THE RELIGION OF 
 THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 H. F. B. MACKAY
 
 CHARI.KS THURNAM * 
 
 CARLISLE.
 
 THE RELIGION OF THE 
 ENGLISHMAN
 
 THE RELIGION OF 
 THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 A SERIES OF SIX ADDRESSES DELIVERED 
 AT ALL SAINTS', MARGARET STREET 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. H. F. B. MACKAY, M.A. 
 
 VICAR 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 
 NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 
 
 1911 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 PREFACE 
 
 IT will be obvious to any one who reads them that I 
 did not mean to publish these sermons. But they were 
 not addressed to the Sunday morning congregation at 
 All Saints', Margaret Street ; they were addressed through 
 that congregation to a larger public, and it has therefore 
 seemed best to accept the suggestion that they should 
 be printed. 
 
 Laymen have often described to me the conversa- 
 tions about religion which flourish in the absence of 
 a clergyman, and the thought occurred to me that I 
 should like to throw a series of Sunday morning ad- 
 dresses into the form of a contribution to such a con- 
 versation. This conversation is prefaced in the two 
 first addresses by some general remarks on the religious 
 and moral condition of English society. 
 
 Complaints continue to reach me of the state of 
 paganism in which little boys are sent to their public 
 schools from professedly Christian homes. Last week 
 a public school master told me that he can discover no 
 knowledge among his boys as to the meaning of the 
 sequence of the Church seasons, and that he had come 
 across three lately who could tell him nothing at all 
 about Judas Iscariot. 
 
 It is plain that very many English parents are failing 
 to teach Christianity to their children. These addresses 
 attempt to suggest some of the reasons. 
 
 H. F. B. MACKAY. 
 
 January 1911.
 
 THE RELIGION OF THE 
 ENGLISHMAN 
 
 I. HIS RELIGIOUS CONDITION 
 
 " The turning away of the simple." PROVERBS i., part of 32nd verse. 
 
 ON six consecutive Sunday mornings, we are hoping to 
 consider together the religious and moral needs of modern 
 English society. We must begin with some survey of 
 the situation, and our subject this morning is, " The 
 Religious Condition of Modern English Society." 
 
 At the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria, a 
 dinner party in Cavendish Square was a gathering of 
 people who professed to be governed by the Christian 
 tradition. At the beginning of the reign of George V. 
 that is no longer the case. 
 
 This does not mean that the world is ceasing to be 
 interested in religion. The English world is much 
 more interested in religion now than it was at the be- 
 ginning of Queen Victoria's reign. Then the Christian 
 religion was to it what the British constitution was the 
 beneficent and unquestioned system under which it was 
 so fortunate as to live. There were enthusiastic de- 
 fenders and exponents of Christianity, as there were 
 enthusiastic defenders and exponents of the British con- 
 stitution ; but that great majority of average persons 
 which forms the bulk of every religion, the people who
 
 8 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 obey it, not because it absorbs and delights them, but 
 because they think it part of the order of the universe, 
 like the sun and the tides these people, eighty years 
 ago, did not discuss their religion at all, or exercise their 
 minds upon it. They had their children baptized, pro- 
 vided them with Bibles, taught them to fear God and 
 hope for forgiveness through the merits of their Saviour, 
 to go to church, and to refrain from work and play 
 on Sundays, to honour the Queen, and to do nothing 
 unworthy of an English gentleman. 
 
 Here was the Church, here were some of the elements 
 of Catholic Christianity, but as the majority held it, this 
 national selection from Catholic Christianity had come to 
 be a kind of Christian Shinto, a tradition of ancestral 
 piety dressed in Christian clothes. 
 
 Now it is this that is dying, this English Shinto, and 
 it is dying because the world has again become interested 
 in religion. It is the revival of interest in religion which 
 has caused ten people out of our dinner party of sixteen 
 in Cavendish Square to cease to represent any tradition at 
 all. They belong to the mass who are only religious as 
 far as they feel they must be. And owing to the endless 
 discussions about religion, they have come to feel that 
 no particular form of religion is so certainly true as to 
 compel their attention. 
 
 Of the remaining six, one lady is a regular attendant 
 at the Daily Eucharist at All Saints', Margaret Street. 
 Her neighbour belongs to the Church Association, a 
 society which exists for the purpose of suppressing All 
 Saints', Margaret Street, and imprisoning its vicar. A 
 third is a convert to the Roman Catholic Church, and 
 the striking-looking man with the strong hands, who is 
 listening with such admirable courtesy and patience while
 
 HIS RELIGIOUS CONDITION 9 
 
 she demonstrates the invalidity of Anglican Orders, is a 
 great surgeon who is a frank and outspoken materialist. 
 The man with the rather long hair is a noted spiritualist ; 
 and the lady who surveys everything from the woodcock 
 to the Roman Catholic with a tender, pitying smile is a 
 Christian Scientist. 
 
 Now our business this morning is, not with any of the 
 six enthusiasts, but with the ten people who have lost 
 the sense of certainty about their religion which consti- 
 tuted to them its sole importance, and who are conse- 
 quently failing to implant in their children the seeds of 
 any definite religious practice at all. It is not any result 
 of the ceaseless discussions about religion which has upset 
 them. It is the fact that there is any discussion at all. 
 The plain man has no time or inclination to examine 
 such things, and he turns to us to make his defence and 
 explanation with a real sense of injury. 
 
 How in the world is he to know which is in the right : 
 the enthusiastic lady who gets up every morning at six 
 o'clock in the cold winter to go to service at All Saints', 
 or the enthusiastic gentleman who wants to imprison the 
 vicar for celebrating the service she finds when she gets 
 there. As to the Bible, it is true that he does not 
 read the Contemporary, or the National, or the Nine- 
 teenth Century, but he does read the lists of their con- 
 tents every month on the table at his club, and every 
 month some shrewd and clever fellow appears to be 
 dealing a fresh blow at the poor old Bible. He has 
 travelled about the world a bit and seen something of 
 other religions, and he is bound to say they all seem to 
 him very much alike. As long as a man acts up to what 
 he believes, that's all that really matters. But as to God, 
 he doesn't care a button what these scientific fellows say.
 
 io THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 Of course there's a God. Why, look at his poor, dear 
 old mother, the best woman that ever lived, God bless 
 her ; is it likely that anybody can make him believe that 
 the God she believed in up to her last breath does not 
 exist ? No, sir. And at the time of her death he is not 
 ashamed to say that he had well, some sort of look into 
 the thing himself. 
 
 o 
 
 His children? No, of course he does not teach 
 religion to his children ; it is not in his line at all, and his 
 wife is so busy with her political work, her golf, and so 
 on, that she can't, and it's not quite in her line either. 
 But the boys are at an excellent preparatory school, where 
 the headmaster is in deacon's orders, and they have a very 
 nice chapel of their own where Morning Prayer is said, 
 shortened on week-days and full on Sundays. The boys 
 get a good Scripture lesson every day of their lives, and 
 like it too. Why, last holidays one of them got badly 
 hurt in a game they had invented out of their Scripture 
 lessons a game called Jael and Sisera. 
 
 But as to church well, he goes in the country, because 
 he must set an example. It is good for the servants to 
 go to church, and they ought to see him there sometimes. 
 He'd go oftener if it did him any good and if he ever 
 heard a decent sermon. But, we must take his word for it, 
 it positively does him harm to go to church. In the old 
 days, when the old vicar was alive, he liked going. The 
 old vicar had been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cam- 
 bridge. He was a thorough old gentleman, a scholar, 
 a sportsman, and as good a Christian man as ever breathed. 
 It was a treat to hear him read the service. Now they 
 have a fellow who sings everything, though he cannot 
 sing a note. The music is too dreadful for words. In 
 the chancel, where his dear old mother used to sit, there
 
 HIS RELIGIOUS CONDITION n 
 
 are now two rows of boys out of the village school, who 
 wriggle all through the service, and whose voices are 
 frightful. In the old days there were some women with 
 quite decent voices who sang. This parson thinks it is 
 wrong for women to sing in church. The parson is a 
 good man, a hard worker, but somehow he cannot get on 
 with him. He does not know what to talk to him about. 
 And he is always upsetting the people. For example : 
 look at the Harvest Festival. In his father's time there 
 had always been a Harvest Home ; to be sure, they did 
 not go to church, but they always rang the bells. Well, 
 now there is a service. He does not mind that ; he thinks 
 it is perfectly right, and the church is always packed. 
 But last time the vicar covered the communion-table 
 with lighted candles, he had got every candlestick out of 
 the vicarage, and he had what he called a procession, and 
 actually he, the squire, and all the rest, were kept standing 
 up, while the boys out of the village school went rolling 
 round the church. 
 
 And as to the sermons, they are always about the 
 Church. He is always being told to obey the Church. 
 What Church ? There is nothing about obeying the 
 Church in the Prayer Book ; in fact, the boot is on the 
 other leg in England ; it is the Church which has to 
 obey the State, and a very good thing too. In Lent he 
 was told the Church expected him to fast ; and before 
 Easter the parson actually had the impudence to say 
 from the village pulpit that the Church exhorted every 
 one who found himself unfit for communion because of 
 his sins to repent and go to confession that he might 
 get absolution. Again he begs to ask, what Church ? 
 Certainly not the Established Church of England. He 
 hopes he knows his Prayer Book. His poor, dear mother
 
 12 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 gave him a Prayer Book when he was six, and he has 
 kept it ever since, and there is not one word in that 
 book about fasting or going to confession. 
 
 No ! he goes to church sometimes for the sake of 
 example, but a walk round the home farm does him a 
 great deal more good, body and soul. He tries to be a 
 good master, a good husband, and a good father ; and if 
 he ever has to give an account of his life to a Higher 
 Power he will be able to say at least that much for him- 
 self, and it is a good deal more than many other people 
 will be able to say who call themselves religious. 
 
 You observe that the squire is quite genuine, and that 
 if he has many imaginary grievances he also has some 
 very real ones. 
 
 Well now, out of that home kindly, hearty, happy 
 where religion is represented by the village church, 
 which the boy finds a bore and the father a source of 
 irritation, the modern boy goes to his public school. 
 He finds a world of much good and much evil, and he 
 gets some sense of corporate religion. The school chapel 
 does thrill him sometimes ; the village church never 
 thrilled him. He gets some sense of the long continuity 
 of the Church of England. He is impressed by the fact 
 than an Englishman ought to belong to it, and not to a 
 dissenting body or the Roman Catholics. 
 
