LIBRARY OF THE University of California. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/finalfaithstatemOOmacl' ■ ■ ■ ' . II. The Bible We have already said that the Christian faith has been perpetuated in history by two institutions, — the Church and the Bible. In making a brief statement about the latter we must perforce begin by emphasising the use of that word " institution." A piece of writing which is nothing more than the expression of individual feeling or opinion is not in the true sense an institution, however excellent may be its literary qualities or crucial its place in the history of thought. But if a piece of writing becomes the controller of a communal life, it takes on the form of a living institution. Such a docu- ment as the Constitution of the United States, or such a work as the Koran, is an institution in this sense. It holds an inner, organic, formal relation to the organised life of a society of men. Of this class of works is the Bible. It rose out of the intense and progressive re- ligious life and experience of Israel and the nascent Christian Church. But it came rapidly and indeed necessarily to be regarded as something more than the — 214 — THE VITAL MEANING OF CHURCH AND BIBLE record of a spiritual history, whose significance lay wholly in the past, or the expression of personal ideals and attainments. It was, and it is, felt to be necessary for the religious experience of all races in all times to come. The reason Hes in the conviction that the Bible describes acts of God upon the hearts and minds of men which were of such a kind as to create or open the way of communion with Him for every child of man. A divine purpose Hes in the reHgious story of Israel and in the birth of the Christian Church, which takes up the record of these into itseK and makes that record an instrument of God's deahngs with all following generations. This comes out most clearly in the case of the New Testament. When the Spirit came upon the Apostolic Church, and its full and real life began, an essential condition of that life was the witness of the Apostles. The vital importance of this lay in the double fact that they had been chosen by Jesus as the inner circle of His disciples, to whom He most fully unfolded His mind and the power of His Person, and that they had been chosen to see and recognise and commune with Him after the Resurrection. These relations with Jesus Christ can never be repeated. They are absolutely unique, and for the existence of the Church they are absolutely essential. By a supreme act of God's selecting grace and power the Apostle Paul was added to this group. He had received a form of preparation which has proved no less vital for the Church's experi- — 215 — THE FINAL FAITH ence and faith than that which consisted in following the earthly ministry of Jesus ; and to him who was the chief enemy, the most convinced and instructed and determined persecuter of the Church, the Risen Christ had appeared in a manner of peculiar significance. He ever after knew himself, and the Apostolic Church con- fessed him, to be an organ of the Spirit of God for the apprehension, dissemination, and interpretation of the gospel of salvation. The earliest churches were founded by or were immediately guided by these Apostles. Wherever they went it was felt that their teaching had an authority which could be possessed by no other. Hence their oral accounts of the ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ became speedily arranged into forms con- venient for the memory, and were also written down and became the basis of our Four Gospels (see Luke i. 1-4). Their addresses to the non-Christian world are preserved for us only in the meagre though most precious records of the Book of Acts. But as the Church in- creased in numbers and power, and as the Apostles extended their journeys, it became necessary for them to send letters — some of them formal, some of an informal character — to individuals and communities. These were probably copied very freely, and circulated more or less widely from the beginning. As the apostolic age drew to an end, and especially in the next, the sub- apostolic stage of history, we find many half-pathetic and yet fervid references to the teaching of the Apostles, — 216 — THE VITAL MEANING OF CHURCH AND BIBLE as being ever essential to the continued existence of the Church. But signs soon appeared that oral tradition, even in the " unforgetting East," is at best a precarious record of the past. It is always plastic to the touch of the human spirit, which receives, moulds, and trans- mits it. Hence vigorous steps were taken to gather, identify, and preserve the writings of the Apostles. We cannot here enter into any of the innumerable perplexing problems which arise from the effort to re-tell the story of the New Testament canon. We must be content with having stated thus briefly the impulses which brought it into existence. And here it is. Criti- cism has not yet proved that its account of the rise of the gospel is not to be trusted, or that the vast majority of these writings did not come from the teaching and direct authority of the first circle of Apostles. It is for us to-day what the oral witness of the Apostles was in Judea and Syria, in Galatia and Macedonia, in Athens and Kome. It brings us into immediate personal con- tact with the creative acts of God, by which for us and for our salvation He sent His own Son into the world, and appointed Him