GIFT OF 
 
Oc amftergt 16ook0 
 
 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
To reach the ultimate, angels' law, 
 Indulging every instinct of the soul 
 There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing ! 
 
 BROWNING, A Death in the Desert 
 
THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 A REVIEW, IN TERMS OF COMMON 
 
 THINKING, OF THE SCRIPTURE 
 
 HISTORY ISSUING IN 
 
 IMMORTALITY 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN FRANKLIN GENUNG 
 
 LATE PROFESSOR OF LITERARY AND BIBEtCAL INTERPRETATION 
 IN AMHERST COLLEGE 
 
 'I 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 
 1921 
 
1126 
 
 Gi 
 
 COPYRIGHT -1921 -'BY 
 MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 
 
 THE PLIMPTON P R E S S N O R W O O D M A S S U S A 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 JOHN FRANKLIN GENUNG, BY John Mason Tyler . . vii 
 
 I. ON THE LARGER SCALE i 
 
 I. THE SCALE HITHERTO PREVAILING ... 8 
 II. ENLARGEMENT DEMANDED BY EVOLUTIONARY 
 
 SCIENCE 19 
 
 III. ENLARGEMENT AS MEASURED BY SCRIPTURE 
 
 CONCEPTIONS 28 
 
 II. THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 37 
 
 I. THE EMPIRE OF LAW AND FATE .... 43 
 
 II. THE ADVENT OF THE SPIRIT ..... 54 
 
 III. EARLY SPIRITUAL REACTIONS 60 
 
 IV. THE BURDEN AND THE CRAVING .... 66 
 
 III. NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME ... 71 
 
 I. THE END OF THE COSMIC TETHER .... 77 
 
 II. ON THE FRONTIER OF ADULT LIFE. ... 83 
 
 III. THE SOUL OF PROPHECY 89 
 
 IV. THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE .... 103 
 
 I. THE SECOND BIRTH ll $ 
 
 II. THE OUTWARD CURRENT 1 3 2 
 
 III. THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN . . . 1 54 
 
 V. THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE .... 177 
 
 I. FROM THE EXCEEDING HIGH MOUNTAIN . . 196 
 
 II. THUS IT BECOMETH US 221 
 
 III. TO THIS END WAS I BORN 235 
 
 IV. THE DECEASE ACCOMPLISHED AT JERUSALEM. 249 
 
 435162 
 
y i CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 VI. NATURALIZING THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT . 267 
 
 I. EYE-WITNESSES OF HIS MAJESTY . 2 
 
 II. SINAI VERSUS SIGN .... 
 
 III. THE MIND OF SAINT JOHN ... 
 
 IV. THE MIND OF SAINT PAUL 
 
 VII. INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES .... 
 
 I. THE UNVEILED MYSTERY 
 
 II. THOUGH OUR OUTWARD MAN PERISH . . .332 
 III. WHY STAND YE GAZING UP INTO HEAVEN? . 350 
 
JOHN FRANKLIN GENUNG 
 JOHN M. TYLER 
 
 ABOUT the middle of the seventeenth century John 
 Guenon, a Huguenot born near La Rochelle, arrived 
 in New York and became one of the first settlers at 
 Flushing, L. I. He married Margreta Sneden, a native of Am- 
 sterdam. Not far from 1700 another Huguenot, having the 
 name of Petell, was admitted to citizenship at Boston. His 
 daughter married Andrew Nichols, a Scotchman from the 
 north of Ireland. Their daughter became the wife of Daniel 
 Dye, a soldier in the Revolution, and probably of Dutch de- 
 scent. The Dyes were characterized by kindliness, sense of 
 humor, and love of music; Daniel Dye's wife certainly ought 
 to have inherited an abundance of firmness of character. 
 
 The name Guenon had by this time been corrupted or 
 changed, as was usually the case with the fine old French 
 names, into Genung or Ganong. Abram Genung married 
 Martha Dye, and their son, John Franklin, was born at Wil- 
 seyville in southern New York, January 27, 1850. Martha 
 Dye had several brothers who were ministers. Abram Genung 
 was partly a farmer, but evidently by preference a carpenter- 
 builder. For this was still the time when the builder was also 
 carpenter and architect and could whittle out a tall-spired 
 New England church or a fine old colonial farmhouse, worthy 
 of the name of mansion. He had vision and a keen sense for 
 proportion and values. 
 
 The child John and his twin brother grew up on the farm 
 at Wilseyville. Here was the early environment and educa- 
 tion which, even more than school or college, made the farmer s' 
 sons of that generation leaders in all communities. Every 
 ploughing probably brought up a new stratum of stones to be 
 
viii THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 picked up by the boys. The farm was a hive of all sorts of 
 industry. Here the boy had abundant physical, industrial, 
 and manual training: to name only a few of his daily exercises, 
 nature study and care of animals were unavoidable; he had 
 his share in the responsibilities of the family, and it was no 
 small one; he learned firmness and self-reliance, skill and in- 
 genuity through emergencies. The stranger, though a friend, 
 dares not invade and describe the family life, the moral and 
 spiritual atmosphere, of that Huguenot, Dutch, Scotch-Irish 
 household. We know what it must have been; John had time 
 and opportunity to think for himself. Church and "little red 
 schoolhouse" did the rest. 
 
 In 1864 his parents "moved to Owego for the sake of better 
 school advantages," - as Professor Genung says in the "Vita" 
 at the end of his doc tor 's thesis. Here he attended an acad- 
 emy, a great institution in those days, usually led and governed 
 by a man of some learning and more power and vitality. He 
 made such use of his time and opportunities that after four 
 years he was admitted to the junior class of Union College. 
 It was a day of comparatively small things and advantages in 
 all our colleges. Their material equipment was very meagre, 
 the recitation rooms were bare and ugly, the library was practi- 
 cally a sealed book to most students. The professors were 
 pioneers none too well prepared for their special work; but 
 there were among them strong men well aware of their own 
 limitations and resolved that students standing on their 
 shoulders should gain a wider and clearer view of the glories 
 of the promised land of learning. 
 
 Among these was one of whom Professor Genung spoke 
 often with especial love and reverence. Professor Tayler 
 Lewis was a deep and broad scholar. In spite of hindrances 
 and difficulties he had gained a thorough knowledge of Latin 
 and Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, and was a profound student 
 of the Bible. He was soaked through and through with ori- 
 ental literature, thought and spirit. In 1855, when the theory 
 of evolution had been forgotten, not to be revived until the 
 publication of Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species" almost fifteen 
 
JOHN FRANKLIN GENUNG ix 
 
 years later, Professor Lewis published his "Six Days of Crea- 
 tion," in which he showed that the generally or universally 
 accepted crude conception of immediate creation of species 
 was unscholarly and unbiblical and against the whole spirit of 
 oriental thought. He was vigorously denounced by a few 
 theologians and scientists, but was generally disregarded and 
 neglected, the usual fate of a pioneer thinker too far in ad- 
 vance of his age. He replied vigorously in a second book, for 
 he was a "mighty man of valor," and the subject dropped. 
 Professor Lewis showed the hungry young Genung the "beauty 
 that was Greece" and the little known glory and depth of 
 oriental thought, and taught him how to study the Bible and 
 literature. All this was but a small part of what the old hero, 
 laying off the harness, did for his young pupil and disciple. 
 He might well have said with Nestor: "My teaching made 
 thee great." 
 
 Mr. Genung completed a course in theology, and was pastor 
 of a church from 1875 to 1878. But during his pastorate his 
 desire to study and to prepare for teaching grew continually 
 stronger. In October, 1878, he entered the University of Leip- 
 zig, where he remained for three years, excepting six months' 
 stay in London. He devoted himself to English literature. 
 Biblical study was not neglected, but does not seem to have 
 stood first in his thought and interest. He was laying founda- 
 tions. His doctor's thesis was a careful and thorough study 
 of Tennyson's "In Memoriam." He returned to Amherst Col- 
 lege, taught rhetoric, and wrote a text-book on the subject 
 which has been used throughout the country. 
 
 What attracted him most was not so much the beauty of 
 form or style or even of content as the truthful expression of 
 life. His work on "In Memoriam" is a study, not of versifi- 
 cation and poetry, but of a soul in pain and struggle. This 
 was the expression of the Huguenot, Dutch, and Scotch strains 
 in his richly blended blood. He loved beauty of expression, 
 but it was largely the beauty of exact, definite truthfulness. 
 The first draft of any manuscript never satisfied him; it must 
 be written again and rewritten. Every word and sentence must 
 
x THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 be true to his thought and message, though the rewriting some- 
 times worked injury to his style. With his ancestry he could 
 not do otherwise than "hold his rudder true." 
 
 From the same source came his steady, firm self-determina- 
 tion and his dour pertinacity. He was a prodigious worker, 
 doing a day's task before most of us had left our beds, and still 
 having time for a walk before breakfast. His sturdy body 
 seemed incapable of weariness. He appeared never to have ex- 
 perienced hurry, worry, or fret. His college duties and exer- 
 cises were never neglected; every lecture and recitation was 
 most carefully prepared. Every theme handed to him was read 
 with painstaking, and usually with pain, and the supposed 
 value was scrupulously entered in a large book. But almost 
 every year there appeared a new study, of close thought and 
 rare finish, the product of a brain which seemed to grow and 
 flourish and work while other men slept. 
 
 In the presence of meanness or falsehood he could be a blaze 
 of indignation. But his humanity and humanitarianism were 
 too large to allow him to devote overmuch anxiety to class- 
 room discipline. If certain "lewd fellows of the baser sort" 
 in the rear seats were conspicuously inattentive, listless, and 
 heedless, he quietly kept on "casting pearls." Once in an un- 
 usually vigorous written protest he characterized some pupils 
 as personae non gratae, but I believe that they remained 
 through the course. One of them is to-day one of his most 
 ardent, though not most learned admirers. Like some of the 
 rest of us, he was sometimes or often imposed upon, but it 
 had its compensations. 
 
 Soon the vitality and heart of the man began to draw him 
 from the books of modern writers to the wisdom literature 
 of the Bible, the grand drama of Job, the shrewd results of 
 ages of experience crystallized in Proverbs, and the ripe ob- 
 servation and thought of Ecclesiastes ; to the far vision of the 
 Prophets and the companionship of the Apostles and their 
 Master. This was his real lifework, a labor of love, completed 
 by him when the second volume of his "Guide Book to the 
 Biblical Literature" appeared a few months before his death. 
 
JOHN FRANKLIN GENUNG xi 
 
 He had no great enthusiasm for academic textual criticism, 
 for wild guesses, or for negative results. His sane common 
 sense and feeling of values had taught him that to sift merely 
 the chaff out of a grand literature was hardly worth while. He 
 was searching for wisdom and life, and he either found it, or, 
 if not, he did not publish a tome to inform others how little 
 he had discovered or appreciated in a great treasure house. 
 Scholars and plain people enjoyed him. His research was 
 patient, broad and deep, original and individual, like that of 
 the teacher whose mantle had fallen on his shoulders. He 
 was never afraid to stand alone. 
 
 He followed the gleam with intent and single eye, and when 
 pursuing a line of truth he had little interest in any other sub- 
 ject. If you asked him about Jeremiah, you might sometimes 
 be surprised to receive in answer a flood of information about 
 the early Perizzites; and you could not win him over to your 
 interests. At that time his mind was occupied by Perizzites. 
 He thought hard and to good purpose. 
 
 He had plenty of avocations. He was editor of The Anther st 
 Graduates' Quarterly from its start. He loved music and was 
 always a member of two or more orchestras. On this subject 
 he was ready to talk gladly. He was chairman of the Town 
 Planning Board, and could always find time to map a new 
 street or design a bridge or a building. Here too he showed 
 the same sanity and accuracy of thought that characterized 
 his scholarship. He was the minister's right-hand man in the 
 church. When the Jones Memorial Library was founded, he 
 was eager to help. Some of the choicest sets of literature in 
 his private library will form by his expressed wish the nucleus 
 of a literary corner in its reading room. He had as many 
 neighbors as the Good Samaritan. He once said to a friend: 
 "When I die, I hope some one will say: 'Is John Genung dead? 
 It's too bad.' " His hope was fulfilled a thousand fold. 
 
 After his death there was found among his papers the 
 manuscript of a new book entitled "The Life Indeed." Here 
 he brought together the results of all his explorations in 
 modern and ancient literature, in science as well as in the 
 
xii THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 Bible, in one volume. It is his last message, crystallized out 
 of study, thought, and the experience of trial, struggle, and 
 success out of a broad and deep life. It is an altogether 
 fitting last word. Life and life indeed was his specialty. 
 
 There are some men whose size you do not appreciate until 
 you stand close to them and measure them by yourself. Then 
 you recognize their stature and breadth of shoulders and know 
 that you are looking at a big man. We all had this feeling 
 when we met our friend and caught a glimpse of the size and 
 symmetry of his soul and heart. The Greeks would have 
 spoken of his sound mind and inward strength. There was 
 nothing of Zarathustra's "reversed cripple" about John Ge- 
 nung. Says Professor Huxley: "That man, I think, has had a 
 liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his 
 body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and 
 pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; 
 whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts 
 of equal strength and in smooth working order; ready, like a 
 steam-engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the 
 gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose 
 mind is stored with the great and fundamental truths of Na- 
 ture and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted 
 ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained 
 to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender con- 
 science ; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature 
 or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself." 
 Genung pressed towards the goal of a liberal education. 
 
 After all, is it true that salvation is nothing more nor less 
 than wholeness, the attainment of perfect health; that health, 
 haleness, wholeness, and holiness are all one in root-meaning? 
 Did we all rightly as well as instinctively draw close to Genung 
 because "virtue went out of him?" Is health more infectious 
 or contagious than disease? And we cannot help noticing that 
 such men of sound sense and good taste as Genung and Dr. 
 Hitchcock always had a surprising predilection and hearty 
 liking for sinners such apparently was also the mind of the 
 Master. And sinners loved them. Such abounding, overflow- 
 
JOHN FRANKLIN GENUNG xiii 
 
 ing, health-giving lives are the irrefutable argument for im- 
 mortality. The "narrow stream of death" is altogether too 
 shallow to overwhelm a great soul. Try as hard as we will, 
 it is impossible to imagine them as dead. They heard the 
 sunset gun, rested a little on their arms, but at sunrise were 
 again marching on refreshed and renewed to the service and 
 victories of a brighter day. 
 
I 
 
 ON THE LARGER SCALE 
 
 BY WHAT MEASUREMENT ALONE AN ETERNAL OUTLOOK 
 OF LIFE IS ATTAINABLE 
 
 I. THE SCALE HITHERTO PREVAILING 
 
 II. ENLARGEMENT DEMANDED BY EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE 
 
 III. ENLARGEMENT AS MEASURED BY SCRIPTURE CONCEPTIONS 
 
 t 
 
THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 I 
 ON THE LARGER SCALE 
 
 TO believe in immortality is one thing/' says Robert 
 Louis Stevenson, "but it is first needful to believe 
 in life." These words, more far-reaching than 
 their simplicity betokens, contain the key to the study on 
 which we are now entering. To believe in immortality, 
 late as our day of the world is, and full of knowledge, men 
 are still trying as desperately and dimly as ever to do this. 
 But they are so constituted that belief cannot come by trying 
 to believe; cannot be made out of whole cloth, cannot be 
 made at all. It is a thing wholly beyond the power of 
 councils or sages or churches or creeds to engender. It 
 must, like knowledge, like science, be built on valid grounds 
 and verifiable data; must in the end be not only desirable 
 but reasonable. 
 
 Where then shall the grounds and data of a belief in 
 immortality come from? There has been no lack of strenuous 
 search. Nature and mind, the secrets of matter and the 
 underworld of human consciousness, have been ransacked 
 for them; thus far it would seem, if we may judge by the 
 still prevailing doubt, to little conclusive purpose. The great 
 majority of open-eyed inquirers are still confessing, "We 
 have but faith, we cannot know"; as if this were about equiv- 
 alent to giving up the case. But somehow the case does not 
 consent to be put out of court. It still has secondary rights 
 to be heard, if not the main one. There yet remains the 
 question how much it means to have faith, as so many have, 
 even against the apparent grounds of faith; and more stimu- 
 lating still, the question, If we cannot know this, this direct 
 
 3 
 
4 r HE LIFE INDEED 
 
 fact of immortality, what can we know? And I think it will 
 turn out that there is more knowledge available, and knowl- 
 edge of greater value, than we have been aware of. The 
 century's austere spirit of doubt, like a lion in the way, has 
 scared us; so that we were too timid to recognize, calmly 
 and wisely, the data that are in plain sight before us. 
 A* The proposition to which this study is committed is, that 
 whatever the ultimate source of these grounds and data of 
 immortality, they can be found nowhere except in life itself, 
 in the normal and rounded life of manhood, what I here call 
 the Life Indeed. Even if they come by what is termed 
 revelation, they must needs come not by portent and miracle, 
 not by some unmotived irruption from without, but by the 
 way of our common human existence. They must come in 
 response to an appetency and an assimilative power already 
 there, already native to manhood, rather than by something 
 extra-human superinduced. This is but another way of saying 
 what Emerson said years ago, that immortality will come to 
 such as are fit for it, and that he who would be a great 
 soul in future must be a great soul now. But this does not 
 close the case; it only opens the more vital question, What 
 is it then to be a great soul, to be fit for immortality? 
 Is it in man at all, as we can compass his life's worth and 
 wealth, to be a candidate for so high a destiny? This throws 
 us back from the grave and its sequel to the arena of char- 
 acter and action; it calls on us to raise manhood life to its 
 highest power; in other words, it stipulates, as I said to begin 
 with, that before we reach the point where we can believe 
 in immortality we learn to believe in life. 
 
 If our study were to depend on voluminous reading, there 
 is no dearth of material. The subject, in various stages and 
 aspects, is just now beyond most others, as we say, in the air. 
 For the latest views, kept supposedly up to date, one need 
 only instance the Ingersoll Lectureship; so I need not ask 
 here what Professor Ostwald thinks about it, and Professor 
 Osier, and Professor James, and Professor Royce, and Pro- 
 fessor Wheeler, and John Fiske, and Doctor Gordon. Nor 
 
ON THE LARGER SCALE 5 
 
 would I here do less than pay them all the tribute of heartiest 
 honor, as men able and authoritative, who have enriched our 
 theme from many sides. It is forever too late, with their 
 weighty contributions in mind, to re-echo that cheap sneer 
 of Omar Khayyam: 
 
 Myself when young did eagerly frequent 
 Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument 
 
 About it and about: but evermore 
 Came out by the same door where in I went. 
 
 And yet can we say that any of them have really, as the 
 old phrase is, touched the spot? As these little books have 
 come out year by year, each from its point of view so frankly 
 admitting that we know but in part, I have caught myself 
 wondering when, if at all, the Ingersoll Lectureship was going 
 to raise the question, What does the Bible say about it? For 
 it seems to me that the Bible, rightly weighed and digested, 
 more nearly touches the spot than any other book or science 
 or philosophy that has been or can be written; that all that 
 is true in these others gets its light from the Bible way of 
 looking at things; and that the gaps and holes in these 
 others are filled and rounded out there. I am not saying 
 this of the Bible, however, according to our conventional way 
 of regarding it; though I raise no objection to this. We 
 have got so used to reading it in a Sunday frame of mind, 
 or only as fitting it mentally to some theological system, that 
 we were well nigh color blind to its natural and cosmic 
 significance. In spite of the analysis and criticism that we 
 have laid out upon it, we are still reading it according to 
 a long stereotyped formula. And so doing we are getting 
 even as Bible scholars behind the age. With minds wonder- 
 fully enlarged and quickened in other lines, we are still letting 
 our Bible thoughts jog along in the same pld pious and petty 
 harness. We are as yet very imperfectly aware how pro- 
 foundly the Bible history and thoughts are changed, as we turn 
 upon them conceptions which have advanced, so to say, from 
 Ptolemaic to Copernican. 
 
 Here is where the Bible view that I wish now to present 
 
6 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 comes in. I want to see how it squares with our common- 
 day conceptions and terms; with the ideas that are potent 
 to-day to move us: how it identifies itself with what nature 
 and human nature are revealing to us otherwise. The Bible 
 has been ignored hitherto, I apprehend, in the interest of 
 science; which supposedly could not mix with revelation and 
 must therefore be its foe. Well, my contention is that this is 
 a false position. I maintain that the Bible itself is in the 
 interest of science, and only so; that on the subject we have 
 in hand, saying now nothing of its other involvements, it is 
 the one truly scientific treatment we have. We may call it, 
 in the most exacting and authentic sense, the world's sufficing 
 text-book of immortality. 
 
 Note then that this text-book of ours bears one plain mark 
 of the scientific attitude: it takes its stand on the ground not 
 of theories and metaphysical speculations, but of actual fact. 
 Its method is historical. It records, with clear indication of 
 the time and the causes and the agency, the fact that life and 
 immortality were brought to light in this world. That great 
 event took place comparatively late in its chronicled account. 
 We can look back from it therefore over a period wherein pre- 
 sumably life and immortality were not yet in light but in 
 gloom, or perhaps in a gradually brightening twilight. Look- 
 ing back, then, as we have such warrant, we find it even so. 
 We come upon a long stretch of time in which no word about 
 a life beyond this life is spoken, and in which the idea of im- 
 mortality, even if it exists, has no motive power at all. Then 
 later we hear the wisest and piousest man in the world asking 
 doubtfully, "If a man die, shall he live again?" Later still 
 we hear another wise man, puzzled with the knotty problems 
 of being, almost indignantly maintaining that we can know 
 nothing about it. And yet in spite of this depth of agnosticism 
 there comes later the announceent that life and immortality 
 are revealed, that they lie clear and illuminate before us. 
 Here evidently is the record of a great revolution in knowledge 
 and insight, amounting to all the difference between darkness 
 and light. The Bible history is a history which sounds a dim 
 
ON THE LARGER SCALE 7 
 
 and perilous way through men's progressive thoughts and 
 ideals, and issues in immortality. 
 
 Note one or two things further. Our text-book does not 
 say that in those earlier times, and for those earlier people, 
 immortality did not yet exist. It raises no question of when 
 it began to be a fact, but simply of when it began to be seen, 
 when it came to light. Note again, that when immortality 
 first came to light, then first life itself came to light; the two 
 came into the field of vision together. It would seem then 
 that in those primal ages of gloom and twilight men did not 
 know fully how to live. Like the animals, in some degree, 
 they were nourishing a blind life within the brain, hardly 
 aware what it all meant. Here then is a momentous history to 
 trace: the long slow development whereby manhood was get- 
 ting its eyes open to see a destiny which had always existed; 
 the passing from blindness, perhaps through dimness and fit- 
 ful glimmers, to full eyesight, from midnight to the light of 
 day. Here we are shown what is the soul's plight before the 
 light has come; what its joy and emancipation after; and how 
 that immortality which was revealed along with life looks in 
 the diffused daylight. Such a course of history, which in fact 
 but represents the matter-of-fact scripture current, kindles the 
 imagination by the splendor of its promise; it is close yoke- 
 fellow to poetry; but does it not also look sane and interre- 
 lated and reasonable? 
 
 We are going now to trace it; very badly and condensedly, 
 as must needs be in our space; but first we must determine 
 the scale on which our minds shall work. On a small scale 
 we can make only small measurements and get a petty out- 
 look. A pint-cup is no fitting instrument to judge an ocean 
 by. Our subject comes into the light of self -evidencing truth 
 only as we approach it on the larger scale. One reason, a 
 main reason I think, why men's endeavor to believe in immor- 
 tality is beset by confusion and conjecture, is that they are 
 looking for the wrong thing, a thing that even if it exists is 
 not scientifically worthy to enlist a soul's supreme energies. 
 It is a mercy, perhaps, that their eyes are holden until they 
 
8 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 are ready to see things commensurate with the dignity of their 
 nature. 
 
 I. THE SCALE HITHERTO PREVAILING 
 
 To realize how this is, let us take a look at the scale of in- 
 quiry and estimate that has prevailed in men's minds hither- 
 to, both in the secular and the biblical standard of view. 
 
 "Where wert thou, brother, those four days?" is the ques- 
 tion which the nineteenth century Laureate, acting spokesman 
 of a whole curious humanity, puts to Lazarus of Bethany, that 
 excepted mortal who, by scripture account, having passed the 
 gates of death and well on into the region of corruption beyond, 
 came back to resume this bodily existence. A question emi- 
 nently natural, and on the scale of ideas hitherto prevailing, 
 most momentous. The poet who phrased it is half resentful 
 at Lazarus, or his historian, for leaving the answer unrecorded; 
 such answer would, he thinks, so laudably crown our hard-won 
 discoveries in the mysteries of being, by telling what it is to 
 die. 
 
 What it is to die, and its correlate, what it is to survive 
 death, in this strain of inquiry it is that the world's search 
 for immortality centres. It is the kind of speculation and con- 
 jecture that rises first out of the phenomena we see, and that 
 takes most immediate hold of actual fact. If only this were 
 known, if only we could push exploration four days, or one 
 hour, beyond the last lapsing breath, what an assured basis 
 we should have, it would seem, for all the rest. At this point 
 it is that knowledge ceases; and at this point, it is reasonable 
 to assume, the broken thread should be joined again. In the 
 quest for evidence of survival, what procedure so obviously 
 fitting as to set up our exploring apparatus at the place where 
 the clue was lost? And with such presupposition it is not un- 
 reasonable to suppose that the Bible, if its claim to revelation 
 is authentic, if indeed it would save itself from discredit by 
 dealing with visible facts instead of religous fancies, should 
 on this matter preeminently be luminous and outspoken. 
 
ON THE LARGER SCALE 9 
 
 Yet here the Bible is as silent and apparently as helpless as 
 is our baffled experience itself. To the inquiry rising so spon- 
 taneously out of this miracle at Bethany no word of reply is 
 vouchsafed. 
 
 Behold a man raised up by Christ! 
 
 The rest remaineth unreveal'd; 
 
 He told it not; or something seal'd 
 The lips of that Evangelist. 
 
 Nor does the Bible elsewhere tell us, with any authoritative 
 or realistic clearness, what it is to die. Such information may 
 have been left to biological science, which would seem to have 
 legitimate charge of such things; at any rate, it does not seem 
 to belong to the distinctive range of scripture disclosure. In 
 its large trend the Bible virtually ignores the tomb; and herein 
 it is in great contrast to other so-called sacred books. It is 
 in no sense a rival, for instance, of that portentous Egyptian 
 Book of the Dead, which in its day wrought to transform a 
 nation's religion into a huge funeral service, and made a 
 whole country-side one vast mausoleum. Brought to confront 
 the mystery of man's exit from this material life, it merely has 
 at command the language that human tongues have moulded 
 for it, no more. The dust returns to earth as it was; the 
 spirit to God who gave it. That is its terse summary of things, 
 and that is ours. No voice from heaven is needed to tell us 
 that; nor is there prophetic demonstration or oracle to tell us 
 more. 
 
 Before we jump to the conclusion, however, that we have 
 here uncovered a lame spot in divine revelation, or take up 
 with the prevailing scientific contempt for the scriptural view 
 of things, it may be worth while to ask if this silence itself may 
 not have a meaning. There are cases wherein an omission, 
 by the very conspicuousness of the absence it creates, is elo- 
 quent as an argumentum e silentio. And this, I think, is the 
 plain state of the case here. The Bible makes so little of 
 physical death and its sequel, in spite of men's age-long bond- 
 age from fear of death, not because it has met a mystery 
 too hard for it, but because on its scale of disclosure these are 
 
io THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 of too little consequence to pay the revealing. All that needs 
 to be known of them can be left to common observation, or to 
 a lower department of science. Its business is with matters of 
 real moment for life. It teaches how to live rather than how 
 to die. In pursuance of this object its range of conceptions 
 shapes itself into a spacious map of being in which, when all 
 vital elements are reckoned, death is seen as a mere incident, 
 nay rather as actually abolished; in which therefore the doubt- 
 ful and troubled interrogation of death, as if this were of any 
 essential account in the large destiny of man, is needless and 
 supererogatory. 
 
 Here at the outset of our study, then, we note a difference 
 amounting to contrast, between the world's prevailing sense 
 of unseen values and the Bible's. On the one side the event of 
 physical death bulks relatively so large in the sum of being 
 that the answer to the question what region it opens, if any, 
 seems the indispensable step to the discovery of immortality. 
 On the other side, that same event counts for so little that the 
 question seems never to have occurred at all. It is evidently 
 regarded as of no essential significance whatever where Laz- 
 arus was those four days. A disparity of estimate this, very 
 important to note and weigh. Views so contradictory cannot 
 both, it would seem, be valid. We are concerned to know 
 which is right, and especially which is more worthy of our 
 manhood and of the true dignity of being. 
 
 Without dwelling longer on this contrast, however, a few 
 minutes' attention is due, before we enter on the scripture con- 
 ception, to the involvements of the estimate of things hitherto 
 prevailing, which is trying, so to say, to get a survey of eternal 
 life by peeping beyond the gates of physical death. 
 
 We may have discredited spiritualism and occultism; may 
 be wholly skeptical of anything authentic coming from psy- 
 chical research; and as a matter of fact there is, and seems 
 always likely to be, as much doubt as belief concerning these 
 things. The difficulties are so enormous, the chances of fraud 
 and self-deception are such a constant besetment, that the 
 instinct of straightforward minds is strongly against the whole 
 
ON THE LARGER SCALE 11 
 
 uncanny matter. Those who would treat it scientifically, in 
 order to see what there is or is not in it, have to work against 
 great odds of sentiment. All the same, men's thoughts of the 
 unseen future are in general keyed to that scale. If it could 
 be proved that spiritualism and psychic research achieve au- 
 thentic results, men would be ready to accept them, and for 
 the most part men are not ready to look for a solution in 
 any other way. This is natural, perhaps; I am not blaming 
 them. I am not saying that something may not in time come 
 of it; or even that the eventual result of the present study 
 may not, on its larger scale, leave us in much the same atti- 
 tude. On any quest for immortality, however, conducted by 
 mere scientific observation we are committed, of necessity, to 
 what may be called a peep-hole revelation. No device of 
 physics, no apparatus of biology, has a lens large enough or 
 fine enough for more. By a natural assumption souls that 
 have passed beyond death are supposedly somewhere in the 
 universe now; somewhere, and in some questionable shape, 
 their once awaited future has become an eternal present. 
 What so reasonable, if this is so, as to try to find them and 
 observe how they fare? This is the tacit idea which not only 
 every spiritualist, but every one who has the spiritualist's 
 calibre, carries about with him. Browning's Mr. Sludge the 
 Medium, fraud though he is, can presuppose so much in his 
 accuser: 
 
 Go back to the beginning, the first fact 
 
 We're taught is, there's a world beside this world, 
 
 With spirits, not mankind, for tenantry; 
 
 That much within that world once sojourned here, 
 
 That all upon this world will visit there, 
 
 And therefore that we, bodily here below, 
 
 Must have exactly such an interest 
 
 In learning what may be the ways o' the world 
 
 Above us, as the disembodied folk 
 
 Have (by all analogic likelihood) 
 
 In watching how things go in the old home 
 
 With us, their sons, successors, and what not. 
 
 Oh, yes, with added powers probably, 
 
 Fit for the novel state, old loves grown pure, 
 
 Old interests understood aright, they watch! 
 
12 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 Eyes to see, ears to hear, and hands to help, 
 Proportionate to advancement: they're ahead, 
 That's all do what we do, but noblier done. 
 
 A natural enough conception, to be sure; though of course 
 all this must needs be, on the scale of estimate it connotes, an 
 external, prying, spectacular affair. It is as if the dead had 
 been transferred to a mysterious museum or aquarium, and 
 we who are left could observe them only as uncouth figures 
 moving vaguely about in an element which, though we should 
 win to the sight of it, could yield nothing of its essential na- 
 ture, its real inwardness. It is very little, after all, that we 
 could get, if we got the utmost we seek. 
 
 Then there is the whole sorry business of opening communi- 
 cation with the dead. I must not go into this at all; I could 
 not without having to go too far. Call it by the most dignified 
 name you can, call it science, call it psychic research, call it 
 theosophy; and what is the real purport of it? I have no 
 desire to belittle it ? any further than it belittles itself; I wish 
 merely, as the phrase is, to size it up. And this we may grate- 
 fully say of psychism : if it has not revealed anything authentic 
 or illuminating about the dead, it is in the way of revealing 
 something about the living; of exploring many secrets of our 
 abysmal personality, many strange mysteries of our subcon- 
 scious selves. It forces us back after all, you see, upon the 
 study of life; it cannot help this in the long run. To believe 
 in immortality is one thing, as Stevenson has already told us, 
 but it is first needful to believe in life. 
 
 What stratum of life, then, shall we address ourselves to, 
 that we may believe in a life immortal; what plane or table- 
 land of life pays the best returns? The question is an end- 
 lessly vital one. And the answer is precisely the answer of 
 the Earth Spirit to Faust: 
 
 Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst, 
 Nicht mir! 
 
 thou art like the spirit whom thou comprehendest, not like me. 
 If your comprehension, your grasp of life is large, a like large- 
 ness crowns your quest; if small and petty, you fall just so 
 
ON THE LARGER SCALE 13 
 
 much below the possibilities of the open secret. Not the mys- 
 tery of being is to blame, but your self-imposed limitation. 
 What spirit of life, then, what reach and principle of being, 
 does it behoove us, if we may, to comprehend? This is our 
 crucial question. 
 
 In business of psychic research there are things curiously 
 parallel to what obtains in other branches of science; the gen- 
 eral method, in fact, has not changed at all. We use a tele- 
 scope to look at the stars; we use a microscope to look at the 
 tissues, the throbbing protoplasmic elements of animal life; 
 and we are at the end of our quest when we have discovered, 
 on the one hand, the courses of planets and stars and suns, 
 on the other the motions of minute organic cells which we can 
 contemplate only from outside, and which have as little realiz- 
 able meaning as has the glass through which we are gazing. 
 In psychic research, too, the procedure is essentially the same; 
 only, as the question concerns the survival of personality, the 
 lens that we use is a personal one which we call a medium; 
 and we try to make this lens as achromatic as possible by di- 
 vesting it of all moral character, or rather immoral, like fraud 
 and mercenary motives, and of all spiritual character, by 
 putting it into a hypnotic trance wherein it lies wholly passive 
 to extrinsic suggestion. As the result of our experiment we 
 get back some of our own personality, some of the medium's, 
 and and well, is any of the equivocal residuum left over 
 a veritable arrival from spirit-land? It is exceedingly hard 
 to determine; almost impossible to identify and prove au- 
 thentic. Some doctors say no, some yes; both very dubiously. 
 And what does the thing amount to after we have got it? If 
 it brings any report from a surviving spirit, it seems to bring 
 - 1 judge from the kind of message elicited only some 
 trivial shreds of personality, dregs squeezed out as it were 
 from the subconscious self, as freakish as dreams, as inane 
 as a weather report; and no character, nothing large and up- 
 lifting at all. No wonder this, is it? For it was not character 
 that set up the search ; we did not bring our essential manhood 
 to the quest, but only our curious brain, and that passive lens 
 
14 \THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 which we employed as medium. And it was not character that 
 was sought; we did not address ourselves to that fibre of the 
 spiritual personality which in any worth or dignity of character 
 could repay our outlay of experiment. We were interrogating 
 merely the bare fact of existence and survival, not the con- 
 tents. Perhaps, after all, we obtained as much as we brought 
 with us, or as we had really at heart. There is no objection, 
 intrinsically, to our getting proof of the departed souPs actual 
 existence if we can; no more objection than to getting proof 
 that the planet Mars is inhabited, if we can. 
 
 But what we are concerned with here, is the scale of things, 
 the scale of ideal and spiritual measurement, that all this con- 
 notes. Water cannot rise higher than its source; neither can 
 human personality. Of the human destiny that we are setting 
 out to consider we may, with the scientists, freely concede the 
 same thing: it cannot be assumed to rise higher than the power 
 and promise embodied in it at the source. But it can rise as 
 high as this. It ought, if it was well planned and not bungled 
 and thwarted, to rise as high. Have we then reckoned our 
 source high enough? Is the scale of measurement hitherto 
 prevailing large enough, worthy enough, self -justifying enough, 
 to answer to the creative word of Him who when He brought 
 .all things, with their store of possibilities, into being, called 
 them one and all very good? 
 
 A valid measurement of things, as we know, starts with the 
 choice of a unit of measure, feet, or miles, or pounds, or 
 dollars. Now the unit with which the prevailing estimate of 
 immortal personality starts is the universal fact of physical 
 death: it takes note of the phenomenon that looms up most 
 inexorable before us and that the world has mourned and 
 feared since the beginning without being able to mitigate or 
 avert. It sees that there is no discrimination; that the unit 
 is as accurate and absolute as that by which we calculate the 
 diameter of the earth; that the sage and the fool, the holy and 
 the profane, the child and the idiot, the criminal and the sui- 
 cide, all come to death alike, however ripe or untimely the 
 event may be. And it is all held to connote one thing: that 
 
ON THE LARGER SCALE 15 
 
 somehow this human nature, so fearfully and wonderfully 
 made, is thereby laid in ruins. The unit, if we may so say, 
 is a unit of dissolution and destruction; and the problem of 
 possible immortality reduces to the problem of discovering 
 some sort of survival, some pieces of the wreck, some flotsam 
 and jetsam, however meagre, rescued from the ravage of death. 
 From the material point of view a hard, nay, an insoluble 
 problem. For when the catastrophe is over, the body is all 
 there still, left on earth, its elements still weighable and chemi- 
 cally analyzable, all accounted for; and we have laid away in 
 earth all the organs of seeing and hearing and handling and 
 thinking, every one. There is no clear sign that some finer 
 breath, some naked essence survives, no more reason on this 
 scale of insight, for supposing that an emanation of the brain 
 goes on to a new life, than for supposing that an emanation of 
 the leg does. We might as well own the fact. We cannot by 
 material science follow up the separation of body and soul. 
 We say popularly that soul and body are two things, and that 
 they are dissociated at death; but for the rest we have but 
 faith. We cannot know on this scale I mean even that 
 body and soul are two; all we can see is the body, which for 
 years has been diseased and decaying, and finally lapses back 
 to its elements before our eyes. Then if by faith or con- 
 jecture we try to trace the history of this so-called surviving 
 soul, all we can image is a part of the man, a piece of him, 
 going on, and that the part that some deem of least value; and 
 so, being only a part, it must needs lead a maimed and crippled 
 existence somewhere, getting on the best it can without organs 
 of sense and activity. 
 
 This is not a caricatured description; it was the sad idea of 
 the whole world, Hebrew, Greek, Egyptian alike, before Christ 
 came: it is the idea of millions now. It underlay the imagin- 
 ings of Sheol and Hades; nor has modern science done any- 
 thing to mitigate it, except in the direction of annihilation. 
 And the best it can certainly affirm of the other state of exist- 
 ence is, that when the soul was separated from the body it 
 was set free from its pains and diseases, its toils and hardships 
 
16 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 too, and at all events is now at rest. To be sure, worthier 
 fancies have not been lacking. The soul has been imagined to 
 be somehow wiser elsewhere than here, and to be able to see 
 into things that were enigmas on earth; and men have put 
 questions to it by necromancy and tried to get light from it on 
 earthly affairs. But these notions were fancies, conjectures; 
 they did not grow as fruitage from a deep-sown seed of vital 
 energy, or rest on a basis of living motive and principle. 
 
 All this natural enough, perhaps, but it betokens a sorry, 
 petty, puny scale of things, as compared with the scale to 
 which the Bible conceptions are conformed. It is making 
 death and the survival of death, not life and the ennobling of 
 life, the unit of measure; it is making the effort of man cul- 
 minate in rescuing a piece of himself from the ruins of nature; 
 it is making the life beyond a virtual prolongation of the life 
 here, with its material and sensual ideals transplanted into a 
 conjectured new environment, which however, so far as inner 
 standards of living are concerned, is a projection of the same 
 old plane. To interrogate that life beyond by mediumship 
 is of a piece with all the rest. Without condemning it as evil, 
 we must say it is low, it is small, it is petty; the fault is in its 
 scale and its unit of measure. The healthy instinct of Scrip- 
 ture, as we know, is strongly against such consulting of the 
 dead. Even in the dim Old Testament days men were guided, 
 whether by Providence or by the disdain engendered of a 
 higher spiritual ideal, away from the necromancy that in- 
 fested all around the Hebrew people. We recall Isaiah's in- 
 dignant words: "And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto 
 them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, 
 and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? 
 for the living to the dead? To the law and to the testimony: 
 if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is 
 no light in them." That is it. The scale ought to be the 
 scale of life, not of death; of life as guided by God and His 
 recognized will; without this scale of measurement there is no 
 light in them. It is only along this line that life and immor- 
 tality, in the only sense worthy of the large possibilities of 
 manhood, can come to light. 
 
ON THE LARGER SCALE 17 
 
 I have spoken of the scale hitherto prevailing in secular and 
 scientific matters. But the prevailing religious and doctrinal 
 scale, likewise, is too small; measured by too confined and 
 partial data; true as far as it goes, doubtless, but needing that 
 juster determination of emphasis which comes of enlargement. 
 For it too is founded on the unit of ruin and rescue, of a fall 
 of man and eventual redemption from it, of a humanity de- 
 based by a primal sin which only a world miracle can heal, 
 and of an elaborate plan for curing it so that finally, here or 
 beyond the grave, man may be a whole man, ready to do man's 
 work and fulfill man's functions. Meanwhile the promise and 
 prophecy that has persisted at the roots of his nature in spite 
 of that original ruin, the positive, so to say, which has more 
 than offset the negative, has received too meagre recognition; 
 the stumbling-stone of sin has blocked the way. In other 
 words, the ideal hitherto has been mainly an ideal of mending 
 and cobbling, getting men into a kind of patched-up order to 
 die and render account. The questions about immortality 
 have mostly been conformed to this standard: questions 
 whether at death the redemption, in the individual case, is 
 going to prove valid enough after all to pull the man over the 
 line into heaven; questions of so-called conditional immor- 
 tality, what are the conditions, and how Christ comes in for 
 those who never heard of him; questions of the chances of in- 
 fants and idiots and suicides; questions of what is called pro- 
 bation after death for those who have not had a fair show here. 
 All these specimen things are real problems; a most bewilder- 
 ing tangle of problems, indeed, on the scale of things in which 
 our churches and systems of theology have hitherto been work- 
 ing. I am not going to try any detailed answer of them. I 
 leave them to the churches and the great evangelizing move- 
 ments of the Christian world. I think I do not court contra- 
 diction, however, in saying that, legitimate questions though 
 they be, and in their place crucial, there is the note of small- 
 ness about them all; they lack somehow the element essential 
 to make the answer to them self-authenticating. They need 
 supplementation by the realization of another and larger scale 
 
1 8 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 of things. It may be that man is a ruined being, who needs 
 mending and cobbler work to get him into repair. It may be 
 that a struggle to regain lost ground is the first thing in order. 
 But ought this idea of him to usurp the whole field? Should 
 it go unexamined and untested, as containing the whole mean- 
 ing of manhood life? 
 
 May we not rather let this retrieval idea rest here a little, 
 in the good keeping of the churches, while we contemplate 
 what man is as well created, what he is in good repair and 
 fulness of function, what he is as growing from infancy and 
 childhood to maturity of powers and ideals, that is, as a 
 being in process of evolution, graduaDy sloughing off the old 
 members and functions that become outworn and atrophied, 
 gradually coming into his full heritage of adult manhood, and 
 when that summit of rounded and finished organism is gained, 
 like Job with his life's record on his shoulder, facing the un- 
 seen? Surely it is no unsafe procedure thus to strike out a 
 little from the stereotyped order of inquiry. 
 
 To contemplate manhood so calls for the adoption of a 
 new scale of values, a new field of investigation, a new kind 
 of apparatus; new and immensely larger. Our imagination 
 must take on cosmic and universal proportions. We have seen 
 things dimly and dubiously so long that we are on the verge 
 of concluding there is nothing to see. But before we so con- 
 clude, let us pause to ask if this dimness may not have been 
 because we had not developed eyes to see, or because, with 
 eyes only partly opened, we saw men as trees walking. It is 
 just on this simple line of seeing, of evolving organs to compre- 
 hend what has always existed, that our scripture text-book 
 represents immortality as being brought to light; and the light 
 into which it at last emerges clear and self-evidencing, is just 
 the crystalline radiance that beams forth from the life itself, 
 the Life Indeed. This is the summit of the scale. 
 
 And this is as we would have it, as our deepest instinct tells 
 us it must needs be. We cannot trust a truth of such tremen- 
 dous import to the precarious bolstering of logical or scientific 
 proof, which it takes only the next wave of thought to unsettle 
 
ON THE LARGER SCALE 19 
 
 again. It must be its own evidence, standing out strong above 
 all our petty scaffolding. On the scale to which we have hither- 
 to been committed we can only gyrate round in circles of alter- 
 nate gleam and eclipse; and that, we may be sure, is not God's 
 way of proving the truths of life. 
 
 II. ENLARGEMENT DEMANDED BY 
 EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE 
 
 To say this is by no means to discredit science, nor to warn 
 it off the field. It is merely demanding that science rise to 
 its occasion. And indeed science is nobly responding. It, no 
 less truly than Scripture, is demanding an enlargement of the 
 scale of vital values; timidly perhaps as yet, and half afraid 
 of the vision that is opening before it; but surely, as soon as 
 it leaves its microscope long enough to think, finding itself 
 launched on a more spacious ocean of being, which sooner or 
 later it must needs navigate. For within the past few years, 
 within the easy memory of men not yet aged, science has 
 named a magic word, the word evolution; and that word has 
 laid down a new unit for all its measurements. The conception 
 of evolution has transformed every view of the world. In 
 these few years it has become a necessity, almost a tyranny, in 
 all our estimates of things; if we do not accept its material 
 conclusions about species and interrelations of being, we can- 
 not help thinking in its terms. 
 
 This instinct of the evolutionary is shown very significantly 
 by science itself, in the attitude it takes toward psychic re- 
 search; which, as we know, has had hard ado to get adopted 
 into the scientific family at all, and even now holds such place 
 only by sufferance, as if it occupied at best only a kind of 
 scientific borderland. I speak of this branch of research 
 merely as it is confessedly looking beyond the bourn of death; 
 when it confines itself to the arcana of personality this side 
 of the veil its legitimation is more freely conceded. Why this 
 strange instinct against it? we ask; and can only answer, be- 
 cause such psychic research is felt to be not in the true evolu- 
 
20 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 tionary idiom. By trying, as it does, to look through a 
 mediumistic lens and see what the dead are doing now, to get 
 a sort of back-stairs entrance among the spirits, it is merely 
 projecting the ideal of life onward along the same old material 
 plane. It has, so far forth, no eyes for a larger development 
 of being; it represents, in short, an evolution that does not 
 evolve. A peep-hole revelation, I was profane enough a little 
 while ago to call this sort of thing. George Eliot, who as we 
 know was a strenuous votary of modern science, was more 
 caustic still; she called it "a rat-hole revelation." Now by this 
 healthy antipathy psychic research is not accused of being 
 false, or even unscientific: it is merely felt to be floundering 
 still in the obsolete presuppositions of science, when men were 
 doing nothing but observing, sticking pins in butterflies and 
 making endless collections, while the end of which these pre- 
 liminaries were but means already looms up far beyond. It 
 is a belated type of exploration; what the slangsters call a 
 back-number. And therefore, while it may still gather much 
 on this material and psychological plane, as regards the life 
 beyond it is bound to be barren. The vast concept of evolu- 
 tion has put it out of court. 
 
 Now evolution, if it is a permanent fact and not temporary, 
 has got to go on past the physical death of man. We cannot 
 stop its majestic wheels; cannot think it down to the paltry 
 thing it would be if we put its full-stop there. Consider the 
 case. The highest product of biological evolution, as all con- 
 cede, is man ; the highest that there is room for in this material 
 world. "The beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!" 
 is how Shakespeare describes him. On earth, as John Fiske 
 said, there will never be a higher being than man; there will 
 never be a higher life than manhood life. The huge tide of 
 evolutionary vitality, which began away back with the throb 
 of unicellular protoplasm, which swept upward through plants 
 and jelly-like things, through rudimental organs and functions, 
 through countless lower animal stages, reaches its climax, its 
 utmost, in that paragon of animals, man. Then it sojourns 
 with man awhile, until he gets started a little on his education, 
 
ON THE LARGER SCALE 21 
 
 and it adds an intellectual element unknown before, the growth 
 of self-conscious mind, and with this the growth of arts, and 
 social relations, and institutions, wonderful things all. Yet 
 all this while man continues as frail as any creature below 
 him, and even more subject to infirmities of the flesh; for all 
 his brain achievements do not seem to have mended evolution 
 in this regard. And then, at a wholly incalculable moment, 
 comes death, and so far as we can see ends it all. Reflect that 
 this is the extinction of the highest being yet evolved; that at 
 this moment the vital motion which began so far back and so 
 far down fades out of the tissues, and these revert to inorganic 
 dust. What an elemental injustice seems to be in such ending, 
 and yet how easy. It is not hard to make a man die, as we 
 should expect it would be if death were so momentous a catas- 
 trophe. A breath of air, a drop of water suffices, as Pascal 
 says, to kill him; nay, men themselves treat death as a trivial 
 thing, rushing impetuously upon it in battles and massacres 
 and foolhardy risks. Is this then the finality, the end of the 
 play? If so, then evolution is a paltry thing, false and hypo- 
 critical; the vast animal world is a botch and bungle; the 
 forces of a universe, with their myriad motions of growth and 
 heredity and development, have been desperately laboring to 
 pick up and lay down a straw. 
 
 No; it is unthinkable. An evolution which has proved itself 
 capable of rolling up such a mighty product must still be in 
 full tide, must still go on, beyond our sight and sense, beyond 
 what our brain has shaped in thought, beyond both matter and 
 mind. We cannot put so tremendous a stoppage of the order 
 of things at the moment of man's bodily death. If we could, 
 the power to stay an infinite creative course would be within 
 the compass of puny man, and of the base in man, as soon as 
 he could get his torpedo boats and machine guns deadly 
 enough. No; we cannot think any end to that majestic current 
 of which we, willing or unwilling, are a part, any more than 
 we can think a bound to space or an end to time; we are in 
 it and swept along by it. We have some faint extrinsic notion 
 of its source among the eternal hills; we have a still vaguer 
 
22 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 notion of the ocean to which we are bound; but one thing our 
 magic idea of evolution will not let us accept, namely, that it 
 is an ocean of death. 
 
 But if evolution goes on, how shall it go on? It has done 
 part of its work, and done it well. We are filled with awe and 
 wonder at the infinite plan displayed in it. But its bodily po- 
 tencies are exhausted in this life and in man; this we know, 
 not because man must die, but because with his larger needs 
 man must go on beyond the point where bodily powers fail, 
 must supplement his eye by spectacles and his hand by cun- 
 ningly devised machinery. We know it too because these 
 potencies return eventually on themselves; they are not aug- 
 mented by heredity; the next generation has it all to do over 
 again, going through the endless circle of birth, maturing, and 
 decay. Does then the intellect, which invented such clever 
 tools and made such conquests of thought, give signs of greater 
 promise? Has it through the evolutionary millenniums grown 
 so large that it must have a new world to fit it? Well, that is 
 not so clear. It is not clear, looking over a long tract of years 
 during which knowledge has been increased, that we are very 
 far in advance of the mind of Plato. Besides, too, the mind 
 is at the mercy of the body, yielding to its diseases and casu- 
 alties; and so at the mercy of environment, yielding to the ex- 
 actions of age and race and climate and custom. Like the body 
 also it seems to return on itself and move in a self -completing 
 circle, from childhood to second childhood. Here then is the 
 situation: the world tide of evolution on the one side, which 
 must go on; universal death on the other, which must exact 
 its due. It is much like the old problem which we used 
 to laugh over as children: if an irresistible body meets an 
 immovable obstacle, what ensues? It looks as if the im- 
 possible had become the actual; it is so, whether it can be so 
 or not. 
 
 Well, we might as well laugh over it as cry; and oddly 
 enough that other old pleasantry comes to mind here, "If you 
 are between the devil and the deep sea, there is nothing for it 
 but to take to the woods." In other words, we must needs 
 
ON THE LARGER SCALE 23 
 
 betake ourselves to what the lawyers call a change of venue; 
 or as we are maintaining here, our science demands an enlarge- 
 ment of scale, whereon evolution shall call into play powers 
 hitherto unexercised and unreckoned with. Otherwise, for 
 the great future we are still committed to mending and cobbler 
 work, to extricating the broken and twisted fragments from 
 the ruins of nature and getting them into some sort of repair 
 for a new lease of more or less crippled survival. And this, 
 in itself, is as unthinkable as the rest. We must have a change 
 of venue; must find some vital principle still more august, 
 something which never yielded to decay and deterioration at 
 all, but was in full vigor still and growing when untimely 
 death supervened. In other words, we must seek a principle 
 whose evolutionary potency is just beginning or ready to begin, 
 when other powers yield to failure. If such a principle could 
 be found, it might not only bear the essential being onward be- 
 yond death, but who knows? it might conceivably redeem all 
 the rest, furnishing them the needed vehicle for renewed life, 
 and so do the repair work which is so evidently needed; doing 
 it so well that all the cobblings and solderings should be swal- 
 lowed up in the larger glory and strength. A tremendous 
 dream this; but does not the authentic involvement of con- 
 tinued evolution demand it? Can it accept less? 
 
 All this is but another way of saying what John Fiske and 
 others have already said, that from this point onward, from 
 the point where our lenses and calculating apparatus fail, 
 human evolution must be spiritual. Manhood must rise to a 
 higher order and standard of being; its immortality absolutely 
 depends on it. Form, habitat, and laws of that larger being 
 are inconceivable except as coordinated with the life of the 
 spirit. 
 
 It is no presumption against the reality of this uprise that 
 we cannot trace it, or cannot on our present scale of biological 
 values even comprehend it. To make room for it and hold it 
 true is only following out the observable order of nature. The 
 course of development that has brought us hither is full of 
 such strange epochs, where all at once a new and broader world 
 
24 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 of being opens above, and there flows into it an order of life 
 absolutely inconceivable to the consciousness of the stage be- 
 low; as inconceivable as is a fourth dimension to us who are 
 so sure that length, breadth, and thickness take up all the 
 space of the universe. Professor Shaler speaks of "many, 
 very many, instances in which the apparently uniform proc- 
 esses of Nature, those which are indeed uniform in their steps 
 of action, lead to sudden and complete changes of result." 
 We can all see how true this is. Water in the fluid state, for 
 instance, if it were endowed with consciousness, could not con- 
 ceive of itself as a solid, as ice; could not conceive of itself as 
 a gas, as steam; yet these exist under their conditions, with 
 wholly new properties, and it takes nothing, apparently, but a 
 slight change of temperature to make the difference. A plant 
 has the same chemical elements in it, and the same make-up 
 of vital cells, as an animal; yet it is absolutely shut out, except 
 as food and shade, from the animal world above it. An animal 
 has the same protoplasmic tissues, the same endowment of 
 senses, as a man; returns to dust in the selfsame way; as 
 Ecclesiastes says, "one breath have they both." We can 
 enter into its life, of sense and instinct; yet the life of our 
 higher world, with its thoughts and ideals, nay with the very 
 use we can make of senses and instincts, is utterly inconceiv- 
 able to its plane of being. Where and when does the animal 
 evolve into the man, biologists are inquiring; yet at some mys- 
 terious rapids in the current of being great Nature made the 
 transformation; and now by the side of the dog exists another 
 animal, his master, who is more than animal, and the dog can 
 only worship and love him, but not understand. Just so we 
 are looking up from beneath to some inconceivable higher 
 stage of being; and men are feeling the need of it and clamor 
 for it. For in one respect our analogy of plants and animals 
 does not hold; the next stage beyond us is not all inconceivable. 
 The far-off dawn of it began to stir the East as soon as man 
 launched out from his animal nature to explore new tracts of 
 being. And now in these latest days a philosopher, Nietzsche, 
 whose untempered vision drove him crazy, and a playwright, 
 
ON THE LARGER SCALE 25 
 
 Bernard Shaw, whose sense of the world's crookedness has 
 involved him in a tangle of paradox, are calling for a Super- 
 man to help us out of our slough, a man who they think, in 
 perverse ignoring of what has long been revealed, is not yet 
 born. And their philosophic ideal is essentially the one to 
 which our new scientific law is forcing us. It maintains, as 
 sound thinking must needs maintain, that manhood evolution, 
 in order to break its deadlock and go on at all, must hence- 
 forth be spiritual. 
 
 Of this contemplated spiritual stage of evolution, whatever 
 that may involve, I have occasion here for only two remarks; 
 but these are weighty for their bearing on our whole 
 inquiry. 
 
 The first is, that this ought to be, as the scientific termi- 
 nology expresses it, not catastrophic, that is, not coming in by 
 miracle or some supramundane irruption from without, but 
 truly evolutionary, that is, rising naturally out of powers and 
 capacities already existing within our human nature. In this 
 stipulation we may freely concede all that the higher biology 
 demands. We of the churches have reproached scientists for 
 their fight against miracles and the supernatural; have called 
 them skeptics and thought of them as wicked. Well, this is 
 the meaning of their skepticism: they are not perverse, not 
 vicious, not undevout; but they want a life beyond of which 
 we as human beings so marvelously made can avail ourselves 
 without belying the laws of thought and imagination which 
 are already in us. They want to play their part in life and 
 bring the solution of the plot without the arbitrary agency of 
 a deus ex machina. Perhaps they are wrong; perhaps they 
 are excluding from their scheme an element of the evolution 
 which, being unseen, is none the less real for not betraying its 
 divinity. But if they, with their loyalty to reason, are wrong, 
 we need not fear to make common cause and be wrong with 
 them. Perhaps it is a question of names after all. What they 
 do not want is the God and the miracles which the narrower 
 and dimmer ages, the ages of the smaller scale, have imagined; 
 and perhaps when they see the real power as it is, working 
 
26 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 though it does by traceable evolutionary methods, they will 
 name it God and most eagerly concede its supernatural char- 
 acter. We must all live and learn. And just as Adam in his 
 more primitive world had to name the creatures that were 
 brought to him, so as our world gets more majestic we have 
 gradually to recognize and acknowledge the spiritual powers 
 that we have for pattern and company. Meanwhile let us not 
 shun to take the scientists on their own stipulated ground. Let 
 the life that we set out to explore, with all its strange events, 
 be seen as a life not catastrophic but evolutionary. Let its 
 energies and achievements be seen as genuinely human and 
 available for man as man. And not supernatural too, not di- 
 vine? Well, that depends on how these connect with the deeper 
 realities of the world. It will not pay to be intolerant and 
 exclusive here either; and if we discover of the soul of man, 
 as did the poet, that 
 
 Ere she gain her Heavenly-best, a God must mingle with the game, 
 
 we need not put the possibility frowardly away from us. The 
 discovery may be great enough to warrant it; and if so, surely 
 we have no call to withhold its true name. 
 
 The second remark is, that on the larger scale of vital values 
 demanded by evolutionary science we need to take fitting note 
 not merely of the fact of continued life but of its nature. The 
 unit of the ideal is not really the immortality of the soul, in the 
 paltry sense that Greek philosophy and modern dualism have 
 given it, the sense, that is, of soul separated from and sur- 
 viving body. As guided by the evolution idea, indeed, it does 
 not even stop to inquire whether man has a soul, conceived I 
 mean as an appendage to body and brain, and separable in 
 such a way as to leave a piece of the man behind while another 
 part floats away as a conjectured naked essence. All this is 
 still in the dubious idiom of the smaller scale. Of course 
 death, what Dr. Smyth calls the place of death in evolution, 
 has to be reckoned with; but the man who is evolved into the 
 hereafter is the whole man, moving all together if he move at 
 all. Begin to subtract from man as you see him here in the 
 
ON THE LARGER SCALE 27 
 
 body, in order to leave a residuum that may survive, and you 
 cannot stop until you have annihilated the man. In other 
 words, it is not survival but amazing as it may seem 
 resurrection, dz/curracris , the rising to a higher life, to a high 
 law and range of being, that, as veritable fact, evolution is 
 forcing us to. This is what makes the matter, on the biological 
 scale, so inconceivable: we are confronting a stage of being as 
 much higher and completer than this as the human is above 
 the animal, with all the values of the present stage intact yet 
 sweeping onward in new conditions and dimensions. There 
 is no name for this but uprise, resurrection. 
 
 Let us disentangle this idea from its non-essentials. Resur- 
 rection, does not this connote death, as if one must needs 
 die in order to rise? Well, that is as it may be. The fact that 
 physical death is universal is not to be taken as meaning that 
 physical death is a necessary prerequisite to resurrection. May 
 not man rise from the maturity of nature as truly as from its 
 ruins? Why should the spirit have to postpone its life until 
 the body dies? It is the enlargement of being that counts, the 
 uprise not from nature but from a certain form and organism 
 of matter. Nor will it do here to complicate this idea with 
 questions of the body and the flesh. These will come up for 
 consideration at the due time. Meanwhile it is enough to 
 grasp this truth: that our modern science, our idea that the 
 way of created nature is evolution, is directed straight toward 
 the issue of resurrection. In some sense most real and au- 
 thentic this is the teleology of life. So we are brought to the 
 point where without equivocation we may answer Professor 
 Goldwin Smith's question, "Is there another life?" No, we 
 may frankly say: this, with its potencies of enlargement, is 
 all the life there is. But if he takes this as evasive and asks, 
 Is there an immortality? Yes, we may confidently answer; 
 for if there is continued evolution there is resurrection, and 
 resurrection includes immortality as the greater includes the 
 less. 
 
28 - THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 III. ENLARGEMENT AS MEASURED BY 
 SCRIPTURE CONCEPTIONS 
 
 That our manhood's evolution, whatever its unimagined 
 goal, must henceforth follow the line of the spiritual; if this 
 is the pass to which scientific thinking has brought us, we 
 must own how natural it is to turn to the ancient records and 
 ask what the Bible says about it. It is not wise to think scorn 
 of an old book just because it is old and we are new; it is a 
 cheap and childish attitude to take. And especially of this 
 old book, it is like kicking away the ladder by which we have 
 climbed. Here is a book that in quaint Hebrew phraseology 
 records spiritual data from a very early period; no, not a 
 book, a literature rather, written at various times while the 
 phenomena of life were fresh and vital issues; written by a 
 people who seemed to have been set apart for the purpose, who 
 had the genius for spiritual exploration, just as the Greeks had 
 the genius for art and philosophy, and as the Romans had the 
 genius for organization and administration. It is to this Bible 
 of the Hebrews that we most naturally betake ourselves, if 
 we would have an authoritative text-book of the data and prin- 
 ciples of spiritual evolution. Whether it will answer to our 
 modern scheme of things, and especially whether in the large 
 it will satisfy the scientific spirit that so conditions our present- 
 day thinking, well, that remains to be seen. 
 
 But, as I have intimated, a great deal depends, nay, for 
 our question, all depends, on the way we read the Bible. A 
 new reading of it is certainly the first requisite. Consider the 
 case. A great expansion of spiritual insight and foresight is 
 in this age coming upon our race ; science itself is contributing 
 to it; the Bible as we have read it has laid its foundations and 
 determined its approaches. Now spiritual insight, in its es- 
 sential elements, is a thing timeless and universal; it makes its 
 way in the ages, not as does logical insight, fainting and doubt- 
 ing under endless mistakes, but rather by trusting its deep in- 
 stincts as far as they go, and wreaking its wealth of life upon 
 them. Such has been the inner history of man, as Hebrew 
 
ON THE LARGER SCALE 29 
 
 insight has traced it. To read the Bible, then, as our too 
 arrogant science does, as if it were an obsolete lie, or a crude 
 nation's vagaries, is to put it at the mercy of time and clime, 
 to make it myopic, like science itself, and subject to the shifts 
 of logic. But to read it as dogmatic theology and religiosity 
 hitherto has done, does not greatly better the case. Our pur- 
 view must be larger. The prophecy that we find in it must not 
 be of private interpretation. We must estimate it by a larger 
 scale of measurement; must project its histories and concep- 
 tions against the background of a more spacious universe. 
 If then it proves too small, or in any way invalid, let the fact 
 appear. If on the other hand it is seen to have risen to the 
 huge occasion, let us not miss the benefit of it. And mean- 
 while, we can well afford to let some of the lesser questions of 
 detail wait until their time comes, until they can be approached 
 with the fitting presuppositions. We need not begin, for in- 
 stance, by puttering with questions of a legislated and pre- 
 carious immortality, questions of mending and cobbler work, 
 of conditional immortality and future probation and general 
 soul repairs. These will fall duly into place when the larger 
 setting is seen as it is, or else, what is more likely, be lost 
 in light, like the spots on the sun. Nor, in truth, can they 
 be brought to a luminous and self-evidencing solution on any 
 smaller projection of things. In a word, the problem of im- 
 mortality concerns manhood as a whole, not merely Christian 
 or heathen manhood, and life as a vast world entity, not 
 merely life as doctored up somehow, or as lived by a saint or 
 philosopher. We have the Scripture's own word of its proph- 
 ecy that this is not of private interpretation. The Bible, 
 no less than science, demands to be taken on the cosmic and 
 universal scale, the scale of eternity. To this scale it is that 
 from the beginning its spiritual findings are adjusted. 
 
 In this new reading of the Bible we must needs first of all 
 determine our attitude toward the thing that has done most 
 to give men pause: the assumption, namely, that it is an in- 
 spired revelation from the ultimate Source of life, the Father 
 of spirits. This is not a thing to asume, but, if true, to dis- 
 
30 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 cover. Every one must make the discovery for himself; no 
 other can make it inwardly for him. And if we waive this 
 assumption ; we are set free from the doubts that inevitably 
 go with it, doubts rising out of its literary origin, adequacy, 
 transmission; our evidence is of quite another kind, and not 
 at all at the mercy of such questions. If we still shrink from 
 committing ourselves to the Bible, in nervous dread of miracles 
 and the supernatural, if we quarrel with this element as if here 
 we must put a preliminary negation, let us consider how truly 
 in any case we must confront it and judge it not by names but 
 by its intrinsic merits. We do not escape the supernatural by 
 abjuring the Bible and taking to science. For science itself is 
 forced to recognize one miracle, one absolutely transcendent, 
 inexplicable thing. That is the advent of life itself. We know 
 how helpless the most penetrative stretch of knowledge is be- 
 fore this. With all the savant's pride of explaining the uni- 
 verse, this, the initial fact of all, completely baffles him. Here 
 are two specks of jelly-like matter, exactly alike in weight 
 and size and chemical structure. One is inert, soggy, passive 
 to decomposing forces from without; the other protoplasmic, 
 throbbing with a mysterious energy called life, and in that 
 smallest compass containing strange potencies of growth, or- 
 ganism, inherited traits. What is the point of difference? 
 What is this thing life, and whence? It is here, but no chemist 
 or biologist can tell where it came from, how it got there, what 
 is its relation to unseen forces. It is an unexplained wonder, 
 which they can see only from the outside; and science must, 
 to start with, assume this main miracle. Well, that is all we 
 assume here, all that the Bible assumes. It puts the main 
 miracle just where science must needs put it, and only there. 
 Starting from that, it follows the continuous evolution that be- 
 gins there; onward and upward to its culmination in an un- 
 imagined destiny. On the larger scale which alone can compass 
 the involvements of its record, it is the history of that man- 
 hood evolution. 
 
 But, it may be objected here, the Bible account toward the 
 end makes another miracle supervene which science cannot 
 
ON THE LARGER SCALE 31 
 
 receive so easily: the alleged resurrection of Christ. No; that 
 is not another miracle. It is the other pole of the same, the 
 consistent outcome of the life so begun, so evolved, as the 
 Bible traces its elements. It is the same life raised to its 
 highest power and entering upon its native heritage. This 
 miracle, if miracle it be, the Bible views as essentially a man- 
 hood thing; calls it the resurrection of the Son of man, of Him 
 who as intrinsic man identified Himself with the life that it is 
 in man to live, saying, "I am the life." Passing wonderful 
 this is, I grant it; but what otherwise is life itself, as soon as 
 we apply to it the spiritual measure and potency? And with 
 all its miraculous look, it merely gives concrete form to a 
 mystery which science can as little evade as it can the inex- 
 plicable beginning. It puts into individual expression the 
 thing that comes of following life according to what science 
 itself acknowledges must be its evolutionary destiny. 
 
 The difference is, that while science, going back to the germ, 
 tries to make life as small as it looks, the Bible boldly yet 
 reverently makes it as large as it becomes. In the beginning 
 it already sees the glory of the end. Evolution must needs 
 have a starting-point; and men have groped and dredged for 
 this, in the sea-slime and in the uncouth products of their 
 laboratories, all in a blind guess-work, working at the idea 
 of spontaneous generation. All friendly speed to them; we 
 ought perhaps to test to the utmost what comes, or does not 
 come, of making the beginning of life mechanical and ma- 
 terial. The Bible, seeing to what spiritual heights life rises, 
 makes its evolutionary starting-point spiritual. The very first 
 event that startled the waste of chaos was, "And the spirit of 
 God was brooding upon the face of the waters"; brooding, like 
 a mother-bird, as if it would warm the waste into life. So it 
 is that it accounts for the main miracle, the entrance of life 
 on our earth. In that event it sees stored up all the vital 
 energies, all the potencies, that come to light in what follows. 
 
 It is very important, I think, to keep in mind this scripture 
 conception that if a God mingled with the game at all He was 
 moving in it from the very beginning. There is no point in the 
 
32 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 tide of life where we can read Him out of the world, leaving 
 it a mere weltering chaos; or even where we can put Him on 
 a throne sitting somewhere outside of this mechanism which 
 He has wound up, and seeing it go. That is to say, here in our 
 Bible is contemplated an evolution of which the initial im- 
 pulse, the determining principle, is not only spiritual but di- 
 vine. It is here, as we see, that the gulf opens between the 
 Bible and the present-day stage of natural science. Science, 
 we may truly say, is fighting against a light. It insists on 
 postulating nothing supernatural, that is, transcendent. It 
 looks at those palpitating tissues and forbids us to find any- 
 thing there but motion. The Bible comes boldly to the light, 
 and postulates everything supernatural. Looking at those 
 same tissues it sees moving there a Power that is all the while 
 reaching in from a higher and deeper world. Every life, every 
 act, every energy, is a spiritual thing, deriving from the un- 
 seen. And if we ask which of these two, science or Bible, is on 
 the truer tack, the only answer is, "By their fruits ye shall 
 know them." Science is brought to the verge of a great abyss, 
 which it must see is an abyss of life, which yet it will not own 
 to be an abyss of light; while it is forced, without knowing 
 what it says, to call for resurrection. Society, keyed to these 
 self-limited conceptions of science, is in like manner beginning 
 to call for a Superman. The Bible, seeing through ages and 
 eons from the beginning, intrepidly postulates the potency of 
 both, nay, writes the history of their advent. It looks, does 
 it not? as if science must be the one to back down; it must 
 do so, it would seem, in order rightly to explore its abyss of 
 life. I do not mean that it must cease to be science, or even 
 that it must die as science and rise again as religion. In ac- 
 cepting more faith, it must exert not less but more reason. 
 It must betake itself, however, to a more fitting apparatus of 
 search, and thus become a truer science, more tolerant of its 
 own vision, without dying at all; must rise to its mighty oc- 
 casion, to the ideal of life that is knocking at its door. 
 
 Ere she gain her Heavenly-best, a God must mingle with 
 the game; the poet who wrote this was still thinking, as so 
 
ON THE LARGER SCALE 33 
 
 many of us do, of some irruption of divinity farther along, 
 some arbitrary interference, it may be, to stay the tendencies 
 of ruin and set things right. The crookedness of the world has 
 got on his nerves, so that he cannot clearly see how God can 
 be in it now. God must supposably come in somehow for the 
 finishing touches only, or perhaps to do mending and cobbler 
 work. And indeed religion too has figured such an arbitrary 
 irruption in its interpretation of the coming of Christ. Nor 
 would we deny this side of Christ's work to the Bible con- 
 ception. He came to seek and to save that which was lost; 
 they called Him Jesus because He should save His people from 
 their sins. What I wish to deny, however, is, that this was 
 in any sense arbitrary, an irruption from without, a happy 
 expedient, an afterthought. In other words, we need to realize 
 that scripture conceptions, the broad cosmic truths which the * 
 Bible holds in solution, are working on a larger scale, a scale 
 of majestic creation and evolution, and not merely a scale of 
 repairing; a scale as large as the whole tract of time, and the 
 whole order of the world, and the whole growth of man. We 
 shall understand the coming of Christ better, I hope, and what 
 it means, as we go on. Meanwhile, we must think of an an- 
 cient world in which God could coexist with monsters of primi- 
 tive form and creatures "that tare each other in their slime"; 
 just as we have to think of a modern world in which, though 
 God is felt as present bringing to pass some great work, He 
 can coexist with city slums and boodle politics and Siberian 
 transportations and Russian bomb-throwing. The game has 
 become very complex, we must needs admit. A very compre- 
 hensive conception that must be, which can compass the so- 
 lution of all its moves. In tracing therefore the tremendous 
 conceptions of a Book which so confidently says, "I see the 
 end, and know the good," can we rightly narrow it to private 
 interpretation? Nay, if it meets the huge case of manhood it 
 must be read in broader light. 
 
 I must not take occasion here even to sketch out the Bible 
 description- of this spiritual development, as from its starting- 
 point it goes through many obscure stages, a dim and perilous 
 
34 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 way; first the natural, as St. Paul puts it, afterward the spiri- 
 tual. Some notion of this is what we must try to get in the 
 pages to come. 
 
 One thing, however, must be noted of its far goal of resurrec- 
 tion, that evolutionary culmination which eye hath not seen 
 nor ear heard. That is, that this is not coordinated with the 
 death of the body, as if all that a man had to do in order to 
 rise were to do what he cannot help doing, namely, to die. We 
 must dismiss this paltry notion; it belongs to the pettier scale 
 of things. When the resurrection comes, as we shall see, man 
 is vigorously cooperating with it, and contributing all that he 
 is to it. In other words, the resurrection which the Bible con- 
 templates, in the spirit and essence of it, begins not with death 
 but with birth, what the Bible calls the birth of the spirit, the 
 birth from above. That may take place here on earth, before 
 we go to that mysterious realm on which physical death ushers 
 us. The life and immortality send their heralds before, and 
 come to light at a calculable point in history and in individual 
 life; so that when we enter the beyond we are already citizens 
 of that country and have the larger light of it within us. This 
 fact, as we see, furnishes a definite and quasi-historic field for 
 our scientific study. We do not have to employ a medium, 
 or wade the swamps of the hypnotic and subconscious; we do 
 not have to leave this visible world; but all our tract of re- 
 search lies in the wholesome light of day. Between the gloom 
 of the nebulous and animal stage on the one hand and the 
 light unapproachable on the other there is a penumbra, tem- 
 pered to our earthly eyesight, which we may explore, and 
 know that the elements we find there, being spiritual, are in 
 truth the unseen elements, and are eternal. We can, with our 
 sane endowments of sense and reason, follow the new reach 
 of life beyond where resurrection begins, far enough to know 
 what are its essential elements in any time, place, or state of 
 being; we can, with the spirit that is in us, test it fully and 
 taste its power. In short, there is put into our hands the true 
 and only fitting apparatus of search: we learn to know the life 
 beyond by actually living it. 
 
ON THE LARGER SCALE 35 
 
 Such is a hint of the larger scale of values that is to condi- 
 tion our reading of the Bible and evolutionary science; not to 
 deny or discard the older readings, but to supplement them 
 according to the idiom in which we have learned to read the 
 world. Before I leave this introductory discussion, however, 
 two remarks may be appended, about the study we are here 
 opening. 
 
 For one thing, I am not asking you, my reader, to take my 
 word for it, as if I were making religious propaganda; am not 
 even stipulating that you commit yourself to what the Bible 
 is found to say. I am merely endeavoring to set forth what 
 I have come to see is a vast cosmic history of life, hid between 
 the covers of this book; and if my exposition of it introduces 
 you to a new point of view, unthought of before, I am merely 
 asking you to treat it as the Bereans treated a view of life 
 new to them; who "received the word with all readiness of 
 mind, and searched the Scriptures daily, whether those things 
 were so." The Bible does not need me nor any one else to 
 defend it; it needs no championing against science or social 
 arrangements; it needs only to be known and understood, in 
 the spirit of it. So if there is fallacy or inadequacy in any 
 view I bring you here, and you cannot lay it on me as inter- 
 preter, lay it on the Bible. And if there is a great enlarge- 
 ment and illumination of life here, and a self-evidencing truth 
 of being, ascribe that to the Bible too, not at all to me. And 
 as for receiving it as true, and lifting your faith up to 
 its height, and living by it, well, that is your affair. It will 
 surely do no one harm. Personally, I am willing to accept a 
 life so revealed; the Bible is to me still, in spite of all the 
 monographs of science and philosophy, the real text-book of 
 life. 
 
 The other remark is this: we are embarked on the history 
 of the coming of life and immortality to light. To what light? 
 may be asked. To the light of man's intellect and insight and 
 imagination and will. In other words, we see two things here 
 confronting each other: the reality of being, and the mind of 
 man. Our question is the question not merely of what is real, 
 
36 THE LIFE TNDEED 
 
 but of what is seen as real, as far and as fast as men have 
 eyes to see. That is to say, we are embarked on a study of 
 men's conceptions of things; of the great concept of life, con- 
 tributed to by many minds, in many ages, yet somehow coales- 
 cing into one unitary concept, which puts forth shoots from 
 the soil of elemental manhood and blossoms and grows. Now 
 this, as we see, raises us to a region above the choking dust 
 of the prevailing historical and archeological criticism; if it 
 comes to a date when the record was not clear, and so needed 
 interpolation or later correcting, it has but to wait until the 
 insight of man has grown a little larger, and the tangled lines 
 are straightened out farther up. It does not choose its path 
 low enough to stumble over an alleged fact because a later 
 editor supplied it, or because it was written by some one who 
 posed as St. John. It takes what the Gospel of John says as 
 representing the conception of life, and of Christ's contribu- 
 tion to it, which the human spirit was large enough to grasp 
 when that gospel was written. So large a view of life, and of 
 such tenor, was then in the bosom of manhood; it could then 
 be given to the world and presumably understood by them; 
 the generation or the century is a subordinate consideration. 
 This is the reason why I have associated this broader reading, 
 this enlargement of scale, not merely with scripture facts but 
 with scripture conceptions. The history is an inner one, a 
 history of the growth of the spirit of man, and of the increasing 
 light that attended him all along the way. 
 
II 
 
 THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 
 
 HOW THE SOUL OF MANHOOD FARES IN MORTAL 
 ENVIRONMENT AND RUDIMENTAL BEGINNINGS 
 
 I. THE EMPIRE OF LAW AND FATE 
 
 II. THE ADVENT OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 III. EARLY SPIRITUAL REACTIONS 
 
 IV. THE BURDEN AND THE CRAVING 
 
II 
 
 THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 
 
 WHEN the sage Koheleth, looking abroad over the 
 world both of things and of men, said, "Every- 
 thing hath He made beautiful in its time, also He 
 hath put eternity in their heart," he was living consciously in 
 a confused and cloudy era, was speaking out of the heart of 
 a twilight stratum of personality, which indeed he recognized 
 as such. The finish of the sentence is, "yet not so that man 
 findeth out the work which God hath wrought from the begin- 
 ning and to the end." He sees himself midway in a great tide 
 of being, of which the beginning and the end puzzle his reason; 
 but there is a power urging him on which he names Eternity, 
 and which, whatever it may come eventually to mean, gives all 
 the beauty of the world its excuse for existing. Not a mid- 
 night this, but a twilight, wherein there is light enough to steer 
 by, and wherein already, in the very heart of it, there is prom- 
 ise of a coming dawn. A friend of mine has lately put this 
 thought of Koheleth's into the familiar metre of Omar Khay- 
 yam, extracting thereby its fragrance and poetic beauty: 
 
 In my own breast beats on Eternity. 
 
 No mirage towers of Dreamlands yet to be, 
 
 But once I bent to taste an upland spring 
 And, bending, heard it whisper of its Sea. 
 
 I shape it not from perishable clay, 
 
 Nor muse on clouds and hope to make them stay, 
 
 But as the patient shell secretes the pearl 
 So I secrete my Heaven from day to day. 
 
 This gentle radiance of spiritual illumination, giving every 
 darkest era enough light to live and find its destiny by, is no 
 more and no less than the Bible elsewhere avers. It does not 
 
 39 
 
4 o THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 shun the most seeming hopeless places. St. Paul, looking 
 straight into the unspeakable corruption of his Roman times, 
 thus describes it: "For the invisible things of him from the 
 creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by 
 the things that are made, even his eternal power and God- 
 head." This is not a mere Jew-bounded utterance, for he 
 speaks with his eye on all the Gentile nations; nor is it a truth 
 of manhood alone, for his purview is generous enough to take 
 in the world of things as well as of men. He is enunciating 
 an elemental truth. In a word, our scripture period of evolu- 
 tion not only begins with the vitalizing Spirit of God, but has 
 the nourishing power of that Spirit, as much as it needs and 
 can use, all along the way. 
 
 Our study, it will be borne in mind, is a study of light: 
 how life and immortality were brought to light. We are un- 
 dertaking to estimate the life of the world, in its various eras, 
 by the amount and nature of the light it had to grow by. 
 Light, so to say, is our testing and measuring instrument. Let 
 us, in imitation of our scientific brothers, call it by an appro- 
 priate Greek name, our biometer. We may begin with the 
 twilight; we need go no farther back, because, as we have 
 just seen, our scripture estimate recognizes no absolute dark- 
 ness. I have called this initial period the twilight stratum, 
 instead of the twilight era. We get into the way, overmuch 
 perhaps, of judging things according to the limiting conditions 
 of time. We must in a measure discard that here. The tides 
 of the informing spirit, we need to premise, are flowing through 
 a hidden history wherein the bounds of space and time are 
 lost, wherein one day is as a thousand years and a thousand 
 years are as one day. So instead of saying there was a time 
 when life lay in twilight, we had better say there is a stratum, 
 a level, in human nature, existing as truly to-day as it ever did, 
 wherein the soul moves in twilight dimness, seeing as through 
 a glass darkly. We are not dealing, therefore, with ancient 
 history, some long past analogy which we translate into terms 
 of to-day; we are dealing with the thing itself, literal and 
 present. We do not even have to go to the Turks and Bui- 
 
THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 41 
 
 garians to find it; rather , from our purest heights of vision 
 we can all look down into ourselves and see there levels and 
 standards of living which, unless illumined from above, yield 
 only dimness of outlook. The abysms of our nature are all 
 there still, the underworld of crude instinct and earthly re- 
 sponse to environment. We never get so far above this but 
 that there come up echoes, however faint and far, of the "call 
 of the wild." We may have risen above the tyranny of such 
 things, but if so we have absorbed them, not abolished them. 
 Or we may figure it scientifically, as soon as we see in man 
 a being in process of evolution. The embryonic life of the 
 body, they say, passes in swift epitome through the inchoate 
 stages of nature: it is a unicellular germ, it breaks up by 
 fission, is a vegetable, a sponge, a fish-like organism, succes- 
 sively, before it takes on any semblance of man. Is the case 
 less true of the embryonic life of the spirit? Must not it too 
 have its period of development in bondage and immaturity and 
 dimness, before it can see its parent Spirit as He is, and be- 
 fore it can see whither it is bound? Well, this embryonic 
 period is the twilight stratum of manhood, the level of life 
 wherein by the nature of the case, the immortal outlook is not 
 yet in sight. 
 
 Of this spiritual evolution of ours we have already become 
 aware, doubtless, of another differentiating trait; it is con- 
 noted by the fact that manhood, when the Bible first sees it, 
 has already won to the region of twilight and is no longer 
 moving in utter gloom. Evolution, in its lower biologic stages, 
 is figured as a blind fate-like thing, wherein the organism is 
 wholly unconscious and passive, acted upon by mysterious 
 forces which it cannot control or understand. The highest 
 name that can be given to its motions is natural selection; the 
 highest motive, survival of the fittest. That is the way evolu- 
 tion looks, and that may indeed be an incident of its rudi- 
 mental stage; though, as a matter of fact, we cannot tell how 
 far down consciousness begins, or how soon a spiritual im- 
 pulse strikes into the game, and there are even those who think 
 that all nature is alive, each thing with will and consciousness 
 
42 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 enough to fulfil its appointed function. With these specula- 
 tions, however, we have nothing to do. We stand on plainer 
 ground. In the stage to which we have attained, evolution is 
 in progress in a being already endowed with reason and a will 
 of his own; a being of whom the quaint Bible record says, 
 "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, 
 and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man be- 
 came a living soul." In him therefore evolution has gained 
 the self-conscious stage: has reached the point where the or- 
 ganism, no longer mere passive clay, no longer even an un- 
 sharing spectator from without, can see its life from within; 
 can cast itself intelligently on life, and cooperate in its own 
 development. So much outfit of life it has, though still in 
 twilight. This is a very momentous element of the case. 
 From this point onward, then, evolution is no longer a blind 
 and arbitrary thing, but increasingly charged with wisdom and 
 light. Already, too, it is deeply prophetic of its august goal, 
 in the fact that it can share, in all its wealth of mind and ideal 
 and will, in the mind of the Father of spirits from whom it 
 conies. The organism now being evolved is a thinking or- 
 ganism. Its moulding power still comes, as absolutely as ever, 
 from the mysterious Reality without; but its light comes from 
 within, or rather by way of the manhood spirit within. 
 
