Religion of the Church 
 
 Manual of Membership 
 
 7 CHARLES GORE, D.D. 
 
 *Bishop of Oxford
 
 THE RELIGION OF THE 
 CHURCH
 
 BY THE 
 
 RIGHT RKV. CHARLES GORE, D.D., 
 Bishop of Oxford 
 
 THE WAR AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 And Other Addresses. Second Edition. 
 Cloth, 1/6 net. 
 
 THE BASIS OF ANGLICAN 
 FELLOWSHIP IN FAITH AND 
 ORGANIZATION. 
 
 An Open Letter to the Clergy of the 
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 with new Prefaci. 6d. net. 
 
 CRISIS IN CHURCH AND NATION. 
 
 6d. net. 
 
 A. R. MOWBRAY & CO. LTD. 
 LONDON AND OXFORD
 
 The Religion of 
 the Church 
 
 AS PRESENTED IN THE CHURCH 
 OF ENGLAND 
 
 A Manual of Membership 
 
 BY CHARLES GORE, D.D. 
 
 Bishop of Oxford 
 
 A. R. MOWBRAY & CO. LTD. 
 LONDON : 28 Margaret Street, Oxford Circus, W. 
 
 OXFORD: 9 High Street 
 MILWAUKEE, U.S.A. : THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN Co.
 
 First impression, September, 1916 
 New impression, October, 1916
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THIS little book is intended as a sum- 
 mary statement of the religion of the 
 catholic church. It is intended to meet 
 a need, which is just now clamorous the 
 provision of a manual of instruction for 
 the members of the Church of England. 
 It has been rapidly written, and, from the 
 nature of the case, can supply little in 
 the way of proofs or justifications of its 
 statements. But I can truthfully plead 
 that there is nothing here written down 
 that has not behind it the meditation and 
 study of a lifetime ; and in other books 
 I have sought to supply the grounds, or 
 a great part of the grounds, on which the 
 statements of this book repose. I hope my 
 critics will remember this. 
 
 My little book has had the advantage of 
 the very careful criticisms and suggestions 
 of Father Paul Bull, C.R. I have not seen 
 my way to accept all his suggestions, and 
 he has no responsibility for what appears 
 in the book. But the help he has given
 
 vi Preface 
 
 me has been invaluable. I owe to the 
 Rev. Wilfrid Cooper, my chaplain, the 
 short index to the topics treated in the 
 book. 
 
 C. OXON: 
 
 Michaelmas, 1916. 
 
 NOTE 
 
 I have been several times asked why I do not print 
 such words as Church, Sacrament, Precious Blood, etc., 
 with a capital. There are, I suppose, two principles 
 on which capitals may be used. One principle, which 
 seems to be dominant, is to use them, even in the 
 case of adjectives, to express sacredness or dignity or 
 importance. The other principle, the principle of the 
 English Bible, is to use them only for proper names. 
 I greatly prefer this principle, and seek to adhere to it, 
 save that I have not dared (except in quotations from 
 the Bible) to print the personal pronouns referring 
 to God without the capitals. Otherwise, I desire to 
 adhere to the principle of the English Bible. I suppose 
 ' ' Church of England," " Church of Rome," "the Pope," 
 " the Archbishop of Canterbury" to be proper names 
 requiring capitals. Otherwise, I print church, bishop, 
 etc., without a capital. It does not seem to me to 
 matter much. But one likes to have some principle 
 to adhere to, and I think the best principle is, as far as 
 possible, to reserve capitals for proper names.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 Membership in the Church - - 1 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 The Catholic Faith. Preliminaries - 9 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 The Doctrine of God and of His Creatures - 16 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 The Church and the Sacraments - - 39 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 The Last Things and the Commmunion of Saints 73 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 Christian Morality ... - 101 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 Prayer . - - - - - 128 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 The Bible its truth, its inspiration, and its use - 141 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 The Church of England in the Larger World - 165 
 
 Index 195
 
 THE RELIGION OF THE 
 CHURCH 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 Membership in the Church 
 
 CHRISTIANITY is a certain kind of 
 v> personal belief and a certain kind 
 of personal life ; but it is not a merely 
 individual religion, "a private matter 
 between a man's soul and God." It is 
 membership, with all the responsibility 
 of membership, in a society or brother- 
 hood which Jesus Christ our Lord founded 
 to bind together in one men of all classes 
 and races and kinds. This society is the 
 Holy Catholic Church, and the Church 
 of England is a part of the catholic 
 church. 
 
 Read the Gospels, and you will read of 
 Jesus Christ founding His church and 
 giving to it and to its officers authority
 
 The religion of the church 
 
 over all its members, authority to " bind " 
 and "loose" 1 that is to prohibit this and 
 to allow that with a divine sanction ; and 
 authority to "remit" and "retain" sins 2 
 with divine ratification that is to admit 
 men into its fellowship or to exclude 
 them if they are unworthy, and to readmit 
 them when they show themselves penitent. 
 Years before our present Gospels were 
 written down, the Christian church was 
 acting on this commission. Read the First 
 Epistle of S. Paul to the Corinthians and 
 you will find a vivid account of one of 
 the first Christian churches. There is 
 plenty of sin and wilfulness to be found 
 there, but there is no mistaking the 
 intense sense of membership. They had 
 been brought at their baptism by the one 
 Spirit into the one body, and they cele- 
 brated together the Holy Communion, the 
 sacrament of continual membership. The 
 authority of the whole body and of the 
 apostle is asserted and acknowledged over 
 every member. Any plainly unworthy 
 member is to be judged and excluded 
 from their company " in the name of 
 the Lord Jesus," and one so excluded, 
 when he is penitent, can be received back 
 into communion or forgiven "in the 
 
 1 S. Matt. xvi. 19 ; xviii 18. 
 1 S. John xx. 23.
 
 Membership 
 
 person of Christ." 1 Every member is 
 expected to take a part and interest in 
 the affairs of the church, its discipline, 
 and its worship. For a "member " means 
 a limb, and every limb of the body has 
 to do part of the work of the body. And 
 as they had learned from Christ the 
 infinite worth of every human soul, so 
 in their fellowship they recognized that 
 the need of each is the care of all, and 
 that " if one member suffer, all the 
 members suffer with it." The great salva- 
 tion in which they all rejoiced was a 
 gift of God for all which bound them 
 into brotherhood : and they acted on the 
 principle of all true brotherhood "from 
 each according to his capacity : to each 
 according to his need." Many things pro- 
 moted the growth of the church in early 
 days the steadfast faith of Christians, the 
 high moral level of their lives, the courage 
 and joy with which they faced trouble or 
 death ; but, perhaps more than all else, it 
 was the intense sense of membership, the 
 spirit of mutual love, which drew men 
 to them. And every local church in every 
 age has been either an effective or an 
 ineffective part of the body of Christ, 
 just in proportion as the sense of member- 
 
 1 See for the whole of this paragraph 1 Cor. xii ; 
 1 Cor. x. 15-22; 1 Cor. v ; 2 Cor. ii. 5-11, etc.
 
 The religion of the church 
 
 ship and the responsibility of membership 
 has been strong or weak. 
 
 When you come down the history of 
 the church to the Church of England, 
 as it was re-ordered at the Reformation, 
 and read its Book of Common Prayer, 
 you will see that it meant to maintain at 
 a very high level the responsibility of 
 membership. Those who are to be bap- 
 tized are to recognize publicly before 
 the congregation assembled their respon- 
 sibility for renouncing what Christ forbids, 
 for believing the common faith of the 
 church, and for obeying the laws of 
 discipleship. They are embarking, and 
 that publicly, on a great adventure, and 
 they must know what they are doing. If 
 infants are to be baptized, then sponsors 
 must be provided as sureties, to guarantee 
 that the infants, as they grow to years of 
 discretion, shall know the meaning of their 
 religion. And they are to renew the vows 
 of baptism through their own lips before 
 they can be confirmed, by the laying-on 
 of the bishop's hand, and so enter upon 
 full membership in the strength of the 
 Holy Spirit. The Lord's Supper or Holy 
 Communion is the sacrament in which 
 their membership is to be constantly 
 renewed and reinvigorated, and it is to 
 be guarded by the officers of the church
 
 Membership 
 
 from unworthy partaking. Those whose 
 lives cause public scandal are to be 
 warned or, if need be, excommunicated, 
 or put out of fellowship, till they have 
 shown themselves of a better mind, and 
 "been openly reconciled by penance," 
 and so can be readmitted to fellowship. 
 And private confession and absolution is 
 provided for those whose conscience is 
 troubled by secret sins. And the needs 
 of the poor and sick are to be relieved 
 by the alms of the whole community. 
 And the law of indissoluble marriage 
 is to set its consecration upon the home. 
 And the sick and dying are to be dealt 
 with as responsible members who must 
 be brought to a right faith and peni- 
 tence, and make their peace with God 
 and man, that, if they die, the words 
 of confident hope, such as belong rightly 
 to the holy fellowship of the church, 
 may be spoken over their graves. 
 
 All this is natural and right. Every 
 union or society which exists for any 
 worthy object must maintain a high sense 
 of the responsibility of membership ; and 
 all its members must recognize that, if 
 they fail to keep its obligatory rules, they 
 must fall out of membership and lose its 
 advantages. A nominal membership is the 
 curse of any union. What trade union
 
 The religion of the church 
 
 could last if a large percentage of its 
 members never obeyed its rules or ful- 
 filled their obligations ? 
 
 But if this is true, then indeed we know 
 wherein lies the present weakness of the 
 Church of England. It has cheapened 
 membership till it has come to mean 
 almost nothing. Of our soldiers we are 
 told seventy per cent, recognize them- 
 selves as members of the Church of 
 England, but it is only a small number 
 whose membership has meant much in 
 their lives. The sacrament of continual 
 fellowship has been ignored. They have 
 taken no interest in the affairs of the 
 church. They have never been led to 
 think of the management of the church 
 as if it was their business. They have 
 not felt it as a fellowship. It has not 
 led them to expect that if they were 
 wronged or unjustly treated, it would be 
 the duty and privilege of the church to 
 see them righted. They have the vaguest 
 idea of the church's faith, and a very 
 weak sense of either the joy or the 
 responsibility of common worship. They 
 have no idea that they wrong the church 
 by evil living, or that the church has 
 anything to do with the matter. For 
 old associations' sake they like to be 
 married in church, and to bring their
 
 Membership 7 
 
 children to be christened, and to send 
 their children to the Sunday school, and 
 they wish to be buried with the church's 
 service. But for the rest, membership 
 in the church means almost nothing. 
 Now I have no doubt at all that the 
 reform which is the most fundamental and 
 necessary, if there is to be any effectual 
 revival of religion in our old Church 
 of England, is to recover the feeling of 
 the obligations of membership. What we 
 want first of all is not more Christians but 
 better Christians, not more Churchmen 
 but better Churchmen. Every one must 
 understand that he or she cannot become 
 or remain a member of the church with- 
 out fulfilling the elementary responsibilities 
 of membership. All Christians are called 
 "kings and priests "in the New Testament, 
 and they should exercise their kingship and 
 priesthood by active participation in the 
 affairs and worship of the church. Both 
 their duties and their rights need to be 
 much more fully recognized. A vast 
 change is needed in this direction. But 
 the first step is to revive the sense of 
 membership ; and because I believe this to 
 be the most fundamental and necessary of 
 all reforms, I have called this book, which 
 attempts to explain the religion of the 
 church according to the use and practice
 
 8 The religion of the church 
 
 of the Church of England, a "manual of 
 membership." 
 
 The church has lately had it brought 
 home to it how small a proportion of " the 
 workers" are practising Churchmen. At 
 the same time the ideas and aspirations 
 of brotherhood that is, the spirit of 
 mutual membership are stirring the world 
 of labour to its depths. There is, I am 
 persuaded, only one way in which the 
 church can commend its message to labour. 
 It is not by lowering its doctrine or cheapen- 
 ing its claim. It is by making the spirit of 
 brotherhood, the spirit of mutual member- 
 ship, once again real and effective in the 
 church, which indeed was founded to 
 carry into every corner of the earth the 
 witness of Christ to the worth and dignity 
 of every human being for whom Christ 
 died.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 The Catholic Faith 
 
 THREE preliminaries must first be 
 considered. 
 
 1. The religion of the church is based upon 
 a word (or revelation) of God. The people 
 of Israel was called by God among ancient 
 peoples to be His people and to reveal His 
 " name " and purpose among men. In the 
 words of a great Christian father the Jews 
 were, through their prophets, "the sacred 
 school of the knowledge of God and of the 
 spiritual life for all mankind." The Jews 
 were thus the ancient and preparatory 
 church of God. The church of Jesus 
 Christ took its origin out of this ancient 
 church, but it is catholic or universal, a 
 super-national fellowship, based upon the 
 fuller revelation of God which is given us in 
 Jesus Christ. But the Jewish church and 
 the church of Christ are really one church, 
 and are alike based on the word of God 
 that is, on God's revelation of Himself 
 given first through His prophets and then 
 finally through His Son : and to become, 
 9 c
 
 10 The catholic faith 
 
 or remain rightly, a member of the 
 church each one must accept the message 
 of the church its fundamental faith as 
 being truly "the word of God." There 
 are solemn words of our Lord which sound 
 strangely in our ears: "Ithankthee, Father, 
 Lord of heaven and earth, that thou didst 
 hide these things (that is, His message) 
 from the wise and understanding, and didst 
 reveal them unto babes : yea, Father, for 
 so it was well-pleasing in thy sight. All 
 things have been delivered unto me of 
 my Father : and no one knoweth the Son 
 save the Father, neither doth any know 
 the Father save the Son and he to whom- 
 soever the Son willeth to reveal him." 1 
 In this wonderful saying our Lord asserts 
 His own community of nature with God 
 His Father, and His unique claim to reveal 
 God to men ; and He expresses a positive 
 joy in the fact that while the learned refuse 
 His message the simple accept it. He sees 
 in this the fulfilment of a divine purpose, 
 and S. Paul after Him, in different words, 
 does the same thing. A little thought will 
 enable us to understand our Lord's joy in 
 what would at first sight seem to us to have 
 been a grave disaster. It is that only so 
 could a really broad and enduring church 
 
 1 S. Matt. xi. 25-27 ; S. Luke x. 21, 22 ; 1 Cor. i. 
 18-31.
 
 Preliminaries 11 
 
 be founded or propagated. The learned, 
 the intellectuals, of every age, instinctively 
 claim the prerogative of their learning. 
 They are, in this respect, like rich men 
 who also instinctively expect a prerogative 
 position because they are rich ; whom, 
 therefore, our Lord similarly treated as 
 being under a special disadvantage in their 
 approach to His kingdom. What is the 
 claim made commonly by a learned class ? 
 It is that they will only accept as true 
 what commends itself to them as the con- 
 clusion of their own reasonings. But 
 the intellectual methods and principles 
 of learned men are not commonly intel- 
 ligible to the mass of ordinary men, and 
 also vary considerably, even profoundly, 
 from age to age and nation to nation. 
 Thus a religion which in any age should 
 approve itself to the learned class as the 
 conclusion of its own reasoning would be 
 a narrow religion, unacceptable to the mass 
 of men and still more unacceptable to men 
 of another nation or another civilization. 
 If there is to be a catholic church, a religion 
 for the common man, all the world over 
 and in every generation, it must be based 
 not on human reasoning but on divine 
 revelation, on God's disclosure of Himself, 
 and must be received by men in simple 
 faith as God's own word. Our religion
 
 12 The catholic faith 
 
 is not to be an evolution from within, but 
 a bestowal from above ; not a conclusion 
 of logic, but a gift of God ; to be welcomed 
 on authority and then verified in experi- 
 ence our own experience fortified and 
 supported by the experience of the whole 
 church. That is what the Bible says, 
 and truly, both Old Testament and New : 
 "Canst thou by searching find out God? 
 Canst thou find out the Almighty unto 
 perfection ? It is high as heaven ; what 
 canst thou do ? Deeper than the grave ; 
 what canst thou know ? " "In the wisdom 
 of God the world through its wisdom knew 
 not God." "Hath not God made foolish 
 the wisdom of the world?" 1 That is the 
 claim of the Christian faith. A brilliant 
 scientist, like Louis Pasteur, may be a 
 devout Christian, but that is because, like 
 Pasteur, he has been content in the first 
 instance to receive his faith, like the most 
 ignorant person, as the word of God from 
 the church which is commissioned to 
 bear it. 
 
