, where formerly it had been of fre- 
 quent occurrence. What is known as 
 Nestorianism separated the human from 
 the divine, in order to the preservation 
 of the human, lest it should be absorbed 
 and lost in the divine ; overlooking the 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 97 - 
 
 truth in the attitude of Cyril, who saw 
 the divine and the human in such close 
 conjunction that they seemed to him to 
 be but one. If we lose the human by 
 merging it in the divine, as is the ten- 
 dency of ecclesiasticism, we are forced to 
 seek it again by separating and distinguish- 
 ing between them. Such may be called 
 the purpose of the higher criticism in 
 our own day, which vindicates the place 
 and importance of the human element in 
 Scripture ; the same essential issue about < 
 which Cyril and Nestorius were contend- 
 ing in the fifth century. This is the con- ( 
 troversy of the Christian ages from which 
 it seems as if we never should escape. In 
 the early Church it turned upon the person 
 of Christ, in the Middle Ages upon the 
 Eucharist, in the Protestant world upon *- 
 the Bible. If we cannot escape the contro- 
 versy, at least we can escape the shameful 
 method by which it was pursued in ancient 
 times, by recognizing, with the fathers of 
 the great council of Chalcedon, that the 
 
9$ Religious Progress. 
 
 attitudes which the controversy generates 
 are vitally related to each other; that it 
 only needs to bring them together, contra- 
 dictory as they may seem, in order to the 
 completed truth, Christ is both human 
 and divine ; the Eucharist remains com- 
 posed of bread and wine, and is yet ver- 
 itably the body and the blood of Christ ; 
 the Bible is literature like any other book, 
 and yet it is also the word of God. These 
 things are not to be confused or mixed or 
 confounded, but also are not to be sepa- 
 rated or divided. 
 
 Every religious movement has its nega- 
 tive side, consisting in opposition to ten- 
 ets which seem to contradict its own, and 
 by resistance to which it gains impetus 
 and momentum for its career. But when 
 the new movement has run its race, only 
 the positive truth which it has advocated 
 remains, and this in some mysterious way 
 coalesces with its contradiction. 
 
 Most of the mischief of religious con- 
 troversy springs from the desire and de- 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 99 
 
 termination to impute to one's opponent 
 positions which he does not hold, or to 
 draw inferences from his principles, insist- 
 ing that he shall be held responsible for 
 them, even though he declares that he 
 does not teach them. We say that he 
 ought to accept them ; that he is bound 
 logically to do so ; that they are necessary 
 deductions from his system ; that the ten- 
 dency of his teaching is in these directions ; 
 and then we denounce and condemn him 
 for that which he disowns. It was in this 
 way that Augustine rilled out for Pelagius 
 the gaps in his scheme which he thought 
 necessary to do, in order to make Pelagius's 
 teaching consistent and complete ; and 
 Pelagius, in his turn, drew inferences from 
 the Augustinian theology about which Au- 
 gustine would have preferred to maintain 
 a discreet silence. Neither Augustine nor 
 Calvin was anxious to make prominent 
 the doctrine of the reprobation of wicked 
 to damnation, but preferred to dwell on 
 the more attractive, more rational tenet of 
 
UNIVERSITY OF REDIANDS UBRARi 
 
 100 Religious Progress. 
 
 the elect to salvation, as subjects of the 
 divine choice and approbation ; substituting 
 for the obnoxious word reprobation, the 
 milder, euphemistic term preterition. It 
 was their opponents who were bent on 
 forcing them out of their reserve, push- 
 ing them into what seemed the consistent 
 sequence of their attitude, and then hold- 
 ing it up before the world for execration. 
 And the same remark would apply to al- 
 most every theological contention which 
 has embittered the Church's experience. 
 
 It seemed strange and inexplicable to 
 Macaulay that a man of such rare intelli- 
 gence as Sir Thomas More should have 
 gone back to the doctrine of transubstan- 
 tiation, which the wisdom of his age was 
 almost unanimous in rejecting. But it 
 must also be remembered that Sir Thomas 
 More had gone further than his contempo- 
 raries, in presenting, in his " Utopia," the 
 baldest deism as the ideal religion in a 
 perfectly organized community, according 
 to which men worshiped as they pleased, 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 101 
 
 or did not worship ; where a complicated 
 religious system was unknown ; where no 
 external authority interfered with indi- 
 vidual freedom. But he became alarmed 
 when he witnessed the excesses of the 
 Reformation, whose destructive tendency 
 seemed to threaten the safeguards of re- 
 ligion and morality. He reacted as we 
 say ; he went back and took up again the 
 old authority which he had been on the 
 point of discarding, accepting all which 
 it enjoined ; whether any particular tenet 
 agreed with his reason was a matter of 
 no importance. 
 
