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THE FAITH AND MODERN THOUGHT 
 
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 TOROXTO 
 
THE FAITH AND 
 MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 SIX LECTURES 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM TEMPLE 
 
 il 
 
 HEADMASTER OF REPTON ; CHAPLAIN TO TH S ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY 
 FORMHRLV FELLOW OF QUEEN's COLLEGE, OXS-ORD 
 
 WITH INTRODUCTION BY M. E. SADLER 
 
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 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 
 
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 COPYRIGHT. 
 
 First Edition Ftbriiary, 1310. 
 
 Reprinted March April, August, and Becanber, 1910, 1911, 1912. 
 
 Shilling Edition July, 1913. Reprinted Octobei', 1913. 
 
4^ 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 The Grounds of our Belief in God ,,.,». 
 
 Religious experience the primary evidence : its 
 appeal for logical support, p. 4 ; nature of 
 this experience, p. 7 ; the argument to a First 
 Cause unsatisfactory, p. 8 ; rationality of the 
 Universe the presupposition of Science, p. 9 ; 
 Mr. Balfour's statement of it, p. 12 ; argument 
 to a Divine Purpose, p. 14 ; religious experi- 
 ence again considered, p. 19 ; its harmony with 
 philosophy, p. 20 ; practical conclusion, p. 23. 
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 Revelation and Faith 
 
 26 
 
 Religious experience and Inspiration, p. 28 ; dis- 
 tinction between Inspiration and other forms 
 of knowledge, p. 30 ; Inspiration conditioned 
 by the character of the recipient, p. 33 ; pro- 
 gressive revelation to the Jews, p. 36 ; the 
 meaning of authority in religion, p. 39 ; In- 
 spiration no guarantee of truth, p. 40 ; it 
 supplies data, not solutions, p. 43 ; Faith the 
 answer to revelation, p. 46 ; its growth, p. 48 ; 
 like Inspiration, it culminates in prophecy, p. 
 50; Adoration, p. 52; Prayer, p. 52; Com- 
 munion, p. 55. 
 
 358888 
 
vi CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Historic Basis of Christia>'ity ...... 57 
 
 The need for a historic basis — psychologically, p. 57 ; 
 logically, p. 59 ; existence of the Church the 
 chief evidence, p. 62 ; the documentary evidence, 
 p. 64 ; the Fourth Gospel excluded, p. 64 ; Mark 
 and Q, p. 67 ; Matthew and Luke, p. 74 ; need 
 of the Resurrection, p. 76 ; the Church again 
 the chief evidence, p. 77 ; the documentary 
 evidence, p. 78 ; conclusion, p. 82. 
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 The Person of Christ 83 
 
 Completeness of His religious life, p. 85 ; the 
 problem of the Apocalyptic sayings, p. 89 ; the 
 secret of the Ministry — growth in love, p. 94 ; 
 the climax of ethics and religion, p. 99 ; St. 
 John's interpretation, p. 100. 
 
 LECTURE V 
 
 The Atonement and the Problem of Evil .... 114 
 The need for intelligible doctrine, p. 114 ; evil 
 the condition of the victory of good, p. 118 ; 
 the past not unalterable, p. 120 ; the problem 
 of Pain, p. 121 ; the problem of Sin, p. 123 ; 
 the power of Christ's Life and Death, p. 127 ; 
 St. Athanasius, p. 128 ; St. Augustine, p. 130 ; 
 St. Anselm, p. 132 ; Abelard, p. 134 ; a solu- 
 tion on Johannine lines, p. 134; "subjective" 
 and "objective," p. 137; Divine justice and 
 indignation at sin, p. 140 ; assistance from 
 modern modes of thought, p. 142. 
 
 LECTURE VI 
 
 The Spirit, the Church and the Life Eternal . . 147 
 
 How can Christ's Life affect us ? p. 147 ; need of the 
 Incarnation, p. 149 ; God omnipotent through 
 the revelation of Love, p. 150 ; the doctrine 
 of the Spirit as the key to modern problems, 
 p. 152 ; need of the Church, p. 158 ; Immor- 
 tality, p. 165 ; Christian Theology the meeting- 
 point of Reason and Experience, p. 168. 
 
AUTHOR'S NOTE 
 
 As it was desired that these Lectures 
 should appear as soon as possible, I have 
 only edited the report made at their delivery, 
 and have not changed a form comparatively 
 appropriate, as I hope, for the spoken word 
 into one more suitable for print. Where 
 nothing is original it is idle to specify 
 
 obligations. 
 
 ^ W. T. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 The lectures printed in this volume were 
 delivered, under the auspices of the London 
 Intercollegiate Christian Unions, in St. James's 
 Hall, London, during November and December, 
 1909, to audiences of men and women students 
 of the University. They are now issued in a 
 form convenient for use by those who desire 
 to study the fundamental problems of the 
 Christian Faith. 
 
 Those who heard the course were impressed 
 by the personality of the lecturer, by the 
 simplicity of his words, the candour of his 
 reasoning and the directness of his appeal. 
 They felt that they were listening to one who, 
 with courage and independence of mind, had 
 faced the issues for himself and who spoke 
 out, without flinching, the truth to which he 
 had fought his way. Step by step he led 
 them along the path which he had found firm 
 
X INTRODUCTION 
 
 under his o^ti feet. He inspired them with 
 the confidence which a climber feels in a 
 strong young guide. Other ways up the 
 mountain there might be, but this he had 
 found and knew. Along it, steadily and 
 cheerfully, he led those who followed him and 
 who, as they followed, learned to trust his 
 strength of character and his knowledge of the 
 ground. 
 
 Character, said Goethe, makes character. 
 Spirit kindles spirit. Thought with life and 
 courage in it makes those who come under 
 its influence more real in their thinking and 
 braver in their quest of the truth. Lectures 
 like these leave the mind ashamed of lingering 
 among half-beliefs. They impel it to a 
 decision. That decision, be what it may, each 
 one, with such help as he can find, must make 
 for himself In the making of it there is a 
 moral factor as well as an intellectual These 
 lectures help towards the strengthening of 
 both. They are infectious with courage. 
 And they bid us, in the grounding of belief, put 
 out to the full our powers of accurate sight and 
 of just reason, while training both under the 
 guidance of those who can teach us how to 
 
INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 see and how to draw conclusions from thin<Ta 
 seen. This, in the different fields of its 
 application, is the discipline and method of 
 science. And these lectures claim that, in 
 the scientific study of the evidences of the 
 Christian Faith, the thinker must be sensitive 
 to the facts of spiritual experience, observing 
 them truthfully, sifting them patiently, and 
 reviewing them in the light of the corporate 
 tradition of the Christian Church, * the blessed 
 company of all faithful people/ 
 
 M. E. Sadler, 
 
 January 5, 1910. 
 
THE FAITH 
 AND MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 THE GROUNDS OF OUR BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 I WISH to begin tins course by calling 
 attention to the vastness of the subject which 
 both to-day and in the ensuing lectures we are 
 to consider. It seemed to me best, when I 
 received the invit-ation of the Executive to 
 give these lectures, that we should try to 
 adopt some one point of view and follow it 
 out as far as possible over the whole field. In 
 doing that I am very anxious not to suggest 
 that other points of view are to be regarded 
 as less valualjle. It is very improbable that 
 we shall all of us find it most natural to 
 approach the subject from exactly the same 
 standpoint. I have adopted one which I 
 
 B 
 
2 THE FAITH 
 
 believe to be the best for this particular 
 purpose ; and it seems to me well to try to 
 make the lectures a coherent whole by fol- 
 low^ing out one point of view, rather than to 
 make them scrappy and disconnected through 
 attempting to approach the subject from 
 various points of view, though each of these 
 may be legitimate and valuable. 
 
 A word must therefore be said about the 
 method of the wdiole inquiry. The method I 
 wish to adopt is, so far as I understand it, the 
 method of any scientific procedure. I suppose 
 everybody here knows that no science exists 
 which quite conforms to wdiat the logic text- 
 books call deductive and inductive methods. 
 Those things are possibly useful, certainly 
 fictitious. All thinking proceeds by bringing 
 together general principles, which have been 
 reached as the result of past experience, and 
 all the new facts bearing upon the subject 
 which can be found ; and I am hoping to show^ 
 that ^ve always, as a matter of fact, set out 
 with a certain ideal of knowledge before us, 
 namely a coherent and comprehensive state- 
 ment of the whole field of fact ; but that co- 
 herence at anv rate is a demand which comes 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 3 
 
 solely from reason, for we have no ground in 
 experience, so far as I know, for insisting that 
 the world shall be regarded as coherent, as all 
 hanging together and making up one system. 
 But we do demand it. And I am further to 
 show that, as our knowledge stands at the 
 present moment, this ideal of reason and the 
 facts of experience stand over against one 
 another in hopeless and irreconcilable antagon- 
 ism, unless all the essential points of the whole 
 of dogmatic Christianity are true : that is to 
 say, if you like to put it so, that Christian 
 theology is the only hypothesis that meets all 
 the facts. That is what I shall try to show. 
 
 To-day we are to begin with the question of 
 the ground of our belief in God ; and I must 
 say immediately that, in one sense, this is the 
 subject of all the lectures, because, as we 
 proceed, we shall, I hope, be making clearer 
 to ourselves what we mean by the word ' God.' 
 It is not enough to prove that some sort of 
 Being exists. In the end, the only thing that 
 matters is the character of that Being. But 
 to-day it must be enough that we shall to our 
 own intellectual satisfaction (and no other 
 satisfaction is in question at these lectures) 
 
 B 2 
 
4 THE FAITH 
 
 establish, if that may be, the existence of 
 a Governing Will, from which the whole 
 Universe proceeds and upon which it all 
 depends. 
 
 Now the first evidence to the religious man 
 of the existence of God is his own religious 
 experience. No one who has had even a 
 moment of such experience can afterwards 
 quite ignore it ; it will perpetually challenge 
 his attention. lie may, of course, find great 
 difficulty in combining the ftict which he 
 seemed then to reach with all the other 
 established facts of science and everyday life. 
 It remains there as a problem ; and as evi- 
 dence it always has this peculiar perplexity 
 about it, that it is incommunicable. If another 
 man says, " I have not the faintest idea what 
 vou mean when you talk about communion 
 with God," how can we explain it to him ? 
 And if he then goes on and says, " Moreover, 
 how are we to be sure that this experience of 
 yours was not due to self-hypnotism ? May 
 it not very well be the case, that you had this 
 experience, whatever it may have been, be- 
 cause you expected to have it, and your 
 imagination worked at the command of your 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 5 
 
 expectation, or else because you were in the 
 company of a large number of other people 
 who were liable to this peculiar disorder, as it 
 may be, of the mental faculties ? " How is one 
 to answer that ? Suppose he still goes on 
 and says, " Besides, there is no evidence apart 
 from your experience that this Being, with 
 whom you have met, exists at all. It is 
 possible to explain all you tell us simply by 
 referring it to morbid psychology and 
 pathology. There is no fact there for you to 
 apprehend." And what shall the religious 
 man say ? When these two considerations 
 are both before us, the incommunicability of 
 the experience itself, and the apparent absence 
 of any independent ground for believing that 
 the " fact " which we reached in that exper- 
 ience exists at all, don't w^e feel as if the whole 
 foundation of our religious life were exceed- 
 ingly precarious ? Most of us, I think, have 
 been disturbed by that charge of self- 
 hypnotism. How can we disprove it ? Don't 
 we feel very much as the old Psalmist felt 
 when he was kept away from the Temple 
 services? — "Like a& the hart desireth the 
 water-brooks : so longeth my soul after 
 
6 THE FAITH 
 
 Thee God. My soul is athirst for God, 
 yea, even for the living God : when shall I 
 come fco appear before the presence of God ? 
 My tears have been my meat day and night ; 
 while they say daily unto me, Where is now 
 thy God ? " 
 
 It is to meet that state of mind, if we can, 
 that these lectures have been arranged. For 
 there are some who, though they have been 
 in touch with what is spiritual, have felt com- 
 pelled by motives which we must respect, by 
 reverence for truth, to believe that it was all 
 illusion ; while others have never come in 
 touch with what is spiritual at all, because the 
 intellectual barrier has always stood in the 
 way and prevented them from yielding them- 
 selves to the influences. That means that 
 religious experience appeals for external sup- 
 port. It is not enough for it in the mind of a 
 scientific man that it happened to him, that the 
 man should have had such and such feelings, 
 such and such momentary convictions ; if that 
 is all that is to be said, morbid psychology 
 is the science to which the study of this 
 experience belongs. We want some evidence, 
 apart from the religious experience altogether, 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 7 
 
 that the God whom we reach in that experience 
 is really existent. And this makes a peculiar 
 feature of the whole of theology, or of the 
 science of religion. All the other sciences at 
 least assume the existence of their subject 
 matter. The physicist is not called upon 
 to prove that mechanical forces exist. The 
 geometrician is not called upon to prove there 
 is such a thing as space. He is allowed to 
 assume it and no one quarrels with him. But 
 when the theologian begins to try to develop 
 a theory of the world on the basis of this 
 experience, he is at once challenged with the 
 question : How do you know that this 
 experience is really a valid guide to fact ? 
 And that question must first be answered, 
 because it is undoubtedly true that some 
 people have very little or even none at all of 
 this specifically religious experience. 
 
 But may I say immediately that by re- 
 ligious experience I do not mean an ecstasy 
 or an extraordinary thing that happens to 
 a few people here and there, but simply that 
 impulse, which comes upon most people at 
 some time, to throw oneself back upon a 
 Power greater than oneself, and the sense, the 
 
8 THE FAITH 
 
 perfectly sure sense, that that Power has 
 received one and is supporting one. Numbers 
 of people have felt something of that sort. It 
 is a sense of self-abandonment and yet of 
 safety ; and that seems to demand, as I have 
 said, further support from outside ; and that 
 support must be of a rigidly scientific 
 character : nothing else will do. 
 
 Now it has often been suggested that we 
 shall find an end of our difficulties if we 
 consider the chief of scientific principles, the 
 principle of Causation. As we all know, 
 science consists mainly in the attempt to find 
 causal relations, and to " explain " events by 
 referring them to their causes. The scientist 
 does not usually trouble himself as to w^hat 
 Causation is, and he generally does not 
 know : but that does not matter. AYe are 
 then told sometimes that whatever is a cause 
 is always also an effect of a previous cause ; 
 but that this cannot go on for ever ; and 
 there must be a first Cause ; something must 
 i have started the whole series. I believe that 
 contention to be essentially true, but that 
 this way of putting it is quite unsound. For 
 the life of me I cannot understand why it 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 9 
 
 should not have gone on forever. I see no 
 reason why you should suddenly introduce a 
 First Cause in that chain of reasoning back- 
 wards that is carried on in the natural 
 sciences : for example, when you have traced 
 back the Solar System to the Nebula, science 
 is not going to be content to say that this was 
 produced by a first Cause ; it is going to try 
 to find out what was the origin of the Nebula, 
 if it can. It may not succeed in finding out ; 
 but that will not prevent science from 
 believing there is an origin to be found if a 
 man of sufiicient capacity ever arises or if the 
 necessary evidence is forthcoming. No one is 
 content, then, at any given point to introduce 
 the notion of a First Cause. But that means, 
 that wherever the effort is made to employ 
 that argument, science will reject it. We 
 shall never find God simply by tracing the 
 world back and back through the process 
 of its development and looking for its starting 
 point. Science will not allow us a starting 
 point at all. 
 
 But I think there is more to be hoped for 
 from another method. Science makes one 
 colossal assumption always ; science always 
 
10 THE FAITH 
 
 assumes that the world is rational in this 
 sense, that when you have thought out 
 thoroughly the implications of your experience, 
 the result is fact. The scientists who have 
 produced the electrical theory of matter 
 believe that the result of their scientific 
 inquiry is the fact ; that the chairs and 
 tables of our ordinary use consist not only of 
 molecules, which consists of atoms, but that 
 even the atoms themselves are each a kind of 
 Solar System of centres of electrical force. 
 Well, they do not look like it : and yet that 
 is believed : it is believed on the sheer 
 evidence of reason. You are assuming that 
 when you have thought accurately about 
 the facts of perception, the result of all 
 that thinking is fact equally with the thing 
 you first perceived. That is the basis of 
 all science ; it is a colossal assumption, but 
 science cannot move one step without it. 
 That means that a rational coherence is as- 
 sumed by science as running right through 
 all our experience. It is all assumed to fit 
 together in a rational scheme, whose principles 
 we can discover if we have the necessary 
 power of thought. But then one may take a 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 11 
 
 step further, which natural science is not 
 required to take for its own purpose, but 
 which we are required to take if we want to 
 understand all the facts, and not only 
 physical or only chemical facts. Our know- 
 ledge is just as much a fact as anything else. 
 My knowledge of the existence of the table is 
 quite as much a fact as the table is. My 
 knowledge, then, is one of the facts which 
 must be held together in this coherent scheme. 
 Now that seems to involve, as far as I can 
 understand the position we have reached, that 
 there is some mentality (I know no better 
 word for the purpose) in all the facts of our 
 experience. I do not mean to say that the 
 chairs and tables are thinking ; I mean that 
 everything which exists must be the embodi- 
 ment of rational principle. The Universe 
 turns out to be a rational whole. Now that 
 is an enormous result. Eemember where we 
 started from. Science begins with its demand 
 that that world shall be seen as coherent ; 
 it insists on looking at it, on investigating 
 it, till it is so seen. As long as there is any 
 phenomenon left out of the systematic co- 
 herence that you have discovered, science is 
 
12 THE FAITH 
 
 discontented and insists that either the system 
 is wrongly or imperfectly conceived or else the 
 facts have not been correctly observed. 
 
 I know no better statement of this part of 
 our problem than what Mr. Balfour said in his 
 Presidential Address to the British Association 
 in 1904. He had been speaking about the 
 electrical theory of matter and how it seems 
 to reach a real unity and to reduce to a single 
 principle all physical facts ; and he continues : 
 " Whether indeed this vehement sentiment in 
 favour of a simple universe has any theo- 
 retical justification, I will not venture to 
 pronounce. There is no a priori reason that 
 I know of for expecting that the material 
 world should be a modification of a single 
 medium, rather than a composite structure 
 built out of sixty or seventy elementary 
 substances, eternal and eternally different. 
 Why then should we feel content with the 
 first hypothesis and not with the second ? 
 Yet so it is. Men of science have always 
 been restive under the multiplication of 
 entities . . . Nor for my part do I think such 
 instincts should be ignored. John Mill, if 1 
 rightly remember, was contemptuous of those 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 13 
 
 who saw any difficulty in accepting the 
 doctrine of " action at a distance." So far as 
 observation and experiment can tell us, bodies 
 do actually influence each other at a distance ; 
 and why should they not ? Why seek to go 
 behind experience in obedience to some 
 a 'priori sentiment for which no argument can 
 be adduced ? So reasoned Mill, and to his 
 reasoning I see no reply. Nevertheless, we 
 cannot forget that it was to Faraday's obstinate 
 disbelief in "action at a distance" that we 
 owe some of the crucial discoveries on which 
 both our electric industries, and the electric 
 theory of matter, are ultimately founded. 
 While at this very moment physicists, how- 
 ever baflled in the quest for an explanation of 
 gravity, refuse altogether to content themselves 
 with the belief, so satisfying to Mill, that it is 
 a simple and inexplicable property of masses 
 acting on each other across space . . . Now 
 and again it happens that observation and 
 experiment are not treated as guides to be 
 meekly followed, but as witnesses to be broken 
 down in cross-examination. Their plain mes- 
 saoje is disbelieved, and the investiojatino^ 
 judge does not pause until a confession in 
 
14 THE FAITH 
 
 harmony with his preconceived ideas has, if 
 possible, been wrung from their reluctant 
 evidence." 
 
 Why ? Simply because it is more satisfying 
 to the intellect. Here then is this colossal 
 assumption, that the truth about facts is what 
 satisfies the mind of man : that is the basis of 
 all science. 
 
 Now this seems already to give us a kinship 
 between the mind of man and the Universe he 
 lives in. It does not take us far yet ; it does 
 not give us yet a living God. We have found 
 no principle of will or purpose there as yet. 
 All we have found is that science, whose 
 method is surely justified by its results, 
 always assumes in the real world the existence 
 of those principles which govern our thinking. 
 And now we go on to a point which science 
 for its own purpose is not called upon to 
 consider. Science investigates our experience 
 and tries to discover the origin of the present 
 condition of the world, the process by which 
 it has arisen ; and it calls that discovery the 
 " explanation" of the present fact. Yet it is 
 never satisfying to the mind altogether, 
 because it takes the world piecemeal. It 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 15 
 
 takes to-day and explains it by yesterday. 
 But take to-day and yesterday together, and 
 ask — Why these two ? Science will go back 
 further to the day before ; but take the whole 
 series together — w4iy this series and not 
 another ? There is still that question to be 
 asked, to w^hich no answer, apparently, is 
 forthcoming. The mind, which in its scien- 
 tific procedure is assuming that its logical or 
 intellectual satisfaction is the guarantee of 
 truth, is still unsatisfied before this long 
 history, w^hich only connects one event with 
 another, and never tells us why the whole 
 series of events should be this and no other ; 
 and many people at any rate have raised that 
 question concerning the whole world as they 
 see it. 
 
 " Oh Love ! could you and I with Him conspire 
 To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire. 
 Would not we shatter it to bits — and then 
 Remould it nearer to the Heart's Desire ! " 
 
 We shall not have done with this problem 
 till the end of our course, and yet the fact 
 that there is a problem of evil at all to the 
 human mind shews that the mere tracing of 
 history, which is all that natural scien<3e has 
 
16 THE FAITH 
 
 ever professed to do, will never produce 
 intellectual satisfaction, and therefore, by 
 the admission of Science itself, will never 
 produce final and ultimate truth. Now there 
 is in our own experience already one principle 
 which does answer the question, " Why ? " in 
 such a way as to raise no further questions ; 
 that is, the principle of Purpose. Let us take 
 a very simple illustration. Across many of 
 the hills in Cumberland the way from one 
 village to another is marked by white stones 
 placed at short intervals. We may easily 
 imagine a simple-minded person asking how 
 they came there, or what natural law could 
 account for their lying in that position ; and 
 the physical antecedents of the fact — the 
 geological history of the stones and the 
 physiological structure of the men who moved 
 them — give no answer. As soon, however, as 
 w^e hear that men placed them so, to guide 
 wayfarers in the mist or in the night, our 
 minds are satisfied. And speaking generally, 
 the moment we agree with anyone that a 
 thing is good it never occurs to us to ask why 
 it should exist. There is no problem of the 
 existence of good. Purpose is a principle 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 17 
 
 which we have already gauged in our own 
 experience and which, where it is applicable, 
 gives a final answer to the question Why ; and 
 there is no other principle known, at any rate 
 to me, that does give a final answer to the 
 question, Why. We have already seen that 
 the principle of Causation in the ordinary 
 sense does not. It can only state facts of 
 history, and you may always say, Why this 
 history ? The only principle then that will 
 satisfy the scientific demand for complete 
 intellectual satisfaction is the principle of 
 Purpose ; science requires, therefore, that 
 there should be a real Purpose in the world. ^ 
 Grant that, and the whole of our experience, 
 as it seems to me, immediately begins to 
 become coherent. Of course the problem of 
 Evil remains : why was the Purpose this 
 which we see and not another ? That for the 
 moment we shall leave, but we shall come 
 back to it in the subsequent lectures. But 
 surely it is scientific, when you already have 
 a principle capable of explaining the fact, at 
 
 ^ N.B. — This is not the argument from Design, which does 
 not deal with the world as a whole, but rests on the adaptation 
 of one part to another part. 
 
 c 
 
18 THE FAITH 
 
 least to investigate and see what can be done 
 with that principle. It is not as though we 
 had to invent the term *' Purpose" to explain 
 the fact of the world, as the old scientists 
 invented Caloric to explain the fact of heat. 
 Purpose exists in our everyday experience. 
 It supplies an answer to our question. It is 
 then scientific to accept that answer provision- 
 ally as a hypothesis. 
 