 2. The purpose of this book is to expound 
 this word of God. To receive the message 
 of Christ from His church in simple 
 docility a man must be convinced that 
 Jesus Christ really is the Son of God, and 
 has really sent His church into the world. 
 
 1 Job xi. 7, 8 ; 1 Cor. i. 20, 21.
 
 Preliminaries 13 
 
 In one who comes from outside this con- 
 viction will be brought about in one case 
 mostly by intellectual, in another case 
 mostly by moral considerations, in another 
 case by personal influence. To produce 
 this preliminary intellectual conviction is 
 the work of what is called "apologetics" 
 that is, the reasoned expression of the 
 grounds of Christian belief. In this book 
 I am not concerned with that. I assume 
 in my readers that they are so far con- 
 vinced, or willing to be convinced, about 
 Christ either by tradition from their 
 fathers, or by intellectual reasonings, or 
 by their moral needs, as to be ready to 
 listen with docile hearts to the message 
 of "grace and truth which came by Jesus 
 Christ." My duty is to make it plain that 
 the message claims to be based, not on 
 human reason, but on a divine revelation 
 given us finally in Jesus Christ ; and my 
 business is to explain the points and articles 
 of this message, as the church, which is 
 Christ's commissioned agent, delivered it 
 from the first. Personal faith is a gift 
 a priceless gift wrought in the heart by 
 the Spirit of God: "No man can say, 
 Jesus is Lord, but in the Holy Spirit." 
 But an important part of the preparation 
 of our hearts for this gift is to be ready 
 to listen attentively and patiently to what
 
 14 The catholic faith 
 
 the message is. To reject it or despise it 
 without having really been at pains to 
 understand what it is, after all that the 
 message of the Gospel has done for the 
 world, is a sort of insolence. 
 
 3. The word of God must be looked for 
 in the first instance from the church. The 
 church was at work perhaps some twenty 
 years before any of the books of the New 
 Testament, as we now have them, were 
 written, and some seventy years before 
 they were all written. It will not sur- 
 prise us, therefore, to find out that no 
 one of the books of the New Testament 
 was written to give to any one his first 
 instruction in the Christian religion. 
 "That thou mayest know the certainty of 
 those things in which thou wast instructed" 
 is the object with which St. Luke wrote 
 his Gospel. And when S. Paul writes 
 in his Epistle to the Corinthians about the 
 resurrection or the eucharist it is to 
 remind them of "the gospel which I 
 preached unto you, which also ye received." 
 "For I delivered unto you first of all that 
 which also I received." That is the tone 
 of the whole New Testament. It assumes 
 and takes for granted the rudimentary 
 instruction which had been already given 
 to the converts to the church. Speaking 
 generally, we may say that all that is con-
 
 Preliminaries 15 
 
 tained in our catechism is, in the New 
 Testament, taken for granted as already 
 familiar ground among the Christians. 
 And the different books of the New 
 Testament were written as occasion arose 
 by the apostles or their companions to 
 record the tradition in its best form, or 
 to reinforce and explain and defend the 
 fundamental faith. It is thus the function 
 of "the church to teach and of the Bible 
 to prove " and confirm the faith. And so 
 complete are the books of Scripture taken 
 together, and so full the inspiration of the 
 Spirit of God under which they were 
 believed to have been written, that it 
 became the accepted principle of the 
 catholic church from the first, as it still 
 is of the Church of England, that nothing 
 could be part of the necessary faith but 
 what can be verified and proved in 
 Scripture. "Do not believe what I say 
 simply," says a great teacher of the early 
 church to his scholars preparing for bap- 
 tism, "unless you receive the proof of 
 what I tell you from the Holy Scriptures." ' 
 With these preliminaries I propose to 
 give a summary of the faith of the church, 
 which is also the faith of the New Testa- 
 ment Scriptures. 
 
 1 S. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Ltcturei, iv. 17.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 The Doctrine of God and of His 
 Creatures 
 
 THE centre and root of the catholic 
 faith is the revelation of the Father- 
 hood of God the doctrine that the one 
 power which made and preserves and 
 guides the whole universe is the almighty 
 will of a perfectly good God, who creates 
 and knows and loves not only all but 
 each. 
 
 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 
 
 Welcome as it is to the hearts of men, 
 this is perhaps the hardest of all Christian 
 doctrines to the speculative intellect. It is 
 so hard to reconcile with the facts of suffer- 
 ing and injustice and cruelty, and with 
 the seeming moral indifference of nature. 
 The intellect of man would never have 
 attained securely to this position by mere in- 
 quiry and investigation. It rests on God's 
 own revelation of Himself a revelation 
 given specially through a long succession 
 16
 
 The fatherhood of God 17 
 
 of Jewish prophets who were inspired to 
 proclaim as the word of God the goodness 
 of the Almighty, 1 and it received its final 
 expression through the lips of one who 
 was more than a prophet, who was the 
 Son of God who therefore not only 
 proclaimed the truth, and claimed the right 
 to declare it with infallible certitude, but 
 also, as incarnate in our manhood, dis- 
 closed to us the real character and mind 
 of God in the intelligible terms of a 
 human life. 
 
 Our Lord was always bringing home to 
 the minds and hearts of men the truth of 
 God's fatherhood, His universal and in- 
 dividual love. Consider the following 
 characteristic sayings: "It is not the will 
 of your Father which is in heaven that one 
 of these little ones should perish." "Not 
 a sparrow shall fall on the ground without 
 your Father: fear ye not therefore, ye 
 are of more value than many sparrows." 
 ' Your Father knoweth what things ye 
 have need of before ye ask him." " Your 
 heavenly Father knoweth that ye have 
 need of all these things." And He claims 
 to speak with infallible assurance "No 
 one knoweth the Father save the Son, 
 
 1 The word "Almighty" or "omnipotent" means 
 properly not so much "able to do all things" as 
 " powerful in and over all things" the all-ruler.
 
 18 The catholic faith 
 
 and he to whomsoever the Son willeth 
 to reveal Him " and not only to reveal 
 in words, but in His own person to express 
 God. "He that hath seen me hath seen 
 the Father." Such sayings abound in the 
 Gospels, and are the centre of our Lord's 
 teaching. They are best summarized in 
 the great sentence of S. John, "God is 
 love." 
 
 It is an amazing paradox. And there is 
 no question that what made it believable 
 was that it was revealed in full view of all 
 the experience which makes it seem so 
 paradoxical. The Old Testament revela- 
 tion of the one good God was given in a 
 blood-stained world that was being trampled 
 by the feet of fierce conquering armies 
 Assyrians and Egyptians, Babylonians and 
 Persians, who neither showed nor ex- 
 pected any mercy. It was given to a 
 weak and enslaved people the Israelites 
 in captivity who knew all that bitter 
 experience can teach. And when the 
 Lord Jesus Christ expressed and deepened 
 and expanded the doctrine, it was as " the 
 man of sorrows and acquainted with 
 grief," who in His own person endured 
 everything that has ever been an argu- 
 ment against the divine love, everything 
 that in slow and embittering experience 
 has ever soured the hearts of men, and
 
 The attributes of God 19 
 
 turned philanthropists into cynics. He 
 held and proclaimed the mighty truth even 
 from the cross of failure and shame, on 
 which He asked the great question, "My 
 God, my God, why didst thou forsake 
 me ? " And His resurrection the third 
 day from the dead was God's vindication 
 of Him ; the central evidence in one signi- 
 ficant act that the power of God, the one 
 power which made and rules the world, is 
 through all seeming weakness and failure 
 on the side of Jesus of Nazareth. 
 
 These, then, are the attributes of God 
 which it is always most important to have 
 in mind. 
 
 1. Omnipotence which means that the 
 one all-creating and all-pervading power, 
 which is both in the whole universe and 
 over it, inexhaustible and eternal, is the 
 sovereign will of God, who can do all 
 things which are in accordance with His 
 own nature and purpose. He has willed 
 to create free beings, and therefore tol- 
 erates all the confusion which their re- 
 bellion has introduced into the world, 
 but He is yet in His supreme wisdom 
 guiding all things to a conclusion, an 
 " end of the world," in which He will 
 vindicate Himself in His whole crea- 
 tion. Thus from the truth of God's 
 almightiness follows the confident ex-
 
 20 The catholic faith 
 
 pectation of the Day of the Lord, of 
 which we hear so much in the Bible, 
 when God at last is to come into His 
 own in the person of Jesus Christ His 
 Son ; "whereof he hath given assurance 
 unto all men, in that he hath raised him 
 from the dead." 
 
 2. Righteousness. The special character- 
 istic of the whole Bible is its insistence on 
 the character of God that He is absolutely 
 righteous and holy, and claims of all free 
 beings whom He has created a like 
 righteousness in their relation to Him 
 and to one another; and is to be pro- 
 pitiated by no gifts or sacrifices or cere- 
 monies, but only by conformity with His 
 own character ; and has impressed a witness 
 to His righteousness upon the consciences 
 of men, who thereby know themselves to 
 be under God's righteous judgement ; and 
 has enlightened their conscience by the 
 teaching of His prophets and His Son, 
 through His Holy Spirit. 
 
 3. Love. The tremendous severity of 
 the divine righteousness must always 
 cause men to fear Him with a holy fear. 
 But the perfection of righteousness is 
 love. And finally, in the revelation of 
 Jesus Christ the Son, the ultimate nature 
 of God is disclosed as pure goodness such 
 that He loves every creature that He has
 
 Jesus Christ 21 
 
 created, and intends nothing but good for 
 every one, and is afflicted in every one's 
 affliction, and shrinks from no sacrifice in 
 order to redeem, and will one day manifest 
 His sovereign love in the whole universe. 
 What more about the nature of God is 
 expressed in His revelation of His heart 
 towards man will appear when we come 
 to speak of the Holy Trinity. 
 
 JESUS CHRIST 
 
 It has already appeared how God revealed 
 Himself at last through His own and only- 
 begotten Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Him 
 men saw and heard as man among men, 
 and they came to believe in Him first as 
 prophet, then as the Christ of God, and 
 then as His eternal Son or Word incar- 
 nate. The process of this belief is apparent 
 in the New Testament, and its conclusion 
 found expression in the Creeds. The 
 belief of the church, then, which is con- 
 firmed in the New Testament, is that Jesus 
 Christ is the eternal Son of God, "very 
 God of very God, "that is "of one substance 
 with the Father ; " by whom all things 
 were made and are sustained in being ; 
 who for us men and for our salvation was, 
 in the fullness of time, made man by a 
 human birth, through the power of the
 
 22 The catholic faith 
 
 Holy Ghost, in the womb of the blessed 
 virgin Mary; so that He was born "per- 
 fect God and perfect man," differing in 
 His manhood from other men in that He 
 was sinless God's new creation ; true 
 man in all that properly belongs to human- 
 ity, but new man the second Adam, 
 free from all the taint and hindrance of 
 sin. In this our manhood, in the power 
 of the Holy Spirit, He lived and taught 
 and gathered disciples and founded His 
 church : in this manhood He was re- 
 jected, and suffered and was crucified : upon 
 the cross He truly died, and His dead 
 body was laid in the grave, while His 
 spirit went where all human spirits go 
 to hell, or Hades, the place of the dead, 
 where He preached His gospel to the dead 
 also : and on the third day, by the power 
 of God, He was raised from the dead not 
 resuscitated to His old manner of life, but 
 transformed in His bodily nature into the 
 condition of the "spiritual body," a state 
 of existence which S. Paul declares to 
 be the destiny of us all. 1 In this risen 
 body He appeared to His disciples during 
 forty days for the confirmation of their 
 faith and for their further instruction, 
 and mounted out of their sight by an 
 ascension above the clouds which repre- 
 
 1 See later, pp. 82-87.
 
 Jesus Christ 23 
 
 sented to their eyes the spiritual truth 
 of His assumption to the throne of all the 
 world, whence He shall come again in the 
 final Day of the Lord to be the judge of 
 quick and dead. 
 
 These events in our Lord's human life 
 which have fallen within the scope of 
 human experience can be expressed in 
 literal human language. Thus He truly 
 was born of the Virgin, and truly died, 
 and truly after His resurrection appeared 
 to His disciples and ascended to heaven. 
 But, so far as concerns what lies out- 
 side human experience, what concerns 
 His going to the place of departed spirits, 
 or hell, and His "sitting in heaven at the 
 right hand of God," we can only use 
 symbolical language, for we have no 
 experience of any world but this, and 
 consequently no human words properly 
 to express either the abode and state of 
 the dead or the abode of God. And the 
 same applies to all statements about the 
 being of God, except so far as He has 
 appeared as man in human experience ; 
 and to much of the language used about 
 angels and about the creation of the world 
 and the last things. Of all matters which 
 lie outside human experience we can only 
 use symbolical or analogical language. 
 "We see through a glass darkly" an
 
 24 The catholic faith 
 
 enigmatic reflection as in a metal mirror. 
 The mercy is that in Christ God has so 
 manifested Himself within human experi- 
 ence that we can speak of Him also in the 
 language of literal historical facts. That 
 is the glory of our creed. 
 