 We reach here a point of view from 
 which Macaulay's stricture, to which I 
 alluded in my first lecture, loses its force. 
 There is nothing incompatible in such a 
 circumstance with a true conception of 
 religious progress. Macaulay thought of 
 progress as following the same law in the 
 spiritual world as in the natural world, an 
 even and regular advance, knowing no re- 
 actions, discarding the old with every for- 
 
702 Religious Progress. 
 
 ward step. He did not recognize that 
 contradictions might be related to prog- 
 ress ; that opposite attitudes might each 
 hold something of essential truth which 
 the other lacked. But his inference is a 
 plausible one, and its wide prevalence 
 as a popular judgment may teach us that 
 there is yet something to be done in 
 the argument with Rome before we can 
 come to a common understanding. The 
 late Frederick Robertson, the inimitable 
 preacher, but also a profound thinker, 
 was convinced that the true method in 
 religious controversy, and especially with 
 Rome, was to seek for reconciliation, not 
 in via media, as Newman fondly thought, 
 but in the exploiting of contradictions, in 
 order to the truth contained in them, 
 rather than the error. He illustrated his 
 method in a remarkable sermon on the 
 Glory of the Virgin Mother. In a sug- 
 gestive paragraph he also pointed out 
 other instances, among them, the famous 
 doctrine of transubstantiation, where the 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 103 
 
 application of the same mode of treatment 
 might show that this tenacious dogma of 
 the Middle Ages, which no negative argu- 
 ment has been able to overthrow, was not 
 incompatible with the theory of Zwingle, 
 which makes the Sacrament a memorial 
 of the body and the blood of Christ. The 
 error in this ancient doctrine is not that 
 a miracle has been wrought to the eye of 
 faith, by which the common sustenance of 
 physical life has been transmuted into the 
 bread of immortality, but that the priest 
 has the power of working the miracle by 
 an incantation. Rather was the transmu- 
 tation accomplished once for all by the life 
 of the incarnate Word, a great act which 
 sufficed so that it need not as well as can- 
 not be repeated; an act which the faith 
 of the worshiper discerns anew in every 
 sacrament, while the office of the ritual is 
 to call attention, as by a memorial, to the 
 original Word by whom the transformation 
 was once wrought and forever. 
 
 It is because men hold some inadequate 
 
Religious Progress. 
 
 theory of progress, or do not discern the 
 various and conflicting elements, which 
 are the conditions of true progress, that 
 we so often hear the charge of dishonesty 
 alleged against those who combine the 
 new truth with the old faith. For they 
 combine them as though it were a simple 
 duty ; the most natural, the most admirable 
 thing to do. They are amazed when some 
 radical reformer, of the type of Marcion 
 in the ancient Church, or some ecclesias- 
 tical reactionary confronts them with the 
 contradiction of which they are guilty, or 
 insinuates their intellectual insincerity, 
 calling upon them in the name of com- 
 mon honesty, either to renounce the old 
 creed, or else abandon the new truth. 1 
 There are many to whom such advice is 
 congenial as the only method by which 
 
 1 " If we wish," says Rothe, " to pray in unison with 
 our Christian forefathers, we must use the same words 
 that they did ; for they cannot understand our peculiar 
 mode of speech, while we are very well able to under- 
 stand theirs." The remark might be easily extended in 
 its application to cover the use of the ancient creeds. 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 105 
 
 they can grasp or retain the new discovery. 
 But such has not been the method of the 
 Church at large in the long range of its 
 history ; it has not been the process of 
 actual life, dealing with realities at the 
 heart of things and setting lightly by theo- 
 ries which control the schools. 
 
 I do not know of any better illustration 
 than the case of St. Augustine, whose 
 teaching was certainly new, a daring inno- 
 vation, but which the Church in the West 
 pronounced to be old, as if held from the 
 beginning. You remember that Vincen- 
 tius of Lerins sought to rid the Church of 
 Augustine's obnoxious teaching regarding 
 original sin and predestination by coining 
 that wonderful motto, which attracts us 
 while it also repels, the test, as he called 
 it, of catholic truth, " that which has 
 always and everywhere and by all been 1 
 received ; " or in the familiar Latin, Quod 
 semper, ubique et ab omnibus, creditum sit. 
 In the second part of his treatise he 
 showed that, judged by this test, Augus- 
 
106 Religious Progress. 
 
 tine's teaching lacked the seal of truth. 
 The Church accepted the test which Vin- 
 centius laid down, it was so exquisitely 
 put that she could not forget it, but she 
 approved of Augustine also, and gave to 
 him an equal place with his elders. All 
 this was done, to be sure, in a most uncrit- 
 ical age; but in such moments instincts 
 may have sway whose expression is in har- 
 mony with the deepest endowment of our 
 humanity. 
 
