A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
A 
 
 WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 BY 
 
 ALEXANDER MacCOLL 
 
 OF THE 
 
 $=" 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 NEW YORK : : : : : 1909 
 
*mnr. 
 
 Copyright, 1909, by 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Published February, 1909 
 
WALTER W. LAW, ESQ., 
 
 OF BRIARCLIFF MANOR, NEW YORK, 
 
 IN GRATEFUL RECOLLECTION OF TEN HAPPY 
 
 YEARS IN THE COMMUNITY WHICH 
 
 HIS GENIUS HAS CONSTRUCTED, AND IN 
 
 THE CHURCH WHOSE WALLS HE BUILT, WHOSE 
 
 SPIRIT HE CONSTANTLY ENRICHED 
 
 184838 
 
PREFACE 
 
 npHEOLOGY in its simplest sense is thought 
 about God and man and this wonderful 
 universe. A working theology is a theology 
 that works, one, that is to say, which closely 
 touches life, confirms itself in experience, and 
 issues in power. Its keynotes are reverence 
 and reality. 
 
 The theology set forth in these pages is 
 neither complete nor systematic. It leaves 
 many vital questions untouched, great gaps 
 unbridged. The aim has been not so much 
 to fathom the ultimate as to set forth a 
 religious faith which will prove a strong work- 
 ing-basis for everyday life. My hope is that 
 the book may prove useful not only to brother 
 ministers, but to many in our churches who 
 are earnestly seeking a point of contact be- 
 tween the older thought and the new. 
 
 MORRISTOWN, N. J., 
 
 February, 1909. 
 
 Vll 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Religious Attitude toward the 
 
 Newer Conceptions of Truth ... i 
 
 II. God the Loving Father; Man the Er- 
 ring Child 8 
 
 III. Divine Providence in the Play of Cos- 
 
 mic Processes 15 
 
 IV. Prayer in a World of Law 26 
 
 V. Miracles in a Scientific Age .... 39 
 
 VI. The Bible in the Light of Modern 
 
 Revelation and Inspiration .... 50 
 
 VII. The Sense of Sin in Modern Life . . 67 
 
 VIII. The Great Gospel of the Cross . . 80 
 
 IX. Things to Come 93 
 
^ OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 I 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE TOWARD THE NEWER 
 CONCEPTIONS OF TRUTH 
 
 A T the base of a wise working theology is a 
 frank recognition of the limitations of 
 human knowledge. Our Saviour once, at least, 
 confessed his ignorance; his Church in this, 
 more almost than in anything else, has hesitated 
 to follow him. Great emphasis has been placed 
 upon self-consistent systems of theology which, 
 mainly as a mental gymnastic, have been strong 
 and creative, when men have recognized (as, 
 alas! they have not always), that the truth of 
 God must be infinitely larger than the gropings 
 of men; that spiritual reality can be revealed to 
 men encased in the flesh, gripped by material 
 things, mainly in symbol; that "language is not 
 so much descriptive as it is suggestive, being fig- 
 urative throughout even when it deals with 
 spiritual truth." * Even in this age men do not 
 
 ♦Horace Bushnell. 
 
 i 
 
2 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 hesitate to dash off a theology at a sitting, or to 
 sum up the eternities in an epigram. It is well 
 to remember that a complete creed is always a 
 false creed; for we know in part. 
 
 The changes which have come over the re- 
 ligious thinking of men in recent years have 
 been repeatedly set forth. The universe, we are 
 told, is infinitely bigger than men thought it; 
 the world in which we live is infinitely older. 
 Our planet was not made in six literal days by 
 direct creative fiat, but coming no less from 
 God's hand, working out marvellously his will, 
 it grew up through the slow struggle and growth 
 of long ages, from cruder forms of life to higher, 
 until at last man himself came forth, and began 
 his wondrous career of self-discovery and world- 
 conquest. The emphasis of thought has passed 
 from God transcendent, dwelling apart from our 
 world, setting it going, interfering now and then 
 in mercy or in wrath, to God immanent, ever 
 present, ever potent, in every moment, in every 
 method, of its life. There are new views of re- 
 ligious authority; its seat, we are told, is within, 
 not without; in the God-illumined conscience, 
 not in church or book. There is a new psychol- 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 3 
 
 ogy, which startles us with many a statement 
 about the mystery of personality, but makes 
 easier than ever belief in a spiritual universe, in 
 spiritual forces, and spiritual contact. " Science 
 is trembling upon the verge of something great." 
 So is faith. This might be called an age of 
 transition, save that every progressive age has 
 been so called. "In knowledge/' said the hum- 
 ble-minded and godly Faraday, "that man only 
 is to be contemned who is not in a state of 
 transition." 
 
 What is the religious attitude toward the 
 newer conceptions of truth ? Can we believe 
 that they are simply profane and vain babblings, 
 and oppositions of science falsely so called ? 
 Can we believe that the last word about the uni- 
 verse was said centuries ago, and that the later 
 light is darkness ? Shall we be of the number 
 of those who fear constantly that something 
 may be discovered which will break down for- 
 ever the cherished hopes of the ages ? This 
 surely is cowardice and the rankest atheism. 
 Or shall we be of those, a great multitude, who, 
 because the mystery is great, give it up, because 
 some pinhead definition fails, give themselves to 
 
4 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 eating and drinking and making money ? This 
 surely is not only to deny God, but to degrade 
 human life. 
 
 The true attitude is that of men of open mind, 
 eager to learn, responsive to every whisper of 
 truth, from whatever source it comes. Largely 
 the business of life is to learn. God has not 
 given us a finished universe whose mission and 
 method are at once clear, but a world in the 
 making, a great kingdom of truth and love in 
 the germ, in which men groping and growing, 
 stumbling and rising again, in that very process 
 are to find themselves and to find their God. 
 Conviction which closes the mind to new light 
 is prejudice, and prejudice is the most fatal 
 form of ignorance. 
 
 But, eager to learn, we must be cautious to 
 conclude that the thing that is new is neces- 
 sarily the thing that is true. In this the leaders 
 of modern science set a good example. The 
 wisest of them still speak of the great principle 
 of growth which has revolutionized the thought 
 of men in the last fifty years as "the evolutionary 
 hypothesis." While there is one missing link 
 the chain is not complete. Again and again the 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 5 
 
 confident conclusion of to-day has been the ex- 
 ploded fallacy of to-morrow. "That is possi- 
 ble," Louis Pasteur used to say, "but we must 
 look more deeply into the subject." The 
 thoughts of men frequently swing from one ex- 
 treme to another ere they light upon the central 
 pole of truth. 
 
 Again, a humble and reverent spirit is essen- 
 tial to a truly religious attitude. Our men of 
 science feel themselves in the presence of a 
 greatness that is far beyond them. " In ultimate 
 essence," says one of them, "we know abso- 
 lutely nothing." "Science," says another, "is 
 groping after a definition of life." "The natu- 
 ralist," says Professor Shaler, "ends always 
 with the sense that the known, however far his 
 knowing may go, must be to that which is to 
 remain undiscovered as one to infinity, as noth- 
 ing to the whole." The man who feels this will 
 be in no danger of pride of mind, he will be 
 humbled every day in the presence of the in- 
 finite greatness of which he is so small a part, 
 his every earnest thought will be an aspiration, 
 his whole life a prayer. 
 
 Most of all, the truly religious attitude tow- 
 
6 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 ard the newer thought of our time is that of men 
 who have the courage and expectation and 
 broadening vision of a rugged and fearless faith. 
 Upon this point the testimony of history is very 
 suggestive. Some of us can remember the 
 anxious fear with which men watched the ex- 
 periments of Louis Pasteur and others on the 
 spontaneous generation of life, for, said many, 
 if this be established, the whole structure of 
 Christian faith will topple to destruction. But 
 to-day Christian biologists tell us that even if 
 spontaneous generation should be established, 
 as some of them believe it will, the only effect 
 would be to carry back the evolutionary process 
 one step further; the discovery would not 
 eliminate God, but increase immeasurably the 
 marvel of his method. So there are those to-day 
 who tell us that if the present philosophic ten- 
 dency toward monism should be established; if 
 it should be shown that the essence of a human 
 life, the things of which it is made, are not two, 
 body and spirit, but one single essence mani- 
 festing itself in two sets of phenomena, all hope 
 of the permanence of the individual as a factor 
 in the universe will pass from the thought of 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 7 
 
 reasonable men. But no. History rings with 
 predictions of the extinction of Christian faith. 
 Voltaire says that in fifty years it will be dead; 
 and in fifty years the very house in which he 
 made the prediction is a depot for the circula- 
 tion of the Scriptures. "The foundation of God 
 standeth sure." The universe has meaning; it 
 speaks everywhere of infinite thought, of infinite 
 patience, of infinite purpose. "Our souls were 
 made for God, and they are restless until they 
 find him. ,, Long ago, one of humble, self-less 
 spirit, whose earthly life was to human eyes a 
 tragic failure, forsaken by his few friends, cru- 
 cified upon a tree, dared to say, "Heaven and 
 Earth shall pass away, but my words shall not 
 pass away." Is not the past a glorious proph- 
 ecy of the future ? Is it not reasonable to be 
 sure that " the best is yet to be " ? Out of his 
 Holy Word, out of the exhaustless storehouses 
 of the natural world, out of the hearts of men 
 growing up into his image, God has yet more 
 light to break forth, more love to radiate, larger 
 life here and hereafter to reveal. "Oh how 
 great is Thy goodness which Thou hast laid up 
 for them that fear Thee." 
 
II 
 
 GOD THE LOVING FATHER; MAN THE ERRING 
 
 CHILD 
 
 A WORKING theology is born of another 
 conscious limitation, the limitation of 
 power, the limitation of moral achievement. 
 The I, groping, stumbling, falling, saying "I 
 will," and living "I won't," misled by its own 
 confidence, starved by its own indulgence, craves 
 somewhere in the universe a Thou, stronger, 
 wiser, purer. 
 
 In a working theology, the doctrine of God is 
 summed up in the two words of Jesus, "God is 
 Spirit," and "Your Father and my Father." 
 The one tells us all we can know of his being; 
 the other all we need know of his character. 
 
 "God is Spirit" — more akin to the atmos- 
 phere we breathe, which no man sees, without 
 which no man lives, than to the physical forms 
 on which we look; more akin to thought which 
 flits hither and thither at will than to the physi- 
 cal brain; to love which is eternal, immortal, 
 
 invisible, than to the physical heart. "The 
 
 8 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 9 
 
 wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest 
 the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it 
 cometh, and whither it goeth; so is every one 
 that is born of the Spirit." He is the first cause, 
 the final goal of all things, in all life, but above 
 all life. But according to the Scriptures, and 
 according to the rich testimony of experience, 
 God is not a mere vapor, an essence, a force; he 
 has those qualities imperfectly summed up in 
 the word personality — imperfectly, for no word 
 of human speech can fully define him — which 
 make it possible for man to know him, and to 
 love him, and to be like him. The thought of 
 God as a Spirit is ever to be balanced by the 
 thought of God as a Person; he thinks and feels 
 and wills as we do; he has self-consciousness 
 and self-direction. But the thought of God as a 
 Person is ever to be balanced by the thought of 
 God as a Spirit; he has none of our limitations, 
 the limitations of form and space and time. He 
 is everywhere and always and in all things: 
 
 "Centre and soul of every sphere, 
 Yet to each loving heart how near." 
 
 Jesus teaches us to bring to our thought of 
 God, who is Spirit, one of the sweetest and most 
 
 
io A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 sacred of human names, Father. It may be 
 freely conceded that the word throws no light 
 upon the great mystery of the being and essence 
 of God, and that it is not even a perfect expres- 
 sion of his character. But it is the most satisfy- 
 ing of all resting-places for the mind and heart 
 as they seek after the Infinite. It has often been 
 said that men made in the image of God have 
 made God in the image of man. This is true; 
 it has often been unfortunate, but in some de- 
 gree it is necessary. We cannot conceive God 
 save in the terms of our own thought, and in the 
 language of our own life. It is at this point that 
 many of the positions of the recent "new the- 
 ology" in England break down as parts of a 
 working theology. When we tell men that be- 
 cause of the essential oneness of God and man 
 and the solidarity of humanity you are I, and 
 I am you, and we are both God; or that it is 
 impossible to conceive of anything in the uni- 
 verse outside of God,* that which we say may 
 
 ♦There must be a region of experience where we shall find 
 that you and I are one. . . . My God is my deeper Self and 
 yours too. . . . How can there be anything in the universe 
 outside of God?" — "The New Theology," R. J. Campbell, pp. 
 34, 35 and 18. 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY u 
 
 be true in the terms of some man's philosophy, 
 but to the men in our churches it is nonsense, 
 it rings false to experience, it is the offering of 
 a stone to men hungry for bread, and has, there- 
 fore, no place in a working theology. But when 
 we tell them that the Infinite Spirit who is in 
 all life and above it — its source, its strength, its 
 goal — has toward every man the thought and 
 purpose and energy of a father, we give them 
 a truth beneath whose spreading folds every 
 experience of life may be interpreted. 
 