 We must speak now in nobler terms than we apply to crys- 
 tals and germ-cells; in terms of personality. For while the 
 progressive discovery of the path of life may still be like obey- 
 ing nature forces, like the fire ascending to seek the sun, or the 
 magnetic needle vibrating loyally to the great earth-currents 
 of the pole, yet it expresses itself in the idiom of free strong 
 manhood: it is the son seeking the Father and the ways of the 
 Father's home, and the glory of the family likeness. This it 
 truly is, however for a time it may stumble among dark moun- 
 tains, or render a dim and wavering allegiance, or even by its 
 own will incur bondage to the conditions of its existence. For 
 its twilight is gradually brightening toward day; its ordered 
 steps are leading in the direction of freedom. 
 
THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 43 
 
 I. THE EMPIRE OF LAW AND FATE 
 
 We are now ready to consider what the Bible conceives to 
 be the essential character of this twilight stratum of life. A 
 late scripture writer, tracing the expression of this to a com- 
 manding personage, and to its national aspect, says, "The 
 law was given by Moses," - by law meaning the whole com- 
 prehensive dispensation before his time, as it is interpreted 
 from an era of greater light. On our cosmic scale, which in 
 spite of its racial unit is truly the scale of the Bible, we may 
 call this the empire of law and fate. It is just the thing that 
 is most plainly and universally before us, saints and scientists 
 alike: the human soul, which never asked or chose to be 
 breathed into earthly life, pursuing its activities here a little 
 while, and finding out the principles and order of them, then 
 suddenly, without will of its own, disappearing into the unseen 
 again. It is the most elemental picture that man can draw of 
 his own mortal existence: the background on which all the 
 colors and shadings of life appear. That this compendious 
 assessment of life is reduced to the term law, and that this 
 law, however rudimentally revealed, becomes a reign of law, 
 and empire over all the centres and outlying provinces of 
 human nature, is not only a deduction of science, a matter of 
 pride for these latter days; it is the recognized commonplace 
 of Scripture, by which its large record of life is defined in two 
 coordinated and correlated halves. If the higher and illumi- 
 nate hemisphere of life is grace and truth, as these came by 
 Jesus Christ, no less truly its lower and basal hemisphere is 
 law, as this is identified with Moses. In other words, this 
 was the essential character of what we call the Old Testament 
 dispensation; distinguishing it from, and perhaps contrasting 
 it to, what a deep-seeing later thinker called "the dispensation 
 of the fulness of times." 
 
 That this empire of law coincides with a twilight stratum 
 of life is indicated historically by the fact that the Old Testa- 
 ment man, from his determining standard of law, has not yet 
 
44 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 discovered immortality, except as a vague longing and dread. 
 The life beyond, to him, is not a motive and inspiration, but 
 an enigma; is not really a life at all, but a sort of punctuation 
 mark to earth, a virtual stoppage and negation of life; which 
 at its sternest is figured as an austere paying-off of old scores 
 in the coin of rewards and punishments, and at its mercifulest 
 does not get beyond the idea of release and rest. Under this 
 law empire the human soul is, so to say, caught and tamed; is 
 brought under the all-encompassing domination, I had almost 
 said tyranny, of prescription and prohibition. And as long 
 as he is there he is not consciously the son of God, but the 
 slave and culprit of God, who can hardly choose but err, or 
 the puppet of God, moved by the unchosen strings of his 
 being's law. It is best not to mince matters here: this, re- 
 duced to lowest terms, is the real state of the case. No doubt 
 it is right; I dare say it ought to be so; at any rate it is so. 
 The empire of law becomes an empire of fate, which the 
 thought of another life, turned back in recompense or retri- 
 bution on this, only accentuates. 
 
 I hardly need pause here to say, that in this matter we are 
 simply following, at a somewhat higher level, the ascertained 
 order of nature. If there is any one thing that has become 
 thoroughly ingrained in men's minds, as the fruit of the scien- 
 tific movement of the last century, that has been made the 
 corner-stone and basis of all the rest, it is the idea that we 
 are living under an all-encompassing, inexorable empire of law. 
 It is just this idea that has made us so nervous about miracles 
 and the supernatural or extra-natural; filling, as it does, the 
 universe so full that there seems no room for anything else. 
 It has got into literature as intolerantly as into science: we 
 are impatient of things like the Arabian Nights and Gulliver's 
 Travels, which deal with freaks and marvels, and relegate 
 these to the nursery where fairy tales are more in order ; while 
 even there the children are learning to say, "Of course it isn't 
 so, the author just said so." Everywhere we are adjusting 
 ourselves, have adjusted ourselves, to a reign of law. And 
 everywhere, too, we have, in spite of ourselves, very largely 
 
THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 45 
 
 conformed our imagination to a reign of fate, wherein, always 
 at an untimely moment, 
 
 Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred shears, 
 And slits the thin-spun life. 
 
 That is why the idea of immortality still persists as a longing 
 and a dread, or at highest as a safety and a rest, but not really 
 as a life, or as a welcomed birth to nobler things. One thinks 
 of the vague fears and apprehensions that connect themselves 
 with accidents and catastrophes of nature, and chances of 
 sudden death, as if all beyond our control were chaotic and 
 unordered ; and then one thinks, by contrast, of that Man who 
 sailed our earthly seas, and who, when the storm was fiercest 
 and disciples were frantic with terror, was quietly asleep on a 
 pillow. The contrast goes deep. It takes hold of the roots 
 of life. We cannot reason it away; our emancipation from 
 such fears must come quite otherwise; and the large scripture 
 way is the only way to bring it about; it comes, so to say, only 
 by the way of the Son of man. Still, quite apart from the 
 proof or illustration of it, the deep contrast remains: a con- 
 trast in mood, attitude, tone, between the soul consciously sub- 
 ject to unchosen law and blind fate, and the soul consciously 
 sharing life with the Wisdom and Spirit of the universe. And 
 this is what, in the sequel of our study, the contrast will 
 amount to. It is the unforced consciousness of things, the 
 spirit oppressed or hopeful, that counts in life, not the labored 
 logic by which we try to persuade our minds. We shall follow 
 life to the point where, in the face of storm and mystery, it 
 can calmly rest its head on a pillow; can bask, as it were, in 
 the light to which it has won, knowing that all is well. 
 
 But we must traverse a twilight period first, just as also 
 nature must. And the felt empire of law and fate, which gives 
 tone to that period, is a sound and sturdy stratum of life; it 
 develops the principle, the stamina, the strong fibre, by which 
 the soul can do its work in the world, and build its ideals of 
 character. It learns to love its reign of law, and it lays its 
 foundations deep beneath the surface; and though it moves 
 in dimness of outlook, yet the night has its stars and its 
 
46 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 brightening East, and God gives it also songs in the night and 
 compensating joys. 
 
 It would be very interesting, if we had the space, to follow 
 into detail the dominance of law, gradually widening and 
 deepening, from its rudimental beginnings to the darkest hour 
 of its twilight, just before the dawn. All we can do, however, 
 is to touch on a few salient points. The Hebrew word for law, 
 torah, did not to begin with have just the meaning that we 
 have come to attribute to the term, when we speak, for in- 
 stance, of English law, or of the laws of nature; though it did 
 approach the modern meaning afterward, as it was seen to 
 cover more of life and the world. We have divested it of per- 
 sonality; it has become to our consciousness a sort of mechan- 
 ical thing, a fate, which renders no account of itself. With the 
 Hebrew, on the contrary, the personal origin of law was of 
 its very essence; in his mind to legislate, to give torah as he 
 expressed it, meant nearly the same as to give orders or in- 
 struction, as a general gives orders to his army, or as a teacher 
 gives instruction to his class. Further, its ultimate source was 
 always thought of as God Himself; the form it took in the 
 mouth of lawgiver or priest or prophet never dispelled this 
 idea; and accordingly, to the end of the chapter, the authority 
 of law, torah, was accepted as absolute. That is, the personal 
 will of God was to the Hebrew practically the same as the 
 order of nature is to us; and his personality, in following that 
 will, went through a development quite analogous to what we 
 recognize in our bodies, in the laws of evolution, heredity, 
 growth, and indeed, when we understand his quaint but semi- 
 nal Hebrew idiom, identical with what we trace in the human 
 mind, in basal rudiments, customs, institutions, history. Time 
 fails me, of course, to enlarge on this, as given in the Old Tes- 
 tament; but it is all there, and all in a natural and self -evi- 
 dencing order. It seems to have been the world mission of 
 the Semitic race, as Professor McCurdy points out, to furnish 
 the type, the norm of things, for the Aryan race to take up 
 and fill out in arts and civilization. "In nearly everything 
 vital to human well-being," he says, "the Semites were the 
 
THE rWILIGHr STRATUM 47 
 
 founders or forerunners." And the seminal principles of life, 
 the pioneer impulses, are best depicted in this book of theirs, 
 which just on that account has become the Bible of the edu- 
 cated and civilized world. 
 
 We speak, in biology, of the law of the species, that rigid 
 law by which every animal instinctively conforms to the ways 
 of its kind. A blind law, our thoughts make this, a law which 
 the animal has no mind to reason out, and no choice but to 
 obey. Well, the Hebrew law was just a kind of magnified law 
 of the species; only, being personal and conscious, he went 
 into it with his eyes open; and its appeal was always made 
 to his reason as well as to his instinct. In other words, from 
 the very beginning he was expected and encouraged to co- 
 operate with it. There was a two- fold element in it; and the 
 power of two worlds, the austere under-world of his primordial 
 nature, and the free upper-world of his manhood. But for the 
 rest, he never got beyond the tether of his species conscious- 
 ness. He merely spread it out into wider areas: from the 
 family, taking its law from a patriarchal head, to the clan, 
 Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau; then to the tribe, tracing 
 up allegiance to a common ancestor ; then through slavery and 
 deliverance and conquest to the nation, which for the first time 
 could begin to legislate and write its laws for permanent use, 
 on stone; then finally, as nationality failed, to a race. That is 
 as far as the Hebrew, as such, ever got. To this day the 
 Hebrews remain a race apart, with an intense, exclusive, al- 
 most fanatical race consciousness, virtually the species con- 
 sciousness writ large. It remained for the Aryan race to take 
 up the matter where they laid it down, and develop the re- 
 gards of men from Judaism to Christianity, from the nation 
 and the race to the world and the universal humanity. They 
 might indeed have done this, and their Pioneer, of their own 
 royal line, was ready; if they had not, in an evil hour, per- 
 versely chosen to reject Him, and thus commit their manhood 
 to an arrested development. The result is before us, for the 
 world to see; the enlarging humanitarian consciousness of our 
 latest age is every day making it plainer. 
 
48 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 But to go back to the spirit of their old law. Its main effort 
 and impact, as you know, was prohibition and restraint: al- 
 ways directed to curbing and bringing into order the imperious 
 surge of the natural man toward lawless freedom. It took 
 men as we take children, saying, "You mustn't do this, you 
 mustn't touch that, you mustn't." You have noted how all 
 the commandments of the two tables, except one, are prohibi- 
 tions, "Thou shalt not"; they recognize the things to which 
 men too naturally tend, and put the bridle there. "Ye shall 
 not do," said Moses to them at the outer edge of the wilderness, 
 "ye shalt not do after all the things that we do here this day, 
 every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes." It was a 
 kind of negative life that was thus contemplated. We can 
 imagine some progressive minded man in his audience break- 
 ing in here and saying, "You have told us what not to do, but 
 when we have obeyed your prohibitions to the full where are 
 we then? What shall we do? How shall we take this tabula 
 rasa of a life and enrich it? The decks are cleared for action, 
 all the clutter and impedimenta removed by your 'Thou shalt 
 nots'; now where is the foe to fight, where is the victory to 
 win? All that you have left us positively to do, barring some 
 ceremonies and sanitary rules, is to honor our fathers and 
 mothers; but we must be fathers and mothers some day; how 
 then shall we in turn be ourselves worthy of honor, and es- 
 pecially in the new conditions of action that times will surely 
 bring?" Well, that was left to the future, to the time when 
 they would be out of the wilderness, and be no longer 
 scolded children but full-grown men, adult and ready to act 
 for themselves. "For ye are not as yet come," said the ven- 
 erable lawgiver, "to the rest and to the inheritance which the 
 Lord your God giveth you." His law was made for a con- 
 sciously unfinal stage of manhood; and so it remained to the 
 end, not because it was inadequate or unwise or not volumi- 
 nous enough, but precisely because it was law. The law, the 
 police regulation of the world, operates to protect society and 
 keep men out of or put them into jail; but what life, 
 what ideal, what spiritual energy, does it, as law, put within 
 
THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 49 
 
 them? Clearly, it represents only the negative half of a di- 
 vided whole; and all that makes positive manhood, according 
 to the Maker's image, is beyond. 
 
 From these rudiments of law, wherein we see men just going 
 under the yoke, our thoughts go out to an empire of law, 
 wherein a universe is caught and tamed; we try to think what 
 the world would be like if it were what the biologists want it 
 to be, a world of law and nothing else. We look into the 
 animal world, which God created and called very good; and 
 there we note the species, each in its own compartment of na- 
 ture, each with its species consciousness and obeying its species 
 law. What do these different species, all from one Creator, 
 do? They fear one another; they fight one another; they 
 devour one another. There seems to be a law in their members 
 impelling them to it. Poets have brooded over it, as if the 
 world were radically cruel and unfeeling; they call it "nature 
 red in tooth and claw." And yet all this seems mellow music 
 compared with what goes on all the while among us. The 
 law of our digestive organs calls for animal food; and what 
 is that army of our species out there in the Chicago shambles 
 doing all day long, and year after year, but kill, kill, kill, 
 that we may eat the flesh? Or if we have scruples against 
 such slaughter, and, choosing rather to be underfed and 
 anaemic, confine ourselves to vegetable food, we have only re- 
 moved the matter one step back, we are still destroying the 
 protoplasmic life of lower creatures to build up our own bodies. 
 The law in our members, the law of our species, demands it; 
 there seems to be no consideration of mercy or sympathy or 
 even justice in the matter. It is all unrelieved law: nature 
 preserving her integrity and uniformity, calm and severe, yet 
 beneath the surface full of fear and fighting and devouring. 
 
 Is it essentially different when we come to the domain of 
 the higher law, as unrelieved law I mean, with its rigid stand- 
 ards on the one hand, its atmosphere of bondage and restraint 
 on the other? What sort of world would this be if the Old 
 Testament dispensation had been perpetual, and had remained 
 unrelieved by more genial elements, that magnified law of the 
 
50 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 species of which I was speaking a few minutes ago? Well, 
 we have a historical example, in our own modern times, to 
 illustrate it for us. We honor the Puritans, and trace much 
 of our noblest and strongest convictions of right and conscience 
 to them. But once in their history they got their doctrines 
 and sentiments a little out of balance, and reverted overmuch 
 to the earlier ways, when the reign of Mosaic law was unre- 
 lieved by grace and truth. This is how Macaulay describes 
 it: 
 
 "After the fashion of oppressed sects, they mistook their 
 own vindictive feelings for emotions of piety, encouraged in 
 themselves by reading and meditation a disposition to brood 
 over their wrongs, and, when they had worked themselves up 
 into hating their enemies, imagined that they were only hating 
 the enemies of heaven. In the New Testament there was little 
 indeed which, even when perverted by the most disingenuous 
 exposition, could seem to countenance the indulgence of male- 
 volent passions. But the Old Testament contained the history 
 of a race selected by God to be witnesses of his unity and min- 
 isters of his vengeance, and specially commanded by him to 
 do many things which, if done without his special command, 
 would have been atrocious crimes. In such a history it was 
 not difficult for fierce and gloomy spirits to find much that 
 might be distorted to suit their wishes. The extreme Puritans 
 therefore began to feel for the Old Testament a preference, 
 which, perhaps, they did not distinctly avow even to them- 
 selves; but which showed itself in all their sentiments and 
 habits. They paid to the Hebrew language a respect which 
 they refused to that tongue in which the discourses of Jesus 
 and the epistles of Paul have come down to us. They baptized 
 their children by the names, not of Christian saints, but of 
 Hebrew patriarchs and warriors. In defiance of the express 
 and reiterated declarations of Luther and Calvin, they turned 
 the weekly festival by which the Church had, from the primi- 
 tive times, commemorated the resurrection of her Lord, into 
 a Jewish Sabbath. They sought for principles of jurispru- 
 dence in the Mosaic law, and for precedents to guide their 
 
THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 51 
 
 ordinary conduct in the books of Judges and Kings. Their 
 thoughts and discourse ran much on acts which were assuredly 
 not recorded as examples for our imitation. The prophet who 
 hewed in pieces a captive king, the rebel general who gave the 
 blood of a queen to the dogs, the matron who, in defiance of 
 plighted faith, and of the laws of eastern hospitality, drove 
 the nail into the brain of the fugitive ally who had just fed at 
 her board, and who was sleeping under the shadow of her tent, 
 were proposed as models to Christians suffering under the 
 tyranny of princes and prelates. Morals and manners were 
 subjected to a code resembling that of the synagogue, when 
 the synagogue was in its worst state." 
 
 A trenchant indictment this; we leave out of the question 
 whether Macaulay exaggerated it, or left it too one-sided. 
 What we are to note here is that this describes not merely an 
 era in history but a stratum of human nature. What is all 
 this but a reversion to the twilight stratum? Given such 
 and such conditions, let the prevailing sentiment, even the 
 sacred zeal of divine law, be too unrelieved and too intolerant, 
 and the Puritan of the seventeenth century after Christ be- 
 comes at heart like the Jew of the prechristian centuries; he 
 has magnified that law of the species and of the race until he 
 can hardly let other species and races exist, or at least can 
 hardly let exist what they stand for and what perhaps has been 
 bred in the law of their being. 
 
 Yet all this time Jews and Puritans alike have, as St. Paul 
 says, consented to the law that it is holy and just and good; 
 have rejoiced in it after the inward man. The empire of law 
 has engendered ideals; nay the ideal of its own perfection and 
 universality, the ideal of its sacredness and unsearchable 
 depth, was at the bottom of that Puritan intolerance and nar- 
 rowness. The very law of the species, with its fear and its 
 fighting, is ideally the integrity of the species. All the ideals 
 of character that rose in the mind of the Old Testament 
 worthies merely reflected this fact at different sides and angles. 
 The stern yet tonic ideal of duty, what is this but giving every 
 obligation, every responsibility, every law of our being, its 
 
52 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 just due? The comprehensive ideal of righteousness again, 
 which is the high summit to which Old Testament conduct 
 tends, what is this? "In this word righteousness," says 
 Brierly, " . . .we need beware lest we take an emotional sub- 
 stitute for the actual meaning. For, in heaven and upon earth, 
 it has only one meaning, Tightness, which again means always 
 conformity to the law of things. In all her myriad depart- 
 ments, Nature has one rule of conduct towards us. She pays 
 according to our conformity to her law." In this ideal, then, 
 we have merely the law of great nature writ large, and made 
 into an empire over our sturdiest and severest character. God 
 Himself, too, is a God of righteousness; He embodies His own 
 law. Or take the highest ideal of all, remote, withdrawn, the 
 ideal that mystics have appropriated to themselves and that 
 seems inaccessible to common and lay humanity, the ideal 
 of holiness. "This latter word," says Brierly again, "we now 
 recognize as signifying neither less nor more than 'wholeness.' 
 It means the full equipment of manhood, the highest state of 
 body, soul, and spirit." Well, what is being a whole man, but 
 having all the functions in vital running order, rejoicing to 
 obey the laws of their being? The empire of law creates a 
 demand for its own perfection; it is inexorable, intolerant if 
 you please; it will not be satisfied until it has drawn into its 
 jurisdiction the whole man and every man. 
 
 And yet at its highest and holiest, the empire of law, as such, 
 is still in the twilight stratum; it has not the light and life of 
 the hemisphere beyond itself. I am not saying this to bring 
 an indictment against law, or to intimate that the twilight 
 stratum is therefore evil. I am optimistic enough to believe, 
 as I look the field of truth over, that things come to light just 
 about as fast as they ought to, and on the whole just about in 
 the order they ought to. You see, the great body of humanity 
 is an inert thing, and stubbornly conservative; a huge mass to 
 move forward through life; and every step of progress has to 
 be naturalized, to be trodden in, until it becomes the posses- 
 sion not of the philosopher or illuminated prophet alone, but 
 of the community, of the rank and file; and it has to become 
 
THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 53 
 
 an atmosphere, which men breathe without thinking, or a sun- 
 light, which warms and guides men while they do not realize 
 its meaning or power. We must judge humanity by its ele- 
 mental endowments, and by the light which has become ele- 
 mental within them. 
 
 To say, then, that while our nature is still under unrelieved 
 law it is still in twilight, and cannot see the immortal dawn 
 beyond, is merely to say that law can only move in its own 
 orbit until it comes round full circle, can only contemplate its 
 own completion, and that until this is accomplished cannot 
 take up, cannot even see, the next and risen stage of being. 
 Consider the case. We will suppose that a man has walked 
 in all the statutes of the law blameless, that according to the 
 "most strictest" sect of Hebraism he has, like Job, to appear 
 proudly before his Maker with his record on his shoulder. 
 What then? Why, he gets his award. Judgment is passed upon 
 him, the just verdict is rendered for what he is and has been. 
 Or suppose, like you and me, he faces the great Reality of 
 things with many gaps and faults, many evil things, in his life's 
 record. What then? Why again, he gets his just judgment. 
 The books are posted and balanced, all the old scores paid off, 
 and the whole matter of life becomes a finality. That is all 
 that the empire of law, that is all that the man who in his life 
 has only law, can see. His case is settled, and the punctuation 
 mark is appended. The next generation comes on and goes 
 through the same circle, to the same award of commendation 
 or penalty. Again we must ask, What then? The rest, so 
 far as law can see, is fate. The law has not imparted life but 
 only ordered it; has ordered it well, has opened ample room 
 for duty and righteousness and wholeness. But when the law 
 has done with educating the man, and when untimely death 
 comes, it has at best only got him where he is in shape for 
 unincumbered duty and righteousness and holiness to begin, 
 while the most of men, unlike Job, must die with their record 
 of conformity to law still far short of its best. And the light 
 beyond, the next stage of evolution in life, is still as much in 
 the dark as ever. If there had been a law given which could 
 
54 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 have given life, as St. Paul says, if life were by the law at 
 all, verily righteousness should have been by the law. The 
 law is not to blame; but when the mystery of introduction to 
 another state of existence comes the law stratum of our being 
 simply has nothing to connote more life, it connotes only its 
 own end and reckoning. We can see now, therefore, why, 
 when the Old Testament men looked at death all they could 
 imagine after it was some kind of payment, reward or punish- 
 ment, or it may be safety and rest; but that was not new and 
 higher life, that was not truly immortality at all. And this 
 because neither the immortality nor the real principle and fibre 
 of life had emerged into light. It belongs to a higher stratum 
 of manhood, where fate has passed on into resurrection. 
 
 II. THE ADVENT OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 But what is the spirit doing all this time? We have seen 
 it in the beginning of things, brooding like a mother-bird on 
 the face of the waters, as if it would warm the waste of chaos 
 into life and organism. And the very first thing that took 
 place thereafter, according to the sublime old record, was the 
 beginning of that motion, or pulsation, which we have taken 
 as our biometer, or measure of life. "And God said, Let there 
 be light: and there was light." Before the sun and stars were 
 created, as this strange account goes, light came into being; 
 and whether or not, as the scientists are conjecturing, it may 
 have been due to some radio-activity in the inchoate matter, 
 its origin here is described as spiritual, with a mind and a 
 decree and a will working in it. 
 
 In our too narrow-minded study of the Bible we have al- 
 most lost sight of this initial power of creation and its stored- 
 up potencies. Certainly, it would seem, that spiritual beginning 
 of things ought to have continued in operation, working still 
 at the core and centre of creation, and always radiating enough 
 light to make its presence and nature evident. It has been 
 tacitly supposed, however, that the spirit of God, having come 
 upon the scene and set things running, then proceeded to take 
 
THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 55 
 
 a long vacation, not to be heard of again definitely until the 
 Day of Pentecost, A.D. 33, was fully come; after which date 
 He was a resident of our earth, having infused Himself, like 
 flame, into the hearts of men. The long intervening history, 
 then, is imagined as devoid of any divine spirit; men getting 
 along supposedly the best they could by their own natural 
 light and impulse, and of course always stumbling and stiff- 
 necked, making mistakes or setting up rebellions, and incur- 
 ring punishments. To be sure, Bezaleel, the son of Uri, who 
 built the tabernacle, was said to have been endowed by the 
 spirit of God for the purpose; and sometimes the spirit came 
 mysteriously upon exceptional men; upon Samson, making 
 him preternaturally strong, and upon prophets, filling them 
 with a kind of divine frenzy and eloquence. But these in- 
 stances were not supposed really to count for much, and the 
 disposition was to explain them away. The Pentecostal spirit, 
 in fact, was so transcendent, and so immediately reducible to 
 religious insight and energy, that all the earlier history of the 
 spirit was cast into the shade, as if it were a sporadic matter 
 and virtually non-existent. It is as if the spirit had acted 
 consciously in the first impulse, and then become reflex or 
 automatic, working in the world as does breathing or digestion 
 in our bodies, but having to give thought and concentrated 
 will to the starting, just as we have to do in learning to swim 
 or play the piano. It is remarkable that the late Professor 
 Cope, one of our most eminent biologists, gives just this ex- 
 planation of the beginning of life on our globe: conscious ef- 
 fort at first, enough to set the vital machinery of organism 
 going; this he calls archaestheticism; then, the life-pulsation 
 being trained by repetition into habit, the machinery going on 
 automatically by itself; all of which he calls catagenesis. 
 
 But if Professor Cope, looking on as a spectator from out- 
 side, can see so far into the creative act as that, we have him at 
 a great advantage; for we have reached the stage of life where 
 evolution has become conscious of itself, and where we can 
 cooperate in bringing it about; we are inside the game, and 
 have a light in our hearts which enables us to trace in some 
 
5 6 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 degree the divine initiative and pattern. To us, as to him, 
 things look as if they lived and grew of themselves; but from 
 our high station within, where we can put forth will, and use 
 nature's laws to conscious purpose, and perpetuate life in an 
 image at once human and divine, we ought to arrive at a 
 worthier, less purely mechanical explanation than his. Our 
 scientific apparatus is finer; it can go beyond terms of vibra- 
 tion and natural selection to terms of inner light and volition. 
 And our text-book, the Bible, thinking in these terms, traces 
 life inward to the informing spirit of God. True, it may take 
 a poet, specially gifted and consecrated, to have a keen sense 
 of that spirit's working in nature, and to put that sense into 
 utterance. Enough, however, for our comfort, that the vision 
 exists in humanity; a vision which, because we can respond 
 to the poet, we may deem to exist, though it may be dimly, in 
 all of us. Wordsworth, whose life was consecrated to this very 
 thing, found what his penetrative spirit sought, 
 
 a sense sublime 
 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things. 
 
 But the vision is not the monopoly of poets, nor confined to 
 that sublimated region of seas and skies and sunsets. It 
 exists in things nearer home; its clearest and most motive- 
 giving realization is in the common man. Elihu, you re- 
 member, that self-confident young man who was going to set 
 Job and his friends right, puts it into words. "There is a 
 spirit in man," he says, "and the inspiration of the Almighty 
 giveth them understanding." We have the light in ourselves, 
 shared with the light and will of the world; clear enough for 
 every one to interrogate and utilize in active life. 
 
 Here then is the situation of things: the spirit of God, which 
 in the beginning brooded over chaos, and the spirit of man 
 
THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 57 
 
 answering to it, as face answereth face in a glass. But it is 
 time now to begin on a definition; to begin on it, I say, for it 
 will take all the rest of our discussions to compass the matter 
 in full. What is spirit? what is a spirit? Well, I do not 
 profess to be enough in the counsels of heaven to define the 
 spirit of God; but we must, and I think we can get a working- 
 idea of the spirit that is in ourselves; that part of power of 
 our manhood of which George Bernard Shaw, else so sure of 
 things, says cautiously, "if I may so name the unknown." We 
 had better begin simply, even though at the risk of landing 
 this side of an adequate conception. We all have an idea 
 what is meant by the spirit of a crowd, or of a poem, or of 
 an age; we distinguish between the spirit and the letter of a 
 law ; we have sometimes to take the* spirit of a poor speaker 
 in lieu of his clumsy words, like taking the will for the deed. 
 In any such case we have a sense of a certain animus or direc- 
 tion of personality concentrated on some specific object or 
 character, and working as one energy. And now let us think 
 of the man we were describing, a being introduced here into 
 a complex world, which he gradually discovers to be a world 
 of law, with which he must intelligently coordinate his own 
 nature, doing this in a way for himself alone, for no two men 
 are alike. Well, my idea of his spirit is, that it is the reaction 
 of his individuality on his world. Let us not complicate 
 matters here by speculating on a disembodied spirit floating 
 off by itself after death, or, if such a thing is possible, arrested 
 and corraled by a medium; enough for us at first if we can 
 understand a spirit still in the body and in this life. If we can 
 know how it will react on this world, we are in the best shape 
 to learn how it will react on any world, seen or unseen; that, 
 perhaps, is what our bodies are given us for, to be the organs 
 of this reaction and life-energy. 
 
 We sometimes get our thoughts tangled up by making a 
 sort of dissection of our nature: as if we were made up of 
 three separable parts, body, soul, and spirit; and the idea of 
 this threefold combination leads to endless puzzling of mind 
 over the question what part each plays in the personality, and 
 
58 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 what may be saved from the wreck when the being is disin- 
 tegrated by the failure of the body. I think that speculations 
 on such a basis are bound to be futile and barren. We cannot 
 cipher out the problem by cutting the man into pieces; he 
 must be and remain a unity, all one man and one character, 
 moving all together if he move at all. We do not save him 
 by working with or supposing any process of disintegration, 
 not even the disintegration of physical death. As to this three- 
 fold division, which is natural enough, we may most simply 
 conceive of it somehow thus: Man has a body, by means of 
 -which he makes connection with this world, its sights and 
 sounds, its meats and drinks, its pleasures and pains; man has 
 a spirit, by which he reacts on a world unseen, its ideas and 
 ideals, its life and light and laws; but man is a living soul, 
 subsisting here between two worlds, and electing to give su- 
 preme allegiance to the one or the other. Man is a living soul; 
 that is what he became when God breathed into his nostrils 
 the breath of life. But that is what also the animals are 
 called: ftp ttfSJ, a living soul, a living creature. In this re- 
 spect he does not differ from them; he too is an animal, with 
 the breath of the universal life-force in his body. But he 
 has also this unique endowment, the spirit, by which he moves 
 in a region above the law of the species, and becomes an in- 
 dividual, with a character all his own. I am not saying the 
 animals have no spirit, no reflex of that mighty life-force; 
 "who knoweth . . . the spirit of the beast, whether it goeth 
 downward to the earth?" says Koheleth. With this, however, 
 the Scripture is not dealing; and it is in the nature of the case 
 beyond our ken, which has enough to do to understand the 
 spirit of our kind. But on the principle "By their fruits ye 
 shall know them" we may certainly say his spirit differs from 
 theirs not in degree but in kind: he is of them, with a spirit 
 that rises enormously, infinitely beyond them ; nay his spirit is 
 not that of the animal at all; if he suffers it to become so, by 
 vice or dissipation, it is his ruin; he does not even make a 
 decent beast. , 
 
 Here, then, he is placed, in this world of law, with a light 
 
THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 59 
 
 in him by which he can become acquainted with it, and with 
 its personal Source and Will, and by which he can react on 
 these as he will. There is a long and rugged road for him to 
 traverse, before a personality so richly endowed becomes ma- 
 ture. I am not sure that in this world at all it can become 
 much more than an embryonic life, on the true standard, I 
 mean; I am tempted to think it cannot when I see what halt- 
 ing, bungling work men and nations make of living. But here 
 he is, getting more life and broader horizons step by step, and 
 getting more light to guide him, as his eyes become better 
 educated. "For with thee," said a Psalmist, "is the fountain 
 of life: in thy light shall we see light." A curious thing, this 
 gradual education in the perception of light. I read an article 
 the other day in a scientific journal which furnished so striking 
 an analogue to our subject that I first thought anew how pro- 
 foundly true were Goethe's familiar words, 
 
 Alles Vergangliche 
 1st nur ein Gleichnis, 
 
 "everything transitory is only a parable," and then I half hesi- 
 tated to bring it in here lest it might seem fantastic and 
 allegorical. It was about the color-sense, as it is found to be 
 developed in primitive peoples. An observer in one of the 
 Philippine islands discovered that the native Visayan dialect 
 had definite names only for the colors at the red end of the 
 spectrum, where the vibrations are slowest; that with the color 
 green the words became vague and wavering, seeming to sug- 
 gest only the idea of unripe things, like grass or uncured grain; 
 and that all above this, toward the blue end of the spectrum, 
 where the vibrations were most rapid, the dialect must have 
 recourse to the later Spanish. Then on interrogating school- 
 children and others he found that all could distinguish red 
 well and green fairly well, though with some uncertainty be- 
 tween that and brown; but that blue, a bright blue garment 
 for instance, puzzled them all, some calling it green, others 
 black. On further inquiry, by him and others, it was found 
 to be a pretty universal fact that primitive folk discern colors 
 
60 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 in this invariable order: reds first, and so on upward, always 
 in the order of the spectrum; but that comparatively high 
 civilization is needed before they be sure of blue at all. All 
 this lies simply in the eye's accommodating itself to different 
 rates of vibration. Is the spiritual order something like this, 
 as men go from animalism upward? They can see red first, 
 the color of blood and raw flesh and war; then they can see 
 green, for it is the color of their green earth, and all growing 
 and unripe things ; but blue, the color of the sky, they see last 
 of all, and only by advanced education; to them the sky is 
 either black, like an abyss or a midnight, or else it is green, 
 like their unripe earth, unready for harvest. What a simple 
 and suggestive gamut of light is here, and how it makes us 
 think of that welter of slow development, during which the 
 spirit, reacting on its universe, is approaching the maturity of 
 its powers when, its blood-red wars and violences past, it can 
 look wisely toward heaven and know that it is neither the 
 blackness of death nor the green, immature continuation of 
 this earth life! Well, it is a parable, like everything transi- 
 tory; but the dream is true. The spirit is receiving its orderly 
 education in life and light; and the two keep pace with each 
 other, each the measure of the other. 
 
 HI. EARLY SPIRITUAL REACTIONS 
 
 But we have kept our empire of law waiting all this time, 
 stationary, while we went back to bring up to date that being 
 who by his endowment of spirit could understand the law and 
 by obedience or accommodation or even transgression react 
 upon it. There it has remained as it will remain, a universal 
 thing; all the creation, high and low, must bow to it late or 
 soon; and one jot or tittle shall not pass from it until all be 
 fulfilled. Now you see what this spiritual reaction is: it is 
 a kind of initiative, wherein man by his innate wisdom or 
 folly takes things into his own hands, and so by experience of 
 effects learns his being's law, and is not merely told it; learns, 
 and if he obeys, obeys freely, rather than like a machine which 
 
THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 61 
 
 is wound up and must go. We have made transition to the 
 higher ground which befits the life of free spirit. The whole 
 scale of things too, for good and evil, is vastly enlarged: the 
 glory more transcendent, the woe more deep and ruinous; we 
 could deal with no mere animal life on such ground. It is the 
 spirit that marks the difference. 
 
 Sooner or later, being personal, we estimate things accord- 
 ing to our own nature, and recognize the personal source of 
 this empire of law: as the Hebrews figured it in their tor ah, 
 it is like the orders of a general to his soldiers, or the instruc- 
 tion of a teacher to his class. Now what shall be the first 
 personal response, the first spiritual reaction, of a being who 
 to begin with is like a callow child, with no wise experience 
 of life, and no contact as yet with the solemn consequences of 
 things? For so, down in that twilight stratum, we must needs 
 figure man as beginning. 
 
 The scripture answer to this question, which is embodied 
 in the quaint old story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden 
 fruit, shows the primitive man that is in us two things: first, 
 that a command given from such a source, as we say, "means 
 business," it cannot safely be trifled with; and secondly, the 
 strange principle afterward phrased by St. Paul, that by the 
 law is the knowledge of sin. That silly couple, as we deem 
 them, acted just as we probably should have done; just like 
 those hapless children of whom every week the newspaper 
 reports, who "didn't know it was loaded," or like those idle 
 fellows who out of sheer wanton curiosity toy with a dangerous 
 machine. A great many children of a larger growth find out 
 to-day, I see it not infrequently in students and their reaction 
 toward new college enactments, that, as the slangs ters say, 
 it won't do to meddle with the buzz-saw. The spiritual re- 
 action must go deeper than that; we must learn to take our 
 empire of law seriously enough for our own good, and not be 
 so idly facile as to be equally ready, as the chance comes, to 
 listen to a God or a serpent. 
 
 I know how much has been made of that Adam and Eve 
 
62 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 story; how Milton, voicing an almost morbid Puritan con- 
 science, described its portentous effects: 
 
 Earth trembled from her entrails, as again 
 
 In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan; 
 
 Sky loured, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops 
 
 Wept at completing of the mortal Sin 
 
 Original. 
 
 And indeed the story goes deep; I have no disposition to be- 
 little it, far less laugh it away; I do not profess to give only 
 one small aspect of it. But we see human nature there, our 
 own human nature. We see too, even there, an authentic up- 
 rise of the human spirit; and we see how light, our spiritual 
 biometer, kept pace with it. Their eyes were opened, and for 
 the first time man was as gods, seeing good and evil. The 
 effects were bad as well as good; but I confess that if this was 
 the fall of man it looks to me uncommonly like a fall upward. 
 Our first parents did not take life seriously enough, to begin 
 with; though afterward Adam, having learned his costly lesson, 
 went to work like a good boy, under his yoke of divine law, 
 his spirit bowing itself docilely to the order of things. His 
 eldest son, however, was not so at all; he was what we call 
 a bad lot. Perhaps there was an inherited crook in his nature ; 
 at any rate, while on the one side he was energetic, active, un- 
 meditative, thoroughly masculine, on the other he was turbu- 
 lent, self-centred, blindly set on making things bend to his 
 own untamed will. We may be sure he never would have been 
 tempted to self-indulgence by a woman. It made him sick 
 to see Abel there, so sweetly pious and so in divine favor; 
 though he too went stolidly through the motions of worship 
 and got no inner satisfaction from it. Do you reflect that, for 
 good or ill, here is one half of humanity, the active, over- 
 coming, business half? After his dreadful deed of murder, 
 the supreme sin, he went forth, you remember, to found cities, 
 and subdue the earth, and beget children who were the origi- 
 nators of the arts of life, agriculture, and music, and the fine 
 and useful arts of craftsmanship. From his family, according 
 to the Bible record, came the beginnings of civilization. Evi- 
 
THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 63 
 
 dently here is a strain of human nature not to be ignored but 
 dealt with and developed. Perhaps he took this world, with 
 its worldly tasks and absorptions, too seriously; I am pretty 
 sure that his half of mankind does. And he must be dealt 
 with on his own ground, the ground of his own turbulent 
 masterful spirit. It requires a new combination with the law 
 of things. This is how the Bible story actually takes him. 
 For though he had no heart for the supreme law of manhood, 
 to be his brother's keeper and lover, he did not fall into his 
 murderous deed unadvisedly or without adequate warning. 
 "Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen?" 
 was the question that somehow had already found way into 
 his lowering mind; "if thou doest well, is there not an uplift 
 to go with it, not a morose, ill-at-ease, falling spirit?' 7 But 
 you want to be doing something, instead of worshipping, do 
 you? It is in you to fight, to make things yield to you, to 
 overcome, is it? Well, here is your foe. Sin, crouching like 
 a wild beast at your heart's door, crouching in craven fear, 
 ready to be subdued. Now fight it; it will yield to you; and 
 you can work out your spiritual reaction, and reach the true 
 expression of your manhood by the negative way, by the way 
 of your own energetic spirit. Don't kill your brother; don't 
 hate him; you need him for your work in the world; kill your 
 sin. 
 
 We cannot help sympathizing, to some extent, with the Cain 
 type of man. I think the Bible does. It puts the active, ro- 
 bust, practical work of the world largely in their hands. On 
 the other hand, with all its unworldly beauty, there is a note 
 of the futile and premature in the opposite, the saintly and 
 pious type. Abel, his sweet life so soon and tragically 
 quenched, was as little his brother's keeper as was Cain. 
 Enoch, who "walked with God," lived out half his days, the 
 world seemingly too bleak a climate for him, "and he was not, 
 for God took him." Beautiful this; but all he did was to beget 
 Methusaleh, whose sole distinction among men was to have 
 existed longer than any other man that ever lived. There 
 seems to be little if any robust reaction of spirit here; and as 
 
64 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 for Enoch, well, he was like Sir Gareth, the ^nly knight who 
 won to the full sight of the holy grail: 
 
 And one hath had the vision face to face, 
 And now his chair desires him here in vain, 
 However they may crown him otherwhere. 
 
 There is something lacking in this strain of life too. 
 
 This Enoch story brings us dimly to an old concept of life 
 and death, which, because its conditions were so speedily over- 
 turned, we can now neither prove nor disprove. It seems to 
 point to what might have been the outcome of the Eden ex- 
 istence, if man had never elected to take the fruit, that is, 
 exercise his own initiative out of desire for knowledge. He 
 was in a garden; tended like the plants, caged in strict regu- 
 lations and unquestioning obedience, like the animals. Un- 
 like the animals he had the power of initiative; its reward, to 
 know good and evil, like God; its risk, to know hardship and 
 death. He might have chosen the passive obedient state, and 
 might have passed out of the earthly stage of existence not 
 by death but as Enoch did. The animals have apparently little 
 real fear and pain of death; he as the more highly evolved 
 creature might normally have had still less, or have passed 
 on like the chrysalis into the butterfly. But it would have been 
 passing onward from a kind of vegetative life, a life passive 
 instead of active, a life not cooperating intelligently with God, 
 but as the unenterprising automaton of God. To exert his 
 spirit, on the other hand, exposed him to deadly risk, nay to 
 deadly certainty, and he chose, virtually, for the sake of 
 inheriting higher things, to take the risk. He would rather 
 die knowing and originating action than as a passively moved 
 thing. Was it worth the risk? It takes centuries to answer 
 the question; but the freely chosen death of the Son of man, 
 for love's sake, is the supreme answer. 
 
 An immense interest there is in those naive old stories of 
 Genesis, which embody the conception of how man's nature 
 fares before he begins to write his laws on stone: the giants 
 in the earth; the rising tide of wickedness; the clean sweep of 
 the flood and new beginning; the Babel tower aspiring to 
 
THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 65 
 
 heaven; then later Abraham the friend of God, dreaming of 
 being a blessing to all the earth; and peaceful Isaac among 
 his flocks; and Esau the surly, stupid, hungry hunter, whose 
 high birthright carried with it no answering sense of noblesse 
 oblige; and Jacob, with his rare combination of business 
 shrewdness on the one side and intense devotion to the ideal 
 on the other. But I must not linger with these old-world 
 tales, full of meat though they are. Is it not clear by this 
 time, that even in our twilight stratum of life that brooding 
 kindly spirit of the beginning of things was neither taking 
 a vacation nor working automatically? We see his work right 
 where we ought to look for it, right where evolution becomes 
 conscious and cooperative; in the answering spirit of man, 
 which as it is warmed and lighted by the spirit of God comes 
 forth from its germinant sleep, and rounds into individuality, 
 and grows. Not always like Enoch or Abel, and sometimes 
 sinking back almost to the abyss where, as Browning says, 
 
 God unmakes but to remake the soul 
 He else made first in vain; 
 
 seldom failing, even in ruins to show, as Hamlet admiringly 
 puts it, "his naked spirit, how majestical," or to prove, by 
 negative vices as well as positive virtues, 
 
 That life is not as idle ore, 
 
 But iron dug from central gloom, 
 
 And heated hot with burning fears, 
 
 And dipt in baths of hissing tears, 
 And batter'd with the shocks of doom 
 
 To shape and use. 
 
 There are strange and endlessly advancing combinations here, 
 of deep action and reaction, of eternal and transitory, of 
 worldly and other-worldly, of divine and human; and in them 
 all, though universal law is establishing its domain, yet life 
 too, the life of the free and joyous spirit, is surely coming 
 step by step into the light. 
 
66 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 IV. THE BURDEN AND THE CRAVING 
 
 I can only indicate now in briefest summary, what the tone 
 and temper of life comes to be when man reaches the point 
 where he writes his laws on stone, and is, for good or ill, be- 
 yond that blessed immunity wherein, as St. Paul says, "sin 
 is not imputed where there is no law." I have named this the 
 burden and the craving. Perhaps we can put it best in the 
 songs that men sing; the musical outflow of a full and hopeful 
 heart. There is no lack of such songs; we derive our own 
 music still from the Hebrew Book of Psalms. In church the 
 other day I heard the choir's closing anthem, "I will sing of 
 mercy and judgment' 7 ; and these words sum it all up, in one 
 melodious utterance. The spirit of man, respond how it would 
 to the law of manhood being, felt the need when the best was 
 done of a forgiving mercy and gracious allowance; yet also 
 felt that the best it could do was worthy enough to welcome 
 the light of heaven upon it and abide the verdict, the verdict 
 pronounced by the eternal court of God. Under these two 
 ideas, mercy and judgment, we may sum up the spirit of man, 
 in this twilight period when the outcome of life was still dim, 
 as living and working. 
 
 Let us imagine what must have been the mood engendered, 
 the universal consciousness of things, when the growing sense 
 of law had become the sense of an empire of law, a kind of at- 
 mosphere enveloping the whole life and getting into the nerves 
 and blood, a something that must be endured and observed, a 
 something as natural as breathing. That is what the sense 
 of the Hebrew world progressively became, before the coming 
 of thrist. It has been called the night of legalism, during 
 which men became more and more iron-bound and imprisoned, 
 and less clearly cognizant of any outlet but final justice and 
 retribution. It must have been, on the whole, an austere and 
 tyrannous era. Not all could put it into words, but all could 
 feel more or less heavily the immense burden of it; and while 
 the more stolid spirits were mercifully spared the keen sense 
 
THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 67 
 
 of it, with the finer spirits, like Job, the feeling of the arbi- 
 trariness and essential iniquity of the world-order rose some- 
 times to an agony of indignation and remonstrance. When we 
 think how all-encompassing this atmosphere of law became, 
 we almost wonder that men could sing at all. I sum up this 
 felt dispensation in a word, as the spirit of man on the under 
 side of things. It is the same dispensation that Professor 
 Haeckel feels and blindly maintains in nature and material 
 life, thinking of law as an automatic and self-acting thing. It 
 amounts to the same, when, as with the Hebrews, the law is 
 sensed as an empire wherein the spirit of man is subject to 
 a Will imposed upon him from without, and only partially 
 though growingly understood. 
 
 Such a felt governance of things is certainly heroic treat- 
 ment, as befits a being whose naked spirit is so majestical. 
 Its effect in the large, according to his response to it, is one 
 of two things: it makes him either a slave or an athlete. 
 
 The sense of bondage, the feeling of being a slave, rises and 
 grows, just as the realization of law, of its largeness and per- 
 fectness and majesty, becomes more keen and ample. A simple 
 personal command, to begin with, which its first recipients 
 hardly took seriously, it grew and spread and covered the field 
 of life, it penetrated inward and upward, until it became a 
 thing unsearchable, unfathomable, impossible. If men had 
 seen at the beginning what it would lead to, would they ever 
 have committed themselves to it at all? Yet it was unes- 
 capable; the very spirit within them impelled them to it as 
 to a fate, giving such inner warning and counsel alike as was 
 given to the aspiring knights of Arthur: 
 
 For the King 
 
 Will bind thee by such vows as is a shame 
 A man should not be bound by, yet the which 
 No man can keep. 
 
 It is by such law as this, consented to all the while as holy 
 and just and good, that men get the knowledge of sin. They 
 develop, in fact, the strange consciousness that a man cannot 
 but sin; that he is a depraved being, totally depraved, his 
 
68 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 heart deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. You 
 remember that awful theological thesis which was the corner- 
 stone of the late Professor Shedd's system: "Sin a nature, and 
 that nature guilt." Well, the same savage theology, fiercer 
 even than Professor Shedd's, was maintained by the friends of 
 Job; who, you remember, took that afflicted patriarch, perfect 
 and upright as he was, and told him that he was being pun- 
 ished not merely because he had sinned to deserve it, but be- 
 cause, being a mortal, a man, he was so impure in the stand- 
 ard of heaven, so innately crooked and depraved, that his 
 utmost punishment was no more than he deserved, nay, was 
 really too good for him. A strange situation this, for man's 
 thoughts of his world to have reached. Yet they could not 
 easily get round the logic of it, if they explored their law of 
 being to its deeper spiritual involvements. It all rose, I think, 
 from the growing sense that their law was so high and holy, 
 and that at every step it had to encounter a law of sin in their 
 members warring against it. "It is high, I cannot attain unto 
 it," was the aspiring yet despairing song that they sang in the 
 night. And along with this sense arose also the feeling that if 
 ever they were to come out well at last they must have mercy 
 accorded them; must transfer their utmost efforts from the 
 sphere of strict justice to the sphere of forgiveness, allowance, 
 mercy. What they came short must be made up by grace 
 and compassion on the part of their Judge. You remember 
 that they dared, in the face of this iron law, to cherish the 
 ideal that came along with the law from Moses himself. "The 
 Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and 
 abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, 
 forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by 
 no means acquit." Note that last clause: the Lord will never 
 acquit a man, and say that he did not transgress when he did; 
 the integrity of the law, the truth of things, must be eternally 
 acknowledged; but He will forgive, will take the guilt as guilt, 
 and cover it up with mercy. A sublime discovery this, is it 
 not? the spirit of man rising so out of the darkness and slavery 
 of law, and attaining to such light on the divine life. The 
 
THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 69 
 
 light seemed to come from without, to be revealed; and we 
 cannot say it was not and that men only thought so; but we 
 can say there was light enough in the human spirit to meet it, 
 and put it into words, and trust in it as a support in their 
 empire of bondage and sacred slavery. 
 
 But this felt governance of law was also developing the 
 athlete: the man who felt he could obey it, and get it thor- 
 oughly into his blood and life, and live up to it. The man 
 perfect and upright, whose savage friends so misjudged him, 
 was strong, you remember, to maintain his integrity, to assert 
 it in the face of God, nay, even to call God to account in the 
 interest of the Godlike and compel Him to revise His law; 
 you remember too how Job's last word, before death ushered 
 him, or as he thought would usher him, before the dread judg- 
 ment seat, was that of lifting up the clean record of his life 
 on his shoulder, which he would bear before the throne like 
 a prince. What a picture of the life athlete this is! And there 
 must have been many holy souls who took up their burden 
 of law, not as men overworked and heavy-laden, but like the 
 strong man rejoicing to run a race. They were eager to com- 
 mit themselves to such heroic treatment of law for the good, 
 and the strength, and the growth, and the fibre of discipline, 
 that they saw in it. Read the one hundred and nineteenth 
 psalm, that unique panegyric of law, that joyful acceptance 
 of all its phases, if you want to understand the mind of the 
 spiritual athlete; it is a truer picture of the grand old regime, 
 I am sure, than the savage logic of the friends of Job. Think 
 too how lovingly and thoroughly the Hebrews extended the 
 application of their law; even beyond their scripture text 
 into the minute enactments of rabbinism and Pharisaism; 
 hungry, as it were, to make its sphere absolute, extending to 
 every smallest duty of life; until when our Lord came He 
 found it top-heavy and unwieldy with the traditions of the 
 elders. This may have engendered hypocrisy and all sorts of 
 external observance; but think what a vigor of loyalty and 
 obedience must have underlain; think too that such a regime 
 could produce a Saul of Tarsus, who even in the new freedom 
 
70 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 of his Christian consciousness could still be proud of having 
 walked in all the ordinances of the law, blameless. Yes: the 
 sense of law had also its tonic and joyful side; it was not all 
 bondage and slavery. 
 
 You will notice just here, too, that judgment in the Old 
 Testament is not a thing to cower before and dread, as if 
 man, conscious of having his fling now, or perhaps his stum- 
 blings and mistakes, were some day to catch it, as we say, and 
 take his punishment. Judgment was a thing that men longed 
 for, called for; as an athlete, who knows that he has played a 
 good game, wants the truth to appear, and calls out to the 
 umpire, "Judgment!" "Judge me, O Lord, for I have walked 
 in mine integrity," is the Psalmist's prayer. It could be of- 
 fered only by one who felt that on the whole he had done 
 well, had observed the law of his being; and was not only 
 willing to abide by the award, whatever it was, but eager to 
 know more accurately what is the high standard of things. 
 
 For always, with the athlete and the slave alike, there is 
 the sense that man is yet incomplete, that what he does and 
 sees is still only partial, immature, far behind the ideal ; hence 
 his craving for judgment, for the pronouncing of things as 
 they are; and that some such day of light will come, when 
 the worn and sinful slave of law shall have attained to what 
 men call salvation, which is only another name for health and 
 undiseased manhood; well, there is not wanting some glim- 
 mering of the idea that life will one day be more than work 
 and wages, more than mere judgment on what has been; 
 though in this twilight stratum the light is still dim, only a 
 faint streak above the eastern hills. It is like Tennyson's 
 outlook from his gruesome Vision of Sin: 
 
 At last I heard a voice upon the slope 
 Cry to the summit, "Is there any hope?" 
 To which an answer peal'd from that high land, 
 But in a tongue no man could understand; 
 And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn 
 God made Himself an awful rose of dawn. 
 
Ill 
 
 NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 
 
 WHAT GLEAMS OF NOBLER PROMISE APPEAR AS THE 
 SOUL APPROACHES ITS MAJORITY 
 
 I. THE END OF THE COSMIC TETHER 
 II. ON THE FRONTIER OF ADULT LIFE 
 III. THE SOUL OF PROPHECY 
 
Ill 
 
 NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 
 
 A DISCOVERY on which the late John Fiske prided 
 himself not a little, giving him, as it so far forth 
 did, original and not merely spokesman rights in 
 the goodly fellowship of the evolutionists, Spencer and Huxley 
 and Darwin, was the discovery of the relative length of the 
 period of infancy in man and the lower animals. It was Mr. 
 Fiske who set forth the important fact that animals have a 
 shorter and less helplessly dependent infancy in proportion as 
 they have a less complex life to evolve. Man, as compared 
 with the whole domain of animal life below him, has so much 
 more to learn, so much wider relations to adjust himself to, 
 and especially in exploring that new region of intellect and 
 reason which it is his special business to evolve, not only be- 
 gins life more helplessly but remains callow and immature 
 longer than any other living creature. He comes eventually 
 to more, but he has more, infinitely more, to come to. We 
 can then, to some extent, measure the worth and dignity of 
 his life, as compared with that of his fellow-animals, by the 
 amount of time he must take to get his vital powers in working 
 order and arrive at the fulness of them. It is his relative 
 greatness that makes the difference. 
 
 The analogy still holds good, or rather it is not an analogy 
 at all but continues a literal fact, when we enter that higher 
 stadium of life wherein the spirit is waking from its preex- 
 istent torpor and learning in a sort of crude, halting, embry- 
 onic way to react wisely on its world of manhood law. If it 
 takes twenty-one years for man in this existence to traverse 
 childhood and youth and come to his majority, how much 
 longer must it take proportionally for the human spirit to 
 
 73 
 
74 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 shape itself to the majestic model of the world to come, so 
 that when finally man enters upon his full heritage he may 
 enter as an adult, and as a prince to the manner born? Four 
 thousand years, according to Archbishop Usher's scripture 
 chronology, was the period of man's spiritual infancy, or per- 
 haps we ought even to say embryonic life; it took all those 
 millenniums of bondage and twilight before St. Paul could say, 
 "When the fulness of the time was come." Evidently, then, 
 that must have been a great thing for which such long growth 
 and maturing was needed; we do not half realize its greatness 
 yet. 
 
 I have chosen for purposes of our exposition to call this old 
 legal dispensation not a period or era but a stratum; and in 
 the deepest sense this is what it is. Instead of saying there 
 was a time, we may just as truly say there is a stratum of 
 manhood life, of your life and mine, from which there is no 
 outlook but dimness and bondage. But the Scripture puts this 
 before us as history, to which we can apply our historic 
 methods of study, and see its elements actually at work. There 
 was also a time, which from obscure beginnings swept up grad- 
 ually through increasing foregleams and clearness to the ful- 
 ness of the time. Just as we figure heaven as both a state 
 and a place, so this immortal manhood of ours is set before us 
 both as an inner spirit and as a development, an evolution, in 
 the care of the hours and the years; and what takes place in 
 one takes place in the other. By the careful study of the 
 time, then, we may get a growing idea of that essentially time- 
 less life within us. The years of the world are man's re- 
 source, his opportunity, his mercy. 
 
 Wait: my faith is large in Time, 
 And that which shapes it to some perfect end. 
 
 But what was the trend of this long time, this four thousand 
 year period, during which the great blind unwieldy world of 
 manhood was creeping upward to the goal of which finally it 
 could be said, Here is the culmination, the fulness? This is 
 the question that we are undertaking, as guided by Scripture, 
 
HEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 75 
 
 to answer. We have seen a little of its beginning; at which, 
 like a hapless child, man did not take the law of his being seri- 
 ously enough, and found as his first discovery that it was 
 woven with the nature of things and had power to hurt him. 
 We have seen him then taking the worldly tasks and achieve- 
 ments of it so seriously, and so with an eye to self-expression, 
 that he ignored the gentle claims of his brother, could not 
 consent to live and let live too. We see him then becoming 
 immersed in the affairs of this life, with its call for order and 
 adjustment and human institutions; immersed in them as if 
 they were all there is, and as if like the man with the muck- 
 rake he could look no way but downward. But all this while 
 there was his endowment of the spirit, and even the combina- 
 tions it made with worldly things were not animal alone, and 
 not merely intellectual, but blindly spiritual, and therefore 
 elemental. It penetrated inward, away from the mere demands 
 of the body and its world, inward and dimly upward, until it 
 stood on the frontier of the world to come, which also was the 
 frontier of its own adult life. Its approaching heaven was also 
 its approaching manhood, wherein all its powers could be sure 
 of themselves, and wise, and worthy of manhood responsibility. 
 The countless reactions of the human spirit, through the long 
 twilight, worked together toward this result, until at length 
 the fulness of the time was near, and the coming dawn was 
 brightening the eastern horizon. 
 
 It would be very charming, doubtless, to go on describing 
 all this in poetic imagery; and it has already been abundantly 
 reasoned out in systems of theology. What we want now, 
 however, while not abjuring all that we can get from these, are 
 the large and literal facts of the case. What was the reality 
 of things, as a growing evolutionary fact? I have tried to 
 make a beginning on our definition of the spirit, the active 
 power of it all; but as you are aware, I could get only a little 
 way, and I warned you as much. It still has an ocean of the 
 unknown behind it, and man has to find himself out, by slow 
 degrees, as he goes along. Meanwhile a curious old text in 
 Proverbs haunted me, and I looked it up in the concordance; 
 
76 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 here it is, it may serve to give our idea another clarifying ele- 
 ment. "The spirit of man," says this proverb, "is the candle 
 of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the body." Does 
 it not seem strange that the Bible, so jealous as it is for the 
 claims of the divine, did not turn this right round, saying that 
 the spirit of the Lord is the candle that searches the inward 
 parts. This latter is doubtless true, as we should find if we 
 went back far enough; but both things, it would seem, are 
 true, each in its place; for the human candle was lighted at 
 the sun. The proverb calls up in turn a remark of St. Paul's. 
 "For what man," says he, "knoweth the things of a man, save 
 the spirit of man which is in him?" This is what we are after: 
 the things of a man, the growing complex of things mounting 
 up to the summit of manhood. Is it not reassuring then to 
 know, and on scripture assertion, that this elemental spirit of 
 manhood, apart from an arbitrary or mystic revelation, is en- 
 dowed with a kind of radio-active light which is candle enough 
 to light our way, if we will give it fair and adequate heed? 
 
 Of the conscious interaction of this spirit of man with the 
 spirit of God, which latter we are thinking of in scientific 
 terms as the eternal evolution spirit, and which the Hebrews 
 suggestively name the spirit of Jehovah, Him who is, the time 
 will come to speak; we cannot take this up now. It is more 
 to our present purpose to note, that when St. Paul announces 
 the fulness of the time, the beginning of what he elsewhere 
 calls the dispensation of the fulness of times, he connects it 
 with the coming of One to whom was given the spirit without 
 measure. We simply note this fact also here; not concerned 
 at present with the question how much more He was than 
 man, how much too high for our manhood to compass. 
 Enough for us that in the same passage St. Paul takes special 
 pains to make Him out true man, "made of a woman, made 
 under the law," that is, an authentic product of the evolution 
 we are tracing. He is squarely and honestly in the line; that 
 is to say, transcendent as we all own Him to be, His appear- 
 ance on earth is not catastrophic but evolutionary, not an 
 unmotived irruption from without, but the culmination of 
 
NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 77 
 
 forces working within, such powers as are germinant in you 
 and me and may be traced by the little candle which our ele- 
 mental being already carries. This fulness of the time that 
 we are nearing, some call it the coming of the Son of man, 
 some call it the coming of the Son of God; both theological 
 ideas, hard to fathom. But of one thing we are assured, and 
 it is to be tested on the ground not merely of theological con- 
 ception but of scientific, evolutionary fact: that this fulness 
 of the time was the mark of rounded, matured, adult manhood. 
 If this has also elements of the supernatural, let us at least 
 deal honestly by them; the candle that is in us will, I hope, 
 enable us to see things as they are. 
 
 I. THE END OF THE COSMIC TETHER 
 
 Standing now on the upper edge of this twilight stratum of 
 life, where we can look back over the way we have traversed, 
 and forward toward what the manhood soul has come to desire 
 and anticipate, what is the scenery of things, what is the spirit 
 of man beginning to discern and demand? 
 
 Well, to begin with, I am reckless enough here to quote 
 again that naughty man, George Bernard Shaw, who I think 
 with all his posturing and wrong-headedness is really pounding 
 at a big idea. "We have seen," he says, "that as Man grows 
 through the ages, he finds himself bolder by the growth of his 
 spirit (if I may so name the unknown) and dares more and 
 more to love and trust instead of to fear and fight. But his 
 courage has other effects : he also raises himself from mere con- 
 sciousness to knowledge by daring more and more to face facts 
 and tell himself the truth. For in his infancy of helplessness 
 and terror he could not face the inexorable, and facts being of 
 all things the most inexorable, he masked all the threatening 
 ones as fast as he discovered them ; so that now every mask re- 
 quires a hero to tear it off. The king of terrors, Death, was 
 the Arch-Inexorable: Man could not bear the dread of that 
 thought. He must persuade himself that Death could be pro- 
 pitiated, circumvented, abolished. How he fixed the mask of 
 
78 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 immortality on the face of Death for this purpose we all know. 
 And he did the like with all disagreeables as long as they re- 
 mained inevitable. Otherwise he must have gone mad with 
 terror of the grim shapes around him, headed by the skeleton 
 with the scythe and hour-glass. The masks were his ideals, 
 as he called them; and what, he would ask, would life be 
 without ideals? Thus he became an idealist, and remained 
 so until he dared to begin pulling the masks off and looking 
 the spectres in the face dared, that is, to be more and more 
 a realist. But all men are not equally brave; and the greatest 
 terror prevailed whenever some realist bolder than the rest 
 laid hand on a mask which they did not yet dare to do with- 
 out." 
 
 Of all the scripture men who dared to pull the mask of con- 
 ventional ideal off from the face of facts, the boldest, the 
 most uncompromising, and accordingly the hardest to accept, 
 is the Hebrew sage who calls himself Koheleth, or Ecclesiastes. 
 His book stands just at the nodal point of the Old Dispensa- 
 tion, where the so-called night of legalism is darkest and most 
 prevailing, and where, influenced by the self-pleasing Greek 
 philosophy, men are beginning to dream of escape into the 
 sweet lubber-land of immortality. Being, if we except the 
 author of Job, the only real philosopher who has invaded the 
 Bible scheme of life, we look to him with keen interest to see 
 what kind of a fist a dyed-in-the-wool Hebrew will make at 
 philosophizing. But we find him not so much a philosopher 
 as a kind of pioneer scientist; he does not speculate at all, but 
 just searches the world for cold hard facts, not blinking the 
 bitter and disagreeable things, or trying to solve the insoluble. 
 His one hungry desire is to see things as they are; his su- 
 preme resolve not to cheat himself with glamours or specious 
 excuses. The voluble vaticinations of immortality around him, 
 and the flood of idle words "about it and about" irritate him; 
 for in the prevailing crookedness of things he is well aware 
 that there is not underlying fibre enough of character to make 
 a real backbone for such tremendous presage. So his self- 
 appointed business is to tear the masks off from the facts of 
 
NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 79 
 
 life, to be a realist; and if all is vanity, "weary, stale, flat, and 
 unprofitable," to own it without fancy or flinching. 
 
 Now if this is true, or in so far as it is true, the world can- 
 not afford not to know it and govern itself accordingly. And 
 indeed there are moods of men, and strains of contemplation, 
 wherein Koheleth's words come with all the force of iron con- 
 viction. Of course they do not set forth the only facts in the 
 world, but only the facts that nucleate round some one point 
 of view. We must ask of them therefore, On what principle 
 are they true, in accord with what presuppositions are they 
 true? And looking into Koheleth's book for his presuppo- 
 sitions, we find a great truth, namely, that he has reached to 
 the deadlock of life, where he perceives that the old scheme of 
 things is worn out, and the new not yet ready to appear. In 
 other words, from his point of view manhood has reached the 
 end of the cosmic tether; has gone as far in the resources of 
 life as this world and this world's ways will let him; has used 
 up his available vitality, so to say, in adjusting his soul to 
 this prevailing empire of law, and has none left over to col- 
 onize a new world and rise from height to height in a new 
 life. This is the deep ground of his strange indictment of 
 things; all his book flows out of this, and all its abysmal sad- 
 ness. 
 
 He begins with the world of nature and of man as man; 
 for in his ponderings his imagination has become enlarged 
 enough to overflow the Jewish nation and its parish affairs, 
 the Mosaic dispensation and its austere legalism, that magni- 
 fied law of the species in which the Hebrews have imprisoned 
 their sympathies. His consciousness has become cosmic; for 
 him the empire of law has become universal. And wherever 
 law works it exhibits the same traits. It is not a forward- 
 moving thing but a thing restraining and regulative; a rou- 
 tine, a treadmill, a huge wheel of being and fate, which, when 
 it has come round full circle, simply starts again, with nothing 
 new under the sun to show for its labored revolution. The 
 next generation is like this, just as tomorrow's sun runs the 
 same course as to-day's, just as the wind whirleth and con- 
 
8o THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 tinually, and the sea, never full, returns to its sources in the 
 mountains. And for all the world is so full of labor, yet it 
 all passes soon and is forgotten. Then there is death, at once 
 a spectre and a hard concrete fact, coming untimely to end it 
 all, for man and beast, wise and fool, alike. So this treadmill 
 is virtually a prison, with no apparent release to larger life, 
 but only the opening of the cell to the gallows and the grave. 
 In a word, here in this law-enslaved world Koheleth misses 
 the element of progress and uprise; its ongoings do not seem, 
 as we say, to be motived; the race of men labors but does 
 not clearly accomplish a work. There is a lack of wages, of 
 profit, of surplusage, to crown the life that man expends so 
 lavishly. He can get his fill, in money and luxury and fame; 
 but what is it all when he has got it? Reckoning up the net 
 proceeds of living, on this plane and scale, what is it all 
 worth, and where the profit? 
 
 Yet there it is, the inexorable fact: law, law, everywhere; 
 cause and effect, sowing and reaping, work and wages, the 
 wheel never still. You can imagine what this enlarged con- 
 sciousness of things must be, when it gets into the blood and 
 nerves of a soul big enough to realize it. It does not drive 
 him mad or pessimistic as it does so many, the Nietzsches and 
 the Schopenhauers and the Ibsens; for his heart is big, and as 
 he expresses it, he keeps his wisdom on top; he is concerned 
 all the while, if not to escape it, yet to bear it manfully and 
 make the best of it. This is his real attitude to things. He 
 will look facts in the face, flinching not before the last and 
 sternest fact of all; he will tell himself the truth; and then he 
 will adjust himself to it. Something good must come, we may 
 be sure, from such an attitude. 
 
 Yet when he turns from great nature and the wheel of being, 
 which, though a grinding routine, is at least uniform, equable, 
 calculable, and looks into the world of human affairs, a new 
 and puzzling element meets him. Something there is, as we 
 say, queering the game; turning the machinery askew, so that 
 it sometimes works in reverse order. "Lo, this only have I 
 found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought 
 
NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 81 
 
 out many inventions." Ah, we begin to see what this disturb- 
 ing element is: it is the spirit of man, acting on its own ac- 
 count, and capable of acting at cross purposes. If it cannot 
 escape the law of being, yet, being shrewd and cunning, it can 
 interpret, and accommodate, and in many ways evade. Hence 
 the oppressions that are wrought under the sun, and the deadly 
 competitions and rivalries; hence the cynical disregard of the 
 poor and helpless, and the crowding of the under man to the 
 wall; hence the cry of the laborer and the sneer of the capi- 
 talist; hence the hypocrisy and falseness that creep even into 
 the house of God. We all know how it is and has been. I 
 was reading the other day in Conan Doyle's story of Sir Nigel 
 how things were even in sacred precincts as late as 1348 years 
 after Christ. In a conversation between the Abbot of Wa- 
 verley and his sacristan, the inquiry is made why the young 
 Nigel has committed certain depredations. 
 
 "Because [says the sacristan] he hates the House of Waverley, holy father; 
 because he swears that we hold his father's land." 
 
 "In which there is surely some truth." 
 
 "But, holy father, we hold no more than the law has allowed." 
 
 "True, brother, and yet between ourselves, we may admit that the heavier 
 purse may weigh down the scales of Justice. . . . Well, well, the law is 
 the law, and if you can use it to hurt it is still lawful to do so. ... I will 
 teach him that the servants of Holy Church, even though we of the rule 
 of St. Bernard be the lowliest and humblest of her children, can still defend 
 their own against the f reward and the violent!" 
 
 This is a novelist's tale, perhaps you say, and printed in a 
 Sunday paper at that; let us not use it to prove actual facts. 
 Well, let us turn to the present, wherein supposedly the keen 
 brain of society is working to devise remedies and punishments 
 for the iniquities of men; to the present and to actual fact. 
 In a recent editorial on an unspeakable horror which has come 
 to light, I read: 
 
 There are times when punishments imposed by man-made laws must ever 
 seem grotesquely inadequate to secure exact justice to all who are concerned 
 in crime. Moral guilt and legal guilt often are not measured by the same 
 standards, and punishments get hopelessly astray. 
 
 All this, modern as it is, fits in to Koheleth's picture 
 of the puzzling welter of things on the old law standard; it 
 
82 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 is not of a day, but of all time. "God hath made man upright; 
 but they have sought out many inventions." The spirit of 
 man, reacting on its complex world, gets sadly tangled up with 
 the laws of things; defines them frowardly or crudely; so that 
 whether he is seeking selfish advantage or strict justice, he 
 makes a mess of it. It looks, does it not, as if the poet's words 
 had got to come to pass: 
 
 Ere she gain her Heavenly-best, a God must mingle with the game. 
 
 You remember how this same poet's Koheleth mood almost 
 got the better of him in his old age, as this same welter of 
 things took deeper possession of his imagination: 
 
 What is all of it worth? 
 
 What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy, varying voices of prayer? 
 All that is noblest, all that is basest, all that is filthy with all that is fair? 
 
 What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment's anger of bees in 
 their hive? 
 
 The fact is, and Job as well as Koheleth is beginning to dis- 
 cover it, a world in which there is only law and justice, 
 arbitrary Will and unchosen submission, work and wage, 
 barter and profit; a world in which, from the deeps of nature 
 to the heights of reason, there are only these for the majestic 
 spirit of man to react upon, is only half a world. There is a 
 whole hemisphere of being yet to enter, a hemisphere in which 
 alone, if anywhere, are the ultimate powers adequate to bring 
 these tangled laws into shape and order. No jot or tittle can 
 pass from law till all is fulfilled; but it must be fulfilled, 
 it must bear its fruit of righteousness and justice. And this 
 it is not doing, with only these elements available; the spirit 
 of man, that unconscionable marplot, has utterly queered the 
 game. And so far as that age can see, the end of the cosmic 
 tether is reached; there seems no room for anything beyond. 
 Is it any wonder that Koheleth sternly puts away the dream 
 of immortality, seeing as he does only these confused materials 
 to make an immortality out of? He will not tell himself a 
 lie; and his distinction, sad yet strong, is, that he will not look 
 
NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 83 
 
 at futurity through a hole or through idle speculations; he is 
 determined to work and wait. 
 
 All this, you will say, looks like anything but nearing the 
 fulness of the time. It looks rather, if such fulness is coming, 
 like the darkest hour before the dawn. This, indeed, is just 
 what it is; and is not this something? Is it not something for 
 the spirit of man so to have outgrown its environment, as to 
 feel that the potencies of the old order are exhausted? When 
 we reach the point where we can define our world, define it 
 and put the full stop to it, we already stand on the upper fron- 
 tier of it; it is below us, albeit played-out and dead; and we, 
 as Maeterlinck phrases it, have secured the foothold where- 
 from to take flight into life. This is something; this is a great 
 deal. The spirit of man has yet his true history to write; all 
 heretofore has been but a blind welter, as it were the auto- 
 matic and reflex motions of an embryo, and we cannot rightly 
 interpret their uses until we can see them working out the 
 rudiments of greater things. 
 
 For we are Ancients of the earth, 
 And in the morning of the times. 
 
 And even to this twilight stratum, in its darkest hour, the 
 morning is surely drawing near. 
 
 II. ON THE FRONTIER OF ADULT LIFE 
 
 Our thought of the end of the cosmic tether, a tether which 
 the spirit of man strains at and stretches but cannot break, 
 has revealed to us the negative side of the case; and by tearing 
 the mask off the facts of life has disclosed strange discordant 
 powers working there, working crudely, blindly, and sometimes 
 in inverse order. It remains now to look at the positive and 
 upbuilding side of things; to see what elements of solid worth 
 and insight the spirit of man has attained to, now that he has 
 traversed the dim childish tract of life, and stands on the 
 frontier of adult manhood. We can by this means get a clearer 
 notion of how truly he is nearing the fulness of the time. 
 
84 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 Mr. Shaw, in the passage I have quoted above, seems to 
 make great virtue of tearing off masks, and looking the facts of 
 the world in the face. He is drawing up a case of forewarned, 
 forearmed; is not that all we need: to see things as they are, 
 the bitter and gruesome things, the inexorable things; and to 
 adjust our spiritual reaction and attitude to them? Realism 
 that is the thing ; to his mind it is the business of the grow- 
 ing spirit to outgrow these fond or fearful idealistic dreams. 
 But have you noticed that the spirit of man cannot bear more 
 than a certain limited amount of pure realism? See how it 
 works in literature, which you know is the spirit of man put- 
 ting itself into words and figures. Notice, for one thing, how 
 sure realism is, in its report of life, to steer either for the dis- 
 agreeable and dirty facts, as in Zola, or for the commonplace 
 and humdrum facts, as in Howells and his school. Then for 
 another thing notice that realism lacks the tonic element; it 
 sees things as they are on its own plane, but it does not see 
 with hope and uplift; the thing that it detects behind the mask 
 is after all its own image, and the gospel it preaches is the 
 gospel of the fox that cut off its tail and wanted all other foxes 
 to experience the joy of taillessness. But for some reason 
 great Nature had given the fox a tail, a fine bushy member, 
 as it would seem, to make use of. A feeling like this comes by 
 a sure reaction betimes in literature; men get tired of unre- 
 lieved realism and take refuge in the wildest, most impossible 
 romance. All this is not an idle figure, it is human nature. 
 Men cannot bear the onesidedness of seeing things as they are; 
 their true desire is to see things as they ought to be. It is 
 in us to dream; all the sleeping half of our life, when the will 
 is quiescent and recruiting its powers, is spent in the mysteri- 
 ous land of dreams. Then add to this fact the strenuous He- 
 brew view: "We are saved by hope: but hope that is seen- 
 that is, realism is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth 
 he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then 
 do we with patience wait for it." In other words, it won't do, 
 it is not in man to outgrow idealism. Idealism has its prac- 
 tical work in life; our whole salvation, our buoyant health of 
 
NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 85 
 
 soul, is dependent on it, is bound up in hoping for that we see 
 not. "Where there is no vision," says the proverb, "the people 
 perish," or as I think the word more accurately means, they 
 are let loose and let down. And that is the certain result of 
 unrelieved realism. 
 
 An ideal has been dimly growing, and rounding feature by 
 feature into definiteness, all through this twilight period; like 
 the pattern wrought from the wrong side of some rich tapestry. 
 It is the ideal of free, unimpeded, undictated, self-directive 
 manhood. Men are getting the feeling that they have been 
 governed long enough from some remote and unseen capital 
 outside; they want home rule; they want the seat of govern- 
 ment in their own hearts. Even the poor work they make in 
 administering the laws of their being, nay even their impulse 
 to accommodate and pervert and evade these, but serves to 
 intensify this feeling. The ideal is knocking loudly at the 
 doors; it will take no denial. We may focus this ideal, per- 
 haps, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson: "He may be a 
 man, in short, acting on his own instincts, keeping in his own 
 shape that God made him in; and not a mere crank in the 
 social engine-house, welded on principles that he does not un- 
 derstand, and for purposes that he does not care for." If this 
 rightly expresses the deep consciousness to which the spirit 
 of man has grown, now that he is nearing the fulness of the 
 time, we can realize what a marvelous road of advance he has 
 traversed, since Moses, with his new-made law, took him at 
 the edge of the wilderness and said, "Ye shall not do after all 
 the things that we do here this day, every man whatsoever is 
 right in his own eyes." Yet this advance connotes no spirit 
 of rebellion or evasion; that is the ennobling feature of it. 
 He is getting ready now, at last, to do whatsoever is right in 
 his own eyes, because by a long and beneficent though stren- 
 uous education, he has come to identify this with what is right 
 in the eyes of God. It is by no means for nothing, or for a 
 small thing, that he has had his protracted schooling in the 
 ideal of duty what is due, to God, himself, and his world, 
 and of righteousness, Tightness, straightness, the square 
 
86 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 deal. He is ready now to take up that supreme ideal, holi- 
 ness, the whole man, acting out his adult, self-directive nature. 
 Here is where St. Paul's idea of the true function of law 
 comes in, what law is really for in the evolving order of things. 
 "The law," he says, "was our schoolmaster, to bring us to 'the 
 point where' we might be justified," that is, secure and em- 
 body justice, righteousness, manhood, "by faith." What faith 
 means, we shall discuss later. The word, pedagogue, her trans- 
 lated schoolmaster, does not mean a teacher, nor a master ex- 
 cept in limited sense; it was the word used to designate 
 a servant of the house, usually a slave, whose duty it was to 
 conduct the growing boy to and from the public school, so 
 that without molestation or truancy he might be in the way 
 of getting his real education in life elsewhere. You can see 
 then what the word connotes. It recognizes the fact that the 
 child is yet a child: immature, without fully-formed judgment 
 or trained impulse, still looking up and learning, still under 
 the law of enforced obedience to tutors and governors. The 
 law, St. Paul says, was our pedagogue, our childhood guardian. 
 And the man, though with all the potencies of manhood grow- 
 ing within him, is still a minor, not yet self-directive, not yet 
 treated as an adult, not yet ready to take the helm of life into 
 his own hands. He must be led, must submit to leading up to 
 the last moment, yet led in such a way that when the clock 
 strikes he may be trusted to take the helm and not wreck him- 
 self. When the time comes he must be ready; that sacred trust 
 of freedom, of fully developed personality, must find in him a 
 worth and a ripeness so ingrained that his life thenceforth 
 shall not be a wild anarchy, or a weak failure, or a base re- 
 version to dissipation and animalism. A great thing it is, this 
 educative stage, wherein he must follow his pedagogue and be 
 under tutors and governors. It is the stage in which, before 
 he is held fully responsible for mistakes and errors, while he 
 yet has the immunities and merciful allowances accorded to 
 a minor, he can train himself in the motions and habitudes of 
 manhood, the elements of freedom. The servant is to become 
 an heir and a son; and he who in his dealings with his eirH 
 
HEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 87 
 
 pire of law felt the sinews of strength is to become an athlete 
 and a victor. 
 
 Now as I have just said, this schoolmaster or pedagogue, in 
 St. Paul's view, was not a teacher, nor in the essential sense 
 a master. He was only a guardian, to lead to school, to pro- 
 tect and defend. We do not get our education then, it seems, 
 from law: this storing up of wisdom toward adult life comes 
 otherwise. What then is the source of our education? Again 
 we must have recourse to our constant term, which by this 
 time, you will think, is growing monotonous. It is the spirit 
 of man, reacting on his world of experience, and forming there- 
 from usages and ideals. The spirit of man we last con- 
 templated as a kind of marplot, invading the equable and 
 calculable reign of law and queering the game by all sorts of 
 inventions and perversions. But that reaction of the spirit 
 comes only when the law is felt as an alien element, only when 
 there is lack of or imperfect sympathy with it. And that is 
 one of the limitations of childhood and youth; even to the date 
 of his majority, to his twenty-first birthday, the young man 
 has wisdom yet to learn, so truly so indeed that until then the 
 laws of men do not fully trust him. And all this while the 
 spirit of man has other uses than to evade and accommodate 
 the terms of living; other and higher wisdom than to tear off 
 masks and look the sordid facts in the face. Youth is the fa- 
 vored time for ideals, the time for mounting and abounding 
 vigor to aspire forward and create new worlds. And after all 
 it is only a side-line, only a negative thing, that it should lay 
 out strength and wisdom at cross purposes with the order of 
 things. More truly, more fundamentally, the youth of man- 
 hood is laying out its strength, according to its growing wis- 
 dom, in manliness. It is coming to see the law of its being as 
 not iniquitous and bungling but as holy and just and good. It 
 is gradually working the law in, to the tissues of its being, into 
 bone and red blood and muscle, so that when the hour of ma- 
 jority comes this shall be no longer the expression of an alien 
 Will imposed from without, but what St. Paul calls the law of 
 the spirit of life. 
 
88 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 I cannot dwell on this idea longer here; though it opens up 
 many vistas of conduct and noble training and broadening 
 horizons of being. Another time will come to speak of the 
 spiritual athlete, training his muscles to sure and harmonious 
 action, and as he approaches adult manhood rejoicing as a 
 strong man to run a race. Here I will speak of only one 
 thing more. We sometimes see the disagreeable youth, the 
 loafer, who has learned to smoke and swear, and whose atti- 
 tude to all things fine and noble is bumptious, sneering, 
 cynical. But such a phenomenon of life impresses us as patho- 
 logical; it is not a health of manhood but a disease; its course 
 is downward, and if it survives from youth to age becomes 
 disgusting and melancholy indeed. To lose reverence for 
 things above us, to lose the capacity of wonder and worship, 
 is the great disaster of growing life. But you will have noticed 
 one thing that in the progress of this twilight period man did 
 seem to lose; and that was the sense of God's nearness. Enoch 
 walked with God, and he was not, for God took him; Abraham 
 talked with God at the door of his tent; Moses, the pioneer of 
 law, saw God as did no man after him, face to face. But 
 these things were one mark of infancy, when men had to cling 
 to the arm and word of God for everything they did. When 
 they got along far enough to see and explore their being's law, 
 the person of God began to become remote; He was progres- 
 sively thought of as a Being throned off somewhere out of 
 sight, and out of our active life. And in the place of this talk- 
 ing face to face there came a sense of distance which wrought 
 to develop a feeling of reverence; for God was no longer on 
 our childish level but high, infinitely high above us. You re- 
 member how Koheleth rebukes the chattering empty-headed 
 fools of his day, who brought their unseemly sacrifice of words 
 to the house of God: "God is in heaven and thou upon earth, 
 therefore let thy words be few." Is this then a reversion, an 
 evolution of the spirit of man backward and away from the 
 spirit of God? Not so. The spirit is by such process striking 
 in, becoming more deeply and wisely ingrained in life and man- 
 hood. Browning has a striking idea, that God's way with man 
 
NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 89 
 
 is to let him go, put him a little away from Himself, in order 
 that man may have the chance to try his powers and learn 
 what he is made of. It is a true idea; we see it working here 
 at the frontier of adult life, working in the very fact that the 
 consciousness of God has become pale and remote. For along 
 with it the consciousness of life and its claims is becoming 
 larger, nobler, more knit with the fibres of being. And though 
 his wisdom comes to discern that he is at the end of the cosmic 
 tether, yet the tether is not broken, nor can it be; his very 
 sense of greatness, and of readiness to emerge from the under 
 side of things but ministers a greater reverence; reverence 
 both for God and for the boundless potencies of manhood law. 
 So even in the sense that he must obey the law of life, the 
 Being from whom the decree ultimately came forth is really 
 nearer than ever, in his mouth and in his heart. 
 
 So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
 
 So near is God to man, 
 When Duty whispers low, "Thou must," 
 
 The youth replies "/ can" 
 
 I can; think how truly we are on the frontier of adult life 
 when we can look upward and forward and say, "I can." The 
 hour of our spiritual majority is all ready to strike. 
 