 I believe that the effort to understand this 
 Purpose is not so hopeless as it looks at first. 
 Scientific principle requires us at least to take 
 seriously the hypothesis of a Purpose in the 
 world, and, therefore, a real Will behind the 
 world. That hypothesis will not be justified 
 until we have seen it through, until we see 
 how it does as a matter of fact cover all the 
 facts and particularly the fact of Evil. And 
 let me say here that to declare the problem of 
 Evil insoluble is Atheism or Agnosticism. 
 The problem of Evil must be soluble. The 
 Revelation of God in Christ exists to be the 
 solution. Whether or not we shall be able to 
 grasp that solution in a single course of 
 lectures — or in our whole life-time — is of 
 course another question. Yet I think we may 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 19 
 
 get clearer about it than perhaps we have been 
 before. 
 
 But now, leaving the further development 
 of this thought of the Purpose that is in the 
 world, let us go back to our starting point, 
 which was religious experience. 
 
 These two seem now to support each other. 
 For what is the leading characteristic of the 
 religious experience ? Surely it is this : that 
 in it the man is in contact with a Being who 
 appears to know him through and through, 
 who is intimate with him as no human being 
 is, and yet whose knowledge is not felt to be 
 intrusive or in any sense a vexation. We 
 might feel that it was an intrusion if some 
 even of our friends had the faculty of knowing 
 all our inmost thoughts, however much we 
 tried to keep them to ourselves ; we should 
 probably resent it ; and people do resent that 
 claim when it is made. Nobody ever dreams 
 of resenting the thought that God knows him 
 through and through. He may tremble at 
 the thought, but he does not resent it. Now 
 what Being is there who could conceivably 
 know me in this way, a Being other than my- 
 self, who yet has an absolute knowledge of 
 
 c 2 
 
20 THE FAITH 
 
 everything that goes on in my innermost 
 nature? Only one possible Being, surely: the 
 Being who made me. He might know; no 
 one else, as far as I can see, could know. If 
 there is a Being who made us, He might have 
 such knowledge.^ 
 
 It seems, then, that the two sides of the 
 argument are beginning to support each other. 
 It appears from the investigation of science, 
 from investigation of the method of scientific 
 procedure itself, that there must be a Will in 
 which the whole world is rooted and grounded ; 
 and that we and all other things proceed 
 therefrom ; because only so is there even a 
 hope of attaining the intellectual satisfaction 
 for which science is a quest. And here is an 
 experience, very common among men, which 
 claims to be a direct contact or communion 
 with a Being, Who, if He exist at all, must be 
 the Maker at least of the man who has the 
 experience ; and if we already believe, on quite 
 other grounds, that there is such a Being exist- 
 ing, it is surely the very height of presumption 
 to say that the man who believes that he is 
 in communion with that Being is deceived, 
 
 ^ Cf. Coleridge's Poem, yvwOi ciavrhv. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 21 
 
 simply on the ground that we perhaps have 
 not had a similar experience. If it can be 
 shown that God exists, then there can be no 
 objection in principle to the thought of His 
 revealing Himself directly to the individual. 
 The difficulty about the religious experience 
 was not any doubt in the man's mind as to 
 whether he had it or not : he knew he had it ; 
 he knew that this extraordinary event had 
 taken place in his life ; but the difficulty was 
 that so many other people had not had it, and 
 at first there was no evidence for the existence 
 of the Being whom he then perceived ; he 
 remembered how under various influences 
 people may perceive things which have no real 
 existence ; and he wondered whether he him- 
 self was the victim of such a pathological con- 
 dition. But when he has found that the most 
 rigid investigation of experience that can be 
 made leads to the hypothesis of a creative 
 Will which is the root of all existence, then he 
 says, " Now I have proved that what I then 
 perceived does really exist. Other people may 
 be blind to it : that does not affect my vision ; 
 I have seen it." And so it seems to me the 
 demand of Keason and the religious experience 
 
22 THE FAITH 
 
 support one another ; either without the other 
 would be precarious. The demand of Reason 
 by itself would set up an ideal to be reached, 
 which yet nobody had reached. It would say 
 that there must be somewhere the Creative 
 Will ; but would still admit that no one has 
 in any way ever perceived it. And on the 
 other side the religious experience is precarious 
 in the way that we have shown ; but the two 
 together support each other ; the intellect de- 
 mands the existence of such a Being, and if so, 
 then agnosticism, (if by that we mean anything 
 more than the reverent confession of our own 
 intellectual failure to understand completely 
 the Object of our religious worship), is not 
 scientific ; it is precisely a refusal to apply the 
 scientific method itself beyond a certain point, 
 and that a point at which there is no reason in 
 heaven or earth to stop. The way in which 
 it arises, I think, is simply that people become 
 so much occupied with the consideration of 
 what they know, that they entirely forget the 
 perfectly astounding fact that they know it. It 
 is by considering the fact of knowledge itself 
 and what is involved in knowledge, namely, 
 this astounding demand of the intellect that 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 23 
 
 experience shall be made to appear coherent 
 and so forth — it is by considering these facts 
 that we are led on to the further principle, 
 which lies outside the field of natural science 
 no doubt, but is yet reached by the application 
 of the strictly scientific method. 
 
 And then, if all that is true, it will follow 
 that the course of the wise man will be to 
 study with all his power the character of that 
 Will and Purpose which governs the world ; 
 he will wish in every way he can to increase 
 his knowledge of this subject, for upon that 
 everything else depends : and recognising, 
 moreover, that this Power is almighty, since 
 all proceeds from it, it will be his wisdom, 
 unless indeed the Power shall turn out to be 
 definitely evil, to ally himself with it as far 
 as he may, and to cultivate the faculty of 
 communion with it — a faculty that can be 
 either cultivated or stunted. And then, too, 
 as he comes to understand the character of 
 that Purpose, he will try to apply it in his 
 own life, not only from the strictly religious 
 motive, but also from the strictly scientific 
 motive, for he will want to verify his 
 hypothesis : he will say, " The hypothesis 
 
24 THE FAITH 
 
 is that God exists, and has such and such 
 a character : let me live in the light of that 
 hypothesis and see what happens ; let me 
 make experiment with it in the one place 
 I can, in my own life. Possibly, as the old 
 theologians used to say, I must believe in 
 order that I may understand. I cannot 
 believe unless I understand a little ; but I 
 shall not understand much, unless I am 
 willing at first to take a certain amount 
 on trust and make experiment with it: and 
 that experiment must be made in myself, 
 because my will is the only will that I 
 can bring, or begin to bring, into harmony 
 wdth the divine Will. It is only in my own 
 person that I can try to discover w^hat alliance 
 with the divine Will means." And so the 
 scientific and the religious impulses wall 
 combine, and will lead a man to submit 
 himself and all his powers to the God in 
 w^hom his reason has led him to believe. 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 REVELATION AND FAITH 
 
 In the last lecture I tried to show some of the 
 reasons why, not only as persons upon whom 
 God has in a measure poured out His spirit, but 
 simply as rational beings, we ought to believe 
 in God; and that, not only in the sense of 
 acquiescence in the theory of His existence, 
 but of trust in His Wisdom and Power. I sug- 
 gested that our religious experience (by which 
 I meant, not some remote and strange ecstasy, 
 that may have fallen at times upon a few 
 outstanding individuals, but our own religious 
 experience which I venture to think all of us 
 have had in some degree) is in itself, as far as 
 it goes, evidence for the Being of God : but 
 that from its very nature it always demands 
 further support, because it may be suggested, 
 either by others or by our own experience in 
 
 25 
 
26 THE FAITH 
 
 other parts of our life, that all this is hallucin- 
 ation and self-deception ; and therefore we 
 need to be assured that, apart from the ex- 
 perience which we seem to ourselves to have 
 of the Divine, the Divine really exists as fact ; 
 and we find that support by investigating the 
 impulse which lies at the root of all scientific 
 procedure, the impulse to grasp the world as 
 an intellectually satisfactory whole, seeing 
 how all the parts are connected together by 
 intelligible principles. And then, we said, 
 the mere fact that the world does correspond 
 in this way to our intellectual demand calls 
 for explanation, and, further, the world as a 
 whole, the entire series of events in time, calls 
 for an explanation which the methods of 
 natural Science cannot give because they 
 do not deal with that type of question at all. 
 The methods of science explain one event by 
 reference to other events ; they explain the 
 facts of to-day by reference to the facts of 
 yesterday, and so on : when you take the 
 whole series of yesterday and to-day together, 
 and ask, Why this and nothing else ? — there 
 is no explanation possible, except in terms 
 of purpose : that is to say, the scientific 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 27 
 
 demand that the world shall correspond to the 
 method of our intellect, the scientific demand 
 for an intellectually satisfactory world, can 
 only be satisfied by belief in a Purpose 
 running through the whole, a Purpose rooted, 
 as all purpose must be, in Will. Then we 
 came back to our starting point and said, this 
 experience of a Power in whose hands we are, 
 seems precisely to correspond with such a 
 Will, for its leading characteristics were, that 
 we are altogether in the hands of this Power, 
 and that this Power is intimate with us and 
 with our own inmost thoughts as no other 
 human being can be, as only the Maker of 
 souls could be. Consequently we found that 
 this hypothesis of a Divine Will, w^hich seemed 
 necessary to justify the method of Science 
 itself, is confirmed by our religious experience, 
 and our religious experience supported by 
 it. The two together make an intelligible 
 scheme of things. And let me say again that 
 by this religious experience I mean that sense 
 that we all have of a Power about us 
 encompassing us and guiding us, by which we 
 are all upheld. 
 
 All of us have felt that in the particular 
 
28 THE FAITH 
 
 form whicli I suggested in tlie last lecture, 
 that of throwing ourselves back in times of 
 distress or perplexity on a Power which 
 receives and supports us. There come those 
 times in the lives of all, I think, who have to 
 make critical decisions ; the man simply 
 abandons himself absolutely and whole-heart- 
 edly to something, he hardly knows what, 
 and the abandonment is justified. He finds 
 himself not, as it were, falling aimlessly through 
 an abyss, but supported and carried on to 
 something perhaps better than he had dreamed 
 of. Very often, at least, that has happened in 
 greater or less matters, I expect, to all of us, 
 certainly to very nearly all. That is our 
 basis and our starting point ; and it is of that 
 type of experience that I wish to speak more 
 especially in this lecture ; for that type of 
 experience is what, in its culminating forms, 
 we call Inspiration. It is the awareness of 
 the Presence of "a Power not ourselves." 
 Sometimes that awareness, that sense of God, 
 is very dim and has hardly any content, and 
 is simply the sense of a Power ; but that 
 same experience in its most vivid form is 
 what we call Inspiration, when the man can 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 29 
 
 say " The Word of the Lord came unto me 
 
 saying." 
 
 Let me preface what I have to say to-day 
 about Revelation with these verses from the 
 Book of Exodus : 
 
 ''And Moses said, Shew me, I pray thee. 
 Thy glory. And He said, I will make all My 
 goodness pass before thee ; and I will proclaim 
 the name of the Lord before thee, and I will 
 be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and 
 will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy. 
 And He said, thou canst not see My face : for 
 man shall not see Me and live. And the Lord 
 said. Behold there is a place by Me and thou 
 shalt stand upon the rock ; and it shall come 
 to pass, while My glory passeth by, that I 
 will put thee in a cleft of the rock, and will 
 cover thee with My hand until I have passed 
 by ; and I will take away Mine hand and thou 
 shalt see My back ; but My face shall not be 
 
 seen. ^ 
 
 And I would preface what I have to say 
 about faith by reminding you of the words of 
 Job, — " Though He slay me, yet will I trust 
 in Him." ^ 
 
 1 Exodus XXX., 18—23 (R.V.) - Job. xiii., 15. 
 
30 THE FAITH 
 
 And now, how shall we distinguish the 
 form of knowledge that we arrive at through 
 Inspiration from other knowledge? In the 
 first place I think we should remember that 
 all knowledge comes from God, because He is 
 the ground of everything that exists at all, and 
 therefore of our knowledge. If we know, it 
 is only because He has given us the faculty 
 of knowing; it is through Him and from 
 Him that we have any knowledge at all. 
 And also all knowledge is directly or indirectly 
 knowledge of Him and His method ; for He 
 is the Maker of all the world ; His is the 
 Purpose which we see manifest in all the facts 
 of life ; and therefore, as we study those facts, 
 we study the product of His will. As we 
 study what He has made, we must come to 
 know something about Him who made it. All 
 knowledge, then, comes from God, and all 
 knowledge is at least indirectly knowledge of 
 God. But there is a very great difference 
 between the knowledge which is the conclusion 
 of a long train of reasoning and the knowledge 
 of direct acquaintance. We can hardly 
 believe in God at all without admitting that 
 our knowledge comes from Him and tells us 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 81 
 
 about Him. But there remains a great 
 diflference between the philosopher and the 
 prophet. The philosopher arrives at his view 
 of the nature of God and of the requirements 
 of God by thinking and arguing ; and he says 
 at the end, — *' Therefore we see that the will 
 of God is so and so." The prophet says, — ** The 
 word of the Lord came unto me saying, Thus 
 saith the Lord." There is all the diflference in 
 the world between the two. The mark, we 
 said, of the religious experience is that we 
 find something : something is there before us, 
 presented to us : we do not argue about it, we 
 meet it ; and in its supreme form, prophecy, 
 where the man is in so intimate a relation with 
 the object of his experience that it seems 
 actually to take the place of his own thinking 
 and to tell him what he shall say, we have the 
 climax of this type of experience in which we 
 do not argue to God but find Him : and I 
 wish to insist that this not only gives the 
 prophet a confidence and power over men 
 which no philosophical argument can give, but 
 it provides something of a wholly difierent 
 kind, because always, when we think, we end 
 up with generalities. All philosophy cul- 
 
32 THE FAITH 
 
 minates with the Divine ; only religious 
 experience can give us God. We all know the 
 difference between a picture and a description 
 of a picture. The description is all in general 
 terms ; perhaps there is only one picture in 
 the world to which all those terms together 
 are applicable. It still remains true that the 
 words do not call up before us the actual 
 picture. No description can take the place of 
 the picture itself. Or think again of any 
 acquaintance of your own and how hopeless a 
 task it is really to describe him to someone 
 w^ho does not know him ; all the words remain 
 generalities ; they may be true enough ; but 
 they never give the friend to whom you are 
 speaking a real knowledge of the third person. 
 Always it is by direct experience, and only by 
 direct experience, that we understand in- 
 dividuals ; and this is true not only of 
 individual persons but of individual things. 
 Consequently, for religion, philosophy is 
 always a mere introduction, to some people 
 an unnecessary introduction ; they do not 
 want it at all ; to others a necessary and 
 inevitable one, but always only an intro- 
 duction. At the end there comes the meeting 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 33 
 
 with God, which is always God's revelation of 
 Himself; for we cannot suppose at this time 
 of day, if we believe in a God at all, that it is 
 possible for a man to surprise His secrets ; we 
 cannot suppose that we are going to know 
 anything al)out God either against, or even 
 without, His will. All we know will be what 
 He likes to tell us, what He is pleased to show 
 us ; that is all. 
 
 But this direct experience which is of 
 inestimable value for religion, (for in fact 
 without it religion cannot exist at all), is none 
 the less always conditioned through and 
 through by the character of the person who 
 has it. All our experience, even our 
 perception of ordinary physical objects, is 
 conditioned by our capacity to perceive. You 
 may put a geranium in flower in front of 
 a colour-blind man, and he won't see the 
 diflference between the flower and the leaves ; 
 it is there, but he cannot see it ; he has 
 not the necessary faculty. So in the case of 
 any artistic object ; whether or not we 
 appreciate a really beautiful object depends 
 mainly upon our own capacity in relation 
 to that kind of object. We have to train our 
 
34 THE FAITH 
 
 perceptive powers and our capacity for 
 
 appreciation. People always like rather bad 
 
 art at first. It requires some training, some 
 
 intimacy with pictures, or music, or whatever 
 
 it may be, to enable us to like the things 
 
 which the experts go on telling us are the 
 
 things that deserve to be liked. And again 
 
 with our friends, I do not argue myself 
 
 into liking a man ; certainly not : but 
 
 whether I like him or not depends on two 
 
 things, — what I am, and what he seems to me 
 
 to be. I shall not like people of a certain 
 
 type because of my own temperament ; they 
 
 won't be congenial. But also what they seem 
 
 to me to be will depend upon the kind 
 
 of person I am. If I am generous I shall 
 
 think they are too ; also if I am niggardly ; if 
 
 I am suspicious I shall suppose they are 
 
 always suspecting me ; if I have any courage 
 
 I shall not easily credit them with cowardice ; 
 
 but if I am cowardly I shall always be looking 
 
 for some hidden terror by which to account 
 
 for their most heroic actions. We all know 
 
 that. It depends upon ourselves how much 
 
 of other people we are able to see when they 
 
 are there before us. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 35 
 
 Most of all is this true in man's relation 
 with God. God may be before a man in all 
 the beauty of holiness, and the man not be 
 able to understand it, not have the faculties 
 for perceiving it. And that is how it is 
 that in the beginning of the Revelation every- 
 thing is crude, a great deal is even wrong ; 
 not because God has deceived the man, but 
 because the man has not yet the faculty 
 for understanding. Men do not understand 
 God without trouble any more than they 
 understand human beings or pictures ; indeed 
 much less, inasmuch as the subject itself 
 is much greater. And so we shall expect 
 to find that God's revelation of Himself, as it 
 is recorded, is always conditioned by the 
 capacity and circumstances of the people 
 to whom it is given. At first man simply 
 trusts to God because there is nothing else to 
 trust to, and He attributes to God the 
 qualities that he most admires. In the 
 early ages when a man is merely a member 
 of his tribe, and hardly an individual at 
 all, he attributes to God the leading character- 
 istic of his tribe. And then gradually, in 
 his intercourse with God, his own capacity to 
 
 D 2 
 
36 THE FAITH 
 
 perceive and to understand will grow, and 
 his vision of God, the unchanging God, will 
 become clearer and clearer. 
 
 There was one people who came out of the 
 East, the home of religion ; who dwelt for a 
 time in Egvpt ; who then went and inhabited 
 a ridge of hills and a few plains in the very 
 meeting-point of the East and the West ; who 
 were then carried away from their home, that 
 there might be nothinsr national left about 
 them except their religion, and who came back 
 held together by religion and by nothing else ; 
 until all the elements of religious life could 
 come to flower in a single human Personality. 
 The Jews are forever the specialists of the 
 human race in religion. Greece gave us 
 philosophy and art, Rome gave us law and 
 social organization ; Palestine gave us re- 
 lioion ; and the record can never be obsolete. 
 In the early ages the nations of the world 
 were specialists in their respective depart- 
 ments. We shall never again, probably, have 
 quite the same purity of intellectual interest 
 as the Greeks ; very probably we shall never 
 have the same capacity for ideal sculpture as 
 the Greeks; because their temperament ran to 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 37 
 
 this expression and all the circumstances 
 of their life pressed out in those directions. 
 Every impulse of Greece was concentrated 
 upon art and every impulse among the Jews 
 was concentrated on religion ; and that is not 
 likely to happen again. They remain the clas- 
 sical expression of the distinctively religious 
 temperament. But there is progress in revela- 
 tion. At first, understanding God's zeal for 
 Israel, they did not equally understand His 
 equal zeal for all other nations ; and Deborah 
 could pronounce a blessing upon Jael the wife 
 of Heber the Kenite as if that were the whole 
 of Divine truth in the matter; and Elijah 
 could confidently massacre four hundred and 
 fifty prophets of Baal to celebrate the victory 
 of Jehovah on Mount Carmel. And people 
 point these things out and ask — "How can 
 you say this is the revelation of God ? " The 
 answer is — Look at the book as a whole. Can 
 you anywhere find anything like that record of 
 persistent growth in the understanding of the 
 Divine ? Must you not say, these men from 
 the beginning to the end were in intimate 
 communion with God ? Nothing else can 
 account for what you find there — the steady 
 
38 THE FAITH 
 
 growth of spiritual insight from the naive 
 religious nationalism of the early days, until 
 Amos proclaimed God's sole sovereignty, and 
 Hosea learnt something of the tenderness of 
 His love, and Isaiah upheld his righteousness 
 as the standard of political and public life, 
 and Jeremiah learnt somethino; of the secret of 
 suffering, and Ezekiel taught the responsibility 
 of every individual soul before God, and the 
 great Prophet of the Exile, who wrote the 
 latter half of our book of Isaiah, discovered 
 something of the Divine redemptive suffering. 
 Nowhere else w^ill you find this steady 
 growth in the understanding of the nature 
 of God, and it is impossible that that 
 growth should have gone on, unless the Divine 
 had been present to that people's mind as it 
 has scarcely been to any nation since then, so 
 that they might go on seeing more of its 
 truth and beauty, and recording faithfully 
 what they saw. As has been well said, "We 
 should treat the Bible not as an inspired 
 record but rather as the record of inspired 
 men " : and we go to school with the Biblical 
 authors, not to think wdiat they thought, but 
 to learn from them how to think ourselves. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 39 
 
 The principle of "authority" is not the 
 authority of someone imposing upon us 
 beliefs from without, but the authority of a 
 man who has had experience such as we have 
 not had, probably, in an equal degree ; but we 
 can learn from him more about it. The art 
 student, who goes to Italy to learn in the 
 school of the great Italian painters, does not 
 intend to do nothing else but paint repro- 
 ductions of their pictures all his life ; but he 
 knows he will never be able to paint modern 
 subjects properly, he will never be able to 
 solve modern artistic problems properly, unless 
 he trains himself under those old Masters who 
 had such absolute control of their own 
 emotions and their own expressions. Just so 
 I would suggest that we should go back to the 
 inspired men of the past, not to find a short 
 cut to truth, (there is none), but to find out 
 how to find truth. These men were in contact 
 with the Divine. We can learn something of 
 how their conception of the Divine grew in 
 their own minds, and we can learn by what 
 steps they established their communion with 
 the Divine, so that following their example we 
 may establish our own. 
 