 God, then, in a working theology, is Infinite 
 Life and Love in all life regnant. Jesus Christ 
 is Infinite Life and Love manifest. A working 
 theology concerns itself little with defining 
 Christ; he baffles, surmounts all definition. 
 Always definitions divide men; simple loyalties 
 unite them. "Every definition," said Erasmus, 
 "is a misfortune." It is a commonplace that 
 the controversies of the ages have, in the main, 
 been controversies about words. Deity, divin- 
 ity, humanity, are after all but words in which 
 man concretes his ignorance, mere direction- 
 points in the seekings of the centuries. What 
 deity is in its essence, what humanity is, what 
 
12 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 in our Master was divine, what human, no man 
 can know until he knows what spirit is, and 
 what matter is, and what, in its essence, life is; 
 and no man knows any of these things to-day. 
 As men beheld the Christ, they said, If God 
 has an only begotten Son, this must indeed be 
 he.* But is not even this sacred word of the 
 ages an accommodation to human thought ? 
 Must not the relation of God and of Jesus 
 Christ be too spiritual, too complete, to be per- 
 fectly expressed in the terminology of any human 
 relation ? My own Christology — a very simple 
 and satisfying one — is summed up in the Mas- 
 ter's word, "I am the Way"; in the face, in the 
 life, in the death of Jesus Christ, I see God. 
 "If ye knew me," he said, "ye would know my 
 Father also.' 5 We know a man not when we 
 know his visible form — we see men every day 
 we do not know — we know a man when we 
 know his mind and heart and spirit. The hum- 
 blest man who knows Jesus Christ, who is try- 
 ing every day to learn of him, keeping his 
 words, seeking his spirit, doing his work, knows 
 
 * We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten from 
 the Father. John i, 14. 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 13 
 
 more about God than all the wisdom of science 
 and philosophy and theology can teach him. 
 As I learn more of him, I find myself saying of 
 him, not at all as the last word of a dogma, but 
 as the utterance of a great love and a soul-satis- 
 fying devotion, "My Lord and my God." 
 
 Jesus Christ is God visible to man; God ex- 
 pressed in the form, speaking the language, do- 
 ing the work of a human life. The Holy Spirit 
 is God vital in man. The great word of a work- 
 ing theology is power; its gospel that the weak- 
 ness of man may assimilate the strength of God; 
 that in every struggle of the soul outward and 
 upward, the infinite resources of the universe 
 may be his. And they are needed. For in a 
 strong working theology sin is very real and 
 very terrible. It is no amiable weakness, no un- 
 fortunate tendency, no blundering quest after 
 God. The depreciation of sin is the emascula- 
 tion of religion. It is true that sin is selfishness, 
 the assertion of the unit against the whole; that 
 punishment is from within, the normal fruit of 
 sin, essential not arbitrary; that hell is the re- 
 morse of the soul localized. There is no new 
 theology in this; one finds most of it in William 
 
H A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 Law in the early eighteenth century. But when 
 we are told that "sin has never injured God ex- 
 cept through man " * a note is struck which is 
 out of tune with every human analogy. The 
 boy who grows up to wrong his fellow-creature 
 hurts his own father even more. The great 
 utterance of Calvary is that the heart of God is 
 rent and torn with the sin and selfishness of 
 men; that God is injured, not in anger, not 
 wholly in that wrath which is the recoil of the 
 pure from the foul, not because the cosmic proc- 
 ess has gone wrong; but in the anguish and bit- 
 ter disappointment and great love of a Father's 
 breaking heart. The very essence of Chris- 
 tianity is the personal relation of God the 
 Father and man the child; we can never em- 
 phasize overmuch not only the blindness, the 
 folly, the self-defeat of sin, but the great wrong 
 it does to a Father's love. It is the manifesta- 
 tion of the love of God that has won the best in 
 men through the ages, and will to the end. 
 
 ♦ "The New Theology," R. J. Campbell, p. 52. 
 
Ill 
 
 DIVINE PROVIDENCE IN THE PLAY OF COSMIC 
 
 PROCESSES 
 
 /^REAT emphasis is placed in a working 
 theology upon Divine Providence. By the 
 term is meant the guidance in all life of an In- 
 finite and beneficent Power, the slow, sure 
 working of a Plan, alike in the ages of history, 
 in the destiny of nations, and in the experiences 
 of individual men. This plan embraces in its ma- 
 jestic sweep no less the indifference, the folly, 
 the antagonism of men than their devotion and 
 aspiration and achievement; ever unfolding, it 
 is never complete; often hidden, it is never dor- 
 mant, and never wholly fails. Wordsworth 
 beautifully expresses the thought in its more 
 personal application in lines which Gladstone 
 used to quote: 
 
 One adequate support 
 For the calamities of mortal life 
 Exists — one only: an assured belief 
 That the procession of our fate, howe'er 
 Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being 
 Of infinite benevolence and power 
 Whose everlasting purposes embrace 
 All accidents, converting them to good. 
 
16 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 Huxley showed that he was in sympathy with 
 this great conception (though he declared the 
 evidence accessible to be wholly insufficient to 
 warrant either a positive or a negative conclu- 
 sion) when he wrote: "If the doctrine of 
 Providence is to be taken as the expression 
 'in a way to be understanded of the people' 
 of the total exclusion of chance from a place 
 even in the most insignificant corner of nature; 
 if it means the strong conviction that the cosmic 
 process is rational and the faith that through- 
 out all duration unbroken order has reigned 
 in the universe, I not only accept it, but I am 
 disposed to think it the most important of 
 all truths. As it is of more consequence for a 
 citizen to know the law than to be personally 
 acquainted with the features of those who will 
 surely carry it into effect, so this very positive 
 doctrine of Providence, in the sense defined, 
 seems to me far more important than all the 
 theorems of speculative theology. If, further, 
 the doctrine is held to imply that in some indefi- 
 nitely remote past aeon, the cosmic process was 
 set going by some entity possessed of intelligence 
 and foresight, similar to our own in kind, how- 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 17 
 
 ever superior in degree; if consequently it is 
 held that every event, not merely in our plan- 
 etary speck, but in untold millions of other 
 worlds, was foreknown before the worlds were, 
 scientific thought, so far as I know anything 
 about it, has nothing to say against that hypoth- 
 esis. It is in fact an anthropomorphic rendering 
 of the doctrine of evolution. " * 
 
 What light does modern thought throw upon 
 the working of Divine Providence, not only in 
 starting off the process in long aeons past, and 
 foreknowing its every issue, but in shaping its 
 smallest detail to-day ? 
 
 (1) Modern thought magnifies beyond hu- 
 man grasp the sphere of the Divine activity. 
 Truly in our Father's house are many dwelling- 
 places. Men have grown up slowly toward, 
 they are far from attaining yet, a fit conception 
 of the omnipresence, the vast universal interest 
 and energy of God. The God of the Hebrews 
 was a tribal God; he was their God, the one 
 true God; but his interests were local, his efforts 
 confined to a limited area, narrowed by antipa- 
 thies and resentments like their own. The most 
 
 ♦ Huxley's Life and Letters," Vol. II, p. 320. 
 
18 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 difficult thing for Israel to learn was that God 
 cared at all for the foreigner. The tendency of 
 men always has been to assume a monopoly of 
 the plan and the care of God. In his name and 
 for his glory the nations have gone forth to kill 
 one another, each claiming his aid, confident of 
 his approval, forgetful as a rule that God so 
 loved the world, that his interests are vast and 
 deep as the sweep of human need. And to-day, 
 we who take the wider view, who are growing 
 up slowly into a world-consciousness, who real- 
 ize that God's thought and purpose embrace 
 the distant nations and the alien races, are apt 
 to forget that the earth, to us so vast, is but a 
 speck in the dominions of the Eternal, that 
 whether or not these distant realms, whose 
 number no man can count, whose dimensions 
 no man can conceive, whose distance from us 
 surpasses estimate, be peopled with beings in any 
 way like us, we are bound to them by the kin- 
 ship of a common creation and a common care; 
 their wondrous secret is the present thought of 
 God, their progress his toil, there as here God 
 is and God works. What new meaning the 
 thought gives to the word of Jesus, "My Father 
 
UNIVERSITY } 
 
 OF / 
 
 A WORKING THEOLOGY 19 
 
 worketh hitherto." Who can ponder the 
 vast expanse of the divine thought and toil, and 
 not be impressed anew with the marvel and 
 mystery of the universe, and the infinite great- 
 ness of Him from whom it comes, whose will it 
 wondrously fulfils ? Who in the presence of 
 such a greatness does not feel humbled, is not 
 ready to say with Washington Irving that the 
 efforts of man to comprehend Divine Providence 
 — to set limits to them, and say, This thou 
 canst do, that never — are "like the efforts of 
 the little blind mole running his tiny tunnels 
 underground to comprehend the marching and 
 countermarching of armies overhead.' 3 
 
 (2) But modern thought about the universe 
 makes easier a reasonable faith in the Providence 
 of God. Men who thought of God as dwelling 
 in physical form on a great throne in distant 
 spaces thought less consistently of his daily 
 contact with all human life; but men who be- 
 gin to realize something of what is meant by the 
 sublime statement that God is Spirit, who feel 
 increasingly the reality of the spiritual uni- 
 verse, find it ever easier to believe that he who 
 is great enough to be the God of the infinite 
 
20 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 spaces is ever present in the life of the world and 
 the lives of his children. And if present, then 
 potent. It is impossible to conceive of God 
 simply as a presence, a mere vapor, inert, pas- 
 sive. Where God is, he achieves. 
 
 But here arise some difficulties which perplex 
 many an earnest mind. One asks, does not 
 modern thought reveal to us a great realm of 
 order in which laws, fixed, relentless, work out 
 their sure results; where, in a universe of law, 
 is the place of a benign Providence ? The an- 
 swer, of course, is that law and Providence are 
 never to be conceived of as antagonistic, that 
 "the course of nature is itself providential," the 
 relation of cause and effect, like the unfailing 
 sequence of the seasons, a part of the kindness 
 of this scheme of things, through which man 
 may know himself and the world around him, 
 and shape his life, and do his work, with confi- 
 dence. All law is love; all love is law. "The 
 very etymology of the word," it has well been 
 said, "should have taught us that Providence is 
 not afterthought, but forethought, foreseeing 
 and consequent foreordaining, not the tinkering 
 of a machine so clumsily constructed that its 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 21 
 
 working fails to accomplish its designed pur- 
 pose, the shoving backward or forward of a 
 clock which fails to keep good time, but the 
 orderly working of infinite wisdom, whose eter- 
 nal plans need no modification because perfect 
 always." * 
 
 But what of special providences ? If by 
 special providences we mean that universal 
 laws are ever interfered with for the benefit of 
 the individual, no such conception can prevail 
 in this age. But if we mean that for each man 
 as for all men the course of nature is providen- 
 tial; if we mean, with Horace Bushnell, that 
 every man's life is a plan of God, this is a 
 thought as essential to any just conception of 
 the majesty of God, as it is precious to the 
 heart of man. Here, of course, some find diffi- 
 culty. "The God whom science recognizes," 
 we are told, "must be a God of universal laws 
 exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a 
 retail business. He cannot accommodate his 
 processes to the convenience of individuals." "j* 
 
 ♦"Christian Faith in an Age of Science," by Dr. William 
 North Rice, p. 338. 
 
 t" Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 496. The quota- 
 tion does not, however, express Professor James' own view. 
 
22 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 But this is to place human limitations to the 
 work of God; it is to materialize and localize 
 him, and assume that because a thing is difficult 
 for man to conceive, it is impossible for God to 
 achieve. Depend upon it, the Lord God Al- 
 mighty does thorough work; in the greatness of 
 his toils he does not let detail escape him. "To 
 the Infinite Intelligence, all and each are alike 
 present. God does not forget details in gener- 
 alizations, nor lose generalizations in details." * 
 But where in a human life is the sphere of 
 Providence ? If my life is a plan of God, 
 mapped out before I was born, where do I 
 come in ? This is the problem, old as the 
 gropings of the human mind, of freewill and 
 foreordination. The answer that appeals alike 
 to mind and heart is that God in the exercise 
 of his Divine sovereignty and love, for the 
 achievement of his great creative ends, has 
 given to man the sublime gift of choice, the 
 image of the Divine within him; that even 
 God cannot compel the choices of a free 
 being; that the plan of a man's life is not 
 mapped out beyond his choices once long ago 
 
 ♦ Dr. Rice. 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 23 
 
 by a distant Power, but that the great Planner 
 is ever with us renewing, reshaping the Plan, 
 out of our false choices making for us fresh op- 
 portunities, with wondrous patience working out 
 the purposes we have long resisted, bringing the 
 scattered ends of life into a glorious unity, say- 
 ing to us with every dawning day, "Behold, I 
 make all things new." 
 
 That there is the least reality in such a view, 
 no amount of argument will ever convince. The 
 testimony of experience alone is sure and strong. 
 There are men whose testimony on other things 
 the world trusts implicitly whose most confident 
 conviction is that God is with them. They are 
 amazed and startled often by the evidences of 
 his presence, by the unfolding in their lives of 
 a plan far beyond their own. Mysterious helps 
 come to them; strange guidances point the way; 
 they seem to feel in all life the touch of a Hand, 
 to hear the whisper of a still small voice. Where 
 others speak of coincidences, they speak of God, 
 and echo gratefully the Psalmist's words, " I am 
 poor and needy, yet the Lord thinketh upon me." 
 