to die, and raised Him from the dead, and gave Him in the outpouring of His Spirit to be the Saviour and Lord of all who believe in Him. But there are three things which we may add about the New Testament, and which may serve to knit together what has already been set down : (1) In the first place, the question which has troubled some theologians as to whether the organised Church — 217 — THE FINAL FAITH or the Bible is supreme is really irrelevant. They are institutions which both arose out of the experience and witness and work of the Apostles of Christ. They are both organs of the Spirit of God, and they are there- fore organically related to and dependent on one another. As we cannot conceive the gospel of Christ taking hold of human history without creating its own community, destined to cover the earth and to bring forth every- where out of the old and perishing race the new and real and final form of humanity, so we cannot conceive of it without that primal witness of the Apostles, that original and originating statement of the gospel, which alone could authenticate the truth for all coming genera- tions. The Bible is merely the preservation of the apostolic witness to the origin and nature of the gospel ; the Church is the solid organism created through that witness. In modern days we have learnt to use what seem to us deeper words about these facts than our fathers knew. We cannot think of the Church as a mere association, nor as an organisation, with its officials exactly and formally defined in function and relation and title for all circumstances and all ages. Nor can we think of the Bible as a kind of legal document, whose words taken separately are capable of direct application to the details of every human Ufe and the variations of human thought. Each of these institutions is of a living nature. It grew from the witness of the Apostles and from the presence and power of the Spirit of Christ in that witness. — 218 — THE VITAL MEANING OF CHURCH AND BIBLE (2) In the second place, the facts which are before us constitute the Bible as the supreme authority for faith and practice among Christians. The nature of authority in general, and its particular seat or seats in the Christian religion, is a large and intricate topic. Suffice it to say that that only can be an ultimate author- ity for the faith and practice of Christians which brings them even in the most widely separated fields of thought and conduct under the supreme power of the Saviour and Lord of man. Nothing does this as the witness of His Apostles preserved for all generations in the New Testament has done it from the first day until now. After historical study has done its utmost to trace the literary history of these documents, to dis- cover the various forms of secular culture which played upon the minds of their authors, they are still there in the form which they have possessed since the end of the apostolic period. No other can tell us what the gospel is with a more authoritative voice than they. Beyond them we can appeal to none higher to tell us what God did in Christ to create this new life in human experience, to bind the sinful in peace and faith, in love and hope, to His own heart of mercy and of power. To know how and why we may trust in the Fatherhood of God, how and why we may best spend our swift lives in the fulfilment of His abiding and eternal will, we must all at last depend on those pages as on no other word or institution which all the ages of endeavour have produced. Over and over again the Church has — 219 — THE FINAL FAITH found that here, in this book of the first witnesses to Christ, it has the means by which its false develop- ments may be corrected, its thoughts may be restrained from conclusions which are fatal to the power of Christ, its conduct may be brought back to the test of a divine purity and an eternal righteousness. By appeal to it Athanasius in one century and Augustine in the next, whatever imperfections clung to their teaching, saved the Church from the threatening inundations of heathenism. By reopening its fountains and letting them flow upon various portions of Europe, Francis of Assisi and Luther (how different their methods and spirit !) both gave men to taste again a little of the airs of that first glorious springtide when the Prince of life made the Apostles radiant with the joy and power of God's delivering grace. (3) The Bible is, then, the permanent instrument of the Spirit of God. Wherever it goes the fruit of the Spirit begins to appear among men. That is why in the last century of world-wide missions it has been translated into more than four hundred languages. That is why no mission is felt to be complete, though it have hospitals and meeting-houses, charities and teachings, unless it has planted the Bible in the life of the people. There is here again something mystical which we may all see and feel and cherish, though it be hard to name and impossible to define. Some speak with scorn of bibholatry, and urge that the Bible be reduced to the level of other books if we would save — 220 — THE VITAL MEANING OF CHURCH AND BIBLE the world from a new form of superstition. And truly we must not be superstitious or foolish or irrational in the place which we assign to it in the life of the Church and in relation to our faith. But yet this book does stand related to the Spirit of God and to the faith and destiny of man in a manner which is with- out comparison or rivalry. Through it He still speaks to mankind. Its pages still glow with a personal appeal which comes from the throne of the universe to the individual heart and conscience. God has made it most truly and powerfully His word in which a second time, as it were, He is incarnate for the apprehension and obedience of mankind. These ancient writings contained the message which He breathed into the souls of His beloved Apostles, selected for this very purpose ; and through them, as we read them, He moves still among men. This Bible is part of the secret by which original Christianity remains final, and by its means the original gospel is being carried to the whole creation. 