 The redemptive work of our Lord is 
 manifold, but it may be summarized under 
 three heads. It is example, atonement, 
 new life or the pattern set before us, the 
 sacrifice offered for us, the new life 
 wrought in us. 
 
 1. The example or pattern of human life. 
 By His words He has taught us all that 
 human life may be, when lived in the light 
 of God. By His deeds He showed what 
 power can work in human life to dispel 
 disease and misery. By all His conduct 
 He proved how rich and glorious a thing 
 human life can be. Henceforth the world 
 can never forget it. Cynics and pessimists 
 stand for ever rebuked. There is the true 
 Son of Man. The fruit of constant medi- 
 tation on the Gospels is to fix in our souls 
 indelibly an image which will never suffer 
 us to be content in ourselves or others 
 with sensuality or selfishness or bitterness 
 or contempt or hypocrisy or worldliness. 
 
 2. Atonement. But what of the past, 
 the horrible, ever self-renewing past of 
 humanity and of myself? How can we
 
 Our example and our atonement 25 
 
 escape the contagion of the world and of 
 our own selves ? How can we break the 
 chain and sequence of sin ? All the world 
 over men have been seeking God and 
 coming before Him with offerings and 
 sacrifices, feeling that God must have of 
 their best, and seeking to render them- 
 selves acceptable to Him. But the con- 
 clusion is ever the same that God does 
 not want those things, for they are His 
 own already ; and " the blood of bulls and 
 of goats cannot take away sin." Mean- 
 while the man himself remains conscious 
 in his innermost soul that he cannot break 
 with his own past or the past of humanity 
 to which he belongs : "I am a man of 
 unclean lips, and I dwell among a people 
 of unclean lips." It is to this sort of 
 feeling that the preaching of the atone- 
 ment has appealed. And there is no doubt 
 how universal its appeal has been. 
 
 In Jesus Christ our manhood took a 
 fresh start. He is true man, but new 
 man wholly free from the taint of sin. 
 He alone realizes perfectly the guilt of 
 sin, because He alone does not share it. 
 He alone realizes perfectly what man 
 ought to be towards God. His life from 
 end to end is a perfect sacrifice. When 
 the sin which is in the world refused Him 
 and rejected Him, because men would not
 
 26 The catholic faith 
 
 part from their selfishness, their indolence, 
 and their pride when sin in the people of 
 Israel closed in upon Him and brought 
 Him to the cross He recognized in the 
 cross the will of God, and was obedient 
 unto death. There at last in blood and 
 agony He accomplished His sacrifice of 
 perfect obedience. This is the New Man's 
 act of reparation for all the lawlessness and 
 wilfulness of the old humanity. He offers 
 Himself without spot to God, and the per- 
 fect sacrifice of self is perfectly acceptable 
 to God. It frees the hand of God to give 
 to man, in Him, all that He would give. 
 This is why the atonement is called also 
 propitiation. Not because it changes the 
 disposition of God towards us, but because 
 it enables Him freely to exhibit His 
 mercy. 
 
 In Him mankind is reconciled to God. 
 He stands in will and intention for every 
 man, as on earth He identified Himself 
 with every man and disowned no one. 
 Actually it means that every one who will 
 come with entire faith in Him and become 
 by baptism identified with Him, however 
 sinful or imperfect he may be, can claim 
 the forgiveness of his sins in His name, 
 and can make a fresh start from a new 
 standing-ground in Christ. He is washed 
 white in the blood of the Lamb. This is
 
 Christ our new life 27 
 
 the doctrine of " Christ for us." There 
 are no sins too many or too great for God 
 to forgive. There is no one who cannot 
 break with his past and start afresh. 
 Wholly without reference to any merits 
 of ours, simply by the free gift of God's 
 unmerited love, we can, every one of us, 
 identify ourselves with Christ by faith, 
 and that a thousand times over after a 
 thousand relapses, and in His name be 
 reconciled to God absolved and set free 
 from all the guilt of the past : "I will run 
 the way of Thy commandments, because 
 Thou hast set my heart at liberty." 
 
 3. But it is quite plain that the redemp- 
 tion of man must be something within 
 him. If he is alienated from God nothing 
 can restore him except such inward re- 
 storation as makes him once again God- 
 like. There is no fellowship with God 
 possible except in likeness to God. This 
 is the central and continuous witness of 
 the Bible. Thus no view of our redemp- 
 tion by Christ would be tolerable which 
 should find its sole or its chief expression 
 in anything done for us. That can only 
 be the prelude to what is done in us. The 
 moral difficulties which have been felt so 
 widely about the Christian doctrine of the 
 atonement have been due in part to this 
 consideration being ignored. Christ for
 
 28 The catholic faith 
 
 us has been separated from Christ in us. 
 But this is quite unjustifiable. Our Lord 
 is represented in the Gospels as plainly 
 instructing His disciples that their future 
 enlightenment and inward renewal by 
 His Spirit would be something far greater 
 than anything which He could do for 
 them while He was among them. More- 
 over, substitution is a very poor word to 
 describe our Lord's relation to us even 
 in His sacrifice. 
 
 He always appears as claiming men's 
 identification with Himself in the spirit 
 of His sacrifice. No idea of forgiveness 
 which is consistent with a refusal on our 
 own part of service and sacrifice can, for 
 a moment, be read into Christ's words or 
 those of His apostles. But His identifica- 
 tion with men was very imperfect while 
 He was still among them as one among 
 many. Accordingly His glorification in 
 heaven is represented as only the neces- 
 sary beginning of His full activity among 
 men. If the heavens cleaved around His 
 ascending form and hid it from sight, it is 
 but a few days before they cleave again 
 around the descending Spirit ; and that 
 Spirit comes not so much to supply His 
 absence as to accomplish His presence, 
 His presence with men in His body, which 
 is the church.
 
 The Holy Spirit 29 
 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 Spirit means breath or life. Thus the 
 Spirit of God is that person of the ever- 
 blessed Trinity who represents the breath 
 or life of God. Thus "the Spirit of the 
 Lord fillcth the world." All the life of 
 nature and all the activities of man, 
 social, industrial, and artistic, are in the 
 Old Testament ascribed to the Spirit. 
 But because God's righteous character is 
 the attribute of God which is there most 
 emphasized, so the Spirit is before all else 
 Holy Spirit, and He cannot dwell with 
 unrighteousness and sin. 
 
 Only here and there a man, prophet 
 or other, is recognized as possessed of 
 the Holy Spirit. But a more abundant 
 outpouring is anticipated not only upon 
 the Christ who is to be, but also upon His 
 people, universally, in the day of Christ. 
 And it is this anticipation which is fulfilled 
 through Jesus Christ, so fully that by 
 comparison the Holy Spirit is spoken of 
 as given for the first time in the great 
 outpouring on the Day of Pentecost. Thus 
 the distinguishing marks of the Pentecostal 
 outpouring are two. 
 
 1. The Holy Spirit came down from the 
 uplifted Christ, the head of the new and 
 redeemed humanity, to fill the company and
 
 30 The catholic faith 
 
 fellowship of men who are to carry on 
 His work in the world ; so that they shall 
 be His organ or "body," in which He can 
 live, and through which He can act, by 
 His Spirit which He has given them. 
 
 2. The other distinguishing mark of this 
 new gift of the Spirit is that it is freely 
 given to all the members of the body. 
 They are already, and are to continue 
 to be, a body with different functions. 
 There are apostles and other members, 
 men and women. But on all alike is the 
 Holy Spirit poured out for enlightenment 
 and for strength, for work and for witness. 
 And if an early Christian had been asked 
 what, as distinguished from other men, a 
 Christian is, he would have given one of 
 two answers either that he is a man who 
 has come to believe in Jesus as Christ and 
 Lord, or that he is a man who has, and 
 knows he has, received His Spirit. But 
 I must say more about this when I come, 
 very soon, to write about the ministry of 
 the Spirit. 
 
 THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 Now we must pause for a moment 
 reverently to consider the effect of all this 
 redemptive work of God for men upon 
 their thought of God. The name of God
 
 The Holy Trinity 31 
 
 the Jehovah or Lord of the Old Testa- 
 ment has become to them now the name 
 of the Father, about whom Jesus Christ 
 had taught them so abundantly as His 
 Father and theirs ; and the name of the 
 Son, Jesus Christ Himself, who had come 
 out of the bosom of the Father to reveal 
 Him, in whom they believed and whom 
 they worshipped ; and the name of the 
 Spirit the Holy Spirit through whom 
 they had abiding union with the Son and 
 the Father. 
 
 The name of God is henceforth the 
 name of the Father and of the Son and 
 of the Holy Ghost, three persons so 
 they came to express it, using the best 
 word they could find in one God. For 
 "the Father is God and the Son is God 
 and the Holy Ghost is God, and yet they 
 are not three Gods, but one God." "In 
 this Trinity there is no before or after, no 
 greater or less, but the whole three 
 persons are coeternal together and co- 
 equal" Trinity in Unity and Unity in 
 Trinity. 
 
 This formula was the outcome of the 
 original experience of the church. At 
 the side of the eternal Father was a Son, 
 whom as man among men they had come 
 to know, whom they had come to believe 
 in as very God of very God ; and from
 
 32 The catholic faith 
 
 the Father and the Son had come forth 
 the Spirit whom Christ had spoken of 
 as "another," whom they had learned to 
 think of as a living, divine person with 
 whom they had to deal. And these 
 divine three they knew were not three 
 Gods. It was but the one God of 
 Israel's old faith more fully disclosing 
 Himself. The three moreover are not 
 separable individuals. Wherever the 
 Father acts, He acts through the Son, 
 whether in creation or redemption, and 
 by His Spirit. Wherever the Son acts, 
 it is the Father who is acting in Him ; 
 and when He sends the Spirit, the Spirit 
 in His coming brings the Son and the 
 Father. It is one only God. Only as 
 God has come nearer to men to redeem 
 them something of His inner being has 
 been disclosed. It is not a monotonous 
 unity that reveals itself, but an eternal 
 fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit. 
 That is to say, it is the sort of unity 
 which we can think of as alive and real, 
 even before ever the world was. In 
 the mutual relationship of the divine 
 persons we can understand how God in 
 His eternal being is Love ; and we can 
 understand further why when He calls 
 men unto fellowship with Himself it is 
 always in society and not as isolated
 
 Human nature 33 
 
 individuals : it is as a family, or a nation 
 or a church ; in any case as a fellow- 
 ship of some sort. Because God Himself 
 is eternal fellowship and eternal love, 
 loneliness and selfishness cannot express 
 Him. 
 
 HUMAN NATURE AND SIN. ANGELS 
 AND DEVILS 
 
 It is sometimes remarked that there is 
 very little about man or sin in the Creeds, 
 except just at the end. This is because it 
 is the main purpose of the Creeds to sum- 
 marize what God has done for man, and 
 revealed about Himself in doing it. But 
 there is much about man that is taken for 
 granted ; otherwise men could not have 
 been the subjects of divine redemption, 
 nor could the Lord of all have been made 
 man. 
 
 What is taken for granted is that man 
 was made "in God's image" that is to 
 say, that he is spirit as well as body, a 
 personality and not a thing, endowed with 
 intelligence and free-will, and made to 
 be God's vicegerent in the world which 
 was entrusted to his government. It is 
 the sense of this great dignity of man which 
 is renewed in our minds as we contemplate 
 the Son of Man. And the motive of the
 
 34 The catholic faith 
 
 divine redemption lies in the fact that our 
 race, though created for so lofty a vocation, 
 has plunged so deep into sin and has so 
 deeply defaced in themselves the image 
 of God, that only the self-sacrificing act 
 of God in redeeming them can raise them 
 from ruin or enable them to realize the 
 purpose of God. "Neither is there any 
 other name under heaven, that is given 
 among men, save the name of Jesus, 
 wherein we must be saved." 
 
 It is possible for one who thinks only of 
 God's majesty to despise men. The over- 
 whelming thought of the sovereignty of 
 God in the mind of some of the greatest 
 Christians, S. Augustine and Calvin ' 
 for instance, has made them disparage 
 or ignore man's right to be equitably 
 treated. 
 
 But God has in fact given men such a 
 right in making them persons and giving 
 them a conscience. And the doctrine of 
 the Bible as a whole, and of our Lord in 
 particular, recognizes to the full the dignity 
 bestowed upon every single child of man 
 by his Creator, and the equitable and more 
 than equitable love of God for each and 
 every one *' who will have all men to be 
 saved and to come to the knowledge of the 
 
 ' I do not think that S. Paul can justly be accused 
 of this.
 
 Angels and devils 35 
 
 truth" "who is the saviour of all men," 
 if they will only have it so. 
 
 And the Bible has a profoundly simple 
 explanation of the terrible condition of 
 humanity, which seems to cry out against 
 the very idea either of man's dignity or 
 of God's justice. The explanation is sin. 
 The disorder of the world is due to sin. 
 Voluntary correspondence with God is 
 only possible if refusal of correspondence 
 is also possible that is lawlessness. This 
 is the Bible doctrine of sin. Sin is law- 
 lessness. It is refusal to obey the will 
 of God: and there is not in the whole 
 universe any other kind of lawlessness. 
 It is the foolish claim of the creature to 
 be independent of the Creator that has 
 wrought all this havoc. That is why man 
 needs to be redeemed. 
 
 And we must extend our view beyond 
 the bounds of mankind. In this vast uni- 
 verse there is no reason to suppose that 
 men are the only free and intelligent 
 beings. Indeed it is almost unimaginable. 
 Certainly our Lord and the prophets and 
 apostles would have us believe that be- 
 yond man there are vast hosts of intelligent 
 spirits, good and bad, angels and devils. 
 And the struggle between good and evil 
 in this world is thus thrown upon the 
 background of a vaster scene of conflict.
 
 36 The catholic faith 
 
 " We wrestle not against flesh and blood, 
 but against the principalities, against the 
 powers, against the world-rulers of this 
 darkness, the spiritual hosts of wicked- 
 ness." " Your adversary the devil, as a 
 roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom 
 he may devour : whom withstand stead- 
 fast in your faith." ' And the good angels 
 are not only the worshipping host of 
 heaven, not only mysterious forces in 
 nature, but also "ministering spirits sent 
 forth to do service " for men. 
 