 III. THE SOUL OF PROPHECY 
 
 "I will sing of mercy and judgment." I wonder if we 
 realize how great the boon was to the striving, stumbling, 
 dim-eyed, wrong-headed humanity of the old dispensation, that 
 they could raise such a song; that in this rigid empire of law, 
 always exacting its stern tribute of righteousness, there was 
 let down, as it were, over the hearts of men the protecting 
 aegis of mercy, compassion, long-suffering, generous allowance. 
 Consider the case once more. Here was the creative Power 
 of the world manifesting His work and purpose; manifesting 
 it first of all in simple power; the same revelation which the 
 naturalists and scientists of to-day are so desperately trying 
 to trace, the same unity of design and interrelation which is 
 
90 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 sweeping upward to include in its purview everything that is, 
 the head and heart of creation, as well as its hands and its 
 hidden automatic energies. The idea of law is this Creative 
 Power's first and fundamental word; the rubric under which, 
 however our thoughts enlarge, we must realize the comprehen- 
 sive oneness of things. And yet, as soon as we get high enough 
 in the scale to traverse the conscious stratum of evolution, 
 where we can begin to cooperate in the design, we become 
 aware how inevitable is a certain crookedness in things, which 
 keeps back the law, the manhood law especially, from its free 
 and full course. We learn this by our own human experience, 
 the law in our members which, even when we would do good, 
 makes evil to be present with us; so that like Paul, when the 
 sense of it comes upon us unrelieved, we cry out, "O wretched 
 man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this 
 death?" This cry is not a fiction of Christian doctrine; it 
 is the cry of the human, as man finds the meaning of his na- 
 ture and situation in the world. And now consider how much 
 it means that he can sing of an order of things wherein is not 
 only a Power that works but a Heart that waits; waits for 
 better and truer things, and meanwhile has mercy, and makes 
 allowance. The consciousness of that is what keeps the old 
 Hebrew mind sane, enabling it to do its work manfully and 
 cheerfully, in spite of a broken law of being. 
 
 You may perhaps have noticed, ere this, that whenever I 
 have come in sight of what is called the problem of evil I have 
 merely glanced at it and gone on my way. That problem, you 
 know, has been the great puzzle of theology; to the untheolo- 
 gized world too, it has in like manner stood in the way as a 
 fated mystery, an insoluble enigma. Why man, the highest 
 product of evolution, should be capable of the lowest degrada- 
 tion, should have in him the ability, nay the tendency, to wreck 
 his manhood by sin, is as hard a nut for science to crack as 
 for theology. Must it remain, then, the impenetrable secret 
 of being, an eternal barrier to the uprise of the highest created 
 thing? I have not avoided it because I would evade it or 
 belittle it; I have kept it for the place in which we could bring 
 
N EARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 91 
 
 the most elements which make for solution to bear upon it. 
 Nor would I, even now, set my humble self up to clarify what 
 has so long puzzled the doctors; I wish merely to mention the 
 contribution which I think this stage of our study makes to 
 it. Sin, we note, is a discount and an evil which goes along 
 with an empire of law; it is an element of the twilight stratum 
 of manhood; in fact, it is by the law, as St. Paul tells us, that 
 the knowledge of sin comes, and sin is not imputed where 
 there is no law. Yet by the side of sin, in the foul midst of 
 sin, and emphasized even more than its presence, is always 
 brought to light this element of gracious allowance and forgive- 
 ness. "The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long- 
 suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy 
 for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin;" 
 this is the burden of the old revelation, insisted on at such 
 length and fulness, before the addition is made, "and that will 
 by no means acquit." He visits iniquity upon generations; 
 He keeps mercy for ever. The sin is regarded from the unseen 
 places as a temporary thing; because, somehow, imbedded in 
 the nature of manhood, there is a healing element, a beneficent 
 waiting and growing power, which sometime will make the 
 sin as if it were not. We see some suggestion of this in the 
 way Nature covers up crumbling ruins with her green vegeta- 
 tion, and makes fertile grain fields out of the places where, in 
 battle, multitudes of men killed each other. But this is only 
 a partial suggestion; for the ruins do not cease to be ruins, nor 
 do the butchered dead come to life, unless it be to a lower 
 form of life. For the true significance of it we must go to a 
 higher level of being; to the plane where the evolved creature 
 comes in sight of his living Source. And there we find this 
 truth: that in all this matter of sin man is persistently and 
 consistently treated as if he were not yet fully evolved, as if 
 he were still a child, with a child's unbridled impulses and un- 
 ripe judgment, as if he were in a cavern, stumbling along in 
 dimness of light, as if he were a minor, not yet ready for his 
 heritage of free personality. It is no great feeder to our pride, 
 but it is a mercy, that under this legal dispensation we are put 
 
92 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 in the class with imbeciles and lunatics and social wrecks; it 
 is a gracious way of holding us less accountable, and of sus- 
 pending judgment. So the onward way is still left open: it 
 is not contemplated that the ruins should continue ruins, or 
 that the dead should be beyond resurrection. Yet all this does 
 not acquit the transgressor, or blink the sinfulness of sin. It 
 is a way of concluding all under sin, that the gracious power 
 of the world might have mercy upon all. And this it does by 
 the sublimely simple way of treating men not merely as wrecks 
 and ruins, needing a painful process of repair and patching up 
 in kind, but as children, as immature, going through a period 
 of growth and schooling and evolution, and saved for better 
 things by the hope that still throbs through the tissues of his 
 immaturity. In other words, this mercy inlaid in creation is 
 essentially a prophecy of things to come, and a waiting for it. 
 Consider at what a deadlock the soul of man would be if it 
 were not for this protecting aegis of mercy, this perennial 
 prophecy of a fuller and more adult manhood, to supplement 
 what the law can give. Think first of the scientific conscious- 
 ness it would engender; we can see this by looking at the con- 
 sciousness actually engendered in the sad middle years of the 
 nineteenth century, when agnosticism and materialism spread 
 like a pall over everything. You recall that sombre interview 
 with George Eliot, the priestess of the new science, which the 
 late Frederic Myers has left on record. "I remember," he 
 says, "how I walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden of 
 Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred some- 
 what beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words 
 which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls 
 of men, the words God, Immortality, Duty, pronounced, 
 with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how 
 unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute 
 the third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the 
 sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing law. I listened, 
 and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned toward 
 me like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew 
 from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and 
 
NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 93 
 
 left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates. And 
 when we stood at length and parted, amid that columnar 
 circuit of the forest-trees, beneath the last twilight of starless 
 skies, I seemed to be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on va- 
 cant seats and empty halls, on a sanctuary with no Presence 
 to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God." Infinitely sad 
 this, sadder even than Koheleth or Omar; when man gets into 
 his inner spirit and life the sense of his prison and treadmill 
 existence. Can we stop his progress at this deadlock; and if 
 not, what more is needed, what food for prophecy and hope? 
 Clearly, we must not stop here. 
 
 Or take it again when man rises up against his doom, and 
 rebelling against that which is, tries to bring about that which 
 he deems ought to be. It is the impulse, you know, of that 
 surging spirit in man to sit in judgment on the order of things 
 with which he is surrounded and call for a better plan; as 
 Omar Khayyam puts it: 
 
 Ah Love ! could you and I with Him conspire 
 To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, 
 
 Would not we shatter it to bits and then 
 Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire! 
 
 Well, about this too there is the same note of unfinality, nay 
 of sheer childishness and callow wrong-headedness, as if men 
 had to make all their reforms by rule of thumb, and not only 
 run the risk but inevitably incur the discount of evil on one 
 side or the other, excesses and vagaries, false starts and an 
 impulse generally unbalanced. You remember how it was with 
 the French Revolution, before men got their noble plea of 
 liberty, equality, and fraternity naturalized in the heart of 
 society; why, they are working at it yet. The Russian nation 
 seems to be bungling its job of revolution in much the same 
 way; full of un tempered hopes and blind desires, like so many 
 children. It was only the other day that Count Witte said 
 this of them: "The only people who acted in their own in- 
 terests were the revolutionists. They knew what they wanted. 
 They chose the most effective means to attain it, and they are 
 capable of adopting these means even at the price of heavy 
 
94 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 sacrifices. The revolutionists hide all their quarrels and ani- 
 mosities and act together for the end they have in view, which 
 spells destruction. Out of the resultant chaos they promise 
 a new world and an earthly paradise." Is not all this like the 
 untempered judgment of an untrained child, or an unripe 
 youth, not yet fit to enter on his heritage of freedom? And 
 if we would prophesy, have we the basis for believing that some 
 time the spirit of man shall work in the sanity of perfect bal- 
 ance and adultness, master of himself and his destiny? It is 
 a grave question, is it not, at this age of the world? 
 
 Or take once more that highest product of the reaction of 
 the manhood spirit on his world of law: the man who will not 
 be a slave but an athlete, accepting his conditions in all their 
 burdensomeness, and standing up courageous and cheerful, 
 saying "I can." We honor such character; it is what we would 
 all be. But here again we note the unfinality, the need of a 
 supplementing and compensating prophecy. "The moralist," 
 says Professor James, "must hold his breath and keep his 
 muscles tense; and so long as this athletic attitude is possible 
 all goes well morality suffices. But the athletic attitude 
 tends ever to break down, and it inevitably does break down 
 even in the most stalwart, when the organism begins to decay, 
 or when morbid fears invade the mind. To suggest personal 
 will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of ir- 
 remediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of 
 things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very power- 
 lessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and 
 secures him, all decaying and failing as he is. Well, we are 
 all such helpless failures in the last resort. The sanest and 
 best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, 
 and death finally runs the robustest of us down. And when- 
 ever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity and provisionality 
 of our voluntary career comes over us that all our morality 
 appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and 
 all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well- 
 being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas, are not." 
 
 It is precisely on this athletic plane that the Old Testament 
 
NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 95 
 
 meets us with its revelation of mercy, the mercy of treating 
 man as incomplete, immature, waiting for larger things. Its 
 generous field of allowance is broad enough to cover also, with 
 the rest, the athletic break-down, on the ground that it is the 
 break-down, the limitation, of youth and upward-mounting 
 strength. You remember that sublime culmination of the 
 fortieth of Isaiah, where the prophet is taxing language and 
 imagery to describe a living God who "fainteth not neither is 
 weary," and who because He can wait will have His people 
 wait and hope with Him: "Even the youths," he says, "shall 
 faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but 
 they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they 
 shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not 
 be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint." 
 
 We are getting in sight now of what prophecy is for, what in 
 the large essential sense it means. Prophecy is the soul of the 
 Old Testament, making it, as no other book in the world is, 
 the book of the future. I am reverting here to the older and 
 simpler idea of prophecy, the idea that comes unforced into 
 the mind of any unlettered man. Bible students and critics 
 are at great pains nowadays, you know, to get an idea of 
 prophecy which will leave room for a possible falsification of 
 specific prediction: they say that it does not mean foretelling 
 but fortelling, as of an advocate speaking for God, or forth- 
 telling, as of a herald announcing and emphasizing a message. 
 All this is true enough, except the negative; prophecy does in- 
 clude these things. But primarily I take it to mean straight 
 foretelling; it is concerned, in the large, with predicting what 
 the spirit of man shall come to when he has survived his grop- 
 ing callow youthful period and enters upon his full heritage 
 of life; it is the glowing vision of the poet, who 
 
 sings of what the world will be 
 When the years have died away; 
 
 but it strikes hands also with the view of the evolutionist, who 
 must needs see his great river of created life going on ever to 
 more life and fuller. This, I say, is the very soul of the Old 
 
96 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 Testament; its soul, just as the rigid empire of law is its body. 
 Justice, righteousness, obligation to rule, are in the nature of 
 things as its bony structure, its brawn and sinew, its hands 
 and brain; but mercy and grace, the wise allowance that waits 
 for childhood to be traversed and strength to come, is the inner 
 reserve of spirit informing and vitalizing that same nature of 
 things. Without this, creation would be but half made, and 
 would not be evolution at all. The law of being would be 
 there, but it would harden into machinery and routine, always 
 grinding out, from generation to generation, the same dull grist. 
 You see how it developed in the Hebrew nation, when after 
 Malachi it suffered an eclipse of prophecy and entered upon 
 its night of legalism. Its Mosaic regime developed an elaborate 
 ceremonialism and ecclesiasticism, and after a little its priest- 
 hood fell into the hands of Sadducees, who were political aris- 
 tocrats and skeptics, and not spiritually-minded at all; and so 
 the order of things settled down to live life by frame-work and 
 rule. You can think what would follow such a state of things. 
 A certain public lecturer of whom I once heard, who had to 
 repeat his carefully prepared lecture several times a week 
 during a whole season, remarked that he got so used to his 
 task that he could just set his face going and go off and leave 
 it. Something like this is the besetting danger of ceremonial- 
 ism and ritual. Dealing with something changeless, estab- 
 lished, eternally divine, it tends to put this into the automatic 
 part of our being, and having set it going, to go off (spiritu- 
 ally) and leave it. This is no argument, of course, against 
 form and ceremony, but rather against the indifference to its 
 vital core and essence. And the corrective to this tendency 
 in the Hebrew nation was prophecy; the essence of which, 
 speaking of Carlyle, Principal Shairp thus describes: "In this 
 he was akin to all the prophets, one of their brotherhood, - 
 that he maintained the spiritual and dynamic forces in man 
 as against the mechanical." Thus it was that through a long 
 period prophecy wrought among the Hebrews as the comple- 
 ment and corrective of their ceremonial Mosaism, to keep life 
 and religion genuine. It was the soul of their Dispensation; 
 
NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 97 
 
 inspiring them onward to a nobler future, and keeping vital 
 the claims of growth and spiritual progress. 
 
 A question much debated nowadays is, why, instead of send- 
 ing missionaries and interfering with the religious affairs of 
 other nations and races, we should not be content to let them 
 remain as they are : giving the Chinaman his Confucius, and 
 the Buddhist his legend of Gautama, and the Persian his ven- 
 erable Zoroastrianism, and the Mohammedan his Koran, and 
 bidding them work out their own salvation in their own ethni- 
 cal and temperamental way. Do not all these books inculcate 
 lofty morality, and lay down strict rules of worship; are not 
 all of them books of life, as their devotees have come to see 
 life, and are they not adapted to race and climate and sphere 
 of ideas? Well, I waive here the practical test which we 
 might well make, "By their fruits ye shall know them;" I 
 need not open the question which so naturally answers itself, 
 what kind of men, what kind of ideals, what kind of society, 
 what stripe of civilization, these so-called sacred books make. 
 It is a deeper test that meets us here. The thing that differ- 
 entiates our Bible from all these others and in this I in- 
 clude the Old Testament no whit less than the New is the 
 fact that it is preeminently, uniquely, the Book of the Future. 
 Some superintending Power and Wisdom has drawn its lines 
 so accurately and truly that it follows the onward-flowing 
 current of manhood evolution; it deepens and broadens 
 steadily forward toward more life and fuller, toward the time 
 and summit where the spirit of man shall be master of his 
 life and his fate, toward the Life Indeed. In this sense it is, 
 precisely in this sense of victorious evolution, that the Bible, 
 from beginning to end, is of prophecy all compact. By the 
 side of it we place these other books, and they seem to have 
 been arrested in their course, to be off somewhere in the eddies 
 of being, puddling and regurgitating; not in the majestic on- 
 ward-sweeping main current. Look into them, and you will 
 see them taken up with ceremonies, and repetitions of vain 
 words, and dull lists of rules, with here and there, as it were 
 fortuitously, a glimpse of something beautiful and sublime 
 
98 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 But there is a sad lack of central principle and motive; their 
 righteousness is not adequately rooted in life and character; 
 and they radiate not light and inner truth but heat and 
 fanaticism and bigotry. They are not in the current of the 
 future, the river of evolving life, but only in the eddies and 
 standing ponds, where they gather foam and dirt and slimy 
 scum. 
 
 Yet these books have more to say about the Hereafter, 
 about immortality and the mode of it, or it may be the nega- 
 tion of it, than has our Bible. They have created the picture 
 of an existence beyond according to their own image: prom- 
 ising to the Mohammedan a sensual and sensuous paradise, 
 to the Egyptian a rigid Rhadamanthine justice, to the Hindoo, 
 with his contempt of the body, a dreamy Nirvana, which is 
 just the negation of all energy, an apotheosis of mental and 
 moral inaction. And all this while the old Hebrew Bible has 
 gone on, developing and systematizing its code of law, accept- 
 ing its rigid conditions, toning up life always by singing of 
 mercy and judgment, rejoicing in a protecting God, and calling 
 for the divine verdict on its own well-doing; yet never formu- 
 lating its idea of immortality, or getting it into definite enough 
 shape to make it a motive of conduct. The whole old Dis- 
 pensation answers fitly to that idea of Koheleth's: of a crea- 
 tion with the vitalizing power of eternity in its heart, yet not 
 yet with the clear sight of the beginning or the end of things. 
 It is consciously in an onward-moving current of being; and 
 instead of concerning itself with the ocean to which it tends, 
 it is mainly concerned with keeping the law-imbued current of 
 life strong and just and pure. 
 
 Here, surely, is a remarkable thing to note. What is 
 prophecy for, we naturally ask, but to find out the future? 
 What has man's impulse always been, but to peer into the 
 beyond, to find something there by which to govern and di- 
 rect his behavior here? Think of the clumsy, floundering, 
 blind-eyed means that men have taken to ascertain the will 
 of the gods: magic, necromancy, astrology, the entrails of 
 beasts, the flight of birds; think of the wizards and mediums 
 
NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 99 
 
 and augurs and Delphic priestesses that have been interro- 
 gated, in the desperate endeavor to get some light on the fu- 
 ture, some direction great or small, for the guidance of life. 
 A sad revelation, is it not, of a universal atmosphere, in all 
 the ancient nations, of dimness and doubt. But in all this 
 you will note one invariable thing: the future direction that 
 they seek is the direction of the man that now is, seeking his 
 own sordid and earthly ends; and the life sought beyond is 
 a projection and extension of this same plane of being on which 
 they are now content to live, and would live indefinitely if the 
 fate of untimely death were not so sure to overtake them. It 
 is through fear of death that they are all their lifetime sub- 
 ject to bondage. The trouble is, they haven't the use of what 
 we have called our biometer; have not the true and growing 
 light on life itself. The life that is, is just as much in the dark 
 as the life that is to be: and they have lost both the thirst for 
 it and the standard of measurement. The Hebrews too, you 
 will say, had their priestly oracle, their Urim and Thummim; 
 a German professor, Professor Siegfried, has even carried his 
 lack of the larger sense so far as to reduce their law itself, 
 their Torah, primarily to decision by oracle, as if their guid- 
 ance of life footed back to much the same sort of inquiry that 
 the heathen made when they noted the entrails of beasts. But 
 from one thing, you will note, the Hebrew ideal was providen- 
 tially saved; and it is a wonder too, when we compare with 
 them all the nations round them. They would have nothing 
 to do with necromancy and familiar spirits and wizards that 
 peep and mutter. From the swamps of the occult and 
 mediumship they were mercifully preserved. It would seem 
 as if their conscious walk in the presence and guidance of 
 Jehovah made it impossible so to reduce the dignity of life: 
 their ordinary living, shot through and through as it was with 
 religious service, created for them a plane of larger being from 
 which they could look down on these dusky black arts with 
 disgust and disdain. Yet all this time the eternity in their 
 heart was a living prophecy; it kept the power of the future 
 vital. And the future to which they were bound was ulti- 
 
ioo THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 mately a future life, with all the coordinations and furnishings 
 of life in full working order. They were by no means indif- 
 ferent to the beyond, though their Book says so little about 
 it. You remember how the author of the Epistle to the He- 
 brews characterizes those Old Testament worthies and their 
 manly yet always unsatisfied fight for life. "They that say 
 such things declare plainly that they seek a country, a home. 
 And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from 
 whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to 
 have returned. But now they desire a better country, that is, 
 an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their 
 God; for he hath prepared for them a city." That was the 
 deep and central tone of the Old Testament heart, as it was 
 struggling and aspiring forward toward the fulness of the time. 
 The whole power of immortality was there, vitally at work, in 
 a deathless energy of endeavor and faith. 
 
 But still working in dimness and twilight. Why was this, 
 we ask; why was not the Holy City revealed at once? The 
 answer to this question brings us face to face with the soul 
 of prophecy. Something else must be revealed, an indispen- 
 sable condition and basis, before the city came in sight, before 
 the spirit of man could find or even see its true home. And 
 so you will have noted that the body of Old Testament proph- 
 ecy centres not in a coming bliss or a coming existence be- 
 yond death, but in a coming Man. It is Messianic; it is 
 looking first for a King of life, an embodiment of full man- 
 hood, a Personality from which shall ray forth all the truth of 
 life, in guidance and mercy and judgment. "Behold," says 
 Isaiah, "a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall 
 rule in judgment. And a man shall be as an hiding-place from 
 the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water 
 in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." 
 Nor is this refuge and comfort all that is prophesied. The 
 great thing about it is that when the king comes men shall 
 see things as they are; shall see through good and evil, and 
 false and true; shall give things their right names, and know 
 when a man is good and when he is wicked, when large and 
 

 N EARING THE FULNESS Ol> TH.E TIME 101 
 
 generous and when only small and churlish. In other words, 
 with the coming of the Man will come also the true light of 
 life. "And the eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and 
 the ears of them that hear shall hearken; the heart of t!he 
 rash also shall understand knowledge, and the tongue of the 
 stammerers shall be ready to speak plainly. The vile person 
 shall no more be called liberal, nor the churl said to be bounti- 
 ful. For the vile person will speak villainy, and his heart will 
 work iniquity, to practise hypocrisy, and to utter error against 
 the Lord, to make empty the soul of the hungry, and he will 
 cause the drink of the thirsty to fail. The instruments also 
 of the churl are evil: he deviseth wicked devices to destroy 
 the poor with lying words, even when the needy speaketh right. 
 But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things 
 shall he stand." Is not this the real light that is needed, the 
 real illumination of prophecy? What would a city be without 
 it; how could men set up a livable existence beyond the grave 
 without being first able to see things as they are, and enter 
 upon the fulness of life as it is? Now you see how divinely 
 wise a thing it was, that the Old Testament did not begin its 
 prophecy with immortality. Before we can have an immor- 
 tality worthy of the name we must first have a manhood 
 worthy of the thing, a manhood wise and true and merciful 
 and strong. And this Messianic object is the soul of prophecy. 
 I cannot stay now to trace, much as the subject invites it, 
 how this idea of a coming Man was gradually freed from 
 littleness and limitation; how it was enlarged and enriched 
 and made glorious, how it became an idea in which not the 
 Jews only but all nations should rejoice and be saved, flocking 
 to Jerusalem like doves to their windows, and eager to bow 
 to the sway of the coming King. The prophecy, like all 
 prophecies, is sometimes foreshortened; and men's present 
 ideals cling to it; the King's universal reign over mankind is 
 not without the thought of conquest, in which he will shatter 
 the wicked in pieces like a potter's vessel. We know now how 
 such prophecy was destined to come out; and how the wicked 
 were to be shattered by ceasing to be wicked, and how nations 
 
102 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 were to bow because it was seen as their own blessedness and 
 emancipation so to do. All this we can leave the fulness of 
 the time to work out: we have meanwhile the figure of the 
 coming Man, in whom manhood should have free and full 
 course, and be fitted at last for the goal, the Holy City and 
 the commonwealth beyond. 
 
 But the idea led on to the depths of being too; and it is 
 no wonder if here the glowing heart of the prophet should 
 pause and study. The coming Man, the Servant of Jehovah, 
 must also suffer; his way could not be all bliss and self-indul- 
 gence. Here is a marvelous revelation of the spirit of man 
 dreaming on things to come. You remember how St. Peter 
 looked back on that prophetic time of the Old Dispensation, 
 and saw the prophets at work and their body of prophecy as 
 it were in the making. It is on the sufferings of their coming 
 Man that he sees them studying, that hardest thing to receive; 
 yet the spirit of Christ which was in them seemed to demand 
 it, and they had no thought of denial but only of how to fit 
 sacrifice and humiliation into the times and of the order of 
 things. "Of which salvation," he says, "the prophets have 
 inquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace 
 that should come unto you: searching what, or what manner 
 of time the spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, 
 when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the 
 glory that should follow." 
 
 So it was: the soul of prophecy is confronting a great abyss 
 and ocean of manhood life; and it studies it eagerly and de- 
 voutly, as it finds itself borne onward toward the fulness of 
 the time. The spirit of man, in that twilight period, has not 
 merely risen up against its doom, nor has it set itself idly to 
 forecast its future; it is concerned to bring into order and har- 
 mony all the deeps of being that the growing light has revealed, 
 all of which manhood is capable, its joys, its honors, its suf- 
 ferings alike, as elements in the way to its ultimate glory. 
 
IV 
 
 THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 
 
 WHAT VITAL ELEMENTS INHERE IN THE ADULT LIFE 
 THAT MANHOOD IS APPROACHING 
 
 I. THE SECOND BIRTH 
 II. THE OUTWARD CURRENT 
 III. THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN 
 
IV 
 
 THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 
 
 IT MAKES all the difference in the world, in our estimate 
 of the Life Indeed, whether we are at a point where we 
 can look back and down upon it, as from a more elevated 
 and sunlit region, or are still plodding forward and upward 
 toward it, as it were through dim defiles and over tortuous 
 and flinty trails, where we come only here and there upon 
 fleeting glimpses of the outlook, as it were by lights broken 
 and withdrawn. Or to put it in the figure we have been using, 
 it makes all the difference whether we see life by daylight or 
 in the uncertain gloaming. The world's realization of life must 
 needs come in this way: first the twilight, then the dawn; first 
 the natural, as St. Paul says, after that the spiritual. We have 
 seen the struggling spirit of man reacting dimly on his world 
 of environment, consciously incomplete and faulty, shaping 
 ideals of mercy and judgment in view of what was yet to be, 
 ideals which gradually rounded into a prophecy of a coming 
 manhood, in whose fulness of life men could see things as they 
 are. We are ready to take up the consideration of this now, 
 as our next historical step forward; but first let us take a 
 breathing-spell to look round us a little and see where we have 
 been and what the daybreak reveals. You remember how 
 simply Bunyan describes this outlook and breathing-spell, in 
 the journey of his Pilgrim; it came after the Pilgrim had been 
 alone all night in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and just 
 as he began to be cheered by the voice of one going on before. 
 
 So he went on and called to him that was before; but he knew not what 
 to answer, for that he also thought himself to be alone. And by and by the 
 day broke. Then said Christian: "He hath turned the shadow of death into 
 the morning." 
 
 Now morning being come, he looked back, not out of desire to return, 
 
 105 
 
io6 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 but to see, by the light of the day, what hazards he had gone through in the 
 dark. So he saw more perfectly the ditch that was on the one hand, and 
 the quag that was on the other; also how narrow the way was which led 
 betwixt them both; also now he saw the hobgoblins and satyrs and dragons 
 of the pit, but all afar off, for after break of day they came not nigh. 
 Yet they were discovered to him according to that which is written, "He 
 discovereth deep things out of darkness, and bringeth out to light the 
 shadow of death." 
 
 Now was Christian much affected with his deliverance from all the dangers 
 of his solitary way, which dangers, though he feared them more before, yet 
 he saw them more clearly now, because the light of the day made them 
 conspicuous to him. And about this time the sun was rising, and this was 
 another mercy to Christian; for you must note that though the first part 
 of the Valley of the Shadow of Death was dangerous, yet this second part, 
 which he was yet to go, was, if possible, far more dangerous; for from the 
 place where he now stood, even to the end of the valley, the way was all 
 along set so full of snares, traps, gins, and nets here, and so full of pits, 
 pitfalls, deep holes, and shelvings down there, that, had it now been dark, 
 as it was when he came the first part of the way, had he had a thousand 
 souls, they had in reason been cast away. But, as I said, just now the sun 
 was rising. Then said he: "His candle shineth on my head, and by his light 
 I go through darkness." 
 
 To name the thing that we are to consider in this breathing- 
 spell of ours, I have chosen a phrase of St. Paul's, "The law of 
 the spirit of life"; we want to know, now that we approach the 
 adult life so long prophesied, what vital elements inhere in it. 
 These have been there working in the dimness, all the while, 
 struggling toward the dawn, putting forth blind and doubtful 
 energies; like Milton's lion in the creation, pawing to get free 
 their hinder parts. As with Bunyan's Pilgrim, the way 
 hitherto has been shadowed by death; but we are coming in 
 sight of a Man, say rather of a manhood, whose mission and 
 function it is to "deliver them who through fear of death were 
 all their lifetime subject to bondage." In other words, we 
 stand now on the threshold of the solution stage of life, in 
 which, as prophesied, we can see and discount things as they 
 are; and the first thing we find here is, that as the growing 
 spirit of man "dares more and more to love and trust instead 
 of to fear and fight," the uncouth objects of fear, like Bunyan's 
 hobgoblins, slink away into their native gloom, themselves 
 afraid of daylight. "The law of the spirit of life," as St. Paul 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 107 
 
 says, ". . . hath made me free from the law of sin and 
 death." 
 
 I think that when the apostle penned that pregnant phrase 
 he was well aware of the latent contradiction of terms that was 
 in it, and that he took this way of asserting its final reconcile- 
 ment. The spirit of life, being spirit, connotes perfect free- 
 dom of will, freedom from what has bound and impeded, free- 
 dom to do as we please. Nay, he says it is the thing that makes 
 free from the old law that has fettered and terrified us. The 
 vision of freedom, liberty, is what nerves and inspires pro- 
 gressive peoples and revolutionists; yet in its cosmic sense 1 
 freedom is one of the three things, the others being God and im- 
 mortality, which to men like Professor Haeckel are absolutely 
 inconceivable. I need not remind you further of the libraries 
 that have been written on the question whether the spirit of 
 man is free, or whether in reality he is only a kind of automa- 
 ton, worked by fated laws of bent and heredity, and having a 
 false sense of freedom. With the involvements of this problem, 
 its physics and metaphysics, men have become so tangled and 
 baffled, that it has come to be taken for granted as one of the 
 insoluble things. Perhaps it is temerity to touch upon it here; 
 but St. Paul's bold phrase helps us see, I think, where to place 
 it. The whole problem belongs to the impedimenta of the 
 lower and twilight stratum, to that level of life whereon, as a 
 slave and prisoner, man obeys one law with the beasts and 
 lies down in the same grave. We have seen how little this 
 animal or even intellectual stratum yielded for immortality; 
 it yields just as little for real freedom. It is no wonder Pro- 
 fessor Haeckel denies freedom to the human; his scheme of 
 life cannot see above the eyes and the finer brute. But let 
 the soul of man once reach the higher level, where the instinct 
 of his being is the spirit of life, and the bafflement disappears, 
 the problem is no longer a problem. Freedom, the manhood 
 will emancipated from bondage and fetters, becomes the ac- 
 tual, luminous, boundless fact. Yet just at this point 
 and emphasizing it, St. Paul's paradox and contradiction 
 of terms comes in. That spirit of life, ideally free as it is, is 
 
io8 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 still the law of the spirit of life; Scripture applies to it also 
 another paradoxical phrase, the law of liberty. It is not ca- 
 price, not licence, not anarchy; being still law it is inflexibly 
 loyal to order and the fruitful calculable ongoings of the uni- 
 verse; still a higher law even when it boldly ventures on what 
 has been called the higher lawlessness. What was before sub- 
 servient to routine and the behest of an alien will, is 
 now wedded to the chosen wisdom of life. So we have not 
 risen out of the cosmic empire of law; rather the law of our 
 being is honored and fulfilled now as it never was before, and 
 the weights and sins which so easily beset us are laid aside 
 for wings and the eager strength to run a race and win. 
 
 This is hard to understand perhaps, just as the reconcile- 
 ment of any two mutually exclusive ideas into a larger inclu- 
 sive one always is, until we have examined its steps and 
 elements; wherefore I must beg your patience through the 
 chapter. Meanwhile an illustration or two drawn from other 
 spheres of life may serve to show how real is the principle 
 we are establishing. I was listening a few weeks ago to a 
 lecture on Greek art, in which the lecturer showed by word 
 and picture how up to a certain point of development the 
 artist, not yet master of his secret, was bound by conventions 
 and prescriptions and shop rules, the exacting laws of his 
 trade; and how accordingly every line, though faultlessly 
 correct, was stiff, angular, as it were concealed in dead 
 formalism. Then all at once there seemed to come a time 
 when the artist, impelled by a more masterful initiative, began 
 to make free with his rules, and dared in a higher interest and 
 vision to disobey them; and lo, the marble began to palpitate 
 with naturalness and strength and the suggestion of breathing 
 life. It was the bondage to time-worn law and convention 
 passing into freedom. In every great art it is so. In our art 
 of life, too, I find a curious adumbration of this, in Koheleth's 
 strange counsel to man not to be too righteous and thereby 
 undo himself, and not to be too wicked either and so die be- 
 fore his time, but to let a sincere reverence be his guide. "It 
 is good," he says, "that thou lay hold of this, and from that, 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 109 
 
 too, refrain not thy hand, for he that feareth God shall come 
 forth of them all." Do we not perceive here the free spirit of 
 life making its presence felt? Koheleth would have his man 
 an artist in life, a master workman, no more a slave to dead 
 rules of righteousness than to disintegrating licence of wicked- 
 ness; he must be above his rules, not beneath them; so that 
 in his masterfulness like Beethoven he could break the laws 
 of the pedants and gain his sublimer effect, or like Cromwell 
 could cast the accepted laws of war to the winds and win his 
 victories. "It is magnificent, but it is not war," was once said 
 of such untrammeled boldness. And there must come a time, 
 it would seem, when the growing spirit of man, if he would 
 reach the height of masterful personality, in the image of God, 
 must boldly enter on a stage of being where he is larger than 
 his rules, his codes of law, his conventions, his prescriptions; 
 where the free spirit that is in him shall be his wise and suffi- 
 cient guide. There is something of the artist ideal here, the 
 ideal of the master workman. It is a phase, or rather it is 
 the core and centre, of the conflict and alliance of law and 
 liberty. This is what we mean by the law of the spirit of life. 
 But how to get the transition made; what elements of the 
 spirit of man to lay hold of and appropriate, this is the 
 great question that rises here, like a mystic barrier to sur- 
 mount. Too evidently man is facing not only an epoch but 
 a grave crisis in his evolution. His spirit has all along reacted 
 bravely against his limitations and his doom ; but on the whole 
 dimly and uncertainly, for the onsets of the animal and the 
 worldly have beset him behind and before. Use his being's 
 law as he will, yet he is just as truly used by it, often to alien 
 and evil purpose, and always in the shadow of untimely death. 
 The slave bends supinely under; and even the athlete, re- 
 joicing in his strength, breaks down eventually. To pass from 
 the sphere of well-doing to the sphere of well-being, from the 
 under side of his environment to the upper, where even weak- 
 ness may have its prevailing fibre of strength; this is the prob- 
 lem that confronts us here, and it is the crucial problem of 
 the Life Indeed. There is a mystic door to open, a veil to 
 
i io THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 rend, a Jordan to cross. Evolution, no less than revelation, 
 demands it; and if the solution does not lie on the other side, 
 then there is no solution of the life-problem at all. Take it 
 how we will, we must, in order to go on, make incursion here 
 into the unseen; for it is there that the spirit of life prevails 
 and prospers. 
 
 It is here that evolutionary science has shrunk back baffled; 
 for here it is that we must lay aside microscope and test-tube 
 and betake ourselves to wholly new apparatus and method of 
 approach. But it does not beseem us to despair, even as scien- 
 tific explorers, as if here evolution must stop. 
 
 What, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when doors great and small, 
 Nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch, should the hundredth appall? 
 In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of all? 
 
 li 
 
 If, as we have been assured, "the spirit of man is the candle 
 of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the body," let 
 us not discard our sublimely simple apparatus, here where it 
 is most needed. Especially so as our alleged resource is so 
 ample. Here is our chance to consult the scientific text-book 
 of the ages and eternities; to see whether, as asserted, the 
 Word of God proves itself such by being "quick and powerful, 
 and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the 
 dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and mar- 
 row, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the 
 heart." If we have not our instrument of research here, we 
 have none at all. Let us give it a fair test and employment. 
 
 According to its concrete folk-idiom, which has been fol- 
 lowed out in elaborate schemes of theology and soteriology, 
 the way, until a few decades ago, has seemed very clear. It 
 has crystallized in what has been called the plan of salvation. 
 But somehow since, as I believe, an all-wise Providence has 
 framed the mind of our age to a scientific temper and exaction, 
 a haze has seemed to gather round this venerable scheme of 
 things. The solution it provides seems to be exclusively an 
 affair of miracle and supernatural extrication; a deus ex ma- 
 china, an unmotived irruption from without, through the arbi- 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE in 
 
 trary agency of the coming of Christ, with its complex train of 
 redemption and atonement and justification and sanctification. 
 All this looks like an opus operatum, effected by one trans- 
 cendent Being, whether more God or man we can hardly judge, 
 and offered to us to take or leave, but in any case as our only 
 resource. Nay, we have been so assured that He did all the 
 work, and that nothing either great or small remained for us 
 to do, that many have profanely said: "Let Him work; it is 
 only a Hebrew and Jewish scheme after all, and we have no 
 call to bother ourselves about it. If He has done it all, why, 
 we may as well take His interpreters at their word, and do 
 nothing." Now far be it from me to reject or caricature this 
 so-called plan of salvation; my concern is not to prove it false, 
 but to find in what sense it is true. Still, there is this un- 
 deniable inertia and indifference to this scheme to be reckoned 
 with; we need, if it is true and has still the potency of appeal 
 to men, to translate it into modern and scientific terms. And 
 this we can best do by heeding the wholesome demand of the 
 age. Our instinctive desire, and it is no profane one or skep- 
 tical, calls for a solution not by an irruption from without but 
 by an evolution of forces stored within. We want to see the 
 way to the summit of manhood continuous and growing, with 
 causes and potencies all in their ordained place and doing their 
 work as it were by laws of nature. In other words, it is the 
 law of the spirit of life, in its evolutionary order, that we want, 
 not an arbitrary miracle. To this, in our present temper, we 
 can commit ourselves; and if, as it comes about, it reveals a 
 continuous road from that remote time when the spirit of God 
 brooded on the face of the waters, or if at the far culmination 
 of personality it evidences itself as interacting with the divine, 
 why, so much the better. Men have no objection to being sons 
 of God, in character and spirit as they already are in skill and 
 inventiveness and reason; they only wish, in the way that our 
 age's temper has made imperative, to trace the real derivation 
 and family likeness. 
 
 This is why I have been searching the elements of the Life 
 Indeed at such length and detail through the obscure twilight 
 
H2 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 period. It was all-important that when the fulness of the time 
 was revealed, we should be duly aware of what it was that 
 gradually and growingly filled the time. It was the endeavor 
 to see how truly the evolution of manhood is orderly and rea- 
 sonable, and how when the freedom came it should still include, 
 in unimpaired operation, all the wealth and worth of its ante- 
 cedent law. 
 
 But, now that we have traversed that stratum and stand 
 looking over into the dispensation of the fulness of the times, 
 we are more aware than ever, in spite of the continuous prog- 
 ress of spirituality that we have noted, that we are facing a 
 vital crisis in the uprise of manhood. There is, as I have said, 
 a mysterious door yet to open, the hundredth and last after 
 the ninety-and-nine, a door into the upper spiritual room. 
 There is a note of the mystic and transcendental about it, not 
 to say of the supernatural. The emergence from blind fate to 
 illuminate destiny, from prison to freedom, from the natural 
 to the spiritual, is as it were the birth of a new man, the Super- 
 man, as our latest time is beginning dimly to call it. Strange, 
 is it not, by the way, that quite apart from Bible revelation, 
 men should have come to make such confession that the old 
 moral and social order has exhausted its potencies, and to call 
 on the unseen to help them out? The old world of social con- 
 ventions and manners, of organized good customs, is growing 
 decrepit; and men, created upright, have sought out so many 
 inventions, through which even organized morals may become 
 honeycombed with selfish evils, that we must needs have a 
 Superman, whose habitat is a radically transformed world. 
 The scenery, the cherished ideals and impulses, nay the very 
 direction and current of things, must be as it were metamor- 
 phosed. Call this miracle or evolution, call it divine or human, 
 men of sober evolutionary mind are coming to see that there 
 is this amazing transition to be effected, if manhood would 
 reach the height of its craving and promise. 
 
 It is just at this point that our scripture text-book puts the 
 supreme vital crisis; here that it puts the one grand uprise, 
 as momentous, as mysterious, as far-reaching as we have 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 113 
 
 deemed the transition to be from earth to heaven; nay, in the 
 light and power of it this latter fades into insignificance, and 
 death itself is said to be abolished. Right at this point it is 
 that the solution comes in sight; and I solicit your patience if 
 I take pains and space to define it. I do not think that either 
 science or theology has taken anything like adequate account 
 of this tremendous Biblical view of things. We could not ex- 
 pect science to have done so, perhaps ; for its field of biological 
 vision is so filled with the life of the body that necessarily its 
 supreme crisis is physical death; or, if it has gone into the 
 higher evolution, it has used up its insight on the phenomena 
 of human consciousness, and does not project its cares beyond. 
 Consciousness that is only the bare background; the frame- 
 work in which all that is moral, spiritual, and therefore truly 
 vital, is enclosed. Theology, too, has been so mixed up with 
 law and grace, faith and works, morals and redemption, and 
 has made life depend on such diverse not to say discordant 
 things, that we hardly know whether it is more concerned to 
 get a man good enough, that is, church-going and law-abiding 
 enough, to squeak into heaven through his works, or to make 
 him cling frantically to the skirts of a historic Personage, and 
 thereby get a pull, so to say, with the final Dispenser of des- 
 tiny. In any case the moment of physical death bulks so large 
 in the scheme, that it is virtually taken as the point where 
 everything is irrevocably fixed and determined. They have 
 no real conception of resurrection, except a speculative and 
 spectacular resurrection somewhere beyond. Now do not put 
 me in the ranks of the scoffers for describing the situation so. 
 Science and theology are both right enough, perhaps, according 
 to their light. But you see they have neither of them disen- 
 tangled the spiritual from the natural enough to see what the 
 real trend of things is. And indeed, we must not blame them. 
 They have all the complexities of earth to reckon with. 
 The spirit of man is still in a material body, as it were in its 
 embryonic stage, drawing placental nourishment from a world 
 of sense and morals and law; every spirit must get its pre- 
 natal education; and not a jot nor tittle can pass until all is 
 
U4 ? HE LIFE INDEED 
 
 fulfilled. It will not make matters less clear, however, but 
 more so, if we escape for a while from these thickets of the- 
 ology and science to the broad open where the spirit of man, 
 having surmounted the twilight and bondage stratum, enters 
 royally on its birthright of freedom and adultness. Here is 
 the birth of the new man; here it is that life and immortality 
 emerge to light; here then is the real vital crisis and spirit. 
 
 It is with the incarnation of this spirit of life in a Supreme 
 Man, in a perfect Manhood, that prpphecy, as we have seen, 
 is centrally concerned; not with the unseen future, or with 
 mystic states of being, but first of all with a manhood worthy 
 to possess and glorify the future. The soul's home, as the 
 prophets deeply saw, lay in this. That was the wise order of 
 things. Get this object effected, and the rest follows by 
 natural consequence. We saw, though too meagrely detailed, 
 how this healthy previsional instinct, which in Shakespeare's 
 phrase we may call 
 
 the prophetic soul 
 Of the wide world dreaming on things to come, 
 
 approached its object not by drawing imaginative pictures of 
 His person and kingly trappings, nor by casting horoscopes of 
 His exact times. We belittle Messianic prophecy unspeakably 
 by making it focus in such casual things as these. Rather, 
 the prophets were interrogating the spirit of life that was in 
 them, the spirit of grace and mercy and sacrifice, and rounding 
 its majestic demands into one personality; and when they gave 
 this personality a title, Messiah, the Anointed One, it was 
 really the name of that fulness and masterfulness toward which 
 all the avenues of their being conducted, that representative 
 completeness of their manhood whom they could anoint as 
 Pattern and Head, Prophet to inspire, Priest to atone, King 
 to receive loyalty and fealty. It was the spirit of life in them 
 coming to concrete expression; or as St. Peter defined it when 
 he looked in upon them at work, the spirit of Christ, the su- 
 preme manhood, itself. Here is a significant thing. The spirit 
 of life that was stirring there, so long before Jesus, was al- 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 115 
 
 ready the spirit of Christ, and so of the highest, freest life, 
 reverently interrogating its ideals, and trying to fit these into 
 the times, and not without amazed wonder at the solemn in- 
 volvements of them. All this is of the preparation, the slow 
 making of man, by the shaping touch of the spirit. 
 
 Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages, 
 
 Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape? 
 
 All about him shadow still, but, while the races flower and fade, 
 
 Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade, 
 Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices blend in choric 
 Hallelujah to the Maker, "It is finish'd. Man is made." 
 
 But we have not to postpone all vision to the far future. The 
 spirit of life is already so aware of itself and its vital principle 
 that we can reduce it to its higher law. 
 
 This, in sonic degree, is the business of the coming sections. 
 We may see then, I hope, how truly this is the law of a higher 
 evolutionary stage, mysterious and inexplicable until we stand 
 where we can see it from above. 
 
 I. THE SECOND BIRTH 
 
 The spiritual life, like all life, begins with birth. That is 
 its law. It is not a thing put on, like a policy, and therefore 
 with a policy's trend of supple opportunism; nor a thing la- 
 boriously ciphered out, like a philosophy, and therefore de- 
 pendent on depth of thought; not a thing submitted to like an 
 allotment, as is law; nor on the other hand achieved by re- 
 bellion, as is an uprise of anarchy. It is born in a man, taking 
 into itself therefore all the native currents of his being, and as 
 solid and calculable as is his personality itself. This is the 
 mystery of it, that it may supervene some time along in life, 
 when as it would seem the bent is already determined, and yet 
 have a wholly new bent and direction of its own, which at once 
 transforms and regulates the old, keeping every good thing 
 intact. We have the description of this second birth from the 
 Man who of all men was most competent to define it; from 
 our Lord Himself, who, regarding the fulness of life that was 
 
ii6 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 in Him, best knew how He came by it, and what it was like. 
 In the name of all the spiritually born He said, "We speak 
 that we do know, and testify that we have seen;" and we can- 
 not go back of His account, to verify or gainsay, until we are 
 like Him, seeing with His eyes. "He that is spiritual," as 
 St. Paul says, "judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of 
 no man." 
 
 Our Lord's remarks on the second birth occur, you re- 
 member, in his conversation with Nicodemus, one of the most 
 cherished and quoted passages in the whole Bible. Nicode- 
 mus, a man high in Jewish counsels, and so a typical repre- 
 sentative of the time-honored consciousness of life, had come 
 by night to Jesus because he, a teacher in Israel, intuitively 
 recognized in the younger man a teacher sent from God. It 
 was, though not without its tremors of caution, the drawing 
 of a sincere and truth-seeking heart. You remember how 
 inexplicable the first onset of the new idea was to him. "How 
 can these things be?" To the Jewish mind, moulded in its 
 consciousness of all-encompassing law and prescription, 
 nothing could have seemed more calculated to dissolve the 
 whole order of things and launch the spirit of man on a shore- 
 less ocean of unrestraint. Apparently to make the shock as 
 great as possible, our Lord springs the new idea upon him 
 without preface or preparation, as if, like the new birth itself, 
 He would impose the very thought of it upon mankind as a 
 kind of crisis and astonishment. Men must be startled, as it 
 were, out of the old way into the new; as must needs be, per- 
 haps, because of the sudden and complete reversal of the cur- 
 rents of being. Yet it is all so orderly and viable too; no labor 
 and logic about it; a moment, and the change is made. The 
 spirit awakes, the will springs responsive, and lo, it is free. 
 It is like that cripple at Bethesda who for thirty-eight years 
 had been lying passive, waiting for some one to save him all 
 volition and initiative and just souse him in the pool. "Wilt 
 thou be made whole?" was the question that came ringing to 
 his startled ears one day; but even then, not seeing the point 
 of the inquiry, he began to whine because some one else al- 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 117 
 
 ways got in ahead of him. "Rise, take up thy bed, and walk," 
 was the only answer to his complaint; and almost before he 
 knew it he was stepping forth out of his hospital, a sound, 
 whole man. Where did the onset of health begin, and was it 
 natural or spiritual? Just so our strange fact comes to us. 
 The second birth is the last term of a long embryonic process, 
 and all the power and growth of the process is in it; but, like 
 its fleshly analogue, it is the sudden opening of doors from a 
 womb to a world. It was of such a described event as this that 
 Nicodemus, still environed by the womb of the old dispensa- 
 tion, still in the unbreathing dark, asked in utter bewilderment, 
 "How can these things be?" 
 
 Before we raise Nicodemus' question for ourselves, which 
 we must needs do, and especially in its evolutionary light, let us 
 look a little more closely at our Lord's presentation of the 
 matter. His abrupt beginning relates to a subject which, when 
 He spoke, was evidently in the air the Kingdom of God. 
 That phrase puts into words a great presentiment that just 
 then was stirring obscurely in men's minds: the presentiment 
 that somehow the fulness of the time was close upon them, 
 and that a new order of things was ripe and ready. Pharisee 
 and fisherman alike, minds set in the legal order and minds 
 tending to the spiritual alike, now felt the strange electric 
 thrill, and were inquiring what it might mean. It was not for 
 nothing, nor for a small thing, like a mere change of dynasty 
 or release from Roman rule, that the surging spirit of man, 
 whose wings had so long beaten, bird-like, against the bars of 
 its earthly cage, now began to feel that the bolts were slip- 
 ping back in the doors of a larger future. 
 
 The old order change th, yielding place to new, 
 
 And God fulfils Himself in many ways, 
 
 Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. 
 
 When therefore without preface our Lord used the expression 
 "the kingdom of God," He was as truly speaking in Nicodemus' 
 idiom as if He had spoken casually of the weather. The king- 
 dom of God, otherwise called the kingdom of Heaven what 
 
ii8 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 is that? Evidently some new organized government wherein, 
 as so long promised and prophesied, the will of God was to be 
 the ultimate law, and wherein Heaven was to be the atmos- 
 phere and environment of manhood life. What then was it - 
 a thing coming to man, all made, and he needing only to be 
 taken up supinely and soused into it, like the man at 
 the Bethesda pool, or a thing to which man was to come, in the 
 might of his long-ripening spirit, and enter on it like a prince 
 taking possession of his inheritance, or like a youth assuming 
 his majority? Our Lord's words, startling as they are, har- 
 monize accurately with the long-promised transition from ser- 
 vitude to sonship. Only, they conform to the true evolutionary 
 order by making this not an affair of political counsel and 
 legislation but a new birth, a second birth. " Verily, verily, I 
 say unto thee, Except a man be born again" - avcoOev, 
 again, or from above, or both? "he cannot see the kingdom 
 of God"; cannot so much as see it, let alone enter it, though 
 it stand as plain as the Bunker Hill monument right before 
 his eyes. You see how our ever-present question of light, of 
 having eyes to see and use the light, comes into the case. Be 
 born with eyes, above the brute's and worldling's eyes, and 
 then you can see. And when Nicodemus' question tries to 
 befog the matter, "How can a man be born when he is old?" 
 our Lord's further assertion assumes the more illuminate 
 idiom, assuring him that man must be born not of blood, nor 
 of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God: 
 "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water 
 and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." 
 Born of water what is that? Water is the natural symbol 
 of purity, of cleanness; and is not cleanness from sin and the 
 soilure of earth the thing after which law has struggled so 
 long, and struggled in vain? You cannot legislate cleanness, 
 cannot get it by volumes and libraries and worlds full of rules 
 and codes. You must be born of a cosmos of purity, that 
 purity of heart wherein a man sees God; must be saturated 
 and enveloped with that bath of cleanness which comes only 
 by way of the inner nature; and the rest follows, by vital con- 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 119 
 
 sequence. "He that is bathed," as our Lord says later, 
 "needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit"; 
 the disposal of the daily soilure, as he goes about his worldly 
 ways, is an easily adjusted matter then. Born of the Spirit 
 what is that? What Spirit? for our Lord adds no qualifying 
 or limiting adjective, not even a definite article; it is "born 
 of water and spirit," as if there were but one element, whether 
 in man or in the world or in heaven, that could be so called. 
 No dissociation of elements here, such as we inveterately 
 make; as if there were two things to reconcile: an evil spirit 
 in man, and a Holy Spirit outside of him, always more or less 
 at cross purposes. Whatever truth there is in this idea will 
 come out afterward; here it is ignored; here too the idea, like 
 that of water, seems to be both literal and figurative, for the 
 word for spirit, irvevpa is taken from nature, meaning 
 literally wind, so that in the sense vocabulary He is saying, 
 "born of water and wind." But we can no more let it stay 
 literal than we can the idea of water. And just as the phrase 
 "born of water," of cleanness, solves the ideal of the old order, 
 so the phrase "born of wind," of spirit, opens and makes viable 
 the ideal of the new order. It names the one means of en- 
 trance into the deepest world order; the cosmos, the universe, 
 of spiritual powers and values, which are beneath and behind 
 and within all that is. "God is spirit," the same Teacher says 
 later; just as He says God is light, God is love; "and they 
 that worship Him" they that feel and acknowledge His su- 
 premacy, His worth-ship "must worship Him in spirit and 
 in truth." Be born into the boundless element of spirit, and 
 forthwith you find that your bondage to the lower world is 
 gone; for you become aware that out there in the abyss of 
 light and mystery "the Spirit itself beareth witness with our 
 spirit, that we are the children of God." We have spoken of 
 the spirit of man and its dim crude reactions on the sum of 
 things; here it has become consciously identified with the 
 spirit of the universe, so that one will, one freedom, animates 
 them both. Being born into the spiritual family, we thence- 
 forth live spontaneously as to the manner born, have the large 
 
120 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 family interests at heart, being thenceforth workers together 
 with God. A simple elementary matter this, as our Lord makes 
 it out; He even intimates that in speaking of it He is speaking 
 of earthly things. "If I have told you earthly things," He 
 says, "and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you 
 of heavenly things? That which is born of the flesh is flesh; 
 and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." That ought to 
 be obvious to anyone, even to a legalized master of Israel; it 
 belongs to the very A B C of things; "Marvel not that I said 
 unto thee, Ye must be born again." The fact, from His point 
 of view, stationed as He is on the upper and illuminate side, 
 is self -evidencing. 
 
 Then He goes on to explain, to this man whose ideals are 
 still groping along the under side, what a man spiritually born 
 is like, how we can tell that a new life is pulsating in him, 
 whether we understand it or not. For this purpose He goes 
 back to the natural phenomena of the wind, which He is dis- 
 engaging from their merely physical motions and pressing into 
 His new sphere of spiritual fact. This is what we must needs 
 do; our thoughts ascend to spirit from sense, to the unseen 
 from the realm of the seen. And I want you to note carefully 
 what characteristics of the wind He uses. "The wind bloweth 
 where it listeth" that is, it is the one natural symbol of 
 perfect, self-directive, self-poised freedom; "and thou hearest 
 the sound thereof" that is, you know it is there and is real, 
 by its actual palpable effects; "but canst not tell whence it 
 cometh, and whither it goeth" that is, the source and goal 
 of it, as you stand outside of it, hearing it, swayed by it in 
 a way, are as absolutely inexplicable to you as if it were a thing 
 of another world. There is one of the commonest phenomena 
 of nature that you really know nothing about, any more than 
 you know about the real inwardness of electricity, or mag- 
 netism, or light. It is there, and it has its world, and you can 
 to a degree utilize its effects; but so far as you are concerned, 
 its will is its own, not yours at all. Well, says Jesus, this is the 
 character of the spiritual life; "so is every one that is born 
 of the Spirit." I think our commentators have done their best 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 121 
 
 to befog this latter assertion. They say it means, so it is with 
 every one that is born of the Spirit; that is, that the Spirit, so 
 to say, takes him up and whirls him through the air, willy-nilly, 
 and he has no idea what it all means, where his new life is from 
 or whither bound, but is just swept along on an inexplicable 
 current of being. This explanation, as you see, takes away all 
 his free-will, all his initiative, all his self-directive light of life, 
 and leaves him a more helpless automaton than ever. In other 
 words, it makes the divine spirit everything, the human spirit 
 nothing; and so the dissociation of divine and human is re- 
 duced by practically annihilating, or absorbing, the human. 
 And this in the face of the plainest assertion, that the spiritu- 
 ally born himself, not his environment, is in all these charac- 
 teristics like the wind. Nay, the assertion is further 
 reenforced. "Thou canst not tell the whence and the whither," 
 says our Lord, and He is speaking to a bemuddled Jew. Does 
 He mean, nobody can tell? Why, almost immediately He 
 says, "We speak that we do know, and testify that we have 
 seen." Who are "we"? Is He not speaking in the name of 
 all who are born of the Spirit? Who else can the "we" be? 
 He identifies Himself with those who have been born again; 
 uses their emancipated consciousness, gives for all time their 
 marvelous testimony to their sense of new life. "He that is 
 spiritual judge th all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. 
 For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may in- 
 struct him? But we have the mind of Christ." And here is 
 the mind of Christ, making the pioneer revelation of the new 
 life to which the adult manhood is born. 
 
 "Thou canst not tell; we speak that we do know." How 
 far this transition of spiritual birth has brought us, and how 
 truly it is an access of light as well as of life, we can realize by 
 comparing with our Lord's assertion the already quoted words 
 of Koheleth written in the midst of the twilight period. 
 "Everything," the sage says, "hath He made beautiful in its 
 time; also He hath put eternity in their heart; yet not so 
 that man findeth out the work which God hath wrought, from 
 the beginning, and to the end." He is speaking in the cosmic 
 
122 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 consciousness, and voicing the cosmic dimness of vision. In 
 this stratum of things his words remain as true now as ever. 
 But all the while, being spiritually sensitive, he is aware of 
 an unresolved element which his cosmic standard cannot meas- 
 ure; as inexplicable to that level of being as was the wind to 
 Nicodemus, yet also just as real in its effects; the element, 
 namely, of eternity, in the heart, bearing us on from an un- 
 known spring to an unknown ocean of being. The vision is 
 becoming clearer now, not too dim now but too glorious for 
 our eyes to see; for it makes all the difference, the conscious- 
 ness that we are born of the ultimate world order, and can 
 feel and know the life of that Spirit whose first word was "Let 
 there be light," and can look forward in congenial spirit to the 
 far-withdrawn summit where dwelleth He "who only hath im- 
 mortality, dwelling in the .light which no man can approach 
 unto." The feeling of such whence and whither we can store 
 joyously in our growing manhood, when we know that the full 
 realization is precluded only by our own finiteness. 
 
 We are ready now, in the idiom of our evolutionary ideal, 
 to raise Nicodemus 7 question anew, "How can these things be?" 
 to inquire whether this second birth is to be referred to an un- 
 motived irruption and miracle from without, or whether it 
 comes through the development and illumination of forces al- 
 ready stored in the deep heart of manhood. But first, taking 
 the scripture idea on its own ground, we must heed our Lord's 
 word that this thing can be seen only from the upper and spir- 
 itual side. Perhaps that is another way of saying that in order 
 to know the spiritual life one must live it; then he has all his 
 subject of study within himself, his heart, with all that com- 
 munion and interchange of life values which he shares con- 
 sciously with the living source. At any rate, it is from this 
 upper side, however wonderful, that we have the warrant for 
 approaching it. We will bear in mind what has been said, that 
 we are working in the stratum of life where evolution has be- 
 come personal and conscious of itself; where therefore the 
 spirit of man is learning to cooperate wisely with a Spirit like 
 his own, but boundless and universal, learning to embody on 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 123 
 
 his own scale and in his limits the Will which determines all, 
 recognized and worshipped as 
 
 A motion and a spirit that impels 
 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 
 And rolls through all things. 
 
 In other words, his growing insight has come to recognize the 
 source and first impact of evolution not as mechanical, blind, 
 as it were fortuitous, but as wise, intelligent, and closing in 
 itself attributes not less high than the highest that man finds in 
 his own potencies and ideals. If evolution must be matched 
 with involution, and man is a product of it, then surely the 
 source and initiative, with the tremendous potencies lying cap- 
 sulate within it, must be as great not only as its highest 
 product man is, but as he can ever hope to be. The glory of 
 the beginning can be estimated only by the glory of the end, 
 where the finished structure crowns the whole work. The unit 
 of measure is not the atom but the God. And as we see man 
 plodding along the way, sloughing off his weakness, his igno- 
 rance, his imperfections, and growing in Godlikeness, just ac- 
 cording as his spirit sees and responds to the unseen, who shall 
 set the limit? 
 
 The great quarrel, as you know, which has hitherto raged 
 between science and theology, has centred round the question 
 whether our universe is a product of evolution or of special 
 creation; whether its complex organism has risen through the 
 steady development of things in obedience to laws and energies 
 stored within, or through miraculous interference here and 
 there from without, injecting as it were a new and unpromised 
 energy and setting law at defiance. It is a dispute about the 
 manner in which things have been brought about; for the 
 wonder of the things themselves is before our eyes, an amazing 
 pageant of glory, as great as if nothing but miracle were con- 
 cerned in them. The question comes up with special insistence 
 here, because in all our series of wonders this so-called second 
 birth is the thing that looks most like a special creation, most 
 as if the shaping hand of God Himself were laid bare. If we 
 
124 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 can understand this, then, having the clue to the hardest and 
 highest phenomenon, we have the key to the whole series. 
 
 May it not turn out that the whole dispute is the old one 
 of the two sides of the shield? If this second birth were proved 
 to be a special creation, would it necessarily disprove the other 
 alternative? Or is there any alternative at all? It may merely 
 prove that at every step of evolution there are just as many 
 unseen forces as seen, a whole world full of both, each coming 
 from its own sphere upper or under, and all working together 
 to one large result; which result here at this second birth has 
 reached the point where it so declares itself, so takes into 
 partnership the spirit of man and the spirit of God, that for 
 the first time we can begin to see things as they are. It is 
 the coming of life to light, so that we become aware of the 
 real law of the spirit of life. Here then is the unit of evolution. 
 This is the view I am disposed to take of it. If evolution be- 
 gan with personal spiritual energy, then, it would seem, there 
 must come a point in the series where person shall be revealed 
 to person, where spirit shall spring to meet spirit; and so the 
 creation, being endowed with a mind of its own, may become 
 intelligently aware not only of its Creator but of the real in- 
 wardness of its own nature and of its trend through the 
 eternities. And it is in the second birth, if anywhere, that this 
 light of life bursts forth. 
 
 On this line on the line laid down by our Lord's definition 
 let us try to trace it a little way. 
 
 Let us begin with the most estranging feature, the fact that 
 to men of the Nicodemus type, whose spirit is set in the lower 
 legalistic key, the birth into a new world of free spirit is ab- 
 solutely inconceivable; they can no more realize it than we 
 can hear the music of the spheres, which was fabled to be so 
 far above our gamut of sound that our ears could not take it 
 in; or than we can see the ultra-violet rays of the spectrum, 
 which yet are there, working their finer effect, in a light un- 
 approachable to our sense. And indeed these casual illustra- 
 tions launch us into the heart of our subject. They remind 
 us that in many spheres, perhaps in every sphere of life and 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 125 
 
 thought, we are midway in a scale and gamut of things which 
 in both directions extends infinitely beyond us; and our Lord's 
 assertion is but His way of saying that the second birth intro- 
 duces us to a sphere of life-values beyond sense, beyond even 
 logic and reasoning. St. Paul says virtually the same thing, 
 in his assertion that "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither 
 have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath 
 prepared for them that love him; but God hath revealed them 
 unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea 
 the deep things of God"; and even this assertion, as he says, 
 is already written in phophecy, in Isaiah's words: "For since 
 the beginning of the world men have not heard, nor perceived 
 by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside thee, what 
 he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him." Here is the 
 waiting for it on the one side, in prophetic dimness, and the 
 record of actual fulfilment on the other. Manhood has risen 
 in the scale, beyond the point that was such a barrier to Nico- 
 demus. But must we desert our evolutionary analogy here, 
 and betake ourselves to miracle, to a special and unmotived 
 creation? Scientists have long been trying to make out that 
 in that vast scale of life which sweeps from the protoplasmic 
 cell upward there is an equable and uniform progress, that 
 somehow, if we could but find it, height melts into height, and 
 species into species, with all the connecting links somehow 
 traceable and calculable ; and they have been impatient of any 
 other conception of things. But you know too how recently 
 Professor De Vries has brought that notion into doubt, by 
 showing that nature advances not in that equable way but by 
 sudden leaps and metamorphoses, which he calls mutations; 
 so that many a time suddenly, and by some inexplicable 
 agency, a new species appears; and he says the scientific 
 "battle now rages about the question whether these strange 
 mutations are to be regarded as the principal means of evolu- 
 tion, or whether slow and gradual changes have not also played 
 a large and important part." You will recall too what I quoted 
 from Professor Shaler: his remark about a certain instance he 
 gave which he said was "one of many, very many, instances in 
 
126 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 which we find the apparently uniform processes of Nature, 
 those which are indeed uniform in their steps of action, leading 
 to sudden and complete changes of result." Why, even mathe- 
 matics has ciphered out the abstract possibility of all this, in 
 its theory of the fourth dimension. Suppose, it says, a being 
 whose whole life of sense and action moved in a world of only 
 two dimensions, length and breadth. All you have to do is 
 to lift that being up, adding the third dimension of height, and 
 at once it can look down upon its former world, and look in- 
 side of its own nature, as it never could before. The third 
 dimension, simple as it was, had been absolutely inconceivable 
 to it, until it was actually transferred thereto. Now, says 
 mathematics, there is no abstract reason why we should not 
 go on adding new dimensions to the three we already know, and 
 as a consequence be able to see inward, penetrate within our 
 world and nature, as we cannot begin to conceive now; and 
 yet, as Nicodemus says, "How can these things be?" 
 
 Now this second birth, as our Lord describes it and as St. 
 Paul gives its consequences, has all the marks of one of those 
 sudden mutations in great Nature which are perfectly obvious 
 as seen from the upper side, but from the under side are as 
 inconceivable as is the organic world to the inorganic, as is the 
 animal to the plant, as is the human to the animal. In fact, 
 this is the supreme mutation; the nodal point in manhood de- 
 velopment where all at once the landscape of life becomes il- 
 luminate, and that fulness of life, that redemption of the body 
 for which the whole creation has groaned and travailed in pain 
 together until now, comes into the field of vision. Passing 
 wonderful it is, I grant you; the glory of it dazzles us as much 
 as it did Nicodemus; but it is not my speculation, it is the 
 absolute assertion and tissue of the Bible idea, and it has all 
 the consistency of the highest evolutionary science. 
 
 The supreme mutation, I have just said, is this marvelous 
 birth into the sphere of spirit; the highest change that our 
 earthly vision can see ; yet put before us as so much a matter of 
 course that our Lord says of it, "Marvel not that I said unto 
 thee, Ye must be born again." And indeed our foregoing 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 127 
 
 studies have shown us the elements that have led up to it; have 
 revealed that it is not an unmotived miracle but that, as Pro- 
 fessor De Vries puts it, slow and gradual changes have also 
 played a large and important part. And now, as to the mo- 
 ment of transition from the long gestation of the ages to the 
 sudden new life, or as we may now call it the shock of manhood 
 mutation, you have noted that the first element our Lord gives 
 of it is, the sense and atmosphere of absolute freedom: "the 
 wind bloweth where it listeth, . . . so is every one that is 
 born of wind, of spirit." It is, as it were, a sudden opening of 
 doors into a larger place, the sudden coming into breath, and 
 light, and song, and joy. Have you ever noticed how our Lord 
 described what He was on earth for, and how much He made 
 of this element of disimprisonment? "The Spirit of the Lord 
 is upon me," He said in the synagogue of Nazareth, "because 
 He hath anointed me to preach . . . deliverance to the cap- 
 tives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty 
 them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the 
 Lord." He was reading this, quoting it from the Scripture al- 
 ready in their hands; already the ideal had been sown by 
 prophecy into the heart of manhood; "he hath anointed me," 
 Isaiah had said, "to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the 
 opening of the prison to them that are bound." You re- 
 member, too, how later, when our Lord in his parable of judg- 
 ment gave the principles on which men should be eternally 
 blessed of the Father; among these was "I that is, every 
 least one of these my brethren was in prison, and ye came 
 unto me." Nay, his apostles would not let this element of His 
 ministry cease even with His death, but imaged Him as still 
 preaching to the spirits in prison, who in the old Noachic days 
 had perished without law in the blind excess of animalism. 
 What a vast jail-delivery, when we come to think of it, the 
 scripture ideal rolls up around this mutation, this nodal transi- 
 tion of manhood growth ! How this second birth seems to open 
 the boundless realm of being and doing exactly what we will, 
 going and coming, working and rejoicing, as the emancipate 
 spirit dictates! It is even so, as St. Paul says: "The law of 
 
128 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 the spirit of life hath made me free from the law of sin and 
 death." We have not received the spirit of bondage, again 
 to fear, but the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, 
 Father. When the spirit of man recognizes the Father of 
 spirits, and springs filially to meet the source of its evolutionary 
 life, then farewell forever to the old alien pressure of law, to 
 the old groaning and passiveness under a burden of fate and 
 death; the law of our being is henceforth ours to use, not to 
 be used and enslaved by. "For God hath not given us the 
 spirit of fear," writes St. Paul to Timothy, "but of power, and 
 of love, and of a sound mind." Is not this, in compendium, 
 the birth of a completed manhood, wherein will and affection 
 and intellect, the whole inner man, stands forth master of his 
 world and his fate? 
 
 But here perhaps the question rises, Why a second birth? 
 Why, instead of coinciding with our first birth into the world, 
 and so an experience in which apart from our volition we find 
 ourselves all transported and naturalized, it has to be brought 
 about with such travail-pangs of creation, and after so long 
 gestation in the underworld of being? Well, as soon as it is 
 propounded, with its elements in order before us, the question 
 answers itself. The birth is a second birth because it belongs 
 to the manhood stratum wherein our evolution has become 
 self-conscious and personal, and we cooperate freely with it, 
 to do our eager share in bringing its consummation. How 
 could this be with our animal birth? That was a thing beyond 
 our will, beyond our choice, beyond our knowledge. We did 
 not ask to be brought here. It came about, as it were, in the 
 reflex and automatic order of things, in the order that Pro- 
 fessor Cope tries to explain with his theories of archaestheti- 
 cism and katagenesis; a birth, like all animal birth, into the 
 species and the race and the material environment. But this 
 second birth must needs supervene at a point higher up, where 
 two elements can work together, the element of an appealing 
 and vitalizing spirit from the unseen, and the element of glad 
 free human choice, the spirit of manhood, rising to meet it. 
 Being of the spirit, it is the birth into freedom; it is the soul 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 129 
 
 emerging from its prison into the open air of liberty and light 
 and love. Why, it must be so: this birth, from the very na- 
 ture of the case, must be a birth wherein the spirit is awake, 
 and knows what it does, and makes for itself individual choice 
 of its life and destiny. This is the essential characteristic 
 that makes it so truly not a mere natural and as it were animal 
 growth but a marvelous mutation which seems to open a com- 
 plete reversal of life conditions. 
 
 And here we see, in another light, its real evolutionary sig- 
 nificance. What we are contemplating, in the large, is that 
 momentous point of history and growth, the emergence of the 
 full-orbed, full-functioned individual. To this, after all, our 
 period of gestation, our twilight period, has all the while been 
 leading. It is the great culminating point in earthly evolution. 
 You recall Professor Shaler's words: "It is hardly too much 
 to say that on this individualizing process depends all the real 
 work that is done within the universe." We can realize this 
 now, both in the history we have traced and in our own per- 
 sonality. We have seen the spirit of man reacting on the law 
 of the species; gradually enlarging it from the unit organism to 
 the family, from the family to the clan, from the clan to the 
 tribe, from the tribe to the nation, from the nation to the race. 
 We have seen how the Jew, to whom was entrusted the care 
 of this spiritual expansion, stuck fast at the race, and would 
 no farther. The last step was too bold, too much an opening 
 of his soul to all the universe for him willingly to take; he 
 preferred to remain exclusive. But in ourselves, too, we know 
 how it is: what stern bonds our species, our race, our age, our 
 climatic temperament, our work, our wealth or penury, have 
 bound us in; it is only in strictest limits, it would seem, that 
 we can do the thing we would. How far are we, in sympathy, 
 even yet, even we who have named the name of Christ, beyond 
 old Dr. Johnson's surly remark, "For aught I can see, all 
 foreigners are fools"? Then too, how sadly we are aware of 
 the law of sin in our members, warring against the law of the 
 mind. All this is a bar and discount to our free individuality: 
 we are, so far forth, only levers and bolts and cog-wheels in 
 
1 3 o THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 a colossal world machine, wherein our free play of personality 
 is hemmed in by tempers, customs, conventions, congealed 
 codes of social law. We need, after all, simply to submit our- 
 selves to that highest and freest impulse, to that inviting plane 
 of being prophesied by the whole spiritual surge of the ages, 
 whereon our individual self is at last free, whereon every man 
 and every created thing in its degree is as it were a second 
 self, with its own rights and life, and our soul, emancipated 
 from the narrowing prison of the species, "lies," as Browning 
 puts it, "bare to the universal prick of light." Here is the 
 strange paradox of the whole mutation, that just when the in- 
 dividual seems turned most out of doors, just then his indi- 
 viduality is most truly born into the unitary life of the 
 universe. 
 
 But here you say, "If the higher evolution is a movement 
 toward individuality, if the vast forces of the universe have all 
 along been in travail-pangs to get the completed individual 
 personality born, what becomes of our social organism?" Ever 
 since the French Revolution the generations have been desper- 
 ately at work on that problem: how to bring about a social 
 order wherein liberty, equality, and fraternity shall have free 
 and full course. Haven't we had enough of individual self- 
 assertion, and has it not proved merely that the spirit of man 
 may thereby become only the more arbitrary and oppressive, 
 only the more shrewd and venomous to work his cleverer will 
 against his fellow-man? Do we not need rather to melt and 
 flow together into one great organism of humanity, wherein 
 each individual soul shall get its rights and the free play of 
 life, and wherein the individual units shall have disappeared in 
 the welfare of the whole? Of individual self-assertion and 
 self-containment, I answer, we have had enough and more 
 than enough; it is no recent thing, the world has always had 
 it. And in this new social movement it is by no means 
 quenched; in fact it has a larger field, albeit furtive and 
 hidden, than ever. But you see men are trying to get their 
 kind corralled and bondaged under the same old regime of law; 
 trying to legislate their race into loving each other and allowing 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 131 
 
 each other their rights. Like the Galatians they will not stand 
 fast in the liberty wherewith Christ would make them free, 
 but are desperately set on becoming entangled again with the 
 yoke of bondage. Our second birth, our mystic birth into full 
 individuality, clears all this up, if we will but choose and en- 
 sue the full power of it. For it is the birth of the free Godlike 
 unit of society. The fulness of the time, in its slow coming, 
 has kept it back, just as Koheleth kept back the vision of im- 
 mortality, until there should be born a personality, an indi- 
 vidual, fit to wield this perilous weapon of freedom. If society 
 starts from and nucleates in this new-born individuality as a 
 unit, then it is sound and free and Godlike all the way through. 
 And only so can it ever be such, strive and legislate and civilize 
 how men may. The kingdom of law can never melt into the 
 one livable kingdom, the kingdom of grace and truth. We 
 must be born again even to see it; must be born of water and 
 spirit to enter its gates at all. So to His little audience of 
 disciples, eager men learning to be individual units in the great 
 universe of life, our Lord says, It is not an affair of discovery 
 and legislation of which men say, Lo here, lo there; the king- 
 dom of heaven, being a thing to which you are born, is within 
 you. And when He simplified the idea, by telling in parable 
 what it is like, He said it is like leaven, which a woman took 
 and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened. 
 There is the real sinking of individuality requisite for the vital- 
 ization of society: wherein every protoplasmic grain, with its 
 free individuality in active and vital energy, is spreading the 
 spirit of God from heart to heart till the whole mass is leavened 
 and light and joyous, like its unseen source of life, through 
 and through. The individual is brought out from the species 
 in order that manhood henceforth may no more be 
 a dead machine, worked by rules and conventions of alien will 
 and prescription, but saturated, as it were, and tingling in 
 every part, with the free spirit of God and man. 
 
 Friends, our topic is so large and glorious that it seems never 
 to let go. But I must say of it only one more thing. Our 
 discussion of things hitherto compels us to enlarge our view 
 
132 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 of the second birth into wellnigh boundless dimensions; we 
 must rise to an unprecedented height, to cosmic and universal 
 scale, to take it in. It is not a mere ecclesiastical affair; not 
 a mere affair of getting a few individuals out of the world into 
 the church; though indeed we must not discard this, for it is 
 the way Christ took. But as a church we must enlarge our 
 purview, our instrumentalities, our quickening promise to the 
 souls in our care. If not we, who then is there to do it? But 
 we must walk in the largeness of the law of the spirit of life, 
 into which because we see we know that we are new-born; 
 recognizing that birth as the temporis partus maximus, the 
 birth of manhood after its longer period of gestation and 
 placental growth, as the marvelous event wherein the true 
 meaning of evolution declares itself. Who is sufficient to these 
 things? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. We 
 have the mind of Christ; we have the instrumentality to our 
 hands. 
 
 II. THE OUTWARD CURRENT 
 
 But after all, this second birth of manhood, full of bound- 
 less promise though it be, is only a birth; only an initial point, 
 a beginning to live; and the whole mounting course of the new 
 life, all that gives it thrust and character and adultness, lies 
 yet beyond. In fact we have not yet discovered the real prin- 
 ciple and essence of this higher stage of personality, any more 
 than we have seen, or can see, in the new-born infant, how its 
 individual bent and endowment are going to develop. I do 
 not wonder that at this point of our study you shake your 
 heads and say, "Well, I must think it over." We are still on 
 the threshold; the law of the spirit of life is yet to be revealed. 
 
 I think some of our churches make a mistake here, or rather 
 unduly limit themselves, by laying so much relative stress on 
 the moment of new birth, as if all their work and responsibility 
 were over as soon as they have got souls converted. The New 
 Testament way is rather to put its strength into the wealth 
 of being that ensues when the new birth is taken for granted. 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 133 
 
 Where else, save in this third chapter of John, is this crisis 
 point, this emergence of the free spirit of life, so rigorously 
 demanded and defined; yet where, in the whole New Testa- 
 ment, is it not presupposed, as if it were to be treated as an 
 accomplished fact, determining once for all the higher plane, 
 the table-land, on which henceforth manhood life is to move? 
 As far as concerns a Nicodemus, whose being is keyed to the 
 old dispensation of living by rule and law, as far as concerns 
 every one whose life is nothing but moral, this mystic entrance 
 upon the life of the spirit is an absolute prerequisite to further 
 evolution. As concerns the Christian, moving spontaneously 
 in the new environment and atmosphere, why, he was born so, 
 and that is the end of it. When and how that birth occurred 
 is of course another matter; but that it consciously occurred, 
 and with full acceptance of the situation, is a thing taken for 
 granted and no more said. To treat the event as if it were 
 always in uncertain abeyance, or as if the soul thus born were 
 always to be held back by main force and constant revival from 
 lapsing into a pre-natal state, is neither of logic nor of science 
 nor of faith. 
 
 But as I said, it is only a birth: that is why we can afford 
 to forget, or rather presuppose it, as we do our bodily birth, 
 while we concentrate our energies on the things that really 
 count, that consort with it. What these things essentially are, 
 we are now to note; but first let us glance again, in summary 
 fashion, at what this second birth has and has not contributed 
 to the Life Indeed. 
 
 What to this point has stood out most prominently in its 
 contribution to life is emancipation. By it the individual unit 
 of the higher evolution, the vital molecule, so to say, has be- 
 come a centre of spiritual force, free to choose and work its 
 work on the individual at its side, and to receive returns of 
 influence from it; each so becoming a thinking active grain of 
 leaven, and all vitalized by a spirit which, "infused through 
 the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies 
 every part . . . even down to the minutest member." This 
 is a tremendous point gained. And it can be gained only by 
 
134 T HE LIFE INDEED 
 
 such freedom of wisdom and action; by making each unit a 
 vital centre in the tissue, or as St. Peter, who wrote before the 
 days of biology, figures it, a "lively stone" in the vast edifice 
 of life. 
 
 But when you come to think of it, freedom is a negative, 
 colorless thing; perilous too, beyond computation, unless there 
 is something sterling behind it. To present a man with free- 
 dom is like presenting him with a blank sheet of paper, on 
 which he can write any record he pleases. Nothing has been 
 so abused, or so awkwardly handled, as liberty. "O Liberty!" 
 you remember was exclaimed in the French Revolution, "what 
 crimes are committed in thy name!" And hardly less grave 
 than the crimes of liberty is the unwisdom that so easily besets 
 it, not to speak of the pinches of downright tyranny and in- 
 tolerance. How hard it is both to live and let live ! How many 
 a man, too, whose spirit is emancipated, who rejoices in the 
 law of liberty after the inner man, becomes enslaved again, be- 
 fore he knows it, to some new order of bondage: some doubtful 
 business enterprise, or soulless corporation, or tyrannous 
 union, in which the individuality that is new-born in him is 
 lost and belied. You remember how Bunyan said that the 
 second part of the Valley of the Shadow of Death was, if pos- 
 sible, more beset with dangers than the first; only they were 
 dangers of another kind, not the ditch and quag now, but 
 snares and traps and pitfalls, in which the unwary soul, or the 
 soul without daylight, was sure to be caught. Clearly, freedom 
 of itself is a doubtful blessing. It was not made to go alone. 
 What then shall go with it, to safeguard it, keeping it from 
 lapsing either into another slavery or into wild anarchy? Can 
 the spirit of man, after all, be trusted with so perilous a gift? 
 Can the law of the spirit of life function as a real law, a con- 
 servator of order and wisdom, and not a fluid, arbitrary, ca- 
 pricious wilfulness? If not, then the fulness of time is here 
 in vain; and evolution has come all this way to go to pieces 
 at the end. 
 
 Here, friends, at last, is the time and the place to name the 
 solution of the whole boundless problem, the supreme pulsa- 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 135 
 
 tion of the Life Indeed. I have kept it back, running the risk 
 of vagueness and dim inklings of the matter until I could trace 
 all the broad steps of reason and science that led up to it; I 
 wanted you in some just degree to realize how great it is, this 
 keystone of the arch, when it falls into its ordained place. The 
 safeguard of the new-born freedom, the fulfiller of the law, the 
 proof that the spirit of man is in its heart of hearts sound and 
 sterling, the guarantee of an evolution that grows onward to 
 the light unapproachable, is LOVE. The spirit that long 
 ago brooded on the face of the waters and the human spirit, 
 that step by step rose to find its unseen witnessing and thereby 
 advanced steadily toward light and liberty, have in this mighty 
 pulsation of love, or grace, as the Scripture calls it, declared 
 themselves to the worlds and the eternities; and we have the 
 final opening of the mystery now, the mystery that was hid 
 from ages and generations. What was that vital motion in- 
 fused through the vast evolutionary mass, we have been asking, 
 and no answer could give the whole key to it. Not mere arbi- 
 trary power and will; not that, for man found in his heart an 
 excellence greater than that, a human worth against which 
 mere power, with all its tyrannous potencies, was weakness 
 itself. Not mere wisdom, the infinite knowledge which adapted 
 means to ends, and brought a world-order and beauty into 
 being; not that, for the spirit of man found that wisdom itself 
 must bow to a mightier master, else its many inventions would 
 go hopelessly astray; not the absoluteness of mere justice and 
 judgment; not that, for in every tract of that hard heartless 
 empire which such governance would engender must be left 
 open and available a still larger area of mercy, allowance, for- 
 giveness. Somehow, in the midst of his twilight of law and 
 growing wisdom and sense of infinite power, the spirit of man 
 was borne onward toward the conviction that to know all was 
 not to punish all but to forgive all. After all, we are not the 
 culprits of God, not the quarry slaves of God, but the sons of 
 God; and the vital pulsation that courses back and forth be- 
 tween us and the Father of spirits is the communion of that 
 love whose expression is fatherhood and sonship. This is the 
 
136 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 illuminate and determining hemisphere of the tremendous map 
 of life, the central character which forever sets off the new dis- 
 pensation of things over against the old. "The law," as St. 
 John defines it, "was given by Moses; but grace and truth 
 came by Jesus Christ." When this revelation was made, men 
 began to live; and the world, by a divinely inspired instinct, 
 has numbered its years from that date, nineteen full centuries 
 now, during which, eagerly exploring its various potencies, 
 men have hardly yet begun to sound its depths and are lagging 
 far behind the unspeakable heights of it. Why, here is work 
 cut out for an eternity: just to realize and embody, to spread 
 and naturalize, the endless potentialities of love. 
 
 Love, in that central pulsation which is the heart of love, 
 namely, unbought undeserved grace, is the supreme and ab- 
 solutely new contribution of the fulness of the time to the 
 wealth of the world. Nothing like it, except as dim and 
 sporadic adumbrations of it, was ever named and naturalized 
 among men before. "The real difference between Paganism 
 and Christianity," says G. K. Chesterton, "is perfectly 
 summed up in the difference between the pagan, or natural, 
 virtues, and those three virtues of Christianity which the 
 Church of Rome calls virtues of grace. The pagan, or rational, 
 virtues are such things as justice and temperance, and Christi- 
 anity has adopted them. The three mystical virtues which 
 Christianity has not adopted, but invented, are faith, hope, and 
 charity" or as we better translate, love; and as St. Paul 
 says, the greatest of these is love. "Behold," says Isaiah, "the 
 former things are come to pass" shall we not say the former 
 ideals of justice and temperance? "and new things do I de- 
 clare: before they spring forth I tell you of them. ... Be- 
 hold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye 
 not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and 
 rivers in the desert." I shall have further occasion to quote 
 how Mr. Chesterton sets forth the uniqueness of these virtues 
 of grace; here I merely record the distinction, that you may 
 have it as a point de repere to bear in mind; that you may 
 know once for all what was the real meaning of things when, 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 137 
 
 at the end of days the Lord rose up and was wroth, as the 
 prophet put it, that he might do his work, his strange work, 
 and bring to pass his act, his strange act. It was the evolu- 
 tion of grace, in the heart of manhood. With this in mind 
 our business now is, to fit this in, if we may, to our adopted 
 evolutionary framework. 
 