221 — CHAPTER IX THE MISSIONARY IMPULSE XN preceding chapters we have been studying the nature of the Christian reUgion, so as to discover the nature of its claim to be the absolute rehgion, and the relation of that claim to its missionary function. In it we see not so much man finding God by his own outreaching towards the Divine, as God revealing Him- self in His personal relations and purposes towards man by acts of transcendent meaning and power. Those acts of God, when they take effect upon the human soul, become the substance of Christian experience. When they are considered in their historic setting and in their cosmic significance, they determine the distinctively Christian view of God and the world ; they constitute Christian doctrine and the Christian message. What we have now to consider more closely is the fact that these Christian truths, when accepted and obeyed most fully and intelligently, have from the first created the missionary impulse. That impulse takes form in the individual as a mighty desire to make known to others the gospel which he has experienced, and which he beUeves that God gave to the world. It is the reflec- tion in his will of the revealed will of God towards man. — 222 — THE MISSIONARY IMPULSE Nothing seems to him so great, so worthy of a man's life, as this effort to make the Christian faith prevail over all hearts, and transfigure all Uves throughout the world. That for which God ha« loved humanity- he beheves that he knows, and he yields himself as the instrument of this sublime, this divine purpose. But each man has approached the gospel on his own feet, along his OAvn path, and each man will give his own account of his missionary impulse. For when one explains or defends any impulse from which he acts, he does so always by changing it into a reason. He seeks, as it were, to universaUse his personal feeling, to see it in that system of life in which he is involved with other reasonable beings. Hence those who are acting under this great Christian impulse will be found always to explain the dedication of their lives by Hnking their will in that act with some one or more aspects of the Christian system. The greatest and wisest among them will give many reasons, but all their reasons will be found to lie not in a mere feeling, but out there in the Christian system as they see it, and in its relation to humanity. It must be our task now to deal with some, the most im- portant, of these explanations of the Christian missionary impulse. I. The Propagation of Life We may begin with one explanation which has no doubt unconsciously swayed multitudes, namely, the — 223 — THE FINAL FAITH fundamental impulse to propagate life. We are told in the Fourth Gospel of the woman who, " when she is deHvered, remembereth no more the anguish, for the joy that a man — a human being — is born into the world." There is the deep racial instinct at work, without which no child could be loved, without which mankind could not endure. It is remarkable that in the New Testa- ment the missionary impulse allies itself with this instinct. It has been pointed out above how soon and how powerfully the early Christians conceived of themselves as belonging to a new race, not Roman or Greek or Jewish, nor a mere conglomerate of these, but a race as real as any other, yet embracing children of them all. " Ye are an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession " (1 Pet. ii. 9). St. Paul speaks still more boldly when he declares that Christ has overcome the opposition between Jew and Gentile, " that He might create in Himself of the two one new man " (Eph. ii. 15). The Apostles felt that they were most intimately concerned with the work of bringing the new race into actual being. It is something more than a mere effusion of tenderness, it is the consciousness of a vital and mystic relation between his converts and himself, which St. Paul some- times described in most daring language (Gal. iv. 19; 1 Th. ii. 7, 11 ; 1 Cor. iv. 14-17 ; 2 Cor. vi. 13 ; Philem. 10 ; 1 Tim. i. 2 ; 2 Tim. i. 2 ; Titus i. 4 ; cf . 1 John ii. 1 ; 3 John 4). To him the family of God was most real ; the eternal life was no mere future state, but a present — 224 — THE MISSIONARY IMPULSE power. And he saw and felt that those over whom he laboured, and who entered into that Ufe, into that supreme family relationship, through his prayers and his teaching, stood for ever as in a sense the offspring of his spirit. All true ministers have entered into this joy in their own measure. And many have gone out into the work of evangelists under this most sacred and deep impulse, yearning to communicate the great new life beating in their own hearts, to see it spring up in other lives. II. Loyalty to Christ Th« supreme, explicit reason for the missionary impulse may best be summed up in the words, " loyalty to Christ." We have already seen that in the Christian faith He sits supreme, the Redeemer in whose great sacrifice of love, the love of the Almighty and eternal God for each human being is opened upon man's vision and breaks in upon his heart. He is also the Lord, the Leader or Captain of the Christian community, which is knit together by the will to do His will, to follow out his purposes towards mankind. 