 If the boy is at an ancient school like Eton or Win- 
 chester, the solemn beauty of the place really affects 
 him ; is, indeed, perhaps, the first really Divine influence 
 in his life. And he hears good sermons. His head- 
 master gets down some of the first preachers of the day. 
 They all preach sermons specially suitable to boys, and the 
 boys hear their favourite virtues enlarged on Sunday after 
 Sunday with a variety of eloquence which is very impressive.
 
 HIS RELIGIOUS CONDITION 13 
 
 Soon comes his confirmation. His housemaster, a 
 fine layman, who has earnestly considered the question 
 of taking orders, and decided that his conscience will 
 not allow him to make the necessary declarations, prepares 
 him. The preparation makes a real moral appeal to the 
 boy. He does not know why. Something sacred and 
 solemn is coming to him ; to have the hands of the bishop 
 laid publicly on his head is a serious matter. No gentle- 
 man can face it lightly. It will be the passport to Holy 
 Communion. Here, some knightly image of the Holy 
 Grail rises before him, and he thinks of his own poor 
 meannesses and secret impurities, about which nobody 
 has spoken to him privately, and he shivers. It is 
 extraordinarily pathetic that the best thing in the life of 
 an English boy who is brought up as a moderate Anglican 
 is that on the brink of the Holy Communion he hesitates 
 and shivers. He does not understand exactly what the 
 Holy Communion is. He only knows that it is not 
 what the Roman Catholics say it is. Nevertheless, he 
 knows that only clean hands should take that Bread 
 and hold that Cup, and he is very humble and uncom- 
 fortable about it. But he gets this out of contact with 
 the fine character of his housemaster, not out of any- 
 thing the housemaster has said ; the veiled and carefully 
 moderate language of the instructions has never bitten 
 at all, and the whole impression passes away. 
 
 But he comes up to Oxford or Cambridge, charming, 
 reverent, and with a very real religious sense. Then 
 what is amiss ; simply this, he is completely ignorant 
 of the Christian faith. The message with which St. 
 Paul transformed the world has all his life been sung 
 to him in anthems, read to him from the Bible, enshrined 
 in the prayers he has been given to say ; but as boy,
 
 i 4 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 youth, and man, he has never heard it so that he could 
 grasp it, love it, and glory in it. He has been preached 
 at to repletion, and starved to death for the lack of 
 catechetical instruction in the Catholic faith, and the 
 demonstration of it in practice before his eyes in the 
 Church. 
 
 And then our reverent young man, with his historical 
 sense nicely developed, but without the Catholic faith, 
 meets the girl who is to be his wife. She should come 
 to him a daughter of Mary, with all the wonder of the 
 Incarnation in her eyes and in her mien. She comes to 
 him clever, keen, hard, shrewd. Mary means no more 
 to her than Artemis. Her hard brilliance cows the man 
 who loves her. He is ignorant of Christianity. She 
 goes further ; she despises all religion she has never 
 lived at Eton or at Magdalen. She soon laughs him out 
 of all his wistfulnesses. She is a capital companion, she 
 fishes and shoots and plays golf. She smokes and plays 
 bridge. Life in such companionship will surely never 
 have a dull moment. And so the young couple of to- 
 day go off from the marriage feast to create the home of 
 to-morrow, to live a creedless life in a childless home. 
 
 A childless home ! That brings us to next Sunday's 
 subject : the moral condition of modern English society. 
 
 A last word. You say that such a generalisation is 
 extremely unfair. No ; I deny it. English society 
 contains its thousands of splendid Catholics, English and 
 Roman, thousands of devout evangelical Christians, 
 hundreds of families, some of them the greatest in the 
 land, always the slowest to change their traditions, which 
 maintain the sober Protestant morality and discipline 
 so nobly exemplified by Queen Victoria and the Prince 
 Consort ; but I am quite sure I have fairly outlined the
 
 HIS RELIGIOUS CONDITION 15 
 
 tendency of the majority. I do not blame the majority. 
 I do not even altogether blame the Church of England. 
 The thing which has happened was inevitable. The 
 majority are where they always are in a period of change. 
 They are in doubt, in suspense ; they would not be 
 religious if they could help it, and now the thing seems 
 to them to have become uncertain again ; and so long as 
 it all seems to lie in the lap of the gods their power of 
 action will remain paralysed. 
 
 I hope that those who are here to-day will come with 
 me through these six Sunday mornings. And mean- 
 while I ask you, every one in church, to say a real prayer 
 every day this week. We must begin to do something 
 for our friends who do not see the vision of Christ as we 
 do. Will you between this and next Sunday everybody 
 here say with your evening prayers the collect for 
 Advent Sunday with the intention that God may help 
 us to help our brethren towards the vision of peace which 
 is the Heavenly Jerusalem ?
 
 II. HIS MORAL CONDITION 
 
 "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity." ECCLESIASTES xii. 8. 
 
 WE were thinking last Sunday about the religious con- 
 dition of English society ; this morning we are going to 
 think about its moral condition. 
 
 Moral ideas change more slowly than religious ideas. 
 We are not so far from the morality of seventy years 
 ago as we are from its religion. The morality of the 
 squire whose profession of faith we listened to last Sunday 
 morning does not differ greatly from that of his old 
 mother. 
 
 The difference is that she knew what she based her 
 morality on, and he does not know what he bases his 
 morality on. She based hers on her intense belief in 
 God and His Word. The squire holds on to his belief 
 in God with some difficulty, but still regards as sacred 
 the morality which flows from that belief. Having lost 
 the connection between his morality and its origin, the 
 squire does not see that Christian morality is an inter- 
 dependent theory of life, and that to pull big stones out 
 of its foundation will bring the whole building tumbling 
 about our ears. 
 
 For example, he does not in the least see that the 
 sanctity of marriage lies in its being indissoluble. He 
 tells me that if Mrs. X leaves her husband and throws 
 in her lot with Mr. Z, it is sheer bigotry in me to re- 
 fuse Mr. X, who is a member of the English Church, 
 the relief of a divorce and the solace of another wife,
 
 HIS MORAL CONDITION 17 
 
 and he continues to cut Mr. Z at his club until the 
 case in the courts is over and he has married Mr. X's 
 wife. But as soon as Mr. Z has made what the squire 
 calls "an honest woman" of her, the squire holds out 
 a rather stiff hand to him and readmits him to his 
 acquaintance. 
 
 If, in my conversation with the squire, I tell him I 
 have not the slightest objection to an unbaptized pagan 
 taking advantage of any arrangement as to a change of 
 wives which the State may allow him, but that I intend 
 to refuse communion to any member of the Church who 
 does so, the squire thinks me immoral, bigoted, and 
 lawless. " The thing, sir," he says, " is either right or 
 wrong. The State allows it. You are an official of the 
 Established Church, and you have no business to censure 
 anybody who keeps within the law." 
 
 The only result of our conversation is that the squire 
 privately decides that I shall not prepare his daughter 
 for confirmation. 
 
 He has lost, you see, the conception of Christian 
 marriage as a contract between two persons, who, since 
 their baptism, have been living in a supernatural state, 
 the laws of which bind them. 
 
 This simple and sincere English gentleman has come 
 to regard marriage as a Roman gentleman regarded it 
 in the time of Tiberius, as a natural contract regulated 
 by the State purely natural, so that when nature rebels 
 against the tie and desires to form another, the State 
 must put no strong impediment in the way, and must 
 ultimately sanction the new arrangement. 
 
 With this view of marriage comes the corollary that 
 the ties of affinity are no ties at all ; that a man's wife's 
 sister is not his sister, but merely somebody else's sister 
 
 B
 
 1 8 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 whom he can marry if he likes on the death of his 
 wife. 
 
 But the squire has one great bother and perplexity : 
 he cannot understand why he has so few grandchildren. 
 His three healthy sons and his three healthy daughters- 
 in-law have given him only two grandsons and one 
 granddaughter. He remembers the cohort of uncles 
 and aunts, and the cohorts of cousins, who in his childish 
 days filled the old manor-house with life and laughter 
 in the summer and at Christmas. He thinks of the 
 helter-skelter of boys who followed him through the 
 stables on the first blessed morning of the Christmas 
 holidays. The smell of a frosty morning in the stable- 
 yard will, even now, bring upon him a rush of feeling 
 which dims his eyes and tightens his throat. He re- 
 members the pure joy of meeting his great friend, the 
 old coachman, and his best pal among the stable boys. 
 Surely, among men nowadays, there is something less 
 of intimacy with God's good earth and with simple 
 things ! 
 
 So the squire ruminates, and then he looks at the two 
 rather &J*-looking little boys in the very well-cut 
 clothes, who are talking to the chauffeur on the steps 
 before the hall door the chauffeur, that well-set-up, 
 rather sinister-looking young gentleman, who has taken 
 the place of the old coachman. And the squire's face 
 grows troubled, and his jaw falls. 
 
 Why are there only these two grandsons ? Simply be- 
 cause his sons aud his daughters-in-law have no con- 
 trolling theory of life at all. They have never heard 
 that there is a Christian law which governs the married 
 state and regulates the procreation of children. Their 
 life is spent in avoiding inconveniences and unpleasant
 
 HIS MORAL CONDITION 19 
 
 sensations, and in pursuing amusement and pleasant feel- 
 ing. It is an intensely restless life, and the young 
 couples wish to be as unhampered as possible. They 
 want the season, and Cowes and Scotland, and their 
 round of visits, and Monte Carlo, and the season again 
 and they don't want children. One or other, or both, 
 dislike the idea. There is a dread, too, of pain and 
 danger for the young wife. There is, in fact, a growing 
 repugnance to the thought of fatherhood and mother- 
 hood. 
 
 A suggestion that they should speak to a Christian 
 priest on the subject at the time of their marriage they 
 would have derided with contempt. Perhaps they have 
 consulted a physician, and it is quite possible he has 
 given them the advice they would have been given in 
 Rome in the days of Tiberius. 
 
 Now, in all this we are in the grip of natural 
 forces, which are stronger than ourselves. A thing has 
 happened which always happens in the declining days 
 of any era of civilisation. The race is becoming too 
 refined for the process of reproduction ; and this always 
 shows itself first in the class which ought to give to the 
 community its best children. Only one thing can carry 
 the race through such a period. It is a fixed, unalter- 
 able standard of thought and feeling on the point. 
 That is what the Catholic religion provides. 
 
 But out of the sixteen people at the dinner party 
 which we were considering last Sunday, only two know 
 anything about the Catholic religion the worshipper 
 at the early Eucharist at All Saints', Margaret Street, 
 and the combative convert to the Roman Catholic 
 Church. 
 