40 THE FAITH 
 
 For this inspiration is never — never — a 
 guarantee of truth. Just remember what the 
 view of the Israelites themselves was upon 
 the subject. In the Book of Deuteronomy ^ 
 there are several tests given, by which it may 
 be proved whether or not a prophet is false ; 
 and we are inclined to think at first that by 
 "false prophet" is meant an impostor, a man 
 who claimed inspiration that he had not got. 
 But remember the story of Micaiah the son of 
 Imlah, as he stood before Ahab and set about 
 to explain how Ahab's prophets had called 
 upon him to go up to Ramoth-Gilead, and he 
 said, " Therefore hear the word of the Lord : 
 I saw the Lord sitting upon His throne, and 
 all the host of Heaven standing by Him on 
 His right hand and on His left. And the 
 Lord said, Who shall entice Ahab, that he 
 may go up and fall at Ramoth-Gilead ? And 
 one said on this manner, and another said on 
 that manner. And there came forth a spirit, 
 and stood before the Lord and said, I will 
 entice him. And the Lord said unto him. 
 Wherewith ? And he said, I will go forth and 
 will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his 
 
 ' e.y. Deut. xiii. 1 — 5. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 41 
 
 prophets. And the Lord said, Thou shalt 
 entice him, and shalt prevail also ; go forth, 
 and do so. Now therefore, behold, the 
 Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth 
 of all these thy prophets, and the Lord hath 
 spoken evil concerning thee."^ 
 
 Now however you regard that incident, 
 whether you think that Micaiah is relating a 
 vision he has really had or is throwing into 
 the form of a vision his own belief about the 
 facts, it is clear that Micaiah believed in the 
 possibility of false inspiration, and also that 
 the people to whom he spoke believed it too, 
 for to suppose that Micaiah at that moment 
 uttered what was popularly regarded as blas- 
 phemous is to credit him with a quite 
 impossible blunder. And now there is this 
 extraordinary statement of Ezekiel : " And if 
 the prophet be deceived and speaketh a word, I 
 the Lord have deceived that prophet^ and I will 
 stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy 
 him from the midst of my people Israel." ^ 
 
 What does this mean ? It means surely that 
 the prophet is so certain that in his moment 
 of inspiration God has spoken to him, that 
 
 1 I. Kings xxii. 19—23. (R.V.) ' Kzekiel, xiv. 9. 
 
42 THE FAITH 
 
 when another man comes and says, " God 
 spoke to me, too," the prophet does not call 
 that in question ; what he calls in question is 
 the truth of the message given him. On the 
 whole it must have seemed to them of more 
 vital import to maintain that men w^ere in 
 genuine communion with God than to insist 
 that in communion with God we apprehend 
 the truth. And in all the ages of open vision 
 it is thought necessary to test the import of a 
 vision before it is believed. Just compare the 
 cases of Saint Theresa and others in the medi- 
 aeval Church ; the vision comes, but before the 
 import is accepted various tests are always 
 applied. Wherever this experience is fre- 
 quent, people refuse to believe the content 
 of the prophetic message, if there is nothing 
 more to be said for it than that it came in an 
 abnormal sort of way. The content must 
 shew itself to be true. Llay not the solution 
 of the problem really be found in what we said 
 just now about our only perceiving w^hat we 
 ourselves are qualified to perceive ? God is 
 there, always the same, always truth, always 
 righteousness ; but the men who have been 
 trained, as the prophets were trained in the 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 43 
 
 schools of the " sons of the prophets," to bring 
 themselves into communion with the Divine 
 can still only appreciate what they are fit to 
 appreciate ; they will still always, as we all 
 must, see God through human eyes ; and it is 
 only the pure in heart who see Him truly. 
 The others will see something, they will see a 
 distorted vision ; and no one is quite perfectly 
 pure in heart. Consequently we shall expect 
 to find, what we do find, gradual develop- 
 ment and steady progress among the inspired 
 men. 
 
 What that leads us to, I think, is this ; that 
 in inspiration we are given, not solutions, but 
 new data ; we do not get the solution to a 
 problem that was puzzling our minds ; we get 
 a new fact altogether ; we find a new element 
 in the Divine. The new data may not sug- 
 gest a solution of the old problem ; they may 
 make it, for the time being, apparently more 
 insoluble than ever : but always what you get 
 in inspiration is not doctrine but fulness of 
 life. It is contact with God ; not understand- 
 ing of God, but living in vital union with 
 Him : and it is possible that the man who has 
 the most vital communion with God will be 
 
44 THE FAITH 
 
 least able to make a scientific theory of that 
 experience. I suppose that Shakespeare knew 
 very much less about the method on which he 
 constructed his plays than either Coleridge or 
 Professor Bradley. It is possible to be a great 
 artist and a bad critic, a noble character and a 
 bad moralist. It is possible to be a great 
 saint and a bad theologian. And very likely 
 it will be true that the people who have the 
 greatest capacity for arriving at the true 
 theory of the religious experience will not be 
 the people who have had the supreme blessing 
 of that experience themselves. A man may 
 see a flash of lightning and account for it by 
 saying that the cloud was broken and he saw 
 light behind, thinking it was sunlight. That 
 would be a bad account of the matter ; he 
 may then come to the man of science who had 
 not seen the flash of lightning but can give a 
 correct theory of it after hearing the fact de- 
 scribed. Just so, it is not always the inspired 
 man who gives us true doctrine, but often 
 someone who comes afterwards and supplies 
 the theory of the facts which inspired the man. 
 Through inspiration we get the facts, the data, 
 of the religious life ; if you like, we get religion 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 45 
 
 itself; but not theology — and while we are 
 bound to go to school with the inspired men 
 for our religion, we are not bound to accept 
 their theology. Indeed, unless we are to sup- 
 pose that the work of the Holy Spirit upon 
 the mind of man has already come to an end, 
 we may expect that theology, that is to say 
 doctrine, will go on growing and progressing 
 as lonof as the church exists. 
 
 This, then, I think, should be our attitude 
 to that part of God's revelation of Himself 
 which is given in inspiration. We should not 
 in any sense try to silence our intellects ; but 
 we should say, — Here are the great facts of 
 religious history ; here are the facts which any 
 true account of the matter has got to include 
 and be just to ; and any crude, rough-and- 
 ready rationalism which leaves out those facts, 
 or leaves them unaccounted for, or calls them 
 hallucination, is thereby self-condemned. 
 They are the most important facts in life. 
 But still we may say, that the man who found 
 the facts may not perhaps have found a theory. 
 Let me give a crucial instance. There is no 
 record in the Church of a more prolonged and 
 more effectual communion of a man with God 
 
46 THE FAITH 
 
 than that of St. Paul. Any theology which 
 does not rest upon the Pauline experience of 
 God and Christ is condemned at once ; it has 
 left out the greatest appreciation of the fact 
 which we have. But wc may still say, surely 
 we must say, that St. Paul was endeavouring, 
 so far as he w^as theological, to account for 
 that experience in the terms which were current 
 at the time, which the people to w^hom he 
 wrote used and could understand ; and they 
 were not really adequate ; and we can still go 
 back to the same experience and see whether, 
 with all the other growth of our knowledge, 
 we could give a better account of the matter 
 than he. We cannot move a step without 
 him ; our theology, if it leaves him out, be- 
 comes vapid and vacant ; but our theology 
 need not on that account be his. 
 
 What then is that faith, which is our 
 answer to revelation ? and what is our faith 
 in general ? All our life is based on faith 
 of some sort. In science, so far as we apply 
 the results of our science, we rest upon a 
 faith, (for it is nothing else), that the laws of 
 nature will be to-morrow w^hat they are to-day. 
 There is no reason to the contrary ; but there 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 47 
 
 is no reason for saying they will be. Yet we 
 believe it, and we trust implicitly to that 
 hypothesis, and our trust is justified in 
 practice. In practical life we do the same. 
 If we are ill we consult a physician, and 
 we don't refuse to take his medicine until he 
 has proved to us that it will do us good, 
 or shown how it will do us good. If our 
 financial afi'airs are embarrassed we talk to 
 a lawyer and take his advice ; we don't 
 demand that we shall understand all the 
 intricacies of finance ; we trust him. So here, 
 surely, if there are men who are experts 
 in religion, (and that is what inspired men 
 are), it is but sanity to trust them. That 
 does not mean believing all their theories ; 
 it does mean taking them as our guide in 
 this region ; we remember that what they 
 supply is data, and not they only, for their 
 vivid form of communion with God is some- 
 thing we too have in our degree ; and our 
 main object in going back to them is to 
 learn by contact with them how we may 
 increase our own sense of communion with 
 God. To begin with, we trust the saints. 
 That is alwavs the order. We are told about 
 
48 THE FAITH 
 
 God, and we believe what we are told. 
 We believe first what men tell us ; our faith 
 does not at first rest, as a rule, upon any 
 direct apprehension of God. As children we 
 were told about God and we believed what 
 we were told. And then gradually, as we 
 acted on that belief, experience came in 
 our own lives, experience which, with most 
 of us, has steadily grown, although there 
 may have been great interruptions from one 
 cause or another, sometimes moral causes and 
 sometimes intellectual ; but that experience 
 has steadily grown until we believe no longer 
 because of what others told us but because we 
 have tried to live the life they suggested 
 and we have found that the experiment has 
 worked ; we have the basis of faith in 
 ourselves. 
 
 At first, in the history of the race, faith 
 is very desperate, like Job's, *' Though He slay 
 me, yet will I trust in Him." Man clings to 
 God, not because He has shown Himself 
 trustworthy, but because there is nothing else 
 to cling to ; we are altogether in His bands, 
 let us hope He means our good. And then 
 that trust begins to justify itself At first, 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 49 
 
 no doubt, the conception is very crude ; 
 there is just a dim sense of a vague Power, 
 and the man will take any material object 
 that he comes across and treat that as the 
 embodiment of God ; this is the *' fetish " 
 stage in which a man will beat his god or 
 dress him in bright calico, according as he 
 treats the man well or ill. All that, though 
 so crude and remote, is the beginning and 
 the germ of what comes later. And then 
 there comes a great epoch in religion, the 
 rise of deliberate idolatry, where the god is 
 conceived of as an individual being, and 
 therefore in only one place at a time : there 
 is a sanctuary, a shrine, for the god, and men 
 resort to the god who is beginning to have 
 some real character in their conception of him. 
 Then there comes the stage when the idol is 
 discredited. As the conception of God becomes 
 more spiritual and transcendental, idolatry is 
 given up. But that leads to something rather 
 remote and abstract. In the Jewish Holy of 
 Holies there was no image, but there was an 
 empty space which was the figure of the 
 Unfigurable, and it reminded men, precisely 
 by contrast with the idols of the surrounding 
 
50 THE FAITH 
 
 nations, that God cannot be represented in 
 any limited form because He is Infinite. 
 Thus gradually God became exalted, but also, 
 for most men, became rather remote, and the 
 process of redemption itself became almost a 
 disappearance of all our sin in the purity of 
 God, symbolised by the sacrificial smoke 
 which rose in a thick cloud from the Temple 
 court to vanish in the purity of God's 
 heaven : "I have blotted out, as a thick 
 cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, 
 thy sin."^ 
 
 And then we arrive at the final stage of 
 revelation. The prophet always presents God 
 in human form ; he speaks of the arm of the 
 Lord, of His hand, of His wrath, of His love ; 
 and our trust in God, if it is to be real, 
 must alway be trust in a God who appears in 
 human form ; and the greatest epoch of 
 religion and of faith would be already come if 
 there is in history a manifestation of God in 
 concrete embodiment, — an embodiment not in 
 stone or any dead matter, but in living 
 manhood, which will have the whole power of 
 the statue, and more than the whole power of 
 
 ^ Isaiah xliv. 22. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 51 
 
 the statue, over the imagination, and yet 
 never check the freedom of the spirit. For 
 it is not when God is thought of as something 
 other than man that we adore Him most ; we 
 must indeed adore the Holy One that inhab- 
 iteth Eternity ; but the perception that we 
 must adore Him is ahnost purely logical. We 
 understand it ; but we do not feel it. We 
 shall never feel the necessity of adoration 
 until we have seen God manifest in a life 
 comparable in its mode with our own, because 
 it is just the comparison that brings us to our 
 knees. It is when God is most human that 
 He is most unmistakably divine. 
 
 That leads us on to the subject of our next 
 lecture, the discussion of our need for the 
 occurrence of such a Life. But meanwhile 
 when all this revelation comes upon us and 
 we have in our degree responded to it in faith, 
 that faith must issue necessarily in worship. 
 Now worship will always have two sides, a 
 practical side, in our conduct, for our whole 
 life will become an act of worship ; but 
 worship must also have its own life in 
 adoration, in prayer, and in communion. 
 And I wish, while we are still dealing with 
 
 E 2 
 
52 THE FAITH 
 
 this part of our subject, to say something 
 about each of these. 
 
 Adoration is the natural response of man to 
 the sense of the greatness of God, and it is 
 the easiest of all forms of worship. Where it 
 predominates, the tendency, I suppose, is 
 usually to what some would call a '* catholic " 
 type of worship, where there is a solemn rite, 
 and a consecrated priest standing between the 
 worshipper and the exalted God ; and though 
 in some sense all creation shows forth the 
 glory of God, yet some elements are to be 
 consecrated as the actual vehicles of His 
 Presence, hallowed for that purpose, because 
 only after such an act can we dare to believe 
 that the exalted and transcendent God is 
 verily before us. The danger here is always 
 Quietism, the danger lest we think that since 
 God is so great we cannot really serve Him, 
 and all we have to do is to bow before Him 
 and gaze upon His beauty. And yet if He is 
 great through love, we can serve Him ; for 
 love needs answerincr love. 
 
 Then there is the life of worship in prayer. 
 Here the most vivid sense, I suppose, is that 
 of God always ready to help, always about us, 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 53 
 
 encompassing us with His love, and ready to 
 give whatever is good for us : and where this 
 sense is predominant we find the " evangelical " 
 type of worship, where no intermediary is 
 permitted between man and the God who loves 
 him, and no places are set apart specifically 
 for God's worship ; for all good work is con- 
 secrated and may be conducted in God's House. 
 And the danger here is always lest we suppose 
 that in prayer we are suggesting to the 
 Almighty something that He had not thought 
 of or was unwilling to do. And it is quite 
 clear that both dangers — the danger of isolated 
 adoration and the danger of isolated prayer — 
 will be met, precisely in so far as the two are 
 practised together. The man who adores 
 before he prays will be in no danger of thinking 
 that what he has to do is to press some course 
 of action on Almighty God. But then arises 
 the question : Why pray ? Well, surely, 
 because God is always waiting to give us all 
 the things that are good for us ; but whether 
 they are good for us will very likely depend 
 upon whether we recognise that they come 
 from Him. For example, victory over tempta- 
 tion is, no doubt, a good thing in itself: 
 
54 THE FAITH 
 
 but suppose that a man wins a victory over 
 temptation, acting, as he thinks, entirely in 
 his own strength, and becomes in consequence 
 morally self-confident and forgetful of God — 
 possibly it would have been better for him 
 that the temptation should have continued. 
 But if he has first fully recognised that all 
 good things come from God alone, then that 
 victory will become good. There are things 
 wdiich are good only when we recognise the 
 source from which all good things must come ; 
 and the most natural and obvious way of 
 expressing our sense that only God can give us 
 these blessings and our desire to receive them, 
 is to go to Him and to ask. But, of course, 
 every Christian prayer, at least, contains 
 explicitly or implicitly the petition — " Not 
 my will but Thine be done," expressed by the 
 w^ords we add to our prayers w^hen we say 
 that we ask through Christ, or in His name, 
 or for His sake. It is only if He too desires 
 what we have prayed for that we want it. 
 And so the essence of prayer is not, of 
 course, the moving of God's will by ours — (a 
 blasphemous and wholly ludicrous conception, 
 for, since God is infinite in Wisdom and Love 
 no addition to His good-will towards us or to 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 55 
 
 His knowledge of our need is possible), but the 
 bringing of our will into dependence upon 
 and conformity with God's, in order that the 
 blessing He is waiting to give may really 
 bless us, and so He may be able to give it.^ 
 
 And all this will culminate in Communion, 
 where the worshipper blots himself out and 
 merges himself in the whole body that God 
 may be all in all, as in adoration he strives to 
 do ; and where he receives into himself the 
 Divine life that in all things he may live by 
 the Spirit of God as in prayer he strives to 
 do. The two come together there. And if 
 our communion is to be perfect, it must be 
 communion with God manifest in human form ; 
 for it must be a union of spirits in love ; and 
 it is only with other men that we can be 
 united, with beings we can understand, who 
 are like ourselves. God Himself must appear 
 before us as infinitely loving according to 
 our understanding of love, and not in some 
 remote philosophical sense, if our communion 
 is to be perfect. 
 
 So these are our conclusions for to-day. 
 Our religion rests upon the religious experience 
 
 * Since human nature is essentially social and the human race 
 is spiritually one, prayer may be vicarious, and is then called 
 intercession. 
 
56 THE FAITH 
 
 of ourselves and of the holy men of God. 
 We go always to those holy men to develop 
 our own religious capacity, not simply to 
 think their thoughts, which were to make it a 
 form of idleness, but to learn from them how^ 
 to think our own thoughts, how we too, 
 according to the capacity God has given us, 
 may be in as intimate relation with God as 
 they were according to the capacity He gave 
 them. And then, as we learn in this way, w^e 
 surrender ourselves to Him in faith, expressing 
 that faith through adoration, prayer and 
 communion. All of this is the most evidently 
 rational thing in life ; to ignore this, to depart 
 from this way of life, is simply to fly in the 
 face of an immense record of experience of 
 the most vital facts in the world ; but we see 
 too that, while revelation is always limited by 
 our capacity, while as was said to Moses we 
 can, as it were, only see the Lord after He has 
 passed by, and never gaze immediately upon 
 His Face, yet if God is to be revealed up to 
 the limits of our capacity, if we are to trust up 
 to the limits of our capacity, if we are to 
 worship up to the limits of our capacity, God 
 must Himself appear before us in human form. 
 
LECTQKE III 
 
 THE HISTORIC BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY ^ 
 
 To-day we are to discuss the historical 
 evidence for the fact of Jesus Christ, and first 
 of all we have to ask, why do we need this 
 fact ? We need it for two reasons ; one is 
 psychological, the other is logical and philoso- 
 phical. We need it, first of all, because a 
 truth which is embodied in a story and in a 
 person has far more efiect upon our minds and 
 wills than a truth which is only stated in 
 abstract propositions. One needs something 
 upon which the imagination can fasten, some- 
 thing which can sway the affections, some- 
 thing which can change the will ; and no 
 doctrine can do any of these things, as was 
 discovered long enough ago. The intellect 
 by itself has no motive force ; it cannot by 
 itself supply ideals, or at least, the kind of 
 ideal that really moves us. We can think out 
 
 * For the historical parts of this lecture I am much indebted 
 to my colleague, the Rev. B. H. Streeter. 
 
 57 
 
58 THE FAITH 
 
 an ideal we already have, or we can think out 
 the way to realise an ideal which we have 
 already formed, but we cannot set ourselves 
 in motion by mere thinking. Mere intellect 
 has no motive force. And then, too, it is 
 always the case that the forces which sway us 
 most are those which appeal to the deepest 
 rooted and most primitive impulses. There 
 is an eloquent passage in Mr. Graham Wallas' 
 book on Human Nature in Politics, where 
 he deals with this subject and shows how it 
 may have happened to a man once in a 
 thousand years to be privileged to stand and 
 listen while Pericles abstracts from the million 
 individual Athenians what it is that gives 
 Athens its meaning for the world, " but 
 afterwards all that he will remember may be 
 the cadence of Pericles' voice, the movement 
 of his hand or the sobbing of some mother of 
 the dead." ^ And that, I think, represents 
 what all of us have experienced at one time or 
 another. The thing that really stirs us may, 
 perhaps, have to be rational, because if our 
 reason rebels against it we shall resist ; but it 
 must be also more than rational ; it must be 
 
 1 Op. cit. p. 73. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 59 
 
 something that can appeal to the emotions ; 
 and it is necessary, therefore, if the revelation 
 of God is to have its full hold upon us, 
 that in the eternal Divine utterance there 
 should be some dominating gesture, that the 
 Word should become flesh for our hands to 
 handle. 
 
 We need the fact of Christ, then, psycholog- 
 ically, because we are so constituted that if 
 truth is to have full weight for us it must 
 first be embodied. But won't a myth do this 
 just as well as a history ? It may be urged 
 that a great dramatist gives us figures every 
 bit as individual, every bit as moving, as any 
 of the figures in history, and perhaps more so, 
 because he has spent time and trouble upon 
 perfecting the character he draws, and he is 
 not fettered by considerations of fact. He 
 can make the picture as perfect as he pleases, 
 and as effective as he pleases. But it is 
 not true that a myth will do as well as history 
 for this reason, that what we need of the par- 
 ticular fact in question is that it shall be to 
 us the revelation of the Eternal and Almighty 
 God. Now in the moment when we are 
 under the fascination or spell of the story it 
 
60 THE FAITH 
 
 may not matter to us whether it is true or 
 not ; we are carried away and we act. But 
 at other times, which are after all the most 
 frequent times, we must justify this trust to 
 our intellects ; we must have some sure plat- 
 form of belief on which we can stand when 
 the moment of inspiration is not present. And 
 if that is to be so, we must not only feel at 
 certain times an intense admiration and rever- 
 ence for Christ, but we must be persuaded 
 that Christ is the revelation of the Divine 
 Power ; we must be persuaded that the secret 
 of life is revealed there. 
 
 Now if we think of God either as the in- 
 dwelling Principle of the world, or, more 
 adequately, as the Will, the Almighty Will, 
 upon which all existence depends, then it con- 
 cerns us more than anything else to know the 
 character of that Will ; and if the story 
 which claims to be the revelation of that Will 
 is a myth we shall have to say — Where is the 
 evidence that God is like that? This is a 
 beautiful drama, no doubt ; yet where is the 
 evidence that we see here the secret of life ? 
 But if in very truth the Life of Christ was 
 lived, then we say, the principle which issued 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 61 
 
 there must be adequate to that manifestation 
 of itself. It cannot be a mere blind force ; 
 that does not explain anything : it must be 
 adequate to what it has done. If the root 
 principle of reality has blossomed once 
 in so exquisite a flower that is new^ 
 evidence as to the nature of the plant. 
 Thus psychologically, and philosophically also, 
 we need the fact of Christ if we are to believe 
 in the love of God. All the revelation that 
 we w^ere considering last time is unable to 
 defend itself against the suggestion that it at 
 least may be hallucination. No one indeed 
 can prove that it is ; and we may even say 
 that in all probability it is trustworthy, if we 
 have already established the existence of a 
 Divine Will. But how are we to prove that 
 this experience of ours or of anybody else is 
 really communion with the Divine Will? 
 We need something more objective, something 
 in the world of fact to which we can turn and 
 say, This has happened ; and by whatever 
 principle you explain the world, that principle 
 must be adequate to this occurrence, and 
 must have in it the power to produce such an 
 achievement. Logically, therefore, as well as 
 
62 THE FAITH 
 
 psychologically, we need the fact of Christ, 
 if our belief in the love of God and His 
 revelation of Himself to us is to be rationally 
 defensible and morally effective. 
 
