OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE*
OURSELVES
AND THE UNIVERSE
Studies in Life and Religion
BY
J. BRIERLEY, B.A.
("J. B.")
THOMAS WHITTAKER, 2 & 3, BIBLE HOUSE.
1903.
AUTHOR'5 NOTE.
I HAVE given to the following Studies the
title they bear because it expresses the fact
which all religious thinking needs to recog-
nise, that spiritual teaching must henceforth
be a cosmic teaching. The facts and ex-
periences on which religion is based, if they
are to make to us their legitimate appeal,
must be set in the framework of that new
Universe which modern research has opened
to us. The themes discussed, as will be seen,
are sufficiently varied, but it will be found,
I believe, that they are united in this one
conception.
J. B.
2031151
Contents.
MM
I. A Boomier Universe 1
II. The Divine Indifference 10
III. Truth's Spiritual Equivalents 19
IV. The Inwardness of Event* 29
V. The Sins of Saints 39
VI. The World's Beauty 4,9
VII. Of Face Architecture 59
VIII. Westward of Fifty 69
IX. The Art of Happiness 79
X. The Mission of Illusion 87
XI. The Soul's Voice 97
XII. Of Sex in Religion 106
XIII. Of False Conscience 116
XIV. Religion and Medicine 126
XV. Spiritual Undercurrents 135
XVI. On Being Inferior 145
XVII. Our Contribution to Life 153
XVJIL The Gospel of Law 162
XIX. Life's Healing Forces 170
XX. Of Fear in Religion 180
XXI. Our Moral Variability 188
XXII. The Escape from Commonplace ... ... 196
XXIII. Of Spiritual Detachment 206
viii CONTENTS.
Mi
XXIV. Life's Present Tense 215
XXV. A Doctrine of Echoes 224
XXVI. Of Divine Leading 234
XXVII. Amusement 244
XXVIII. Dream Mysteries 253
XXIX. The Spiritual Sense 262
XXX. Our Thought World 272
XXXI. Morals and Eternity 282
XXXII. The Christ of To-Day 292
XXXIII. The World's Surprises 302
XXXIV. Life's Exchange System 812
XXXV. The Spiritual in Teaching 823
XXXVL-Behind the Veil , 332
OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
A Roomier Universe.
OUR English winter compensates for its gloom
and rigours by offering us now and then a
night of extraordinary splendour. The solitary
country wayfarer has, on these occasions, his
gaze irresistibly drawn by the solemn mag-
nificence of the spectacle above. He is
tempted to forget earth while he has speech
with the constellations. The starry hosts,
" that great and awful city of God," gleaming
with a lustre rare in these latitudes, send their
mighty message straight to the heart. From
the beginning men have pondered that message.
The earliest theologies have been astronomical.
The European and classical names for God go
back to the old Sanscrit word for the sunrise.
Stonehenge is a temple of the sun, and our
1
2 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVEKSE.
leading ecclesiastical festivals of to-day are bap-
tized survivals of customs, existing in the dawn
of history, which had their origin in observed
movements of the heavens.
To-day our theology is again being touched
from the stars. The telescope has proved a
veritable instrument of revelation, and what it
has revealed stirs our inward life to its centre.
Since it began to sweep the heavens man has
had to domesticate himself in a new universe.
In his earlier thinking creation was a compara-
tively snug affair. The earth was its centre
and man its raison d'etre. Our planet was the
fixed point round which everything revolved.
The sun was created to give man light by day,
the moon and stars to shine on him by night.
At a handy distance above him was a paradise
for the good, and beneath, within equally easy
reach, an avernus for the wicked. The as-
tronomer has overturned this theology for us.
The scene he discloses is one in which our
earth is found to be the insignificant satellite
of a sun nearly a million times bigger, but
which in its turn is only a speck in the sur-
rounding immensity. He talks to us of fifty
million stars as visible with the telescope, each
one a mighty sun, the centre probably of
A EOOMIER UNIVERSE.
planetary systems full, for aught we know, of
conscious life. He describes the distances of
these worlds by the centuries of years which
it takes light, flying at its rate of inconceivable
swiftness, to cross the gulf between themselves
and us ; or, what is not less bewildering, by
showing us that a star viewed by us in January,
and then again in June, when we are one hun-
dred and eighty million miles from our earlier
standpoint, has not altered its apparent position
by a hair's-breadth. "We are indeed the deni-
zens of a roomier universe !
But the point for us here is in the effect
which this immense widening of the human
outlook has had, and is likely to have, upon
man's religious conceptions, and his accompany-
ing spiritual life. The first result has been
undoubtedly one ef profound disquiet. It is
hardly worth while to blame the Church for
her treatment of Galileo. She was acting here
strictly in accord with average human nature,
which dislikes nothing more than to be turned
from its old familiar thought-habitations into
a fresh one to which it is not yet accustomed.
Man is bound to the old mental home by a
thousand ties, and suspects that he will catch
his death of cold in the new. Our religious
4 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
teachers are a long way yet from having got
accustomed to the roomier universe. Hazlitt's
gibe that " in the days of Jacob there was a
ladder between heaven and earth, but now the
heavens have gone farther off and are be-
come astronomical," suggests a problem that
still puzzles sorely many an honest pulpiteer.
A well-known popular preacher, in a sermon on
heaven, laid it down as a leading proposition
that heaven was a place above us, and cited
passages of Scripture to prove that the depar-
ture of the glorified was always an ascent. In
this argument it seemed to ha\ e been forgotten
that an "ascent" from London and an <f as-
cent " from Melbourne would take the " ascen-
ders" in exactly opposite directions. " Above "
and " beneath," so far as space and locality are
concerned, have been emptied of their meaning
by astronomy, and it is time that religious
teachers of all persuasions took account of so
elementary a fact. What is the exact signi-
ficance for the inner life of this feature of
the astronomical revelation we may inquire
presently.
Meanwhile it is worth observing that the
mental confusion, and one may say distress,
which the breaking down of the older concep-
A ROOMIER UNIVERSE.
tions has caused, is by no means confined to
the ecclesiastical world or to mediocre minds.
It has been felt in an acute degree by thinkers
of the first order. The cry of Pascal, "The
eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrifies
me," is echoed by our own Watson :
But oftentimes he feels
The intolerable vastness bow him down,
The awful homeless spaces scare his soul.
Carlyle, too, was dominated by this feeling
when a friend whom he had accompanied to
the door of his house at Chelsea, and who had
pointed to the brilliant starlit heavens as " a
glorious sight," got from him the reply, " Man,
it's just dreadful ! " It is evident that even
the highest human thinking has not yet become
fully acclimatised to immensity.
And yet the signs are multiplying that we are
at the dawn of a new and better conception.
Man is already feeling his way about in this
larger habitation, and we may predict that
by-and-by his inner life will be not only entirely
at home in it, but gloriously free and exultant.
As a proof of this let us note here one or two of
the elements which the new conditions are
causing to emerge in our spiritual consciousness.
It is infinitely reassuring, to begin with, to
6 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
realise that to the uttermost verge of these
vast spaces we find not only everywhere the
presence of Mind, but of the same Mind.
The laws of light and heat and gravitation
which obtain in London obtain in the
Pleiades. The same King's writ evidently
runs throughout the whole Empire. The old
Eoman's pride and sense of being at home
when, in farthest Britain or by the remote
Euxine, he saw the flash of Home's eagles
and heard the tramp of her legions, is, in a
finer way, reproduced in loyal souls, who to-
day find the Power they adore exercising a
sway which, at no furthest remove in this
stupendous whole, is contravened. If the
universe, through all its suns and systems,
knows but one Master of the House, who is
already known to us, there is enough here
surely to thaw out all the chill of strangeness
and to make the cosmic spaces to their utter-
most reach friendly and homelike.
But this is only the beginning. There is
immense spiritual inspiration in this other
message of the telescope, that life altogether
is larger than our fathers imagined. For the
idea grows upon us that if the material realm
of which we form a part is so much vaster than
A EOOMIEE UNIVERSE.
we deemed, so in like manner must be that
spiritual realm to which we also belong. That
our poets and philosophers should sing and
write as though creation's greatness spells
man's littleness is, when one thinks of it, the
oddest perversion. It supposes that we are
dwarfed by the immensity of the whole,
whereas it is this very vastness, properly con-
sidered, that enhances the worth of our own
life. For we are not only in the universe, but
the universe is in us. It plays through us, find-
ing in the soul the organ of its consciousness.
The greater the whole, the mightier the throb
of its pulsation through us who are its parts.
More than that. The greater the universe,
the greater its Maker. The dimension of the
one helps us to conceive the proportions of the
other. But in a great nature it is ever the
moral quality that counts most. If God in
these later ages has astonished us by the
revelations of His material side, what sur-
prises may He not have in store on the side
that is spiritual? If His power is expressed
in the worlds that populate the Milky Way,
what is the love that is proportioned to such
a Power, and what may we not expect
from it?
8 OUKSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
But the most important message of the
stars is yet to be stated, and must be put into
a line. It is that of the absolute spirituality
of true religion. The widening of the outer
heavens is the cosmic emphasis upon the word
of Jesus : " Neither shall ye say, Lo here !
or lo there ! for, behold, the Kingdom of God
is within you." Astronomy puts the veto on
external pilgrimings, as aids to religion. We
might journey from here to Arcturus and be no
whit nearer God. The movement needed is
of another kind, in another sphere. Relig-
ion's " above " and " beneath " have nothing
to do with location. They are states of the
heart. To get on here we need not to change
our place but our ways. We reach heaven not
through the clouds but through our own souls.
It comes into us, and we come into it, in pro-
portion to the stages we make in faith, in love,
in humility of spirit. As we move along this
line of things what we are chiefly conscious of
is not so much the roomier realm of the stars,
majestic though that be, as the roomier realm of
the soul. How the two are exactly related does
not yet appear. Enough if we realise that the
inconceivable vastness of the one stands over
against the inconceivable vastness of the other.
A BOOMIEE UNIVERSE.
Citizens of a boundless physical universe, let us
rejoice most in our fellowship in that spiritual
kingdom whose treasures an inspired voice has
thus described : " Eye hath not seen nor ear
heard, neither hath entered into the heart of
man, the things which God hath prepared for
them that love Him."
n.
The Divine Indifference.
THERE are times in history when a mortal chill
seems to fall upon the human soul. A deadly
suspicion spreads abroad that man is, after all,
in a universe that is deaf and dumb to his
prayer. The impression gains that morality
and spirituality ; faith, hope, love all the
things that make life precious and holy are
phenomena simply of our own consciousness,
and that there is no evidence of there being
anything corresponding to them outside. Men
argue that our moral code is provincial, that its
writ does not run beyond given boundaries. It
is valid for certain spheres of human conduct.
It is, for instance, correct to say that industry
produces prosperity, that sobriety and frugality
promote health, while dissipation induces
disease ; that love and self-sacrifice have what
seems an ennobling effect upon our sensibilities.
But how far does this carry as related to the
immeasurable realm outside ? Nature appears
THE DIVINE INDIFFERENCE. 11
to know nothing of our morality. She slays
wholesale, and in her slaying takes no heed of
ethical distinction. When the ship goes down,
or the earthquake engulfs the city, the pious
and prayerful are swept away just as remorse-
lessly as the murderer and the thief. People
living sheltered lives may dream of love as at the
heart of things ; but the man on a raft in the
pitiless Atlantic, or staggering, lost and hope-
less, to his death in the Australian bush, finds
no suggestion of this friendliness.
There are times, we say, when such considera-
tions come upon men with crushing force. The
earthquake at Lisbon, it is said, made multi-
tudes of people atheists. It is strange, by the
way, to remember that the call to faith in view
of that catastrophe was given in Europe by no
other than Voltaire, who wrote a poem coun-
selling silent and trustful resignation in face of
an inscrutable Providence. In events of this
kind Nature seems to outrage our best in-
stincts. We should not wonder if the survivors
of the tidal wave at Galveston found their
faith as well as their property submerged.
At such times men echo Carlyle's outburst,
" God sits in heaven and does nothing ! "
And history often staggers us as much as
12 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVEKSE.
Nature. We picture to ourselves what happens
in a single twenty-four hours on this planet
hideous massacres in China, the kidnapping of
slaves in Central Africa, the brutal orgies
repeated every night in the great cities, with
their engulfments of virtue, their defiance of
God ; these things happen, and there seems no
outside response, no faintest sign that any
moral sensitiveness beyond our own has thereby
been touched.
Brooding of this kind is very rife to-day, and
it has produced the singular result of a re-
ligious scepticism that has morality for its
chief support. Man has become conscientious,
but cannot find a conscience in the universe.
He thinks himself better than his world, and is
ready to propose an evangelistic mission
amongst the unseen powers. The modern
mind shows us in every direction the bewilder-
ment into which it has fallen. It serves us up
afresh the denials of Lucretius, and the despair
of Omar Khayyam. It repeats Heine's scoff
at the world as "an age-long riddle which
only fools expect to solve.*' It lowers its
conception of God to the " Fortuna omnipotens
et ineluctabile fatum " of Virgil, or declares
with the messenger in the Antigone that " it is
THE DIVINE INDIFFERENCE. 13
but chance that raiseth up, and chance that
bringeth low, . . . and none foretells a
man's appointed lot." The heavens offer to it
the griin spectacle of
Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes,
Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand
His nothingness into man.
A Nietsche treats man as a mere passing
phase of existence, a Watson as Nature's
chance child:
Through untold seons vast
She let him lurk and cower ;
'Twould seem he climbed at last
In mere fortuitous hour,
Child of a thousand chances 'neath the indifferent
sky.
And yet in all this the chief puzzle to us
lies not in the world-problems that are pre-
sented, but in the fact that men in such
numbers, and often of such conspicuous ability,
should so misconceive the whole question.
For, when everything is said, what does this
supposed evidence about " the Divine indiffer-
ence " amount to? Looked at narrowly, it
resolves itself into a series of surface appear-
ances of really no weight as against the other
side. We will not linger here in the region of
14 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
the too obvious, otherwise we might point out
that to grumble because the good man as well
as the evil perishes in a shipwreck or falls from
a precipice is to impeach one of our best
friends and safeguards. The unvarying action
of the laws of Nature may drown a man here
and there, or break him in pieces at the bottom
of a cliff, but what kind of a world should we
have if this uniformity ceased, and gravitation
pulled up or down at any man's whim or need ?
Our navigation, our building, our engineering,
the whole of our mechanical arts, the whole
progress of the sciences ; more than that, the
whole education of the mind, its forethought,
its calculation, its coolness, its courage, depend
upon the faith we have in Nature's guarantee
that she will keep to her course and not
deviate at random from her established line of
things.
But what of those who get the rough side of
this uniformity, whom it buffets or crushes?
Why is Nature in places so horribly fierce, so
utterly cruel ? As a rule the men who know
most of that fierceness, the mariners buffeted
in Bay of Biscay gales, the explorers of
Antarctic wastes, are just the people who do
not complain. Roughness is one thing to a
THE DIVINE INDIFFERENCE. 15
nincompoop, another thing to a man. "What/'
such men are inclined to say, " would you have
us cockered up and kept all our days in cotton-
wool ? God thinks too well of us to leave us to
such a fate." Nature's wild and remorseless
energy is the field on which they reach their
strength. And when things have come to the
worst, and some disaster which no courage or
skill can avert crashes down and leaves ruin
behind, can we argue as though the world's
moral laws have here been defied or annulled ?
If we will only look below the surface we shall
see that it is precisely here, on the contrary,
they get their most decisive vindication. There
is no such thing as " one event happening to
all." Each man's event happens according to
what he is and not otherwise. The shipwreck
which carries fifty men to the bottom varies in
its aspect to every one of them by the whole
range of his moral and spiritual constitution.
When the three were crucified at Golgotha
there was, to the outer eye, no difference in
the foitune of the sufferers. The indifferent
soldiers performed their functions, and indif-
ferent Nature performed hers. There were
equally for all crosses, nails, tortures, thirsts,
death. And yet this one event to the three
16 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
who suffered it stood separate as to its
personal significances by the whole diameter of
the universe. Even that old pagan Montaigne
had the grace given him to see this, and
remarks somewhere that " external occasions
take both flavour and colour from the internal
constitution." Whatever happens in the
region of men's physical and material fates,
not a hair's breadth of deviation shows in the
operation there of the moral and spiritual laws.
But what to the modern conscience is,
perhaps, the greatest stumbling-block of all
remains yet to be dealt with. This lies in what
seems " the Divine indifference " to man's
moral and religious aspirations. Earnest men
watch with dismay the immoralities around
them, the orgies of lust and crime, the pros-
perity of villains, the grinding of the poor, and
in their struggle against it they seem to get no
help. They read of earlier revelations and
interpositions, but the events of to-day appear
to carry "no revelation except that nobody
cares." At times the dumb silence of that
outside universe to which we turn our eyes
seems almost maddening. But here again we
are out of our reckoning simply because our
observations are faulty. There is nothing
THE DIVINE INDIFFERENCE. 17
wrong with the heavens ; it is our sextant and
compass that need adjustment. For how do
we expect God to interfere in the world's moral
history ? Shall He visit the wicked with fiery
cataclysms ? That would be history in the
sphere of phenomena and sensation, but it
would in no sense be moral history. If we will
only look deep enough we may see that God,
conceived as moral and spiritual, is acting
precisely in the way we should expect. So far
from being indifferent, He offers an ever-grow-
ing revelation of His moral care. His universe
is not silent on this point. The mistake men
make is in looking for speech in the wrong
direction. Schelling long ago indicated the
law of the Divine working here in the aphorism,
" Only the personal can help the personal, and
God must become man in order that man may
come again to God." His entire approach to
us is by immanence and incarnation. The
developing sentiment of the moral community,
the sentiment which protests against injustice
and works for a better order, is simply His
voice in the world. He speaks to man through
man and no other way. Our very impatience
with the oppositions and the slow progress is
but the rush of the stream of His life in the
18 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
too narrow channels of our limited nature
The revolt of our conscience against the low
moral order is His battle-cry for a better one.
To sum up. " The Divine Indifference " is
apparent, and not real. The universe, despite
surface appearances to the contrary, discloses a
Divine moral order and a Divine moral passion,
the revelation of which is in the human con-
sciousness. God can only make Himself known
morally in the sphere of the soul, and there He
does make Himself known. Any man to-day,
if he chooses, can have the consciousness of
God in his own spirit. In view of this it is
well for us " to bear without resentment the
Divine reserve." With a modern French
writer we realise that " the sincere acceptance
of the inevitable supposes a love for the inevit-
able, the consciousness that this obscure universe
has a mysterious and kindly significance." We
go farther. Those who penetrate to its centre
find there clear sky and angels' food. To him
that overcometh is given to eat of the hidden
manna.
III.
Truth's Spiritual Equivalents.
THE debt of theology to science is, perhaps,
nowhere more strikingly illustrated than in the
light which modern discovery in the latter field
is shedding upon some of the most difficult
problems of religious thought. One of the
brightest rays of this new illumination is that
which streams from the scientific law of the
transmutation and equivalence of energy. The
fact, now so familiar to us, that force is con-
stant ; that it is capable of infinite transforma-
tion while remaining the same in quantity ;
that so much motion can be turned into so
much heat, or light or electricity, and back
again through all the series, without the loss
of a fraction of it irresistibly raises the ques-
tion whether a similar law may not be discerned
in other spheres. We propose here t* follow
out this suggestion in one particular direction,
and to ask whether evidence does not exist
of a law of equivalency between moral or
20 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
spiritual feeling and intellectual truth. Can it
be said that a given moral emotion argues
always the presence somewhere of a corre-
sponding truth for the intellect? Is what is
noblest in the moral life truest as a fact ? Can
what the soul realises as the highest in its
inner feeling be taken as a proof of an objective
reality that the reason may recognise? Before
we have done we shall hope to show that the
topic is a practical one, and that the applica-
tions of it are of the first importance.
We need not stop here to investigate the
precise philosophical relations between thought
and feeling, nor to inquire to what extent, in a
given mental state, feeling is amalgamated
with thought. It is sufficient for our purpose
to go upon the distinction, broadly marked in
every man's consciousness, between his reason
and his emotions. To indicate precisely what
we are inquiring after, let us take a concrete
illustration. The first appeal to a man of a
volcano in eruption would be to his feeling.
After the initial act of perception what he
would be immediately conscious of would be
sensations of wonder, admiration, awe, perhaps
terror. But if he were a scientific man, there
would be a supervening play of faculties upon
TRUTH'S SPIRITUAL EQUIVALENTS. 21
this spectacle of a totally different order. He
would find himself speculating about the causes
of the phenomenon. What has happened to
his emotions has suggested a problem to his
intellect. Now the point we wish here to bring
out is that his investigation would proceed
upon the supposition that the feeling just raised
in him had somewhere a full objective equiva-
lent; that the awe, wonder, terror, in the
sphere of his emotions were a correct, though
as yet undeciphered, register of outside causes
and forces which it was for his intellect to
interpret.
We can proceed now immediately to the
application of this to the problems of religion,
and especially of New Testament religion. The
religious appeal, both to the race and to the
individual, is first of all to the emotions. The
cry of Faust, " Gefuhl ist alles," is a strained
expression of the fundamental truth on which
Schleiermacher built, that the heart, the moral
consciousness, is the true theologian. We turn
the pages of the Gospels and the Epistles to
find what? Not an argument, a definite
appeal to the intellect, but an exhibition of
emotions and of acts consequent upon emotions.
Like our traveller in presence of the volcanic
22 OtfKSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
eruption, the first Christians, we find, are full
of an immense complex of feeling to which they
are here trying to give expression. The
traveller's phenomenon is the volcano ; their
phenomenon is Christ. The traveller, as a
scientific man, is convinced that the immense
impression on his senses has an exact equivalent
behind it of objective fact. And the question
of questions for us to-day is whether we are not
entitled to apply this same law to the impression
made on the first disciples by the Master of
whom they write.
Let it here be observed that the force of this
consideration is in no way lessened by the
criticism that the language in the New Testa-
ment which describes these impressions may
possibly be inexact or hyperbolical. We may
accept it as perfectly true that the titles given
there to Christ, such as the Son of God, the
Logos, the Messiah, were not coined by the
writers, but were already familiar to the Jewish
Messianic theology. When all this is granted
we have still this position remaining and to be
accounted for, that the life, words, and works
of Christ had produced in His followers an
emotional and moral condition an awe, a
wonder, a love, a sense of holiness, a hatred
TRUTH'S SPIRITUAL EQUIVALENTS. 23
of sin, a consciousness in them of spirit-
ually renovating power such as had never
before been reached in the human soul. The
question is, What were the dimensions of the
objective fact capable of producing this inner
effect ? Science demands that for every result
there must be an adequate cause. What was
the cause adequate to this effect ? In this
conjunction it is really ludicrous to observe the
attempts of the Comtists to make Paul the
effective author of Christianity. To exalt Paul,
and in the same breath to nullify his one life
testimony is surely a strange procedure. To
the really scientific student of Paul's utter-
ances, of those ever-repeated asseverances that
Christ is everything and himself nothing ; that
his whole inner life, so far as it is good, is a
derivation from Christ the one question is,
What or who was He who could produce such
an impression upon such a mind ?
The argument which looms out of all this is
immensely strengthened when we remember
that these inward impressions are not an affair
of testimony merely, but have been a matter of
continuous experience in human history ever
since. The inward thrill which Paul and John
felt at the presence of Christ, and which they
24 OuilSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
tried to translate into words, has been felt ever
since, and is felt to-day. Into the histories of
Christ, as we have them, we may have to admit
that something legendary has crept. But in
the love and joy which He made to spring up
in human hearts, the sense of forgiveness, of
sonship, of inward sanctifying, there was
nothing legendary. There is nothing legendary
either about the same experiences which fill
the souls of men to-day wherever He is preached
and accepted. But what is the intellectual
equivalent of such a feeling as this ? Theology
has through all the ages been trying to find it
for us, and has not succeeded any too well. But
whatever the formula we accept as to the Per-
son of Christ, this at least the scientific as well
as the Christian consciousness demands, that it
shall not be lower than the effect. The
apostles and first witnesses felt that their soul
had been in contact with God, and they said so.
The living Church, though it may vary its
phraseology, repeats the affirmation. As Her-
mann puts it : " None of us can come as a
witness to the virgin birth ; one can only report
it. But that the spiritual life of Jesus has not
proceeded from the sinful race, but that in Him
God Himself has stepped into the history of
TRUTH'S SPIRITUAL EQUIVALENTS. 25
the race, of that we can be witnesses, for this
knowledge forms a part of that which we our-
selves have experienced."
The value of this line of argument to the
central positions of Christianity will, perhaps,
not be immediately patent to us all. But in
the days of theological storm and stress that
are coming, when the tempest of New Testa-
ment criticism which already in Germany has
wrought such havoc upon earlier conceptions
has made its force fully felt in England, it will
be realised that here is faith's central and im-
pregnable defence.
And the suggestion we have here been
following, that the morally highest has its
equivalent in the intellectually truest, and
vice versa, will be found to apply with excellent
results in other of the problems of religion and
life. It may, for instance, be safely taken for
granted that whatever contradicts the soul's
highest moral witness is thereby proved intel-
lectually false. When, for example, the last
century listened to the scornful criticisms of
Diderot, Condorcet, and the other encyclo-
paedists on Christianity as " most absurd and
atrocious in its dogmas, most insipid, most
gloomy, most Gothic, most puerile, most un-
26 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
sociable in its morals," and so on, the inward
sense of untutored Christians knew them
wrong, though it took another century for
the critically educated intellect to discover
precisely where the error lay. And conversely,
when from the supposedly orthodox side doc-
trines are presented to us as Christian which
the moral consciousness revolts against, we
may rest assured that, however venerable the
authority against which it reacts, the verdict
of feeling here will turn out to have its full
equivalent in the ultimate presentment of
the reason. When the Puritan Cartwright,
offering what he supposes is Scriptural con-
firmation of religious persecution, exclaims,
" If this be regarded as extreame and bloodie
I am glad to be so with the Holy Ghost," we
know he is wrong long before we discover the
arguments that prove it. But the feeling and
the arguments tally in the end. In general it
may be stated that whatever in the way of
teaching detracts from reverence, from love,
from self-sacrifice, on the one side, and on the
other limits liberty and deadens the instinct for
truth, is thereby, without further evidence, cer-
tified by the soul as false. The moral criterion
is linked indissolubly with the intellectual one.
TRUTH'S SPIRITUAL EQUIVALENTS. 27
From the foregoing exposition a number of
results follow which we can here only in the
briefest way indicate. One is that the Church
which fails to produce the highest inward
states is proved thereby defective in its
teaching. Conversely, the higher spiritual
conditions, wherever we find them, are the
surest of all religious evidences. The inward
life of a saint points as certainly to an actually
existent spiritual world as the colouring of a
flower to the existence and potencies of light.
When, however, we say that the highest life
can only be nourished on the highest truth it
is not meant that the form in which the truth
is held is always necessarily the best. Some of
the noblest lives we have known have been
nourished on doctrines many of which, in the
form they were held, we should reject. But
the very fact that a doctrine has helped to
nourish a holy character is, if our analysis is
correct, proof that, however defective its form
or expression, its substance is true. Whatever
has helped to make men better is always intel-
lectually as well as morally verifiable. It was
precisely this argument, from the moral to the
intellectual, that in the second century turned
Justin Martyr from a pagan into a Christian,
28 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVEESE,
and that, in the nineteenth, brought Tolstoi
from sceptical pessimism to the optimism of
faith. The pagan philosopher tells us how,
studying the lives of the early Christians, he
realised that such moral effects must have fact
and truth for the cause, and the Eussian has
testified that when " I saw around me people
who, having this faith, derived from it an idea
of life that gave them strength to live and
strength to die in peace and in joy," the moral
logic of the spectacle subdued him.
The Church need never worry itself about
giving a complete intellectual expression to the
life that is in it. For what is the meaning of
the breakdowns of its past theologies? Is it
not simply that the truth hidden behind its
life is something vaster than any of its mental
forms can contain ?
IV.
The Inwardness of Events.
OURS is the age of scientific analysis, and it
might seem at first sight as though the whole
of life had come under its swaj. While our
chemistry resolves every substance into its
elements, our psychology proposes to unravel
every complex of the consciousness. We put
both our outer and our inner world into the
crucible, and are ready with an approved book
formula for each. There is, however, one life
element left out of this calculation. It is that
of events and of what they contain. Our
science of events is as yet that of the veriest
tyro. It is this fact which makes so much of
what is called history veritably ludicrous when
regarded as a statement of what actually is, or
has been. Tor our historian, in numberless
instances, offers us the mere surface and ragged
edges of a happening, as though this were the
whole of it. A Froissart pictures one battle
scene after another, or a Guicciardini describes
30 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
the intrigues and wars of the Italian states
"without," as Montaigne remarks, "ever
referring any action to virtue, religion or con-
science," and they imagine that here they
have told us all. As a matter of fact, they
have told us almost nothing. It is only when
we begin to realise that every event, in addition
to its outer form, has an inward life of its own,
mystical, infinitely complex, whose full develop-
ment may take centuries and millenniums to
unfold, that we are in a position to study it
aright.
It is, indeed, when we properly consider
events and their inner significance that we are
most stirred with a sense of life's wonder and
mystery. The event is our predestination.
Men propose at times to construct their career
from within, as when a Jerome flies to his cell
in the desert, or a Descartes, in search of a
philosophy, passes three years in his chamber
without seeing a single friend, or so much as
going out for a walk. But wherever made, the
attempt is impossible. The recluse, as well as
the man of action, has to reckon with the in-
calculable that waits for him outside. These
innumerable fates that are in the path of every
human being, what is their meaning? They
THE IXWARDNESS OP EVENTS. 81
bide their hour till the wayfarer they are in
search of appears, and then leap to meet him.
They know him by sight when he comes. It is
for him they are waiting. From all eternity
that event has been travelling to meet me at
this particular point and to deliver its message.
Its shock of contact becomes immediately a
part of my deepest life, for it is the something
outside myself that produces what it were
impossible for the unaided spirit to originate.
It and I were assuredly wedded in heaven
before the world was.
It is a great step in the interpretation of life
when we have discovered that all events are
ultimately spiritual. Their outside may seem
at the furthest remove from any such character,
but we have only to go deep enough to find that
this is the simple truth about them. The fall
of Jerusalem was to Jeremiah and his contem-
poraries just a bloody and horrible catastrophe.
AVithin it was contained the movement which
led up to the revelation of God as henceforth not
the tribal deity of Judah, but the one God and
Creator of all nations of the earth. The split
in the Papacy, which gave fourteenth century
Christendom two rival and mutually anathema-
tising Popes, was, to innumerable devout
32 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
Catholics, only a distressing quarrel and a
grievous religious scandal. At its centre the
spectacle held the germ of that appeal of the
Christian consciousness from fallible and rival
ecclesiastics to Christ Himself, which issued in
the Reformation. When shall we ever reach
the central inwardness of the event we call the
Crucifixion ? In itself, on the outside, it was a
sheer, grim fact, a hideous killing. It was not
speech, nor music, nor poetry, nor art, nor
philosophy, nor saving power. It was the doing
to death of a victim in the cruel Roman fashion.
And yet, as we press toward the inner recesses
of this fact, how much do we meet of art and
philosophy and devotion and saving power, and
all Divine things that have already come out of
it, and how much more, unreached as yet,
remains behind ?
This conception of events, as all containing a
spiritual essence, which they will ultimately
yield, should ever be with us in our estimate of
the world's religious prospects. It is a
ludicrous misconception which regards man's
inward progress as dependent exclusively on
the avowed and professional religious agencies.
Guthenberg wore no cassock when puzzling
over his printing-press, and George Stephenson,
TUB INWARDNESS OF EVENTS. 33
in elaborating the idea of the locomotive, was
conscious of no specially theological inspiration.
Yet for their after influence in the develop-
ment of religion what purely ecclesiastical
procedure could we match against the invention
of printing and of the steam-engine? An
Egyptian excavator, stumbling some fine
morning upon a Greek manuscript, say an
Ur-evangelium of the first century, might upset
for ever thereby the theological doubtings of a
thousand years. Plainly the pulpit is not the
only religious teacher. The roughest, rudest
block of fact that lies across our path, giving
no hint at first of aught in itself but what is
purely material, may suddenly open, and from
its store of hidden contents pour out un-
dreamed-of spiritual treasures. Our study of
missions, to be complete, must take a far wider
scope than is usual. It must not end with
biographies. Events are evangelists of the
first order.
There is this advantage about events con-
sidered as teachers, that they are so entirely
honest and trustworthy. Unlike so many of
our religious instructors, they carry no top
hamper of tradition, and they never worry us
with preconceived theories. They neither lie
3
84 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
nor flatter, but bring us a lesson crammed with
reality, and bid us make what we can of it.
And yet here is the mystery. Out of what
outwardly is the same thing none of us gets the
same result. None of us will find this same
thing to be the same. And for the reason that
what it teaches is precisely according to what
we are able to learn. Events yield their
essence in proportion to the quality and char-
acter of the being in contact with them. They
are thus, in a sense, the looking-glass in
which we behold ourselves. "If you journey
to the end of the world," says a modern mystic,
"none but yourself shall you meet on the
highway of fate."
When we consider the inconceivable numbers
of events that sweep across our life pathway,
their bewildering variety, their unexpectedness,
their often sinister and even terrible aspect, we
might easily be led to think that on their side, at
least, we were in a world of chance, where was
no complete or benign supervision. Events seem
so often to be destroyers rather than teachers.
A deeper study of them should reassure us.
For it will show that in their seeming wildest
aberrations they are subject to a spiritual law,
the same which rules in our own breasts. It
THE INWARDNESS OP EVENTS. 35
is, indeed, bj their constant attrition upon our
life that the letters of this law are rubbed into
distinctness. It is profoundly interesting to
observe at how early a period the world gained
a perception of this. The ancient doctrine of
fate was a much higher one than we are apt to
imagine. In the teaching of Heraclitus, and
also of Plato, that fate was the general reason
which runs through the whole nature of the
universe, and in that of Chrysippus, who speaks
of fate as a spiritual power which disposed
the world in order, we have an idea, however
imperfect, of the Divine purpose that is em-
bedded in events. A clearer revelation has
assured us that their source and eal are the
same as the source and end of i.he highest
aspirations of the soul.
To discover and be firmly co.i.inced of this
higher law underlying events is, perhaps, the
greatest result of the education through which
they put us. To be quite assured that the
event, however grisly its shape, can never hurt
you provided you are faithful to the spiritual
law ; that, with this condition observed, it will,
in fact, infallibly lift you a point higher in the
scale of life, is practically the winning of the
battle. This is where that stout New England
36 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
Puritan stood who, on a certain " Dark Day,"
when it was supposed that the end of the world
had come, and the assembly of which he was a
member was about to be adjourned, quietly
observed : " If this be the Day of Judgment I
prefer to be found at the post of duty ; if it be
not, there is no reason for an adjournment."
And what a testimony on this point is that
word of the dying Scaliger, given as the fruit
of his life experience, to his disciple Heinsius :
" Never do aught against thy inward conviction
for the sake of advancement. Whatsoever is
in thee is God's alone.**
How intimately related the world of events is
to the world of spiritual law is, perhaps, even
Btill more vividly exhibited in the happenings
to those who neglect or defy that law. It is
impossible here to mistake the religious char-
acter of events. They become moral avengers.
Schiller's dictum that "the world's history is
the world's judgment," is a simple statement
of the fact. " The deed," says the Indian pro-
verb, " does not perish." Where it is an ill
deed it lives to track down the evil-doer.
Eugene Aram murders Daniel Clark, and buries
the crime under fourteen following years of
intellectual activity. He becomes famous as a
THE INWARDNESS OP EVENTS. 37
philologist, making his name known as the dis-
coverer of a European affinity in Celtic roots.
But his deed, deep buried, is not dead. It
awakes and delivers its blow, and our philologist
gets hanged as a murderer. Innumerable mur-
derers have escaped hanging, but they can no
more get away from their deed and its full
results than the earth can get away from the
sun.
The greatest evidence, perhaps, of the
grandeur and infinite reach of the human
destinies lies in this conscious exposure of the
soul to the momentous events that await it.
And especially those darker events which cast
so chill a shadow before them. It may be that,
as Livy says, " Segnius homines bona quam mala
sentiuni " : men have a keener sense of ill than
of good. But what they feel so keenly as ill
bears in itself a message that it is not the end.
That deep word of Mrs. Browning, " But pain
is not the fruit of pain," verifies itself. No, not
pain, but something far other shall be the fruit
of what we here suffer. Shall we not say,
indeed, with a German writer of to-day :
" Everything inferior is a higher in the making ;
everything hateful a coming beautiful, every-
thing evil a coming good"? An inspired
38 OUESELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
apostle has given us the true inwardness of
events, in the declaration that the present pain
shall be swallowed up in the coming glory, and
that no one of all the conceivable happenings
in heaven or on earth can separate the people
of God from the love of God.
V.
The Sins of Saints.
THERE is a saying reported of St. Teresa that
" she saw one good thing in the world, namely,
that it would not condone the faults of saints,
and that the power of its murmurs made them
the more perfect." The vivacious Spanish lady
was here repeating one of the commonplaces
of morals. She recounts the penalty which in
every age visits those who profess a higher
mode of living than that of their neighbours.
Their very virtues are a danger. There is no
such advertisement for a black spot as a white
background. A reputable man may go on
doing a thousand good things without attract-
ing attention. Let him do one bad thing and
the world will ring with it. And if the sins
are not there they will be invented. If we
judged the early Christians by the accounts of
their enemies we should think them a set of
scoundrels. According to these stories, they
were atheists and child murderers; their
40 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
religious services were the occasion of nameless
debauchery. Justin Martyr, in a striking
passage tells how, in his heathen days, he had
listened to these slanders against Christians
until an investigation of their actual character
showed him " it was impossible they could be
living in wicked self-indulgence."
But the topic we are discussing is by no
means summed up in observations of this kind.
The " sins of saints " are not all inventions, nor
even exceptions. There are grave faults attach-
ing to some forms of the religious temperament
against which all who seek a sane and whole-
some way of living need to be on their guard.
We have scarcely yet waked to the significance
of the fact that Christ's severest criticisms were
directed against this very type of character.
The Pharisees were the Puritans of their time.
Anyone inquiring after the saints then in
vogue in Jewish society would have been
directed to their ranks. The attitude of Jesus
towards them, especially when compared with
His attitude to less considered classes outside, is
a revelation on our subject of the highest kind.
It shows us how far, in the Supreme Teacher's
estimate, is any one kind of temperament, even
the most religiously attractive, from, represent-
THE SINS OP SAINTS. 41
ing the wholeness of humanity ; how easy it is
to give to certain spiritual qualities a wholly
false character value. It was a long experience
of .Richard Baxter, and one, let us remember,
obtained amongst the severest types of religion,
which led him in his old age to say : " I see
that good men are not so good as I once thought
they were, and find that few men are as bad as
their enemies imagine."
But when we talk of the sins of saints we
must first of all define, What are sins, and
what are saints ? Both words represent a con-
tinuous development of ethical standard. We
speak of the Old Testament " saints," and the
word is, in respect to them, not at all a misnomer.
Nevertheless, the man in the street of to-day,
with no pretension to sanctity, would not dare
to imitate their conduct. Did he attempt it he
would find himself in gaol within a week.