 Let us clear up our minds on this subject. That
 
 20 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 wretched little Portuguese republic has produced divorce 
 proposals which are intended to show the way towards 
 the emancipated relationships of the future. If it brings 
 them into being, it will find the need of another law 
 a law of compulsory breeding. If men are, after all, 
 only animals, but animals which have the astounding 
 power of avoiding the responsibilities of parentage, then 
 it will be necessary to preserve and improve the breed 
 like that of any other cattle. 
 
 Now it is these young people who are giving the 
 tone to modern society. They have no great virtues, 
 and they have no great vices. They neither defy God 
 nor believe in Him. They do not hate the Christian 
 religion. It simply does not interest them at all. 
 They help to form a restless, good-natured society, eager 
 for distractions. It is a society of children too busy 
 with its devices and amusements to think. Hence its 
 horizon is steadily contracting. It has no sense of 
 there being vast issues involved in life. It is singularly 
 free from violence. Nobody quarrels over public 
 matters, nobody quarrels in public, because nowadays 
 nothing seems worth quarrelling about. If a husband 
 and wife change partners, no blood is shed to-day, no 
 blow is struck, but hostesses are still careful that the 
 newly-shuffled couples shall not be brought face to face 
 in the same country house. Nothing that can upset 
 the cheery practical-joking existence of the great body of 
 good-natured people, who call one another by pet names, 
 is permitted. And there is very little drunkenness. 
 
 Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox, and their contemporaries, 
 drank so much, that we, their descendants, have been 
 deprived of the capacity of drinking at all. Most 
 people in society are as free from excess as we are in
 
 HIS MORAL CONDITION 21 
 
 this church, and we are all sober for the same reason 
 because if we took to excessive drinking we should be 
 dead in a month. In Mr. Pitt's and Mr. Fox's days 
 people drank deep and went on. Now if a man drinks 
 deep he falls out. Why, most of us modern men 
 cannot even drink coffee after dinner. 
 
 But while there is very little desire now for excess, 
 there is an increasing recourse to stimulants and drugs 
 to enable men and women to endure the rush of life. 
 We are all like actors, tired and weary of our parts, 
 and we are tempted to take stimulants that we 
 may do ourselves justice in the next act of the 
 play. 
 
 The rush of life! That is the worst evil of the 
 present day. 
 
 The idols of the present day are not luxury and 
 beauty. They are convenience and speed, and both 
 are acting injuriously on human nature. We have 
 almost lost the discipline of enduring little discomforts, 
 and of waiting for what we want. With electricity for 
 our magician, we can conjure up speed, light, warmth, 
 and knowledge as we will. Modern conveniences are 
 softening us all. They deprive us of half the daily 
 discipline which used to teach men endurance and 
 patience. 
 
 And with the nerves of this soft age its speed is 
 doing the work of the devil. Men and women are 
 being shot half conscious through a world of dissolving 
 views, gathering their knowledge from the headlines 
 of the newspapers. 
 
 So habituated are we to noise and jar, that we cannot 
 tolerate stillness and repose, and our amusements become 
 more and more violent. Conceive the amazement of
 
 22 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 the people who dance through Watteau's pictures if they 
 could see their successors on the switchback and on the 
 wigglewoggle. 
 
 And there are signs that a jaded age is in search of 
 more debased sensations still. There is a marked in- 
 crease in certain forms of vice, vice which is also crime, 
 and that among the educated classes. Shops of a cynical 
 shamelessness now flaunt themselves in the main thorough- 
 fares untouched by the law. The education of the 
 masses has borne evil fruit in a crop of gutter journals, 
 which cater for the lowest tastes, and in an epidemic 
 of cheap, impure literature, which we have now seen for 
 some time on the bookstalls, and against which, so far, 
 we have made no effective protest. 
 
 But this is not a wicked age ; it is a careless and 
 a thoughtless age ; careless of principle, unconcerned 
 with great issues, and besotted with delight at its own 
 petty inventiveness. 
 
 " Society," wrote a contributor to the women's supple- 
 ment of the Times of November 12, "is engaged in 
 a fatal game. But we can still alter its course if we 
 set to work steadfastly to change a life of artificial 
 pleasure, unhealthy excitements, vain pursuits, ignored 
 responsibilities, into a life of healthy purposes, keen 
 physical and intellectual enjoyments, and responsible 
 undertakings where duty reigns." 
 
 That appeal meets with a rejoinder in yesterday's 
 issue from an inquirer who, in sarcastic tones, asks for 
 the details of the remedy, and condemns the appeal as 
 " a generalisation in terms of cant." 
 
 I will give the inquirer the details of the remedy. It 
 is a short prescription, but it goes far. The remedy 
 is God. God ! English society has ceased to hold any
 
 HIS MORAL CONDITION 23 
 
 worthy or even credible conception of God, and it has 
 consequently got a wrong notion of the relative im- 
 portance of things. There let us stop to-day. Our 
 subject next Sunday will be the failure of the modern 
 English conception of God.
 
 III. HIS ATTITUDE TOWARDS GOD 
 
 " I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." 
 
 APOSTLES' CREED. 
 
 WE are thinking of the religious and moral state of 
 English society. We have seen that it has ceased to 
 be governed by any strong religious tradition, and that 
 it is too much distracted by the pressure of temporal 
 interests to give itself to serious reflection on the 
 matter. 
 
 Against this prevailing tendency two bodies of opinion 
 would desire to make protest an older and a younger. 
 There remains, and I should suppose it was magnificently 
 represented among the great aristocratic families, a large 
 body of men and women which is animated by the very 
 highest sense of public and private duty. Both our 
 great hereditary landowners and our chief politicians 
 compare well with those of other European countries, 
 but it cannot be said, either in the matter of religion 
 or morals, that this important group is capable of giving 
 the country a clear lead. Its English Catholics, its 
 Roman Catholics, its Evangelicals are not strong enough 
 numerically to impress the country ; and the rest have 
 no effective religion at all, and are consequently uncertain 
 as to the basis and the inferences of their traditional 
 morality. 
 
 The hope of the moment lies in a group of the 
 younger people, which is hardly as yet conscious of 
 itself. Several kindly but rather impatient correspon- 
 
 -4
 
 HIS ATTITUDE TOWARDS GOD 25 
 
 dents have written to remind me of the existence of this 
 group. I am not likely to forget it, because the four 
 Advent Sunday morning sermons are to be addressed 
 to it. 
 
 There is, then, in English society to-day a strong 
 leaven of noble young men and women who feel the 
 need of a religion, of noble young husbands and wives 
 who see the difference between a Christian and a non- 
 Christian home, and wish to bring up their children 
 Christianly. 
 
 After my first sermon one of my brother priests said 
 to me, " Your sermon had this bad flaw in it : in order 
 to get the effect that you wanted at the end, you were 
 obliged to marry the best young man to the worst young 
 woman." 
 
 Well, I am impenitent. That contemptuous young 
 woman dominates the social scene ; why, we are always 
 trying to give courage to gentle Christian ladies who 
 wince and shrink under the tyranny of her hard eyes, 
 her hard laugh, her keen speeches, her contemptuous 
 silences. 
 
 Yet, for all her insolence, that young woman has her 
 black moments, and is an arrant coward at heart, and the 
 young men and women who are the hope of the moment 
 could break her down and change her life if they only 
 knew how to begin. 
 
 On these four Advent Sunday mornings I am going 
 to suggest to them a line of thought and action. 
 
 At present they identify religion with a very much 
 detached sort of subscription to Anglicanism, by which 
 I mean the theory which takes these two little Provinces 
 of Canterbury and York, with their peculiar method 
 of performing the rites and ceremonies of the Church,
 
 26 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 and sets them in the centre of the Christian picture as 
 the central and final authority in matters religious for 
 the English people. They associate Anglicanism with 
 cathedral services and the leisured society of the cathe- 
 dral close, and they are conscious that the whole thing 
 bores them. 
 
 Further, they assume that religion must be taught 
 through the medium of Bible stories ; and when, animated 
 by a high sense of duty but with no enthusiastic con- 
 viction, they begin to teach their children Bible stories, 
 they are disconcerted to find that their children are as 
 much bored as they are. 
 
 Jesus of Nazareth suggested to His followers that 
 they should regard nice children as experts in true 
 religion ; and if religion bores nice children when it is 
 conscientiously provided for them like German and like 
 Swedish drill, let us be quite sure there is something 
 wrong in the method of presentation. 
 
 What is wrong with these conscientious attempts of 
 the young father and mother ? Simply this, they are not 
 communicating religion to their children from themselves. 
 Religion is a life. A child can only take it in as it takes 
 in the other constituents of its life, the sun and the air, 
 and the bread and butter, when like these it is in the 
 atmosphere and in the inevitable routine of its home. 
 
 Now if religion is not sun and air, and bread and 
 butter to the father and mother, it will not be to the 
 child. And it is only sun and air, and bread and butter 
 to the father and mother, when they have a personal 
 experience of God. A personal experience of God. 
 That is where our good young couple must begin. 
 
 God ! Let us follow the young husband into the only 
 room in the house where God is ever discussed the
 
 HIS ATTITUDE TOWARDS GOD 27 
 
 smoking-room. The smoking-room is pervaded, as some 
 one has lately said, by a notion of Catholicity which 
 helps it to treat all definite doctrine as provincial. It 
 does not talk if a priest is present, and the ecclesiastically 
 minded layman is a very nervous defender of the faith. 
 Hence the smoking-room notion of religion is usually 
 about as clear as its atmosphere. I think we can help 
 the good young couple by trying to clear up the smoking- 
 room mind. 
 
 The first great division we must make is between the 
 men who accept the materialistic interpretation of the 
 universe, and the men who accept the spiritual inter- 
 pretation of the universe. Let us get those two camps 
 quite clear ; and then let us beg from the materialist no 
 more bombast, for your seriously purposed materialist 
 talks more cant than any man in the world. 
 
 If unconscious energy and atoms account for every- 
 thing, then virtue and vice are physical products like 
 sugar and vitriol, and ethical science, which regulates 
 those products, is chemistry. 
 
 Well, if so, then let us beg that this department of 
 chemistry may be taught in the plain, simple language 
 in which other departments are taught, and that materi- 
 alists will cease to glow over it in words borrowed from 
 supernatural religion. 
 
 Secondly, let us observe that everybody in the smoking- 
 room who is not a materialist either believes in the 
 spiritual interpretation of the universe, or thinks it a 
 possible alternative the theory, that is to say, that 
 behind the universe of physical phenomena there reigns 
 Eternal Spirit who has brought it into being, and for 
 whose service it exists. 
 