 So then we ask what is the evidence ? 
 Primarily, without question, the existence of 
 the Church. How in the world are you to 
 suppose the Church came into an existence, 
 unless Christ is a historic person ? You must 
 have some starting-point for this enormous 
 network of ecclesiastical organisations ; you 
 must have a foundation which is adequate to 
 the fact. And the Church's theory of its own 
 foundation is adequate. Indeed, the difficulty 
 really is that the foundation seems more than 
 adequate to the fact ; for it seems easy to ask 
 and difficult to answer, why the Divine 
 Founder should found an institution so 
 remote in -its practice from His own ideals. 
 But at least it is true that the Church's 
 theory is adequate. The Church says that it 
 was founded by a historic Figure whose 
 spiritual pre-eminence is such that we cannot 
 but confess Him the revelation of God in 
 human life. That is adequate. And how 
 else are you going to explain the fact of the 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 63 
 
 Church ? For, remember, however far short 
 the Church may have fallen at times from its 
 own ideal, it has always represented and stood 
 for an ideal not to be accounted for by the 
 ordinary social environment of the times. 
 Perpetually, of course, the influence of the 
 world has told upon it and dragged it down ; 
 but it still remains true that the principle 
 which it has upheld, the principle which 
 breaks out in the moment of the Church's 
 own degradation and revives it over and 
 over again in history, is a principle not to 
 be discovered in, or accounted for by, the 
 ordinary social influences of the time. This 
 is something perfectly intelligible if the whole 
 Church is rooted in a Divine Christ who is 
 also a historical figure : otherwise it is not 
 intelligible at all. And keeping in our minds 
 the thought that we have somehow to find an 
 explanation for the Church's existence, we 
 may go on to the dithculty of the imperfection 
 of the Church. And I think it need not take 
 us very long ; for we see that if the Founder's 
 purpose is to produce a type of character and 
 to achieve a spiritual result, then the new 
 force which he brings into the world must 
 
64 THE FAITH 
 
 take men as it finds them, and win their free 
 consent, never forcing their minds or wills, 
 never compelling them, but winning from 
 them free allegiance, and securing acceptance 
 always because it is seen to be good, and 
 never by the exercise of any over-ruling and 
 over-powering authority. But if that is true, 
 then, of course, we shall expect the whole 
 history of the Church to be one long conflict 
 between the ordinary worldly nature of the 
 men w^ho make up the body of the Church 
 and the new spirit which is the Church's real 
 life. 
 
 And now let us proceed to those documents 
 in which the Church enshrines its own record 
 of its own foundation. We are dealing, you 
 will remember, simply and solely with ques- 
 tions of evidence and not at all at present 
 with questions of edification. As a matter of 
 evidence the first thing we have to do is to be 
 quite clear what points are contained in the 
 first three Gospels and what in the fourth, 
 and to exclude the fourth. If the facts 
 contained in the first three Gospels are 
 established, then perhaps w^e can go to the 
 fourth Gospel for the interpretation of those 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 65 
 
 facts. The religious value of the fourth 
 Gospel is quite incalculable ; but it is not 
 evidence ; at any rate in the present state of 
 the controversy it is not evidence, because a 
 very large number of the most sincere critics 
 are unable to determine that it is the work of 
 an eye-witness, or even that the writer him- 
 self supposes the events to have occurred 
 precisely as he tells us. We shall come back 
 to the fourth Gospel next time, but as long as 
 the critics are disputing about its authorship, 
 as they are now, it is not fair to use it as 
 evidence. What are we to say, then, about 
 the other three Gospels ? 
 
 Now I will beoin rather late, because there 
 are certain wild theories current which sug- 
 gest that, the moment you let yourself into 
 the snares of Biblical criticism, you will find 
 yourself compelled to believe that the Gos- 
 pels are a fabrication of the second or third 
 century. Where that myth comes from I 
 have not the remotest idea, but it exists in 
 various people's minds. Now about the year 
 180 A.D. you have Irenseus ; and Irenseus is 
 already so certain that there are four authori- 
 tative Gospels and only four that he begins to 
 
^6 THE FAITH 
 
 prove a priori that it must be so. But 
 nobody begins to prove that such and such 
 must be the case, until he at any rate is sure 
 that it is so ; and this reflection is made more 
 interesting by the further consideration that 
 Irenseus' arguments are quite indescribably 
 bad ; one is the argument that there must be 
 four Gospels because there are four winds and 
 four corners of the Earth, and so on. So 
 confident is he that there are four and only 
 four that he is prepared to argue like that. 
 By 180 A.D., then, at latest, there was no 
 doubt that there were four ofHcial Gospels. 
 Again, not later than 170 a.d. you have 
 Tatian composing what he calls the Diates- 
 saron, the harmony of the four Gospels, which 
 shows that in his time too there were four and 
 only four ofhcial Gospels. Before that you 
 have Justin Martyr about 160 a.d. certainly 
 using our four Gospels. In 140 a.d. the 
 heretic Marcion produced a mutilated version 
 of St. Luke, showing that St. Luke was then 
 already an authority. But what is perhaps 
 most important for our purpose is this, that 
 Papias, who was already Bishop of Ilieropolis 
 in 120, so that he cannot have been a very 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 67 
 
 young man at that time, mentions tliat the 
 Elder (his authority, and perhaps the author 
 of the fourth Gospel) said that Matthew wrote 
 the Logia (we shall come back to what the 
 Logia were in a moment), and that Mark, 
 who was the interpreter of Peter, wrote what 
 he remembered of Peter's teaching accurately 
 but not quite in order. 
 
 Now if you take the first and third Gospels 
 and bracket off, say with blue ink, every 
 section that is contained in both of these and 
 also in St. Mark, you find in the first place 
 that it is the greater part of St. Mark, and 
 that it is a great part of the first and the third 
 Gospels. And if you then bracket off, say in 
 red ink, all the rest of the first and third Gos- 
 pels that are common to those two, you will 
 find that it is a considerable proportion of the 
 remainder, and consists entirely of teaching. 
 The obvious inference, an inference accepted 
 with slight modifications by all the critics, is 
 that the first and third Gospels, St. Matthew 
 and St. Luke, rest upon the second Gospel 
 and another document now lost ; that in 
 composing the first and third of our Gospels 
 the authors had before them previous evidence 
 
 F 2 
 
68 THE FAITH 
 
 which they used : St. Mark was a part of it 
 and this other document was another part. 
 Now, as we saw, we have got to give all the 
 four Gospels time to become fully official 
 before the date of Tatian ; and such a process 
 takes some time. We also have considerable 
 evidence in St. Matthew that some of the first 
 generation of disciples were still alive when it 
 was written, for it contains many promises 
 that the Second Coming will be before that 
 generation has altogether passed away. Then 
 St Luke's Gospel w^e now know to have been 
 written by St Luke. The evidence that has 
 lately been accumulated for that view is quite 
 overwhelming. It is chieliy linguistic, show- 
 ing that the Gospel and the whole of the Acts 
 are by the same author as those parts of the 
 Acts where the author uses the words "We " 
 — " we sailed," " we fetched a compass," and 
 so on ; all these are by one author, St. Luke. 
 Now St. Luke met with St. Paul about 52 a. d., 
 and obviously was then a fully grown man. 
 You have then to put the third Gospel in the 
 lifetime of someone who was a fully grown 
 man in about 50 a.d. That brings you again 
 within the first centurv. Now St. Matthew 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 69 
 
 and St. Luke in the first century, writing as far 
 as we can tell in wholly different atmospheres, 
 for wholly different sets of circumstances, yet 
 find that both St. IMark and this other docu- 
 ment are already established authorities and 
 base their Gospels upon them ; that leads to 
 a very early date for these two documents. 
 
 Now what is the character of this other 
 document, which we will call Q, the name 
 nearly always given to it from its German 
 title ** Die zweite Quelle," the Second Source ? 
 What is the character of Q, and what is its 
 date? Its date is such, apparently, that it 
 was already an authority even when St. Mark 
 wrote. There is a very large amount of 
 evidence that St. Mark used it, particularly in 
 the fact that the document itself consists 
 almost entirely of teaching. Now St. Mark 
 uses the words that represent teaching, 
 either the verb or the noun, more often than 
 either St. Luke or St. Matthew,^ and in 
 proportion to the length of the Gospel a great 
 
 1 5i5!xx^— Mt. 3, Mk. 5, Lk. 1. hhdcTKw—Mt. 14, Mk. 17, Lk. 
 17. See Hawkins Horae Syi\opticat, p. 10. Sir John Hawkins 
 has kindly pointed out to me that the verb 5i5ci<r/fa> is used of our 
 Lord in narrative Mt. 7, Mk. 13. Lk. 10 times ; this of course 
 strengthens the argument above ; c.f. especially Mk. x. 1 (is 
 fia-0«i) and vi. , 34. 
 
70 THE FAITH 
 
 deal more often ; and yet he hardly gives any 
 of it ; with the exception of the 13 th chapter, 
 which is an entire critical problem by itself, 
 there is hardly any discourse of our Lord in 
 St. Mark's Gospel and yet St. Mark is always 
 referring to His teaching. Surely this implies 
 that the Lord's teaching was already known. 
 Not only is this the case, but St. Mark 
 appears definitely to use this other document 
 on several occasions. I will mention three, 
 which anyone can refer to, as about the most 
 obvious, the preaching of St. John the Baptist, 
 the story of the Temptation, and the incident 
 when our Lord's enemies accused Him of 
 working miracles in the power of Beelzebub ; 
 in all these cases, if you look at them, you 
 will find that the account in St. Matthew and 
 St. Luke is longer than that in St. Mark. 
 Now unless we are going to throw up 
 altogether the hypothesis of the two docu- 
 ments as the basis of St. Matthew and 
 St. Luke, we shall have to say tliat St. ]\Iark 
 here alludes, for instance, to the Temptation ; 
 he knows it is far too important an event 
 to be left on one side, but he does not give 
 the whole story because people already have 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 71 
 
 that in their hands ; and similarly with the 
 other incidents : it is not necessary to do 
 more than to speak of them as facts ; the 
 details are already known. There are a large 
 number of detailed instances that anyone who 
 studies the Gospels very carefully, looking out 
 for traces of this, will discover, where St. 
 Mark abridges the account of the incidents 
 given in full in the other documents ; and this, 
 of course, is further evidence that this docu- 
 ment was already an authority at the time 
 when St. Mark was writing, and shows that his 
 many allusions to our Lord's teaching refer to 
 this document either alone or among others. 
 
 And now we go further ; what is the char- 
 acter of the document Q from which our 
 record of the teaching is derived ? It appears 
 to be a production of the primitive Palestin- 
 ian Church. It is impossible here to do 
 justice to the arguments which lead to that 
 conclusion, and, rather than weaken them by 
 compression, I will refer to Mr. Streeter's 
 essay on Tlic Literary Evolution oj the 
 Gospels in the volume edited by Dr. Sanday 
 and entitled Studies in the Synoptic Problem} 
 
 * Clarendon Press. 
 
72 THE FAITH 
 
 We can quite understand that the early 
 Church would be anxious to record as soon 
 as possible the sayings of the Lord. Nobody 
 was going to forget how he went about heal- 
 ing men of all manner of bodily and spiritual 
 diseases ; nobody was going to forget the 
 story of the Last Supper, of the Betrayal, of 
 the Crucifixion, of the Resurrection : these 
 things need not be written down, there is no 
 fear of their perishing at present. But we 
 must write down His teaching at once because 
 words are so easily forgotten. And there was 
 a danger, a danger whose reality the fourth 
 Gospel proves, that their homeliness and terse- 
 ness would be overlaid. The teaching must 
 be recorded at once ; and this document, used 
 by our first and third evangelists, goes right 
 back to the very beginnings of the whole 
 Church, so that it would become a manual of 
 teaching that missionaries could leave behind 
 them as they went on their journeys, when 
 they had persuaded the people to accept 
 Christ as the Lord of life. If the converts said, 
 "Now what do we do in consequence of our 
 acceptance of Christ as Lord ? " the preacher 
 could hand them the Teaching of the Lord 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 73 
 
 and say, '*Do your best to live up to that 
 standard." And then later on we find again 
 what we should expect ; as the disciples, the 
 personal disciples, of the Lord were disap- 
 pearing from the earth and there seemed to be 
 none left who actually remembered the events, 
 we find a demand for a written narrative, and 
 when St. Peter himself is martyred at Rome, 
 the people come to St. Peter's interpreter, St. 
 Mark, and beg of him to write down at once, 
 before he forgets it, all he can remember of 
 the chief-of-the-Apostles's teaching : and so 
 you get St. Mark's Gospel, which, differing 
 absolutely from Q in this respect, contains 
 almost nothing but events, and lays the whole 
 emphasis upon the Passion. The whole book 
 is a " story of the Passion with an introduc- 
 tion," whereas Q seems to have contained 
 no account of the Passion at all. In St. Mark 
 everything is centred upon the Passion ; the 
 last week takes up a third of the whole Gospel. 
 Since those early days St. Paul had brought 
 out the true significance of the Cross of 
 Christ ; in the interval between the first 
 document and the second document, the whole 
 Gospel of the Cross of Christ had come into 
 
74 THE FAITH 
 
 being and its meaning had become known. 
 Everyone now saw that everything turns 
 upon the Crucifixion and the Resurrection ; 
 and so that becomes the pivot of the whole 
 Gospel Thus we reach a result, which as far 
 as I can see is absolutely established ; St. 
 Mark gives us in his Gospel, written whilst 
 St. Peter's teaching is fresh in his mind, 
 and wholly based upon St. Peter's own 
 evidence, the record of the outward frame- 
 work, as it were, of the Lord's life, and besides 
 this we have a document giving us the teach- 
 ing of the Lord w^hich goes back to the very 
 earliest ages of the Church. 
 
 Thus we begin wdth this certain datum of 
 the moral and spiritual ideal upheld and 
 realised. We begin with evidence as good as 
 anybody can demand for the teaching of our 
 Lord, for the ideal He set before people and 
 for His own realisation of it. Compare the 
 Sermon on the Mount wdth His own behaviour 
 before Caiaphas and Pilate. He not only 
 conceived an ideal but He realised it ; and 
 that is our certain datum : a moral and 
 spiritual ideal upheld and realised. And 
 then there come the two other evangelists. 
 
AND MODERiN THOUGHT 75 
 
 It is very difficult to determine the author- 
 ship of the first Gospel, but criticism seems 
 inclined to think it impossible that it should 
 have been written by St. Matthew. On the 
 other hand, there is every reason to suppose 
 that St. Matthew was the author of the other 
 document which both the third and the first 
 Gospels use: for Papias' memory was, that 
 he was told by the Elder, how Matthew wrote 
 the Logia or Utterances of the Lord. Well 
 then, if a Gospel is composed, part of wdiich is 
 St. Mark's and nearly all the rest of which is 
 St. Matthew's, there is no difficulty in explain- 
 ing how St. Matthew's name came to stand at 
 the head of it, because anyone can see what in 
 it belongs to St. ]\Iark ; and the rest is actually 
 St. Matthew's. St. Luke tells us definitely in 
 his preface that he took great trouble to find 
 the various records and to test them and sift 
 them ; he has a large amount of special 
 information, more indeed than St. Matthew 
 has ; several of tlie longer parables. Dives and 
 Lazarus, The Unjust Steward, The Good 
 Samaritan, The Prodigal Son, are in St. Luke 
 and St. Luke only ; but we can be sure from 
 his preface that he has been at great pains to 
 
76 THE FAITH 
 
 test his sources. It is useless, as far as I can 
 see, to speculate as to where he may have found 
 the record of these parables or anything else 
 that is peculiar to him, altliough an obvious 
 source is suggested by the story of how he and 
 St. Paul stayed together with St. Philip on 
 St. Paul's last journey to Jerusalem. 
 
 Here, then, is our starting point, — a moral 
 and spiritual ideal upheld and realised. But 
 that is not enough. It is not enough that the 
 governing Power of the world should once 
 have produced this great instance of spiritual 
 pre-eminence ; for it is, after all, just possible 
 that it was produced only to perish, and that 
 the Almighty Power had no more interest in 
 this being than in any other being. That 
 would still be just possible. Perhaps you 
 remember the end of Thomas Hardy's novel 
 Tess, — '' The President of the Immortals had 
 finished with Tess." If all we have yet stated 
 were the whole story, we might say at the end, 
 " the President of the Immortals had finished 
 with Christ." If we are to be on sure ground 
 in taking Him as the revelation of the Divine, 
 it is necessary that the Divine Power should 
 be seen clearly co-operating with Him, carry- 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 77 
 
 ing Him through His ultimate self-surrender, 
 and bringing Him out victorious. We need 
 the Kesurrection. 
 
 What, then, is the evidence for the Resur- 
 rection ? Here again the chief evidence is the 
 Church. Somehow or other we have to 
 account for the fact that the Church came 
 into being. European history, at least, from 
 that day to this has been mainly the story of 
 interaction between the Church and the out- 
 side world. AVe must find some ground for 
 this great fact ; and to attribute it to 
 hallucination is to reduce the whole of Euro- 
 pean history to a perfectly insoluble enigma. 
 If we believe in the Government of the World 
 by the Divine Will, we shall not acquiesce in 
 the belief that the Church with all its bene- 
 ficent activities is grounded on a hallucination. 
 Moreover, to attribute the Resurrection 
 appearances to hallucination is psychologic- 
 ally outrageous. The disciples were plainly 
 not in a state of mind that could produce 
 hallucination. At the Betrayal they all for- 
 sook Him and fied ; many of them were 
 probably already well on their way back 
 to Galilee at the time of the Crucifixion. 
 
78 THE FAITH 
 
 There they were, the scattered followers of a 
 discredited Messiah ; and suddenly they be- 
 came the nucleus of the greatest political 
 achievement of the human race. Something 
 has got to happen ; and it cannot happen 
 simply in their minds, for they are not going 
 to become convinced for no reason whatever 
 that the Lord is alive ; the thing is out of the 
 question. The only conceivable explanation 
 of the gathering together of the Apostles 
 as the nucleus of the Christian Church is that 
 Christ was actually alive and in communion 
 with His friends. There is nothing else that 
 can possibly account for that fact ; and if that 
 fact is unaccountable, then history from that 
 day to this is unaccountable. Unless we are 
 prepared to give up all efforts to think scien- 
 tifically and to find causes for events, we must 
 see that what these people believed was that 
 Christ was in communion wdth them again as 
 really as He had ever been; and this belief 
 could only arise if the fact w^ere so. And then 
 we go to the documents with that thought 
 in our minds. First we have St Paul's 
 evidence : the list of appearances given in 
 I. Cor. XV. is plainly a traditional official list, 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 79 
 
 — an oificial list already extant and accepted 
 by 56 A.D. at the latest. Then we pass on to 
 the Gospels. Well, of course I know that 
 anybody who likes can show that it is difficult, 
 perhaps impossible, to bring out any consistent 
 chronology in the Gospel-records of this period. 
 But why rationalistically minded folk should 
 suppose that in a moment of almost intolerable 
 joy people are going to have an exact memory 
 for dates and places I cannot conceive. Of 
 course there are inconsistences in the storv; 
 it would be monstrous to demand anything 
 else ; but what stands out all through is that 
 time and again they were convinced of the 
 presence of the Lord amongst them as they 
 cannot have been convinced unless He was 
 there. And then, following upon that, there 
 is the story of the empty tomb and the 
 risen Body. It all fits in ; it all harmonises. 
 We may find it difficult to understand it, or 
 to picture to ourselves exactly what it was 
 that happened. I do not know why we 
 should very much wish to do so ; for religious 
 purposes, what matters is that the Lord was 
 alive. As far as I can see it does not matter 
 very much what became of Ilis Body. T do 
 
80 THE FAITH 
 
 not doubt that His Body was in some way 
 risen and glorified ; but if anybody finds this 
 incredible, that need not prevent him from 
 believing in the reality of the Lord's Resur- 
 rection. That the Lord was alive seems to 
 me certain. 
 
 There then is our basis historically. \Ye 
 have the first and third Gospels within the 
 first century. We have them already taking 
 St. Mark and another document as authorities, 
 and when we examine St. Mark and that 
 other document we find that St. Mark brings 
 us back to the memory of St. Peter himself ; 
 and the other document goes back to the 
 primitive Church and the beginning of all 
 things ; the evidence is as good as can possibly 
 be desired. Sometimes it is asked why there 
 are not more records or allusions bearing upon 
 these documents in early Christian literature ? 
 Chiefiy because there is hardly any such 
 literature. Just think of how much of it 
 there is — the letters of St. Ignatius, one letter 
 of St. Polycarp, one of St. Clement of Rome, 
 the spurious Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd 
 of Hernias and the Didache — and they are all 
 of them documents in which it would be 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 81 
 
 impossible that there should be many allusions 
 to contemporary Christian literature ; and yet, 
 even there, we find quotations and references, 
 though, of course, not very many. The 
 objection, then, that is raised to these early 
 dates for the authoritative documents, seems 
 quite negligible, and the early date itself seems 
 to be the only one that is the least compatible 
 with the facts. 
 
 And so we have all the facts we require 
 established, and we are able to say confidently 
 that the efforts to explain the story of Christ 
 by any other means than the theory of the 
 Church about its own origin in His historic 
 Person are all of them thoroughly unscientific. 
 They try to account for facts by causes which 
 will not account for them. They try to 
 account for the Church by principles which in 
 no way explain its power in the world even 
 if they explain its bare existence ; and 
 particularly with reference to the Resurrection 
 they have to suppose hallucination on the part 
 of the disciples in circumstances where 
 hallucination is absolutely out of the question. 
 To refer so great a factor in human history as 
 the Church to an event which cannot possibly 
 
 G 
 
82 THE FAITH 
 
 have occurred is, to say the least of it, 
 unscientific. 
 
 We have said nothing about the character 
 of our Lord's teaching, or about Ilis own 
 realisation of it, beyond pointing to the fact 
 that He did realise His own ideal. To all of 
 that we shall come next time ; and we shall 
 find that, if we agree, as we must agree, that 
 the Spirit of the Universe is for us expressed 
 in human language in the Person of Christ 
 and that the secret of life is there revealed and 
 made manifest, this will- involve for us no mere 
 basking in the sunshine of Divine favour, but 
 rather our entrance into the spirit of a life whose 
 historic occurrence is amply demonstrated, 
 whose moral and spiritual pre-eminence consists 
 in the completeness of self-sacrifice, and whoae 
 inspiration for those who try to imitate it is 
 without parallel in human experience. 
 
LECTUEE IV 
 
 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 
 
 In the last lecture we established, if I carried 
 you with me, the fact of Christ. To-day we 
 are to consider the nature and significance of 
 that fact ; and the difficulties, which have beset 
 us hitherto in this course of lectures, become 
 in this connection almost overwhelmino-. In 
 the first place there is the difficulty that 
 people approach the subject from very different 
 points of view ; and we must agree, that, if 
 Christ is what the Church has always claimed 
 that lie is, no one individual and no group 
 of individuals can possibJy exhaust His 
 significance. The unsearchable riches of 
 Christ are not to be possessed by any one 
 man ; they belong to the Church. For that 
 reason it is very likely to appear to many 
 that anyone w^ho speaks on this subject from 
 
 83 
 
84 THE FAITH 
 
 a particular point of view is beginning 
 altogether at the wrong end. And another 
 difficulty is that our interest in the subject 
 is due to its sanctity ; and thus we are in- 
 volved in the problem, to what extent we 
 should allow the emotion of reverence to 
 colour our treatment. There will be some, 
 to whom it will appear that the influence 
 of that emotion can only obscure the clear 
 process of the intellect : and there will be 
 others to whom a purely intellectual treat- 
 ment seems profane. 
 