David was a true spiritual leader, but his actions,
judged by our standard, would fit him for Port-
land rather than the pulpit of St. Paul's. It is
absurd to judge of religious characters apart
from the moral level of their own time. Even
Christianity, with all its lustre of spiritual
revelation, has had to wait for, and to woxk
with, the tardy evolution of conscience age after
42 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
age. This slow and universal movement has
put the common man of to-day in important
respects far above the saints of even Christian
centuries. And there is no room for a sneer
in this. When we read of Augustine advo-
cating religious persecution, of Calvin advising
our protector Somerset "to punish well by
the sword Catholics and fanatic gospellers,"
and especially to avoid moderation, and a
saintly Fenelon approving the dragonnades,
there is here no argument against sainthood,
nor against those men as though they were
mere pretenders to it. All that such illustra-
tions show is, that the noblest personalities
obey the la-w of their environments. The light
in them, showing clear and full on certain sides,
is on others merged in the common conscious-
ness of the time.
It is not along such lines that the subject is
really reached. No enlightenment comes, on
this or any other theme, from the process of
picking holes in the coats of great men of the
past, doing their best under barbarous condi-
tions. The really important study here is as
to the special dangers of what may be called
the spiritual temperament. Religion in its
wholeness is, of course, something far other
THE SINS OP SAINTS. 43
than a temperament. There are, neverthe-
less, departments of its expression for which
certain temperaments seem specially fitted,
and the possessors of these are almost certain
to be chosen as guides and leaders. There are
varieties here, widely differing, and an accur-
ate analysis would have to take in a large
gradation of subtle shadings. Speaking
broadly, however, there are two well-marked
forms of religious character, each wielding
immense power, each capable of noble service,
but open both of them to dangerous and even
deadly defects. We may call them, respec-
tively, the aesthetic and the ascetic.
The former, which in certain varieties might
perhaps be even better described as the
emotional, is singularly open to impression.
Delicately strung, with an artist's soul for
beauty, vibrating to life's subtlest overtones,
with an intense sense of the awe and mystery
of life, it is made for the religion of feeling.
Its faith at the fullest is a rapture, an ecstasy.
It is an epicureanism of the higher sensations.
It beholds visions, it listens inwardly to
melodies which no mortal music ever made,
and when it comes to expression, there are none
can speak so pleadingly, so persuasively. Men
44 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
listen as to angel voices. But all this is at a
price. Humanity would have got on badly
enough for its religion without this tempera-
ment, but still worse had it been the only one.
As if to teach the lesson of the human
solidarity, the lesson that the whole world of
us, and no one individual or type, is the true
man, we find this character full of weaknesses
and leaning always heavily upon others.
There have been, indeed, souls of this order,
with a beautiful spiritual expression, and yet
so halting on other sides that they could not
even preserve a decent morality. No more
truly spiritual mind or greater spiritual teacher
existed in the England of his time than Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, but, on the side of conduct,
what, to say the least, a poverty-stricken
record ! And in the next generation we have
poor Hartley Coleridge, with religious instincts,
fully as deep and keen, and the speech of an
angel, yet mingled with animal outbursts which
led him periodically to the sty ! The genius
for recognising spiritual beauty has, indeed,
been too often weighted with an over-master-
ing passion for the sensuous. Our antinomian
has soared so high as to get quite out of sight
of the Ten Commandments. Within Chateau-
THE SINS OF SAINTS. 45
briand, says a modern critic, was an obscene
Chateaubriand, and the same was true of
Lamartine. Often enough the prophet of this
order, after the moments of his highest exalta-
tion, finds himself at closest grips with the
devil.
Apart, however, from such open lapses,
there are other weaknesses of the emotional
religious temperament in much need of candid
treatment, but which we cannot stop even to
name. One only may we find room for in
passing, and that is its frequent lack of sheer
truthfulness. That defect in the religious
minds of former ages is giving us no end of
trouble to-day. If only the makers of church
chronicles had had the grace to observe accur-
ately and record faithfully ! If only Pascal's
maxim that "the first of Christian truths is
that truth should be loved above all " could
have been inscribed on the wall of every theo-
logian's study ! As it is we have the era of
pious frauds, a Saint Bonaventura stuffing his
life of another saint with impossible legends,
and a Eitualist Oxford don of the nineteenth
century emitting the sentiment, " Make your-
selves clear that you are justified in deception
and then lie like a trooper ! " Before we have
46 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
got much further in the twentieth century it
is to be hoped we shall have made up our minds
that religion shall at least speak the truth.
We have space in closing for the barest
mention of that other variety of the religious
temperament the ascetic and of the moral
defects which beset it. This character, of
which every age produces specimens, with its
superb reaction against the slothful indulgence
of the masses, develops often into a potent and
magnificent spiritual leadership. Founding
itself on a heroic mysticism that discerns from
the beginning the essential emptiness of
material and sensuous pleasures, it presses on
behind the veil to find its joy in spiritual
reality. It is enamoured of renunciation, and
finds a marvellous liberty in following that
austere road which St. John of the Cross
indicates in his motto : " Whatever you find
pleasant to soul or body, abandon ; whatsoever
is painful, embrace it." Men of this tempera-
mentand Pusey was a conspicuous example
have a sense of sin and shortcoming which
causes them at times the keenest anguish.
Yet, strangely enough, the defect most con-
spicuous in them is one of which they never
think of accusing themselves. They have
THE SINS OP SAINTS. 47
found an inner world -which is good and
glorious, but they have made the prodigious
mistake of declaring the world they have
renounced to be intrinsically bad. It is not
so, and that they have failed to see its good-
ness and enjoy ableness is, if they only knew
it, a fault far greater than those they deplore.
It is time we were done with the pseudo-
Christianity whose leading characteristic is the
exhalation of gloom. There is no grace in this
November fog. Sourness is a crime of Use
humanite. To what, my bilious brother, do
you propose to convert the world? To your
own griinness? It were hardly an improve-
ment. The world wants saving into soundness
and light, and it shows a healthy discrimina-
tion in refusing the overtures of morbidity
and darkness. When the Church thoroughly
understands this it will mend some of its ways.
In teaching the higher life of the invisible, it
will show always its appreciation of that fair
world of the seen which is the other's vestibule.
It will teach that man belongs to the two, and
may be a proficient in both. It was said of
Sir Walter Scott that he enjoyed more in
twenty-four hours than other men did in a
week. It should be counted to him as a grace.
43 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
The man who enjoys helps others to enjoy.
He cannot keep his sunshine to himself. It is
here that, turning from the imperfections of
its followers, we see the Divine wholeness of
the Master-life. A Prophet of the invisible,
Christ knew and loved the seen. The world of
birds and flowers, of happy sunshine and
human fellowships, was also His world. A
Messenger from the Centre, He dwelt with
gladness in the outer court, knowing it also
was a part of the Father's house.
VI.
The World's Beauty.
IN the glowing summer days we are Nature's
willing thralls. She invites us into her world
to come and play. With the glee of children,
we accept her invitation, and wander entranced
in her realm of enchantments. To us all,
prince or peasant, she offers royal entertain-
ment. We step out of doors and are at once
encircled by a more than regal pomp. She
feasts us with beauty. No need to travel a
thousand miles for it ; it is here at hand. Our
own island is packed with loveliness. We
wander over four continents to discover we had
left the best behind us. And this festival has
been repeating itself without fail through
thousands of years. We talk of the dark ages,
but it is pleasant to remember that through
them all Nature was giving our ancestors such
good times. Chaucer's springs and summers
were just as intoxicating as ours. The birds
sang as merrily, the wild flowers were as sweet,
4
50 OUKSELVES AND THE UNIVEESE.
the leaf of elm and oak was as green and
comely, the streams were as clear, the skies as
blue as in this year of grace. And it was good
to be alive.
Has it ever occurred to us to investigate the
meaning of the world's beauty ? How conies it
that Nature everywhere, whether in the wing of
insect, or the clothing of the forest, or the blue
concave above, or the clear depths of the river, or
the craggy summit of the mountain, shapes her-
self to this loveliness, this grandeur ? Why do
we call a thing beautiful ? Whait is beauty ?
Here we are upon questions that go deep. In
search of answers we find ourselves thrown
straight back upon the soul and its structure.
For the beautiful is evidently a spiritual per-
ception. Put a horse in front of our noblest
prospect and it sees nothing of what we mean
by the word. And the perception is one that
unfolds only gradually in man himself. The
savage has little sense of it. It has taken ages
to develop this special response. And yet it
lies in the depth of every soul, and in propor-
tion as that soul moves towards its typal
perfection does the sentiment find amplitude
and volume of expression.
But what, we may again ask, is this response ?
THE WOKLD'S BEAUTY. 51
What is contained in our idea of beautj ? On
this subject philosophers and scientists have
discoursed abundantly from varying standpoints.
Materialists, who have felt themselves here put
on their mettle, have discussed it as an affair
of curves, surfaces and sensory impressions.
Schopenhauer has treated it with a more than
usual exaggeration and incoherence of statement.
When all has been said it remains that tne
recognition of beauty by the mind can be
explained satisfactorily in only one way. The
term we have just used is in itself the key.
Our feeling here is a re-cognition, that is a re-
knowing, a reminder of what the soul already
knows, of what is native to its realm. Schell-
ing is on the track of all this when he treats
of the external world as another expression of
the same eternal Life that finds itself in our
consciousness. The beauty of Nature is the work
of a supreme Artist whose fundamental ideas
are reproduced, however faintly, in our own.
Without such a relationship to begin with there
could be no possible recognition of beauty on
our part. A painter who exhibited his picture
would be astonished to learn that the public
were admiring it on the strength of ideas
entirely foreign to any he had himself put into
52 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
it. The very basis of our comprehension, not to
say appreciation, of a picture's merit lies in the
fellowship of our feeling with that of the artist.
And the law which obtains in the Academy rules,
so far as we can see, through all the worlds.
But we have not nearly exhausted the pro-
blems opened by this theme. Another, and a
by no means simple one, comes up when we
touch the relation of beauty to morality. We
remember once propounding it to a couple of
Anglican clergymen, in whose company we were
watching a gorgeous sunset on the Jungfrau.
"Is there any link -between this splendour and
the beauty of holiness ? Is there any natural
affinity between the grace of sainthood and the
grace of external form ? " The question seemed
new to them, and to be hardly a serious one.
There was an excuse for this attitude, for at
first sight the subjects seem scarcely com-
pressible into the same category. And further
observation appears to add positive reasons
against any such alliance. The sense for
external loveliness has had apparently no con-
nection with high moral character. The ages
in which it has been most conspicuous, as that
of the Greeks under Pericles, and of the
Renaissance in Italy, were conspicuous, we
THE WORLD'S BEAUTT. 53
are told, for their dissoluteness. The artist
world has been generally a Bohemian world.
But statements of this kind need to be taken
with a certain reservation. When we hear
these sweeping verdicts upon certain classes
and periods, we are reminded of Talleyrand's
saying: "H n'y a rien qui s'arrange aussi
facilement que les faits." As to the Italian
Renaissance, let us remember it produced a
remarkable literature devoted to the idealisa-
tion of love and the redemption of it from the
grosser elements. Nor were all its artists
libertines. It produced a Michael Angelo as
well as a Benvenuto Cellini. The designer of
St. Peter's, the painter of the Sistine Chapel,
the writer of the sonnets had artist enough in
him for half a dozen ordinary reputations.
And yet it is he who could say we have it in
one of his letters to his father " It is enough
to have bread and to live in the faith of Christ,
even as I do here, for I live humbly, neither do
I care for the life or honours of this world."
No man in these later ages has had a mind
more teeming with images of immortal beauty
than our own Milton, but " his soul was like a
star and dwelt apart." Our own times have
seen a Wordsworth, a Buskin, a Tennyson,
S
54 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
natures all of them in which the sense of
beauty both in Nature and in art reached its
highest expression, and all of whom found in
it an immediate ally of spiritual perfection.
And when we mention the contrary instances,
what do they prove? Not the immorality,
assuredly, of these men's sense of form, but the
imperfect development of their other senses.
Their report of one portion of God's Palace
Beautiful is not the less accurate that they saw
not the whole of it. That a given musician is a
rake is no evidence that the laws of music which
he obeys are not Divine. He has eyes only
for a piece of Heaven's law, not its wholeness.
The whole argument here, in fact, seems summed
in the nature of Christ. If the Gospels speak
truly there was never a nature that thrilled
more exquisitely to the world's beauty. Yet
never nature set forth so surely God's holiness.
The more comprehensively the subject is
studied the more sure will become our convic-
tion that there is in all beauty an essential
unity of idea whose root is in God. The gran-
deur of great deeds, of great characters, appeals
to the same faculty in us, and stirs the same
emotions as the grandeur of the mountains or
of the sea. If we could realise it as possible
THE WORLD'S BEAUTY. 55
that a pure soul could take form, we feel
instinctively that the form would be beautiful.
How intimate the alliance is shown by the
workings of character upon feature. The
nobler spiritual instincts mould the flesh into
curves of greatness, suffuse it with a glow of
ethereal brightness. As if to put its final seal
upon this view of things, the Bible gives us in
the Apocalypse a series of magnificent con-
ceptions, in which righteousness is clothed with,
and set in the midst of, the utmost perfection
of external splendour. Often separated and
far removed from each other in the earthly
struggle, the two elements are here exhibited
in their true and everlasting union.
The topic as it thus opens is far more than a
merely speculative one. If we admit what has
here been advanced we must admit with it some
important practical consequences. For instance,
the inculcation of righteousness, the preaching
of God's Kingdom, should ever link itself with
the soul's innate sense of beauty. The ugly
may everywhere be left to the devil as his
monopoly. It is curious to note here how the
inmost in man has claimed and gained its rights
in even the most adverse circumstances. In the
barest conventicle and in what has seemed the
56 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
most ostentatious absence of form, wherever
men have been attracted and impressed, it will
be found that they have been reached and held
by their sense of the beautiful. It was the
music of the pleading voice, or the glowing
splendour of the imagery, or the melodious
rhythm of the words, or, deeper even than these,
the feeling that a pure, beautiful soul was here
revealing itself, which drew them. Other
attachments may come later, but these first.
The Divine words of Scripture double their
power upon us when set to great music. " He
shall feed His flock like a Shepherd," gets to
the very roots as it sings through us in Handel's
strains. How perverse, in view of all this, the
avoidance of beauty in our worship as though it
were a snare ! To offer a drab service to Him
who, outside our conventicle, is filling heaven
and earth with the splendour of His handi-
work! It were an appropriate question for
Christian conferences how far the cultivated
youth of our generation have been alienated by
misconceptions of this sort, and what steps can
be taken in the opposite direction to recover the
lost ground. The business of the Christian
persuader is, as a French moralist has said,
" to make truth lovely."
THE WORLD'S BEAUTY. 57
But the subject has a wider bearing than its
application to Sunday and to Church worship.
Our municipal life is as yet only at its begin-
ning. There are a hundred different sides
along which it has to develop, but one of the
greatest and most fruitful will be in its educa-
tion and satisfaction of the public sense of the
beautiful. The mass of English people are
children here where the ancient Greeks were
grown men. One wonders what a cultivated
Athenian would have thought of our black
country ! In coming generations our towns
will be, not an outrage upon Nature, but a
blend with her, a heightening through art of
her primitive graces. And the beauty cultivated
will be that which appeals not only to the eye,
but to the ear also. Why can we not have in
England what one has so often met on the
Continent, where, wandering through some old-
world city, the ear has suddenly been entranced
by delicious choral music, rendered by a mass
of trained citizen voices, while a crowd of their
fellow townsmen, silent, absorbed, drink in the
charmed notes? We shall be making an
approach to the municipal ideal when the
whole civic atmosphere is so penetrated with
high and ennobling influences, with such
58 OuKSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
elements of art and refinement, that the
meanest citizen, by the mere fact of mingling
with it, will find his own life immeasurably
enriched. In these nobler communities of the
future there will be no room for the antithesis
which Plutarch draws between the different
Athenian administrators: "Themistocles, Cimon
and Pericles filled the city with magnificent
buildings, . . . but virtue was the only
object that Aristides had in view." It will be
better than this when virtue blossoms into
beauty as the flower springs from and beautifies
the tree.
To sum up. The belief in beauty is part of
our belief in God. Tke Universe strives after
it as the realisation of His idea. Ugliness is to
be striven against as a frustration of Heaven's
plan. Beauty of character and beauty of form
are essentially allied, and should be striven for
as elements in the wholeness of life. Our com-
munal life should be an intimate, harmonious
blend of the spiritual and the material, each
recognised as a portion of God's holiness.
Their true union will produce a social structure
whose enduring splendour shall be a reflex
of the holy city, the heavenly Jerusalem which
John saw descending out of heaven from God.
YII.
Of Face Architecture.
THE interest in face architecture is, in certain
circles, centred almost exclusively in one
department of it, that of decoration. From
" smart society " emerge from time to time
hints of the ever deepening mysteries of the
lady's dressing-table. Fortune awaits the pro-
ducer of a successful wash or dye or powder.
There are face artists who specialise upon the
lip, the nose, the eye, the eyebrow. There is,
indeed, nothing new in this. The story is as
old as the world. Montaigne gives us astonish-
ing stories of the tortures undergone by ladiea
of his time in the pursuit of beauty. There was
one at Paris who, " to get new skin, endured
having her face flayed." He adds: "I have seen
some swallow gravel, ashes, coals, dust, tallow,
candles, only to get a pale, bleak colour."
Things were as bad evidently in the classic
times. Tibullus has some amusing lines on the
expedients of the Roman ladies for getting rid
60 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
of grey hairs and for the securing of fresh com-
plexions. And ancient Egypt and antique
Babylon were in these respects no whit better.
Outside the circle of beauties, professional
and otherwise, there are other forms of face
architecture, still of the external and decorative
order, that are not without interest. It is a
marvellous gift, which only a fool would despise,
that enables a Macready or an Irving to repro-
duce the living aspect of a Eichard III., to look
on us with the face of Hamlet, to make hate
and love, ferocity and magnanimity, humour
and grief reveal themselves successively
in glance and feature. Great mimicry has its
place and function. But it is horrible out of
place. Cowper has drawn the picture of the
pulpit poseur " who mounts the rostrum with a
skip," and there scans and arranges hair and
feature with a pocket glass. Goethe deals this
performer an even heavier blow when, in the
conversation between Wagner and Faust, to
the former's remark, " A preacher has a good
deal to learn from the actor," Faust replies,
"Yes, when the preacher is simply an actor
himself." There are, however, face arrange-
ments, still only in the region of mere feature
drill, which we regard with a kindlier feeling.
Qv FACE ARCHITECTURE. 61
What a moving passage that where Cicero
describes the " death etiquette " of the gladi-
ator ! " What gladiator, however mediocre,
ever groans ? Who of them ever changes
countenance ? Which of them, when down,
ready to be despatched, as much as draws back
his neck from the stroke ? " It is the demean-
our sought bj the modern army officer, who in
the service books is directed, when his men are
under fire, to keep at the front with an uncon-
cerned air, and if himself struck to fall with as
little noise as possible. A pose this, if you will,
but one worthy of a man.
But these, after all, are only surface views on
the subject of face architecture. It is astonish-
ing, considering the interest people have in such
phases of it, that they do not go a little deeper.
For we are not yet arrived at the real face
artists. To know them and their work is to
know the central powers in heaven and earth.
The human face, in any approach of it to the
ideal, is the greatest creation of time. That
such a result should have been brought out of
man's prehistoric and animal ancestry over-
whelms us with the thought of the measureless
duration, the infinite patience, the unswerving
continuity of Nature's process. Everything
62 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
conceivable of beauty and power is summed up
for us in a great face. Plato saw there tlie
consummation of the moral and the physical.
" All the greatest painting," says Kuskin, " is
of the human face." The true artist always
knows this, and makes the rest of his canvas
an accessory to those two or three inches at the
centre where a living soul looks on us through
luminous eyes. In a picture such as that of
"Christ leaving the Pretorium" we study in
succession the steps, the building, the crowd,
the soldiers as all leading us onward to the
central interest that thorn- crowned face,
marred and worn, on which we could gaze for
ever.
What builds the face? Environment, of
course, for one thing. The degree of latitude
in which a man finds himself not only paints
his complexion, but alters the ground-plan
of his features. America and Australia are
developing each a distinct expression of their
own. Climate, soil, food and occupation among
them have wrought the race physiognomy
which separates Turanian from Semite and
Aryan from Negro. Buckle and his school
have sought to make this the whole explana-
tion. Give them these factors and they will
OF FACE ARCHITECTURE. 63
manufacture our whole man for us, face and
all. But their easy induction does not satisfy
the deeper thought of to-day. Humanity, it is
being discovered, cannot be reckoned up in
terms of a rule-of -three sum. We have not
yet reached our real face-builder.
As we traverse that unrivalled picture-gallery
the open street, and study what we find there,
we get the certainty that what has made the
faces here is not so much the force without as
the force within. We are in the presence of
spirits who are the true artists of feature.
Charles Kingsley has somewhere a quaint
sentence in which he speaks of the soul secret-
ing the body as a crustacean secretes its shell.
It exaggerates, doubtless, but the truth lies on
that line. If we try to be materialists on this
point, our very language turns upon us. What
do we mean when we speak of " a pure face " ?
Nothing that can be expressed in terms of flesh
and blood. What was it that Charles Lamb
saw on the countenances of the Quaker ladies
on their way to the Bishopsgate meeting, making
them "as troops of shining ones"? Very
much, we suppose, like the something that
people saw on the face of St. Yincent de Paul,
and which transfigured features that were in
64 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
themselves homely to ugliness. It was the
gleam of the supernatural in man, the
shining through mortal flesh of a sun behind
the sun.
This is the highest beauty of the world.
There are faces that are gospels, and there is
only one way of making them. They shine
along the course of Christian history as no-
where else. It was such a face as looked upon
England at the close of the fourteenth century
from over the emaciated form of John Wycliffe.
We do not wonder that, as his disciple, John
Thorpe, says, " Very many of the chief men of
this kingdom frequently held counsel with him,
were devotedly attached to him, and guided
themselves by his manner of life." There was
a sunshine here, they realised, which savoured
of another summer than England's June could
create. It has been so with all the great souls.
To look at these faces people have made
pilgrimages and endured all manner of priva-
tions. We feel what throbbed in the heart of
Peter the Venerable when, writing to Bernard,
he declares : " If it were permitted to me, and
if God willed it, I should prefer to live with
you and be attached to you by an indissoluble
tie, than to be first among mortals and to sit
OP FACE ARCHITECTURE. 65
on a throne." We do not know what the
features were of Macrina, the sister of Basil,
and of Gregory of Nyssa. But we know the
kind of light that shone through them when we
read what they say of her, how she woke the
one " as out of a deep sleep to the true light of
the Gospel," and excited in the other an affec-
tion so deep that, as he tells us, " when they
had buried her body he kissed the earth of her
grave."
It is this mystery of the face and what is
behind it, that has set Christian minds in every
age wondering what were the lines of that
Galilean countenance, the radiance from which
has made another and a higher daylight for the
world. Beneath the dust that covers old-world
cities are lying, perhaps, precious memorials
that may yet be unearthed. Who knows that
we may not yet recover the statue of Christ
that Eusebius saw at Caesarea Philippi, or some
of those portraits of the Master which he had
also seen? Which tradition of the face was
the true one, that followed by Justin Martyr,
by Clement of Alexandria and by Tertullian,
which spoke of it as " without form or comeli-
ness " ; or that of Jerome and Augustine, which
declared it divinely beautiful ? It may be both
6
66 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVEBSE.
are true. We are sure, at least, of the latter.
With a possible homeliness, or even rugged-
ness, of outline there shone through a trans-
figuring splendour which awed and fascinated.
Christ's " Follow Me " conquered men not
so much by the words as by the look that
accompanied.
When we now ask again how the great faces
arise we seem nearer the answer. They are
reflections of faces that belong to another
world. Behind the fleshly face is the soul's
face. And the soul's face is a great spiritual
absorbent. As plants spread their surface to
the sun and drink in the rays that beat upon
them, transforming all into life and beauty, so
in these natures the spiritual upper surface
along its whole length and breadth, is open to
the impact of pulsations emanating incessantly
from the Centre by which all souls live. And
not one of these pulsations is lost. It is woven
into the structure of the soul and reflected in
its expression. The face becomes thus a
register of the life we are living. It is the
book in which our history is written, a faithful
record, with no item omitted, and which, to eyes
deeply enough initiated, can be read clear from
end to end.
OP FACE ARCHITECTURE. 67
A topic like this teems with practical lessons.
The Church should be a great face builder. It
has been in the past, but it needs to study its
models afresh. Historical Christianity has
developed face types that were never in the
world before. The spiritual riches to which it
has introduced humanity have translated them-
selves into new glances of the eye, into fresh,
beautiful harmonisations of feature. But its
artistry here has not been always of the best.
By crude, at times terrible, misrepresentations
of Divine things, it has created the morbid face
and the fanatic face ; it has overspread honest
features with the gloom of religious melan-
cholia. Religion must have done with this
business. Its work is to weave brightness into
human souls. Let us take to heart this saying
of Robert Louis Stevenson: "In my view one
dark dispirited word is harmful, a crime of
lese humanite, a piece of acquired evil ; every
bright word or picture, like every pleasant air
of music, is a piece of pleasure set afloat."
Fathers and mothers are perhaps here the most
potent workers in humanity's church. It is
theirs to mould their children's faces into the
comeliness wrought by high thought and noble
inspirations. Goodness is the beginning of
68 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
beauty. Young spirits growing in an atmo-
sphere of true thinking and true feeling are all
unconsciously being penetrated by harmonies
which shape their nature into ideal forms.
And with an eye thus upon others we are to
look also to ourselves. A hundred artists
within and without are at work upon our
feature and expression, but it is from us they
take their orders. The question as to how joy,
grief, gains, losses, the shocks of change and
fortune are to use their graving tools, depends
on the instructions we give them. For no
event is wholly outward or has an existence
in itself. Its whole colour and aspect are
derived from the soul on which it strikes. To
be crucified is one thing to a thief, a wholly
other thing to a Christ. If we accept all life
as a process for the building of the soul, we
shall find in the end that the process has been
a double one. For with the building of souls
there has been also the building of bodies. Not
these of flesh through which the soul faintly
shines, but spiritual ones, fit for immortal life.
And to these shall be given the vision of that
Model after which all their Divine lineaments
have been fashioned. " For they shall see His
face, and His name shall be in their foreheads,"
VIII.
Westward of Fifty.
A FAMILIAR line of pulpi^ exhortation is that
which regards our present life as a preparation,
good or bad, for a future and invisible one.
"What we do here and now will enormously
affect what we become yonder and then. It
would be fully as much to the point, and with
some minds even more efficacious, if, in this
view of life as a preparation, the preacher at
times, for a change, confined himself to our
visible career. The region lying westward of
fifty is one which we shall all traverse if we
live long enough, and it is a doctrine against
which no sceptic voice can be raised that our
experiences there will be largely a reaping of
what, in, the earlier period, we have sown.
That a successful sowing is not too easy is
evident from the failures that are everywhere
apparent. How frequent and disastrous these
failures are is perhaps best illustrated by
the bad repute which old age has fallen
70 OUKSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
into, both in literature and in the popular
imagination.
There have been philosophers, such as Plato
in the remote distance and Fontenelle nearer
at hand, who have glorified age as life's
happiest time, but the general verdict has
seemed otherwise. The early world as a whole
regarded the post-youth period almost with a
shudder. A line in Mimnermus tells us that
" when the appointed time of youth is past it
is better to die forthwith than to live."
Anacreon the joyous, the poet of love and
wine, finds nothing in the last stage but the
sense of privation and the prospect of dread
Avernus. Horace, his Latin counterpart, sends
across his past the futile prayer, " Oh ! that
Jove would restore to me the years that are
gone ! " Montaigne, who considered himself
old at fifty-four, declared that "old age set
more wrinkles on the spirit than on the face."
Even Wordsworth, with his immense spiritual
insight, seems afraid of life's second half.
The poet, he found, did not usually fare well
in it.
We poets begin our life in gladness,
But thereof comes in the end satiety and madness.
And there is perhaps nowhere in literature a
WESTWARD OP FIFTY. 71
more vivid picture of desolation than that of
his ' ' Small Celandine " as an image of life's
helpless last stage, with these mournful lines
for an ending :
Oh, man ! that from thy fair and shining youth,
Age might but take the things youth needed not.
And there is undoubtedly a great deal, and
that not merely on the surface, that appears
to back up this indictment. Age is in a sense
a decline, a failure, a disease, which no
medicine can cure. Old Eoger Bacon's curious
"Libellus de Eetardandis Senectutis Acci-
dentibus," in the various means it proposes for
resisting the advance of the enemy, holds out
no hope of finally driving him off. On one
great side of our life, whatever our earlier
precautions and preparations, we are, after
fifty, certainly on the down-grade. We have
ceased to be athletes. We can no longer draw
on unlimited physical reserve. The sensualist
must, with however bad a grace, give up his
nuits blanches. He finds himself, in fact,
disagreeably occupied with the bill for them,
long deferred, and with a prodigious interest
charged, which Nature is now presenting him.
He would sympathise heartily with the senti-
72 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVEKSE.
ment of a law lord of the last century whose
riotous youth had brought him gout in the later
years, when, apostrophising his afflicted ex-
tremities, he cried, " Confound the legs ! If
I had known they were to carry a Lord Chan-
cellor I would have taken better care of
them ! "
But that is not all, nor perhaps the worst. It
is brought as one of the fatal accusations
against the post-fifty period that it lacks
interest. A man has by that time, maybe,
gained a fortune to discover that the pleasures
he hoped to purchase with it have ceased to be
pleasures. A deadly monotony has set in. We
have got to the bottom of things, have seen the
whole show and begin to find it wearisome.
This note, supposedly a modern one, is really
nothing of the kind. The whole flavour of the
sentiment had been tasted nigh two millenniums
ago by Marcus Aurelius. "A little while,"
says he, "is enough to view the world in, for
things are repeated and come over again apace.
It signifies not a farthing whether a man stands
gazing here a hundred, or a hundred thousand
years, for all he gets by it is to see the same sights
so much the oftener." It is the unhappiness
of some men at this period to find in Nature's
WESTWARD OP FIFTY. 73
freshest products nothing new or inspiring.
Goethe, in one of his autobiographical notes,
remarks of a contemporary that " he saw with
vexation the green of spring and wished that
by way of change it might once appear red."
The German would have found a sympathiser in
our "Walter Pater who, it is recorded, regarded
it as an annual affliction to have to " look upon
the raw greens of spring."
But there is even worse than this. Some
physiologists and some psychologists have not
hesitated to maintain that there is a decay of
moral enthusiasm in life's after period which
renders the average man after middle age less
ethically valuable. And any one wishing to
maintain this thesis need not lack evidence.
History is full of stories of a youth of high
moral promise dashed by the later years. Had
Henry VIII. died young he would have appeared
in our annals as a hero instead of a monster.
Nero, when the pupil of Seneca, had excellent
inspirations. In reading Plutarch's life of
Alexander one is struck with his deterioration
of character, from the earlier warmth and
generosity to that later caprice and cruelty
which showed in his alienation from Aristotle,
and in the murder of his old friends Clitus and
74 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
Parmenio. The " religious rogue " of modern
times is commonly a man who unscrupulously
exploits the confidence secured to him by a
profession which in his earlier days had
sincerity behind it. The inner deterioration
experienced by some men in their later life
was expressed in somewhat startling fashion to
the present writer, years ago, by a noted
minister of religion of his day. "It is you
young men," said he, " who must start the new
ventures. It is no use looking to us old fellows,
who believe in nothing and nobody ! "
All this is evidence of something being
seriously wrong somewhere. To declare half
of our life to be necessarily a failure is to
bring an indictment against life altogether.
As it stands, the indictment suggests one of
two alternatives. Either the order of the
universe which ordains old age is faulty, or
the failure lies in our interpretation of, and
obedience to, that order. The matter is not
cleared, but still further complicated by a
Church teaching, for centuries in vogue, which
has depreciated the present earthly life, with
its old age included, in favour of a future life
elsewhere. It is astonishing that Christian
teachers have not more generally seen the
WESTWARD OP FIFTY. 75
falseness of this view. To put the " now " and
" here " of earth in such complete opposition
to the " then " and " there " of heaven is
to endeavour to extract from time and place
what they were never intended to yield. If
the life in God, the satisfying life as revealed
in and by Christ, cannot be lived here and
now, it can be lived nowhere and nowhen.
We come back, then, to our opening sugges-
tion, in which the view of life as a probation
is taken in the sense that the after part reaps
what the earlier part has sown. The failure,
where failure there is, lies not in the game, but
in our way of playing it. Properly understood
and followed, the human career, if we interpret
it rightly, should to its very end be full of
freshness and benediction. The whole business
resolves itself into the question whether life's
after part is to be considered by us as a decline
or as part of a growth. To point to physical
and even to some aspects of mental deterioration
as evidence that it is a decay is, be it here ob-
served, quite beside the mark. Decay is always
going on somewhere, in every part of the
career. The foetus life in some of its aspects
perishes when the child is born. Infancy and
adolescence have severally their growth, cul-
76 OUESELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
mination and ending as the boy pushes on to-
wards the man. The whole point lies in what
we are thinking of when we talk about life's
decline. If it be physical powers and enjoy-
ments, or even some forms of mentality, there
is no possible controversy, for no one disputes
the facts. Unquestionably if this is all man is
or has, the pessimists are right, and his later
life is a pitiable business, about which the less
said the better.
But may we not see in Nature's blunt exhibi-
tion of the failure of this side of old age in
this thrusting of it in all its nakedness before
our eyes her effort to awaken us to a deeper
conception ? It is, indeed, only in the light of
that conception that it becomes to us at all
intelligible. But in that light everything
assumes a new aspect. Man appears to us at
this period as a being full of desires and thirsts
which the world he has passed through no
longer attempts to satisfy, to which the organs
of sense fail to respond, for which nothing that
is of the seen or of the flesh is an answer.
This unquenched desire, if it be not a mockery,
is surely for him the greatest of prophecies.
Naked indeed is he, if there be not an invisible
with which he is being clothed upon ! Dying
WESTWARD OP FIFTY. 77
also, but if he be awake to the proper signifi-
cance of himself, he will realise now that what
in him is dying is no more his truest and deep-
est than was the passing away in him of the
child when he became a man.
It is well to persuade ourselves, and the
sooner in life the better, that there is no possi-
ble way of making our " after middle age " a
success except this one of accepting ourselves
as in this world mainly and ultimately for
spiritual growth. It is this only which will
save that after period from monotony. And it
does save it most effectually. Aurelius is
wrong here. We do not see the same show over
again. As our inner nature opens our world
becomes ever more beautiful, more mystically
inspired. If each new spring does not bring us
a deeper message it is because we have been
neglecting our inner life. To the growing soul
the world is ever miraculously renewing itself.
Our fellow-men grow always dearer to us,
always more interesting. And how much more
interesting does God become !
It is this principle alone, too, which preserves
from age's otherwise inevitable moral wastage.
If we do not take faith's leap and " catch on "
to life's higher order we shall certainly develop
78 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
the " moral wrinkles " of which Montaigne
speaks. But let no one believe in any psycho-
logical necessity here. Paul and Augustine,
John Wesley and Catherine Booth did not
grow worse as they grew older; they grew
better ; they ripened. And when with some of
these, a period has been reached in which the
desire to remain longer in the world has visibly
lessened, this means, not a diminishing of in-
terest in life, but a preparedness for the next
evolution of it.
As years assist
Which wear the thickness thin, and let man see,
such spirits gain so ravishing a sense of that
" life beyond the bridge " that they long to join
themselves unto it.
IX.
The Art of Happiness.
IT is something, as a start in the world, to be
convinced on good grounds that the Ordainer
of our life on this planet intended joy as one of
its chief products. That it means other things
service, sacrifice, education, development,
probation, as well as a thousand aims beyond
our ken we may well believe. But one of its
governing designs is the joy of living. If there
is proof of anything there is proof of that. It
peeps out of every detail of the scheme. The
material for enjoyment is so inwrought into the
world's constitution that we cannot put a spade
into the ground anywhere without turning it
up. Men reach joy by the most diverse roads.
By travel, by staying at home ; by working, by
resting ; by strain of the muscle or strain of
the mind; by speech, by silence; by solitude,
by society; by helping, by being helped; by
receiving, by giving. One could go, indeed,
through almost every process of life and find a
80 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
pleasure as its result. We enjoy as we eat and
drink, as we open our eyes upon the world, as
we swing our limbs in the walk down the road.
If we ask why it is that a rose should ravish us
with its perfume and feed our artistic sense
with its beauty of form ; that the fresh breeze
should be a delight and not a pain to breathe ;
that the vision of a countryside makes the
heart leap within us there seems only one
answer. The outer has been fitted to our inner
with a direct view to these results. Human
delight, and not human only but that of all
living creatures, is one at least of the world's
ultimate ends.
The happiness idea, while so deeply inter-
fused into the constitution of nature, is seated
even more deeply in the heart of man. It is
touching, and at the same time most suggestive,
to see how youth always and everywhere believes
in it. An Amiel, when he is forty, may talk of
hopes disappointed and of the future as a
dreary prospect, but not even an Amiel can do
that at twenty. That primal instinct for happi-
ness, reborn in each generation, means much.
It is not only a thirst but a promise. What is
in humanity first as a desire comes out
eventually as a result, Man believes in joy
THE AET OF HAPPINESS. 81
even when he is sorrowing. " Est qusedam flere
voluptas " (There is a certain pleasure even in
weeping), said a master of the science of human
nature. Even when nursing their spleen people
are, in a way, enjoying themselves. When
Burton sings,
All my joys to this are folly,
Nought so sweet as melancholy,
he is simply indicating one of those strange
involutions of the human spirit by which it
tastes a happiness in what seems its opposite.
But the happiness material, as we have said,
requires extracting, and for this there are some
rules. One might call them simple were it not
that such multitudes of clever people fail in
applying them. It is indeed the cleverness,
apart from wisdom, that has so often sophisti-
cated man out of his joy. In nine cases out of
ten where he is miserable it is because he has
allowed his imagination to play tricks with him.
It has, for one thing, darkened his world with
false religions and malignant demons. Strange,
that in a universe which smiled so kindly on
him he could have imagined an Enthroned
Cruelty as its author. The perversity seems
the greater when we find ethnology digging up
6
82 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
from all parts of the globe evidence of a primi-
tive tradition which, amidst the most savage
tribes, recognised the Creator as righteous and
beneficent. Stranger still that this perverse
rendering should have been permitted to distort
even the Christian Gospel, and to make, even
in our day, its life-scheme so forbidding that a
divine of the last generation could suggest it as
an improvement that the whole human race
should die off at the age of four years ! When
Athenagoras, the Greek Father, argued that the
heathens' practice of self-torture to propitiate
their divinities was evidence of the false origin
of their religion, he could hardly have antici-
pated that Christianity itself was to produce a
similar teaching, and on the largest scale. Yet
so it is, and as a result men have to be retaught
their inheritance; to learn over again their right
to the natural human joys ; to cease to tremble
as they sit at life's feast. They have not even
yet full confidence that to really enjoy it is to
please God and not to anger Him.
It is not enough, however, for happiness to
have got rid of these spectres of the dark. The
soul must in some positive directions be trained
to enjoy. It must, for one thing, learn to be
simple. The art of being happy is the art of
THE ART OP HAPPINESS. 83
discovering the depths that lie in the daily
common things. Delight in the simple is the
finest result of culture. The animal exhilara-
tion which the child has in exercise and the
fresh air and the sense of life becomes in the
trained soul a so much deeper, subtler thing.
It ravishes with a sense of something behind.
One is intoxicated with the feeling which a
modern mystic has expressed when he says, " I
see, smell, taste, hear, feel that Everlasting
Something to which we are allied, at once our
Maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves.'*
This training is, we say, a training in simplicity.