1. The Purpose of Christ. — The one word in which the purpose of Christ is summed up is — "to bring men to God." That was the mind which was in Him when He laid aside the form of God and became incarnate, when he girt His human will for obedience, " yea even unto the death of the Cross." The same mind is in Him to-day as His very Spirit works in human history. 15 — 225 — THE FINAL FAITH His will is to bring men unto God. As one who has accepted Christ's leadership, with all it means, gazes directly and intently upon that will, the missionary spirit is stirred in him. As he looks from the foot of that kingly throne at which he kneels day by day out upon the world, as he realises that the eyes of his King are watching with an infinite and eternal love all those teeming sons of men, he finds his own heart reflecting that divine passion of desire, his own will gradually directed and finally determined simply to live for Christ's own end, to bring men to the love of God the Father. When that has taken place the Christian man is naturally and inevitably led to regard it as the call of Christ to himself. Without superstitious waiting for voices or outward signs, he receives the certainty that loyalty to Christ means the mission field for him ; just as at an earlier day he discovered that his faith in Christ was God's gift, that it was the seal of his personal salvation set upon his own will by the Spirit of the Eternal. 2. The Cross. — The man whom this view of the will of Christ has begun to move mightily finds it throwing a bright light upon the whole work of Christ as the Redeemer and Lord of men. With a new fascination he regards the gospel story in which what we may call the universaHty of the consciousness of Jesus stands revealed. While He confined his own earthly ministry to the boundaries of the Jewish people, He yet dealt with them on broad and human grounds. He did not limit His call " Come unto Me " to the children of — 226 — THE MISSIONARY IMPULSE Israel. He did not say, " Every Jew that confesseth Me before men, him will I also confess before My Father which is in heaven." He did not say, "The Son of man came ... to give His life a ransom for all who are already loyal to Moses." In all such sayings Jesus set Himself in relation with human nature as such. He makes us see and feel that He was dealing with the fundamental relations of the whole race with God. He evidently intended to teach and labour, to su£fer and rise again, " that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name unto all the nations " (Luke xxiv. 46, 47). It is therefore impossible for any one intelUgently to look upon the Cross of Christ in its individual, without looking upon it also in its universal, aspect. No man dare say, " He loved me and gave Himself up for me," without remembering that all men have the same right to use those w^ords ; and no one man can use them fully of himself while in his spirit he denies them to any class or race of man. Before that Cross, as we have already seen, all geograph- ical, racial, educational, social obstructions vanish. It is the universal human situation which it deals with, and each man who finds it applied to his own case has looked into the depth and height, as it were, of the heart of Christ as He willed on the Cross to change the relations of man and God. 3. His Great Command. — But loyalty to Christ attaches itself not only to the leadership of Christ on his throne, directing the history of His Church out- — 227 — THE FINAL FAITH wards upon the race, not only to that will of His in the wonderful days of his flesh, as He moved towards the Cross, it also bows in reverence before His explicit words. No one who beheves in the fact of the Resurrection can reasonably doubt that the Gospels have preserved in varjring forms of words His direct and final command to His disciples to proclaim His gospel to the whole race. "Go ye therefore and make disciples of all the nations " (Matt, xxviii. 18-20) ; " Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel unto the whole creation " (Mark xvi. 15; cf. Luke xxiv. 25-27, 44-49; John xx. 19-23). The missionary nature of the Christian rehgion Ues, as we have seen, in its very nature, and many of the most thoughtful and powerful missionaries have felt the impulse arise within them, as they found themselves personally related to that Divine Person and the virtues of His redeeming work, and as they saw into the white and burning centre of that love of His for all men. But the missionary Church is right to set those explicit words emblazoned on high as the formal charter of its world-wide and endless empire. From the hps of the Risen Lord they fell. They uttered His will, expressed once for all and for ever the consciousness which filled His mind and will no less in the dark depths of Gethse- mane than on the Mount of the Ascension. They formally sealed that, His consciousness, upon the consciousness of those men as the law of the Church's very being. Before the larger community was gathered together, before