 All along we have been aware, through the pre-Christian 
 ages, of a vague prevailing sense of something lacking. The 
 spirit of man could not rest in its manhood attainment; it 
 recognized its manhood as incomplete, its supreme prophetic 
 vision was of a coming manhood, in which man could see and 
 be what he deeply felt it in him to be. This is not speculation 
 or philosophy; it is recorded fact; we have that actual pro- 
 phetic pulsation of the human spirit to reckon with. Nor is 
 it ancient history alone; it is the present experience of the 
 finest, deepest-seeing poetic souls. In a world full of beauty 
 and splendor, of work and achievement, of ideals of justice and 
 self-control, yet the key of things was so conspicuously lacking 
 that to many a sensitive heart all seemed, as to Hamlet, a a 
 foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." You remember 
 how Browning has put this into a poem, and supplied the key. 
 "Wanting," he says, 
 
 Wanting is what? 
 
 Summer redundant, 
 
 Blueness abundant, 
 
 Where is the blot? 
 
 Beamy the world, yet a blank all the same, 
 Framework which waits for a picture to frame: 
 What of the leafage, what of the flower? 
 Roses embowering with naught they embower! 
 Come then, complete incompletion, O comer, 
 Pant through the blueness, perfect the summer! 
 
 Breathe but one breath 
 
 Rose-beauty above, 
 
 And all that was death 
 
 Grows life, grows love, 
 Grows love ! 
 
 This, you say, is a poet's dream, not science. Well, then 
 let us interrogate art. Did you ever see that wonderful pic- 
 
138 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 ture of Albrecht Durer's, on which he inscribed the word 
 "MELANCHOLIA"? Diirer, you know, was the friend of Luther 
 and Melanchthon and Erasmus, a man of whom was said, 
 "His least merit was his art"; and he made this picture in 1514, 
 seven years before Luther's great confession at Worms, at a 
 time when the Revival of Learning, then in full sway, was able, 
 as man had not been since Christ, to record the marvelous 
 energies and achievements of the spirit of man. This picture, 
 the verdict of the greatest master of the German renaissance 
 on his day, portrays at once its greatness and its sad futility. 
 A female winged figure, the very embodiment of human wis- 
 dom and might, her head crowned with the laurel, and with 
 keys and a great purse at her girdle, sits at the foot of a half- 
 built tower, whose unfinished top is out of sight beyond the 
 picture. It is done as far as the first string course, the base- 
 ment story, so to say; and on one wall of it hang the even- 
 balanced scales of justice, on the other the hour-glass, its sands 
 almost run, the passing-bell ready to ring the final hour, and 
 the magic square which in every direction, vertically, horizon- 
 tally, diagonally, foots up ever the same, the emblem, it would 
 seem, of a rounded, self-contained life. The woman sits look- 
 ing at a shapeless block of stone, and with a great pair of com- 
 passes is evidently trying, but hopelessly as her countenance 
 indicates, to plan how it may be fitted into the edifice above. 
 There the ladder is, all ready, the refractory stone at the foot 
 of it; but scattered on the ground lie the discarded instruments 
 of art and research, the jagged and worn-out saw, the useless 
 plane, the broken T-square, the idle hammer; while the sphere, 
 the symbol of perfection, lies reproachfully at her feet, an un- 
 approachable pattern, and the crucible beyond contains no 
 secret of the ultimate elements of being. By her side on a 
 large mill-stone emblem, this stone, of grinding labor sits 
 a winged child with stylus and tablet, and the fringed cloth 
 that makes its seat easier seems to tell of that contented spirit 
 which rejoices in work as its portion; but the child is asleep 
 over its reckoning, and at the foot of the stone lies a dog, also 
 fast asleep. All betokens a stoppage and deadlock of achieve- 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 139 
 
 ment; the woman only being awake, but awake to the most 
 hopeless thoughts. Yet beyond, on the shore of the limitless 
 ocean, is a prosperous city, with its stateliness, its marts, and 
 the ships of commerce in its harbor; no indication here of 
 human failure; while in the sky of the background the most 
 conspicuous object, filling it all with its exaggerated rays, is 
 what we hardly know whether to call a sun or a baleful comet, 
 whether betokening glory or doom, an object left thus ambigu- 
 ous, perhaps, of the artist's intent. But crossing its equivocal 
 rays, firm and solid as if built into Nature, is the rainbow of 
 promise; while flying away with a cry into the night, its back 
 turned to sun and rainbow, is a strange bat-like creature bear- 
 ing on its uncouth wings the legend "MELANCHOLIA." Such is 
 this speaking picture, eloquent in every smallest detail. What 
 spirit of life shall break this deadlock and rouse the sleepers? 
 Who shall square that shapeless block, shapeless but noble in 
 size and texture, and fit it for its place in the edifice above? 
 For that winged spirit of man has reached her limit of power; 
 earth's splendid resources -are exhausted, and the tower is un- 
 finished; if the game is to go on, a God, it would seem, must 
 mingle with it. 
 
 This picture of Diirer's, unlike Browning's poem, fails to 
 vouchsafe any key to the situation. It portrays merely a 
 standstill and an enigma. Even the winged child, if it is in- 
 tended for the conventional figure of love, is merely love ab- 
 sorbed in art and work, and it is asleep. A similar record of 
 deadlock in the Bible, however, supplies, in the writer's own 
 idiom, a hint of what is needed to clear the situation. I refer 
 now to Koheleth, and his trenchant yet true assessment of his 
 legalized, toil-ridden world. It is something, you know, to have 
 reached the point where, whether we know the remedy or not, 
 we can diagnose the disease. Well, this is what Koheleth did 
 for his pre-Christian era. Like Goethe, 
 
 He took the suffering human race, 
 
 He read each wound, each weakness clear; 
 
 And struck his finger on the place, 
 
 And said: Thou attest here, and here! 
 
I 4 o THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 Koheleth, you know, looks out into the world from much the 
 same as Diirer's point of view, the point of view of labor and 
 art, and cheerily bids man rejoice in his work; but at the end 
 his verdict is, all vanity, futility, a chase after wind. It is 
 the same verdict from the under side that St. Paul afterward 
 pronounces from the upper, in saying that the creation was 
 made subject to vanity, a vanity not of its own willing. St. 
 Paul tells why; Koheleth merely puts his finger on the ailing 
 spot, in his question, "What profit hath man in all his labor, 
 which he laboreth under the sun?" The thing that is lacking, 
 in all this busy work, in all this ordered life, of the world, is 
 profit, something to make the work worth doing, the life worth 
 living. Koheleth, being not a modern scientist but a Jew, 
 speaks in his Jewish idiom of business; but the fact that he 
 immediately applies his question to the ongoings of nature and 
 history indicates that by profit he has something more in mind 
 than work and wages, or dollars and cents. The word means 
 literally surplusage. What surplusage : what is there left over, 
 when a man's work, when a generation's work, when the 
 world's work is done? And you remember how the lack of 
 surplusage in life is emphasized by his thought of things re- 
 turning on themselves, like a great wheel that comes round 
 full circle and starts again, ever again, but does not get for- 
 ward; so that when you compare generations each with each 
 there is nothing new under the sun. 
 
 Such is Koheleth's picture of his world, comparable to 
 Diirer's; I have spoken of it many times here, because to me 
 it is the most fundamental and searching estimate of the old 
 dispensation that exists; and besides it furnishes the evolu- 
 tionary clue to the new birth that here takes place. Surplus- 
 age; surplusage of life; vitality, as it were, liberated to excess, 
 overflowing; life enough for the soul's own needs, and life to 
 spare for the needs of others: that is what the dead-locked 
 world needed, and what in the fulness of time it began to have. 
 Koheleth had raised the inquiry "What surplusage?" and 
 searching into life had found little shreds of it here and there, 
 in wisdom, in the joy of the God-appointed work, in the faith 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 141 
 
 which takes all chances. But he had not learned to give this 
 overflow of life the right name; had not reached its innermost 
 secret; and so his search for surplusage remained largely a 
 thing of shreds and patches, nay pathetically small, compared 
 with the immense reality. This we can see, as soon as the 
 reality stands before us. When He who embodied it came, 
 and told the world what He came for: after describing the 
 earlier ones, who came and lived only for what they could get, 
 He said of Himself: "I am come that they might have life, 
 and that they might have it more abundantly." His word 
 is Trepurcrov, literally and exactly this idea of Koheleth's; 
 - that they might have a surplus, an overflow of 
 life. His whole attitude to life, and all the conduct He 
 founded on it, was keyed to this idea of self-impartation: 
 life imparted, flowing out like the waters of a fountain, work- 
 ing to vitalize other lives; and not at all as a thing taken in, 
 gloated over and made luxurious, or employed merely for what 
 could be got out of it. This self-impartation of life, put into 
 character, can mean nothing less, nothing other, than loving 
 your fellow-man. Under law, you either work for wages or 
 else try to dodge the penalty of transgression; that is about 
 what it reduces to; and it is all a self-regarding, self-seeking, 
 self-cultivating, and so inward-flowing current of spirit, which 
 makes yourself the centre of your system. Under love all this 
 is reversed; the spiritual current is outward, flowing to give 
 life and joy and truth to other hearts; but you do not im- 
 poverish, rather you enrich your own life thereby. You are 
 a great deal more of a man than you were before; you have 
 secured the supreme significance of manhood. In other words, 
 you have all the life you need for your own uses and more, nay, 
 becoming more as it spends itself; every pulsation of love for 
 your fellow-man is a veritable overflow of life, from the vital- 
 ized heart into the world. That is the reason why I entitle 
 this section The Outward Current. From a living soul, as 
 St. Paul expresses it, man has become a life-giving spirit; it 
 is this reversed current of being that has made him so. 
 
 Here I think we have an idea of life that fits into our evo- 
 
I 4 2 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 lutionary conception. It is the law of the spirit of life that at 
 the critical point where manhood evolution merges into its 
 highest and adult stage, there takes place what may be called 
 a liberation of the life-force to excess, an overflow of vitality; 
 so that thenceforth the man is not merely self-contained and 
 self-regarding, not merely a reservoir of vitality; but a foun- 
 tain of vitality, a source of life and refreshment to the world, 
 self-imparting and self-forgetting. This is the ideal, put in 
 quasi-chemical terms. It is the supply of what Koheleth felt 
 the lack of: the surplusage, which in his world was so doubt- 
 ful, yet to his prophetic soul was so needful an element to 
 progress. This elementary conception of it has many conno- 
 tations: it has to be accommodated, in fact, to every dialect 
 of life. We have spoken of the soul under tutelage of law, 
 and with the sense of being a minor; well, here the majority 
 bell has struck, and henceforth the soul is self-directive, a 
 man among men. We have spoken of a pervading sense of 
 bondage and fear; well, here the consciousness that fills the 
 soul is the sense of freedom and confidence. We have spoken 
 of the man whose individuality was baffled by his earthly and 
 hereditary conditions; well, here the spirit that is in him has 
 free course to pour itself forth spontaneously on the world 
 and on the task; and the key to it all, its absolute guarantee 
 of safety and sanity, is, that this overflow of a vitality derived 
 from the spirit of God is just the emergence and pure impulse 
 of love. In this all the stress and struggle after law, obedience, 
 righteousness, and all the livable relations with the world, 
 reaches its perfect and as it were natural solution. He that 
 loves his neighbor works him no ill; therefore love is the ful- 
 filling of the law. The ideal of fulfilment so long sought is 
 reached at one easy bound, as soon as the spirit rays outward, 
 as soon as love is in free play. But how crude and rudimental 
 this fulfilling looks, by the side of what more love brings into 
 life. Fulfilling of law is merely the negative and inert side of 
 love worketh no ill, virtually leaving neighbor alone and 
 yet the law, as such, is satisfied. But over against it put the 
 whole new world of life values and activities, when the spirit, 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 143 
 
 vitalized by love, overflows in good sympathies and good 
 works, forgetting self, or rather finding its truest self-interest 
 in the welfare of neighbor and the new-birth of a world. 
 
 Such are the evolutionary aspects of the case; and while 
 the contemplation of them throws light on the depths and in- 
 volvements of being, yet fortunately the world did not have 
 to wait for the era of scientific research to get its revelation 
 of this profoundest truth of the world. We can get at it best, 
 indeed, by attending to the limpid simplicities of the matter. 
 Love is, after all, the great simplifies When our Lord put 
 before men the kingdom of God, to which men must be born, 
 He treated that birth as a beginning of the simplest, sweetest 
 things; and setting a child in the midst, He said that men 
 must receive the kingdom of heaven as a little child. We can 
 see why, when love is the light of our seeing. Simple and 
 natural as it is, it is the mark of that growth of the spirit 
 which we have already noted, wherein men dare to love and 
 trust instead of to fear and fight. A little child, in its perfect 
 openness of love and trust, is the bravest being in the world, 
 brave because so unconscious of its courage, the bravest and 
 the most overcoming. It has found the sublimely clear way 
 to the conquest of the kingdom. Yes, the child on its mill- 
 stone, asleep over its uncongenial work, must awake and be- 
 come the dominating influence of the picture; and as it sends 
 its ray of trustful love into the energies of things, and thus 
 takes the helm of progress, the hard strained look will melt 
 from that mighty spirit of man, and the compasses will strike 
 the right line, and the shapeless block will round into the per- 
 fect pattern, the completed sphere of character and destiny. 
 No more a magic self-contained square, with the passing-bell 
 already trembling to strike above it, but the sphere of per- 
 fected relations, heart to heart and man to man, ready for 
 its place at the top of the ladder, where the tower goes up out 
 of sight. Wagner, you know, in his Parsifal, is dreaming of 
 an innocent fool who shall heal the diseases and foulnesses of 
 the world; in his Lohengrin, of a spotless yet ignorant knight 
 who shall overcome; in his Siegfried, of an untutored, run-wild 
 
144 T HE LIFE INDEED 
 
 product of nature, who shall somehow, in the twilight of the 
 heathen gods, open the new radiance of Christianity. But 
 none of them strike into the ongoings of the world as a force 
 and power there; they do not create but only suffer and 
 achieve; and they all leave the intractable world at last, by 
 death, or treachery, or translation, leave it with only the 
 memory of a vision. Our Lord opens the simpler way, the 
 way not for the exceptional knight or giant or fool, but for 
 every common man and every prosaic life. Receive the king- 
 dom of heaven as a little child; dare in the perfect courage of 
 the childlike heart to love and trust, to lay aside fear 
 and fighting and the strain and strenuousness of puzzled study, 
 and the door of the kingdom of heaven lies wide open. How 
 many are ready, even in this age of the world, to commit them- 
 selves to this simple ideal of love, accepting it without reserva- 
 tions and safeguardings on this side and that, and to ensue the 
 consequences? 
 
 One difficulty is, and has been, that men, though looking 
 out into the universe and seeing love and mercy there, have 
 been too ready to treat that love as working only in one direc- 
 tion; only in the direction from heaven to earth. As the long- 
 suffering love of God became more evident to them, they have 
 hastened to accept it and make it available for their purposes, 
 without adequate committal to the human return it should en- 
 gender. The power that evolves the universe is a spirit that 
 loves and forgives; what then shall the recipient of such favor 
 do about it? Receive it and make use of it, of course; but too 
 many have stopped there, and just have banked on it, as one 
 more instrument for furthering their own alien ends. Like 
 Heine's blasphemous wit on his death-bed, after a consciously 
 misspent life, their lives have too often and too affrontingly 
 said, "God will forgive, c'est son metier, it is His trade." And 
 so that love of God has been allowed to minister to their greed 
 and their lazy transgression; they have lived their old selfish 
 life and banked on getting forgiveness at the end. This is not 
 childlikeness; it is mere perverse childishness. But you must 
 note this: that this revelation of mercy and allowance, is just 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 145 
 
 the polar opposite of self-seeking or even of justice: it pro- 
 claims the spirit of God as a spirit of free grace, as love un- 
 bought, undeserved, pouring itself forth on the world out of 
 its own infinite fulness. That is the only true interpretation 
 of love; all that stops short of this contains still some tinge of 
 barter, of reward, of commercialism. And that is the interpre- 
 tation which has been coming slowly, how slowly, and with 
 what difficulty, into the free ideals of manhood. It is the 
 outward current, the free unrestrained overflow and surplus- 
 age, which because it is felt in the universe, is by that fact 
 recognized as the real ideal of manhood and life. If the spirit 
 bearing witness with ours is the spirit of God, how can our 
 spirit find true communion otherwise than as a spirit of grace, 
 daring to love not because our neighbor is lovable and deserv- 
 ing, not even because thereby we would secure his answering 
 love and so conserve our greater dignity and safety, but be- 
 cause our spirit of love flows in the same majestic direction as 
 the mystic spirit that witnesses with it. Love unprovoked, 
 without reference to payment or consequences; such is the 
 ideal of life that is struggling to the birth. When we see its 
 height and depth as it is, how can we regard it otherwise than 
 as a transcendent element of life, a miracle, if you please, from 
 the unseen places, far beyond the scope of what may be com- 
 manded, far outrunning the empire of law. Yet with the ful- 
 ness of time the ideal has come; a veritable law of the spirit 
 of life; we cannot deny it, we cannot attain rest until it is in 
 us. You remember how absolutely, how uncompromisingly, 
 St. Paul has set it forth, by drawing out a kind of scale of 
 values, measuring it by the response that different shades of 
 life elicit. "For scarcely for a righteous man," he says, "will 
 one die, yet peradventure for a good man some would even 
 dare to die." The human response may be put forth haltingly 
 and sporadically when some worthy man comes who deserves 
 it, some man whose disinterested love elicits an answer after 
 its own kind. "But," the ideal goes relentlessly on to say, 
 "God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were 
 yet sinners, Christ dies for us." And who is Christ? Is he 
 
146 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 not bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh; is He not, in truth, 
 the coming Man, whom law has struggled to create, and proph- 
 ecy has worked into progressive vision? Is not this the per- 
 fect, ultimate expression of that liberation of the spirit to 
 excess, that surplusage and overflow of love, which stops not 
 at desert or answering worthiness in the object, but is the copy 
 of the spirit of God? And if one died for all, then were all 
 dead. There, my friends, whether you take it or leave it, there 
 is the ultimate ideal of manhood's capabilities. 
 
 "It is high, I cannot attain unto it," is doubtless the answer 
 that springs into your heart here. Yes, it is high, as heaven 
 is above earth; yet the holiest manhood is committed to it; 
 we are bound that way; we remain in deadlock, surrounded 
 by the broken implements of our toil, without it. And what 
 less can we augur of an evolution that begins with the brooding 
 spirit of God, warming into life the timid and halting, yet 
 ever more confident, reactions of the human spirit? Why, 
 here is the point where the spirit of man, stronger at last than 
 death, steps forth free, adult, master of its impulses and ac- 
 tions. Men have tried, as we saw at the beginning of our 
 study, to peer curiously into that spirit's destiny, by interro- 
 gating the occult, by exploring the dim tracts of psychism and 
 hypnotism and mediumship and dreams; but all they could 
 discover was a mysterious underworld of subliminal conscious- 
 ness, out of which came here and there a fitful flash of some 
 strange unclassified power, they knew not what. Was it not 
 their mistake that they were looking toward the underworld, 
 down toward the instinctive rudiments of being, where men 
 are still the puppets of arbitrary nature? No, not downward 
 is the direction, but inward, inward, inward, to the central 
 point where, in the dawning of light, the spirit of man and the 
 spirit of God are beginning their communion together, in a 
 mystic common witness of which nothing but the final seeing 
 eye to eye in love, and the final cooperation in the work of a 
 kingdom, can be the key. I believe it is so. The central rudi- 
 mental instinct is the instinct of the spirit; and the only 
 worthy definition and dignity of that we find in the creative 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 147 
 
 spirit of God. The revelations of our subconscious self are all 
 well enough; we do not reject them; but let us be sure they 
 are grounded in a centre worthy of our highest nature, worthy 
 not only of what we are but of what our hearts beat on to be. 
 Thus it is ; if ever, that the unfolding of the life beyond can 
 become clear, and authentic, and pure. 
 
 But transcendent as all this is, it begins, it pursues its whole 
 course, in the most universal relations of life. What other 
 thing is there that fills the world so full, after all, as love? 
 Viewed in this supreme manifestation it seems, and is, a trans- 
 cendental thing, so high that we faint in the contemplation of 
 it. But does not a new world open, and a new impulse of labor 
 and sacrifice, to every young man and every young woman, 
 that have found, out of all the world, the heart to which his 
 or her affections may be married? How God is revealing love 
 all the while in the family, in the friend, in the neighbor; 
 how it expands in wisdom and strength from the neighbor 
 the boor that is nigh the tiller of the soil and working man 
 whose activities lie next to ours onward to the community, 
 and the clan, and the nation, and the race; yes, onward, in a 
 divine momentum, to humanity and the world that God has 
 made. Why, this love that I have been describing is just the 
 final opening of the gates, so that what began with lover and 
 lass, father and son, brother and sister, still narrow and rudi- 
 mental in all, though genuine, in all, is an unchecked fountain 
 for all the world, flowing at last free and full, and consciously 
 identified with the spirit of the universe. The race of man is 
 some day not only to accept and acknowledge, but in very 
 truth to be the Christ, the Messiah of its promise. This is 
 what the law of the spirit of life, which so long has surged up 
 to light and energy, finally amounts to; the far destiny of its 
 evolutionary uprise lies involved in it. 
 
 Our subject has now become so broad, and the radiations 
 of this outward current are so many, that I must needs exer- 
 cise care here to keep rigorously to the main channel, lest we 
 lose ourselves in complexities. You may know then, if ques- 
 tions rise, that I am postponing many things here calling im- 
 
148 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 portunately for remark; postponing them in order first of all 
 to get the one dominating line; and indeed there is coming a 
 more fitting place for the various applications to life. Mean- 
 while, it is important to note that here we have reached the 
 outer bounds of the world; in other words, the love by which 
 at the fulness of the time manhood becomes vitalized is a love 
 universal. It spreads upwards, downwards, everywhere; free 
 and pervasive as the air; its only sufficing pattern the love of 
 God. You can see what a marvelous chain of sequences lead 
 to this; can see it in the simple terms of his growing insight. 
 There has risen in humanity an ideal that at some stage of 
 being every man, his individuality complete and accountable, 
 may do what seems good to him; but to this end he must at- 
 tain to a table-land whereon the good that seems shall be real 
 and absolute, whereon he shall see things as they are. Now 
 in order to see things as they are, he must love them; there is 
 no other way to enter into their life, with its motions to good, 
 its tendencies to evil. Without that penetrative, allowance- 
 making love, he stays outside. But further, I am speaking of 
 a communion which can only be with beings like-minded, a 
 communion wherein both parties can enter on equal terms; 
 and man's equal party, his likeness and image, is just his 
 fellow-man. If he has idealized him to the Son of man, still 
 He is the brother-man, wiser and holier, and so Lord of man's 
 will. There is the object of his regard. In order to see the 
 good in his fellow-man he must love his fellow-man; to see it 
 in the ongoings of the world, he must love the mankind that 
 makes up the world; to see it in God, still his way is to love 
 his brother-man, for as St. John says, "He that loveth not his 
 brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom he 
 hath not seen?" There is a bit of common sense for you. St. 
 John, with all his mysticism, will not have a soul straining it- 
 self to get the rapturous emotional attitude toward God, when 
 all the while his heart is hard toward any brother-man. A 
 man that does that, he says, and professes thus to love God, 
 is a liar. All this reduces, you see, to a free play of love 
 through all the manhood being; it has the pulsation of uni- 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 149 
 
 versality; a man has reached the plane where he loves his kind 
 not because his kind is lovely, or because his love would wait 
 for and depend on any evoking occasion, but just because it 
 is in him to love. Therefore it is a love not for those alone 
 who are bound by ties of blood, for wife, family, comrade, clan, 
 race, though all this has had its broadening and beneficent 
 part in his evolution; it is a love also for enemies and perse- 
 cutors, and for all who are in need or darkness, whether here 
 or across the seas. "Who is my mother? and who are my 
 brethren?" you remember our Lord once asked. "And he 
 stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Be- 
 hold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do 
 the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is 
 my brother, and sister, and mother." Some scoffers have 
 treated this remark as if it betrayed a strain of heartlessness 
 in Jesus, and especially when He startled men by a half-truth 
 utterance of the same principle, saying that whoever would 
 come after Him must hate his father and mother and relatives 
 and forsake all he had. Why, it was just the utterance of a 
 heart as big as the world, His translation of love from the 
 terms of the family and the parish, from a narrow and blood- 
 bound thing, to the free course of the love of God, love uni- 
 versal. A simple thing, after all, though so large; it is the 
 emancipate spirit of life, which we may express in the words 
 in which Lowell described the character of Abraham Lincoln: 
 
 Fruitful and friendly for all human kind, 
 
 Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. 
 
 I confess there is no other revelation of Scripture which so fills 
 me with amazement, is so manifestly of another world, as this. 
 It almost takes one's breath away to reflect how fearlessly and 
 absolutely this intrinsic love in man, and for man, is identified 
 with the far-withdrawn life of God. "God is love," says St. 
 John, "and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God 
 in him." There you have it; no theologian in the world, spec- 
 ulating on essences and attributes, on omniscience and omni- 
 presence and omnipotence and omni-what you please, would 
 
150 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 dare say that of his own motion; it is too sublimely simple. 
 The divine is so revealed in that supreme human trait, the per- 
 fected capability of loving without bounds, that what can be 
 predicated of the one is unconditionally predicated of the 
 other. 
 
 Here is the essential note of contrast between the old and 
 the new. Under an empire of law the soul looks up from the 
 under side of things to a Power and Wisdom enthroned above 
 it, and stretching out so vastly beyond man's power and wis- 
 dom that he cannot emulate them. He can do a little to dis- 
 cover and use them; he can to a limited extent deflect the 
 forces of the universe, physical and moral, to his own purpose; 
 but for the most part his role is one of simple submission to 
 the inevitable, and of endeavor to make the best of it. If he is 
 a slave, he looks up to the cosmic burden above him and groans 
 under its weight. If he is an athlete, who accepts and master- 
 fully wields his law of being, he still looks up thankfully to 
 the Source of law, but he is apt also, unless a finer spirit im- 
 bues him, to look down on his weaker fellow and despise him; 
 is proud, like the Pharisee, because he can work his law better 
 than can his neighbor the publican. In the empire of grace 
 and truth, the dominance of the outward current, all this is 
 changed. It is no more looking upward, to a remote and alien 
 Will which must be obeyed, nor looking down from a superior 
 height on those whose works are less meritorious than ours. 
 Here, you see, comes in St. Paul's distinction about the grounds 
 of salvation: "not of works, lest any man should boast." No: 
 it is just looking straight out into a brother's eyes, and making 
 acquaintance with his soul, and sharing his human burden and 
 lot. It is looking straight out, too, fearless and trustful, into 
 a universe vitalized by such love. Then comes the amazing 
 consciousness that in this attitude of love he is sharing, on 
 equal and filial terms, in the central life of God; such love 
 being the motion and spirit that rolls through all things. On 
 this ground, as not on the ground of power and wisdom, he 
 can actually emulate God. There is no more near and far, no 
 more sense that the universe is an undiscovered and inacces- 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 151 
 
 sible realm beyond him, though in power and wisdom he still 
 must keep to his insignificant place; here, in a love which is 
 fruitful and friendly for all, he is dwelling, as at home, in the 
 secret place of the Most High. His very humility but accen- 
 tuates his essential likeness to God; it is "that stoop of the 
 soul which in bending upraises it too." This idea, you re- 
 member, is Browning's favorite theme; he has laid out tre- 
 mendous poetic effort on the expression of it. In his poem of 
 Saul it reaches its most glowing height; where David, after 
 having measured himself, in sense of utter insignificance, 
 against the power and wisdom of the universe, goes on to say: 
 
 Yet with all this abounding experience, this deity known, 
 
 I shall dare to discover some province, some gift of my own. 
 
 There's a faculty pleasant to exercise, hard to hoodwink, 
 
 I am fain to keep still in abeyance, (I laugh as I think) 
 
 Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I worst 
 
 E'en the Giver in one gift. Behold, I could love if I durst! 
 
 But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake 
 
 God's own speed in the one way of love: I abstain for love's sake. 
 
 Thus the power to love rises in man's heart as a discovery, 
 just as we have seen it rising; as a discovery of that in which 
 man can emulate God. Of course he does not gloat over his 
 new discovery long. It raises the question whether, after all, 
 he is so far beyond the Father of his spirit: 
 
 Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift, 
 
 That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here, the parts shift? 
 
 Here, the creature surpass the Creator, the end, what Began? 
 
 Would I suffer for him that I love ? So wouldst thou so wilt thou ! 
 So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown 
 And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up or down 
 One spot for the creature to stand in! 
 
 So his discovery of love, with the deduction from it, becomes 
 his discovery of Christ, who after all is his own nature, per- 
 fect and ideal. 
 
 This is the summit of manhood, as it comes to measure its 
 potencies and use its free spirit of life. As thus in free play 
 these potencies are too great for an earth-trained human na- 
 
152 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 ture; but in fact life is not free from its fetters until it has 
 reached this summit. Every point short of this, as soon as 
 we put the check there, leaves life, in one way or another, as 
 much in bondage as ever. Over against each halting-place of 
 love rises a converse of hate or armed neutrality; suspicion 
 and distrust, or jealousy and contempt, dark evil glances over 
 the barrier; while the love that is prisoned inside is no more 
 than a spiritual compact of offense and defense. So instead 
 of making this marvelous pulsation of love a hallowing power 
 to make us love all men better for loving one, every bound set 
 makes an occasion to hate or ignore all outside the circle. This 
 is not grace at all, but only a refined kind of business partner- 
 ship. Take as illustration the Jews, whose tremendous dis- 
 tinction it is to have been the national vehicle whereby this 
 salvation by grace was revealed. Their law had not dried up 
 or made less intense their capacity of love; they had merely 
 made it too exclusive. I have remarked that their great error 
 was to have stopped at the race, to have magnified the law of 
 the species to that point and then committed themselves to an 
 arrested development. They could not get over the stumbling- 
 block of Christ crucified, could not accept the ultimate conse- 
 quences of a free play of universal grace. Yet within their 
 bounds their love of race, intense and pure, furnishes almost 
 the ideal pattern of love. Its error is just in its self-imposed 
 barrier, which will not let the passion burst bonds and flow out 
 to all the earth. And so just at that barrier-point cluster evils 
 and hatreds as intense as is the love itself; and these bring on 
 that race the answering hatred and distrust of the world. Like 
 begets like. Here is how Charles Kingsley makes a Jew de- 
 scribe his race as it was in the fifth Christian century. "Alas, 
 my lord," says a certain Jew secretary to the prefect, "y u do 
 not know the customs of that accursed folk. They have a 
 damnable practice of treating every member of their nation 
 as a brother, and helping each freely and faithfully without 
 reward; whereby they are enabled to plunder all the rest of 
 the world, and thrive themselves from the least to the greatest." 
 Whether that is a fair description of the nation to-day I leave 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 153 
 
 you to judge. But that is another story. The Jewish spirit, 
 as such, with its undeniably noble traits, may not be aware 
 what ails it; but some day, St. Paul says, the veil will be taken 
 from their hearts. Well, if it is, look out for the avalanche 
 of human love which will mark their mission. Nor have we, 
 as a so-called Christian nation, any great cause to boast. Pa- 
 triotism, love of country, is a noble thing; but set the limit of 
 love there and the nation is still capable of rejoicing, as it did 
 a few years ago, over the success of a tariff which takes the 
 bread out of another nation's mouth. I need not extend the 
 illustration to the prodigious navies and armaments, as well 
 as the finely exacting treaties, which one and all are the huge 
 symbol of national distrust and fear; I need not speak of the 
 churchly love which splits a doctrine between north and north- 
 east side to make a fence round it, and has only odium theo- 
 logicum for the outsiders; nor of the rancors and jealousies of 
 private life, which are so often merely the reverse side of a 
 too narrow, too restricted love. No: I give you the exact and 
 rigorous truth : you stay the course and radiation of love at any 
 point short of a whole humanity, and at that point it is not 
 love at all; it is still in the shackles of an old bondage and an 
 old fear. 
 
 What then do I owe to my fellow-man? A fair question 
 this, echo though it be of the old Cain question, "Am I my 
 brother's keeper?" What we owe to men, to life, to the world, 
 is just our duty, what is due. The law has taught us that. 
 And St. Paul, speaking for the adult man, and making the 
 height of our duty correspond to the grade of our evolution, 
 puts the whole matter into one short utterance: "Owe no man 
 anything, but to love one another." That is the whole extent 
 of our debt; that is to say, we owe to mankind simply all that 
 we are. It is the tremendous crowning-point of evolution, as 
 moulded by the free spirit, that man has it in him to do that. 
 Love does not let us off easily; but we cannot remonstrate; it 
 is love's own chosen way, its only blessedness lies in that peren- 
 nial obligation. 
 
154 rHE LIFE INDEED 
 
 III. THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN 
 
 But a new element rises to view here. A debt so imperative, 
 a self-sacrifice so absolute, a freedom so bound, who shall 
 lay it upon us as a duty? Through all those centuries of edu- 
 cation in godlikeness men have learned to receive mercy and 
 forgiveness, and the consciousness of that grace from the un- 
 seen places has made two results possible: either to make that 
 immunity an occasion for carelessness, not to say transgres- 
 sion, or to make the law itself all the more holy and just and 
 good. So it is that every advance in insight has its obverse and 
 reverse sides, according as it is or is not accepted in the spirit 
 of it. But when it comes to showing that same mercy and for- 
 giveness, and embodying it in loving character, and when this 
 is put before man as a debt that he owes, as a thing that as 
 true man he must do, immediately Shylock's question rises to 
 rebel, 
 
 On what compulsion must I? tell me that. 
 
 And the same answer meets it: 
 
 The quality of mercy is not strain 'd; 
 It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven 
 Upon the place beneath it: it is twice blest; 
 It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes. 
 
 But to secure the blessing of him that gives; in other words, 
 to commit ourselves freely and without reservation to this new 
 law of the spirit of life; this is the new problem that rises to 
 view here, the last and crucial barrier to surmount. For we 
 have reached the point where we can see over into the new life, 
 can see its glory and its beauty; and we are aware that we have 
 been lifelong recipients of just such grace and forgiveness; but 
 to launch forth on it, as on a returnless ocean, and to make 
 it the rule of living, who is sufficient for that? Until there 
 is actual committal of the will to it, the heart of man is still 
 merely looking through the gates of his prison, merely con- 
 templating the sunshine beyond. The untasted cup is at his 
 lips. 
 
 He saith, "It is good"; still he drinks not: he lets me praise life, 
 Gives assent, yet would die for his own part. 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 155 
 
 And so, high as we have come, dazzled as we are with the glory 
 of it, still we must ask, as Browning asked of Saul, - 
 
 What was gone, what remained? All to traverse, 'twixt hope and despair; 
 Death was past, life not come. 
 
 This committal to the new spirit of life, here so absolute a 
 requisite, is what we call faith; and this faith, in its essence, is 
 the evidence, or as some translate it, the testing, of things not 
 seen. It is, in the evolutionary dialect we have chosen, that 
 supreme effort of the spirit of man by which he enters the 
 majestic outward current of the universe, so as thenceforth 
 to be consciously and willingly identified with it. Whether 
 God or he has more part is an idle question; our concern is 
 with the committal which constitutes his part. Until this is 
 made, the whole new life remains merely a proffer, not a gift; 
 and so a thing not understood at all, for it cannot be under- 
 stood except by living it. This, you see, is only another way 
 of saying, "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the 
 kingdom of God." Faith is the human initiative, as it makes 
 the vital venture and enters the kingdom. 
 
 A man cannot make this committal by being told to make 
 it. It is wholly beyond any law that can be laid upon him, 
 anything that can be commanded. It must be a free motion 
 on his own part, his own surrender, his own will. And yet, 
 we do not know how, a strange other half comes to meet his 
 act, and as soon as it comes he feels, he knows, that that other 
 and unseen half is really the vital whole, and his half is 
 nothing. Have you ever waked up in the night unable to 
 stir, as if somehow the wheels of your being were caught 
 at a dead centre; unable to make the slightest movement 
 hand or foot, unable to cry out for help, every function but 
 breathing at a dead syncope? You know how awful is the 
 sense of this stoppage of the vital motions, though it be en- 
 tirely without pain. And yet, the instant you succeed in 
 making the smallest movement, hardly a movement at all, 
 everything is right again, the currents of life resume their 
 normal flow. Well, it has always seemed to me as if, on its 
 
156 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 larger scale, the personal venture of faith were IIKC that. One 
 moment the being, though all ready to live, is at a deadlock 
 and standstill; the next moment it is launched in the free cur- 
 rent of the new life, with functions in full play, as if it were 
 born so. It is like that man to whom our Lord said, "Stretch 
 forth thy hand." What a command this, to one whose arm 
 had been withered and inert for years, perhaps from birth, an 
 atrophied member. And yet somehow the effort was made, 
 and the ruddy current of life came coursing down, and the 
 man was made whole. It was, so far forth, the birth of a spirit, 
 a will, and new vitality was the answer to it. 
 
 How much this committal of faith means, morally and prac- 
 tically, we can realize better by comparing its bold reckless- 
 ness, as a virtue, with the self-contained and thrifty virtues of 
 paganism and legalism. You remember I quoted from Ches- 
 terton the remark that Christianity had adopted the old pagan 
 virtues, like justice and temperance, but had invented three 
 wholly new ones, faith, hope, and charity, the so-called vir- 
 tues of grace. He goes on then to contrast these new virtues 
 with the old. Not stopping here to dwell on his first element 
 of contrast, namely that, while the old are the sad virtues, 
 these new are "the gay and exuberant virtues," we note that 
 "the second evident fact, which is even more evident, is the 
 fact that the pagan virtues are the reasonable virtues, and 
 that the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity are in 
 their essence as unreasonable as they can be." His exposition 
 of this remark, though it strains the paradox a little, will bear 
 thought. He shows first how eminently reasonable and self- 
 justifying the pagan virtues are. "Justice," he says, "consists 
 in finding out a certain thing due to a certain man and giving 
 it to him. Temperance consists in finding out the proper limit 
 of a particular indulgence and adhering to that. But," he 
 goes on to say, "charity means pardoning what is unpardon- 
 able, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things 
 are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believ- 
 ing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all." This is his violent 
 way of saying, what is essentially true, that these new virtues, 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 157 
 
 reversing the whole current of character from inward-flowing 
 to outward, are just as unreasonable as they can be, and do 
 their work of regenerating the decrepit old world by their very 
 unreasonableness. 
 
 Before we go on to complete the application of this to our 
 subject, it is worth while to quote Mr. Chesterton a little 
 further, as especially relating to the greatest of these, charity, 
 or love. "It is true," he says, "that there is a thing crudely 
 called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; 
 but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. 
 It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does 
 not exist at all, or exists wholly for them." Then later he 
 sums up the general atmosphere, so to say, of the world pagan 
 and the world Christian. "The beautiful and astonishing 
 pagan world," he says, " . . . was a world in which common 
 sense was really common;" while of the virtues which irradiate 
 a Christian world he says: "They are all three paradoxical, 
 they are all three practical, and they are all three paradoxical 
 because they are practical. It is the stress of ultimate need, 
 and a terrible knowledge of things as they are, which led men 
 to set up these riddles, and to die for them. Whatever may be 
 the meaning of the contradiction, it is the fact that the only 
 kind of hope that is of any use in a battle is a hope that denies 
 arithmetic. Whatever may be the meaning of the contradic- 
 tion, it is the fact that the only kind of charity which any 
 weak spirit wants, or which any generous spirit feels, is the 
 charity which forgives the sins that are like scarlet. Whatever 
 may be the meaning of faith, it must always mean a certainty 
 about something we cannot prove. Thus, for instance, we be- 
 lieve by faith in the existence of other people." 
 
 This last sentence is not so much of an anticlimax as it 
 sounds. To have faith in the existence of other people, with 
 all their individual worlds of hopes and fears, handicaps and 
 errors, is really the final application of faith to practice. Let 
 us leave the ordinary notion of faith, that it is assent to a 
 creed; it may include that, but it is a great deal more, and 
 its central essence is something quite other. To say that by 
 
158 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 faith you commit your whole being to an ideal is to say that 
 you live as if a certain thing were true, conforming all your 
 acts to that idea, and yet the thing to which you thus relate 
 yourself does not yet exist, or if it does you cannot prove it, 
 do not try to prove it; rather your faith virtually creates it, 
 as an object to live for. Your faith is thus a kind of excess, 
 an exuberance of being; you take that attitude when there is 
 no reason in things or in men for you to act so; nay, the atti- 
 tude may be absurd or dangerous from a reasonable point of 
 view; and yet you act so because it is in you to act so, it is the 
 spirit, the initiative, of your being so to do. This, you see, is 
 just that overflow or surplusage of life that we have spoken of. 
 It is the vitality that comes into a man when his ideal of things 
 has laid hold of his will; Professor James speaks of it 
 as "the will to believe"; though it is not so much the will 
 to have faith as it is the will which is itself faith at work. It 
 is something like the youthful spirit of adventure for the ad- 
 venture's sake; only, with all the abandon of that, it sees an 
 unseeable good beyond the adventure. It is like nay it is, 
 the leap from realism, which sees only a sordid and crooked 
 and toil-enslaved world such as Koheleth and the realists in 
 general see, to idealism, to romance if you please, which 
 creates a world more delightful, more righteous, more coura- 
 geous, more capable of love, than actually exists, and which 
 then casts the whole weight of its being into that scale. You 
 can think how much this means. Why, it is as much as life 
 is worth to have such faith as this. And it is large, it makes 
 us large, just according to our ideal of the sum of things, ac- 
 cording to the mighty horizon in whose bounds we move. 
 
 Now the reason why we cannot let faith stop with mere 
 assent to a creed is because it is not mere passive surrender 
 alone; it is an act, or rather a habitude of action; the very 
 highest act of the spirit of man, its act when the spirit of God 
 bears witness with it; it is in fact this life indeed in action. 
 We speak of things at rest and things in motion; we contem- 
 plate them, as the phrase is, both statically and dynamically. 
 Well, we have seen the statics of the new life: love to fellow- 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 159 
 
 man, taking its pattern from the pervasive love of God. Here 
 in faith we have the dynamics of it: that same love tingling 
 and quivering with energy, committing itself to a work in the 
 world, to a creative contact with man as man, and daring to 
 ensue the consequences. That is, it is faith in human nature; 
 it is freely venturing to commit itself to human nature as it 
 is, in that overflow of self-forgetting love; or as St. Paul says, 
 it "beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, 
 endureth all things." This, not because all things are there 
 to believe in, or rather to know, because if they were there 
 you would know it, and not have to believe it at all, but 
 precisely because they are not there, and the faith would create 
 them there. And this faith in human nature, as the mighty 
 power of Christian love is with us to testify, is the greatest 
 creative agency in the world. Without it, to call men out of 
 their prison of worldliness, and out of the baseness in which 
 they wallow, where would mankind be? Why, this faith in 
 human nature, which brings love to men and gives them a 
 chance to rise, is just what we have laughed at as an absurd 
 and unreal thing, and the crude view of which has split de- 
 nominations asunder, what we call imputed righteousness. 
 Imputed righteousness is just giving man a chance; the same 
 as you give a drunkard who desires to reform all the help and 
 encouragement in the world until he has reformed in actual 
 fact. When he signs the pledge he is not a temperate man; 
 he is the same old sot, with his raging appetite still pulling at 
 his vitals; but you treat him as if he were a temperate man, 
 you open to him all the freedom and privileges of the world 
 of temperance into which you are introducing him; you accord 
 him these though you know he will stumble and fall; you would 
 be heartless and inhuman not to do so. Well, what is that? 
 Imputed temperance, nothing less, nothing else. You impute 
 to him the virtue that is possible, until he has made it real. 
 Just so it is with all the virtues, all the potencies, of humanity. 
 By your faith in human nature you treat them as if they were 
 righteous when they are not righteous; you love them into 
 righteousness; you give them by imputation all the benefits 
 
160 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 of the completed virtue, until they have made the imputed 
 virtue real. What else can you do, if you love men at all? 
 
 But you say faith is faith in God; you are afraid I will 
 leave out the divine element. Don't be afraid; the divine ele- 
 ment is all the while working with the human; it is the divine 
 indeed that from its unseen depth is all the while taking the 
 initiative. Your faith in human nature is faith in the God on 
 whom human nature is to lay hold for salvation, just as you 
 have already laid hold of that spirit which is in you to will 
 and to do; your own faith is the laying hold of that unseen 
 power, and by it you are new-born into that kingdom where 
 He works and reigns. Not to have faith in Him is not to be- 
 lieve, not to take for granted, that He can manage the world 
 that He is evolving and bring it to its goal. Faith in God? 
 Why, God's court, God's believed nature, is just the clearing- 
 house of all our ideas of effective work in the world. That 
 nature of God, walked in as if known, lived in as the only solu- 
 tion of life, is our constant base of supplies. Here is where, by 
 contrast, the deadly blight of agnosticism appears. To live 
 as if the source and impulse of your evolution could not be 
 known is to cling to the bondage, the inertia, the paganism, 
 the death, of realism; you are condemned thereby to treat the 
 world as it is, and to get out all your ideals by experiment, by 
 the rule of thumb, having no clearing-house of love and high 
 standards to measure by. Think how much more it means 
 when, having by the sublime uprise of faith risen out of ag- 
 nosticism, you hold it true, and live as if it were true, that 
 God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and 
 God in him. Now you have the principle by which to make 
 your ideal no more a rule of thumb, a thing groped after and 
 always doubted, but real and feasible, and known by its 
 mighty works. 
 
 But your faith in God, your primal reference, so to say, to 
 your clearing-house of ideal, translates itself in its final appli- 
 cation to faith in your brother-man. It becomes a kind of 
 spirit of adventure in which you go forth to make man from 
 what he is to what he ought to be. In so doing you must 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 161 
 
 reckon with all his unto war dness, all his baseness, all his depths 
 of degradation; and your knowledge or agnosticism is not 
 sufficient to this; it must be a reckless launching forth on the 
 shoreless ocean of faith, must be an overflow of your own life 
 beyond reasonable bounds. As Chesterton says, it is, in its 
 very essence, just as unreasonable as it can be. But it, and 
 it alone, has that other mark of full life that he mentioned: 
 it is full of joy, abandon, gaiety, exuberance. As a virtue of 
 grace it contrasts itself with the sad virtues of paganism, or 
 the painful obedience of that empire of law wherein, as St. 
 Paul says, men were "shut up unto the faith which should 
 afterwards be revealed." Joy is the note of the full tide of 
 being, wherein all the functions of life are in free play, making 
 music together. What a misapprehension it is under which 
 men labor, that the Christian life of love is a solemn, sancti- 
 monious, morose, despairing thing! Do you know that even 
 so great a man as Edmund Clarence Stedman has so mistaken 
 the reality of things as to say that that picture of Diirer's, his 
 "Melancholia," represents the Genius of Christianity! Why, 
 this full tide of faith, wreaking its energies on the needs of 
 the world, is the joyfulest thing, the sanest, most enthusiastic 
 thing in the world. Stedman wrote while our age was still 
 under the morbid influence of a half -faith; you recall the 
 period well; when, with Tennyson and Matthew Arnold and 
 their school, men were trying to have faith in God, and moon- 
 ing and mourning over the seeming malignities that they found 
 in Nature. It was a kind of dead-lift of faith, trying to pull 
 itself up by the boot-straps, and it found expression, or tried 
 to, in the contemplation of those sad seers 
 
 Who trusted God was love indeed 
 
 And love Creation's final law 
 
 Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw 
 With ravine, shriek'd against his creed. 
 
 That was only a half-faith, afraid God wouldn't, or couldn't, 
 do his part; it assumed that if only God would manage things 
 right, humanity could do the rest. But the real progress of 
 things is to get out of this half-faith; to trust in your clearing- 
 
162 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 house, your base of supplies, taking for granted that God has 
 as large an ideal at heart as we have, and then live up to 
 it. The only way to live up to it is to be yourselj love indeed, 
 and then you are contributing your part to make love cre- 
 ation's final law. And just as soon as you do that, applying 
 that love in the freedom of the spirit to your neighbor at your 
 side, your doubt and sadness melt into an exuberant, adven- 
 turous joy. Your life becomes genial, rays out to meet and 
 illumine all other life. You don't have to strain and struggle 
 to live, or figure on how to get up the proper emotional state 
 for happiness, you live by radiating life. Chesterton describes 
 one of the well-known men of this age in these words: "He 
 was one of those people who live up to their emotional incomes, 
 who are always taut and tingling with vanity. Hence he had 
 no strength to spare; hence he had no kindness, no geniality; 
 for geniality is almost definable as strength to spare. He had 
 no god-like carelessness; he never forgot himself; his whole 
 life was, to use his own expression, an arrangement. He went 
 in for 'the art of living' a miserable trick." Geniality - 
 strength to spare the god-like carelessness which forgets 
 self these are marks of that adventurous life which has 
 committed itself to faith in human nature. And its alternative 
 is, either vanity, all shut up in the contemplation of one's own 
 cleverness and cultivating the art of living, or else the morbid 
 inertia of that half-faith which cannot take God's gracious 
 love as a thing to be known, and exulted in, and poured out in 
 good deeds on the world. 
 
 Such faith in human nature is no weakling virtue. I am 
 not prophesying to you smooth things, or idle emotions of 
 sweet belief; am not opening the vision of a life that drifts 
 lazily down the stream of years with no hand on oar or rudder. 
 No: with all its strain of purest joy, the only true joy of living, 
 such life of faith, which can love enemies and suffer injustice 
 and dare to turn the other cheek, connotes the highest courage. 
 It requires pluck, stamina, to love your fellow-man through 
 thick and thin, to keep that love in you burning brightly and 
 without flicker of inconsistency or abatement; it is as much 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 163 
 
 as life is worth. "God hath not given us," as St. Paul says, 
 "the spirit of cowardice, but of power, and of love, and of 
 sanity a sound mind." 
 
 We need to keep constantly in mind our base of operations, 
 and so I must have you note again that this life I am portray- 
 ing this life of universal love, universal faith, universal hope 
 - is life on the larger scale, on a scale as large as the largest 
 it can ever be in us to be. It is just the life of the spirit, of 
 the outward current, wherein we magnificently dare to take 
 the initiative and wreak ourselves "soul-forward, headlong" 
 on the world as we see it, or rather as we see what is ideally in 
 our manhood. But this larger scale magnifies everything in 
 proportion, and the depths that are possible are correspond- 
 ingly just as great as are the possible heights. We have be- 
 come, so to say, original; and both original sin and original 
 righteousness partake in this enlargement of relation. I am 
 using the word original, you see, not in its mystic theological 
 sense but in the sense which we give it in everyday parlance. 
 We have reached the point where it is our adult function to 
 have about us something individual and original; not neces- 
 sarily that we do differently from everybody else, but that we 
 do it of our own motion. So far forth, as St. Paul says, we 
 are dead to law, that is, to doing things merely because some 
 external will has imposed it upon us. And so our original sin, 
 if we are foolish enough to incur it, is really originative; not 
 a fated thing to which we are born, whether we will it or not, 
 nor a blind stupid pitfall into which we tumble heels over 
 head, and then either curse or pity ourselves because we find 
 ourselves caught, but what is called a "sin against light," a 
 sin in which we know what we are about, and deliberately 
 choose it, and in which our new-born power and love and sound 
 mind are all outraged. In like manner our righteousness has 
 become individual and originative, artistic so to say; it takes 
 the color and thrust of our personality; not a thing which the 
 givers of the law, or the officers of the church, wound up and 
 set going, to run thenceforth of itself, but a thing again in 
 which our new-born power and love and sound mind have free 
 
164 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 and fearless course. There is the note of originality about 
 them both; and this is what makes them great and manlike. 
 The adult man ought to count it shame to be like a jelly-fish, 
 which environment and heredity can mux all up and tread into 
 shapelessness, or a chameleon, which takes any color that will 
 keep it out of danger; he belongs to the higher species which 
 has a backbone and an emancipated will, and which to any 
 alien action against it can oppose the overcoming reaction of 
 individual judgment and wisdom. 
 
 You remember how Kipling has set forth this need of origi- 
 nality in life, by contrast, in his striking poem entitled "Tom- 
 linson." He has done it so brutally as to make it sound coarse, 
 but this is merely his way of hitting the nail on the head with 
 such a resounding blow that the reader's attention must re- 
 spond; and we can take whatever truth it has without the bru- 
 tality. Tomlinson of Berkeley Square, you know, gave up 
 the ghost and went to his eternal account. He had always 
 lived a conventional parasitic sort of life, depending on others 
 and taking the passive color of circumstances; but now he 
 found that in order to balance his books he must answer some 
 searching questions. 
 
 "Stand up, stand up now, Tomlinson, and answer loud and high 
 The good that ye did for the sake of men or ever ye came to die 
 The good that ye did for the sake of men in little earth so lone!" 
 
 At which his naked soul grew white with terror: 
 
 i 
 
 "O I have a friend on earth," he said, "that was my priest and guide, 
 And well would he answer all for me if he were by my side." 
 
 But to this he only got the response that Ezekiel long ago an- 
 ticipated, that this was not a partnership but an individual 
 matter, 
 
 "For the race is run by one and one and never by two and two." 
 
 Then he could only look vainly up and down, and falter out: 
 
 "O this I have read in a book," he said, "and that was told to me, 
 
 And this I have thought that another man thought of a Prince in Muscovy." 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 165 
 
 But this would not go either, and as inexorable destiny gripped 
 him closer, he could look back and forth and whimper, 
 
 "O this I have felt, and this I have guessed, and this I have heard men say, 
 And this they wrote that another man wrote of a carl in Norroway." 
 
 But the stern answer to all this paltering was, 
 
 "O none may reach by hired speech of neighbour, priest, and kin 
 Through borrowed deed to God's good meed that lies so fair within; 
 Get hence, get hence to the Lord of Wrong, for doom has yet to run, 
 And ... the faith that ye share with Berkeley Square uphold you, 
 Tomlinson !" 
 
 Then they took him to the other place, where sat as stoker 
 and judge the Satan who, whatever his abysmal evils, had from 
 the first character enough to have striven with God and taken 
 the consequences; and here the other side of the account was 
 opened. 
 
 "Sit down, sit down upon the slag, and answer loud and high 
 The harm that ye did to the Sons of Men or ever you came to die." 
 
 Yes, he could think of a foul fleshly wrong he had done; but, 
 falling back on Adam's excuse, he said it was not he, it was 
 the woman who tempted him; and to this came the same ob- 
 jection as to his borrowed good deed: 
 
 "For the race is run by one and one and never by two and two." 
 
 Then, as he went on to rake up what he had heard, and what 
 was noised abroad, and what he had got out of French books, 
 only to be met by the peremptory demand, 
 
 "Have ye sinned one sin for the pride o' the eye or the sinful lust of 
 the flesh?" 
 
 he managed to recall one deadly sin ; whereat Satan 
 
 "Did ye read of that sin in a book?" said he; and Tomlinson said, "Ay!" 
 
 In utter contempt Satan gave him over to his tricksey crew 
 to a winnow him out," as he said; and they did it with unction; 
 
 And back they came with the tattered Thing, as children after play, 
 
 And they said: "The soul that he got from God he has bartered clean away. 
 
 We have threshed a stock of print and book, and winnowed a chattering wind 
 
 And many a soul wherefrom he stole, but his we cannot find: 
 
 We have handled him, we have dandled him, we have seared him to the bone, 
 
 And sure if tooth and nail show truth he has no soul of his own." 
 
i66 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 So finally he is sent back to earth again, fit neither for heaven 
 nor hell; sent back to carry a sturdier word, the word of man- 
 hood initiative and individuality, to the Sons of Men. It is 
 Kipling's strong and brutal version of Browning's similar idea 
 of the awful court of judgment and award, 
 
 that sad obscure sequestered state 
 Where God unmakes but to remake the soul 
 He else made first in vain. 
 
 I keep drawing, as you see, upon the poetry and fiction of 
 our day, the literature that we all have in our libraries; and 
 this I do advisedly, because, when we read it with the key in 
 .mind, it is alive with flashes of the truth absolute, which piece 
 by piece God is all the while revealing to men. But the Bible 
 also, whose central theme we are tracing, is a literature; it, 
 like our modern literature, is the majestic stream of story and 
 poetry and parable by which men like us have put into words 
 the law of the spirit of life as it came to light. One main 
 difference between it and our literature is, that in its large out- 
 come it always holds the balance true; while in modern litera- 
 ture it is hard to find a mind, however gifted, who does not 
 err by excess on one side or the other. Here, for instance, our 
 truculent friend Kipling has so violently emphasized the ele- 
 ment of individuality that it seems to fill the whole horizon; 
 as if a man's supreme virtue were to have an entity of his own, 
 not a hearsay or book-learned or parasitic entity; while our 
 exuberantly optimistic friend Browning is just about as far 
 over the other way; as if every ruined life had only to await 
 some far time and place to be taken into an irresistible Hand, 
 and in a way apart from its bent or will remoulded to its 
 original heavenly design. Both poets, in their zeal for the 
 truth they see, tip the balance a little one-sidedly; their in- 
 spiration, as we should say, is not plenary. The fault is, they 
 have not reckoned adequately with the law of the spirit of life; 
 have an imperfect ear for some chords of its music. The Bible 
 writers also, like all fervid seers, overstate things sometimes; 
 perhaps they could not wake sluggish attention without; but 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 167 
 
 in the end the Book foots up even, for it has the Spirit with- 
 out measure, and as our Lord promised to His disciples, the 
 Spirit guides eventually into all truth, by taking of the things 
 of His perfect manhood and showing to men. 
 
 But the Spirit also shows them things to come; with the 
 coming of full-orbed life to light comes also immortality. Both 
 these poets speak in parables of another world; they are set- 
 ting forth, in the images current among men, what is to be 
 when eternity in the heart comes out beyond the bewilderments 
 of time and space. But so also does the Bible speak in par- 
 ables, in the same images current among men. To balance up 
 these poets' picturings let us turn to the great scripture parable 
 of judgment, wherein the Spirit of Christ shows us the undy- 
 ing principles of things to come. You know what I mean: 
 that tremendous scene in the twenty-fifth of Matthew, where 
 before the throne of eternal award are gathered all nations, 
 Christian and heathen alike. There too the essential matter 
 is not what has been read from a book or deduced from a 
 written code, but what has struck into the tissues of individual 
 life. Let us for a moment dismiss from our minds that picture 
 which has so usurped the main place in the imagination of 
 many: of a great menagerie of sheep and goats, or a crowd 
 standing right and left before a throne, disembodied souls 
 shivering between a glory and a flame. The parable, in fact, 
 does not assume that they are disembodied, nor that they are 
 in a post-obituary world; and each sentence of judgment fills 
 this world as full as it does the other, fills the universe as far 
 as the law of the spirit of life extends. You remember on what 
 that august Inasmuch as ye have, or have not, done it, turns. 
 Not on their being aggressively individual, as in Kipling; 
 though each for himself they are, and the judgment is indi- 
 vidual; not on the question of soul integrity or disintegration, 
 as in Browning; though this is a profound element of their 
 case; but solely on the disinterested love and faith that is in 
 each man, on how the spirit of their life has been directed. 
 Those souls have not been buying heaven on their merits, nor 
 incurring hell as more or less blundering culprits; there is an 
 
168 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 entire lack of that grading in their awards which such a stand- 
 ard would require. They have just been living their life, a 
 life as spontaneous as breathing; and the question turns on 
 what that life has been, as it acted on man as man. The souls 
 on the one side, you remember, are surprised to find that they 
 have been living a life of eternal blessedness, the self-same life 
 that is in their Judge, when they did not know it; just by 
 letting that divine instinct of love and faith have free course 
 with the least and neediest, whom Christ identifies with Him- 
 self as brothers. The souls on the other side, too, are sur- 
 prised why? Not because they have done such base and 
 heinous things ; indeed they seem to think they have been very 
 worthy and respectable people, ready to do Christ a good turn 
 when they saw Him, but they never saw Him. They might 
 have seen Him all the while; He had delegated His presence 
 everywhere among them; but they had steeled their cold 
 hearts, or left unopened their sluggish and indifferent hearts, 
 to the plight in which, in the person of the neediest and un- 
 worthiest ones, He stood before them. In other words, it is 
 because of what they have left undone; they have not let out 
 their personality in the one direction worthy of full manhood, 
 the free outward current of love and faith. Man's salvation 
 the word salvation, you know, means the souPs wholeness 
 and health, man's immortality, lies in his being the glad 
 vehicle of the grace of God; that is the truth of the parable. 
 But, you say, the eternal element, that awful spectre of 
 everlasting punishment, what of that? Would you live in 
 a world of law and order and have it otherwise? Just think 
 out what would be if some day the higher order of things, in 
 which we trust and rejoice, should reverse itself, and an apa- 
 thetic unloving heart be happy. It is the eternal law of being, 
 unaffected by lapse of time or change of worlds, that love and 
 faith in the life are their own blessedness and light, and that 
 the lack of these, the deadness of apathy no less than the burn- 
 ing of hate, has inherent in it the unending curse of the Evil 
 One. Take it or leave it: that is the tremendous alternative 
 revealed in the perfected evolution of manhood. 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 169 
 
 Such is the unescapable ideal, when life and immortality 
 come to light together. I have already tried your patience, 
 perhaps too long, in tracing its elements; but two or three 
 things remain to say, belonging especially to the fact that this 
 is the life, the motion, of that initiative which we call the 
 spirit. On this larger scale, as I said, everything is large in 
 proportion; and we must accommodate our thought to it, all 
 along the line. 
 
 Well, in the first place, you have noticed that this parable 
 of judgment does not say anything to either party about the 
 sins they have committed or avoided, in the sense, I mean, 
 of the transgression of law, or mistakes and blunders, or fail- 
 ure to live up to their moral obligations. It is all about the 
 spirit in which they have lived; that attitude toward their 
 brother-men, of active helpfulness or inert indifference, which 
 has become to them a second nature, as instinctive as breath- 
 ing. Strange, is it not, to men who under the long empire of 
 law had got their whole life interpreted in terms of a huge 
 debit and credit account? The debit and credit idea, the 
 question of obligation and justice, has wholly disappeared, and 
 the free spirit of life has taken its place. Mercy, it would 
 seem, has swallowed up judgment, and ,the sins, as such, are 
 forgiven, blotted out of the book. This is what has been held 
 out before men, as a heartening influence, a reassuring hope, 
 all through their twilight period, when they were as children 
 stumbling along towards the light, or as bond-slaves with the 
 inevitable burdens of life upon them. Where sin abounded 
 grace did much more abound. "All manner of sin and blas- 
 phemy," as our Lord says, "shall be forgiven unto men." All? 
 All except one; and here comes in the awfullest revelation of 
 the Bible. There is one sin that cannot be forgiven. "Who- 
 soever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be 
 forgiven him ; but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, 
 it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in 
 the world to come." You know the vague speculations that 
 have clustered round this mysterious sin against the Holy 
 Spirit; I remember how, when I was a boy, people used to con- 
 
1 70 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 jecture, with bated breath, what particular vice or iniquity it 
 might be, and wonder if a man might fall into it without being 
 aware of the fact. It seemed like a kind of trap which the 
 arbitrary Power above had set and hid in the way, for men to 
 tumble into inadvertently. But I think the scale and level of 
 truth we have reached removes the mystery. The sin against 
 the Holy Spirit the spirit of wholeness and health is just 
 the rejection of the spirit of life. It takes a peculiarly har- 
 dened, not to say utterly perverted and fiendish, heart to re- 
 ject the gracious spirit of life, when its motions and fruits are 
 seen. You remember what it was that called forth this as- 
 sertion of our Lord's. The Pharisees, seeing Him do the self- 
 same works of goodwill and love which as Judge He 
 pronounces blessed, said, in a frenzied antipathy of bigotry, 
 "Why, this is devil's work; this fellow is in league with Beelze- 
 bub." Jesus did not resent this malignant word as against His 
 person; but, he said, the spirit that can say such a thing, the 
 spirit that would bring forth the fruits of such a verdict, why, 
 it is the polar opposite of anything like forgiveness, love, help- 
 fulness, faith; how can a spirit that cannot forgive be for- 
 given? It stops, so to say, the circulation of the current of 
 life, which is flowing from the Father of spirits to the least and 
 lowest corner of His creation. So the matter, with all its aw- 
 ful portent, comes back to the same test of life that we have 
 seen applied in the parable of judgment; simple, yet as radical 
 as life itself. On this subject let our American Hawthorne, 
 who you know made such lifelong specialty of the pathology 
 of the human heart, speak the defining word. In his story of 
 Ethan Brand, you remember, he portrays a man who, in the 
 cold spirit of research, set out to find the unpardonable sin; 
 and he roamed the world over, stopping at nothing that seemed 
 to promise a solution of his problem; blighting hearts and 
 ruining many a life, without mercy or compunction; only to 
 find at last that the sin was in his own heart, and had 
 so demonized his nature that his very laugh caused a shudder 
 in whoever heard it. He had come back from his long quest 
 to the place where years before he had worked as a humble 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 171 
 
 lime-burner; now a highly educated man, with a sardonic sense 
 of utter separateness from his kind, whom one and all he de- 
 spised, and with an intellect as keen and hard as steel; "but," 
 Hawthorne goes on to say, "where was the heart? That, in- 
 deed, had withered, had contracted, had hardened, 
 had perished! It has ceased to partake of the universal throb. 
 He had lost his hold of the magnetic chain of humanity. He 
 was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or the 
 dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, 
 which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now 
 a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his ex- 
 periment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his 
 puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such de- 
 grees of crime as were demanded for his study." 
 
 Such an extreme of human perversity must necessarily be 
 exceptional in actual fact; there are too many motions of our 
 God-given nature working against the completion of it. 
 Through some chink the power of disinterested love or self- 
 forgetting faith will filter in: through the family, or the lover, 
 or the comrade, or the country, or the cause of generous en- 
 deavor, nay, even through the art or research in which for the 
 sake of the world's welfare or instruction a man may lose his 
 selfishness. There are many feeders, when we come to think 
 of it, to our soul's health and wholeness; we do not have to 
 get it all out of a book; many avenues by which the light and 
 life, that are smiting themselves into the universe, come in to 
 vitalize in various degrees our individual being, and help us 
 live, as God lives, for other than selfish issues. The very work 
 we do, which we love and try to make prevail for the upbuild- 
 ing of the world because in some individual feature we can do 
 it better than any one else, is a means of grace. And so the 
 rank and file of us, musing as we are on how to be a strength 
 and uplift to some less endowed comrade, and how thus to 
 leave the world better than we found it, are in the position of 
 learners undergoing a gracious education; the fact that we are 
 not beyond forgiveness, and that we can bank on sufficient 
 grace, is proof of this. For forgiveness is essentially a recipro- 
 
I 7 2 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 cal thing; it cannot exist one-sidedly; the fulness of life that 
 we receive is a fulness of grace for grace. It was there for 
 Ethan Brand all the while, just as the air and the water and 
 the food of earth all the days of his hardening career kept him 
 alive and contributed to the discipline of that merciless in- 
 tellect; it was there though his sin was unpardonable; but be- 
 cause he would not open his being to it, by loving as he was 
 loved, and committing himself according to the committal that 
 life itself had made to him, it must remain an unfinished thing, 
 a proffer and not a gift. It cannot be otherwise; it is the law 
 of the spirit of life. So the prayer that is taught us, by which 
 our daily object-lesson is kept in mind, is, "Forgive us our 
 debts, as we forgive our debtors." 
 
 But by the same pervasiveness of grace for grace the other 
 extreme of the scale is just as majestic as the one we have con- 
 sidered was terrible; a height as great as the depth. As in the 
 tremendous gift of spiritual freedom there inheres the possi- 
 bility of a sin unpardonable, so in the same divine trust in- 
 heres the potency of a well-being which no discount of flesh 
 or lower nature or evil heredity can impair beyond forgiveness. 
 And this is it. This spirit of life, moving freely as "faith which 
 worketh by love," redeems the whole man. No accumulated 
 debt of the lower nature can over-balance it; it is what the 
 Scripture calls the power of an endless life. We have done 
 our best, I am inclined to think, to make the idea of redemp- 
 tion unreal and remote, by regarding it as a sort of churchly 
 magic, and narrowing its operation to the historic work of one 
 Person. It is Christ, we say, who redeems us, and other foun- 
 dation can no man lay. That is profoundly true. But as 
 our study has revealed Christ in idea, as the perfect manhood 
 after which the spirit of man has dimly struggled, the idea of 
 the redemption He works is correspondingly enlarged and clari- 
 fied. We have, in fact, found the essential Christ; found Him 
 in the spirit of grace and the courage of faith. Suppose this 
 essence of highest manhood, by whatever historic agency it 
 got there, becomes the life and motive power of the individual 
 man. Well, this redeems his nature; wherever he is, America 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 173 
 
 or Timbuctoo, whenever he lives, twentieth century or dark 
 ages; redeems him according to the completeness with which 
 it possesses him. Our best approach to the notion of redemp- 
 tion, I think, is the simplest; just through our everyday cur- 
 rent terms. We say of a man he has some disagreeable 
 unpleasant things about him I suppose that may be said 
 of many of us or he has the relics of old vices and evil habi- 
 tudes; but he has this redeeming character, that he is square 
 as a die, you know where to find him, and that he will stand 
 loyally and comradelike by any one in misfortune or need. 
 And that is the kind of man we can tie to. We can forgive him 
 a great deal, we can forgive him everything, for the sake of 
 that. Well, don't you see, that is what redeems him ; the good- 
 hearted, common-sense world pronounces him redeemed by 
 that controlling quality; and do you suppose God will do less? 
 And this simple pronouncement translates these great con- 
 cepts of love and faith into the idiom of every common life; 
 you can see how they apply to the laborer, and the outcast, 
 and the business man, and the man who is lost in the crowd, 
 no less than to the church member and the millionaire and the 
 man of high position. It is the magnetic pulsation of the great 
 loving, suffering heart of humanity that redeems him, that 
 makes him an uplifting and vitalizing power, and therefore 
 in essence a new man. Every lowliest position in life is its 
 opportunity; its leaven is pervasive everywhere. The living 
 spirit of the universe is there, working according to its sphere; 
 as the mystic beauty of the ocean resides in the rill and the 
 dewdrop. For what is being square as a die, or whatever 
 President Roosevelt called "the square deal," but just the ma- 
 jestic fulfilling of the law of truth; and what is standing by 
 your brother-man in need and trouble, but the practical dy- 
 namic of love? It is the one direction in which life may be 
 so focussed as to be aware of its essential unity and common 
 centre. All else knowledge, culture, money-getting, ambi- 
 tion, power is centrifugal; it scatters men into classes and 
 warring interests and tends to hardness of heart. But here 
 on this level neither God nor man can be a respecter of per- 
 
174 rHE LIFE INDEED 
 
 sons; the race may have these separating tendencies, but this 
 resolves them and redeems the man. 
 
 You know what a role this simple idea of the redeeming 
 trait has played in literature through the past half-century. 
 The most popular theme of poetry and fiction, perhaps, has 
 been some form of heroic self-sacrifice, or the finding of a true 
 and loving heart in the most unpromising men and places. It 
 is this detection of the soul of good in things evil that has set 
 authors to raking the slums and the mining camps and the 
 cow-boy ranches and the army barracks of far India; always 
 there is brought to light some pearl of sterling character and 
 unobtrusive sacrifice which has made the most sordid sur- 
 roundings and the roughest manners forgivable and beautiful. 
 Why, this aspect of redemption has almost become the staple 
 of our thoughts of life. At the same time, we must confess, 
 this same theme, I think beyond anything else, has had a 
 powerful dissolving influence with the masses of men, to keep 
 them out of the churches; due perhaps to the fact that the 
 idea is just now in that unbalanced excess which holds men's 
 eyes from seeing more than one great thing at once. For in 
 the discovery that unexacting love and self-sacrificing faith 
 are the one redemption of manhood, men have got the mistaken 
 prejudice that the well-fed and prosperous churchman stands 
 for something alien to this, something exclusive and Pharisaic, 
 and that while thus the poor have not the gospel preached to 
 them, the heart of the matter, the real saving quality, can 
 just as well be found elsewhere, and maintained apart from 
 ecclesiastical machinery. Of course this prejudice is wrong, 
 and I think temporary. But does it not behoove us, who love 
 the place where the saving Name is named, to see to it that 
 the power of redemption do not escape us, even by one motion 
 of exclusiveness, and take up its recognized abode in places 
 where our refinement and taste have perhaps been indulging 
 a similar prejudice? Let us not lose sight of the real heart of 
 the matter; we can afford to crucify our tastes a little for the 
 sake of seeing straight. Literature has gloried, perhaps over- 
 much, in setting forth its new theme coarsely and brutally; 
 
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 175 
 
 but the idea is there, and it has found men's hearts, assuring 
 them, perhaps by its very rudeness, that nothing is henceforth 
 to be despised as common or unclean. Chemistry, as a pro- 
 fessor of it once remarked to me, recognizes no such thing as 
 dirt or stench; it is too much concerned with the vital elements 
 of God's world for that. You remember that poem of John 
 Hay's, which perhaps did a leading part to set the ball of this 
 new theme rolling; wherein a swearing, reckless steamboat 
 engineer, when his boat was on fire, held her bow against the 
 bank until every last man was safe ashore, and because he 
 would not desert his post, bravely gave up his life. Here is 
 the verdict that took the popular heart, and has been repeated 
 in many a variation ever since: 
 
 He weren't no saint, but at jedgment 
 
 I'd run my chance with Jim, 
 'Longside of some pious gentlemen 
 
 That wouldn't shook hands with him. 
 He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing, 
 
 And went for it thar and then; 
 And Christ ain't a going to be too hard 
 
 On a man that "died for men. 
 
 The poem, like Kipling's and Browning's, has struck for a 
 single point of truth, brutally and straight from the shoulder; 
 but the point is central, and it translates the redeeming ca- 
 pacity of manhood into the coarsest vernacular. Let us not 
 suffer its rudeness to switch us off on a side-issue, while we 
 gather up our skirts to avoid the contact. For in its heart it 
 is the same thing that we are coming to love and reverence as 
 the principle of holiest manhood; it is, albeit uncouth, a 
 homely echo of the parable by which Christ judges the world. 
 
 Thus, I have tried to trace what this life of ours is, when, 
 at the fulness of the revealing time, it has become a free in- 
 itiative, a spirit, and when in the light that has risen to guide 
 it, it has evolved its own higher law of working. We have seen 
 what man has it in him to do when he does as he likes, and 
 when love has vitalized his committal to his world. It is a 
 divine pattern, an ideal, which now the Christian ages are to 
 
I 7 6 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 make real, by making it the natural way of living. And now 
 for the slow planting of it in individual hearts, man by man, 
 the naturalization of it in a gainsaying world. It takes long; 
 but its season of springtide and summer and harvest is a season 
 in which a thousand years are as one day. And we cannot get 
 round this fact, that it is the law of risen manhood, and not 
 one jot or tittle can pass until all is fulfilled. Our business, as 
 we see it, is just to live it unreservedly, and by life and word 
 to teach men so. "Write the things which thou has seen," 
 says the Revealer to St. John in Patmos, "and the things which 
 
 are." 
 
V 
 
 THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 
 
 WHAT, AS MATTER OF RECORDED FACT, CAME OF 
 
 PERFECT COMMITTAL TO THE LAWS OF 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 
 
 I. FROM THE EXCEEDING HIGH MOUNTAIN 
 
 II. THUS IT BECOMETH Us 
 
 III. To THIS END WAS I BORN 
 
 IV. THE DECEASE ACCOMPLISHED AT JERUSALEM 
 
V 
 
 THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 
 
 HISTORICALLY speaking, the chapter we have just 
 finished has run far ahead of our subject. We have, 
 so to say, slipped the cable of the actual and launched 
 out on the ocean of the ideal; and this, by the methods of re- 
 search that prevail in our time, is something not unlike a sin. 
 For a generation or more now, men have been so absorbed in 
 the contemplation of what has been and its laws that they have 
 suffered themselves to become wellnigh color-blind to the all- 
 pervading prophecy and potency of what is to be, which is 
 the law of the spirit of life. And so here at the opening of the 
 twentieth Christian century, we are confronted with the 
 strange fact that the vision of the life absolute, with its corol- 
 lary of immortality, counts for hardly more as a grounded con- 
 viction than it did in the twilight period of Old Testament 
 days. For this there may be various reasons. I can think of 
 two main ones. One is that while the great abysmal current 
 of the spirit has all the while been silently heaving toward its 
 flood, 
 
 Such a tide as moving seems asleep, 
 Too full for sound and foam, 
 
 yet it has encountered so many eddies and cross-currents of 
 temporary endeavor, so many things that make noise and tur- 
 moil, that men have inveterately tended to take the surface 
 for the eternal depths. Another reason, I am tempted to think, 
 is that men's minds have sometimes become darkened from 
 sheer excess of light. They have hesitated to admit the di- 
 vine, not because it was hidden but because it was so evident; 
 like the bluff, impulsive Peter they have cried out, "Depart 
 from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." Of course they 
 would be slow to own this to themselves, or to declare 
 
 179 
 
180 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 for darkness rather than light. Their fault is rather like the 
 fault of those who have an ear for music, and delight in it after 
 the inner man, but put it by as the music of the spheres or 
 of a more ethereal future. As a recent writer puts it, speaking 
 of Plato and his idealizing mood: "Doubtless the concord he 
 conceived was beautiful. But the dissonances he would have 
 silenced, but which, with ever augmenting force, peal and 
 crash, from his day to ours, through the echoing vault of time, 
 embody, as I am apt to think, a harmony more august than 
 even he was able to imagine, and in their intricate succession 
 weave the plan of a world-symphony too high to be appre- 
 hended save in part by our grosser sense, but perceived with 
 delight by the pure intelligence of immortal spirits." This, 
 you see, is a veritable recoil from excess of light; the reluc- 
 tance of man, even though with such ideals surging within 
 him, to own that he is an immortal spirit, and that such music 
 is just the idiom of his immortality. The light is good, he 
 says, is glorious; but it is not practical; the use of it must be 
 postponed to a more favorable state. So he shades his eyes 
 from it and turns again to the shadows; ignoring the com- 
 pleted design for the chips and dust-heaps of history, in his 
 search for something more workable and feasible. As a result 
 the thing that he most desperately needs appeals in vain. You 
 remember how Browning makes the aged John, as he is dying, 
 set forth this idea: 
 
 I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ 
 Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
 All questions in the earth and out of it, 
 And has so far advanced thee to be wise. 
 Wouldst thou unprove this to re-prove the proved? 
 In life's mere minute, with power to use that proof, 
 Leave knowledge and revert to how it sprung? 
 Thou hast it; use it and forthwith, or die! 
 
 Then by a telling figure he illustrates what is the real ailment 
 of men who so perversely reopen a clear case: 
 
 For I say, this is death and the sole death, 
 When a man's loss comes to him from his gain, 
 Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance, 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 181 
 
 And lack of love from love made manifest; 
 
 A lamp's death when, replete with oil, it chokes; 
 
 A stomach's when, surcharged with food, it starves. 
 
 There is something in this thought of the life indeed which 
 we must face and resolve. When the ideal becomes so high, 
 as in the evolutionary course it is bound to do, its first effect 
 is to give us pause. Is this, we ask, the law of our higher na- 
 ture, these the tremendous exactions of love and faith, when 
 the fulness of the time is here, and our duty henceforth, if 
 we would be free and perfect men, is to take these ideals, 
 these potencies within us, and make them real? And so our 
 tendency is, either to stand dazed and benumbed before them, 
 thus leaving them practically inoperative; or, else, deeming 
 them a misfit on earth, to postpone the working of them to 
 some realm out of time and space, to some mystic heaven, 
 which we dread as much as we desire because there, as we 
 think, we shall have to be good. A misfit here, we say, be- 
 cause here are all these eddies and cross-currents of spirit, and 
 all this law of sin in our members; we could love God and our 
 neighbor if it were not for these, but here alas, we must fight 
 the devil with fire. 
 
 Well, we saw the deadlock that paralyzed the growing spirit 
 of man, when the ideal was not yet in sight; here we seem to 
 have encountered a similar one when it is. What then can be 
 done? What shall overcome this strange inertia of the spirit, 
 and start the wheels of being out of the clay in which they are 
 again stuck fast? There has been no lack of effort, no lack 
 of experimenting on life. Men have proved abundantly that 
 manhood has a surplusage of being, a mighty overflow, which 
 must needs be laid out somewhere. As Ruskin puts it: "It 
 has tried fighting, and preaching, and fasting, buying and sell- 
 ing, pomp and parsimony, pride and humiliation, every pos- 
 sible manner of existence in which it would conjecture there 
 was any happiness or dignity; and all the while, as it bought, 
 sold, and fought, and fasted, and wearied itself with policies, 
 and ambitions, and self-denials, God had placed its real happi- 
 ness in the keeping of" well, never mind what; it is not 
 
1 82 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 to our purpose here, and man, I am persuaded, has in him a 
 higher hunger than for happiness. All these things have been 
 carried to the pitch of heroism. Self-denial and asceticism 
 have attended them all, and all are just as susceptible to fanat- 
 icism and insane excess as is religion itself. Ruskin says 
 further: "If there were any other mistake that the world could 
 make, it would of course make it. But I see not that there is 
 any other. ... It has now made its experiments in every 
 possible direction but the right one; and it seems that it must, 
 at last, try the right one, in a mathematical necessity." So 
 it surely does. But now that the spirit of life has evolved its 
 law, and the one way of love and faith stands before men for 
 adoption, men recoil almost in dismay. It is not workable, 
 they say. Heroic as they are in every other direction, here 
 their heroism fails ignominously. The ideal has revealed it- 
 self as 
 
 The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard 
 
 and so, while it may do for poets and musicians, whose busi- 
 ness is to dream and sing, for the hard-headed man of affairs 
 it is too evidently a misfit. Pusillanimous mortals ! the summit 
 of life has uncovered their weak point. They are afraid to 
 go over and take possession of their kingdom; afraid of what 
 some one else will do, some cheater or traitor, who as soon as 
 they dare to love and trust, will take a mean advantage. If 
 only it were not an individual matter, wherein each must take 
 the initiative for himself, how much more feasible it would be. 
 If only love could be legislated and sworn to, like an oath of 
 fealty; the whole human race dropping its weapons and agree- 
 ing with one consent to lift together, heave ho ! what a heaven 
 on earth would spring up, to be sure! That is what, as matter 
 of fact, men's dreams of social and national regeneration to- 
 day reduce themselves to. But no: that does not satisfy other 
 conditions of the ideal; that would be universal bondage again, 
 under another name, not freedom at all; besides love is not 
 love at all, but merely good manners, when it must depend for 
 its existence on law. Its breath and finer spirit evaporate just 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 183 
 
 as soon as it binds itself to the letter and the oath. Love and 
 faith cannot organize a trust; they must be a life-giving spirit, 
 they must be individual. Men cannot live this highest ideal 
 in a mass ; they must come in, and keep in, one by one. ' You 
 remember the whimsical parable by which Dr. Holmes set 
 forth the failure of massed play on the part of humanity. He 
 figured the whole world as having once agreed together that 
 at a certain specified moment all should raise a mighty shout 
 in unison; and when the moment came it proved to be the 
 only absolutely silent moment that the world ever knew, for 
 every man was listening to hear how mighty the shout would 
 be. Well, the moment of the fulness of the time comes, and 
 men have eyes to see in what its glory consists; but to this 
 day, through all their civilizations and communal interests, 
 they are waiting, and listening, and wrangling and making 
 oath-bound treaties, until all shall be compelled to pull to- 
 gether, and no one shall take advantage of his neighbor. And 
 then they say their ideal is not workable. No: it is not, on 
 such principles. 
 