It indisposes us to rush after the extraordinary,
the so-called magnificences of life. It leads us
more and more in the way of the common, and
to the deeper appreciation of what is there. It
sets us longing not so much for the sensation
of the millionaire as he shows his new palace,
as for that of a Wordsworth, or a Kuskin, as,
on a spring morning, they contemplate a green-
ing tree. This delight has its guaranteed
security in the fact that the materials for it
the common things that, looked into, transform
themselves into heavenly wonders and mysteries
are here all around us, filling every inch of
space and every moment of time. The man of
84 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
simple mind, of purged eye and pure heart,
walks daily wrapt in the consciousness of being
in the midst of a universe divinely beautiful,
and which is all his.
It is another facet of the same idea to say
that the secret of the joy of living is the proper
appreciation of what we actually possess. That
kingdom of the unpossessed for which we so
foolishly thirst is not half so good as this of
what we have. A child sobs with grief over
the toy that is broken, and is not comforted by
the thought of all its glorious assets of youth,
and health and coming years. It has not got
the thought. We who are older are often hardly
wiser. Coningsby, in Disraeli's novel, when
bemoaning the loss of a fortune, is asked by his
friend to remember that he has still left him
the use of his limbs. It is an excellent sug-
gestion, and to be taken in all seriousness. In
our moments of spleen there is no better
exercise than to reckon up as against our
losses the things that remain. When we have
fairly understood the worth of our personal
gifts ; what it means to be able to swing along
in careless freedom of limb, to open clear eyes
upon the world's beauty, to eat with appetite,
to reason, to remember, to imagine, instead of
THE ART OP HAPPINESS. 85
being reduced to the privation of these things,
we find we are rich where we thought ourselves
poor. The worst is where we lightly value our
wealth in love. Multitudes of us are fuming
in a false sense of poverty when close at home
are faithful hearts that, if taken from us, as
they might be next week, would leave a void
that not the wealth of Indies would fill. We
are only poor by thinking ourselves so. It is,
in fact, our perverse thinking that every day
makes fools of us.
As our life studies proceed we discover the
infinite complexities, the depths beneath deeps,
that enter into the happiness of a growing
soul. With increasing capacity it strikes ever
grander chords, uni 1 its experiences are, as to
the surface pleasures, what a Beethoven sonata
is to a ditty of the music-hall. The Gospel
account of Jesus stands out here as the typical,
highest example. In the beginning was the
exquisite joy of a pure heart in the presence of
nature, when the flowers and the birds pro-
claimed the goodness of the Father. At the
end this soul, ever learning and growing, had
reached a capacity such that the Cross, striking
full upon it, evoked only a deeper harmony.
The joy which, at the Supper, Jesus offered His
86 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
disciples, was richer than that of the Sermon
on the Mount. And this marvel has continued.
Men have learned from Christ how to find joy
in pain ; how to be happy when suffering and
dying. It was not vain boasting nor an unreal
idealisation, but the statement of plain facts
when Minutius Felix, speaking of the martyrs
of his time, could say, " God's soldier is neither
forsaken in suffering nor brought to an end by
death. Boys and young women among us
treat with contempt crosses and tortures, wild
beasts and all the bugbears of punishment,
with the inspired patience of suffering." In
our own day we read of Bushnell that " even
his dying was play to him." Such histories
are the supreme proof that, to the soul that
learns, life at what seems its darkest and its
worst, is realised as infinitely worth living.
Courage, then, in the gloomy day. " If winter
comes can spring be far behind ? "
Bo our joy three parts pain,
Strive and hold cheap the strain,
Learn, nor account the pang ; dare, never grudge the
throe!
The Mission of Illusion.
AMONGST the subjects which no Christian
teacher of to-day can afford to ignore is that of
illusion and the part it plays in life and religion.
It is a matter that will not be burked, and all
who in any way stand for the interests of
faith have to make up their minds upon it. To
the present generation it is becoming in-
creasingly clear that many things which it had
been accustomed to regard as religious fact are
really not so, and the revelation is one full of
danger to the inner life unless its actual
significance is fully explained. The Church
has been, in a sense, brought up on illusions, and
the plain man who is just becoming conscious
of this, is shocked at the discovery. His first
impulse is to cry " Treachery ! " Religion has
betrayed him; the teacher has proved false,
and is therefore no longer to be regarded.
What he here evidently needs is a doctrine of
illusion which shall remove his misapprehen-
88 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
sions and put him at his ease in the new situa-
tion. He has to learn that, as the French
Joubert tersely puts it, " Illusions come from
heaven, errors come from ourselves." In other
words, the existence of illusion in life and
religion, is no betrayal, but one of the Divine
ordinances for the education of humanity. It
works by ascertainable laws, and its operations,
when understood, are seen to be wholly benefi-
cent.
The law of illusion is written broadly on
every department of life. Children live in a
world of make-believe, and Nature's method
with the young people here has been her way
with man as a whole. Truth is one of her
goals for him, but she is in no hurry to get him
there. She is content, in the earlier stages of
his development, to fit him out with rudimen-
tary and provisional ideas, adequate to his
growth and requirements at any given stage,
but to be replaced by broader ones when the
time for them comes. He lives at first in a
fancy world where his senses trick him at every
turn. They give him what seem facts as to
the relation of the earth to the heavens, as to
the sun's motion, the blue of the sky, the
nature and number of the elements, all of which
THE MISSION OP ILLUSION. 89
turn out afterwards to be illusions. And are
we sure even that a large part of the so-called
scientific perception of the universe of the
present day will not, in its turn, prove to be
illusion ? At best our theories are a series of
working hypotheses which may turn out to be
quite incorrectly based. We are, for instance,
resting everything on an atomic theory, without
knowing anything as to the interior nature of
the atom, or how it came to be there at all. And
when our knowledge has reached its utmost
bound it will, after all, be an affair only of our
particular perceptive faculties. We shall, as
Fichte says, go on always making our own
world. We can say nothing as to ultimate
existence except that, as Spinoza has put it,
" things must exist, not only in the manner in
which they are manifested to us, but in every
manner which infinite understanding can
conceive."
With illusion playing this part in the
broadest realms of life it would be surprising
if its law should be abrogated in any one
sphere of it, such as that of religion. As a
matter of fact, we find it in full play there, and
it is high time that we gave to its operations
the recognition they demand. The successive
90 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
cults of fetichisin, of star worship and of
polytheism, by which man arrived ultimately at
monotheism, have been the differing vessels
which in turn have held the treasure of his
growing spiritual life. When these prepara-
tory ideas had served their turn, the force
which developed them provided for their decay.
The soul, like the body, has an apparatus of
decay which works as surely as its apparatus
of growth. By a process which nothing can stop
it separates, excretes and rids itself of, every
element that has ceased to be of use. The
efforts of a Julian to resuscitate the Roman
paganism were powerless, though he had the
force of an Empire at his back. Paganism
passed because its hour had come.
Theology has been excessively reluctant to
admit the working of this law in the Church,
but the fact of it can no longer be denied.
What we now discover is that the Christian
consciousness that forms the Church's life has
had successive coatings of ideas which it
perpetually outgrows and casts aside. The
reservoir of living water has had the roughest
material for its embankment. The early
Church was cradled in illusions. Whether it
looked before or behind it met the mirage. It
THE MISSION OP ILLUSION. 91
looked behind to a view of the Old Testament
which we now smile at. Many of the Fathers
readily accept the view that Ezra miraculously
restored the books of the Hebrew Scriptures
that had been lost during the exile, as well as
the story of the miracle by which, in the trans-
lation of the Septuagint, the seventy elders,
shut up in separate cells, wrote each one of
them exactly the same words. In its forward
look the first Christian community had a
similar experience. It is pathetic for us, as
we gaze back from our far-off standpoint, to
observe the absolute confidence of those early
forecasts and the way in which events have
contradicted them; to see how, in succession,
now a Justin Martyr, now an Irenaeus, now
a Tertullian and a Cyprian, and anon a
Jerome and an Augustine, find in the state of
the world around them the sure signs of the
Advent and the world's end. In all this they
were wrong ; but what then ? Was their
religion one whit less centrally true or Divine
because contained in this framework of primi-
tive ideas ? Their religion was not in that
framework, but in the fact that the love of
Christ constrained them ; that their hearts
had been filled by Him with the passion for
92 OURSELVES AtfD THE
holiness; that His infinite pity for all who
suffered and were needy wrought in them.
Here was the evidence both of its truth and of
its divinity. The evolution of its ideas could
in the meantime take care of itself.
To-day we have to recognise that a certain
portion of the Church creeds were wrought in
an atmosphere of illusion. They were con-
structed to the scale of a pettier universe than
that to which we now know ourselves to
belong. The creeds are, for one thing,
geocentric. They conceive the earth as
central, with heaven and hell as adjunct
and completion. They are unreal to a view
which regards our planet as a dust speck in
the infinity of the worlds.
At contra nusquam apparent Acberusia templa.
Jacob's ladder no longer reaches to the sky.
The heavens have removed far off and become
astronomical. In short, the concepts which
presided over the Church creeds represent, in
the language of a recent writer, " undeveloped
science, imperfect philosophy and perverted
notions of history." They will have to be
revised. Their view of Christianity is steadily
giving way in the minds of men to one more in
THE MISSION OF ILLUSION, 93
accord with the laws that govern the outside
universe and the evolution of the human soul.
What then ? Will this march away from
the earlier illusions lead Christian people to a
barer pasturage for the spirit ? Will their
religion be poorer for the change in some
of its surrounding ideas ? The previous
history of the human movement should be
enough to reassure us on this point. What
man has found hitherto is that the new
reality which he reaches is always greater and
more satisfying than the old illusion which it
displaces. The tiny Cosmos of the ancients
was not to be compared in grandeur with that
which modern astronomy and geology have dis-
closed. And if this be so with the external
world the whole analogy of things suggests
that in like manner will it be with the inner
and spiritual world. We shall not go forward
in every other department to go backward
here. The new concepts which, in our escape
from earlier illusions, we are gaining as to the
origin and nature of Christianity will be more
sublime and more religiously effective than
those earlier ones, as they will offer an exacter
and more satisfying relation to life's infinite
whole. We shall advance, as Goethe says,
94 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
" from a Christianity of words to a Christianity
of feeling and action." And as the investiga-
tions of science disclose to us an external nature
which becomes more and more immeasurable
to the view, so the sense of religion as it
develops will reveal ever wider spheres in
which love and faith and holiness may grow
and expatiate.
There is another side of the mission of
illusion which we can none of us afford to
ignore. It is that of its relation to our
personal life. Illusion is the charm and
poetry of the soul, as well as one of its
most effective inspirations. Children live in
its enchanted realm, and if we are wise, we
who are older will often take up our abode
there, too. It is a trick of the present
writer, of which he is willing to make a
present to his readers, when at a concert where
the highest music is provided, to enhance the
enjoyment by the simple process of shutting
his eyes and imagining himself in his own
room, and this glorious feast to be an im-
promptu serenade under his windows. By
getting rid, in this way, of the claims of ex-
pectation, and allowing everything to come as
a surprise, one has doubled the delight. It is
THE MISSION OF ILLUSION. 95
by illusion also that Nature gets her biggest
things out of us. Young men set off on hardy
adventures of campaign or of travel with an
idea of accompanying pleasure or profit which
in nine cases out of ten will not be realised.
But they will have done something for their
own and the world's furtherance, which
otherwise would not have been done. A
lad's notion of his own powers, and of his
future, is half illusion. But what power
he does exercise, and what future he will
secure, are owing largely to that illusion.
Under this rainbow arch men and women
walk together to marriage and the found-
ing of homes. Nature smiles at their ideas
while securing, at their expense, the harvest
of her own.
Yet is her smile, while carrying in it a trace
of irony, ever benevolent. From passion's
illusion, by which hearts seem often so cruelly
beguiled, come results better than the dream,
though so different from it. The family life,
consisting often of hard enough realities, will
leave higher effects upon character than the
sentimental raptures which preceded it. And
its disappointments and sorrows show illusion
as one of the great training forces of the
96 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
human spirit. It is by the contrast here
forced on us between earth's promises and
their fulfilment that it urges on the soul,
as by an inner necessity, to seek finally
its peace in those imperishables which do
not betray.
XI.
The Soul's Voice.
ONE of the greatest events in the history of
this planet was the beginning upon it of arti-
culate speech. Evolution has, as yet, attained
no greater triumph than in this discovery of
soul to soul by the fitting of thought to sound.
How it came about we know not, though
science is ever groping towards some answer to
the problem. Animals, we know, have their
signal codes. In Africa lions hunt in concert
and send message notes to each other as they
tighten their cordon round the game. The
chatter of apes is being spoken of as a rudi-
mentary language, and attempts even are being
made to translate it. Human speech began
probably in similar humble fashion, but its
destinies were magnificent. In the process of
its development we cannot say what was the
order of co-operation, how far the struggling
soul shaped its organ of expression, or how the
perfecting of the organ gave new capacity to
7
98 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
the soul. May be that our poet Spenser is
mainly right in his Platonic affirmation,
Of soule the bodie forrae doth take,
For soule is form and doth the bodie make.
But how the mere effort of the inner life
wrought to the shaping and refining of the
vocal machinery up to the present range and
delicacy is as great a mystery as is that of its
present use. Have we ever properly considered
this latter mystery ; of how at any moment our
intellect, our emotions, our will establish them-
selves at our vocal chords and, without the
slightest hesitation, strike the exact combina-
tion of them they want, and set them vibrat-
ing to precisely the needed pitch; and how
thus the complex of our inmost soul, made into
a sound, discharges in this fashion its full con-
tent into another soul ?
Questions of this sort meet us at the threshold
of our topic, but it is not on their account that
we have introduced it. There are matters con-
nected with the soul's voice that touch us more
nearly than do the purely scientific problems
connected with it. How closely the voice and
that realm of harmony to which it is related lie
to the innermost of man's moral and spiritual
THE SOUL'S VOICE. 99
life was a point very early discerned. Plato
exhibits its full significance when in the
" Republic " he speaks of rhythm and harmony
as entering into the deepest parts of the soul,
and declares that "by the educated sense of
harmony we learn to discern between the good
and the base, the ugly and the beautiful in all
things." Euskin endorses the doctrine when
he reminds us that " all the greatest music is
by the human voice," and that "with the
Greeks the God of music was also the God of
righteousness."
It is worth trying to discover what precisely
these ideas amount to. That which Plato, in
his doctrine of music, seems mainly to convey
was that rhythm and harmony of sound, how-
ever produced, have a marvellous parallel with
man's inner states ; that music, like the soul,
can be gay, frivolous, wrathful; or solemn,
serene, ecstatic ; that man's heights and depths,
his greatness and his littleness, can be inter-
preted for him and realised in him through
sound. But there is more than that. The
relation of sound to our deepest life is not fairly
got at till we study a certain phenomenon in
speech, not too often met with, but which,
where it is, leaves ever its own unmistakable
100 OuBSELVES AND TflE
impression. When we have discussed the
quality of a voice as tested by the usual
standards ; when its powers have been registered
by the singer, the elocutionist, or the actor,
has all been said? The range they cover is
immense, but there is an element of voice
possibility which they have not touched and
never can. It is the element, unique and
indefinable, that is furnished by the size and
the stirring of the soul behind.
It is not in life's ordinary intercourse that we
catch this note. The voice is employed for the
most part in doing the mind's hack work. It
retails the news, discusses questions of fact or
of logic, expresses in its different registers the
usual day-by-day emotions, and all this without
any unlocking of its secret doors. But those
doors sometimes do open, and a breath from
within, of something mysterious, unearthly,
passes into the tone. The speaker whose utter-
ance is of life's weightier matters knows per-
fectly the experience. At times his voice has
handed out what he had to say mechanically,
by a hard, pumping process, each sentence, as
it were, with a separate stroke of the handle
so much fact, so much argument, and there an
end. At another time his vocal organs, utter-
THE SOUL'S VOICE. 101
ing, it may be, almost the same words, are
thrilling with vibrations from an unseen source ;
each note has its myriad overtones, spirit echoes,
as it were, of what is said. The man's voice is
the instrument of a new music; his soul is
speaking, stirred in its turn by an Oversoul
mightier than itself. Socrates was describing
this note when he spoke of being, in his words,
" moved by a Divine and spiritual influence."
It thrilled at times in the utterance of Newman.
It was this which was felt in the words of Keble
when, as Thomas Mozley says of them, " they
seemed to come from a different and holier
sphere." When the Jewish people said of the
words of Jesus, "Never man spake like this
man," the reference, we may be sure, was not
merely to the meaning conveyed. There was the
impression also of the unfathomable soul that
uttered them, and that lived in the tone, satur-
ating it with its mystic essence. Between words
spoken by one man and the same words uttered
by another, what a gulf ! It is the difference
in size of the one soul behind as compared with
that of the other. All which may be summed
up in a word, to wit, that no one has discovered
the capabilities of his voice till he has dis-
covered the capabilities of his soul.
102 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
It is worth while reading history just for the
purpose of discovering this magnificent spiritual
note as it from time to time breaks in upon the
human concert. There are periods when every-
thing appears drowned in dissipation and folly,
when human speech is a mere chatter, and the
deeper man seems dead. Suddenly there breaks
upon the air the indescribable vibrant tone. A
voice sounds through the night, as the Latin
poet says, " declaring immortal things in human
speech," and the soul of every man within
him trembles in response. Terrena ccelestibus
cedunt. It is felt that a prophetic word has
been spoken, that the deepest essence of the
age, its whole inner burden of feeling, aspira-
tion and desire has uttered itself in this cry and
has delivered therein its spiritual testimony.
It was precisely in this that Luther, as Harnack
in his fine study of him has shown, was the
prophet of the Western world in the sixteenth
century. What filled his voice with a power
beyond words was the soul behind, fired with a
new consciousness of God. No man need pose
as a prophet unless that tone is singing in him.
When it is there he is not to be stopped though,
as the aforesaid Dr. Martin once himself de-
clared, it " should rain devils for seven days."
THE SOUL'S VOICE. 103
Wonderful and awe-inspiring as are the
effects when the soul comes thus into human
speech, uttering itself to the world, not less so
are they when the music is wholly interior,
meant for one ear alone. The intruding note
coming out of the depths of the spirit has
been enough many a time to rend a man in
twain. Most instructive here is that story, one
of a thousand similar that might be told, of
Lacordaire, the great French preacher. As a
young advocate at the Bar, after a brilliant
university career, irresistible in eloquence and
ability, his career assured, the world at his feet,
he is found one day by a friend alone in his
room, sobbing and heartbroken. What is the
matter with Lacordaire ? This : that in the midst
of his successes the inner deeps have suddenly
broken up and overwhelmed his pleasure-world.
A voice has spoken within, proclaiming that
world a mockery, and himself a failure. " A
delusion," says some one, "a moment of pique."
But the preacher's whole career dated from that
moment. Paul had such a time, and Augustine,
and many another who has carried, as it seemed,
a world's spiritual interests in his hands. As to
whether the voices they heard were trustworthy,
they were perhaps as good judges as their critics.
104 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
Domestic life is full of histories, pathetic,
often tragic, of the soul's strange, long silences,
broken at last, and many a time too late, by a
cry from its depths. How often happens it
that the genuine affection of worthy hearts,
covered up and concealed under a vexed surface
of irritations and misunderstandings, lies almost
unnoted by its possessors until the swift warning
of a near parting wakes the soul to a sense of
what it is losing, and draws from it the awful
cry of its anguished love ! What a lesson writ
in fire is that word of Carlyle on the death of
his wife : " Oh, if only I could have five min-
utes with her to assure her that I loved her
through all that ! " How well were it here for
some of us to follow the example of the worthy
Siebenkas in Jean Paul Richter's story when,
concerning Lenette, "Every morning, every
evening he said to himself, c How much ought I
not to forgive ; for we shall remain so short a
time together ! ' "
It were indeed vastly better for us all if, in
our intercourse with one another, we oftener
permitted the soul to speak. The surface
chatter of the present day is in its emptiness
and unreality almost worse than that of the
France of the seventeenth century which
THE SOUL'S VOICE. 105
tempted Pascal to exclaim, " Diseur de bons
mots, mauvais caractere ! " If people knew it
they could rule by the voice ; not by its vehe-
mence and clamour, but by the soul they put into
it. Spirit, which can saturate feature, can also
saturate sound with its mystic essence. A
domestic circle may be made a paradise by the
music of one low, sweet voice. There are tones
of spiritual natures that seem to visualise holi-
ness, under whose pleading an erring man has
been as the fallen archangel at the reproof of
Zephon :
And felt how awful goodness is, and saw
Virtue in her shape how lovely ; saw and pined
His loss.
The note we have been seeking to fix and to
describe is indeed a voice from heaven, and to
hear it, as at times we do, is to receive anew the
assurance that man is not forsaken of God. It
is a note worth striving for in human speech.
The elocutionist cannot teach it, nor is it found
in the whole scale commanded by the operatic
star. To cultivate it we must go deeper than
the vocal organs. Its seat is in the soul.
XII.
Of Sex in Religion.
IN a study of sex in religion it would be open
to us to follow one of two different directions.
We might, regarding humanity as the subject
of religion, as operated upon mysteriously by
its unseen spiritual force, try to analyse the
separate effect of this force as working upon
the masculine or the feminine nature. Or,
contrariwise, taking religion in its aspect as a
human product, we might seek to trace in its
institutions, its theologies and its varied
activities the separate share which each of
the sexes has contributed Along either of
these ways some noteworthy results would be
obtained if they were carefully followed. The
differences between man and woman stand out
in a quite new aspect when seen under this
special light. Each half of the race gives out
its own peculiar note when that element of it
is touched. It is certain that we shall not
properly understand either religion or human
OF SEX IN KELIGION. 107
nature until some such inquiry has been made.
Many of the greatest mistakes of the past have
been due to the neglect of it. In the religious
reconstruction of the future the reparation of
that neglect will, if we mistake not, form one
of the leading features.
Looking at religion, for a moment, as a pro-
duct, one might suppose at first sight that it
was almost entirely a masculine affair. It is
man everywhere who explores its metaphysics,
who erects its theologies, who founds and
governs its institutions. Man is its pope,
priest, and prophet; its legislator, preacher,
and pastor. Its divines have all been men.
The great world religions, originating in the
East, have taken an entirely Eastern view of
the man's and the woman's part in this supreme
interest. In the Judaean decalogue woman is
subordinate and ancillary. Thy "neighbour's
wife," in the command against covetousness,
is included in the list of his possessions. The
Mohammedan was indisposed to concede woman
a soul at all. In early and mediaeval Catholicism
she is treated with a courtesy almost as scant.
In monkish literature she figures as the tempt-
ress to be fled from, the one malign influence
against which, above all others, the saint must
108 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
steel his soul. The feeling has its appropriate
expression in that brutal outburst of Tertullian,
" Woman, thou art the gate of hell." In a
later and more enlightened time we find Eras-
mus demeaning himself by describing woman
as "an absurd and ridiculous animal, though
entertaining and pleasant " ; while his con-
temporary Eabelais has no epithet too coarse
with which to pelt her. In a later century the
polished La Bruyere thinks he has said the
final word upon woman in declaring that " the
greater part of them have hardly principles,
but are guided by the heart, and depend for
their morals on those they love." From the
beginning woman has occupied no position of
authority in the Church. Her voice has never
been heard at a council, nor has her pen ever
formulated a decree. The England of to-day
gives a curious illustration of the ecclesiastical
ban under which she has been placed, in the
status it accords to the wives of Church digni-
O
taries. An archbishop may have social pre-
cedence over a duke, while his wife shall be
plain Mrs. Smith. It was left for a woman to
put the finishing touch on this order of things
in the remark of Queen Elizabeth to the wife
of Archbishop Parker, on being entertained at
OF SEX IN BELIGION. 109
Lambeth, " Madam. I may not call you, and
mistress I am loth to call you. I know not
what to call you, but yet I thank you for your
good cheer."
If woman were of a revengeful disposition
she might easily console herself by reflecting
on the price that man has had to pay for his
exclusiveness. He has, she might reflect,
assumed the right to legislate for the Church,
to define its doctrine, to build up its whole
system of thought, and a pretty mess he has
made of it. His ecclesiastical polity has split
the Church into a thousand pieces, while his
theology has made religion hateful to multi-
tudes of ingenuous minds. It is safe to say
that the mother side of humanity would never
have constructed the hell of medievalism, nor
have made it possible to exhibit as orthodoxy
the notion of Aquinas that heaven's pleasure
would be augmented by the view of the tortures
of the lost, or that of Calvin of the preordained
damnation of the non-elect. The male eccle-
siastic, imagining religion to be an affair of dry
intellect, a formula to be ground out of his
logic mill, succeeded in making it anti-human.
He achieved the surprising feat of so dressing
up the primal facts concerning God and the
110 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
soul as to make theology a nightmare, and of
turning a region of thought, which ought to
have been man's highest inspiration, into a
jumble of inconsistencies, at once a barrier to
faith and a stumbling block to the moral sense.
Nothing has been made clearer than that the
attempt to build religion out of elements
purely masculine is a blunder for which the
outraged nature of things will always take a
full revenge.
But we are anticipating, and, moreover, this
is not a quite complete statement of the case.
We must remind ourselves of what was sug-
gested at the beginning, that it is only, after
all, a surface view which fails to recognise
woman in the history of religious production.
Man has tried hard to shut her out from this
sphere, but, happily, he has not fully succeeded.
One feels a sort of poetical justice in the fact
that, as Professor Brinton points out, in certain
primitive tribes it was the woman only and not
the man who was regarded as possessing an
immortal soul. Polytheism, in all its forms,
has vaguely felt after the truth of the feminine
element in religion in distributing the celestial
government amongst gods and goddesses. In
Catholicism the deification of the Virgin Mary
OF SEX IN RELIGION. Ill
may be said to have found its basis in this
sense of the feminine element as necessary to
the idea of Deity. Renan puts it in his own
daring fashion in the assertion that in the
Catholic system Mary has entered of full right
into the Trinity, having displaced there the thin
and incomprehensible idea of the Holy Spirit.
However we may regard that curious statement,
this at least may be said, that the only way of
accounting for the success of a cult so badly
based both in reason and in history is in
regarding it as the clumsy expression of the
human yearning after a Divine Motherhood,
as combining with the strength of the eternal
Fatherhood, at the heart of the universe.
When we look a little more deeply into re-
ligious history we shall be less surprised at
finding how, despite all effort to the contrary,
ideas traceable to woman's religious intuition
have to so considerable a degree found their
way into the Church's thought. For behind
most of the great teachers has stood a woman.
Augustine owed himself to his mother Monica.
At the back of Basil and of Gregory of Nyssa
we discern the figure of their sister Macrina,
" who led them both to the faith, and stirred
them to their best work," about whom Gregory
112 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
confesses that he wrote his treatise on "The
Soul and the Resurrection " from her in-
spiration. We remember what Jacqueline was
to Pascal and what Henrietta was to Kenan.
Let us not forget either the direct influence
which, even in the period when masculine
autocracy in religion was at its height,
woman from time to time contrived to exert.
Each century of the dark ages is illuminated
by some woman teacher. Jerome celebrates
for us Paula, the distinguished Roman matron,
the great Hebrew scholar to whom the Latin
father was glad to refer difficult points in
his commentary on Ezekiel. The eighth
century shows us those Benedictine nuns
who did so much to evangelise Europe, the
workers under Boniface, such as Lioba,
Walburga, and Berthgytha, who missionised
Germany, and are reported as being versed in
all the science of the time. What a figure,
too, is that of Hildegarde, in the eleventh cen-
tury, whom Rohrbacher calls the "instructor
of the people, the councillor of bishops and
monarchs, the restorer of piety and manners,
and oracle of the Church ; who was among
women what St. Bernard was among men.'*
What might one not say also of a Catherine of
OF SEX IN EELIGIOIT. 113
Siena, in the fourteenth century, the beloved
of the poor, and at the same time the feared
and obeyed of popes ; or of the Spanish Teresa,
of the sixteenth, who founded orders, ad-
vised kings, and -whose " Treatise of Prayer "
is one of the most wonderful of devotional
works !
As we trace the feminine influence in religion
through the past and observe its fuller expan-
sion in our own times, we realise more clearly
the dimensions of the blunder which for long
ages sought so persistently to repress it. For,
as we now begin to perceive, it is the woman
nature that, more intimately than the man's,
expresses the innermost soul of religion. It is
dawning upon us that those spheres of reason
and of logic where man is strongest, and where
he loved of old to elaborate his theologic sys-
tems, are not, after all, the place where we shall
find the thing we are seeking. Faith's true
seat is elsewhere in the soul. The statement of
a modern investigator that "science arises
from man's conscious, and religion from his
subconscious states," may perhaps be too sweep-
ing a generalisation, but it points undoubtedly
in the right direction. We are understanding
better now Pascal's profound remark, in its
8
114 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVEKSE.
application to religion, that " what is founded
only in reason is very badly founded." It is in
the region beyond reason, in the sphere of
intuition, of feeling, of aspiration, of that
Formless which Goethe declared to be the
highest thing in man, that religion finds at
once its perennial spring and its impregnable
refuge. And it is precisely because in these
regions woman's nature is at its richest that we
are beginning to discover how primary and how
essential is the contribution which she makes
to it. It is because along that side of its
nature humanity most quickly and most surely
feels the quiver of the Infinite that woman
must inevitably in the future be recognised as
arch-priestess of religion.
In proportion as this element of the supra-
rational existing both in man and woman, but
in man so frequently deficient assumes with-
out cavil its true place in religion, we shall see
going on in it a steady readjustment of values.
The bastard religion of dogma, forged in a
place which has no proper apparatus for pro-
ducing it, will yield precedence to the true reli-
gion of faith, hope and love. The Church will
cease to frame definitions of everything in the
universe, with anathemas attached against all
OF SEX IN RELIGION. 115
who fail to accept them, and will instead give
itself to its proper work of loving, praying and
serving. It will labour with all its might to
understand, but it will not again commit the
offence of offering the world a syllogistic salva-
tion. It will know God as every mother's soul
has always known Him, and as logic has never
known Him. It will bear sinners on its heart as
mothers do their prodigal sons. And by this
means will it arrive at and abide in the true
orthodoxy, the proper knowledge of God. For
it is because God's heart has in its centre this
mother love that He is our God. It is because
Christ's life was the expression of that heart
that He is the Saviour of the world.
XIII.
Of False Conscience.
THE view advocated by Socrates, and by Plato
after him, which practically identified virtue
with knowledge, has been sharply criticised and
can easily be shown to be defective. But the
controversy has at least helped us to realise
how essential a factor is knowledge to all moral
progress, and how fatal an impediment to that
progress is ignorance. The saying of Dean
Church, that " it is not enough to be religious,
but we need to know the kind of religion we
are of," is entirely applicable here. It is not
sufficient to call ourselves conscientious. The
point is to discover the kind of conscience we
are using. The habit in many religious
teachers of describing conscience as a kind of
divinity within us whose judgments represent
infallible moral truth, is an evidence of the
looseness of thinking which prevails in some
pulpits. That there is a Divine working in the
human conscience is credible enough, but the
OF FALSE CONSCIENCE. 117
search for it reveals to us at once two elements
which have to be decisively separated. One is
the central light which from the beginning has
been streaming upon humanity ; the other is
the human organ or medium upon which that
light has played, and which in different ages
and races shows itself as a development in all
stages of imperfection. The ray which falls
on the lens is entirely pure. But the rough
and often quite rudimentary character of this
instrument, its imperfect polishing, and the
foreign matter which inheres in its substance,
cause often the most grotesque and distorted
images to be thrown.
It is when we have grasped this fact that
those earlier histories of conscientiousness,
which form often such unpleasant and puzzling
reading, become at least intelligible to us.
What we find there is really a blend between
the religious impulse and grotesquely false ideas
of the universe. When the Lacedaemonians
whipped boys to death as an offering to Diana ;
when the mother of Xerxes, as he departed on
one of his expeditions, buried alive a number of
youths to propitiate the subterranean powers ;
when the Carthaginians placed their little
children on the red-hot lap of Moloch, they
118 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
were acting in the fear of God; but their God
was a bad God. Conscientiousness for many
ages and amongst many peoples might be trans-
lated as bad-Godism. The cult is in full vogue
to-day. The present writer had recently in his
hand a photograph of an Indian fakir with a
long, emaciated arm stretched at right angles
from the shoulder. He had conscientiously held
it in that position for some thirty years ! In
Paris the other day died an old woman whose
body was covered with scars and burns. She
had starved and tortured herself to death in
the name of religion. The fakir and the Paris
Catholic belong outwardly to different faiths.
They might be bracketed together as devotees
of a divinity who, if he were real, would have
to be described as cruel and barbarous ; whose
moral character, in fact, would not bear
inquiry.
Most of us will claim to be quite remote from
mental conditions of this order. We have out-
grown those conceptions in which religion, to
use the terrible words of Lucretius, " displayed
her head from the heavens, threatening mortals
with her hideous aspect." We have purified
our thoughts of God, and concurrently have
raised the standards by which we judge of
OF FALSE CONSCIENCE. 119
character and conduct. Very likely our self-
satisfaction in these respects may be fairly well
grounded. In the ordinary and well-worn
tracks, both of religious thinking and practical
living, our conscience can be trusted to yield
results that in comparison with those cited may
be regarded as respectable, and even superior.
And yet it requires no very close observation,
even in the circles nearest to us, to discover on
every hand badly trained, badly nourished con-
sciences, which, from not having enough
intellect in their virtue, are playing false in a
dozen directions to life's higher interests.
There is an aberration of conscience which
rules specially in religious natures, the subtle
working of which has, so far as we know, never
yet been fairly analysed. The disturbing cause
here might be summed up in a phrase as the
short-sighted selfishness of religious enjoyment.
The inner history of the conscience which offers
this phenomenon may be traced somewhat as
follows : Upon a highly sensitive nature there
comes, whether by sudden emotional inflow or
by quieter inner movements, a condition of
spiritual feeling which is recognised as the
highest and purest enjoyment that life has yet
afforded. Call it what we will "conversion,"
120 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
" reconciliation," " the sense of God," " the
higher life" it is there, a rapturous experience
known to multitudes and recognised by them
as an incomparable treasure and luxury of the
soul.
The natural and immediate sequence of the
experience is the desire and resolve to retain
this joy at all costs. Whatever seems to
diminish its intensity or to fail to contribute to
its increase is regarded as an enemy to be
avoided. And everything, on the other hand,
that appears to aid it, or to open up sources for
its supply, is welcomed and cherished. But
the age-long experience of the human spirit has
at last begun to discover that even this loftiest
phase of the heart's life has its own dangers ;
that its impulses are not all to be trusted, that
its verdicts must be tested by another court
if they are not to lead us astray.
The manner in which this feeling, left to
itself, has repeatedly and disastrously missed
its way is writ large in human history. One
can trace three separate wrong directions along
which the instinct has operated. In the first
place, in the search for what seemed its most
appropriate food, it has, especially in earlier
days, given a false currency to the miraculous
OF FALSE CONSCIENCE. 121
and the supernatural. Craving ever for its
sense of God, it went on the supposition that
He was most distinctly to be realised in what
transcended the order of Nature. Here is the
origin of those " wonder stories " which flowed
from the imagination of the pious minds of
former times, written and read with the single
idea of promoting that religious rapture of
which the supernatural alone seemed to be the
source. Whether they are Jewish haggadah in
which prophets are transported across continents
by the hair of their head, or " Gospels of the
Infancy," which represent the Saviour as
addressing profound sayings to Mary from the
cradle, or mediaeval lives of the saints, such as
Bonaventura's of Francis of Assisi, stuffed with
marvels, they bear the same stamp and are
from the same mint. Protestants as well as
Catholics have yielded to this impulse. We
read in Mary's reign of a voice, thought by the
people to be that of an angel, speaking against
the Mass from a wall in Aldgate, when the
angel turned out to be a girl concealed behind
the plaster. This aberration of the old-time
conscience in the interest of the religious feel-
ing is pressing specially hard upon us to-day.
It is burdening the Church with one of its most
122 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
difficult and painful tasks in the unravelling of
truth from error.
The desire of the soul to preserve its God-
consciousness unimpaired has led religion along
a second fatal track, that of the banning of
inquiry and of contrary opinion. Received
doctrine being, as was maintained, the vessel
that held the treasure, to touch the one was to
imperil the other. Hence that " castration of
the intellect," to use Nietzsche's terrible phrase
which for centuries characterised ecclesiastical
procedure; the feeling that led Augustine to
assert that schismatics would suffer eternal
punishments, " although for the name of Christ
they had been burned alive"; which found
voice in Cardinal Pole's dictum that murder
and adultery were not to be compared in
heinousness with heresy ; which in our own day
made Newman declare that " a publisher of
heresy should be treated as if he were embodied
evil," and the gentle Keble to regard scholars
who applied modern scientific criticism to the
Bible as " Men too wicked to be reasoned with."
A milder form of the same feeling is that which
burks inquiry from fear that the results will
damage one's religious joy. It is this which in
the sixteenth century gave occasion to the gibe
OP FALSE CONSCIENCE. 123
of Erasmus that " our theologians call it a sign
of holiness to be unable to read." What, if it
had not been said in our own hearing, would
have been less credible was a recent declaration
of thankfulness by a Nonconformist minister
that he had never learned German ! " German
religious thought was so unsettling ! " That a
man whose business it was to know and to
teach should in these days express gratitude for
ignorance would be inconceivable in any other
sphere. But in theology all things are possible.
Only very slowly is the religious conscience
beginning to understand what Pascal tried to
teach it more than two centuries ago, that " the\
first of all Christian truths is that truth should
be loved above all"; only now is it beginning to
realise that the God-consciousness, to preserve
which it has often so ignorantly striven, reaches,
only its loftiest form when the intellect is per-
mitted its fullest and freest play.
The third of the ways in which the unedu-
cated instinct for religious joy has tended to
mislead the conscience has been by practising
what seemed the cheap and easy process of
exclusion. Secular pursuits, interests and
enthusiasms drew the mind off God and were
therefore as far as possible to be barred.
124 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
Hence science, the arts, the drama, physical
exercises and pastimes were banned as hostile
to the Divine life. To-day in many circles that
ban is not yet raised. There is a story of a
modern evangelist shutting his eyes when sail-
ing up the Rhine lest the beauty of the scenery
should prove a temptation. Even learning has
with some modern religionists been avoided
as distracting from true piety. It is distinctly
a credit to the Jesuits, with all their faults,
that their leader, Ignatius Loyola, saw the
fallacy of all this and taught that the religious
emotions, fascinating as was their indulgence,
must not be allowed to hinder the acquirement
of scholarship and the arts. One must in this
sense " go away from God for God ; ad majorem
gloriam Dei." That is one of the great lessons
of the inner life as we understand it to-day.
We are, as a French writer has powerfully said,
to " beware of a religion which substitutes itself
for everything; that makes monks. Seek a
religion which penetrates everything ; that
makes Christians." We are discovering now
that God is not only the source and object of
the religious feelings, but that He is also a
musician, an artist, a mathematician, the
Creator and Giver of all beauty, and that in
OP FALSE CONSCIENCE. 125
seeking perfection in these directions we are
seeking Him. It is a false conscience which
would shut up our religious interests to the
narrow ground of a few elementary ideas.
That is to put it in charge of a kitchen garden
when its true role is to govern a universe.
XIV.
Religion and Medicine.
IN modern civilisation the clergyman and the
doctor stand at such a distance apart that it is
almost difficult for us to realise that originally
they were one and the same person. Yet there
was a time when medicine the whole business
of healing was a purely ecclesiastical function.