 But into this dimly-known background 
 of human life we must carry back the 
 same principle. All created beings were 
 made by God in love and for good. If 
 they have become evil, it is because they 
 have used against God, by a perverted 
 freedom, the power that was given them 
 to use for Him. Wherever sin is, it is 
 lawlessness. 
 
 And it does not need any revelation, 
 either in any other age or to-day, to tell 
 us how deep and wide is the havoc which 
 sin has wrought. All men have sinned. 
 And sin has been disastrous in its effects, 
 as is shown in experience. And because 
 men are not entirely individual, but are 
 united by physical and social bonds in 
 families and races and the one common 
 
 1 Eph. vi. 12 ; IS. Pet. v. 8.
 
 The doctrine of sin 37 
 
 race, so sin has infected and disordered 
 the whole race of mankind. It is already 
 in us before the beginning of our personal 
 consciousness. "In sin hath my mother 
 conceived me." This is the Christian 
 doctrine of sin, "actual" and "original," 
 or individual and social. 
 
 No student of this doctrine, in particular 
 no student of the teaching of Jesus Christ, 
 will ever echo the foolish idea that sin is 
 a survival in us of our animal ancestry 
 which we are outgrowing. True it infects 
 the body ; but its seed is in the spirit. It 
 is wilfulness and selfishness the refusal of 
 God. Our Lord will not let us think that 
 bodily sins drunkenness and lust are 
 worse than selfishness and pride, or that the 
 sin of the barbarian is any way greater or 
 more serious than the sin of the highly civil- 
 ized man. In fact the opposite is the case. 
 Sin accompanies every stage of human 
 development, and threatens with disaster 
 every individual and every civilization. 
 And such is the respect with which God 
 treats the freedom of man that He endures 
 all the awful havoc which sin has made, 
 while everywhere, in the soul of every 
 human being, and on the great stage of 
 the world, He is working for redemption 
 redemption which is by sacrifice. 
 
 That is the call of Christ, then the call
 
 38 The catholic faith 
 
 to redemption. There is no one who does 
 not need to be redeemed. It is true that 
 Christ does more than redeem us He 
 brings us to perfection. Man was created 
 at the bottom of the ladder of progress. 
 He was not created perfect, but only 
 capable of attaining perfection by the 
 grace of God. The humanity which is 
 revealed in Christ is not humanity as it 
 was created, but humanity at the very 
 height of its possibilities. Christ consum- 
 mates humanity as well as redeems it. 
 None the less, every single human being 
 is in sin, and needs redemption, and not 
 merely development. He needs a fresh 
 start to be converted or turned ; to be 
 regenerated or grafted upon a fresh stock 
 the stock of Christ. 
 
 But this, and the great and eternal des- 
 tiny of man, we shall have to consider 
 in succeeding chapters.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 The Church and the Sacraments 
 
 WHEN the Holy Spirit came down 
 from Christ in heaven on the day 
 of Pentecost, He came to fill with Christ's 
 own life the church which had been 
 already gathered to await His coming. 
 Henceforth the church is Christ's body, 
 one organism (if I may so speak) with its 
 Head in heaven, 1 and His living instru- 
 ment for His work in the world. Thus it 
 stands a visible institution in history from 
 the first chapter of the Acts of the Apos- 
 tles onward, awaiting the conversion of 
 individuals to Christ. The individual 
 converts did not combine to form the 
 church. It was there before them. Con- 
 version leads necessarily to incorporation 
 in the church. It could lead to nothing 
 else : for there is no belonging to Christ 
 
 i S. John, we should note, represents our Lord as 
 speaking of Himself as " the vine " of which we men 
 are the branches branches included in the vine ; and 
 S. Paul speaks similarly of Christ as consisting of the 
 Head and the members. See S. John xv. 5, 1 Cor. 
 lii. 12. 
 
 39
 
 40 The catholic faith 
 
 except by membership in His body. As 
 the Gospel is preached in city after city 
 churches arise the church of Corinth, 
 the church of Ephesus, and so on ; but 
 each of these churches is the local repre- 
 sentative of the one church. It is all 
 one gradually expanding fellowship : the 
 church is one as Christ is one : holy 
 because consecrated in Him by His Spirit : 
 catholic because there can be in it 
 "neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, 
 barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free." It is 
 the destined home of all human beings 
 simply in virtue of their being men or 
 women. It is one all-embracing com- 
 munity, destined to extend itself to the 
 ends of the earth, and bind in one faith 
 and fellowship all kinds and classes of 
 men. 
 
 The idea that the essence of Christianity 
 lies in a merely individual faith in Christ, 
 and that church membership is a secon- 
 dary thing, is not to be found in the 
 New Testament. The fatherhood of 
 God and the salvation wrought by Christ 
 are to be realized only in the brother- 
 hood of men, which is the church. It 
 is very difficult for men, different as they 
 are in temperament, class, and race, to 
 become or to remain one brotherhood. 
 The New Testament abundantly illus-
 
 The doctrine of the church 41 
 
 trates the difficulty. In overcoming it is 
 to be found the real triumph of Christ. 
 " He hath made both (Jew and Gentile) 
 one." According to the New Testament 
 all men by their true nature are intended 
 for brotherhood, but only in Christ can 
 they really become brothers. Thus, the 
 church is "the brotherhood." S. Paul 
 would not have tolerated for a moment 
 the idea of two churches at Corinth or 
 Ephesus, one for Jews and one for 
 Gentiles, or one for free men and one for 
 slaves. He would not have tolerated the 
 idea that a man can first believe and then 
 choose which church to belong to. There 
 can be only one church to which all be- 
 lievers are, by their faith, bound to belong. 
 It is Christ who by His sacrifice has 
 broken down the barriers between man 
 and man, and made it possible for men in 
 Him to accomplish the difficult task of 
 realizing and maintaining unity. 
 
 But we must stop to consider two diffi- 
 culties which naturally present themselves 
 to our minds. 
 
 1. The doctrine of "salvation only in 
 the church " seems a narrow doctrine 
 from two points of view first, because it 
 has been interpreted to mean that ever- 
 lasting misery is the destiny of all who are 
 not members of the church, whether
 
 42 The catholic faith 
 
 heathen abroad or unbelievers at home. 
 But this is a mistake. We know for 
 certain the character of God as it is re- 
 vealed in Jesus Christ. We know that 
 in a real sense all men by their very 
 nature belong to Christ in whom "all 
 things, "and much more all rational beings, 
 "consist." We know also that God's 
 opportunities extend beyond the limits of 
 this life. He will deal equitably with 
 every soul. He alone can judge. He will 
 never condemn any one who has tried 
 honestly to be true to the best light he 
 had : of that we may feel quite sure. But 
 the great salvation which Christ brings is 
 to be a visibly manifested thing, as Christ 
 was visibly manifested. It is represented 
 by "a city set on a hill." It is a great 
 organized society going out into all the 
 world in the saving power of Christ. 
 When we say that salvation is to be found 
 only in the church we mean not some- 
 thing reserved in the unknown depths of 
 God's mercy, but something here and 
 now covenanted, accepted, experienced 
 and proclaimed. 
 
 2. But Christianity has been a long time 
 in the world, and there are all kinds of 
 Christian churches not in communion 
 with one another. It is surely narrow to 
 proclaim that there is only one church ;
 
 The doctrine of the church 43 
 
 for, whatever definition you may give of 
 the church, you are sure to "unchurch" 
 a number of very excellent Christians who 
 belong to other communions which you 
 do not recognize. This is the greatest of 
 difficulties, and we must come back to it 
 before we have done. But now I would 
 ask you simply to consider, with a quiet 
 and determined contemplation, what is 
 the intention expressed in the New Testa- 
 ment, which is indeed the intention of 
 Christ. He meant all His disciples to be 
 one in a visible unity. There is no men- 
 tion of any invisible church in this world. 
 And to-day, amid the clamour of our 
 class divisions, amid the horror of nomin- 
 ally Christian nations engaged in slaughter- 
 ing one another, we turn again longingly 
 to Christ's intention. It is schism that is 
 narrow, not catholicity. It is schism pro- 
 viding a separate church for each nation, 
 a separate church for each class or each 
 distinctive disposition of men it is schism 
 that makes the witness of Christ so feeble 
 in the world. And the doctrine of the one 
 catholic church, constraining all men 
 who profess belief in Christ to discipline 
 themselves enough to live in unbroken 
 fellowship a fellowship which transcends 
 all natural divisions of race and class it is 
 this alone that can give us a really broad
 
 44 The catholic faith 
 
 Christianity. "We are all one manhood 
 in Christ Jesus." And, indeed, the world 
 to-day would be far better off, the witness 
 to Christ would be far better borne, if in 
 every country we had but half the number 
 that we now have of nominal Christians, 
 but these maintaining the unity of the 
 spirit in the bond of peace. 
 
 Our Lord, then, certainly meant all the 
 believers in His name to feel the obliga- 
 tion of belonging to the one church. 
 That is the unmistakable witness of the 
 New Testament. The very difficulty of 
 maintaining such a unity among all the 
 differences of human nature is to be one 
 main trial of the sincerity of our faith. 
 And the reality of our obligation to maintain 
 the unity of the society is brought home to 
 us by the institution of visible sacraments 
 as instruments of spiritual grace. 
 
 THE SACRAMENTS 
 
 The sacraments are "outward and 
 visible signs of an inward and spiritual 
 grace given unto us." In their principle 
 they are in harmony with the whole 
 system of the material universe. For 
 everything visible in the world expresses 
 some spiritual meaning and contains some 
 spiritual force. We men ourselves are
 
 The doctrine of the sacraments 45 
 
 embodied spirits, and spiritual reality 
 must come home to us, like all other 
 reality, through our bodily organs. It is 
 in accordance with the deep necessity of 
 our being that "The Word was made 
 flesh, and dwelt among us." And the 
 church with its visible sacraments is 
 the extension in idea and in reality of 
 the incarnation. The gifts of God in 
 Christ are not to depend upon our sub- 
 jective feelings, but upon the will of God, 
 and are guaranteed to our wills by the 
 outward sign. 
 
 But also the sacraments are social cere- 
 monies ceremonies connected with mem- 
 bership. Baptism, as taken over by the 
 catholic from the Jewish church, was 
 regarded not only as a ceremony of per- 
 sonal cleansing, but also as admission into 
 the holy community. "By one Spirit 
 were we all baptized into one body." 
 Confirmation is an outward blessing of 
 each admitted member by the local head 
 of the community, and conveys to him 
 his equipment for full membership. The 
 Holy Communion is a common sharing 
 of the one bread and the one cup the 
 speaking symbols of membership. Absolu- 
 tion is restoration to the fellowship of the 
 community, Ordination is appointment to 
 office in the community. Thus, by making
 
 46 The catholic faith 
 
 sacraments, visible ceremonies of a visible 
 society, to be the instruments of spiritual 
 grace to the individual by making these 
 social sacraments to be the provided 
 means of personal salvation God has 
 made it apparent that His salvation is 
 no gift to isolated individuals, but a gift 
 given to members of a body, a gift for 
 membership. 
 
 Only it needs to be remembered that 
 when we say that the great sacraments 
 are "generally necessary to salvation" we 
 do not limit the power of God to give to 
 individuals what He wills to give, outside 
 all sacraments, in this life or beyond it. 
 We are speaking of salvation in the sense 
 explained above as something open, cove- 
 nanted, and proclaimed. 
 
 As to the number of the sacraments 
 there has been much controversy. If you 
 take the general definition of sacraments 
 to be "outward and visible signs of an 
 inward and spiritual grace given " you 
 may reckon a large number of sacraments. 
 If you add to your definition "ordained 
 by Christ Himself" that is, ordained by 
 Him in their outward form during His 
 earthly ministry as recorded in the four 
 Gospels, then you must reckon them as 
 two only. But, in accepting this definition, 
 the Church of England, in our present
 
 The number of sacraments 47 
 
 Prayer Book, does not exclude the use of 
 the word sacrament in a less restricted 
 sense. I propose in this book to treat as 
 sacraments, besides the two great "sacra- 
 ments of the Gospel " Baptism and the Holy 
 Communion, also Confirmation which is 
 the apostolic completion of baptism, the 
 reconciliation of the penitent or Penance, 
 Matrimony, Ordination, and Unction of the 
 Sick, which, in the greater part of the 
 catholic church, are reckoned as the 
 sacraments. 1 
 
 I must add that sacraments were en- 
 trusted to the church, which has authority, 
 under Christ, to "bind" and "loose," 
 that is to legislate with divine sanction ; 
 and therefore, except so far as the out- 
 ward ceremony was fixed once for all by 
 the authority of Christ and His apostles, 
 the church must be regarded as having 
 authority to determine the conditions of 
 administration that is, to decide what con- 
 stitutes a "valid" sacrament, meaning by 
 the word "valid" a sacrament which the 
 church recognizes and ratifies. A sacra- 
 
 i There is considerable ancient authority for speak- 
 ing of only two sacraments if confirmation is included 
 in baptism, or of three if confirmation is reckoned 
 apart. But so much misunderstanding hat resulted 
 from not reckoning as sacraments matrimony, ordina- 
 tion and the reconciliation of penitents that I think we 
 had better reform not our doctrine but our nomen- 
 clature.
 
 48 The catholic faith 
 
 ment may be irregular in the conditions 
 of its administration, but still valid and 
 not to be repeated. I hope I need not add 
 that God is not tied by conditions of 
 validity, but can give His blessing where 
 and how He sees fit. But every society 
 must have for its official action conditions 
 of validity. 
 
 Before I go on further I would seek to 
 kindle the imagination of my readers with 
 a sense of the profound adaptation of the 
 whole system of church and sacraments to 
 the moral needs of men. As fellowship 
 in a nation supports each citizen and 
 guarantees his freedom ; as fellowship in 
 a regiment sustains a soldier's courage 
 when, alone, he might fail ; as fellowship 
 in a trade-union supports the solitary 
 worker with the protection of comradeship 
 so fellowship in the church is meant to 
 sustain the weakness of the individual, 
 through all experiences of failure and 
 disillusionment ; the sympathy of a com- 
 mon creed is meant to carry him through 
 periods of depression and vacillation ; 
 and the gifts of divine grace as embodied 
 and guaranteed in sacraments are meant 
 to lift him out of the vagaries of sub- 
 jective emotion upon the solid ground cf 
 objective reality. 
 