 Now, may we not ask of the man who believes this
 
 28 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 what we have asked of the materialist, that he will speak 
 and act as befits this conception, and not speak and act 
 as though he did not believe it ? 
 
 And so, I make my first appeal to the noble young 
 father: "Sir," I say, "let me beg you to consider how 
 tremendous, how all-controlling, is the thought of God- 
 that little word of three letters by which we glibly name 
 the Spiritual Unity, which is the Eternal, the Infinite, 
 the Supreme. If He exists, He is not merely endlessly 
 bigger than you and I, as you used to think when you 
 were a child. Big and little have no relation to Him, 
 He is everywhere, endlessly, completely present. And 
 He is not human, as you used to think when you were 
 a child not a gigantic, invisible man, sometimes kind 
 and sometimes unkind, sometimes attentive and some- 
 times inattentive. ' I find it so difficult to believe that 
 God hears my prayers,' you have said to me, as if God 
 were somewhere or other in space, and prayer an invis- 
 ible telephone, by means of which you tried to reach 
 Him. If this Eternal, Infinite, Supreme Spiritual Unity 
 exists, He interpenetrates you and me as the ether, and 
 at every point within and without us He is completely 
 present. 
 
 " No, God is not human ; but if we can recognise 
 
 ' D 
 
 Him and take up an attitude towards Him, then you 
 and I are certainly Godlike, and so can describe Him to 
 ourselves in terms of the faculties which we have in 
 common, provided that we are careful to remember the 
 great saying : ' What is understood, or felt, or thought 
 about God is as nothing to what cannot be understood, 
 or felt, or thought about Him ! ' 
 
 " Now the religious experience you desire is a con- 
 scious personal intercourse between your spirit and the
 
 HIS ATTITUDE TOWARDS GOD 29 
 
 Spirit of God. ' Yes,' you reply ; ' but I do not believe 
 in the thing strongly enough to get it. This is what 
 I wish to believe, but I don't quite believe it. Although 
 I reject materialism when it is put before me as a 
 theory, I don't see my way clearly to act upon the 
 other.' " 
 
 Now my answer is this. " You will never see your 
 way until you begin to act. Solvitur ambulando. If you 
 would verify your supposition that God exists, you must 
 make a great venture on the basis of that supposition. 
 You must seek to know God as you seek to know another 
 human spirit, and your search must be worthy of the 
 nobility of your quest." 
 
 " We are speaking very confidentially. I want an 
 illustration of my point. Sir, you have made a perfect 
 marriage. Tell me, how did you win your wife ? " 
 " Well, we first met in a country house at a dance. I 
 don't think, and I didn't think then, that she was the 
 prettiest girl in the room, but at once I knew how well 
 I remember the moment ! that she was meant for 
 me." 
 
 " And, then ? " 
 
 *' Well, then, I took a lot of trouble about it, of 
 course. I got myself a lot of invitations to play cricket 
 down there the next summer, and when I got down I 
 tried to see her all I could. I went to all the garden 
 parties." 
 
 " You are very fond of garden parties ? " 
 
 " No, I hate garden parties ; they bore me to death ; 
 but you see well, I hoped she would be there." 
 
 " And was she always there ? " 
 
 " No, not always. And when she was I only got a 
 word with her, but it was quite worth while."
 
 30 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 "In the end you were successful ? " 
 
 " Yes ; it was very strange. She had always thought 
 of me as I had thought of her. I hadn't imagined such 
 happiness was possible. It didn't make me proud, it 
 made me humble. I was so utterly unworthy. But it 
 cured me of some things. For example, I lost it was a 
 wonderful thing I lost all my temptations to sins of the 
 flesh." 
 
 " After that everything went smoothly ? " 
 
 " No, indeed it didn't. I had very little money, and 
 there was great opposition. I was not allowed to see 
 her or write to her for a long time. But we had each 
 other, nobody could alter that, and it made all the 
 silence and separation bearable." 
 
 " How did it come right ? " 
 
 " Through that blessed Boer War. I volunteered, you 
 remember, and had great luck. I got my commission 
 and one or two other things ; they were much too civil 
 to me in despatches. Then her people caved in. I lost 
 my arm, of course, and she got a streak or two of grey in 
 her hair. But we are married thank God." 
 
 " Listen. There are numbers of people all round 
 you, people whom you often meet, to whom God is 
 infinitely more than your wife is to you, and who 
 found God and won Him just in the same way. 
 There is no other way. It is a splendid and an arduous 
 quest, and you, sir, have never embarked upon that 
 quest at all. You and your wife want to stand out 
 against the prevailing tendency. You want to be re- 
 ligious. You want to teach religion to your children. 
 Well, here you must begin, in the pursuit of God. 
 For your failure runs right back into this, into an 
 utterly unworthy and impoverished conception of God.
 
 HIS ATTITUDE TOWARDS GOD 31 
 
 You have never improved upon your childish thought of 
 Him. The rest of your early mental outfit you have 
 outgrown and replaced. You have outgrown this, but 
 you have never replaced it. No teaching or preaching 
 about the being of God has ever got through to you. 
 What relation do the prayers and acts of self-sacrifice by 
 which you have tried to know God bear to the gallant 
 adventure in which you won your wife ? 
 
 " Have you ever gone away and spent some days in 
 trying to put yourself into vital union with God ? Have 
 you ever locked yourself up in your room for half-an- 
 hour and pulled yourself together into a bodily, mental, 
 and moral attitude of strong attention, and tried to con- 
 centrate the whole of yourself upon Him ? 
 
 " Man ! have you never learned that the pursuit of God 
 is the divine adventure ! And yet times out of number 
 you have held the psalter in your hands, and you must 
 have some sort of glimmer as to the lives of the saints. 
 You must begin ; and you must begin by doing what 
 you really do not do you must begin by practising 
 religion." 
 
 And now the young husband and his friends in the 
 smoking-room find their voices, and all the difficulties 
 about the practice of religion are hurled pell-mell at my 
 feet out of a sort of lucky bag the efficacy of inter- 
 cessory prayer, the definitions of the Athanasian creed, 
 the Creation stories of Genesis, the miracles of the Old 
 Testament, the mistakes in the Bible, eternal punish- 
 ment, the variety of religions, the failures of Christians, 
 the divisions in the Church. 
 
 " Gentlemen, let all these things lie on the ground for 
 a moment and listen. Religion is a commerce between 
 the Spirit of God and the spirit of man. How do we
 
 32 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 human spirits commune with one another ? We have 
 devised a code of material signs which we call language. 
 Now there is in the world a great code of signs by which 
 the Spirit of God and the spirit of man have commerce. 
 We call this code external religion. 
 
 " External religion is essential to the practice of re- 
 ligion, but it is not religion. External religion is the 
 code. Religion is the use which God and man make of 
 the code. 
 
 "Now, it is that particular code called Christianity 
 that you are in some difficulty about. You have got a 
 little uncertain about it. You cannot use it or teach it 
 with enthusiasm. You are always saying, ' I am not an 
 irreligious man, but ' but something or other, which 
 always means, ' I do not understand parts of the code. 
 I do not like parts of the code. I have detected mistakes 
 in parts of the code.' 
 
 " And yet you want God. Well, let us lock up the 
 code and all its difficulties for a fortnight : until Sunday 
 week, let us lock up in a cupboard the Catholic religion 
 by which the saints talk and walk with God, and I will 
 keep the key. 
 
 " Meanwhile, we will consider together next Sunday 
 one object, and only one. Here it is." And now in the 
 middle of the smoking-room there stands a figure a 
 man. He is about thirty. He wears an un-English 
 dress of flowing outline. He is worn and pale ; but he 
 is serene and strong. What is he carrying ? He is 
 carrying a bundle of carpenter's tools. In an instant 
 every chair in the smoking-room is vacant. Cigars and 
 cigarettes are thrown into the fire. The men are stand- 
 ing massed together on the hearthrug, white and tense 
 and breathless, and in the awful silence you can hear the
 
 HIS ATTITUDE TOWARDS GOD 33 
 
 clock tick. The man does not speak ; he does not even 
 look at anybody in the room. With a strange majesty 
 he waits. We will consider him and question him next 
 Sunday. He bears a name very common in his time and 
 country Jesus.
 
 IV. ATTITUDE TOWARDS JESUS CHRIST 
 
 " And in Jesus Christ, His only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy 
 Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, 
 and buried ; He descended into hell ; the third day He rose again from the dead, 
 He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father, from 
 thence He shall come to judge both the quick and the dead." APOSTLES' CREED. 
 
 WE are considering the religious and moral condition of 
 English society ; you remember the point at which we 
 left the subject last Sunday. 
 
 We had turned with thankfulness and hope to that 
 group of younger men and women who feel the need of 
 a religion, who appreciate the results of Christianity as 
 they have seen them in noble lives, and who wish to 
 bring their children up as Christians. We had reminded 
 the young husband that the quest of a religion is the 
 quest of God, a quest which is as arduous as it is noble. 
 We had reminded him that, like all other quests, it must 
 begin by an act of faith, by acting, that is to say, on the 
 supposition that the object of the quest exists. We re- 
 minded him, in a word, that his quest must begin with 
 the obedient practice of religion. 
 
 And the young husband and his friends had rejoined 
 by enumerating difficulties connected with the history 
 and literature of Christianity which were hindering them 
 from the obedient practice of religion. 
 
 In reply I asked them to allow me to lock up these 
 difficulties until next Sunday, and meanwhile to contem- 
 plate a single figure, and I introduced our Lord into the 
 smoking-room. 
 
 34
 
 ATTITUDE TOWARDS JESUS CHRIST 35 
 
 It proved a most uncomfortable social situation. The 
 gentlemen who had been pelting me with difficulties 
 from the depths of their arm-chairs sprang to their feet, 
 hurled their cigars into the fire, and stood on the hearth- 
 rug, quite rigid, with their mouths open. They are 
 standing there still. They do not know what on earth to 
 do. Now, that attitude is the subject of this morning's 
 sermon. 
 
 Young men and women in English society to-day, 
 even the well-intentioned ones, do not know what to 
 think about Jesus Christ, and this is why they cannot 
 set out upon the pursuit of God. Before setting out 
 upon the divine adventure, it is not at all necessary to 
 have defined one's relation to Balaam's ass or Jonah's 
 whale, but it is necessary to have defined one's attitude 
 to Jesus of Nazareth. One must either take His path 
 or another, and Jesus so completely dominates the Euro- 
 pean situation, that it is impossible to try another path 
 until one has cleared Him out of the way. 
 