In savage tribes to-day the " medicine man " is
also priest. And the reason is evident. The
primitive belief everywhere connected disease
with spiritual causes, and for a cure looked to
the supernatural. Throughout rural India, as
Mr. Crooke in his " Folk-Lore " informs us,
sickness is attributed to spirits or to the anger
of offended ancestors, and the priest or " holy
man " is in such cases at once called in to pro-
pitiate or exorcise the evil influence. We need
not, indeed, go so far afield for similar ideas.
There are parts of rural England where cramp,
ague, the falling sickness and other ailments
are held to be due to demonic agency, against
EELIGION AND MEDICINE. 127
which the remedy is in charms and mystic in-
cantations. It has been by a very long process,
in accordance with that law of specialisation of
function the working of which Mr. Herbert
Spencer has so laboriously delineated, that the
medicinal art has, amongst civilised peoples,
gained the distinctive place of which we find it
in possession to-day.
Medicine, on its way to becoming a science
and an art, has had some rude experiences.
Its earlier stages were hardly an improvement
on the old supernaturalism. For a charm or
an exorcism, if they did no good, at least they
hardly did harm. Often, indeed, they wrought
their miracles, for they left nature to do her
work, assisted by that mighty reinforcement,
faith. It was another matter when actual
experiment began to be made with drug and
with operating knife upon the human subject.
This ticklish business of putting, as Voltaire so
cruelly insinuated, " drugs of which you know
little into a body of which you know nothing,"
brought the healing tribe for a long period into
grievous disrepute. They have been the sub-
ject of some of the world's oldest witticisms.
There is that of the Lacedemonian, who, on
being asked why he lived so long, replied that
128 OlTESELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
it was because of his ignorance of physte ; and
the mot of Diogenes to an inferior wrestler who
had turned physician : " Courage, friend, now
thou shalfc put them into the ground that
beforetime put thee on it." Montaigne
makes us shudder with his picture of the
medical practices of his time. Fancy a pre-
scription which included " the left foot of a
tortoise, the excrement of an elephant, the
liver of a mole, the blood from under the left
wing of a white pigeon, and rats pounded to a
small powder " ! It was a hardy race, surely,
that stood all this and yet survived to tell the
tale.
It is worth while recalling these earlier
phases of the healing art and of the standing
of its professors, in order the better to realise
the immense change that we witness to-day.
Resting on a broad basis of accurate knowledge,
master of a thousand secrets, its history
crowded with glorious victories in the cam-
paign against disease and pain, and with fore-
most names, with intellect and worth everywhere
devoted to its interests, the medical profession
has reached a kind of apotheosis in modern
life. Art has expressed the present estimate
of it in Mr. Filde's beautiful picture " The
RELIGION AND MEDICINE. 129
Doctor," while Ian Maclaren in his exquisite
and moving portraiture of the Drumtochty
practitioner has written the same sentiment
into literature. The feeling has grown upon
men that this calling, demanding as it does the
constant exercise at once of knowledge and of
sympathy, which has the most fascinating
problems for the intellect and the most imperi-
ous claims upon the heart, whose aim is the
furtherance of life and the defeat of death, is
emphatically a calling for noble souls, and
noble souls in abundance have flocked into it.
To-day the personnel, the standing and the
achievements of the medical profession repre-
sent one of the most valuable assets of civilisa-
tion.
It is precisely on this account that the
question becomes so interesting as to the
precise present-day relations between medicine
and religion. One of our reasons for writing
on the subject is the feeling that, in more than
one direction, they might be improved. There
is, for one thing, an impression abroad that the
bent of the physiological mind is toward
materialism. The old saying, " tres medici duo
aihei" is still quoted. Miss Power Cobbe, in a
magazine article some time ago, lamented that
9
130 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
the medical faculty was setting up a new priest-
hood which was to replace the care of the soul
by the care of the body. There is certainly no
group of educated men so exposed to that
appeal to the senses on which materialism
relies as are our doctors and surgeons. More
closely to them than to the rest of us comes
home the argument of Lucretius :
Prseterea gigni pariter cum corpore et una
Crescere sentimus, pariterque seneacere mentem.
" Besides, we see the mind to be born with the
body, to grow with it, and with it to decay."
They are continually in contact with death, as
the apparent conqueror and extinguisher of
mind. And so it has happened that some of
the strongest attacks against religious ortho-
doxy have come from the medical and physio-
logical side. Rabelais, the arch-scoffer of the
sixteenth century, was a physician as well as a
monk. Darwin and Huxley, who gave the re-
ligious sentiment of the last generation so rude
a shake, were bred in this school. It is also,
in this connection, a curious coincidence that
the starter of the modern denial of the Mosaic
authorship of the Pentateuch should have been
a physician the Frenchman, Jean Astruc.
RELIGION AND MEDICINE. 131
It is one of the greatest misfortunes of the
modern specialisation of studies that it should
make the ablest and most earnest men almost
inevitably one-sided. And nowhere is this
result more to be lamented than in the sphere
of medicine. For here the sheer necessity of
overtaking and keeping abreast of the enor-
mous accumulation of technical knowledge in
their own department has kept numbers of
medical men comparatively uneducated on a
side of their nature, which, for the purposes of
their work, requires the most thorough train-
ing. The question here is not that of their
personal attitude towards this or that theo-
logical dogma ; it is whether the comparatively
small attention paid by some members of the
faculty to the spiritual side of human life does
not, in some most important particulars, hinder
and mar their professional work ? On abstract
grounds it would, we believe, be not difficult to
show that the modern spiritual philosophy, aa
expounded by a Caird, a Green and a Mar-
tineau, has effectively met the arguments of
the later Materialism. But it is much more to
the point to show how medicine can neither do
justice to itself nor to the humanity to which
it ministers unless it both recognise the
132 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVEESE.
spiritual, and, what is more, receive a definite
training in its laws.
The neglect of this plainly-marked depart-
ment of its work has, for one thing, kept the
ground open for a swarm of non-experts and
adventurers. Heterodoxy has in every age had
the function of showing to orthodoxy the new
roads ahead, and this has been emphatically
true of the schools of medicine. It has been
reserved for the outsiders, who have in succes-
sive generations stirred the wrath of orthodox
medicine, to suggest to it what turn out in the
end to be indubitable truths. What, for
instance, is the doctrine of faith-healing, for
which a " Dr." Dowie is assaulted by a crowd
of boisterous medicos, more than the assertion,
in an extravagant form, of a truth now on its
way to universal acknowledgment, that the body
has to be approached first and foremost through
the soul? The world is full of unformulated
facts on this question. The healings wrought
by Christ and the apostles, the cures to which
Irenseus bears testimony in the second century,
the marvellous physical results of the preaching
of Bernard, the raising of Melancthon from
what seemed immediate death at the prayer of
Luther, are parts of an immense tradition
KELIGION AND MEDICINE. 133
which points all in one direction. It testifies
to the existence of secret spiritual energies,
potent against disease and for the fuitherance
of life, which under certain conditions are at
the disposition of humanity, and which it
behoves the men responsible in these depart-
ments most carefully to study.
But the relations of medicine with the spirit-
ual by no means end here. The best men of
the profession recognise growingly, we believe,
the immense moral responsibilities attaching to
it, and the grave questions which hang thereon.
Their position brings them continually into con-
tact with life's ultimate problems. They stand
between the young man and his vices. They
see humanity in its defeats, its exhaustions, its
despairs. They are called in to the spectacle of
life-bankruptcies when all the physical forces
have been rioted away, and there is a famine of
power and of joy. Every day they see men face,
with what philosophy they can muster, the last
enemy. And their entree is to every class. They
are called in where the clergy are excluded. In
their parish there are practically no dissenters.
To a man of the nobler instincts the appeal
of this helplessness and despair should be irre-
sistible. But what has he to meet it with ? In
134 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
nine cases out of ten physical alleviation is the
smallest part of what a sufferer needs. The
thing he wants above all is hope and courage.
But where is our practitioner to find this ; where
is he to gain power to stiffen the moral back-
bone of tempted youth ; or to cheer the lonely
invalid to whom the days are a weariness and
the nights a horror; to help men gain the
supreme moral victory over suffering and over
death ? One must put it bluntly : he cannot be
a good doctor who is not fundamentally a good
man. Emphatically is it true for his work that
" one man with a belief is worth ten men with
only interests." What we are here saying has
nothing to do with sectarianism ; still less with
that professional religionism which is the most
detestable of all poses. It is simply the asser-
tion of certain fundamental truths that have
been lacking in some medical curriculums, and
of which, in conclusion, we may give this as the
sum : Medical science is ultimately a branch of
spiritual science ; bodily healing requires a
knowledge of psychic as well as of physical
conditions ; and finally, the medical ministry to
a diseased and broken humanity can never be
adequate unless carried on as a mediation of
the Eternal Goodness and Love.
XV.
Spiritual Undercurrents.
IF a man who has purchased an acre of land
could only comprehend and utilise the values
that he has here obtained he would be over-
whelmed with the sense of his riches. He is
going to make what he can of the surface, but
knows practically nothing of what he owns
underneath. Hints of what lies there occasion-
ally make themselves heard, and the favoured
ones in whose ears they are whispered win
fortunes in coal, in oil, in gold. But these,
after all, are only scratchings of the outer
crust, leaving immeasurable depths unsearched.
Little by little we are learning what a realm of
forces we are at the top of. We discover that
bodies related to each other by their separate
chemical qualities and affinities are under the
common sway of mysterious earth-currents,
magnetisms and what not, that sweep the
central deeps and are felt from pole to pole.
The world, as a purely physical system, is
136 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
governed far more by what is hidden than by
what we see.
When we turn our attention from the round
globe itself to the being who lives on it, we
seem to find all this repeated in another
sphere. A man must be reckoned not so much
by what he is, as by the sum of the forces that
are acting on him. In the purely physical life
who is to say when the outside air which he
draws into his lungs, or the food of which he
partakes, is, and is not he? When we have
taken stock of a man's visible outfit, reckoned
up his bit of brain, his level of culture, his
apparent reach of faculty, have we here the
sum of his life possibilities ? Far from it. To
get that we have to take into account the
spiritual system to which he belongs, and to
estimate what he may do or become under the
impact of its mysterious powers. Here, too,
we are becoming sensible of mighty under-
currents. They sweep along the whole unseen
force-region that lies underneath humanity,
and to comprehend them is, we are beginning
to realise, a fundamental element in the busi-
ness of life. There are side branches of this
theme along which, at this point, one is much
tempted to diverge. One might, for instance,
SPIRITUAL UNDERCURRENTS. 137
discuss here those strange psychical phenomena
about which Kant was constrained to say:
" For my part, ignorant as I am of the way in
which the human spirit enters the world, and
the ways in which it goes out of it, I dare not
deny the truth of many of such narratives."
But these phases of the topic, absorbing as
they are to many modern minds, are not the
main point. And we want here to keep
to that.
Of the spiritual system to which we have
just referred as offering the real measure of
our separate possibility, the New Testament is
the manual in chief, and yet there is no book
that on this point has been more misunder-
stood. The Christianity it depicts offers us,
for one thing, a marvellous object-lesson on
human nature and its unseen environment. It
shows us what can be made of the average man
when a new force plays on him. Its language,
and the facts it recites as to the " endowment
with power " and the " gift of the Holy Spirit,"
are a piece of spiritual geography exhibiting,
with a clearness and certainty new to the
world, the features of the great power-realm
which environs humanity. But the interpreta-
tion of the manual has been hitherto a crude
138 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
and unscientific business, and we are only just
emerging upon a view of the facts that is solid
and satisfying. To listen to some talk still
current, one might suppose that the " gift " or
" outpouring " of the Spirit were a kind of
parochial phenomenon, showing at hazard
amongst this or that group of enthusiasts,
and whose chief characteristic was the element
of caprice and of the incalculable. Men quote
the text, " The wind bloweth where it listeth,"
and forthwith conclude they have to deal with
something that quite transcends any question
of law or of uniformity. As though the wind
were outside the sweep of law ! We do not
indulge in talk of this kind in the other
departments in which man is to-day enriching
his life. Electricity is an outside power by
whose reinforcement we have quadrupled our
energies, but we know better than to treat its
coming or going as belonging to the uncertain
or the inexplicable. The analogy here suggested
is worth pausing upon. When we call ours
the age of electricity, what do we mean?
Certainly not that electricity has been bestowed
on the world in our time. It was there
all the time. The difference is that ours
is the age in which its existence has been
SPIRITUAL UNDERCURRENTS. 139
recognised, its laws ascertained, and the appli-
cations of its force, in part at least, understood.
It may yet be that the twentieth century will
be known, in comparison with former times, as
the age of the Spirit, and for a similar reason.
No new forces will have been created, but the old
ones, the spiritual undercurrents that have been
running from the beginning, will have been
uncovered and tapped, and the human soul
bathed in their constant supply.
What has so much confused our thinking in
this matter has been the question of personality,
and especially our thinking about the supreme
personality of Christ. We speak of the Spirit
as His gift, and that on excellent authority, for
so is it stated in the New Testament. On the
same high authority we speak of the Spirit as a
Person, as part of the personality of God.
And here also we do well. Not so well, though,
in the inferences we are apt to draw. How did
Jesus give us the Spirit ? How did Faraday
give us electricity ? Not by creating, but by
revealing. The gift in each case was there,
old as eternity, but with a veil on its face. In
each case the moment in human evolution came,
the ripened time for the unveiling. Jesus, in
His historical manifestation, was what He was
140 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
through the new relation of His personality to
the spiritual forces, just as, in an immeasurably
lower sphere, Faraday was what he was through
a new relation to the electric forces. The New
Testament is abundantly clear on this point.
The Christ had his power through being " filled
with the Spirit." According to his own testi-
mony He could " do nothing of Himself." His
place in history was and is unique, because of
His unique receptivity for the fulness of Divine
Life.
The gist of this is that the spiritual under-
currents on which the higher life depends are
not variants, but constants. It is a question not
of the flow and ebb of their tide, for their tide
knows no ebb, but of the extent and delicacy
of the surface we can open to their impact.
There is no break here between the analogies
of the natural and the spiritual world. The
uniformity of the laws on which we depend in
nature is not more exact than the uniformity
we find in the kingdom of grace. In both we
have to do with the same ineffable Personality.
In gravitation, as in inspiration, we are in
contact with the one eternal Spirit of God.
The significance of the history of Jesus for
us is, then, partly, at least, the revelation it
SPIRITUAL UNDERCURRENTS. 141
offers of the possibilities of humanity when in
fullest union with its spiritual environment.
Verily, here is He the first born of a new
creation, the forerunner in a new and higher
stage of development. That perfect life, with
its Divine self -consciousness, its utter purity, its
love, its Calvary-consummated sacrifice, opened,
as it were, the sluices through which the pent-
up spiritual currents, hitherto hidden, could
roll in upon a thirsty humanity, bringing
Paradise in their flow. Precious beyond words
is that draught of the undercurrent, and beyond
words precious is He to whom we owe it.
Mankind, said Goethe, is continually progress-
ing, but the individual man is ever the same.
The same, that is, in his central need, a need
which no progress in civilisation can ever
supply, but which is met and satisfied through
Christ. As men understand these things more,
the more will they enter into that sheer,
adoring love of Christ which perfumes the
New Testament. The language of Christina
Rossetti becomes our own : " How beautiful are
the arms which have embraced Christ, the
hands which have touched Christ, the eyes
which have gazed upon Christ, the lips which
have spoken with Christ, the feet which have
142 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
followed Christ ; how beautiful are the hands
which have worked the works of Christ, the
feet which, treading in His footsteps, have
gone about doing good, the lips that have
spread abroad His name, the lives which have
been counted loss for Him ! "
The relation of Christ's personality to the
spiritual undercurrents is, in a lower degree,
that of all His followers. It is, in a way, like
what we have in magnetism, where, in addition
to the great, central, perennial earth currents,
there is the separate and varying magnetic
susceptibility of each different object and
element. The spiritual currents concentrate in
us, form in us reservoirs of power, use us as
media of their mighty movement. It is pre-
cisely to the extent in which we are in touch
with them that, as Churches or as individuals,
we are of any religious use to the world.
What a spectacle that of a Church with all its
organism complete for work, but with the
stream that should furnish its driving-power
cutting for itself a channel in a new direction,
and leaving all this ecclesiastical plant high and
dry on the deserted shore ! This is what Carlyle
had in view when, in a passage written sixty
years ago, but which has not yet lost its signi-
SPIRITUAL UNDERCURRENTS. 143
ficance, he speaks of "these distracted times
when the religious principle, driven out of most
churches, either lives unseen in the hearts of
good men, looking and longing and silently
working towards some new revelation, or else
wanders homeless over the world like a disem-
bodied soul seeking its terrestrial organism ! "
It is for the Church of to-day to render such
a consummation impossible, and now is its
supreme opportunity. With all history behind
it, with a clearer apprehension than has ever
before been known of its mission and its powers,
with the humanity it deals with visibly opening
to new and deeper apprehensions of the truth
and life it brings, the Church has now in its
reach the clear possibility of revolutionising the
world and of establishing it upon the immutable
basis of God's spiritual law. Its new regime
will be, in the best sense, a scientific one.
Just as, in the electrical sphere, no teacher of
the science is possible who is ignorant of, or
careless about, the laws which operate in it, so
in this spiritual sphere no Church authority
will be recognised which is not founded on
knowledge of, and obedience to, the inner laws.
The idea of a Church subsisting on, or working
by, any other power than that which rises in
144 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
the spiritual world, will be felt to be as absurd
as Laputa's project for extracting sunbeams from
cucumbers. The Church's speech, its prayers,
even its silences, will be channels of the Spirit's
mighty undercurrent. No preacher will venture
the impertinence of utterance which, either in
substance or in delivery, is divorced from the
operation of the kingdom's law.
As a crater, in an eruption, is onlj the organ
and mouthpiece, as it were, of forces infinitely
beyond its own range, working far beneath, so
the worker in this kingdom, be he never so
eminent or never so humble, will recognise that
so is it with him. If his work is worth any-
thing at all he will know that its worth consists
precisely in this, that it originates in a sphere
beyond himself.
XVI.
On Being Inferior.
ONE of the greatest disciplines of the inner life
lies in the choice that is offered us as to the
treatment of our own inferiority. It is a dis-
cipline which none of us is allowed to escape.
Some of us are very low down. There are
ranges and ranges of visible human life that
are far above us. But the sense of inferiority
is by no means confined to the poor or the
meagrely gifted. The highest amongst men
are really in the same position, and are often
made to feel it the most acutely. Illustrations
of this will come presently, but meanwhile the
point is as to how we regard the fact in itself.
That its true lesson is difficult to learn is evident
from the stumbles over it that are everywhere
made. There are, for instance, the meaner souls
who seek to balance matters by an inane and
spiteful process of levelling down ; whose
. . . low desire
Not to feel lowest makes them level all.
10
146 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
A variety of the same species is the man
whose morbid self-conceit leads him to fix on
some chance feature of his individuality in
which he surpasses his neighbours as a reason
for ignoring the thousand points in which he is
beneath them. Often enough the feature itself
is of ludicrously small importance. Our great
man is some " Thrasybulus of the ward of
Stira, who had the strongest voice of any man
among the Athenians." On the other hand,
there are men who allow their sense of defect to
crush out all manly self-confidence. It was the
reverse of the true way of taking his own in-
feriority which led poor Benedict XII., on
hearing of his election as Pope, to say to the
conclave, " Brethren, you have chosen an ass."
Yet, again, there are in our day not a small
number who gird at their limitation of position
and gifts as part of that great system of in-
equality which, in their eyes, is the most
flagrant instance of the injustice of life, and
consequently of the immorality of the universe.
It is surely not for such results that life
brings us under the discipline of being inferior.
In searching for the true ends of it let us try
first to get at the facts of the case. What
meets us at the outset is the circumstance that
ON BEING INPERIOE. 147
our inferiority one to another is mixed up in a
most complicated way. There is no absolute
superiority. We are all at once superior and
inferior. The mixing process commences with
an initial difference of rank. Mr. Gladstone
was fond of saying that English society was
immutably based on its finely-graded and
clearly-recognised system of classes, of which
the throne was the apex. The New World is
spoken of sometimes as having abolished this
system and founded another on the basis of
human equality. It is hardly so. Names have
been changed, but not things. There is no
more equality in America than there is in
England ; nor can be, for the thing is not in
human nature. And it is amusing to think
that the stoutest Republican recognises to the
full the doctrine of inequality, of absolute
monarchy even, in his religion, where he
worships one supreme Euler, and speaks of a
hierarchy of saints and angels. No true man,
in fact, girds at rank. He knows that it re-
presents something worthy, if not in its actual
possessor, yet assuredly in the force that
created it. It is there, the evidence of a
primal life-power that once lifted itself
amongst men and made itself respected.
148 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
But the man high in social position is full,
in his turn, of inferiorities. When Charles V.
picked up Titian's fallen brush and handed it
to the painter with the remark that he was
proud to wait on so supreme a genius, the
master of half the world spoke here with a full
sense of an inferior towards a superior. In the
artist's great realm of life he knew himself to
occupy the lower place. In the yet higher
sphere of the moral and spiritual this interplay
of values is even more striking. The Stoic
Epictetus, who had emperors afterwards for
disciples, was a Greek slave. The Galilean
peasant whom Pilate condemned did not dis-
pute for a moment the higher social rank of
the judge. But to-day the judges and great
ones of the earth name the Galilean's name
with religious devotion, and have no words
which adequately express their sense of His
rank in the world. Throughout history, in
fact, the moral and spiritual superiorities seem
by a kind of law to have been wedded with
lowliness of outward position. Libanius made
fun of the early Christians as a set of tinkers
and cobblers who had left their mallets and
awls to preach the kingdom of heaven.
Spinoza ground lenses for a livelihood. George
ON BEING INFERIOR. 149
Fox and Jacob Bohme got theirs by cutting
leather. Literature tells the same story. From
Homer downwards the kings of ideas have
been, as often as not, bankrupt of pocket. Yet
always the wealthy and the great have felt
their own smallness beside these beggars.
Pauperemque dives me petit. " The rich man
seeks me, the poor man," has been the poet's
boast in every age.
But this, it may be said, is only a partial
and specious view. To pit intellectual and
moral values against material and social ones is,
we shall be told, only to trifle with the subject.
For when the superiorities both of money
and rank and of brain and heart have been
accounted for, the real question remains. These
rich dowers, inward and outward, belong after
all to the exceptional. What of the vast
average of men, the dim multitudes, who have
no special gift, either of property, rank or
mind ? There surely is a " being inferior "
with no romance in it ; in which one fails
utterly to find the ideal ! No one with open
eyes will think so. The higher up a man is the
more profound will be his respect for the
average humanity, the more humble will he be
in its presence. For it is here in the midst of
150 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
the common and the normal, in life's mid-stream
rather than amongst the exceptions, that he
will recognise with awe the existence of a
Power in humanity mightier than its own, a
Power that is working out ideas infinitely
greater than those of the ablest individual man.
This study of the superiority that lurks in
and beneath the life of the common man is, in
fact, the one thing needful and grievously
lacking among the present-day accredited pur-
veyors of our moral ideas. It would do some
of our armchair theologians, who judge man-
kind by their prim lists of ecclesiastical
" virtues and their contrary vices," a world of
good if they could spend some months amongst,
say, the common sailors on board an ocean
tramp. On Sundays, while the tramp's owners
and the pious British public generally are at
church, they would find these men at some
foreign port loading grain or coal. Their
language will not be ecclesiastical, and when
they get a day ashore their procedures are not
such as are provided for in the Assembly's
Catechism. This, without doubt, is very
shocking. But by-and-by it will dawn upon
our theologian, if he have grace, that the moral
and spiritual lack of these men is the sacrifice
ON BEING INFERIOR. 151
they are offering to the interests of the religious
British public; that their Sunday and week-
day labour, their exposure to the tempests of
ocean, and to the thieves and harlots of the
foreign port, are the price at which this stay-
at-home public gets its corn and wine, its com-
forts and luxuries, three-parts, in fact, of all it
eats, drinks and wears. It dawns upon him
that if vicarious sacrifice is the highest height
and deepest heart of morals, then these men,
who have sacrificed the interests of their bodies
and their souls for the rest of us, are in their
unchurched paganism actually a great deal
higher up than we. When besides he has
touched hands with these men, and known their
childlike simplicity, their quick response to
what is higher when it is offered, their splendid
courage, their noble devotion, he will be more
than ever inclined when he comes back to revise
his theology. He will search for some new
definitions as to who is high and who is low
in the kingdom of heaven.
The superior and the inferior are then, we
find, lying everywhere side by side, and we are
now, perhaps, furnished with an answer to the
question we asked at the beginning, as to what
this feature in our life is meant to accomplish
152 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
in us. The true man is simply amazed at the
notion that there can be any injustice in
inferiority. The sense of it, rightly taken, is,
he realises, one of our greatest inward helps.
It is a miserable business to be perpetually
looking down. What we want is something to
look up to. It is the altitudes that make us
climbers. An awakened nature is positively
greedy after occasions for respect and venera-
tion. And he finds them everywhere, and most
of all amongst the commonest people. His
attitude to a nature manifestly better than his
own is that of a man who has come on a new
treasure. A great soul is a banquet to which
we are all invited. Shall we be envious that
this feast of which we are partaking is so rich ?
"Against the superiority of another," said
Goethe, "there is no remedy but love." A
deep saying, but expressing only half the truth ;
for where love is the light of our seeing there
will be no question of " remedies " against
superiority. The question will be how most
fully to open ourselves to its strength, and
how to be lifted highest on the wings of its
inspiration.
xvn.
Our Contribution to Life.
THERE is food for abundant thinking in that
apocalyptic conception of a great human judg-
ment in which books are to be opened. The
suggestion here of a kind of celestial book-
keeping, in which a debtor and creditor account
is kept between us and the universe, sounds
startling enough, and yet, the more we ponder
it, the closer does it seem to the facts. Life,
as we have known it, suggests irresistibly the
idea of an unseen capitalist who has invested
largely in us, and who is looking for a return.
At the beginning the account is all on one side.
Our existence is a passivity, a vast continuous
reception. Our entrance into the world, as a
tiny bundle of fates and destinies, a thin
segment of the infinite, a link between nothing
and everything, is in itself a momentous con-
tribution to life, but it is not our own. The
very " I " that we now cling to as most
centrally ours was none of our choosing. That
154 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
the new consciousness which in us came to the
surface should emerge on this tiny planet
instead of on a satellite of Sirius, that it
should appear in the nineteenth century instead
of the sixth or sixtieth, that it should be of
this particular physical and mental capacity,
of this precise shade of temperament, these
and a thousand other decisions out of ten
million "might he's," are all an affair of the
Investor, who is not ourselves. One grows
dizzy in thinking of the length of the chain
of which we form the latest link. That
palaeolithic ancestor of ours, whom we discern,
rude, unkempt, groping his way in the savage
conditions of the measureless past have we
any affection, any filial regard for him ? Yet
it is on him we hang. Had he not succeeded
in his struggle, kept the torch of life burning,
spite of every adverse gust, and handed it, still
glowing, to the one who came next, we had
not been.
After our arrival we are, for the first part
entirely, and for the after part still very
largely, recipients and absorbents. Life's
hoarded capital is at every turn being lavished
upon us. The universe flows in through
myriad open gateways of the soul, leaving
OUR CONTRIBUTION TO LIFE. 155
deposits of all kinds from its infinite store-
houses. We gulp the present and the past.
All the histories, all the literatures work at us.
We may not have read them, but they create
the atmosphere we breathe. The agonies of
martyrs, the struggles of patriots, the visions
of seers, the achievements of science, the
products of adventure, help to swell the
revenues we draw. In fact, there is no arith-
metic can calculate the cost in thought, in
effort, in suffering, in all that constitutes the
ultimate values, that has gone to the equip-
ment of the humblest of us alive to-day.
That is one side of this marvellous book-
keeping. Not less remarkable is the other. We
discover, as we study it, that the capitalist we
have to deal with, lavish though he be, is no
aimless spendthrift. He looks for a return, and
insists upon getting it. Nothing is more won-
derful than the way in which this demand utters
itself, the way in which we are singled out and
sent off to our particular spell of work. It is
as though the heavens were opened and our
names called. Out of our desires and our will-
power, out of our circumstances, out of the
impinging upon us of the unexpected, out of
our successes, blunders and calamities, there
156 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVEBSE.
emerges, as the years go on, a something, form-
less, mysterious, unreckonable, which, never-
theless, awed and wondering, we begin to
understand as our Contribution to Life.
Formless and unreckonable we say, for we
are at the furthest remove from any clear com-
prehension of what our output amounts to in
the sum of things. We have no proper gauge
of the importance of this or that. Do we
imagine that St. Paul ever dreamed that his
stray correspondence, written at the white-heat
of the moment, addressed to the passing cir-
cumstances of a given time and place, for-
gotten, may be, by himself, as our own often
is, when the pen is laid down, was destined to
be the leading part of a sacred book, to be
regarded as the storehouse of doctrine, the
centre and foundation of a world's faith !
Often it is what the man himself has thought
least of that represents his largest payment.
Goethe prided himself more on his theory of
colours, which was a false one, than on his
Faust. How little did Ken's " Evening hymn "
and Newman's " Abide with me " bulk to the
writers as compared with the sum of their activi-
ties and their interests ! And yet, as the years
roll on, it seems more and more as though it
OUR CONTRIBUTION TO LIFE. 157
were to write these hymns that these men
lived.
But surprises of this kind are only a small
part of the matter. The marvellous fortune
of a Paul's letters, hidden from himself, is
visible to us. But the greater part of our
contribution to life, whether it be that of an
apostle or a drayman, is hidden, not only
from us and our contemporaries, but from all
posterity, so long as it keeps on this side the
veil. In trying to unravel the riddle of men's
destiny we are apt to catch at the illumined
and splendid points, as though we have here the
explanation of the parts of it that are dark
and troubled. It is nothing of the kind. Do
we find, for instance to take a stray historical
example that the great after career of a John
Knox, as evangelist and reformer, is any
sort of explanation of his sombre years as a
Dominican monk, or of the horrible experi-
ence when he toiled as a slave at the galleys ?
The prosperity of one period of life or of one
part of the world is no answer concerning the
suffering of another part. That so large a
portion of our contribution to life takes the
form of sheer endurance, the doing of things
that are irksome and that supply no visible
158 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
reward, demands a deeper solution. And
there is surely one to hand. The pessimistic
interpretation of life commits the mistake of
supposing that our seemingly unprofitable and
disastrous experiences have been transacted
once for all; that this is their final form,
about which nothing more is to be done but
the lamenting. Whereas all the probabilities
are that such experiences have only begun
their history ; that these seeming unprofit-
ables and wearinesses are the rough out-
lines, the first stages in a series of immense
transformations and results that are yet to be
revealed.
It is only along that line, the ancient line of
faith, that we are able to make any satisfactory
terms with our past. Viewed in this light our
very blunders and failures receive a consecra-
tion which makes us at peace with them. The
joy we missed and the pain that came instead
are seen to form the cross, the manful bearing
of which may turn out to be our chief, preor-
dained, contribution to life. In the centre of
the trial stand we, glad in the midst of it to
know that our Commander has assigned us so
difficult a post, and determined that the trust
reposed in us shall not be betrayed.
OUR CONTRIBUTION TO LIFE. 159
When I was young I deemed that sweets are sweet ;
But now I deem some searching bitters are
Sweeter than sweets, and more refreshing far
And to be relished more, and more desired,
And more to be pursued on eager feet,
On feet untired, and still on feet tho' tired.
But our contribution to life is still in
progress ; with some of us it is as yet only a
beginning. What form the unfulfilled part
of it is to take is a secret ; so many factors that
enter into it are hidden from us. Yet of one
factor we can make sure, and that is our own
will. No combination of all the natural forces
in the planet can vie for one moment with the
potentialities of the human volition. In its
secret chamber we can forge destinies. The
combination of freedom and necessity that
goes on there is a mystery we shall probably
never explain. The nearest approach to it,
perhaps, is in the formula of Hegel : " It is only
as we are in ourselves that we can develop
ourselves, yet is it we ourselves that develop
ourselves." Despite the dense sophistical webs
that have been woven round this subject man
has always believed in his freedom. Plutarch well
represents this age-long faith when, speaking
of Homer, he says, " The poet never introduces
the Deity as depriving man of the freedom of
160 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
the will, but as moving the will. He does not
represent the heavenly power as producing the
resolution, but the ideas that lead to the
resolution."
But this life-determining power to be of any
service to us has to be trained, and to be
reinforced. The supreme human achievement
is to make resolutions and to keep them. If a
man cannot resolve for a lifetime, let him
resolve for one day. His will-power for the
morrow will be perceptibly stronger for the
effort. The world's emancipation, its advent
to an earthly paradise, depends not on the
accumulation of capital, but on the rescue of
its will-power and the concentration of it on
noble living. Imagine the lift toward human
felicity if this magnificent sentence in Tertullian
were made into a fixed resolve : " To wish ill, to
do ill, to speak ill or to think ill of any one we
are equally forbidden without exception."
Here is a contribution to life, the noblest
conceivable, which we can every one make. It
may not be ours to add to the world's wealth by
great inventions or works of genius. We may
be prevented from doing the thing we had most
set our hearts on. But in one direction lies a
sphere of glorious freedom. It is that of help-
OUR CONTRIBUTION TO LIFE. 161
ing the world to its new, its Christian temper.
When as a daily discipline we resolutely
crush within us the first beginnings of unloving
thought towards our fellow, when we help him
by bathing the facts of each day's life in the
radiant atmosphere of our own faith, when by
God's grace and our inner struggle we have
produced that noblest and most delightful of
products, a richly developed inner life, we shall
have taken the best possible means of paying
back our debt. The world's greatest asset is
the souls it is producing. Let us see to it that
our own becomes a worthy addition.
XVIII.
The Gospel of Law.
THERE are few subjects about which people
have indulged more in the luxury of confused
thinking than that of law in relation to religion.
St. Paul has something to do with this, though
the blame does not lie at his door. Men have
imagined they were following him in opposing
law to grace, in making law the antithesis of
gospel. That is their mistake and not his.
Paul never attempts to get outside law. His
gospel is full of it. With him it is a question,
not of law or no law, but of higher versus
lower law. He rises above the Sinai and
Leviticus sphere in the same way that the
organic rises above the sphere of the inorganic.
The higher life is still one of law. It takes, in
fact, the laws of the region from which it has
emerged into a higher synthesis, where it
exhibits them in new forms, with higher
potencies. The apostle sums all this in his one
pregnant statement : " For the law of the Spirit
THE GOSPEL OF LAW. 163
of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from
the law of sin and death."
The idea of law as being the antithesis of
Gospel has, however, in recent thinking,
revived under some new forms. It has been
declared on high authority, and in more than
one quarter, that the great system of law which
we designate as Nature contains no gospel for
man, and no prophecy of one. Professor
Huxley meant this when he affirmed, in his
Romanes lecture, that Nature was non-moral,
and that human ethics were, in fact, a battle
against her methods. Modern poetry, too, has
painted her as ruthless, "red in tooth and
claw," while there have not been wanting
religious teachers who proclam that, apart
from the direct revelation in Christ, man finds
in the universe no suggestion of grace or love,
no hint of a Heavenly Father.
It is worth while examining whether these
things are so. Some of us read Nature very
differently. That Christ's revelation is the
master-key to her problem we entirely believe.
But a key, to be of any use, supposes a lock
which fits it. If Nature herself is not full of
grace, what is certain is that Christ misread
her. He found the world writ all over with the
164 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
sign-manual of His Father, and taught us that.
"We are at a far remove from the standpoint
of the Deistical Tindal, but his " Christianity
as Old as the Creation" contains after all a
true idea. Christianity is largely a rendering of
what was in Nature, but which man had pre-
viously failed to discern there. We designate
Nature as feminine, and truly. For she is full
of the mother element. On the whole subject
Hooker had a wider outlook than some of the
moderns, when, at the end of the first book of
his " Polity," he gives of law, as discerned in
the general system of things, this magnificent
description : " Of law there can be no less
acknowledged than that her seat is in the
bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the
world; all things in heaven and earth do her
homage, the very least as feeling her care,
and the greatest as not exempted from her
power."
Law, we say, is full of grace. In its
operations, its conditions, its promises, its per-
formances, it suggests everywhere what we
understand by Gospel. A man proposes to
learn swimming or cycling. He finds himself
immediately in contact with certain laws.
They say to him, "Believe^ obey, and accord-
THE GOSPEL OP LAW. 165
ing to your faith it shall be unto you." The
neophyte, if he be nervous, imagines that while
other men in this matter may be under grace,
he is certainly singled out for reprobation. The
laws by which a man may keep at the top of
the water or in easy equilibrium on the saddle
of a bicycle, have assuredly, his fears suggest,
a statute of limitations which keeps him out.
Let him trust and see. He learns finally that
in place of reprobation, of favouritism, of limita
tion, the law says " whosoever will." To all-
and sundry, to rich and poor, to gentle and
simple, to wise and foolish, to good and bad,
it offers without restriction all its largess of
service, provided only it is believed in and
obeyed.
Granted, we are told ; but then there is the
other side. What of the man who disobeys,
or who fails to learn ? What Gospel is there
in Nature's ruthlessness, in her law of gravita-
tion, when it smashes a man at the foot of a
precipice, in her blind rage of tempest when
the howling sea swallows a shipload of shriek-
ing creatures within sight of land? What
forgiveness is there in Nature, what escape
from the chain of her iron necessity? Our
human societies, faiths and hopes, are they not
1GG OlJESELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
a protest against her, rather than an inspira-
tion from her ?
Softly, and one thing at a time. Nature, it
is true, has her stern, hard side, but is it after
all as stern as it is often painted ? Expertis
crede. Some of us have actually been as near
death by foundering, or by precipice smash as
could well be, without the actual experience-
near enough to know what the immediately
previous sensation would be like, and have
found it not nearly so bad as the outsider
might picture. A famous Alpine climber has
described his feeling when, having missed his
footing, he found himself dropping from one
rock to another down a precipitous descent.
He felt certain of being killed, but his one
mental occupation during the operation was
the calculation as to how many bumps it would
take to finish him. Such experiences, be it
also remembered, are the great exceptions of
life, and they are soon over. "The black
minute's at end " before there is time to worry
much over it. With animals, where Nature's
slaughter is on the greatest scale, both pain and
worry are at a minimum. Besides, suffering
and death are a part of the scheme of revela-
tion, as well as of Nature pure and simple. If
THE GOSPEL OP LAW. 167
any odium attaches to them it must be shared
by one as well as the other.
But Nature, it is said, differs from Gospel in
her doctrine of non-forgiveness. We are at a
loss to know how this notion arises. Rather
should we affirm that Nature forgives royally,
unto seventy times seven. Nothing, on the
whole, is more astonishing than the way she
bears with wrongdoers. Generations of men
will go on violating her laws and yet survive.
She mothers them and keeps them going some-
how, spite of their frightful heresies in food,
and air and exercise, and a thousand things.
They break each other's bones or spill each
other's blood. Straightway the great Nurse
is busy with them, working with her vis medi-
catriz at their wounds, weaving new tissues,
deftly joining what has been sundered, and
giving up never while a chance remains.
Men talk of the dire inevitableness of heredity.
Nature herself makes not nearly so much fuss
about it as some modern professors. Gutter
children, heirs of generations of vice, who,
according to the prevailing doctrine, should be
irrevocably damned, body and soul, are daily
taken out of the streets of London and put into
new conditions, by which their entail of ruin is
168 OCJKSELVES AND THE UNIVEESB.
cut off. Transplanted to Canada or some other
region of open air and hard work, they slough
off their legacy of heredity and develop into
wholesome farmers and citizens. Man's
recoverableness from seemingly desperate con-
ditions is, in fact, the wonder and the lesson of
history. When we read of the early triumphs
of Christianity ; how, out of the inconceivable
vileness of the society of the time, there arose,
in Rome, in Ephesus, in Corinth, the Divine
character described in the letters of Paul or in
the Epistle to Diognetus, we think of all this,
and rightly, as a marvel of grace. But not less
is it a marvel of Nature. Leaven, however
good, could not make bread out of a stone.