 Now I propose to deal with the sacra-
 
 Holy Baptism 49 
 
 ments in detail, and because it is of their 
 very essence to be definite ceremonies, 
 I propose to state with regard to each 
 what, in the common judgement of the 
 church, is the outward part of the sacra- 
 ment that is the matter or visible material 
 and action, and the form or words defining 
 the purpose and meaning of the sacrament ; 
 what the inward spiritual grace ; of what 
 sort is the appointed minister ; and who 
 are the subjects or proper recipients of the 
 sacrament. 
 
 HolyBaptism. Most respectable societies, 
 existing for any permanent objects, have 
 some ceremony of initiation or incorpora- 
 tion. Baptism, then, is the ceremony of 
 incorporation into Christ and His church. 
 Its outward matter is washing with water. 1 
 Its form is "I baptize thee 2 in the name 
 of the Father and of the Son and of the 
 Holy Ghost." The priest is the proper 
 minister, but baptism by any baptized indi- 
 vidual is allowed, and every Christian 
 should be ready to baptize in an emer- 
 gency. Its inward and spiritual grace, that 
 is, the gift which, by the will of God, is 
 declared to accompany the ceremony, is 
 incorporation into Christ. The baptized 
 
 1 It should be at least a real pouring of water, and 
 not merely a sprinkling. 
 
 2 In the Eastern Church it is " N., the servant of 
 God, is baptized in the name, etc." 
 
 H
 
 50 The catholic faith 
 
 person who has hitherto been only a mem- 
 ber of our sinful humanity is hereby 
 regenerated by the Holy Ghost ; that is, 
 he receives a new birth or incorporation 
 into Christ and His body. He becomes 
 a member of Christ's family, with all the 
 privileges of membership ; and can claim, 
 in Christ's name, the forgiveness of his 
 sins. " We acknowledge one baptism for 
 the remission of sins." This is the plain 
 teaching of the New Testament and of the 
 Prayer Book. 1 I say that he can claim, in 
 Christ's name, the forgiveness of his sins : 
 for sacraments are not charms. They are 
 indeed in themselves effective instruments 
 of divine grace ; but, because we are 
 rational beings, God can do nothing for us 
 without our co-operation. And baptism 
 will do a man no spiritual good unless he, 
 by faith, will claim as his own the gifts 
 which baptism has given him. Any un- 
 baptized person may be the subject of 
 baptism. 
 
 The baptismal services of the church 
 were drawn up in the first instance for 
 adults capable in their own persons of 
 renouncing the life of sin from which 
 Christ redeems them, and professing their 
 
 1 See S. John Hi. 5 ; Acts ii. 38, xxii. 16 ; Rom. vi. 
 3 ; 1 Cor. xii. 13 ; Titus iii. 5 : cf. the catechism and 
 the service of baptism,
 
 Confirmation 51 
 
 belief in the Christian creed after due 
 instruction, and their intention to obey and 
 follow Christ. Solemn vows to this effect 
 have always been required of those to be 
 baptized. But, apparently from the first, 
 the children of Christian parents have 
 been admitted into church membership 
 by baptism in their infancy, and spon- 
 sors representing the church have an- 
 swered on their behalf, and have guaran- 
 teed their Christian education if they 
 should survive infancy. Without some 
 such guarantee the church does not au- 
 thorize the baptism of infants. Indis- 
 criminate baptism of infants is simply an 
 abuse. 
 
 Confirmation, or the laying on of hands. 
 From the beginning the laying on of hands 
 by the apostles followed baptism. Thus 
 baptism and the laying on of hands taken 
 together (and sometimes called by the one 
 name of baptism) were held in the early 
 church to constitute the ceremony of 
 initiation into the Christian society. And 
 both together were solemnly administered 
 only at the season of Easter each year. 
 But the bishop's presence being needed for 
 the second part of the ceremony, and not 
 for the first, the desire not to defer 
 baptism has led to the separation in the 
 Western Church of the two parts of
 
 52 The catholic faith 
 
 confirmation from baptism. Neverthe- 
 less they should still be regarded as the 
 two parts of the one ceremony, and it is 
 intended that both should be publicly 
 administered. The proper matter of 
 confirmation is the laying on of hands 
 (to which in early days unction with oil 
 was added, but it is not necessary). The 
 proper form is some formula of blessing 
 which makes mention of or implies the 
 gift of the Holy Ghost. The inward and 
 spiritual grace is the gift of the Holy Ghost 
 to strengthen the person confirmed, and 
 to equip him or her for membership. 1 
 For, as in ordination, the laying on of 
 hands symbolizes consecration for service, 
 and the confirmed person should be taught 
 to regard himself as a fully-equipped mem- 
 ber of Christ, that is equipped for service 
 and endowed with all the duties and rights 
 of membership, and as sharing the king- 
 ship and priesthood of the whole body of 
 Christ. The minister of confirmation is 
 the bishop. 2 The subject of confirmation 
 is any baptized person. In England, con- 
 firmation being reserved to the years of 
 
 1 See Acts viii. 17, 18 ; xix. 6. 
 
 2 This is so quite exclusively in the Anglican Com- 
 munion ; in the Roman Church with very slight 
 exception ; in the Eastern Church only indirectly 
 so, in that the bishop blesses the oil which is the 
 instrument of confirmation.
 
 Holy Communion 53 
 
 discretion, that is, the time when the child 
 can understand and learn and choose for 
 himself, and baptism being generally ad- 
 ministered in infancy, the person to be 
 confirmed is required before his confir- 
 mation to renew the promises of his 
 baptism. The age of confirmation has 
 been the subject of much discussion, but 
 certainly the Prayer Book suggests an 
 earlier age than has of recent years been 
 customary among us. 
 
 The Holy Communion. The greatest of 
 all the sacraments of the church is the 
 Holy Communion the greatest because it 
 sums up in itself such an incomparable rich- 
 ness of spiritual meaning and force ; because 
 of the glory of the presence and gift there 
 vouchsafed ; because it perpetuates both 
 Bethlehem and Calvary ; because it evokes 
 all the powers and faculties of the wor- 
 shipping soul ; because it is commended 
 to us as the Lord's own service "This 
 do in remembrance of me." As we read 
 the four accounts of its institution, 1 its 
 elementary meaning becomes plainly in- 
 telligible. At the Last Supper with His 
 disciples, Jesus took bread and blessed it, 
 and brake, and gave it to them saying, 
 '* Take, eat, this is my body," and they 
 
 1 S. Matt. xxvi. 26 ff. ; S. Mark xiv. 22 ff. ; S. Luke 
 xxii. 19 ff. ; 1 Cor. xi. 23 ff.
 
 54 The holy communion 
 
 all partook of the one bread. And He 
 took the cup and blessed it, and gave it 
 to them saying, " Drink ye all of this, for 
 this is my blood of the new covenant 
 which is poured out for you for the re- 
 mission of sins." And they all drank of 
 the one cup. This simple ceremony speaks 
 for itself. It means sharing together ; and 
 that in which they are to share together 
 is He Himself, whose body was broken 
 and whose blood was shed to redeem 
 them. When our Lord said, " Do this 
 in remembrance of me," and so made this 
 speaking ceremony the central sacrament 
 of His religion, He must have meant that 
 the communion (or sharing together) of 
 all His people in Him, who died for 
 them, was to be its governing idea. But 
 we must examine the rite a little more 
 closely to take in its meaning in different 
 aspects. 
 
 1. It is the communication of Christ 
 to each receiver. The priest, the officer 
 of the church, repeating what Christ 
 our Lord did and said when He instituted 
 these holy mysteries, consecrates the 
 bread to be His body and the wine to 
 be His blood, that we receiving these 
 outward things may feed on Christ, may 
 eat His flesh and drink His blood. We 
 cannot analyse the mystery. Christ is
 
 The divine gift and the fellowship 55 
 
 made present there in His body and in 
 His blood under the humble form of 
 bread and wine. While with our eyes 
 we see nothing but the outward gifts, 
 by faith we behold heavenly things made 
 present amongst us. True, in the bread 
 broken and the wine outpoured, separate 
 the one from the other, we see the 
 remembrance of a transaction upon this 
 earth, the sacrifice of Calvary. But if 
 we inquire into the spiritual reality, we 
 know that it is not the dying Christ but 
 the living Christ Christ as He is in the 
 heavenly places who is here to feed us 
 with His own life under these humble 
 forms. " Christ herein imparteth Him- 
 self, even His whole entire person, to 
 every soul that receiveth Him." He who 
 was our example outwardly is now by His 
 Spirit given to be our new and inward 
 life, to dwell continually in our hearts, 
 and to renew us into His own likeness, 
 strengthening our weakness, and purify- 
 ing our uncleanness. And in the whole 
 process of the sacrament we recognize 
 the characteristic work of the Holy Spirit, 
 who in the consecration brings the presence 
 of Christ, who Himself communicates Him 
 to the receiver. 
 
 2. But it is not merely a gift to the indi- 
 vidual receiver ; it is a sharing together
 
 56 The holy eucharist 
 
 or communion in the body and blood of 
 Christ. We share together, not merely 
 with those who are kneeling at the same 
 altar, but with all Christ's people, the 
 living and the dead, the great company 
 which no man can number, in one com- 
 munion and fellowship. Thus the body 
 of Christ renews the body which is His 
 church, and the blood, which is the life 
 of Christ, reinvigorates its common life. 
 We need, more than can easily be said, 
 to recall to the consciousness of each 
 communicant that his every communion 
 lays upon him the privilege and the 
 obligation of behaving as a brother to 
 every other communicant, "girding him- 
 self with humility to serve them." We 
 have very few communicants amongst us 
 compared to what we ought to have ; but 
 it would be a different England if every 
 one of them behaved as if he really 
 believed S. Paul's words 1 "The cup of 
 blessing which we bless, is it not a com- 
 munion in the blood of Christ? The 
 bread which we break, is it not a com- 
 munion in the body of Christ? Seeing 
 that we, who are many, are one bread, 
 one body ; for we all partake of the one 
 bread." 
 3. Finally, the eucharist (as it is called) 
 
 1 1 Cor. x. 16, 17.
 
 The Christian sacrifice 57 
 
 is the great Christian sacrifice. According 
 to the doctrine of the Bible the only 
 sacrifice acceptable to God is a spiritual 
 sacrifice : that means the sacrifice of 
 a person, and of words or things only as 
 the expressions of a person. In the holy 
 eucharist we come solemnly before God, 
 as His people met for the commemoration 
 of our redemption, to present to Him the 
 sacrifice of our persons and our goods, our 
 alms and our oblations, our prayers and our 
 praises. And it is our own symbolic gifts 
 of bread and wine that are consecrated 
 to become the body and the blood of our 
 Redeemer, the body that was broken and 
 the blood that was shed for us. Thus, by 
 His presence among us, all our imperfect 
 and sin-stained sacrifices are brought into 
 union with Christ's one full, perfect, and 
 sufficient sacrifice, which was once offered 
 for us, but is ever pleaded in the heavenly 
 places. Thus in every eucharist the one 
 perfect sacrifice is pleaded amongst us 
 afresh. And, when we have fed upon 
 Him, we ourselves are joined to His 
 sacrifice ; and in Him we offer ourselves, 
 our souls and bodies to be all together a 
 reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto 
 God who made us. This is indeed the 
 end of our being. 
 
 In this way we may strive imperfectly
 
 58 The holy eucharist 
 
 to summarize and express, what still 
 remains inexpressible, the meaning of 
 this august mystery. Here is the whole 
 Christian truth in its every aspect. Here 
 is the whole Blessed Trinity at work : 
 here is the incarnation and the atonement 
 perpetuated and applied ; here is union 
 with the heavenly Christ, and the eager 
 expectation of His second coming 'Ye 
 do show the Lord's death till He come ; " 
 here is the stimulus alike to divine worship 
 and to human brotherhood ; here is the 
 satisfaction of the innermost longing of 
 the heart of man for union with God. 
 
 It is a terrible mistake to have allowed 
 the Lord's service to become anything 
 else than the central service of the morn- 
 ing of the Lord's Day. As things are 
 the vast majority of the members of 
 the church never receive the blessed 
 sacrament : millions of the baptized never 
 join in the only divinely-appointed act of 
 Christian worship the most easily intel- 
 ligible, because the most dramatic, of all 
 services and indeed are barely conscious 
 of what is there enacted. 
 
 I know what is the obstacle to restoring 
 the Lord's service to its proper place. It 
 is the strength of the tradition which puts 
 the chief service at eleven o'clock. Now 
 that we have become more widely desirous
 
 The special service of Sunday 59 
 
 to obey the rule of the ancient church, 
 that the body of Christ should be the first 
 food that passes our lips, the eucharist 
 celebrated with music and a sermon at 
 eleven o'clock as the chief service of the 
 Sunday is apt to become a celebration 
 with very few communicants, or none at 
 all except the priest. And, in spite of 
 the example of the Roman and Eastern 
 churches, in their later course, a great 
 many of us, even of those who have no 
 prejudice whatever against the attendance 
 at the service of the altar of those who 
 are not communicating, feel that the 
 chief service should be the corporate 
 communion, the service at which the 
 most communicate, as it was in the 
 catholic church everywhere for wellnigh 
 the first thousand years of its life. I 
 am convinced that we cannot habitually 
 separate the offering of the sacrifice from 
 the act of communion without grave loss. 
 I cannot help looking longingly, and not 
 without hope, for a state of things when 
 the chief service of the Sunday shall be 
 at an hour when all can communicate 
 who are qualified and prepared. 
 
 Before we leave this great theme it 
 ought to be said that the matter of this 
 holy sacrament is bread, leavened or 
 unleavened, and wine or wine mingled
 
 60 The catholic faith 
 
 with a little water ; and the form the 
 act and words of consecration ; and the 
 minister a priest ; and the subjects (or proper 
 recipients) all baptized and confirmed 
 persons (or such as at least are ready and 
 willing to be confirmed) who have not 
 subsequently been put out of communion, 
 but can approach the holy sacrament in 
 faith and repentance. 
 