 Judged by the criticism of the under- 
 standing, the motto of Vincentius is only 
 an instance of vicious reasoning in a circle, 
 as Sir George Cornwall Lewis has shown 
 in his work on " Authority in Matters of 
 Opinion." The motto asserts, as he re- 
 marks, "that a certain doctrine is true 
 because it was held at all times and in all 
 places and by all. But when it is found 
 that it was not held by a certain sect at a 
 certain time and place, it is answered that 
 they are not to be considered because they 
 are not a part of the Catholic Church ; 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 707 
 
 but when it is inquired why they are not 
 a part of the true Church, the answer is 
 because they do not hold the doctrine in 
 question." The criticism is certainly a 
 just one, to be commended to partisans 
 of the authority of the past who think to 
 stay the wheels of progress by throwing 
 this canon which consecrates immobility 
 athwart its path. But when the Quod 
 semper may be so interpreted as to admit 
 of change and innovation, we have an in- 
 stance of the power of life to reconcile 
 the insuperable antagonism. 
 
 Herein lay the power of the Roman 
 Church in the age of its ascendency. No 
 contradictions, however radical, were then 
 too great for her to solve. She accepted 
 the monastery, with its innate opposition 
 to the historic episcopate ; the conflicting 
 ideals of administration and prophecy, of 
 solidarity and individualism, marriage and 
 celibacy, poverty and wealth, the world 
 and the rejection of the world. But at 
 last there was bred a contradiction to 
 
io8 Religious Progress. 
 
 which she was not equal, justification by 
 faith in conflict with hierarchical institu- 
 tionalism, and then her power collapsed, 
 her dominion was gone. Macaulay was 
 wrong again, misled by the hallucination 
 of a name, when he thought that the great 
 Church, whose long and proud career in- 
 voked his admiration, was still in exist- 
 ence. The papacy had fallen when Luther 
 refused to recant at the Diet of Worms, or 
 when Henry VIII. set free the suppressed 
 force of nationality, and England became 
 a nation. The papacy fell, only the Bishop 
 of Rome remained ; nor will the day come 
 for which he waits and sighs, until he can 
 accept the contradiction between authority 
 and freedom. 
 
 If I may be allowed a reference to the 
 Episcopal Church, with whose inner work- 
 ing I am more familiar, there is a con- 
 tradiction embedded in her formularies, 
 where, in the Ordinal for the Priesthood, 
 the presbyter takes the vow to preach 
 nothing which he is not convinced, or 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 109 
 
 inwardly persuaded, is true ; and, on the 
 other hand, to set forth the doctrine as * 
 this church hath received the same. Pri- 
 vate judgment and church authority here 
 confront each other with an equal sanc- 
 tion. Their reconciliation is found in ways 
 which criticism might distrust. There are 
 those who can understand and follow 
 church authority ; there are those who can 
 appreciate the value of private judgment; 
 they often fail to appreciate each other ; 
 but in the mysterious alembic of life the 
 contradiction tends to disappear ; private 
 judgment makes church authority, the 
 doctrine as this church hath received the j 
 same, rational and intelligible, while church . 
 authority deepens and enlarges the range 
 of private judgment. 
 
 Churches are strong and best fulfill their 
 mission, not in proportion as they maintain 
 a narrow consistency, but rather in so far 
 as they are capable of embracing opposite ( 
 attitudes and contrasted views of truth. 
 Controversy may be bad, but stagnation is 
 
no Religions Progress. 
 
 worse. The Church which we look for in 
 the coming age of Christian unity must 
 I embrace greater contradictions than any 
 church that now exists is willing to re- 
 ceive. Let me enumerate some of them 
 as I close this part of my discussion : 
 the sovereignty of God and the freedom of 
 the will ; total depravity and the divinity 
 of human nature ; the unity of God and the 
 triune distinctions in the Godhead ; gnosti- 
 cism and agnosticism ; the humanity of 
 Christ and his incarnate deity ; the freedom 
 of the Christian man and the authority of 
 the Church ; individualism and solidarity ; 
 reason and faith ; science and theology ; the 
 miracle and the uniformity of law ; culture 
 and piety ; the authority of the Bible as the 
 Word of God, with absolute freedom of Bib- 
 lical criticism ; the gift of administration 
 as in the historic episcopate, but the gift 
 of prophecy as the highest sanction of the 
 ministerial commission ; the apostolic suc- 
 cession, but also the direct and immediate 
 call which knows only the succession of 
 
The Organic Life of the Church, in 
 
 the Holy Spirit, these, and others which 
 it would be tiresome to mention, are antag- 
 onisms whose blending in organic relation- 
 ship by the mysterious power of life or 
 progress will lead us into the fuller truth 
 for which we wait. 
 