The new force could only operate through the
power of response in the raw material. Men
became Christlike because they were ante-
cedently capable of becoming so. The greatest
spiritual victories the world has known are
equally victories of natural law.
Any other theory is, in short, logically un-
thinkable. The universe has no antinomies of
nature and grace. The one works through the
other. The humanity which has evolved ethics
more, which has evolved, because of having
first received, Divinity has done and won all
THE GOSPEL OF LAW.
this through Nature, and no otherwise. Out of
the one force, which fashioned and keeps the
visible world, which gives us the blasts of
winter and the infinite grace of spring, which
evolved from lower types the human form, and
lifted us from brute to man, from this has come
also the capacity for the spiritual and then the
spiritual itself. Revelation in its forms of in-
tuition, of Prophet, of Christ, of Spirit, is the
working of the One Divinity immanent in
every part and portion of the visible as of the
invisible universe. The laws of that universe
are everywhere permanent, and trustworthy,
and good simply because they are God's
habits, the expression of His character.
XIX.
Life's Healing Forces.
IN that creed of experience which people, by
the time of middle age, have generally built up
for themselves, a central article will, with most
of them, we fancy, be a conviction of the
immense healing power hidden away in every
department of the world's life and available for
every circumstance of it. For some of us who
have reached the " grand climacteric," or are
beyond it, the reflection that we are alive at all
is a source of constant astonishment, while the
consciousness that we are happy is yet more
wonderful. It is the men and women who
have been well knocked about who are most
sensible of nature's marvellous doctoring.
When we have had the body laid low by all
manner of ailments and yet have survived;
when fate's ploughshare has gone clean through
one after another of our most cherished pro-
jects, to leave us, as we discover afterwards,
not one penny the worse j when, after our in-
LIFE'S HEALING FORCES. 171
most affections have been smitten by shattering
bereavements, we rise from the blow not only
still loving, but still enjoying, we become con-
scious, as no tyro or mere surface skimmer can,
of a vis medicatrix naturce, of a vast system
and force of healing, spread through the whole
constitution of things, which becomes hence-
forth one of our most delightful and most in-
structive studies.
Apart from its great speculative outlooks, to
which we shall come presently, the subject is,
we say, for itself most pleasant to linger over.
Is there anything in the world so tender, so
entirely motherly, as that caress with which
Nature, when we are sick or overwrought, woos
us back to strength? Eobust health is very
well in its way, but there is a subtle happiness
it does not know. It is that tasted by the man
of nervous organisation when, strained to ex-
haustion point, he flies for recovery to his
healer ; when, away on the sea, or meeting the
keen breeze of the moorland, he knows that
every breath he draws, every glint of the
open heaven, every bit of scenery his eye
rests on, every moment of the delicious
resting-time, is forming part of one great
system of beneficence that is working to make
172 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
him well. One might expatiate, too, on
Nature's surgery ; how, when the bodily
economy is broken in upon by sword-cut or
bullet-wound, she immediately summons her
forces to the point attacked ; how there she
commences a process of stanching, of spinning
and weaving of tissues, of expulsion of dan-
gerous matter, and building up of new and
healthy substance, all in a way so wonderful
and masterly. Not less beautiful is her
manner of handling wounds of the mind and
heirt. When in our grief we refuse to be
comforted, and put joy from us as something
forbidden, she waits, and gently insists until
we smile again. Tourgenieff's statement of the
difference between youth and age that " youth
will eat gilt gingerbread and fancy it is daily
bread, too ; but a time comes when you're in
want of dry bread even," is one of those ex-
aggerations which are the bane of antithesis.
Nature is kinder than this. The after-life
affords us dry bread and something more. The
middle-aged world has had wounds enough of
body and mind to kill it a dozen times over ;
but it is alive and cheerful ; it has found heal
ing for its hurts.
But we may launch out now a little and
LIFE'S HEALING FORCES. 173
touch, cautiously, one or two of those specula-
tive points to which this topic directly invites.
The first of these is the question, " How far do
these remedial agencies go ? Is there, in the
realm either of the material or of the spiritual,
anything that is irremediable ? " One of the
most impressive features, it will be remem-
bered, of " Butler's Analogy " is his conception
of Nature's teaching of the irremediable.
Courses of conduct relating both to body and
mind that contravene her laws may, up to a
certain point, be condoned, and their evil
results averted ; carried beyond that point, their
penalty is utter ruin. This, he says, is true of
the physical body, where the sentence is death,
and of communities and nations, where the
judgment is final destruction. And the ana-
logies here from the present life, he argues,
may be taken to hold of the life to come.
We doubt whether, if Butler had lived in our
day, he would have been so ready with this
particular argument. For he would have had
to take into consideration the fact, of which
modern science and the modern philosophy of
history are continually reminding us that the
final judgments on which he lays so much
stress are, after all, not finalities; that the
174 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
destructions, when looked into, are not so
much destructions as healings. Of the national
"days of judgment" few have been more
impressive in their apparent hopelessness than
the fall of the Jewish State under Nebuchad-
nezzar, and its after and completer destruction
by the Eomans under Titus. But we now
realise that to the former the Jews owed their
highest conception of God, their greatest
literature, in short, their spiritual selves ; while
to the latter, with its consequent dispersion of
the race over the face of the earth, we trace
the immense world-wide Judaic influence of
to-day. The " destruction " was, in fact, a
remedy. When Augustine penned his " De
Civitate Dei" the shadow of the impending
Vandal invasion was already over his beloved
North Africa, and the Roman State was every-
where crashing into hideous ruin. It was
natural that he, with the other Christian
thinkers of the time, should see here the final
doom of the world-powers; the coming cata-
strophe in which everything outside the Catholic
Church was to perish. We, who are on the
farther side of these events, judge them differ-
ently. The old Rome fell, it is true, but it
died only to rise again to rise in a dozen new
LIFE'S HEALING FORCES. 175
and vigorous communities, who in their laws,
their institutions and their spirit, inherited
what of it was fitted to live. Kome's day of
judgment was neither a ruin nor a finality. It
was, again, a remedy.
May we not say the same of death itself?
On the physical side it is Nature's way out of
an impossible situation. It is her heroic
surgery. When the forces of disease have
prevailed against her ordinary methods of
healing, she dissolves in this way a combina-
tion that has become simply painful. Nothing
has been destroyed. What has happened is
that the arrangement of particles round a
hopelessly weakened centre has come to an
end, leaving these particles free for a new and
sounder grouping. And even in this, the
harshest of her processes, it is wonderful to
observe Nature's tenderness. In a recently-
published German work, which has gone
through eight editions, "Vom Zustande des
Menschen kurz vor dem Tode," the author,
Professor Hornemann, gives a scientific
analysis of the experiences of the dying. He
declares that the " death agony " is painful
to the spectator rather than to the patient;
that the sense of dread of death which haunts
176 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
so many during life almost invariably dis-
appears at its actual approach ; that, in fact, as
is shown by the testimonies of people brought
back from the verge of the grave, a special
consciousness of remarkable calm and peace
is a normal experience of the closing hour.
From beginning to end, and even through
what we call the "end," Nature appears ever
as the healer.
But having come so far we must go farther.
We are confronted now with the question,
"What bearing has all this upon spiritual
disease, and specially upon the Christian
doctrines of sin, redemption, and the future ? "
We must remind ourselves, to begin with, that
Christianity contemplates man's spiritual his-
tory as, throughout, a pathology. It considers
him as morally infect. It starts with the
doctrine of a Fall. The science of the sixties,
we remember, hotly joined issue at this point
with religion, declaring that Evolution knew
nothing of a fall, but only of a perpetual rise.
It forgot, what it has since thought of, that
there might be such a thing as a fall upwards,
a fall as part of the process of rising. Indeed,
when, according to Pascal's famous analogy,
we consider the whole race as a single human
LIFE'S HEALING FOECES. 177
being perpetually growing and perpetually
learning, we realise that some such event is
exactly what we should expect. In the history
of every child a moral tumble is part of its
process of inner growth. Beginning on the
purely animal plane, with physical instincts in
place of moral perceptions, it gradually
evolves the moral sense and with it the
capacity of sinning. Its first spiritual failure
is thus at once a rise and a fall.
The line of thought here opened points to
more than a reconciliation between physical
science and Christian theology, though that
is something. In the minds which it fairly
enters it will react with immense effect on
the shaping of the theology itself. It will,
for instance, influence our whole conception of
evil, both as to its nature and its final
results. While not dogmatising about evil, or
pretending fully to understand it; while
avoiding, on the one hand, the Neoplatonic
optimism which regarded it as merely a not-
being, the necessary foil of the good, the
shadow of the light, " the transitoriness cleaving
to the many in opposition to the one " ; and on
the other the pessimism, orthodox and un-
orthodox, which has made evil a hopeless
12
178 OURSELVES A^TO THE UNIVEESE.
blackness that must for ever cloud the
universe, we do at least along this line of inves-
tigation come across some rays of light. When
we see in the physical world a system of diseases
kept in check by a ubiquitous counter system
of remedial powers, and this carefully limited
action positively used as one of the great moral
educators of the race, we may well ask whether
a similar thing may not be predicated of man's
spiritual condition. Without going the length
of the daring " peccando promeremur " of some
early Christian thinkers, we may, at least,
with St. Paul, believe in the abounding of
"grace over sin"; believe even that the
action and reaction, in this sphere of evil
and its remedy, will produce some high result
impossible without it, but as yet not ascertain-
able by us.
We have touched here the merest fringe of
an immense subject. We have said nothing of
the factors in this system of spiritual healing ;
of the Cross which is its centre j of the vicarious
suffering which is its principle ; of the myriad
human ministries by which that principle is
applied. It is enough to have emphasized the
fact that the human sickness of body and soul
is no ground for despair, but rather for hope.
LIFE'S HEALING FORCES. 179
It is something if we can believe that the
world's evil is not irremediable ; that for its
diseases there are remedies ; that in these very
diseases themselves may be discerned an
ulterior purpose of good.
But hush ! For you can be no despair :
There's amends ! 'Tis a secret ; hope and pray.
XX.
Of Fear in Religion.
THE point is often discussed whether the com-
parative absence from the modern pulpit of
those appeals to fear characteristic of the
earlier evangelism has not militated against
its power. The question here opened is
one that has to be faced afresh by this
generation. Under the reaction caused by
the crudities and falsities connected with
earlier presentations of judgment and punish-
ment there has been a disposition to give the
whole subject a wide berth. But this can
never be a permanent attitude. The Church,
as trustee of the human spiritual interests,
cannot afford to be in two minds on the
question, still less to have no mind at all.
And there is no reason for such a position.
The Christian consciousness, in its fuller de-
velopment, has attained to a view of God, the
soul and the world sufficiently precise to enable
it to pronounce here with perfect clearness
OF FEAB IN RELIGION. 181
The preacher of to-day, awake to the spiritual
revelation that is going on around him, should
have no difficulty and no hesitancy about the
place he assigns to fear as one of the religious
working forces.
In endeavouring to ascertain what that
place is, it may be well to begin with a glance
backward. Man's earliest impressions of reli-
gion carried with them undoubtedly a large
element of terror. Timor fecit Deos, " fear made
the Gods," says Statius, and the statement has
its truth. The sense that he was in the
hands of vast unknown powers, which might
at any time become fatally hostile to him, was
the impression on the savage which first drove
him to prayer and sacrifice. The gleam of
the lightning, the roar of the thunder, were to
him certain indications of supernal wrath. In
religion terror came first and love last. Every-
where in the early world, as in the primitive
races which represent it to-day, the feeling
seems to have been that man's fate was in the
hands of hostile rather than benevolent powers,
and that his pressing business was to placate
them, or protect himself from them. The
Dyaks of to-day, after an illness, change their
names so that the demon who sent it may not
182 OUESELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
recognise them and continue his persecutions.
Modern anthropology is full of similar illustra-
tions. The latter Pagan philosophy both of
Greece and Rome reached what it conceived
to be its highest achievement in ridding the
mind of these fears. Lucian turns them into
a jest ; while perhaps the best quoted line in
all Roman literature describes "the happy
man " as " he who could put all fears and
inexorable fate under his feet."
But the element of fear which classic philo-
sophy sought to eliminate came back into the
world through Christianity. The New Testa-
ment does not hesitate to strike this note.
What it had in view in so doing we will
discuss later. Nowhere, however, did the
primitive Church conception suffer more from
that " secondary Christianity," to use Harnack's
expressive phrase, which eventually flooded
Christendom with the old Paganism under a
new name, than in the later ecclesiastical use
of terror. For long centuries the prevailing
conception of the spiritual powers was
demonic. God was demonic as well as Satan.
He was taught as capable of inflicting endless
physical tortures on little children, on beings
powerless to resist, and of using the Devil and
OF FEAR IN RELIGION. 183
his angels as willing henchmen in the business.
It is a symptom of the essential healthiness of
the normal mind that at heart the people never
believed in these horrors. Anyone who reads
the old mystery-plays of the Middle Ages, in
which the traditional hell, with its devils, was
made the subject of the coarsest burlesque,
must feel that there was no sense of reality
here either to terrify or restrain. And this
revolt steadily grew. Rabelais, who represented
one large note of the Renaissance, treats hell
quite in the manner of Lucian. The lesson of
history here should surely suffice. It shows
that appeals to fear of this type, whether under
a pagan or a Christian name, lead only to
cynicism and unbelief.
Apart from history the Christian conscious-
ness, where it is allowed full play, makes it for
ever impossible to use the mediaeval conception
of hell as an appeal to fear. What forbids it
is the New Testament conception of God. The
supreme Gospel offered there to man is that
God is Love. But if God is Love anywhere He
is Love everywhere, as much in the place called
hell as in the place called heaven ; as much the
moment after a man's death as the moment
before it. To imagine it possible that because
184 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
the breath is out of a man's body the Provi-
dence which hitherto has cherished him should
suddenly become his torturer, with mocking
fiends for executioners, is as reasonable as to
suppose that a mother, because her child has
fallen asleep, should straightway cease to be a
mother and change into a murderess. The
heart, which Schleiermacher says is the true
theologian, will not permit such conclusions as
these.
But what of the New Testament appeal to
fear ? Is not the book full of warnings ; is not
hell in its list of contents ; and have not those
preachers and those Churches been most suc-
cessful who have most insisted on this side of
its teaching ? If we answer these questions in
the affirmative, as we find ourselves compelled
to do, where is the reconciliation between such
a position and those others we have just been
urging ? It is well that such demands are made
on us, for they render it impossible that we
should remain indifferent or negative. They
compel us to a solution.
And the solution is not, after all, far to seek.
The Christian appeal to fear finds its explana-
tion, not in the vindictive character of God,
but in the stupendous possibilities, up or
OP FEAR IN RELIGION. 185
of the human soul. What science is at length
tardily recognising has lain revealed, all these
centuries, upon the pages of the New Testa-
ment that man essentially is spirit ; that he
belongs to an unseen order, and that he plays
a part there in which infinite issues are involved.
The insistent warning note of the Gospel is
that man is making or marring himself ; that
it is an immense and wondrous self he is making
or marring ; and that the process is going on
now. Heaven and hell are truly in this busi-
ness, for, as said the old Persian poet :
Behold, myself am heaven and hell.
The one is the zenith of our possible spiritual
fortunes, as the other is the nadir. To-day we
are weaving the structure we are henceforth to
inhabit. The profound speculations of Ulrici
in his Leib und Seele, where he conceives the
thoughts, volitions and actions proceeding from
our daily inner life as constructing the spiritual
body of the future, are entirely in a line with
the genius both of modern Science and of
primitive Christianity. Surely there is ground
here for the most urgent and compelling appeal
that one man can make to another ; ground for
utmost awe and fear lest our folly should
186 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
baulk these possibilities ; lest our course should
be towards blindness instead of to the heavenly
vision ; down deathwards instead of up to the
ever fuller life !
Mingled with this element of the Christian
fear is the dread of offending God. We have, it
is hoped, outgrown that precious piece of theo-
logical casuistry which argued that man's sin,
because against an infinite Being, was there-
fore infinite, and demanded an infinite punish-
ment. It was forgotten, surely, in this syllo-
gism that an infinite God would have an infinite
capacity of forgiveness. The theologians here
had got hold of infinity by the wrong end.
What holds the enlightened conscience of to-
day is not a consideration of that kind, but the
thought of the Love which it sins against, and
the intimacy with the Holiest against which
sin is the bar. We cannot bear the thought of
that Heart being smitten with our ingratitude,
of that Face turned away in grief from our
shortcoming. Jean Ingelow has put with unsur-
passable force this side of the Christian fear :
Come, lest this heart should, cold and cast away,
Die ere the Guest adored she entertain ;
Lest eyes that never saw Thine earthly day
Should miss Thy heavenly reign.
OF FEAR IN RELIGION. 187
Such fear will also react on our whole con-
duct towards others. Everywhere around us
we see spiritual destinies in the making, souls
on the upward or the downward way. It will
be impossible, holding such convictions, for us
to be indifferent towards them. Bather will
the Christian fear in us work as a Divine solici-
tude for their inner welfare, impelling us to
such courses of life as shall be for their help
and not their hindrance. And thus fear, which,
as we have seen, entered as first and lowest
element into the religious concept, comes out,
transmuted by love, as its last and highest.
XXI.
Our Moral Variability.
ONE of the supreme questions concerning a
man's character is that of the range of its
variation. We want to know about him not
simply what he is to-day, but what he may be
to-morrow. He is never in one stay, but is
perpetually passing from one moral grade to
another. This movement will be within certain
limits. A correct estimate of him will require
that we know these limits, and that we are
able to strike the middle point between his best
and his worst. But a closer observation will
reveal a movement not only of the man within
the limits, but also of the limits themselves.
And here a curious thing is to be noted. In
the order of human development extremes
meet. For the two points of least variation
are at the bottom and the top. The rudest
savage and the most perfect character agree in
presenting the minimum of moral variability.
It is on the way from the one to the other that
OUR MORAL VARIABILITY. 189
we find the maximum of oscillation. The brute
and the saint can each be reckoned on for what
they will do under certain conditions. The
man and the woman between these points, that
is, shall we say, our noble selves, are the
puzzling, if not the unknown, quantity.
It is difficult to say anything about a cha-
racter, even our own, until it has been put
through certain tests. Our progress through
life is a progress from one astonishment to
another at the vagaries of our own particular
ego under the continually varying conditions
which time and the world bring. The craft
which behaved so beautifully when sailing
down stream reveals quite new features when
the swell of ocean smites it and a sou'-wester is
on the beam. To take, for instance, what is
now almost a universal experience, the test of
travel. The old reproach that the Anglo-
Indian dropped his Christianity at the Cape on
the voyage out, and picked it up again there on
his return home, is to some extent rolled away ;
but are we quite sure how our staid village
churchwarden is going to behave during his
fortnight in Paris ? The Parisian himself will
tell you that the reproach of debauchery
brought against his city arises from the con-
190 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
duct, not of its regular inhabitants, but of the
strangers who rush through its dissipations
and then go home to gravely denounce Con-
tinental immorality. Certain it is that a
change of sky and the absence of home cyno-
sure and restraint is a test that will surely find
a man's rotten spot, if there is one.
But enormous moral variations may come
without our stirring a step. There is that
arising from the mere movement of time. In
the course of a couple of years a growing lad or
girl will often slough off their earlier likeness
and take on something quite new. Robert
Louis Stevenson tells how, by a process he
could not explain, he found himself at that
period changed from an inveterate shirker of
hard work into a patient toiler, wrestling with
all his force to get the best out of himself. He
came about like a good ship. There must have
been, he concludes, a Pilot at the helm. Every-
one agrees, also, that advancing age is a great
modifier of the morale, though in what way and
to what degree are matters on which observers
are widely at issue. A medical author declared
some time ago that the moral sentiments dis-
tinctly declined with the advance of years.
Montaigne, too, avers that " old age sets more
OUR MORAL VARIABILITY. 191
wrinkles on the spirit than on the face," and
that there belongs to it " a ridiculous care for
riches after the use of them is forfeited, besides
more envy, injustice and malignity." Fonte-
nelle, on the other hand, finds there the period
in which " our passions are calmed, our duties
fulfilled and our ambition satisfied." As a
matter of fact, old age is the day of judgment
on youth and manhood. It is the hell or the
heaven which these have made it.
Perhaps the most momentous possibilities of
moral variation, both for good or ill, lie along the
line of our human fellowships. The impact on
us of another soul is potent, not only in reveal-
ing ourselves, but in creating, as it were, a
new self. There seems to be a kind of spiritual
chemistry here, which from two combining
elements produces a fresh something, a moral
condition which was not there before. This
power of the character to blend and almost to
lose itself in that of another is wonderfully
illustrated in what Montaigne, to quote him
again, says of his friendship with La Boetie, a
friendship which, he avers, " having seized all
my will, induced the same to plunge and lose
itself in his ; which likewise having seized alj
his will, induced it to plunge and lose itself iy
192 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
mine, with a mutual greed and with a like con-
currence." The sublimest examples are those
where neglected and demoralised natures are
brought into contact with a high spiritual
character, and, yielding to its mysterious force,
begin straightway to form after that likeness.
This, with what is implied in it, and with
what lies back of it, is our divinest guarantee
of human improvability.
But the variation through companionship
has also its sinister side. The meeting of the
strong with the weak is too often the wreck of
the latter's moral equilibrium. Arthur Clough
has given us on this point one of his subtlest
studies where, in that fine poem, " The
Bothie," he delineates the special danger of a
girl of the humbler class when solicited by " a
gentleman." The peril is that the sense of
class helps to confuse the moral standard.
To the prestige of the richer the lowly are prone to be
yielding ;
Think that in dealing with them they are raised to a
different region,
Where old laws and morals are modified, lost, exist
not ;
Ignorant they as they are, they have but to conform
and be yielding.
Certain temperaments have more to struggle
OUR MORAL VARIABILITY. 193
against than others in the matter of moral
oscillation ; and of these most of all, it would
seem, the artistic and the poetic. We are not
in a position to properly adjudicate upon the
aberrations of genius. We cannot compare the
immense swing backwards at times of a Burns
or a Heine with the moral equanimity of the
placid burgher who stumps with undeviating
pace along his turnpike. It is the climbers
who are in danger of the abyss. Must we not,
for instance, forgive something, perhaps a
good deal, on this account, to that most
dazzling of artists and of rascals, Benvenuto
Cellini ? It was surely not hypocrisy, but
partly the madness of his time and partly
the madness of his artist blood, which made
him capable now of quoting St. Paul and
discoursing eloquently of heaven, and anon of
plunging his dagger into a rival and boast-
ing of the deed! The extraordinary thing,
indeed, about those times, and of some later
ones, is that men were capable of what seem to
us the most monstrous inconsistencies without
apparently themselves discerning in them any
moral incongruity. What a picture is this,
for instance, which Horace Walpole gives us of
what he saw in the Chapel Eoyal at Versailles :
13
194 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
" There was Mme. du Barry, the King's reign-
ing mistress, close to the altar ; her husband's
sister was with her. In the tribune above,
surrounded by prelates, was the amorous and
still handsome King." The piety, the pomp,
and the carnality seemed to everybody appar-
ently to go perfectly well together. We are
by no means all we should be to-day, but we
have, at any rate, progressed to the point of
being able to see some difference between
these things.
But with the best of us, with those who have
been diligently using every means, human and
superhuman, for inward advance, there re-
mains a disheartening consciousness of moral
variability. A sleepless night, an excess of
mental exertion, will make us uncertain in
temper. The strangest reactions come. We
have heard a preacher say that he felt him-
self a mere Pagan on Monday morning.
Amiel notes, as Browning has done, the
advent of spring as waking up every kind of
desire. "II fait tressaillir le moine dans
Vonibre de son couvent, la merge derriere les
rideaux de sa chambrette." Worthy people on
whose general charity and probity we can
always count, seem as to their tempers to be
OUR MORAL VARIABILITY. 195
possessed at times by two totally different
spirits, whose successive entrance or exit
changes the whole set and shape of the
features, the light in the eye, the quality of
the voice.
It will be the mark of a growing inward
life that with an ever-widening range of
knowledge, feeling, and capacity, our area of
moral variation steadily diminishes. More and
more the central governing force of our life
will hold us to itself. Outward circumstance
of every kind will lose power to confuse and to
upset. People will know with an increasing
certainty where to look for us in the spiritual
realm. The only movement they will learn to
anticipate will be a movement upwards. What
is possible in this sphere is expressed for us in
a way that can hardly be surpassed in the
eulogium which the sceptic Gibbon passed on
the mystic William Law, who spent some
years as tutor in his father's house at Putney :
" In our family William Law left the reputa-
tion of a man who believed all that he pro*
fessed, and practised all that he enjoined."
XXII.
The Escape from Commonplace.
THERE is the story of a man of leisure who
found his future an endless vista, as it
seemed, of days in which he would go through
exactly the same round of getting up, dressing,
feeding, and going to bed again too appal-
ling in its monotony, and so escaped from it by
suicide. In such a position we could sympa-
thise with his feeling if we did not proceed to
his extremity. One of the greatest of human
burdens is the sense of being imprisoned by
the commonplace. A man spends his working
day in making the eighth part of a pin, or in
totting up columns of figures, or in selling
calico. His wife, meanwhile, is occupied with
an incessant cooking, cleaning and arranging,
which has all to be begun over again to-
morrow. " If only there were a respite, and a
chance of travel and change ! " They take it
for granted, and are here voicing the almost
universal feeling, that the escape from com-
THE ESCAPE FROM COMMONPLACE. 197
monplace is simply an affair of change of
circumstances.
How great an illusion this is will be patent
to any one who has the opportunity of study-
ing his fellows under widely varying conditions.
Riches in themselves furnish no escape from
the commonplace. They can purchase in-
numerable things, but not this. There is a
mob of rich people to-day, and they are on the
whole less interesting than the poor. Their
money can, if they choose, buy them laziness,
which they share with the tramp, and to about
as good purpose. It can secure the indulgence
of animal sensations with all manner of luxuri-
ous accessories. But some fatal laws block the
way to felicity along this line ; the law of
familiarity which robs the sensation of its first
flavour, and the laws relating to excess which
exact the grisliest of after penalties. Leading
performers in this line, a Tiberius and a Sar-
danapalus, offer great rewards for a new plea-
sure. The new pleasures, alas ! turn out to be
neither new nor pleasant. Consumed with the
thirst for enjoyment, and with a whole world
waiting to minister to it, they are at last un-
able, from the whole complicated apparatus, to
extract one satisfying drop.
198 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
People who have to stay at home imagine,
we have just said, that a sure escape from the
commonplace is by travel and change of scene.
It is enough to rub shoulders with the average
globe-trotter to be disillusioned on that head.
He carries, alas ! the commonplace everywhere
about with him. We call to mind how, at a
Swiss hotel, when an expedition was being
planned, a British tourist who was listening
exclaimed, wearily, "I suppose it is just the
same there as here, a lot of mountains and that
kind of thing ! " The Alps awakened in him
absolutely no response. He wanted Paris. It
was a brother soul who, on the JEgean, with
Salamis and the mountains that look on Mara-
thon in full view, grumbled in our ear, " I can't
for the life of me see what people find to rave
about in these places ; a lot of barren rocks and
tumble-down ruins ! " One meets Americans,
spending half their holiday in railway carriages,
rushing Europe and Asia, the driving power
behind them the fear that their neighbours in
Philadelphia or Indianapolis will want to know
if they inspected this mosque or saw that pic-
ture, and will triumph over them to their life's
end if they did not. To be carted round the
planet by contract is, after all, a thin, surface
THE ESCAPE FEOM. COMMONPLACE. 199
business that will never turn a fool into a wise
man, nor put insight into a blockhead.
So far, then, as at present appears, the busi-
ness of escaping the commonplace is a difficult
one, out of the reach apparently of any but the
rarer natures. But that would be a hasty con-
clusion. The most important factors in the
problem have not yet been touched. To begin
with, Nature does not seem to have organised
man's life here with a view to its being a purely
humdrum atfair. That she placed him in such
an astonishing universe, and with a relation to
it so marvellous, is in itself the answer to such
a supposition. "When, a million years ago, she
turned this new-comer off the track of his
fellow mammalian primates and began to add
to his brain-power while these others were
merely developing limb-power; when, bit by
bit, she brought him along this fresh line until,
with a body in the same zoological kingdom as
the chimpanzee, he attained to a mind that
demanded infinity for workroom and playplace,
she gave notice that here was a being whose
experience and destiny were to be certainly not
common. Nor will she allow any one of us to
forget this. The knowledge of good and evil
that she rubs into us j our encounters with pain
200 OURSELVES AND THE ONIVEESE.
and trouble, the fact that we can never get
through a day without some rebuff, some tangle
of circumstance ; and, most striking of all,
that in full view there is placed before every
mother's son of us, for wind up of our present
career, the tremendous adventure of death,
are all Nature's stern refusal to man to permit
himself to be trivial.
And with this plain hint from headquarters
to start us, we may now profitably turn our atten-
tion to the ways in which, imprisoned as we
most are in our narrowing labours and posi-
tions, we may yet individually escape the
commonplace. There is but one way and it is
an inward way. The only change as to our cir-
cumstances that is really effective is the change
of our mental and moral attitude towards them.
It was to this that Madame Swetchine arrived
as the result of her wide experience, " At
bottom there is in life only what one puts into
it " ; and which Montaigne, from an experience
still wider, has expressed in the aphorism,
" External occasions take both flavour and
colour from the inward constitution." Pre-
cisely in proportion as we become in ourselves
deeper, purer, more refined, more open-eyed,
does our environment become more wonderful,
THE ESCAPE FKOM COMMONPLACE. 201
more wholly removed from tedium or vulgarity.
There is no need to travel a thousand miles in
search of the sublime. A starry night is vastly
more sublime than Niagara. Samuel Drew, the
Cornish shoemaker, without going from his
last, sounded the deeps within him to such
purpose as to produce an astonishing work on
the soul. Let any one to whom the hedgerow
by his door has become common take with
him on his next visit there some handbook
of botany, say that treasure of delights, Anne
Pratt's " Flowering Plants of Great Britain,"
and he will find his hedge bottom grown
miraculous to him. The moment we take
ourselves in hand this way and realise that
the whole question of change, whether it
be of scenery or circumstance, is from begin-
ning to end a question of our own interior, and
of what goes on there, our deliverance has
begun. Maeterlinck, in his " Wisdom and
Destiny," strikingly illustrates this in what he
says of Emily Bronte. Here, says he, is a
young woman, daughter of a country clergy-
man, without means or the excitements of
travel or of society, who never had lover or
husband or family of her own. And yet, as her
one wonderful book shows, she lived out all
202 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
these experiences in her own soul and in their
highest forms. The world for us, let us repeat,
is our own interior.
We are not all, it may be said, constructive
geniuses like Emily Bronte. But if we cannot
speak we can at least listen, and in the great
literatures which come now to our doors almost
gratis, we may at any hour escape from mean
surroundings into the rarest society. If Homer
and Socrates and St. Paul and Shakespeare are
of our circle, we can dispense quite easily with
an invitation to the next Lord Mayor's dinner.
We have touched literature here, however, not
to dwell upon it, but for something to which it
leads us. The power of a great book, we soon
discover, is the power of the personality which
it enshrines. What moves us is that we are
there in contact with a soul, and the more soul
there is in the book the more we are moved by
it. A treatise of mechanics is not literature
simply because this personal element is lacking.
It is here that literature helps us to understand
religion. The life of literature, its whole
emancipating power, lies in this contact with
personality. It unites us with the world's great
spirits. And it is because of its revelation of
the Greatest of all Personalities that religion
THE ESCAPE FEOM COMMONPLACE. 203
is for us the everlasting deliverer from the
commonplace. The humblest peasant who has
felt God steps at once into the world's selecter
circle. He can never be henceforth, either to
others or, what is more important, to himself,
common or unclean.
It is to us one of the mysteries that so high
and serious a nature as that of Comte should
have been able to live and die in the belief of a
world that had no Supreme Personality behind
it. The deadly chill upon the spirit which such
a system casts a system in which we find
ourselves in a universe only of things a dead
universe with, as Richter puts it, a ghastly eye
socket glaring down upon us where an eye
should have been makes us shiver even now
as we remember the experience. It took a
Frenchman to prick this French system with
one touch of the pen. " The All," said Victor
Hugo, " would not be the All unless it con-
tained a Personality, and that Personality is
God."
Religion, we say, in the sense of an abiding
consciousness of God, is the supreme deliverer
from the commonplace. It is, as Joubert has
put it, "the poetry of the heart"; it is for
every man the open door into the infinite.
204 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
There seems a corollary to this, a special instruc-
tion to the religious teacher of whatsoever name.
What his fellow-man requires of him, what,
indeed, constitutes his chief raison d'etre in the
world, is that for himself and for his fellows he
escape the commonplace. And he is to do it, not
so much by genius or by learning as by enlarge-
ment and cleansing of his interior life, by the
infiltration into it of the life of God. There is
something pathetic beyond words in men's
yearning for the Divine, in the eagerness with
which they recognise any trace of it in their
teacher's speech and life. By a sure instinct
they know the reality and its counterfeit.
" Art thou Brother Francis of Assisi ? " said a
peasant once to the saint. " Yes." " Try,
then, to be as good as all think thee to be,
because many have great faith in thee, and
therefore I admonish thee to be nothing less
than people hope of thee." Yes, truly ! Here
spoke the deepest heart of humanity, and so
speaks it to-day. Our chief debt to our fellows
is the obligation to be good, to live the highest
life we know. A child-like, God-loving soul,
that begins its life afresh every morning,
whose history is that of a perpetual soaring,
is the most refreshing, heart-healing thing
THE ESCAPE FROM COMMONPLACE. 205
that exists. Beneath the world's cynicism
lives the consciousness that its chief treasure,
its rarest product, its pearl of price is the
saint's supernatural life. When humanity
sees this plant growing in the wilderness it
takes heart in its journeying, knowing it is not
forsaken of God.
XXIII.
Of Spiritual Detachment.
IN the coming reconstruction of theology the
builders will seek both their ground-plan and
their materials in the region of the spiritual
laws. These laws, which operate throughout
the universe, focus and realise themselves in
man. All the revelations, all the external
facts that make up human religious history,
have their origin and their interpretation here.
Some of the laws lie very deep down, and yield
themselves only to a very careful investigation.
Of this number is the principle of spiritual
detachment, with which we propose now to
deal. How difficult its trail is to discern is
evident by the numbers who have lost their
way in trying to follow it. The Indian
devotees who give themselves up to voluntary
tortures, or who leave their families for a
solitary, homeless life in the forest, are types
of these bewildered explorers. But their very
aberrations point to a something beneath,
OF SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT. 207
which is distinctive not only of the devotee
but of every man of us, and which must be
taken into account if we would reach any
proper comprehension either of history or of
ourselves.
The law of detachment lies close by the side
of the law of association in religion. The two
co-operate in defining the soul's movement
somewhat as the centripetal and centrifugal
forces co-operate in defining the orbit of the
earth. The operation of detachment is by a
constant breaking away of the mind from the
objects of its earlier attraction in search of
what is wider and higher. The spiritual move-
ment here has a close parallel in the mental
progress of a country-bred man who has after-
wards seen the world. In his earlier years his
view has been confined to the parish he was
born in. He knows no other scenery and no
other opinions. He applies to everything the
parochial standard of measurement. He
Thinks the rustic cackle of his bourg
The murmur of the world.
But the later years of travel and observation
snap the cables which tie him to this small
world. He finds himself part of a larger
208 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
system. He has a new measuring line, a
fresh standard for judging what is big and
little. Many things which loomed on the
rural horizon as of portentous moment are
now reckoned as of small account. All round
the man there has, we perceive, gone on a great
process of detachment.
But this, while it represents relatively an
immense development, is, after all, only a
beginning. Before a deeper insight such a
world-culture stands, in its turn, as something
only parochial. For a true cosmopolitanism
there must be excursions in a yet wider realm.
An imperious necessity drives man beyond the
region of flesh and sense. When these have
yielded him their utmost he still finds himself
Galled with his confines, and troubled yet more with
his vastness ;
Born too great for his ends, never at peace with his
goal.
Everything in the sense world bears, we
discover, the stamp of the evanescent. The
Baying of Heraclitus that we never cross the
same river twice, because the water we first
passed over has fled to the ocean, is a parable
of all our relations to the visible. While we
look at our possessions they melt before our
OF SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT. 209
eyes. And could we hold them, they are not
good enough. We drink of this water and
thirst again. That immense Weltschmerz of
which we read in the life of Lacordaire, when,
as a brilliant young advocate, with the world
at his feet, he suddenly saw all its hideous
emptiness, and fled from it to the life of the
cloister, is known to us all. If we listen to the
deep within us we hear a cry there as of a live
thing in prison, sighing for its true home. Like
some sea-bird in the centre of a continent that
seeks a way to the ocean that is its habitat,
the truest within us calls to the illimitable, the
unseen, and the imperishable as its only proper
abiding-place.
It is not till we have reached this stage
of thought and feeling that we are in a
position to estimate the real significance of
the message of Christ. Its central teaching
is that worldliness is a stupid provincialism.
It is not so much that it is wicked as that it
is so absurdly limited. Christ brings ua
tidings from a larger world on which He
proposes straightway to launch us. His
proposition is that we should
Here on this bank in some way live the life
Beyond the bridge.
14
210 OUKSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
The parochial view finds its end in the gain-
ing of sensual pleasures, of wealth and worldly
honours. Christ proclaims this to be the pastime
of babes, and suggests that we take up pursuits
worthy of manhood. He speaks as the
citizen and emissary of a larger universe, to
whose vaster and more splendid careers He
invites us. And the magnificent detachment
manifest in His teaching shines even more
resplendently in His life. In a fine passage in
one of his essays Holt Hutton has pointed out
how this appears specially in Christ's attitude
to His own sufferings. It does not occur to
Him that there is any hardship to Himself in
being scourged and crucified. Nothing is
further from His mind than any consternation
at the shame and disaster of His own earthly
destiny. He is occupied here entirely with the
wider purpose of the Divine Mind. He takes
suffering and want, and all the affronts the
world can offer, as moments simply in a con-
stant spiritual progress, as factors and instru-
ments for making visible on earth the invisible
things of the Kingdom of God.
It appears after all then that, despite the
scoffs with which the phrase has been greeted,
the only successful worldliness is an other-
OF SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT. 211
worldliness. To master this world we must be
free of another. Any lesser conception reduces
our life movement to something like the
navigation of the pre-compass period; a petty
steering by capes and headlands instead of
bold ventures across the ocean, guided by the
stars. Let us see, however, in more detail,
how this law of detachment works.
It disconnects for one thing the centre of
gravity of our life, the sum of its purpose,
inclination and desire, and lifts it to a
plane from which everything takes on a new
aspect. At this height we find men taking
their sorrows as personal possessions and en-
richments. They may not with a Goethe turn
them into song ; but they will certainly trans-
late them into character, which is even better.
A Boethius under sentence of death calmly
occupies the interval in writing the " Consola-
tions of Philosophy"; a St. Teresa when
persecuted " finds her soul in its true king-
dom with everything under its feet." What a
splendid height of detachment is that described
for us by the Roman annalist, of Canius Julius
condemned to death by Caligula ! At the last
stroke of the executioner he is asked by a
philosopher friend standing by, "Canius, in
212 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVEESE.
what state is your soul now ? " The answer is,
" I thought to keep steady with all my force to
see whether in this instant of death I might
perceive some dislodging of the soul, and
whether it would show some feeling of its
sudden departure." In this supreme moment,
that is, he is occupied simply in the calm
scientific analysis of his own sensations !