 Perhaps, after all, the subject itself will 
 carrv us throuo^h ; for our task is to under- 
 stand the Lord, so far as may be in a 
 single hour, as He appeared to tlie people 
 among w^hom He lived ; we are to go back, 
 if that may be, behind all the theology, 
 behind our own worship and adoration, to the 
 historical fact, and try to see what the out- 
 w^ard form of the Lord's life w^as. It was 
 through appreciating that outward manifest- 
 ation that the first disciples reached their 
 theological position and commenced their life- 
 lon2f devotion. And for us, too, it cannot 
 
 o 
 
 be anything but healthy to oro back to that 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 85 
 
 basal fact and study it, if we can, for a time 
 apart from the theological significance that 
 we attach to it ; and then come again to the 
 question : What is the meaning and value 
 of the fact that we have apprehended ? For 
 there is a great danger that our confession 
 of our own limitations will end, in effect, 
 by imposing upon the Lord our own con- 
 ceptions of what lie should be. We all agree 
 that we shall not find the whole truth about 
 Him for ourselves, and that other men may 
 have found parts of the truth which seem 
 hidden from us ; but the moment that ad- 
 mission is made, there is great danger that we 
 shall be content simply to set up our own 
 ideal independently and read it into the life 
 of Christ. We must go back to the actual 
 historical fact and find out how the Lord 
 appeared among men, and start from there. 
 
 And first I would call attention to the 
 unparalleled completeness of His religious life. 
 There are two strands in our religious life 
 which are very rarely combined, in any degree 
 of fulness, in the same person ; they seem to 
 be almost incompatible with each other 
 There is the ecstatic, fervid type which 
 
96 THE FAITH 
 
 appears in the prophet, who is appallingly 
 aware of the importance of moral choice, and 
 who is aware, with a vividness that is nearly 
 always painful, of the presence of God and of 
 His purity and holiness. In almost all the 
 great mystics we find that curious combination 
 of a longing for a return of the mystical 
 experience with a memory that whenever it 
 has come it has been more intensely painful 
 than anything else ; but it is upon the stormy 
 immediacy of their experience that I would 
 lay stress. That is one type, the ecstatic type. 
 On the other side we have the quiet, calm 
 confidence of firmly established faith, when a 
 man fears nothing because he has put his 
 trust in God, and is content to leave all great 
 issues in God's hands. One of the paradoxes 
 of religion is that both these elements must 
 be present in some degree. It is vital to a 
 complete religion that it should insist upon 
 the responsibility of man before God ; and it 
 is quite equally vital that it should insist that 
 all our lives are in His hand. How those two 
 are to be reconciled is one of the great 
 problems of religion of which perhaps I may 
 say something in the last lecture ; but wc 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 87 
 
 cannot deal with it now. What we have to 
 observe is that in all human religion one or 
 other of these tendencies predominates, and it 
 is quite clear to which type any given man 
 belonsrs. In the case of our Lord there is 
 endless dispute as to which type can claim 
 Him. Various writers have brought out 
 different sides. Perhaps our first impression 
 is that indicated by Harnack when he says 
 that the " most astonishing and greatest fact 
 about Him" is that "entrusted with the 
 greatest of all missions, His eye and ear are 
 open to every impression of the life around 
 Him — a proof of intense calm and absolute 
 certainty." ^ He w^atches the sower as he sows 
 his seed : He observes the beauty of the 
 lilies ; He calls the children to Him in the 
 street. That is one side ; and it is quite true ; 
 His confidence in the power of God is 
 absolute, — not one sparrow falls on the ground 
 without the Father. ^ But there is another 
 side ; the moment after the baptism, that is, 
 so far as we can tell, the moment that He 
 became convinced of His own Messiahship, 
 the Spirit drove Him into the wilderness 
 
 » Whai 18 Chriatianity ? p. 36. ' Mt. x. 29, 
 
88 THE FAITH 
 
 to be tempted of the devil.^ And it was 
 possible for men to say that He was in 
 league w^ith Beelzebub ; ^ and His own 
 relatives, too, said, — ** He is beside Himself." * 
 There is all the directness and vividness of the 
 ecstatic type of religious experience; both types 
 are here in absolute fulness. Writers of the 
 one temperament emphasise His calm, and 
 His repose ; writers of another temperament 
 emphasise the prophetic and ecstatic nature of 
 the ministry. Both are there in full develop- 
 ment ; and yet, surely it is true to say that the 
 element of confidence is the stronn^er ; that He 
 never for one moment in all those times of 
 storm and stress doubted the omnipotence or 
 the love of the Father ; that He emerges even 
 from the Agony in the Garden prepared for 
 the scene before Caiaphas and Pilate. 
 
 We may take another instance. Some 
 writers exalt Him as wholly different from 
 other men ; some wish to insist that He was 
 just as other men, going about among them, 
 a man among men. Are not both true ? He 
 was the friend of ordinary people. He was 
 the welcome guest at a wedding feast ; He was 
 no stern ascetic. It was a possible libel to 
 
 > Mk. i. 12 ; Mt. iv. 1. « Mk. iii. 22. ' Mk. iii. 21. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 89 
 
 say that He was a gluttonous man and a wine- 
 bibber.^ And yet, all through, He is abso- 
 lutely alone. The disciples never understood 
 Him until after He was withdrawn. At the 
 end they all forsook Him and fled : and we 
 see Him in His absolute loneliness as He bears 
 the Cross. But that loneliness is only the 
 climax of the whole life from the beginning ; 
 He is in spirit quite alone ; He alone knows 
 the secret of His mission. 
 
 Now there is one problem which we must 
 consider, because I think it is the problem 
 which has caused most trouble to careful 
 students of the Gospel story in recent times ; 
 I mean the question that concerns our Lord's 
 apocalyptic utterances about His own Second 
 Coming. Certainly the Early Church expected 
 His return almost immediately, of that there 
 is no doubt ; and it is recorded that He spoke 
 of His own return as something immediately 
 about to happen. It used to be the fashion to 
 attribute all this to the misunderstanding of 
 the disciples, to suppose that they had mis- 
 represented the Lord's sayings. Lately the ten- 
 dency has rather been to accept these sayings 
 as genuine ; and even Dr. Sanday, certainly a 
 
 1 Mt. xi. 19. 
 
90 THE FAITH 
 
 cautious, and certainly an orthodox writer, has 
 used the phrase that in reading the prophecies 
 of the Lord we have *' to determine, not only 
 what the Son meant, but what the Father 
 meant, speaking through the Son." ^ That is, 
 we must be prepared to think that He was 
 mistaken as to the mode of the inauguration 
 of His Kingdom. And upon that foundation 
 has been built up a very strong attack upon 
 His whole ethical teaching ; it is pointed out 
 that, if He was expecting the end of the 
 present Dispensation almost at once. His in- 
 difference to all w^orldly goods and possessions, 
 and the ** counsels of perfection " in the Sermon 
 on the Mount may have had their root in this 
 misapprehension. And I see no way of com- 
 pletely answering that charge if we accept 
 this suggestion that He did actually expect 
 His own immediate return. Yet it is certainly 
 true that to refer all these sayings merely 
 to the misunderstanding of the disciples is 
 unscientific and uncritical. Once w^e leave 
 our sources, we can spin no end of cob-webs 
 about what we suppose the Lord to have said. 
 But there is one saying of an apocalyptic kind 
 
 ' The Lift of Christ in Recent Fcscarch, p. 118. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 91 
 
 which seems to me to give the clue to our 
 problem. When the Seventy returned and 
 reported that they had the same power which 
 the Lord Himself possessed over what in those 
 days was called possession by devils, He 
 replies, " I beheld Satan as lightning fall from 
 heaven." ^ Surely the meaning is clear. The 
 report comes that His spirit is working 
 through His disciples ; it is leavening the 
 world ; and in the beginning of the process He 
 already grasps the end ; the power which can 
 defeat the power of evil is there ; and in the 
 beginning of its work He sees the final over- 
 throw of evil : in the moment of strong excite- 
 ment His imao-ination bodies forth before Him 
 the triumph of His cause, and He says, — " I 
 beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." 
 With that clue we go on to the sayings about 
 the end " of this age." They are all connected 
 apparently with the Fall of Jerusalem. We 
 know how our Lord had yearned over Jerus- 
 alem all through His ministry. " Jerusalem, 
 Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered 
 thy children together, and ye would not." ^ 
 Jerusalem was the embodiment not only of His 
 
 1 Lk. X. 18. 2 Mk. xxiii. 37 ■ 
 
92 THE FAITH 
 
 people's hope, and at first certainly of His own 
 hope, but of everything that stood for oppo- 
 sition to His cause, for spiritual self-content- 
 ment and comfortableness and deadncss, which 
 was the real enemy He had to fight. And so, 
 as He looks at the city ^vhich thus represents 
 the whole of the opposing force, and as He sees 
 the necessity of its downfall, in the collapse of 
 that last barrier He grasps the whole triumph 
 of the Kingdom that shall follow. I think you 
 will find if you study the apocalyptic wTitings 
 generally, that they come from a type of 
 religious genius w^hich apprehends as it were 
 in a single moment what must take centuries 
 to w-ork itself out, and what is knowm by the 
 Seer to need centuries to work itself out. So 
 here the Lord sees in the vision of a moment 
 the triumph of His Kingdom ; but He knows 
 quite well that it is not coming all at once. 
 " The Kingdom of God cometh not w^ith obser- 
 vation." ^ "So is the Kingdom of God, as if 
 a man should cast seed into the ground ; and 
 should sleep, and rise night and day, and the 
 seed should spring and grow up, he know^eth 
 not how."^ There is much to show^ that in 
 
 1 Lk. xvii. 20. « Mk. iv. 27. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 93 
 
 our Lord's conception the growth of the King- 
 dom was to be gradual. It is even very likely 
 true that it was precisely this conception of the 
 growth of the Kingdom as against its sudden 
 descent from heaven which so much perplexed 
 the minds of His hearers in Galilee, excited as 
 they must have been by the apocalyptic con- 
 ception of the Messianic Kingdom of which 
 the air was then full.^ That is why the Para- 
 bles seemed to them so obscure ; ^ for the 
 "word" which "the sower" scatters is the 
 proclamation of the Kingdom ; the comparison 
 of this to a seed which may or may not grow 
 would be unintelligible to people accustomed 
 to the vivid language of apocalypse. All this 
 language of apocalypse He will use at times 
 of great crisis to emphasise the decisiveness of 
 certain events in the history of the Kingdom. 
 But at other times, when He has calmly set 
 forth the principles on w^iich it is to grow, He 
 shows that He intended that it should be, as 
 it has been, a gradual steady growth, not a 
 
 ^ A complete study of this and kindred subjects would have 
 to include a discussion of the contemporary apocalyptic 
 literature — such as 2\'ie Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, the 
 Assumption of Moses, the Ascension of Isaiah and so on. 
 
 a Mk. iv. 11, Hi. 
 
94 THE FAITH 
 
 sudden catastrophe. But only He understood 
 that. The early Church seems to have ignored 
 all those parables of slow growth and to have 
 expected sudden immediate return. They mis- 
 understood Him just as, until Pentecost, they 
 altogether misunderstood the secret of His 
 Ministry. 
 
 For what is that secret ? In any dramatic 
 story one finds the significance by looking for 
 the conflict. The first task for any critic 
 of tragedy is to find what are the opposing 
 parties in the tragic conflict. What are here 
 the opposing forces ? Christ on the one side ; 
 what on the other? Of course, we are 
 at first inclined to say, Sin ; and that is right, 
 if we mean enough by the word "sin." But 
 it does not mean that the Lord's enemies were 
 of the criminal classes. The background of 
 darkness against which the Light of the 
 World stands out in its splendour is not sin 
 as we ordinarily conceive it ; it is dead 
 religion. The great opposing force against 
 which Christ, in the days of His flesh, could 
 efl'ect little w^as the established and self- 
 satisfied religion of the time ; and once at 
 least He expressed His judgment that the 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 95 
 
 deadness of that religion was something 
 beyond the reach of the divine forgiveness. 
 What was it that had happened ? He had 
 healed a man possessed of a devil, and 
 those wdio watched asserted that He did this 
 in the power of the devil. He replies, That 
 is to suppose that the devil divides his house 
 against itself, which seems improbable : but it 
 is also to say of a plainly good thing that it is a 
 bad thing. And he adds, Say what you like 
 about Me ; " Whoso speaketh a word against 
 the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him ; " 
 but if when the very spirit of goodness is at 
 work before you, you call it evil because it 
 happens not to fit into your scheme, then 
 there really is no hope ; ** Whosoever speaketh 
 against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be 
 foro-iven him, neither in this world, neither in 
 the world to come." ^ They were not 
 peculiarly wicked people ; they were the 
 upholders of a conventional righteousness : 
 but they were contented. That is always in 
 the Gospels the one hopeless condition. The 
 Pharisee praying in the temple was no doubt 
 a very much better man than the publican. 
 
 1 Mt. xii. 22 32. 
 
96 THE FAITH 
 
 That is, in fact, the point of the parable ; he 
 really was a good man according to the 
 standards of the time ; but he was contented ; he 
 was going to stay where he was and never get 
 any better. He was content with thanking God 
 that he was not as other men are. And the 
 other man, who no doubt stood much lower in 
 the moral scale at the moment, but knew his 
 imperfections and his need of forgiveness and of 
 growth, is justified rather than the Pharisee.^ 
 So it is too in perhaps the most extra- 
 ordinary of all the stories of the Gospels, 
 when there was brought to the Lord a woman 
 taken in adultery that He might pronounce 
 judgment ; having first shamed into silence 
 the accusers. He says to the woman, " Neither 
 do I condemn thee ; go and sin no more." ^ 
 It is possible to say, " Neither do I condemn 
 thee ; " because it is also possible to say, with 
 effect, " Go and sin no more." The one thing 
 demanded is always the power to grow. 
 Growth and progress in the spiritual life is the 
 one thing Christ is always demanding ; and 
 however low the moral state of any individual 
 may be, provided that capacity for growth is 
 
 1 Lk. xviii. 9-1-i, ^ John viii. 1-11. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 97 
 
 not lost, there is always hope, hope even of 
 ultimate perfection. But however high the 
 moral state may be, if perfection is not yet 
 reached and the power of growth is gone, 
 then the imperfection is permanent and 
 salvation is impossible. 
 
 But it is not enough to learn that our Lord's 
 one demand is for the power to grow and that 
 the one deadly foe we have to meet is 
 spiritual stagnation. What is it in which He 
 requires that people shall grow? There is 
 one ceremony and one ceremony only which 
 He has commanded His disciples perpetually 
 to celebrate. Let us go back behind all the 
 theology, and all the meanings which have 
 quite rightly gathered round that ceremony, 
 to its first institution ; let us think what it 
 must have looked like to the people who were 
 there, before they began to meditate upon it, 
 and before they could find what it could 
 do for them in their own lives. In a time of 
 quite intense emotional stress — the last time 
 that the Lord was to sup with His friends — 
 He took bread and said that it was His body ; 
 and He gave thanks for it, He broke it, and 
 He gave it to them and said, — '* Do this in 
 
 H 
 
98 THE FAITH 
 
 remembrance of me." ^ He took the bread of 
 which He said it was His Body, — *' This is My 
 Body : as I treat this bread, so I treat My 
 Body " — and He gave it to them ; and said, 
 '* Do that if you want to show you remember 
 Me." Do what? The sign, no doubt. But, 
 far more important, what it signifies. The 
 demand is nothing less than this, that men 
 should take their whole human life, and break it, 
 and give it for the good of others. The quality 
 in which we are to grow is service to the point 
 of absolute devotion and complete sacrifice. 
 
 Love, and the capacity to grow in love, 
 is the whole secret. And He in His own 
 life realises His own ideal. If one takes 
 all these precepts and sets over against them 
 the life itself from its relatively happy open- 
 ing, when the people flock to Him in Galilee, 
 to the dark conclusion in the Garden, before 
 Pilate, and on the Cross, all through we feel 
 that this quality of absolute selflessness is 
 manifest in perfect completeness. It would 
 never occur to anyone to say of Christ before 
 Pilate that He was a great man ; it would 
 never occur to anyone to say that He was 
 
 1 Cor. xi. 2.3-25. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 99 
 
 noble-minded ; all these expressions, which 
 have about them some suggestion of dominance 
 and the imposition of a man's own will upon 
 others, are inappropriate. He rises superior 
 to all about Him, not because He imposes 
 His will upon them, but because He does 
 not impose His will at all, because He has 
 apparently no will of His own except to do 
 what His Mission requires. 
 
 And so, both in His teaching and in His 
 life, He is the climax of human ethics. For 
 there is no morality beyond absolute devotion 
 to the public good. That is the climax of 
 morality ; you cannot go further. He taught 
 it and He practised it. And He is the 
 perfection also of human religion, for not 
 only does He combine together all the strands 
 that can be woven together in the religious 
 life, but also His wdll is in perfect dependence 
 upon the will of God. In His experience 
 prayer w^as always answered ; and it is His 
 promise that w^hatsoever w^e ask in His name, 
 in His spirit, w^ill be answ^ered, for it will be 
 the will of God. There is the fact ; there at 
 least are just a few, a very few, of the leading 
 features of that great fact. 
 
 H 2 
 
100 THE FAITH 
 
 How are we to understand it ? We will 
 not attempt to-day either to grasp more fully 
 than before a theological system or (still less) 
 to formulate a new one. Let us rather go 
 back to a document which we were careful 
 last time not to consider, the Fourth Gospel. 
 Now there is a great dispute about the 
 question who wrote the Fourth Gospel. 
 I cannot help thinking that it does not very 
 much matter. The writer had either been 
 present at the scenes which he records, as I 
 believe, or else He was absolutely steeped in 
 the record of that Life. In either case He is 
 finding in that story the manifestation of the 
 divine Christ with whom he is in daily 
 communion. It is perfectly clear, for 
 instance, that the style of the discourses 
 belongs to the writer and not to our Lord. If 
 the Lord spoke as He speaks in the Synoptic 
 Gospels, then He did not speak as He speaks 
 in the Gospel of St. John. It is quite clear 
 also, as the writer says himself, that he 
 selects episodes specially adapted to bring out 
 the lessons which He wishes to teach. ^ Here 
 then we have a writer who is not merely 
 
 » John XX. 30-31. 
 
AND iMODERN THOUGHT 101 
 
 recording what he remembers, or has heard, of 
 the Lord's life, but is exhibiting the identity 
 between the historic Christ and the spiritual 
 Christ of religious communion. And thus the 
 Gospel fulfils what would otherwise be a 
 great need in the New Testament. In the 
 Synoptists w^e have the outward facts recorded; 
 in St. Paul's Epistles we have the theory of 
 those facts gradually evolved by one who 
 perhaps had never seen the Lord, who stood 
 at a little distance, who looked at the great 
 Fact and tried to estimate its value and 
 meaning. But so the Lord had become rather 
 remote. The risen, glorified Christ of St. 
 Paul's Epistles, if taken alone and apart from 
 the Gospel narrative, would not have the 
 intimacy of human appeal which we need. 
 In St. John we have one who writes with the 
 whole w^ealth of Pauline meditation at his 
 disposal, and who then reveals the absolute 
 identity of that human Figure in Palestine 
 with the divine SjDirit known in the 
 communion of the w^orshipper. 
 
 And this makes the Gospel surely not 
 less valuable, but more so. It is the 
 inspired comment on the old story, the 
 
102 THE FAITH 
 
 comment of one who can fitly be represented 
 as saying, 
 
 " To me that story, ay, that life and death 
 
 Of which I wrote, It was, to me, it is. 
 
 Is here and now ; I apprehend nought else." ^ 
 
 How does he set about the great task ? He 
 begins with a conception ahnost universally 
 accepted at the time, just as it is almost 
 universally accepted now, although its name 
 is now^ generally different, — the conception of 
 the divine Word or Logos. Everyone at any 
 rate understood what was meant by the 
 prologue of St. John's Gospel ; it was common 
 property. The theory had been elaborated by 
 the Stoics and had been combined with 
 Jewish speculation by Philo. Everyone 
 w^ould understand it : and it would serve 
 not only to bring the Gospel into relation 
 with the modes of thought habitual to the 
 people for whom it is written, but it would 
 also serve to bring out the full significance of 
 that life, or at any rate more of the signifi- 
 cance than previous attempts had been able 
 to do. It was of no use to say to a Gentile 
 
 1 Browning, A Death in the Desert. (The best commentary on 
 St. John's Gosp*-» i 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 103 
 
 community that the Messiah was come ; they 
 had not been brought up to expect any Messiah 
 to come ; it would be an announcement wholly 
 without interest for them. But to say that 
 the indwelling principle of the world, which 
 governs everything, has been made manifest 
 in a single Life is to say something whose 
 importance is beyond all parallel. They 
 believed, as we believe, that the world is a 
 single system governed by a single principle ; 
 and there is nothing which matters so much 
 as to know the character of that principle. 
 St. John says that this principle, the Logos, 
 by whom all things were made, and without 
 whom was not anything made which was made, 
 became flesh in Christ. AVe are to see there 
 the character of the principle or spirit which 
 made the world and holds it in being, 
 — nothincr less than that ; and he constructs 
 his narrative in such a way as to bring out 
 
 m 
 
 this character. 
 
 The Gospel falls of itself into five sections. 
 It is a kind of spiritual drama in five acts. 
 The first section consists of the first four 
 chapters. There is the Prologue; and then 
 there is the introduction of Christ to four 
 
104 THE FAITH 
 
 different types of persons. First to the fore- 
 runner, the predecessor, who recognises and 
 yields before his greater Follower. Secondly 
 to the group of disciples who follow because 
 of what another, namely John the Baptist, 
 tells them ; and then to another group of 
 disciples who follow because the Lord calls 
 them Himself ; as that exhausts the ways in 
 which men can come to the Lord there is no 
 need to give the call of any other disciples. 
 Then we have the introduction to Nicodemus, 
 the religious leader who wished to come by 
 night and in secret, spying out the new move- 
 ment, and is very directly told that unless he 
 is moved by the inscrutable influence of the 
 Spirit to join it openly he can never enter into 
 its triumph : " Except a man be born again 
 he cannot see the Kingdom of God." Lastly 
 there is the simple woman of Samaria, to 
 whom the truth is quite plainly told, and by 
 whom it is accepted. There you have typical 
 introductions. 
 
 All this is followed by a long controversy 
 between the Lord and the Jews, represented 
 in this Gospel in sharp antagonism as the 
 forces of light and darkness. This section 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 105 
 
 occupies chapters V to XII. Very steadily 
 the gulf widens ; the controversy becomes 
 more and more acute, until at the last moment, 
 when the breach is complete, seeing no doubt 
 a strange significance in the fact, St. John 
 reports the advent of those first Greeks who 
 came to see the Lord, the first fruits of the 
 Gentile world : and the section culminates 
 with a very definite proclamation of the 
 central principle of the Gospel; " Except a corn 
 of wheat fall into the ground, and die, it abideth 
 alone ; but if it die it brinoreth forth much 
 fruit. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, 
 will draw all men unto Me." ^ 
 
 The next section, the section most familiar 
 to Christian readers, occupies chapters XIII 
 to XVII ; here the Lord is alone with 
 Plis friends, and prepares them for the crisis 
 that is to follow. Then there are two very 
 short sections ; first chapters XVIII and XIX, 
 which tell of the apparent triumph of the forces 
 of darkness, and then chapter XX, which 
 records the actual triumph of the Lord. Chapter 
 XXI is, no doubt, an epilogue. 
 