 Earth is silent, ominously silent, when men try to shout in 
 unison. But there was one man, a simple artisan in an obscure 
 Galilean village, who dared to bear His whole weight, without 
 reservation or flinching, on the completed ideal of life; and his 
 still small voice is heard round the world and through the 
 eternities. Under the tumult it sounds ever, the sweet under- 
 tone of peace and goodwill; through the jarring discords of 
 sects and opinions and manifold quarrels of men its uniform 
 note is heard, and in the end it compels attention; the very 
 date that we write at the head of our letters and documents 
 numbers the years of his gracious message to the world. The 
 heroism that was so lacking is here at last, calm and magnifi- 
 cently simple; and never, in battle or physical peril, was hero- 
 ism like it. We are resuming history now, after our long 
 excursion into the ideal; and this is the world-filling historic 
 fact. Nay, the ideal itself did not get into words, until it had 
 this historic fact as datum; we could not speak the dialect of 
 the new life, or realize its rhythms and cadences, until we 
 
1 84 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 heard it spoken, and the word itself had breath, working with 
 human hands the creed of creeds. A word is the embodiment 
 of an idea ; and this life was God's idea of men, and man's idea 
 of his own manhood, which had so long struggled for expres- 
 sion. We cannot state in simplest terms the largeness of this 
 historic fact without seeming to invest it with miracle. Yet 
 how sane and sincere it all is; the echo of our central being; 
 the plainest man can understand it. It does seem as if here 
 we were face to face with the secret mind of evolution; as if 
 there must needs be revealed an individual, the individual, in 
 whom should be typed the elements of personal evolution. 
 There must be a pioneer in every exploration, a practical de- 
 signer of every noble edifice. Somebody, some man like our- 
 selves, with our manhood capacities of mind and spirit, must 
 translate into act and life every upbuilding idea; and as the 
 idea is more momentous, his originative spirit must be stronger, 
 his personality more imposing. Must this not be supremely 
 so in the highest ideal of all, the profoundest movement of the 
 spirit of life that ever took place on earth? How large this 
 idea is, and what demands it makes of manhood, we have seen. 
 Think then of the man who is large enough to take it in, and 
 strong enough to live it. No matter if he is a carpenter; no 
 matter if he does not cry nor lift up; no matter if he has not 
 where to lay his head. Life is more than livelihood, and a 
 man's life consists not in the abundance of things he posses- 
 seth. The idea it is, and the perfectly adequate committal 
 of spirit to it, which makes him great. Greater therefore than 
 man, a miracle of personality, with hopelessly unattainable 
 elements? Jesus made no such pretension; all the gifts He 
 brought are placed freely at our disposal. But certainly He 
 is greater than any of our race have been, before or since; 
 though His spirit has begotten many a noble copy of His great- 
 ness, and many a martyr to it. One and all, however, lacked 
 somehow of the fulness, as the echo lacks the substance and 
 volume of the original sound; then too there is to be reckoned 
 with the greatness of the pioneer effort and committal, like 
 the energy of a chemical reaction in its nascent state. But 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 185 
 
 mainly their lack was in completeness of committal; to all of 
 them at some flinching point, or some occultation of wisdom, 
 His voice comes as it did to Peter, "O thou of little 
 faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?" Men hold back and 
 tremble, or try to get their fellows to make the start, or wait 
 for some signal when all shall go together. And so they lose 
 themselves in the crowd; their soul is not their own, is not 
 free. That is the history of the mass of humanity. The law 
 of the species, or of the race, or of the land, or of the social 
 convention, is still their tyrant. They are not the ones to 
 overcome the inertia of manhood. What is needed, it would 
 seem, at this crisis-point of individual evolution, is just a man 
 who will let himself go, in the perfect abandon of the free 
 spirit of life, trusting that the native powers of manhood, as 
 trained by law and counseled by wisdom, are sound and true, 
 and holding that faith patiently, in spite of evil seeming, until 
 it has justified itself in the answering heart of man. This, it 
 would seem, is required in the large scientific plan, if the com- 
 pletely evolved personality is ever to come to light; an indi- 
 vidual is needed to stake out the way which henceforth indi- 
 viduality, free from the trammels of the species, must take. 
 
 Such a man has actually lived among us; has lived a life 
 so common and approachable that all may avail themselves of 
 its light; and yet all His life was heroic, in the calm heroism 
 of daring to trust the spirit of life to the uttermost, and ven- 
 turing on the unexplored ocean of love and faith, undismayed 
 by the storms of consequence, and consistent to whatever end. 
 This is why I call His life, as He went about doing good, the 
 supreme historic venture. That, when we reckon with all its 
 freely accepted elements, is what it amounts to. 
 
 What, by fair human view, was the special outfit of Jesus 
 for such a venture as this? I am not referring now to the 
 endowments that connected Him with His nation and its af- 
 fairs His advantages of residence, education, occupation, 
 position in society; these, in the large, we have fully in 
 mind, and know that they created so little distinction for Him 
 that even a near-by neighbor exclaimed, "Can any good thing 
 
1 86 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 come out of Nazareth?" He owed as little to environment as 
 does any common man. What I refer to rather is the endow- 
 ment that connects Him with the unseen, and with the tide of 
 new life that was waiting only for such venture to break forth 
 and flood the world. We look perhaps for some super-eminent 
 saintliness, or eloquence, or sense of leadership; but these it 
 was not, and the still unsaved world had always had these. 
 Well, let us ask John the Baptist; he as the authentic embodi- 
 ment of the old prophetic insight was entitled to judge; and 
 among them that were born of women there had risen no 
 greater. He, you know, with all his spiritual aggressiveness, 
 felt his own limitation, and the limitation of all that he repre- 
 sented; knew that he was not the coming One. He spoke a 
 word of God, but not the word; he was a voice, not the full- 
 orbed life; a keynote and prelude, not the symphony and 
 diapason. But of Jesus he said, as if he were defining a whole 
 manhood in Him, "He whom God hath sent speaketh the 
 words of God: for God giveth not the spirit by measure unto 
 him." Here we have the outfit of Jesus: the spirit without 
 measure. The spirit has been as it were doled out before, as 
 men could contain it and act upon it; as food had been doled 
 out in Jerusalem, according to EzekieFs prophecy, when men 
 ate bread by weight and with care, and drank water by meas- 
 ure and with astonishment. Here at last was a Man who had 
 opened all His being to the influx of the spirit, and so had 
 become a pure initiative and imparter of life ; could let himself 
 go, abandoned as it were to the current of being within Him. 
 And the consciousness in which He could do this was just the 
 simple consciousness of being the Son of God, with all that 
 interplay of love and power which inheres therein. "The 
 Father loveth the Son," said the Baptist, "and hath given all 
 things into his hand." No more the spirit of bondage, again 
 to fear, but the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, 
 Father. You see how many of the elements we have traced 
 meet here and are resolved: freedom, adultness, the son's 
 estate succeeding the slave's, the manhood majority and in- 
 heritance succeeding the period of nonage, the release from 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 187 
 
 tutors and governors. Where the spirit of the Lord is, there 
 is liberty; and where the spirit is without measure there is 
 the mighty pioneer outfit, the impulse for the supreme his- 
 toric venture. Simple and obvious it is, when we see it, but 
 tremendous. 
 
 This word venture is just another name for faith. That, 
 you know, is how I have defined faith: a venture of the will 
 and life on a course which, by worldly and pagan view, with 
 all its hedging and caution, is just as unreasonable as it can 
 be. He was bearing His full weight, and without reservation, 
 on life as He saw it; in the conviction that manhood life is 
 from God and of God. To venture thus was to work that life 
 out in the dues and duties that come to Him, high or lowly; 
 to wreak Himself on life as a man of men, not merely as a 
 Jew, or a king, or a priest, or a prophet; to work out its com- 
 mon details and teach men so, sharing life with them. No 
 small thing this, as a pioneer thing, naturalizing a standard of 
 life unheard of before. Can we call such simple faith as this 
 anything short of heroic? 
 
 Now this venture, fitting accurately as it does into the 
 Bible scheme of higher evolution, has its scientific significance, 
 no less than its religious. It focuses our attention on a work 
 big with results for all the world and all life, present and to 
 come. On its immensely larger scale it has all the marks 
 of penetrative wisdom, keen testing, verification, choice of 
 practical agencies, which we associate with such men as Koch 
 and Pasteur, as in their quiet laboratories they devise means 
 for the healing and happiness of men. Nazareth and Caper- 
 naum, the wilderness and the Holy City, in those years 30 to 
 33, are a world laboratory; and .the eyes of God and angels 
 are fixed on the patient but mighty research that is going on 
 there, the exploration of the evolutionary secrets and healthful 
 remedies of life. And that life of Jesus, we say it though 
 with reverence as literally as we would of any study what- 
 ever, is the most colossal scientific experiment that the world 
 has ever seen. This I say is literal matter of fact; we have 
 only to project it on its cosmic background and its evolution- 
 
1 88 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 ary setting to see it so. The experiment was made in a 
 remote corner of the world; but that does not matter; our 
 laboratories are all remote from the crowds of men, and no 
 palatial structures. It was made by a humble, unobtrusive 
 villager; but that does not matter; we did not know Koch 
 and Pasteur until their deeds made them great. And if it was 
 well and thoroughly made it was made once for all; it need 
 not be repeated or corrected; it needs only to be utilized 
 and naturalized, in the fulness that all we have received of 
 Him, and grace for grace. As matter of fact, the world has 
 no occasion to demand repetition or correction of it; they 
 could not conceive how to add truer vital elements to it; and 
 they are still far, very far, from having exhausted its bene- 
 fits. The experiment has abundantly proved, and is increas- 
 ingly proving, its entire success; and men have crowned Jesus 
 not only Saviour and King, but the supreme scientific evolu- 
 tionist of the ages. 
 
 That whole-souled venture of His, that pioneer experiment, 
 has also its literary bearing; for literature, you know, is just 
 the getting of the spirit of manhood into illuminative words. 
 The designation that comes to be given to Him is an essen- 
 tially literary one: the Word who was with God; the expres- 
 sion of God's idea to men, and of man's idea of his holiest 
 manhood. "Wherefore," says a scripture writer, "wherefore, 
 holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the 
 Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus." 
 That is what, in various phases and involvements, with applica- 
 tions great and small, in many lights broken or crude or pure, 
 the world of men has been doing ever since considering 1 
 Christ and getting education from it. The Apostle one 
 sent forth from the presence of the Father of spirits; there- 
 fore God's representative and ambassador to men; and to this 
 day men have not found or desired a representative more 
 answering to their highest conception. The High Priest 
 who stands between men and God, to voice their prayers and 
 embody what they would fain be; who thus is the representa- 
 tive and spokesman of men to God; and to this day men have 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 189 
 
 neither sought nor desired to be better represented. So far 
 forth the word, the idea, is finished. This we know because 
 Messianism as a prophecy, that prophecy of a coming Man 
 which once focussed the hopes of the world, has disappeared, 
 its complete fulfilment being taken for granted. But the 
 Messianic idea is an idea that grows for ever; its involvements, 
 its perennial applications to life, are never finished. It still 
 has its prophetic pulsation, greater than ever; only the ictus 
 of it has changed; not the coming man now, but the coming 
 life. In two directions this idea is working, intensively and 
 extensively; the direction of its depth, and the direction of 
 its breadth; in other words, the prophetic soul of the world 
 is asking, on the one hand, What shall become of the indi- 
 vidual? and on the other, What shall become of the race, of 
 society? Just now this latter inquiry has the floor; and so 
 predominantly that for the moment it seems to fill the horizon. 
 Questions of social betterment and of the massing and mu- 
 tualization of large human interests how to regulate capi- 
 tal and labor and rates and commerce and industry and edu- 
 cation, how, in a word, to make the vast social organism what 
 it should be are the overwhelming burden and pain of the 
 age, like an uneasy obsession. And meanwhile the question of 
 individual salvation has quite passed into eclipse; and men 
 have almost ceased to inquire or care about personal immor- 
 tality, except here and there in vague psychic research and 
 spiritualism, as if immortality could lie in that unsavory 
 direction ! The most of men don't want it, if that is all there 
 is to it; they would rather save their interests for something 
 of real uplift and importance. Well, the situation has its 
 noble features; noble, and eminently wholesome. We think 
 infinitely more of a man who is toiling and studying to regen- 
 erate his fellow-men and to make the corporate life more 
 livable, than of a man who, like a miser with his gold, is 
 scheming how to evade the fire and secure safety for his own 
 measly greedy little soul. Yes: we have no occasion for pes- 
 simism about the race so long as the hunger to be saviours and 
 benefactors so pervasively possesses the souls of men. But 
 
190 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 just here it will pay us to release ourselves a little from this 
 sociological obsession, and return to the question of the indi- 
 vidual. After all, the individual, our individual personality, 
 has the first claim. We make a grievous mistake if we think 
 that mankind is to be saved in a lump; nay, the undeniable 
 good that we can bring to them in a lump, by legislation or 
 sentiment or public benefaction, is only good of a lower and 
 material kind, such as expresses itself in terms of comfort 
 and ease and wealth and general externalism. And our return 
 to the intensive side of our prophecy, to the individual life with 
 its ideal endowment of freedom and independence, does not 
 quench but rather intensifies our impulse to promote such good 
 as this in the world. It is indeed the one true spring of it. 
 Christ, the unique individual, is by that very rounded fulness 
 of individuality the representative of the living God, "who," 
 as St. Paul says, "is the Saviour of all men, specially of those 
 that believe." His great venture of love and faith began with 
 the neighbors at His side, with the villagers of Galilee, and 
 His cousins by the lake-side, and the sick who gravitated to 
 Him in their feebleness; and He helped them not merely by 
 healing, or by preaching better wages and shorter hours, but 
 by giving each man of them a new idea to live by. His venture 
 was directed to making regenerate individuals of them; and 
 he left the rest, the social betterment, to follow by natural con- 
 sequence, by their own individual motion. 
 
 We did well to dismiss our care for immortality, so long as 
 it was merely a refined dream of greed, or a question of going 
 to heaven when we die. For if personal immortality is any- 
 thing, it is the polar opposite of this; it belongs, as we have 
 seen, to the outward and love-current of life, not to the inward 
 and selfish one. This is the truth that Christ came to estab- 
 lish, when He brought life and immortality to light. But His 
 immortality, you see, is not revealed as a thing to work for at 
 all. It does not come as wages, or reward, or even as rest. It 
 does not contemplate that we should get tired of what we are 
 doing now, so as to need rest; or ashamed of it, so as to need 
 a change and a kind of cleaning up. It is, in fact, merely an 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 191 
 
 incident of life, which, with the spirit of life in control, we can 
 leave to take care of itself. To take thought for immortality, 
 in this narrow sense of personal safety, is not of the idiom of 
 that faith which we are now defining as a disinterested venture 
 of life. One of the most salient elements in this historic ven- 
 ture of Jesus was His magnificent disregard of what would be- 
 come of Him as the sequel of His chosen work. He might be 
 revered as divine, He might be scorned and put to death; it 
 was all the same, so far as the integrity and thoroughness of 
 the work were concerned. This feature of his life is what St. 
 Paul honors in his idea of the KeWcris, or self-emptying, 
 of Christ; "who," he says, "being in the form of God did not 
 deem his equality with God a prize, a thing to be clutched at 
 and maintained at all hazards; but made himself of no repu- 
 tation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made 
 in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man 
 he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the 
 death of the cross." This is how the Christ-life looks from the 
 unseen places, where the divine who is in act to smite His na- 
 ture into manhood is initiating the movement of uttermost love. 
 From the human side, as we see it in the deeds and words of 
 Jesus of Nazareth, it has a simpler look, being translated into 
 the present- world idiom; but its principle is the same, its 
 primal impulse is identical, starting as it does away inward in 
 that sacred withdrawn centre where the spirit of God is wit- 
 nessing with the spirit of man. In this manhood idiom it is 
 simply taking outward consequences, of humility and hardship 
 and scorn, as all in the day's work, all inherent in the strange 
 new venture, but never availing for a moment to warp the 
 spirit from its divinely plotted orbit. The truest and strongest 
 elements of the human, the seeing eye and the stedfast will, 
 are as inherent in it as is the mystic divine. And we, as emu- 
 lators of that same self -forgetting faith, are nearer to it when, 
 seeing it truly, we just let ourselves go, as it were instinctively, 
 on the limitless current of love and faith, regardless of the un- 
 toward things we thereby incur, than when we are nervously 
 apprehensive about heaven and hell. Every stop that we make 
 
192 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 to count our personal chances of ultimate safety or reward is 
 essentially a self -limitation ; and love and faith will accept no 
 limitations. 
 
 We have just considered St. Paul's interpretation of this 
 self-emptying of Christ, an interpretation made from a point 
 of view the other side of the veil, as if he had been admitted 
 into the secret counsel of God. How do you suppose he got 
 there? There are many other such interpretations of things 
 in Scripture: the whole fabric of what we call revelation is just 
 that: men by an amazing presumption taking upon themselves 
 to assert what the Spirit of the universe thinks and plans, in 
 His vast creative work of evolving a humanity. How do you 
 suppose they got the other side of the veil? We are not in 
 position to say, it is presumptuous to say, they did not get it 
 by an authentic report from the unseeci places; and of one 
 thing we may be sure: they did not get it by psychism and 
 occultism in any form; psychism and occultism do not bring 
 that kind of news. These are as earth-bound as we are; as 
 earth-bound as is any casual, vagrant dead fact; for all the un- 
 canny facts it can accumulate, and all the facts that historical 
 research can verify and sift, are of the letter that killeth; in 
 themselves they are not truth, are not the spirit of life. But 
 we do not have to depend on that kind of news; our faith is 
 not at the mercy of manuscripts and various readings and 
 documents. No: if we have a report from the unseen, Christ 
 Himself is that report, Christ the perfected manhood; and the 
 way we recognize whether the report is authentic, or as the 
 scientific jargon puts it, veridical, is by the spirit within us, 
 the highest and purest possession we have. But you say, How 
 do we know that supreme report from the unseen except by 
 the words that have been written, and how can we tell what 
 those words are, except by sifting and keen criticism, by which 
 we may separate what actually was said and done by Him 
 from what men afterward thought was said and done? Here 
 again we are not at the mercy of documents. We have one 
 unshakable historic fact: the fact that one Man, in a way that 
 showed He had the spirit without measure, dared to make the 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 193 
 
 supreme venture of love and faith, and to work it out in terms 
 of the common life. In this fact inheres all the rest, even to 
 the end of time. And now, ever since that fact emerged to 
 history, the mind of the ages, as I said, has been considering 
 the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus. 
 They began to consider Him just as soon as He had lived His 
 life ; for they knew by a secret instinct that here was a unique, 
 a world-filling thing to consider. They were dazed and be- 
 wildered at first; naturally; we cannot pass the definitive judg- 
 ment on historic events while they are in progress; our 
 historians must have time to digest and coordinate and assimi- 
 late them. So it was in the scripture age; our Gospels did not 
 assume their present shape until years afterward, some think 
 nearly two centuries before the last of them was done. But 
 what does this show? Merely the inevitable movement of the 
 human mind, merely what all literature shows, that 
 
 the past will always win 
 
 A glory from its being far; 
 And orb into the perfect star 
 We saw not, when we mov'd therein. 
 
 That is why, in reviewing this record of the Life Indeed, I re- 
 ject nothing. It is all a part of that literature which sprang 
 out of that one colossal fact; it is the effort of men to get that 
 fact into meaning and coordination; as Matthew Arnold ex- 
 presses it, it is language thrown out toward an object too large 
 to be fully comprehended. And that effort has by no means 
 prisoned itself between the lids of our Bible. It is going on 
 still; I dare to say that what has made the poetry and phil- 
 osophy and fiction of the ages vital, has been in its essence 
 just considering Christ, and therefore is making, in ever-mov- 
 ing discoveries and concepts, an unending Bible. What matter 
 if there are errors of judgment and faults of transmission? 
 These may be left to the mending hand of time; they are cor- 
 rected best, not by the letter which always has the corruptions 
 of a thing that is dead, but by the spirit which giveth life. And 
 the spirit sends us back, or rather inward, to that supreme fact, 
 
194 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 which being expressed in human life was not at the rude mercy 
 of the letter. Jesus wrote nothing; He lived. 
 
 And so the Word had breath, and wrought 
 
 With human hands the creed of creeds 
 
 In loveliness of perfect deeds, 
 More strong than all poetic thought. 
 
 I confess to something very like reverence to the great, surg- 
 ing, unwieldy, yet desperately earnest body of human litera- 
 ture; the voice of their poetic and prophetic spirit always 
 making itself heard; I can enter into the feeling that Jesus 
 had in the wilderness when to every suggestion of the Tempter 
 He responded, "It is written." I think we do ill to limit or 
 confine its multifarious utterance, except as we judge it by 
 the mighty spirit of life. I have been struck by a remark in 
 Sabatier's "Life of St. Francis of Assisi," who of all saints is 
 by many deemed to have been most like Christ; the author 
 says: "Only a profoundly religious and poetic soul (is not the 
 one the other?) can understand." Is not the one the other? 
 I ask of the thoughts and images that come to me in literature. 
 And when I read a book like Professor Schmidt's recent work 
 "The Prophet of Nazareth," and see how he labors to show 
 that none of the prophecies meant Christ, and none of the 
 types meant Christlike things, and the term Son of man only 
 meant this little thing, and the term Son of God must be 
 whittled down to this other, as if it were essential to our 
 view of truth that we reduce everything to lowest factual terms 
 and sail as it were under bare poles, I feel that I am asked 
 to give up the thought of the ages, the words in which unwit- 
 tingly men from the beginning have been helping Christ to 
 live. We make nothing by this; we lose unspeakably. The 
 world's interpretation of Christ will not bear limitation; it is 
 growing all the while. Why, this view of Him in the cosmic 
 and evolutionary reference, which men are trying to portray 
 in scientific terms, is a product of our very latest time. But 
 is it any less likely to be true? For it foots itself squarely on 
 this colossal world fact, this supreme historic venture. 
 
 So the world is still recording the meanings of that experi- 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 195 
 
 ment in life ; and their record, in spite of mistakes and vagaries 
 and aberrations, is like a steady voyage of discovery. The cry 
 "Back to Christ" is all very well, as a return for orders to 
 headquarters; but it will not do to make it an occasion for 
 narrowing or belittling the Christ idea; rather, with the spirit 
 of that initial venture in mind, let the watchword be, "Forward, 
 ever forward, to the Christ that is to be." For that historic 
 venture was only a beginning, an opening of the gates; and 
 the end is not yet. 
 
 In a summarizing word we may say: As the lower evolution, 
 which has to do with the life of the body, finds its norms and 
 types in the species ; so this higher and conscious evolution, in 
 which the spirit cooperates, and which therefore tends ever 
 from the fettered species to the free individual, has developed 
 its supreme spiritual type in one Man; who now, as perfected 
 personality, embodies the life to which all manhood life is 
 organically related, the foundation other than which no man 
 can lay; and the love and faith which characterize the com- 
 pleted ideal are the vital pulsation in which alone, henceforth, 
 manhood achieves its rest, its fulness, its joy. In this Man, 
 as He stands unique and towering, it is impossible to say which 
 is more evident: His manifoldness of human relation, or His 
 utter singleness of motive and aim; His individual remoteness 
 from all, or His universal intimateness with all. Is not this 
 the mark of the type? It takes away the future tense from 
 that verse of Isaiah's, making it present: 
 
 A man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, 
 
 And a covert from the tempest; 
 
 As rivers of water in a dry place, 
 
 As the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. 
 
 But whatever more we recognize in Him, this much we may 
 say, in a more pregnant application of Shakespeare's words : 
 
 His life was gentle; and the elements 
 
 So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up, 
 
 And say to all the world, "This was a man!" 
 
 These words were said, you know, of that noble Roman Bru- 
 tus; but Brutus' nobleness was obscured at one point; he got 
 
196 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 entangled in a conspiracy, and yielded part of his soul to evil 
 counsel, and went under. This Man trod the wine-press alone, 
 and of the people there was none with Him. To be a man: 
 that was the quest for the sake of which He laid aside His 
 divine claim. Alone He ventured forth; alone He traversed 
 the whole consistent, heroic way; alone He passed out of our 
 sight. Where would we be, what our way of life, what our 
 hope, if at any point He had flinched or failed? The question 
 opens for the whole world an alternative too awful to face. 
 
 I. FROM THE EXCEEDING HIGH MOUNTAIN 
 
 His kinsmen, you remember, when they saw how His min- 
 istry was going, tried to lay hold on Him, saying, "He is be- 
 side himself"; and many of the Jews, when they listened to 
 His interpretations of life, said, "He hath a devil, and is mad; 
 why hear ye him?" Such were among the things He had to 
 encounter. It is our business to-day to inquire what method 
 there was in His madness ; in other words, whether this strange 
 unique life of His was a thing into which He drifted as it were 
 by accident, and then found later that He was so committed 
 that He could not consistently withdraw, or whether from the 
 beginning it obeyed a plan, a foreseen determination, and all 
 along bore the fruit that belongs to its kind. Astounding as 
 it was to all, not all judged it as madness; to some it openect 
 a dim vision of something transcendently great and beneficent, 
 they could hardly divine what. "These are not the words of 
 him that hath a devil. Can a devil open the eyes of the blind?" 
 Some there were, then, who were trying to pass upon His life 
 of the spirit the common-sense judgment of effects, though the 
 mystery of the cause stretched far beyond their ken; just as 
 He Himself had said to Nicodemus, "The wind bloweth where 
 it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not 
 tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth; so is everyone that 
 is born of the spirit." In Him the great free atmosphere of 
 the spirit was stirring in the world, the breath of another and 
 higher world; and from the effects of it which they could see, 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 197 
 
 its contact with their lower life, they were gradually, according 
 to their fairness and openness of spirit, to judge of its inner 
 nature, which they could not see. By their fruits ye shall know 
 them. 
 
 But to begin with, we have before us just such a thing as 
 we see everyday, just such as everyone of us has by experience 
 to meet and solve: namely, a young man, with a young man's 
 hopes and energies, setting out upon life and livelihood. To 
 Him, as to us, the alternative that rose before Him was capable 
 of a very simple reduction: which shall it be, life first and 
 livelihood incidental, or livelihood first and life the incident, 
 the uncared-for thing? All depended, with Him as with us, 
 upon the spirit that animated Him. To make its significance 
 more real, let us put beside it Carlyle's account of his young 
 contemporary, John Sterling: "Here, then," he says, "is a 
 young soul brought to the years of legal majority, furnished 
 from his training-schools with such and such shining capa- 
 bilities, and ushered on the scene of things, to inquire practi- 
 cally, What he will do there? Piety is in the man, noble 
 human valor, bright intelligence, ardent proud veracity; light 
 and fire, in none of their many senses, wanting for him, but 
 abundantly bestowed: a kingly kind of man; whose 'king- 
 dom,' however, in this bewildered place and epoch of the world, 
 will probably be difficult to find and conquer ! " You remember 
 how, in thus starting his hero forth, Carlyle makes assessment 
 of various pursuits and professions: divinity, law, medicine, 
 public life; only to find that none quite suited his aptitude, 
 except "the anarchic, nomadic, entirely aerial and uncondi- 
 tional one, called Literature." He, too, then, like his great 
 Prototype, had the controlling bent to be a word to the world, 
 to coin his life into expression; and if we had time to follow him 
 we should find, as we find universally of men, that the success 
 of his impact on the world depended upon the largeness of the 
 life and the fulness and beauty of the expression. 
 
 I have chosen this case to set by the side of ours, that we 
 might have a kind of unit to measure by. The earthly con- 
 ditions, not greatly different, were if anything in Sterling's 
 
i 9 8 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 favor. He was finely trained and cultured; but he had no 
 profession and was casting about for one that would suit his 
 temperament. Our Lord already had a means of livelihood, 
 the carpenter's trade; but He gave it up, and did not work at 
 it any more; it afforded obviously too narrow a vocabulary 
 in itself, to fill out the expression of the life that was in Him. 
 His giving it up, however, cast no slur on that or any other 
 trade; rather it left them all glorified, while he passed beyond 
 questions of livelihood to seek first the kingdom of God and 
 His righteousness. And here begins His vast differentiation 
 from men; so great that it seems almost profane to set any 
 other man by the side of Him. Yet it was no differentiation 
 that He sought; it all came about rather by His single-minded 
 determination, incidents and accidents of life ignored, to in- 
 carnate that essential vital principle wherein He could stand 
 as a brother by the side of every man. No one had ever made 
 this determination before; no one, before or since, even with 
 His spirit to help, has made it to such purpose. There is a 
 strange universality of appeal and relation to reckon with here; 
 we canot account for it all, nor for the vital part of it, by say- 
 ing that in the reign of Tiberius a young carpenter of Galilee 
 resolved to be very good and carried out his resolve consist- 
 ently. This is about what it amounts to, if we regard Him 
 merely as a man among men; even reckoning the wise things 
 He said, and the death He died. Rather, somehow His person- 
 ality overshadows us as that of the man we would all be, as 
 the type of complete manhood which all that is holiest in us 
 is struggling to realize. Here is the phenomenon to resolve: 
 the fact that this Man's personality is the touchstone of hearts. 
 As Napoleon Bonaparte is reported to have said: "Jesus 
 Christ has succeeded in making of every human soul an ap- 
 pendage of His own." 
 
 I am led to these remarks by the thought of Professor 
 Schmidt's book, "The Prophet of Nazareth." It is one of 
 those books of which the coming few years are likely to see 
 a considerable crop; for you know Biblical criticism is shift- 
 ing its ground now from the Old Testament to the New, and 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 199 
 
 its austere historic method is going to sift the records as they 
 have never been sifted before. I tell you this that you may 
 not be unprepared when it comes; also to record here my con- 
 viction that the historic method itself as exclusive matter- 
 of-fact research I mean is on its last legs, and that its sting 
 is in its tail. It must give place to something more genial and 
 constructive. The book I mention will prove, I think, to be 
 one of the ablest of these investigations ; as it certainly is about 
 as sweeping and radical as it can be. Here we have about the 
 utmost that a rigid, purely factual, unimaginative criticism can 
 do. I respect the book, with all its relentless rakings from the 
 German workshops, far more than I do these touch-and-go 
 books that will soon take occasion from it to scatter fire-brands 
 of raw second-hand assertion, or sparks of ad captandum 
 superficial reply, saying, "Lo here, lo there!" Its object, on 
 its factual scale, is to reduce the life of Jesus to lowest his- 
 toric terms, to an irreducible minimum; and this by disen- 
 gaging from the gospel record all that it deems the fondness of 
 disciples, or the looseness of tradition, or the interpretations 
 of poetry and theology, have, during the succeeding ages added 
 to it. The Gospels, you know, did not reach their present 
 shape until many years after the ministry was done; and books 
 like this look upon the intervening years as a sort of run-wild 
 garden plot, out of which it is concerned to pull the too luxuri- 
 ant growth of weeds. Its excisions are startlingly radical. It 
 rejects the fourth Gospel altogether; leaves out virtually all 
 that precedes the beginning of the ministry, all that follows 
 the crucifixion and burial, and all the miracles except a few 
 doubtful cases of mind-cure; and almost totally ignores the 
 Epistles of Paul. So the Jesus it would leave us is about what 
 a man in the street, with a head for nothing but sense-per- 
 ception, would see from the outside, and would report as men 
 report a street-fight, saying just this and that, without any 
 varnish or frills, is what occurred. And the writer apparently 
 takes comfort in the thought that he has got down to literal 
 bed-rock; which in his view is, that Jesus neither professed to 
 be, nor was, anything more than a wise and well-disposed 
 
200 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 prophet, whose life was remarkably sincere, and whose views 
 of life were so astonishingly correct, even by our present com- 
 plex standards, that they are worthy of a fuller confidence and 
 application than civilization or the churches have ever ac- 
 corded to them. All this Jesus certainly was; we can go with 
 the writer so far, and still have the richest legacy of the ages. 
 But I confess I am suspicious of every man and every method 
 that sets up an arbitrary limit and says "No thing but." And 
 when I see that "nothing but" applied to the life of Christ 
 when I measure it up and ask "Is that all?" forthwith there 
 rise to my thought many vital elements of being, many strands 
 of life even in my poor ideal, to which this frigid criticism is 
 blind. It is not on the Christ scale; not even on the scale of 
 inner creative history; but only that of newspaper journalism 
 and courts of law. All that makes the life of Christ perennial, 
 a present power and pulsation, has evaporated; leaving only 
 a few stray annals of ancient story, and a few precepts to 
 learn by rote. 
 
 Now I am not concerned to refute this book, or to warn 
 against the danger of it. That is why I am so free to call at- 
 tention to it. If it has found the irreducible minimum of fact, 
 let us be glad; for there is no danger in authentic fact. The 
 Bible itself invites the scrutiny of facts; we have not followed 
 cunningly devised fables. But there are facts and facts; and 
 on top of all this external history there is this larger fact to 
 be reckoned with, that from Jesus' day to this the world has 
 not been able to look at His life cold-bloodedly. That life lays 
 hold on men; it enkindles their hearts, gives them peace and 
 joy and energy and a sense of solved existence, why? Then 
 forthwith there spring up all around it, like a springtide luxuri- 
 ance, art and poetry and vitalized thinking, why? Then 
 we become aware of a vast new movement of the spirit of man, 
 all tracing back directly to that life, as to a mighty seminal 
 impulse and power, why? A mere villager who has left his 
 carpenter's bench to become a self-made prophet has no busi- 
 ness, it would seem, to figure like that in history; if he has, 
 and if this paltry fact accounts for him, what has become of 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 201 
 
 all the prophets who have done similar things? This is a world 
 of law; and like causes ought to produce like effects every- 
 where. And if Jesus so figures in history not by virtue of what 
 He was and did but by virtue of the halo with which others 
 have invested Him, how resolve the halo? Did it take other 
 minds, then, to piece His out and make a Christ of Him? And 
 if so, where do we find the real Christ nucleus, in A.D. 30 or 
 some vague time in the second century? If we must throw 
 away the Gospel of John in order to get the authentic Jesus, 
 I submit the serious question rises whether it wouldn't be 
 better to throw away the history-shorn Jesus and keep the 
 Gospel of John. For somehow a Christ, the recognized 
 summit of manhood not a mere carpenter-itinerant has 
 out of the nebula of history orbed into concrete being, and be- 
 come the greatest theme of literature and life. Did that Christ 
 live, with the supreme manhood in Him from the first, or did 
 a company of poets and fictionists create Him out of a Jew? 
 If the latter, then must we dismiss Jesus and put our faith in 
 poetry and fiction? We might do worse. I am not sure but 
 we would do worse, by cramping our faith down to the sight 
 of the eyes, to a casual fact seen only from the outside. There 
 is in these more of the spirit which giveth life than there is in 
 a congealed external letter which killeth. And if we insist on 
 reporting this majestic Christ phenomenon as one would a 
 street-fight, we abjure all our heritage in the loving, creative, 
 assimilative mind of the ages which forthwith made all the 
 Christ events its own, and quickened its holiest ideals by them, 
 seeing in them not only the fact but the eternal truth without 
 which facts are nugatory. 
 
 I seem here to have made a long digression; but by the 
 scale on which we are thinking I have not. For it all belongs 
 to the answer we must needs give here to the question which 
 our Lord himself put, "What think ye of Christ? Whose son 
 is he?" This, in scripture terminology, is really the crux of 
 our inquiry. Our foregoing investigation, following the higher 
 evolution of spirit up to the law of the spirit of life, with its 
 supreme instinct of love and faith, has brought us up to the 
 
202 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 point where this answer is the next thing in order. Shall it 
 be a petty answer, from the outside, or shall it, from the inside, 
 be large and roomy? In other words, it is time now to pro- 
 ject our view of Jesus of Nazareth on the background of the 
 ideal of life which somehow a long line of manhood striving 
 has evolved. Does He stand the test, or look we for another? 
 He Himself puts the question, offering Himself thus as a candi- 
 date, whom we, according to our insight, are free to take or 
 leave. Nothing could be fairer or more above board. He calls 
 himself the Son of man; He arrogates nothing higher, and even 
 this term He uses in a theoretical way, not as a personal title, 
 but as a means of defining what, in this case and that, the Son 
 of man would naturally be and do. Thus by His very use of 
 the term He is demonstrating, point by point, His conception 
 of manhood life and character. Men ask Him in bewilder- 
 ment, "Who is this Son of man?" and He only refers them to 
 the light that is with them, by which they may judge for them- 
 selves, and ought to make up their minds in the little while 
 that the light is with them. Some ardent souls like Nathanael 
 carry their insight further, and say, "Thou art the Son of God; 
 thou art the King of Israel"; but this is not His assumption, 
 it is their inner recognition; they come to see that He answers 
 their conception of what the Son of God would be like. Once 
 indeed He is reported to have asked a man whose eyes He has 
 opened, "Dost thou believe on the Son of God?" and when 
 the man asked, "Who is he, Lord, that I might believe on 
 him?" He answered, "Thou hast both seen him, and it is he 
 that talketh with thee." But this is not an arrogation; it is 
 a revelation to one whose opened eyes and heart are ready for 
 it, one who has become like Nathanael. 
 
 The Son of man, the Son of God, what shall we make ot 
 these terms? Professor Schmidt juggles with them; puts them 
 through the philological mill by translating them back into 
 Aramaic, the presumed language that Christ spoke; discovers 
 that in this and cognate languages the word son means virtu- 
 ally one of a species. That is all right; a higher critic's mind 
 is built that way. The Son of man, then, becomes a specimen, 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 203 
 
 one of a species, a specimen man; and the Son of God is, 
 why, is a specimen God, as if there were a divine species for 
 Him to represent; this latter definition having to be fortified by 
 heathen usage, in order to make up gods enough to furnish an 
 average specimen. But his main contention, after all this jug- 
 gling, is that when Jesus says Son of man He means simply 
 a man; and Professor Schmidt's rather lame conclusion is that 
 Jesus never said it at all, but some later marplot said it for 
 Him. Well, we won't quarrel with his philology; his conclu- 
 sion, it is evident, is of a piece with his prevailing desire to 
 make Christ as little as possible, so that the average man, con- 
 tinuing to be an undifferentiated specimen, can grasp Him. 
 But when we see, as we see on every gospel page, what Jesus 
 conceives the Son of man should be and do, we can hardly 
 think He has the average man, the mere specimen, in mind; 
 for certainly the race in general had not averaged up, when 
 He spoke, to being Lord of the sabbath and forgiving sins and 
 rising from the dead. Rather He is describing the ideal man, 
 what man, as his evolution dictates, has it in him to be; and 
 in His own person He is working out the elements of that ideal 
 before men's eyes. Not the specimen, but rather, so to say, 
 the whole species stands before us individualized, and con- 
 scious of closing in itself the ultimate manhood type and value. 
 This from our scientific point of view is reasonable and feas- 
 ible; for our evolution course has all along been working 
 steadily toward the perfected individual, of the species yet 
 more than a specimen, a prophecy, rather, of what shall be 
 in the ages to come. If human evolution begins with the im- 
 pulse of the unlimited spirit, it seems as if it must in course of 
 time evolve the Christ, the Son of man and the Son of God 
 in one, as soon as it reaches the point where it has the spirit 
 without measure. In this sense we need not be afraid to say 
 Christ is a product of evolution; for the cosmic energy, which 
 is love, must do so much, with all the self-emptying and sacri- 
 fice involved therein, for pure love's sake. How could love 
 reach its full expression otherwise? How could it stop one 
 step short of this? 
 
204 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 Now the discovery of all this might conceivably have been 
 left to the scientific mind of the twentieth century to put into 
 word and definition, according to its current notions of biol- 
 ogy; in which case man would be at the mercy of the scientific 
 vocabulary, and evolution would be a thing for scholars and 
 philosophers. But this concerns every unlettered man; every 
 man who knows what it is to be a father and a son has a vital 
 individual interest in it. How then shall he find it out, in the 
 language in which he was born? What way so natural, so 
 reasonable, so universally adequate, after all, as for the Spirit 
 of the universe, the Father of spirits, to announce, "This is 
 my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased," and for the su- 
 preme Personality, once evolved, to say and show to men what 
 the Son of man, the Man of men, should be and do? This 
 is precisely what the Scripture says took place, and this has 
 ever since been recognized as an authentic revelation from the 
 unseen source whence the power and spirit of it proceeds. How 
 the announcement got into words, and when, is by comparison 
 a paltry matter; we have the revelation, and the great heart 
 of mankind, and, I think, the large reason of evolutionary 
 science, set to their seal that it is true. Evolution has become 
 a matter not of bondage and blindness but of sonship ; and the 
 terms Son of God and Son of man are doing the best work that 
 it is in words to do. 
 
 Now when this Personality, whose double witness that He 
 is Son of man and Son of God constitutes Him the supreme 
 Personality, sets forth on human life, how shall He behave? 
 What shall He assume that He is; in the way of love and faith 
 I mean, in such a way that not only shall men recognize 
 Him as He is, but what is of paramount importance, that they 
 shall commit themselves, in the same love and faith, to that 
 spirit and current of life? It is a great evolutionary problem, 
 which not science alone but the universal mind of man is called 
 to solve. Is it not a crowning mercy that one mind solved it, 
 instead of leaving the matter floating through the ages for a 
 scientific syndicate of minds to solve? 
 
 So here we are brought back to the young Galilean Jesus 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 205 
 
 setting forth, as did John Sterling, on life, but on a life how 
 much greater. If He has not solved the problem, no one has. 
 Shall He solve it consciously alone, or shall He make equal 
 connection with the Father of spirits who is witnessing with 
 Him? In other words, shall He be an agnostic, as so many 
 thinkers are now, or shall He live and act as if He knew the 
 source of His life? Here is what the agnostics are saying: I 
 quote from a book entitled "A Modern Symposium": "Man 
 is in the making; but henceforth he must make himself. To 
 that point Nature has led him, out of the primeval slime. She 
 has given him limbs, she has given him brain, she has given 
 him the rudiment of a soul. Now it is for him to make or mar 
 that splendid torso. Let him look no more to her for aid; for 
 it is her will to create one who has the power to create himself. 
 If he fail, she fails; back goes the metal to the pot; and the 
 great process begins anew. If he succeeds, he succeeds alone. 
 His fate is in his own hands." In this programme of life man 
 not only bids farewell to nature, which is all that God has 
 ever meant to him, but regards himself as a splendid torso, 
 with the rudiment of a soul, which he is to complete without 
 any pattern to work by, except what is furnished by his own 
 wisdom and will. All this is in polar contrast to our young 
 Galilean, for whom nature means father and God, whose soul 
 is no rudiment but completed through the vital upbuilding of 
 love and faith, and who from a living soul is setting forth to be 
 a life-giving spirit. All the agnostic seems to think of is self- 
 building; the manhood he would create is a hard, self-reliant, 
 self-regarding manhood, in all the pride of his intrinsic great- 
 ness. The Galilean hardly seems to think of Himself at all; 
 He is not here to please Himself ; and this gives an attractive, 
 sympathetic tone to all the record of Him. It is an infinite 
 relief to turn from the cold self-sufficiency of the words 
 we have just read to the more winsome idiom of the gospel 
 narrative. 
 
 Imagine what would be the effect upon an ardent-minded, 
 true-hearted young man, if there should come pressing into 
 his consciousness, as from some far-withdrawn inner depth, 
 
206 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 the assurance, "Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well 
 pleased." This, you know, is what is reported to have hap- 
 pened to Jesus at the Jordan. Along with this assurance, as 
 the same report relates, He saw the heavens opened, and the 
 Spirit came upon Him in the bodily shape of a dove. Whether 
 this was the first time such consciousness of His significance 
 in the world had been with Him is not quite clear; most likely 
 it was, like a great awakening from dreams and desires that 
 had been beautiful and true, but more or less undefined. At 
 any rate, we know that from the beginning He had had the 
 bent, the appetency; at twelve years of age, He was impatient 
 to be about His Father's business, and thereafter, until this 
 scene at the Jordan, His wisdom and His favor with God and 
 man increased with His stature and age. The germs of the 
 matter were always in Him, just as the child is the father of 
 the man; but this is different from coming, as from a long 
 orphanage, to know how great His paternity was, and to be 
 confronted with the question what to do about it, how to main- 
 tain the family likeness and tradition, how to be true to this 
 tremendous noblesse oblige. All men have it obscurely in them 
 to be sons of God; but to be the beloved Son, the first-born 
 of many brethren, and therefore to make the will and nature 
 of the Father palpable, and to give to as many as received 
 Him power themselves to become sons of God, was not this 
 the greatest task, and the greatest glory, ever laid upon a son 
 of man? 
 
 That He took that majestic trust with full appreciation of 
 its huge involvements, is evident from the next thing that oc- 
 curred. That sweet spirit, so accordant with the angel's 
 earlier song of peace, goodwill to men, proved at first to be 
 anything but dove-like in Him; it led Him, or as St. Mark 
 says, it drove Him, to the wilderness, where a spirit of very 
 different sort awaited Him, where, we may say, two spirits of 
 a diverse impulse were fighting to obtain possession of His 
 life, and where He, from the wisdom and fibre that was in Him, 
 was to make the momentous decision. Will the manhood 
 which the ages have evolved and concentrated in this person- 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 207 
 
 ality stand the stress, will it define in truest manhood terms 
 what it is to be Son of God, so that henceforth the felt spirit 
 of the Father of spirits shall flow consciously and wisely 
 through the deeds of men? It is a breathless moment of his- 
 tory, this forty day struggle in the wilderness. For Satan's 
 wisdom and methods, which whether true or not are mighty, 
 have hitherto usurped the spiritual field, and if they are dis- 
 lodged must give place to something yet to be tried, yet prob- 
 lematical and experimental. I have spoken of Christ's life as 
 the most colossal scientific experiment that was ever made. 
 Well, here in the wilderness it begins: He must determine by 
 what apparatus, what procedure, what behavior in all the de- 
 tails of life, He shall make it. Hitherto men have been the 
 slaves of nature, of expediency, of custom, of law; but all this, 
 in the view we have been taking, was an obligation of their in- 
 fancy and childhood, as they came up from the animal to the 
 spiritual; so their bondage has been, after all, to God, who has 
 evolved their lower nature as well as their higher; and this 
 other spirit, now recognized as so malign and destructive, is 
 virtually raising the question, not whether these lower wis- 
 doms and methods shall cease from man, but whether they 
 shall be on top, shall control his action as if they were his 
 highest self-expression. It is a question, at bottom, of the 
 all-directing current of spirit, the tide of manhood, whether, 
 as a felt pulsation of God, it shall be inward toward self, or 
 outward toward the vitalizing and uplifting of the world. 
 
 I cannot stay to dwell long on the stages of this temptation 
 in the wilderness; full enough though they be, each one, for a 
 whole season's study. You will note how accurately adapted 
 to the situation every temptation is: how the lower spirit says 
 every time, "If thou be the Son of God," do this, make the 
 fact evident in this way; you will note too how every time the 
 answer is, not God's son should assert Himself so and so, but 
 man shall not live by bread alone, shall not tempt God, shall 
 worship none other than the very highest and holiest that he 
 feels God to be. Christ is here to express God in terms of the 
 human; and so alone can He express the human in terms of 
 
208 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 God. But if it is this latter that He will express, it shall be 
 the human as it is at the fulness of the time, when the current 
 of love and faith is ready to have free course; not as it was 
 in the groping, twilight, childish times, when men were gov- 
 erned by environment and expediency. We can see from this 
 how wisely and truly Christ always expressed Himself when 
 He set forth what the Son of man, man in His idea, should be 
 and do. 
 
 The first temptation, beginning on the lowest and most ob- 
 vious plane, is as rampant now, the world over, as it was here 
 in the wilderness. Man, feed yourself; use your opportunity 
 to get the comforts, the bodily supports, the gratifications of 
 your body; see what a chance you have; if you are the son 
 of the creative power of the universe the very stones may at 
 your word be your bread. Well, we know what marvelous in- 
 ventive skill man can put forth to make this assertion true; 
 there seems to be no end to his power to take the resources of 
 nature and turn them to his purpose; and how predominantly, 
 in the spheres both of labor and luxury, it seems to reduce it- 
 self to getting enough to eat. How much of civilization fo- 
 cusses in this. Here is how a recent book puts it: "For, as 
 we read history, the economic factor determines all the others. 
 'Man ist, was er isst,' as the German said; and morals, art, 
 religion, all the so-called 'ideal activities/ are just allotropic 
 forms of bread and meat." The man who wrote this has heard 
 Satan's temptation and answered it the other way; he too rep- 
 resents himself as trying to uplift the race, his panacea for 
 their ills being a socialistic scheme; and what he wants to do 
 is to give everybody enough to eat, so as to build up their 
 tissues into healthy, happy physical men, from which, as he 
 thinks, the sound mind in a sound body will follow by natural 
 consequence. What an opportunity for Christ, to steer men 
 to their God-sonship through the tissues of the body! But 
 no! man's spirit is set in a better way; his true life comes 
 through the words of God, and when these are his meat and 
 drink, as they always were to Christ, the wants of the body 
 will be cared for as an incidental thing. When later He said, 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 209 
 
 "What man of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him 
 a stone?" was He not thinking of His own hunger in the wil- 
 derness, and from His own experience putting it upon men to 
 take the God part, not the man's, and to be sons of God by 
 giving the best wheaten bread, and the best that is in them 
 every way, rather than the animal part, by going through life 
 an embodied hunger and craving? And when He fed the five 
 thousand, was not every word that through his filial lips pro- 
 ceeded out of the mouth of God so much greater food to their 
 souls that the five loaves and two small fishes were an object 
 lesson of how easily, with God's words to supplement, the body 
 could respond to the fulness of the spirit? Truly, these wil- 
 derness lessons became a very vital reality in the ministry that 
 succeeded. 
 
 The second temptation takes another ground, I was going 
 to say, higher^ but I am not so sure. It is as extreme on the 
 mystic side of life, as was the first on the animal. Man, if you 
 are the son of God, use the fact to reveal God's secret and 
 astounding working; you can show He is in you by making 
 exceptions to the laws of nature, and by a wonderful feat of 
 levitation actually put Him at His word, and showing a gaping, 
 wondering world that when He promised to bear men up by 
 angels He meant what He said. This temptation, you see, was 
 a hoary old thing; its principle came down from the time when 
 the serpent in Eden had said, God said you would die. Try 
 it once, ye shall not surely die; put Him at His word and see 
 how false it is; or as here put Him at His word and demon- 
 strate how true it is. This opens the whole sphere of the mar- 
 velous, the occult, the exceptional, in a word, of the things 
 wherein especially gifted souls may separate their life from the 
 general ongoings of humanity. We know what has come of 
 this in history: the unhealthy effort to make men trust in 
 powers exerted for them and not in them, powers available 
 only to the skilled and initiated, and exhibited as a holy show 
 and not as a universal and practical vitalization of character. 
 If Jesus had yielded to this He would have committed Himself 
 to going through life as a kind of fakir, astonishing men by 
 
210 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 occult feats, or perhaps as a sort of Indian yogi, sitting apart 
 from men and playing the role of an inaccessible, withdrawn 
 sanctity and wisdom which can only be looked at. You see 
 the polar opposite of this temptation to all the whole- 
 some bent and spirit of Jesus. No: not tempting God by put- 
 ting the word on which you feed to a doubtful test, as if He 
 were some cosmic spirit mystic and only exceptionally mani- 
 festable; but taking your common life, in love and faith, down 
 from the pinnacle to the needy hearts of men, and making it 
 their universal resource and working tool. Put all that is 
 mystic and holy in you to the homely and practical issues of 
 life; so only shall you prove yourself Son of God, in terms of 
 believing, energizing, life-giving manhood, the perfect son of 
 man. 
 
 If Jesus had succumbed to this second temptation, which 
 I am disposed to regard as the subtlest and in the end the dead- 
 liest of the three, the game would have been up. It would 
 have amounted to expatriation from the spirit of the whole 
 family in heaven and earth, the Spirit of God and the spirit 
 of man alike. For while, on the God side, it would have seemed 
 in the innocence of exaggerated trust, to be leaping into the 
 arms of the divine, by emphasizing this at the expense of the 
 human, in naive contrast to the first and third temptations, 
 which emphasized the human at the expense of the divine, in 
 reality it would have been blind committal to the God power 
 at the expense of the God love, which latter is the central God 
 essence. Or to put it in another way, it would have been using 
 God's freely proffered love, making traffic of it as it were, 
 without the spontaneous interchange of love in return; for it 
 would have been detachment from the God-spirit and transfer 
 to the attitude of the doubter and tempter, who instead of 
 moving freely in the love current tries freakish experiments 
 on the very life in which he lives. But this is not the worst 
 of it. On the man side it would have made the Christ inac- 
 cessible, by making His manhood not a universal uplift but a 
 clever, magical performance, a thing to be looked at, not emu- 
 lated. How easily this temptation may steal upon us all! 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 211 
 
 The thing can be done by the popular orator, by the brilliant 
 scholar, by the talented business man, by the unscrupulous 
 millionaire; by any means, in fact, whereby a man occupies 
 a plane of privilege or cleverness from which he is merely a 
 detached spectator or exploiter of the great common life below. 
 Consider, then, what resistance to this subtle temptation 
 means. This straight-seeing carpenter, filled with the Holy 
 Spirit, not partly filled, is bent, according to his insight, on 
 making the will of His Father prevail. And here comes in 
 His wholly new reading of that will. You remember how 
 cleverly Matthew Arnold phrases this ideal of His; so cleverly 
 that we do not at first recognize how fatally he limits it. 
 Matthew Arnold says that the supreme Christian ideal is to 
 make reason and the will of God prevail. Reason? Why, 
 that is the ideal of the Greek philosophers; if they had their 
 way, perfect reason justice and temperance and all the self- 
 contained, self-restraining virtues, would prevail, and the 
 world would still be congealed in heathenism and triumphant 
 law. Jesus' ideal is, rather, to make the unreasonable virtues 
 and the will of God prevail; for in His reading God is identi- 
 fied with the unreasonable virtues, the virtues of grace; is 
 identified with love and faith and the hope for mankind that 
 springs out of these. These, you will recall, are the new in- 
 vention of Christianity. And what hope, what surge out of 
 the deadly restriction and self-bondage of the present heathen 
 and legal dispensation, except by a grand venture and abandon 
 on the new ocean of love and faith? It is just to this new 
 ideal that Jesus' resistance to this second temptation commits 
 Him, commits Him and confirms Him in it. 
 
 To leave the Christ inaccessible, to emphasize the god, is, 
 however, alluring and self-pleasing, to leave the rank and file 
 down there at the foot of the pinnacle where it was before. 
 The heathen and the legalists already know what it is to em- 
 phasize the god; they have described it and prophesied it; it 
 is no new revelation. Jesus defines it in human terms; but it 
 is by turning their ideas face about. "You are making Him 
 more supernatural all the while," says one of my friends. 
 
212 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 But I am not trying to; it is He that is doing it; in 
 spite of all my efforts to hold Him back He keeps getting be- 
 yond me and beyond the old humanity. He is doing it just 
 by not emphasizing the god; and as Browning puts it, so when 
 we bethink ourselves we say, 
 
 Such ever was love's way: to rise, it stoops. 
 
 In other words, in all His transcendency He is emphasizing 
 the god by making man, with whom He has thoroughly identi- 
 fied Himself, more supernatural; is emphasizing the god by 
 launching Himself on the divine, unreasoning tide of love, and 
 inspiring men to commit themselves to the same. So He makes 
 the Christ accessible by coming down from the pinnacle to the 
 broad plane of help, that is His answer. There are two 
 ways to get your ideals into the hearts of men ; and they show 
 themselves in the simplest matters, as simple as the writing of 
 a paragraph. One is to make everything so plain and easy 
 that they can understand without putting forth effort; very 
 desirable this, but there is the risk that they will hold cheap 
 what they get so cheaply, and so just look on and let the writer 
 do all the thinking. The other is, while putting before men 
 a hard thought or ideal, to stimulate them to do enough more, 
 in cerebration or in spiritual response, to appropriate it. There 
 cannot be much question which alternative is the more valu- 
 able. We have Jesus' way before us. The divine is here, ex- 
 pressed in your own terms. Rise now to meet Him. You can 
 if you will drink of His cup and be baptized with His bap- 
 tism. To do more, to take of the energy of love and do un- 
 reasonable things will then be easy, nay, the natural way of 
 living. 
 
 The third temptation, not now on the solitary pinnacle but 
 on the exceeding high mountain whence are visible all the king- 
 doms of the world, enters that sphere of practical action with 
 which Jesus must needs reckon; for if He is Son of God, He 
 is obviously the one to bring about that kingdom of heaven 
 which John has preached, which the prophets have prophesied, 
 and which He Himself has supremely at heart. "Behold, a king 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 213 
 
 shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judg- 
 ment,' 7 the old-time seers had said; here now was the grand 
 opportunity. If you think this opened a dream too vast for 
 the young Galilean to cherish, consider what possibilities must 
 have risen, to the mind of one who had received assurance that 
 He was the beloved Son of God, and who afterward, in the 
 very pursuance of His lowly mission had to escape to a moun- 
 tain to evade those who would make Him king by force. To 
 set up the kingdom of heaven, with a Prince of the blood, as 
 it were, upon the throne; what thoughts of ways and means, 
 ideals and principles, must have inhered in the conviction that 
 He was the chosen One to do it. John had just been depicting 
 that kingdom in austere hues, with the stern alternative of 
 fire and the axe as penalty of the rejection of it. Men had 
 always hitherto been driven into kingdoms, that is into sub- 
 jection; the one dominating idea was that it was the business 
 of the rank and file to be governed, not to govern themselves. 
 Men would not come to subjection of their own motion; they 
 were proverbially stiff-necked and rebellious, the best of them. 
 Therefore drive them; force them; raise your sceptre and put 
 them in the forms of government, if not the heart. Then you 
 could bend them to your will, as it were in detail. I stood 
 once on a hill in Germany, Hohen-Syburg, where was an old 
 pool or spring, in which the tradition says the Saxon Duke 
 Wittekind, with all his people, was forced by Charlemagne 
 from heathenism into Christianity by the simple method of 
 compulsory baptism. What other plan of empire so time- 
 honored and compendious? But no: that was Satan's way, the 
 external, the way of war and tyranny; that was giving the 
 worship the worth-ship to the adversary method, as had 
 always been done. The temptation had only to be raised to 
 be summarily rejected; there is a trenchancy about the an- 
 swer which seems to betoken that the mists and glamours of 
 things were at last cleared away, and the baseness of the whole 
 proposal stood forth in its naked ugliness. Worship God: as- 
 cribe the worth-ship to the God you have come to see, and 
 the spirit with which your life is filled, that is the answer. 
 
214 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 Whatever sovereignty comes from that comes by the way of 
 service to that all-controlling ideal. 
 
 Such committal to kingliness as this sheathes the sword, and 
 in lieu of it opens the way of repentance and humility. 
 
 Repentance have you considered what this is? It be- 
 longs to the new idiom of things that is coming in; it is the 
 all-men's means of entrance into the kingdom. John had intro- 
 duced the word; but he was still of the old order, and to him 
 it meant mainly what men should repent from; and it came to 
 many who did not feel the need of repenting from anything, 
 being already candidates for the kingdom, as children of Abra- 
 ham. What need for them to change their minds from some- 
 thing, or bother about their spiritual attitude at all, so long as 
 all the kingdom they had minds for was already theirs by 
 right of birth? But Jesus, who came down from the moun- 
 tain to preach the same duty of repentance, had supremely in 
 mind what men were to repent to. For it was no longer a 
 question of being children of Abraham, and ruling the earth; 
 it was their marvelous opportunity of becoming children of 
 God. "The kingdom of heaven is at hand," He said; change 
 your minds, then, throw open the doors of your spirit, to get 
 ready for it, and welcome it as it is. It is a new thing; you 
 cannot enter by the old ways. It is a new life, for every man 
 that comes in; there is no antagonism of ruler and subject 
 here, nor any pride of birth or office-holding. It is a kingdom 
 where all are made kings, and priests of a higher king; and 
 this by simply opening their hearts to receive the kingliness 
 into themselves. This is a new definition of repentance. The 
 old world was crowding the idea out of its scheme; was taking 
 pride in a heart fixed and changeless ; nay, its law was making 
 it feel that a man once established thereunder could not change 
 himself, and need not. The same idea pervades our scientific 
 thinking, which will hold a man prisoner to his environment 
 and heredity. It is almost an axiom of science and common 
 sentiment that as a man is, so he must remain, that it is not 
 really in him to change his heart and mind. 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 215 
 
 The world will not believe a man repents: 
 And this wise world of ours is mainly right. 
 Full seldom doth a man repent, or use 
 Both grace and will to pick the vicious quitch 
 Of blood and custom wholly out of him, 
 And make all clean, and plant himself afresh. 
 
 So a wise poet has made King Arthur say. But this Galilean 
 king committed his procedure to the idea that a man can 
 change; that the mind and heart of man are not of necessity 
 hard and rigid but flexible, capable always of being opened 
 and expanded to the largest growth and nobleness. I have the 
 idea that repentance is not a momentary thing but permanent; 
 its other name is readiness, to rise out of hardness into love, to 
 commit itself to a more generous effort of faith. 
 
 We needs must love the highest when we see it, 
 Not Lancelot, nor another, 
 
 said once a guilty queen, waking late to the high possibilities 
 of her life. And such an ability as this is what Jesus took for 
 granted, in His sublime faith in human nature. Everyone can; 
 there is something in him that can; when the door is open he 
 can enter; for when man is evolved to the point of adultness 
 he is not a rigid and unchanging thing, like a higher au- 
 tomaton; he is for the first time free and adaptable. There- 
 fore our Lord's first business, when He comes down from the 
 mountain to announce His kingdom, is, to treat men so. Do 
 you see what a new stimulus to development this brings to the 
 sons of men? It takes the race of man, at the deadlock to 
 which the empire of law and reason is conducting it, and virtu- 
 ally says, You can overcome this deadly inertia; you can vi- 
 brate responsive to these higher things; you can stretch out 
 your withered hand and open your withered heart, if you will; 
 for there is enough in your own higher nature, so capable of 
 love and faith, to be your support and strength, if you will but 
 exert it. This, to my mind, is what is involved in repentance. 
 The command to it, in Christ's royal reading of the term, is 
 His divine expression of His limitless faith in human nature. 
 
 But when He came down from the exceeding high moun- 
 tain, He came with this assurance still in His mind, that He 
 
216 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 was the beloved, the unique Son of God; He was not to make 
 His way and build His kingdom by ceasing in any whit to be 
 that. He was simply transferring the same ideals, the same 
 consciousness of life-values, to another field, or rather to the 
 universal field. He had rejected Satan's way, and in His 
 mighty experiment was taking God's way. But how shall the 
 Son of God, thus moving among men, look? How shall He 
 comport Himself? Jesus was not without prophecy to guide 
 Him and lay down His programme; that very announcement 
 of His sonship at the Jordan was a quotation from the second 
 Psalm, which may have come to Him at once through the 
 channels of His own memory and out of the ethereal realm 
 about Him. And that Psalm lays down a programme for the 
 Son of God, as the ideal existed when the Jews had earthly 
 kings and kingdoms to pattern from. You remember how 
 crude that early ideal is: it represents God as sitting in the 
 heavens and laughing in derision at earthly kings and their 
 futile oppositions, and the Son of God as a capricious Being 
 who must be propitiated and conciliated lest He be angry and 
 kill them; and all this in support of the conception that He 
 is to make His enemies His footstool. That ideal, made ven- 
 erable by age and classic song, still held the ground when 
 Christ came; it was at the basis of Satan's temptation, and so 
 had wrought its work in Jesus' own mind. It must be reckoned 
 with; and He must take such a course with men as either to 
 confirm it or dislodge men from it. It may be too there were 
 elements of truth in it, a larger truth, it may be eternally true 
 that the Son of God is destined to reign until He has put all 
 enemies under His feet. But in what sense is this to be true? 
 He must take the way that shall disengage the purer sense 
 from the cruder, and preserve the truth for higher uses. The 
 old seers and psalmists had a real vision of the great things to 
 be; but in their foreshortened notions, which were just like 
 ours, they seized the kingship and its results while their eyes 
 were still holden from the real kingliness. What is real king- 
 liness, the kingliness that is patterned after the King of kings? 
 Is he a real king, who sits arrayed in splendor, and walks in 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 217 
 
 luxury, while under his sway are gnashing teeth and turbulent 
 rebellious hearts, and while all around him are rags and squalor 
 and the sigh of the oppressed? Shall the king keep his iron 
 foot on these, or shall he be a beneficent influence, like the God 
 whom he represents, to relieve, to uplift, to help men bear the 
 burdens of existence? The true kingliness wins, not subdues; 
 or rather, it subdues by winning. A story is told of an old- 
 time Oriental monarch, who on coming to his throne in a time 
 of revolts and wide-spread disloyalties, boasted that he would 
 slay all his enemies, and when later, in the era of prosperity 
 and good-will that he inaugurated, these very rebellious ones 
 came to do him enthusiastic homage, was reminded of his 
 boast. "But are the enemies not slain?" he replied; "They are 
 no longer enemies, for in my reign of kindness and wisdom 
 and peace their enmity is dead." Here was the real kingliness, 
 a kingliness that created, not destroyed; that gave the sterling 
 allegiance of his subjects a chance to be, not crushed and out- 
 raged. And that, in Jesus' view, is the kingliness of the Son 
 of God, to which His programme of life must be adjusted. It 
 is His reading of life, as it has emerged from the searching 
 fire of temptation and shaped itself into the duty of the Son 
 of man. 
 
 Here comes in that other virtue of which I spoke, the virtue 
 of humility; a phase of the new pulsation of life which we have 
 not yet considered. I quoted, you remember, Mr. Chesterton's 
 remark that while Christianity had taken and naturalized all 
 the pagan virtues, it had invented three absolutely new ones, 
 faith, hope, and charity, and that these, as distinguished from 
 the dictates of reason and common sense, were the absolutely 
 unreasonable virtues. But to this list he later added this 
 fourth virtue of humility, saying that this also was new inven- 
 tion of Christianity, and that the hope of the world depended 
 on it, as on the others, for its deliverance from deadlock and 
 its progress to higher things. Humility what is this? It 
 is not a self -pleasing thing; we would all much rather be proud 
 than humble, and if we haven't anything to be proud of, too 
 many of us try to make up the lack by being vain. But the 
 
2i 8 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 fact that humility is not self-pleasing is just what saves it and 
 makes it a new power of life. Humility is no more self-abase- 
 ment than it is self-aggrandizement; rather, it is the adjust- 
 ment of our spirit to life as it is, large or lowly, and as we 
 essentially are, without reference to self at all. It is in fact 
 just what comes into life from the elimination of the self- 
 element. Think of that, and you will realize how it makes 
 things fall into their real and related place. When self is 
 eliminated, for the first time life and the world are seen and 
 treated as they truly are, without the obscuring glamours of 
 self-interest or pride, and without the twist of jealous preju- 
 dice, to distort the view. For the first time, then, Sophocles' 
 ideal is truly realized, "to see life steadily and see it whole"; 
 it is only the humble man who can do that. This helps us to 
 understand why Jesus saw so much more in manhood than 
 had ever been seen before; and why, in spite o'f all the dis- 
 counts that he must make for sin and depravity and how 
 great these were He, who needed not that any should testify 
 of man, for He knew what was in man, He was well aware - 
 yet He trusted Himself whole-souled to the deeper human na- 
 ture, in order that by the power of such trust the good that 
 was possible in it might some day become real. To the un- 
 regenerate heart this humility looks like a weakling virtue. It 
 looks like knuckling under, or at best like an enthusiastic 
 Quixotism, treating men as they are not. Well, it is, but it 
 is none the less the hope of the world. It is just the practical 
 attitude that this supreme historic venture takes; the huge 
 experiment in life which aims to awaken an answering life. 
 When it is carried far enough to turn the other cheek to the 
 smiter, yielding, as it looks, it is at least strong enough to re- 
 main steadfastly the same in spite of evil provocation and con- 
 tempt. And when the same lowly virtue goes steadily and 
 faithfully on to death and the cross, its real strength becomes 
 manifest; it is the manliest, mightiest virtue in life, so trans- 
 cendently great that Jesus 7 death, with the staunch humility 
 of faith that led to it, has been laid hold of as the one concrete 
 event that redeems the world. 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 219 
 
 How easily we deceive ourselves about the values of life, 
 until we get down to the eternal principles of things. Here is 
 a man who, making no adventitious claims for self, calmly en- 
 dures contempt, ridicule, torture, death, His self-reverence and 
 self-control being all the while intact and prevailing; while all 
 round Him are men who, in their nervous dread lest their self- 
 dignity should be invaded, bolster it up with scorn and great 
 swelling words, and would if the stress came run away from 
 a cow. And here we see how truly humility is a new thing in 
 the earth, a Christ invention. The ancient and modern pagan- 
 ism makes the supreme quest of life happiness; the happiness 
 of a proud, prevailing egoism. And it gets happiness; it is the 
 law of our being that we get what we supremely want. Mr. 
 Chesterton speaks of "the absurd shallowness of those who 
 imagine that the pagan enjoyed himself only in a materialistic 
 sense. Of course, he enjoyed himself, not only intellectually 
 even, he enjoyed himself morally, he enjoyed himself spiritu- 
 ally. But it was himself that he was enjoying; on the face of 
 it, a very natural thing to do." It was the reasonable quest 
 of heathenism; eminently reasonable; we see its result in the 
 Pharisee, who was really nothing but a Jewish pagan, as he 
 stands hugging himself in proud delight, and thanks God that 
 he is not as other men are. But, as Mr. Chesterton, in his 
 contention that humility is a newly invented and essentially 
 unreasonable virtue, goes on to say: "The psychological dis- 
 covery is merely this, that whereas it had been supposed that 
 the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by extending our 
 ego to infinity, the truth is that the fullest possible enjoyment 
 is to be found by reducing our ego to zero." This is just what 
 Jesus, the carpenter Son of God, did; and we name the virtue 
 humility; and at the end, in the very shadow of the impending 
 cross, we hear him saying, "These things have I spoken unto 
 you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might 
 be full." Oh, friends, a prophetic soul in the twilight period 
 had said, "Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my 
 sorrow," and modern interpreters, applying this to Jesus, have 
 called him the Man of Sorrows. Behold and see: is there any 
 
220 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 joy like the joy of a strong, self-denying, creative, humble 
 faith? 
 
 When Jesus came down from the mountain where in sight 
 of all the kingdoms of the earth He had met and solved the 
 problem of life in His own godlike way, He came down to 
 what Satan and the world would have called an inglorious anti- 
 climax. He had stood before the opened heavens and heard 
 the Voice; had received the baptism of water and the spirit, 
 dove-like yet with eternal power; and the upshot was He 
 went home to Nazareth, among His old-time neighbors, bent 
 on healing diseases and opening prison doors, on cheering the 
 poor and turning His hand, as you and I may do, to 
 
 that best portion of a good man's life, 
 
 His little, nameless, unremembered acts 
 Of kindness and of love; 
 
 not going out of His way for the activities of life, but taking 
 them as they came. And when men, dimly feejing the power 
 of the highest in the humblest, began to respond, coming in 
 crowds to the light and warmth of His presence, He "was 
 moved with compassion toward them, because they were as 
 sheep not having a shepherd"; their ailment was not that they 
 were hungry, that was only incidental, but that they had not 
 discovered the principle of self-guidance within them. So He 
 was not supremely concerned to give them a meal of victuals; 
 that again was only incidental; rather "he began to teach them 
 many things." He labored to make men see and accept life 
 as the indwelling grace of God has given it promise and po- 
 tency. He did not bring up their past before them at all; 
 rather He took His stand on the new beginning of things, blot- 
 ting out that past in which they had wrought the will of the 
 Gentiles, and opening the future. So it was consistently in 
 His treatment of all. When the woman whom the hard legal- 
 ists were ready to stone for her sin was brought to Him, 
 ashamed and cowering before the purity of His light, He said, 
 "Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more." There 
 had come a new and endless opportunity for every one. And 
 before His ministry was over, He had announced that the Son 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 221 
 
 of man the man that He would have all of them be, accord- 
 ing to their faith was Lord of the sabbath, forgiver of sins, 
 and candidate for resurrection. The heavens that opened to 
 Him are thrown freely open to all. 
 
 H. THUS IT BECOMETH US 
 
 And now, in this new warmth and light and life, what shall 
 the spirit of man do? What shall he do, first of all, with the 
 law, under which hitherto he has subsisted, and which the mind 
 and customs of men have laden with prescriptions, and con- 
 ventions, and all in which the good order of society is involved? 
 Ours is a world of law, unbending, impartial; science and his- 
 tory alike have discovered that; and however bold and free 
 the venture of the spirit, it must not be toward anarchy or 
 toward a wild caprice; the tether of law and order is still there, 
 no jot nor tittle impaired. The spirit of life, evolved to this 
 godlike point, must have its higher law of the spirit of life; 
 else it will be the slave and irresponsible minor it has always 
 been. 
 
 I have already described this law of the spirit of life, psy- 
 chologically, as a kind of overflow or surplusage, whereby the 
 life of the soul is set in the outward and neighbor-regarding 
 current, not in the inward and self-regarding; and the spirit 
 of man itself, when it is committed to this great reversal of 
 direction, I have described as free from all tyranny of alien 
 will, joyously free to be and to do just what it wills. We are 
 now to see how this grand reversal was applied to the laws and 
 prescriptions of men; how that spirit wrought as a simple ob- 
 ject lesson in the life of the Son of man. What can pure in- 
 itiative, instinct if you please, when vitalized by the spirit with- 
 out measure, be trusted to do in the realm of conduct; or in 
 other words, when it makes its own law and adopts, or over- 
 rides, the laws already in the field? The law has been the 
 great world burden. The spirit is the great emancipation. 
 Shall the spirit work then by throwing off the burden and ab- 
 rogating law, in other words by debasing the long evolved ideal 
 
222 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 of living; or shall it confirm and exalt the law by stimulating 
 men to do more, and thus stand strong and loyal under the 
 burden? It is the decision of this alternative that we look for 
 in Christ's life, as applied to the laws that men have come to 
 reverence. The law of Christ, what shall it be? Well, St. 
 Paul sums it up not inaptly, and throws a gentle radiance over 
 the whole ministry of Jesus, when, in terms of exhortation, he 
 says, "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of 
 Christ." This really tells the whole story of Him who emp- 
 tied Himself of heavenly distinction and dignity in order to 
 identify Himself with the estate of manhood. Being found in 
 fashion as a man, He bore the burdens of a man, and was con- 
 stant in helping others, and infused the spirit of rest into all 
 who came to Him laboring and heavy laden. "For," said He, 
 "my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." 
 
 Yet this was no truckling or nerveless acquiescence; it 
 tingled with wisdom and searching criticism of the empire of 
 law; nor was it without moments of flaming indignation di- 
 rected especially against those who were most scrupulous and 
 strenuous in maintaining the law, the Scribes and Pharisees. 
 He was an iconoclast as truly as He was an upbuilder. It is 
 important therefore that we note, in this new light of the spirit 
 of life, both what He built up and what He tore down, in His 
 dealings with the prevailing structure of law. 
 
 To get at His spirit of upbuilding, of uttermost construc- 
 tiveness, we do best, I think, to interrogate His attitude toward 
 the small things of the world's rules and customs, the things 
 that because they are insignificant or do not happen to apply 
 to us, we are apt to neglect or disparage, making an exception 
 in our own favor. There are many such things; in fact, for 
 the most of us, the law, as related to our conduct, is almost 
 wholly made up of such little observances. We never figure 
 in police and court-room annals; the big laws against arson 
 and house-breaking and fraud are dead letters to us, wholly 
 out of our inner world. It is the little things, the trifles about 
 which is said de minimis non cur at lex, the law does not care 
 for trifles, and which can be measured only by the general 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 223 
 
 spirit of observance or transgression, that really enter into 
 our lives. And of these Jesus taught that the spirit which is 
 tenderly observant of these small things is really the largest, 
 most constructive spirit; He singled out, you remember, as 
 least in the kingdom of heaven, him who despised one of the 
 least of these commandments and taught men so, while He 
 called men great in the kingdom according to their attitude 
 toward little and non-essential things. Get the spirit of your 
 life rightly related to these, and the essential things will take 
 care of themselves. 
 
 And so, as best expressing Jesus' fundamental attitude to 
 the laws and rules of men, I have chosen the remark He made 
 in answer to John the Baptist, when He came to the Jordan 
 to be baptized. The rite of baptism, as John had instituted 
 it, connoted sin and repentance; it was the act by which men 
 told the world that a revolution had taken place in them, that 
 they had broken with an old order and were making ready 
 for a new one. In Jesus, as soon as He appeared, John recog- 
 nized an exception to this rule, an exemption, if ever there was 
 one, from the requirement. "I have need to be baptized of 
 thee," he said, "and comest thou to me?" Jesus knew this as 
 well as John; He knew what the sound sense of the situation 
 demanded. What a chance there was for Him here; how 
 easily He could have told the world a new thing, that here 
 among them at last was sinlessness, fulness of life, perfect 
 immunity from the evils and depravities of the human lot, and 
 therefore perfect freedom from men's blundering laws and 
 institutions. How easily, even before He went to the wilder- 
 ness, He could have yielded to the second temptation, and 
 emphasized the god! But no: He had not come to the Jordan 
 to pose as an exception to rules; if men came eventually to 
 recognize His godlikeness it must be by another way, by a 
 way in which they also might be included. "Suffer it to be 
 so now," was His reply to John, "for thus it becometh us to 
 fulfil all righteousness." What depth of meaning in that word 
 "us" here, and what liberal and limitless interpretation of that 
 eternal ideal righteousness! So he submitted to this perfectly 
 
224 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 unnecessary and for His case meaningless thing, in order to 
 march shoulder to shoulder with those everywhere on whom 
 life had imposed prescriptions of law and rite and custom. 
 
 This was not a solitary example. It laid hold on the whole 
 fibre of His manhood spirit. A later incident reveals how truly 
 this compliant obedience was of His very nature, and no mere 
 expediency or opportunism conditioned by occasion. The 
 Jewish officials came once to Him and His disciples to collect 
 the temple-tax of half a shekel, a poll-tax imposed on every 
 member of the state church. He knew, and He made His dis- 
 ciples know, that as Son of God and therefore essential Lord 
 of the temple He was exempt. To tax Him at all for the serv- 
 ices wherein His was the spirit to be worshipped and main- 
 tained was an anomaly and an affront; and to pay it was really 
 to buy the worship of Himself. That is not the way, He said, 
 that kings of the earth do; they take tribute of strangers, and 
 the children are free. True worship, if it is anything at all, is 
 a freedom, a spontaneous uprise of heart. There was a prin- 
 ciple at stake here; as truly as there was in Boston a century 
 and more ago, when our forefathers met in the Old South 
 Church and refused to pay the tax on tea. I am not judging 
 them. But what does He do? "Notwithstanding," He says, 
 "lest we should offend them, go thou," provide the money 
 for every one of us and pay the tax. Offend them whom? 
 The government of nation and church; an institution, an ab- 
 straction you say, under which, if men can make their case 
 good, a great many feel perfectly free to declare off or scale 
 down their taxes. Here again I am not judging; it is the 
 spirit of the thing that counts. And the spirit that was in Him 
 was not determined by this or that opportunity, this or that 
 abstraction, this or that loop-hole of exception; it was the 
 intrinsic spirit of love itself, which is as mighty to abstain from 
 causing offense, as it is to exert itself positively. And it was 
 by this very act of abstaining from offense, of guarding His 
 good from being evil spoken of, that the way was kept open 
 for the positive beneficence which He had supremely at heart. 
 
 In fact, this whole business of law, so far as men can embody 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 225 
 
 it in enactments and institutions, is mainly an affair of ab- 
 staining, the negative matter of letting your neighbor alone, 
 so that he can be as free to live as you are. That is why all 
 the old commandments are couched in the words "Thou shalt 
 not." They are adapted to a lower human nature, not yet 
 fit for freedom, which unless restrained would tend always to 
 molest the neighbor and make his life and property insecure. 
 The law, after all, is only the established way of clearing the 
 ground so that love to neighbor, when it is positively evolved, 
 may have free course. And so it is an embodied prophecy of 
 the coming freedom; a prophecy and preparation. But the 
 essential command of the developed freedom is no more nega- 
 tive but positive, "Thou shalt"; it is the outward current of 
 spirit, engaged in actual service and upbuilding. It takes men 
 on the ground of their higher and regenerate nature, and sets 
 that in motion. This is what, if we read them in the new spirit, 
 all the old commands really meant. "For this," as St. Paul 
 says, " 'Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, 
 Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou 
 shalt not covet,' and if there be any other commandment, it 
 is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, 'Thou shalt 
 love thy neighbor as thyself.' Love worketh no ill to his 
 neighbor: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law." And 
 when the question comes up, "Who is my neighbor?" you re- 
 member how Jesus answers it. Your neighbor, a neighbor? 
 Why, every one who has the spirit of loving-helpfulness is a 
 neighbor; a Samaritan, an outcast, just as truly as a priest or 
 a Levite; there is no aristocracy or foreign element here. You 
 recall with what wonderful skill, in His parable of the Good 
 Samaritan, Jesus turned the point of His critic's question: His 
 answer amounts to this, It is your business not to hunt up a 
 neighbor, or to ask whom you can secure that will neighbor 
 you; it is your one business to be a neighbor, and the rest 
 follows of itself. And however far upward that spirit extended, 
 He never limited it. Even when it reached the source of law 
 and obligation, that abstraction which we call government, 
 His answer, classic for all time, was, "Render therefore unto 
 
226 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things 
 that are God's. 7 ' It is all, from beginning to end, a free render- 
 ing, no compulsion or evasion; it is a motion of the law of the 
 spirit of life. 
 
 In his Sermon on the Mount, you remember, our Lord runs 
 over some of the main points of the venerable laws and customs 
 in which He finds men moving; and it is passing wonderful 
 how, as soon as He touches them, He lets in the light and air 
 of the spirit upon them, so that things fall into their real per- 
 spective and balance. And every one of His principles, when 
 He says, "Ye have heard how it hath been said of old time, 
 . . . but / say unto you," every one of these turns on 
 what our fellow man is to us, and what our inner attitude to 
 him is. If you are doing your duty to fellow man and this 
 is what ideal law connotes, a great deal, I was going to say 
 everything, depends on what you take your fellow man to be. 
 I was quoting, you remember, Carlyle's description of how his 
 friend John Sterling entered upon the life in the world that his 
 character and education fitted him for. From this description 
 he goes on to say: "For alas, the world, as we said, already 
 stands convicted to this young soul of being an untrue, un- 
 blessed world; its high dignitaries many of them phantasms 
 and players' masks; its worthships and worships unworship- 
 ful: from Dan to Beersheba, a mad world, my masters . . . 
 Truly, in all times and places, the young ardent soul that enters 
 on this world with heroic purpose, with veracious insight, and 
 the yet unclouded 'inspiration of the Almighty' which has given 
 us our intelligence, will find this world a very mad one." The 
 world is indeed a fair enough place, Carlyle continues, to get 
 rich in, or to raise a little temporary applause of flunkies and 
 toadies; but "for any other human aim, I think you will find 
 it not furthersome. If you in any way ask practically, How 
 is a noble life to be led in it? you will be luckier than Sterling 
 or I if you get any credible answer, or find any made road 
 whatever." A promising approach to the world this, for a 
 young man, is it not, to presuppose it as made up of madmen 
 and fools, and you the only sane mind in it? What is such 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 227 
 
 a world going to be, in its response to you, or you to it, in the 
 things you undertake or inculcate? 
 
 Our Lord's polar contrast to this disparaging attitude illus- 
 trates what it is the business of this chapter to trace, His di- 
 vine creative faith in human nature; a faith which goes 
 beyond man as He finds him, as far as eternity beyond, and 
 adapts its working to the nobility of nature which is in po- 
 tency, and which through the power of that faith is yet some 
 day to be. And His attitude toward law, in accordance with 
 the trend of law, expresses the negative side of this faith, 
 what man is not to be, as related to us. He begins with the 
 greatest crime a man supposably can commit, the crime of 
 murder. What is the real essence of murder? If you kill, He 
 says, you have, under the law, put yourself in danger of the 
 judgment; you have raised the question how far you are or 
 are not justified. But I say unto you, if you are angry with 
 your brother causelessly, and call him Raca, a good for 
 nothing, treating him so, you are in danger of a higher judg- 
 ment, the inner verdict of the spirit; and if you call a man a 
 fool and treat him so, you are in danger of a great deal fierier 
 thing than judgment; it is the worst way of killing him, so 
 far as you are concerned, for it puts him with the brutes and 
 cuts off his chances of life altogether. This strikes a pretty 
 high standard, to begin with; but from this He goes on to even 
 graver things. He next raises the question, How shall you 
 treat that woman, any woman, no matter whom? Shall you 
 treat her as if she were not even so high as a fool, but only a 
 soulless thing, to minister merely to your wanton lusts? Well 
 then, you have broken the commandment, in the very worst 
 way. How shall you treat that wife of yours, that divinely 
 ordained partner of your life and lot? Shall you treat her as 
 if she were only a slave, or a casual toy, whom, as soon as 
 she does not furnish all the congeniality and domestic mating 
 you crave, you may heartlessly turn away, into all the risks 
 of destitution and sin? Why, just as every man is your 
 brother, so that woman, whoever she is and whatever her legal- 
 ized relation, is your sister, one of the same great family, a 
 
228 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 potential temple of the same spirit that dwells in you. Let 
 therefore that spirit at its best, which is the spirit of universal 
 love, have free, patient, forgiving course; and be not too ready 
 to forbid its working. It comes back, after all, not to her but 
 to you; are you able to bear your weight on that spirit? Then 
 a step further still He goes, and brings the solution of it all 
 in view. How shall you treat that enemy of yours no fool 
 or soulless thing this time, but in active hatred and malice 
 against you? Here is your chance to treat men as they ac- 
 tually are. Well now, are you going to hate him back again, 
 giving as good as you get? Why, then, you are weakly letting 
 him set the copy for you to live by. Your regard for him is 
 just as big as his for you, no bigger; and so your treatment 
 is just the same as the old crude notion of an eye for an eye 
 and a tooth for a tooth. Is it for you, in your adult ideal of 
 life, to be such a helpless echo of another that you cannot love 
 him until he begins the game and loves you, or do him a good 
 turn until he has virtually compelled it by doing good to you? 
 Why, sinners and publicans, the very outcasts do as much as 
 that. What thanks have you, what surplusage and overflow of 
 life, if you do no more than that? That is not the copy that is 
 set for your living. Look up to the God who made you and 
 him, and in whose creative love all your life has grown and 
 thriven. He is all the while sending His sun and rain on the 
 evil and the good, on the just and the unjust alike; even in 
 their blasphemy and rebellion they are living on His unweary- 
 ing grace. There is your copy. There is the law of your adult 
 manhood. Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in 
 heaven is perfect. A tremendously high standard this, I 
 grant you; but not to be like Him, when you see Him as He 
 is, is to be like a publican and a sinner, is to be less 
 than your accepted standard, your legal standard even, of the 
 human. 
 