 Reconciliation of Penitents, or Penance. 
 Sin is not only a private matter between 
 the soul and God ; it is a weakening of the 
 whole life of the church however secret 
 it may be. The church is wronged by 
 any and every sin. It is this feeling in 
 part, I suppose, which causes S. James 
 to exhort Christians thus "Confess your 
 sins one to another, and pray one for 
 another, that ye may be healed." 1 It is 
 also certain that Christians from the 
 beginning believed that our Lord had left 
 to His church the power to absolve or 
 retain sins. S. John records His solemn 
 grant of this power to the eleven on the 
 day on which He rose from the dead. 
 "Receive ye the Holy Ghost : whose soever 
 sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto 
 them ; and whose soever sins ye retain, they 
 are retained." 8 Whatever other applica- 
 tion these words may have, at least one 
 
 S. Ja. v. 16. * S. John xx. 22, 23.
 
 Penance 61 
 
 principal application was to members of 
 the church who fell into scandalous sin. 
 Such persons were put out of communion 
 and, when they had shown marks of 
 true penitence or "done penance," were 
 readmitted to communion in some formal 
 way, as by prayer and the laying on of 
 hands of the bishop. This was done, as 
 S. Paul says, 1 "in the person of Christ," 
 the action of the church being regarded 
 as the action of Christ Himself in the 
 church. That is the essence of the 
 church doctrine of "penance" the duty 
 of the church to judge its members, and 
 the authority of the church to retain or 
 forgive their sins. And this is a properly 
 sacramental action, because the formal 
 action of the church in absolving or 
 reconciling penitents carried with it the 
 action of Christ. This system of penance 
 was applied in the first instance, as I have 
 said, to sins which caused scandal, to open 
 sins. In the Church of England at the 
 Reformation it was desired to restore, 
 as far as possible, this system of public 
 penance ; and one of the Thirty-Nine 
 Articles (the thirty-third) speaks of such 
 notorious sinners as being excommunicated 
 and then "openly reconciled by penance." 
 In our old parish books there are frequent 
 1 2 Cor. ii. 10.
 
 62 The catholic faith 
 
 notices of such public penances down into 
 the eighteenth century. 
 
 But besides this, from the beginnings of 
 the church its members are found volun- 
 tarily confessing their secret sins at first 
 in the public congregation, later to the 
 bishop or priest appointed to receive such 
 confessions ; and then doing penance and 
 being absolved, at first publicly and then 
 privately. In the Middle Ages such private 
 or auricular confession of all grave or 
 mortal sins was made obligatory, which 
 it had not been in earlier times. At the 
 Reformation all such obligation was re- 
 moved, and the matter now stands with us 
 thus. The authority of the priesthood to 
 absolve is strongly maintained. The 
 words of the ordination of a priest among 
 us run thus : " Receive the Holy Ghost 
 for the office and work of a priest in the 
 church of God here committed unto thee 
 by the imposition of our (the bishop's) 
 hands : whose sins thou dost forgive they 
 are forgiven, and whose sins thou dost 
 retain they are retained," etc. And the 
 following form of absolution is (in the 
 Order for the Visitation of the Sick) 
 given to the priest to use: "Our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, who hath left power to His 
 church to absolve all sinners who truly 
 repent and believe in Him, of His great
 
 Penance 63 
 
 mercy forgive thee thine offences ; and by 
 His authority committed to me, I absolve 
 thee from all thy sins, in the name of the 
 Father and of the Son and of the Holy 
 Ghost." As in the ancient church, it is 
 strongly maintained in our Prayer Book, 
 that all worthy penitence, without any 
 sacramental confession or absolution, is 
 met by the fullest forgiveness of God. 
 But any one who cannot quiet his own 
 conscience, but requires further comfort 
 or advice, is exhorted to come to the 
 parish priest, "or to some other discreet 
 and learned minister of God's word, and 
 open his grief; that by the ministry of 
 God's holy word he may receive the 
 benefit of absolution, together with ghostly 
 counsel and advice, to the quieting of his 
 conscience and avoiding of all scruple 
 and doubtfulness." Besides this, on their 
 sick-beds people are to be " moved " to 
 confess their sins to the priest, if they 
 feel their conscience "troubled with any 
 weighty matter." 
 
 Circumstances have changed greatly 
 since the Reformation. Public penance 
 has become more and more and more 
 difficult to administer. The sense of sin 
 has fallen in most men to a very low level. 
 It is necessary for a living church to give 
 directions suited to present-day needs.
 
 64 The catholic faith 
 
 All that I am at present authorized by 
 the church to say is that (where public 
 notorious sin is not in question) no priest 
 is justified in requiring any one to make 
 his confession ; and no priest is justified 
 in refusing the ministry of confession and 
 absolution to any penitent who desires it. 
 There has been of late years an immense 
 increase in the number of confessions 
 made : but if the gravity of sin was more 
 widely felt, I believe that multitudes more 
 would desire to submit themselves to the 
 judgement of the church through its min- 
 isters, seeing that the authority to judge 
 and to absolve has been so explicitly and 
 solemnly given it by Christ. 
 
 Of course, the ministers of the church 
 may exercise judgement wrongly just as 
 the preacher may misrepresent the divine 
 message. Over all their mistaken judge- 
 ments we must believe in the rectifying 
 action of God. Still the fact remains that 
 to bind us to His church Christ deliberately 
 committed this tremendous authority to 
 fallible men. 
 
 The outward sign of absolution is some 
 formula or prayer of absolution spoken 
 after the confession of the penitent has 
 been made, and any necessary require- 
 ments, necessary as evidence of real 
 repentance, have been accepted : the in-
 
 Holy matrimony 65 
 
 ward and spiritual grace is divine absolution 
 and the removal of the barriers to Com- 
 munion : the minister is a priest : and the 
 subject is any baptized Christian who has 
 sinned and repented. 
 
 Holy Matrimony- The religion of Christ 
 centres in the home as much as in the 
 church. And the sacredness of the home 
 is based upon holy matrimony the life- 
 long union of man and woman. By civil 
 law marriage is required to be before an 
 appointed officer, minister of religion or 
 civil officer ; and our ecclesiastical law re- 
 quires the ministration of the priest. But 
 its essence lies in the deliberate contract 
 of the man and woman with one another. 
 It is sacramental only because ratified and 
 rendered indissoluble by God "Those 
 whom God hath joined together let no 
 man put asunder." By our church law in 
 England a marriage, duly made and con- 
 summated, is strictly indissoluble except 
 by death ; and, while it admits of separa- 
 tion a mensa et thoro, allows of no such 
 divorce as would free either party, during 
 the lifetime of the other, to marry again. 
 Of this there can be no question. It is 
 the opinion of the best scholars that this 
 indissolubility represents the intention of 
 Christ ; so the church in general has 
 interpreted it; so the present writer be-
 
 66 The catholic faith 
 
 lieves. But there exists, apparently, in 
 S. Matthew's Gospel the permission for 
 the husband of an adulterous wife to 
 divorce his wife and marry again. 
 
 This we must believe to be a declension 
 from the standard of our Lord. But we 
 cannot deny that it is within the com- 
 petence of any national church to admit 
 a relaxation so authorized. Those who 
 desire such relaxation of our law must 
 move for its formal adoption. Meanwhile 
 our church law admits no exception. It 
 upholds the strict standard of Christ, and 
 the standard of the church at its best. 
 And those who break in this important 
 matter the law of the society to which 
 they belong must expect to forfeit the 
 privileges of communion. This law of 
 indissoluble marriage has proved, as the 
 first disciples anticipated, a very hard 
 standard to maintain. All sorts of evasions 
 have been adopted, and it is possible that 
 nowadays it could not be strictly main- 
 tained as the law of civil society. But I 
 believe that the church is doing the will 
 of Christ in maintaining the law of indis- 
 soluble marriage as the requirement of 
 its communion. 
 
 One other matter must also be men- 
 tioned. The church has so believed in 
 the union of husband and wife as to treat
 
 Unction of the sick 67 
 
 the relatives of either party as the relatives 
 of the other to treat "affinity " as equiva- 
 lent to " consanguinity." More than that, 
 the church has believed this principle to 
 be divine. At the Reformation the legiti- 
 macy of Queen Elizabeth depended on 
 the doctrine that no ecclesiastical authority 
 could dispense from it. Our modern state 
 has broken through this principle at one 
 point by sanctioning marriage with a 
 deceased wife's sister ; but our part of the 
 church retains the old principle, and 
 refuses sanction. 1 
 
 Unction of the Sick. There ought to be 
 no question that our Lord would have us 
 regard sickness and disease as (at least for 
 the most part) an invasion of the evil one 
 which we ought to resist and repel. And 
 as a part of sanitary science, side by side 
 with the ministry of the physician, we 
 ought to recognize spiritual influences 
 for the healing of the body. There cer- 
 tainly is such a thing as faith-healing. And 
 of this ministry S. James speaks thus : 
 "Is any among you sick? let him call 
 for the elders of the church ; and let 
 them pray over him, anointing him with 
 oil in the name of the Lord. And the 
 
 1 The terminology of matter and form, etc., do not 
 admit of any satisfactory application in the case of 
 matrimony.
 
 68 The catholic faith 
 
 prayer of faith shall save him that is sick. 
 And if he have committed sins, it shall be 
 forgiven him." ' In accordance with this 
 passage, the church has generally ad- 
 ministered Unction of the Sick : and 
 though, unfortunately as some of us think, 
 its misuse led to its abandonment as an 
 authorized and sacramental ordinance at 
 the Reformation, it is being restored 
 among us, with the sanction of many 
 individual bishops, who are willing to 
 bless the oil for this purpose, when any 
 sick person claims what S. James so 
 plainly counsels. Let us indeed pray 
 that its restoration may be accompanied 
 by the restoration all along the line 
 of the right attitude of the church 
 towards disease, as being not only an 
 infliction to be patiently borne, but an 
 aggression of evil to be resisted both by 
 science and by faith, and expelled both 
 from the society and the individual, as far 
 as possible. The wise know well how far 
 that expulsion might go. 
 
 Holy Orders. Bishops and priests, as 
 ministers of Christ, have been already 
 mentioned repeatedly. Christ Himself 
 instituted a ministry in the persons of 
 His apostles, intended plainly to endure 
 
 1 S. Jas. v. 14.
 
 Holy orders 69 
 
 to the end ; x and the apostolate stands at 
 the beginning of the Acts with an un- 
 questioned authority. Thus the church 
 did not appoint the ministry ; it was there 
 to start with, as appointed by Christ. 
 There were the Twelve and men of like 
 authority, such as Barnabas and Saul, 
 who exercised a general ministry and 
 a general authority ; and when local 
 churches arose, "presbyters" (also called 
 "bishops") were ordained by the apostles 
 in each church, with deacons and, perhaps, 
 deaconesses. In the New Testament there 
 are also other figures, such as prophets 
 and evangelists and teachers, whose exact 
 position is not easy to define. And in the 
 earliest period when the church was 
 undoubtedly expecting the advent of 
 Christ immediately, there was naturally 
 no thought for the future. But even 
 before the end of the apostolic age, when 
 the church felt compelled to contemplate 
 a longer future, it threw itself on the 
 principle of succession that is, the prin- 
 ciple that the ministry as instituted by 
 Christ was intended to be perpetual down 
 the ages ; so that every minister, who could 
 rightly claim to be such, in any grade of 
 office, must have received ordination from 
 those in the church before him who had 
 
 1 S. Matt, xxviii. 20 ; S. Luke xii. 41 ff.
 
 70 The catholic faith 
 
 authority to ordain and who had in their 
 turn received it step by step from the 
 apostles. The history of the way in 
 which the ministry of the later church 
 emerged out of the apostolic ministry 
 cannot be exactly traced. But we must 
 insist that in this, as in all other matters 
 not precisely ordered by Christ, the 
 church has authority to bind and loose ; 
 and with an extraordinary unanimity of 
 judgement a unanimity which lasted 
 down to the sixteenth century it was 
 held for certain that the three chief orders 
 of the ministry were bishops, presbyters, 
 and deacons: that of these the bishops 
 held in succession from the apostles the 
 full authority and ministry of the word 
 and sacraments, with sole authority to 
 ordain the other ministers ; that priests 
 held a minor priestly authority, especially 
 authority to celebrate the holy eucharist 
 and to absolve and to preach ; and that 
 the deacons held a ministry of assistance. 
 
 The democratic principle in the appoint- 
 ment to the ministry was very fully recog- 
 nized in early times : the people, it was 
 commonly agreed, should appoint the 
 persons whom the bishops should ordain, 
 and should choose the bishops themselves. 
 But the act of ordination the laying on 
 of hands with accompanying prayer or
 
 The apostolic succession 71 
 
 formula was regarded as sacramental, 
 an outward and visible sign of an inward 
 and spiritual grace thereby given. So it 
 was regarded from the beginning, as 
 S. Paul had spoken to S. Timothy of " the 
 gift that was in him by the laying on of 
 his (S. Paul's) hands." 
 
 It will be plain to any one that the 
 principle of the succession in the ministry 
 is even a necessary element in the idea of 
 a visible church. If there is one church, 
 one visible society, to which all who are 
 Christ's must needs belong, it must be 
 made manifest where that church is to 
 be found. 
 
 Continuity of doctrine is a great thing ; 
 but it is not enough. There must also be 
 continuity of persons. Otherwise any 
 group of dissatisfied individuals might go 
 off by themselves and still say "We are 
 the church." The obligation to continue 
 in communion with the bishop provided 
 the necessary bond. The succession of 
 bishops guaranteed the continuity of the 
 church, and the communion of bishops 
 with one another was intended to guar- 
 antee the unbroken fellowship of the 
 church. 
 
 What has been done in this chapter is 
 to outline the doctrine of the one holy
 
 72 The catholic faith 
 
 catholic church, with its ministry and 
 sacraments, as it was believed and taught 
 with astonishing unanimity for more than 
 fifteen hundred years in Christendom, 
 and as it is still maintained in the Church 
 of England. That it is maintained under 
 difficulties and in the face of objections 
 we know ; and some of these difficulties 
 and objections, as urged both from the 
 Roman Catholic and from the Protestant 
 side, I hope briefly to consider in a later 
 chapter. 
 
 Meanwhile, what I have tried to do is 
 to give Churchmen a sense of the way 
 in which the doctrines of the visible 
 church and of the sacraments and of 
 the ministry hold together as parts of one 
 whole, and how that whole is rooted in 
 the intention of Christ and in the very 
 idea of the incarnation.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 The Last Things and the 
 Communion of Saints 
 
 THE END OF THE WORLD 
 
 THE church looks forward to an "end 
 of the world " that is, an end of the 
 present familiar order of things, which is 
 to usher in the future state, "the world 
 to come " that is, the kingdom or reign of 
 God, when all rebellion and evil has been 
 utterly overcome and purged away, and 
 God shall be all in all. There are pas- 
 sages in the New Testament in which 
 the visible church is identified with the 
 kingdom, and other passages in which they 
 are distinguished. Thus, while we belong 
 to the church, we are taught to work 
 and pray that God's kingdom may come, 
 implying that it is not here at present. 
 Perhaps on the whole we may say that 
 the kingdom is something larger than the 
 visible church, but that both are of one 
 piece : that the church represents the 
 kingdom in the present world and by its 
 73 L
 
 74 The catholic faith 
 
 prayers and activities prepares the way for 
 its future coming. Thus the church is to 
 expect with the most profound desire the 
 "day of God," when God is to come into 
 His own in the whole universe of things, 
 and the undisputed and universal reign of 
 His Christ is to begin. 
 