 If it seems to any 'that in all this there 
 is no practical rule of guidance for the 
 individual in the formation of religious 
 opinions, or that the result would be disas- 
 trous to any religious sect which sought to 
 maintain so large and open-minded hospi- 
 tality to conflicting aspects of the truth, 
 to these objections, which are not without 
 their force, it may still be replied that 
 there are organic influences in the religious 
 sphere which tell upon us all alike, upon 
 individuals and upon sects ; which may act 
 without our knowledge or even against our 
 will ; which no self -direction, however deter- 
 mined or clear its aim, or ecclesiastical 
 policy, however exclusive, can ever entirely 
 evade. To harmonize the working of such 
 a law with theories of self-culture or the 
 
112 Religious Progress. 
 
 varying ecclesiastical policies may be diffi- 
 cult, if not impossible. But, at least, the 
 lessons of history, the experience of the 
 Church, our own individual experience as 
 well, may teach us, and comfort us by 
 teaching, that opposing aspects of truth do 
 not neutralize or destroy each other. The 
 reformers who speak so confidently about 
 this or that phase of ecclesiastical thought 
 or practice as destined soon to disappear, 
 may be, and probably in most cases are, 
 too sanguine. But, on the other hand, no 
 attitude of religious belief can abide wholly 
 unchanged after the serious challenge of 
 controversy which asserts its opposite. 
 Its modification, but also its fulfillment in 
 some larger scheme of things, is sure. 
 
 in. 
 
 The remaining point to which I wish to 
 ask your attention is this : that all move- 
 ments in the Christian Church or in Chris- 
 tian history, which we call progressive, 
 have had a backward look, as if the new 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 113 
 
 truth for which we hunger came to us by 
 the revelation of the past, so that progress 
 might be almost identified with an ever 
 deeper penetration into the old truth and 
 its richer appropriation. 
 
 If I illustrate this proposition by the 
 teaching of St. Paul, it is not that I am 
 seeking to commit the sacred authority of 
 Scripture to some theorizing of my own ; 
 but, because, if ever a writer had a distinctly 
 conceived philosophy of history, it was the 
 great apostle to the Gentiles. When he 
 was controverting the Jews, as in his Epis- 
 tle to the Galatians, his mind traveled 
 backward to a greater man, and a greater 
 age, than Moses or the giving of the Law, 
 to Abraham, who was the Father of the 
 Faithful, because he lived by faith ; to 
 whom the promise was given before he 
 was circumcised, and to whom, and not to 
 Moses, was the further promise that in 
 him, not one people only but all the na- 
 tions of the earth should be blessed. The 
 universality of the earlier age is here con- 
 
ii4 Religious Progress. 
 
 trasted with the particularism, the narrow 
 exclusivism of the later age. That type of 
 religion known as Judaism, which claimed 
 Moses as its authority and had culminated 
 in ceremonialism, appeared to St. Paul, 
 even at its best, as a passing episode in 
 the religious training of man. It seemed 
 so irrational in the light of faith in Christ, 
 that he almost wonders how God should 
 have tolerated it. The larger universal 
 attitude which Abraham represented must 
 have been superseded by the unspiritual 
 and legal Judaism, in consequence of the 
 hardness of men's hearts. If even so, it 
 had served a purpose in the divine economy 
 as a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ ; 
 yet now that its task was done, there must 
 be a return to the larger faith of Abra- 
 ham, which was at the same time an ad- 
 vance into the liberty, wherewith Christ 
 had made men free. So also, the writer 
 of the Epistle to the Hebrews, following 
 the method of St. Paul, rejects the priest- 
 hood of Aaron, and goes back to a still 
 
The Organic Life of tloe Church. 7/5 
 
 more distant age for the type of a higher, 
 more universal priesthood ; Christ had 
 been made a priest forever after the order 
 of Melchizedek, that mysterious priest- 
 king of a remote past, whose glory it was, 
 that, unlike the Aaronic priesthood, he 
 was without father or mother, his gene- 
 alogy or his succession unknown, who had 
 neither beginning nor end of days, but, like 
 the Son of God, a priest continually. 
 
 In the history of the Church, the desig- 
 nation of the Middle Ages implies a period 
 intervening between a greater past and a 
 greater future ; a waiting period until the 
 past should be restored, and its ruling 
 ideas which had been sacrificed for some 
 immediate purpose should be regained. 
 When we reach the Renaissance, in the 
 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, what 
 we know as progress, what is generally 
 admitted to be progress, began to work 
 so powerfully as to change the face and 
 modify the character of civilization. But 
 the Renaissance, as the name suggests, 
 
/ / 6 Religious Progress . 
 
 was at almost every point a return to an 
 earlier age, before the Middle Ages began. 
 The leaders of the movement had their 
 faces set toward the past, until they 
 brought back a higher world, which was 
 also a lost and buried world until resur- 
 rected from antiquity. Kings and princes 
 made their appeal to the older Roman law, 
 before the Canon law had been framed, 
 in order that by the restoration of its au- 
 thority they might be freed from papal 
 interference, or from the tyranny of the 
 Holy Roman Empire. Scholars also went 
 back, the Humanists, as we call them, 
 to the classical writers of ancient Greece 
 and Rome, in order to regain the old 
 outlook upon life, of whom Petrarch is 
 the type ; they studied Cicero and Vergil 
 and Homer, as if divine guides who spoke 
 by revelation. To restore the ancient lit- 
 erature became the supreme motive of 
 the Renaissance, in which princes and 
 ecclesiastics combined with scholars, cre- 
 ating an enthusiasm for a by-gone age by 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 7/7 
 