 Who and what is Jesus ? The answer to that question 
 runs right back into the beginnings of human history. 
 The pursuit of God is beset by an enormous difficulty. 
 Our good young husband and wife who exhibit this 
 curious confusion of thought and incapacity for action 
 in the matter are not peculiarly gross and stupid. On 
 the contrary, their incapacity is a highly refined edition 
 of a contradictory element, in fact, an odd strain of per- 
 sonal antagonism which all through history has shown 
 itself in men when they have attempted the pursuit of 
 God. 
 
 The whole history of religion is the history of endea- 
 vours to deal with this obstacle to the quest, which to 
 the ruder man has been a blind terror, and to the finer
 
 36 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 man a tender and piercing distress a blind terror which 
 stuffed a wicker idol with living men and burned them 
 in the hope of clearing the road ; a tender and pathetic 
 distress which broke out in the lamentable cry, " O God, 
 Thou art my God, early will I seek Thee. My soul 
 thirsteth for Thee ; my flesh also longeth after Thee in 
 a barren and dry land where no water is." 
 
 And in the course of history this has become clear 
 the obstacle lies in the circumstances of life and also in 
 human nature itself. And the pursuit involves not only 
 a selection among the things around us and a separation 
 from some of them, but also a selection among the im- 
 pulses of our nature and the destruction of those that 
 fight against the quest. 
 
 Gentlemen on the hearthrug, before we go any 
 further, notice that I am not talking theological theory. 
 I am drawing your attention to the most remarkable 
 phenomenon in history, a phenomenon which you must 
 take note of if we are to get any further in this business. 
 
 Now, there was centuries ago a nation which under- 
 stood this better than any other nation the Jewish 
 nation. We have its history from this point of view 
 in the big collection of documents we call the Old 
 Testament. These documents represent a great many 
 centuries of national and literary history. Each bears 
 the stamp of the period in which it was produced, and 
 we have to adjust our ideas to the ideas of each period, 
 if we are to understand exactly what its author means. 
 But in the history of religion the whole thing has an 
 everlasting value. Taken together, it is the story of a 
 whole nation which accepted the spiritual interpretation 
 of the universe and made the quest of God its first 
 business. On this subject it remains the classic.
 
 ATTITUDE TOWARDS JESUS CHRIST 37 
 
 What does it show ? It begins by showing us a man 
 who separated himself and his family from their sur- 
 roundings and embraced a life of self-sacrifice in the 
 pursuit of God. It begins by showing us a father and 
 mother to whom God was sun and air and bread and 
 butter, and who consequently produced and trained a son 
 who had the root of the whole thing in him Abraham, 
 Sarah, and Isaac. It insists that a God-fearing nation is 
 a nation composed of such families, and it shows us the 
 most gallant attempt at such a nation that the world has 
 ever seen. There it was, enthroned on its high oblong 
 plateau, as on an altar of stone, an object to be gazed up 
 at from the caravan route between the two great world 
 powers of Syria and Egypt ; to the east the desert, and 
 to the west the harbourless sea. 
 
 And, now, Sunday after Sunday, the prophet Isaiah is 
 reminding us of the sacrifice it was set there to offer the 
 sacrifice of refusing advantageous alliances with men when 
 they were seen to be in opposition to the pursuit of God. 
 
 And the result ? The result was the sifting out of 
 a few thousand souls of a particular type of mind, and 
 for the rest almost incredible disaster. It was indeed as 
 costly a process as the extraction of radium, but the 
 radium was extracted souls all aglow for the Divine 
 adventure and brought to a point of the road where they 
 saw they were bidden to wait ; while scattered across 
 the world in secret unconscious sympathy lay the men 
 from whose minds the glamour of the Empire was fading, 
 and who had come to see that this most wonderful unity 
 of worldly well-being was only after all the biggest idol 
 that men had ever made. Then suddenly there rang out 
 " the Gospel." 
 
 Suddenly there appeared in the world New Men, extra-
 
 3 8 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 ordinary, radiant, shining, triumphant. Shouting, shout- 
 ing, shouting, " The way is clear, the Power is come, we 
 have got it. It is ours." 
 
 " Why, what has happened ? Why do you look and 
 speak thus ? What are these things that you do ? Why 
 don't you mind pain, and sorrow, and death like other 
 men? Explain yourselves. Explain what we see you 
 are and what we see you do." 
 
 "What has happened? Something as big as creation. 
 Jesus who lived with us and was dead lives again, lives 
 for ever, lives within us, and is the Power you see and 
 feel in us. It is not we who are what you see. It is not 
 we who do what we do. It is Christ within us." 
 
 " But, men, what you say is very strange. Some have 
 shown me a law which I must obey, and others have pointed 
 out some direction towards which I must worship. But 
 you come embodying it. You claim to have it in your 
 very flesh and in your blood. Here, let me take your 
 hands. Yes ! a thrill goes through me. Let me look 
 into your eyes ! Yes, that certainty and triumph con- 
 vince. O ! tell me what I must do. I want God. I am 
 weary of sin. I have tried so many ways. I have got 
 so short a way. Take me in among yourselves ; share 
 with me what you have." 
 
 " Jesus, you call him. Who is Jesus ? Where did he 
 live ? What ! Nazareth ! Impossible ! How did he 
 die ? Crucified ! Absurd ! No ! I retract ! I can take 
 even that from you. Ah ! forgive me ; you have turned 
 the world upside down for me. Forgive me, and take 
 me yes, pour the water upon me. No, stay. I dare 
 not. Listen ! I have been a thief. I have been a forni- 
 cator. I have been an adulterer. I have hated, I have 
 defamed, I have oppressed. Depart from me.
 
 ATTITUDE TOWARDS JESUS CHRIST 39 
 
 " But you are smiling. You are looking lovingly at 
 me. Oh ! how can you put your arms round me, know- 
 ing what I am ? Then receive me, and do with me what 
 you will. The water ; ah, thank God for it ! And the 
 pressure of those hands upon my head ! Fire courses 
 through me. But who is this whom I now see for the 
 first time, standing in the midst, the One with the 
 wounds ? Jesus ! my God ! " 
 
 Sir, before you came into the smoking-room you went 
 very quietly into John's nursery, where he was sleeping 
 in his cot. By some strange instinct he seemed to know 
 you were coming, for, as you bent over him, he opened 
 two grave eyes upon you like two flowers opening to the 
 sun. He was too sleepy to speak, he was too sleepy to 
 smile, but he put out two very warm, soft arms and 
 folded them round your neck, and as you kissed him he 
 gave one long deep sigh of peace and sank back into 
 dreamland. 
 
 It was only a moment, but in that moment you, a man, 
 were caught up to the throne of God. In that moment 
 you reigned in the heart of the universe, king and priest. 
 
 Now you want to make John a Christian. If so, you 
 must bring him to Jesus as to the Ultimate Force, for 
 this is Christianity. Christianity is the knowledge that 
 Jesus is All, that there is nothing further anywhere. 
 And Jesus reigns in this mystic circle of transfigured 
 men. He can only be seen by eyes opened through 
 participation in the life which has transfigured them. 
 
 And if you would bring John well, you must bring 
 him yourself, and you cannot do that as long as you 
 stand on the hearthrug with your mouth open. You 
 must get out of that circle of men in dress clothes. 
 You must go upstairs and take John, warm and rosy,
 
 40 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 out of his cot, and wrap him in a blanket and bring him 
 down into the smoking-room, and before all these fellows 
 yes, I am very sorry to have to say it to you before 
 all these fellows you must kneel at the feet of that 
 Figure with your baby in your arms. 
 
 Such Christianity was in the beginning ; such it is now ; 
 such it ever will be. It is the knowledge that while 
 there are many ways by which the spirit of man can 
 commune with the Spirit of God, the Spirit of God has 
 opened the perfect way in Jesus, in whom the Spirit of 
 God and the spirit of man are indissolubly united in a 
 Person, Who is God. 
 
 The detail of the way we have agreed to lock up in a 
 cupboard until next Sunday. We locked it up because 
 the gentlemen in the dress clothes had found its archaisms 
 and difficulties quite insupportable. Of course it has 
 archaisms. It wouldn't be historic if it had no archaisms. 
 Of course it has difficulties. It would not be true if it 
 had no difficulties. We will consider the way and the 
 difficulties next Sunday. 
 
 Meanwhile I have a last word to say to the young 
 couple. Christianity is the experience of Jesus in the 
 sphere where He manifested Himself on Whitsun Day, and 
 ever since has manifested Himself His Church. And 
 so you cannot have the full experience until you unite 
 yourself to the life of the faithful. It comes in the life 
 of the faithful. You can see it all beginning to happen 
 if you choose to read the Epistles of St. Paul. But you 
 have had the misfortune to hear the Epistles of St. Paul 
 read to you in church until the very name of them bores 
 you. You say you can't make head or tail of them. 
 Have you ever tried ? You are very fond of picture 
 puzzles. I often see a half-finished one on a table in
 
 ATTITUDE TOWARDS JESUS CHRIST 41 
 
 your house. If you had spent as much ingenuity and 
 patience over the first Epistle to the Corinthians, the 
 mists would have cleared, and you would have seen the 
 wonderful thing beginning to happen, the first appearance 
 of the radiant society of transformed men in that corrupt 
 university city of long ago. 
 
 But you will never find salvation in the Church of 
 Corinth. It awaits you in the Church of London, and 
 nowhere else. It is in the Church of London, and 
 nowhere else, that you, an inhabitant of London, must 
 get your experience of Jesus. 
 
 The explanation of a great deal of the present situation 
 lies in the fact that for many years we have been taught 
 to find our experience of Jesus in the pages of the 
 Gospels and not in the life of the Church. There has 
 been an attempt on the part of those who found the way 
 of the Church laborious to escape from it into the 
 Gospels. Now it is very important to explain to people 
 to-day that the Gospels are not an independent biography 
 of Jesus. The Gospels are the work of the men of 
 Power who embodied the life which transformed the 
 world. They are such a selection from the sayings and 
 doings of our Lord as shall best illustrate His intercourse 
 in His risen life with His children in His Church. 
 
 No ! one cannot escape from the Church into the 
 Gospels, which the Church shaped and gave to her 
 members in order that they might understand better 
 what they were already experiencing within her circle. 
 The Bible is not the way ; it is the time-table which 
 shows us when and where the train starts. If you want 
 to go to Glastonbury, you will do well to consult a time- 
 table of the London and South- Western Railway ; but 
 having done so, you do not do well to sit down on the
 
 42 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 open page and say, " Here I go to Glastonbury." That 
 is not the way the time-table conducts you to Glaston- 
 bury. It points you to two parallel lines of metal and a 
 coach which runs along them, and if you get into the 
 coach at the scheduled time there is every hope that you 
 will reach the shrine. 
 