 But what of those whose lives give no such 
 testimony ? Two things are to be remembered. 
 
24 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 (a) Divine Providence is never to be asso- 
 ciated only with strange guidances, mysterious 
 helps, marvellous coincidences. It may be 
 associated no less with great disappointments, 
 sudden shocks of sorrow, dread perplexities, 
 awful defeats. Of some of the great deliver- 
 ances of life we say sometimes, Things were at 
 their very worst, all was darkness and despair, 
 when suddenly a way was wonderfully opened 
 up, a great light flashed upon the horizon, and 
 we felt that God's hand was in it. But no less 
 truly might we say when blow after blow falls 
 suddenly in a dozen directions, and the life that 
 seemed joyous and confident is rent with an- 
 guish or blighted with defeat, This, too, is God's 
 hand, driving us into the wilderness, this, too, 
 his voice, saying, "Quit you like men, be strong; 
 my face may be hidden, but I will never leave 
 you nor forsake you." A great soul of old was 
 called wonderfully out of the darkness of blun- 
 der and folly into the sunshine of faith and 
 hope. As he puzzled out his new life-problem, 
 a messenger of God was sent to him, and this 
 was the message, "I will show him how great 
 things he must suffer for my name's sake/' 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 25 
 
 There was no room for the Saviour of the world 
 at his birth; he went by a lonely and thorny 
 way to a cross. Life as God plans it is never to 
 be identified with the life of ease and prosperity; 
 the gathering storm is in it no less than the 
 clearing path. 
 
 (b) There is rich suggestion in the remark of 
 R. H. Hutton that God's providences work 
 largely in the sphere of the choices. "The 
 minds that are alive to every word from God, 
 give constant opportunity for his divine inter- 
 ference with a suggestion that may alter the 
 course of their lives; and like the ship which 
 turns when the steersman's hand but touches the 
 
 lb 
 
 wheel, God can steer them through the worst 
 dangers by the faintest breath of feeling, or the 
 lightest touch of thought." * This is the old 
 word of the Psalmist: " The secret of the Lord 
 is with them that fear him"; it is the word of 
 Jesus, "He that wills to do God's will shall 
 know." The man who resolutely chooses God's 
 will finds it ever more perfectly; the life which 
 is eagerly sensitive to the divine touch feels and 
 follows that touch ever more confidently. 
 
 * " Theological Essays," p. 81. 
 
IV 
 
 PRAYER IN A WORLD OF LAW 
 
 "1X7'HAT is the place of prayer in the life of 
 the man who feels himself to be living in 
 a great universe of law in which, with unchang- 
 ing order, the same causes or combinations of 
 causes always produce the same effects ? At 
 once, of course, we have to rid ourselves of the 
 thought that prayer is in any degree antagonistic 
 to law. Men have been wont to think of them- 
 selves as living in the presence of two great classes 
 of phenomena, the natural, the common order, 
 the expected sequence of events, and the super- 
 natural, the abnormal, the prodigious. In his 
 government of the universe God, it has been 
 assumed, has detailed certain work to subor- 
 dinates called laws; but ever and anon they fail 
 of their purpose, they get things all mixed up, 
 they rend and tear the hearts of men, and so, in 
 response to his children's cry, God sets them 
 aside, and steps himself into the fray. Now 
 
 modern thought about the universe, and the In- 
 
 26 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 27 
 
 finite Spirit who in it is ever-present, ever-po- 
 tent, conceives all this very differently. It is not 
 that the reality of the phenomena commonly 
 classed as supernatural is for a moment ques- 
 tioned — those inexplicable happenings, those 
 providential guidances, those remarkable an- 
 swers to prayer. Far from it. Rather is their 
 sphere broadened, and their foundation deep- 
 ened and strengthened. But the conception of 
 two antagonistic methods in the universe — 
 law and Providence, nature and the supernat- 
 ural — is dismissed. We begin to see that the 
 course of nature is itself providential, that law is 
 love, that the supernatural is not the abnormal 
 but the supernormal, the higher-natural; those 
 perfectly natural self-expressions of the Infinite 
 Spirit of Life which the mind of man groping 
 dimly toward the light is as yet too blind to 
 conceive. 
 
 There follows at once from this a different 
 conception of the spirit, the atmosphere, of 
 prayer from that which men have sometimes 
 held. True prayer does not ask God to set aside 
 his laws, to interfere with the normal sequence 
 of events. There is a striking definition in one 
 
28 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 of the novels of George Meredith which goes to 
 the very heart of the matter. "Prayer," he 
 says, "is the recognition of law." That is true. 
 At the heart of all true prayer is the assent of the 
 soul to the unbroken order of the universe, its 
 sublimest utterance, "Thy will be done." Have 
 you noticed the habitual recognition of law in 
 the sayings of Jesus about prayer ? "If" is the 
 keynote of these sayings. " If ye abide in me, 
 and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye 
 will, and it shall be done unto you." "Ye have 
 not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and or- 
 dained you, that ye should go and bring forth 
 fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that 
 whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my 
 name he may give it to you." "He that believ- 
 eth on me, whatsoever he shall ask in my name, 
 that will I do." That is to say, if my spirit is in 
 you, if in you my words have become flesh, the 
 very longings of God will be yours, and they 
 cannot fail. The life whose passion it is to bear 
 fruit, to push on somewhere the great work of 
 God, will ask the things which God is far more 
 eager to give. "Prayer," says Dr. George 
 Albert Coe, "is the process of identifying our 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 29 
 
 will and whatever effectiveness we may have in 
 the world with the will and work of God." 
 "The reason," said Henry Drummond, "why 
 so many people get nothing from prayer is that 
 they expect effects without causes, and this is 
 also the reason why they give it up. True 
 prayer for any promise is to plead for power to 
 fulfil the condition on which it is offered and 
 which being fulfilled it is in that act given." 
 A man never prays until at the heart of his 
 prayer is the assent of his soul to the unbroken 
 order of the universe, the desire that he may 
 take the place in it God means for him humbly, 
 bravely, completely, the longing that in his life 
 God's will may be wholly done. Prayer is the 
 recognition of law. 
 
 But does not this conception limit greatly the 
 scope of prayer ? It does limit somewhat the 
 scope of our asking, but it immeasurably ex- 
 tends the range of our receiving. The man who 
 has such a thought of prayer as this cannot ask 
 God to set aside the order of the universe for 
 his convenience, or to save him from the effects 
 of his own folly. For this reason Charles Kings- 
 ley refused to pray for the stay of the cholera 
 
30 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 epidemic in his time; it was the effect of men's 
 filth and indolence, and they should take the 
 consequences. Many a man has gone to his 
 knees when he should have gone to the axe and 
 the disinfectant. The man who has such a 
 thought of prayer cannot argue with God in 
 prayer, try to convince him that he is wrong, 
 counsel him confidently as to the conduct of the 
 universe or of a human life. Such prayer is 
 "teasing, not trusting." But how vastly the 
 higher thought of prayer expands the range of 
 our receiving, for it brings us into touch with 
 the interests, not of one or two human lives alone, 
 but of all, not with our own poor plans alone, 
 but with God's, it makes the achievement of his 
 work, the progress of his kingdom, and not the 
 getting of bread for our own hungry lives, the 
 ever-broadening interest, the ever-deepening 
 longing of our hearts. And is it not just this 
 which many a man's life needs above all else — 
 not the fulfilment of this petty plan and that — 
 but a broadening interest, a larger outlook, a real 
 grip upon the universal sympathy and interest 
 of God in Christ ? 
 
 It may be asked, is there not in this thought 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 31 
 
 of prayer a limitation larger than any which has 
 yet been mentioned ? If we are living in a uni- 
 verse of unbroken order, if causes always pro- 
 duce effects, if God cannot be expected to 
 change his plan to please us, why pray at all ? 
 Did not Jesus say, "Your Father knoweth what 
 ye have need of before ye ask him" ? Yes, but 
 he also said, "When ye pray, say, our Father," 
 and the greatest of all his followers said, "Never 
 cease to pray." But why ? For answer, I might 
 remind you of the great limitations of our 
 knowledge, of our weakness, our sense of need, 
 our longing many a day for strength, for guid- 
 ance beyond our own. Shall not this passionate 
 hunger of the soul find utterance ? I might call 
 the roll of the mighty men of achievement who 
 have also been men of prayer — Gladstone, with 
 his unfailing morning hour, saying to his inti- 
 mates in the hour of political crisis, "What we 
 need is more prayer, more prayer"; Chinese 
 Gordon, with the white handkerchief before his 
 tent which told that then he must be undis- 
 turbed; Wesley, of whom it was said that he 
 was much in the upper room; Matthew Henry, 
 confessing, "I forgot to ask special prayer on 
 
32 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 the day's work, and so the chariot wheels drove 
 heavily." I might speak of the great institu- 
 tions, such as those of Muller and Barnardo and 
 Quarrier, which have been built up on and sus- 
 tained by prayer. I might quote such a testi- 
 mony to prayer, from the standpoint of the sci- 
 entific psychologist, as that of the late F. W. 
 H. Myers. A friend wrote asking him what, 
 candidly, he thought about prayer, and this is 
 what he says: "I am glad you have asked me 
 about prayer, because I have rather strong ideas 
 about the subject. First, consider what are the 
 facts. There exists around us a spiritual uni- 
 verse, and that universe is in actual relation with 
 the material. From the spiritual universe comes 
 the energy which maintains the material, the 
 energy which makes the life of each individual 
 spirit. Our spirits are supported by a perpetual 
 indrawal of energy, and the vigor of that in- 
 drawal is perpetually changing, much as the 
 vigor of our absorption of material nutriment 
 changes from hour to hour. I call these facts 
 because I think that some scheme of this kind is 
 the only one consistent with our actual evidence. 
 How, then, should we act on these facts? 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 33 
 
 Plainly we must endeavor to draw in as much 
 spiritual life as possible, and we must place our 
 minds in any attitude which experience shows 
 to be favorable to such indrawal. Prayer is the 
 general name for the attitude of open and ear- 
 nest expectancy; it is not a purely subjective 
 thing; in it spiritual power or grace flows in 
 from the infinite spiritual world." 
 
 But the best answer I know to the question, 
 why pray ?, the answer which never fails to sat- 
 isfy the man who has made it his own, is this: 
 Prayer is not simply the recognition of law; 
 prayer is the recognition of love, the love that is 
 in all law, the love that is in all life. The secret 
 of all true prayer, the unfailing rule for its ex- 
 ercise and interpretation, was given by Jesus 
 when he said, "When ye pray, say our Father." 
 We fathers know what is good for our children 
 much better than they do, why should they pre- 
 sume to tell us ? A sad day it would be for all 
 of us when our children ceased to come running 
 to us with their childish wants and troubles, 
 which are often so very foolish, for their coming 
 is the expression of the love which is our very 
 life, and of the trust which is our joy. And so, 
 
34 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 when the cannibal chief, of whom James Chal- 
 mers tells us, prays "We much want tobacco, 
 calico, and tomahawks and knives," I am sure 
 it pleases God even as it pleases us, for it is the 
 foolish child coming to his wise Father, and by 
 and by, coming often to that Father, he will know 
 better what to ask. And when the child of whom 
 Dr. George A. Coe tells us, seeing a storm com- 
 ing that will stop his play, kneels upon the lawn 
 and prays that it may not rain, it is prayer, for 
 it is the child coming to his Father, the child 
 making the truly Christian assumption that 
 God is interested in the games of childhood. 
 And when the farmer prays for rain for his 
 wheatfield, though the order of nature is un- 
 changed by his words, still this is prayer, for by 
 it the man assumes a relation of conscious de- 
 pendence and trust toward God, and by bring- 
 ing his daily occupation to God attains to some- 
 thing greater than wheat.* I must come to God 
 with my poor little human prayers because he is 
 my Father and I am his child, and if I do not 
 speak to him, nor he to me, the sweet relation is 
 lost. He is no more my Father, nor I his child. 
 
 * See Dr. Coe's " Religion of a Mature Mind," p. 357. 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 35 
 
 And I may ask him for anything I like, because 
 he is my Father, but coming to him often I 
 learn, as our children soon learn with us, that 
 there are many things it is useless to ask, that 
 the things best for me are the things my loving 
 Father longs to give; that the best prayer is 
 prayer that I may know what these are, and de- 
 sire them above all, and love and trust him more 
 and more. For the best prayer is not asking for 
 things, it is the quiet, creative hour when the 
 child is alone with his Father, seeking his guid- 
 ance, receiving his strength, resting in his infinite 
 love. 
 
 And yet this is not the last word about prayer. 
 The most Christlike prayer is prayer for others, 
 that God's will may be done in them, that in the 
 world they may be kept from the stain of the 
 world, that they may be comforted in sorrow, 
 upheld in toil, guided into the fullest fruition of 
 their lives. Such prayer is not simply the nor- 
 mal utterance of Christian faith and love; it 
 achieves wondrous results; in it space is anni- 
 hilated, and soul touches soul. Devout men 
 have always believed this. Many a man has felt 
 around him all his life an impelling, restraining 
 
36 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 influence which he has ascribed to his mother's 
 prayers; in moments of moral peril he has felt 
 himself arrested as by an unseen hand. The 
 great missionary movement has been built up 
 largely upon the prayers of the faithful. 
 