 As I have already said, the end of the 
 world, like the beginning of the world, is 
 presented to us in forms and images which 
 are symbolical. But they are symbolical 
 of what is to be actually true. In fact, it 
 follows inevitably from any real belief 
 in God as the one only creator and 
 sustainer of the world, that one day 
 He must vindicate Himself in His whole 
 creation. Thus whenever the prophets of 
 God in the Old Testament or the New 
 see any kingdom or empire or institution 
 or individual flouting God in arrogance 
 and pride, they anticipate with assurance 
 for such an institution or person, if not 
 repentance, then overthrow. That is 
 God's day. And the prophets treat each 
 particular overthrow of an insolent 
 creature of God, which has used against 
 God the powers which come from Him, 
 as a specimen of the great final day of 
 the Lord in the whole universe ; and they 
 commonly describe it in terms of the final 
 universal convulsion. We must recognize
 
 The end of the world 75 
 
 that the prophets had an inspired and 
 assured insight into the principles of 
 God's government of the world, and 
 accordingly they foresee what must happen 
 in a particular case for instance, that 
 Babylon or apostate Jerusalem or per- 
 secuting Rome must be overthrown. 
 Thus they utter real predictions, which 
 have been fulfilled. But they have no 
 general knowledge of future history given 
 to them. In their anticipations they con- 
 stantly foreshorten the future and give 
 freedom to their imagination in describing 
 the details. This is characteristic of 
 Biblical "apocalypses" or unveilings of 
 the future. There is an element of true 
 and definite prediction and also a large 
 element of symbolical scenery. It is only 
 in a very restricted sense that prophecy 
 can be described as "history written 
 beforehand." And those, for instance, 
 who have tried to construct history before- 
 hand out of the materials of S. John's 
 "Revelation" have proved in almost all 
 instances remarkably wrong. 
 
 The really important point is that the 
 prophets were inspired to assure the faithful 
 people of God that nothing should prevail 
 against God or His Christ, and that, in spite 
 of all seeming failures, the day of the Lord 
 and of His Christ was sure. Our Lord
 
 76 The catholic faith 
 
 Himself uses the apocalyptic method. He 
 has a definite prediction to make that 
 is, the destruction of apostate Jerusalem. 
 This He predicts as about to occur in 
 the present generation, and His prediction 
 was fulfilled. It occurred in what we call 
 the ordinary course of history, and there 
 does not appear to be anything specially 
 miraculous about it. But, after the manner 
 of ancient prophets, our Lord treats this 
 overthrow as God's act of judgement on 
 the city which had rejected not only the 
 servants of God, but the Son Himself; 
 and He throws this overthrow of the 
 apostate city and temple upon the back- 
 ground of the end of the world and His 
 own coming in glory, as the triumphant 
 Christ, to judge the quick and the dead. 
 His language is symbolical, like that of 
 the prophets ; and, like theirs, His vision 
 of the end is quite independent of time. 
 He told His disciples before His passion 
 that even He Himself did not know " the 
 day or hour " ; and, after His resurrec- 
 tion, He told them that the times and the 
 seasons were reserved in the Father's own 
 power. Moreover, in His own discourses 
 as recorded in the Gospels, we find our 
 Lord frequently using language which sug- 
 gests gradual development in the future, 
 and perplexing delays, as well as language
 
 The coming of Christ 77 
 
 which anticipates the great day of final 
 divine intervention as if it were imme- 
 diately to be expected. 
 
 That the first Christians did in fact 
 expect "the end" in their own lifetime 
 does not admit of doubt. And the belief 
 that it must soon come has characterized 
 most religious revivals. To converted 
 souls it has seemed inconceivable that 
 God should any longer tolerate the in- 
 solence of men. We may well believe 
 that it would have come much more 
 speedily than in fact it has, if the church 
 had been faithful in maintaining its 
 witness and extending it into the whole 
 world, instead of falling back into a fatal 
 acquiescence in things as they are. But 
 our Lord had prepared the minds of His 
 disciples to see the assurance of "the 
 end " in His resurrection, and its actual 
 realization (in a sense) in His ascension 
 and the mission of the Spirit and the 
 establishment of the church ; so that when 
 in actual experience the fall of Jerusalem 
 came and "the end was not yet," the mind 
 of the church was not perplexed. Their 
 attention was turned to the next adver- 
 sary the insolent, persecuting empire of 
 Rome ; and, taught of John, the seer of 
 "the Apocalypse," they waited for the 
 judgement of God upon Rome. By the
 
 78 The catholic faith 
 
 time of the fall of Rome, however, the 
 church had got too much at home in the 
 world to be as zealous for the end as it 
 had been in its bright beginnings. 
 
 To-day there are not many of us, I fear, 
 who really and passionately desire the end 
 of the world and the consummation of the 
 kingdom. But it remains true always and 
 everywhere that every institution which 
 ignores or resists God every civilization 
 which seeks to build itself up on a merely 
 secular basis or on a basis of self-interest, 
 individual or corporate on pleasure, or 
 avarice, or pride must be overthrown. 
 It remains true that we are led, both by 
 revelation and experience, to expect the 
 vindication of God not merely by a gradual 
 development of the world into perfection, 
 but by a cataclysm or series of cataclysms 
 in which the forces of evil are overthrown 
 and God manifestly triumphs over them. 
 On a universal and final scale this is to be 
 the end of the world. It may well be that 
 the final manifestation of divine victory 
 will follow upon a state of things in which 
 God has seemed to be utterly defeated all 
 the world over, just as the resurrection 
 of Christ followed upon the seeming total 
 failure of the cross. But the wise Chris- 
 tian is content to wait and see, while he 
 holds the confident faith that Christ reigns,
 
 Heaven 79 
 
 supreme and unquestionable, and will one 
 day come into His own in the whole scene 
 of creation. 
 
 HEAVEN 
 
 On the whole, the anticipations of the 
 New Testament do not lead us to transfer 
 the scene of the kingdom of God from 
 earth to some other sphere called heaven. 
 Rather it describes a "return" of Christ 
 from heaven to earth, and (so to speak) 
 a fusion of heaven with earth, or a new 
 heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth 
 righteousness, the centre of the whole new 
 world being the New Jerusalem, the per- 
 fected fellowship of humanity, the city of 
 God. I am sure that we make a mistake 
 if we attempt to translate the symbols 
 of the end into literal anticipations of 
 history. But the matter of greatest im- 
 portance is that it is this creation of God, 
 and the humanity which we now know, 
 that, purged and transformed, are to sup- 
 ply the material of the kingdom of God. 
 Whatever the catastrophe through which 
 the world must pass, whatever the purging 
 process of judgement, whatever the trans- 
 formation of matter, it is this world that 
 is to become the kingdom of God. Thus 
 no labour will ever really be lost which 
 we spend here upon the preparation for
 
 80 The catholic faith 
 
 the kingdom. All faithful work done in 
 Christ's name, however much it seem to 
 fail, is really laid up in God's treasury, and 
 its fruits will at last appear. It will become 
 a stone in the New Jerusalem. " Blessed 
 are the dead which die in the Lord from 
 henceforth : yea, saith the Spirit, that they 
 may rest from their labours ; for their 
 works follow with them." 1 
 
 THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 
 
 All this belief in the kingdom to come 
 has involved a belief in a life beyond death. 
 It became plain with the flash of inspiration 
 to the soul of Isaiah that the dead Israelites, 
 who had died without seeing the great 
 deliverance, must be raised again to share 
 in it. "Thy dead shall live; my dead 
 bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye 
 that dwell in the dust : for the earth shall 
 cast forth the dead." 2 It is most interesting 
 to see how the ancient people of Israel 
 came to that belief in a future life which 
 before our Lord's time we find prevailing 
 amongst them, with the exception of the 
 small and aristocratic section of the Sad- 
 ducees. It was not through dealings with 
 the dead. They originally shared with all 
 their neighbours a background of belief in 
 
 1 Rev. xiv. 13. * 1st. xxvi. 19.
 
 The resurrection of the dead 81 
 
 the pit of " sheol," where the spirits of the 
 dead pale shadows of their former selves 
 subsist drearily somewhere underground. 
 But they were sternly debarred from any 
 attempt to have intercourse with the dead. 
 Their religion was to be a religion of the 
 active, sunlit world ; they were to see 
 God's reign here and now. And they did 
 see it ; but only partly. It dawned upon 
 their collective mind, and was confirmed 
 to them by here a prophet and there a 
 psalmist, (1) that if there be a God, almighty 
 and righteous, there must be some larger 
 sphere than that of this world this "wild 
 and irregular scene " for God to realize 
 and reveal Himself. This world cannot 
 be the end ; (2) that the intimate spiritual 
 relationship into which God admits His 
 saints Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, 
 Moses and Samuel and David cannot 
 end with death. This intimacy must be 
 continued in the beyond. By constant 
 dwelling on these two lines of thought 
 and expectation the Jews came to believe 
 not merely in "the immortality of the 
 soul," but in "the resurrection of the 
 dead." Among the Greeks there was 
 always the feeling that the body was 
 something degrading the prison-house of 
 the soul and its pollution. They were con- 
 tent to expect a survival of souls only. 
 
 M
 
 82 The catholic faith 
 
 But by a much healthier instinct, anticipat- 
 ing the future of a still remote science, the 
 Jews felt that the body is an essential part 
 of the man. They were healthily un- 
 ashamed of the body and the bodily func- 
 tions. Thus, if they thought of a future 
 life, they wanted a complete life : they 
 wanted a better body perhaps than this 
 present flesh, but certainly a body and 
 for each man his own body to match the 
 more perfect world in which he should 
 find himself. And it was this anticipation, 
 itself wrought into their minds by divine 
 inspiration, which was confirmed in our 
 Lord's teaching, and which received its 
 first realization in experience in His re- 
 surrection from the dead. 
 
 Any one who reads the records of the 
 forty days after our Lord's resurrection 
 will see that He is represented as having 
 been raised to life in His body, but in that 
 body transformed into a quite new state. 
 He no longer lives here or there, in Jeru- 
 salem or Galilee, so that the disciples could 
 find Him by calling there. He has not to 
 pass by walking from one scene to another. 
 Closed doors are no obstacle to Him. He 
 seems to be existing on some higher plane 
 from which He manifests Himself, in 
 different forms and guises, according to His 
 spiritual purpose. He can walk with the
 
 The risen body 83 
 
 two disciples to Emmaus, and even eat 
 with the eleven in Jerusalem. But we 
 are not to suppose that He needs food or 
 depends upon locomotion. It is suggested 
 in the narratives that He had, on the 
 morning of the resurrection, left the tomb 
 before it was opened, and that the body 
 had passed out of the grave-clothes, leav- 
 ing them to collapse in their places. All 
 this corresponds very well with S. Paul's 
 teaching of a spiritual body a body which 
 is no longer the "flesh and blood " of our 
 present experience, but has been trans- 
 muted into a higher state : still material, 
 but sublimated in such sense that its matter 
 is no longer the restraining and hamper- 
 ing medium that we now know, but the 
 perfect instrument and vehicle of the 
 spiritual will. 
 
 Our Lord's own resurrection is spoken 
 of by S. Paul as "the resurrection of the 
 dead " (in the plural), because His resur- 
 rection is the foretaste and assurance of 
 the destiny of all men. He is the Man 
 our real representative. In His resurrec- 
 tion we see the issue of life for all of us 
 who belong to Him. This is a common- 
 place of the New Testament. 
 
 There are three further remarks which 
 I should wish to make about the Christian 
 doctrine of immortality.
 
 84 The catholic faith 
 
 1. As to the basis on which it rests. It 
 rests on moral considerations raised to the 
 point of certain conviction by the resurrec- 
 tion of our Lord. Nothing is more certain 
 than that, if the supreme and only governor 
 of the world is a perfectly just and good 
 God, we do not see the end of His opera- 
 tions upon individuals or upon society in 
 this world. It must be that " the more 
 parts of His works are hid," and the fulfil- 
 ment of justice and righteousness is not 
 seen on this side of death. The most 
 extreme instance of this incompleteness 
 would be the life of Christ ending at Cal- 
 vary in consummate failure and shame. 
 There must be, we feel, something more. 
 And the other moral argument is equally 
 forcible. If there be an eternal God 
 who raises men into intimate communion 
 with Himself, it cannot be imagined that 
 He will leave the human person who has 
 been allowed to become His friend to 
 perish like a worm. We watch a good old 
 man's faculties failing, his faculties physical 
 and intellectual. But there is something 
 which shows no signs of failing that is 
 the assurance of communion with God 
 and the quiet confidence that beyond death 
 he is going to a still more intimate fellow- 
 ship with his divine friend. These and 
 the like considerations have made the
 
 Spiritualism 85 
 
 belief in immortality seem inseparable 
 from the higher kind of faith in God. It 
 is this sort of longing confidence which 
 first the teaching of Christ and then His 
 resurrection confirmed. It is in this sense 
 that S. Paul declares that God "brought 
 life and incorruption to light through the 
 gospel." 
 
 2. It must never be forgotten that that 
 ancient people amongst whom our faith 
 was developed, as we believe under divine 
 leading, were definitely debarred by their 
 laws from what we call spiritualism. They 
 were not to seek to have dealings with the 
 dead. We should be loath indeed to limit 
 scientific curiosity or to deny the lawful- 
 ness of any kind of serious investigation 
 into facts. But spiritualism is very preva- 
 lent in our time, and we can watch its 
 effects on men and women over a wide 
 area. It seems to stimulate in them exactly 
 that sort of excitement arid curiosity which 
 needs to be repressed, and to tend to a 
 morbid sort of religiousness which is very 
 unlike Christianity. I cannot help often 
 feeling that, if the experiences which 
 spiritualists report are true experiences, it 
 is more likely that they are the victims of 
 clever demons than in real communication 
 with the spirits of just men being made 
 perfect. At any rate it is of the greatest
 
 86 The catholic faith 
 
 importance that we should keep it clearly 
 before men's minds that the Christian's 
 belief in immortality should follow from 
 and depend upon his belief in God. 
 