 So then, by Jesus' estimate, it ministers neither to life nor 
 law to treat the world of men like fools or things or aliens or 
 enemies; what if, as Carlyle assumes, it is "a mad world, my 
 masters"? The dictate of this new pulsation of faith, so di- 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 229 
 
 vinely unreasonable, is not at all what the world is but what 
 you are, and what your brave insight sees the world, far hence, 
 to be capable of being, capable because it is your family 
 and you, as brother of the world, are capable. But this, you 
 say, produces a misfit of conditions. Yes: it does. It was 
 just to this misfit of conditions that Christ, in His supreme 
 historic venture, committed Himself. He was courageously 
 working for the far result; was sowing the seed of love and 
 faith which would little by little germinate into a springtide 
 and harvest of new life. What a tremendous originality and 
 initiative in it all ! He knew how the first generation, His own 
 contemporaries, took it and would take it; knew what is in the 
 childish heart of man always. They were like children sitting 
 in the market-places and peevishly reproaching their fellows 
 for not playing as they wanted. John the Baptist was too 
 austere and ascetic; and you would think they wanted nothing 
 but gaiety and comradeship. Jesus was a comrade, entering 
 into all the amenities of society and eating and drinking; and 
 you never saw such ascetic people as they wanted to be; all 
 his good fellowship was to them only gluttony and winebibbing. 
 There is the childish in man to be reckoned with; to go con- 
 sistently on your own higher way of life runs all the risk of 
 being a misfit. But wisdom is justified of her children; the 
 leaven of the kingdom will work unseen; and here and there 
 men who will stop being childish long enough to be really child- 
 like will find that the power of that strong consistent love and 
 faith which makes them dare to live their life as it ought to 
 be lived, is their one hope, their one open door of salvation. 
 Think then how much it means, that when Jesus put Himself 
 under the law of His kind, He did not treat His kind as de- 
 praved and corrupt, as law-breakers and sinners, but rather 
 as heirs of a limitless potency of life. And as the foundation 
 of His theology He lays it on us to treat men likewise, and 
 to dare the consequences. Does it not look, friends, as if, when 
 we read His life in its large proportions, we must change the 
 centre of gravity of our whole dogmatic system? Have we 
 not tried to save men by cobbling and patching-up work long 
 
230 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 enough? Does not the time past suffice us to have treated 
 our brother's human heart as deceitful above all things and 
 desperately wicked, whether it is so or not? It is time, I 
 think, to try Christ's way, the way of divinely directed spiri- 
 tual evolution, whereby the law of His being is fulfilled by 
 the outward current of grace. That is what it amounts to. 
 
 To me one of the most touching incidents of our Lord's 
 whole life is that single gesture recorded of Him when they 
 brought Him the woman taken in adultery. There they stood, 
 sinners all, looking in ill-concealed glee to see what judgment 
 He would pronounce on their broken law. There was she, 
 guilty and ashamed, expecting that this holiest Being of all 
 would the next moment give the word that would put her out 
 of life. It was a moment big with suspense and heart-search- 
 ing. "But Jesus stooped down, and with his fingers wrote on 
 the ground, as though he heard them not." What did He 
 write? men have curiously asked and conjectured; He of whom 
 this is the only record of writing, He who alone is authorized 
 to write the sentence by which the whole world is judged. 
 Many are the answers given, according as men read the mind 
 of Christ. Did He write their sentence there? Not so: rather, 
 they wrote it themselves, in their guilty slinking away, just 
 as soon as He spoke again. Was it then an evasion on His 
 part, whether because He was at loss what to say, or because 
 He would not give words to His indignation? Or was He, as 
 some think, hiding the blush that rose to His face at thought 
 of the whole shameless business? None of these conjectures 
 are satisfying, and perhaps we are over curious to inquire at 
 all. It has always seemed to me as if this simple act were 
 His way of keeping silent about the shame that He found in 
 His adopted family of man; as if when they would force Him 
 to declare judgment He would not bring Himself to tell tales 
 out of school. If we all are reticent about our domestic af- 
 fairs, and especially, as the phrase is, will not wash our dirty 
 linen in public, would we expect Him, the most tactful and 
 charitable of all, to blurt our human baseness to the universe? 
 His silence was His loyal reticence about the adopted family, 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 231 
 
 His brothers and sisters, for whom by His faith He would hold 
 the gate of life always open. 
 
 Yet, as I have intimated, this very Son of man did not 
 scruple to be a flagrant law-breaker and iconoclast, when men's 
 laws had ceased to be God's law, and no longer ministered to 
 life. The life of man was the supreme concern, not the law. 
 So it came about that the very law by which the Scribes and 
 Pharisees set most store, and which perhaps they had reduced 
 to the minutest and exactest enactment, was the law that He 
 cast bluntly back in their teeth as an unholy thing. I refer to 
 His treatment of the prescribed Sabbath observance. Here 
 was a law that could be accurately codified. The elders could 
 measure off just how many inches a man might travel, just 
 what things he might and might not eat, just what he might 
 do about cooking and dressing and visiting and worshipping 
 and working; it was all capable of iron-bound rules. And 
 being so exact on the side of the letter, it was equally suscep- 
 tible to evasions and accommodations and scalings-down, when 
 one had not the spirit of it in his heart. Our Lord, you know, 
 went on doing His works of mercy without stopping to in- 
 quire what day it was, and when His disciples were hungry 
 let them pluck the corn and eat; to Him the day was just as 
 sacred, and just as great an opportunity, as any day. This 
 exasperated them; it did not beseem a prophet and teacher of 
 men; did not make the Sabbath sanctified enough, in other 
 words gloomy and lazy and useless enough, to suit them. What 
 is a holy day for, except to be useless to any one but God? 
 Well, you remember what an arrant Sabbath-breaker He was; 
 and how consistently He devoted the day not to excuses for 
 laziness and austerity but to royal opportunities for man's 
 highest work, his work of helpfulness and mercy, which can 
 be so much better done then as he has not the cares of daily 
 livelihood to interfere. "My Father worketh hitherto," He 
 said, "and I work." One is holy enough for that or any day, 
 if he does as God does. So His ideal was not to break 
 the Sabbath but to fulfil it by putting it to the highest uses 
 after which a true man's life yearns and longs; to make it the 
 
232 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 best day by doing the most godlike things. That he will do, 
 if it is supremely in him to do it. It comes back, after all, to 
 the spirit of man. You cannot make a man keep the Sabbath 
 by legislating a Sabbath; and a man cannot keep the Sabbath 
 by going through external motions, however pious, or even by 
 lying abed all day. If it is separated from other days it must 
 be separated on some other principle. It comes back to the 
 spirit of the man himself; the active, unforced, spontaneous 
 spirit of life. When the apostle John Eliot, at Newton, tried 
 to evangelize the Indians, it is said he had very little difficulty 
 in persuading them to rest on the Sabbath; the real difficulty 
 came in when he tried to get them to work on any other day. 
 There was the rub; I don't think, however, we would call it 
 too much Sabbath, but too little man. As for the Mosaic 
 Sabbath, the day of rest, well, there are two ways of getting 
 at that. One is, if the bent is in you to be useless, to make it 
 a day of cessation and inaction; the other is, to make it a day 
 when, like a sweet home-coming and recreation, it is rest and 
 refreshment to you to do the highest manhood work. The 
 Sabbath was made for man, for man at his best, not man for 
 the Sabbath. And what that noblest manhood work is, we 
 have the life of the Son of man to answer, and the restful work 
 of love that He never ceased to do. "Therefore," He says, 
 "the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath." I think the 
 Christian world has done not unwisely, by changing the day 
 of the week and the name of the day, to transfer our holy day 
 from the ideal of cessation to the perpetual ideal of the highest 
 to which the Son of man may rise, the ideal of resurrection 
 to new life; I think it not only immensely hallows the day, 
 but better fulfils the Mosaic law of rest too. Here therefore, 
 as otherwhere, our Lord came not to destroy but to fulfil. 
 
 Our Lord's severest denunciations were directed against 
 those leaders and pace-setters of society who would take oc- 
 casion of their position to bind grievous burdens upon men, 
 and then not stir a finger to lift such burdens themselves. 
 "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Abraham had 
 once asked of God. Shall not the judges and guides of men 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 233 
 
 obey their own laws? It is a very easy and hypocritical thing 
 to live under an empire of law if the other fellow is to do all 
 the obedience. Jesus' sympathies were always with the under 
 man, the bearer of the burden, the man whose business it was 
 to be governed; He would begin with this man because He 
 would make the law of his being sound all the way up., from 
 bottom to top. Into this essential man He would breathe the 
 spirit which would enable him, in a new athletic vitality, both 
 to make and to keep his own law. The law itself would turn 
 out to be the same old law of manhood which the ages had 
 already hallowed as the law of God, only transfigured, quick- 
 ened, made self-acting; and this it would be by being taken 
 in on the way, as man commits himself to the full outward 
 current of life, the current of grace, love, forgiveness, brother- 
 hood. This is what it all mounts up to. The law is there, 
 intact, no jot nor tittle lacking; but it has become a thing of 
 course, an incident of life. In the life of brother love there is 
 no more call to bother about rules of living than there is to 
 take thought for breathing or digestion. As a body of pre- 
 scribed rules telling you what not to do, the old law is dead; 
 not, however, because it is abrogated, but because it is buried 
 up in the natural functions of life. 
 
 In the ancient prophetic ideal it was said of the Servant of 
 Jehovah who was to come: "The Lord is well pleased for his 
 righteousness' sake; he will magnify the law, and make it 
 honorable." And is it not so? The self -regarding leaders of 
 Israel, priests though they were and endlessly self-righteous, 
 had run their law into pettiness and limitations; had fenced 
 it round everywhere with puerile interpretations, which were 
 one and all like breathing-places where a man could stop obey- 
 ing and begin to evade or accommodate. They had belittled 
 the significance of the very terms they used; like the French, 
 whose word homage is attenuated to mean outward flattery of 
 women, and whose word vertu is whittled down to a fine piece 
 of furniture or old china. What do you suppose the upper 
 class of Jews called righteousness? They gave the name to 
 alms-giving; that was doing righteousness; and when our Lord 
 
234 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 tells His disciples not to do their alms before men to be seen 
 of them, He uses the current term, telling them not to do their 
 righteousness in that way. Righteousness, that far ideal of 
 truest living, had become largely a thing done for show, like 
 a contribution to charity, a thing in which it was quite feasible 
 for the spirit not to go along with it at all, but just to send a 
 check and get a popular credit on the books for beneficence. 
 Why, the poor widow with her two mites, all she had, was do- 
 ing more righteousness than the whole crowd of them. And 
 so He told His disciples, whom He was educating in the spirit, 
 that except their righteousness exceeded the righteousness of 
 the Scribes and Pharisees the kingdom of heaven was no place 
 for them. For the thing that He had unearthed in their lives 
 was, not only that their petty interpretations and restrictions 
 had belittled the whole scheme of the law ideal, but that they 
 had honeycombed it with hypocrisies. He told His disciples 
 to beware of their "leaven," which is hypocrisy; all that silent 
 pervasive ferment of influence and spirit, which we figure by 
 leaven, and which is the most beautiful illustration, on the 
 true-hearted scale, of the growing kingdom of heaven, was in 
 them an unreal thing, a lie, making a pretense of things that 
 are not. The Greek word for hypocrisy, you know, is the 
 word that they use for play-acting; an actor, whose business 
 it was to represent the shows of things, was in their language 
 a hypocrite. So His indictment against the Scribes and Phar- 
 isees was that they were living a put-on life, pretending to be 
 righteous while they were not, and putting their righteousness 
 into the concrete observances that men could see and applaud. 
 And all the while there stood the law of righteousness ma- 
 jestic before them, confessed in their words and their fashions, 
 a silent monument of the homage that the counterfeit always 
 pays to the true. We do not counterfeit worthless things but 
 valuable things; our hypocrisies are our testimony to the law 
 of truth, that it is holy and just and good. But with Jesus, 
 the true Servant of Jehovah, the ancient prophecy has come 
 true, by the plain and sterling way of the inner spirit. "He 
 will magnify the law, and make it honorable." With Him it 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 235 
 
 has become a thing large and universal, a law of highest na- 
 ture; no longer a thing for the under man to groan under and 
 for the upper man to evade and falsify; no longer an affair of 
 codes and fine distinctions, as if it were a thing made out of 
 paper; and no longer restrictive at all, nor any bridle on the 
 free spirit of man, which is the spirit of brotherhood. Its very 
 negative trend, its "thou shalt not," has become the fine and 
 delicate tact of Him who will no wise hurt or offend. So in 
 the honorable relations of man and man which it establishes, 
 when observed in the spirit, we know now for the first time in 
 history what its supreme ideal, righteousness, means. 
 
 III. TO THIS END WAS I BORN 
 
 i 
 
 Very evidently it is a King of men who is moving so calmly 
 and genially among us; the more kingly as His presence is 
 more approachable, and as by His impact on every individual 
 heart He works to make His realm a veritable democracy of 
 kings and priests. We have seen it in the laws He reaffirms 
 and interprets, and in the steady attitude of upbuilding which 
 He has at heart. We are to ask now how He Himself defined 
 all this, and what end of it He set before Him. His plans were 
 broadly laid. He came down from the exceeding high moun- 
 tain not only with a plan of life which could be carried out in 
 humility and open-hear tedness, but with a plan of empire. We 
 cannot, as some do, think, with the words "Thou art my be- 
 loved Son" in our ears, that His career was in any sense an 
 accident or a makeshift. When the temporary emergency 
 arose He indeed did, as the old phrase is, "the next thing"; 
 but it was always both the preordained thing and the most 
 far-reaching thing, a thing which never had to be undone. 
 Every event in His ministry, being an event of the typical man- 
 hood , came to stay. 
 
 The upbuilding, vitalizing agency on which He relied, as we 
 have abundantly seen, was simply love, or as St. John calls it, 
 grace: which is just love initiative, love which does not wait 
 for merit or dignity or loveliness to call it forth, and which 
 
236 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 does not make demands or conditions, but exerts itself un- 
 provoked out of its own infinite fulness, which is identified 
 with the creative and upholding power of the universe. It is 
 this grace that He lives; this that He brings in all lowly offices 
 of good to His neighbors and to needy ones; this, in its ap- 
 plication all the way from kinsman to enemy, that He lays as 
 ideal on all who would learn of Him. This was the initial 
 kingliness He brought to men; this, in application, constituted 
 His social norm and code of law. 
 
 But this new way of treating men, inoffensive as it was and 
 the highest note of evolution, could not have undisturbed 
 course. The very contrast it made men aware of in their own 
 hearts would of necessity make it a standing reproach to their 
 ways, and so cause reaction. Too evidently, at the first im- 
 pact, it would not bring peace on earth, but a sword. There- 
 fore such love to men must have not only impulse but staying- 
 power. As some one has expressed it, "An icy air and the 
 hard rock of selfishness were conditions which hindered the 
 growth of the germ which lay in the creation." Besides, in 
 the view of things to which men were used, the very complete- 
 ness of that grace seemed an element of weakness; it was so 
 tender, so undemanding, seemed as it were a kind of collapse 
 of the whole pride of aggressive manhood. To this day we all 
 find it the hardest thing in the world to incorporate in our na- 
 ture. Men can so override it, so take advantage of it, so trade 
 upon it, as if having only grace to play against they had all 
 the tricks of the game in their own hands. A schemer, or a 
 bunco man, it would seem, could not desire a more facile prey 
 than this offers; so apparently unsuspicious that all the zest 
 is taken out of the game. And so of those who are good with- 
 out any spice of malice or retaliation we get up a proverb, say- 
 ing, "So good that he is good for nothing," and think there is 
 something lacking in their brain; and of ourselves we say, 
 "Yes, I can forgive, and I can love my enemy, up to a certain 
 point, but" and that but sets a limit, lower or higher, where 
 we can stop loving and begin to pay the world off in its own 
 coin. We have moments when, as to Machiavelli it seems to 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 237 
 
 us, "That the Christian faith has given up good men in prey 
 to those that are tyrannical and unjust"; and we subscribe 
 heartily to Lord Bacon's wise advice: "Seek the good of other 
 men, but be not in bondage to their faces or fancies; for that 
 is but facility or softness; which taketh an honest mind pris- 
 oner." There is an authentic strain of integral human nature 
 to reckon with here: our grace, our goodness, must be wise, 
 must be an art of goodness, with tools, for all our strong 
 personality to use, and sphere for all our skill and tact to 
 work in. 
 
 How shall Jesus meet this reaction which His grace is so 
 sure to induce, meet it so that in the long run His meekness 
 and humility shall not go under but survive and conquer? 
 Shall He be gracious and nothing else, or must something more 
 be added, to complete the endowment of the Son of man; and 
 if so, what? 
 
 St. John, you remember, in speaking of the Word made flesh, 
 adds another element to the account. There He stood among 
 men, God's idea spelled out in human life, and we beheld His 
 glory, so pure and perfect that we saw therein the only-be- 
 gotten Son of God; and the life He lived was full of grace and 
 truth. This characteristic was what differentiated His era 
 from the old dispensation: the law was given by Moses, but 
 grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. We have seen the grace 
 in practical working; going about doing good, healing diseases, 
 announcing goodwill to men, as if these were all it had to do. 
 And we have seen how lamblike and apparently defenseless 
 such grace is against the evil onsets of men. What now shall 
 we make of this second element, this supplementing endowment 
 of truth, added to grace? St. John, who for all his mystic and 
 poetic strain was a keen thinker in a logic of his own, has the 
 most to say about truth of any of the New Testament writers; 
 it is through him that we get the term and the large idea. But 
 it is a tissue of many threads, both of thought and of life; 
 and the other evangelists, though they do not make such free 
 use of the name, contribute their part, as important as St. 
 John's, especially in their record of the deeds He did, and in 
 
238 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 their revelation of His mind, which merits no less absolute 
 name than the truth of life. 
 
 Along in the middle of His ministry, or a little beyond, there 
 came to Jesus what we may call an enlargement of scale: His 
 realization of His mission broadened and deepened; this we 
 may say, whatever view we take of Him, for like all of us He 
 lived and learned, learning obedience by the things He suffered. 
 An untold shock it must have been to Him, that single-hearted 
 villager working in such purity of love and faith, when the 
 elders and scholars of the nation called it all devil's work and 
 interpreted it by Beelzebub the prince of devils. It was this, 
 you know, that called forth His warning about the sin against 
 the Holy Spirit which could not be forgiven; to Him it was 
 like an utter reversal of the laws of being. To think that the 
 accredited guides and leaders, in whose keeping were the ruling 
 standards and sentiments of men, should read life by the polar 
 opposite of the real truth, was the sharpest stab that could 
 have been given to His sensitive spirit. At that point a gap 
 must needs open between Him and His beloved nation, that 
 nation of which He had said, "salvation is of the Jews." Soon 
 after this rebuff He extended His journeying into the coasts 
 of Syro-Phenicia, the only occasion in His ministry, so far as 
 we know, when He went beyond Jewish soil and came in con- 
 tact with a foreign nation. And there, you remember, He found 
 hearts just as hungry for life, and just as responsive to His 
 healing power, as He had found in Galilee. The Syro-Pheni- 
 cian woman, who would not accept His word, "It is not meet 
 to take the children's bread and give it to the dogs," but was 
 eager, like the dogs, to take some crumbs from the Master's 
 table, this woman conquered by her faith, and thus proved 
 to His ever-open heart that foreigners too and heathen, alien 
 in thought and antecedents, were just as truly open to the 
 light He brought, and just as capable of assimilating His way 
 of life, as were the lost sheep of the house of Israel. This 
 discovery, though He had all the germs and premonitions of 
 it before, produced a great enlargement of His scale of things; 
 henceforth the whole world, and not a mere Jewish corner of 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 239 
 
 it, was the sphere of His love and power. What if now the 
 Jews did reject Him, and what if this contemporary genera- 
 tion should vent upon Him all their malice and caprice, doing 
 with Him as they listed, the same as they had done to John the 
 Baptist? He had come in sight of a larger outlet of life, 
 broader and loftier than could be cramped down to space and 
 time, or thwarted by the prevailing evil of men. He had dis- 
 covered that this life of His was adapted to work universally, 
 and that the deep heart of man, wherever and whenever the 
 life found it, had the susceptibility to lay hold of it and live. 
 And we may be sure He was not slow to grasp and formulate 
 the meaning of all this. 
 
 That it worked on His heart and engendered great thoughts 
 we know from the question that He asked His disciples on His 
 way back from this foreign trip. Then it was, it would seem, 
 that the tremendous idea of Messiahship came into His mind; 
 He had hardly brought Himself to cherish it before, at least 
 for Himself; He would not, until He had felt His way and 
 knew He was right. And when now He did broach the idea, 
 it was not by assertion; that was never His way; but by get- 
 ting the opinion of those who, being always with Him, were 
 best able to judge. "Whom do men say that I, the Son of man, 
 am?" The disciples gave Him various answers, floating 
 opinions like gossip, all more or less vague and laden with 
 crude superstitions. Some, they said, called Him John the 
 Baptist, come back from death to finish his work; some, Eli- 
 jah, the prophesied forerunner; some, Jeremiah, come again 
 perhaps to bring back the ark and the holy vessels which he 
 had hid in a cave; and still others, one of the ancient prophets 
 come to revive the prophetic word so long silent. None had 
 made any large or lucid interpretation of Him. "But whom 
 say ye that I am?" He asked; and when one of them, Peter, 
 answered, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," 
 His reply, so accordant with the thought that was surging in 
 Jesus' heart, was hailed as a discovery revealed not by flesh 
 and blood but by the Father in heaven Himself. But He 
 charged them to tell no man that He was Jesus the Christ; 
 
240 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 the thing was too sacred to be thrown like an idle gossip to the 
 raw crude conceptions of men, or to make its way by proclama- 
 tion, with its inevitable uprisings and revolutions; it must 
 come to them by the way of their own hearts, as it had come 
 to Him and Peter, and come only as their hearts were large 
 enough to interpret the real glory of it. 
 
 Here I must speak of an interpretation, lately promulgated, 
 which I think errs by belittling and in a way belying our Lord's 
 attitude to men and to His work. We have seen how 
 He always spoke of the Son of man and the Son of God as if 
 He were, so to say, working out a study, a theory, an ideal, 
 of what this personage, whoever He individually was, should 
 be and do. It was as if He were here on earth creating out of 
 existing material an authentic type of manhood for the world 
 to see and judge and accept. This type He was shaping every 
 day, not by words and philosophy alone, but by deeds and by 
 the way He met experiences as they came. But when it came 
 to applying the names to Himself, or making high assumptions, 
 that He left to others; His sane humility would not let Him 
 claim for Himself more than men out of straight-seeing eyes 
 could see. So when men asked Him to declare Himself, He 
 always put the matter back upon them; as if He would have 
 them put the data together and judge for themselves whether 
 He answered to their ideal or not. When John the Baptist, 
 who felt that the truth of his own announcement was at stake, 
 sent from the prison the inquiry "Art thou he that should come, 
 or look we for another?" the answer sent back to him was, 
 "Go and tell John the things which ye do hear and see," 
 as if Jesus would say, There are the data; you ought to know. 
 Now the belittling interpretation of which I spoke relates to 
 the answer that, as we note, He always made to His ques- 
 tioners, high-priests or potentates, whoever would fathom His 
 personality. "Art thou the Christ the Son of God the 
 King of the Jews?" "Thou sayest," was always the answer. 
 Now Professor Schmidt says that He made this answer as an 
 evasion, because He knew He was not the Messiah and was 
 honest enough to avoid saying He was, and so parried the 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 241 
 
 question. This, it seems to me, introduces a false note into 
 Jesus' character; if it makes Him honest it makes Him also 
 cowardly. Why, I think that answer is just in the idiom of 
 His whole non-assuming transparent life: "Thou sayest" is 
 equivalent to answering, "That is for you to say." This com- 
 ing of the Christ He regarded as a sharing, cooperative matter, 
 wherein men had their part as well as the Christ. If it was 
 for Him, or any one, to be the Messiah, it was for them to see 
 Him as He was and name Him, according to the answer of 
 their hearts. Else He was no Messiah to them; nor did He 
 desire to be, on any other terms than free choice and recogni- 
 tion. 
 
 You know what happens as soon as Peter has made his con- 
 fession, showing how Jesus has come to impress a big-hearted, ' 
 genuine man of the people who has companied with him long. 
 He calls that confession, and the spirit that can make it, a rock 
 on which the church may be so built as to stand against the 
 gates of hell. Then at once He begins to ponder on that great 
 sacred trust of His, just as He had pondered on being Son of 
 man and Son of God; as if He would study out its mighty con- 
 tent, and learn what the Christ should be and do. The Christ 
 idea had become so hallowed and magnified by the imagination 
 of the ages that, like all great historic ideas, it had acquired 
 an almost superhuman remoteness; but also there had gathered 
 round it unworthy accretions of superstition and belittlement. 
 And now that it had come close home to Him, to His own 
 lowly life, the first thing to do was to clear up the idea, making 
 it sane, livable, accessible. It was as if a world burden were 
 laid on His shoulders. The wholesomest thought, duty, imagi- 
 nation of the ages and the lands were concentrated in Him, 
 this clear-seeing artisan of Galilee. He had been chosen for 
 this high trust for the spirit that was without measure in Him; 
 the working of it out, then, must be as it were an obedience to 
 heredity, the consistent way which His whole nature had al- 
 ready started upon. Priests and Pharisees, with their sneer 
 of devil's work, must not deflect Him one inch; He was on 
 higher ground than the whims and blindness of a generation 
 
242 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 or a national form of religion. The hungering heart of aliens 
 and heathen, sharing in the same large humanity, was calling 
 Him; He must not disregard this universal need and capacity 
 for a common faith. The Christ, the anointed King of men, 
 must be a Christ for the ages and for the world; the redeem- 
 ing Head of the whole family in heaven and earth, the firstborn 
 of every creature. Such must have been the nature of the 
 ponderings which Peter's confession and the events of the 
 latest few days pressed upon Him. He was confronting the 
 greatest idea in the world, and was undertaking to incorporate 
 it in His own life. No such sacred trust had ever been laid 
 on mortal man before; no more godlike opportunity could ever 
 come again. It must not therefore be entered on lightly or 
 hastily; its deepest ultimate meaning must be studied out in 
 secret, and preclude the risk of any false step. No wonder He 
 told His disciples to keep quiet about so tremendous a revela- 
 tion, until He could have time to feel and know His way. 
 
 But as soon as He reached this table-land of Messianic con- 
 sciousness, one element of the idea came to Him at once as an 
 essential, elemental requisite. The Son of man, the anointed 
 King and Type of manhood, must die. Death was a part of 
 His kingliness; it stood there plain and obvious in the path to 
 His glory. To be sure there was the death that all must die, 
 the common lot of man; but in this new case the death, just 
 because it was the common lot, must be other. It must be a 
 death freely chosen, the more freely because it could so easily 
 and naturally be evaded. And so it must be a death for men, 
 a death that came as the uttermost expression of love. 
 "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his 
 life for his friends." If, as hitherto, He was committed to the 
 complete and ultimate revelation of the love of the Father, He 
 must not flinch from this. In a world where sin so abounds, 
 and where men's eyes are so blinded by it, grace must much 
 more abound ; it must prove that it is free grace, and the most 
 godlike pulsation of all being, by abounding; it must abound 
 by outlasting the deadliest that sin can do. If it cannot so 
 outlast, taking sin's most venomous onsets yet remaining con- 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 243 
 
 stant and active, then there comes a point where grace goes 
 under and sin is the ruling element in the world. This must 
 not be; God, who is love, must not have created and led for- 
 ward His handiwork in vain; manhood, whose spirit has risen 
 dimly to such heights of capability, must not fail of that height 
 which is the crown and solution of all. So there is nothing for 
 it but that the Christ shall lay down His life for the world. He 
 must do it, in order to be true to the ideal He has already pur- 
 sued as Son of man; not to do it is to go back upon its 
 sacredest demands and own the evil of man's heart too strong 
 for Him. Now you can see how little of that "facility or soft- 
 ness" which Lord Bacon deprecates, and which the world in 
 its false pride despises, there is in boundless goodness to men. 
 It is not "bondage to men's faces or fancies," but the polar 
 opposite; not bondage to their stormy malice and blindness 
 either, but the heavenly freedom from it; it is the strong thrill 
 of the eternal life smiting into time and putting there the vi- 
 tality which overflows and outlasts. You can see now too 
 how that strain of grace is also the strain of truth; it is true 
 to itself and integral even to the end; meek and yielding as it 
 seems, it abates no inch of its principle; it has the power and 
 constancy of the eternal ongoings of the universe. 
 
 So when the disciples get their glimpse of His essential Mes- 
 siahship, the next thing Jesus does is to take them and sol- 
 emnly tell them that the Son of man must be delivered into 
 the hands of men and die at their hands and rise into the fulness 
 of life that way. This is estranging to them and inexplicable; 
 it contradicts all that their imagination has shaped of the 
 Christ. When the Christ comes, must He not abide for ever, 
 and if so, must He not be the grand exception to nature and be 
 gloriously exempt from ignominy and death? If Enoch could 
 be rapt away from earth without dying; if Elijah could rise 
 in a chariot of fire; if Moses could fall asleep by "the kiss of 
 the Eternal"; if these could be historic exceptions to the mor- 
 tal lot; how much more the highest and holiest of all, He whom 
 God has anointed and crowned King of men. No, said Peter, 
 right on the heels of his great confession; no, this humiliation 
 
244 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 must not, cannot be. But here he met his sharpest rebuke. 
 He was wrong, he was blind, to say so; it was, though he knew 
 it not and though it was the impulse of loyalty, it was the Satan 
 in him that urged the self-aggrandizement of Messiah and 
 the royal exemption from death. How easy it thus was, in 
 the presence of this ideal of outlasting grace, to become the 
 tempter, the mouthpiece of the Adversary himself! John the 
 Baptist had come, and rightly received, he had all the spirit 
 and power of the promised Elijah ; but men did with him what 
 they pleased, and they pleased to put him to death, just as 
 they had served the other prophets. So with the Son of man; 
 they will do with Him what they please; but at all events He 
 must be to the uttermost the subject and target of their free 
 will, and their salvation must hang on what they please to do, 
 on the spontaneous choice they make, not on what they are 
 forced to do. At all hazards the human spirit must have free 
 play, whether in hatred or in love; in no other way can the 
 freedom which is love have its supreme opportunity in their 
 hearts. But so also must the Son of man assert His freedom : 
 just by being true to Himself, true to the extreme of laying 
 down the life that their blind hatred demands. Nor only so. 
 If you, He says, my disciples, are going to follow after me, 
 learning my way and sharing in my kingliness, you must every 
 one of you deny yourselves, and take up your cross daily, and 
 trudge forward patiently, stedfastly, strongly, in the way of 
 that same death to sin. This is not the way for one anointed, 
 glorified man alone; not a performance for your magnified 
 Ideal to go through and leave you down below gaping in 
 wonder; it is the godlike way of every man. Death too, for 
 me and every man, must be no longer a bondage but a free- 
 dom; you must learn to use it for all there is in it, by living 
 the life that rises above it. For your goal is not to evade 
 death, or even to get ready for death; your goal, no less than 
 mine, is resurrection, the uprise of life on which death, though 
 it come as the extreme of injustice and cruelty, has no power. 
 We come here in sight of a new truth, a truth of untold sig- 
 nificance for every man. In His wise way of bringing things 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 245 
 
 into sound balance and relation, you remember how Jesus made 
 it clear that law, that universal empire in which all nature 
 is, is for the completed man merely an incident of life. Here 
 now we behold a truth greater yet: that for the Messiah, and 
 so ideally for every son of man, death is an incident of life. 
 Amazing as it seems at first to us who see it taking away every 
 dear one we have and waiting inexorably for us, this is the 
 calm assurance on which He enters His high mission. Death 
 is not extinction of life, not deflection from the life's currents, 
 not stoppage and delay of vitality; not what to the eyes it 
 seems to be at all. It is merely a station on the way to uprise 
 and resurrection. Therefore it is not a motive of life; as if 
 our business were to prepare for it, or in any way to change 
 our attitude of life, in conformity to a thing that comes without 
 preparation, and has no moral worth when it comes. There is 
 nothing in it to make a motive out of. The life remains in- 
 tact, with all its endowments of loyalty, righteousness, grace, 
 truth; steps down to the tomb with all these vital motions 
 strong as ever within it. At the same time Jesus hallows death 
 into a life element, makes it from an inert characterless thing 
 into a vital motive, by accepting it as death for the world and 
 for truth, swinging it thus into the consistent line of love. It 
 is an incident of life; but being the last enemy to be destroyed, 
 it may be made the redeeming, crowning, holiest incident. And 
 His death, with its world accompaniments, shall exhibit death 
 to all the ages in its ultimate type and beauty. 
 
 What then does this crisis in Jesus' ministry, when as Christ 
 He confronted the eternal issues of life and death, demand? 
 Simply that He go on being true to Himself and to life as He 
 sees it. He is here, a man among men; working out the details 
 of manhood life; He will not therefore take advantage of His 
 Messiahship, as Peter urged, to introduce an exception into 
 the order of things, or any miracle except such as by faith all 
 could work. He will not assume the god, just because He is 
 Messiah; rather He will be the more truly a man. The Mes- 
 siahship has not changed His nature; rather it has given His 
 Son-of-manship free course. This must express itself to the 
 
246 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 end, or rather, regardless of the end. It must use death as 
 it will, putting it into its true subordinate place; and thus, by 
 a supreme object lesson, deliver those, the shivering, paralyzed 
 humanity, who through fear of death have been all their life- 
 time subject to bondage. For the Son of man has it in Him 
 to conquer that last enemy, by making it an authentic element 
 of life. 
 
 From this time, then, the record goes on to say, Jesus set 
 His face stedfastly to go to Jerusalem, where He knew death 
 awaited Him. There was a Messianic dignity and sublimity 
 in this very resolve, which showed itself in His whole appear- 
 ance and mien. It seemed to make Him larger than human. 
 The disciples, you remember, were amazed as they saw Him 
 going on before them; and like men dazed they followed, not 
 knowing what it all meant. So in course of time He came to 
 the capital city; and it happened to Him as He had foretold. 
 Calmly and wisely He made His preparations, preparing His 
 disciples for the event and for what should follow; putting into 
 their minds strange words and predictions, which some time, 
 when the stress and the need came upon them, they would re- 
 member. Then He was set before the high-priest and ques- 
 tioned on oath, Art thou the Messiah? "Thou sayest," was 
 His answer; that is for thee to say. But how do you prove it? 
 There are my works and my words, open and plain; in secret 
 have I said nothing. But He added a significant thing. This 
 life of mine, it meant, is just the way of highest manhood, and 
 whether you accept me or not, hereafter you shall see the Son 
 of man, the divinely perfected manhood, coming in the clouds 
 of heaven. That is the far end for which He is living, what- 
 ever the event to Him individually. Then later He is brought 
 before Pilate, the highest representative of kingly might and 
 authority. Here is one of the sublime moments of history; 
 a greater scene than Joan of Arc before her accusers, or Luther 
 at Worms: the king of the land, with the handling of brute 
 life and death in his hands, and the King of men, with the gift 
 of eternal life before which death becomes a paltry powerless 
 thing. "Art thou the king of the Jews?" Pilate first asks; but 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 247 
 
 Jesus puts the question aside as not relevant to Pilate himself; 
 it makes no difference to Pilate whether Jesus is king of the 
 Jews or not; that is a question for the Jews to determine. 
 "Art thou a king then?" Pilate goes on, in vaguely prescient 
 apprehension, to ask. And the answer seems to me one of the 
 most wonderful answers in all history. "Thou sayest that I 
 am a king"; it is for thee to say whether I am a king, to say 
 according to what your heart tells you. The appeal is to the 
 heart of a Roman potentate, the representative of a mighty 
 world-power whose genius is for law, organization, order, jus- 
 tice; such a representative ought to know. Then He goes on 
 to give the data: telling this king of the earth, for him to 
 weigh and judge, what it is to be a king. "To this end was 
 I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should 
 bear witness to the truth. Every one that is of the truth 
 heareth my voice." A marvelous way this to be a king: just 
 to be a true man, according to the ideal of manhood that birth, 
 and the wise ages of prophecy, and the free movement of the 
 spirit have put within Him. Such true manhood as this men 
 will hear and obey, and thus make it their king, as soon as they 
 will let the manhood that is in them speak and the true cur- 
 rents of being have free course. But the definition is too 
 simple for Pilate. He has always been so tangled up with ex- 
 pediencies and opportunism, with schemes for keeping his po- 
 sition intact and keeping his head on his shoulders, with 
 politics and complicated policies, in a word, with what we 
 in modern days call the policy of "get there," of securing im- 
 mediate ends, no matter what, by hook or crook, that all 
 conception of a determining truth and principle of being, of a 
 character moving consistently and all together and to an ideal 
 end, is atrophied and lost. "What is truth?" he asks, in utter 
 bewilderment; and turns away; and belies the timidly rising 
 nobility of his nature by yielding once more to the tyrannous 
 necessity of keeping his head on his shoulders, and weakly let- 
 ting the clamorous Jews have all their will, and by trying to 
 wash his hands of the whole matter. So that interview of the 
 two kings resolves itself into the truth of life and falsity and 
 
248 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 weakness of life confronting each other. We see where the 
 real strength remains, and when it comes to the encounter, 
 which goes under. We see too that the power put momen- 
 tarily into the false one's hands to crucify the True has nothing 
 to do with the issue, except to make that Malefactor's death 
 for ever glorious. 
 
 How we have suffered ourselves to belittle our idea of truth! 
 How far we have fallen short of seeing the sublimity of this 
 simplest thing in life, being true to self and ideal! We too, 
 like Pilate, have become tangled up in our expediencies, and 
 our temporary makeshifts, and our worldly machinery, and 
 our too convenient assumption that it is the business of human 
 nature to be more or less sinful and fallen; until the straight 
 road of life has become blurred and befogged, and our paths 
 have become crooked. Truth is not a thing to tell; it is a 
 thing to be. "I am the truth," was our Lord's word to His 
 disciples; and when He says to Pilate He has come into the 
 world to bear witness to the truth, do you know what the word 
 "bear witness" means? It is the same word from which comes 
 our word martyr. I am come to be martyr to the truth; that 
 is what He says; to hold and live the truth of life in face of 
 all that comes, be it policy or persecution or rejection or death; 
 to hold up the truth of essential manhood high for all men to 
 know. And in an age which had forgotten what truth was, 
 and would not lift a finger for anything but its own selfish in- 
 terests, He put a strain into the hearts of lowly men, fishermen 
 and mechanics and the weak of the earth, which impelled them 
 to walk joyfully to the stake and die for what was in them, 
 martyrs to the same noble witnessing to truth. And He re- 
 vealed that this is a divine thing; for a little later, when the 
 meaning of things has time to shape itself, we hear St. Paul 
 saying that the Holy Spirit witnesses with ours, is a martyr 
 along with us, as we work out the wondrous determination to 
 be true. It has become the glad freedom of life, according to 
 the word which He said, "Ye shall know the truth, and the 
 truth shall make you free." 
 
 We have seen Him resolving on death, and setting His face 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 249 
 
 stedfastly to go to Jerusalem. All this had a great philosophy 
 of noblest life underlying it, a philosophy which, according to 
 His wont, He drew from the analogies of God's great world of 
 nature. When the Greeks, you remember, came to ask Him 
 about His principle, He hailed the moment as the moment of 
 His glorification, and gave them this explanation: "Except a 
 corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abide th alone; 
 but if it die, it beareth much fruit." The same truth this, that 
 St. Paul afterward takes up and restates, almost in scorn for 
 those who will not see a thing so clear: "Thou fool, that which 
 thou sowest is not quickened except it die." What a different 
 face this puts upon death, just because it utilizes death in the 
 way of being stedfast, and strong, and true. Such death, or 
 rather such oneness of purpose and consistency to holiest man- 
 hood, opens the Christ way for every lowliest, weakest one. 
 He first trod the wine-press alone; was the pioneer to open 
 the strange new way of life and truth, He who was the way 
 and the truth and the life; but thenceforward the gate stood 
 open for every one to enter. And as for Him, who first made 
 this witnessing for truth the great object-lesson of martyrdom : 
 "And I," He said, "if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw 
 all men unto me." That is the crown of His kingliness: is 
 there any other real test of kingliness adequate except this, 
 that men come eagerly to be subject, to be loyal and free in 
 His presence, because there is their one blessedness? How dif- 
 ferent from the dominion that Satan promised Him on the ex- 
 ceeding high mountain! It is the kingliness in which, by our 
 response to the same spirit, we all become kings in our degree; 
 all living the same strain of life, all bound for the like ending 
 of it. So a little later we hear the same note of truth addressed 
 as a hope and promise to every one: "Be thou faithful unto 
 death, and I will give thee the crown of life." 
 
 IV. THE DECEASE ACCOMPLISHED AT JERUSALEM 
 
 We have seen the end which Jesus set before Him from His 
 baptism : to be faithful to His ideal jof Son of God by being 
 
250 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 consistently Son of man, and therefore the Brother of every 
 human soul. We have seen how His thoughts were enlarged 
 as the sense of His Messiahship came in full force upon Him; 
 and how the enlargement was after all but the intensification 
 of life in the same predetermined direction : faithfulness to the 
 lowly occasion, and duty becoming faithfulness, bearing full 
 weight of witness, martyrdom, to the full truth of manhood. 
 There is no alteration of principle here; only an enlargement 
 of scale: bearing witness to the truth is just faithfulness car- 
 ried to its larger ultimate. If it is required of a steward that 
 he be found faithful, of a king likewise, who is the steward of 
 a loftier trust, it is required that He be true to the kingly ideal 
 that is laid upon Him. And in Christ's case the idea reaches 
 the height of grandeur from the fact, in which He and the 
 Father were consciously at one, that the lot of the eternities 
 had fallen on Him to be the Anointed One, the firstborn of 
 many brethren, the King of kings. And we have seen how, 
 "being found in fashion as a man," with the noble humility of 
 manhood upon Him, He at once recognized that the logic of 
 His situation required Him to be "obedient unto death, even 
 the death of the cross." 
 
 We have now to inquire how this end, which to Him was 
 merely bearing witness to the truth, actually came to Him. 
 Our inquiry will reveal some marvelous things, of which I can 
 only say, you must not take them on my say-so, and it is for 
 you to determine whether you will take them at all. My busi- 
 ness is merely to tell you what the Bible says ; and if the Bible, 
 which with all its wonders of record speaks throughout in the 
 tone of perfect sanity and soberness, if the Bible account 
 is not true, well, we are left with life infinitely poorer and 
 leaner, and we are yet in our sins. Hitherto it has lifted us 
 step by step to heights of vision and an awesome rarity and 
 purity of atmosphere; let us trust its pinion a little farther, 
 and tell out the tale to the ending. 
 
 There is a thing much spoken of in literature, and held as 
 an absolute requisite to the art: the thing that men call "po- 
 etic justice." The poet, you know, was figured by the Greeks, 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 251 
 
 who are our arbiters in art, as a maker, a creator; that is what 
 our term poet originally means: a creator of new ideals, new 
 worlds of thought and imagery, new ranges of spiritual exist- 
 ence. And it was required of these new creations that they 
 be organic and self-consistent, and that when the end comes it 
 shall come out right, with the potency and promise of its whole 
 structure fulfilled. Otherwise its creative justice fails; it has 
 not obeyed its law of being. As soon as we apply this principle 
 to the literature of the Bible, we have brought this too into 
 the court of poetic justice. Does this too come out right? I am 
 not asking now whether it accords with that truth absolute to 
 which we may commit our lives and destiny; that is a thing 
 for our personal faith to settle; but whether it comes out con- 
 sistently with its beginning and its whole creative course. One 
 thing we have noted about the life of Jesus: He has lived 
 throughout as if He were a poet, creating a new world of ideal, 
 putting into concrete expression the terms Son of God, Son of 
 man, King of men, Messiah, the loftiest terms that can engage 
 the poetic mind; creating this new world not in words alone, 
 or philosophy, or beautiful imagery, but in the far more cogent 
 eloquence of perfect deeds. In these, in bearing witness there- 
 by to the truth as He saw it, His life has been absolutely of 
 a piece. His committal to it has been the committal of utter- 
 most faith. What now does the report tell us of the poetic 
 justice of the case? How do things fit together, and how do 
 they fit the larger meaning which we now know was the sequel 
 to them? This, you see, is not the question how some deed 
 of His would have looked at the time, to a company of be- 
 wildered disciples who had no key to its purport or motive; 
 but rather how it came to look when they saw how it came 
 out, and when the spirit, their guide to truth, was taking the 
 things of Christ and showing to them. Therein lies the key 
 to this grand organism of poetic justice; it is quite analogous 
 to the true reading of all inner history. There is poetry, spiri- 
 tual creativeness, as well as fact, in every great movement of 
 life and mind; much more then, it would seem, in the greatest 
 movement of all. Goethe, when he wrote his autobiography, 
 
252 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 called it "Dichtung und Wahrheit" poetry and truth; and 
 many readers since his time, hide-bound in external fact, have 
 accused him of taking liberties with reality and recording 
 things merely fantastic and imaginative. Not so : that is what 
 his life meant, to him; it took more than deeds alone to com- 
 pass it; there was also, in the motive and meaning of the deeds, 
 and in the ideals he had at heart, a claim of poetic justice. 
 Just so, in its purer and loftier degree, in the life of Jesus: 
 that too was truly a poem, which if true to highest manhood, 
 must be as it were a work of divine art, and come out accord- 
 ing to the claims of poetic justice. 
 
 On our way, then, to the marvelous outcome of His life, let 
 us pick up some of the connecting links and indications, and 
 see how they fit together. 
 
 We saw how a little past the middle of His ministry there 
 seemed to have come to the carpenter-prophet a great enlarge- 
 ment of range and scope; how He felt that the scale of His 
 life and being was greatened; and how this was intimately 
 connected, as would appear, with His consciousness of Mes- 
 siahship. This enlargement of range we might describe to our 
 metaphysician friends, who surely ought to have due deference 
 paid to their idiom, as an expansion of being in two directions : 
 the direction of space and the direction of time. In other 
 words, it was as if He had come to see that in order to be 
 truly Messianic the life and light that were in Him must be 
 universal, fitted not to Jew alone, nor any mere ethnic condi- 
 tion, but to Greek and heathen, to man as man, to the spirit 
 that was dimly stirring in every remotest human life. This 
 in the space direction. Then as to the time direction: the 
 Messiah had from earliest times existed in the prophetic soul 
 of the world, and He must, when arrived in flesh, be the same 
 yesterday and to-day and for ever. As Anointed One of the 
 ages He must, so to say, embody a power which should be at 
 once active, pro-active, and retroactive, the divine power of the 
 eternities, made visible and operative in human personality. 
 No less tremendous ideal than this could fulfil the promise and 
 satisfy the colossal poetic thought that had so long been strug- 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 253 
 
 gling toward expression in the mind of the centuries. Does 
 now the record of His life, from this enlargement onward, 
 shape itself in some authentic degree to such poetic justice 
 as this? If so, what gleams and flashes of this greater rela- 
 tion of things shall we find in One who, even while He is aware 
 of His majestic position, will not consent for one moment to 
 cease being the approachable comrade and brother of every 
 humblest man? This is the situation of things that we are 
 now confronting. 
 
 Well, from the beginning of His ministry, we have noted 
 a steady movement toward the first of these, toward univer- 
 sality of work and love and sympathy. In meeting His dead- 
 liest temptation, He would commit Himself to nothing which 
 should interpose the slightest bar to this. His interpretation 
 of the law transcended every thing merely Jewish or ceremonial 
 or conventional, and brought the spirit of the law home to the 
 universal heart. Then as He went on, He whose very ideal of 
 law had made the family so pure and sacred a centre of rela- 
 tions, He outgrew the bounds of family; saying to His mother, 
 "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" and when she with 
 His brothers would confine Him to the tether of an earthly 
 family, saying to all His hearers, "Who is my mother? and 
 who are my brethren?" Then stretching forth His hand 
 toward His disciples, He said, "Behold my mother and my 
 brethren ! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which 
 is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister and mother." 
 A harsh answer this has seemed to some, but only to those who 
 would make their love an enclosure, in which regard for the 
 little clique inside might be a motive for enmity or indifference 
 to all others. Such exclusive love, as between man and wife, 
 has been thus described in a most popular recent novel: 
 "Yes," it is said of Simon Rosedale, "he would be kind . . . 
 kind in his gross, unscrupulous, rapacious way, the way of a 
 predatory creature with his mate." The Jewish feeling, you 
 see, the law of the species sharpened to a point. The soul of 
 Jesus, King of the Jews though He truly was, could not cramp 
 itself to anything like this. For His love to man, patterned on 
 
254 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 the love of God, was love absolute; so that if He loved His 
 family, as He probably did and provided for them by His ac- 
 tual labor till His thirtieth year, that fact only made Him love 
 everybody else the better, according to the relation He could 
 establish with men. Love, with Him, was not a family or 
 parish or provincial matter; it took account of no such bounds, 
 but only of its own intrinsic motion, as free as the kindly offices 
 of air and rain and sunshine, and as undiscriminating. So it 
 went on; His consistency to this ideal always in control; so 
 that when in His Messianic consciousness He spoke to the 
 Sadducees, who deny resurrection, and described the resurrec- 
 tion to which He and all His were bound, we do not wonder 
 that He corrected their materialistic cavils by saying, "Ye do 
 err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For 
 in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in 
 marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven." The up- 
 rise to which His life was directed was not an affair of the 
 perpetuating of sexual and domestic matings ; there was enough 
 in earthly ideals of love already to hallow these, if vitalized by 
 the spirit; it was rather an uprise into the love that binds the 
 universe of hearts together. And when, on that last sacred 
 evening, He gives His little circle of disciples His parting 
 words, it is of a piece with all the rest of His life that He says, 
 "In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so 
 I would have told you; . . . and other sheep I have, which 
 are not of this fold." He has become consciously the Head of 
 the whole family in heaven and earth; and all their interests 
 are dear to Him. Such has become His felt relation to the 
 great spacious world, spreading out from where He stands and 
 suffers and dies to the remotest corners; spreading out from 
 the central luminary to the confines of darkness. Wherever 
 the spirit of Christ is, there is the centre of things, and there 
 the sheep of His pasture may be folded. It is not in the bounds 
 of space, or nation, or family, or species, to interpose barriers 
 to the limitless love of God, manifest in the flesh, His incar- 
 nate Word to men. 
 
 But just as He came, in His sense of Messiahship, to move 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 255 
 
 consciously in the brotherhood of all the earth, so also He 
 entered consciously into the brotherhood of all the ages; and 
 here we aproach a strain of His life which as yet we can but 
 dimly understand, nor can we understand it at all except as 
 we know within ourselves the power of His resurrection. We 
 can only note the strange indications, as did the bewildered 
 disciples ; can note too, as we put data and data together, that 
 all belong to a marvelous tissue of poetic justice. If a new 
 life is to be constructed on His plan, and if it is the summit 
 and crown of manhood life, we can truly say these wonders 
 are strictly homogeneous with it; though they seem in calm 
 sober sequence to have thrown down the barriers of death, 
 and to have introduced man into the felt company of those who 
 have gone before, as if they were present all the while, waiting 
 only till we have eyes to see and life to appropriate. That pul- 
 sation of the world love engenders its own consciousness of 
 company and fellowship; and as it enlarges no past is past, 
 but all its wealth of life is a perpetual present, as real as is the 
 actual presence of our brothers on the other side of the world. 
 This, I say, is hard to understand; for here in the flesh our 
 eyes are still holden; but something like this is involved in 
 Jesus 7 life from the Messianic recognition onward; He lives 
 and acts and talks as if this were so. 
 
 About a week after He had so solemnly impressed upon His 
 disciples His mission of death and rising again and theirs of 
 self-denial and cross-bearing, there came a wonderful mani- 
 festation of the new order of life and relationship in which He 
 was moving. It came to only three of the disciples, the three 
 who, it would seem, stood nearest to the divine secret of His 
 heart. He took them up into a mountain, and there He was 
 transfigured metamorphosed, the original word is before 
 them; and again in His history, as He stood there shining and 
 glorious, with the luminous cloud above Him, were heard the 
 words, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; 
 hear him." Then the doors of the mighty past seemed all at 
 once to stand wide open, and the eternal unseen was disclosed 
 to mortal view, and Moses and Elijah were there, talking over 
 
2.56 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 the great things of life and death with Jesus, as if already He 
 were of their company and in His own fitting home. They 
 spake, St. Luke says, of His decease which He should accom- 
 plish at Jerusalem; the thing which He had already told the 
 disciples must needs be: His exodus, the word is, His going out. 
 Noteworthy, is it not, that they did not speak of death; they 
 gave this event another name, a new name perhaps, coined 
 for the new thing. It was the same tremendous subject of dis- 
 cussion which one of these disciples, Peter, afterward said had 
 been the carefully studied theme of the ancient prophets, the 
 crux of their prophecy; "searching what, or what manner of 
 time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when 
 it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory 
 that should follow." No new theme this; it had been vital and 
 paramount in the unseen places for centuries; and immortal 
 beings were waiting in wondering suspense for the solution, on 
 the eve of which the world seen and unseen was now standing. 
 Here, among the immortals, was the very Spirit who had given 
 them insight and foresight, speaking of the very event which 
 so long ago had engaged their most amazed study. It was 
 like a council of the holiest minds of the ages, planning for 
 the crowning glory of the fully evolved manhood; as it were a 
 kind of rehearsal and understudy of the supreme uprise, now 
 so near at hand. That it meant something like this would 
 seem to have been Jesus' explanation of it; for you know He 
 told the disciples to say nothing about it until the Son of man 
 had risen from the dead, that they might have that event to 
 interpret it by. 
 
 The Transfiguration has all the elements of a clarifying, and 
 surely much needed object-lesson. It seems to reveal the true 
 situation and relation of things on the Christ scale: life and 
 death, survival, immortality, resurrection, all seem here to fall 
 into place and coordination as in no other event of Scripture. 
 Of course there is an easy way to dispose of the whole matter, 
 Professor Schmidt's way: to say that it never occurred, that 
 it is a fancy picture. That kind of denial must have been 
 urged long ago; for Peter takes pains afterward to say of this 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 257 
 
 very event that it was actual fact, and that we have not fol- 
 lowed cunningly devised fables. But this consideration apart, 
 there is still the congruity and harmony, the poetic justice of 
 the case, to be reckoned with; for as soon as we lift ourselves 
 from material facts to that higher order and scale of events 
 in which the whole life of Jesus and the whole history of man- 
 hood evolution moves, this fits in perfectly as a natural and 
 vital ingredient. It is as if for once we were reading the 
 highest and deepest things of life from the inside, where we see 
 at first hand the powers and motives that give it meaning. Let 
 us see how this is. 
 
 I well remember the feeling that came upon me when in one 
 of the Passion Play years I entered the little village of Oberam- 
 mergau. As I walked through the street, with its neat 
 white-washed cottages, each with a picture of some scripture 
 scene painted on its front, then saw the dominating parish 
 church in one direction, and in the other, at the edge of the 
 hamlet, the more dominating open-air theatre where the Pas- 
 sion Play was given, and behind it all, like a guardian, the 
 cross-crowned summit of the Kobelspitze, it was like being 
 transported into another world, with all the feelings of life, 
 its ways and motives and sentiments, suddenly made other. 
 The noise of commerce was far away; and here among the hills 
 a little community of peasants were feeding their souls year 
 after year on that same prophetic and historic theme, "the 
 sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow;" and the 
 whole atmosphere of their little world was made sweet and 
 calm by it. I wonder if it was not so, in truer reality and 
 degree, on this mountain of Transfiguration, when the dis- 
 ciples trembled as they entered into the cloud, and found the 
 glory almost too great for their waking sense to endure. Yet 
 it was a real world, and adapted to their souls; so restful and 
 congenial that Peter wanted to make tabernacles and stay 
 there. May it not have been a momentary unveiling, for love 
 and humanity's sake, of what is always near, always present, 
 waiting only till the Christ-formed manhood has eyes to see 
 
258 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 and heart to appropriate? How like it is to that vision of the 
 supreme world-day which a poet has thus put into words: 
 
 Soon the whole, 
 
 Like a parched-up scroll, 
 Shall before my amazed eyes uproll; 
 
 And without one screen, 
 
 At one burst be seen 
 The presence wherein I have ever been. 
 
 It were over-curious, perhaps, to assert this; but how fruitful 
 the whole scene is of imaginings. And especially it sets us 
 wondering whether, after all, the transition to the unseen world 
 may not be a much less violent and catastrophic thing than our 
 fears have figured; and whether it may not be in us so to live 
 that all the likeness and congeniality of it, save the sudden 
 rapturous moment of entrance, may already be full-formed in 
 our nature. At any rate, here, to my mind, is the unending 
 marvel of the scene: the chill and wrench of death is totally 
 absent, unreal, abolished. As Tennyson expressed it of cer- 
 tain trance-like states of his, death seems here an almost 
 laughable impossibility; and yet this is no trance but a sane 
 and matter-of-fact opening of the accessible realm where mor- 
 tality is swallowed up of life. This is what the Transfigura- 
 tion event looks like to me; and as such it is not an exhibition 
 or performance but a most weighty revelation of the signifi- 
 cance of life. Here, if anywhere in the Bible, is unveiled the 
 world eternally beyond death, beyond the bounds of time, and 
 far within the encompassing limits of space and race and 
 cramping custom. And an essential part of it is that strange 
 mystic change of form, the same, it would seem, that St. Paul 
 afterward calls the spiritual body which he regards as forming 
 itself within us all the while, and which is just as real and con- 
 gruous as the rest; a thing which he even dares to make the 
 subject of a Christian command. "Be not conformed," he 
 says, "to this world: but be ye transformed" transfigured, 
 metamorphosed, precisely the same word as used here "by 
 the renewing of your mind." Nor is it the mind alone that is 
 concerned; for this command comes just at the heels of an 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 259 
 
 injunction to present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy, accept- 
 able unto God, which is our reasonable service. Can it be, 
 then, that in a true sense transfiguration is in the list of the 
 new life's duties, as if it were the most rational thing in the 
 world for us, whose citizenship is in heaven, to seek those 
 things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand 
 of God? And have we not here a glimpse of the scenery and 
 the company that we are in, just, as it were, beyond the violet 
 rays of our spectrum? It is not for me to say; but such, in 
 our grand poetic justice, seems to be the Bible assumption. 
 
 Here we must pause to note another thing which seems here 
 brought to light: a discrimination so momentous that we can 
 only deem the event which makes it clear one of the greatest 
 boons ever vouchsafed to a dimly-seeing humanity. If, a*s 
 intimated, transfiguration and resurrection are correlative, ex- 
 plaining each other, if here we are looking for once at the very 
 core and article of eternal life, then we see how distinct from 
 it, nay opposed to it, are all men's vague notions of immor- 
 tality, in the sense of a survival of soul, separate from the 
 body. This is the thing that men have always dreamed of and 
 psychic research is trying to prove; fastening their eyes al- 
 ways not on life but on death, as the necessary prelude which 
 must somehow be resolved. Jesus had called people back from 
 death; the young man at Nain, the daughter of Jairus; and in 
 a few weeks he would do a more wonderful thing still, calling 
 back Lazarus from his four days' entombment. But these were 
 not resurrection; they brought no higher thing with them; 
 they were only resuscitation. They are not in the class with 
 this event at all. They left the resuscitated body still as 
 mortal as ever; and all the process of dying had in time to be 
 undergone over again. Our Lord did not set store by these 
 miracles, as in any way enriching the sum-total of life. His 
 ministry was otherwise directed; directed to an uprise of life, 
 inner and outer, wherein there should be no separation and 
 joining again, no ruins and subsequent repair, no wreck and 
 dubious survival, but one integral wholeness of tissue and har- 
 mony of progress and birth to the new range of being to which 
 
2 6o THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 manhood is bound. By the side of this, even as here fleetingly 
 glimpsed, how paltry appear men's crude notions of a piece- 
 meal survival of death. His miracles of resuscitation from the 
 dead serve a useful purpose, if only for the object-lesson they 
 afford; we have in them something to set over against the 
 larger reality; we can sense by them how small a part death 
 plays in the grand total of evolutionary uprise. And here on 
 Mount Hermon, far more truly than at the grave of Lazarus, 
 here by His mingling with the great minds of the ages and by 
 the revealed splendor which is so obviously His native element, 
 He has vouchsafed to men a view of the summit to which the 
 Son of man, bringing with Him the bidding for all men to hear 
 and become with Him sons of God, has at length ascended. 
 It is high; but humanity too is there, intact and glorious. 
 
 The splendor of the hour faded, and when it was over the 
 disciples again saw no man save Jesus only; but from this 
 hour onward this wonderful event registered' the true measure 
 of Him. Henceforth, Head of the family in heaven and earth, 
 He moved consciously among the eternal verities, lived and 
 thought and spoke as to the manner born. His consciousness 
 seemed to be enlarged in the time direction, as well as in the 
 space direction. He spoke of Himself in terms deeper than 
 human; calmly assumed to be contemporary with the men of 
 old. "Verily, I say unto you," He boldly told the Jewish 
 elders, "before Abraham was, I am." He met the Sadducees' 
 denial of resurrection, and proved that resurrection is a pres- 
 ent fact, by the truth, to Him as evident as the existence of 
 God, that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob are alive. He spoke 
 to Pilate of His kingly purpose in coming into the world, in 
 just such terms as one uses who is moving in the consciousness 
 of preexistence. We can little understand this now; we need 
 the completed resurrection to explain it; but we can see the 
 harmony of it with all the rest of His life, the poetic justice 
 of the tremendous drama He was enacting. And is not that 
 very grace and truth of His, so at one with the eternal mind 
 of God, the clearest road to the realization of the mystery; 
 may not a love so large have carried with it the timeless con- 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 261 
 
 sciousness of eternal personality? Do we not even in our 
 earthly love, when it reaches its purest expression in perfect 
 union with another soul, have the sense of an eternal new 
 world opening, and as if here were a pulsation from a limitless 
 past? Of this sacred experience I may not speak out; I leave 
 each of you to think how it has been in your own soul. In 
 a recent play it has been put into question and answer; where- 
 in a poet, sensitive to the purest breath of love, comes to feel 
 that his soul has found its perfect mating. "How old are you, 
 Eugene?" he is asked. His answer is one that none of us will 
 read as meaningless: "As old as the world now. This morning 
 I was eighteen." This sounds almost flippant, perhaps, by the 
 side of our larger subject; but the supreme venture of history 
 has labored to prove that love is as old as the world, and He 
 who committed Himself to the proof speaks just as if He had 
 entered into the secret of that consciousness. When we have 
 fathomed the greatness of His Messianic personality we shall 
 be slow to deny to Him the ability to say the word, "Before 
 Abraham was, I am." 
 
 While we are on this high ground, though we cannot now 
 build tabernacles and stay, we must needs note one more thing. 
 In the light of the evolution we have traced, with all its trans- 
 cendent elements, this change of form into a spiritual body 
 seems, and I think is revealed to be, the natural transition of 
 the completed manhood from this earthly stage of being to the 
 stage beyond. It is the way that is taken when death is 
 abolished. It registers the supreme effect of the spirit of 
 Christ on the whole life, body and all. He might have gone 
 out that way; for already the gate stands open; it was the 
 next step. His fulness of love had already proved too strong 
 for death to handle; there was nothing for corruption and 
 decay to lay hold of. It perfectly suits with the logic and fit- 
 ness of things that this should have been the absorption of His 
 life into the higher stage and element; the whole current of 
 His being drew that way. Amazing as it may seem, this trans- 
 figuration of Christ, so far from being a miracle, looks like 
 the most natural and as it were scientific outcome of the his- 
 
262 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 tory we have traced. Its theoretical claims are satisfied. We 
 could never have impeached His perfect sinlessness, His com- 
 plete realization of manhood, His divine wisdom of word and 
 work, if when Moses and Elijah vanished from men's sight, 
 He too had vanished with them and been seen no more. If it 
 were only law and merit and righteousness that He came to 
 fulfil, here was the fitting crown and ending. 
 
 But right here, though our thoughts of this story have 
 mounted from height to dizzy height, we must reopen the case 
 higher still, and note the thing which, as Browning phrases it, 
 "shall crown him the topmost, ineffablest crown." All this 
 opportunity to enter the fulness and glory of life He puts aside 
 without regret, without flinching; His chosen way, the way to 
 which His love for men points, is other. There below Him, 
 all over the world, are men sinning, struggling, laboring, dying; 
 even now, while He is standing beyond the reach of death, a 
 hapless boy on the plain below is writhing in the full possession 
 of "him that hath the power of death, that is, the devil," and 
 no one, not even the disciples, can help him. But if He goes 
 now, what of all these? If He goes now, how shall men lay 
 hold on the same power of life that is in Him, and make it also 
 their own? Something more is needed than that it shall 
 be shown to them, and then, when its wonder is greatest, 
 be withdrawn. He himself would not hold His life on such 
 terms; and heaven would not be heaven to Him if the door 
 were shut from any who were in uttermost need. So here, at 
 the very door of light and peace and reward, He turns away, 
 and goes down the mountain slope toward Gethsemane and 
 Calvary. It is no more as if He had to die. This very scene 
 has demonstrated that He does not have to die, that He has 
 the power to escape the mortal lot of man. It is in the very 
 consciousness of this power that He takes His life in His hand 
 and offers it as a sacrifice on the cross. "I have power," He 
 says, "to lay it down, and I have power to take it again." It 
 is the freedom of truth that thus speaks; and in the light of 
 this His obedience to the death of the cross acquires an in- 
 effable grandeur. 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 263 
 
 So though for merit's sake He might now receive His wages, 
 for love's sake He will live out this human life to the ending, 
 and sound the depths of all the experience that sinful man must 
 sound. This death, being the supreme expression of love, has 
 thus become an active principle of life, a thing taken and ap- 
 plied to the salvation of the world. As He regarded it, it is 
 like a seed sown in the ground, which by its very death and 
 rising again bears much fruit. 
 
 To what depths of spiritual suffering, to what abysses of the 
 underworld of being this chosen road of death led Jesus, we 
 can little know; we can only veil our faces before it. This 
 aspect of His life presented itself to Him as like a cup which 
 He must not only taste but drain to the dregs. Earlier in His 
 ministry we hear Him asking His disciples, "Can ye drink of 
 my cup?" and predicting that they shall do so, though they 
 are so little aware what it means. But as He approaches the 
 actual setting of the cup to His lips, it requires the utmost that 
 is in His manhood to nerve Himself to it; it seems to be some- 
 thing by the side of which standing before Pilate is almost an 
 insignificant thing. The first shrinking of spirit from the tre- 
 mendous thing before Him was shown when the Greeks came 
 to inquire of Him, and get, so to say, His manifesto, His ac- 
 count of what His mission meant. "Now is my soul troubled; 
 and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour. But 
 for this cause came I unto this hour." Then He went on to 
 speak of the corn of wheat dying, and of His being lifted up 
 from the earth; and as in the same connection He prayed, 
 "Father glorify thy name," there came the third voice of ap- 
 proval from heaven, as it had come before, at His baptism and 
 transfiguration, "I have both glorified it, and will glorify it 
 again." This was His last sign of the Father's approval; but 
 as the awful gloom deepened it was enough; His spirit held 
 out. We hear Him later praying in Gethsemane that if it be 
 possible the cup may pass; but always with the addition of 
 uttermost obedience, "Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou 
 wilt." Then a few hours of indignity and silence and brave 
 witness for the truth; then the crash of the nails through His 
 
264 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 feet and hands, and the prayer for their forgiveness; then that 
 strange cry as from an unfathomable depth, "My God, my 
 God, why hast thou forsaken me?" We cannot understand 
 it all; there is an uttermost of divinity as well as of humanity 
 in it which stretches away beyond us and beyond our earth. 
 We only know that it was in the road of what He freely chose 
 to taste for men, and for every man; we know too that here 
 on the cross, as put in words in Gethsemane, there was utter- 
 most surrender of the human, with all its depths of life and 
 love and faith, to the will of the divine. And in a few hours 
 more the cup is drained, the spirit has survived its shrinking 
 and conquered, and the final word is rereXeo-rat, "it is 
 finished." 
 
 When Jesus went down the transfiguration mountain toward 
 Calvary, He went not only in love, a love which would leave 
 no son of man out of His beneficence, but He went also in faith, 
 just such faith as you and I have in something that we 
 have not verified, and therefore do not know. He knew, by 
 this touch of His glorification, that there was a way to the 
 higher existence wherein death was abolished. He believed that 
 that same higher existence was approachable through death, 
 and to this belief, not as knowledge but as a sublime experi- 
 ment, He committed Himself. That meant committal to all 
 that it involved. His surrender to death was in just as good 
 faith, and with as little experimental knowledge, as if death 
 were to be utter extinction of being or the ending it seems to 
 be. He said He had power to take His life again; but no man 
 had done it, nor had He anything but His sublime faith to 
 make the assertion on. After all, to surrender Himself thus 
 to death was going into the black; it was a colossal venture of 
 faith, a venture on the supreme vitalizing power of love. 
 
 And as the apostles soon began to preach, the great com- 
 mittal was fully justified; the venture, the experiment, proved 
 its success and opened a new world of life and truth to men. 
 Death wrought its worst on Him, in agony and suffering; but 
 death could not hold Him. It had merely added one more in- 
 gredient in His sum of holiest manhood life. When, a few 
 
THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 265 
 
 days later, He appeared in another form to two of the disciples 
 as they went into the country, His triumphant question to them 
 was, "Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to 
 have entered into his glory?" He had made the mightiest 
 venture that manhood had ever made, had sounded the ex- 
 tremest depths of love and faith, had turned the doubtfulness 
 and gloom of our human life into sunlit eternal certainty; and 
 yet all this in the sanest and most self-evidencing way, the 
 way that when it was seen must needs appeal to every true 
 man. He had royally and consistently done what as Christ, 
 as Son of man, He ought to do. 
 
VI 
 
 NATURALIZING THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 
 
 HOW TEEIS SOLUTION OF THE LIFE PROBLEM WAS 
 INTERPRETED TO THE WORLD 
 
 I. EYE-WITNESSES OF His MAJESTY 
 
 II. SINAI VERSUS SIGN 
 
 III. THE MIND OF SAINT JOHN 
 
 IV. THE MIND OF SAINT PAUL 
 
VI 
 
 NATURALIZING THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 
 
 THE most momentous single word ever spoken in 
 this world, most momentous and most abysmally 
 significant, was that last word spoken from 
 the cross, rereXeo-rai, "It is finished." We can never hope 
 to comprehend more than one half of its meaning, until 
 we are where we can see it from the other and 
 inner side. It is the announcement of a great accom- 
 plished fact, as great as the whole history and evolution 
 of man; a fact on which through the growing ages God and 
 man have been working together in a mighty partnership. On 
 the evening before the word was spoken Jesus had said to the 
 Father: "I have glorified thee on the earth; I have finished the 
 work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify 
 thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with 
 thee before the world was." Some colossal thing is recognized 
 here which, even before Gethsemane or the arrest or the cruel 
 execution, is already complete; what remains is only making 
 it plain in the sight of men. Throughout the huddled scene 
 of the cross too, as through the swift turmoil of arrest in the 
 garden, there is on His part the same note of deliberateness, 
 calmness, as of one who is bringing everything into final order, 
 even down to the details of caring for His family and His fol- 
 lowers. "Of them which thou gavest me have I lost none," 
 was His word about His disciples, fulfilled by His letting them 
 go their way in Gethsemane; and you remember too how, when 
 He had committed His mother to the beloved disciple's care, 
 He knew then that all things were now accomplished, and re- 
 ceived the vinegar and spoke the final word. About this going 
 out which He accomplished at Jerusalem there was nothing 
 
 269 
 
270 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 hurried or disordered, as if it were a catastrophe; no loose and 
 ravelled ends of life and speech. It was the same on the third 
 morning afterward, when the tomb was found empty; no 
 marks there, as it were, of a sudden tumult of triumph, but 
 the linen clothes lying neatly together and the napkin folded 
 in a place by itself. From greatest things to smallest, the world 
 could see not only a tremendous finished work but the minutest 
 finishing touches, as if every proper and tasteful impulse of a 
 finely touched nature would be satisfied. How that word "It 
 is finished' 7 seems to enlarge and expand, upward and down- 
 ward and inward and outward, until it fills the horizon of the 
 universe full. 
 
 The great fact is now accomplished; Jesus names this in 
 terms of glory. He had in all the lowly deeds of His life glori- 
 fied the Father; the Father, answering at every step, down to 
 the deepest and obscurest, but culminatingly in this final lifting 
 up from the earth, had glorified Him. Here at last was the long 
 event, emerging from the unseen places of the universe, in 
 which God and manhood were in full harmony together, each 
 revealing the plan that had eternally occupied his spirit, each 
 seen as he is, in the central truth of universal being, in the 
 unitary Life Indeed. You remember how St. John afterward 
 described it: "That which was from the beginning, which we 
 have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have 
 looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of 
 life; (for the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and 
 bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was 
 with the Father, and was manifested unto us)." He seems to 
 strain language almost to breaking-point to make apprehen- 
 sible something which, for all its ineffable greatness, was yet 
 so real here under the sun. The only word that can be used 
 to name this, both on its earthly and heavenly side, is glory. 
 Let us think of this word a moment. It is one of those words, 
 of which there are not a few in Scripture, that have to be taken 
 from men's commonplace conceptions and vocabulary and 
 crowded with new meaning to suit new and larger realities. 
 
 I like to think of it in connection with that name which the 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACr 271 
 
 Hebrew was somehow guided to give to God, and which you 
 know became so sacred and withdrawn that he dared not pro- 
 nounce it: the name Jehovah, or Jahaveh, which you know 
 means, "He who is," or "That which is." A pregnant and 
 penetrative name this: the very discovery or invention of it 
 was a kind of incentive to truth. For it always seemed to me 
 as if what under this term the Hebrew was seeking and wor- 
 shipping and trying to explore was just reality, the ultimate 
 reality of things, that which is rather than seems, that which 
 remains rather than changes or passes. The Hebrew mind, 
 even in its devoutness and religion, was thus essentially like 
 the scientific mind: it was set toward what is actual, true, lit- 
 eral, real, and it valued finding that. Its bent of worship and 
 belief, too, corresponded; for the Hebrew was looking always 
 for signs, tokens, or as we may say effects, which would indi- 
 cate what the reality is, and what the character of His work- 
 ing; this is what St. Paul recognizes when he says the Jews 
 seek after a sign; our Lord too appeals to the same national 
 trait. What is the sign of the deepest reality of things, of the 
 highest reality of life? In a true sense we may say the trend 
 of the Hebrew genius was toward the answer to this question. 
 And the name they gave to this sign or evidence of God's pres- 
 ence or working, glory, started from the idea of weight or abun- 
 dance or splendor. That is how they figured the glory of God, 
 and perhaps the palpable values of life : splendor, the splendor 
 of wealth and abundance and honor. If God should appear it 
 would be in a splendor beyond mortal power to endure. The 
 Greeks too had a word for glory, the word that the New Tes- 
 tament employs; and this word, in its primal meaning, was 
 accurately keyed to the mind of a people who, as St. Paul says, 
 seek after wisdom, who are inclined to philosophize on things. 
 It comes from the word to think or estimate; and to the 
 Greeks the glory of God or of man is what we are to think of 
 him at his best, truest, deepest, highest; what he is to be to 
 our minds rather than our senses, when we fathom his being 
 as it really is. When therefore Jesus glorified God, and God 
 glorified Jesus, the splendor that the word glory gave to the 
 
272 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 idea was not merely an outward thing, an insufferable bright- 
 ness, but an inward thing which could shine in the secret place 
 of the soul, and which, equally real and true, could coexist 
 even with ignominy and persecution and death, and could shine 
 through the humblest deeds. The word had become large 
 enough in Jesus' use of it, and He Himself so enriched its 
 meaning, that He could say to the philosophizing Greeks that 
 the Son of man was at that moment glorified when He was in 
 act, like a corn of wheat, to fall into the ground and die that 
 so an abundant harvest of the truest life might ensue. And a 
 little while afterward, interpreting the same spirit of life, St. 
 Paul promises nothing less than life eternal to those who by 
 patient continuance in well-being seek for glory and honor and 
 immortality. The glory of God, the glory of the Son of man 
 what we are to think of them in their beauty and brightness 
 and essential truth, what they are in the light of the great ac- 
 complished fact, and what in turn every man may strive to 
 make his own too evidently it is an unspeakably great re- 
 ality that is revealed here. Can man bear the realization of 
 it, and live? The Hebrew, in the thought of his sensuous image 
 of glory, and his ingrained sense of sinfulness, would naturally 
 doubt it. Or shall man not rather come to himself and then 
 first begin to live, when he gets it into his mind as it really is, 
 and appropriates if ever so little a pulsation of it? This was 
 Christ's object, for which he lived and died. That same glory 
 was a thing not to be exhibited alone; not to be wrought to 
 complete manifestation and then withdrawn; but to be natural- 
 ized and made the manhood way of living. Once come, it was 
 to remain, accessible, available, fruitful and friendly for all 
 human kind. 
 
 There are some interesting signs that seem to show, even 
 on the Hebrew conception, that this glory of the Son of man, 
 both in its exaltation and in its abysm of suffering, had ele- 
 ments too great for a mortal to bear; only a spiritual body, it 
 would seem, could be equal to it. On the mountain of Trans- 
 figuration, you remember, when the exceeding brightness came 
 and Moses and Elijah appeared in glory, the three disciples 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 273 
 
 were heavy, stupid with sleep, and could only bear it, as it 
 were, in a waking dream. And again in Gethsemane, when the 
 same glory was the glory of surrender to the utmost of the 
 Father's will and the bitter cup, the same disciples, nearest 
 and most intimate as they were, were cast into the same heavi- 
 ness of slumber, and sensed it only imperfectly. "What! could 
 ye not watch with me one hour? The spirit is willing, but the 
 flesh is weak," was the word that expressed Jesus' hunger for 
 companionship yet readiness to excuse them. There was some- 
 thing transcending earth, and too much for the flesh to bear, 
 even in the blackness of that experience; does it not flash forth 
 the moment after, when, as soon as Jesus tells the approaching 
 soldiers "I am he" they run backward and fall to the ground? 
 They cannot lay hand on a being so glorious (though the out- 
 ward rays are quenched in gloom and have become as it were 
 actinic), until He gives them free permission. Other instances 
 are given, where He walked through malignant mobs un- 
 touched; and we recall how, in the splendor of His great re- 
 solve to go up to Jerusalem and Calvary, the disciples were 
 amazed at the grandeur of His presence. There were not want- 
 ing flashes of splendor, the spiritual splendor of His native 
 element, all along His earthly way; at the very beginning of 
 His ministry, among His life-long neighbors and acquaintance, 
 there is a touch of it, so that no hand can be laid on Him be- 
 fore His time. Men can come to Him and be healed; can walk 
 freely in the light and warmth of His gracious presence; but 
 until the work is done, and His glory and their flesh are tem- 
 pered to each other, no man can presume. "Touch me not," 
 was His warning word to Mary, "for I am not yet ascended 
 unto my Father." Yes : in all its phases men beheld His glory, 
 and wherever seen it was the glory of the Life Indeed, full of 
 grace and truth. 
 
 We have seen what the accomplished fact, the result of the 
 great historic venture was; we have traced its stages and its 
 vital principles from the beginning; and great as it was we have 
 found it a fact for men. There is indeed an element of it 
 which can be wrought but once; nor need it be repeated. The 
 
274 rHE LIFE INDEED 
 
 experiment of life once conducted in full, with all the condi- 
 tions historic and other in typical place, and the problem is 
 solved once for all; manhood vitalized by the spirit without 
 measure, has reached the summit of its evolution, where life 
 and death are its willing instruments, and the power of the 
 tomb is abolished, and the way henceforth is resurrection and 
 ascent to higher stages of being. From this time forth man 
 may know the truth to which he may witness; and there will 
 not be wanting many a martyrdom, and sufferings like those of 
 Christ, and hardships eagerly undergone, that men may know 
 Him and the power of His resurrection. But the one death 
 that has been chosen as the sacrifice for all remains unique; 
 the laboratory work of the Life Indeed has wrought its com- 
 plete demonstration. But there remains now the work of 
 making this great thing available; of sowing the spirit and 
 faith of it among men; of making it the natural way of living. 
 Fitting and motived as it was, it came with the shock of sur- 
 prise; no one was prepared to see the venture come out so; 
 it came to men bewildered, who must have time to take the 
 things of Christ and piece them together; came to fisher-folk 
 and publicans and laboring men, whom we do not select to 
 be the wielders of ideas, but only the livers of humble life. 
 And on such it devolved to set this accomplished fact in motion 
 and make it the power of a kingdom. Through their life and 
 words and work it must be naturalized, so that in time the 
 conduct and sentiment and atmosphere of communities, yes, 
 and the world, may take the principle and color of it. The 
 centre of light and power is established among men; the ques- 
 tion now, so to say, is the question of output; how the life shall 
 become the light of men. 
 
 I. EYE-WITNESSES OF HIS MAJESTY 
 
 "For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when 
 we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, but were eye-witnesses of his majesty. For he 
 received from God the Father honor and glory, when there 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 275 
 
 came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is 
 my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.' And this voice 
 which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in 
 the holy mount." These words, written by one who calls him- 
 self "Simon Peter, a servant and an apostle of Jesus Christ," 
 strike the keynote of the earliest and simplest announcement 
 of the accomplished fact, the wonderful new thing that had 
 come to the world and made itself known to the eyes and ears 
 of men. It is just the kind of announcement that we should 
 first expect, suited to plain people who want their Gospel plain; 
 and just the mirror of a forthright, bluff, unmeditative mind 
 such as the gospel history leads us to ascribe to St. Peter. 
 There are no circumlocutions here, no posturings of philosophy, 
 no manufacturing of fables, as if it were his business to put 
 his explanations upon things. It takes its stand on the basis 
 of simple concrete fact. The fact was so; we saw it; we heard 
 it. How much the fact means, how it connects itself with 
 our life and the ideas by which we have guided ourselves 
 hitherto, is a thing for other heads to work out. St. Paul, for 
 instance, is good at that sort of thing; he has made a study 
 of it, "and according to the wisdom given unto him hath 
 written unto you." Some things that he writes are hard to be 
 understood, and men that are not experts can easily misuse 
 his words and turn them to their own hurt. But I have nothing 
 to do with those deep things; they are beyond my unphilo- 
 sophic fisherman brain; but I can tell you what I saw and 
 heard; and plain man as I am, I was one of those who were 
 chosen to be fishers of men, and one of the three who, for what- 
 ever reason, were selected to be eye-witnesses of the highest 
 majesty that human eyes could behold. 
 
 Such is the honest, humble, perfectly transparent attitude 
 assumed by the writer of this second epistle of Peter. In re- 
 ferring you to it, I am not raising any questions about the gen- 
 uineness of this epistle, or when it was written, or when it 
 came unto the canon; I am concerned merely with what it says, 
 and with the mind it reveals. As a matter of fact, you know, 
 this is one of the epistles whose right critics question; in the 
 
276 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 general shaking-up of things that prevails nowadays they are 
 so tangled up with what the church fathers say or do not say 
 about it, and perhaps with its very primitiveness of tone, that 
 the plain state of the case, the line of least resistance, seems 
 to have lost its chance with them. St. Paul, you know, speaks 
 of contemporaries of his who are "ever learning and never able 
 to come to the knowledge of the truth"; such possibilities 
 still exist among men. And this at least may be said for it: 
 it speaks accurately in character; it suits so well a man like 
 St. Peter, and what would presumably impress him most, that 
 we must hold the writer of it to have been either the man he 
 professes to be or a consummate play-actor palming off an 
 assumed personality on men in the interests of the holiest fact. 
 It either carries its own transparent evidence, or is high in the 
 rank of such literature as we ascribe to Shakespeare. 
 