 "Away in foreign fields they wondered how 
 Their simple word had power; 
 At home the Christians, two or three, 
 Had met to pray an hour." 
 
 To-day modern conceptions alike of the uni- 
 verse and of the individual make easier the faith 
 that such prayer is a positive force. True, we 
 are just reaching the first outlook upon an un- 
 known country; what wonders are beyond no 
 man knows. But the glimpses already opening 
 to the vision — the self beneath the sphere of 
 consciousness where some tell us spirit has its 
 meeting-place with spirit, and God with man; 
 the new emphasis upon mental suggestion, in 
 healing diseases alike of the body and the mind; 
 the reality of telepathic communication, which 
 is probably the one thing thus far fully estab- 
 lished by psychic research — all these aid 
 the belief that when I pray for my friend I am 
 touching him with spiritual energy; when I 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 37 
 
 suggest to him, even if he be distant from me, 
 that he can conquer his weakness, that he can 
 rise above his sorrow, that all things are possi- 
 ble to him that believeth, I am helping to bring 
 spiritual forces at least within his reach, I am 
 pleading for that very faith which the Master 
 always required ere his love wrought its won- 
 drous work. There is no peril in this of what 
 some may call a mere naturalism, the apparent 
 identification of God with the forces of the uni- 
 verse and the latent resources of the human 
 spirit. The man who is most keenly conscious 
 of the spiritual energies around and within him, 
 most eager to be a channel through which they 
 may work, will never lose in them the Infinite 
 Spirit of Life who is great enough to have 
 brought them into being; as he seeks to awaken 
 the latent resources of his own and his brother's 
 spirit, he will realize gratefully that by far the 
 greatest of these resources, from which none 
 that is strong and sure can ever for a moment be 
 separated, is God himself in the human soul. 
 
 To many a Christian the offering of prayer 
 "through Jesus Christ ,, is no formal use of an 
 empty phrase. He so prays because he sees God 
 
38 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 in the face of Jesus Christ, because Jesus has 
 led him into a new understanding of the mean- 
 ing and the power of prayer; most of all it is 
 his thought that his prayer should pass through 
 the very heart of Christ up to the Infinite and 
 out to his brother, because he realizes that the 
 prayer that is purified by the Master's spirit of 
 self-surrender, of obedience, of perfect love, 
 unites itself with the Divine will and is bound 
 to triumph. 
 
 Such a conception of prayer as this of course 
 leaves many unanswered questions. But that 
 by prayer life is linked with life, the might of 
 God with the weakness of man, is in these days 
 a reasonable and a great working faith. 
 
MIRACLES IN A SCIENTIFIC AGE 
 
 [N a credulous age, miracles were the fore- 
 most evidence of Christianity; to-day, to 
 many minds, they are among the greatest of 
 religious difficulties, while others dismiss them 
 wholly from their thought. "There is nothing," 
 says Matthew Arnold, "one would more desire 
 for a person or a doctrine one greatly values 
 than to make them independent of miracle." 
 
 What is a miracle ? In the simplest sense of 
 the word, a miracle is a wonder, a wonderful 
 thing, that is all. In the restricted sense in 
 which we commonly use the word, a miracle is 
 a departure from the known laws of nature, a 
 startling deviation from the common sequence 
 of events. From this definition two things fol- 
 low: (i) Miracle is not necessarily a departure 
 from law, but from known law; it is not neces- 
 sarily an interference with the order of the uni- 
 verse, but the calling in of a higher law. With 
 this view it is possible to define a miracle 
 accurately as "a divine restoration of the true 
 
 39 
 
4 o A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 order of nature." * (2) The miracle of yester- 
 day is the commonplace of to-day. Had I told 
 a friend fifty years ago that, sitting in my study, 
 I had that day talked with a man a hundred 
 miles away, or that I had just heard from a 
 friend in midocean, I would have been deemed 
 untruthful, insane, or a worker of miracles; 
 but to-day the statement awakens no surprise. 
 
 Let it be clear, then, that in the light of mod- 
 ern knowledge of the universe, there is no diffi- 
 culty about miracles simply on account of 
 their marvellousness. In epoch-making words 
 Huxley made this very clear: "Whoso clearly 
 appreciates all that is implied in the falling of a 
 stone can have no difficulty about any doctrine 
 simply on account of its marvellousness. ,, "I 
 am too much a believer with Butler that there 
 is no absurdity in theology so great that you 
 cannot parallel it by a far greater absurdity of 
 Nature to have any difficulty about miracles." 
 And again, "Science offers us much greater 
 marvels than the miracles of theology, only the 
 evidence for them is very different." f "Sci- 
 
 * Stearns, "Present Day Theology," p. 63. 
 
 t Huxley's "Life and Letters," vol. i, 211, 227, etc. 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 41 
 
 >> L. '^ (< 
 
 ence, says a recent writer, recognizes no mir- 
 acle because all the world has become mirac- 
 ulous." * 
 
 So much for the possibility of miracle. In 
 the presence of the infinite vastness of the phe- 
 nomena with which he deals, the observer of 
 reverent spirit stands humbled, feels profoundly 
 the limitation of his knowledge, and hesitates to 
 say of any wonderful thing, It could not be. 
 It is needless to assume that the processes of 
 nature as he who made them knows them, are 
 so clumsy and ineffective that he has ever to go 
 beyond them to effect his ends. But on the 
 other hand, it is alike presumptuous and illogi- 
 cal to assume that in the common order of the 
 universe as known to men, the Infinite Spirit 
 has exhausted his resources ; sane and reason- 
 able is it rather to believe that the latent forces 
 which man is gradually finding and making his 
 own are but a few of the infinite powers of the 
 exhaustless power of God. 
 
 The real question is not, are miracles pos- 
 sible, but have miracles happened ? Was the 
 
 ♦"Christian Theology in Outline," William Adams Brown, 
 p. 228. 
 
42 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 advent of Christianity heralded and accom- 
 panied by the working of inexplicable wonders ? 
 Now, there are two avenues of approach to this 
 question. One is to go to Christ through the 
 miracles, because of them to believe in him. 
 The other method is to go to the miracles 
 through Christ, because of him to look at them. 
 The first method no longer appeals to our age. 
 We recall at once that the earthly life of Jesus 
 was lived in a credulous, unscientific age, in 
 which the air was peopled with ghosts and de- 
 mons, and the more marvellous a thing was the 
 more ready men were to believe it. We recall 
 that all religions, and especially the lives of their 
 founders and great leaders, have been associated 
 with stories of wonder-working. We recall that 
 some of the records of the Old Testament mira- 
 cles were written centuries after the events they 
 describe, and that a large legendary element 
 may have entered into them; and that even the 
 New Testament stories may well have been em- 
 bellished by tradition ere they were written down 
 for ages to come. In a word, this method quickly 
 brings us into a fog of uncertainty and doubt. 
 Take, then, the other method. But first, in 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 43 
 
 deference to our pride of mind, let us make sin- 
 cerely the effort to banish the miraculous from 
 Christian faith, and see where it issues. Must we 
 not begin at one sweep with the character of 
 Jesus, for he is himself the greatest of his mira- 
 cles ? The noblest souls of the ages, as they 
 bowed before God, have felt ever the great gulf 
 that separated them from the Infinite; they have 
 felt keenly their sinfulness and unworthiness. 
 But here is One, humble in spirit, selfless in life, 
 the sanest soul of the centuries, who dares to 
 say, "I do always the things that please him," 
 "I and the Father are one"; and after nineteen 
 centuries of research and criticism the testimony 
 of the ages is that of Pilate of old, "We find in 
 him no fault." In kindred words this testimony 
 was given by Matthew Arnold, who will not be 
 classed commonly as an orthodox Christian, 
 "Jesus himself is an absolute; we cannot ex- 
 plain him; he is the perfection of an ideal." If 
 the miraculous goes, the character of Jesus, the 
 ideal of the centuries, is a delusion, for it is an 
 interference with the common order, it is 
 wholly beyond the experience that leaves him 
 out. And of course his resurrection goes. It is 
 
44 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 one of the best-attested facts of human history. 
 It is impossible, without it, to conceive what 
 changed those blind, timid, self-seeking friends 
 of his into strong, resourceful apostles, men 
 with a message ever clear, ready to suffer, ready 
 any day to die for it, and for him. It is impos- 
 sible, without it, to account intelligently for the 
 survival of Christianity. " If Christ be not risen 
 your faith is vain." But if the miraculous goes, 
 the resurrection goes. And this is but the be- 
 ginning. All the most cherished convictions of 
 Christian faith — the Divine guidance of indi- 
 vidual lives, the reality and the worth of prayer 
 — are, as far as man's knowledge of the proc- 
 esses of nature goes, miraculous; they are be- 
 yond the common order, a departure from 
 known law. What is left? "Let us eat and 
 drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die." 
 
 Rather let us begin with Jesus. What do we 
 find ? The Master is no mere wonder-worker, 
 playing with infinite powers, "omnipotence let 
 loose." Urged again and again to do some 
 showy trick that men might be sure of his 
 claims — to leap from the temple roof upon the 
 pavement beneath, to make stones into bread, 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 45 
 
 to give a sign of some kind — he declines, saying: 
 "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." 
 He manifests no pride in his works, ascribes 
 them all to God, tells men if they can but lay 
 hold on God they can do all these things, and 
 greater, too. "The Father that dwelleth in me 
 he doeth the works/' "He that believeth on me, 
 the works that I do shall he do also, and greater 
 works than these shall he do." True, at times 
 he appeals to the works as an evidence of his mis- 
 sion, as when, to comfort his discouraged fore- 
 runner, he said, "Go tell John what things ye 
 have seen and heard: the blind see, the lame 
 walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the 
 dead are raised up." But this is not their pur- 
 pose; they are not mere wonders, but works, 
 the outflow of divine sympathy in the presence 
 of human suffering and need. His miracles are 
 a consistent part of his redemptive work, the fit- 
 ting expression of his love; when we read of him 
 at the wedding feast in Cana, in the home of 
 the centurion, by the bier of the widow's son, we 
 feel a perfect sense of harmony between the 
 man and the work; the heart responds, "It was 
 just like him." 
 
46 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 But this is the Christ of history. What of the 
 Christ of experience ? I know intimately a man 
 who for years was a victim of the liquor habit. 
 He drank degradation to the dregs. The habit 
 cost him friends, position, health, all on earth 
 but a mother's love and a mother's prayers. 
 Again and again he tried to reform, again and 
 again sadly failed. Child of a cultured home, 
 this man, tottering in limb, shattered in spirit, 
 drifted one day for food and lodging into a res- 
 cue home. A Christ-guided hand was laid upon 
 him. "Do you really want to reform ?" said the 
 stranger. "I do, but it's no use." "Have you 
 ever asked Christ to help you ?" "I have not." 
 They spoke of Christ, they knelt and prayed, the 
 stranger first and then the poor weak man. In 
 that hour he received not simply new purpose — 
 that he had often had before — but cleansing 
 power. "My appetite was taken away," he 
 says; "I have never since wanted to drink." 
 If this be true, and he is a very sane fellow, who 
 for years now has given his leisure to work for 
 men who are a*s he was, it was a miracle as won- 
 derful as any of the wonders of Scripture. An- 
 other man was for years bowed to the dust by 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 47 
 
 a great sorrow; duty only deadened it; friends 
 were kind and sympathetic, but, ah, they did 
 not understand; now he has learned habitually 
 to look to Christ, to think of him, to pray to him; 
 somehow the look always brings courage and a 
 new hope; his smile returns, his step brightens, 
 his heart can find a song — he does not wonder 
 at the miracles. Another lived only to get; to 
 this end every effort of his life went forth; it 
 meant incessant struggle, restless fear, bitter 
 enmity, a prize ever sought and never found. 
 Then he learned of Christ to give, a very simple 
 change — new direction in life, a different way; 
 but so marvellous the change it has wrought in 
 the whole sweep of his life and in his own heart 
 that to him all the wonder-working of old seems 
 but a poor outward thing compared to the mira- 
 cle that has been wrought of Christ in him. 
 
 So is it ever. Begin sincerely with Christ, 
 and all else in this world of mystery begins to 
 have upon it the morning light. Of course, in 
 face of the miracles of old, the Christian will not 
 silence his thinking function, or accept anything 
 because it is associated with the name of Jesus. 
 He will not be blind to the human element in the 
 
48 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 Scriptures; he will not forget the wealth of Ori- 
 ental imagery and symbolism, so unlike our 
 matter-of-fact Western forms of speech. But as 
 he is led of Christ into the greatness of the Di- 
 vine Plan and the marvel of the Divine Love, it 
 will seem to him ever less strange that in that 
 crude age when first the law was given, by 
 strange signs the Divine presence was attested; 
 or that when first the prophets spoke, by deeds 
 as well as by words men were summoned to hear; 
 or, most of all, that when the great Revelation 
 of Love was given, when at last a human life 
 perfectly responded to the will and fully did the 
 work of God, in his presence latent forces of the 
 universe sprang into action, and all nature felt 
 upon it the touch of a Master hand. 
 