 Scattered through this story the evangelist 
 
 ^ John xii. 24, 32. 
 
106 THE FAITH 
 
 records seven miracles representing seven great 
 stages of the spiritual life/ (l) There is the 
 changing water into wine : the change which 
 Christ will bring about in our spiritual con- 
 dition is as the change from water to wine. 
 (2) The healing of the nobleman's son : the 
 absolute necessity of faith, without which we 
 cannot receive blessing. (3) The liealing of the 
 impotent man : the restoration of the powers 
 which we lost in the wasted years before our 
 contact with the Lord. (4) The feeding of 
 the five thousand : Christ the sustenance of 
 all our life. (5) The walking on the water, 
 with the incident, mentioned only by St. John, 
 that the moment He reached the boat they 
 were at the land : Christ the unseen Guide in 
 all our troubles. (6) The healing of the man 
 born blind : Christ the source of light, so that 
 we no longer need external guidance. (7) The 
 raising of Lazarus : Christ the source of all 
 our life. And this interpretation of the 
 miracles is not fanciful, because to many 
 of the miracles there is appended a long 
 discourse bringiug out their spiritual meaning. 
 
 1 John, ii. 1-11 ; iv 46-54 ; v. 1-9 ; vi. 1-14 ; vi. 16-21 ; 
 ix. 1-7 ; xi. 1-46. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 107 
 
 There are some quite definite points that 
 emerge in the Gospel to which I would like 
 to call attention. It is pre-eminently the 
 Gospel of Divine Immanence. It begins 
 with the conception of the immanence in the 
 world of a principle, the Logos, or Word ; it 
 is the manifestation of the indwellino^ God. 
 But all through the Incarnate Word refers to 
 *'Him that sent Me" as some one above and 
 beyond Himself. And that is a step that we 
 must take. We found in the first lecture 
 that we cannot in the last resort understand 
 the world at all, except by regarding it as 
 the expression of a purpose, which must be 
 rooted in a Will. To speak about an immanent 
 purpose is very good sense ; but to speak 
 about a purpose behind which there is no 
 Will is nonsense ; and to speak about an 
 immanent will is nonsense. It is the purpose, 
 the meaning and thought of God, that is 
 immanent, not God Himself. He is not 
 limited to the world that He has made ; He is 
 beyond it, the source and ground of it all, 
 but not it. Just as you may say that in 
 Shakespeare's work his thoughts and feelings 
 are immanent ; you find them there in the 
 
108 THE FAITH 
 
 book ; but you don't find Shakespeare, the 
 living, thinking, acting man, in the book. 
 You have to infer the kind of being that he 
 was from what he wrote ; he himself is not 
 there ; his thoughts are there. And so we 
 must follow St. John very carefully ; for, in 
 our interest in insisting upon the divine 
 immanence, we are in danger of forgetting 
 that God is a Spirit who makes the world, 
 upon whose will it depends, but who is not 
 the sum total of its natural laws. 
 
 One might say a good deal about the 
 treatment in this Gospel of the problem of 
 evil ; but as that problem is to occupy us next 
 time I shall pass it by. But something must 
 be said about the relation here shown between 
 Christ and the Spirit. St John keeps the 
 two sides of this question both fully before 
 us. Only through Christ can the Spirit come ; 
 " There was not yet Spirit, because that Jesus 
 was not yet glorified " ; ^ only through Him, 
 only through His historic Life, can the Spirit 
 come. But also the work of that historic 
 Life is not complete for us so long as it 
 remains a mere historic event. The Spirit 
 
 ^ John vii. 39 (see Greek and discussion of reading). 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 109 
 
 that was in Christ must become through Him 
 the Spirit in us. ** It is expedient for you 
 that I go away : for if I go not away, the 
 Comforter will not come unto you ; but if I 
 depart I will send Him unto you." ^ The 
 historic fact is the only means by which the 
 Spirit can be brought ; it exists in order to 
 bring the Spirit and must never be isolated 
 from the gift of the Spirit which follows. 
 So we find all the post-Resurrection appear- 
 ances of this Gospel emphasize the need of 
 turning from the historic to the spiritual. 
 There is the appearance to Mary at the tomb. 
 '* Cling not to Me " (as it should be trans- 
 lated), " for I am not yet ascended " ; it is not 
 to the historic finite Christ that we are to 
 cling, but to the glorified Christ of spiritual 
 experience. There is the appearance to the 
 ten in the Upper Chamber when *' He breathed 
 on them and saith unto them, Receive ye the 
 Holy Spirit " ; the Spirit of His life is to be, 
 as it were, the breath of their lives. And 
 then there is the appearance to Thomas, 
 supplying him with the external evidence 
 that he needed, but leading to the words, 
 
 John xvi. 7. 
 
110 THE FAITH 
 
 " Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet 
 have believed." This spirit has to become 
 the spirit of our life ; and only so far as it 
 does so, according to this Gospel, is the work 
 of Christ complete.^ 
 
 What then is this Spirit ? We have arrived 
 at the point to which our consideration of the 
 fact of Christ led us, that He is the mani- 
 festation of absolute human morality and 
 religion ; and because He is that, St. John 
 tells us He is the ex^^ression in human lan- 
 guage of absolute Godhead : His character 
 reveals the character of God. " He that hath 
 seen Me hath seen the Father." ^ So then, 
 we shall learn from Him what is the real type 
 of human life for us to follow ; and what is 
 the divine life into which we are to enter 
 through His life. The divine life is the 
 Christ life ; Heaven is the Cross. That, I 
 would almost say, is the central thought of 
 the whole of this Gospel. " We beheld His 
 glory " ; ^ all through what is being revealed 
 is the glory of the Son of God. But the 
 emphasis on the term " glory " becomes more 
 
 1 John XX. 11-18 ; 19-23 ; 26-29. Chapter xxi. is not part 
 of the original sclieme of the Gospel. 
 ^ John xiv. 9. ' John L 14. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 111 
 
 and more complete as the Passion approaches ; 
 and becomes greatest just at the moment 
 when our Lord is dedicating Himself to the 
 last Sacrifice. He opens the prayer of self- 
 consecration to that sacrifice with the words, 
 " Father, the hour is come ; glorify Thy Son, 
 that Thy Son also may glorify Thee. ... I 
 have glorified Thee on the earth ; I have 
 finished the w^ork which Thou gavest me to 
 do. And now, Father, glorify Thou Me 
 with Thine own self with the glory which 
 I had with Thee before the world was." ^ 
 The eternal glory is to be fully manifested 
 when the self-surrender and the self-sacrifice 
 is complete. The divine life, to which we are 
 called through Christ, is not then a life of 
 enjoyment purchased by temporary sacrifice ; 
 it is the sacrifice ; and there is no reward 
 beyond except the triumph of the cause for 
 which the man is sacrificed. There is no 
 appeal to human selfishness in the Christian 
 doctrine of the divine reward for virtue ; for 
 the reward is simply the demand for further 
 sacrifice. There may come a time when 
 absolute self-surrender brings no pain, but 
 
 1 John xvii. 1. 4, 5 : cf. xii. 23, 24. 
 
112 THE FAITH 
 
 only the in tensest joy, such as love brings 
 when it is returned ; meanwhile the surrender 
 and the sacrifice itself is realised as the 
 greatest treasure in the world. The Divine 
 Life is the Christ Life ; Heaven is the Cross. 
 
 The further implications of this must be 
 left for another lecture ; but in connection 
 with it we go back to the historic Christ and 
 understand Him perhaps more fully. We 
 like, it may be, to think of Him as saying, 
 " Come unto Me all ye that labour and are 
 heavy laden and I will give you rest." ^ Yes 
 if we are heavy laden, if we have taken upon 
 ourselves the burden of the world's misery 
 and sin, then the promise is for us that the 
 yoke shall be easy and the burden light. 
 But if not, then there is another saying of 
 Christ recorded in the Synoptic Gospels, 
 which perhaps has more applicability. St. 
 Peter had confessed that He was the Messiah ; 
 and one of the things which was expected of the 
 Messiah w^as that he should lead a triumphal 
 procession into Jerusalem, that He might take 
 possession of the throne of His father David. 
 And He says, There will be a Messianic 
 
 1 Mt. xi. 28. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 113 
 
 ■)cession, but it will not be the kind of 
 g you expect. What it will look like 
 irocession of condemned criminals. " If 
 an will come after Me, let him ignore 
 I .xiiself and take up his cross and follow Me." ^ 
 Wholesale crucifixions were not so very 
 uncommon at that time ; the picture would 
 have been vivid enough, each man carrying 
 his own gallows to the place of execution. 
 
 That is the demand. The fact and the 
 interpretation tally. If Christ was what St. 
 John tells us, the manifestation of the divine 
 Word, then He has the right to make that 
 claim upon us ; not otherwise. And if it has 
 been found, as it has been found over and 
 over again, that in experience the people 
 who answer the demand receive the promise, 
 then the historic Christ must be the Christ of 
 St. John's theology. 
 
 Mk. viii. 34. 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 THE ATONEMENT AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 We have considered the Personality who is 
 in every sense the pivot of the Christian faith 
 and the Christian philosophy ; but we have to 
 2:0 further in order to understand that Person- 
 ality, if we may, at least in some degree, not 
 only in Himself but in His relation to the 
 whole of our experience. The field is obvi- 
 ously far too wide to be covered in one 
 lecture, but it is nothing short of this which 
 the doctrine of the Atonement really under- 
 takes. And the doctrine of the Atonement 
 is absolutely central, in the sense that what 
 we all of us need of our religion is primarily 
 that it should throw some light upon the 
 mystery of Evil. 
 
 When we say that we hope in some degree 
 to understand what it is that the historic life 
 
 114 
 
THE FAITH 115 
 
 of Christ stands for, not only in our own 
 experience but in the history of the world, we 
 mean that we hope to see it in relation to all 
 other facts. That is all one can ever mean by 
 understanding ; but such understanding is, 
 I think, peculiarly necessary at the present 
 moment, because there is a tendency in some 
 places to suggest that we can do very well 
 without understanding our religion at all, 
 seeing that it is a great spiritual experience 
 which comes upon men, which is its own 
 evidence, and which is only spoilt by any 
 attempt to make it intelligible. It must be 
 taken, we are told, as the breaking in upon 
 the world of some Power not otherwise to be 
 discovered in the world, a Power from which 
 we hope for our own and for the world's 
 Redemption ; but if it is thus alien from the 
 normal process of the world, it is impossible, 
 on the face of it, to relate it to the other facts 
 of the world ; it must be taken apart from 
 them altogether as something unique and 
 it is almost a profanity to suggest that it can 
 be intelligible at all. 
 
 Now the motive which prompts such a 
 contention we must all respect, for it is the 
 
 I 2 
 
116 THE FAITH 
 
 motive of reverence, and of fear lest in our 
 clumsy hands the beauty of the truth should 
 suffer. And yet when we come to the prob- 
 lem of Evil, the most real of all problems, 
 no one is content with dreams ; everyone 
 insists that what is believed must be estab- 
 lished. It is not enough to say, " I have felt 
 it ; and I am sure that what I have felt is 
 true." The man who is really at grips with 
 evil, whether in his own life or in the world, 
 will require some further assurance than 
 another individual's ecstatic feelings. We 
 must have an intelligible scheme of salvation ; 
 we must have it, because precisely those 
 people who most need the saving force are 
 unable to receive it unless it is in some degree 
 intelligible. There is this permanent paradox 
 about evil, that it is itself the chief obstacle, 
 intellectually, to a belief in God, and yet it 
 constitutes the chief motive for desiring God. 
 We may have noticed how differently people 
 were affected by the earthquake at Messina. 
 Some people (mostly, I am inclined to 
 suspect, reading about it in their arm-chairs, 
 and writing about it in well-appointed studies) 
 urged in the Spectator and other eminently 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 117 
 
 respectable journals, that this catastrophe 
 made it very difficult to believe in God. But 
 you will find other people who say that, 
 in face of such a fact, life is unbearable 
 without God. And then one begins to realise 
 that, though a religion may be a poor thing, 
 which only comes into operation in so far as 
 we are depressed or overcome by the evil of 
 the world, yet it is true that the evil in the 
 world is the main force which drives us back 
 upon God, if God there be. So we have this 
 great paradox : the same fact which seems at 
 first sight irresistible evidence against the 
 existence of God, is itself the chief cause of 
 our demand for the existence of God. 
 
 Let us, then, try to consider in the first 
 place a perfectly general form of the prob- 
 lem. As far as the argument is concerned 
 the earthquake at Messina is no more difficult 
 than an ordinary headache. Why is there 
 any evil in the world at all ? That is the 
 problem ; and we have already seen in our 
 first lecture that Why? means, For what 
 purpose ? The problem of evil is always a 
 problem in terms of purpose. No one is 
 much interested in finding out how it came 
 
118 THE FAITH 
 
 here, as a matter of historical fact ; that does 
 not much matter. The problem is, what is it 
 doing here ? What is it for ? Why does God 
 permit it ? Or, if God is omnipotent, in 
 which case permission and creation are the 
 same, why did God create it ? While we are 
 sitting at our ease it generally seems to us 
 that the world would be very much better if 
 all evil were abolished, and indeed had never 
 existed. But w^ould it ? Which are our own 
 best days, — the days when we have nothing 
 to perplex us, or trouble us ? or the days 
 when, at considerable cost to ourselves, we 
 have made some real effort against the evil 
 w^hich afflicted either ourselves or other people ? 
 Surely the latter. Surely we know that one 
 of the best of the good things in life is victory 
 and particularly moral victory. But to de- 
 mand victory without an antagonist is to 
 demand something with no meaning. If, then, 
 goedness is to exist up to the limit of what 
 even we can understand, there must at least 
 be an antagonist to be overcome. If you take 
 all the evil out of the world you will remove 
 the possibility of the best thing in life. That 
 does not mean that evil is good. What one 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 119 
 
 means by calling a thing good is that the 
 spirit rests permanently content with it for its 
 own sake. Evil is precisely that with which 
 no spirit can rest content ; and yet it is the 
 condition, not the accidental but the essential 
 condition, of what is in and for itself the best 
 thing in life, namely moral victory. 
 
 That, of course, is a perfectly general treat- 
 ment of the subject, which does not for a mo- 
 ment touch any particular case ; it only tells 
 us in general terms that evil at least may be 
 conducive to a total excellence of the world 
 greater than is possible or conceivable without 
 the existence of evil. It also tells us that the 
 actual solution of the problem of evil in any 
 particular case is to be found by destroying 
 that evil and wringing out of it the victory of 
 which it is the possible condition : so that in 
 the end our solution of the actual evil in the 
 world is not to be found by sitting down and 
 thinking, but by searching out all the evil we 
 can find and fighting it ; only when it is 
 beaten, does it become an element in the total 
 good of the world. And this is true even of 
 evils that are past : for it is not the case, when 
 you are speaking of values, that the past is 
 
120 THE FAITH 
 
 unalterable. The facts of the past may be 
 unalterable ; its meaning and value is not. 
 If its meaning were unalterable, atonement 
 would be impossible. But just consider two 
 plays, each in three acts, one passing from 
 gloom through a neutral state to joy, and the 
 other reversing the process ; it is not the case 
 that the total emotional value of those two 
 plays is identical because the average emo- 
 tional value of the three acts is identical. 
 On the contrary, the former is supremely 
 exhilarating (more so than a play which is 
 joyous throughout), and the latter supremely 
 depressing (more so than a play which is 
 gloomy throughout). So it may be in the 
 history of the world. If there is any ground 
 discoverable for saying that the history of the 
 world is really a continuous and progressive 
 moral victory, then it will appear true that all 
 the evil, bad as it is, and precisely because it 
 is so bad, is an element in the total goodness 
 of the whole • we shall only realise that good- 
 ness in so far as we side with the forces that 
 are triumphing over the evil, in so far as we 
 assist in the victory. But if victory is good, 
 and if victorious spiritual excellence is some- 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 121 
 
 thing better than an untroubled innocence, 
 then, granted that the evil is overcome, it is 
 better that it should first exist. 
 
 And now let us apply this in some detail, 
 if we may. First of all we must notice that 
 there are three main forms of evil — intellectual 
 evil which we call Error, emotional evil which 
 we call Pain, and moral evil which we call 
 Sin. The problem of Error I must ask you to 
 excuse me from treating, because it would 
 take us very far away from the main theme of 
 these lectures. Obviously, if what we say is 
 true, it must be applicable to the problem of 
 Error ; but the application is not possible here 
 and now. 
 
 For Pain there have been three types of 
 consolation, and, so far as I know, three only. 
 There is the Stoic type (still, I suppose, 
 though I speak in great ignorance, the 
 dominant attitude of the Mahomedan world), 
 which bids us rise superior to it : "It is the 
 will of God ; to the wise these things are 
 nugatory." But that does not help us, if we 
 are not wise ; and I think it is the case that 
 nearly all the great Stoics were people in 
 comfortable circumstances. There is also the 
 
122 THE FAITH 
 
 Epicurean answer, wliich is in essence much 
 the same as the answer of most of the great 
 religions of the East : "It is but for a time ; 
 soon we fall asleep in the unending slumber." 
 That is consolation of a sort. And there is 
 one other answer : *' Christ also suffered " ; 
 and that, I venture to suggest, with the 
 Christian interpretation of Christ, is a real 
 and even adequate solution. If it is true 
 that Christ is the manifestation of the divine 
 Life, then it is also true that in our sufferings 
 we are entering into the secret of the divine 
 life, provided we bear them in His Spirit. And 
 does not that as a matter of fact satisfy us ? 
 
 There are two ways, in which, it seems to 
 me, pain or suffering is justified as an element 
 in a world for which we claim that it represents 
 the purpose of an omnipotent and all-loving 
 God : in the first place it is surely true that, 
 so far as suffering meets with real sympathy 
 (and if God is the father of Jesus Christ, all 
 suffering finds real sympathy in Him), it has 
 become a positive gain both to the sufferer 
 and to the sympathiser. It is not easy to 
 argue such a question ; people think so or 
 they do not. One cannot ever argue about 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 123 
 
 questions of value ; but I will only ask that 
 we should try to think of these subjects 
 with our imaginations alive. For, of course, 
 the moment our imaginations are slack, the 
 moment we begin to talk prose, we lose sight 
 altogether of the real fact and only think how 
 disagreeable pain is. Of course, it is dis- 
 agreeable ; that is why we call it pain. But 
 are we going to say that all things that are 
 disagreeable are bad ? I do not think that 
 would have been the attitude, or is the 
 attitude, of any martyr who is a real martyr. 
 They *' rejoiced that they were counted 
 worthy to suffer." ^ St. Paul rejoiced that 
 he was able *' to fill up that which is behind 
 of the afflictions of Christ." ^ There is no 
 suggestion that it would be better if the 
 suffering could be avoided. Suffering must 
 not be sought for its own sake, for it is an 
 evil ; but if it comes in the course of a life's 
 devotion to some great cause, the true devotee 
 will welcome it. This is the second justi- 
 fication of Pain, its value when gladly endured 
 for a worthy cause. 
 
 But I must hurry on to the crucial point. 
 
 1 Acts V. 41. 2 Col. i. 24. 
 
124 THE FAITH 
 
 How can sin be part of a perfect whole 
 planned by Almighty God ? And how can 
 sin itself ever be overcome and done away ? 
 Is it not a vital flaw in the world ? 
 
 Now, of course, if you take the world as it 
 is at the present moment and stop there, and 
 do not consider at all what is to come out of 
 it, then the evil in it is a vital flaw ; the 
 world as it exists is very largely bad ; and if 
 its present condition is all that can ever be, 
 then the problem of evil is insoluble. But 
 then too either God is not omnipotent or He 
 is not good. But what do we mean by sin ? 
 Always, surely, in the last resort, self-will. 
 All the actions which under certain circum- 
 stances are sinful may under other circum- 
 stances be right : the impulses which prompt 
 them have their place in the whole economy 
 of human nature. Sin is the self-assertion, 
 either of a part of a man's nature against the 
 whole, or of a single member of the human 
 family against the welfare of that family and 
 the will of its Father. But if it is self-will, 
 how can it be overcome ? Not by any kind 
 of force ; for force cannot bend the will. Not 
 by any kind of external transaction ; that 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 125 
 
 may remit the penalty, but will not of itself 
 change the will. It must be by the revelation 
 of a love so intense that no heart which beats 
 can remain indifferent to it. Then the self- 
 will may be overcome. To that part of the 
 question we will return. But if that Tvere 
 true, would it not also be true that we should 
 find some value even for this ? Yes, surely ; 
 for the struggle and the sacrifice, which love 
 goes through in that self-manifestation, enter 
 into the fibre of the love itself. Love consists 
 in the giving away of self for others. What- 
 ever makes that giving away of self more 
 complete, w^hatever makes it absolute and 
 final, is a help to the perfecting of love. 
 Would you rather have a world that had never 
 sinned, or a world that has sinned and been 
 redeemed through the sacrifice of Christ ? 
 To my mind, only one answer is possible. A 
 redeemed world is infinitely greater in moral 
 worth ; its moral achievement taken as a 
 whole, its spiritual value, is something out of 
 all proportion to that of a world which has 
 simply never known what wrong is. And 
 this harmonises with what we found before, 
 that the one thing on which our Lord insists 
 
126 THE FAITH 
 
 is always the power to grow in love ; and we 
 remember tlie parables which close with 
 the saying that "joy shall be in heaven 
 over one sinner that repenteth more than 
 over ninety and nine just persons, that need 
 no repentance." ^ The growth in love, and 
 the sacrifice which evokes that growth in love, 
 are, I would suggest, the most precious thing 
 in life. Take away the conditions of this and 
 you will destroy the value of the spiritual 
 world. In St. John's Gospel the mani- 
 festation of the Divine Glory is completed in 
 the Death of Christ upon the Cross ; it is 
 only in the death-struggle with evil that the 
 full splendour of absolute goodness is realised. 
 Moreover, evil, having occasioned the sacrifice, 
 is itself conquered by it ; it is condemned by 
 the condemnation it pronounces on the Lord, 
 and won over by the Death which it inflicts. 
 "Now is the judgment of this world; now 
 shall the prince of this world be cast out. 
 And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will 
 draw all men unto me." ^ Considering how 
 rigid this writer is in his distinction between 
 children of light and children of darkness, we 
 
 1 Lk. XV. 3-10: cf. 11-32 and v. 32. - Jn. xii. 31, 32 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 127 
 
 cannot doubt that, when he said " all men," 
 he meant it. Thus, when the breach between 
 good and evil is complete and the sacrifice it 
 leads to is imminent, we find that this very 
 sacrifice is to heal the breach. 
 
 But now let us try to consider, if we may, 
 how this is actually efiected, as the Church 
 claims, by the Life and Death of Christ ; and 
 I am afraid I must ask you to pardon me 
 while I mention some of the older theories on 
 the subject, because it is necessary that we 
 should gather together all the main elements 
 which have entered into the experience of the 
 Church. 
 