the first word of witness was borne from behevers — 228 — THE MISSIONARY IMPULSE to those who knew not the God-wrought story of salva- tion, before the first table of communion was set up or the first convert to the Christian faith was baptized, the Lord of the Church wrote upon its primary group the nature and the end of their existence as His Church. And loyalty to Christ to-day is summed up, for an increasing number of souls, in direct obedience to those supreme words through which alike the mission of the Church and the destiny of the world stand revealed in their mutual dependence : " Preach the Gospel to the whole creation." III. The Nature of Christian Experience We come to a third ray of light which falls upon the missionary impulse. We have seen it as the energy of the new Ufe which animates the Christian com- munity, and as the expression of individual loyalty to Christ, the Redeemer and Master of mankind, for fulfil- ment of His purpose and obedience to His command. It is also quickened by the conditions and nature of that experience which we have studied. 1. The Gospel a Social Fact. — It is important here to recall the fact that this is in no sense a purely private experience. Personal or individual we must call it, for here individuality is reaHsed in a manner and to an intensity of degree which no other human relationship or conduct makes possible. There is a true and deep sense in which, when the gospel seizes a man's soul, it — 229 — THE FINAL FAITH reveals his personality to himself, and creates new ranges and qualities of individuality within him. A man is never fully the man he was designed and intended and called to become until his personal nature is united with, filled out, and completed by union with God in Christ. But while this is true, the other side must not be forgotten. The gospel is a social fact. To us all it comes through the mediation of the Christian com- munity. That community produced and has dissemin- ated the Scriptures, the witness of the primary Christians to the nature of the gospel. That community, multi- form now beyond our description, through some human agency brought that witness to our doors, urged it upon our consciences, instilled its truths into our minds. The gospel is a social fact, received by the individual through and in the midst of a community — a small group, or even one messenger it may be, representing the vast Church of God, the whole body of living and faithful souls who confess the Name of Christ. It streams to him, indeed, from God's own Spirit, an inward personal act of God upon himself, with elements in it which are his very own, alone, and can belong to none other. But it streams to him also at first and at last through others, through the written page of Scripture and the preacher's voice, through the intercession of the Church and its praises, through its symbols of ceremonial and sacrament. It is a debt which each man owes to other men. 2. The Inner Meaning of Mercy, — We may go even — 230 — THE MISSIONARY IMPULSE deeper into the experience of the mercy of God. That mercy, immeasurable, inexpHcable, descends upon the individual as a gift offered to all. When modern evangelists use with inexhaustible effect the old words " whosoever will," their effort is to get men to see in that phrase the strange interblending of the universal and the particular. " Whosoever " is a distributive word which seems to isolate a man and deal with him singly. But the gospel message so isolates, or would isolate, every man without exception. It is out of that glorious universal call that the overwhelming individual appeal at last reaches the inner seat of the heart and the will. I do not understand mercy till I have seen it directed upon me, but I could not so see it until it shine before me and above me like an encircling and universal sky embracing all human beings in its blessed light. Even here, then, in the lonely hour when remission of his own sins is granted to each man, he owes it to the fact that he belongs to the race upon which the mercy of God has fallen. The divine mercy is then something which can be truly understood in its individual appUcation only when it is seen in its general intention. Each man must meet the will of God as He directs His grace upon all men. He must see its wonder, its searching beauty, its merciless exposure of all sin, and its merciful wiping out of all guilt, in order to grasp that grace for himself. In the very act of accepting mercy he must feel mercy — " Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." — 231 — THE FINAL FAITH But who can thus truly see the '' wideness of God's mercy," and who can thus appreciate it as the source of his personal salvation and object of his personal faith, without feehng the impulse to convey it unto others ? If I can only receive a boon for myself because it is intended for all, how can I avoid the wish, or stifle the will, that it shall reach all because it has reached me ? The very sense of a baffling and inscrutable Providence which overwhelms one when he asks the unanswerable question, why this word of grace has come to him and not to one thousand million other persons in the world to-day, ought to arouse in him the determination to do something that the word may spread from heart to heart till all the world is leavened with that grace. The missionary impulse springs from the experience of personal salvation, because when a man enters upon this experience he does so as a child of the race. IV. The World and its Need We have seen the missionary impulse as it arises from the energy of the new life, from loyalty to Christ, from the innermost implications of the experience of salvation. We must try to understand how it is related with the world when looked at in the light of the gospel. 