 In a working theology, the test of the miracles 
 is a very simple one. The miracles that seem to 
 the Christian to be like Christ, outpourings of 
 his love, manifestations of his spirit, he will 
 gratefully accept, and love to read about; those 
 that seem to him unlike the Master, trivial, arbi- 
 trary, the will put unhesitatingly from his 
 thought, awaiting upon them the light of a 
 clearer day. The counsel of the old Scotch 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 49 
 
 preacher, "Let us look the difficulty in the face, 
 and pass on," was very wise, a frank recognition 
 of comparative values, a refusal to discredit the 
 sunlight because for the moment some pinhead 
 obstruction blinds the eyes. 
 
VI 
 
 THE BIBLE IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN REVE- 
 LATION AND INSPIRATION 
 
 npHERE has been suggested constantly in 
 these chapters the new dignity of the nat- 
 ural. Of old, men were apt to think of God as 
 active mainly in the abnormal, the occasional, 
 the supernatural. Jonathan Edwards used to 
 open his windows in a thunder-storm; the at- 
 mosphere was so full of God, he said. To-day 
 we begin to realize that God is at work in every 
 blade of grass as in the earthquake and the 
 thunderbolt, in the commonplaces of life as in 
 its crises; that the laws of nature, being his 
 workmanship, cannot well be the clumsy and 
 ineffective weapons of his will, requiring peri- 
 odically to be superseded, which men have 
 sometimes supposed; that the supernatural so- 
 called is simply the supernormal, the higher- 
 natural, those perfectly natural self-expressions 
 of the Infinite Spirit which the mind of man, 
 struggling toward the truth, is as yet too dull to 
 
 understand. 
 
 50 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 51 
 
 Now nowhere is the new dignity of the nat- 
 ural more manifest than in our modern thought 
 about the Bible. Many devout Christians have 
 been much troubled by the newer teaching; it 
 has seemed to them that the authority of the 
 Scriptures was questioned, their truthfulness 
 impeached, their value denied. But to-day we 
 are coming to see that the sum of the best mod- 
 ern thought about the Bible is this, that the 
 Bible is an infinitely more natural book than 
 men have sometimes thought it, and for this 
 very reason a far more precious and powerful 
 book than otherwise in these days it could be. 
 It is not that there is less of God in the Bible, 
 but that his methods here are seen to be more 
 like what he has been teaching men of his 
 methods everywhere. 
 
 How natural, for instance, was the origin of 
 the Bible as the Bible itself reveals it. Had men 
 claimed always for the Bible only what it claims 
 for itself, much harmful controversy would have 
 been saved. Needless to say, the book was 
 never dropped from heaven complete; it grew 
 up out of the life of a race chosen of God for 
 great service, the expression of all that was best 
 
52 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 in their history, their biography, their literature, 
 their poetry, their preaching, their legislation. 
 In very early days one writer from his stand- 
 point, and another from his, but both with a 
 strong religious interest, gathered together cer- 
 tain traditions long current not only in Israel, 
 but in Babylonia and elsewhere, as to the begin- 
 nings of human history; a later writer gathered 
 these writings into one without attempting to 
 harmonize them, and our book of Genesis — the 
 wonderful book of Beginnings — came into being. 
 Exodus is the history of the dramatic exodus of 
 Israel from Egypt. Leviticus is the lawbook of 
 the nation. Psalms, on which the devout spirits 
 of the ages have been nourished, was, with its 
 appendix the book of Lamentations, the hymn- 
 and prayer-book of the Jewish community. 
 Proverbs is a collection of the sayings of the 
 sages, the wise men who were in every village, 
 whose successors sought out the infant Jesus, 
 the counsellors of the people, men with a genius 
 for summing up truth in a sentence.. A certain 
 prophet of God, unable longer to reach his 
 audience, receives a command to write the 
 things that are throbbing in his soul; and one 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 53 
 
 of the great books of the prophets is written. 
 An ancient philosopher faces the great problem 
 of the ages, why the good suffer with the wicked; 
 in dramatic form he weaves his thought around 
 a well-known story probably much older than 
 his time, and the result is the book of Job, the 
 great epic of the human soul. Gradually these 
 books, and others, written some of them centu- 
 ries apart, were gathered together, and the Bible 
 as Jesus knew and loved it, the cream of the 
 sacred literature of his race, had taken its place 
 in human history. 
 
 Quite as natural, and much more easy to 
 trace, is the origin of the New Testament as the 
 New Testament itself reveals it. The heart of 
 Paul, the great missionary apostle, goes out to 
 the little bands of converts, and the struggling 
 churches, he has left all along the line of his 
 progress; driven by persecution from their cit- 
 ies, he cannot go to see them; but he can write, 
 and he does; out of a full heart, out of a glowing 
 mind, out of a great experience, he pours out to 
 them his inmost soul on the great themes of life 
 and destiny, on the greatest theme, Jesus Christ; 
 in words he never thought would live after him, 
 
54 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 in words born of the immediate needs of the men 
 to whom he wrote, in words born of his great 
 love. To-day these letters of Paul, dictated most 
 of them to an amanuensis, with a brief postscript 
 sometimes in his own hand, for he was half- 
 blind — "See with what large characters I have 
 written to you" — constitute about one-half of the 
 New Testament; and upon them the religious 
 thinking of the centuries has been largely built. 
 Luke, the physician, has a friend Theophilus — 
 "loved of God" — who is also dearly loved of 
 Luke. He is eager, he tells us, that Theophilus 
 should have full knowledge of Jesus's life and 
 words, and a firm basis for the faith that is in 
 him; so "having had perfect understanding of 
 all things from the very first," he writes them 
 down in order, and the book he wrote for The- 
 ophilus is our Gospel of Luke, without which the 
 world would never have known the parable of 
 the prodigal son. Later he carried the story on 
 to the beginnings of Christian history, again for 
 the sake of Theophilus, and the book of Acts is 
 the result. Just as Robertson of Brighton, his 
 biographer tells us, wrote out his sermons after 
 they had been preached, for the sake of a single 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 55 
 
 friend whom he thought they might help, and 
 the labor of love thus done by Robertson for his 
 friend has been used of God to mould the re- 
 ligious thinking of the world as have no other 
 English sermons for a century. As the days 
 passed, these books and others — gospels, letters, 
 poetic visions — came to be read in the meetings 
 of the early Christians for their comfort and in- 
 struction; they became a vital part of the 
 church's life; and after a time the church, in the 
 exercise of its wisdom, and ever seeking the Di- 
 vine guidance, chose the best of them, gathered 
 them together, and the New Testament was 
 wedded to the Old. How natural the origin of 
 the Bible as the Bible itself reveals it! 
 
 And then how natural and human are the 
 books thus in this wonderfully natural way given 
 to the world. No claim to a miraculous infalli- 
 bility is made; no claim that the Spirit of God, 
 inspiring these men, breathing into them great 
 thoughts, large visions of truth, overthrew the 
 citadel of their individuality, crushed out crude 
 conceptions born of their age, made of them 
 sacred but slumbering penmen. No, the 
 human is ever quite as manifest as the divine. 
 
 F THE. ^V 
 
 ERS1TY ) 
 
 OF TJ 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
56 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 Sometimes Paul feels sure that he is writing 
 the very word of God for his children; some- 
 times he says frankly that he is giving his 
 own opinion. "I have no commandment of the 
 Lord/' he writes to the Corinthians, "but I give 
 my judgment as one that hath obtained mercy 
 of the Lord to be faithful;" sometimes he thinks 
 he has the Divine approval, but is not sure — "I 
 think also that I have the Spirit of God," he says 
 in the same letter. Again Paul says frankly that 
 he knows in part, prophesies in part, sees 
 through a glass darkly. He says of Peter, an- 
 other of the apostolic writers, that he dissem- 
 bled, and walked not according to the truth of 
 the gospel; and Peter says of Paul that he some- 
 times writes things hard to understand which 
 ignorant men have twisted to their own destruc- 
 tion, a verdict with which many a modern ad- 
 mirer of Paul inclines to sympathize. No effort 
 is made by the various writers to harmonize 
 their accounts in detail; there has been no say- 
 ing, Let us be careful that we all say this and 
 that; strong evidence this of their perfect frank- 
 ness and truthfulness. Just as no two biogra- 
 phers of St. Francis give alike the names of the 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 57 
 
 friends who accompanied him to Rome on his 
 great mission to the Pope; just as no two expert 
 reporters report a great event in just the same 
 way or agree perfectly in their statement of 
 facts; so these biographers and historians of 
 early ages tell their story each from his own 
 point of view as he understands and emphasizes 
 the facts. The conception of a Bible in its every 
 detail infallible — the great misfortune of Protest- 
 antism, which opened the way for such fiascoes 
 as Ingersoll's "Mistakes of Moses," and for so 
 much misunderstanding of a higher order— was 
 born of an apparent historical necessity at the 
 time of the Reformation. To the man who 
 asked, "What is truth ?" was ever ready the an- 
 swer, "Ask the church; the Pope, the vicegerent 
 of God, cannot err." Now this was changed. 
 But men still craved an infallible authority, and 
 so, in place of an infallible church, they put an 
 infallible book, forgetful that God makes his 
 approach directly to each individual soul, and 
 that each soul may come directly to him. As a 
 result, men eager to champion the sacred book 
 have bent backward in their devotion, and as- 
 sumed that opening it at random one could find 
 
58 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 an infallible guide in every experience of life. 
 When vaccination was first introduced in New 
 England, a sermon in opposition to it by one 
 Mussey of London was widely circulated; its 
 text was, "So went Satan forth from the presence 
 of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils from 
 the sole of his foot unto his crown"; its argu- 
 ment, that Satan was the first inoculator. So 
 wise a man as John Wesley twice tried to find 
 guidance as to a call to Bristol by a random 
 opening of the sacred book, and when the second 
 time the verse that fell beneath his eye was 
 "And Ahaz slept with his fathers, and they 
 buried him in the city, even Jerusalem," he and 
 his friends, for reasons which his biographers do 
 not explain, found here a confirmation of the 
 call to Bristol. But this is bibliolatry, not the 
 wise use of the Scriptures which the sacred 
 books themselves commend. Paul loved the 
 Scriptures, nourished his soul upon them, but he 
 quotes from them in a way that indicates either 
 a careless memory, or the use of a version not 
 now known, or more probably an emphasis upon 
 the spirit rather than the letter of the ancient 
 books. Matthew (27 : 9) ascribes to Jeremiah 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 59 
 
 a record which is found only in the book of the 
 prophet Zechariah. The mind of Jesus was sat- 
 urated with the great writings of his race; but 
 unhesitatingly he puts himself far above them, 
 saying "Ye have heard that it hath been said by 
 them of olden time . . . but I say unto you/ 5 
 and again to the advocates of a literal interpreta- 
 tion of every word of the ancient law, "Ye search 
 the Scriptures because ye think that in them ye 
 have eternal life; and these are they which bear 
 witness of me; and ye will not come to me that 
 ye might have life." The true place of the Scrip- 
 tures in the life of the Christian is proclaimed by 
 Paul in a familiar passage, "Every Scripture in- 
 spired of God is also profitable for teaching, for 
 reproof, for correction, for instruction which is 
 in righteousness; that the man of God may be 
 complete, furnished completely unto every good 
 work." That is to say, their mission is educa- 
 tional, corrective, inspirational; their great rela- 
 tion to the life of man, that he may be wise in 
 thought and strong for service. They are " able 
 to make thee wise unto salvation" — in them- 
 selves? — no, "through faith which is in Christ 
 Jesus." "The word was never made verses," 
 
60 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 well says an old Scotch minister of the last cen- 
 tury; "it was made flesh." "No other paper," 
 says Phillips Brooks, "is fit to hold that awful 
 writing." 
 
 But now it may be asked, if the Bible is not, 
 in its every detail, infallible, if its conception of 
 the material universe is outgrown, and its mor- 
 als at times primitive to say the least, why read 
 the Bible to-day ? Is not God still revealing 
 himself to the spirits of men ? Are there not 
 still prophets inspired of God to proclaim his 
 will ? And the answer of course is, that revela- 
 tion and inspiration have not ceased; to every 
 age God is speaking as he spoke to the prophets 
 of old. But the Bible is not superseded. For 
 these reasons it has, and will always have, a 
 unique place in the life of men: 
 
 (i) It is the inspired record — inspired be- 
 cause in this wonderfully natural way men were 
 guided of God to do things far larger than they 
 conceived — of the great revelation of God in 
 Jesus Christ. The Old Testament, in ways the 
 men who wrote it never dreamed, is the record 
 of the progressive preparation of the world for 
 his coming; to him as with an index finger it ever 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 61 
 
 points; in the New in the fulness of the times he 
 stands before us, lives his life of love, speaks his 
 wondrous words, is crucified and risen; in the 
 New, too, we see the influence of his life and 
 words and death and resurrection upon the men 
 who were nearest to him, the small beginnings 
 of the Kingdom that, slowly coming even yet, is 
 destined everywhere to triumph. The perman- 
 ence of the Bible is the permanence of him into 
 whose presence it leads; as there can never be 
 a greater and more satisfying revelation of God 
 than the love of Christ, so there can never be a 
 greater record of that revelation than the Bible. 
 (2) The Bible is unique in all the literature of 
 the ages because of its wonderful adaptation and 
 appeal to the needs of all sorts of men in every 
 age. Outgrown in science, product of a primi- 
 tive age, unlike all other books it never grows 
 old. It speaks ever out of the experience of 
 yesterday, to the needs of to-day, and the long- 
 ings of to-morrow. And the reason for this 
 perennial freshness is that the themes with 
 which it deals, and the impulses it aims to kindle, 
 are the same in every time in every clime. As 
 Bishop Butler said long ago, it gives us an ac- 
 
62 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 count of the world in this one single view as 
 God's world; it lays bare the corruption of the 
 human heart, the self-deceit of its motives, the 
 sure disappointment of its selfish efforts, until 
 he who reads cries with Judas, "Lord, is it I ?"; 
 it utters as does no other book the perennial 
 yearning of the longing soul after God and im- 
 mortality, crying with the troubled spirits of 
 every age, "Oh that I knew where I might find 
 him!" It is the great storehouse of religious ex- 
 perience, the exhaustless reservoir of religious 
 aspiration. As Coleridge said of it so tersely, 
 "It finds me." 
 