 which their own age threatened to be 
 submerged. If Aristotle had been the 
 teacher of the Middle Ages, Plato now 
 furnished the inspiration toward move- 
 ment in another direction, till almost 
 every change, every revolution in thought 
 or in institutions, may be traced to his 
 influence. Science was reborn by the ap- 
 peal to Plato, and when Plato lived again, 
 Aristotle, the genuine Aristotle, followed 
 Plato as in the ancient days. The art, 
 also, of the age of the Renaissance, sought 
 its models in ancient art, imitating and 
 reproducing until the lost faculty was re- 
 stored, a new creative art, with a motive 
 of its own. 
 
 The Protestant Reformation could not 
 have been without this return to the past, 
 for the religious and moral awakening was 
 but the completion of the process of re- 
 habilitating a distant age. The revival of 
 the study of Greek led to the study of the 
 New Testament, so that the life of Christ 
 and the writings of St. Paul were read in 
 
1 18 Religious Progress. 
 
 -the original tongue and became once more 
 living words to living men. The avowed 
 purpose of the Reformers was not to cre- 
 ate anew, but to restore the old. They 
 sought their authority, their precedents, 
 in the ancient Church, before the papacy 
 arose. Such was Luther, who found his 
 mission in advocating a lost or forgotten 
 truth, not in asserting a new truth, though 
 he made it new by the vigor of its repro- 
 clamation. So Calvin brought back again 
 one phase of Augustine's teaching which 
 the Middle Ages had practically rejected. 
 In the early Church also did both Calvin 
 and Luther seek their warrant for the 
 changes they introduced in the ecclesias- 
 tical order, or in the rites of worship. 
 The ideal of reform in the Church of Eng- 
 land was the constitution and worship 
 of the Church in the age of Constantine. 
 The sacred cause of nationality, which in- 
 spired the states of Europe to break away 
 from the fold of the Holy Empire, was 
 fed by tfce reading of the Old Testament, 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 1 19 
 
 which is most truly regarded as the story 
 of the life of a nation, called of God, and 
 educated by Him for its task. We can 
 best understand Savonarola as appearing 
 in the role of a Hebrew prophet repro- 
 ducing the old prophetic burden, as if a 
 new message for his beloved city. 
 
 These movements of religious reform, 
 which all alike appealed to the teaching 
 of the past, which justified themselves as 
 restorations and not as new creations, 
 which, as it were, identified the reason 
 with the voice of antiquity, these move- 
 ments which threatened to carry with them 
 the world of the time, at last woke up the 
 Roman Church from its bewildered and 
 helpless daze. We sometimes speak of 
 Loyola as if he had remade the Latin 
 Church into something unlike its true, ori- 
 ginal self. But in reality what he did was 
 to reassert with a clearer intuition the 
 original mission of Latin Christianity, put- 
 ting the Church again on its early footing 
 when it began its career in Western Eu- 
 
120 Religious Progress. 
 
 rope. If he made innovations, it was in 
 the interest of keeping the Church to the 
 original motive from which it had departed, 
 seduced by the glamour of the Renais- 
 sance. 
 
 There were other voices in the sixteenth 
 century, as those of the Zwickau prophets, 
 who hinted at new revelations communi- 
 cated afresh in the soul of the prophet, not 
 to be found in the pages of the book ; but 
 these voices were drowned in the unani- 
 mous acclaim which invoked the old as its 
 authority. Servetus perished because he 
 refused to walk in the light of his age, and 
 mistook the tendency which was restoring 
 the old, as if it sought to create anew by 
 the aid of the individual reason. And 
 now from the sixteenth century to our own 
 day, the same principle has been avowed 
 in those religious movements which have 
 contributed to religious progress; how- 
 ever much they may have differed in aim 
 or result they illustrate a tendency to 
 reproduce, or they appeal to the past for 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 121 
 
 their sanction. I cannot mention all ; let 
 me select a few of the most important. 
 
 What was known as the Deistic Move- 
 ment in the last century may seem to us, 
 as it did to the Christian apologists then, 
 a destructive movement, rejecting almost 
 every Christian truth, reducing religion to 
 a few essential principles, God and immor- 
 tality and the necessity of virtue, what is 
 called natural religion. But the leaders of 
 the movement felt the charm of this same 
 motive, and they, too, professed to be 
 restoring Christianity to its original sim- 
 plicity. Christ, they said, had added no- 
 thing to the religion of nature ; He came 
 to confirm it, reproclaiming it with a deeper 
 force and insight ; " Christianity was as 
 old as the creation." Or take the move- 
 ment led by Wesley in opposition to De- 
 ism, whose effect was to overcome its nega- 
 tive, chilling influence by diffusing the 
 glowing atmosphere of an enthusiastic, 
 religious life. He, too, disclaimed that he 
 was an innovator bringing new truth to 
 