1. The Meaning of Humanity. — The coming of Christ and His Spirit changed the meaning of the word humanity. There had been among Greek and Roman thinkers some insight into the unity of mankind, but it had not — 232 — THE MISSIONARY IMPULSE been deep and true enough to create a new and perma- nent personal attitude. A Roman poet did say, "Nothing human is foreign to my interest," and the thriUing word must be ever welcome to our hearts. It was a foregleam of that full sunhght which the gospel of Christ alone has shed abroad upon the human race. We must admit, of course, that even in Christendom, race prejudice still holds our hearts in bondage. They are few and rare souls, indeed, of whom it can be said, that none of the distinctions among men which arise from colour, or social standing, affect their conduct or even their feelings toward their fellowmen. But it is a matter of supreme meaning that, in spite of that fact, the missionary impulse is sending people all over the world who are determined to see and act upon humanity in every child of the race, and pour something of the love of God through their own hearts upon the lowest members of the race. The vast works of philanthropy, which involve close fellowship and even intimacy with the pitiable objects upon whom their redeeming efforts are spent, would be impossible unless a new power had appeared to make that other Roman saying about the " sac redness of man " more clear and more real than it was to the philosophic and superior Stoic of old. (1) One Race. — In the first 'place, modern philosophy, as well as modern studies in history and ethnology, have not only compelled us to say that mankind is one race, they have revealed to us the greatness of the nature which we call human. Something of the infinite — 233 — THE FINAL FAITH seems to be suggested by all the central powers of man. Reason, ever growing in its grasp of the outward word, and withal, holding infinite ideals in its grasp ; conscience, claiming the authority to utter the laws of a rational universe ; imagination, a glowing fire from which warmth and beauty are flung out upon the coldest seas and the most distant star ; love, which even in the dullest heart may suddenly wake to utter its claims of endless life, indignant at the separating grave, — all these and any other power which may belong to man as man possess a dignity, suggest a glory not to be measured in earthly terms. These forms of knowledge cannot discover man's actual destiny, but they show us man's capacity for some great destiny. They describe to us a nature, " heaven's consummate cup," so nobly planned that we must not only admire it as it is, but expect some greater thing from it and of it, which no eye has seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man to con- ceive it. (2) The Revealed Destiny. — In the second place, while philosophy sets man sub jade ceternitatis, discloses that he is fashioned for an infinite end, that end cannot be defined. The eternity of which Philosophy speaks remains an empty form. It has no describable substance. It may say with Kant that man must pursue the good will as an infinite and for ever unattainable goal. It may tell us that man is pursuing " the pathway to reality " or perfecting " individuality." But none of these terms, valuable in their place, can give to the — 234 — THE MISSIONARY IMPULSE capacity of a man . a concrete achievement which immediately glows with substantial reahty. Philo- sophy can neither lift history above time nor drag its eternal goal down and set it there ardent, mystic, actual to win our love and dominate the whole movement of our living energy. Christianity alone has ever professed to satisfy this need. It has set humanity sub facie Christi. Now the face of Christ is at once a historical and an eternal fact. In Him the infinite good has suddenly become actual in history. The perfectly good will, conscious of its triumph, the final individuality, conscious of its perfect reality, is there in Him. The Christian man, knowing Christ, knows what is to be made of man. The meaning of our nature stands revealed in Him whose love led Him to the Cross and whose power lifted Him from the dead to the throne of God. There the cup of human nature stands, fashioned gloriously, with the very life of God filling it full. (a) For one thing, man was the object of the love of Jesus even in His earthly life. No one has put the meaning of this more beautifully than the author of Ecce Homo : "Of this race Christ HimseK was a member, and to this day is it not the best answer to all blas- phemers of the species, the best consolation when our sense of its degradation is keenest, that a human brain was behind His forehead and a human heart beating in His breast, and that within the whole creation of God nothing more elevated or more attractive has yet been — 235 — THE FINAL FAITH found than He ? . . . And yet He associated by pre- ference with these meanest of the race. . . . There is nothing of which a man may be prouder than this ; it is the most hopeful and redeeming fact in history ; it is precisely what was wanting to raise the love of man as