 (3) The Bible is unique in literature in that 
 it is the great channel of present revelation and 
 inspiration. As ever, God works by natural 
 methods. He seeks the man who seeks him. 
 He reveals himself to the inquiring soul. Many 
 a man has found that the days when, for one 
 reason or another, the Bible was largely a closed 
 book, were the days of dimness of vision and 
 languor of impulse, the days of doubt and dis- 
 couragement; and that, on the other hand, the 
 days when, not understanding fully its message, 
 often perplexed and troubled, not understanding 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 63 
 
 God and his own heart, he yet sought earnestly 
 to nourish his soul upon the words of Psalmist 
 and prophet, most of all upon the blessed words 
 of the Master, these were the days of new illu- 
 mination and confidence, the days he was strong 
 to persist and patient to endure. As with life 
 itself, the richest treasures of the Bible are not 
 upon the surface. He who brings to it the most 
 gets from it the most. He finds that systematic 
 and prayerful study brings to him often the ex- 
 perience of which Thomas Fuller, one of the 
 wise men of the seventeenth century, spoke, 
 "Lord, this morning I read a chapter in the 
 Bible, and therein observed a memorable pas- 
 sage, whereof I never took notice before. Why 
 now, and no sooner, did I see it ? Formerly my 
 eyes were as open, and the letters as legible. Is 
 there not a thin veil laid over thy Word, which 
 is more rarefied by reading, and at last wholly 
 worn away ? I see the oil of thy word will 
 never leave increasing whilst any bring an empty 
 barrel." 
 
 The recognition of the Bible as the great 
 channel of present revelation and inspiration, 
 suggests a satisfying answer to the perplexing 
 
64 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 question as to the ultimate source of authority 
 in the Christian life. If the infallibility of the 
 book is set aside, as was the infallibility of the 
 church, where to-day are men to look for an 
 infallible authority ? The answer is that the 
 word of God, uttered once perfectly in the 
 mind and word and work of Jesus Christ, is the 
 one infallible authority. But how are men to 
 know with unerring accuracy the word of God 
 thus expressed ? The answer of Roman Cathol- 
 icism is partially right; the church through its 
 history more than through its decisions and 
 dicta interprets to men the Divine mind. The 
 answer of historic Protestantism is partially 
 right, marking a great forward step; in its spir- 
 itual leadership the Bible is infallible, the man 
 who opens wide his heart to its teaching will in- 
 evitably be led ever more perfectly into the way, 
 the truth and the life. The answer of modern 
 criticism is partially right, marking another for- 
 ward step; the word of God vocal in the soul of 
 man is the final authority; no external author- 
 ity is valid and vital until it is confirmed and 
 attested within. And yet all these answers are 
 partial. The forgotten truth in them is that an 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 65 
 
 infallible authority can only reveal itself com- 
 pletely to, can only utter itself fully through, an 
 infallible life. This is the testimony of Script- 
 ure: "The secret of the Lord is with them that 
 fear him," "Blessed are the pure in heart, for 
 they shall see God." And this is the testimony 
 of experience; it explains the puzzling fact that 
 the word of God vocal in the souls of earnest 
 men seems often to speak with so many clashing 
 tongues. In this school of life God's revelation 
 to the individual as to the world is, and must be, 
 a progressive revelation, dependent upon the 
 growth of the man's soul; always for the seed 
 of truth there must be the soil of faith and love. 
 And commonly his method is to reveal truth not 
 in a flash, but in the friction through the years 
 of opposing half-truths. Wherever there is a 
 double allegiance, part for God and part for 
 self, the vision of truth will be blurred; wherever 
 there is cherished prejudice, there will be nar- 
 rowness of view and false emphasis; where but 
 one phase of truth is seen, the sense of propor- 
 tion will be lost. But where there is a docile mind, 
 a humble spirit, a pure heart, a surrendered will, 
 a life responsive to the lessons of history and 
 
66 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 nourished constantly upon the sacred Script- 
 ures, such a man will grow up increasingly into 
 the mind of Christ; more and more the word of 
 God will be vocal and vital in his soul. The 
 great word of Jesus to the man who is seeking 
 an infallible authority is this, "He that hath 
 ears to hear, let him hear." 
 
VII 
 
 THE SENSE OF SIN IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 / I A HE decay of the sense of sin in our genera- 
 tion has often been noted. "The higher 
 man of to-day," says Sir Oliver Lodge, "is not 
 worrying about his sins at all, still less about 
 their punishment; his mission, if he is good for 
 anything, is to be up and doing." "There is 
 no virtue in thinking upon sin," says Dr. George 
 Albert Coe, "or in emotional experience with 
 respect to it, except as these are merely reverse 
 aspects of aggressive fighting, or of industrious 
 work upon the eternal temple." * Compare this 
 with Paul's consciousness of sin — "Christ Jesus 
 came into the world to save sinners, of whom 
 I am chief"; or with the self-estimate of Ber- 
 nard of Clairvaux, whose life was one of habitual 
 self-denial and beautiful devotion to the Chris- 
 tian ideal, " When I look at myself, I find myself 
 oppressed with such a burden of sin that no 
 other hope of salvation is left me save in the 
 mercy of Christ alone"; or with the confession 
 
 ♦ "The Religion of a Mature Mind." p. 392. 
 
 67 
 
68 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 of Samuel Rutherford, "The world hath sadly 
 mistaken me; no man knoweth what guiltiness 
 is in me; I am a wretched captive of sin"; or 
 with the saying of Tholuck, addressing a gath- 
 ering of his students and of the learned men of 
 Germany assembled to do him honor on the fifti- 
 eth anniversary of his professorate in the Uni- 
 versity of Halle, " The one thing for which I have 
 most to thank God is the conviction of sin." 
 
 To-day men seldom talk in this latter way. 
 True, most of us have bad half-hours with our- 
 selves when we realize what fools we have been. 
 We are keenly conscious of limitation and im- 
 perfection, but the sense that we are downright 
 sinners somehow escapes the average man of 
 our time. He is distinctly respectable, certainly 
 as good as his neighbor. "I do about as nearly 
 right as I know how," is the self-satisfied verdict 
 repeatedly given by men to whom the claims of 
 Christianity are presented. The sense of sin 
 seems to be gone. 
 
 The change is sometimes ascribed to the 
 worlds progress. Fortunately the moral stand- 
 ards of the sixteenth century are outgrown. But 
 there is still coarseness and vulgarity enough to 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 69 
 
 give the common conscience of humanity many 
 a restless night. Vice may be more refined, but 
 it is not less vicious. If in some things we have 
 outgrown our fathers, in others they would be 
 heartily ashamed of us. 
 
 The modern emphasis on culture is some- 
 times supposed to account largely for the 
 change. Many people are not rascals mainly 
 because they are not fools. Men are finding 
 out that it is much more comfortable and hy- 
 gienic to live in a pure, healthy body, than in one 
 tainted and weakened by self-indulgence; that 
 a mind which habitually thinks broad, kindly, 
 hopeful thoughts is a much more pleasant trav- 
 elling companion than one which habitually 
 thinks petty, envious, resentful, selfish thoughts; 
 that a life of self-control dominated daily by a 
 sovereign will and a sublime purpose is infi- 
 nitely more satisfying than a life tossed by every 
 sudden squall. But of genuine culture the 
 usual effect is to open a man's eyes to summits 
 of attainment unseen before; to reveal to him 
 the vastness of the chasm between the man he 
 is and the man he should be. True culture 
 deepens rather than weakens the sense of sin. 
 
70 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 By others the change is laid to the purer re- 
 ligious thinking of our time. Fear, we are told, 
 was the characteristic word of the religious 
 thinking of our fathers; to-day love is the word 
 that goes to the heart of our teaching. This is 
 nearer the truth; of the contrast suggested more 
 will shortly be said. Yet who can believe that 
 fear was the impelling motive of the devout souls 
 of generations past, of Paul, of Bernard, of our 
 own sainted fathers ? 
 
 The source of the change lies deeper. With 
 multitudes of men the lost sense of sin follows 
 the lost sense of God. Recognition of respon- 
 sibility to God, and of the infinite meaning of a 
 human life, have disappeared from their horizon, 
 and with these has gone of course the sense of 
 sin. Restore the old-fashioned virtues — rever- 
 ence, humility, conscious dependence upon 
 God, daily loyalty to Christ — and the sense of 
 sin will quickly return. Others misconceive 
 wholly the nature of sin. They confuse sin 
 with sins. Sin fundamentally is not an act, it is 
 an attitude. It is the chasm of motive and 
 effort which separates my thought and life from 
 the thought and life of God. Reputable men 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 71 
 
 who habitually think of sin as drunkenness, or 
 impurity, or profanity, or theft, will naturally 
 experience a decay of the sense of sin. 
 
 But is this the last word upon the subject ? 
 Is there really everywhere in the deepest things 
 of the spirit a backward movement ? Are our 
 best men worse than their fathers ? Is there not 
 rather possessing the minds, and animating the 
 hearts, and impelling the consciences of multi- 
 tudes of men to-day a new sense of sin, less 
 clearly defined, perhaps, but more real, vital and 
 truly Christian than the old. I believe confi- 
 dently that there is. It is a safe rule that there 
 is no virtue in a thing simply because it used to 
 be. On the contrary, if it used to be, and is not, 
 it is well commonly to inquire whether there is 
 not some good reason for the change. For to 
 believe that the world is going backward is to 
 lose the dominant note of Christian faith. Are 
 there not some things about the old sense of sin, 
 beautiful, humbling, creative, as it often was, 
 which the world has well outgrown, losing 
 which in the growth of its better thought it has 
 in the natural motion of the human pendulum 
 swung to the other extreme and for the time 
 
72 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 lost also much of the good ? If I mistake not, 
 there are. 
 
 For instance, the old sense of sin was often 
 more a theological inheritance than a practical 
 experience. The burden of Adam's sin was 
 upon men. A racial taint, hopeless, cruel, pur- 
 sued them. To-day, too flippantly perhaps, 
 men are disposed to let Adam take care of him- 
 self. In the mind of the average Christian, prac- 
 tical experience precedes, tests, controls, every 
 theological tenet; is this true? means not, has 
 some one said this long ago ? but, do men know 
 it to-day in the battle-ground of the soul ? Orig- 
 inal sin is not denied; it is lost to view in the 
 pressure of present conflict. The problem of 
 origins has not lost its interest, but its prece- 
 dence. Sin is not less real, but it is a great grim 
 fact to be bravely met, not an insoluble mystery 
 to be quarrelled about. 
 
 Again, the old sense of sin was apt to be mor- 
 bidly introspective. Habitually it looked with- 
 in. It dissected motives, longings, affections; 
 it fed upon self-analysis; it revealed itself in 
 moods. Under its influence good men doubted 
 their own salvation, and were driven to despair. 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY j$ 
 
 How they suffered, these pure, sensitive spirits 
 of old ! Pascal, sick, nerve-racked, wondered if 
 his affection for his sister, who had nursed him 
 through a long illness, was not sinful. One day 
 he wrote in his diary, "God forgive me for lov- 
 ing my dear sister so much." Afterward he 
 drew his pen through the word "dear." To-day 
 self-analysis has its place in the Christian life, 
 but it is a minor place. Outward, onward, up- 
 ward is the Christian's look. God is not a jeal- 
 out taskmaster, but a loving Father, not a rival 
 of human affections but their source, their in- 
 spiration, their very life. The saving of one's 
 own soul is no longer possible as the ruling 
 thought of the Christian mind; as Job's cap- 
 tivity was turned when he thought of his friends, 
 so often the redeeming process, the "being 
 saved" of Scripture, gains reality only when a 
 man's thought and effort go forth to others that 
 they may be brought to their true selves and to 
 God. To be selfishly saved is to be lost. 
 