/22 Religious Progress. 
 
 his age. More than most men he was in 
 bondage to the principle that the higher 
 truth must be recalled from the older 
 world. He began his career with reviving 
 j usages that had declined in the Church of 
 England. Then he went back to a period 
 in the early Church when the love-feast 
 still survived, and sought through its re- 
 storation to secure that peculiar quality of 
 the religious life when Christians were 
 bound together in the intimate ties of 
 brotherly friendship and love. Although 
 Wesley must be regarded as one of the 
 most striking figures in modern religious 
 history, he was essentially a prophet with 
 the old burden, reviving doctrines which, 
 it was commonly supposed, had been buried 
 in oblivion, never again to trouble the 
 churches. One innovation he made in the 
 ecclesiastical order, a most startling inno- 
 vation from the point of view of the Church 
 of England, when as a presbyter of that 
 church he created bishops for his followers 
 in America. But he grounded his action 
 
Tbe Organic Life of the Church. 
 
 on what he thought an ancient precedent, 
 drawn from his reading of a once famous 
 book, Lord King's " Enquiry into the 
 Constitution and Discipline of the Primi- 
 tive Church." 
 
 But of all these religious appeals to the 
 authority of the past, none has exceeded 
 the Tractarian Movement in the scope 
 and intensity of its purpose to restore 
 what it was pleased to call catholic an- 
 tiquity, in its doctrine and discipline and 
 ritual. If it has seemed to us strange 
 and unaccountable that such a movement 
 should have been possible in the nine- 
 teenth century, yet it will not appear 
 quite so exceptional in its character if we 
 associate it with other movements in the 
 Church, such as the Renaissance of the 
 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which 
 not only resembled the work of Pusey 
 and Newman in its aim to reproduce an 
 older and forgotten world, but resembled 
 it still more closely in the enthusiasm, 
 and even passionate devotion, with which 
 it pursued its mission. 
 
124 Religious Progress. 
 
 It is no part of my task to compare 
 these movements with each other, or to 
 sit in judgment upon them, in order to 
 determine the value of the restorations 
 they have accomplished. In them all, 
 alike, the evil has been mingled with the 
 good, and no one of them is complete in 
 itself apart from the others. But they 
 are components of a vast organic process, 
 which, if it is to be interpreted aright, 
 must be contemplated as a living whole. 
 Differ as they may, or contradictory as 
 they may seem, they have a common like- 
 ness ; at least, they serve to confirm the 
 proposition which I advanced, that re- 
 ligious progress seems to have had a 
 backward gaze, as if the new truth were 
 locked in the embrace of a world which 
 is dead. It may be with religion as with 
 the animal or vegetable creations, where 
 old species may become extinct, but within 
 the range of human observation there has 
 not been witnessed the evolution of a 
 single type which is actually new, how- 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 125 
 
 ever great may be the modification of the 
 old. It has been a supreme character- 
 istic of our own age, and more particu- 
 larly in Germany, since the impetus given 
 to theology by Schleiermacher, that it has 
 studied religious history with such thor- 
 oughness and devotion as to make the 
 past live again before us, till it has almost 
 become a part of our own experience. We 
 have learned to speak of the Christian con- 
 sciousness as the authority or ground of 
 certitude for our faith, and it must be be- 
 cause this consciousness may be read and 
 interpreted more clearly in the past than 
 in the multifarious and confused utter- 
 ances of our own time, that we turn to it 
 in order to understand our own place and 
 position in history. And again, it is the 
 peculiar quality of religious truth, as com- 
 pared with scientific truth, that it has its 
 ground in the heart as well as in the intel- 
 lect; and, therefore, however inadequate 
 may be deemed the intellectual formulas 
 of past ages, in which it was endeavored 
 
126 Religious Progress. 
 
 to translate into language the aspirations 
 and needs of the soul, we must continue 
 to study the old formulas as attesting the 
 immortal convictions of the soul. To con- 
 demn or reject those formulas in whole- 
 sale fashion, as not entitled to our respect 
 or attention, would be like cutting off from 
 the tree the bough on which we are sit- 
 ting, the negation of that consciousness 
 which is our highest spiritual confidence. 
 How can we continue to have faith in the 
 utterances of the human soul to-day, if 
 the utterance of the past has no endur- 
 ing validity? It might almost seem as 
 if an age like ours, given over to critical 
 analysis, and even morbid introspection, 
 may even be at a disadvantage, so far as 
 religious truth is concerned, compared 
 with the spontaneity of the ages before 
 us, when intellectual activity did not check 
 or embarrass the spiritual life. 
 