man to enthusiasm. An eternal glory has been shed upon the human race by the love Christ bore to it." We must add, of course, that the love of Christ for man reached its perfect as well as its most mysterious expression in His sacrifice on the Cross. If man's measureless guilt in His view made that most dreadful deed of His will upon His own heart necessary. He performed it because He saw in man that which was worthy of being redeemed. Man's original power to receive the life through the love divine must be restored at any cost, that the eternal will of his Creator may be done. This joy was before Jesus when He endured the Cross, despising shame. This joy of His drops into the heart of His disciple as the impulse of the missionary and the philanthropist. (&) The man who gives himself to Christian service, if by any means he may save some, is one who has caught a glimpse of the infinite value of the human soul. That glance of its glory may be connected with a study of its capacities, but it came primarily from the revelation of the intention of God. The cup exists not for itself ; it is beautifully fashioned in base and rim for uses of a cup, for the joy of Him at whose feast — 236 — • THE MISSIONARY IMPULSE of love it is destined to serve. The infinite value of human nature is suggested by its rehgious capacity ; it is revealed and made sure in the whole work of God in Christ and in the descriptions of that eternal kingdom, that family of God, that host of the redeemed, that temple in which God is revealed, that city in which his own Light stands, which our Lord and His Apostles gave to the world. Many an eager saintly spirit, brood- ing over this will of God, has been fired with the passion to open that world of hope to the bewildered souls that know not how great they are, nor how near, when Christ, is named, stands the infinite measure and assur- ance of their destiny. 2. The Dreadful Need of Humanity, — Over against the world in its splendid capacity we must fix our eyes steadfastly on the world in its dreadful need. As we have already seen, the very history of man's religious endeavours is a most pathetic witness to " something wrong " at the very root of his life. Splendid indeed have been many of his religious aspirations, inspiring have been many of his words uttered in moments of true and deep insight. But everyvt^here we find proof that his striving for God has been deflected and defeated by some other force in his nature and experience. What barbarities and tortures has he not inflicted in the name of his gods and for their approval ! What extremes of anguish has he not endured as proofs at once of his insatiable appetite for some supreme good and of his inveterate tendency to mix it with iniquity ! — 237 — THE FINAL FAITH And nowhere has he found a true and lasting peace. The enlightenment of Buddha was only partial and incapable in its original form, still more so in its later developments, of conferring that glorious and positive sense of triumph, that possession of the pardon of God, that assurance of life everlasting, which the consummate religion can only bestow. The Christian man knows, as he regards even the history of religion, that he is looking on the desolation of sin. It has clouded man's vision, it has blocked his way, it has oppressed his heart. The sense of right undone, of wrong accomplished, is not peculiar to the higher civilisations. An accusing conscience casts its shadow throughout the world upon the human spirit. It underlies all legislation and government, it reared every altar of expiation, it sang every dirge of hopeless woe. To quell it man has put on the garments of joy, but the flowers always wither. He has tried to simulate the peace it had shattered, to despise the victory of the grave, to be content with pleasure of the senses, to cage his infinite yearnings within the bars of time and cir- cumstance, even to torment and mutilate his poor body that his spirit might have peace. But always in vain. " I ought " is a feeling that woke up in man's breast when he first sought the Divine ; it woke with the pang of remorse, and the pang has survived all devices, save only the Cross of Christ. But the Christian man of to-day is peculiarly sensitive to the fact that the desolation of sin is no mere inward — 238 — THE MISSIONARY IMPULSE and secret sorrow of the religious soul. It appears out- wardly in all the wrongs that infest the relationships of men. True it is, as we have seen, that sin is the misuse of appetites and impulses seated in man's original nature, and themselves sinless. But the fact of the desolation is spread over the whole of human history. The lust of the flesh and the pride of the spirit, the passion for power and the will to deceive, have worked in all races. They have reared empires on the graves and crushed hearts of conquered races ; and they have undermined and cast the same empires down into the dust. In our day, even in Christian lands, the social desolation of man has evoked the zeal of all reformers, and sent whole armies into the highways of social service. The Christian man, believing that until the broken relations with God are set right, until the state of sin is removed, these desolations must persist, gives himself to the service of that gospel which deals first with sin that it may cleanse the fountainhead of greed and self-will, of passion and crime. He knows that he is working at the root of all social evil when he seeks to bring