 All this, however, affects our real subject not one whit. For 
 at any rate we have here, just as we have elsewhere, a true in- 
 dication of what was the staple of the earliest preaching of the 
 apostles, while still their message was a matter of plain fact, 
 and before the ferment of philosophy and theology supervened. 
 It was fact that the world needed to know; it was fact that 
 these unlearned apostles gave them. Here was an event, the 
 Transfiguration, with its interpretation vouchsafed straight 
 from heaven; an event that by our Lord's own direction the 
 three witnesses kept quiet until they had the resurrection to 
 supplement it and interpret it by; and this event, with its still 
 larger supplement, was what they began to announce just as 
 soon as they understood it. The staple of the earliest Gospel 
 was simply the wonderful news that a man who before all the 
 world had been put to death was risen from the dead, was alive 
 in the heavens, and was the same Lord of men's life and will 
 that He ever was. Here was a new thing for the world to 
 know: that we have a Guide and Teacher, One who has shared 
 all our life and nature, in the bright region beyond death. 
 Here is a new thing: that though He submitted freely to death, 
 death could not hold Him. This, you remember, was Peter's 
 own account of the matter, in his preaching at Pentecost: 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 277 
 
 "Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by 
 miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the 
 midst of you, as ye yourselves also know: him, being delivered 
 by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have 
 taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: whom 
 God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: but it 
 was not possible that he should be holden of it.' 7 All the early 
 preaching was like this: a statement of fact; an identification 
 of this Jesus with the one whom the Jews well knew and had 
 crucified; a testimony that He was a man perfectly just and 
 holy, with the evidence of His divine spirit and power always 
 with Him; and an assertion that this man was risen from the 
 dead. Nor was the preaching confined to assertion of a past 
 and accomplished fact. Here you see a present fact right be- 
 fore you. Here is a community of men living a strange and 
 new, enlarged and exalted life; a spirit of power and love has 
 taken possession of them which connects with this same risen 
 man; He is still at work healing diseases, forgiving sins, speak- 
 ing as never man spake, infusing the divinest vitality into every 
 heart that will welcome Him, just as He did in the flesh, yes, 
 and more abundantly, because He is with the Father, the 
 source and centre of all. Right from the world into which at 
 His ascension a cloud received Him, the world where when we 
 entered into the cloud we saw Him talking with glorified men, 
 a world that is very near, nay, a world that comes into our 
 souls, bringing tongues of flame for our speech, and vibrations 
 of might for our hands, and motions of love for our hearts, and 
 the very breath of joy and goodwill to intensify our life; right 
 from this world come continual messages of good, and light 
 and life are coursing back and forth, ascending and descending, 
 as did the angels in Jacob's vision. The veil is rent; the bar- 
 riers are down; all is one world now, seen and unseen; and the 
 spirit of the divine is closer than breathing, and nearer than 
 hands and feet. And this is just what has been prophesied, 
 what from the days of the prophet Joel men have looked and 
 longed for; the Holy Spirit coming upon men and making new 
 men of them; putting in them the full salvation, health, whole- 
 
278 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 ness of being, delivering them from the bondage of lust and 
 sin, making them partakers of that eternal life of which the 
 hour of transfiguration made us eye-witnesses, and which the 
 resurrection redeemed from the fell empire of death. Such was 
 their enthusiastic announcement; and let not the tremendous 
 content and involvement of it blind us to the essential sim- 
 plicity and forthrightness of it. It is not a theology that these 
 plain men are bringing: it is a fact which has grown in form 
 and beauty through a ministry and a death and a resurrection, 
 and has orbed into reality and meaning until that same Jesus 
 "hath shed forth this which ye do see and hear." We have seen 
 it all; have been confused and bewildered by it even to its un- 
 expected outcome; but now we know what it is, and identify 
 all its parts and stages, and cannot but speak of the things 
 which we have seen and heard. 
 
 So these apostles took hold of the strange new thing by the 
 simplest handle, the handle of the actual and the real. To 
 them it was first of all just what St. Paul called it afterward, 
 the coming of life and immortality to light. St. Peter's forth- 
 right mind, wherein there was only one vigorous leap from fact 
 to conclusion, was just the mind to have the first dealing with 
 it. In his explanation of the Pentecost event, you remember, 
 he fastens at once on that prophecy of David's in the sixteenth 
 psalm, where the psalmist's soul rests in hope that God will 
 not leave him in the underworld nor suffer His holy one to see 
 corruption. No more significant word of old could possily 
 have been chosen; it is the most telling prophecy of immor- 
 tality in the Old Testament. And this, he says, has come glori- 
 ously true: the resurrection of Christ has put it into fact, and 
 this pouring forth of the Holy Spirit has put it into power, a 
 gift of life for all men. It is now actually in the world, a real 
 and available thing, to be domesticated and naturalized in the 
 common life of men. 
 
 The name that the apostles forthwith gave to their message, 
 and that covered its whole essential content, corresponded ac- 
 curately to this simple conception of it: it was evayy^Xio^, 
 "good news/' the report of a radiant new fact from heaven, new 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 279 
 
 boon for earth. When they chose a new man to announce it, 
 Matthias, so that their number twelve might be made intact 
 after the defection of Judas, they chose him because he too had 
 been an eye-witness of the resurrection, and therefore could 
 testify to fact and tell the good news at first hand. And their 
 manner of telling it was preaching, not arguing or philosophiz- 
 ing but just proclaiming; the foolishness of preaching, St. Paul 
 calls it; but it was the direct way of bringing fact to men, a 
 simple report of the actual, sowing concrete fact among men 
 and letting it work as it would. That was enough for them 
 to do; that contained its own power. For, as George Eliot puts 
 
 For Fact, well-trusted, reasons and persuades, 
 
 Is gnomic, cutting, or ironical, 
 
 Draws tears, or is a tocsin to arouse 
 
 Can hold all figures of the orator 
 
 In one plain sentence; has her pauses too 
 
 Eloquent silence at the chasm abrupt 
 
 Where knowledge ceases. 
 
 Out of the fact that manhood is risen from the grave, such 
 full-orbed manhood as we have seen with our eyes and our 
 hands have handled, comes all the light of life. 
 
 Now I have dwelt on this aspect of the case because it cor- 
 responds so precisely with the quasi-scientific view of things 
 which we have regarded the Bible as taking as the grand text- 
 book of life and immortality. We have looked at Christ's life 
 as a supreme historic venture, a laboratory work of love and 
 faith, the most colossal scientific experiment that was ever un- 
 dertaken and carried to the profoundest depths. No element 
 of the problem was evaded or omitted. When He went down 
 the slope of Hermon toward the cup of Gethsemane and the 
 agony of the cry, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani," He was ap- 
 proaching the very abysm of being, infinitely farther than we 
 could follow, where prophets and angels could only look in 
 wonder. And now this announcement of fact is an announce- 
 ment that the tremendous experiment has issued in complete 
 success. The long laboratory work of the ages, the long wit- 
 
280 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 nessing of the spirit of God with the spirit of man, has at the 
 fulness of the time completed its work of growth and freedom; 
 manhood has wrought its redemption through the law of the 
 spirit of life; and the doors of the higher evolution stand wide 
 open. The plain visible fact of the light of day has joined 
 hands with the large ongoings of heaven and earth, and men 
 have discovered the identity. 
 
 II. SINAI VERSUS SIGN 
 
 So the accomplished fact, as soon as resurrection and as- 
 cension set the seal to it, became forthwith a fact not past but 
 present; it was a new dynamic in humanity; and from this 
 time forth, as the wonders of the day of Pentecost proved, men 
 could avail themselves of the same power of life which had 
 raised Jesus from the dead. The power was abroad in the 
 world: it was transforming and transfiguring men inwardly, 
 was healing disease and delivering from sin. The apostles were 
 not only eye-witnesses of His majesty; they were also reposi- 
 tories of the same spirit and vitality which had burst forth in 
 glory at Mount Hermon and come forth as a risen body from 
 the tomb; and they were ambassadors from this same court of 
 glory, where the Son of man sat, the unseen Lord of their wills, 
 yet with them always. I need not stay now to note how this 
 same dynamic of life enlarged on the apostles' hands ; how our 
 straight-minded energetic apostle St. Peter discovered through 
 a vision, in which among all the creatures of God he discerned 
 nothing common or unclean, and through actual bestowal of 
 the Spirit, that the power of life worked as well with heathen 
 as with Jews, and that "of a truth . . . God is no respecter 
 of persons, but in every nation he that feareth him, and 
 worketh righteousness, is accepted with him." This finished 
 work, this accomplished fact, of which the apostles were in 
 charge, and which was proving so growing and vital, was also 
 a universal fact; it belonged to man as man, not to man as 
 Jew, nor merely to man whose heredity had prepared him for 
 it in one way. It was limpid, pervasive, adaptable, suited to 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 281 
 
 any inherited range of ideas, remedial for any incurred cor- 
 ruptions or errors of life; this it showed by its large beneficent 
 effects on Gentiles and Jews alike. So, just like a scientist who 
 has discovered a new appliance for healing or comfort or labor- 
 saving, and who desires to make its usefulness as widespread 
 as possible, just in that same goodwill spirit, St. Peter and 
 the rest are concerned to spread and naturalize the workings 
 of this new life among men, among all men. 
 
 But it has been brought to light and power through the his- 
 tory of one nation, and through one man who has proved Him- 
 self not only Son of man but king of that nation, who on the 
 cross where He laid down His life bore the inscription, for all 
 the world to see, "Jesus, the King of the Jews." That nation 
 had its peculiar body of traditions, its long line of energies and 
 histories and laws and ceremonials and literature; to which 
 Jesus Himself had conformed all His life, and which was in 
 the very blood and bone of the apostles. As our Lord Himself 
 had said, salvation is of the Jews; and when He brought heal- 
 ing to the Syro-Phenician woman, it was under the recognized 
 figure of sharing the children's bread with dogs. All these pe- 
 culiar Jewish ideas must now be brought into line with the 
 great new fact; all was one tissue and consistency; all must 
 be brought over from the theory and imagery in which hitherto 
 it had existed, from the ideals of life which for so many cen- 
 turies had been men's culture and educative power, and fas- 
 tened on this colossal fulfilment and culmination. The Hebrew 
 nation had been, as it were, living through a grand allegory of 
 life, in which customs, and temple- worship, and sacrifices, and 
 orders of priesthood, and prophetic promises had all embodied 
 symbols of things to come; like a minutely articulated body of 
 theory and poetic image, which sometime was destined to melt 
 into the actual and literal. No nation ever lived on earth which 
 was so truly and thoroughly a prophetic nation; its whole body 
 of inner ideas was an articulated promise and symbol of things 
 to be. 
 
 Accordingly, the very first thought that sprang into the 
 apostles' minds, when they came into possession of the accom- 
 
282 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 plished fact, was the thought of identification. How does this 
 fact fit in with the facts and prophecies which we already have, 
 which our history has bequeathed to us? As soon, you re- 
 member, as St. Peter, in that second epistle, avers that we were 
 eye-witnesses of His majesty, he goes on to say we have also 
 a sure word of prophecy, sure because it has all come true, and 
 that prophecy came through the same Holy Spirit moving the 
 hearts of men of old, and that prophecy is no monopoly of 
 Jews, is not of private interpretation, as if any people or age 
 could appropriate it and rejoice in their exclusiveness. It is 
 capable of being made true for all; its lines have indeed been 
 wrought out in one nation, but, once fulfilled and established, 
 it is a boon universal. 
 
 If this is the case, we would naturally expect that out of 
 the plexus and tangle of Jewish ideas, clear and obvious 
 enough to them but meaningless to the great body of the 
 heathen, the promulgators of the accomplished fact would 
 bring out some large idea, simple and plain for all men to see 
 and appropriate. For the Jews this truth must be comprehen- 
 sive enough to take into order and relation all the system of 
 life that they carry in mind; but for Gentiles and Jews to- 
 gether, who henceforth must have the keeping of it, it must 
 emerge into a large rounded statement, which will be just as 
 great and cogent, and satisfy all the premises of the case, 
 though these premises be not Jewish, and indeed though 
 heathen come to it out of darkness and with no formed theories 
 of life at all. What statement of truth shall be large enough, 
 simple enough, self-evidencing enough, to satisfy these condi- 
 tions; being at once the accurate fulfilment of all that the past 
 has symbolized and promised, and a present pulsation and 
 power wholly beyond dependence on a peculiar past? The 
 answer to this question, along with their simple announcement 
 of good news, was the literary problem that first confronted 
 the apostles. It resolved itself into the question how all this 
 strange new truth of life laid hold of past and present, fulfilling 
 prophecy and at the same time giving prophecy its final dis- 
 charge. 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 283 
 
 The Epistle to the Hebrews contains perhaps the most 
 thorough and detailed solution of this part of the apostles' 
 problem, the stage of teaching that came next after the first 
 plain gospel announcement. It is full of scripture quotation; 
 it takes up the salient points of prophecy and shows how truly 
 and broadly these are fulfilled; it runs over the Jewish temple 
 system of sacrifice and tithes and priesthood, and shows how 
 a great High Priest has at last come and offered such a sacri- 
 fice that no bulls and goats need more be slain, nor altars 
 erected, nor inaccessible holy places be veiled off from men; 
 for He has entered into the holy place once for all, with all 
 our difficulties and temptations upon Him, bravely and sin- 
 lessly overcome, with righteousness actually earned and obedi- 
 ence learned through suffering, with our human nature com- 
 pletely rounded out and finished; so that henceforth there is 
 nothing higher to look and languish for, but now our anchor, 
 our hope is within the veil. Then there is that longing for rest, 
 which all the Hebrew wilderness history so ingrained in them, 
 and which their exiles and tossings about among the nations 
 through all their turbulent career so accentuated; all that is 
 satisfied now, after so many days had been set for it and passed 
 without fulfilment; all has come true and real now; we which 
 believe do enter into rest. Then there is that prophecy of the 
 essential greatness and supremacy of man, and how God had 
 put all things under his feet; that too has come true. True, 
 we see not yet all things put under him; but we see Jesus, 
 made in the same way and loyal to the same nature; and we 
 see Him for the suffering of death crowned with glory and 
 honor. There is where manhood is now, in heaven, sharing 
 the dominion of all things in the power and love of God. 
 
 I must not stay to trace all the details of this enthusiastic 
 interpretation of things. It amounts, I think, to this: that 
 the writer is laboring to show how, in this radiant accomplished 
 fact, all the drag and burden is taken off from life, and how 
 now the soul of man, in full sight of his goal, is free to leap 
 forward into larger and fuller being. His redemption is fin- 
 ished; his sacrifice accomplished and the austere altar-fires 
 
284 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 forever put out; he is at the beginning of his true life, with the 
 glorious race all before him; all that remains is to lay aside 
 weights and sins and spring forward unimpeded and free, run- 
 ning with patient staying-power the race that is set before him, 
 running toward Him who has already run the same race and 
 is waiting to welcome him to the throne where He sits. And 
 here, compassed about with a great cloud of witnesses, unseen 
 perhaps but seeing and noting all, he stands in the morning of 
 the times, ready to run and overcome. 
 
 Another thing is noteworthy. We are inveterately accus- 
 tomed to look toward the unseen future as if it were all a 
 dream, a doubt, a grand perhaps; there is a painful lack of 
 anything that we can commit ourselves to as real, we do not 
 take things for granted. The whole course of this epistle is 
 from dreams to realities; the unseen home to which all these 
 energies and promises pointed is regarded as an actual present 
 fact. The cloud of witnesses out of all the ages and lands are 
 even now present, compassing us about; there they are, so to 
 say, just beyond the violet rays of our spectrum, but still in 
 the spiritual actinic rays, watching to see us run our race and 
 play our part well. "For," as St. Paul says, "we are made a 
 spectacle, a theatre, unto the world and to angels, and to men." 
 That being man, who for a little while and for a noble purpose 
 was made a little lower than the angels, has learned in what 
 company and to what end it is given him to play this earthly 
 part. There is no more any austere veil, no real separation of 
 heaven and earth. You remember who those witnesses are. 
 They are the ones described in the eleventh of Hebrews, the 
 heroes of faith in all ages, who in their time had the substance 
 of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen; and yet 
 whose life was simply going forward to do the next thing, 
 striving in dimness but never in doubt, and always dying with- 
 out having obtained what they sought. "They which say such 
 things," says the writer, "declare plainly that they seek a coun- 
 try," a home of the soul. And now the home they sought, 
 which even after their death remained as incomplete to them 
 as life in the old dispensation of things was to us, has received 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 285 
 
 its crowning finish; and it is all one commonwealth, the whole 
 family in heaven and earth united in one redemption. The 
 seen and the unseen departments of it went forward together; 
 and the better thing that was provided for us was "that they 
 without us should not be made perfect." It is wrong to figure 
 them as transferred to a dreary Sheol, where existence is only 
 a standstill and arrested development; equally wrong to deem 
 their life remote from and uncoordinate with ours; the new 
 order of things has made such crude ideas of immortality im- 
 possible. The self-same redemption, the self-same energies 
 of life, the self-same order of the spirit, obtain there as here, 
 and here as there; nay, and because our citizenship is in 
 heaven, the making and organizing and beautifying of heaven, 
 the wise promotion of its welfare as a commonwealth, is as 
 truly in our hands as in hands unseen. How luminous and 
 reasonable a conception this has become, and how it draws 
 the vast universe into unity and order. It is a marvelous pic- 
 ture of the new consciousness that came to find place in men, 
 after they had got a glimpse of the reality of things in the 
 holy mount, and had seen the great ones of old actually in 
 consultation, and came by the way of resurrection and the 
 Pentecostal spirit to realize what it meant. For ye are not 
 come to Mount Sinai, with its threats and its lightnings and 
 its paralyzing influence of terror and dread; but ye are come 
 to Mount Sion, where all around you, present and aware, are 
 the unnumerable company of angels and men, and Jesus, who 
 has wrought to found and finish it all, and the spirits of just 
 men made perfect. For by all these agencies and histories and 
 experiences of the undying spirit, whose past and future alike 
 record forever the vitality of faith, God hath prepared a city, 
 a new Jerusalem, and He who sits on the throne of it says, 
 "Behold, I make all things new." 
 
 HI. THE MIND OF SAINT JOHN 
 
 All this, we will bear in mind, is how this new dynamic of 
 humanity looked to simple-minded people; who if they saw 
 
286 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 things with elemental vividness, saw them as straight palpable 
 fact, and without the warpings and glamours of a preconceived 
 philosophy; this was their frrst deduction, as they felt the 
 thrill of a new life, and identified it with the continuous and 
 pervasive resurrection power of their Master. It was in the 
 providence of the Father of spirits that this tremendous thing 
 should be submitted first to the keeping of sincere and virgin 
 minds; for there was its universal home, which every lowliest 
 one could share in, and there was the clear nucleus of concep- 
 tion from which, as time and experience went on, should pro- 
 ceed all the applications to whatever complexities of life. 
 "Blessed are the pure in heart," said Jesus the word, you 
 know, is simple, one-folded, what the Germans call einjdltig 
 "for they shall see God"; they it is whose spirit is best fitted 
 to identify these transcendent elements of life and refer them 
 to their true source; they, the weak things of the earth, can 
 by this endowment confound the mighty. This corresponds 
 to the effort of our Lord's whole ministry; which was directed 
 to simplicity, one large and lucid unity of spirit controlling the 
 whole being of man. "One thing is needful," he once said to 
 Martha, not the many things that distract one with care and 
 worry, but the one totality of ideal, the good part which Mary 
 has chosen and which nothing can take away. The realization 
 of this came from His early Nazareth years; His brother and 
 childhood companion James, you know, when he in turn came 
 to teach men the things of the new life, warned them against 
 being double-minded. And the whole process of naturalizing 
 the accomplished fact, corresponding to this initial realization 
 of it, was a simplifying process. It struck out straight for the 
 largest and most comprehensive facts of being, in which all 
 the others are framed and environed: the varied pageant and 
 arena of life, the unescapable lot of death. How by this new 
 thing life is illumined, enlarged, enriched; how death is van- 
 quished, disenvenomed, abolished; such is the spacious and 
 inclusive effect to which this access of good news, this success- 
 ful venture, reduces. St. Paul got it accurately right, after 
 all, when he summed it up in the words which so many times 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 287 
 
 come into our theme: "who hath abolished death, and hath 
 brought life and immortality to light through the gospel." The 
 light of life is here, our biometer and unit of measure; all that 
 remains, and that is a thing for world and eternity to compass, 
 is to explore and assimilate and disseminate it. 
 
 It is interesting to note in what sturdy, concrete, matter-of- 
 fact way these Galilean apostles set about accomplishing this 
 great new object to live for. One and all, they made it a 
 matter of the spirit, that initiative in man whose history we 
 have traced from twilight to noonday; but the spirit they recog- 
 nized was not an abstraction or a theory, but a present Person 
 and Helper, who was witnessing with their spirits, and who in 
 every juncture was taking of the things of Christ and showing 
 to them, showing them also things to come. Equally also in 
 a negative way, the spirit that they were moved to resist stood 
 out as a concrete foe to fight. The writer to the Hebrews, you 
 remember, so vividly aware of the long Jewish history, in which 
 through fear of death men were all their lifetime subject to 
 bondage, makes Christ's great act in taking flesh and blood 
 an act undertaken "that through death he might destroy him 
 that had the power of death, that is, the devil." If the power 
 of death reduces to Satanism, then here is a plain element of 
 personality on which to concentrate our fightings and antipa- 
 thies; we have found the vulnerable point in the very 
 king of terrors. No obscured issue here; no diffusion of evil 
 and death all through our system; we know in what spirit and 
 personality the power of death resides, and can direct our 
 forces to that point. So likewise St. James, writing to the 
 early communities of dispersed Jewish Christians, says, "Re- 
 sist the devil, and he will flee from you"; and our sturdy St. 
 Peter, figuring the foe as a roaring lion ranging for prey, bids 
 men resist him stedfast in the faith. St. John makes the 
 matter equally definite: the Son of God, he says, was mani- 
 fested that He might destroy the works of the devil; and St. 
 Paul, mindful of the inner subtleties of the conflict, warns his 
 readers that Satan has changed his tactics and has trans- 
 formed himself into an angel of light. I am not sure that we 
 
288 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 have gained greatly by letting our notions of spiritual issues 
 grow dim and abstract; perhaps for this very reason the re- 
 bellious, negative, denying spirit that is so prone to invade the 
 hearts of us all is all the more free to gain a foothold and give 
 too controlling tone to our life. There is power in the plain 
 instinctive resolve to define evil in personal terms, and hold 
 him as an alien outside our personality. When Jesus Himself 
 begins His career by going up into the wilderness, driven by 
 a holy spirit, on purpose to try issues with the devil, and when 
 in an absolute instinct of antipathy He says, "The prince of 
 this world cometh, and hath nothing in me," we feel that He 
 is fully as well armed against spiritual atrophy and death as 
 we, in our vague double-minded speculations, are likely to be. 
 There is real advantage in bringing the large issues of life to a 
 point where not only our mind, but as it were our senses, can 
 lay hold on them. It is the impulse of simple-minded men, 
 like these early disciples; and if we continue straight-seeing 
 we do not outgrow it. You remember how Tennyson has made 
 this very concreteness of insight, with its natural connotation 
 of religious forms, the basis of a warning addressed to those 
 who pride themselves on a more abstract and philosophical 
 faith. 
 
 thou that after toil and storm 
 
 Mayst seem to have reach'd a purer air, 
 Whose faith has centre everywhere, 
 
 Nor cares to fix itself to form. 
 
 Leave thou thy sister when she prays, 
 
 Her early Heaven, her happy views; 
 
 Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse 
 A life that leads melodious days. 
 
 Her faith thro' form is pure as thine, 
 
 Her hands are quicker unto good: 
 
 Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood 
 To which she links a truth divine! 
 
 See thou, that countest reason ripe 
 
 In holding by the law within, 
 
 Thou fail not in a world of sin, 
 And ev'n for want of such a type. 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 289 
 
 There is a kind of common sense about this putting of our 
 spiritual struggles and achievements into common-day terms 
 and forms that somehow appeals to our admiration; it makes 
 our deepest life an affair of our work and our visible world. 
 
 I am taking a peculiar way, you will perhaps urge, in set- 
 ting out to describe what I have proposed, the mind of St. John; 
 but perhaps the way is not so indirect, after all. For he too 
 is in this same trend of simplification; his preeminent charac- 
 teristic is, that he goes straight to the supreme issues of life 
 and death, faith and conduct, spirit and impulse, without in- 
 tervening glamours and colorings; defines terms in their ulti- 
 mate values. What makes his views of life so deep is not that 
 they are less simple than those of others, but that they are 
 more simple : they have the large, boundless simplicity of truth 
 absolute. But they are set squarely in the higher key and 
 idiom. To him the life of Christ was no longer the life of a 
 Galilean artisan whose venture of love and faith had such mar- 
 velous results; it was the life of the Son of God, nay, it was 
 the Word made flesh and tabernacling among us; and what 
 we beheld in Him was the glory as of the only-begotten of the 
 Father, full of grace and truth. The life that was in Him, 
 therefore, was the life absolute, pulsating with one vitality both 
 divine and human; and that life is the light of men, illumi- 
 nating and irradiating all the spirit and power that belongs 
 essentially to human life. If we would see what God would 
 be like, as expressed in terms of flesh and blood, here it actu- 
 ally is, moving among men for them to see and hear and handle, 
 appealing to men for their belief and worship and obedience. 
 We beheld His glory; the ideal has become real; the God 
 whose supreme unpronounceable name is reality, He who is, 
 has spelled His name in the letters of human life, has expressed 
 His nature in the terms of human deeds, and now we have 
 but to look at it and see if it is not so. The interest that we 
 take in such an Object is not the interest of past history, with 
 its details of time and place; not primarily the interest of wise 
 teachings and precepts of conduct; it is the interest of coming 
 face to face with the divine, and therefore of coming to the 
 
290 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 very centre and spirit of our own true life. "These are 
 written," he says of the signs of his gospel, "that ye might be- 
 lieve that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that be- 
 lieving ye might have life through his name." All this, you 
 see, deep as it is, is just the far-reaching depth that inheres 
 in a luminous transcendent fact, recognized as the greatest fact 
 that can smite itself into the life and history of men. It dis- 
 engages the fact, so to say, from its accidents of time and place 
 and nation and custom ; and instead of putting details together 
 and reasoning upon them and like the centurion deducing, 
 "Truly this was the Son of God," it treats the deduction as 
 already made; or rather, it takes the fact as so obvious, so 
 accordant with our highest ideals, that it does not need to be 
 submitted to logic and reasoning at all, it is its own evidence, 
 and needs only to be seen. Here is more than a historical fact, 
 more than a body of teaching, more than a ministry of signs 
 and wonders; here is the life absolute, the Life Indeed. In a 
 word, the mind of St. John, as revealed through his gospel and 
 epistles, is an intuitive mind, which sees the truth of things 
 at first hand, and needs no crutches of logic or philosophy to 
 evidence it or support it; a mind which ignores preliminary 
 processes of getting at truth, and fastens at once on the abso- 
 lute conclusion of the whole matter. So its view of the accom- 
 plished fact is not a deduction from visible premises; rather it 
 is like a large and self-evidencing vision. 
 
 Such a mind employs its own vocabulary, corresponding to 
 its own peculiar scale and range of conceptions. To under- 
 stand it, and to share our ideas with St. John's, we must move, 
 so to say, in his atmosphere, must realize the scenery of his 
 super-earthly, absolute world. It is like conforming our 
 imagination to the ideas of a poet, in order to get the values 
 of his poetry. 
 
 Wer den Dichter will verstehen 
 Muss in Dichters Lande gehen, 
 
 is Goethe's way of expressing it, 
 
 Who the poet will understand, 
 He must go to the poet's land. 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 291 
 
 But when we get there, and when we think ourselves into the 
 world of St. John, we find his ideas homogeneous, correlated 
 and coordinated with each other, and accurately adjusted to 
 his large conception of things. He moves in his world as 
 simply and naturally as we in ours. That the things of Christ 
 look differently to him from the other gospel writers, and that 
 he has recalled other and deeper strains of Christ's teaching, 
 is perfectly consistent with the fact which Jesus said would 
 accompany the coming of the Spirit, namely that the Spirit 
 would take the things of Christ and show them to men, bringing 
 all things to their remembrance ; the difference is, that St. John 
 apprehends the central spirit of Christ's being more intimately, 
 more at first hand, more according to the sacred ideal which, 
 being the holiest and secretest thing in Jesus' life, would nat- 
 urally be divulged only to the most sympathetic insight. So 
 his memory and interpretation of things is more penetrative; 
 he reports what he has had the inner ear to hear and the closer 
 intimacy to gather. Thus it is that the Bible places him be- 
 fore us; he was the disciple whom Jesus loved. And the things 
 he draws from the treasury of Christ are all in keeping with 
 this conception of him; not a line out of character or out of 
 perspective. The poetic justice of the case is complete. The 
 mind of St. John, you know, is the battle-ground of the myopic, 
 unpoetic, unspiritual critics; they deem that such a way of 
 portraying the Life Indeed must have taken about two centuries 
 to evolve, and that men could not come to think so until they 
 had poked their prosaic noses into gnostic books and Neo- 
 Platonic books and the speculations of Philo and the maun- 
 derings of pedants and book-worms. It is a curious example of 
 how each man imputes himself; that is the only way they can 
 conceive of getting at the involvements of a transcendent truth, 
 because it is their way. But this report of Jesus does not look 
 like the sort of thing that you get out of parchment and phi- 
 losophy; it is too vitally inwoven with the inmost fibre of 
 Christ's life for that. The scripture account of the case is 
 more natural, more in the line of least resistance, when it says, 
 "This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote 
 
292 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 these things: and we know that his testimony is true." And if 
 it be objected that such deep views of life are beyond the scope 
 of a fisherman from Galilee, well, the deepest soundings of 
 human nature that literature has given us were not beyond 
 the plummet of a youth from Stratford-on-Avon, whose words 
 for three centuries have remained the standing enigma of the 
 prosaists who would account for them; and have we less data 
 to work on here, in a pure-hearted young man who at the 
 very beginning of Jesus' ministry was asking "Rabbi, where 
 dwellest thou?" who was with Him in the holy mount and the 
 mysterious garden, who leaned on His breast at supper, and 
 who never denied or deserted Him in His uttermost extremity? 
 Put such a man, no matter if he hasn't a university degree, a 
 man imbued with his nation's purest ideas, a man of immedi- 
 ately apprehensive, penetrative, intuitive mind, a man of 
 Boanerges' temperament ready to call down fire from heaven 
 on any spirit that would not yield instant faith and allegiance, 
 put such a man before the majestic pageant of life that was 
 unfolding itself there in Palestine, the greatest venture of the 
 manhood spirit that ever was enacted; and would it take him 
 two centuries to apprehend what it meant? Whenever these 
 words of John were written, we have them to reckon with and 
 account for. Are they likelier to have come by the slow, grop- 
 ing, deductive way, the way of the library and parchment and 
 the dust of subterranean scholarship, or by the way that Scrip- 
 ture itself grounds and avers, the flash of rapturous discovery 
 and intuition? It is not a mere question of how and when all 
 this got into the canon; that is the least significant part of it. 
 It is rather the question of eyes to see and a mind to appre- 
 hend and interpret. And I find the matter no more difficult, 
 as attributed to the son of Zebedee, fisherman though he was, 
 than is an analogous fact, as attributed in modern times to 
 the son of a wool-dealer John Shakespeare; and the way seems 
 far clearer than the way which pushes it two centuries away, 
 into the dullest period of our annals. It shows us the Life In- 
 deed working an immediate, not postponed effect; or postponed 
 at least only until the ripened mind of the aged St. John could 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 293 
 
 assemble its recollections, and coordinate them, and weave 
 them in with their transcendent meanings. That is the way 
 the Scripture represents it: John's gospel, the latest written, 
 coming in to supplement men's too narrow views and correct 
 their myopic errors. You remember how Browning, in his 
 poetic portrayal of St. John's death-bed, puts into words his 
 account of the case: St. John is represented as speaking of the 
 storm of doubts and objections that raged round his old age, 
 clamoring for explanation and craving for new and more cogent 
 grounds for faith. 
 
 I never thought to call down fire on such, 
 
 Or, as in wonderful and early days, 
 
 Pick up the scorpion, tread the serpent dumb; 
 
 But patient stated much of the Lord's life 
 
 Forgotten or misdelivered, and let it work: 
 
 Since much that at the first, in deed and word, 
 
 Lay simply and sufficiently exposed, 
 
 Had grown (or else my soul was grown to match, 
 
 Fed through such years, familiar with such light, 
 
 Guarded and guided still to see and speak) 
 
 Of new significance and fresh result; 
 
 What first were guessed as points, I now knew stars, 
 
 And named them in the Gospel I have writ. 
 
 It is an old man's recollections, but also an old man's long- 
 seasoned insight and wisdom; not only the memory, ranging 
 over the three wonderful years of its richest field, but the clear- 
 seeing, meditative, intuitive mind of St. John. 
 
 All of St. John's words correspond accurately to this cast of 
 mind. The most salient characteristic of them is the note of 
 absoluteness that pervades them; they deal with truth abso- 
 lute, they speak in its idiom. To him the reality that has come 
 in to fill the world of manhood is not the promise of salvation, 
 or prophecy of an eventual life eternal, but just life, without 
 modification or limitation, life absolute and full-orbed, pul- 
 sating through worlds seen and unseen alike. "I am the life," 
 he makes Christ say, not am working to secure it; and accord- 
 ing to this conception he defines life: "This is life eternal," he 
 reports Jesus as saying to the Father, "that they might know 
 thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." 
 
294 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 All the elements of man's existence and duty he states not in 
 terms of process or struggle or slow cure of sin or gradual 
 growth, but as it were in terms of completed evolution. The 
 world he habitually moves in is the world risen with the per- 
 fected life of Christ. He it is, you know, who reports the con- 
 versation with Nicodemus, wherein is revealed the necessity 
 and nature of the second birth; from him it is that we have the 
 conversation with the woman of Samaria, wherein man's wor- 
 ship of God is defined as the spontaneous impulse of spirit and 
 truth, and man's true power in the world as like that of a 
 well of water, pouring forth cheer, and refreshing, and spring- 
 ing up into everlasting life; from him the pregnant words 
 about making the will of God our meat and drink, and know- 
 ing of the doctrine by willing what God wills, and obtaining 
 freedom of spirit by knowing the truth. He it is who pre- 
 serves to us Jesus' supreme declaration of His purpose in 
 coming into the world, that He might be king of men by bear- 
 ing witness to the truth; and he it is who records those wonder- 
 ful words of counsel and explanation and prayer by which on 
 that last sad evening He would adjust their souls to the coming 
 crisis, leaving with them His joy and peace, that their joy 
 might be full. All belongs to the homogeneous idiom, the de- 
 tailed exploration, as it were, of manhood life as an absolute 
 rounded thing, a solved problem, beyond the invasion of bond- 
 age and error and sin. It is what life is, adult and fully 
 evolved; we could not conceive it higher or essentially other, 
 though it were transferred to heaven. Here is the Life Indeed, 
 which through so many centuries of dimness and struggle and 
 growth has been advancing to fulness and rounded truth of 
 being. 
 
 Now we must not omit to note, as we pass along, to what 
 simplicity of terms, after all, these tremendous ideas are re- 
 duced. This is not the abstract interpretation of a gnostic 
 theologian but the forthright conception of a sincere Galilean, 
 telling us of another Galilean's life and innermost ideas. The 
 very figures he uses are startling, sometimes almost repulsive, 
 in their plainness. St. John it is, you remember, who preserves 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 295 
 
 to us that cannibal conception of eating the flesh and drinking 
 the blood of the Son of man; no philosopher in the world, we 
 may roundly say, would ever have put it so; and yet how 
 effectually is thus revealed what it means to get the power of 
 the new life thoroughly incorporate with our blood and breath. 
 He it is who identifies the most inner values of life with the 
 simplest acts and experiences: reducing it to terms of eating 
 bread, and drinking water, and walking in daylight, and bear- 
 ing fruit like branches of a vine, and following, like sheep, the 
 voice of a Shepherd, and entering into a door and finding pas- 
 ture. With all these everyday figures, too, St. John's vocabu- 
 lary is throughout large and elemental: the terms light, life, 
 love, truth, world-filling conceptions, are the controlling terms 
 of his portrayal of things; he uses them with all the easy as- 
 surance and consistency with which we use the technical terms 
 of a science or a philosophy. "This then is the message," he 
 announces as the starting-point of what he would maintain in 
 his First Epistle, "which we have heard of him, and declare 
 unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." 
 It is as if he would describe the creation of a new world, with 
 its initial decree "Let there be light," like the primal decree of 
 old, except that the light and He who commands it are identi- 
 fied as one; and as if henceforth all the new creation were 
 resolved into the question of walking and growing and bearing 
 fruit in the kindly power of the light. "He that loveth his 
 brother," the epistle goes on to say, "abideth in the light, and 
 there is none occasion of stumbling in him. But he that hateth 
 his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and 
 knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath 
 blinded his eyes." A simple elemental matter this; as ele- 
 mental as instinct and the rudimentary life of nature. Then 
 again, declaring that "God is love," he makes a practical iden- 
 tification too bold and direct for a philosopher to dare, that 
 "he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." 
 It is the one bold, assured, luminous step from premise to con- 
 clusion: dwell in love, let that be your central vitality, con- 
 trolling all your relations near and distant, filling your world 
 
296 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 full, as it is in you to apprehend your world, and the problem 
 of your living is solved. That is a matter not of logic and 
 deduction, not of philosophy and speculation, not of the mere 
 intellect, but of the spirit and the elemental being; it lays hold 
 of our sympathies and antipathies, as these have been tem- 
 pered and educated by love and a divinely directed life. The 
 tests which he applies to life, and if you will look at his first 
 epistle you will find it full of such tests reduced to plainest 
 issues, are one and all tests of the spirit. "Beloved," he says, 
 "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are 
 of God." Though so frankly intuitive, his mind is not ram- 
 bling and blindly adventurous; he it was, you remember, who 
 in the earlier days of his unregulated impulse, when he was 
 ready to denounce incontinently any who did not see just as 
 he did, incurred from Jesus Himself the reproof, "Ye know 
 not what spirit ye are of." But the sojourn in the intimate 
 presence of the Life Indeed, and the long succeeding years of 
 meditation and inner growth, had made his tests luminous and 
 sure; like the man born blind, whose recovery he records, he 
 could say, "One thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I 
 see." This insight, which is just one phase of a larger life- 
 filling energy, carries with it also the same absolute, antipa- 
 thetic, supremely victorious power of dealing with the 
 sinfulness of human nature; it is to him like the spiritual 
 prepossession that shuts all of us absolutely out of the lower 
 temptations and crimes; sin is as alien to all the pulsations of 
 his being as arson or highway robbery is to us; "whosoever is 
 born of God," he says, not opens a new account wherein as 
 soon as sin is committed it is forgiven, but "doth not commit 
 sin" at all. "We know," he says again, "that whosoever is 
 born of God sinneth not; but he that is begotten of God 
 keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not." In 
 a word, he is defining life, in all its powers and crises, accord- 
 ing to the new idiom; there is a kind of reversal of our every- 
 day view whereby, according to his intuitive insight, he is 
 describing things as they look, and as they essentially are, as 
 approached from the divine side of the veil. In such spiritual 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 297 
 
 scenery it is, he virtually says, that we, to whom is given power 
 to become sons of God, are empowered to move and have our 
 being. And the education we get here is of the same absolute 
 strain; it is just progressive insight, coexisting with progressive 
 purity and strength, as we advance toward the supreme goal 
 which, being unseen, is still unknown except in its essential 
 power. St. John it is, you remember, who gives what is after 
 all the most simple, and yet the most searching test of the 
 life to come: "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it 
 doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that, when 
 he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as 
 he is." Eyes to see, coordinate with beings to assimilate and 
 appropriate the highest manifestation of life; that is the sum 
 and crown of it. 
 
 If we were studying St. John's mind psychologically, we 
 should say there is a prevailing note of the feminine in it: it 
 goes straight to the heart and root of the matter; it needs no 
 crutches of logic and groping premise because it instinctively 
 feels what is truth, approaches the ultimate meanings of things 
 by the tactile sympathy of insight and vision. To such a mind 
 the dull processes of proof, and equally the warping and im- 
 peding motions of sin and evil, are practically eliminated: the 
 divine-human manhood, for us as for Christ, just is, and that 
 is all there is to note; it is, and we are, and here is the iden- 
 tity, put here on earth, and moving toward its unseen goal of 
 insight and realization. From such intuitive strain of mind 
 it is that we most truly derive our best impulses to growth and 
 pure progress ; it is the alluring and assuring power of our new 
 world. This it is that Goethe has in mind in that famous sum- 
 mary of his, at the end of his greatest poem: 
 
 Alles Vergangliche 
 1st nur ein Gleichnis; 
 Das Unzulangliche, 
 Hier wird's Ereignis; 
 Das Unbeschreibliche, 
 Hier ist's getan; 
 Das Ewig-Weibliche 
 Zieht uns hinan. 
 
298 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 This too is written, like St. John's words, as if things were 
 seen from the holy mount, the other side of the veil: Every- 
 thing transitory is only a parable; the inadequate, here it be- 
 comes actual event; the undescribable, ineffable, here it is 
 done; the eternal womanly, which loves and feels and sees at 
 first hand, this influence it is which allures, draws us on- 
 ward, to light and life. It is not by logic that we are saved, or 
 philosophy, these are but the support that life must devise for 
 our dim groping intellect; not by mere fightings with evil ten- 
 dency and obedience to law and earning reward or escaping 
 punishment; these are but relics of an older and childish dis- 
 pensation; it is by walking in the noonday light of life, walk- 
 ing forward and upward in the eternally feminine might of 
 straight insight, and faith, and love. 
 
 Now it is of crowning interest to note how such an absolute, 
 intuitive mind as this of St. John's will confront the universal 
 fact of death. To this, after all, this event which to Old Tes- 
 tament saints was the king of terrors and which to New Tes- 
 tament saints, exultant as they are, is still the last enemy to 
 be destroyed, to this we must come, and adjust our new view 
 of things to it. And I think it is mainly to clear up this enigma 
 that St. John has added to former accounts his record of the 
 raising of Lazarus. Tennyson has blamed him for not com- 
 pleting the story and telling what Lazarus saw beyond the 
 tomb during that four days' sojourn; it would so reassure us, 
 he says, by telling what it is to die. 
 
 Behold a man rais'd up by Christ! 
 
 The rest remaineth tmreveal'd; 
 
 He told it not; or something seal'd 
 The lips of that Evangelist. 
 
 Why, this is just what the story does tell us; or rather it tells 
 us what it really is to rise from death, and this is so much 
 greater, so much more truly in the uninterrupted current of 
 life, that death actually disappears, is abolished. To rise from 
 death is not to be resuscitated, as Lazarus was, with all the 
 old organism and powers intact, ready to sit down again at 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 299 
 
 table, and take up again the old relations, and have all the 
 process of existing and dying to go through again; if this were 
 all there is in resurrection, as Browning has described in his 
 poem of Karshish, it would simply leave Lazarus bewildered 
 with a double consciousness, trying to adjust the reestablished 
 currents of the old world with the prematurely realized glories 
 of the new. Nor is resurrection simply waking up at some 
 future indefinite time, when the list of candidates is so fully 
 made up that all can enter upon the restored life together. 
 Martha already had this hope for her dead brother. "I know," 
 she said, "that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the 
 last day." And the tremendous answer that Jesus gave, the 
 answer that is repeated at all our burial services, corrected this 
 crude notion by saying, not that men who lived the new life 
 of faith should rise again, but that they should not die at all: 
 "I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, 
 though he were dead yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth 
 and believeth in me shall never die." Here is the supreme 
 absolute of John and Jesus; as the crown and culmination of 
 the long history we have traced, death is regarded as actually 
 and literally abolished. "Said I not unto thee," Jesus answers 
 to Martha's last shrinking objection, "that if thou wouldest 
 believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?" Here it is; 
 but its inner guise is not what Martha deemed; it had to come 
 to such minds as hers, perhaps, by a negative, by a crude mir- 
 acle of resuscitation showing first what the grand uprise of life 
 is not; and so perhaps it has to prove itself to most of us, 
 tangled up as we are in the life of the senses and in the sur- 
 face shows of things; but to an intuitive mind like St. John's, 
 which devoted a lifetime of meditation to its large meanings, 
 this glory of God, this ideal made real, brought to remem- 
 brance the central mind of Christ, and death was seen not as 
 circumvented or evaded but essentially abolished. O friends: 
 have we not been naming the wrong thing death? We have 
 given the name not to the thing itself but to the symbol, to 
 that physical event which with all things transitory is only a 
 parable. And our fears and doubts have clustered about the 
 
300 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 symbol ; to this we have closed our eyes in dread, or endeavored 
 to meet it in stoicism and bravado, while the thing itself, which 
 is our own selfish refusal of the spirit of life, has been to us 
 a thing unreal, with which we have played, or which we have 
 doubted, as if it were only a non-existent fancy. And when we 
 see and deal with the thing itself, vanquishing it by our faith 
 and will, as vitalized by the spirit of Christ, we find that im- 
 mortality is a present fact, that mortality is swallowed up of 
 life. Such is the culmination that the working consciousness 
 of St. John, the intuitive mind that sees the end and knows the 
 good, has labored, from the youth of his wonderful vision to 
 the ripened wisdom and insight of old age, to make plain to us. 
 
 IV. THE MIND OF SAINT PAUL 
 
 The mind of St. John, scholars tell us, is the mind of a 
 mystic; an accurate enough designation, though I have not 
 used the word hitherto, preferring rather to speak in terms of 
 what the word means, the thing itself. Men have an invet- 
 erate habit of giving a thing a name, and thereby putting it 
 as it were into a pigeon-hole, out of the sight and present grip 
 of life, where it is available only as casual occasion rises for 
 reference. To call a man a mystic is virtually to remove him 
 from our everyday and prosaic world into a region where sup- 
 posedly the landscape is just the scenery of the beatific vision, 
 with which only exceptional natures can be familiar, and they 
 only by transporting themselves through imaginative contem- 
 plation into something ecstatic, unworldly, unreal. Thus we 
 conveniently take such a man out of our milieu of concrete 
 experience and stow him away in his pigeon-hole. But when 
 we come to think of it, our real life, the central individuality 
 which we can share with no other person, reduces itself not to 
 external facts but to inner meanings. No two of us are just 
 alike; no two of us have worlds just alike. There is relatively 
 more of the mystic in some of us, relatively less in others; the 
 minds of some of us approximate to that of St. John, to a 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 301 
 
 mind that sees splendors and profundities where others see 
 only what the retina can picture. We never can tell what life 
 is to our neighbor; his inner seeing self is to us a sealed book, 
 which can never be opened until we know as also we are known. 
 Life, for every one of us, is what our inmost personality makes 
 it. You remember how Stevenson has set forth this truth in 
 his immensely suggestive essay, "The Lantern Bearers"; in 
 which, among others, he peers into the mind of a miser, with 
 the dreams and ambitions and delights that cluster round his 
 crazy clutch for gold. "And so with others," he says, "who 
 do not live by bread alone, but by some cherished and perhaps 
 fantastic pleasure; who are meat salesmen to the external eye, 
 and possibly to themselves are Shakespeares, Napoleons, or 
 Beethovens; who have not one virtue to rub against another 
 in the field of acitve life, and yet perhaps, in the life of con- 
 templation, sit with the saints. We see them on the street, and 
 we can count their buttons; but heaven knows in what they 
 pride themselves! heaven knows where they have set their 
 treasure!" So it is. The soul of man is a seething alembic 
 of vital and creative forces; a living potency of poetry and 
 vision and heaven. How many of us, do you suppose, 
 may essentially be mystics, eating, drinking, toiling, planning, 
 as we all have to do here on earth, and yet all the while 
 walking as it were on air, in a sphere beyond the invasion of 
 sense? 
 
 We call St. John a mystic; and when we come to square the 
 term with what he says and does we find simply that he dwells, 
 so to say, at one pole of our common life, the pole where ideals 
 have weathered the impeding austerities of struggle and logic 
 and become realities. His mysticism does not connote some- 
 thing dreamy and ecstatic; rather it is a state of mind crystal 
 clear and certain. It gazes on the finished structure of life 
 at first hand, as it comes complete from the Master's shaping, 
 with the litter and the scaffolding cleared away. To him the 
 battle of achieving life is fought and won, the sins and childish 
 crudeness of an old era put away in a forgotten limbo to which 
 his spirit is henceforth for ever dead. To him it remains now 
 
3 02 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 only to walk in a radiant new light, the light of men, and to 
 explore the splendors and vitalizing powers of the light. What 
 such an attitude of mind, placed as it is in history, has to im- 
 part to us, is surely of untold value. For in this intuitive de- 
 termination the mind of St. John is also the mind of Christ, a 
 motion as it were straight from the breast on which he leaned 
 at supper; the self -same mind indeed which St. Paul says we 
 also have, in our scope and degree; though most of us must 
 still be Marthas, cumbered with much serving, rather than 
 Marys, sitting serene and satisfied at the feet of the Life In- 
 deed. With a great sum the most of us must obtain our free- 
 dom. St. John was free born. 
 
 When, however, we enter into the mind of St. Paul, we find 
 ourselves in a very different region, a region more like the one 
 in which the ordinary man must move, and it may be for that 
 reason more genial and stimulating. A mind his, not less pene- 
 trative of the secrets of being than that of St. John; equally 
 capable of immediate vision, though his times of vision were 
 not his habitual way of thinking, as of a mystic, but those 
 rare occasions when his soul mounted up with wings as eagles 
 do. One such he refers to as the turning-point of his whole 
 life, that vision on the way to Damascus, when he saw Christ 
 face to face, in a glory that left him blinded but filled with a 
 grand new purpose. Another such, in which however he would 
 not glory, transported him to the third heaven, where he heard 
 unspeakable words impossible for a man to utter. It is note- 
 worthy that in all these visions and revelations which Scrip- 
 ture records, the recipients took the matter just the other way 
 round from our way. They never questioned, as we do, the 
 objective reality of what they saw and heard; to them the 
 scene on the mount of Transfiguration, and the interviews after 
 Christ's resurrection, and the sight of their Lord ascending be- 
 yond the cloud, and the vision on the way to Damascus, and 
 the mystery of the third heaven, and the apocalypse of him 
 who was in the spirit on the Lord's day, were one and all au- 
 thentic glimpses of that which most deeply is, though they 
 might be uncertain, as St. Paul was, whether they themselves, 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 303 
 
 when they saw such things, were in the body or out of the 
 body. To us all such things, whether told in Scripture or al- 
 leged in modern experience, are unreal, not to say uncanny; 
 subjective we call it, hypnotic, a gleam from our subliminal 
 consciousness, not such revelation as can be brought to evi- 
 dence in a court of justice. We never doubt that we are in the 
 body, and we demand that everything that would claim actu- 
 ality and authenticity also be in the body. Rightly enough, 
 perhaps; our psychology has changed, though human nature 
 remains; and it may be worth while to remind ourselves that 
 more rigidly scientific conceptions, and more up to date, are 
 not ipso facto more correct, and there are regions of our per- 
 sonality and its hidden connections yet to be explored. But 
 at any rate to return from this digression St. Paul's is 
 not a mind to glory in mystic states and visions; and what he 
 has to tell us about life and its essential elements is made up, 
 like our insights and reasonings, on other grounds. We have 
 seen men of unsophisticated mind reporting what they alleged 
 was fact and not cunningly devised fable; we have seen in 
 St. John one who by masterly intuition identified what he saw 
 with the greatest fact that can be revealed to men; and now in 
 St. Paul we see one who, equally based on historic fact, applies 
 to this the deductive mind, the mind of reason and logical proc- 
 esses, and determines its relation with man as he is, and with 
 the concepts of a storied and thinking past. 
 
 To enter with any detail into the natural history of the 
 mind of St. Paul, admittedly one of the most colossal minds 
 of history, would be quite beyond our scope or occasion here; 
 we merely wish to see, as we did in the case of St. John, how 
 his type of mind places him, so to say, in relation to this great 
 problem that we are tracing, the problem of the Life Indeed. 
 St. Peter and St. John were Galileans, as was also our Lord; 
 they came from a region and atmosphere where the rigid old 
 Jewish traditions sat more lightly on men's minds, and where 
 there were fewer clogs of prejudice to keep them from leaping 
 forward into a new revelation of things. The writer of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews inherited the priestly and sacerdotal 
 
3 04 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 tradition; he thought in its terms; but this, which was in itself 
 a symbol, an allegory, a prophecy, was no clog to the new 
 view; rather, as soon as its fulfilment came in sight, it gave 
 him wings of faith, so that he could without effort enter into 
 the holiest by a new and living way. St. Paul's mind, on the 
 other hand, was laden, both by heritage and education, with 
 an accumulation of traditions, interpretations, legal and na- 
 tional presuppositions, which nothing short of a colossal mind 
 could resolve, but which, once resolved and concentrated on 
 the new life, must needs be of untold significance to the cause; 
 we may almost say the fate of the new cause, as a system and 
 sweet reasonableness, lay trembling in his masterly hand. If 
 he had reached the point where a vision on the Damascus road 
 would set his susceptible soul right, what a stroke of resurrec- 
 tion genius let us say it with reverence it was on the 
 part of the Master to vouchsafe it! St. Paul was brought up 
 a Pharisee, according to the strictest sect of the Jewish faith, 
 trained in all the lore of scribes and doctors and rabbis, 
 moulded in the rigid requirements of law and oracle, no ele- 
 ment of .the old dispensation lacking. The whole pattern of 
 the twilight stratum, from the beginning up to the fulness of 
 the time, found in him as it were an instrument, a working- 
 tool, shaped to its hand. But he had not become congealed in 
 the austerity and pedantry of the old. There was in him a 
 tremendous fire and zeal, a soaring poetic constructive nature, 
 so that when he became Christian he could have insights and 
 speak with tongues beyond them all; a steady conscientious- 
 ness, too, which compelled him to act on convictions new or 
 old, and made him dare to correct himself and innovate, chang- 
 ing from a persecutor to an apostle. All this cast of mind, 
 susceptible as it was to growth and change, was no wavering 
 or double mind; it was too solidly based for that; rather it 
 was grandly consistent with itself, a mind that was strong to 
 shoulder aside its huge impediments and make its way to its 
 goal of faith and life. 
 
 Two great things St. Paul had to do, in his apostolic mission 
 to the world; either of them work for a mind of the highest 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 305 
 
 order: to become free from the law, thus settling the world's 
 account with the old system of things; and to open the way 
 of life to the Gentiles, thus making the new pulsation of faith 
 universal. No one but he had the peculiar spiritual combina- 
 tion to compass these. St. Peter, strong rock of the church as 
 he was and sturdy in his place, had not mind enough, nor train- 
 ing; you remember how, even after his vision of the great 
 sheet let down, showing him with regard to the heathen that 
 nothing was common or unclean, he could not commit himself 
 whole-souled to the new way thus opened, and reverted to a 
 Jewish and legal Christianity. St. John, the Sir Galahad of 
 the apostolic circle, dwelt in a mystic contemplative region 
 of his own; he had, as it were, seen the Grail face to face, and 
 was rapt away from men's earthly errors and conflicts, an 
 idealist rather than a struggler, 
 
 And now his place desires him in vain, 
 However they may crown him otherwhere. 
 
 The Galileans must take to themselves the aid of the Pharisee; 
 for there is a great work to be done, a world-work rooted in 
 all the evolutionary past; and there must be left no loose 
 joints, no crude bungled expedients ; and in the orderly growth 
 yet to come all the contributing elements must be accounted 
 for. The empire of law, inconclusive as it is for life, is not 
 for nothing, and it can pass only by fulfilment. The Jewish 
 exclusiveness, necessary though it was for a time, cannot throw 
 open its gates to anarchy and licence, for the sake of making 
 itself acceptable to the Gentiles; there must still be an eternal 
 separateness and antipathy to whatever is unholy and impure. 
 Hence the place we have found for the reconciling constructive 
 mind of St. Paul. 
 
 But what we are concerned with here, in pursuance of our 
 general subject, is, to note how life and immortality come to 
 light, to a mind shaped and trained like St. Paul's; how its 
 large elements reveal themselves in order and relation, and 
 what attitude of living and belief is thereby engendered. And 
 as we look at it, in comparison with that of St. John, the first 
 
306 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 thing that strikes us is, how much more closely it corresponds 
 to the life we all have to live, our ordinary life of hopes and 
 fears, of struggle and suffering and aspiration, of gradually 
 forming ideals and insights, of actual experience, so rich yet 
 often so baffling. St. John does us good by holding before our 
 eyes, serene and undisturbed above us, the region of the purer 
 air and the eternally won victory. St. Paul does us good by 
 showing us the conflict still on, the slow shaping of means to 
 ends, the rising into assured strength and faith through the dis- 
 cipline of toil and suffering. The light is the same perfect 
 light of life; it comes to the self -same evolution and revelation 
 in the end; but with St. John walking in the light has become 
 as it were an instinctive thing, wherein all our tendencies and 
 powers join in sweet harmony and consent; while with St. 
 Paul the rebellious elements must be subdued and tamed, and 
 the experiences in plain sight before us must be fully reckoned 
 with, and the splendors of the unseen must dawn upon us by 
 degrees. While St. John, with his powerful intuition, leaps to 
 the end and ignores the slow steps of process, St. Paul, with 
 his load of tradition and bodily infirmity, and with a mind 
 that must deduce things from point to point, is still in the 
 thick of the process, clearing away the obstructing clouds and 
 fogs. 
 
 For one thing, St. Paul must stay to wrestle with the prob- 
 lem of righteousness, that ideal of the law of being; and in 
 the same conflict he must have dealings with the law itself, 
 which has become to him a thing not Mosaic merely but cos- 
 mic and elemental. And as his exacting, conscientious nature 
 looks into it, he makes a great discovery: namely, that in the 
 nature of the case and of man the law is an impossible thing. 
 It cannot be kept. However athletic the man may be to train 
 himself in the observance of it, his sinful will or weakness will 
 break loose somewhere; he will transgress or come short, and 
 offending in one point will manifest the alien spirit and so be 
 guilty of all. To cherish the only ideal worthy of a perfect 
 law necessitates this, saying nothing of the corruption and in- 
 firmity of man. Like Arthur's ideal for his knights, so his 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 307 
 
 ideal righteousness, imperative as it is, has become unattain- 
 able: 
 
 For the King 
 
 Will bind thee by such vows, as is a shame 
 A man should not be bound by, yet the which 
 No man can keep. 
 
 Besides this too, he finds a law of sin in his members, warring 
 against the law of his mind, and bringing him into captivity. 
 St. Paul was too spiritual, too penetrative to remain a typical 
 Pharisee; he never could have stood in the Temple, like that 
 Pharisee of the parable, and thanked God that he was not as 
 other men are. The innate corruption and limitation that is 
 in all men he saw and felt and acknowledged; he put himself 
 by the side of the most degraded, in that category where all 
 are included under sin, if by any power of insight, looking from 
 that common depth, he might discover light and life. And 
 one of his two great achievements, as I have noted, is to have 
 become free from this impossible law, this body of death. He 
 discovers this freedom not by anarchy, not by licence, not by 
 any sort of indifference to righteousness, but by the access of 
 a higher power of life. "The law of the spirit of life in Christ 
 Jesus," he says, "hath made me free from the law of sin and 
 death." This is his grand solution, whereby in every man's 
 soul the battle is fought out, and the victory won by a power 
 not our own, yet truly our own, for it is the spirit of highest 
 manhood. 
 
 No one reaches greater heights of triumphant, exultant life, 
 no one brings forth more abundant fruits of the spirit, than 
 does St. Paul; yet about it all there is the note of effort, van- 
 quishing of untoward elements, vigilant watchfulness and 
 overcoming. "Walk in the spirit," he says, "and ye shall not 
 fulfil the lusts of the flesh"; but you see the lusts of the flesh 
 are there, in fell working potency; to be subdued not as St. 
 John would do and as Jesus did, by the sheer impact of an- 
 tipathy, but by the expulsive power of a new affection taking 
 up and preempting the field. It is a strategy, a directed battle 
 of life. So, as compared with St. John's tranquil ideal, we may 
 
308 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 say that instead of walking calm and holy as a perfected new 
 man St. Paul must first kill the old man. There is a sternness 
 and peremptoriness about this idea which comports well with 
 St. Paul's fiery turbulent spirit. The figure of death, not only 
 of putting our evil propensities to death but of ourselves de- 
 terminately dying to what is alien to us, plays quite a part in 
 St. Paul's thinking; we are not merely to pity ourselves as 
 naturally sinful but candidates for healing and forgiveness; 
 we are rather to take heroic measures with our whole inner 
 nature, are to reckon ourselves dead to sin but alive to 
 righteousness. In this new energy of the spirit we are to enact 
 in ourselves, so to say, the great elemental drama of life and 
 death, strenuous, determinate; with the triumph of newness 
 of life is to be coordinated the grim tragedy of the death of 
 the old man. 
 
 Just so it is, too, that St. Paul approaches the life and min- 
 istry of Christ. To him, you know, that life was not a subject 
 for detailed biography but a rounded solution of things, an 
 idea; he was an apostle born, as he says, out of due time, and 
 did not know Christ after the flesh. This was to his advan- 
 tage, perhaps, in his work of universalizing the gospel; for as 
 the world grew older, and customs changed, men could not 
 take, as the first disciples did, the naive and childlike way of 
 following the steps of an example; they must take rather the 
 adult way of living in the same spirit of love and faith. And 
 this is how St. Paul apprehends Christ. Of the specific events 
 of Christ's life his spirit fastens especially on the death and 
 resurrection; these are truths for every man to incorporate 
 in his being; but he does not dissociate these two, as St. John 
 virtually does; to him resurrection is resurrection from the 
 dead. If we had only St. John's ideal to go by, we might al- 
 most gather that the uprise of life was designed to be just a 
 kind of melting into the next stage of being, the unveiling of 
 a glory, like the transfiguration of Christ, without any conno- 
 tation of antecedent death at all. But this, however true it 
 may be spiritually, remains necessarily a very unreal thing to 
 us here in the body, who with all our potencies of spiritual 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACr 309 
 
 achievement, still have physical death to reckon with. St. 
 Paul, however, takes death and resurrection together; one 
 must rise out of the other; one derives its worth and stamina 
 from the other. There must be effort and strenuousness and 
 sacrifice to correspond to the glory and rapture of the uprise. 
 It was in this way, rather than after the flesh, that St. Paul 
 aspired to know Christ; it was for this kind of knowledge that 
 he counted all other things as relatively contemptible. "That 
 I may know him," he says, "and the power of his resurrection, 
 and the fellowship of his sufferings; being made conformable 
 unto his death, if by any means I might attain unto the resur- 
 rection of the dead." He had a positive appetency for all the 
 hard things that lay in the road to such a culmination; for the 
 tribulations which, because, through the wholesome discipline 
 of patience, experience, and hope, they led eventually to the 
 shedding abroad of the love of God in our hearts, he could 
 glory in; even for some glorious opportunity, in his own flesh, 
 to fill out the sufferings of Christ. Thus through that same 
 spirit of life his fervent endeavor was to create a Christ within 
 his own energizing turbulent nature. He has much to say of 
 the death of Christ; he has theories, more or less vague and 
 rabbinic, of what is called atonement. As we compare his 
 words on this matter with each other we cannot say he worked 
 his thoughts on it quite clear and luminous; but on one point 
 he is positive and strenuous: Christ died, not merely that we 
 might live, but that we might die the same kind of death, in 
 the same spirit of sacrifice, of love to men, and faith in the 
 regenerative power of human nature. If He laid down His 
 life that He might take it again, and in so doing take all the 
 fulness of manhood with it, so also the spirit of Christ- 
 like manhood should impel us to do; it is our business not 
 to be mere beneficiaries of Christ but uttermost reproducers 
 of Him. 
 
 The same conception of things shows very significantly in 
 his attitude toward the majestic ideal of righteousness, the 
 righteousness which is of faith, as contrasted with the old 
 righteousness, which is of the law. The righteousness which 
 
310 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 is of the law reduces to a very simple and obvious thing: the 
 man who doeth these things shall live by them; that is plain 
 enough, and that is sufficing. But here comes in his tremen- 
 dous discovery that the law is an impossibility; the trouble is 
 you cannot truly do these things. Express life in terms 'of 
 doing, of work and wage, and you come to a deadlock; your 
 power runs out; you have not life enough to fulfil the ideal of 
 a law which expands to a thing so impossibly holy and just 
 and good. You must have a new access of power, of the spirit 
 of life. And now when that spirit takes possession of you and 
 puts you into a wholly new attitude to things, the attitude of 
 initiative, venture, faith, how shall it work out its problem of 
 righteousness? St. Paul has shown us this, in a passage which 
 has always been too hard a nut for the commentators to crack. 
 Let us look at it a moment. After saying that " Christ is the 
 end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth," 
 he gives that belief a voice, sets it to philosophizing, as it were, 
 on the question how it, as such, shall produce righteousness. 
 "The righteousness which is of faith," he says, "speaketh on 
 this wise, Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into 
 heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down) : Or, Who shall de- 
 scend into the deep? (that is, to bring up Christ again from 
 the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even 
 in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, 
 which we preach; That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth 
 the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath 
 raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the 
 heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth 
 confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture saith, 
 Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed." The ob- 
 scurity of this passage comes partly from the fact that St. 
 Paul is adapting old scripture words to his purpose, perhaps 
 with a little touch of rabbinism; but if we keep to his funda- 
 mental presupposition and point of view the sense is clear. We 
 must remember that faith is speaking, and trying to get into 
 terms an ideal of action, of righteousness. Now if we are 
 trying to attain to an ideal, two conceivable temptations may 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 311 
 
 rise to invalidate our endeavor: we may either desire to lower 
 the ideal, so as to bring it within bounds of feasibility; or we 
 may desire to attain the same ideal by a different way. To 
 both of these temptations St. Paul interposes his negative. 
 There your ideal is, clear and plain; you see the life that Christ 
 has achieved, the perfect Tightness of manhood, you see the 
 way he took to reach it; all lies before you in the good news 
 that we are preaching. Now if your faith is true and integral, 
 you won't try to lower that ideal of life, by bringing Christ 
 down to something less than consummate life, you will take 
 the ideal just as it is, however lofty, and commit yourself to 
 it; neither will you try some other way to get to it, by bringing 
 Christ up from the dead, making the way less strenuous than 
 death and resurrection; you will believe in your heart that this, 
 however hard, is the one perfect way of rising to perfect 
 righteousness, and all the life which your mouth confesses, the 
 action which mirrors itself in your sincere word, will conform 
 itself to that way of voluntary death, if by any means you too 
 may attain resurrection, and that same Christ will be your 
 Lord of life. Such faith will be ashamed neither of the height 
 of its ideal nor of the depth of humiliation through which loy- 
 alty to it leads. For this spirit of Christ has become a prac- 
 tical element of manhood; not only of the emotional rapture 
 which the contemplation of its glory engenders, but equally 
 of that sturdy righteousness which expresses itself in doing 
 and enduring and truth. 
 
 With St. Paul, conscious as he was of the law of sin in his 
 members, and moving in a Gentile world of fleshly degradation 
 and corruption, the life of the rebellious body and the element 
 of physical death cannot be ignored; they must play a car- 
 dinal part in his tragical drama of the consummation of life. 
 If we had only St. John to think for us, with his idealized word 
 "Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die," we 
 could hardly think of any other outcome of existence but that 
 of a disembodied spirit, whatever that may be; and even here 
 in the flesh St. John conceives of life almost as it were dis- 
 embodied, without any members at all to work weakness and 
 
3 i2 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 confusion. With St. Paul the members are all here, with their 
 tendencies and heredities; and our business is to present them 
 as instruments of righteousness unto holiness; our privilege 
 and glory to present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy, accept- 
 able unto God, which is our reasonable service. It is in just 
 this connection, you remember, that he bids us be transfigured, 
 metamorphosed, by the renewing of our minds; as if somehow 
 the new spirit that is in us were to shape a new body. And 
 this, in fact, is just his fundamental conception. When the 
 life rises to its height it is not to be a division and dissociation 
 of the elements of nature, not the survival and uprise of a piece 
 of life, but the whole nature body, soul, and spirit enter- 
 ing a higher stage of being together, intact and glorified. For 
 this he works; to this end he conforms his precepts of conduct; 
 these temples of the Holy Spirit, which our bodies are, are to 
 be kept so holy that corruption can have no power on them, 
 here or hereafter. This idea fills his cosmic ideal too; he has 
 a genuine conception of the far end of evolution in his thought, 
 of the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain together 
 until now, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of 
 the body. To this end he conforms that constant figure of 
 his, of our being members of Christ, working His will and 
 agencies of His spirit, while He, the Head, sends forth the 
 intelligence and the impulse that always animates us. It is a 
 noble, a world-filling conception; with the practical value of 
 conforming to men and things as they are. Here is the spirit 
 already with us and in us; the power of resurrection already 
 circulating through our members, shaping an organism within, 
 which he calls a spiritual body, and thus getting ready for a 
 final uprise which in the end is not death at all, but birth. 
 The spirit is already ours by a new birth in Christ; but it re- 
 mains yet for the body, through the nourishing and transfigur- 
 ing power of the spirit, acting through the acts and sufferings, 
 the ennobled energies of our earthly life, to be born. It is as 
 if physically we were still in the embryo stage of existence, 
 still in the womb of a shaping active world, drawing form and 
 development and beauty from its meats and drinks and work 
 
THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 313 
 
 and plans; and as if, when the hour which we call death 
 strikes, our resurrection were by the birth of a full-orbed or- 
 ganism of life to demonstrate its majesty and power. So when 
 at last the body is laid aside it is, as it were, but the casting 
 away of a placenta, an afterbirth, whose function is done, it- 
 self henceforth a worthless insignificant thing. This, I believe, 
 is virtually St. Paul's conception; and it conforms exactly, you 
 see, to the long developed evolutionary conception which we 
 have been tracing. 
 
 So when St. Paul approaches the end of life he conies after 
 all, by his own more strenuous way, to just the same outcome 
 that St. John held so serenely before him; for him too, as 
 truly as with St. John and Jesus, death is actually and literally 
 abolished. He expresses this under the figure of striking a 
 tent and moving on to a new and higher stage of our journey. 
 "We know," he says, "that if our earthly house of this taber- 
 nacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not 
 made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, 
 earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which 
 is from heaven: if so that being clothed we shall not be found 
 naked. For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being bur- 
 dened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, 
 that mortality might be swallowed up of life." So it is: he can 
 be content with no piecemeal survival, no disembodied naked 
 essence going on to an uncouth and unimaginable beyond, leav- 
 ing its values of sense and bodily existence behind; it takes 
 its new body with it, the body which, though sown in dishonor 
 and corruption, is raised in strength and beauty. What this 
 spiritual body is, this organism for the behests and activities 
 of the higher life, we cannot well understand until we can study 
 its anatomy and physiology from the other side of the tapestry 
 of life; but we cannot call it an illogical or irrational idea; it 
 conforms, in fact, more closely to our evolutionary demand 
 than any other. Evolution must henceforth be spiritual, but 
 it need not throw away all the discoveries it has made of or- 
 ganism and function and the orderly support of the conscious- 
 ness and the will. 
 
3 i4 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 So with the shaping mind of St. Paul, though physical death 
 remains a fact, with all its accompaniments, yet because its 
 sting is removed, and life has so swallowed it up as to have 
 transformed it into a glorious birth, it is abolished, and life 
 and immortality stand forth in fulness of noonday light. 
 
VII 
 INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 
 
 "What is it when suspected in that Power 
 Who undertook to make and made the world, 
 Devised and did effect man, body and soul, 
 Ordained salvation for them both, and yet, 
 Well, is the thing we see, salvation?" 
 
 I. THE UNVEILED MYSTERY 
 II. THOUGH OUR OUTWARD MAN PERISH 
 III. WHY STAND YE GAZING UP INTO HEAVEN? 
 
VII 
 INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 
 
 NEVERTHELESS I tell you the truth," said Jesus in 
 his farewell discourse; "it is expedient for you that 
 I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will 
 not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. 
 And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of 
 righteousness, and of judgment: Of sin, because they believe 
 not on me; Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and 
 ye see me no more; Of judgment, because the prince of this 
 world is judged." These words, plain and simple, as adapted 
 to the simple-minded group who first heard them, map out on 
 broad lines all the inner history, all the history that can be 
 called vital, which is yet to be; for they are in the enlarging 
 order of things, revealing the connecting link between Christ 
 and humanity, and thus opening the culminating stage of the 
 majestic chapter of manhood evolution. What was expedient 
 for them is just as expedient for us. The disciples thought, as 
 tradition had told them, that when the Messiah came He would 
 abide forever; and to their conception that was the summit 
 of well-being, to have always with them the bodily presence 
 of Him who could be implicitly followed as King and Leader 
 and Judge. Even these solemn words of Jesus did not strike 
 in, at first; this old idea held the field and crowded them out; 
 one of the first questions they asked Him when they saw Him 
 in resurrection form, safe back from the dead, was, "Lord, 
 wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom of Israel?" 
 But you see it takes time to get a new ideal into vital power; 
 and their minds were not enlarged enough to see how rudi- 
 mental, how childish it is after all, to have all our thoughts 
 and beliefs and judgments made for us, and doled out to us, 
 as it were, from a central bureau, leaving us in general unable 
 
 317 
 
3 i8 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 to take a step forward until we receive marching orders. Even 
 now, after nineteen centuries, we see how slow the world is to 
 replace the monarchic idea by the democratic; how slow and 
 timid we all are to bear our weight on the law of the spirit of 
 life, as feeling within us the wisdom and authority to do so. 
 And yet this, just this, is what our Lord's words contemplate. 
 It is expedient for us that the Incarnate Word go away; that 
 He be no more an object of sense, to be seen and heard and 
 followed about from place to place; because henceforth the 
 guidance of life must be incorporated with our nature, breath- 
 ing with our breath, thinking with our thoughts, loving and 
 hating with our love and hate, shaping the fair fabric of life 
 with our hands. Our Lord's departure was in the way to this. 
 He left us, but as He said He would not leave us orphans; left 
 us that a better thing than His bodily presence might come to 
 us. And if we, like the disciples, doubt what could be better 
 than His bodily presence, a moment's reflection guides us to 
 the essential truth that the new thing that was to come was 
 the self -same thing that was taking its leave; only it was to 
 come closer, not stopping at our bewildered eyes but coming 
 all the way to the centre of our being; not coming to sojourn 
 as in a tabernacle, but to take up its permanent abode, as in 
 a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. The 
 same risen Personage who said, "It is expedient for you that 
 I go away," said also, "I will not leave you orphans; I will 
 come to you." "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end 
 of the world." 
 
 An evolution, in the nature of the case, must have a tele- 
 ology; that is, by the very order and adaptation that are evi- 
 dent in every part it reveals some masterful design, orbing 
 into larger fulfilment from the beginning, and steering toward 
 a vaster and determinate end which, whether it comes fully 
 in sight or not, prophesies its significance and nature by the 
 working potencies it brings progressively to light. Natural 
 selection, development of species, survival of the fittest, and 
 all the other processes named in the jargon of science may be 
 verifiable facts; they are all on trial, undergoing the severe 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 319 
 
 testing of observation and definition; but they are only proc- 
 esses after all; and when all is done there remains the main 
 problem, the tremendous end toward which these are but 
 means. Evolution cannot rest, any more than could Ecclesi- 
 astes, in the thought that all this turmoil of forces and develop- 
 ments merely goes round in a circle, gyrating through the 
 generations and returning on itself. It has a teleology; how- 
 ever it moves round and round it moves also upward, revealing 
 at every stage a surplusage to apply on the next stage and make 
 the sum of things better, nobler, maturer. This is the huge 
 fact that our review of things has brought to light in the grad- 
 ual uprise of manhood as evolved by the power of the free 
 spirit of life. We have seen how out of the species has risen 
 the full-orbed individual, fitted in the obedience of perfect 
 law, yet in the supreme venture of perfect freedom, to act on 
 other individuals, to show every one the way of life, the ful- 
 filment of his complete personality. But now, at the date of 
 Christ's resurrection, it has only been shown, for men to look 
 at and analyze; and as a spectacle it is to be withdrawn. To 
 what end, after all, was all this pageant of life, this abysmal 
 venture of faith, this colossal experiment of being? Success- 
 ful indeed, as resurrection shows ; but to what end, unless this 
 resurrection be also the firstfruits of a vaster resurrection? 
 You remember how Browning, speaking as if he were Renan, 
 has portrayed how a sensitive mankind feels in the idea that 
 Christ came but to shine a little space and disappear again, a 
 description beautiful in its utter sadness: 
 
 Gone now ! All gone across the dark so far, 
 
 Sharpening fast, shuddering ever, shutting still, 
 Dwindling into the distance, dies that star 
 
 Which came, stood, opened once ! We gazed our fill 
 With upturned faces on as real a Face 
 
 That, stooping from grave music and mild fire, 
 Took in our homage, made a visible place 
 
 Through many a depth of glory, gyre on gyre, 
 For the dim human tribute. Was this true? 
 
 Could man indeed avail, mere praise of his, 
 To help by rapture God's own rapture too, 
 
 Thrill with a heart's red tinge that pure pale bliss? 
 
320 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 Why did it end? Who failed to beat the breast, 
 
 And shriek, and throw the arms protesting wide, 
 When a first shadow showed the star addressed 
 
 Itself to motion, and on either side 
 The rims contracted as the rays retired; 
 
 The music, like a fountain's sickening pulse, 
 Subsided on itself; awhile transpired 
 
 Some vestige of a Face no pangs convulse, 
 No prayers retard; then even this was gone, 
 
 Lost in the night at last. We, lone and left 
 Silent through centuries, ever and anon 
 
 Venture to probe again the Vault bereft 
 Of all now save the lesser lights, a mist 
 
 Of multitudinous points, yet suns, men say 
 And this leaps ruby, this lurks amethyst, 
 
 But where may hide what came and loved our clay? 
 How shall the sage detect on yon expanse 
 
 The star which chose to stoop and stay for us? 
 
 All this, you see, sadly beautiful as it is, is in direct traverse 
 of the words of Christ we have quoted. "I will not leave you 
 orphans; it is expedient for you that I go away." And as to 
 why it is expedient for us, we can do no better perhaps than 
 to add Browning's supplementing stanza, spoken in his own 
 proper person, after he has described how Christ, though ab- 
 sent in bodily presence, has become identified with the spirit 
 of our world: 
 
 That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
 
 Or decomposes but to recompose, 
 
 Become my universe that feels and knows! 
 
 This, when we compare it with our evolutionary outlook, rep- 
 resents not merely the poetry and phantasy of the matter; it is 
 the sober outcome of the Bible interpretation of life. 
 
 The business of our present chapter is to make an inventory 
 of the main vital values that inhere in this culmination of man- 
 hood evolution, translating them, if we can fairly do so, from 
 the scripture idiom into the idiom of to-day. 
 
 I. THE UNVEILED MYSTERY 
 
 The first vital value that we note is that Christ, now be- 
 come a diffusive and universal spirit, is identified with the con- 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL FALUES 321 
 
 scious spirit of manhood everywhere; His unique life the rec- 
 ognized life of man, His spirit the revealed spirit of man. The 
 historical Christ goes away that the essential Christ may take 
 His place and become by that means the controlling element 
 of character and a new vital power in the world. The writer 
 to the Colossians I am not sure whether it was St. Paul, but 
 at any rate he writes in the vein of St. Paul's later years 
 described this as "the mystery which hath been hid from ages 
 and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints; 
 . . . which is Christ in you, the hope of glory." The two 
 epistles to the Colossians and the Ephesians say a good deal 
 about this mystery; out of twenty-six or twenty-seven occur- 
 rences of the word in the New Testament ten are in these two 
 short letters. A mystery, in the apostle's view, is something 
 which has always existed, being as essential to humanity as 
 anything however clear, but it has only now come to light, 
 only now have the elements been supplied for the comprehen- 
 sion of it. And this mystery is the mystery of Christ in us. 
 In whom? The writer speaks as the apostle to the Gentiles; 
 and repeatedly he speaks with wonder of the fact that the 
 Gentiles the word, you know, is the same that is used to 
 designate the heathen show just as authentic marks of its 
 presence as do the Jews; the possession of it breaks down the 
 walls be-tween the nations and the ages, and puts all men in 
 one great united family. In other words, this mystery of 
 Christ in us, now unveiled, is something that belongs to man 
 as man, and to the man of all time past and to come. Not 
 it, but just the unveiling of it, is the distinction of the Chris- 
 tian dispensation; it was really there in man always; Christ 
 was there, away back in the ages, a dim pulsation of manhood, 
 and men did not know it. And if Christ in us is the hope of 
 glory now, so He was then; Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, 
 and to-day, and for ever. This is only another way, you see, 
 of describing the coming of life and immortality to light; our 
 large question, as I said earlier, is not when all this began to 
 be a fact, but when and how it was revealed so that men might 
 know what was all the while in them, and might act intelli- 
 
322 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 gently upon it. It has come out into the light, so that we can 
 give it a name, and note its vital elements, and commit our 
 spirits to it; but it was always there, ever since the spirit 
 moved on the face of the waters, and in its growing illumina- 
 tive power we have been led hither. Why, the soul of proph- 
 ecy was Christ in men; you recall how St. Peter dwells on that 
 picture of the prophets searching with wonder what the spirit 
 of Christ which was in them did signify, and trying to find a 
 time where suffering and sacrifice would fit in, as they looked 
 toward that which was to be. The very sustenance and re- 
 freshment of the wilderness journey, according to St. Paul's 
 allegorical account, was Christ; "they drank of that spiritual 
 Rock which followed them: and that Rock was Christ." This 
 diffused universality of the spirit of Christ is a great discovery 
 to make; even though the mystery has been unveiled so long 
 we are ourselves slow to acknowledge it; and how many there 
 are to-day who, like these disciples who wanted to call down 
 fire from heaven, know not even yet what manner of spirit 
 they are of. 
 
 If this mystery is so permanent and wide-spread there must 
 be many ways in which Christ may be in manhood; or rather 
 perhaps one way, when we get down to it, but under multi- 
 tudinous conditions and combinations. It would be hazardous 
 for any of us to say where He is not, or to measure out just 
 how much or how little there is of Him in our neighbor's soul ; 
 for there are last that shall be first. About as safe a way for 
 us as any, perhaps, is to fall back on the aged St. Paul's judg- 
 ment, as he saw his time so filled with heresies, "Nevertheless 
 the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The 
 Lord knoweth them that are his." Of this we must say more 
 later; but here for a few moments we must note the historical 
 movement by which this mystery of Christ in man was gradu- 
 ally unveiled. 
 
 All along it has been the scripture way to spell the secrets 
 of life out in concrete facts, which men may see and handle; 
 and when the meaning and power of the fact strikes in, so as 
 to be a source of motive and wisdom in man, then the crutch 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 323 
 
 of outward sense is removed. This applies to the whole life 
 and ministry of Christ, the Life Indeed. And when resurrec- 
 tion had set the supreme seal on His life, there is to be noted 
 the very remarkable way in which this support of sense was 
 removed gradually, as common men could bear it, and in its 
 place gradually substituted the inner light and power of the 
 spirit. All this was done in such condescension of love, was 
 so in the tender character of Christ, that it carries its truth 
 on the face of it; no mind short of Christ's could have in- 
 vented it. "Such ever was love's way; to rise it stoops." The 
 body that came from our Lord's tomb, you remember, had 
 something very strange about it. It seemed of this earth, yet 
 not of this earth; seemed to be endowed with mysterious re- 
 versed powers. As some one has described it, "what was 
 natural to him before seems now miraculous; what was before 
 miraculous is now natural." Though He had lain there only 
 three days, yet His nearest disciples did not recognize Him 
 at first; and in each case of recognition they had to have a 
 preparation of mind, of awakening spirit, in order to identify 
 Him at all. The journey of the two disciples to Emmaus is 
 typical in this regard; wherein He walked with them several 
 miles as a stranger, making their hearts burn within them as 
 He opened the Scriptures to them, before they knew Him by 
 the familiar act of breaking bread. He stands suddenly in the 
 midst of a company; He vanishes as suddenly. There are 
 various minds to be convinced, various degrees of faith to be 
 supported; and so He submits to the tests fitted to each, shows 
 the wounds and lets them touch Him; though to the first one 
 who saw Him He warned "Touch me not." Even the incident 
 of the empty tomb, seeming to prove that the material body 
 had been transformed into a body immaterial, was in the line 
 of necessary identification; it was for their and the world's 
 sake, however, inexplicable; and at any rate it demonstrated 
 the absolute ascendency of spirit over matter. But all this, 
 we may fairly say, this reestablished materialization, belonged 
 to the uniqueness of the event; it was an individual phe- 
 nomenon, like all His miracles, whereby love wrought its pur- 
 
324 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 pose of showing resurrection to be real; not, however, intended 
 to reveal a species phenomenon. The resurrection of the body 
 is not the same as the resurrection of matter; we must learn 
 to separate the two in our minds. There is a spiritual body, 
 St. Paul says; but flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom 
 of God. It was this mystery, both sides of it, that our Lord's 
 strange forty days after resurrection would demonstrate; He 
 would show them that the spiritual body is both a body, not 
 a naked essence, and spiritual, not material; and to show it 
 He began, so to say, at the material pole, and working step 
 by step, as they could comprehend it, toward the spiritual pole, 
 at the end had so accustomed them to the tremendous new 
 truth, that when He was finally parted from them, never to 
 submit to such testing any more, they returned to Jerusalem 
 with great joy. There is a gradation observable here too. To 
 have recognized Him once, by a crude test, was no guarantee 
 that they would recognize Him at the next appearing. The 
 succeeding test was apparently less material, finer, requiring 
 an advance in spiritual perception; so that, though on that 
 first appearance in Jerusalem they were affrighted and needed 
 reproach for their hardness of heart in doubting His identity, 
 on the later appearance at the sea of Tiberias, where all was 
 like a restored companionship and joy, "none of the disciples 
 durst ask him, Who art thou? knowing that it was the Lord." 
 It looks like a divinely adapted advance toward the point 
 where the crutch of sense and material apprehension could be 
 removed, and their Master could be to them a Reality appre- 
 hended purely by the spirit. Those forty days were the stages 
 of a transition. 
 