 The first theory which attained to very 
 great importance, after the Apostolic age, 
 is that of the Greek theologians, to whom 
 everything turns upon the union of the divine 
 and human substance. The Greeks had very 
 little conception, if any, of spiritual individual- 
 ity : they had very little apprehension of the 
 fact that, because I am I, I am not anybody 
 else. They thought of great human qualities 
 which subsisted unchanged in diff'erent people. 
 The humanity of all of us, they thought, is 
 the same : and if humanity has been taken 
 
128 THE FAITH 
 
 into the Godhead, then, in that action, all 
 persons who have humanity were redeemed. 
 They also had practically no psychology of 
 the will, and they were, therefore, unable 
 to state the problem in strictly moral terms. 
 For them redemption was a change of sub- 
 stance, not a transformation of the will. And 
 also they had no general doctrine of progress, 
 such as has been introduced into our thought 
 mainly through biological evolution ; and 
 consequently they were unable to regard the 
 world as steadily progressing from lower to 
 higher, and had to regard salvation as a 
 complete change from one fixed state to 
 another fixed state. 
 
 The chief theologian of that period is, no 
 doubt, St. Athanasius ; and it is important that 
 we should understand the significance of his 
 controversy with the Arians. It arose entirely 
 from the necessity, under which the Greeks 
 lay, of thinking in terms of substance. The 
 starting of both was the Logos-doctrine. The 
 Logos-doctrine, in pre-Christian thought, had 
 been the means of explaining how the world 
 came to be made by the infinite unchanging 
 God ; the Logos, the divine Word, was inter- 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 129 
 
 polated between the supreme God and the 
 world as Mediator of Creation. But if He 
 was to mediate between the divine substance 
 and the perishable substance of this world, He 
 must not Himself be of one substance with 
 the Father, for then He would not be a 
 Mediator at all. On the other side, if human 
 substance is to be redeemed by the infusion of 
 the divine into human nature, then it is 
 essential that the Redeemer should be of one 
 substance with the Father ; and the whole 
 controversy really turned on the question 
 whether Christianity was to be a particular 
 form of Neo-Platonic philosophy or a religion 
 of redemption. That was the question at issue. 
 To us the difference between " one substance" 
 and ''like substance " has very little meaning 
 because we do not habitually think in terms of 
 " substance " at all. To them it meant simply 
 everything. The Arians were concentrating 
 attention upon the problem of Creation, which 
 is secondary ; for here the world is, however 
 it got here. Athanasius was concentrating 
 attention on the doctrine of Redemption ; and 
 that is primary. 
 
 Now the Greek method of thinking alwavp 
 
 K 
 
130 THE FAITH 
 
 involves the difficulty that it putvS the moral 
 problem rather in the background. But there 
 was one thing it seized upon with quite 
 unequalled force, and that was the experience 
 of the Christian's unity with his Master. 
 " He became Man," as St. Athanasius said, 
 "in order that we might be made divine."^ 
 In Christ was accomplished the union of the 
 human and divine Natures, which is at once 
 the Incarnation and the Atonement ; it is in 
 that union of Natures that everything is found; 
 and the basis of that conception, w^hich made 
 it so important to those thinkers, is the 
 experience that Christ was with them, that 
 they w^ere mystically one with Christ, in the 
 way which St. Paul expresses " To me to live 
 is Christ"; "I live; yet not I, but Christ 
 liveth in me." ^ 
 
 The next great stage which we must con- 
 sider for a moment is that of St. Augustine and 
 his controversy with the Pelagians : and here 
 we arrive, as I think, at the real root of the 
 problem. Pelagius' position, put shortly, was, 
 — " I can be good if I w^ill. God rew^ards me 
 when I am good ; but does not make me good. 
 
 i Dt Incamatione, 54. ^ Phil. i. 21 ; Gal. ii. 20. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 131 
 
 His reward is, of course, an incentive to good- 
 ness but it is no more ; and God's connection 
 with the moral struggle is confined to the 
 promise of reward or the threat of punishment." 
 Augustine in effect replies, — ** I could be good, 
 if I would ; but I won't." And that is the 
 whole difficulty : I cannot move my will. My 
 will moves everything else ; but what is to 
 move it, if it is diseased and is set on the 
 things which I know are wrong ? What in 
 the world will cure that? The whole 
 difficulty is, that when the opportunity of 
 wrong-doing comes, I always choose it; how 
 am I to cure myself? And I do not think 
 there is any writer w^ho has ever grasped this 
 absolute impotence of the human will with 
 o-reater vigour than Auojustine ; and his 
 answer is, that the revelation of God in 
 Christ supplies a new force, which he calls 
 Grace, which comes upon us from without and 
 changes us. His whole insistence is that we, 
 by ourselves, cannot work out our own 
 salvation, or even our own claim to salvation. 
 We are quite helpless ; sin consists in the 
 disease of the will ; and if the will is diseased 
 it cannot cure itself If a man is in the state 
 
 K 2 
 
132 THE FAITH 
 
 of Augustine himself when he prayed, " Give 
 me chastity, but not yet ! " he is, if left to 
 himself, incurable. 
 
 Now we notice that in the Greek theory, 
 whatever its form, and in the Augustinian 
 theory, nothing appears to be said about 
 the Death of Christ. The Greeks, of course, 
 dealt with the Death of Christ, almost always 
 reo-ardins it as a ransom paid to the devil, by 
 which God bought us back from the just 
 dominion of the devil, under which the Fall 
 had brought us. That theory of the Death of 
 Christ held the field on the whole, so far as I 
 know, until St. Anselm, and it was still 
 defended with passion by St. Bernard in his 
 controversy with Abelard. St. Anselm is 
 really the author, more than anyone else, of 
 the doctrine of the Atonement which has 
 prevailed in Western Christendom from that 
 time onwards. His position in effect is this. 
 We owe a debt to God, because His claim upon 
 us is for absolute obedience ; and even if we 
 obey for the whole of the future, there is still 
 the past unredeemed. And the magnitude 
 of our debt is to be measured by the Majesty 
 against which we have ofifended. We have 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 133 
 
 incurred, therefore, an infinite debt which, be- 
 cause it is infinite, we cannot pay ; only God 
 can pay it. But it must be paid by Man, for it 
 is Man who has sinned. God, therefore, must 
 become man ; the God-Man being sinless need 
 not die, for death is the punishment of sin. 
 His death, therefore, will be something over 
 and above what is required of Him, and will 
 constitute merit and a claim upon God which 
 He can plead for those who by His Incarnation 
 are His fellow-men, provided they will present 
 themselves before the Father in His Name. 
 That is to say, the position is very nearly the 
 position commonly known as "vicarious 
 satisfaction." ^ The difficulties about it are 
 these : first, that it sets out from a conception 
 of God as ofi'ended and needing to be appeased ; 
 and secondly, that it concentrates attention 
 upon delivery from the punishment of sin, 
 and not upon delivery from the sin itself. 
 Consequently it has a tendency to a certain 
 self-centredness which is not wholly Christian. 
 But it has this great gain, that it speaks, 
 
 1 It is important to distinguish this from ** Vicarious suffering," 
 a principle everj'where operative (for ail over the world good 
 jwople suffer through the fault of bad people), and most oon- 
 gpicuously in the case of Christ. 
 
134 THE FAITH 
 
 as Augustine had spoken, in moral terms, and 
 treats the problem as a problem of guilt, and 
 expresses the central truth that God takes upon 
 Himself the burden of the sin of the world. 
 
 At about the same time at which that 
 theory arose, there arose also the simple 
 theory of Abelard, that Christ by His mani- 
 festation of His love awakens love in us, and 
 that this is the Atonement. This was de- 
 nounced by St. Bernard, apparently because 
 St. Bernard could only think in legal terms 
 and required that there should be a definite 
 transaction. And yet what Abelard said is a 
 thing which every Christian is prepared to 
 say, though he may wish to add more. 
 
 Now let us see if it is not possible, w^ith the 
 help of modern thought, to construct for 
 ourselves a doctrine which, of course, will not 
 be exhaustive of all the mystery of the 
 Atonement, but which may, none the less, sec 
 before us that mystery under a form which 
 makes it no longer baffling to the intelli- 
 gence, but rather something which we can 
 receive as rational, something which we have 
 begun to understand and which we hope in 
 time to understand more fully. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 135 
 
 We go back to St. John who has the key 
 to all our modern problems : we begin by 
 asking what is the character of God, what is 
 His relation to us, and particularly what is 
 His relation to us when we sin ? We see it 
 in Christ. '* He that hath seen Me hath seen 
 the Father." ^ In Christ's Agony we see what 
 our sin costs God ; and in His bearing before 
 His enemies we see how God regards us as we 
 inflict the blow ; '* when He was reviled He 
 reviled not again, when He suffered He 
 threatened not." * We cannot go on wound- 
 ino- One who accepts our wounds like that ; 
 we are filled with fear, not the old craven 
 fear of punishment, but the fear of wounding 
 the tenderest of all hearts. " There is mercy 
 with Thee, therefore shalt Thou be feared." ^ 
 And in this, which sounds so simple, I believe 
 there is contained every valuable element 
 that was present in any of the great historic 
 theories of the Atonement. We realise our 
 own absolute impotence to change ourselves ; 
 but we realise also that we are changed as we 
 contemplate the love of God revealed in 
 Christ ; we realise that we owe to God some- 
 
 > Jn. xiv. 9. ' I Pet. ii. 23. » Pa. cxxx. 4. 
 
136 THE FAITH 
 
 thing that we can never pay, but which in 
 His love He remits as though it were paid 
 already ; and we realise an absolute unity 
 between ourselves and Him as something 
 which is at least possible, and is beginning 
 already to be actual, because to love like that 
 we must respond with love ; and love is the 
 union of spirits. All the great elements 
 come in. The great difficulty about the 
 theory of Abelard was that it never showed 
 us how the death of Christ was the revelation 
 of His love ; the suffering of One so gentle 
 and so perfect must awaken sympathy ; but 
 we need to see how the suffering itself flows 
 from the love. That we find, if we take 
 St. John's great guiding principle, that in 
 Christ we see the Father, so that in His 
 attitude to His enemies we see God's attitude 
 to us when we are at enmity with Him (for 
 He is never at enmity with us), — *' Father, 
 forgive them ; for they know not what they 
 do." ^ I believe that if we work out that 
 theory, thinking of the effect which love 
 always has, when it is understood, upon any 
 heart, and remembering that the world has 
 
 1 Lk. xxiii. 34. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 137 
 
 progressed a good deal since the earliest 
 ages that we know, and progressed in love 
 more perhaps than in any other quality, 
 we shall find that it may be true that the 
 whole world is moving onwards for ever 
 under the impulse of the infinite love of 
 God to a more and more adequate return of 
 that love ; we begin to think of the whole 
 Universe as knit together in that love as its 
 one controlling principle. Love works by 
 sacrifice ; that is always the mode of love's 
 operation. But that sacrifice is not the 
 means of appeasing anger ; it is the outcome 
 of love and of love alone. "We shall never be 
 true either to our own best thought, or to 
 the religious experience that is enshrined in 
 the New Testament, unless we are resolute in 
 setting out always from the love of God. 
 " God commendeth His love toward us, in 
 that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for 
 us." *' God so loved the world that He gave 
 His only begotten Son." ^ 
 
 It may be objected that this view of the 
 Atonement is purely " subjective," and that 
 the Christian experience demands something 
 
 * Rom. V. 8 ; Jn. iii. 16. 
 
138 THE FAITH 
 
 more " objective." But what exactly is meant 
 by this ? Is it meant that the Atonement is 
 accomplished altogether outside us, or that it 
 is something done for us, which we could 
 never do for ourselves ? These two are 
 compatible, but they are not identical. The 
 view I have outlined insists that we could 
 never accomplish our own Atonement ; it is 
 done/o?' us, and we have only to accept what 
 is so done. But our theory also insists that 
 though done for us, it is accomplished in us. 
 The Atonement was completed on Calvary 
 in the sense that the Love of God then first 
 became fully manifest and thus attained its 
 full power to redeem ; the Atoning power 
 then came fully into the world. But the 
 Atonement in the sense of full salvation, is 
 not complete until every soul knows the Love 
 of God and responds to it with answering 
 love. Nor would it be true to say that we 
 are reducing it to a change of will for the 
 present and the future, the whole of the past 
 being ignored ; for we have seen that the 
 meaning and value of the past has still to 
 be determined by the events of the present 
 and future. When the Love of God in Christ 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 139 
 
 has altogether conquered me, and changed me, 
 my past sin will be the occasion of my loving 
 Him, not only as King, but as Redeemer. 
 
 I know, of course, that it is possible to 
 parody this view so as to make it a most 
 pernicious lie, which tells a man not to trouble 
 about sin for it is " only moral growing-pains." 
 The danger of that lie, as of every lie that 
 is dangerous, depends on the half-truth it 
 perverts. Sin is the condition of what for me 
 is the highest attainable state — the love of 
 God in Christ my Redeemer. But it only 
 becomes in fact the condition of that blessing 
 in so far as I hate it with all my soul. Then, 
 when I loathe it, it is the stepping-stone on 
 which I rise ; but while I am content with it, 
 it is evil and not good at all. Yet it 
 only exists in me because (with part of my 
 nature at least) I am content with it. I only 
 do what is wrong because I like it. And 
 therefore I cannot loathe it with my whole 
 soul unless something lays hold on my 
 affections and will, and changes them. " It 
 is no more I that do it but sin w^hich dwelleth 
 
 in me wretched man that T am ! 
 
 who shall deliver me out of the body of this 
 
140 • THE FAITH 
 
 death ? I thank God through Jesus Christ 
 our Lord." ^ 
 
 Or again, it may be said that we are 
 leaving out of sight the justice of God ; 
 and again we must ask, what do we mean by 
 the Divine Justice ? In the sense of treating 
 all men equally, God is certainly just ; He is 
 no respecter of persons. But so far as justice 
 means the infliction of pain on those who do 
 wrong, without any intention to benefit them 
 thereby, it is no virtue. Retributive punish- 
 ment is always either non-moral or immoral ; 
 a man has moral evil in him, and you add 
 physical evil ; what is the good of doing that ? 
 Of course, if the pain or physical evil has the 
 effect of curing the moral evil, its infliction is 
 justifiable ; but the notion that wickedness 
 ought somehow to be balanced by pain seems 
 to me wholly without foundation. 
 
 Are we to say then that God is not angry 
 at sin, that He is incapable of moral 
 indignation ? Certainly not. Love can be 
 indignant. A father can be indignant at the 
 ingratitude of the son he loves. But he does 
 not wish his son evil ; the anger and the 
 
 1 Rom. vii. 20, 24, 25. 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 141 
 
 indignation, with the actions they prompt, are 
 such as may be compatible with love. 
 
 If the Cross is the symbol of the pain 
 our sin inflicts on God, it is thereby the 
 symbol of the antagonism between sin and 
 God. Between sin and His Nature there 
 is utter enmity, and only through what we 
 see in the Agony and Death is He victorious. 
 That pain, we must suppose, is coloured 
 and suffused with the knowledge of the 
 victory beyond, but it is none the less real. 
 The Epistle to the Hebrews maintains that 
 *' for the joy that was set before Him " Christ 
 "endured";^ but does not suggest that the 
 " endurance " was unreal. 
 
 And the Cross is the symbol also of what 
 sin costs man. In Christ we see God, but 
 only because we first see man. The desolation, 
 the sense of desertion and hopeless failure and 
 irremediable defeat : these are the elements 
 that constitute the horror of great darkness 
 which sin creates and through which we must 
 pass to its destruction. 
 
 Gethsemane and Calvary are what sin costs 
 to God and man. God's unchanging love 
 
 » Heb. xii. 2. 
 
142 THE FAITH 
 
 endures the mocking and the scourging and 
 the thorns ; Man's self-will must undergo them 
 too, that it may learn its own destructiveness ; 
 yet the thorns make np the crown of the 
 King of Love, and the Cross is the throne 
 from which God holds sway over our hearts. 
 
 Keeping a steady hold on the Love of God 
 as our one all-sufficing principle, and making 
 a wise use of the conceptions of Personality 
 and Evolution, which play so large a part in 
 our modern thoug^ht, v/e shall be able to catch 
 more of the meaning of the revelation of God 
 in Christ than was possible, perhaps, in earlier 
 times. The seat of the problem is our wills ; 
 they need transforming. It is not a change 
 of " substance," but a love of things which now 
 we do not love, that must be wrought in us. 
 But though 1 am myself and no one else (so 
 that the assumption of Humanity by God in 
 Christ does not of itself unite me to God), yet 
 1 am social in every fibre of my being ; to the 
 appeal of love, if once I have heard and under- 
 stood it, I cannot be indifferent ; and Christ 
 includes my personality in His own, and with 
 His own presents it to the Father, because the 
 appeal of His love is gradually conquering my 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 143 
 
 heart, and consequently His purpose is gradu- 
 ally taking possession of my will. But the 
 process is gradual, and there is no utter breach 
 between the Human and the Divine ; rather we 
 should say that, because men are spiritual as 
 God is spiritual, it is possible for God to 
 reveal Himself in a human life ; but because 
 men are sinful, it takes all the ages for that 
 self-revelation to win them to Himself. As 
 the veil of self-love is drawn from the eyes of 
 our soul, we appreciate Him more fully and 
 are transformed more completely to His like- 
 ness. *' We all, with unveiled face reflecting 
 as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are trans- 
 formed into the same image from glory to 
 glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit." 
 "We know that, if He shall be manifested, 
 we shall be like Him ; for we shall see Him as 
 Heis."i 
 
 Our Atonement then is accomplished through 
 our realisation of the love of God. But how 
 are we to believe that God is loving in this 
 sense ? If it is true that He made the whole 
 world and all that is in it, and that we 
 know Him only through the revelation of 
 
 1 II Cor. iii. 18 (R.V.) ; I John iii. 2 (R.V.) 
 
144 THE FAITH 
 
 Himself that He has given in Creation and in 
 Inspiration, then how can we say that the 
 Maker of this Universe is a God of infinite 
 love ? And I think we cannot, unless we are 
 first persuaded of the fact of Jesus Christ. I 
 think that we cannot claim that the Universe 
 is made by such a God as the Christian 
 theology presents, unless we are first sure that 
 one of the thing's that has come into the world 
 from that source is the life of Christ. There 
 are some, I think, who would say that the 
 historical fact is indifierent, the ideal remains 
 valid ; Christ is the revelation of God and of 
 the true life for man, whether He existed as a 
 historical fact or not. I cannot assent to that. 
 If He never existed, where is the evidence 
 that God is like Him ? It is open to anyone 
 to say that this character is supremely beauti- 
 ful, but that unfortunately reality is con- 
 structed upon principles wholly at variance 
 with it. But if that life is a fact, then, as 
 we have said before, we have to conceive of 
 God as One who can utter Himself in such 
 language ; we may go further and take it as 
 the interpretation of the world, and then look 
 again at the whole history of things ; and we 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 145 
 
 see (do we not ?) that, in the ultimate 
 analysis, the individual or the species has 
 significance as it serves the progress of the 
 race ; and that moral development always 
 means expansion of the area within which we 
 owe service ; and that political development, 
 the growth of democracy, has always meant 
 the growing insistence that each shall serve 
 all. The spirit of absolute service may be seen 
 in every field to be the actual spirit of the 
 whole of life. But we should never have found 
 that it was so, if it had not broken out once 
 in its full splendour in the Person of the 
 Lord, for only there is it seen in untainted 
 completeness and beauty. 
 
 I said in the first lecture that in my belief 
 the demand of reason that the world should 
 appear coherent would stand over against the 
 facts of experience in hopeless antagonism 
 unless we accept the whole essential fabric of 
 Christian Theology. And this is what I 
 chiefly meant ; the demand that the world 
 shall appear rational led us to believe that it 
 was all rooted in an Almighty Will ; we 
 cannot believe in an Almighty Will which, 
 being entirely able to determine itself, does 
 
 L 
 
14G THE FAITH 
 
 not will the good ; we cannot believe that 
 the world, which it has made, is good, unless 
 the life of Christ w^as actually lived, and 
 unless, with the sacrifice in which it culmin- 
 ated, it was indeed the revelation of the 
 Father, and has in consequence a power to 
 change our hearts and wills, making sin itself 
 the means to the manifestation of the re- 
 demptive love, which is the true glory of 
 God. 
 
LECTURE VI 
 
 THE SPIRIT, THE CHURCH AND THE LIFE 
 ETERNAL 
 
 Our AtoDement is accomplished, and the 
 problem of evil solved, through the revelation 
 of the love of God in Christ. But how is it 
 possible for us in the twentieth century to 
 come under the influence of one who lived 
 two thousand years ago ? How is it possible 
 that a life occurring at one moment of time 
 should have the immense influence that is 
 claimed for it upon the whole of human 
 history ? If Christ is simply one isolated in- 
 dividual like any other individual, it is not 
 possible ; apart from the doctrines of the Incar- 
 nation and of the Spirit,. the whole experience 
 of Christendom is absolutely unintelligible. 
 
 There is no mockery more bitter than to 
 urge a man simply to folio w^ the example of 
 
 ''' I. ? 
 
148 THE FAITH 
 
 Christ, if that is all that he is told. It is 
 nothing to me that at about the same period 
 Julius Cffisar conquered and regulated Gaul 
 so masterfully in ten years that it remained 
 permanently loyal to the Eoman Empire. 
 He could ; I can't. It is nothing to me 
 that St. Paul was caught away into the 
 third Heaven and heard the unspeakable 
 words, and spoke with tongues. He could ; I 
 can't. And if the example is all, it is nothing 
 to me that Christ lived and died as no other 
 man has lived and died. The very uniqueness 
 makes the example all the more meaningless. 
 He could ; I can't. But if it is true that He 
 is the Incarnation of the divine Word, of the 
 principle by which God rules the whole of 
 existence and through which He made the 
 world, then it is made quite clear that I can 
 never for an instant be outside His influence. 
 It is the governing fact of all facts, and never 
 for a moment can we be away from the divine 
 purpose which is manifest in Christ. But 
 then we may ask, — If it is true that the 
 principle which is seen clearly in the life of 
 Christ, and nowhere else so clearly, is after all 
 the governing power in the whole world, what 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 149 
 
 is the need of the Incarnation ? It is govern- 
 ing the world already ; why should it appear 
 once for all in a human life ? Because the 
 work that is to be done is a spiritual work and 
 must, therefore, be accomplished through the 
 free assent of the people in whom that work 
 is wrought. So long as the power of God is 
 unnoticed, so long even as it is inadequately 
 understood, our response cannot be complete. 
 The divine power itself can only have the 
 effect upon human spirits which we call 
 redemption, if it wins from them freely a real 
 appreciation and assent ; and, therefore, it is 
 necessary that something more than a mere 
 guiding principle should be given to us. What 
 we need is manifestation of the divine power 
 and the divine purpose such as will win from 
 our hearts free allegiance and answering love. 
 We need something upon which our imagina- 
 tions can lay hold, something which will mould 
 our affections, something which will change our 
 will; and that can never be done except by 
 something that we can appreciate ; and we 
 cannot appreciate what is not before us. God 
 cannot be omnipotent except by the revelation 
 of His Love. By His power He could control 
 
150 THE FAITH 
 
 our actions, but not our wills. If He is to be 
 Lord of all that exists, He must be Lord of 
 our wills. But the will is not amenable to 
 force ; it can only be governed through what 
 seems to it good ; God can only rule our wills 
 through a complete and intelligible manifesta- 
 of His Love. The secret and hidden and 
 undetected operation of the Power of God 
 can never reach its own goal. If that goal is 
 to be reached, the divine Principle itself must 
 appear before us in all the splendour of its glory. 
 God can only be Almighty through the revela- 
 tion of His Love — that is, through sacrifice; 
 Calvary is the mode of God's omnipotence. 
 