 Once more, the old sense of sin was apt to 
 look backward rather than forward. It mourned 
 over the past. It dwelt upon failures. The 
 new sense of sin is the response to a voice which 
 
74 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 says: " Behold, I set before thee an open door"; 
 it has learned Phillips Brooks's message that a 
 man has nothing to do with his past save to get 
 a future out of it. Saddened by yesterday's ex- 
 perience, it is also strengthened by it; and its 
 face is toward the light. It is illumined by a 
 clearer vision of the Fatherhood of God. A 
 son, rebellious, wayward, eager for his own way, 
 leaves his father's home. By and by, coming 
 to himself, he comes again to his home, cries: 
 "I am no more worthy to be called your son; 
 make me as a hired servant." The father 
 requires of him no painful penance, no morbid 
 moping over the bitter past; to the boy's bleed- 
 ing heart goes forth the father's healing, reviv- 
 ing touch, he kills the fatted calf, calls in the 
 neighbors to welcome him home. The Father 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ requires of his children 
 no unhealthy lamentation over the past, but only 
 that confessing humbly our wrongdoing, learn- 
 ing watchfully its hard lessons, we go on in their 
 light to the better sonship of the days to come. 
 In the true Christian life there is never any time 
 for mere morbid regrets. The more wasted 
 time in the past, the less time to waste to-day. 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 75 
 
 Once more, the old sense of sin saw mainly 
 things done; the new and better sense of sin 
 sees mainly things undone. Its heartbreak is 
 the gulf between the ideal and the real, the 
 things purposed and the things achieved. It is 
 active rather than meditative, less a review of 
 the feelings than a survey of the field. 
 
 And so the new sense of sin, already, if I mis- 
 take not, keenly felt in the lives of Christian 
 men and women to-day, and destined to be felt 
 ever more creatively as the kingship of Christ 
 gains ascendency in the hearts of men, has these 
 three kindred characteristics: 
 
 (1) It is social no less than it is personal. The 
 personal is not lost to view; it cannot be; for 
 sin seen to its heart is the absence of a personal 
 relation. But that of which men are conscious 
 in these days as never before is a broadening of 
 the personal relation. As Gregory, hearing of 
 a poor man's death by starvation in Rome, felt 
 himself to blame, and scourged and denied him- 
 self for his sin, so the Christian of to-day who, 
 in faintest degree, has caught the spirit of his 
 Master, cannot separate himself from the sin, the 
 sorrow, the struggle, the ignorance of his race, 
 
76 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 feels them as though they were his own, knows 
 his life to be a failure until it is going forth to 
 meet them. Wherever poverty, oppression and 
 selfishness are blighting human lives, wherever 
 manhood is missing its meaning and weakness 
 is sinking in the mire, there the Christian feels 
 within him a burning of shame and a passion to 
 help; it is the new sense of sin. New ? It was 
 the sense of sin which the Hebrew prophets felt. 
 Remember Amos: "I know your manifold 
 transgressions and your mighty sins" — what 
 are they? "They afflict the just, they take a 
 bribe, they turn aside the poor in the gate from 
 their right." "Woe to them that are at ease in 
 Zion, that lie upon beds of ivory and stretch 
 themselves upon their couches, and eat the 
 lambs out of the flocks, that drink wine in bowls 
 and anoint themselves with the chief ointments; 
 but they are not grieved for the afflictions of 
 Joseph." Micah is "full of power by the Spirit 
 of the Lord to declare unto Jacob his transgres- 
 sion and to Israel his sin," and what does he 
 say ? "Hear this, ye heads of the house of Ja- 
 cob, and princes of the houseof Israel, that abhor 
 justice and pervert all equity; the heads thereof 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 77 
 
 judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach 
 for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for 
 money" — the grasping and the "graft' of the 
 age have aroused in the prophet the sense of 
 sin. "Cease to do evil, learn to do well," cried 
 Isaiah, but how? "Seek justice, relieve the 
 oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the 
 widow; come now and let us reason together, 
 saith the Lord; though your sins be as scarlet, 
 they shall be as white as snow; though they be 
 red like crimson, they shall be as wool." And 
 what were the sins to which Christ was most 
 sensitive ? They have been well classified in 
 this way: sins of the thought — envy, uncharita- 
 ble judgment, evil desire; sins of Pharisaism — 
 the pious tongue, and the proud, selfish, con- 
 temptuous life; sins against the little ones, the 
 young, the sick in body or in mind, the weak in 
 achievement or in will. All of them are sins that 
 touch some other life. Himself sinless, the 
 Master had as few have had, the sense of sin; 
 it was the burden of the cross, the pang that 
 made him cry, "My God, my God, why hast 
 thou forsaken me ? " 
 
 (2) The new sense of sin is closely related to 
 
78 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 the advancing kingdom of God. This was the 
 reason Jesus gave for calling on men to give up 
 their sin and selfishness; "repent, for the king- 
 dom of heaven is at hand." Christ seldom 
 spoke to men of the wickedness of that which 
 they were doing, but of the greatness and beauty 
 of that which they were missing. Change your 
 minds, he seems to say, about the real prizes 
 and pleasures of life, get into line with the 
 things that count, for God's day is coming, 
 slowly but surely his triumphant will is advanc- 
 ing to victory. To think what God is doing here 
 on earth — making men in his own image, bring- 
 ing forth a universal kingdom, of which right- 
 eousness and truth and peace shall be the at- 
 mosphere, in which all men shall be brothers 
 under one great Father — to think what God is 
 doing, and then to think what most of us are 
 doing; to think earnestly the thoughts of God 
 after him for the men and women around us, 
 and then to think our own: this is to feel the 
 new sense of sin, and it stings and rebukes and 
 renews as the mopings of monks and the scourg- 
 ings of ascetics could never do in this age. 
 
 (3) The new sense of sin is tested and quick- 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 79 
 
 ened or quieted by the law and the life of love. 
 To know oneself a sinner in these days it is not 
 well to dwell too long upon the Ten Command- 
 ments, lest in blindness to their larger meanings 
 we be like the royal duke whose audible response 
 to each of them was "Never did that." The 
 enormity of sin in modern life is better brought 
 home in the thirteenth chapter of First Corin- 
 thians and the first Epistle general of John. " If 
 a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, 
 he is a liar." "We know that we have passed 
 from death unto life because we love the breth- 
 ren." When a man brings the thoughts of his 
 heart and the efforts of his life to a test like that, 
 better still when he brings them to the test of the 
 mind and the life and the cross of Christ, he will 
 be ready to join with new and redeeming mean- 
 ing in the old confession: "All we like sheep 
 have gone astray, we have turned every one to 
 his own way." 
 
VIII 
 
 THE GREAT GOSPEL OF THE CROSS 
 
 *^[OWHERE must the two keynotes of a 
 strong working theology be borne more 
 earnestly in mind than in any attempt to dis- 
 cuss this supreme theme. Reverence saves 
 from the contradiction of defining the infinite; 
 reality puts the emphasis upon those phases of 
 truth which touch the springs of life and are 
 pregnant with redeeming power. 
 
 Through the ages controversies about the 
 cross have been largely speculative and scho- 
 lastic. Many minute theories as to the effect of 
 the Saviour's death have been confidently ad- 
 vanced. It was a ransom paid to the devil, or 
 a price exacted by Infinite Justice, or an exhibi- 
 tion of Divine Love. The natural reaction has 
 been the modern mood which, accepting the fact 
 of the Saviour's atoning death for men, con- 
 fesses frankly that it has no theory to offer. This 
 is the position of multitudes of earnest men to- 
 day. But there is manifest in our time an im- 
 patience with this position. Some theory, we 
 
 80 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 81 
 
 are told, must go with a fact, or the fact is vague 
 and impotent. What is the fact about which 
 we have no theory ? Is it that the cross saves — 
 how, we know not ? But what do we mean by 
 the cross ? The wood on which the Master 
 hung? Or the actual blood that was shed on 
 the cross ? Or his voluntary self-consecration 
 to the will of the Father ? Or his identification 
 with human sin and suffering ? And what do 
 we mean by being saved ? Through the cross 
 is a man saved from past sin ? From the power 
 of sin ? From the effects of sin ? From the pun- 
 ishment of sin here and hereafter ? These ques- 
 tions concern the fact, not the theory, of redemp- 
 tion; the "what," not the "how." This is the 
 discussion which is waxing warm just now in 
 England, where men who answer in one way 
 are ruling out of the faith men who answer in 
 another. In our own land similar questions are 
 being asked. The prevalent mood is one of 
 great uncertainty. Devout souls, incarnating in 
 their own lives something of the spirit of Jesus, 
 accepting gratefully the gospel of the cross, are 
 earnestly seeking clearer thought about its 
 meaning. 
 
82 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 Now all such discussion, when reverent in 
 spirit, is to be welcomed as a healthful symptom 
 of the search for reality in our time. Men are 
 resolved to be delivered from the tyranny of 
 well-worn phrases through which the edge of 
 truth is often dulled; by them they will no 
 longer be driven into the kingdom. The most 
 sacred words, the cross, the atonement, the 
 blood of Christ, must continue to reveal truth 
 that illumines the mind, and warms the heart, 
 and transforms the life, or pass from the speech 
 of men. A transaction which squares accounts 
 with the Infinite, but effects no change in the in- 
 dividual, is a contradiction which will not appeal 
 to this age. I know a man, in earlier years de- 
 voted in Christian service, who has long aban- 
 doned all outward expressions of the life he 
 once held dear. He no longer attends church; 
 from his home all forms of reverence have van- 
 ished; he yields frequently to the sins of the 
 flesh. Yet he writes: "My life is nearly over; 
 I am trusting in the finished work of Jesus 
 Christ my Saviour." Qne realizes of course the 
 imperfection of all human judgments; and yet 
 the indications are strong that for this man the 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 83 
 
 "finished work" is not merely an empty phrase, 
 a spiritual catchword, but a great peril of the 
 soul. For always real and redeeming is the 
 work of Christ in a life. 
 
 May it not be frankly and helpfully recog- 
 nized that the gospel of the cross is larger, 
 broader, more spiritual than any human con- 
 ception of it, and makes its appeal in varied 
 ways to men of varied thought and experience ? 
 The teaching of Jesus was always adapted to 
 the needs of the individuals to whom he was 
 speaking; to-day there is no mould save the 
 heart of need through which it must pass. The 
 fact of the atonement, the greatest of all facts, is 
 that God was in Christ reconciling the world 
 unto himself; to this sublime statement of the 
 fact nothing need ever be added. Every theory 
 of the fact, as to how God was in Christ, as to 
 how reconciliation was or is effected, as to the 
 relative value of his life, his words, his death, is, 
 comparatively, of minor importance; the eter- 
 nal destinies of a soul will never depend upon 
 his grasping of an intellectual proposition, or 
 his fathoming the relations of the infinite God 
 and his Christ. Yet every theory helps which 
 
84 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 makes vivid even to a single man the fact; when 
 through it reconciliation with God in Christ 
 becomes real and creative, every such theory 
 has surely caught some fringe of the garment of 
 Christ; it is false and presumptuous only when 
 it assumes to express perfectly the thoughts that 
 are not as our thoughts and the ways that are 
 not as our ways. 
 
 The man, for instance, whose life is stained 
 with the blighting memory of sin and shame, 
 upon whose soul lies heavily the bitter weight of 
 years misspent, of lives ruined, of wrongs that 
 never can be righted, rejoices to see in the 
 death of the Divine Master, sent into the world 
 by the Father, going freely to the cross for men, 
 the pledge of sin forgiven. At the cross his bur- 
 den falls away; the loving Christ has taken it 
 from him; he feels sure that even for him the 
 way is forever open to the Father. No man 
 who knows the sin-stained human heart will 
 doubt that the gospel for this age must have in 
 it clear and strong the note of forgiveness. The 
 peril of the man whose thought of the cross con- 
 centrates upon the forgiveness of sin is that, 
 saying, as a man in jail writes to me, "My hope 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 85 
 
 is now that Christ died for me, and therefore I 
 can enter into life eternal," he may rest at this 
 point. But if a genuine love for his Saviour has 
 been kindled in his heart, he cannot rest there. 
 Forgiveness will mean to him, not a clean sheet, 
 but an open door. His life will be reconciled 
 with God in Christ. 
 
 Another has lived a life outwardly clean and 
 correct. His experience has been the gradual 
 unfolding of the powers within him, a deepen- 
 ing desire to know the larger meanings of his life 
 as they are revealed in Christ, and enter into 
 them. Such a man is less impressed by the 
 thought of substitution in the work of Christ 
 than by that of identification; to him the gospel 
 of the cross is that Divine Love has made the 
 race struggle his own, identified himself with 
 human need to the limit of sacrificial love. His 
 great joy is not that Christ has borne his sin, but 
 called him to be a sharer in his great world- 
 burden. Beneath the shadow of the cross, he 
 has passed from anxiety about personal salva- 
 tion, and speculation about theories of represen- 
 tation, to the loving labors of the Christ. The 
 cross is to him an impulse more than a refuge. 
 
86 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 If his spirit be humble, and his dependence 
 upon Divine strength deep and constant, may 
 we not believe that some part of the truth which 
 is so much greater than his faint gropings after 
 it, possesses his soul, and is making him free ? 
 
 Another emphasizes the sacramental view. 
 He thinks of Christ's work as in him rather than 
 for him. In his own strength he must fail. The 
 very life of Christ must be given to him, if he is 
 to win his battle and live a truly Christian life. 
 But ere Christ's life can be given to men it must 
 be poured forth; on the cross he beholds it 
 freely given for men; the Lord's supper, recall- 
 ing his death, is the perpetual pledge that it is his 
 who sincerely hungers for the bread of life. 
 There are both mysticism and symbolism here to 
 which some minds do not quickly respond; but 
 there is also the very heart of Christian faith 
 and experience. We can never emphasize over- 
 much the fact that if there is to be life achieved 
 there must be life received. The gospel of the 
 cross is preeminently a gospel of power. 
 