Small ground, surely, for the howl of the
pessimist when life at its worst can hurt no
more than this !
An example of this kind shows us the extent
to which the pagan world, at its best, had
learned the secret of spiritual detachment. Its
achievement, however, was largely a negative
one. There is not much good in a detachment
from the lower if one has not, to meet it, a
satisfying attachment to the higher. Stoicism
had a grey sky over it, and a north wind
blowing. It was bracing, but the scene lacked
sunshine. It is here that the Christian
sanctity so far surpasses the Stoic sanctity.
It gives a positive for the pagan negative. It
offers a home in the invisible such as we search
for in vain in Epictetus or Seneca or Aurelius.
They have hardened themselves into a noble
scorn of pain and loss, but they have not that
OP SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT. 213
fine sense of harbourage far up in the will of
God which enabled our Baxter, shut up in
prison, to sing :
No walls or bars can keep Thee out,
None can confine a holy soul ;
The streets of heaven it walks about,
None can its liberty control.
A detachment of this kind, which makes the
soul, in old Tauler's words, " so grounded in
God that it is dissolved in the inmost of the
Divine nature," is far more than a defiance of
the world's disabilities. Its note is not defi-
ance, but delight. The spirit revels in the
thought of having attained at last to life's
inmost secret, of being launched at last on a
career which answers its deepest aspiration and
calls forth all its powers.
It is not less interesting to trace the work-
ing of spiritual detachment in the sphere of
human relationships. It is, for one thing,
the secret of loving. There is no enduring
attachment apart from a high detachment.
Where two souls hold together it will be
by a mutual breaking off from the lower
and the unworthy in each other, and the
cleaving to and working upon what is really
lovable. When our friend insists in seeing
214 OUESELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
only the best in us, trusting it, taking it
always for granted, and ignoring the lower,
he is going the surest way to kill this
lower. Our evil is here in a vacuum where it
cannot breathe. It is by a similar detach-
ment that creed wars and theological hatreds
will finally die out. All great souls, says
Schiller, are akin. And as souls become greater
everywhere, they will refuse to deny their
kinship. They will detach themselves more
and more from the divisive element in their
separate formularies, to unite on the deeper
life beneath.
To sum up. We have in the law of detach-
ment a principle of separation in view of a
higher union. Its presence in man proclaims
him born for citizenship in two worlds. As
the earth's motion is explicable only by its
relation to a larger cosmos, so is the movement
of humanity explicable only by reference to an
unseen cosmos. Christ's life and message are
the completest example and demonstration of
this greater cosmopolitanism. The spiritual
detachment which He teaches secures the
highest forms of union, and by linking the
seen to the unseen shows us how to possess
and enjoy them both.
XXIV.
Life's Present Tense.
GRAMMAR, in our school days, was the desert of
Sahara. In its dreary sand realm of rule and
form grew no single flower of human interest.
How differently it opens to us in these later
years ! Grammar, we find, is a page out of the
soul. Its every line is burdened with the
mystery, lit with the romance of the human
spirit. Take a list of pronouns. In its " I,"
" Thou," " He " we have man's dawning
sense of himself and his neighbour. A
verb's moods open all the unfathomables of
volition and responsibility j its tenses confront
us with the stupendous problem of Time.
What is the real meaning of " Now " ; and how
is it related to a "then" and a "to be"? Our
grammar study may concentrate itself on this
point. There is enough in it to keep us busy.
We are approaching these themes to-day from
some startlingly fresh standpoints. For ages
men have, for instance, mused upon the transi-
216 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
tory, upon the impossibility of holding the
present moment, of calling " halt " to the
eternal flux. Physical research has now its
own say on the matter. It shows us how the
sense of change is necessarily intertwined with
our consciousness, for there could be no con-
sciousness without it. Every state of feeling is
the result of an impact of object on subject, a
play of oppositions. Our knowledge of our-
selves and the world results from an incessant
movement in the primordial mind-stuff, in
which, during every second of time, thousands
of infinitesimally small changes, of readjust-
ments of fleeting groups of pulsations, are
taking place. Our sense of a present that
never stops with us, that is ever ceasing to be
a present, has, then, one of its origins in the
physical conditions of thinking. Our " now "
cannot abide with us because the very thought
of it is itself a movement. From another
side, then, than that along which Tennyson
approaches the theme, we reach his conclusion :
Thus
Our weakness somehow shapes the shadow, Time.
But our Time relation has of late set men
thinking in other and perhaps less profitable
LIFE'S PRESENT TENSE. 217
directions. We have revivals of the old meta-
physical objections to the Christian outlook
derived from the ideas of existence and suc-
cession. When, for instance, we speak of
personal survival in a future life, we are asked,
" Survival of what ? Survival of our childhood,
of our youth, of our manhood or of our old age ?
Why this talk of an after life, when by the
mere process of living, if we are old enough,
three- parts of us are already dead? Where is
our childhood ? Why do we not clamour for
that ? What is gone is for ever gone." From
another side, Life's Present Tense is used as
an argument against the Divine Goodness.
" What use," we are asked, " is it to point to
some possible state of future felicity as a set-off
against the evil and misery of the present?
That to-morrow may be good is no answer to
the fact that to-day is bad. If God's world is
evil now, a coming millennium takes no black-
ness from the present fact."
Plainly, if we constitute ourselves the vindi-
cators of the universe as against all comers,
we have enough on our hands. Our role is
assuredly not that. With a good conscience
we can leave the universe to take care of itself.
We cannot, however, help thinking that the
218 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
objectors here, the new as well as the old, might
conceivably have found a healthier occupation.
As to the non-survival argument, our own
experience supplies, surely, the best answer.
Its message is that while, in one sense, our past
has gone, in another it most truly lives with us.
For our man-consciousness holds in itself our
child-consciousness, while old age contains both.
The " now " of the actual life is never only the
present moment. It is a compound, a distilla-
tion. Its essence is an extract of all that has
gone before. The argument, then, as regards
a future life gains reinforcement rather than
opposition from the time sense. Its suggestion
is, under new conditions, of a further sublima-
tion, in which the resultants of all the phases
of the old life shall combine into a new and
higher whole.
And to those who bring life's present tense,
with its apparent evil, as a charge against God
and His world, and who admit no plea of a
coming better in mitigation, the answer is
practically the same. Their " now " is a
fictitious one. For there is no such thing as a
present without a future. As Schiller has it,
"all is fruit and all is seed." The "to come"
is not only ahead of the existent, but is in it
LIFE'S PRESENT TENSE. 219
and a part of it. The one would not be itself
without the other. And the soul is deeply
conscious of this, and in the highest tumult of
the outward is sure of its good. " My body,"
says a modern thinker, " weeps and sighs, but
a something in me, which is above me, rejoices
at everything." When Walt Whitman, in his
daring fashion, declares, " I say there is in fact
no evil, or if there is, I say it is just as import-
ant to you or to me as anything else," he
means practically this. The totality to which
we belong, including all to which it tends, as
well as all from which it comes, is a good at
which the soul rejoices. The Areopagite, the
old Greek Christian thinker, whose thought
ruled so many ages, in declaring that evil was
a shadow, a non-being, a finite to set off the
perfection of the Infinite, sounds the same note.
A German poet thus re-echoes it to-day :
"Everything inferior is a higher in the
making, everything hateful a coming beauti-
ful, everything evil a coming good. And we
see it, aD incomplete as it is, and laugh and
love it,"
On ultimate questions we shall perhaps not
get much nearer than that. Meanwhile, Life's
Present Tense suggests matters more immediate
220 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
to ourselves. Our own age is not strong in its
appreciation of the present tense. In its
desperate chase after what it has not, the ques-
tion might occur whether, as Goethe so pro-
foundly says, " we are not farthest from the
object of our desires when we imagine we pos-
sess that which we desire." A man consumes
his life in gaining wealth, and finds at the end
that he has lost the power of enjoying it. He
postpones his happiness till to-morrow ; he
forms the habit of so doing, until the postpone-
ment becomes sine die. Meanwhile the world
men are rushing through without stopping to
observe it belongs really to him who has
learned that " Now is the accepted time." The
whole art of living, properly considered, is the
art of the present moment. " Can this hour be
sordid," I ask, " when it is a piece of God's
eternity ? " If God is not Love at this moment,
He never was or will be. If that Love is not
filling me at this moment with its own heaven
that is my fault. To pure minds there are no
sordid moments, and there is no sordid world.
What fools we are not to taste our " now," to
feel its whole content, to distil from it the
wonders, the mysteries, the ecstasies that lie
there !
LIFE'S PRESENT TENSE. 221
To extract this savour of the moment re-
quires the perpetual discipline and enlargement
of the soul. We cannot taste time's full flavour
till we have pierced through to something that
is beyond time. As a mediaeval thinker puts it,
" Our passing life that we have here in our
sense-soul knoweth not what our Self is."
Spinoza, the Jew grinder of lenses, who refused
a fortune in order to conserve his inner wealth,
had mastered the lesson. To love only the
perishable, says he, means strife, envy, hatred
and fear, while "to love the eternal and
infinite feeds the mind with pure joy, and is
wholly free from sorrow." When we have
reached this point, of seeing the Divine in the
present and the actual, we are free of the uni-
verse. We belong no longer to that category
of men who, in Emerson's words, "seem as
though whipped through the world, the hacks
of invisible riders." Eather are we of those
who, to quote a modern philosopher, " have a
degree of existence at least ten times larger
than others who, in other words, exist ten
times as much."
There is one sphere is which life's grammar
of the present tense imperiously calls to be
mastered, if we would avoid failure's deepest
222 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
hell. It is that of the affections and of the
family. We burn to reconstruct the characters
of our acquaintance and kinsfolk, and forget
that, just as they are, they are full of a lovable-
ness which only our prejudices hide, and which
we shall see as with a flash when it is gone
from us. How many are there in the plight of
Marie Bashkirtseff when she says of her
mother : " I believe she is really fond of me,
and I am really fond of her too, but we cannot
be two minutes together without irritating
one another to tears." "Nevermore," the
saddest word in language, gains tenfold
bitterness when uttered of an intercourse
snapped by death, where love has failed of
its expression.
For she is in her grave, and oh !
The difference to me !
is then the cry from a tragedy too great for
words.
The full appreciation of the present tense is
one of the privileges of the later years. Life,
to the youthful palate, is a somewhat raw and
acrid product. It is full of froth and ferment,
and has not had time to mature. It takes
years for the liquor to clarify and gather its
LIFE'S PEESENT TENSE. 223
true relish. That is why a career of spiritual
growth blossoms into such rare beauty towards
the end. "We say of such proficients what
Morris sings, with a different application :
In such Saint Luke's short summer lived these men,
Nearing the goal of three score years and ten.
They can say with a French wit, though
with a better application, <f Je prends mon bien
ou je le trouve." They eat and drink, not
because "to-morrow we die," but because
their day has a taste in it of eternity ; their to-
morrow suggests not death, but life. Life's
present tense is to them not only an existence,
but a becoming. Half its joy is an aspiration.
It holds a good which has only begun to be
fulfilled. An old mystic has struck its note
with a sweet exactness in the words : " I saw
Him and sought Him; I had Him and I
wanted Him."
XXV.
A Doctrine of Echoes.
AN echo may, for general purposes, be con-
sidered as made up of two main factors, a
sound and a reflecting surface. In multitudes
of cases it would be difficult to say which of
the two has the greater share in the effect. In
the world's famous echo spots, such as Killar-
ney, or that at the Castle of Simonetta, in
Italy, which repeats a note sixty times, the
result is, here as everywhere, in direct propor-
tion to the loudness of the trumpet-blast or
pistol-shot. But that is only half the matter.
The marvellous repetitions, as well as the
quality and volume of sound, depend not so
much on the emitted note as on the number
and character of the reflecting surfaces. Of
all echoes it is true that if we change either of
the two factors, the original sound or the sub-
stance on which it impinges, we have a corre-
sponding change in the phenomenon. This
play of forces in the dead world of rock and
A DOCTRINE OP ECHOES. 225
mountain has impressed most of us at one time
or another with its strange, startling and often
weirdly beautiful results. If we have been in
a reflective mood, it has probably set us think-
ing. As these great sound combinations have
rolled round us we have realised the quickness
of Nature's response, and also the variety of it.
We see how every substance answers the call
made on it according, not simply to the intrin-
sic nature of that call, but according, also, to
its own intrinsic nature. The moment we
strike that truth, we are at the centre of life
and of history. An illuminating flash gleams
over a hundred mysteries, and, if it does not
penetrate their secret sets them at least in a
new light. Let us see, in some different direc-
tions, what the light seems to reveal.
The true echo realm is, let us premise, not
the mountains but the field of human life.
Hock and hill give back nothing comparable
for variety and mystery with the notes that
reverberate through the ages, with human
souls for their sounding-boards. Our thought-
world is full of deep undertones that roll in
upon us from an immemorial past. The com-
monest words we use are blocks of mind-stuff
rolled into their present shape by the attrition
16
226 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
of measureless years. The ideas of the antique
world are all alive to-day, only yielding new
tones as they strike fresh mental surfaces.
Continually in history have we the phenomenon
of voices that had slumbered for millenniums,
waking up suddenly and beginning again to fill
the world. So was it at the Renaissance, when
Europe, sunk for centuries in mediaeval scholas-
ticism, listened entranced to the mighty musi-
cal note from ancient Greece. To-day the
hoary East, from an even greater antiquity, is
whispering its mystic word into the modern
ear. It is wonderful to note the tricks which
the echo plays in history ; with what strange
and sometimes sinister varieties it throws back
the original sound. Luther's gospel rolls on
him from one point in the shape of a Peasants'
War ; the liberalism of a Locke and a Boling-
broke, so restrained and ordered as first uttered,
striking on the fevered imagination of France,
echoes back in wild eighteenth-century revolu-
tion; the calm research and cautious affirma-
tions of our English Darwin rebound from
answering brains on the Continent as a system
of materialism and of no religion.
But our real theme is waiting. What has
been said on the natural history of echoes was
A DOCTRINE OF ECHOES. 227
with a view to its special application to the
question of religion. There are points here,
obvious enough when we actually face them,
but which have been strangely overlooked in
average religious teaching. It was seen a
moment ago that our echo varies directly, not
only according to the character of the produc-
ing sound, but also to that of the material it
strikes on. Have we fairly considered what
this means in its bearing on our theories of
Gospel and Christianity? An evident first
result is that Christianity, as a received fact,
must vary with every race and every individual
that it severally touches. For here, as with
the mountain and the bugle note, it is not the
sound only but the surface it reaches that pro-
duces the result. The whole problem is raised
in that parable of the sower, the real signifi-
cance of which is generally so entirely missed.
The seed is from one basket and of a like
quality throughout. But it falls upon a variety
of soils and the results are entirely in accord-
ance with the difference in them. The Gospel
as thus conceived is, then, a revelation, not
simply of the truth contained in itself, but of
the mental and spiritual condition of those it
reaches. The proclamation of it is a kind of
228 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
judgment-day, in whose light stands revealed
the precise height to which its hearer has risen.
It seems strange to say that a man's gospel is
what his pre-existing disposition makes of it.
That, indeed, would not be entirely true, for
the message brings something of its own,
apart from any qualities of the receiver. But
these latter, we repeat, tell, and that de-
cisively, at every point of the result.
But what is the outcome of this ? For one
thing, that Christianity, as received by nations
and individuals, is never an entirely new
thing. It can only reach the soul by mingling
with what is already there, and taking on its
shape and colour. We teach what we call
" the same things " to a cultured, subtle
Brahmin and to a cannibal of New Guinea.
Are they the same thmgs ? Assuredly not to
them. The mental product in these separate
minds is different with all the difference of
their training and of their past. Evidently we
cannot make our Christianity a thing separate
and apart from the world's earlier culture.
The thing is forbidden by everything in
history and by everything in the human soul.
There is a Greek Christianity, and a Latin, a
Saxon and an Indian as many Christianities
A DOCTEINE OF ECHOES. 229
as there are races and types, as many, indeed,
as there are minds. And these forms owe
their speciality to the earlier training which
they found. The New Testament religion, so
far from being isolated and out of relation with
other disciplines, could not, the human mind
being what it is, do anything at all except in
union with them. To what, in the " sower "
parable, is owing the thirty or the sixty fold
product of some natures ? How did the ground
in these cases come to be so good ? There is
only one answer. The Gospel here recognises
the goodness of the Gospels that went before it.
We find here, in fact, a recognition of what
a study of the nature of things, especially as
seen in the laws of the mind, makes inevitable
that Christianity can only be properly under-
stood as forming part of a great redemptive
world-process, embracing all nations and all
ages, and working as certainly beyond as within
the sphere of its own direct influence. This
truth was indeed recognised in earlier ages of
the Church more clearly than it is in some
places to-day. The Alexandrian fathers were
emphatic in their acceptance of what Clement
calls the " dispensation of paganism " ; in their
admission that the Greek philosophy was a
230 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
Divine teaching, and that the whole earlier
world was taught of God. What a fine
breadth, at once of faith, of insight and of
charity, have we in that utterance on this
point of Clement in the " Stromata " :
" Wherefore His are all men ; some actually
knowing Him, others not as yet; some as
friends, others as faithful labourers, others as
bond servants. He it is who gives to the Greeks
their philosophy . . . for He is the
Saviour, not of these or those, but of all. . . .
Dispensing in former times His word to some,
to some philosophy, now at length by His own
personal coming He has closed the course of
unbelief ; Greek and barbarian being led for-
ward by a separate process to that perfection
which is through faith."
The New Testament religion, then, as offered
the world is not, nor was intended to be, in
itself an absolute. It is a relative, avowing in
its very terms a dependence for its results on
the cultures which had preceded it. But to
leave the matter here would be to leave it in
halves ; we should have, in fact, precisely one of
those half truths which make a whole false-
hood. To get the entire truth we need now to
look at the other half of our echo. We have
A DOCTRINE OP ECHOES. 231
seen some of the things included in the reflect-
ing surface. What now of the producing
voice ? There are laws on this side as well as
on the other. When, in the same surroundings,
coming back from the same mountain side or
cliff formation, we have at different times a
different echo, we know the difference here
must be in the originating sound. Variation
of tone, of quality, of intensity, will be accord-
ing to what is found in that. It is when we
apply to the Gospel this other side of an echo-
doctrine that we can re-make the Christian
affirmations that our earlier study seemed to
question. Innumerable other voices have, be-
fore and since Christ, thrown themselves against
this mountain mass of humanity. The mass
was the same, but what of the response ?
It is here that the consideration comes in
with such effect that Harnack has urged in his
latest work, "Das Wesen des Christentums." We
cannot, as he says, judge a great personality
simply by himself ; we cannot measure him
merely by his own words, his own deeds. To
approximate to his full size we must study the
effect he has produced on others. And where
we cannot hear the voice itself, we can measure
it by its echo. When we carry this method to
232 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
our estimate of Christ there is no doubt about
the result. The most merciless critic of the
New Testament must recognise that it repre-
sents what the first generation of believers
thought and felt about Jesus. This is the
echo of His personality in human hearts. Was
there ever such an one, before or since ?
Imagine Luther's or Wesley's most enthusi-
astic followers using language about them such
as is used of Christ in the gospels and the
epistles ! And the echo is not in language only,
but in lives. Let any one read the account
of early Christian living and character in the
Apology of Aristides, and ask himself what
force must have been operating to produce
such effects upon the dissolute and degraded
humanity of the Roman Empire ? The Divine
life in man as here depicted, be sure, had
Divinity for its origin.
What is here written is the merest fragment
on our doctrine of echoes. All life and history
could indeed be presented in terms of it. Our
truest art is ever an echo. It is the reproduction
of a pattern in the Mount, the reflection of an
Eternal Beauty subsisting before the worlds.
And music also. Our Beethovens and Mozarts
are none of them inventors or creators. The
A DOCTRINE OP ECHOES. 233
music was there, with all its laws, its inmost
essence and meaning, before they came or
humanity was. They are only explorers of
what was waiting to be found. Like St.
Cecilia, they are listeners to a harmony that
floats down from heaven. Our world is indeed
full of echoes from that better country. Were
our faculties more attuned we should hear them
sooner. A saintly life makes a man an auditory
nerve of the eternal. That others hear nothing
is no disproof of his message. The deniers are
simply asserting that they are deaf. The men
who have seen do not contradict the blind.
They pity them. Says Erasmus of Sir Thomas
More : " He discourses with his friends of the
life to come in such a way that one cannot fail
to recognise how much his mind is in it, how
good a hope he has of it." "A reporter of
echoes," say you ? Yes, but the echoes imply
a voice.
XXVI.
Of Divine Leading.
AFTER some thousands of years of conscious
life on this planet our race continues to ex-
hibit a strange confusion of opinion concerning
the terms on -which we inhabit it. Across the
gulfs of time one generation calls to another
as to what cheer, and gets only dubious
replies. Watchers' eyes are turned night and
day to the heavens, but the report is often of
nothing but the incessant drift of impenetrable
cloud. Some of the acutest minds have made
of the Universe only a chance medley. The
messenger in the Antigone, who declares " it is
but chance that raiseth up and chance that
bringeth low," represents a mental habit
strangely fashionable both in the old and
modern world. People in both periods have
fallen back upon this theory with positive relief
as a refuge from current theologies. Lucretius
proclaimed his doctrine of materialistic no-
religion as a real gospel. He thought men
OF DIVINE LEADING. 235
would become happy by ridding themselves of
the notion of a Providence and a hereafter!
Nietzsche, in our day, reappears with the same
notion. He apostrophises the idea of God in
the language of Charles the Bold when com-
bating Louis XL, " Je combats 1'universelle
araignee."
But the old atheist had an excuse which we
cannot allege for our modern one. The gods
the former was asked to worship were, assuredly,
not worth the trouble. They have gone since,
and are not missed. Think of a '* divine
guidance " under which an Agamemnon must
see his loved Iphigenia, the delight of his eyes,
in the bloom of her virgin youth, lifted on the
fatal altar, "face downwards," as ^Eschylus
describes, and a knife drawn across her throat !
Well might the Latin poet, thinking on these
horrors wrought in the name of piety, conceive
of religion as a kind of Medusa head displayed
from the clouds, " threatening mortals with
her terrible aspect."
Spite of these outbursts, however, the main
stream of human thinking has set broad and
deep in the direction of an overruling Provi-
dence as at once the ground and the explana-
tion of life. The "Fate" of Stoic doctrine,
236 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVEKSE.
when examined, comes mainly to this. We are
in a world that was arranged for us and not
by us. The thinking out of the business was
done before we arrived. Our own mental
exercises are at best a very subordinate affair.
They are something like our perambulations on
board a vessel. As we move about on the deck
our steps may take by turn a northerly or
southerly or westerly direction, but they do not
alter in the least the course of the ship, nor
the ultimate point to which it will bring us.
As to whether this providential supervision
regarded the world only as a whole or ex-
tended to the concerns of individuals the early
thinkers seem divided. Homer puts his heroes
under the special protection of this or that
divinity, but lets the mass take care of them-
selves. Cicero, with his doctrine of the vir
magnus inspired afflatu divino, seems of the
same opinion. Yictor Hugo has somewhere
expressed himself similarly. Geniuses (like
himself) were certainly looked after in this
world and the next. As to the rest, it didn't
much matter. Epictetus, who in this seems
very likely to have been in contact with Jewish,
if not even with primitive Christian sources,
strikes a far more certain note. He proclaims
OP DIVINE LEADING. 287
a divine leading for us all. "There is no
movement of which He is not conscious. To
Him all hearts are open. . . . As we walk,
or talk, or eat, He Himself is within us, so that
we are His shrines, living temples and incarna-
tions of Him."
Of the Christian doctrine on this subject, as
recorded in the original documents, there can
be no doubt. The religion of the Sermon on
the Mount is above all things a democratic
religion. "The hairs of your head are all
numbered " applied not only to patrician locks
but to the unkempt polls of the cobblers and
fishers who heard first the Divine words. It
was, indeed, the eager acceptance and handing-
on of the doctrine by the " dim common
populations " that so excited the wrath of its
" superior " opponents. Libanius, like Sydney
Smith with the Methodists, could not away
with teachers who "had left their tongs,
mallets and anvils to preach about the things
of heaven." His sneer reminds us of that
later one by Cornelius Agrippa : " Blessed are
the poor in spirit, blessed are illiterate people
like the apostles; blessed is the ass."
Yet this doctrine of the highest guidance
for every mother's son of us is really the only
238 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
one this side atheism. As a modern writer
has bluntly put it, " Unless the hairs of our
head are all numbered there is no God." The
doctrine is so logical. Any one who, under
good scientific guidance, has examined the
structure of a human hair, has to say whether
this marvel is a product of blind chance or
of a high intelligence. If it is intelligence
which made it and is still looking after it,
then, a fortiori, intelligence is looking also
after its wearer. It is amazing we do not
more definitely settle this matter with our-
selves. It would resolve so many questions.
We should go on working, but leave off
worrying. As it is, we imagine the world is
on our shoulders. We groan over the con-
dition of the Church, and the back ebb in
which religion finds itself. If we believe in
the sermon our own hair teaches us as we
brush it of mornings we shall stop this
lamentation. As if religion began when we
took up its business and will end when we
retire ! Of the amazing tricks men resort to,
in the notion that thereby they are keeping
religion going, there will also be a final end.
Orthodoxy will cease to be alarmed about
Biblical criticism, under the assured persuasion
OP DIVINE LEADING. 239
that God knew its conclusions and results long
before Wellhausen.
It is, however, in the bearing of this
doctrine on our personal life that it gains
its weightiest import. If a man can only get
some reasonable assurance that in this welter
of a world he is not left to fight his own
battle, or to muddle his way through as best
he can, unhelped or un guided ! What for the
twentieth century is the assurance on this
point? Apart from the consideration just
urged the evidence is of two sorts, an external
and an internal. In that first, outward sphere
there is to be noted what strikes us as a
feature most significant and affecting. It is
that the evidence is usually reserved to the
period when it is most needed. In early life,
when the blood leaps in the veins, when the
sensation is of an inward vigour that can crash
through everything, when parents and friends
are at hand for what aid is needed, the notion
of a providential guidance is little thought of.
But when that other half of our life opens,
that old-age half which Bishop Warburton
characterised so truly as " a losing game," the
half which will contain our suffering, our
decaying, our dying, then is it that for the
240 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
loyal and disciplined soul there arises the
steadily accumulating demonstration of a
wonderful and beneficent leading. And, as
Ritschl has here observed, "the belief arises
not from the study of the fortunes of others,
but in each case from the study of our own
fortunes and experience." Nor is it the least
tried people who get the deepest assurance.
It is Robert Louis Stevenson, in his youth
such an outrecuidant sceptic, who in his later,
broken invalid years writes : " If you are sure
that God, in the long run, means kindness to
you, you should be happy." He had become
sure of that himself.
The evidence we go upon is often such as we
cannot talk about, and which would appear by
itself quite inadequate in a law court. It was
not meant for the law court, but for our-
selves. It is its mysterious inner appeal to us
that counts. A conjunction of circumstances,
which has no special meaning to others, seems
to whisper a message in our private ear. It
is to us in that moment as though Nature had
broken her long habit of silence, and told our
heart that we are known, and cared for, and
loved. There are innumerable stories abroad
of what are called special Providences. Some
OP DIVINE LEADING. 241
of them, doubtless, need to be received with
caution. People are apt to put a large
quantity of subjectivity into narratives about
themselves. The demand for the wonderful
creates a supply. We do not forget the speech
reported by Henry Wilberforce of a certain
Archdeacon : " It is remarkable that all the
most spiritually-minded men I have known
were in their youth extraordinary liars." The
sphere of religion, because it is the sphere of
the marvellous, has suffered more than any
other from the lack of simple accuracy. Yet
when all deduction has been made, the
evidence is overwhelming that testifies to the
visible footprints of the Guide. It comes from
every age and quarter. Paul's story of his
experience outside Damascus, and Augustine's
of the " tolle, lege," which converted him at
Milan, are not more wonderful than histories
poured into our own ear by people who are
walking about to-day.
But the satisfying evidence for this belief
will be, for each of us, an internal one. The
conviction of a guidance of our outward life
will grow in proportion as we realise a
guidance of the inward life. Barclay, in his
" Apology," has put the principle of all this
16
242 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
in language that can hardly be bettered :
" That Christians are now to be led inwardly
and immediately by the Spirit of God even in
the same manner, though it befall not many
to be led in the same measure, as the saints
were of old." The higher spiritual life is just
as much a reality as the higher intellectual
life. Precisely as a man who devotes himself
to the culture of his intellect will rise to a
plane superior to that of the mass and bring to
the decision of questions a faculty of which
they are scarcely conscious, so in the most
central sphere a similar devotion will yield a
like result, only a higher. To those who lodge
in the soul's uppermost chambers there opens a
prospect unseen by those below, unbelieved in
by these latter, may be, but none the less real.
" What," says Bagehot somewhere, " will ever
be the idea of the cities of the plain con-
cerning those who live among the mountains ? "
This inner discipline, wherever it is pursued,
brings sure conviction, amidst all vicissitudes,
of a Divine and most gracious leading. And
thereby does it disestablish personal pessimism.
It recognises the present circumstance, how-
ever gruesome seeming, as the best for it. It
greets each event as a spiritual messenger. It
OP DIVINE LEADING. 243
welcomes the hardship that makes for progress.
It recognises to the full that
Nor for thy neighbours, nor for tb.ee,
Be sure was life designed to be
A draught of dull complacency.
And it moves to the final scene with the calm
certitude that the Guidance which through
the earthly career has become ever more
manifest will not, at that hour, quit its gracious
function.
XXVII.
Amusement.
BELTQION and amusement; the two things
are here together on this God's earth of ours ;
have been here from the beginning ; and we
have not found yet the formula which unites
them. Piety still looks askance at comedy,
and knows not what terms it should make with
it. It is singular that in a world which has
never been without philosophers there should
have been all along, on a theme so vital, a con-
fusion so utter. Cicero introduces the ques-
tion of the significance of laughter only to
dismiss it as insoluble. Christian thinkers
handle amusement from all manner of stand-
points, but end generally by leaving their
theme in the air.
There is, for instance, the solution of what
may be called the Christian pessimism, of
which Pascal was so great an exponent. To
him the world's amusements were the most
striking illustration of the essential misery of
AMUSEMENT. 245
most human lives. Men sought amusement in
order to escape from themselves. The very
name " diversion " let out the fatal secret. To
" divert " a man was, what ? To turn his
thought away from his wretched self. People
gathered in crowds, talked, laughed, gazed at
spectacles, did anything rather than face the
ordeal of their solitary thought. Pascal's
is, though with a different application, pre-
cisely the picture which Lucretius draws of the
blase Eoman of his day, who rushed from town-
house to country villa, and was happy in
neither. "In this way each man flees from
himself ; but this self, whom he cannot escape
from, still clings to him, and he hates it."
The description is true enough of those who
are in the sorry plight of making amusement
their one business. " What is your occupa-
tion ? " is the question put to a young Parisian
in a French romance. " Je m'amuse," is the
reply. Poor wretch ! His occupation will grow
harder every day.
But the pessimistic point of view, both
Christian and non-Christian, despite the sup-
port it receives from the miserable misuse of
amusement, does not satisfy us. Nor does
another religious view, still in vogue in some
246 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
quarters, which regards gaiety and laughter as
not countenanced by the example of Christ or
by the teaching of the Gospel. The Puritan
found the New Testament a tremendously
serious book, as undoubtedly it is. But he
discovered no laughter there, which is a pity.
Had he discerned it he had been a wholesomer
man, and perhaps have won England, which is
a laughter-loving country, to his side. As it
was the Puritan verdict was a partisan verdict,
the verdict of a sect, and fatally open to the
raillery of the wits :
These in a zeal to express how much they do
The organs hate, have silenced bagpipes too ;
And harmless maypoles all are railed upon,
As if they were the towers of Babylon.
The mediaeval Church, with all its faults,
understood this side of human nature better.
In its miracle plays, out of which, let us
remember, the modern theatre arose, the full
swing of broadest humour in immediate con-
tact with all that was sacred, while giving rude
shocks to our modern susceptibilities, con-
tained, nevertheless, the hint of a truth which
the Puritan could not see. It was the truth
that gaiety belongs to the cosmical scheme, that
laughter lies at the inmost heart of things.
AMUSEMENT. 247
If for a moment we could conceire of life in
its wholeness, see it as God sees it, we should
perceive a strange thing. We should find that
everywhere the world was, at the same time,
laughing and weeping. The gay and the
solemn blend there at every moment. The
marriage feast synchronises with the funeral
service. While manhood confronts its sternest
problem the child is playing in the street.
One such God-view of the world, that took all
in at a glance, would be enough to convince us
that these things at the root are essentially
one ; that neither can forswear the other, nor
call itself complete without the other. We
should be yet more deeply convinced of this
did we consider the inter-relations of work and
play, of the serious and the jocular. All
amusement is, on its other side, serious work.
A drawing-room entertainment means hard
toil for servants ; the world of spectacle is, to
a great host of our fellows, the business whicfr
earns the daily bread ; the man who jests Oh
the stage does so often enough with deepest
tragedy at his heart. There could be no such
subtle interchange if gay and grave were not
woven of the same life-stuff.
Wherever, indeed, we cast our eyes the
248 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
same lesson meets us. The universe is serious
enough, but its surface everywhere ripples with
gaiety. It is ready always for a laugh.
.2Eschylus saw that ages ago, when he wrote of
the " anerithmon gelasma " of Old Ocean. The
depths below might be sombre and fathomless,
but at the surface was " unreckonable laughter.'*
Nature's handiwork completes itself always
with a smile. Sunshine is not only warmth
and light; it is festivity. The young of all
animals salute life with gay gambollings.
Their glee is Nature's theology, asserting
against all comers that the world is a good
world and a wholesome.
What is passing strange is, that any one
coming from such a view of things to the New
Testament should imagine an incongruity. A.s
a matter of fact, Christ in His teaching takes
the cosmic laughter always for granted. His
world is a festive world. The parables take
merry-making as their natural background.
The children pipe in the market-place ; the
prodigal son comes home to music and dancing ;
the kingdom of heaven is as when a man
makes a great feast and invites many. The
gladness of Jesus at the Galilee spring-time,
His rapture at the song of the birds and the
AMUSEMENT. 249
beauty of the flowers, are to us a religious
revelation just as much as are His most solemn
words concerning sin, sorrow and death. For
they are His reading of life. Clouds are here,
for Him and us, but they do not stop the
shining of the sun. The laughter of the
universe is the reflex of God's joy which He
would share with us.
The mistake about amusement is that men
invert its position. They go to amusement to
get from it a satisfaction in life, whereas it is
not till men have obtained life's satisfaction
that they are in a condition to be amused. The
soul can never be satisfied with anything lower
than itself. Until its deepest want has been
met its harp is on the willows. It cannot sing
in exile. Men called Napoleon " the Unamus-
able." Talma might play before him, and " a
pitful of kings," his vassals, form part of the
audience, but the conqueror extracted no gaiety
from the performance. That is the Nemesis of
self. When, on the contrary, the soul has
found its true life, the simplest things will
serve. A man then learns "the heart's
laugh." He will be another example of
what an acute thinker has declared to be a
psychological law : " The more a man is capable
250 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
of entire seriousness the more heartily can he
laugh."
The Christian Church needs in the present
day to know its mind on the subject of
amusements. It cannot ignore or taboo them,
for its own teaching, properly interpreted,
shows them to enter deeply into the Divine
scheme of life. On the other hand, it must
never forget that the prime function of
religion is to supply the inner reconciliation
without which there is no true amusement
possible. The soul cannot laugh its own laugh
till God has filled it. The Church has also to
teach the world the ethics of amusement. The
" gaiety of nations " can only increase as men
imbibe Christ's unselfishness. It will come
never, let us be sure, out of greed, or pride, or
egotism. When, in society, we are passing a
pleasant evening, be sure that at the bottom
of it lie somebody's loving thought and self-
sacrificing labour. And any amusement
worthy of the name means, let us remember,
culture of some sort. Field sports train the
eye, the hand, the foot ; are an education of
sense, nerve and muscle. The growing pas-
sion for them in modern times is wary Nature's
set-off to the lowering of vitality which town
AMUSEMENT. 251
life and sedentary toil are bringing upon
civilised peoples.
Good amusement is, then, an education ; but
it is something more. For the masses it is a
diversion of the life-force from brute gratifica-
tion to something healthful and humanising.
When a man has choice of half a dozen
skilled exercises for his free hours, he is less
likely to occupy them in drink or vice. A
nation's morale in this respect may be said to
be largely a question of its progress in amuse-
ment. We have advanced from the time, not so
far distant, which made possible that terrible
story Mozley tells of Magdalen College in
Bouth'p day. f Says Routh to the chief college
officer, one morning, ' Stop, I know what you
are going to tell me. One of the Fellows has
died drunk in the night.' 'It is indeed so.*
The President exclaimed, ' Stay, let me guess.'
He guessed right. 'There, you see, I knew
very well. He's just the fellow to die drunk.' "
In England, within span almost of our own
time, to drink oneself to death was the diver-
sion of a gentleman at which no one seemed
surprised.
The Church, for ages, with more or less
success, has been teaching men to pray. It
252 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
has also, it now realises, to teach them to play.
It must widen its programme until it takes in
the whole man. It must renounce for ever the
view which made seriousness take offence at
mirth, knowing that each is from the same
source, and works to the same end. Its
attitude to humanity must be less of a menace
and more of an encouragement. For ages has
it busied itself with the religious meaning of
tears. Let it now investigate a little more the
religious meaning of laughter. Men, we learn
on the highest authority, are to become chil-
dren to understand the kingdom of heaven.
The children's play is God's pledge. The
child-heart delivers to us the open secret. In
the midst of this tremendous universe, with all
its mystery and all its tragedy, these little
ones, nearest to the centre, are light of
heart. The Church can build its doctrine on
that fact. In it is contained the whole
Gospel.
XXVIII.
Dream Mysteries.
THE position accorded to dreams as a factor
in religion is, we might almost say, one of the
curiosities of modern thought. Schools of
belief and teaching that are wide as the poles
asunder are united in regarding them as, in
this respect, of the highest importance. The
Agnostic and the Christian believer are here
at one. On the one side we have the system
of evolutionary philosophy represented by Mr.
Herbert Spencer which looks to the phenomena
of dreams, as experienced by primitive and
savage races, for the explanation of man's
belief in the soul, the future state, and the
whole circle of ideas generally associated with
religion. The savage, say these authorities,
identified dreams with realities. When in a
dream he saw a person he knew to be dead
he concluded he was still alive in the unseen.
When he awoke in the morning, after hunting
during the night in dreams, and learned from
254 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
his companions that his body had lain motion-
less all the time, it was his " soul " that must
have been in action. And the souls outside
man eventually developed into gods. If this
theory be taken as simply a natural history of
ideas it is well enough. When, as is sometimes
the case, it is employed to explain away
religion, or to belittle its authority, it is apt
to recoil heavily upon the hands of those who
thus use it. For when all is said this dream
theory simply exhibits savage man as in con-
scious relation with a spiritual world. That he
blunders pitifully in his apprehension of that
world is what we should expect. But what
destructive criticism has to face is the fact
here elicited that, from his earliest beginnings,
man has been haunted by these apprehensions,
pursued by these intimations from, an invisible
around him, and that, despite science's latest
developments, he is so still.