 And so we reach a clue to the great paradox 
 which we found in all religious experience. 
 We found that in all religious experience we 
 are at once vividly conscious of our own 
 responsibility before God, and also of the fact 
 that all our lives are in His hands ; that He 
 guides and shapes our destiny from begin- 
 ning to end; that He is omnipotent yet we 
 are free ; and that remains an unintelligible 
 paradox, until we remember that the change 
 in man's will that is accomplished when love 
 is won from his heart by the love of another 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 151 
 
 is at once his own act and the act of the 
 other. When St. Paul said, '* I live, yet not 
 I but Christ liveth in me," ^ he did not mean 
 that his will was suppressed and checked ; he 
 did not mean that either without his will, or 
 against his will, he preached the Gospel under 
 some strange compulsion ; he meant that his 
 life was wholly governed by Christ, because, 
 seeing the nature of Christ and the beauty 
 of His character, he had accepted that charac- 
 ter freely as his own. He was absolutely 
 governed by Christ; but it did not follow that 
 he was not free ; rather it followed that for 
 the first time he was perfectly free, for he had 
 freely yielded himself to the love of God and 
 in that yielding of himself had for the first 
 time found his own satisfaction and peace. 
 
 So it is in all our experience of God ; we 
 are not driven on by some external force as 
 a mechanical body is set in motion by an 
 external force ; but love is won from our 
 hearts by the love of God. We cannot resist 
 giving it, when we see the love of God ; but 
 what makes it impossible for us to resist is 
 just our human nature ; nothing else. We are 
 
 * Galatians ii. 20- 
 
152 THE FAITH 
 
 free precisely in our inability to refuse our love. 
 It is the expression of our own nature ; it is 
 not something imposed upon us from without ; 
 it is the natural expression of what we are. 
 
 And so with the greatest difliculty, as it 
 sometimes seems, in the commencement of the 
 religious life ; people find that they cannot 
 approach God without His help, and then 
 they wish to pray for His help and find that 
 they cannot even pray without that help. 
 From the beginning to the end our lives are 
 in His hands absolutely. But we are in His 
 hand as the child is guided by the love of the 
 Father, not as a physical object is moved by 
 an external force. And the motion of our 
 wills which is wholly due to Him is none the 
 less the free motion of our own will : it is the 
 answer of our hearts to His love. The true 
 conclusion to draw from the discovery of our 
 impotence is not a fatalistic quietism and 
 spiritual indolence, but a complete selflessness 
 and surrender to God. This religious sense of 
 the individual's helplessness has not in history 
 led to inactivity, but to an energy that the 
 isolated individual could not command. 
 
 Now in this conception of a governing 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 153 
 
 divine Spirit which is in all the world, treated 
 and interpreted as it is in the Christian 
 theology, I believe we have the clue to the 
 chief of our modern difficulties ; for these 
 difficulties, if I understand the matter aright, 
 do not arise from any new way of thinking of 
 specifically religious things. It is a change, 
 not in our theology, but in our total habit of 
 mind, to which we have to adapt ourselves ; 
 and this change is due to two main causes. 
 The first is, of course, the development of 
 natural science. A hundred and fifty years 
 ago people supposed that God had made the 
 world and had imposed certain laws upon it, 
 and then left it to go more or less its own way 
 according to those laws, interfering now and 
 then by way of a miracle ; and still we have 
 in popular language certain events, usually, 
 I am afraid, calamities, which are classified 
 as the Act of God — a relic of that old way of 
 thinking. Then gradually the development 
 of science produced its efi'ect upon the public 
 mind, and men began to believe that every- 
 thing can be explained by natural law. And 
 very often religious people are distressed at 
 this, for it seems to have curtailed the sphere 
 
154 THE FAITH 
 
 of the divine activity. But it was they who 
 had curtailed it in the first instance by 
 allowing that it was only in miracle that we 
 could see the hand of God. What has really 
 happened to us is that instead of seeing the 
 divine activity here and there, or now and 
 then, we have again an opportunity of seeing 
 it, as we should always have seen it, every- 
 where and always. There is nothing which 
 God does not do. '* Through Him all things 
 were made and apart from Him hath not one 
 thing happened." 
 
 The growth of science, then, is one main 
 factor in the situation ; the other is the 
 growth of democracy. As long as nations 
 were governed by kings, it seemed natural to 
 extend the analogy to the universe ; men 
 thought of God as King of the Universe ; and 
 I believe you will find that in all ages popular 
 theology rests upon such political analogy. 
 Then in the eighteenth century, when it was 
 thought to be necessary to respectability 
 that man should believe in the constitutional 
 necessity of a monarch, but contrary to 
 political prudence that he should be allowed 
 to do anything, you have in theology the 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 155 
 
 extraordinary phenomenon of Deism, which 
 insisted strongly that God exists, but 
 regarded it as fanaticism to suppose that He 
 ever does anything. And now, in our time, we 
 have a conception of Government as a power 
 not acting upon the subjects from without, 
 but through them from within ; a conception 
 which maintains that the only power before 
 which the individual should bend his will is the 
 collective will of the whole community ; and 
 parallel with that you have a great insistence 
 on the doctrine, always in the Church from 
 the outset, of divine immanence ; and when 
 any preacher finds a way of expressing the 
 divine immanence so that people can under- 
 stand it, they crowd to him as to a new 
 revelation. We must, I think, in our day, 
 begin with this conception of the indwelling 
 divine power, because it is at this point that we, 
 like St. John, can find a starting-point common 
 to ourselves and those to whom we speak ; 
 but we must not end with it ; and we must 
 not be content to leave it uncharacterised. 
 We must not end with it, because as we said 
 before, what is immanent in the world is the 
 divine purpose, not the divine Will : an 
 
156 THE FAITH 
 
 immanent Will is nonsense. And we must 
 not leave it uncharacterised ; we must ask how 
 it operates, and to what goal it is leading us. 
 The answer for the Christian is the life and 
 death of Christ. " The Word was made flesh 
 and we beheld His glory." There is all the 
 difference in the world between the divine 
 principle of progress as mediated by nature or 
 by tribal worship or by secular civilisation 
 and that same divine principle mediated 
 through its own perfect manifestation in 
 Jesus Christ. When we have seen it mani- 
 fest in Christ we can take it as the clue to all 
 our experience and see that in every depart- 
 ment of life the Spirit which was in Him is 
 operative. But if we had begun with biology 
 and human history we should never have 
 reached any conception of the governing 
 divine principle as one whose only charac- 
 teristic is love, whose glory is moral, not 
 spectacular, and whose pre-eminence is 
 through sacrifice and not through power. 
 It is only through Christ that we can come 
 to the Spirit as the whole power of God 
 operating in its fulness upon our spirits. It is 
 indeed in all the world. The Word is the agent 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 157 
 
 of Creation ; it is in all the world, and we 
 can never be altogether outside its influence ; 
 but it will not have its full effect on our wills 
 until we understand and appreciate it and 
 yield ourselves to it ; that is to say until it 
 has been fully manifest in the terms of our 
 own life. So the Spirit proceeds, not only 
 from the Father, but from the Father and the 
 Son. We may look back upon the previous 
 history of the world before Christ and see 
 how the same Spirit, which was in Him, was 
 guiding the ages up to Him, as it has guided 
 the Church ever since. But in the fulness of 
 its power it does not exist in the world till 
 after the Incarnation and Crucifixion. " There 
 was not yet Spirit, because Jesus was not 
 glorified." ' 
 
 The Spirit, therefore, which governs the 
 world, must be mediated for us through 
 Christ ; we must never for a moment suppose 
 that we can find that same spirit anywhere 
 else without His help. When we have found 
 it in Him we may see its operation elsewhere. 
 We cannot first find it elsewhere, and then 
 discover that it was manifest in Him. For in 
 
 1 John vii. 39. 
 
158 THE FAITH 
 
 all the rest of our experience there is no 
 evidence that the character of the Spirit is the 
 character of Christ ; but if Christ is a fact, then, 
 as we have often said before, the governing 
 Power of the world must be something capable 
 of expressing itself in that fact ; it must be 
 adequate to its own greatest achievement. 
 
 And so the Spirit is to be taken, not only 
 as the guiding power of the world, but as the 
 guiding power of the world as seen in Christ. 
 Only so can it have its full effect upon our 
 hearts and wills. No doubt the Spirit is 
 present in all men — it '' lighteth every man" ; 
 and it is no doubt more fully present in some 
 who are not Christians than in some who are. 
 But its full manifestation is in Christ alone ; 
 others have the Divine Spirit in their degree, 
 but He alone is altogether God. And though 
 this or that man may reach great moral 
 heights without any conscious relation to 
 Christ, only the Love made manifest in the 
 Cross is sufficient to take away the sin of the 
 world. 
 
 And yet another condition is necessary ; 
 the Spirit must be mediated through Christ, 
 and it must be operative in the Church. The 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 159 
 
 whole reason why this sort of discussion is 
 necessary is that our religious experience 
 always appeals for logical support ; it is 
 always anxious to defend itself against the 
 charge of self-hypnotism ; it wishes to know 
 that the God revealed to it is not the object 
 of a dream, but is the real and living God ; 
 that is to say, our religious experience knows 
 itself to be precarious as evidence, and it 
 appeals to philosophy for support ; and a 
 philosophical argument always fails to carry 
 complete conviction to anyone who is alone in 
 believing in it. I may think out some long 
 train of reasoning which seems to me perfectly 
 cogent ; but if when I tell others they reject 
 it, though I cannot see the flaw, I cannot help 
 wondering whether there is not some flaw 
 which they detect, though it escapes my 
 notice. And so even when we have cor- 
 roborated the evidence of our religious ex- 
 perience by philosophical reasoning, we are 
 still in a precarious position ; we still need 
 further support because we cannot be perfectly 
 sure that our ow^n reasoning is without flaw. 
 We need, therefore, if our faith is to be 
 absolutely secure that all men, nothing less, 
 
160 THE FAITH 
 
 should come to believe what we believe. As 
 long as there is one man who, after thinking 
 the problem over, still doubts, there will be 
 a haunting doubt in our own faith ; and, as a 
 partial realisation of that universal support 
 by all humanity, we collect together in the 
 Church to support our own faith, because 
 there we find other people who, either through 
 the same reasoning, or from different reason- 
 ing, or else simply on the basis of their own 
 religious experience, have reached the same 
 conclusions as ourselves ; and it strengthens 
 our own belief in those conclusions to meet 
 with others who have reached them. If the 
 conclusions are untrue, the charge of mutual 
 hypnotism can be made ; but if the con- 
 clusions are true, nothing in the world can 
 be more rational than that we should take 
 every possible step to secure that our belief in 
 them is vital. 
 
 But there is more than this involved, for 
 our belief does not end in intellectual assent ; 
 it must become a living faith, the impulse to 
 a life singularly alien from our natural im- 
 pulses. If this further step is to be taken, we 
 need again the support of others — the support 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 161 
 
 this time not so much of their intellects as of 
 their wills, and above all of their affection. 
 We need to consort with people all pledged to 
 the realisation of the same ideal that we may 
 
 catch their fire. 
 
 And then further we know quite well that 
 any really living society is a far greater thing 
 than the sum of the persons who compose it. 
 England is not the name for the fact that 
 a large number of us happen to inhabit a 
 particular island ; it is a spiritual entity with 
 a life of its own, a life to which we all 
 contribute in co-operation, but a life, none the 
 less, greater than the mere sum of our own 
 lives. Still more is it true that in the Church 
 we have a great society professing an ideal 
 which scarcely any, if any, of its members 
 has ever realised, professing an ideal which 
 probably not one of its members has ever 
 fully grasped. Only in the whole Church is 
 the whole truth known ; only indeed when 
 the whole Church is the same as the whole 
 world will the whole truth be fully known ; 
 for each has his own contribution to make 
 to the life which is to be lived under the 
 impulse of the divine love; each individual 
 
 M 
 
162 THE FAITH 
 
 is unique and different from all others ; and as 
 long as there is any who is withholding what 
 he alone can give, that life remains imperfect. 
 But if all this is true, then it follows that 
 in order to bring ourselves under the full 
 operation of the Spirit we must be members 
 of the Church, which is the Body of Christ, 
 the organ of His Spirit as His fleshly Bod}^ 
 was in the days of His earthly Ministry. 
 It would take us far away from the funda- 
 mental questions that are occupying us in 
 these lectures, if I were to go into details 
 as to the exact meaning of the word 
 "Church"; but at least it must mean this, 
 a body with an intelligible form and definite 
 organisation, to which we can consciously 
 belong. It must not be a mere group of 
 persons who happen to be congenial to one 
 another ; that would be the narrowest con- 
 ceivable sort of sect. It must be a full life, 
 collecting together all the types of spiritual 
 experience which can flow from the love of 
 God ; and in our full membership in such 
 a body, in devoting ourselves absolutely to its 
 service, we shall be bringing our contribution 
 to the whole life of the Body of Christ. That 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 163 
 
 Body of Christ is something which is steadily 
 being built up. You will remember how, 
 particularly in the later Epistles, St. Paul 
 perpetually speaks about the building up of 
 the Body of Christ, and the goal of it all is 
 that we shall " come to one perfect Man," 
 which will be the " measure of the stature of 
 the fulness (or the completion) of Christ."^ 
 He does not mean, of course, that each of us 
 is to become perfect in that sense, that each 
 of us is to attain to the measure of the 
 stature of Christ. Of course not. lie means 
 that the whole human race is to become so 
 knit together through the purpose of God 
 that it will be a single whole, with one life 
 expressed through all its members ; so closely 
 knit together that it can be called " one 
 perfect Man " : and that will be the " measure 
 of the stature of the fulness of Christ " ; that 
 will be the manifestation of the full glory of 
 the Spirit of Christ : for if we limit the work 
 of Christ to what He accomplished when He 
 was upon earth, then that life becomes an 
 isolated event and the rest of the world 
 becomes an insoluble enigma. But if we say 
 
 A Ephesians iv. 13. 
 
 M 2 
 
164 THE FAITH 
 
 in that life there was manifest a principle 
 which becomes increasingly manifest in the 
 life of the whole world until at last the whole 
 human race will exhibit the same character, 
 then we see how the glory of Christ is not yet 
 completely revealed and will only be known 
 altogether when the whole world is showing it 
 forth. He is the Head of the Body, and from 
 Him *' the whole body fitly joined together 
 and compacted by that which every joint 
 supplieth, according to the effectual working 
 in the measure of every part, maketh increase 
 of the body unto the building of it in 
 love." 
 
 And from this point of view, may I suggest 
 that we get a new impulse to the work of 
 foreign missions ? For we see that even our 
 own faith can never be complete, and our 
 lives never be under the full influence of 
 the Holy Spirit, until the whole world is 
 Christian. Only then will the Holy Spirit be 
 active in the plenitude of His power. 
 
 Our conception of the world so far is that 
 of a perpetual moral and spiritual progress, 
 victory at every stage and always new victory 
 to be won ; and the impulse to all that pro- 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 165 
 
 gress is the love of God, at first dimly 
 apprehended but in Christ fully revealed, so 
 that now it operates in all its strength. And 
 it all seems to have one fatal flaw ; for men 
 die before the victory, which might justify 
 the effort of their life, is come; they die 
 before they see the triumph of the cause for 
 which they are themselves sacrificed. And so 
 there is some element in the world, namely 
 these men's experience, which remains still 
 not quite rational, still not explained by the 
 one divine Purpose. We need the doctrine 
 of immortality. It is not enough that from 
 the Father and the Son the Holy Spirit should 
 proceed, nor that so proceeding He should 
 operate through the Holy Catholic Church. 
 We need also the Communion of Saints and 
 the Life everlasting. 
 
 Now it is, of course, possible to treat the 
 doctrine of immortality at very great length ; 
 and any brief treatment of it is bound to be 
 almost provoking. And yet I will content 
 myself with producing the argument which 
 belongs to the general point of view we have 
 adopted, and which, to my own mind, is the 
 most convincing of all that can be urged on 
 
166 THE FAITH 
 
 the subject. It is this : we are thinking of 
 the world as the expression of the purpose of 
 God, for we found that without a divine w^ill 
 in which the world is rooted and grounded 
 the whole of our experience is unintelligible ; 
 and we believe necessarily that that Will, 
 being perfectly free and untrammelled by any 
 sort of circumstance, will choose what is good ; 
 and we have found that even the world of our 
 experience may after all be regarded as part 
 of such divine Purpose, if we are willing to 
 take the principle that is manifest in the life 
 and death of Christ as the governing principle 
 of its existence ; and we have found also that 
 in this world every individual brings some 
 contribution of his own. Very well ; it is a 
 short step to say that that contribution must 
 not be lost. If it is lost, then some element 
 in the world is taken aw^ay, and the universe 
 is impoverished, which would be intelligible 
 enough if we were treating it as merely a 
 brute fact, but which is unintelligible if it is 
 nothing at all except the embodiment of the 
 divine Purpose. When you bring together 
 the Purpose of God and the uniqueness of 
 each individual soul, the doctrine of immor- 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 167 
 
 tality follows as a necessary corollary ; for it 
 is impossible that God should allow the 
 universe to be impoverished, and it is certain 
 that the destruction of a unique, and there- 
 fore irreplaceable, spirit could be nothing 
 other than its impoverishment. The love of 
 God is the impulse of creation ; and that same 
 love cannot allow the destruction of what it 
 made for its own satisfaction. The love of 
 God is the basis of our hope of immortality. 
 
 But if it is true that death is not the end of 
 our life, but a change whose significance we 
 cannot wholly estimate but which certainly 
 does not exclude the individual from the 
 spiritual society, then immediately it becomes 
 true that we can pay the debts which we owe 
 to the departed, because we can assist the 
 progress of the Kingdom which includes both 
 ourselves and them ; we can minister even 
 to those, whom we perhaps have led wrong at 
 some time or another and have never since 
 met with that we might confess our guilt and 
 help their recovery, because we can assist 
 the progress of the Kingdom which includes 
 both ourselves and them. 
 
 Thus the vision we win is of a spiritual 
 
168 THE FAITH 
 
 world, where perpetually new beings come 
 into existence and none ever perishes, so that 
 the volume of love, which is the pervading 
 principle of this spiritual world, may grow 
 and grow for ever ; and what we witness is 
 the perpetually wider application of the divine 
 Word which God spoke in the cadences of 
 Christ's life and death, — Cross and Eesurrec- 
 tion, death and victory, life laid down and 
 love triumphant. 
 
 That is the conception of the world which 
 Christianity gives us, and the attitude of the 
 Christian who has grasped this conception to 
 the defiance, as it sometimes seems, of Keason, 
 will be calm and collected ; for some at least 
 of the utterances which Reason hurls at 
 Religion in a kind of desperate blasphemy, 
 the Christian will accept as the very platitudes 
 of the faith. When Reason says, **It is God 
 who made all the world ; He therefore is 
 responsible ; it is He who should suffer " ; we 
 answer, " Yes, of course ; He does suffer ; look 
 at the Cross." And when Reason cries, " If 
 God were the loving Father of whom you 
 speak, He could not endure the misery of His 
 children ; His heart would break " ; we answer, 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 169 
 
 ** Yes, of course ; it does break ; look at the 
 Cross." And when Keason exclaims, " God is 
 infinite and ineffable ; it is blasphemy to say 
 we know Him ; we cannot know Him " ; we 
 answer, ''No; not perfectly; but enough to 
 love Him ; look at the Cross." ^ 
 
 And then we go on to compare this divine 
 life revealed by Christ with our own con- 
 ception of the ideal life for ourselves, and we 
 find that it answers to our own ideal, differing 
 from it only by transcendence ; for when we 
 put the question seriously to ourselves whether 
 we would rather have a life of untroubled 
 comfort and ease, or a life of struggle, even 
 with suffering, against the evil of the world, 
 there is no doubt what we would choose. 
 
 What better would'st thou have when all is done 1 
 
 If any now were bidden rise and come 
 
 To either, could he pause to choose between 
 
 The rose-warm kisses of a waiting bride 
 
 In a shut silken chamber, and the thrill 
 
 Of the bared limbs bound fast for martyrdom 1 
 
 If the martyrdom were no purposeless barren 
 pain, but martyrdom for a great cause, martyr- 
 
 ^ This paragraph is taken substantially and almost verbally 
 from Christus Futurus (Anonymous : Macraillan). 
 
170 THE FAITH 
 
 dom which is to do some good in the world, 
 which should we choose ? Perhaps we do not 
 know which we should choose ; but we know 
 which we should wish to choose ; and we find 
 that our own ideal, our own conception of the 
 best life to live is after all just a feeble, 
 shadowy outline of the life divine as it is 
 revealed in Christ. The hypothesis, then, 
 meets the facts. Is there any other con- 
 ception anywhere to be found which unites 
 the demand of Reason for a coherent and 
 intelligible universe with appreciation of all 
 the facts in life and particularly of evil and 
 suffering ? 
 
 The Christian hypothesis meets the facts ; 
 and it is not a hypothesis invented merely out 
 of men's heads in order to meet the facts. It 
 is an application to the world of a principle 
 that is already in the world, for it was in the 
 life of Christ. 
 
 We are trying in these lectures to think 
 scientifically about the world. I said at the 
 outset that the demand of Reason stands in 
 hopeless and irreconcilable antagonism over 
 against the facts of experience unless we will 
 accept the whole doctrine of Christianity — 
 
AND MODERN THOUGHT 171 
 
 unless, that is, we will accept the doctrine 
 that the world proceeds from God the Father, 
 the Creator ; that the method by which He 
 creates and guides it is revealed in Christ and 
 particularly in His Death ; the doctrine that 
 through that Life and Death the divine 
 power, in the Person of the Holy Spirit, 
 operates with full force through the Church 
 upon the individual, so constituting the 
 Communion of Saints, through entrance into 
 which we obtain Forgiveness of Sins, which 
 is the condition of the Kesurrection and of 
 the Life everlasting. The whole creed is 
 the only hypothesis that meets the facts ; no 
 article of it — not even the first — can stand 
 without the rest. No Spirit, no Christ ; no 
 Christ, no God. Only the whole creed is 
 true ; but that is true. As a hypothesis it 
 meets the facts, and it is no fictitious hypo- 
 thesis, for its doctrines are all the register of 
 men's direct experience of God. Religious 
 experience and philosophy come into har- 
 mony and mutual support in the Christian 
 doctrine. 
 
 And then, as we look out upon the world, 
 we find it all knit together in the love of God. 
 
172 THE FAITH 
 
 From that love it all proceeds. It was 
 because of that love that He made other 
 spirits than Himself " to love and be loved by 
 for ever." The world of spirits is perpetually- 
 growing and the volume of love grows with 
 it. Love is made perfect through suffering 
 in the struggle against the evil, which it 
 permits in order that the glory of redemp- 
 tion may be known ; and we find in all our 
 experience nothing but God, and the glory of 
 God which is redemptive sacrifice. 
 
 HOLY, HOLY, HOLY, LORD GOD OF HOSTS ; 
 HEAVEN AND EARTH ARE FULL OF THY GLORY, 
 GLORY BE TO THEE, LORD MOST HIGH. 
 
 THE END 
 
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