 Nor was this the end. The next step of manifestation, 
 though now spiritual, began even yet at a kind of physical 
 pole, according to what they could apprehend, though in the 
 physical phenomenon least suggestive of matter. A week after 
 His ascension, you remember, when the day of Pentecost was 
 fully come, the Spirit filled the house with the sound as of a 
 rushing mighty wind, and became visible in tongues of flame. 
 Perhaps this too was a concession to the simple conceptions of 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 325 
 
 the time; the Jewish mind craved a sign; and perhaps such 
 a sign was necessary to authenticate the strange new enthu- 
 siasm and power that endued them all at once. They must 
 know and identify the source of their new access of life; so 
 that with full assurance they could say to believers and gain- 
 sayers, "This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are 
 witnesses. Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, 
 and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy 
 Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear." 
 But this too, with its train of marvelous spiritual gifts, was 
 only a step in the process whereby the mystery of Christ in 
 man, the hope of glory, was revealed. The mystic splendor 
 faded into the light of common day; but let us guard our 
 thoughts against deeming the spiritual endowment, by being 
 diffused through all our prosaic duties and deeds, became less 
 real; it became even more real, more essentially available, by 
 becoming more purely spiritual, and depending not at all on 
 the support of sense. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, 
 neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which 
 God hath prepared for them that love him. God hath revealed 
 them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, 
 yea, the deep things of God." These words of St. Paul do not 
 refer, at least primarily, to heaven; they refer to the light that 
 is shed abroad by the felt and obeyed presence of Christ in us. 
 We will remember that the Jew interpreted his life accord- 
 ing to what we are pleased to call an antiquated psychology. 
 In all his times of health and disease, and in all unusual ex- 
 periences, he was open to the influence or subject to the inva- 
 sion of spirits. A man who was insane was in his idea 
 possessed by a demon; an alien personality had usurped his 
 will and consciousness; you remember how many times Jesus 
 conformed his cures to this psychological idea, and how the 
 demons themselves, if there were such, obeyed His behest ac- 
 cording to the same psychology. So also to the Jew the world 
 unseen was practically the world of the air; and this was 
 peopled with spiritual beings with whom in various ways our 
 life had relations: there were angels, with their orders and 
 
326 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 hierarchies, who were employed as ministering spirits sent 
 forth to aid those who should be heirs of salvation; there was 
 an evil power of the air, with its prince, a spirit working in 
 the children of disobedience; there were principalities and 
 powers, spiritual wickedness in high places, against which as 
 by hand to hand fight it was the Christian's business to wrestle. 
 All the inner operations and relations of life were thus, as the 
 philosophers say, objectified; not merely personified, like po- 
 etic figures, but conceived in terms of actual living personality, 
 of unseen impulses and wills capable of impact on us, as we 
 act on one another. There was a quasi physical and material 
 quality in their idea, too, quite foreign to our ways of thinking: 
 the spirit of God was the breath of God; the spirit of evil was 
 as it were a crazing and miasmatic atmosphere working havoc 
 in men's lives. When Jesus met His disciples after the resur- 
 rection, and gave them their commission for the time to come, 
 He breathed on them and said, " Receive ye the Holy Spirit." 
 We have just noted, too, the phenomena that accompanied the 
 coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, the sound as of a rushing 
 mighty wind and the tongues of flame. The effects were 
 correspondingly marked and visible. Mockers attributed these 
 to new wine; and Peter took pains to tell them that it was 
 too early in the day for these strangely exhilarated men to be 
 drunk; nay, later in the history of the intensified new life 
 that had come to men, St. Paul is careful to separate its means 
 and origin from analogous physical inducing means; "Be not 
 drunk with wine," he says, "wherein is excess, but be ye filled 
 with the Spirit." Even in modern revival efforts men speak 
 in the same psychological idiom; they pray for spiritual out- 
 pouring, as if somehow there were a vital fluid out in space, or 
 in the region just above our heads, which in a way transcend- 
 ing our initiative, may come in to flood us with exhilaration 
 and enhanced joy and energy. It is as good a conception as 
 any, the best perhaps, for the common unmetaphysical mind 
 to approach the source of its highest life; infinitely better, 
 surely, than to suffer a modern psychological abstraction to 
 fade it away into nothing at all. There is a holy power not 
 
IN7ENTORT OF VITAL FALUES 327 
 
 ourselves to be accounted for and reckoned with; it must not 
 only be ours, but be translated into our ways of thinking; but 
 it must not be denied and evaporated in the process. 
 
 I have already spoken, in an earlier chapter, of that won- 
 derful providential guidance by which, all through the twilight 
 period of growth, the Jewish mind, surrounded though it was 
 by nations given over to necromancy and demon worship and 
 all the uncanny inquiry of the occult, would never submit it- 
 self passively to the invasion of spirits through mediumship 
 and vulgar psychic hypnotization. To study the reason of 
 this in detail would be well worth while, but of course we can- 
 not go into it here. I think one reason was because the Jewish 
 spirit and genius could never consent to be a passive thing, 
 helplessly acted upon from without; it cooperated vigorously 
 and intelligently with its unseen influences ; it insisted that the 
 spirits of the prophets be subject to the prophets; and the 
 Holy Spirit that it would call to its aid was conceived as a 
 spirit bearing witness with our spirits, thus meeting us on 
 common intelligent ground. Besides, there was its growing 
 clarifying idea of God, the great Reality, which idea must at 
 every step be identified with authentic realities, revealing a 
 glory, a splendor, which however transcendent must be recog- 
 nized as true to our highest ideals. This produced a spiritual 
 disdain for those dim uncertain underworld phenomena, what- 
 ever they were, that invaded the colorless passive mind of the 
 medium; the grand heritage of his religion and his practical 
 wisdom, beginning with the reverent fear of God, had made 
 these things antipathetic to him. So when the time came for 
 the long hidden mystery to be unveiled, the mystery of Christ 
 in us the hope of glory, his mind in spite of its now antiquated 
 psychology, or perhaps indeed by reason of it, was already 
 well educated, both negatively and positively, to apprehend 
 it and act upon it as it essentially is. And on it our more scien- 
 tific conceptions may safely build; there is nothing in it to 
 make succeeding ideas of life and spirit other than true and 
 wholesome. 
 
 When therefore we try to realize the truth of Christ in us, 
 
328 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 our honest way to deal with it is to translate it into our own 
 psychological terms, thus completing the transition that was 
 begun at Ascension and Pentecost. If it has become alien to 
 our sense of reality to think of that human Person who was 
 born at Bethlehem and died at Calvary as now somehow dis- 
 tributed through the world, as a diffusive power or pulsation, 
 like electricity or light or magnetism, it is at least open to us 
 to think what there is in men who pay homage to Christ to- 
 day, what spirit there is now potent which, because it unites 
 us in a common joy and a common hope, traces back its origin 
 and illumination to Him. There are not wanting abundant 
 analogies to help us. We can think of the wave of reform and 
 new faith that swept over the hearts of men when Luther made 
 his brave stand against the paralyzing errors of his time; we 
 can think how Napoleon's personality had in it a power to in- 
 spire and characterize an army and a period of history; we 
 can think how a mighty spirit of patriotism and hatred of 
 slavery was diffused through the North in our Civil War, mak- 
 ing the people for a time one will, and bringing an enlargement 
 of life and being which still exists in power. All these in- 
 stances show what potencies slumber in manhood, waiting only 
 the illuminative word and the fitting time to call them forth 
 into energy; and what a perpetual hope of better things the 
 successively awakening potencies are. Such facts are the 
 commonplaces of history. Can we not think back from these 
 to the origin and concentrated potency of them all; to the light 
 which shone when Hope itself was born? We nucleate them in 
 the name Christ; in Him these various potencies, the prophecy 
 of progress to better things, become concrete, elements of a 
 large world personality, a spirit which we can name and define. 
 The sum total of this spirit we call the Holy Spirit; which, in 
 one true sense at least, is, as was said earlier in our studies, 
 the spirit of wholeness, soundness, the whole man now brought 
 to light in a typical Personality, and demonstrating His whole- 
 ness by the finished work He did. This wholeness of manhood 
 within us, redeemed from the sin and error and bondage of 
 man's twilight stratum of being, set free at last to work his 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 329 
 
 regenerate will on himself and the world, is our hope of glory. 
 It existed there, in a dim mystery and onward spiritual surge, 
 from the beginning; the potentiality of wholeness, health, 
 eventual maturity was an unrest and a prophecy through all 
 those dim years; and now that its true centre and principle is 
 revealed, it has become a great rest and peace in us, yet also 
 an energizing spur to larger, purer things, forbidding us to 
 call any earthly thing our rest, or cramp our souls to it, and 
 a perpetual prophecy of things that have not yet entered into 
 the heart of man. This is Christ in us; this our modern no- 
 tions of mind and spirit can appropriate. If we can no longer 
 take it as breath and flame and an outpoured fluid, we can 
 commit ourselves in strong abandon of faith to the wholeness 
 of manhood, and to the supreme principle which sums up and 
 unifies its maturity; can resolve to live the life of goodwill 
 and good works and sacrifice which, in one divine Person, has 
 so demonstrated its fulness and power. This is Christ in us; 
 this is the same yesterday and to-day and for ever; this makes 
 the ideal of our being, however high our evolution puts it, not 
 an unattainable despair but a lively hope. 
 
 It is our inveterate tendency to confuse our hope and the 
 hope of our neighbor by applying some other standard than 
 this to our destiny; and especially the older standard of legal 
 morality and sinlessness which Jesus and the apostles have 
 so labored to make us outgrow. A strong vein of the Jew is 
 in all of us, perhaps indeed ought to be until that current of 
 duty is worked clear. We tremblingly ask, Am I good enough 
 to be saved? knowing all the while that we are not, and indeed 
 that salvation by the Pharisee way, the works of the law, is 
 impossible. Then we turn to our neighbor, perhaps in disgust 
 and bitter disdain, and say, Can that degraded, unlovely, de- 
 praved, heathenish man enter heaven? and sometimes, in our 
 American way of joking we say that if he is going there, on 
 the strength of salvation wrought for him by faith and the 
 church, we prefer to go where we can have more congenial 
 company. But most of us still shiver over the question in 
 sadness and doubt. "Lord, are there few that be saved?" the 
 
330 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 disciples once asked Jesus, when they still had only their old 
 law of works and prescription to measure by. His answer, 
 accommodated to their idiom, was, " Strive to enter in at the 
 strait gate, for many shall seek to enter in and shall not be 
 able." The old law of destiny is inexorable: it opens inevit- 
 ably that sombre picture of two roads, the broad one, populous 
 and crowded, leading to destruction, and the narrow one, with 
 only here and there a traveler, leading to life. And our Lord's 
 word virtually is, If that is your accepted standard of life, 
 strive to obey the strictest, straitest, most strenuous condition 
 that you can see imposed on you; you will be none too sound 
 and safe then; don't fear that you will do too much, or live 
 too ideal a life. But at the same time He says that many of 
 whose salvation they have not dreamed shall come from the 
 north and the south and the east and the west and sit with 
 the spirits of the just made perfect in the kingdom of heaven. 
 And then, going on in His ministry, He made the strangest, 
 most revolutionary recognitions of the powers of life: ate and 
 drank with publicans and sinners; while He pronounced woe 
 on the hypocritical Pharisees, pronounced the word of salva- 
 tion on Zaccheus the publican; and even on the abandoned 
 woman who had fallen a victim to her trust in human love 
 and fidelity, He pronounced the word of hope: "Her sins, 
 which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much." Here is 
 the new standard of living, the standard of love, which, though 
 capable of the lowest depths of abuse, is also capable of the 
 highest things, being, when followed by the committal of faith 
 and wisdom, by the truest that is in us, the pulsation of the 
 love that broods over all the world, in fatherhood, and sonship, 
 and the communion of the spirit. It is this pulsation of love 
 that He would call out from its dimness and slumber, and free 
 from selfish, degrading elements, and naturalize in the universal 
 heart of man. The apostles took up the same endeavor, and 
 stated it in its principle: "By grace are ye saved, through faith, 
 and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God; not of works, 
 lest any man should boast." We read this one-sidedly, as if 
 it were our business, as candidates for salvation, to be merely 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 331 
 
 receivers and beneficiaries of the free gift, and as if, having 
 received it, we were only to gloat over what we have secured. 
 But grace within us, the free giving impulse of love, is still 
 grace; it is not transformed into its opposite; our faith in it, 
 our venture of life upon it, makes us henceforth instrumen- 
 talities of it, the vehicles of that same overflow of life to the 
 world. And this is to have Christ in us; this it was that He 
 wrought out consistently, though identified with the poor and 
 the publicans and the harlots and the malefactors, going down 
 to the degraded depths of humanity, in order to show how 
 from the lowest the way of vitalizing, redeeming love is open 
 to all. It was a veritable release of the soul of man from his 
 prison-house of law and prescription, which without love to 
 illuminate it, must remain an ever-increasing bondage. But 
 now we have a new standard whereby to judge our neighbor. 
 We must allow for the fact that it is the boast of grace to enter 
 and take up its abode in the unlikeliest places. A heart almost 
 all degraded may still respond, for the sake of wife or family 
 or comrade or a world in peril, to the unselfish prompting of 
 love; may even lay down life, when the stress comes, for the 
 sake of a good which, so far as his body is concerned, may be 
 his sacrifice. We cannot tell. The Lord knoweth them that 
 are His. That degraded man may at some point have laid 
 hold, in a blind faith, on the love of God, and made it operative 
 in love of neighbor. Well, then Christ is in him, the essential 
 Christ, the diffused spirit of life; and no knowing how slender 
 a pulsation, seemingly, may have in it the seminal power to 
 grow, and redeem his heritage or education of sin, and 
 make his essential being new, and so be, in the long run, his 
 full salvation. For this reason it is hazardous to judge men 
 on mere moral lines; we must rather know the amount of love 
 and faith that is in them than the amount of works. "Not 
 of works, lest any man should boast." Equally inconclusive 
 is it to erect a standard of vital judgment which excludes from 
 any chance of life those, like depraved criminals, whose wills 
 are diseased, or, like idiots, whose mind is undeveloped, or, 
 like infants, who have not come to understanding. All these 
 
332 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 are hard problems to a moral and legalized standard of judg- 
 ment; we cannot force the great world-current of life through 
 such narrow channels. Nor can I stay to speak of those 
 whose vision of life is not yet universalized and clarified: of 
 those myopic souls whose impulse of love cannot get beyond 
 their family or parish; of those color-blind souls who in their 
 devotion to a philanthropy or a dogmatic system can be harsh 
 or intolerant toward those whose love works in narrower or 
 strange bounds. There is doubtless something in all of us 
 which some time or other will need to be straightened or en- 
 larged or corrected. It is a long process to get, as Scripture 
 phrases it, Christ formed within us; I am not sure that this 
 earthly existence of ours is going to suffice, even for us who 
 have all the experience of the past to learn by. We cannot tell ; 
 but meanwhile let us take comfort that the mysterious power 
 of growth and sacrifice has been working in man from the 
 beginning; that the Lamb was slain from the foundation of 
 the world; and that both we and our neighbor have eternity 
 to grow in. We have also in us that wonderful power of rec- 
 ognizing according to the love that is in us, rather than accord- 
 ing to the theorized merit that is in others; on this our 
 judgment hangs. If we do not cultivate this, the Helper when 
 He comes may convict us of sin, because we believe not on 
 Christ. It resolves itself in this, after all, the mystery of 
 Christ in us is the bearing of our whole weight on the perfect 
 loving manhood that through so marvelous a history of the 
 spirit is revealed as the one way of manhood life. 
 
 II. THOUGH OUR OUTWARD MAN PERISH 
 
 The cry that for several decades has dominated the religious 
 sentiment of our age and land is, We don't want theories, we 
 want facts. It is a wholesome plea; it lays hold of the ele- 
 ments of hope, reality, promise. But like all popular senti- 
 ments, it is as shallow as it is deep; that is, it may be shallow 
 or deep, according to the spirit in which it is held. The nega- 
 tive side of the plea, we don't want theory, or as men have 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 333 
 
 been pleased to dub it, we don't want dogma, is, and for 
 decades has been, a very shallow thing, and not without bad 
 effects, as must be the case with everything superficial. It 
 has done much to empty our churches, to discredit the noble 
 profession of the Christian ministry, and in general to pitch 
 the life of the rank and file in a low key. Perhaps indeed the 
 ministry itself, the country through, has not remained wholly 
 untouched by it; perhaps the ambassadors of Christ have 
 sometimes let their high credentials go under partial eclipse, 
 while in their endeavor to make their message popular and 
 workable they have played too much to the galleries. After 
 all, ministers have a good deal of human nature in them; they 
 are not so far beyond us but that we of the rank and file can 
 still keep them in sight and judge them; besides, it is not our 
 business to sit in judgment on them, or anybody, but rather 
 to draw our own views of life from the same Word that is sup- 
 posedly in them. This shallow plea, then, comes back just as 
 straight to us as it does to them; the Word is nigh us, in our 
 mouth and in our heart; and if we have not the teaching office 
 in our hands, we have in our keeping the general level of faith, 
 and are alone responsible for its being high or low. Now this 
 cry, we don't want theory, pitches our faith low; it opens the 
 door to all those lazy, easy-going, drifting people who hate 
 to think and want to get into some instinctive sort of life that 
 shall merely run itself. So it brings about, if we are not heed- 
 ful, an unspoken ideal of Christian living as if it were not an 
 arena where we must fight for what we get, or run a strenuous 
 race for a prize, but rather a nice soft bed where we can lie 
 and rest, with the comfortable feeling that we have a ticket 
 for heaven under our pillow. I suspect, however, that the 
 real meaning of this shallow plea is not that we don't want 
 theory, but that we don't want the theory that we have in- 
 herited from Augustine and Calvin and Jonathan Edwards; 
 and the trouble is that too many have let it go at that, without 
 troubling themselves to inquire what they do want. For the 
 fact is, we cannot very well believe without believing some- 
 thing; so if we too lightly abjure theory, which is only an- 
 
334 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 other name for theology or dogma, the alternative is apt to 
 turn out no faith, no really grounded character, at all; and 
 in the end the plea of less theology and more religion issues 
 inevitably in less religion, in a sort of vanishing quantity. It 
 is but another example of what I have so many times spoken 
 of: the evil effect of taking up with the negative side of an 
 ideal, and letting the positive side go. I don't believe in nega- 
 tives: they are good for nothing under the sun but just pur- 
 poses of definition, they only show where the real thing, the 
 positive truth, begins, and our concern is to leave them behind 
 and thenceforth ignore them. 
 
 It is false and shallow, then, to say we don't want theory. 
 We do want theory; we want all we can get, we must have it, 
 if we are going to live our lives in any sort of order and prin- 
 ciple. If we have faith in God, we must have a theory of God, 
 a theology; if we commit ourselves to faith in man, we must 
 have a theory of human nature, an anthropology. Our theory 
 may not be articulated into all the minutiae of a philosophical 
 system, but it must be real and have a basal principle; it must 
 be what we call a working theory. The Greek word from 
 which our word theory is derived is very simple; it means two 
 things, the act of looking at a thing, and the thing looked at. 
 According to its connection it may mean either of these; and 
 we need both of them: we must be energetic enough to look and 
 look hard, and we must have something to look at so definite 
 and real to us that we can venture life and destiny upon it. 
 That is theory; and no individual of us, however he may feel 
 lost in the crowd, can absolve himself from this obligation, so 
 long as he has an active and intelligent life to live. 
 
 But while we must have theories, and while they must be as 
 searching as our best thinking can make them, we certainly do 
 want facts too; this part of the plea is strong and wholesome. 
 It is the facts, the actual application in experience and prac- 
 tice, that test our theory. This is only another way of saying 
 that in order to be good for anything our theory must prove 
 itself true by doing what it promises to do. And if one theory 
 does not work, or has ceased to do all the work we need of 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 335 
 
 it, we do not mend matters by throwing up the game; we must 
 try another. "By their fruits/' was our Lord's word, "ye shall 
 know them"; and if our enlarged, emancipate, adult life craves 
 fruits which the old theory of living is ill-adapted or inade- 
 quate to bear, then we must reconstruct life on a new basis. 
 But a basis we must surely have; and it must be a higher, 
 roomier, more vital basis than the old; for there are greater 
 fruits to grow and gather, and there is a greater manhood field 
 to grow them in. Men are awakening to this truth to-day; 
 they are getting sick of negatives and of their poverty of doc- 
 trine. And if the old Puritanism, which practically made 
 Jews of them, will not serve, they must have something better; 
 and the thoughtful among them will not, in their desire for the 
 better thing, think scorn of the old, or throw it heedlessly 
 away in their lazy indisposition to think. It was not so that 
 the early disciples did. They were placed in a precisely analo- 
 gous position to ours of to-day. They felt, they knew by 
 spiritual insight, that the old regime, the heritage of many 
 centuries, was decrepit and ready to vanish away. But they 
 were not unprepared for the crisis: they already had a new 
 theory of life which not only more than took the place of the 
 old, but retained all that the old had proved sound and en- 
 during. And now they were subjecting the new to the test of 
 fact and experience. Will it work? was their question; like 
 the life of Christ when it was first lived, so now, their life, on 
 the same divine lines, was a colossal experimentation, a kind 
 of laboratory work of test and verification. 
 
 Let us think of those early disciples, then, as first those 
 simple-minded, straight-minded men, like Peter and John and 
 James the Lord's brother, whom the Bible calls "pure in heart," 
 whose minds are not so warped by prejudice and the accumu- 
 lations of conventional tradition but that they can commit 
 themselves in common-sense clearness to the new vision of life 
 that their Master has made real and concrete; then secondly, 
 as added to these, men like Paul and Apollos, who have the 
 culture which enables them to cope with the world's ideas, yet 
 who retain through it all the same singleness and consistent 
 
336 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 purity of heart, enabling them to translate their new idiom 
 of life into a workable theory; then thirdly, we must not leave 
 out, as the most significant element of the whole, the rank and 
 file of the lay disciples and members, a joyful and loving body, 
 who if they cannot think deeply can at least lay down their 
 lives, and cheerfully bear all that comes surging up against 
 them from whatever quarter, to show what a new vital prin- 
 ciple can accomplish in practical living. These, after all, were 
 the test and proof of the Christ spirit; they were the witness 
 bearers, the martyrs, whose blood was the seed of the church. 
 We have not their thought in written words, nor any record 
 of their mental acumen, but their lives were sown in the brown 
 earth, like their Master's, falling into the ground and dying, 
 that a great harvest might in time spring up therefrom and 
 bear much fruit. It is impossible to estimate the immense 
 vital value that came to the world from the freely sacrificed 
 lives of these nameless believers in the power of the new life. 
 Have we thought of it? A story I once heard may help us 
 realize it. Two men, devout clergymen of the Church of Eng- 
 land, were once earnestly debating together about the first 
 generations of Christians. The Church of England, you know, 
 sets great store by the Fathers; thinks, reasonably enough, 
 that as men lived nearer to Christ's time and were privileged 
 to walk in the more immediate rays of His presence, their 
 doctrine must have been purer, their lives saintlier, their view 
 of divine things straighter and more trustworthy. But one 
 thing greatly disturbed these two devout men: the fact that no 
 illustrious name, no winged word, no brilliant achievement of 
 these primitive Christians has come across the centuries to 
 us. Not a single notable thing that they did is on record. 
 Men more entirely common place and mediocre than the im- 
 mediate followers and successors of the apostles it would be 
 hard to find; and the century in which they lived is perhaps 
 the most uninteresting in Christian annals. So despite their 
 assumption of what must have been, these two pious men soon 
 found their inquiry reduced to the simple question, What were 
 those early Christians good for? Having discussed this ques- 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 337 
 
 tion till late at night without reaching any satisfactory con- 
 clusion, the friends prayed together and separated, one of them 
 setting out for his home in another part of the city. As he 
 was well on his way, however, still revolving the problem, sud- 
 denly the answer flashed upon him like an inspiration; and 
 hastening back to his friend's room he called out in triumph, 
 " I have it! They were good to burn !" I think you will agree 
 with me that the answer was as true as it was striking. It 
 reveals to us the most tremendous vital value in the world: 
 men in whom is working one redeemed and quickened spirit, 
 the unveiled mystery of Christ in manhood; and these were 
 without any fuss or parade just living the life and dying the 
 death of their Lord, yielding all they have and are to the great 
 Idea that has come to vitalize them. And if it had not been 
 for these, what fruits of Christianity would the world be 
 noting and gathering to-day? Follow out those nameless 
 martyrdoms, as the leaven of them spread from heart to heart 
 and from age to age, and mind and imagination are lost in the 
 greatness of it. 
 
 The vital value that we noted in the last section seemed to re- 
 duce all the new life to terms of spirit; and though in a way 
 we are becoming aware that the power of spirit is the only real 
 power we can trace in life, yet as soon as we name the word 
 spirit, our idea of things is apt to dissipate itself into some- 
 thing vague, shadowy, unreal; if it is a vibration, like mag- 
 netism or electricity, it is a vibration whose wave-lengths and 
 wave-contours we cannot devise instruments to measure. It ob- 
 stinately refuses to express itself in terms of mechanism; and 
 so we too lightly conclude that there is really nothing in it. 
 That is the quarrel that our materialistic and biological science 
 has with spirit, and you see it is simply the quarrel that it has 
 with life itself: it cannot compute the curve of an idea, a mo- 
 tion, an emancipated will, that is big enough to fill life full, 
 permeating and transforming all its character and material 
 energies, without giving any account of itself except its own 
 reality. "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest 
 the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and 
 
338 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the spirit." 
 It is a wholly baffling thing until we consent to measure it in 
 its own terms; but then it is at once the simplest and the 
 deepest thing in the world. 
 
 One thing, however, we must not leave out, and it is the 
 vital value that forms the specific subject of our present study. 
 A bad result of our prevailing vagueness of conception is that 
 we are apt to postpone the working of the resurrection spirit, 
 relegating it to some unseen realm away off somewhere, and 
 to some indefinite future, while we leave the poor body, which 
 for the purpose we have separated from its soul, sickening and 
 decaying and dying here. We have given scant rights to our 
 body; it is a thing that, because we go at it in the wrong way, 
 we really understand as little as we do our spirit. So according 
 to men's disposition, worldly or otherworldly, they either 
 make it the prey of lusts and luxuries, with their grievous en- 
 tail of disease and premature mortality; or else, treating it 
 as an enemy, try to kill its appetencies by some sort of asceti- 
 cism, under which term we may include not only such self- 
 tormenting as we ascribe to anchorites but the modern vagaries 
 of dieting and dosing. Or, if we adopt the more wholesome 
 idea of mens sana in corpore sano, the sound mind in a sound 
 body, which is as good Christian doctrine as it is heathen, we 
 are so apt, in our ardor of training and exercise, to lay out all 
 our spiritual energies on the body that by the time we get to 
 the question of putting in the sound mind there is hardly 
 enough mind left to be worth perpetuating; it is all so absorbed 
 in golfing and football that the serious question rises whether 
 for such a soul eternal existence would not be an unendurable 
 bore. Have we reckoned with the problem of ennui; do we 
 realize how vital may, for many, become the question whether 
 after all life is worth living? I sometimes wonder about those 
 hapless mortals whose mind is to them so little of a kingdom 
 that they have much ado, by various inane distractions, to 
 kill time; I wonder, if time hangs so heavy on their hands, how 
 they are going to kill eternity. Nor is it the play side of life 
 alone that suffers; the work side too, however interesting or 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 339 
 
 successful the work is, shares the same unbearableness and 
 exhaustion; the worn-out body and nerves have some day to 
 cease from it, just as the athlete inevitably breaks down; and 
 the corrective no more comes by stopping work than the cor- 
 rective of the other side of life comes by stopping play. It 
 goes back, after all, to the inner source whence work and play 
 proceed, to the intrinsic spiritual man, as he really is whether 
 in action or at rest, to man with that endowment of life which 
 answers to his supreme aspiration. "Not that which goeth in 
 at the mouth," said our Lord, "defileth a man, but that which 
 cometh out of the heart"; we may say the same thing too of 
 that which upbuilds and makes life worth living. We may 
 get a partial object-lesson toward this truth in the way men 
 absorb themselves in art and learning; and in the saving fact 
 that every man is capable of doing things ideally, and going 
 on doing them in spite of penury and sacrifice; and in the fact 
 that the highest work a man can do, the work that calls out 
 his best ideals and energies, is work that he would scorn to 
 be paid for except in kind. The very work we do, the very 
 free play of talent and genius that we love, is perpetually call- 
 ing us away from our bodies, what we shall eat and drink and 
 wherewithal we shall be clothed. But you see our errors come 
 from assuming that the body is on top; and along with this, 
 from the idea that we must die anyhow, that we must be sub- 
 ject to the shoal of diseases and decrepitudes that are them- 
 selves merely stages of dying, and that we may as well accept 
 the situation and have the evil event over. In other words, 
 so far as the body is concerned, we still, in spite of our Chris- 
 tian revelation, make up life with reference to death; it is 
 bodily death we are looking for and dreading, however we may 
 try to stave it off by asceticism and dosing, or meet it with a 
 show of bravado. Our theory of life is concerned; we need 
 a more livable theory, one that is adapted to work higher 
 things than the things of the body and the world. 
 
 Right here we may learn some very suggestive things about 
 vital values from the lives of those nameless common men who 
 were only good to burn. They could not do the acute think- 
 
34 o THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 ing; could not cipher out rules of living by logic; but they 
 were imbued with one great simple idea that would work; they 
 had learned to make up life not with reference to death but 
 with reference to life, life ever more and fuller. For them 
 death was in the most essential sense actually and literally 
 abolished. Now when you come to think of it, this was a 
 tremendous working idea; and we can think how tremendous 
 must have been the ground swell of the spirit which could 
 raise the living faith of common men to such a high level. 
 They had to get at it, unsophisticated minds as they were, by 
 the simplest and concretest ways, and the idea had to grow 
 from elemental beginnings. From the first, too, it had to es- 
 tablish itself in the face of this universal lot of death to which 
 all mankind is subject. To live as if this last enemy were prac- 
 tically killed, and therefore a negligible quantity, how shall 
 the man of the rank and file learn this? It was a spiritual 
 truth, a truth of the unseen, and yet it must be laid hold of in 
 terms of the body; the whole man, not merely the ethereal 
 part of him, must have the benefit of it. Well, there was the 
 initial fact, for constant faith and reference, that their Lord 
 when He rose from the dead left an empty grave and showed 
 them a body that they could see and handle; a miracle if you 
 please, a unique thing whose reality our sapient scholars are 
 doubting, but certainly a miracle placed where it could do 
 most good, and what is of most consequence, having power as 
 an idea ; a whole increasing community of men forthwith began 
 to live as if it were so, That is the main point. Then there 
 were other plain ideas accompanying this: this same risen 
 Master was all the while just over that unseen boundary, ready 
 to receive His own; and further, He was coming again, very 
 soon, before they died perhaps, and the end of this world and 
 the beginning of a new unworldly kingdom was hard at hand. 
 Do you say this was a false scaffolding for their thoughts? 
 But it was adapted to their minds, it was on their level, per- 
 haps their lowly conceptions had equal shares in the shaping 
 of it; and above all, it was a working idea that led straight to 
 the noblest, joyfulest living. They had to live in perpetual 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALVES 341 
 
 liability to death by violence and torture; but they leaped ex- 
 ultingly to meet it, for that was the death that Christ died, and 
 with that death was especially associated the power of His 
 resurrection. Then meanwhile they had their spiritual gifts, 
 among which were gifts of healing; and they lived long in the 
 confidence that they were to be immune from deadly poisons 
 and serpents, and that the prayer of faith would save the sick. 
 Their body was to be healed and cared for, by the power of 
 the spirit that was in them. Then gradually changes came 
 upon this idea; and we cannot say whether these came because 
 faith lessened or because it deepened and broadened, becoming 
 a more spiritual, less purely material thing. The era of aston- 
 ishing feats of the spirit passed just as soon as its vital value 
 was secured; but it passed into something greater and more 
 universally workable. "Covet earnestly the best gifts," St. 
 Paul told them; "and yet show I unto you a more excellent 
 way"; and this, you remember, was his occasion of assuring 
 them that while the exceptional feats of the spirit were bound 
 to pass, yet faith and hope and love survived, and that love 
 was the greatest thing in the world. The same apostle gloried 
 in tribulation also, because that was the austere friend which 
 steered them through growing stages of inner discipline until 
 the love of God was shed abroad in their hearts. He found 
 indeed among the Corinthians that faith was not up to the 
 mark, that many were weak among them and many sick; 
 that was a thing that ought not to be; their spirits, endowed 
 with such gifts, should have better control over the body than 
 that. But later he seemed to have learned, and with him 
 the church, that we could not expect to go on ignoring or evad- 
 ing disease as if we were immune; that sickness and decay, 
 like tribulations and hardships, were necessary facts of life, 
 to be dealt with as things to be undergone rather than evaded. 
 If, as he believed, this physical body was as it were a womb 
 in which a spiritual body was getting ready to be born, and 
 if it was our duty to be transfigured by the renewing of our 
 minds, yet this was not to come about necessarily by a pro- 
 gressive release from bodily ills, but in spite and presence of 
 
342 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 them; besides there was a fighting faith and beauty of love in 
 the way he met bodily suffering which was itself a triumph of 
 the spirit. And so the spiritual body, by whatever experience, 
 might go on forming itself and essentially transfiguring the 
 man; or as he expressed it, " though our outward man perish, 
 yet is our inward man renewed day by day." In this truth 
 it looks as if the naive faith and expectation of the early Chris- 
 tians were at last translated into their ultimate spiritual value. 
 The inward man had come to his own; was asserting a power 
 of life which day by day rose superior to the physical un- 
 towardness and progressive decrepitude that were the natural 
 accompaniments of the day. "For this cause we faint not," 
 he said. There had been cause for fainting and doubt, as the 
 exultant first disciples saw little by little that in spite of their 
 marvelous spiritual gifts the tendency to sickness and evil-hap 
 still remained; and while they were growing old, and some of 
 them dying off, still their Lord did not come for them. Their 
 faith was losing the support of its initial physical wonders. 
 So it was: the scaffolding of the exceptional and astonishing 
 had to be gently removed, as men could bear it, and from the 
 light of miracle men must emerge into the light of common 
 day. But when the inner man is strong and comely enough 
 to stand alone, facing with joy and courage all the adverse 
 winds that blow, it is better that he stand without scaffolding. 
 This is only a little broader interpretation of the saying, "It 
 is expedient for you that I go away"; the Christ of the mar- 
 velous and immediate response must go away, that the Christ 
 of the individual himself, with his individual initiative, may 
 have his chance. If, though in its insidious forms death at- 
 tacks his mortal frame, just as it used to do, if all the while 
 his inward man rebounds with daily renewal, then in a still 
 truer and more practical sense Christ is formed within him, 
 the hope of glory. It is just in this connection, you remember, 
 that St. Paul figures our bodily frame as merely a temporary 
 tent, in which we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon 
 with our house which is from heaven; and as soon as that 
 tent is struck, as if it had been a kind of veil, there emerges 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 343 
 
 the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. You 
 remember too how the language of dying, the conception of it 
 as extinction or even as a crisis in life, wholly disappears from 
 the New Testament vocabulary; instead of it, the apostles 
 speak of falling asleep, of putting off this tabernacle (St. 
 Peter's word), of departing and being with Christ, but not at 
 all of death as an enemy, or having any real existence, not at 
 all as Job and the psalmists and prophets spoke. Yet the 
 thing that both apostles and prophets faced remained as ever, 
 and its attendant train of bodily ills and decay was still here 
 as ever. We learn a great deal in Scripture from the concep- 
 tions that disappear, extinguished by larger light and vitality. 
 That the conception of death as death, and of disease as a 
 thing that unmans us, should have died out of men's habitual 
 thoughts, is, when we think of it, the strongest possible cor- 
 roboration of the coming of life and immortality to light. 
 
 So that progressive spiritualization of the early Christian's 
 thoughts was like a perpetual voyage of discovery, in which, 
 while in the course of time they were fated always to encounter 
 new views of truth, new waves of disclosure, yet always the 
 fundamental thing that they had discovered, the mystery of 
 Christ in man, remained intact, and made itself good with 
 every new application; it proved itself an ever deepening and 
 broadening vital value, adapted alike to body and spirit. It 
 was from the first bestowal of the Spirit, with its quasi ma- 
 terial effects, a means of their living spontaneous, joyful, as 
 it were instinctive life, in which they were delivered from 
 the drag of reckoning with disease and death, and could have 
 the full energy of faith to lay out on other and more real pur- 
 poses. But also it was a means of culture, and of advancing 
 wisdom; it stimulated thought, it invited men to explore and 
 verify their theory of life and apply it to things as they are. 
 From that day to this it has been the world's deepest educa- 
 tion; and yet in the process it has lost no whit of its initial 
 power, even while it has gathered power in its advance into 
 the unseen. Now since those wonderful early gifts faded from 
 their material manifestations into the light of common day, 
 
344 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 the culture side has been more in evidence; so that while men 
 have followed its growth into their systems of theology and 
 ecclesiasticism they have tended more and more to ignore its 
 working in their bodies and nerves, and to give this latter 
 phase of life, the bodily, into the keeping of mechanical and 
 materialistic theory, into the exclusive hands of surgery and 
 medicine and diet. In this they have not been wrong; and in 
 this they have accomplished marvelous things; witness, for 
 example, how the one element of cleanliness and sanitation has 
 wrought to uplift and ennoble the life of man. But there has 
 also been an over tendency, by this very one-sidedness, to 
 separate our nature into two discordant parts, body and spirit, 
 and to keep the phenomena of the two apart, as it were in 
 water-tight compartments which have no communication with 
 each other. You know, too, how unable the majority of men 
 are, with all their culture, to think of two things at once; in- 
 stead of combining the two, like notes in a musical chord, 
 into a third harmonious compound, they deny one in order to 
 emphasize the other, and so go on as one-sided as before. So 
 men have suffered the side with which the Christ work began 
 to go under spiritual eclipse; they have surrendered it too 
 much to the exclusive operations of material nature; they 
 have forgotten that the Christ in them, just the same as the 
 Christ in history, who began His work with healing diseases, 
 that this same Christ in them intends health, that His spirit, 
 just as truly as was the case at Pentecost and in the initial 
 nascent power of spiritual gifts, intends healing and health. 
 The truth is, this law of the spirit of life works, and ought to 
 work, to effect not only a universal spiritualization but a uni- 
 versal incarnation; its saving power is as great in the body as 
 in the mind; the whole man is quickened and raised from the 
 dead together, the inner wars and discordances removed; this 
 is the great truth that resurrection, as distinguished from sur- 
 vival and ultimate separation of soul from body, is designed 
 to establish as the crowning destiny of life. Now here in our 
 modern days we have a most significant witness of the surging 
 of this forgotten truth to the front. I refer to the rise and 
 
INVENTORY &F VITAL VALUES 345 
 
 prevalence of Christian Science. What there is good in Chris- 
 tian Science, and we cannot deny much good in it, I re- 
 gard as the practical recrudescence, the indignant remonstrance 
 as it were, of an inner power of life which had gone too much 
 into eclipse. Men had so let their Christian energy dissipate 
 itself into a kind of disembodied spirituality, which they heed- 
 lessly divorced from common bodily life, that when the prac- 
 tical break-up of old theological theories came, and they were 
 unable to bank on the real efficacy of their Puritan concepts 
 of life and death, they were left with too slender a sense of 
 theories that would work; the question became a vital one, 
 What does our Christianity, the Christianity congealed in 
 dogmas and church observances, really do for us after all? 
 Just here, to fill the void for the rank and file who do not 
 think, came Christian Science, with its plea that the great con- 
 trolling power of the universe is not matter at all but mind, 
 and what was more significant still, its impulse of faith, if 
 this was so, to apply mind, spirit, confident and active will, to 
 the maladies and diseases of the body. And men found, to 
 their exceeding delight, that in a large degree this impulse 
 of faith worked; they found that the power of the spirit was 
 just as real as in the wonderful and early days. Here, so far 
 forth, was a theory of life that worked; it produced facts in- 
 stead of philosophy, it was a vital power in the incarnate life 
 of humanity. All this, you see, was simply a return to the 
 elemental first principles of things; it is a recrudescence of 
 St. James's truth given to the first generation of Chris- 
 tians, that the prayer of faith will save the sick. And 
 it was just in the direction that medical science is 
 longing for; the doctors no less than the saints de- 
 sire before all things to establish among their patients the truth 
 that the great beneficent power of nature prefers health, in- 
 tends health not disease, and that untold advantage is gained, 
 and incalculable potencies of success, just so far as they can 
 get their patients to cooperate heart and soul in this truth. We 
 can think too, in the case of diseases wherein the imagination 
 is on top, all that prevailing class of neurotic ailments wherein 
 
346 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 the spirit of modern man has got so tangled up with its own 
 miseries, which are no less real for being imagined, you 
 can think what a tremendous advantage it is to give men 
 something outside themselves to think of, something that will 
 make them forget and ignore their pretty woes, in the power 
 of a new impulse toward life and health, even though their 
 philosophy of life and health be vague and crude. Nay, the 
 field broadens out very large. Why not, in this intense, nerv- 
 ous, restlessly enterprising age, apply the same principle to 
 business, which in its way seems nowadays to have become a 
 kind of disease? In this realm, too, does not the Christ in us 
 intend health, joy, the free play of love and faith, confidence 
 in an order of things in which we can have our supreme alle- 
 giance to a spirit of life, rather than to increasing the abun- 
 dance of things a man possesses? Does our regenerate nature 
 intend so much sudden break-down and heart-failure as we 
 see among those whose worldly cares have so taken up all their 
 thoughts that they have really forgotten to live? Do not they 
 too need above all to live more in the consciousness of a power 
 of life which is mind, spirit, and whose pulsation of love and 
 faith heals the sordid selfishness and crooked ways which, 
 while they are so exclusively set on worldly success, also work 
 like a fever to wear out our vitality? Yes, we may learn some- 
 thing from Christian Science as a social symptom and a re- 
 crudescence of primitive vitalities; we have too heedlessly let 
 some of our Christian heritage lapse into atrophy and become 
 inoperative, though the power of it has been ours from the 
 beginning. We have not less reason than Christian Science 
 but more, to live the joyful, confident, care-free lives that we 
 see in so many of the new sect; lives in which the buoyant 
 and exultant spirit shall exert its good effect of faith on nerves 
 and bodily well-being, while also our very interest in life be- 
 comes a thing not wearing but energizing and restful. There 
 is no need of making a new sect to discover this; we have all 
 the data and motive we need, if we will use what is revealed to 
 us. But we have meanwhile waited for Christian Science to 
 point out one way, the old way of using the faith it is in us 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 347 
 
 to have, by which we may recover from our torpid one-sided- 
 ness and be made whole. That way is ours no less than theirs. 
 If the Christ in us intends life and health, if He is identified 
 with the recuperative powers of nature, let us not fear to make 
 up life with reference to fuller and freer life, not to death; 
 with reference to abounding health, both of the spirit, which 
 is the controlling element, and of the body, which ought to 
 be the controlled, and which in the divine intention is designed 
 to be the clean, sacred, beauteous temple of the spirit of 
 Christ. 
 
 But in so doing we cannot afford, in the arrogant name of 
 Christian Science science forsooth! to outrage science 
 itself ; and to throw away all the research and experimentation, 
 the single-minded devotion to healing and bodily well-being, 
 which through the ages has so dominated that high-minded 
 profession of medicine, which has so nobly trodden in the steps 
 of the Great Physician. When, in order to emphasize the 
 truth that God is spirit, Mrs. Eddy proceeds to maintain that 
 body is unreal, that there is no such thing as disease, and no 
 remedies but remedies of mind, we must in the name of 
 common sense take leave of her. When we say No to medicine 
 and surgery, and to the means which they with such searching 
 wisdom have devised, we are saying No to the plain testimony 
 of our God-given senses; nay, we are saying No to our mind, 
 to our trained intellect, to our Christian culture, and trying to 
 think ourselves into a world just as unreal and one-sided as 
 the one we are asked to leave. We are asked to outrage our 
 sense of fact in order to maintain a crude thinker's sense of 
 theory. In the way "Science and Health" gets at its interpre- 
 tation of things one is reminded of Charles Dudley Warner's 
 famous distinction between the two things out of which Chris- 
 tian Science has grown, the fads of mind-cure and faith-heal- 
 ing: "In the case of mind-cure, you see, one need not have any 
 faith; and in the case of faith-healing one need not have any 
 mind." Very little if any mind, it would seem, is needed to 
 make such a theory of life as Christian Science has committed 
 itself to. The strange phenomenon of such a crazy phi- 
 
348 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 losophy, in our advanced age, cuts two ways. In the first place, 
 it seems to be just an instance of what I have mentioned: it 
 betrays a mind so limited that it cannot think of two things 
 at once, and so combine them, a mind so dazzled with one 
 idea that it cannot see the other, and so has no recourse but 
 to deny the existence of the other. It is just as one-sided to 
 say there is no matter as to say that everything is matter. In 
 fact, the lame point of Christian Science, as is the case with 
 every philosophy, is in its denial, its negative; it is so taken 
 with the Berkeleian idea that all reality is in our minds that 
 it has no eyes for the reality that is in matter. You remember 
 how sturdy old Dr. Johnson met the Berkeleian idealism, his 
 theory of the non-existence of matter, when it was first 
 broached. "I observed," says Boswell, "that though we are 
 satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. 
 I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, 
 striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till 
 he rebounded from it, 'I refute it thus! " This was not phi- 
 losophy, perhaps; but neither is the toothache; but it con- 
 vinces a common mind of something very real. But in the 
 second place, the fact that this crazy philosophy can in this 
 late day actually make a sect of itself does not leave the gen- 
 eral level of our doctrine unscathed; like the other and better 
 side, this side also is a symptom. When we see what theories 
 of life whole congregations of otherwise cultivated people can 
 take up with, just on the strength of a recrudescent faith, we 
 wonder what conviction of truth, what body of doctrine, they 
 really had in possession. It looks as if on the theological side 
 their minds were found empty and swept and garnished, and 
 the new Christian Science philosophy, entering in, had not 
 corrective even of common sense to encounter. Is it not an 
 indication of the poverty of Christian thought and conviction 
 into which too generally men had fallen? 
 
 But we have not so learned Christ. The Christian way does 
 not deny fact; it seeks fact, and seeks its sanest interpretation. 
 Nor does it make up its theory of life on the basis of evading 
 pain, or of seeking an ideal existence where ills are eliminated. 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 349 
 
 Rather, it still retains the sense of something to fight, some- 
 thing to hold as real and as an enemy, something to overcome 
 by the power of life that is in us. "Though our outward man 
 perish" there is still an outward man, subject still to the 
 ills of the flesh "yet our inward man is renewed day by 
 day." So our Christian life still remains an arena for the 
 seasoning and renewal of the inner man; and to this end there 
 is room for all our culture, our wisdom, our science; we need 
 not throw away the fruits of our mental powers for the sake 
 of a return to primitive and elemental things; for all things 
 are ours, and we are Christ's, and Christ is God's. 
 
 If then, in our inventory of vital values, we have noted first 
 that the Christ in us is a progressive spiritualization, we may 
 with equal confidence note secondly, that life in Him is a pro- 
 gressive incarnation, a progressive adoption into the family 
 of those who are realizing in life what the whole creation has 
 groaned for, to wit, the redemption of the body. And to this 
 end our intellect has share with the rest; its faith is not merely 
 instinctive and elemental, requiring the authentication of 
 bodily well-being, though this also is its right, but takes into 
 itself all the growing wisdom of the ages. Our theory keeps 
 pace in sanity with our facts. St. Paul's prayer for men was, 
 "That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, 
 may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the 
 knowledge of him: The eyes of your understanding being en- 
 lightened; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, 
 and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, 
 And what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward 
 who believe, according to the working of his mighty power, 
 Which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the 
 dead." Here is an appeal not only to our buoyant appetency 
 for health but to our sound and grounded progress in ideas; 
 body and spirit are raised into fuller, wealthier life together. 
 
350 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 III. WHY STAND YE GAZING UP INTO HEAVEN? 
 
 "Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?" 
 These words, which seem to contain a note of reproach, were 
 spoken, as St. Luke says, by two men in white apparel, who 
 were suddenly perceived to be standing on the spot whence a 
 moment before Christ had ascended. They seem to warn us 
 not to direct our gaze away off somewhere, straining our eyes 
 at an empty heaven and something gone, but to turn and find 
 the solution of things here, just where we stand. What shall 
 we find, as we betake ourselves from this mount of ascension 
 to common life again? Are these words for us the prelude to 
 a supreme disillusion and culmination of deception, or to a 
 supreme truth, now demonstrated in the flesh, and the cul- 
 mination of reality? A momentous alternative this, which we 
 cannot refuse to face. This Christ, as we have come to know 
 Him better, has satisfied our hearts as a world epitome, gather- 
 ing into one Personality all the hidden values of life. If now 
 He is gone, all is gone; where are we without Him? Our al- 
 ternative becomes poignant and piercing: was all this struggle 
 of the manhood spirit co-witnessing with the divine, stumbling 
 through the dimness of the twilight stratum, winning painfully 
 to the fulness of the time, walking for a bewildered season in 
 the mild presence of the supreme historic venture, getting eyes 
 hitherto holden true-sighted enough to see the law of the spirit 
 of life, was all this, which we associate inalienably with the 
 Christ, was this ministry which was the solution of it all, 
 as men like Renan think, for nothing, a beautiful unsubstan- 
 tial episode which passed and left no trace; or rather did it 
 reveal the supreme meaning and power and beauty of life, in 
 the glory of rounded personality, vanishing only as stars vanish 
 before the sun, vanishing yet also here, standing unseen in the 
 Presence wherein, though unaware, we have ever been, the 
 presence of Him who only hath immortality, dwelling in the 
 light which no man can approach unto? Such is the tremen- 
 dous alternative pressed upon us by the ascension, which ac- 
 
INFENrORT OF VITAL 7ALUES 351 
 
 cording as we receive it entails upon us a paralysis of sorrow 
 or a permanent vitality of joy. You remember how Browning 
 has described the sorrow of it: 
 
 Who failed to beat the breast, 
 And shriek, and throw the arras protesting wide, 
 When a first shadow showed the star addressed 
 Itself to motion; 
 
 and what consequence he draws, that, "we, lone and left silent 
 through centuries," are thrown back into uncertainty again, 
 our life still dim and unsolved. 
 
 We shall not look up, know ourselves are seen, 
 Speak, and be sure that we again are heard, 
 Acting or suffering, have the disk's serene 
 Reflect our life, absorb an earthly flame. 
 
 Not so did it affect those who saw it with their eyes, men 
 whose souls, yet unsicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, 
 could move in lines of straight and simple consequence. 
 "They," St. Luke says, "worshipped him, and returned to Jeru- 
 salem with great joy; and were continually in the temple, 
 praising and blessing God." If there was engendered a sense 
 of loneness, a silence of bereavement, through the centuries, 
 surely these Galileans who had the final sight of Him were 
 not the originators of it. 
 
 No: rather from that last mystic event on the Mount of 
 Olives their simple minds were firmly set toward the positive, 
 the glorious member of the alternative; and thenceforward 
 through time their faith was an education, continually en- 
 larged and enriched, in the meaning and involvement of it. 
 This education began, like all their disclosures of life, at the 
 point where they stood, at the thing they had eyes to see. The 
 announcement with which the two white-robed men followed 
 up their monitory question was, "This same Jesus, which is 
 taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner 
 as ye have seen him go into heaven." This is the most literal 
 and visualized prediction that we have of the second coming 
 of Christ; and so, whatever else it says, it puts into plainest 
 
352 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 and most apprehensible terms the truth that there is a con- 
 servation of the spiritual energy and fulness that has once 
 come to earth, that it is here not to be exhibited and with- 
 drawn but to stay and work an eternal work, not a memory 
 only, but a prophecy and a living power. "Shall so come in 
 like manner as ye have seen him go," is the prediction. For 
 forty days the Galileans had been under a wonderful and 
 unique schooling, being prepared to see Him go. There were 
 Peter temperaments among them, and John temperaments, 
 and Thomas temperaments; there were soon to be added to 
 them the fiery penetrative temperaments of Paul and Apollos, 
 and the long line of those who must receive the prediction not 
 from actual sight but from report and reading and sense of the 
 inner truth of things. How did all these see Him go? How 
 have we seen Him go? How then for us shall He come again; 
 how shall the conservation and correlation of spiritual energy 
 as embodied in Christ manifest its continued existence? Each 
 one saw according to his own eyesight and insight; not more. 
 But not one of those who remained faithful remained the man 
 he was. In a week more a mighty pulsation of light and growth 
 was to enter into them; so soon was the essential coming again 
 to begin; and they who had looked upon the Son of man were 
 in the new transfiguring light to look upon new creations of 
 faith and the events of a redeemed manhood going on from 
 more to more. They could not remain the men they were; 
 they must not. It befell them, as they went on living, as it 
 did in Tennyson's vision, wherein he senses himself sailing 
 down a mighty river toward the ocean, conducted by maidens 
 who as they sailed sang of what is wise and good and graceful, 
 and of a bettering world, and so accompanied him toward the 
 great deep, where his friend Hallam was. 
 
 And still as vaster grew the shore 
 And roll'd the floods in grander space, 
 The maidens gather'd strength and grace 
 
 And presence, lordlier than before; 
 
 And I myself, who sat apart 
 And watch 'd them, wax'd in every limb; 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 353 
 
 I felt the thews of Anakim, 
 The pulses of a Titan's heart; 
 
 As one would sing the death of war, 
 And one would chant the history 
 Of that great race, which is to be, 
 
 And one the shaping of a star; 
 
 Until the forward-creeping tides 
 Began to foam, and we to draw 
 From deep to deep, to where we saw 
 
 A great ship lift her shining sides. 
 
 The man we loved was there on deck, 
 But thrice as large as man he bent 
 To greet us. Up the side I went, 
 
 And fell in silence on his neck. 
 
 Nay, some such conception as this, of our growing and greaten- 
 ing as the years go on, came to one of those who saw Christ 
 ascend and heard this prediction of His coming. St. John, 
 who saw most deeply and intuitively, wrote long afterward, 
 "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet 
 appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall 
 appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." 
 We have seen Him, each one of us, as we are; but with what 
 narrowness and dimness of vision, what trembling timidness 
 of faith. It remains for us and the world, as we grow in like- 
 ness to Him, to grow in fitness to see Him as He is. What 
 matter if He should come again many times over, if we could 
 not see Him as He is? So in this very prediction' of the second 
 coming of Christ, there seems to be hinted a provision for men 
 to grow other and greater, nay for the growth of a world his- 
 tory, in order on something like equal and therefore recognizing 
 terms, to meet Him. 
 
 I am not trying here to do anything more than the Scriptures 
 themselves do toward dissipating this prophesied return of 
 Christ into a merely spiritual and mystical event. It was long 
 held to be a literal, bodily coming, and dates were set for it 
 within the lifetime of those who saw Him go. St. Paul, scholar 
 
354 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 as he was, in his native Jewish appetency for a sign, 
 laid it at first vigorously and vividly on his imagination; and 
 in his earliest letter to the Thessalonians he pictured it as close 
 at hand, with all its accompaniments of shouting and Arch- 
 angel's voice and the trumpet of God and a great multitude of 
 embodied and disembodied together caught up to meet the 
 Lord in the air; but even in his second letter to the same 
 church his ideas were beginning to change, and he would post- 
 pone the great event a little, to make room for a previous fall- 
 ing away and revelation of the man of sin. In his letter to the 
 Corinthians, while he still seems in imagination to hear the 
 trumpet, and still figures the event spectacularly, saying we 
 shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in 
 the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump, yet he no longer 
 sets a date, and his coming of Christ seems to be joined with 
 a general resurrection. The prophecy, in fact, as time goes 
 on, suffers the fate of all prophecies: its sharp outlines gradu- 
 ally dislimn, and its details conform themselves more to natural 
 ongoings, while the substance and essence of it strikes in- 
 ward, becoming a more spiritual and by that very means a 
 more real and vital value. The fate of all prophecies, I say, 
 however true; if the fate of any great prophecy were other, 
 the prophecy would smack too much of private interpretation, 
 private to an age, or to a passing date, or to a particular 
 people's notions. Men had to learn that no prophecy, if it 
 was to avail for a universal humanity, was thus of private in- 
 terpretation. A whole heritage of such prophecy, a whole 
 stock of ideas about coming things, accumulated from the old 
 Jewish regime, was in these early disciples' keeping, and had 
 to be either adjusted to new conditions or outgrown. One of 
 the first things they discovered was that there was a whole 
 effete system of ideas which, as the writer to the Hebrews 
 says, was ready to vanish away; it was waiting for only one 
 more mighty earthquake to tumble down forever. "Whose 
 voice then shook the earth," the writer says; "but now hath 
 promised, saying, Yet once more I shake not the earth only, 
 but also heaven. And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the 
 
INFENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 355 
 
 removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are 
 made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." 
 The disciples little realized, to begin with, what a clean sweep 
 of man-made things, hoary old traditions and notions, was 
 destined to be made. The idea of a coming judgment and 
 assize, for instance, was merely an appendage of the empire of 
 law, wherein every man was uncertain, without an external 
 will to teach him, whether his works were rewardable or pun- 
 ishable; and even before the New Testament times are over 
 this judgment idea has about as good as gone by the board; 
 for the apostles have discovered that in Christ we have all the 
 data for judgment we need, and that in such light of truth not 
 only are the saints to judge themselves but to be judges of 
 the earth. The era of faith and love is its own light and certi- 
 tude; it justifies and ratifies itself; what need then of a grand 
 demonstration in the valley of decision, a spectacular assize? 
 The same with the idea of a simultaneous and multitudinous 
 resurrection of the dead; the sharp lines of this notion begin 
 even in the apostles' lifetime to fade, and in fact the date of 
 resurrection begins to be squarely identified with the date of 
 our committal to His spirit. The Christian is viewed more 
 and more clearly as dead to sin and risen with Christ; what 
 occasion then for a grand demonstration of resurrection, away 
 along in the ages, long after the multitudes of risen lives have 
 become complete in Christ? What has been left behind that 
 the risen life is ever to have use for? In fact, all this idea 
 is the offspring of the obsolete old notion of making up life 
 with reference to inevitable death, as if some time everything 
 were to end, and we could make a new beginning, if at all, 
 only when the end is complete, and then make it, if at all, 
 only on the basis of disintegration and ruins, only by patching 
 up and mending survived fragments, like the patching up of 
 a steel-framed building here and there after the San Francisco 
 earthquake. The Christ ideal, with its abolition of death, has 
 annulled all that. Mortality is swallowed up of life; this 
 men come increasingly to realize; hence physical death be- 
 comes a negligible quantity; that is no point at which to set 
 
356 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 up our beginning of life, whether survival or resurrection. 
 Rather, our initial point is the place where our faith, our whole 
 will and energy of being, lays hold of the new life force which 
 comes in with the redemption of the body, that redemption 
 after which all creation has groaned until now, and which the 
 supreme historic venture on the issue of love and faith has 
 once for all proved true, valid, an authentic power of highest 
 manhood. Redemption is not an end but a beginning, the 
 great beginning of life after which we set our dates and number 
 our years. So from this point the one issue is, not get- 
 ting ready to die, not even getting ready to rise from the dead, 
 but making the life that is already proffered us rich and full 
 and wise and pure, as a life obeying the functions of perma- 
 nent, eternal, ever growing and greatening elements, which 
 resolve themselves into elements of love and faith. These 
 are our real vitality; these abide while all that is of the senses 
 decays and passes; these gather into themselves all the values 
 and permanent interests of life. So with these and their in- 
 volvements as our outfit, we can disregard the things that die, 
 for in us they are already dead. "If ye then be risen with 
 Christ," one plain and glorious duty remains; "seek those 
 things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand 
 of God." Here is the essential heaven in the present world; 
 here is resurrection in this life; the rest, the conjectured con- 
 dition of things after that insignificant crisis of physical death, 
 is only matter for scientific curiosity or perhaps psychic re- 
 search, but does not belong to the principles and motives of 
 things. Nay, as we go on, the clean sweep of crude old ideas 
 becomes still more portentous and momentous. The whole 
 idea of making death a punctuation-point, at which the punc- 
 tuation and full-stop of life is merely a clearing off of old 
 scores by reward or punishment, the whole basis of world-made 
 legislation and justice, has become inoperative and obsolete, 
 not because it has passed, but because it has become rudi- 
 mentary and as it were automatic, like the reflex and involun- 
 tary operations of our body; the abolition, or rather 
 absorption, of the whole matter has been provided for and 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 357 
 
 promised, ever since the Father of spirits proclaimed mercy 
 greater than justice, ever since we have known of a God who 
 forgives all manner of iniquity and transgression and sin, even 
 while He would by no means acquit or say that the guilt of 
 a broken law of being was not guilt. The basis of judgment 
 has become entirely other. Henceforth, though we receive as 
 truly as ever according to the deeds done in the body, the 
 question of destiny is not that of slaves and culprits dreading 
 justice, nor of self-complacent Pharisees putting in claims for 
 reward reward, forsooth, for being true and honest! but 
 rather of how the glad free current of love in us has wrought 
 good, as Christ did, to the least and lowest, those who could 
 not pay, those from whom, because the love within us is au- 
 thentic love, we never dream of demanding pay. True, there 
 remains the possibility of a second death; there remains the 
 unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit, and what horrors 
 hang round that, God forbid that many utterly perverted souls 
 may ever know! But this belongs inseparably to the great 
 issue of love, as Christ has already drawn it in the twenty-fifth 
 of Matthew; to the question whether the soul will freely choose 
 its own eternal element, the element of Christ in us, or, its 
 manhood instincts working in an awful inverse order, deliber- 
 ately choose the impulses and bitter malignity of a fiend. It 
 is not the crude issue of justice at all; that is swallowed up in 
 redemption and forgiveness; it is the issue of grace, the pure 
 unbought love of God working in and through us, our spirits 
 consenting, or put away and repudiated, our spirits outraged 
 and satanized. The issue is still beyond conception awful; but 
 is there not still in this so gloriously evolved manhood, the 
 quenchless hope, always fed by the progressive formation of 
 Christ in us, that where sin so abounds grace may much more 
 abound, and that in the great reckoning God may find in our 
 shrinking, struggling life some authentic pulsation of His own 
 love, which by its free working, however blindly, may enable 
 us to inherit the kingdom prepared for us in our own nature, 
 and perfected in our accepted representative, Son of man and 
 Son of God? 
 
358 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 But we have too long left the prophecy with which we 
 started, the prophecy that Christ would come again, that the 
 spiritual energy which He awakened would be conserved and 
 correlated with humanity by an actual return to earth. That 
 prophecy, too, as we have seen, had to pass through modifying 
 and transforming phases, sometimes hard to recognize and 
 identify with the original prediction; until by the time of the 
 Second Epistle of Peter scoffers of the last days are beginning 
 to say, "Where is the promise of his coming? for since the 
 fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the 
 beginning of the creation." Their spirits could not see what 
 is the real glory of that coming, that it smites itself into the 
 ongoings of creation, because creation itself is a steady prog- 
 ress, an evolution. His coming does not abjure or repudiate 
 the rudimental stages of creation, does not treat these as a 
 degeneration and ruin, or even as evil; rather it is wrought in 
 with them, infusing a spirit into the very centre of them, which 
 has limitless powers of seminal quickening and growth. May 
 we not say then that Christ in His second coming arrived on 
 earth at the day of Pentecost, only a week after the return was 
 predicted? That partly is the date we may set; that was 
 surely the spiritual coming. But the bodily coming, what of 
 that? Ah, here comes in the tremendous enlargement of the 
 idea, the marvelous process of making it a universal and 
 eternal fact. To have that risen body of Jesus of Nazareth 
 with us again, appearing and vanishing at limited points of 
 space and so feeding idle curiosity, asserting His restored king- 
 liness at momentary points of time, and so keeping the promise 
 material and literal, how would that fulfil the sublime 
 promise, what real use could a waiting world, still gazing as 
 it were into heaven, make of such sporadic and miraculous 
 coming as that? Is it thus that we have seen him go; have 
 we made so little use of our post-resurrection enlightenment 
 as that? Have we not learned to see in that ascension, the 
 whole gracious fulness of humanity, intact and complete in 
 body and spirit, vanishing for a space, only in order to return 
 in greater reality and power, not as a spectacle for the eyes 
 
INFENrORT OF VITAL VALUES 359 
 
 but as a vitality for our inmost life? Well then, if we have so 
 seen Him go, so in like manner let Him return. It comes back 
 to the eyes we have developed to see Him as He is. But mean- 
 while, here is the marvelous truth that comes more and more 
 to dawn on men like St. Paul and St. John, whose enlightened 
 wisdom enables them to see the inside of things. This risen 
 spirit of Christ, victorious over the death of the cross, is hence- 
 forth engaged in shaping itself a body, a body in which ever 
 more sublimely to reappear, a body with all the functions 
 which the varied energy and wisdom of man's body may put 
 forth to do its work in the world. And the material out of 
 which this spirit shapes that body is the vast body of hu- 
 manity, with one new life in its members, with all its varieties 
 and degrees of endowment, all its applications of function, 
 teaching and working and healing according to the individual 
 talent and grace, all its powers at the disposal of the whole 
 growth of manhood, according to what each joint supplieth. 
 This is the form that the returning person of Christ comes 
 more and more to take in men's minds. You remember how 
 much St. Paul says about the body of Christ; how sometimes 
 he figures it as a building, to which those who are in Him con- 
 tribute strength and beauty, as it were a divine artistry; how 
 oftener he figures it as a colossal universal body of believers, 
 Christ the Head sending forth wisdom and spiritual impulse 
 to all the members, or sometimes the very life and body as 
 a whole, to which human heads and hands and hearts are 
 vitally related, as the branches to the vine. The figure is too 
 great and comprehensive for St. Paul to manage consistently; 
 but it is this view of things to which the prediction of His 
 coming resolves itself. Nay more: men come to see that Christ 
 Himself is not yet complete, but that He is being developed 
 out of the varied elements of manhood; that we are all builders 
 of the Christ in our degree, that it takes a whole hu- 
 manity to express Him in heart and soul, that we may even 
 do something to fill up what is behind of His sufferings and 
 sacrifice. It is a conception in which imagination is almost 
 lost and baffled; but it is the only conception which makes 
 
360 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 the prophecy as true as the world and ages, that conception 
 of humanity as not many things but one body, working har- 
 moniously in one spirit, and growing from glory to transfigured 
 glory, "Till we all come, in the unity of the faith, and of the 
 knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the 
 measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." Can we say 
 now, with this tremendous interpretation in mind, that Christ 
 did not come again, or ask doubtfully after the promise of His 
 coming; can we say that He is not coming, after all that we 
 have traced in His personality, so in like manner as we have 
 seen Him go? Oh, friends, how have we seen Him go, with 
 what spirit and reality and power? Even as the power and vi- 
 tality of a mighty new evolution, whereby the final stadium of 
 manhood even now, in that history wherein a thousand years 
 are as one day, is being steadily and majestically traversed. 
 Away with Renan's sentimental pulings over the sad departure 
 of Christ. The body of Christ is with us now, is us; and to 
 each one of us it is given, whether a vessel to honor or dishonor, 
 to be in our place and work a living member. So it is, by this 
 second coming, that manhood is all the while being made, ac- 
 cording to the pattern shown us in the mount. Need we seek 
 a more glorious evolution than this, even though, while eyes 
 to see Him as He is are still weak and astigmatic, we know 
 not what we shall be? Such agnosticism as this is a saving 
 agnosticism, for we know the potency of greater things, and 
 in our own unitary body of manhood we are using it. If as 
 yet we see through a glass darkly, it is only because we are 
 still in the turmoil of evolution; the lower world within us 
 still struggles to obscure the higher; and as with St. Paul the 
 battle is still on, though its issue is no longer uncertain. We 
 fight in undismayed hope, and in the joy of greatening light, 
 for the boundless powers of love and faith are yet far from 
 explored and proved; and these are shaping us within. 
 
 Where is one that, born of woman, altogether can escape 
 From the lower world within him, moods of tiger, or of ape? 
 
 Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages, 
 Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape? 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALVES 361 
 
 All about him shadow still, but, while the races flower and fade, 
 Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade, 
 
 Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices blend in choric 
 Hallelujah to the Maker "It is finish'd. Man is made." 
 
 Meanwhile a mighty Spirit of life is consciously with us and in 
 us, reconciling the world to Himself, to His cross and to the 
 power of His resurrection; nor is His work destined to cease 
 or slacken, but rather to grow in wisdom and scope, until that 
 other prophecy is fulfilled: "Then cometh the end, when he 
 shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; 
 when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and 
 power. For he must reign till he hath put all enemies under 
 his feet. . . . And when all things shall be subdued unto 
 him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that 
 put all things under him, that God may be all in all." So it 
 is, in this new era of light. Already there is looming before 
 illuminate souls a larger unity still, when the perfected hu- 
 manity, Head and members alike, shall be merged in Him 
 from whom the whole vast evolution proceeds; when creature 
 and Creator shall be no more twain in spirit but fully and har- 
 moniously at one. 
 
 But while thus this prophecy of the Christ that is to be 
 enlarges itself to a vast breadth, until it becomes the forecast 
 of a universal social evolution, let us not forget or think away 
 its beginning; let us not be of those who in order to contain 
 one idea must deny another. The social consciousness which 
 is so characteristic of our time tends to merge the individual 
 in the crowd; tends to rub off the angles and outlying peculi- 
 arities of individuality, and make the personal soul, who seems 
 to himself such a world in himself, a mere bolt or pinion in 
 a vast communal organism, whose mind is not his, nor a 
 centred mind at all, but the mind of some colossal diffusion. 
 This tendency spreads itself also over the unseen future; so 
 that this final unity in God loses personal bounds and becomes 
 a vague Buddhism and nirvana. Not to be ourselves, not to 
 retain what is unique and characteristic in us, our talents, our 
 acquirements, our individual traits of being, what would a 
 
362 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 survival like this be worth? The thought of this is a source 
 of much trouble to persons who love life as it is, with its lights 
 and shades, its individual ties and comrade relations; they 
 shrink from it, in fervent echo of Tennyson's remonstrance: 
 
 That each, who seems a separate whole, 
 Should move his rounds, and fusing all 
 The skirts of self again, should fall 
 
 Remerging in the general Soul, 
 
 Is faith as vague as all unsweet: 
 
 Eternal form shall still divide 
 
 The eternal soul from all beside; 
 And I shall know him when we meet: 
 
 And we shall sit at endless feast, 
 
 Enjoying each the other's good: 
 
 What vaster dream can hit the mood 
 Of Love on earth? 
 
 Our return to the scene from which we have started furnishes, 
 I think, the wholesome corrective of this vague doubt. "In 
 like manner as ye have seen Him go," - how, we must ask 
 again, have we seen Him go? As a mysterious Being indeed, 
 whose strange physical nature we had gradually learned to 
 dissociate from our body of clay; but still, when He vanished 
 into light and cloud, He vanished as a body, as a glorified 
 organism, with its functions and individual traits all intact; 
 nay, going from us as the one perfectly evolved human Per- 
 sonality the world ever saw. In Him we have seen individu- 
 ality complete and finished; it is the social Christ, the diffused 
 Christ, whose evolution still waits and grows. And when, a 
 few months or years later, He stood again in light beyond 
 noonday, to answer the question of Saul of Tarsus, "Who art 
 thou, Lord?" so far from being remerged into the diffused love 
 that fills the universe, He still said, "I am Jesus of Nazareth, 
 whom thou persecutest." In other words, the resurrection 
 whose power we aspire to know, if not a resurrection of the 
 flesh, is nevertheless revealed to us as the resurrection of the 
 body, a true and authentic body, with all that bodily organism 
 essentially implies; that is what distinguishes His going out 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 363 
 
 of life from mere spiritual survival; that is just what He be- 
 gan to teach us by His transfiguration, referring us to the 
 resurrection for the meaning of it, referring us to this rather 
 than to the resuscitation of Lazarus. That is the grand new 
 truth impressed upon us by His uprise from the dead. There 
 is a natural body, a physical body as St. Paul calls it, the or- 
 ganism of the natural life, and it dies; there is also a spiritual 
 body, the organism of a larger and diviner life, and even though 
 it freely consents to death, it lives; lives not by killing the 
 physical body but by redeeming it, buying it back as it were 
 from its pains and bondages and fitting it for a purer inheri- 
 tance. Just as within the blinded eye of Milton there was an 
 inner power of sight; just as within the deadened ear of 
 Beethoven there was the power to hear and create symphonies, 
 so though our whole outward man perish the real man, the in- 
 ward man, is not yielding to death, but may be renewed day 
 by day. Not an abstruse or unreasonable idea this: that the 
 most real and characterizing body of ours is not our flesh and 
 nerves but inside our flesh and nerves, transfiguring us by the 
 renewal of our mind, and waiting only to step some day out of 
 its temporary tent, its outworn placenta, and be born as the one 
 adequate organism of our true life, a house not made with 
 hands. In such a revelation death is in all literalness 
 abolished; its truer name is birth. 
 
 Now if this is so, here is opened a field not only for the 
 discoveries of religion, but for the research of open-eyed, open- 
 minded, liberal science. We have got indeed beyond the realm 
 of the tissues, but not beyond the realm of the body; we are 
 still legitimately in the field of an enlarged and fair-minded 
 biology. We are at least in an interpretation of life to which, 
 if science cannot yet say Yea, it certainly cannot say Nay. It 
 has tried, arrogantly enough, to say Nay, and to pin the body 
 and spirit alike down to matter; but all its narrowing asser- 
 tions, as time went on, have suffered confusion and shipwreck. 
 What is matter? it has asked; and by the time it had got 
 matter all sweetly reduced to little balls or polyhedra called 
 atoms, out of which it could build everything we see, along 
 
364 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 came radium and strange electric ions of force, which circu- 
 lated freely through the minutest of their atoms, as we roam 
 about in the world; nay, men are beginning to wonder if an 
 atom of hydrogen may not be a completely furnished world in 
 itself. Countless energies there are, with all the marks of 
 design and intelligence, and with strange potencies to mould 
 matter, which yet can go freely through the densest matter, 
 as the risen body of Jesus is represented to have stood sud- 
 denly in the midst, though the doors were shut. Men are all 
 at sea about matter itself; and are in doubt whether they ought 
 to say substance at all, whether it is not all reducible to energy. 
 The whole universe down to its minutest speck, seems alive; 
 and every atom seems to have in it the organic completeness 
 of the whole. Where does life begin or end; what does it 
 mean; what smallest or greatest body is not furnished with it? 
 Is it electricity; is it light; is it blind and fortuitous, or is it 
 intelligence? And if, as we know life, it is endowed with con- 
 sciousness and will, what smallest speck of protoplasm is not 
 endowed with its due degree of individuality, of consciousness 
 and will? Surely, in the light of such unanswerable questions, 
 which are only specimens from a limitless multitude, science 
 can no longer say No to the idea of a body which, let us say, 
 may have such relation to a luminiferous ether, which exists, 
 though no man can measure it, as our natural body has to the 
 air. I do not say this is so. But that there is a spiritual body, 
 to which space and time are no longer a bridle and bondage, 
 is the tremendous idea to which, through the powers and de- 
 mands of the spirit, the Scripture squarely leads us; and 
 science, in spite of itself, is forced in the same direction. If 
 this is so, then science and Scripture alike, have room for their 
 evolution, their growth of life out of dying matter into the ful- 
 ness of its promise. Death is not death; it is change and tran- 
 sition. Nor does it have to be transition into a far-off land, 
 or to an unknowable perhaps. The other world may, after 
 all, be within our world, as the spiritual body is already within 
 our body; complete and organized, like the new Jerusalem 
 getting ready to come from God out of heaven; we cannot, 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALVES 365 
 
 even on scientific grounds, say No to this. Who can say that 
 Cardinal Newman's picture is not literally and factually true: 
 "And yet, in spite of this universal world which we see, there 
 is another world, quite as far-spreading, quite as close to us, 
 and more wonderful; another world all around us, though we 
 see it not, and more wonderful than the world we see, for this 
 reason if for no other, that we do not see it. All around us 
 are numberless objects, coming and going, watching, working 
 or waiting, which we see not: this is that other world, which 
 the eyes reach not unto, but faith only." 
 
 Faith only; but faith is no bar to knowledge, rather a 
 promoter of it; no imaginative dream, or denial of what we 
 see, rather the endowment of eyes that see more deeply, and 
 the spur to research and realization; faith is a vitality, a ven- 
 ture, an initiative energy, a living as if this were so. What 
 has come of such faith when it has its perfect work, working 
 by love and purifying the heart, our whole course of study has 
 shown us, with its supreme historic venture, unfolding to us 
 the Life Indeed. And the privilege of exploring its resources, 
 as it deepens and broadens, is ours forever; it lures us on, from 
 every lowly spot whereon we stand, to life more and fuller, 
 until by its vital energy we 
 
 reach the ultimate, angels' law, 
 
 Indulging every instinct of the soul 
 
 There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing! 
 
 So now we have traversed our course of study, and reached 
 the supreme point where the Life Indeed, having established 
 its law and its principle of growth and continuance, having 
 also filled and ennobled this earthly existence, is ready for, 
 nay has already essentially made, its transition to a higher 
 and larger sphere of being. A manhood evolution passing won- 
 derful it is, that we have reviewed, as simple and elemental as 
 it is far-reaching and complex. What now, in one deepest word, 
 does it all mean? 
 
 One great idea I have approached several times, several times 
 seen it standing large and majestic in my path, and yet have 
 
3 66 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 felt an invincible awe about exploring it and as it were pro- 
 nouncing verdict upon it, until more testimony was in, more 
 data for coordinating its elements with our general evolu- 
 tionary view. There seemed to be in it something very real 
 and very fundamental, which when the fitting moment came 
 we must not miss or ignore; and yet somehow my eyes were 
 holden. And now that we reach the summit, and have a whole 
 ordered course to look back upon, that idea seems all at once 
 to stand out clear and plain, as the colossal key to the entire 
 marvelous history. It is the great living evolving truth of 
 atonement; let us pronounce the name according to its simple 
 and winsome English derivation, at-one-ment. We have trav- 
 ersed the inner history of a manhood so evolved by the power 
 of the spirit of life as to be fully and finally at one with the 
 creative spirit that has wrought upon and within it. 
 
 For many years thinkers, you and I with the rest, have been 
 baffled by the magnitude of this idea of atonement. It would 
 not let itself be cramped into our narrow and crude definitions. 
 The truth of it, in some large sense, we did not doubt; but to 
 define a thing is to limit it; and out of every such limitation 
 arose a feeling of remonstrance, the sense of what atonement 
 is not, or at best of what it is only in part. It is not the ap- 
 peasing of an enraged God; it is not, in the grotesque 
 old mediaeval idea, the paying off of the devil for the souls that 
 have become his due; nor the liquidation of our huge debt of 
 law in a lump sum; of these negations we are very sure. Nor, 
 true as vicarious suffering is of the noblest manhood, can we 
 quite satisfy ourselves with the idea of one of our race being 
 substituted for the rest, as if then the rest had nothing further 
 to do but contemplate and rejoice; nor any more, mighty as 
 is the grip of Christ's influence upon us, does it exhaust itself 
 in moral influence; for still the question is open, influence to 
 do or be what? Men have, I am inclined to think, over-empha- 
 sized the duty of sheer sacrifice for its own sake; they have 
 sometimes made it a kind of fetish; as if there were any more 
 intrinsic virtue in giving up everything without a motive than 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 367 
 
 there is in strongly and wisely subduing everything. But not 
 to multiply untenable or partial aspects, there is about all these 
 a note of the artificial, as if atonement were a made product, 
 not to say an ingenious fiction, instead of something elemental 
 and intrinsic in manhood. And perhaps the most deeply 
 doubted of all, saving as are its effects on this score, is the idea 
 that atonement is an after-thought and makeshift; as if in 
 order that it be brought about at all man must first have fallen 
 and become a ruined nature, and as if therefore atonement 
 were not really a creative thing, an at-one-ment with God from 
 the beginning, but essentially a colossal piece of mending and 
 cobbler work. We do not like to make it a thing so casual and 
 adventitious; what becomes thus of the Lamb slain from the 
 foundation of the world? We cannot rest in its being only as 
 large as degeneration; we want it to be as large as the mighty 
 evolution itself, an at-one-ment that is vital and valid for sin- 
 less as well as sinful manhood, and as such not an artificial but 
 self-illuminating and self-evidencing thing. 
 
 Is such a conception of atonement obtainable? I think we 
 come nearer to it by the line of thought we have been following 
 than in any other way; though in trying to sketch it I warn 
 you I am not the author of it; I lay it all, with its evolutionary 
 assumptions^ to the Bible. It rests with an enlarged science, 
 perhaps, to say whether it is possible or impossible, or to defer 
 judgment until we know something about our world; at any 
 rate it is abysmally deep and it is eminently consistent with 
 itself, as it were a grand poetic justice. 
 
 Its basis is a simple naive object-lesson pursued and re- 
 vealed through centuries. It begins with the tacit assumption 
 that man, when God breathed into his nostrils the breath of 
 life and he became a living soul, was not made for death, as 
 death has come to be his lot; that is, that there was in his 
 frame and flesh no intrinsic necessity of passing into a higher 
 state disembodied and by the way of disease or violence or 
 decrepitude, but perhaps by some such way as we see adum- 
 brated on the mount of transfiguration and later on the Mount 
 
368 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 of Olives where Christ disappeared from our senses. If man 
 had remained at one with God in childlike dependence and un- 
 questioning obedience and sinlessness, that way was open to 
 him, a kind of melting naturally from the sensualized form 
 of being to the ether ealized. But man chose rather to be at 
 one with God in a sense which, though it entailed grave conse- 
 quences, was really higher and more penetrative of the God 
 nature; he chose to be as gods, knowing good and evil, that is, 
 he chose knowledge and initiative enterprise and power to sub- 
 due the earth; and in so doing he virtually chose what we call 
 death, that is, the other and more painful way of exit from this 
 stage of being. "In the day that thou eatest of it thou shalt 
 surely die," had been his warning; but in spite of this there 
 was in him the overweening impulse to stronger, less sweetly 
 childlike things, and his spirit dared, and his eyes were opened, 
 and he fell upward. At the same time he put himself at 
 disadvantage even with the animals from which he had sprung; 
 for their death, though natural and inevitable, has not the 
 shrinking horror and dread about it that man's has; they, in 
 their instinctive submission, beat him in passing out of life. 
 There are still left us landmarks in the object-lesson to show 
 what might have been: Enoch, walking in utter childlike de- 
 pendence with God, "was not, for God took him"; Moses, in 
 his great meekness of legal order and wise leadership, passed 
 in his Creator's arms; Elijah, in his single-minded prophetic 
 zeal, fiery like his nature, passed in fire and flame to another 
 stage of being. Highest of all, when, a week after He had 
 announced His Messiahship, our Lord stood on the mount of 
 transfiguration, and these exceptional men stood with Him, He 
 had the offer of just such an exit; it seems to have been the nat- 
 ural evolution of perfect sinlessness. Does it not seem to tell us 
 that the whole race might have gone that way, entering by a 
 painless metamorphosis on its prepared heritage, if it had not 
 chosen the way of initiative wisdom and pain and death? Nay, 
 this object-lesson seems to show, that sin is no more an ele- 
 mental necessity of manhood than of the animals: the spirit- 
 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 369 
 
 ual instinct, so to say, is wholesome and sound. But about 
 all these exceptional lives with their manner of passing, nay, we 
 dare to say even about the life of Jesus up to this point, we 
 get a sense of limitation; life's deepest resources are not all 
 embodied there; there is still about them a kind of passiveness, 
 supineness, lack of individual venture, which in spite of its 
 sinless purity leaves some higher reach of manhood yet to be 
 revealed. So there on the mountain these hitherto highest rep- 
 resentatives of humanity talk about still another exit from life, 
 which Jesus, strong in His sense and duty of Messiahship, 
 chooses instead of the easy way that here is offered. There is 
 still another way, essential to the highest manhood spirit, of 
 being at one with the Father of spirits, a final depth and height 
 in which, when it is complete, both God and man shall be re- 
 vealed as they most truly are. What is it, what could be more 
 than fully evolved innocence and sinlessness? 
 
 God is love, says the Bible's deepest and ripest definition of 
 Him. The problem of being at one with Him, then, is the 
 problem of being at one with love, in all the involvements that 
 life has created for it. It goes beyond passive innocence into 
 active, holy, vital work and sacrifice, not the sheer blind sacri- 
 fice of abnegation, but the vigorous, voluntary, fruitful sacri- 
 fice, of effecting a union of human hearts and human lives in 
 one spirit of love. It goes beyond the shrewdness and studied 
 order of wisdom, of which the world is full, committing itself 
 fearlessly, patiently, hopefully to activities which are the su- 
 preme unwisdom of men, but which prove through time to be 
 the far-reaching wisdom and power of God. How far and how 
 deep it goes we have Gethsemane with its bitter cup, we have 
 the cross with its shame and torture, we have the awful realiza- 
 tion of aloneness, of separation at once from God and manhood, 
 to tell us. And it goes on, as we see, not by the way of revolu- 
 tion or rebellion, but by the way of greater obedience, obedi- 
 ence even to the death of the cross. But it is the death of 
 death; and from the grave which so long ago man chose rises 
 a new life, which no death can grasp or hold, a life henceforth 
 
370 THE LIFE INDEED 
 
 clear and available, on the same terms, to a whole renewed hu- 
 manity. Is not this the' self-illuminating definition that we 
 have sought, a definition that no longer limits or makes its 
 way by ingenuity? This is the Life Indeed, the supreme 
 atonement, the fully revealed majesty and glory of being at 
 one with God. 
 

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