When we have disposed of the savage's
dreams we have to deal with our own. It is
only their familiarity as experiences which
makes us blind to the profound mysteries they
open up. As a recent German writer has well
said, it is unnecessary for us to look, as we
commonly do, to "the other side," "the
DEEAM MYSTERIES. 255
beyond," for the unseen and the spiritual.
We have it all here with us, woven into our
flesh and blood. And when we come to
examine, nowhere is it more markedly in
evidence than in our dream-life. While
science is, as we have seen, endeavouring to
explain religion by dreams, religious men from
another standpoint offer concurrent evidence.
The Bible is a great dream-book and never
apologises for the fact. The prophets dealt
largely in dreams and, if we are to believe the
Acts, it was to a dream dreamed at Troas that
Europe owed its Christianity.
There is, of course, a psychology of dreams,
but before looking at that, and as a prepara-
tion for it, let us put together one or two
facts. It is a circumstance significant enough
in itself, that, inquire where we will, and
amongst the most cultivated of our acquaint-
ance, we find almost invariably that in this
department of their life there is some mystery
to confess.
Which of those who say they disbelieve,
Tour clever people, but has dreamed his dream,
Caught his coincidence, stumbled on his fact
He can't explain P
Goethe was not exactly a superstitious per-
256 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
sonage, but lie says that his grandfather had
revealed to him in dreams beforehand some of
the principal events of his life. Robert Louis
Stevenson avers that it was to his dreams he
owed his best ideas. In his work, " The Un-
conscious Mind," Dr. Schofield speaks of a
clergyman he knew " whose whole life was
changed by hearing a sermon preached to
himself in a dream."
Stories of this kind, and they could be multi-
plied indefinitely, are not to be disposed of by
talk of stomachic derangements. But it does
not require, in order to be in contact with the
deepest dream mysteries, that we rake about in
the pages of literature. It will be enough to
turn to our common experience and to examine
what we find there. The subject is a difficult
one, not only from its elusiveness, but from our
natural reticence. We touch here too closely
"the deep reserves of man." About these
entirely subjective passages of our life weak
natures are apt to exaggerate, and stronger
ones to conceal. " Dicenda, tacenda locuti ;
things that should be said, and things better
left unspoken, get uttered." But most of us
can admit experiences similar to the following.
In our sleep we have had flung upon the canvas
DKEAM MYSTERIES. 257
of our consciousness a series of vivid pictures,
each perfect in its grouping, colour and per-
spective. The present writer had thus flashed
before him, not long ago, a stage full of people,
numbering apparently nigh a hundred figures,
of the time of the French Revolution, where
each face in the foreground was a vividly out-
lined portrait, and where the costumes and sur-
roundings were marvellous in their historical
accuracy.
Now in a dream perception of this kind not
at all, we imagine, an uncommon one observe
the problems which immediately offer them-
selves. There is first of all that of personality.
It seems that two intelligences, at least, are
here palpably revealing themselves. There is
first the " I " to whom the picture is presented,
and who is vividly conscious of being, not the
producer, but the passive spectator of it. If
he knew himself as the producer he could not
be, as is so frequently the case, filled with
astonishment at what he sees. But if this
" ego " does not make the picture, who does ?
Who is the artist who has conceived this
scene, grouped it, drawn the portraits, clothed
the figures, and all in the twinkling of an eye ?
You say all the materials were stored in tho
17
258 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
memory-chests of the brain. Perhaps, but
who determined on making this particular
show of them, who arranged them into this
perfect conception ? The subject of the dream
is himself, as a rule, no artist. How comes he,
then, into the presence of this magnificent
artistry ?
Any attempt at explanation here seems to
involve us in one of two hypotheses. The first
is that worked out with so much ingenuity by
the American writer, Mr. T. T. Hudson, of
Boston, in his " Law of Psychic Phenomena,'*
the theory, that is, of the possession by each of
us of a dual mind. A modification of that
view, and perhaps an improvement on it, would
be the supposition of powers in the soul lying
quite hidden during our waking hours, and re-
quiring, in our present life, the psychic condi-
tions of sleep or trance for their activity. And
that this contains, at least, a part of the truth
seems borne out by another, and perhaps a
rarer, of the dream experiences. The writer
speaks again with some hesitancy, not sure
whether on this point he is reporting what is
to any extent a common experience. But he
can testify with certainty as an individual to
occasions, coming at widely separated intervals
DREAM MYSTERIES. 259
in the career, when the soul, under the condi-
tions of sleep, has become conscious of itself
with a power, a freshness as of immortal
youth, a felt relation to the illimitable and the
eternal, accompanied by a thrilling rapture, as
of heaven's central life, to which no waking
state can offer a parallel. In remembering
such times one recalls Philo's description of
"the spiritual ecstasy," when "the soul having
transcended earthly things, is seized with a
sober intoxication, like the frenzy of the
Corybantes, only with a nobler longing, and so
is borne upward to the very verge of spiritual
things, into the presence of the great King."
The other supposition, not, be it observed,
contradictory to the former, is that the second
personality involved apparently in some of our
dreams is a reality, an intelligence, that is, out-
side of our own, and making use of us tempor-
arily as its instrument. That such a use of our
bodily and mental organs by another will and
intelligence is possible is abundantly clear from
the experiments of the Charcot and other
schools of hypnotism. But once we have
granted this of the relations of visible human
beings we have nothing, either in logic or in
fact, which permits us to deny the possibility
260 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
of a similar " possession " of us, under certain
conditions, by intelligences beyond our ken.
It is indeed only when we admit some such
hypothesis that certain facts otherwise inexplic-
able in man's spiritual history become intelli-
gible. It is along this line mainly that a
doctrine of prophetic and apostolic inspiration
credible to the present age seems likely to be
built up. The idea of a lower personality
entered into, dominated and used for its own
purposes by a higher, the possibility and fact
of which is rapidly being established as among
the truths of science, will become the modern
rendering of the New Testament doctrine of
inspiration, that "holy men of old spake as
they were moved."
However this may be, enough, perhaps, has
been said to show that our common experiences
as dream-haunted, whatever the special explana-
tions of them to which we incline, are mysteries
which enter very closely indeed into the whole
subject-matter of religion. We have no quarrel
with the Evolutionist for tracing the beginning
of the history here. His mistake commonly
lies in not pushing the investigation far
enough. When he has accepted all the facts
on the subject which are to hand, and faced
DREAM MYSTERIES. 261
the deductions which seem fairly drawn from
them, he will, if we mistake not, find him-
self approaching conclusions for which his
philosophy has not yet provided. In our poet's
word, " we are such stuff as dreams are made
of," lies more than appears on the surface.
We shall appreciate it better when we more
clearly understand what dreams are made of.
A study, however slight, of the problems they
present is enough at least to shatter the
materialist theory of life, and to bring home to
us with fresh power a sense of that
Sweet strange mystery
Of what beyond these things may lie
And yet remain unseen!
XXIX.
The Spiritual Sense.
THE history of religion has been, for one
thing, largely a history of false alarms. Again
and again has the enemy breached and stormed
positions supposed to be vital for her defence,
to discover that the captive they hoped to make
was not there. The history of that defence is
indeed the most grotesque of stories. In some
aspects it approaches to comedy. We see men
in turn entrenching religion behind an infallible
Church ; again building around her a rampart
of infallible Bibles ; anon barring the way of
attack by a chevaux de frise of metaphysics.
History, philosophy, science, criticism, are
summoned to her aid, and then, when the fight
is hottest and the defences seem giving way
at every point, behold ! the beleaguered one is
walking quietly and unhurt through the very
ranks of the foe ! At last men are beginning
to discover the ludicrous blunder they have
been making. On their astonished eyes the
THE SPIBITTJAL SENSE. 263
truth is beginning to dawn that while Church,
Bible, history and philosophy have all their
religious uses, it is not upon any of them that
religion ultimately rests. Her stronghold is
not in anything that man has done. It is in
what he is in himself. Her final evidence is a
psychological one. It lies in the existence in
humanity of " the spiritual sense."
What is meant by this will perhaps be best
indicated if we institute a parallel. We all
know what is meant by the musical sense.
Now, there is a history of music and a logic of
it. Any one who has worked at harmony and
counterpoint understands how intimately it is
allied to purely intellectual processes. It has,
besides, institutions, patrons, endowments.
But the prospects of music as a force rest upon
none of these things. They rest on its appeal
to a distinct, yet fundamental, element in
the human soul. When its notes fall on
the ear something in us responds. And the
response is peculiar. It is not an answer of
the intellect, the sensation of a problem solved,
or the stir of any of the senses. It is a deep
thrill of consciousness, unique, different from
aught else, unable to interpret itself in any
other way except than that it is an answer.
264 OURSELVES AND THE
And the answer is to some external reality that
fits exactly this special quality of the soul.
As the harmonic sense develops, and especially
where it blossoms out into the flower of the
higher musical genius, it becomes ever more
vividly conscious of this external reality that
answers to it. The musical creators, so called,
create nothing. They only discover what is
there already. They find a harmonic universe
with its laws framed from eternity, becoming
ever more wonderful, more beautiful in
proportion as their inner sense develops.
The point here is that this external, har-
monic world fits exactly our internal one.
There are multitudes of unmusical people.
There are races that have the feeblest musical
perception. But always in proportion as the
gift is developed does there come the sense of
the reality of its outer source ; the sense that
the music is a true witness of it. Our
ignorance or indifference makes no difference
to the objective fact. Moreover, this ignorance
and indifference will in time be certainly and
universally conquered. What music has
already accomplished in man is evidence, then,
for one thing, of its future general predomi-
nance, and for another of its perfect corre-
THE SPIRITUAL SENSE. 265
spondence with a harmonic system outside of
man, deeper and wider than himself.
But what has this to do with religion and
the spiritual sense ? Everything. For all that
has just been said applies here with an almost
absolute exactness. The part played by the
musical sense in relation to its world is the
precise counterpart of that played by the
spiritual sense in relation to religion. Perhaps
the loosest and most badly-defined word in our
language is the word Faith. In the lips, not
only of the people but also of scholars and
divines, it has been made to connote all manner
of dissimilar and incongruous elements. But
in its primitive and Biblical signification it
stands for the precise function of the soul with
which we are now trying to deal. It means
neither more nor less than the spiritual sense,
the faculty of response in man to the spiritual
world around him. It is the soul's retina, on
which alone the light that streams thence can
register its pictures. Like the musical faculty,
it has been slow in its emergence. For long
ages of his history man seems to have felt no
stir of it within him. The palaeolithic times
offer not a trace of a religious sense. Even
now it is most irregularly distributed. In
266 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
multitudes it seems entirely dormant, if at all
existent; in a few it has from time to time
exhibited itself in a commanding and over-
powering potency. The parallel, so far, seems
complete.
Can we go further and say that, as with the
musical faculty, the inner affirmations of this
sense can be trusted as corresponding always
to an outer reality? Here lies the whole
religious question, as the best minds of to-day
realise. And the answer tends more and more
to an affirmative. Calvin was groping towards
this position in his statement that Faith is a
matter not so much of the intellect as of the
heart. Schleiermacher is so sure of this
ground that he is ready to stake Christianity
upon it. Pectus est quod theologum facit is the
corner-stone of his system. The one thing for
the religious teacher to accomplish, says he, is
to reach that stratum of the consciousness
where this sacred instinct lies concealed.
With Eitschl the idea of the spiritual sense
lies at the bottom of his doctrine of "value
judgments." It is singular, however, that
having gone so far, he does not go further;
that while regarding the soul's instinctive
feeling in the presence of Christ as the
THE SPIRITUAL SENSE. 267
greatest of the Christian evidences, he should
speak as he does of those inner responses to
the spiritual universe outside -which he dis-
parages as mysticism. What else was Christ's
own attitude to the spiritual universe but a
mystical one ; what revelation had He to offer
except the response of His perfect spiritual
sense to the infinite spiritual system which
corresponded to it? But that is mysticism,
which not Bitschl nor any one else will ever
eliminate from the essence of religion.
But to come closer. What is the function
of this spiritual sense, and how does it affirm
its authority ? We have only to look carefully
at its operation in ourselves to discover at once
how absolutely different it is from the pro-
cesses of mere reasoning. It mingles at every
point with reasoning, but is in itself as distinct
from it as is the emotion raised by a Beethoven
sonata. One might describe it as the soul's
thrill at the approach of the Divine. Religious
literature is the attempt to put that thrill into
words. Eeligious history is the story of the
great creative spirits who have felt it at first
hand, and of its communication by them to
others. What in varying degrees was realised
by these founders, and by Christ in a trans-
268 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
cendent degree, was a sense of the universe
as spiritual, of holiness as the supreme value,
of the external world, with its natural forces,
as the veil of a Supreme Thought and Love, of
man as in himself a revelation of God, and as
in immediate contact with God. The spiritual
sense immediately recognises itself in other
souls and rejoices in the contact. Eeligious
fellowships arise from the play of its law of
affinity. It knows instinctively where its
nutriment lies, and has processes of its own
for extracting and assimilating it. It finds
in itself a supreme mandate to develop at the
expense of the lower nature allied with it. It-
works towards the evolution of a body more
expressive of its needs. In the rarer natures
the effort leads often to physical disaster. A
St. Francis, a Pascal, a Catherine of Siena,
Die of having lived too much
In their large hours.
But what they attempted too early and too
strenuously the race will arrive at later. We
need not be impatient with the rate of move-
ment if God is not. The pace, after all, is not
a sluggish one when we consider the obstacles
in the way. The spiritual sense is so far only
THE SPIRITUAL SENSE. 269
at the beginning of its work. It is at present
not so much a master as a reporter. The flesh
is still in possession. When Massillon preached
before Louis XIV. on the carnal and the
spiritual in man, the monarch exclaimed, " Ah !
here are two men I know very well ! " Of the
two it is to be feared he preferred the acquaint-
ance of the former. He represented here that
majority of whom it may still be said
With the true best alack ! how ill agrees
The best that thou wouldest choose !
But the history of the spiritual sense, how-
ever disappointing to our impatience as the
record of a religious triumph, is almost perfect
as a piece of religious evidence. We need
scarce any other. If, to revert to our earlier
analogy, all the musical institutions were
destroyed, the world's present harmonic sense
and culture would make it impossible for even
such a catastrophe to result in any real loss.
The same may be said of religion. Could all
the external record of its past, its systems, its
literatures, be imagined as lost, its power and
authority would hardly be affected. The
spiritual sense as we now have it contains the
essence of these things in itself, and would
270 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
reproduce them, with new elements added of
the eternal revelation. And that this sense is
authoritative, that its report of the spiritual
world is authentic and trustworthy, is a
conviction as well founded as that of the
trustworthiness of the musical faculty, or
indeed as that by which we affirm the outside
world revealed to us by the senses. All these
affirmations rest ultimately on an act of Faith
the belief, namely, that our nature is not
being befooled ; that its reporters are telling us
the truth, and not a lie.
It is the business of the Church, and
specially of the religious teacher, to develop
the spiritual sense. The real end of worship
and of exhortation is not to root men in tradi-
tion or to drill them in logic, or to cram them
with facts. It is to find the mystic chord
which vibrates to the breath of the Unseen. It
answers always to the true note. Often the
thrill comes apart from any words. Tolstoi was
converted from Atheism by studying the faith
of simple people. When a man has felt God
his neighbour knows it. That is where the
true preacher's power lies. Beyond all elo-
quence, all learning, its secret is in the fulness
and fineness of his spiritual sense. And that
THE SPIRITUAL SENSE. 271
grows in him by careful cultivation. He
above all others needs to ponder the old Greek
saying : " The gods sell us all the goods they
give us." We cannot, that is, get the best
without paying for it. Inferior substitutes for
the true power can be had at specified rates,
but for this there is no haggling and no
cheapening. Those who, in pulpits or else-
where, desire to be irrefutable evidences of the
heavenly kingdom must offer their whole selves
as the price.
XXX.
Our Thought World.
WE are all of us absolute monarchs and govern
each an empire compared with which old Rome
or the modern Greater Britain are, in their
extent, as a country parish. Every man's
house, we say, is his castle ; but his mind is a
world. It is hardly an extravagance of Jean
Paul Richter's that " a new universe is created
every time a child is born." All our life is a
thinking. According to the quality of our
thought is the quality of our being. Our
humdrum and bourgeois age has dulled its
taste for real pleasure. It might take lessons
from those old Greek philosophers who, instead
of blocking themselves with expensive arrange-
ments, reduced their physical wants to a mini-
mum in order to enjoy, day by day, untram-
melled, the luxury of their own thoughts.
For, as they had discovered, our thought
world is our real world. It should surely be
our first consideration to explore this realm,
ODE THOUGHT WORLD. 273
of which we so strangely find ourselves in
possession ; to trace its boundaries, to under-
stand its laws, to unearth its hid treasures, to
investigate the Beyond of which it gives such
wonderful hints.
We have just said that our thought world
is our real world, and it may be worth while
at the beginning to show that the statement
is more than a phrase. Some of us have a
confused enough notion of reality. Nothing,
for instance, seems more certain to us than
the solid " outside of things," with which we
are constantly in contact. Dogmas and doc-
trines may be illusion, but the earth we tread
on, the wall we run against, the cloud that
rains on us, the sun that shines, are, at any
rate, a piece of solid fact which nobody can
dispute. This " solid fact " of the visible and
touchable, say some aggressive disputants, is
indeed all we do know. The invisibles about
which metaphysicians and theologians discourse
are mere doctrinal ghosts. When we talk of
the things we see and handle we at least know
where we are.
Yet a moment's reflection should show us
the shallowness of this view. The outside
world is nothing to us but a series of
is
274 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
thoughts. Our mind really constructs it for
us. We talk of the world's colours, its scents,
its sounds, but there would be no such things
as colours, scents, or sounds apart from a mind
which can be affected in these particular ways.
The fact of one set of vibrations producing in
us a sensation we call " sound," and another
set a sensation we call " sight," is a mystery
first and most of all of the perceiving mind.
That the external world can be in any sense
the same thing as the image of it formed in
our brain, is a notion which the crudest
thinker, as soon as the problem is fairly
before him, must dismiss as impossible. That
the " something outside " which affects us in
these myriad ways is a reality, and that our
relations with it are truly represented by the
reports of our senses, is a thing of which we
have and can have no logical proof. The
world's very first demand of us to believe,
namely, that it is such a world as our thought
presents is a sheer act of faith.
That things are thus with us, that our
thought world, far more than any external,
is the one we know, will appear more plainly
when we consider the mental laws and the way
they work in constructing our world for us.
OUR THOUGHT WORLD. 275
Have we ever considered what happens when
we " see " an object, say, a boat moving on a
river? Light rays, propagated by vibrations
of inconceivable velocity, falling upon the
retina have produced there an image. Upon
this retina-picture the mind now begins its
marvellous work. By one act it gathers all the
colour and form impressions it has received
into a single unity ; by another act it classifies
this unity, separating its individual qualities
from its common ones, and by virtue of these
latter placing the object into the category
called " boat " ; another act gives to the boat's
motion a cause, either the action of rowers, or
perhaps of a steam propeller. Vastly more are
the mental actions and laws concerned than
these, but enough are here to show that our
boat on the river, as known at least to us, is a
work, a very large proportion of which belongs
to our own brain. The sense perception ; the
acts by which we unify and classify it; the
placing of it in space and time ; and that
strange last act by which we are irresistibly
led to attribute its motion to a cause, are all
the products, not so much of the material
object as of the marvellous laws within us.
The external world, before it reaches us, has
276 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
we see, become a manufactured article, and the
machinery is in ourselves. The wonder of it
all and the awe of it grow upon us as we
realise that these laws are none of our making;
they were here, we perceive, in all the minds
that were before us; are in all the minds
around us ; and the very world itself is built
and framed in accordance with them.
Indeed, from whatever aspect we view this
inner kingdom of ours, the mystery of it
deepens. What are called clever people are
apt to be vain sometimes of their mental
achievements. They would be less so if they
remembered that most of these achievements
are carried on by a power that, while within
them, is yet outside their own will and even
their own consciousness. Our thought world
carries on its operations largely without con-
sulting us. The real creator in us is the
Unconscious. In that abysmal depth, lying
somewhere beneath our formulated thought,
the operations are going on which, by-and-by,
emerge on our view as completed ideas. Every
thinker, for instance, knows precisely the
experience which Stevenson thus hits off about
his own work : " Unconscious thought, there is
the only method; macerate your subject, let it
OUE THOUGHT WOKLD. 7?
boil slow, then take the lid off and look in
and there your stuff is, good or bad." An
excellent prescription for the young writer, but
the very terms of it show that, instead of
having been the performers ourselves, we are
mainly spectators, waiting on the operations of
another, who in mysterious ways and in obscure
depths beneath the surface, is doing the think-
ing for us. " Is this my idea ? " we say as it
flashes into our mind. Why, no one is more
surprised at it than ourselves. It is as much
ours as the sunshine reflected on our lens. The
illuminated lens is ours, but the light has
travelled from afar.
But the fact that our thought world is, to so
large an extent, worked for us rather than by
us, must not blind us as to our share in the
operations. Over a large part of its surface
our will reigns supreme, and can make of it
either a desolation or a paradise. Our thoughts
are our companions, which we cannot get rid
of. We may shake off every other society, but
not this. It is the merest common-sense,
therefore, to make it as good as possible. But
there is no royal road. A man may buy his
way nowadays into all manner of social circles,
but his coin is not current in this domain,
278 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
Nor will rank serve. The son of Louis XIV.,
the Dauphin, had for instructors Bossuet and
Huet. The one wrote for him "The Discourse
on Universal History " ; the other edited for
him " The Delphine Classics." After he had
outgrown his schooldays the object of these
cares never touched a book, and about the only
thing recorded of him is that he was fond of
killing weasels in a barn. The lad was heir to
a throne, and this was his inner empire ! Of
all the waste that goes on in our extravagant
world the waste of our thought possibilities is
the worst. Lords of this inner realm, we might
stretch its boundaries till they touch the
illimitable; could make every inch of its sur-
face rich with flower and fruit ; could populate
it with the noblest minds; could open it to
highest inspirations, to the very breath and
prospect of the Infinite. Instead, most of us
are content to run up a log hut on its border,
to scratch its surface for a few kitchen
vegetables, and to leave the rest as barren as
Sahara.
With a well-tended thought world all his
own, no man need call himself poor or fettered.
Moneybags may voyage in his yacht to southern
seas and be very much bored over the business.
OUR THOUGHT WORLD. 279
The worker at his bench, if he know his inner
privilege, can voyage to fairer realms and feel
no fatigue. Let no man think his taskwork a
monotony, though it be pin-making, or trench-
digging, while his mind-realm is his own.
There, as he hammers or digs, he may call up
what scenery or what action he wills. It is
here that thought life surpasses experience.
In experience we take what comes, the rough
with the smooth. In our inner world we can
choose. And surely this is enough to give zest
to the commonest career that, at will, we can
live over again our choicest moments, recall
those elect days when we touched life's best,
and make our whole interior radiant with that
reflected glory.
There are innumerable aspects of this theme
which we pass over in order to touch, in
closing, one on which the modern mind is
painfully exercised ; the question, that is, of
our thought world as related to a future life.
Readers of Schopenhauer will remember how,
in pursuit of his favourite doctrine of the
priority and predominance of the will, both in
man and the world, he seeks to belittle the
intellect. Our consciousness, he declares, is
the mere product and parasite of the brain ;
280 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
grows with it, decays with it, dies with it. It
is the old argument of the Epicureans, which
their great poet Lucretius has expressed with
unsurpassable force. But it all rests upon a
fallacy which a schoolboy ought to perceive.
For when we propose to make reason depend
upon a brain we must extend our reference,
and make the Universal .Reason, the mind we
discern everywhere at work in the cosmos,
dependent upon a brain also ; " which," as the
logic books say, " is absurd." True psychology
is coming more and more to realise that the
thought world within us uses the brain as an
instrument rather than as a cause. The
instrument is no more the creator of the
thought than Beethoven's piano was the
creator of his music. The instrument might
wear out, but the music can be reproduced
elsewhere.
The truer and higher our mind life becomes
the more sure are we that our mind is fed, not
by brain activities merely, but more, and
chiefly, by Another Mind whose celestial ray
streams into ours, and in whose Immortal Life
we live. The fine thought of Plutarch con-
cerning the daimon or guardian spirit of
Socrates, that it was "the influence of a
OUR THOUGHT WORLD. 281
superior intelligence and a diviner soul operat-
ing on the soul of Socrates " can be taken as
true of all the nobler thought life. Our bodies
may wear out and our brains ; but the thought
world which lies behind them is, as we have
seen, a realm of its own, with laws of its own.
By no possibility, as Tyndall himself confessed,
can we find the nexus between muscular and
nerve energy and a state of consciousness.
They are a world apart. Death, which divides
the two, destroys neither the one nor the
other. An ancient word still expresses as
much as we know. " Then shall the dust
return to the earth as it was ; and the spirit
shall return unto God who gave it."
xxxr.
Morals and Eternity.
THE conception of eternity is a differentia of
humanity. Apart from any question of a
future life, the mere fact that man is capable
of this immense idea, that it lies there as part
of his permanent brain furniture, places him in
a class apart. Said an English farm labourer
once to the present writer: "There are two
things that press upon my mind ; one is the
thought of boundless space, and the other the
idea of time without end." It was pleasant to
hear the words. The humble toiler, unassisted,
had come upon the two things that have gone
most to the making of man, considered as a
thinking being. "The capacity of becoming
conscious of the Infinite," says Lotze, " is the
distinguishing endowment of the human
mind."
But the study of infinity, especially in its
aspect of eternity, has had some curious
results. The effect on the human conscious-
MORALS AND ETERNITY. 283
ness and on human conduct has not been by
any means uniform. There have been, in fact,
the widest divergencies in the mode of conceiv-
ing eternity, with all manner of strange corre-
sponding effects on morals and life. Nowhere
than on this theme has religious thinking been
more confused; nowhere has religious action
blundered at times more pitifully. A glance
over some of the diverse paths along which
thought has stumbled here may help us in our
quest for the proper track.
There is, for instance, a view of eternity
which, followed to its logical issue, would
leave us simply with a morality of "go as
you please." In this scheme the only eternity
is an eternity of matter and force. Matter is
eternal, force is persistent. The universe dis-
closes no such thing as final causes, no such
thing as pre-determined ends. We must
dismiss all idea of progression, of dramatic
denouement. A complete universe can, by the
very terms, make no advance. The changes
which science records are, as an American
advocate of this view puts it, to be considered
simply as " variations of cosmical weather."
This odd combination of Spinoza and Buch-
ner, of an outworn idealistic determinism,
284 OURSELVES AKD THE UNIVERSE.
with an equally outworn materialism, is not
likely to keep any lengthened hold on modern
thinking. Science, for one thing, is too dead
against it. An a priori philosophy which
denies progression because it contradicts an
unproved abstract idea, has little chance
against an ever accumulating body of facts
which spell progression and nothing else.
Evolution becomes here, as against con-
tradictors of this order, the modern basis of
faith. It sweeps magnificently into line with
the New Testament doctrine of great consum-
mations, of the
One far off divine event
To which the whole creation moves.
But the concept of eternity which pictures
for us a changeless universe, an eternity of
endless and aimless rearrangements of matter
and force, is not only unscientific ; it is un-
moral. Were it accepted the only morality
could be one of convenience. To the extent
it is believed in, human life becomes a jest or
a pessimist tragedy.
Quum tamen incolumis videatur
Summa manere,
cries Lucretius. Despite all surface appear-
MORALS AXD ETERNITY. 285
ances, " the great sum of things is seen to
remain unchanged." And the conclusion is, as
it must be of all thinking along that line,
" Eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."
Religious aspiration in a brute universe,
in which by some strange chance man's
fevered consciousness figures for one brief
moment, must be a joke for the stars. The
only logical life course should be Omar
Khayyam's :
Drink, for we know not whence we came nor why ;
Drink, for we know not why we go, nor where.
Sanctity is absurd in a cosmos of indifference.
The foundation for what morality were left us
would lie in Voltaire's answer to the man who
wanted to know why, on such principles, he
might not commit robbery or murder. "Be-
cause, my friend, if you do, you will probably
get hanged."
It is not, however, solely in outside specula-
tions of this order that we find a misuse of the
idea of eternity. In quarters nearer home
misconceptions about it have brought strange
and sinister results. Religious thought on this
theme has been continually stumbling upon
two mistakes. One is the identification of
286 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
eternity with the idea of cataclysm, and
catastrophe. Successive generations of Chris-
tian people have gone on dividing their
world-system into two parts one the time in
which they lived, which was about to come to
an end, and the other, " eternity," which was
to be ushered in by an overwhelming cosmic
outburst. This idea, borrowed in the first
instance from the Jewish apocalyptic systems
which flourished so abundantly in the post-
exilic and pre-Christian eras, had full
possession of the Early Church, and has,
since then, continually been renewed. The
Christian Fathers, age after age, see in the
circumstances of their time exactly the
prophetically declared conditions which are to
usher in the final scene. Under this idea great
panics have at different epochs swept over
society. One can hardly imagine a more
terrible state of affairs than that which
prevailed in Western Europe when Christen-
dom reached the eve of its thousandth year.
Prophets everywhere declared that this was
the end of the age. The people believed them
and shut up their shops, left the crops to rot
in the fields, broke off from family relationship,
and gathered in famine-stricken bands to await
MORALS AND ETERNITY. 287
the dread Appearing. The sensation of sheer
terror probably never reached such a height in
this world as when the ebbing- moments of the
fated year ran out to the close.
The lesson of these delusions has, however,
not even yet been universally learned. In a
recently published " History of the Plymouth
Brethren " the author, a competent and
cultured observer who has studied the move-
ment from within, declares that " if any one
had told the first Brethren that three-quarters
of a century might elapse and the Church be
still on earth, the answer would probably have
been a smile, partly of pity, partly of disap-
proval, wholly of incredulity." The moral
result of such a view, as pointed out by the
same writer, is instructive. The men and
women who have held this persuasion have
systematically withdrawn themselves from large
and important parts of human interests and
responsibilities. They have left it to others
to fight the battles of reform and of freedom.
The early Brethren stigmatised the movement
of Clarkson, Macaulay and Wilberforce for the
abolition of the slave trade as "unholy."
They discouraged philanthropy and even
missions. Had the world been left to them
288 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
it would have had no art, no science and no
literature. It is surely time that this view of
eternity, as of a kind of approaching tidal wave
that will by-and-by roll in and submerge every-
thing that is, should be recognised by sensible
men as provedly false and provedly immoral,
and as such to be henceforth dropped and done
with.
And with this must go another idea that has
prevailed even more widely. It is that view
which has regarded eternity as a kind of infinite
Topsy-turvydom, in which all the principles of
Divine government which we recognise in the
present state are to be neutralised and reversed.
The idea that the God we know could be also
the God of the torturing hell of mediaeval
theology is to a really serious mind simply
unthinkable. That because a man dies God's
whole character should change towards him
and become wholly dreadful, is a notion
possible only to a barbarous and illogical age.
It is as if a mother should love and cherish her
child so long as it keeps awake, but, the
moment it falls asleep, should change to a
monster and devour it. There is only one
consolation in studying the long reign of this
theological nightmare, and that is, that the
MOBALS AND ETERNITY. 289
laws of the human mind have always declined
to deal with it seriously. The imagination
refused to grasp it. Conscience would not be
governed by it. In the ages when its reign as
a dogma was most complete, character and
morals were, in fact, at the lowest ebb.
Humour made havoc among its terrors. The
fourteenth century bards laughed at the priests
and their stories. The human reaction reached
its culmination in Rabelais, who treated hell in
the manner of Lucian, and made Europe roar
at the jocosities of the under-world.
It is time we reached that nobler concept of
eternity which is at once the essence both of
true religion and of true morals. The more we
study it, both in the New Testament and in
that other revelation given in the ever-growing
human consciousness, the more we shall realise
the inadequacy and the falseness of the
travesties we have been sketching. In this
clearer light we shall recognise the Apocalyptic
thunderings and trumpetings as poetic repre-
sentations of a something that in itself is
entirely spiritual. The true eternity which
Christ taught has, it is true, duration in
it; death also and the Beyond in it; but
these are the smallest part of the idea.
19
290 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVEBSE.
For, essentially, His eternity is not only then,
but now ; not only there, beyond the stars, but
here, in the conscious soul. The eternal life
He offers is not a mere uncountable sum of
years. Its chief element is a conscious relation
to, reception of, and fellowship with, that im-
mutable spiritual Order which exists behind the
veil. It is the sharing of that Divine reality of
which the soul's most ardent aspirations are the
faint adumbration; to taste of which is to
know at once life's meaning, and its inmost
satisfaction. To the man who inhabits this
region, time and eternity are not two things,
they are one. He sees the visible in the light
of the invisible, sub specie ceternitatis. The
world is to him like one of those dissolving
views, in which the scene we watch is already
transfused by the gleam of the one that is
behind.
It is eternity under this aspect that gives
morality its one vital and efficacious motive,
and to human life its true value and perspective.
It is a view which inspires the whole man.
Citizenship, science, art, politics, social law,
become ennobled as part of a world-order which
rests on an immutable spiritual scheme. The
truth of all this carries its evidence in the fact
MORALS AND ETERNITY. 291
that our fellow becomes only entirely human to
us, truly dear and valuable, as we discern in
him something of this eternity. The man who
gives clearest proof to his brethren that his
habitual dwelling is in that region, who can
bring to them largest spoil of this sacred
Invisible, will be always recognised by them in
the end as of all benefactors the highest.
XXXII.
The Christ of To-Day.
THE title, without explanation, might seem
almost an impertinence. Is the Christ of
to-day, then, different from the Christ of
yesterday or of to-morrow? Is not the
doctrine of His unchangeableness the centre
of Christian orthodoxy ? That may be, and yet
our title holds. For it is an expression simply
of the relativity of our knowledge. In a sense
Christ is the creation of each fresh generation,
because each generation creates the world
it lives in. The universe is to a worm
what the worm can make of it. We cannot
get an absolute knowing, because we cannot
cut ourselves loose from the variableness of our
knowing faculty. The universe grows with
our growth. It is bigger with every addition
to our own mental height. And this law of
relativity holds equally in our religious
knowledge. The difference between the per-
ception of Christ which recognised Him simply
THE CHRIST OF TO-DAY. 293
as " the carpenter's son," and the perception
of the writer of the fourth gospel marked, let
us remember, no difference in the object, but
only a difference in the perceivers. And the
point of view which gives us our vision is one
which, apart from our will and apart from our
moral condition, is perpetually changing. The
twentieth century cannot see the Christ, if it
would, with the eye of the middle ages. It
sees with its own, and the later view will carry
in it something different from the earlier. We
may not quarrel with this fact, far less reproach
ourselves because it is so. It lies in the nature
of things. It is God's way with us.
What we want, then, is to discover the
content of the consciousness of to-day con-
cerning Christ and to reach some conclusions
about it. And the first point we note is that
our age brings to this study some fresh
measuring instruments. By its new scientific
process, and especially by its all-comprehending
formula of evolution, it proposes to reinterpret
all the phenomena of life, and amongst them all
the Christian phenomena. The historical facts
are studied in the light of a new science of
history, including a science of the growth of
legends and myths. The New Testament
294 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVEBSE.
literature lias in our time been put under the
microscope and every line of it critically
examined. All the facts, all the historical
material of that first century, all its mental
and moral conditions, all the sources from
which light, from however distant a point,
could be thrown upon the central story of the
Christian origins, have been investigated with
a patience and an accuracy to which no earlier
time offers a parallel. A great theological
school, the Bitschlian, to which modern Chris-
tian thought is, in many ways, so much
indebted, declares that only along this line of
historical investigation is the truth to be
reached, and discards accordingly what it calls
the metaphysics of religion. In other direc-
tions there is exhibited a similar tendency to
strip off from Christianity its element of
mystery. The emphasis is put on the moral
teachings of Christ. The splendid analysis of
these teachings by a Wendt and a Bernard
Weiss has given the world a new sense of the
supreme equality of the Gospel ethic. A
Tolstoi, cutting himself loose from the conven-
tional orthodoxy of the Church, finds in these
teachings alone what he considers a complete
theory of living.
THE CHRIST OF TO-!)AY. 295
The historians and the critics have, indeed,
laboured hard to give us the real Christ, and,
especially in their work upon the teaching, it
must be said not without fruit. And yet when
we examine the Christian consciousness of
to-day, where, at least, it is to any adequate
degree developed, we are struck to find to how
small an extent the external, visible history of
Christ enters into the totality of its possession
in Him. The history makes Him tangible to
us as a human personality, fixes Him firmly
upon the ground, gives Him a date in time and
a place in nationality. He is there as visible
and actual as Tiberius or as Tacitus. And yet,
compared with what He stands for in the
inner life, this purely personal story is as a
cloud that forms upon a corner of the sky
compared with the infinite blue beyond.
If one might speak of final causes in this
connection, it could be said that from the
beginning it seemed fore-ordained that Christ's
external history should play only a subordinate
part in His total representation. We seem
ever unable to reach Him that way. A man
travels over Palestine, studies the topography
of Jerusalem and Nazareth, and feels as he
conies away that he is not nearer but infinitely
296 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
further from his quest. The world contains
no monument of Christ, no authentic picture.
The early fathers who venture descriptions of
His personal appearance fall into hopeless
contradiction. Apart from the doubtful cor-
respondence with the King of Edessa, we have
not a line from His hand. We know Shake-
speare by Hamlet and Goethe by Faust, but
Christ published no book. Even that part of
His career of which alone we have any written
details, the period of from one to three years
of His public service, we do not know how
coherently to piece together. All we can say
is, there is a personal history, but as compared
with the totality of our Christ of to-day it is a
fragment, a suggestion.
Who and what, then, is the Christ of to-day?
First of all, He is the Power behind the New
Testament. Not, to the modern mind, so much
visibly in it as behind it. Just as science finds
in all phenomena the manifestation of an un-
seen, ever-present Force, so the investigator
to-day, turning over the Christian records, feels
himself at every point in contact with the
mystery that made them possible. Here, to
the scientific mind, is the real question. For
to whatever extent the inaccurate or the
THE CHRIST OF TO-DAY. 297
legendary inay have crept in to the New
Testament, there is one thing in which its
absolute reliability can never be questioned.
It represents, with the accuracy of a hair
balance, the impression made upon its writers
by Christ's personality. The fourth gospel is
the echo from the soul of its writer of the
heavenly voice that had spoken to it. The
Pauline Epistles show us what one of the
deepest minds the world ever produced felt
about Jesus. The different reports of these
manifold collaborateurs vary with all manner
of individual idiosyncrasy and standpoint. But
not one of them fails to make us understand
that the One whom he wrote about had made
on the writer the impression of something
heavenly, mighty, beautiful beyond all that
was human, of One who had opened new
powers in, and disclosed new horizons to, his
own soul. But, by the law of dynamics, a
given impression requires an adequate cause.
If this was the impression, what of the cause ?
Thus is Christ to us of to-day for one thing,
the Power, the radiant mystery behind the
New Testament.
But the Christ of to-day is something more,
in a sense we may say, something much greater
298 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
even, than the Christ of the New Testament.
There we behold Him in the restrictions of
bodily life. But now we see Him, as a sheer
spiritual Power, traversing and transforming
the ages. Psychological facts are just as real
as any other more so, indeed, for they are the
only ones we really know. And the candid
inquirer upon our theme has now to investigate
the meaning of that Christ of the inner man of
whom the subsequent ages are full. We have
here to step beyond the bounds of Judsea and
of Galilee, beyond the bounds of A.D. 30, and
to discover the significance of the Christ in St.
Paul, in Augustine, in Bernard, in Wesley.