 The Bible is the time-table in which the company of 
 transformed men tells us the time, the way, the place, 
 the plan. The fact is that our Bible teaching bores our 
 children, because we have not used it to put them into 
 the train. We have been reading them the time-table 
 when they wanted change of air. 
 
 Yes, that is what our young husband and wife must 
 give their children change of air. They must trans- 
 plant their home into the agelong atmosphere of the 
 Catholic Church. They must create one more sweet 
 Catholic home within these provinces of Canterbury and 
 York. And when they have done that, then their little 
 child will lead them. 
 
 It is a big Bavarian village church. I am in a corner, 
 but for the rest the broad nave is empty. Why does 
 the west door tremble and move in that odd fashion ? 
 Surely no draught can shake it in that manner, it is too 
 heavy. Something is trying to get in. A dog ? No ! 
 it is Wilhelm, John's Bavarian cousin, aged five. There 
 is an awful moment when it appears that the big door 
 is going to crush him, but he eludes it skilfully, and 
 patters cheerfully up the nave in his tiny hobnailed shoes ; 
 Wilhelm of the bare legs and knees and short knicker- 
 bockers, the magnificent braces strapped over the white 
 shirt, and the brave hat with the eagle's feather. He is 
 all alone. He is five years old. But he is full of business. 
 Up to the top he goes and is engulfed and lost to view
 
 ATTITUDE TOWARDS JESUS CHRIST 43 
 
 in an immense pew. The church is big and empty ; it 
 is full of twilight shadows ; great white figures of the 
 saints look down from the altar-pieces. Amid this awful 
 silence Wilhelm prays. He is not in the least alarmed, 
 for above him in the gloom of the chancel a friendly star 
 is twinkling, and the star is saying in language which 
 Wilhelm understands, " Jesus is here."
 
 V. HIS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE 
 CATHOLIC RELIGION 
 
 " I believe in the Holy Ghost ; the Holy Catholic Church ; the Communion 
 of Saints." APOSTLES' CREED. 
 
 LAST Sunday we were in a smoking-room. Our Lord 
 was standing in the centre. At some distance on the 
 hearthrug stood a party of English gentlemen in evening 
 dress, silent and rigid. 
 
 One of their number had separated himself from them 
 and was kneeling at the feet of Jesus holding a sleeping 
 baby in the arm the Boer War had spared. It was an 
 embarrassing and uncomfortable situation. 
 
 To-day it is still the smoking-room, but it is the next 
 morning. Everything has resumed an ordinary air. The 
 young husband who had offered his gold and frank- 
 incense last night wants to talk to me. In a grave and 
 constrained way he has filled a pipe while the silence is 
 broken by shouts of laughter from the lawn. John, who 
 has tumbled over while playing with his fox-terrier, is 
 lying on his back on the grass laughing helplessly, and 
 the fox-terrier is standing over him and trying to look 
 like a man-eating lion. 
 
 At last John's father begins, " Well, I saw the thing 
 last night, the whole thing, and of course it has changed 
 everything. It is absurd to say I am going on with it. 
 There is nothing else for me to do. Now, I want to 
 know the way, because, of course, what I have called my 
 religion up to this won't do. I will tell you about it.
 
 ATTITUDE TO CATHOLIC RELIGION 45 
 
 When I was a boy I used to say my prayers. I gave 
 them up more or less when I left school. I took to 
 them again when I met my wife. They have not been 
 much good. It has just depended upon how much I 
 have cared for the thing I prayed for. My prayers for 
 my wife and John are all right, and when John nearly 
 died of croup I did pray, and I am quite sure it was 
 answered. I have always been sure of that. But that is 
 about all. I go to church here, but I cannot pretend I 
 care about it, and the odd thing is, I don't see how 
 I can care any more about it now. It does not seem 
 somehow to have much to do with what I discovered last 
 night. 
 
 " Well, then, about the Holy Communion. Of course 
 I didn't go for a good many years, but when I got back 
 from the war, and my wife and I got engaged, we went 
 to communion together, and when we have been down 
 here together we have gone always about once a month. 
 I have never been by myself. I should not have felt 
 quite comfortable to go by myself. But after last night 
 I feel I cannot go again until I am a better sort of man. 
 I always used to say I could not go if I thought it was 
 what the Roman Catholics think it is. Of course I do 
 not know anything about what's the word ? thank you 
 Transubstantiation. But, if you can understand what 
 I mean, now I see it is, well well, you know, it is it's 
 practically what they say it is ; and I can't go. 
 
 " Look here, I have brought you into the smoking- 
 room to have this out. Now, the fact is, before I met 
 my wife I did not lead a straight " 
 
 ** Stop. I beg your pardon, may I say something to 
 you before you go on ? These are not the difficulties 
 you mentioned last night. I have had those difficulties
 
 46 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 under lock and key ever since. Here is the first, * The 
 Creation stories of Genesis.' ' 
 
 My friend's tone becomes a little irritable and im- 
 patient. " I don't see that that has got much to do 
 with what we are talking about this morning. The 
 Creation stories of Genesis. Oh ! I suppose they are a 
 way of putting some things we ought to know about 
 God being One, and about men being free, and about 
 their having made a bad choice things of that sort. Is 
 not that it ? 
 
 " Yes, I think it is. Difficulty number one goes into 
 the waste-paper basket. And here are three which your 
 new experience has answered offhand. The variety 
 of religions ceases to be a difficulty, now that you have 
 experienced the new life in Jesus Christ. The failures 
 of Christians they do not now stand in the way of 
 your being one yourself. It is your own personal 
 failure to correspond with what you have experienced 
 which now absorbs you. And you have now seen and 
 understand for ever the possibilities of intercessory prayer. 
 Those three difficulties can be dismissed, and I fancy 
 this fourth can go with them mistakes in the Bible. 
 
 " Before yesterday, when you got your first Christian 
 experience, you used to demand that there should 
 be no human element in the Bible. You did so, I 
 think, because you had heard it called what it does 
 not call itself the Word of God. Now you have 
 seen and, as it were, felt and handled Him whom the 
 Bible calls the Word of God. So now you know that 
 the Bible is true true for the purpose for which it 
 is grouped together, because it plainly speaks of Him. 
 Its Divine inspiration and its human features you can 
 study at your leisure. For the first time, too, you are
 
 ATTITUDE TO CATHOLIC RELIGION 47 
 
 able to appreciate the Christian view of its wonderful 
 contents for example, the miracles of the Old Testa- 
 ment. No doubt some are poetry rather than prose. 
 The rest are mainly incidents in the lives of the great 
 prophets, and you are now ready to notice three facts 
 about them. First, that these spiritual men made such 
 a big splash that the spray of it reaches us in the form 
 of these stories across these several thousand years. 
 Secondly, even if it be true that a Daily Mail reporter 
 would have given us a more commonplace narrative, 
 that it would have conveyed to us less and not more 
 of the truth about the prophet's spiritual force than 
 we gain from these vivid stories. But that, thirdly, 
 looking back now from the point of view of your new 
 experience, the occurrence of unusual events in the 
 straight line of preparation gets a new probability. 
 
 "Two difficulties remain first, the Athanasian Creed, 
 its definitions and its warnings. What do you think 
 about the Athanasian Creed this morning ? " 
 
 "Well, I dislike the Athanasian Creed as much as 
 ever. But, again, I must remind you, these things are 
 now only difficulties which surround my experience. 
 They used to be hindrances to my holding the Christian 
 theory of things, but now my religion is not a theory, and 
 they cannot touch my experience." 
 
 " Yes, and that means that you have experienced the 
 truth which the statements of the Athanasian Creed are 
 framed to guard. The Athanasian Creed says in the 
 language of the sixth century what our Lord said and 
 implied in His every word and deed that He is the 
 Alpha and the Omega, that Christianity is final, that 
 there is no alternative ; and I think I can put the force 
 of its warnings to you in a way you will understand.
 
 48 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 Last night you knelt at the feet of Jesus with John 
 in your arms. Those other men on the hearthrug did 
 not budge an inch. Now the Athanasian Creed does 
 not say that they are damned if they do not move, but 
 it does say that you would have been damned if you 
 had not moved, and that you will be damned if you 
 cast away what you have now got. You see, you were 
 ready, and therefore responsible, and perhaps those men 
 were not. And if the Men of Power really must preach 
 Jesus as the ultimate force, then they had better do 
 so in words which bite in. 
 
 " Yes, you are quite right in saying that such a conver- 
 sion or turning round as you have experienced dissipates 
 most of the difficulties which I had locked up in the 
 cupboard, but one remains, and one about which you 
 must take a practical line the divisions among Chris- 
 tians. You have been turned round, but you have 
 still got all the way before you, and your difficulty is 
 that there seems to be more than one way. 
 
 " I know, and the difficulty has cropped up already. 
 You see, we have never had family prayers. I want to 
 start them now, and I have been talking to my wife this 
 morning about the religion of the servants. The butler 
 and his family, who live at the lodge, are Roman Catholics. 
 They all tramp over to Stoke Cotterell to the Hampton 
 Lacy's private chapel for Mass, wet or fine, Sunday after 
 Sunday. It has been rather a nuisance, but the man is 
 such a capital servant I have put up with it. Then my 
 wife says that the cook is a strict Methodist and a most 
 excellent woman. She goes to the chapel in the village. 
 And one of the housemaids belongs, I am told, to a big 
 Low church in London. She is a very good girl, and so 
 religious, that although she belongs to the Church she
 
 ATTITUDE TO CATHOLIC RELIGION 49 
 
 prefers to go to the chapel. All the other servants say 
 they belong to the Church of England, but my wife 
 says they don't seem to have any religion at all, except 
 Robert, the second footman. He is a very nice boy and 
 always looks so cheerful. He sings in the choir, and is 
 tremendously keen. My wife says that he was brought 
 up at St. Alban's, Holborn, and that he belongs to Father 
 Stanton. I don't know what ' belonging to Father Stanton ' 
 means, but my wife seemed to imply that it explained 
 Robert." 
 