 Yet another cannot separate in his thought 
 the death of Christ from his life and his words. 
 To him the incarnation, the entrance of God 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 87 
 
 in Christ into human life, is the beginning of the 
 cross. He does not depreciate Calvary; he ex- 
 tends and prolongs it immeasurably. But he 
 cannot think of the cross as a single event in 
 time; to him it is an age-long sacrifice, not a 
 momentary surrender, a divine life-work, not an 
 infinite transaction. He speaks of the atoning 
 life more than of the atoning death. To him it 
 seems that Christ is still being borne to the 
 cross; the thought of Sigismund Goetze's great 
 picture, possesses his soul; he seems to see the 
 Master being crucified afresh not only on the 
 steps of St. Paul's cathedral to-day (as the pict- 
 ure suggests), but wherever men are deaf to his 
 appeals, false to their true selves and their fel- 
 lows, blind to the rich meanings of their lives. 
 His soul responds to the pathetic cry of the Di- 
 vine sufferer, "Is it nothing to you, all ye that 
 pass by ?" All this may be very vague; it may 
 not always put the emphasis where it has com- 
 monly been put; but if it arouse in this man 
 a great love and loyalty, who shall say that the 
 gospel of the cross has not entered with recon- 
 ciling power his soul ? 
 
 To very many, baffled, burdened souls, the 
 
88 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 great gospel of the cross is that it illumines as 
 does nothing else the dark mystery of life. He 
 to whom was given the wondrous testimony, 
 "This is my beloved Son," the sinless, perfect 
 Son, suffers to the very limit of human suffering 
 and loneliness and wrong, crying in anguish, 
 "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup 
 pass"; in loneliness, "My God, my God, why 
 hast thou forsaken me ?" Not only does he suf- 
 fer, he submits; bravely, patiently, without a 
 rebellious word, he treads the wine-press alone, 
 saying at the last in perfect surrender, " Father, 
 into thy hands I commend my spirit." The 
 cross was in his life who did perfectly the Fa- 
 ther's will; no wonder it should be in ours. "I 
 have suffered a good deal of pain," said a work- 
 ingman on a sick-bed to me, "but not half what 
 my Saviour suffered for me." What a gospel 
 is here! 
 
 So one might go on indefinitely. All human 
 theories are partial and inadequate, relics, some 
 of them, of Jewish ritual, and Roman law, and 
 pagan rites, clever efforts most of them to read 
 our little human ways into the ways of God. 
 The theory for every man is the theory that 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 89 
 
 makes vivid to him the fact, the theory that 
 warms his love for Christ, and quickens his 
 impulse to serve him. There may be crude 
 thinking, but if there is an open mind and a re- 
 sponsive will, the Spirit will guide him into the 
 larger truth. But there must be no mistake 
 about the fact. God was in Christ reconciling 
 the world unto himself. Reconciliation involves 
 separation, antagonism. Man self-governed 
 is alienated from God. Sin is separation from 
 the Infinite above and the Infinite within. The 
 gospel of the cross is that in Jesus Christ the 
 gulf is bridged; through him God comes to 
 man; through him man comes to God, and to 
 himself. 
 
 My own thought of the cross finds constant 
 illustration and illumination in that sphere to 
 which Jesus so often pointed men, the home. 
 A father's heart is rent by the sin and disobedi- 
 ence of his son. What is the longing of the 
 father's heart toward his boy ? The first burst 
 of resentment over, the father-love speaks. He 
 would forgive the boy freely, fully. But forgive- 
 ness without change of mind and heart on the 
 son's part achieves nothing but the mastery of 
 
9 o A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 the father's spirit; its probable issue is indiffer- 
 ence and contempt and continued sin. And so 
 he must show his son his sin; in some way the 
 boy must see it as it is. Moreover, he must 
 bear with his son the effects of his sin; whatever 
 the boy has to suffer, he, too, for the love he 
 bears him, must suffer with him. Above all, he 
 must save his son from his sin, so that it shall 
 never stain his life again. 
 
 All this, I am sure, and much more of 
 love, there is in the great gospel of the cross. 
 The best in man is far beneath the least in 
 God. In the words of the old collect, it is 
 his nature and property to forgive. There 
 is no obstacle to forgiveness on God's side; 
 no necessity of his nature to satisfy by a 
 divine sacrifice; on God's side the only ne- 
 cessity is the necessity of love. The only ob- 
 stacle to free forgiveness is on man's side. For- 
 giveness that is simply the erasing of a record is 
 weak and ineffective; soon man writes another 
 fouler still. Man must see his sin as it is and 
 turn from it. The cross, the crowning revela- 
 tion of God's love, is also the great revelation 
 of man's sin. This is where it leads; this is 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 91 
 
 what it costs; the rending of the Divine Suf- 
 ferer's heart, the betrayal and crucifixion of 
 purity and love by selfishness and hate. But 
 the cross is no mere exhibition of love suffering 
 for sin, no spectacular display of divine emotion. 
 It is all intensely real. Because he loves us, God 
 bears with us the effects of our sin. In the cross 
 the Divine Spirit regnant in Christ entered into 
 the sins and struggles and sorrows of men, bore 
 them as a mother bears the burden of her child. 
 All this he does to save; this is the great end of 
 sacrificial love. And how does the cross save ? 
 In the home the process is easy to trace. Touched 
 by his father's sorrow, seeing in its true light his 
 sin, what it costs, where it leads, won by the 
 love that shares with him its penalty, the boy 
 comes to himself, turns from his sin, henceforth 
 rejoices to take his father's way, not his own. 
 Just this it is to be saved. Wherever kneeling 
 at the cross, won by the love of the Father who 
 sent, or the love of the Divine Saviour who 
 came, a man sees his sin as it is, where it leads, 
 what it costs, comes to himself, dethrones the 
 baffled schemes of self, enthrones the love and 
 the will of Christ, he is saved. No longer a 
 
92 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 rebel, a malcontent, he is henceforth a son, a 
 humble learner of Christ, a glad co-worker in 
 the toils of God and the burdens of the Sav- 
 iour. He has taken his rightful place in the 
 great scheme of things; henceforth the re- 
 sources of the universe are his; the stars in their 
 courses fight for him. Delivered from the 
 tyranny of self, a free captive of a loving Mas- 
 ter, naturalized into the kingdom of Christ, he 
 is reconciled with God, and to him is given the 
 ministry of reconciliation. He goes forth an 
 apostle of the cross, his message this, "Whoso- 
 ever wills to lose his life for Christ's sake shall 
 find it." 
 
IX 
 
 THINGS TO COME 
 
 HpHE doctrine of the future in a working the- 
 ology is concerned mainly with this after- 
 noon and to-morrow. It has not two gospels, 
 one for time and one for eternity, but one for 
 the eternity which is now. Its great guide and 
 inspiration is the priceless word of the Master, 
 " I am the Resurrection and the Life," and " He 
 that believeth on me hath everlasting life." The 
 moment of Christlikeness is the moment of 
 deathless life. 
 
 The great words of the gospel are these two, 
 life and death, and we are false to the Master 
 when, charmed by the glory of the one, we for- 
 get the dread reality of the other. The more 
 one reads of the sacred book, or learns of the 
 cruelties in nature; when one reflects that of 
 the thousand million species of animals and 
 plants which now tenant this earth not one in 
 100,000 individuals ever reaches maturity; when 
 horror after horror sends a chill to the heart, 
 and he that sitteth in the heavens is silent; the 
 
 93 
 
94 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 more the conviction is likely to grow that in all 
 the strange discipline and tragedy of life God is 
 teaching his children the cheapness, the noth- 
 ingness of life as men commonly conceive it, the 
 life of sleeping and waking, of hungering and 
 feeding, of making and spending, the life of the 
 senses and the appetites — it is the cheapest thing 
 in the universe. But ever with this God is teach- 
 ing us the other lesson — and of it every Christian 
 is the herald — the priceless value of life as God 
 conceives it, the life of finding by losing, of get- 
 ting by giving, of having by doing, the life which 
 is the harmonious play of all the powers to high- 
 est ends intent, the very life of God in the soul 
 of man. The cross on Calvary, on which One 
 brought near to us as the only begotten Son of 
 God gives his life for men, is the divine estimate 
 of the infinite and eternal value of life like this. 
 And so this is our gospel, "He that hath the 
 Son," — he in whom the love of the Father has 
 awakened the loyalty of the Son — "hath life": 
 that life in which death shall be a mere incident 
 issuing in fairer forms and larger toils beyond. 
 "He that hath not the Son hath not life." 
 The full content of life or of death hereafter 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 95 
 
 Jesus has not told us. Doubtless the veiled 
 future is part of the kindness and the wisdom of 
 this scheme of things. "Eye hath not seen, nor 
 ear heard" — we would not understand it if we 
 knew. There are, indeed, many unanswered 
 questions, and they weigh heavily at times on 
 the minds of thoughtful men. There are ear- 
 nest Christians who expect the Master to return 
 very soon and reign upon this earth; the pro- 
 phetic Scriptures seem to them to make this 
 clear. There are others who believe that in the 
 Spirit the rich promises of another coming have 
 already been fulfilled; their interpretation is 
 more spiritual and to them more helpful; they 
 are nearer to Paul when he says, "To me to live 
 is Christ," or "Christ in you, the hope of glory," 
 than when he says, "We which are alive and 
 remain shall be caught up together with them 
 intheclouds." Menask: where is heaven ? what 
 shall we do there ? shall we know our loved ones 
 again ? must not a loving and omnipotent God 
 triumph at last in every soul he has created ? will 
 not all punishment prove remedial ? how could 
 a mother live in bliss while her son suffered or 
 was lost ? 
 
96 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 A wise working theology leaves these ques- 
 tions, and many others, trustfully in the hands 
 of Him who doeth all things well. It emphasizes 
 the Master's own words "Watch, and pray"; 
 be ready for whatever God's plan for you may 
 any day reveal. It balances the larger hope, 
 the apparent logic that an omnipotent God who 
 is Love must triumph at last in every life, by the 
 tender Saviour's emphasis upon the great alter- 
 natives, his pictures of the offal heap into which 
 the city's refuse was cast and the great gulf 
 fixed, his word of the tree that bore no fruit, 
 "Cut it down," of the man who made nothing of 
 his talent, "Give it to him that hath ten." It 
 feels the clear words of the Master to be a far 
 better basis for the business of living than the 
 vague hope that somehow everything will turn 
 out right at the last. It recalls that love is not 
 a pretty sentiment, a weak emotion, love is the 
 most compelling force in the universe; love is 
 tender, but also love is stern; love seeks, but 
 also love shuns; love is passionate, persuasive, 
 but also love is pure. May there not be beyond 
 tremendous spiritual realities, to us as we think 
 of them sadly blighting, which God in his 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 97 
 
 wisdom and love will see to be wholly good ? 
 Perhaps no wiser words have been written on 
 the problems of destiny than those of the ten- 
 der Whittier: 
 
 "Forever round the mercy-seat, 
 
 The guiding lights of love shall burn; 
 
 But what if, habit-bound, thy feet 
 
 Shall lack the will to turn? 
 
 What if thine eye refuse to see 
 
 Thine ear of heaven's free welcome fail, 
 
 And thou a willing captive be 
 
 Thyself thine own dark jail? 
 
 O doom beyond the saddest guess, 
 
 As the long years of God unroll, 
 
 To make thy dreary selfishness 
 
 The prison of a soul." 
 
 But there will be no shadow upon the bliss of 
 those who enter at last into the fulness of life 
 beyond. If there be a contradiction here, God 
 holds the key, and his secret, we may be sure, is 
 far better than the loftiest of man's groping. 
 
 In a working theology the great question for 
 every man is not, Is there a future life ? what 
 sort of life will it be ? but, Is there anything in 
 my life that is worth a future, anything which 
 an Infinite God who has the business of a uni- 
 
9 8 A WORKING THEOLOGY 
 
 verse on hand — the making of men, the defeat 
 of sin and selfishness, the establishment of a 
 universal spiritual kingdom of righteousness 
 and peace and truth — can reasonably be ex- 
 pected to continue to all eternity ? In a word, 
 what is there in me of the things that are un- 
 seen and eternal, the fabric of which through 
 the ages God is building his spiritual uni- 
 verse. 
 
 From the vagueness and uncertainty of the 
 future there is but one sure refuge; it is to be 
 found in a life of love and loyalty, sincere and 
 thoroughgoing, to the great Master who even 
 here leads us to heavenly summits, and who 
 dispels all fear of death and the mysteries be- 
 yond by his confident word, "I have the keys 
 of hell and of death." To him, one must 
 notice, it is all intensely personal; he does not 
 simply say, There is a future life, but "I am 
 the Resurrection and the Life," " I go to prepare 
 a place for you," " To-day shalt thou be with 
 me in Paradise." It is an unfailing stay and 
 strength that he, who was so selfless and 
 so humble, who has never deceived those who 
 have trusted him in deepest things, whose 
 
A WORKING THEOLOGY 99 
 
 boldest words have been so marvellously ful- 
 filled, spoke here without the shadow of uncer- 
 tainty. To him it was clear and sure; there 
 will be enduring personality; there will be life, 
 boundless and beautiful, reaching on to the 
 infinitudes of God. 
 
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