We have to compute here the whole content
and quality of that stream of spiritual life
which from the first century has been flowing
in upon human souls and producing such won-
drous experiences. What is the force that, in
an Ignatius, condemned to a torturing death,
impels him rapturously to welcome fire, cross,
and wild beast if only he may " attain unto
Jesus Christ " ? That is one of a million of
the inner testimonies. But they are all to the
same effect. It is the simple fact to say that
to all ages and conditions Christ has been the
life of the soul. In this view the Christ of
THE CHRIST OF TO-DAY. 299
to-day is an invisible world power, whose
operations are in the interior of human hearts.
And the force seems as continuous, as persist-
ent, and as penetrating as that of gravitation.
If the facts are thus, or anything like this,
what is the explanation? There is an early
one that, so far as we know, has never yet been
bettered, and the full significance of which we
have perhaps scarcely yet fully grasped. It is
that given us in the history of St. Paul. Xo
human being probably has ever been more
profoundly under the power of Christ, and yet
he had never seen Christ in the flesh, and he
scarcely ever refers to the facts of His earthly
career. Yet he was persuaded of Christ as yet
living and as the very centre of man's unseen
world. His own inward life and the resulting
external career were made, he unceasingly
declared, by His touch from the invisible.
Paul's assurance here is the more remarkable
as he has nothing to say of the birth stories
and nothing about what Harnack calls the
Easter stories. What he knew was his own
soul and the power on it of this unseen
Christ.
What we have reached, then, as our Christ
of to-day is, a human history, a personality
300 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
and a power behind. A cloud in the heavens,
shall we say, and the infinite blue beyond,
from out of which the cloud has drawn itself ?
And the cloud and the blue are one. "The
mystery is beyond words, and yet this is finally
how it shapes itself : The Infinite to be the
Infinite must contain the element of person-
ality. It contains more than force ; it
contains, also, truth, love, purity, holiness.
But these to have their true effect in the
human sphere must personalise. The Infinite
here must take shape. The limitless blue must
yield its cloud. And it has done so. TV hen in
the secret place of our soul we build our God,
we form Him not out of cosmic forces, not out
of gravitation and chemical attraction, but out
of holiness and love. And, lo ! as we look, the
form is as of the Son of Man ! The Absolute
as Absolute is not enough for the religious life.
Man must have some fixed, visible point, some
crystallisation, as it were, of the All on which
his love and reverence may rest. That is
where the New Testament story meets him.
Here he finds the humanising and person-
alising of the Infinite Goodness. In the study
of this Life he tastes eternity. And as he
believes, the power to be good flows into him.
THE CHRIST OF TO-DAY. SOI
Therefore knows lie to-day the Christ, not
only as human, but also as Divine; not only
as a figure in history, but as the eternal
Now.
God may have other Words for other worlds,
But for this world the Word of God is Christ.
XXXIII.
The World's Surprises.
MAX MULLER says of the early Aryans that
they seem never to have got over their first
surprise at the world, their sense of its utter
strangeness, and of themselves as strangers in
it. It is a refreshing utterance. We have not
sufficiently appraised our sense of wonder as
a spiritual asset. In fact, not to wonder has
been in more than one age lauded as a virtue.
We remember how Aristotle, in the " Ethics,"
speaking of his " Magnanimous Man," says
that " he is not apt to admire, for nothing is
great to him." And the tendency of modern
research seems, at first sight, all in favour of
nil admirari. Science has swept the universe
clean of the old elements on which wonder fed.
The gods and goddesses have ceased from
Olympus ; dryads and genii no longer haunt
the woods and streams. The world's poetry
seems in danger of extinction under the empire
of universal law. Where is romance when
THE WORLD'S SURPRISES. 803
everything has been explained? Long ago
Keats protested at science's dry-as-dust pro-
gramme :
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy P
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven :
We know her woof, her texture : she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
But our poets need not be afraid. It is not
in the power of science to extinguish the soul's
wonder at itself and the world. Busied for
awhile with the new explanations, it discovers
in the end that the problem has been thrown
only one step further back. The primal
mystery looms out behind more unfathom-
able than ever. There are people who talk
about the improbability, almost the incon-
ceivability, of a future state of existence. Has
it ever occurred to them to speculate on the
antecedent improbability, inconceivability even,
of such a state as the one we actually find
ourselves in ? After it has been made certain
to us that such impossible beings as we are
actually inhabiting so impossible a world, the
a priori objections against another life for us
in another world become in comparison
ridiculously small. It is worth while to catch
304 OUESELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
this view sometimes in its full force. We get
it now and then when 3 in waking slowly from
a dream state, after lying for a while in semi-
consciousness, the reality gradually dawns upon
us. " Is it actually true, then," we say, " that I
am what I am, and where I am, and that
things around me are as they are?" We
taste to the full in that moment the world's
strangeness. To have waked up in another
sphere had been hardly less startling than to
have waked up in this.
No scientific explanations, no cosmic
theories, can take away the essential marvel of
things as they are. When we explain the
motion of suns and planets by a law of
gravitation, which acts, we say, "as the
square of the distance," we simply run up
against another question that we are powerless
to resolve : Why should there be a law of
gravitation? and why should it act as the
square rather than, say, as the cube of the
distance? When we account for the world
by tracing all back to an original revolving
fire mist, condensing into planets and evolving
in succession atmosphere, rocks, soil, water,
plants, animals, and finally man, "why," we
must ask, "did the original motion work along
THE WORLD'S SURPRISES. 805
these, out of all possible, lines, and what
was there in the first impulsion that could
produce such effects ? " How, along this
line of thinking, did the original blind force
contrive to endow us, at this far end, with
souls, and sympathy and religion ? To reach
this actual, what inconceivable hosts of im-
probabilities have been trampled over ! The
miracle of man, as conceived by the Hebrew
cosmogonists, is nothing as compared with
the miracle of man as conceived by the
scientists.
To thoughtful minds the world's greatest
surprise lies in its two-sidedness. To gaze in
one direction gives us a fit of pessimism. We
cannot look five minutes in another direction
without being swept on the tide of a glorious
optimism. It is this mixture of the divine and
the sordid that makes the riddle. On the one
side we have a sense of the splendour of life
which makes even such a scoffer as Nietzsche
break into rapture : " And truly," says he,
" divine spectators are necessary in order to
appreciate the spectacle which is here inaugur-
ated, and of which the outcome can not as yet
be imagined, a spectacle too fine, too wonder-
ful, too paradoxical for its possibly being a
20
306 OURSELVES AND THE
mere meaningless side-show upon some ridicu-
lous star." But then that other side, the side
of darkness, failure, pain and evil ! How it
has racked the human brain to find here some-
thing that is intelligible ! We turn the pages
of Plato, with his idea that the Creator, having
to mix together necessity and thought, made
the Universe as like to Himself as He could ;
of Aristotle, with his distinction between the
inner form of the Universe and the outer
matter, identifying the Divine perfection with
the form and the imperfection with the matter;
of a Leibnitz holding this to be the best world
possible, the best solution of the problem in
maxima and minima, of the union of the
infinite with the finite. Every age has, in
fact, had its solution, and ended by leaving the
matter very much where it was. But it is this
darkest side which leaves us most certain that
we form part in no commonplace scheme, and
that a world which offers us such surprises to-
day has yet greater ones in store.
This conclusion, which the general outlook
suggests, is greatly strengthened when we
come to the study of history. A modern view
has disparaged history as "dealing, not like
philosophy and science, with ideas and concep-
THE WORLD'S SURPRISES. 307
tions, but only with endless particulars, with
things that happened once and then ceased to
exist." This conception by Schopenhauer of
history, as a jumble without laws underneath
it or purposes running through it, is matched
in fatuity by that of another non-Christian
thinker, Buckle, who, going to the opposite
extreme, makes all history an affair of natural
law, and reduces the difference between men
and races into an affair simply of climate, soil
and food. One might ask here why on this
hypothesis a Germany, having the same
climate, soil and food as Luther knew, does not
continuously produce Luthers ? Neither of
these teachers offers a satisfying answer to the
problem of history. As against Schopenhauer,
we see in its events and persons the sequences
of an ordered movement; we see its back-
ground crammed with purpose. As against
Buckle, we discover it to be full of the unex-
pected, of the incalculable. It is because the
universe exists not for the sake of laws, but of
persons ; because its, to us, invisible spheres
are full of them, that we may expect continu-
ally vast births of time, the appearance of
great natures, whose solitary thought and voli-
tion change the destinies of generations.
308 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
Unpredictable indeed and unimaginable are
the turning-points of history. Imagine a
Buckle in the year 1 A.D. studying Palestinian
Judaism, and from what was there to see in the
present, and from a past that for long centuries
had been so arid, foretelling its probable
future ! What was there in the circumstances,
and the outlook, to make possible the New
Testament and the history of Christendom?
And yet all this came. " Unto us a Child is
born," and the key is turned in the door of
destiny. On a minor scale the same thing is
continually happening. At the end of the
eighteenth century poetry seemed dead in
England. Who remembers the names of the
laureates of that time ? Decades of barrenness
succeeded each other, and then suddenly arose
a whole galaxy, and the firmament shone with
a Wordsworth, a Coleridge, a Byron, a Shelley,
a Keats. To-day the literary drought is sore,
but a new Shakespeare may be in the cradle.
The world indeed, both of thought and action,
is prepared for immense surprises in the imme-
diate future. Those of us who are middle-aged
have seen within our lifetime a change in
ideas in the mode of conceiving the Universe,
greater than any that has taken place before
THE WORLD'S SURPRISES. 309
through thousands of years. And the rate of
movement now promises to be cumulative.
We may be on the eve of discoveries, or
coming within the sweep of influences, that
will alter the whole face of humanity.
But the theme, treated thus far on general
lines, has some personal applications. At the
beginning we spoke of wonder as a spiritual
asset, and we can now return to that. Men
think a good deal to-day of their surprise
faculty, and pay large sums to feed it withal.
The Roman Emperor who offered a fortune to
the man who could procure him a new sensa-
tion would find sympathisers to-day. People
travel round the globe in search of its big
things, the views that will startle and astonish.
But this is, after all, a worn-out way of seeking
the wonderful. The true way of travel here
is not the lateral, but the vertical. The secret
is not BO much that of roaming as of mount-
ing. A man who has seen the prospect, every
day of his life, from his native village would
scarce know it as viewed from a balloon. If as
individuals we would seek the world's surprises
it must be by the inner way. When we change
a habit, when we start a fresh study, when we
take on a new service, when we open a
310 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
hitherto untouched side of our nature to the
free play of God's Spirit, we shall find our-
selves in a new world. Life, as Madame
Swetchine says, consists mainly of what we put
into it. Natures that by constant endeavour
and aspiration preserve their freshness, find an
intoxication in every fresh dawn. To them,
happy souls, is it given
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower ;
Hold infinity in the palm of the hand,
And eternity in an hour.
They have learned Emerson's lesson, that every
day is the best day in the year.
That, too, is a poor life which, in the retro-
spect, does not abound in reverent wonder at
the Divine goodness in the whole ordering of
it. It is a fine observation of Ritschl that each
man's belief in a personal Providence arises
out of his own experience of God's leading.
Stevenson found it hard to forgive God for the
sufferings of others, but melted at the thought
of His fatherly dealing with himself. And yet
what a sufferer was he ! It is the marvellous
history of that hidden Love toward us in the
past that heartens us for the future. When
we steer towards some menacing fate that
THE WORLD'S SURPRISES. 311
fronts us we may meet it without fear. Its
utmost shock will be a surprise of grace.
That is what will happen to us in death.
Dying will not hurt us. Sir James Paget said
that he had scarce known a patient who, when
the end came, regarded it with fear, or with
aversion. He believed, indeed, that it had its
own pleasure, as has every other physical func-
tion. It was said of Bushnell that, " Even his
dying was play to him." And why not ? We
agree with Erasmus that "no man can die
badly who has lived well." And all that we
have experienced in this world, the wonder of
it, its deliverances, its trainings, its thousand
gracious interpositions, lead us in our turn to
the saint's trust of every age, that our passing
hence will be to encounter the grandest and
most blessed surprise of all.
XXXIV.
Life's Exchange System.
THE world has abundance of written creeds,
but it is the unwritten ones that really count.
Each man carries his own. After a certain
number of years on this planet we most of us
gain a conception of life which becomes hence-
forth our working belief. Part of it inherited,
and part of it home made, the whole gets
shape and colour from our special experience.
This private creed of the modern man differs
often from the Catechism as much in what it
contains as in what it leaves out. It is
strange that theology should have failed so
signally in furnishing the really vital formulas.
The man in the street if asked for his idea
of life, instead of quoting the Thirty-nine
Articles, is more likely to turn to the utterance
of some rank outsider. How immense, for
instance, the vogue of Huxley's famous simile
of a game of chess, where man is pitted
against an unseen player, inexorably just,
LIFE'S EXCHANGE SYSTEM. 313
demanding strict adherence to the rules, allow-
ing no move back, awarding full recognition to
skill and care, but meeting ignorance and
negligence with certain overthrow !
And jet the illustration was a poor one. It
is not true. At least not true enough, not
la Verite vraie. In chess the win of the one
party is the loss of the other, unless the game
is drawn, when neither has any advantage.
We refuse to accept any such result as the
summing-up of life. Far nearer to the fact,
surely, is the conception of it as a commerce,
a system of exchanges. In a true commerce
both sides win. Bu} r er and seller, the one who
delivers and the one who receives, are alike
benefited, and the series of transactions works
for the individual and the general enrichment.
The facts are certainly more solidly behind this
view than that of the chess game. There are
enough of them to permit us to say that, in
the long process of the years, life's exchange
system has wrought, not for a win at the price
of an equivalent loss, but for a steady gain all
round.
But we are anticipating. Our formula has
not yet justified itself. Is it allowable to
speak of the universe as summed up in an
314 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
exchange system ? It would be presumption,
indeed, to use the phrase as a complete
explanation of the Whole to which we belong.
But it may fairly be said to contain a great
deal of it. For one thing, inanimate nature is,
as we see, a perpetual commerce. Everything
changes into everything else. Force is
Protean. The same energy becomes in turn
heat, light, electricity, motion. The chemical
elements rush into continual new combina-
tions. There is no such thing in this sphere
as the solid and the immutable. The " ever-
lasting hills " are none of them everlasting.
The Matterhorn, as Tyndall said, is in ruins.
Snowdon was once probably twenty thousand
feet high. Its debris is scattered to-day over a
dozen counties. The history of a planet is of
an unceasing transformation, from moment to
moment, and from seon to aeon, until the fire
niist from which it sprang resolves itself once
more into the central heat.
It is, however, when we come to the plane
of human affairs that our formula reveals its
chief contents. And here it is not so much
the mere process of change, though that bulks
largely enough, as the give and take in it, the
sheer barter element, that most strikes us.
LIFE'S EXCHANGE SYSTEM. 315
Nature sits at her seat of custom and drives
her bargains with an unfailing zest. Her
weights and scales, her currency and values
vary immensely as we mount to life's higher
spheres, taking on, as we near the summits, a
fineness, a quality of the ethereal, which baffle
our own calculations. But from bottom to top
there seems ever the rule of a quid pro quo, of
a something for something, and never of a
something for nothing.
So strict is her rule of payment here that it
obtains rigidly in directions where Optimism
would have asked for relaxation. She allows
no advance without a seeming loss. The step
forward must pay toll. Civilisation gives us
watches and roads, but robs us of the savage's
intuition of the time, and his unerring trail
through the forest. We build towns and
forfeit the countryman's virility. We reach
our era of peace and lose the heroic virtues of
the old war time. One revolts against Mark
Pattison's dictum that " a time of peace and
security inevitably tends to foster an umbratile
and academic science ; curiosity is withdrawn
from the momentous questions which have
interest only for noble souls," but one is unable
to contradict it. Men win what seems mental
316 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
freedom, and often enough pay for it in moral
energy. "Only think," says Vinet, "of
France ! So much liberty and no beliefs ! "
What a price for a supposed intellectual
enlargement that which Clough expresses in
his agnostic days :
We are most hopeless who had once most hope
And most beliefless that had most believed !
England could not get her Reformation even
without paying over what seemed a large part
of her moral assets. Froude's picture of
the position under the Somerset protecto-
rate is terrible, yet hardly exaggerated.
"Hospitals were gone, schools broken up,
almshouses swept away . . . and the
poor, smarting with rage and suffering, and
seeing piety, honesty, duty trampled under
foot by their superiors, were sinking into
savages."
This particular ledger of nature offers
material that, it must be confessed, is
sufficiently confusing to the moral sense. We
have to leave it with the feeling that our
knowledge of the accounts here is not suffi-
cient to permit of our striking a balance.
There are other volumes m which we can see
LIFE'S EXCHANGE SYSTEM. 317
our way better. Weighted with immeasurable
significance are, for instance, the facts we
come across relating to the exchanges between
man's visibles and invisibles. The world's
history is largely one of this incessantly trans-
acted human barter of the seen for the unseen,
or of the unseen for the seen. We get glimpses
also of the results, though they are but
glimpses. From the beginning men have
revolted against the system which demands
that we should give up one thing to get
another, and have asked why we cannot have
both. How true to the heart of all time is
this lament of an old thirteenth-century
writer : " But no advice was I able to obtain
how one should appropriate to himself three
things in order to possess the fulness of his
powers. Two of these things are honour and
wealth. . . . The third is God's grace,
worth more than the other two." He wants
all three, but goes on to complain that he
cannot find out how they can be all combined
in a single life.
Pathetic bewilderment of each human soul,
that from the beginning it is besieged by the
rival claimants, with their cry of " Choose ! "
No line can we conceivably follow but it
318 OUESELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
involves the giving up of others that seem, as
we leave, them, so desirable. To energise is to
forfeit; quietude ; in society we lose contempla-
tion,; in the city's gaiety we have missed the
country's charm. At every step we pay.
Nothing is given ; all is bought. The Great
Temptation is strictly on these lines. "All
the kingdoms of this world will I give thee if
. ." and the price is named. A man gains
a million and finds himself inwardly beggared.
The mischief here is that men can reckon and
put into exact figures the coarse visibles that
entice them, while for the final treasures they
give in exchange they have no calculus. There
is no harm in a man's desire to be rich if only
he will define properly. To be rich is ulti-
mately a consciousness. One man is ten times
more alive than another, at a height ten times
the height of another. That is being rich.
" Give me health and a day," says Emerson,
"and I will laugh to scorn the pomp of
emperors." Pagan Horace approaches the
truth in his
Cur yalle permutem Sabina
Divitias operosiores ?
To exchange the quiet of his Sabine valley,
LIFE'S EXCHANGE SYSTEM. 319
with its life of poetic contemplation, for the
fevered rush for gold was to exact too hard a
bargain. How much of life's highest range had
been forfeited to make possible that inscription
on the monument of Sardanapalus : " Eat,
drink and (sexually) love, for all else is but
little worth ! "
The bartering of invisible for lower values,
and its inevitable life impoverishment, which
makes up so much of the human storj, serves,
however, to set off the more vividly the peculiar
and supernatural splendour which attaches to
the opposite form of commerce. " Something
divine," to use the words of Aristides, is surely
mingled with a humanity that has made such
ventures of faith, such offerings of visibles for
invisibles as are on record. What was the
inward reckoning, what the uncountable coin
paid over to the man's spirit which made a
Tyndale satisfied to devote his splendid abilities
to a task which he was beforehand convinced
was to bring him, not riches nor honours, but
torture and the stake! What motive, what
inner force is this that sets a man on a work by
which we, without paying him a penny, obtain
our English Bible, while he for reward gets
long lodging in that dismal Belgian dungeon
320 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
where lie sits through the cold winter nights
shivering in the dark, until its door opens to
his executioners ! Who shall say that a race
whose annals contain such stories is born to
commonplace destinies? The prophets and
martyrs know better. The path they tread,
and the goods they offer and receive hint at
transactions of the soul, in its commerce with
the Infinite, which make the bargains of Wall
Street or our Capel Court the mere huckster-
ings of the gutter.
And this leads us to a question in which all
that has gone before is summed up. What is
the ultimate nature of life's exchange system ?
We have insisted that Nature keeps tally and
demands payment for everything she offers us.
But is that the final word on the subject ? No.
When we get to the matter's deepest heart we
find the word there is not debt but grace.
Nature's business habits, her exactions, her
demand always of a something for something,
are only a modus operandi which veils a deep
mystery of Good that lies behind. The pay-
ment got out of us is really a gift to us, and
one of the most precious. Listen here to the
confession of a modern spirit, one of our most
gifted and representative. Robert Louis
LIFE'S EXCHANGE SYSTEM. 321
Stevenson has laid bare the innermost of the
thing in this marvellous utterance of his own
experience : " But indeed with the passing of
the years, the decay of strength, the loss of all
my old, active and personal habits, there grows
more and more upon me that belief in the
kindness of the scheme of things, and the
goodness of our veiled God, which is an excellent
and pacifying compensation." Nature's hard
bargaining with her suffering son had let him,
the one-time sceptic, into the secret of a
boundless Love!
And must we not include death itself, that
ultima linea rerum of the ancients, as only a
part of " Life's Exchange System " ? Science
joins religion in ignoring the old " ultimate
boundaries." Seeming destructions are in its
view only new beginnings. It was both science
and Christianity which mingled in the senti-
ment of Wordsworth when, as Aubrey de Vere
records, he " frequently spoke of death as if it
were the taking of a degree in the university of
life." We shall have come well out of our life
commerce if, as the account draws near its close,
the give and take, the gain and loss, have left
for final result the full assurance of this great
Christian hope; if we are in the company of
21
322 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVEESE.
those to whom apply the noble words of our
Edmund Waller :
The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made ;
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become
As they draw near to their eternal home.
XXXV.
The Spiritual in Teaching.
TEACHING is often thought of as a class
function, but it is vastly more than that.
When we have reckoned up the twenty
thousand odd Anglican clergy, the yet greater
array of Nonconforming ministers, and the
vast host of public instructors, who in all
spheres, from the infant class to the University
lecture-hall, are drilling the nation's youth, we
have only touched the fringe of our national
army of teachers. Artists, poets, statesmen,
physicians, are all in it ; so is every business
man; so, par excellence, is every father and
mother. The teaching comes by word and
deed, and by things that are beyond either.
For, in addition to what we are specifically
doing in our trade or calling, we are all
in our daily habits and conversation ex-
hibiting a certain philosophy of life, a mode
of regarding the universe and the human
relation to it, which makes us, whether we
324 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
recognise the fact or not, the exponents of a
doctrine.
Looking over the immense and wonderfully
varied fields of human activity we discern
in them all, we say, a teaching, and the ques-
tion now is as to the relative value of this
teaching. What we want here to point out is
that in all these departments, however seem-
ingly remote from one another, the quality of
the work depends on the presence or absence of
one element. In painter or politician, in
architect or business man, in parent, school-
master or preacher, the note which Nature
demands, and which will decide their real
worth, is the note of the spiritual.
By the note of the spiritual we mean the
recognition, back of every form of living and
working, of an Unseen Holy, of a Divine and
Infinite Purity, Beauty and Love, by which
these several activities are to be inspired, and
to which they are always to look for final
appraisement. This view of things is one
against which, in different quarters, very
vigorous revolts have been made ; but the
issue of those revolts confirms the fact that
the universe will tolerate no other. In art we
have seen a fleshly school; in literature a
THE SPIKITTTAT, IN TEACHING. 325
realism which boasts of describing the naked
fact with no ideal behind it ; in public affairs
there have been men who have formed them-
selves on Machiavelli. These attempts are
sometimes described as wicked ; it would be
much better to call them mediocre. A
really great nature can never endure itself
in such conditions. The proof is when we
see such a nature and study what it
instinctively seeks for and founds itself
upon. Arnold was reverenced at Rugby not
for his specialty in teaching classics or his-
tory, excellent though that was; his unique
hold on English young manhood lay in
something outside text-books. It lay in
character, and the character, again, rested on
a sacred mystery behind. And there is no
schoolmaster worth his salt of whom a similar
thing may not be said.
A great painter puts all this on his canvas.
To gain mastery of form and colour is only the
alphabet of his work. The task which fires
his soul is that of making " the light that
never was on sea or shore " to stream through
a landscape or to inspire a countenance. So
when men carve or build. It is not only in a
St. Mark's at Venice, where the whole New
326 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
Testament has been translated into marble,
that architecture represents the spiritual idea.
There is no structure, ancient or modern, as
our Euskin has magnificently shown, but
either defies it or does it homage. And if, in
public affairs, we note the career of politicians,
statesmen, or rulers, it will be found, without
exception, that, in the long run the men who
really impress their fellows, and whose work
endures, are citizens of the Unseen. Whether
it is a king like Alfred, or a revolutionary like
Mazzini, or a middle- class Kadical like Bright,
their power lies here.
What we want now, however, specially to
deal with is the place of the spiritual in the
teaching more definitely recognised as religious.
An Italian ex-priest and professor, the Abb6
Casamichela, who became a convert to Pro-
testantism, and so knew both sides, said that
while Rome hid behind her gorgeous exter-
nality a miserable poverty of thought, Pro-
testantism made up for its simplicity of
external worship by a glorious affluence of
ideas. The antithesis is flattering to Pro-
testantism, but needs to be taken with a certain
reserve. Affluence of ideas is an excellent
thing in religion, but it is not the only nor,
THE SPIRITUAL IN TEACHING. 327
indeed, the highest thing. The teacher's
power here will depend on something more
even than his intellectual range, and that is
his relation to the spiritual world. An Indian
sage gives us the whole secret in his saying
that "the best preacher is the man who has
attained a true liberation of soul." In Laur-
ence Oliphant's phrase he is one who " has
lived the life."
It is curious, in this connection, to see the
efforts men make after originality in religious
teaching. They annex foreign languages and
literatures, look up all manner of obscure
subjects, cultivate at times the wildest phan-
tasies in the frantic endeavour to find some-
thing new. They forget that the only true and
healthy originality is that which comes from
the constant growth of their own soul. If we
want our " old things " to become " new " the
method is to see them from the variant stand-
point of an ever-deepening life. And this
deepening will come by practice, by action,
more even than by study. When a man knows
a religious truth simply as a doctrine he will
preach it in a certain way, probably a very dry
way. When he has ventured something on it ;
lived with it j suffered over it ; triumphed in it,
328 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
he will preach it in a very different way. The
teacher becomes inexhaustible by putting him-
self thus in right relation in his inner world ;
by going ever deeper into it, not speculatively,
but actually, and offering always what he finds.
Such a man discovers that the false in teach-
ing lies not so much in its wrong relation to
outside fact as in its wrong relation to his own
spirit. The heresy of heresies is to proclaim
and urge upon others what we ourselves have
not realised. On our soul's peril let us not talk
of a thing we have not lived. Bather let there
always be more lived than we can utter. Mon-
taigne has a passage somewhere in which he
expresses his scorn for Cicero and Pliny for
seeking glory by the mere style of their writing
and speaking. Caesar and Xenophon, he says,
would never have written of their actions had
they not felt that the actions in themselves
were greater than their words. Which reminds
us of what Plutarch so finely says of Csesar,
that " his ambition was nothing but a jealousy
of himself, a contest with himself, as if it had
been with some other man, to make his future
achievements outshine the past." The am-
bition here was not on the highest plane, but
the principle is one for us all. There is no
THE SPIRITUAL IN TEACHING. 329
way of retaining freshness as a teacher but by
a life which, in its ever-increasing possession
of the spiritual world, continually outshines
the past.
And it is a deepening inner life that con-
stitutes the best of all securities for a sound
doctrine. As we become surer of God and
more acclimatised in His truth, holiness and
love, we can look upon the bewilderments of
dogmatic utterance from a very safe stand-
point. Not that we are going to be infallible.
We may make abundance of mistakes ; only,
as Joubert says, " there are some minds which
arrive at error by all truths ; and others which
arrive at great truths by all errors." The true
soul will be wrong often enough in its argu-
ments, but right in its conclusions. A teacher,
for instance, may state the Christian doctrine
of the Atonement in a way which, from the
philosophic or the forensic or the scientific
standpoints, may be riddled with objections.
But if he has stated it so that men have gone
away with a new hatred of sin and passion for
holiness; with a deeper insight into the love of
God, and his law of sacrifice ; and with a fresh
great hope for the utter redemption of this
sorrowful world j we say that whatever the
330 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
faults and ragged edges of his theory, as a
religious teacher he has not gone far wrong.
If we are in right relation with Eternal Love,
Truth and Righteousness, we shall steer our
way through doctrines without fear of ship-
wreck.
Such teachers will find the movement of the
modern world as full of spiritual meanings as
the old allegorists did the stories of Job and of
Jacob. That line of the German Claudius
which so shocked Dr. Pusey
Ea kam mir ein Gedank von ohngefahr
So spraoh' ich wenn ich Christua war,
in this view seems not at all shocking. They
realise that they are interpreting the world of
to-day on the lines of the Christ-spirit, and in
their measure, are speaking of it as He would
were He here.
To sum up. Our work and life form a
teaching the value of which depends on our
relation to the spiritual world. Unless we and
our work are rooted there, we and it are as a
bubble that breaks on the passing wave. In
religion we can teach nothing effectively that
we have not first lived. Our measure as
teachers will be in the measure of our experi-
THE SPIRITUAL IN TEACHING. 331
ences. "We can give only of what we have
received, and we are receptive only as we prac-
tise inner obedience. The men who are mighty
in this field are those whose height of attain-
ment gives a quality of its own to the words
they use, who use speech as a channel along
which flow influences that no words can trans-
late.
XXXVI.
Behind the Veil.
HUMANITY, says Comte, consists more of the
dead than of the living. We who are now
here are the veriest fragment of those who
have looked upon the sun. Life is a glimpse
and a vanishing. The crowd that rolls in and
out of London every day is as great this year
as last, but its constituents have altered. Vast
gaps would yawn in it were it not for fresh
recruits. Uno avulso non deficit alter. The
newcomer fills the vacant place. But the
vanished ones, what of them ? They were so
completely one with us, so much at home in
our midst. Their laughter is still in our ears,
the light in their eye haunts us. They were
more to us than all the world, and now . . . !
The journals are full of news, but of these
there is no word. The earth is a Babel of
noises, but on this one side the silence is
absolute. Our planet rolls in space from end
to end of its vast orbit ; the solar system itself
BEHIND THE VEIL. 833
is sweeping, with us in it, toward an unknown
bourne, but never are we carried within sight
of that undiscovered country into which our
beloved have passed. How well the heavens
keep their secret! No, it is not the world's
uproar that plays havoc with our nerves. It is
its maddening silence, where we pant to hear a
voice.
There is no subject on which the teacher of
to-day, who is supposed to have any message
for his fellows, is more eagerly questioned than
this, of what, for us and ours, lies behind the
veil. We all have such heavy stakes in this
venture. If we have reached the middle age,
half our friends are already over the border,
and in a few years their lot, whatever it is, will
be ours. What is the outlook ? Is there any
new light on this theme ? In one respect we
note a striking change of position in the
educated mind of to-day. If it has not dis-
covered any fresh ground for belief, it has very
clearly recognised the futility of what, not so
long ago, were regarded as very excellent
reasons for disbelief. We have in view all
that has been said on the negative side, from
Lucretius to Schopenhauer, and it is surprising
how little it amounts to. The French encyclo-
834 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
peedists imagined they had settled the question.
Their arguments to us are simply amusing-.
We turn, for instance, to Diderot's Entretien
d'un Philosophe, and find our philosopher talk-
ing as follows : " If you can believe in sight
without eyes, in hearing without ears, in think-
ing without a head, if you could love without a
heart, feel without senses, exist when you are
nowhere and be something without extension
and place, then we might indulge this hope of
a future life." Could a more parochial view of
things be imagined than this ? Spinoza might
have taught our Diderot better. Anyone with
the smallest modicum of philosophic imagina-
tion could picture for himself beings in other
spheres to whom the connection of thinking
with a brain would be as impossible as that of
thinking without one appeared to the encyclo-
paedist.
The whole negative argument from material-
ism, is, in fact, out of date. We are beginning
to realise that the problem of a life to come is
involved in a new way with the problem of the
life that is. " Behind the veil " relates to
" now " as much as to " then." To the
instructed eye the material world by which we
are encompassed is itself a veil, from behind
BEHIND THE VEIL. 335
which a partially hidden reality dimly shows.
Plato's enigmatic utterance about matter, v\t)
a\t]6iv6v i/reuSo? " matter the true falsity,"
stands here for us as the shadow of a truth.
What we think we know of the visible world is
largely a projected image of ourselves. The
" thing in itself " behind the show our senses
create for us is an unsolved riddle. The suppo-
sition that the universe amounts to just what our
five senses report would be a philosophy worthy
of Bumbledom. For ought we know a thousand
new senses might be created in us, and each
find outside its answering world. And the
senses we have stop short on a track they have
not half traversed. There are colour and
sound vibrations going on perpetually around
us of which our eyes and ears report nothing.
What, on the one side, lies beyond the millions
of stars revealed by our telescopes, and, on the
other, beyond the minutest visible open to our
microscopes? We are left without a guess.
All we know is that we are in the midst of a
system of infinite life and potency, where every
advance of our powers of perception reveals
new depths and possibilities of being. The
veil that hides things from us is not death. It
is our own limitations.
336 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
The sense of the visible as only the shadow
of a greater reality behind comes with more
difficulty to some races than to others. The
Western peoples are not specially gifted on this
side. Theirs has been largely a material
mission. To root themselves solidly on the
planet, to learn its surface laws, to enrich them-
selves by the clever manipulation of its forces,
this has been the Western function. The
East gained an earlier sense of what lay
beneath. The world's great religions are
Oriental. Egypt lived thousands of years
before Christ in the acutest perception of an
invisible world. In its Vedanta philosophy
India also, in a far antiquity, beheld the world
as phenomenal, resting on a Divine which alone
was real, declaring man's hold on immortality
to be in the surrender of what in him was
earthly and transitory. But no race of man,
whether in East or West, is permitted to escape
this discipline. Sooner or later, after our first
intoxicating experience of the visible, does it
dawn upon us that all this is only a screen.
The very senses that linked us at first so firmly
to earth turn traitor to it later, and cry
" illusion I " The world is in this respect a
Church, whose teaching and ritual none may
BEHIND THE VEIL. 837
evade. As friend after friend departs, and our
own years tell their story, life becomes more
and more a vast expectation, a wait till the
curtain shall be raised. That humanity, spite
of itself, is drilled always into this attitude is,
for those who see any purpose or coherence in
life, a sufficient hint of what is yet to come.
While these thoughts have been with
humanity, as it seems, almost from the be-
ginning, there are considerations belonging
specially to our own time which point all in the
same direction. Evolution, for instance, gives
us life as a perpetual ascent. Each grade of
being takes in all that is beneath it, with some-
thing of its own added. Man, as we know
him, sums up in himself the laws and forces of
inorganic matter, the vital principles of vege-
table and animal life, together with a whole
higher world of his own. His organism, by its
subtle magic, transmutes air and water, vege-
table and animal, into its own superior form.
Why should not this ascent continue ? Why
should not the inner economy of the human
spirit contain, in its turn, a principle by virtue
of which the essentials of the personal human
life shall be lifted to a yet higher term, in a yet
higher sphere ? The argument gathers weight
22
838 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
in proportion to the values which are being
dealt with. If matter, as we now know, is
indestructible, preserving its being through
infinite changes of form, what is there in the
nature of things to forbid our belief that its
nobler partners, spirit and personality, are no
exceptions to this rule ? And when to all this
we add the considerations opened by the later
evolutionary researches, showing as they do
that the lower organisms are practically
immortal ; that death has come in as part of
the struggle towards a higher structure come
in, that is, not as the lord and tyrant of life,
but as a fellow-labourer working towards its
furtherance we realise how the evidence
accumulates which bids us look for higher
fruitions, as well as for the solution of our
enigmas, " Behind the Veil."
There is one side of this theme which we
hesitate to touch. The subject of spiritual
communications from the unseen has been too
often the hunting-ground of the religious
adventurer, of those who exploit the human
yearning for purposes of their own. The world
seems hardly yet sufficiently trained, either
scientifically or morally, for a safe exploration
of this enchanted land. Yet things from this
BEHIND THE VEIL. 889
side have swum into human ken which refuse
to be ignored. More and more are they arrest-
ing the attention of the leading minds. It was
Kant who said of ghostly appearances : " For
my part, ignorant as I am of the way in which
the human spirit enters the world and the ways
in which it goes out of it, I dare not deny the
truth of many of such narratives." The late
Professor Sidgwick held that the evidence of
the apparition of persons at the point of death
to others at a distance amounted to scientific
proof. On the question of the actual communi-
cation between spirits of the departed and
those now living, the result of the researches
of a London committee of eminent men of all
schools of thought, appointed some years ago
for this purpose, was sufficiently suggestive.
Its finding, in substance, was that communica-
tions were made which could only be accounted
for on the supposition of an invisible personal
agency ; but that this agency, in the majority
of instances, seemed in point of intelligence to
be below the normal human level. The plain
inference from this would seem surely to be,
that the souls we have known and loved when
disengaged from the body enter upon spheres
of being too refined and too remote to be
340 OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE.
cognised by our mortal sense, and that those
within reach are only inferior or degraded
types.
What we have mainly to note is that life's
silences and separations are a purposed disci-
pline. The pains here are the spirit's " grow-
ng pains." The heavens are mute, not be-
cause there is nothing to say, but because the
time is not yet. Meantime our business is to
develop more and more that spiritual sense
which gives us, here and now, the vision of life
in its wholeness. " Heard you not that sweet
melodious music ? " said Jacob Behmen to his
son, when dying at Gorlitz. There is a more
than mortal music already audible to attuned
ears. The elect souls are already free of the
world behind the veil. They are on pilgrimage
towards that fatherland. " For they that say
such things declare plainly that they seek a
country. . . . But now they desire a better
country, that is, a heavenly."
OTHER WORKS by J. BRIERLEY, B.A.
("/.." of "The Christian World.")
STUDIES OF THE SOUL.
Third Edition. Crown STO. Cloth, 3a.6d.
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tlt j. B.' is the most thoughtful, the most suggestive,
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" Mr. Brierley is at once a seer and a mystic. Therg
it a fine spiritual aroma about hi-s essays; the atmo-
sphere he creates is stimulating and bracing. . . .
Such a work at thit will live." BAPTIST MAOAZINI.
FROM PHILISTIA:
Essays on Church and World.
Crown 8vo. Cloth, 3s. 6d.
"Both sweetness and light are in them."
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BRITISH WEKKLT.
" From a vigorous and unconventional pen. Mr.
Brierley has read widely in all kinds of literature."
METHODIST TIMES.
" Readers of these delightful essays will find in them
not only a safe 'insurance against dulness,' but many a
happy and inspiring thought expressed in chaste and
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" This is one of the most remarkable books oftheyear.'
CROTDON CHRONICLE.
QUESTIONS FOR
THE FREE CHURCHES.
Crown 8ro. Cloth, 2s. 6d.
"Practical, suggestive, and well worthy of the earnest
attention of all icho would see the influence of the Church
extended and adapted to the new conditions of the present
hurried, active and restless age."
DUNDEE ADVKKTISSR.
"A book that should be read by all Church workers."
CBOYDON ADVERTISER.
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THE FBI KM AN.
" A valuable contribution to an important discussion."
LEICESTER CHRONICLE.
" Mr. Brierley's essays are short and pointed, and
are invariably worthy of frank and patient considera-
tion." BRITISH WEEKLY.
" Mr. Brierley -wields a trenchant pen, and hitt with
precision and force many of t : ,e hindrances which retard
the progress of the Free Churches in this country. Th*
book is a healthy one and is likely to do great good."
ESSEX TELKGRAPH.
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