the conscience to that peace of God, in whose light righteousness shines clear and in whose merciful love the heart of man learns the love of man. 3. The Doom of Impenitence. — There is another view of the situation which was more emphasised in a former day than in our own, and which we may describe as the doom of impenitence. It would be right to say, perhaps, that the error of that former time lay not so — 239 — THE FINAL FAITH much in mere exaggeration of this peril of the human soul, but in its isolation. It is not the sole fact nor the whole truth about man. But it is assuredly one element or aspect of his condition which it is mere blindness not to see, and sheer folly not to treat with appropriate energy and awe. No book throws so bright a light upon the destiny of man as the Bible, but the corresponding shadow is proportionately dreadful and dark. It was Jesus who so loved man as we have seen, who could be so broad and generous and even genial in His treatment of the facts before Him in the multi- form interests of human society, who yet could utter the words of most astounding and even of appalUng severity. It was He who used the word " lost," and He allowed no exceptions to be made in its appHcation. That is enough. He saw multitudes Uving without God, some openly, some as the hypocrites. He saw the possibility of a final impenitence. He and His Apostles have taught us that the children of darkness may prefer that darkness when the intensest light of God is shining straight upon their hearts and minds. The wondrous charity of the New Testament which recognises that in every nation he who worketh righte- ousness is accepted of God, must not paralyse but quicken the missionary impulse. For surely if men are to be judged according to their light, they will do better in a brighter light. Surely if in all heathen religions there is expressed in some measure man's hunger for the divine, they who have the secret of that — 240 — THE MISSIONARY IMPULSE true Bread of Life must take it to them, lest they fail to find it. Surely if the will may become impenitent, it ought to have every chance, which the very grace of God can give it, to turn unto righteousness and repent and live. This religious view of man's situation, as one of infinite danger, led Jesus to the Cross and sent forth all the great heralds of His salvation to the ends of the earth. Two final observations must be made : 1. In the first place, the missionary impulse is com- posed of two elements, the sense of a supreme com- passion and the feeling of an everwhelming debt. The pity is born in a man's heart from the new love of God and from his new insight, which that very love makes clear and poignant, into man's dreadful need. The debt is felt to be a debt of honour. No institution can enforce it. No human being can judge his neighbour in respect of the manner and amount of its payment. It rests upon every man's honour to see it and weigh it and pay it. It may be put briefly in two sentences — " What I have freely received I owe to him who has it not. Especially do I owe the greatest boon to the direst need." 2. In the second place, the man who believes in the gospel of Christ with all it contains, not only of grace offered now, but of human glory prophesied hereafter, knows that he is here gazing upon the deepest form of reality. What does not belong to this fife in Christ from God must pass from human experience. From this and around this must gather all that henceforth is i6 — 241 — THE FINAL FAITH to be human nature and a human world. Through Christ and His work the divine purpose with man is as it were gazing in upon our souls and challenging our confidence, our hfe's devotion, in the call to beUeve and serve the gospel. That divine purpose is the substance of man's nature and history, the final reaUty for which all the stages of history are but the scaffolding and the tools. We may put it this way — All are agreed that much of what seems most solid in our experience is evanescent. Most are agreed that if anything is to last or preserve its identity for ever, and so prove itself of supreme value, it must be sought not in the physical, nor in the fitful pulses of pleasurable emotions, nor in the forms of earthly knowledge, but solely in the moral nature of man, in a good conscience, a will made one with the will of God. There you strike upon the indestructible thing, the one form of reality that must live as long as God. But here is our climax of glorious assumptions, our claim which outtops all wildest effronteries of the human spirit. We of the Christian world hold this as our fundamental conviction that only through the power of Jesus Christ is that good conscience, that unity of man's will with God's will, being actually created. This conviction is Christianity, and to deny it is to lose the whole Gospel. The preacher and teacher, the humblest ministrant of the gospel, is working for that. He may close his eyes to all other careers, and be deaf to other praise. — 242 — THE MISSIONARY IMPULSE This is praise enough, and here is work sublime enough. It brought the Son of God to earth, that He might in our world produce that which when all else has vanished for ever will remain for ever — the human soul alive for ever in God. — 243 — Printed by Morrison & Gibb Limited Edinburgh THIS BOOK IS DTTE OK THE r. --'fJ/l^jT^OF 25 CENTS °AV AND ?o "° '° "''^ ON ThV/o';*'-^ ^r«ouH:^"° *' °° °N THE s^'^^^r^i;; i-osi-ioom-T/as /"C yjU n^ liyyd^