 My treatment of this vast subject would 
 be even more fragmentary than it is, if I 
 did not insist, however briefly, upon one 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 727 
 
 point before I conclude it. Every rever- 
 sion to the past, every movement which 
 has aimed to reproduce some feature of an 
 older life whether in doctrine, discipline, C 
 or worship, has never brought back again 
 exactly that for which it went in search or 
 sought to restore. It has been found as 
 impossible accurately to imitate or repro- 
 duce in the religious sphere as it has been 
 in art or literature or philosophy ; and we 
 must be content to admire or reverence 
 the old ideals without being able wholly to 
 appropriate them, just as we find inspira- 
 tion in studying the old monuments in art 
 or sculpture or architecture or literature. 
 But just as modern art may be greater as 
 it has drunk deep at the original fountain, 
 by study and admiration of the old masters, 
 so is the religious life of the Church deep- 
 ened and expanded and enriched by the 
 appeal to the past, by the effort to restore 
 it, even if vain and impossible. 
 
 At this point we touch the deep mystery 
 of our existence, that unknown, undefinable 
 
128 Religious Progress. 
 
 element which constitutes life or progress, 
 the inner, unexplored range of our being 
 which calls for change, and incessantly re- 
 peats the call, in order to meet some exi- 
 gency, some imperative, unsatisfied need of 
 the soul. This inward dissatisfaction with 
 the present attainment which begets inces- 
 sant change must have its source in Him 
 who made us as we are, in whom also we 
 live and move and have our being. We 
 may have discovered in what we know as 
 the law of evolution a hint that some sim- 
 ilar law may prevail in the spiritual world ; 
 but this is as a voice out of the darkness 
 compared to what history reveals as already 
 known regarding the higher life of man, 
 that it is a movement forward as if to- 
 ward completion, a development of germs 
 into the flower, a persistency of ideals, be- 
 getting commotion and unrest in order to 
 their fulfillment. 
 
 We may not be able to discern the goal 
 which the movement of progress seeks, 
 or it may be defined in different ways. 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 
 
 To the eye of the Hebrew prophets, the 
 vision expanded, till they saw the know- 
 ledge of the Lord cover the earth as the 
 waters cover the sea, the time when men 
 shall no longer call upon one another to 
 know the Lord, for all shall know Him 
 from the least unto the greatest. The 
 same strain has been taken up by Christian 
 seers, foretelling an age when the kingdoms 
 of this world should become the kingdoms 
 of our Lord and of his Christ. Others, in 
 less hopeful mood, have seen the world as 
 reserved chiefly for the elect, as if the 
 world-process would have its consumma- 
 tion in the preservation of the faith even 
 unto the end ; as if it would be enough for 
 the fulfillment of the divine promise, a suf- 
 ficient justification of divine wisdom, if 
 the generation of God's children should 
 never be wanting to hand on the torch of 
 divine light and love, by which the dark- 
 ness of this world is illuminated. St. 
 Paul embraced both the lesser and the 
 larger hope ; for if he endured, as he tells 
 
Religious Progress. 
 
 us, all things for the sake of the elect, he 
 declares also that we shall all come by the 
 knowledge of the Son of God unto the 
 stature of the perfect man, the measure of 
 the stature of the fullness of Christ. 
 
 More than ever to-day does the sense of 
 [some impending change in the world's 
 order haunt us with its unknown possibili- 
 ties. What is now becoming a current 
 phrase, " the end of the century," is 
 charged with our fears and hopes as we 
 leave another age behind us to enter upon 
 a new era in history. For it may be that 
 the twentieth century will differ from the 
 nineteenth century, as that in turn has 
 differed from the century which preceded 
 it. Just as we have sneered at the eigh- 
 teenth century, making it a butt of re- 
 proach in theology or in literature, the 
 coming age may sneer at our favorite as- 
 sumptions, our shibboleths, the watch- 
 word so often used but never analyzed or 
 defined. Or on the other hand it may be 
 that the next century will follow out our 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 131 
 
 purpose to its completion, as that great age 
 of reforms, the sixteenth century, reduced 
 to practice the issues and the hopes of 
 the long years that went before. Will the 
 world become tired at last of incessant 
 change and threatened revolution, and for 
 a while demand rest or the immobility of 
 conservatism as if to clear its vision or re- 
 cruit its energies, or will it gird itself 
 anew for greater changes and a longer 
 stride in advance ? As to these things no 
 one is wise enough to prophesy. Just at 
 present a favorite topic with our students 
 and foremost thinkers is to sound the 
 depths of pessimism so powerfully urged 
 by Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Von Hart- 
 mann, or Heine, because only an optimism 
 which has measured the full extent of the 
 dark negation can stand the test. We 
 must know the worst that can be said, if 
 we would still retain our faith in a higher 
 future for humanity. 
 
 I have dwelt upon what many may re- 
 gard as an unprogressive and even sinister 
 
Religious Progress. 
 
 aspect of the Church's life, that tendency 
 to plunge into the past, as if it would es- 
 cape thereby the reality of the present. 
 To me this tendency has seemed rather, 
 as if the baptism of each new generation 
 into the waters of life, and therefore the 
 ground of hope and assurance. I have 
 not attempted to define progress, but rather 
 accepted it as the new word of our own 
 day, which carries in it this special revela- 
 tion of the Spirit, that life must consist in 
 activity and change, directed by some un- 
 seen purpose, whose end, however, which 
 as Wordsworth said it is our duty to be- 
 lieve, is the unattainable perfection of man. 
 The Church progresses because it is always 
 living down more deeply into the past, 
 ' bringing together in living unity, more 
 and more, by the compromises of real life, 
 the contradictions which have hitherto 
 distracted or weakened its energies. 
 