 " Well, yes, if one looks at it superficially, that is all 
 very confounding and perplexing, but it is not really so 
 perplexing as it seems. Your way is straight before 
 you. You must live the life of an English Catholic 
 Christian. Ever since the New Life appeared within 
 the circle of the Men of Power, men have continued 
 to receive it by being drawn within that circle, 
 and the religion they have found themselves practising 
 has never varied in its essential character. It is called the 
 Catholic religion. It is easy to recognise it. There is 
 nothing at all like it, there is nothing in the world 
 so passionately loved ; there is nothing in the world so 
 bitterly hated. Its typical product is unique. The 
 Catholic saint is the product of the Catholic religion. 
 There are many good and holy men outside the Catholic 
 religion, but there are no Catholic saints outside the 
 Catholic religion. The communities which have been 
 formed in opposition to the Church have produced noble 
 men and heroes, but they have never produced a Catholic 
 saint. 
 
 " It is not difficult to describe the Catholic religion. It 
 circles round an altar which is both on earth and in 
 heaven, and where time is not. It is always Bethlehem 
 
 D
 
 50 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 there ; it is always Calvary ; it is always the garden by 
 the Cross. And around it the men of power are ever 
 standing. They do not pass away. The new generation 
 but adds another outer circle to the throng. About this 
 central point the Catholic Christian worships, and prays, 
 and works, and eats, and rests, and sleeps, and plays. 
 Death does not sever him from it. It only moves him 
 from one group to another and brings him nearer. Death 
 forms no barrier between the groups. The one com- 
 munion and fellowship of worship and reciprocal prayer 
 radiates from the Centre and pervades the whole. 
 
 " Now I am afraid as I paint that picture your thoughts 
 go, not to your dull parish church, but to the private 
 chapel at Stoke Cotterell. I remember your telling me 
 once how you were staying there for some hunting, and 
 that, one morning as you came down to breakfast, you 
 looked into the chapel and found your host kneeling 
 all alone in his pink he was going out hunting. He 
 didn't see you. You said he was staring at something. 
 You thought it was the altar, and you slipped away 
 undiscovered. 
 
 " Yes, but although you have never found that life in 
 your parish church, Robert, the second footman, has. 
 That life has always needed for its maintenance the circle 
 of the men of power, which we call the Apostolical Suc- 
 cession. But, lamentable as separation from the See of 
 Rome is, that separation has never destroyed it. The 
 Catholic life is lived as fully and completely in Asia 
 Minor as in France, in Greece as in Spain, in Russia as 
 in Italy ; and the greatest religious phenomenon of the 
 last seventy years has been its reappearance in all its 
 blessedness and glory in the Church of England. 
 
 " And if you ask me how it comes that the Catholic
 
 ATTITUDE TO CATHOLIC RELIGION 51 
 
 life is greater in power and glory than any other, I 
 answer, because the life of Christ is now extended as it 
 were in the life of His Society. And we only get the 
 whole of Him, if every clause of the Catholic Creed and 
 every sacrament of the Catholic Church is making its full 
 contribution to our life. 
 
 " So, since throughout the years of the deadness and 
 degradation of the Church of England the historic age- 
 long fabric remained, it only needed a fresh grasp of 
 every clause of the Creed, and recourse once more to 
 every sacrament of the Church, to recover the light and 
 warmth and glory. 
 
 " Forgive me, it is many minutes ago since you did 
 me the honour of proposing to tell me the grave and sad 
 reasons which now seem to debar you from communicat- 
 ing at the Catholic altar, the heart of the Divine life in 
 heaven and on earth. You shall tell me that next Sunday, 
 and then I am going to suggest to you the way by which 
 your parish church may gradually, dull as it is, become 
 to you what it is to your second footman. 
 
 " Let me end with a caution : this is a practical matter. 
 The Catholic religion is as practical a matter as building 
 a house or cooking a pudding. You have been converted. 
 You have been turned round. Now the rest is a steady, 
 plodding, monotonous grind, working when you want to 
 stop, following when you want to rest. If you are going 
 on you have much to amend. You delightful young 
 people have no business to be in this plight at all. You 
 have never thought. You have never inquired. You 
 have never studied. You have starved in the midst of 
 plenty. All the great Christian books have been re-edited 
 for you ; you have never read one. You have been 
 within reach of all the greatest preachers. You have
 
 52 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 never gone to hear them. In London you have been 
 within a stone's throw of worship which expresses the 
 devotion of the whole Church ; you have never joined in 
 it, or inquired about it. 
 
 " Let me warn you that if you are not prepared to 
 let this cost you a good deal, I cannot take you a step 
 further. You will lose friends ; your interests will 
 change ; certain pleasant things will lose their savour, 
 and you must leave some of your present characteristics 
 behind. Your objective will no longer be this present 
 life ; it will be the life to come." 
 
 Once for many years I visited a girl dying of con- 
 sumption. I will call her Margaret, and she remains to 
 me a symbol of the true character of the Catholic life. 
 Margaret's awful illness robbed her of any pleasure in 
 her religion. Her days were perpetually overclouded 
 by an overwhelming weariness and feeling of irritability ; 
 but with magnificent grit she persevered. Shenever gave 
 in. Her confessions, her communions, her meditations, 
 her prayers, they all went on continuously. She died 
 quite suddenly. They had moved her into a country 
 cottage, when one Saturday afternoon the message came : 
 Margaret is dying and wants the sacraments. I can never 
 forget the scene I saw when I entered the room. Mar- 
 garet was dressed and lying on a couch in an oriel lattice 
 window, the whole of which was flung open to the roses 
 and the sunshine. It was a gorgeous summer afternoon, 
 and all the turf round the cottage was covered with boys 
 in flannels playing cricket. It was like giving the last 
 sacraments at Lord's in the middle of the Eton and 
 Harrow match. The click of the balls and the shrill 
 joy of the children filled the air. Never did life and 
 death meet more dramatically. I bent over Margaret.
 
 ATTITUDE TO CATHOLIC RELIGION 53 
 
 She opened her eyes and smiled. All the weariness was 
 gone. " It has come at last," she whispered, " first my 
 confession." I put my ear to her lips and shut my eyes 
 against the cricket until the hoarse broken whisper was 
 ended and she had been made white in the Blood of the 
 Lamb. " I am so glad," she said, and I saw the joy was 
 coming back. Then she received her communion, and, 
 strangely enough, there was a moment's shadow. " I 
 could not taste," she whispered. " You have received our 
 Lord," I said. She thought a minute and said, "Yes," 
 and then looked happy again. 
 
 Then there was a long silence, broken at intervals 
 by the prayers for the dying, and Margaret's soul sank 
 deep down under the dark waters. At last I paused, and 
 hesitated, and rose, and looked at the still, white figure, 
 and wondered if it still breathed. The moment had 
 come for that tremendous prayer with which the Church 
 on earth dismisses her child into the Church beyond. 
 The great prayer was said, and then a hand moved, and 
 very slowly and brokenly it traced a sign upon the breast. 
 And I stood in the summer sunshine amid the shouts of 
 the boys in white, while out of the deepest depths of 
 death there came a sign the sign of the Cross.
 
 VI. HIS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE 
 CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 " The forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life ever- 
 lasting." APOSTLES' CREED. 
 
 WE have reached the last chapter of our serial story. 
 The young husband who says he has now seen the truth 
 and power of Christ has told me what he brought me 
 into the smoking-room to hear. 
 
 " You see," he concludes, " I am not the man to help 
 in this matter of making the Christian religion more 
 effective in English society. You must get my cousin 
 back from the Oxford Mission to Calcutta to do that. 
 I don't suppose he has ever had a bad thought in his life. 
 Thank God, I have been another man since I got engaged 
 to my wife, but there is no getting over the fact that 
 I have disqualified myself for anything more than trying 
 to be a good husband and father in the light of this new 
 knowledge that Christ is all, and I pray God that John 
 may never know the bitterness of such a sin as mine." 
 
 I am silent for a minute or two, for a human soul has 
 unveiled itself before me in all its greatness and its weak- 
 ness. I watch John and the fox-terrier out on the lawn. 
 I say a Venl Creator^ and then I have my try. 
 
 " I know you want me to say what I think ; so I will. 
 And on your part, I want you to try to give a real assent, 
 moral and intellectual, to whatever you clearly see to be 
 true in the things I say. 
 
 " My first point is this. You cannot hold back from 
 
 54
 
 ATTITUDE TOWARDS CHRISTIAN LIFE 55 
 
 the service of the Church because you are a penitent 
 sinner. All saints are sinners who have accepted Christ 
 and persevered. They have all begun where you are 
 now. St. Peter in the boat, and you in the smoking- 
 room, begin with the conviction of sin and the genuine 
 cry, * Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.' 
 But our Lord's answer is always a cheery one, ' Don't be 
 afraid ; now at last you can make a beginning.' 
 
 " Now I know what your rejoinder is. You say, 
 ' That is exactly what I cannot do. If I had never had 
 any relations with Jesus Christ until now, I should do 
 just what St. Paul's converts did when he illuminated 
 their consciences, snapped their sinful ties, and brought 
 them to the threshold of the Church. I should put 
 myself into the Church's hands and do what I was told 
 to do. But I am a man who has been a member of the 
 Church since within a month of his birth, and the 
 relationship has been a failure. I was baptized without 
 knowing it ; I was confirmed and not affected by it. 
 My communions have been well meant, but they have 
 been ignorant and uncomfortable acts/ 
 
 " Yes, your hesitation is due to that sort of tangle of 
 reasons ; but it is not difficult to get the tangle undone. 
 You honestly think that the mortal sin you fell into 
 earlier in life permanently disqualifies you from the 
 militant service of Christ. In thinking that you are 
 something you have never heard of, you are a Novatianist, 
 and the Church decided against your position in the 
 third century. You are right in thinking that mortal 
 sin is an absolute impediment to Church fellowship ; but 
 the Church insists that she can remove the impediment. 
 I do not think you would find any difficulty in believing 
 that if you had ever had any real experience of the Church,
 
 56 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 but the fact is that the Church, as you have known her, 
 has never made any impression on you. You cannot 
 conceive of her as a body to whom you vitally belong, to 
 whom you owe it to give an account of yourself, and 
 who, when she has judged your case, has the power of 
 removing this impediment to fellowship with her which 
 has arisen in your life. 
 
 " You are like Mr. Cecil Rhodes. You feel that the 
 Church of England does not interest you. And that is 
 not to be wondered at, since both you and he were taught 
 to think of the Church of England merely as the Sunday 
 department of the English Civil Service. She is not 
 that. She is for you the age-long Church of Christ, and 
 if you turn to her as such you will find her to be your 
 mother. 
 