 IV. 
 
 In my first lecture I dwelt upon those 
 
The Organic Life of the Cburcb. 
 
 motives or theories of progress which are 
 followed by individuals as rules of self- 
 conscious guidance in the search for re- 
 ligious truth. These motives also con- 
 tribute to the larger collective life of the 
 Church, and by such gifts of truth and in- 
 sight the Church expands its life. There 
 have been cases where the fuller truth has 
 been first discerned and enforced by the 
 individual before it was taken up by the 
 Church and incorporated into its institu- 
 tions, its creed, or ritual. As it has hap- 
 pened before, it may yet happen again, 
 that some heaven-born man will appear in 
 whom the universal experience can be 
 more clearly read than in the organic insti- 
 tution, whose mission it will be to lead the 
 Church into fuller truth. When the truth 
 attained by individual revelation has re- 
 ceived the sanction of the Church it gains 
 a new significance, and is disclosed as an 
 integral part of the insight and experience 1 
 of humanity. The universal Church which 
 thus grows from age to age through the 
 
Religions Progress. 
 
 confluence of many individual contribu- 
 tions as well as by the silent aggregation 
 of elements whose origin cannot be traced, 
 which has also a mysterious life and a 
 method of its own for the acquirement of 
 truth, this universal Church is larger 
 than the individual, and demands of him 
 that he should enter this wider field of 
 religious thought and experience as if it 
 were his own heritage, to be made increas- 
 ingly his own by the power of private 
 judgment, but his own, nevertheless, while 
 he is still unable to appreciate the richness 
 of his possession. 
 
 And in order that the individual may 
 appropriate his own, he only needs to be 
 alive in himself, full of faith in God and 
 man. Then it will dawn upon him that 
 the history of the Church in all its diverse 
 movements is but his own enlarged bio- 
 graphy. The individual must come to the 
 knowledge of himself, not merely through 
 his own experience but through the know- 
 ledge of what others than himself, and in 
 
The Organic Life of the Cburcb. 
 
 other ages than his own, have thought and 
 done and suffered. " If we were more 
 alive," said the late Mr. Maurice, " more 
 alive and more interested in all the things 
 that are passing around us, in all that we 
 and other men have to do and suffer, the 
 history of past times would be infinitely 
 more clear to us. At any rate, that is the 
 way we must get to know anything about 
 it." This process of enlarging one's own 
 view, or enriching one's own experience 
 by the life and thought of the past, is 
 inexhaustible. We may sometimes fear 
 that a limit must come to the wealth which 
 can be brought us by the interpretation of 
 the past, as if there would be nothing to 
 do for those who come after us but to 
 repeat the process in dreary repetition. 
 But the interest of life is not in the things 
 that happen, but in the men who are alive \ 
 and able to see. To the ever new man, 
 the old world will be forever new. Com- 
 mon and familiar things will shine with a 
 new light. As there may be no limit to 
 
136 Religious Progress. 
 
 the wonders of scientific discovery, so the 
 relations which may exist between the 
 world and the soul of the man who is ever 
 growing in faith and spiritual imagination 
 are practically without limit, and so the 
 everlasting interest of life, the perpetual 
 progress of humanity, is sure. 
 
 Even now there has begun another re- 
 turn to the past, the return to Christ Him- 
 self for which all previous movements have 
 been preparing the way. Each successive 
 revival of Church life, which has drawn 
 inspiration by reverting to the earlier ages 
 of Christian history, has been forcing us 
 back to Him in whom they took their ori- 
 gin. How many efforts to retell the story 
 of his life have been made in our own gen- 
 eration, while the conviction grows that it 
 has not yet been told, that the " Life of 
 Christ " must always remain to be written. 
 In this lies our hope that Christ is begin- 
 ning to live in the modern Church as He 
 has not yet lived since He first walked the 
 earth in human form. In the power of his 
 
The Organic Life of the Church. 
 
 life, we may trust that the religious differ- 
 ences which now distinguish will no longer 
 divide or separate us. Our theological 
 differences we may still cherish as an 
 inheritance from the past, or as so many 
 diverse means by which differing person- 
 alities grasp and retain the central, com- 
 mon truth. When we discern the true 
 value of our differences, while we shall 
 hold them more firmly, we shall also more ( 
 easily subordinate them to the higher 
 virtue of Christian charity. In this way 
 the unity of the Church, which has not to 
 be anew created but which really exists 
 already, may find what is also sorely 
 needed, some common mode of manifesta- 
 tion to the world. 
 

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