 " Now here comes another difficulty. You shrink 
 from doing that. You shrink from giving this beautiful 
 spiritual experience of yours a purely practical sequel a 
 sequel of letters, appointments, interviews, statements, 
 acts. Why should you not keep it, you ask, a beautiful 
 vision for the consolation of yourself, your wife, and 
 John ? Because, my friend, you cannot. The vision 
 will not stay. Our Lord will never again appear to you 
 in a smoking-room. For redemptive purposes Christ's 
 life is extended in His Mystical Body. He has found 
 you in the smoking-room. He is now waiting to receive 
 you when you return His visit, and you must find Him 
 where He is waiting. He is waiting in His Church. 
 And if you ask her where you will find Him, she gives 
 you her age-long answer, in that act of candour with His 
 society, and of fresh resolve which removes the impedi- 
 ment of mortal sin. The form of this act has varied in 
 different ages of the Church, but its essence is contained
 
 ATTITUDE TOWARDS CHRISTIAN LIFE 57 
 
 in the moral requirements of the situation, and never 
 varies. Nobody came to St. Paul with reservations. 
 The lists of sins which he gives as the result of his 
 personal knowledge of his people shows that their candour 
 must have caused his converts a good deal in the way of 
 humiliation. This confidence which you have given to 
 me has been impelled by a natural impulse, and it cannot 
 take the place of the confidence you owe to the Church. 
 You owe her the reparation of candour. If she judge 
 you a true man, she will bless you with His forgiveness 
 whose body she is, and restore to you the shoes, the robe, 
 and the ring. 
 
 " Confession is candour with the Church. True, in 
 the present discipline the confidence of the penitent 
 passes into the mind of the Church through the agency 
 of a single minister and is withheld from the comment 
 of individuals ; but its essence is candour, and every man 
 who has been candid with the Church knows it to have 
 been the purest, strongest, noblest act of his life. Nothing 
 can be plainer than the direction which the Prayer Book 
 gives you about this. Read the office for the Visitation 
 of the Sick. Do you mean to tell me that what applies 
 to a sick man does not apply to a man in your present 
 distress, or that if you refuse to come to grips with the 
 Church about this now, you are likely to do so when 
 weakened by sickness? 
 
 " Read the Ash Wednesday Service. Notice that the 
 English Church speaks of the Prayer Book system of 
 discipline as provisional until a stricter can be established. 
 It is not true, as the Bishop of Birmingham has said, that 
 the failure to restore public discipline in three hundred 
 years adds force to all that is said in the Prayer Book 
 about private discipline ?
 
 58 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 " Read the Exhortation to Communion. Notice, that 
 if the rubric ordering its recital were obeyed, every 
 Sunday of your life you would hear from the altar an 
 injunction warning you that if you feel yourself to be 
 debarred from communion you must seek absolution. 
 Read the formula used in the ordination of priests in the 
 English Church. It suggests a functionary very unlike 
 your conception of your rector, that excellent citizen, 
 with his boys at a public school, whose sermons and 
 whose conversation bore you. 
 
 " No, you have never seen the English Church in her 
 true character. Go in sorrow to her knees and you will 
 find the age-long Church of Christ waiting for you, wait- 
 ing to be your mother. And for the first time you will 
 understand the Christian unity, when some faithful priest 
 exercises his office towards you, and fulfils his Master's 
 injunction, ' Tend My sheep.' 
 
 " Now, let us suppose that you have done that and 
 you are back here again. You have flung yourself back 
 in your chair and laughed long and low, ' I did not think 
 it could possibly make such a difference' ; and with a 
 funny look of amused keenness in your face you have said, 
 ' And now, what next ! ' Next you must have a spiritual 
 adviser and never roam in this chartless and pilotless 
 fashion again. You have a doctor, you have a lawyer; 
 why not a priest ? And you must join a Christian 
 community, where, within a circumscribed area, the whole 
 Catholic life is being lived. As things now are in England, 
 you will not get your inspiration out of your country 
 parish. You will only do your duty in your country 
 parish intelligently, if you are attached to a Christian 
 community in one of the big cities. 
 
 "You expect me to exercise my priesthood in some
 
 ATTITUDE TOWARDS CHRISTIAN LIFE 59 
 
 definite circle. And I expect you to exercise your priest- 
 hood in some definite circle. A layman is a member 
 of the royal priesthood of Jesus Christ. Join the London 
 congregation which circumstances suggest to you St. 
 Paul's, Knightsbridge, St. Barnabas', Pimlico, St. Mary 
 Magdalene's, Munster Square, whatever it may be. You 
 will find a community one with the Christian com- 
 munities of every age and at its heart our Lord ever 
 living in sacramental mystery. 
 
 "Make the Sacrifice and the Sacrament of the Altar 
 the centre of your activity and the source of your life. 
 You have a great deal to learn, almost everything about 
 the age-long doctrine of the Church. You have even 
 to learn how to perform the characteristic act of the 
 creature towards God. Your characteristic act as a 
 creature is neither petition, nor acquisition, nor thanks- 
 giving those are all secondary. It is worship. You 
 have never learnt to worship. You have half unknow- 
 ingly thought the worship of God to be idolatry. But 
 you will learn to worship as you improve in what must 
 be your first concern, your prayer. You must really 
 begin your prayer as completely as if you had never 
 tried to pray in your life. Begin it by simply putting 
 yourself and holding yourself in the presence of God, 
 being much more careful about strong intent and re- 
 collection than anxious about the words you say ; praying 
 as largely as possible, and not from your own standpoint, 
 but as far as you can discern it from the standpoint 
 of God ; caring now principally, not that John should 
 be spared croup, but that John should grow great in 
 his Lord's service, and fill the place in the universal 
 plan he is designed to fill. 
 
 "And if you would learn to pray, you must fence
 
 60 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 off a bit of time for it. You must keep a bit of time 
 clear every day for thought and prayer. I remember 
 an undergraduate who had volunteered for the war, 
 saying when he came back, ' I learned to pray out 
 in South Africa. You see,' he said, * I was on sentry- 
 go a good deal at night, alone in the dark, with nothing 
 to do but keep a lookout, and think. And the stars 
 looked so wonderful out there. You have no idea what 
 the stars look like when you see them from the veldt.' 
 A very great deal of modern failure in religion simply 
 arises from the fact that the whole relationship with 
 God gets crowded out. Now you have to begin to 
 find room for it. And you would do well to fence 
 about a bit of space for it. You have a big house 
 with rooms for many purposes. You should have a room 
 for prayer a prayer room, with its altar and pictures, 
 and its statues of Our Lady and the Saints. You must 
 make it beautiful. You must gather your family and 
 household there. I know some of these houses, and 
 there is no doubt whatever of the priceless value to 
 the family and the household of this symbol the little 
 holy place in the heart of the dwelling-house. 
 
 "And remember, your religion is the religion of the 
 Cross. No man in the world escapes the Cross. But 
 the religion of the Cross deprives it of its terror by 
 encountering it, and voluntarily clasping it, and carrying 
 it. This can never be a religion which costs you nothing, 
 and you must not evade its discipline. All the rules 
 of the Church about fasting and abstinence are embodied 
 in the Prayer Book. You must obey both in letter and 
 in spirit. 
 
 " The early rising, the fast before communion, the 
 observance of the Friday abstinence, the control of the
 
 ATTITUDE TOWARDS CHRISTIAN LIFE 61 
 
 engagement list by the ecclesiastical kalendar, the strong 
 endurance of bodily, mental, and spiritual fatigue in the 
 service of the Church and of men these are the things 
 which make a strong Catholic, one who honours the 
 authority which is really laying a restraining and chasten- 
 ing hand upon his impulses and desires. 
 
 " You must find time and space. You must give 
 effort, and you must give money. Money is power, 
 and coming to us, as it so often does in the modern 
 world, detached from the sources of its production, we 
 have strangely lost a true sense of responsibility for its 
 possession. We hold this power, with all the rest of our 
 power, a sacred trust for God, and it must be expended 
 in His sight, and a due proportion must be offered to 
 His service. 
 
 " But living this life, my friend, you and your wife 
 and John will never die. As years go on the physical 
 and natural ties between you will become spiritual and 
 supernatural ones ties, not of time, but of eternity. 
 As the body grows weaker, as the eye grows dim, as the 
 strength fails, that spiritual body which you are receiving 
 from the Second Adam in the Blessed Sacrament of the 
 altar will grow stronger and nobler, and the life you live 
 together here will be already the life everlasting." 
 
 Brethren, such is the Christian life, and English 
 society to-day is very far from living it. But this is 
 a hopeful moment. Our young husband and wife are 
 really yearning for the Christian life for themselves and 
 for John. But they do not know where to turn or how 
 to begin. Now we must help them. Will you please 
 consider the points I have put before you on these six 
 Sunday mornings very seriously ? Some weeks ago, 
 Father Neville Figgis, of the Community of the Re-
 
 62 THE RELIGION OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 surrection, gave two addresses on Religion and English 
 Society at a small gathering of people in London. 
 They have been published by Longmans, and can now 
 be obtained through any booksellers. I need not say 
 that they are very weighty, very important utterances. 
 I beg you to get them at once and to read them carefully. 
 
 Then I should like to suggest that you form small 
 groups in your own houses for the discussion of these 
 topics. I believe that the gathering together of small 
 groups of friends perhaps between tea and dinner 
 with the definite object of discussing the application 
 of religion to English social life might have very far- 
 reaching results indeed. Like Inkermann, this must be 
 a soldiers' battle. We want more speech and action 
 from the laity in this matter. Among the clergy we 
 want more active Regulars. We want more Religious 
 in the Church of England. Very greatly, indeed, do we 
 need another body of regular priests in West London, 
 men who are pledged to a life of complete self-renuncia- 
 tion, and detached from parochial and family ties. And 
 we need a further ministry of women, women to whom 
 young wives can turn for the help they so often need, 
 women who can point the way to their less experienced 
 sisters by directing them to books or to personal help. 
 
 Lastly, and above all, we need contemplatives. We 
 need both the power and the spectacle of men and women 
 who have given themselves entirely to the life of prayer 
 and self-immolation. I do not believe that much will 
 ever be done by the English Church until there is within 
 her a greater power of prayer and self-sacrifice. It needed 
 the martyrdom of St. Lawrence and St. Agnes to convert 
 Roman society. Roman society was converted by the 
 deaths of that splendid youth and that beautiful child,
 
 ATTITUDE TOWARDS CHRISTIAN LIFE 63 
 
 and it needs a faith, a zeal, and a self-sacrifice as great 
 to startle our modern world into remembering that time 
 is flying, that the world is growing old, and that the last 
 things are at hand Death and Judgment, Hell and 
 Heaven. 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co. 
 Edinburgh 6* London
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
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