 3. No doubt over a large area of Chris- 
 tianity the resurrection of the body has 
 been supposed to mean that the material 
 atoms of our present bodies are to be re-col- 
 lected and become the resurrection bodies. 
 This to a more scientific age is inconceiv- 
 able, and the appeal to divine omnipotence 
 is very unsatisfying. So it is a comfort to 
 feel that some early Christian thinkers 
 held a more reasonable view, and that this 
 rather than the cruder belief is suggested 
 by S. Paul in his treatment of the resur- 
 rection. 1 He there contemplates three sorts 
 of resurrection. There is the resurrection 
 of Christ on the third day, which we must 
 suppose to have involved the transforma- 
 tion of His dead body in the tomb into 
 the spiritual body of His resurrection. 
 Secondly, there is the sudden transforma- 
 tion " in a moment, in the twinkling of an 
 eye, at the last trump," of those whom the 
 last day shall find alive. This he speaks 
 of as "a mystery, "doubtless remembering 
 that "we see through a glass darkly" the 
 experiences of the last day. Intermediate 
 between these two he speaks of the resur- 
 
 1 In 1 Cor. xv.
 
 The spiritual body 87 
 
 rection of those who had fallen asleep in 
 Christ, and whose bodies had "seen 
 corruption." 
 
 Specially in view of their case he con- 
 ceives that the earlier " natural " bodies 
 were, to speak in a figure, the seeds of 
 the spiritual bodies that should be. Death 
 and corruption, while it dissolves the 
 natural body, enables God to give to each 
 his own proper spiritual body. This sug- 
 gests a continuous personal identity, but it 
 does not suggest the re-collection of material 
 particles. It makes us prefer the phrase 
 the "resurrection of the body "or "of the 
 dead" to the phrase the "resurrection of 
 the flesh" ; for "flesh and blood," S. Paul 
 says, "shall not inherit the kingdom of 
 God." But it leaves us with the assurance 
 that perfected manhood in us, as in Christ, 
 shall have its perfect spiritual organ and 
 expression, its spiritual body. 
 
 JUDGEMENT AND HELL 
 
 We have spoken of the blessed dead ; 
 but there is another and an awful side to 
 our belief about the end. It is not the 
 idea of our religion that "we are all going 
 to the same place." Life is represented to 
 us in the Bible, and nowhere with more 
 penetrating simplicity than in our Lord's
 
 The catholic faith 
 
 teaching, as an awful choice between two 
 alternatives. We are always choosing life 
 or death, light or darkness, good or evil. 
 By choosing the evil or the darkness we 
 pass under divine judgement. Judgement 
 on the evil choice is not to be considered 
 as an arbitrary act of God, but as the 
 inevitable consequence of the choice itself. 
 Acts form habits, and habits stereotype 
 into a settled character which becomes 
 more and more fixed. And if the char- 
 acter be determined by lust or pride or 
 hatred or falsehood, if these things become 
 the man's real self, death does not change 
 him. The awfulness of death is that it 
 does not change us, but only sets us naked 
 and bare in the presence of the holiness 
 of God. 
 
 In a famous passage of Isaiah the 
 coming of God to Israel in His awful holi- 
 ness is described by the metaphor of fire. 
 The sinners in Zion are afraid. "Who 
 among us," they cry, "shall dwell with 
 the devouring fire? Who among us shall 
 dwell with everlasting burnings?" The 
 answer is that only the righteous man can 
 dwell with God. God cannot change 
 Himself. He cannot take the character 
 which has become determined for evil 
 into union with Himself. He is indeed 
 infinitely merciful, but He cannot save
 
 The state of the lost 89 
 
 us in spite of ourselves. That is the 
 terrible prerogative of our freedom. 
 And if words mean anything we are 
 assured by our Lord and His apostles 
 that obstinate refusal of the light, obstin- 
 ate adherence to the wrong, may bring 
 the soul to a spiritual ruin so complete 
 as to become final and irreversible. I do 
 not think it is possible to attach any other 
 sense to the tremendous language of the 
 New Testament. 
 
 Our Lord means us to take this warn- 
 ing to ourselves, rather than to inquire 
 about others. But hell, since there is a hell, 
 becomes part of the scene of the future, 
 and must be fitted somehow into our 
 whole picture of the universe as it shall 
 be. The last judgement, which is depicted 
 in tremendous imagery, leaves men divided 
 into "saved "and "lost." 
 
 There has been a vigorous reaction 
 against the "old-fashioned" teaching of 
 hell. This was in part quite legitimate, 
 for God had been represented by current 
 Calvinism as creating multitudes of men 
 irreversibly doomed to hell from their 
 creation, and even more generally as 
 condemning to hell those who, through no 
 fault of their own, had failed to believe 
 and be baptized even the heathen, for 
 instance, who had never heard of Christ, 
 
 N
 
 90 The catholic faith 
 
 and unbaptized infants, who had no capa- 
 city for choice. Now we who believe in 
 Christ know nothing more certainly than 
 the character of God. We know that He 
 is perfect love, perfect equity. We are 
 quite justified in refusing to believe about 
 Him anything which would be inconsistent 
 with the highest goodness that we can 
 conceive. We can be quite sure that He 
 will do the best possible for every soul 
 whom He has created. And we know 
 that He has worlds beyond this ages of 
 ages in which He can carry out His 
 hitherto unfulfilled designs. Any idea 
 of souls destined for hell by an irreversible 
 decree of God we may quite dismiss out 
 of our horizon. "God will have all men 
 to be saved, and to come to the knowledge 
 of the truth." 
 
 Thus, if souls are to be lost, it must 
 be through their own fault. Those who 
 have had no opportunity can be supplied 
 with opportunity, we must suppose, in 
 some unknown world. Of course the 
 Bible is written for those who have 
 opportunity. For them indeed "now is 
 the accepted time ; now is the day of 
 salvation " ; and they have no right to 
 expect another opportunity if they reject 
 this one. But we are glad to notice that 
 S. Peter speaks confidently of our i Lord
 
 The state of tht lost 91 
 
 in Hades as preaching the Gospel to the 
 dead, with the intention that, though they 
 were judged according to men in the 
 flesh, they might live according to God 
 in the spirit. 1 And we rightly resent 
 on behalf of the church the closing of 
 any avenue of hope which the Divine 
 Spirit has not closed, and the preten- 
 sion to any fuller knowledge than in 
 fact is given to us. 
 
 If I am to lay down definite conclusions I 
 should say (1) that the universal ism which 
 is so popular to-day the belief that every 
 created spirit must ultimately be recovered 
 to fulfil the end of its being in God, though 
 it is supported by some early Christian 
 authorities, and though it has never been 
 formally condemned by the church with 
 any ecumenical judgement, is flatly con- 
 trary, plainly contrary, to the language 
 used by our Lord about the destinies of 
 men, and generally to the language of the 
 New Testament. 
 
 (2) That I do not think that, by exclud- 
 ing universalism, we are absolutely shut 
 up into the almost intolerable belief in 
 unending conscious torment for the lost. 
 The language of the Bible does not neces- 
 sarily suggest this. 2 I do not think that it 
 
 1 1 S. Pet. Hi. 19 ; iv. 6. 
 
 3 The only phrase which expresses the idea clearly is 
 Rev. xx. 10. There it refers to the beast and the false
 
 92 The catholic faith 
 
 supplies us with any ground for the dogma 
 that the consciousness of a man once 
 created is indestructible. Final moral 
 ruin may involve, I cannot but think, 
 such a dissolution of personality as carries 
 with it the cessation of personal con- 
 sciousness. In this way the final ruin of 
 irretrievably lost spirits, awful as it is to 
 contemplate, may be found consistent with 
 S. Paul's anticipation of a universe in 
 which ultimately God is to be all in all 
 which does not seem to be really com- 
 patible with the existence of a region of 
 everlastingly tormented and rebellious 
 spirits ; while at the same time the awful 
 warnings of our Lord and his apostles as 
 to the inevitable consequences of wilful 
 final sin supply to every one who chooses 
 to think at all a most powerful motive to 
 prefer any effort to the risk of "losing his 
 own soul." 
 
 THE INTERMEDIATE STATE AND 
 PURGATORY 
 
 It is certainly the case that the revelation 
 of the New Testament is not given us to 
 satisfy our curiosity or to let us feel that 
 we know or can know the future state 
 
 prophet, confessedly symbolical figures, as well as to the 
 devil. And in this book all the measures of time are 
 symbolical.
 
 The intermediate state 93 
 
 otherwise than "in part." What is told 
 us is sufficient to make faith firm and hope 
 active, and (we must add) to strengthen 
 the natural fears of an evil conscience but 
 certainly not to enable us to anticipate 
 the experience of another world. Cer- 
 tainly the final bliss of man is identified 
 with the kingdom which is to come after 
 the end of the world and the day of 
 judgement ; and we are led to believe in 
 an intermediate state of (in some sense) 
 disembodied souls, in a condition of wait- 
 ing or expectancy, following on the 
 "particular judgement" that is, the dis- 
 closure of a man's real state which 
 appears to be associated with each one's 
 death. About this intermediate state we 
 are told exceedingly little, but we are 
 led to suppose that there is such a state 
 both for good and bad, and that it is a 
 state of conscious life, and for those who 
 have departed in Christ a state of greater 
 nearness to Him, a being "in Christ" 
 and "with Christ." 
 
 It is a state where the souls of just 
 men are made perfect. There is infinite 
 satisfaction about such phrases. But how 
 much they are allowed to know about 
 us who remain on earth, and about the 
 incidents of earth, we are not informed. 
 Nor can we tell at all what the lapse of
 
 94 Purgatory 
 
 time, as we know it, may mean to them. 
 It was one view held in the early church 
 that souls at death are made suddenly 
 and instantaneously perfect for good or 
 evil. But this idea has not proved accept- 
 able. We almost all instinctively tend to 
 believe in some sort of purgatory, a state 
 of cleansing and gradual emancipation 
 and enlightenment for the imperfect. 
 As regards any such purgatorial state, 
 however, we must confess that the New 
 Testament is absolutely silent. 1 S. Augus- 
 tine allows it with a "perhaps." And we 
 cannot get beyond that. It is rather a 
 conclusion of our natural reason than 
 a revealed truth. And inasmuch as the 
 Roman church is specially identified with 
 the teaching of purgatory, it is important 
 to notice that the ameliorative aspect of 
 purgatory is not that on which the Roman 
 church has laid stress. According to the 
 Roman doctrine, though all bad habits 
 and vicious inclinations of the soul be 
 instantly purified away by the moment- 
 ary fire of the particular judgement, or 
 the accompanying vision of God, and 
 though the soul be rendered instantly 
 fit for heaven, yet it is detained in pain 
 
 1 S. Paul's much-quoted words (1 Cor. iii. 12-15) 
 about a man "being saved, yet so as by fire," have 
 really nothing to do with the matter.
 
 The communion of saints 95 
 
 simply to work out the temporal punish- 
 ment due to its sins. The Roman purgatory 
 is thus predominantly penal or vindictive. 
 What we moderns desire is the purgatory, 
 penal indeed, but predominantly educa- 
 tive and ameliorative, which certain great 
 Christian teachers have imagined. In 
 that we may nay, I feel, we must 
 believe ; but it is rather a conclusion of 
 our reasoning than a part of what is 
 revealed. 
 
 THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 
 
 This article of belief was added as an 
 expansion of the article about the holy 
 catholic church. It means that all the 
 redeemed, living and departed, are in one 
 fellowship, which death does not interrupt. 
 The visible catholic church is only a part 
 of the whole church. Only the lower 
 limbs of the body of Christ are visible to 
 us. We are in communion also with the 
 dead, "with the spirits of just men made 
 perfect " ; and we are not prohibited from 
 adding with the spirits of just men being 
 made perfect. How are we to exercise 
 this fellowship ? 
 
 There can be no real question that in 
 the Middle Ages a superstructure of largely 
 rotten material but of very portentous
 
 96 The catholic faith 
 
 weight had been built upon the basis of 
 the belief in the communion of saints. 
 Current ideas about purgatory and in- 
 dulgences and invocation of saints, and 
 current practices based on these ideas, 
 were most urgently in need of amendment 
 and reform. But the reaction of Protes- 
 tantism was culpably unguarded, and the 
 Church of England shared in this lament- 
 able reaction, so that, in result, we almost 
 forgot in our practical and public reli- 
 gion our continued fellowship with the 
 blessed dead. One may question whether 
 mediaeval superstitions have not been 
 preferable to our blank ignoring of the 
 communion of the saints. We must aim 
 at living without superstition, but also in 
 the full light of truth. And the com- 
 munion of saints, as its name implies, is 
 pre-eminently a matter for public recogni- 
 tion and not merely private memory. 
 
 There are in particular two expressions 
 of the communion of saints on the restora- 
 tion of which in our common as well as 
 our private worship we ought to insist. 
 
 1. We must recover without apology or 
 concealment the practice of prayer for the 
 dead. It is matter of revelation that the 
 departed are alive and waiting their final 
 perfection. They need something as we 
 need something. And therefore we may
 
 Prayers for the dead 97 
 
 pray for them. That is a practice inevit- 
 ably resulting from the revealed belief 
 about the efficacy of prayer for others in 
 all their real needs. I should contend 
 that S. Paul prayed for his dead friend 
 Onesiphorus. 1 I am sure that the church 
 has always prayed for the dead, for light 
 and refreshment and peace, and that they 
 may receive forgiveness and mercy of the 
 Lord. I do not want to define. But I 
 must insist upon my right to pray, leaving 
 all unknown things in God's hands. And 
 I must demand this right, by legitimate 
 authority, in the public services. 
 
 2. Besides praying for our dead gener- 
 ally, besides keeping again our All Souls' 
 Day, we should remember specially the 
 heroes of our faith, those whom in a 
 special sense we call saints. The ancient 
 church used to commemorate them 
 solemnly by name. Moreover, believing 
 that nothing could be more practically 
 certain than that the perfected spirits were 
 occupied in properly spiritual activity, and 
 that their larger love, in the unseen world, 
 must lead them to pray for us who remain 
 in this world, the ancient church desired 
 to have them for its intercessors, and 
 solemnly asked God that it might be 
 allowed to benefit by their intercessions. 
 
 1 2 Tim. i. 18.
 
 98 The catholic faith 
 
 S. Cyril of Jerusalem speaks thus of 
 the commemoration of the dead, which 
 in his days followed the consecra- 
 tion of the eucharist. "Afterwards we 
 make mention also of those who have 
 fallen asleep, first of patriarchs, prophets, 
 apostles, martyrs, that God by their 
 prayers and intercessions will receive 
 our supplications. Then also (we pray) 
 on behalf of our holy fathers and bishops, 
 and generally of all those who have fallen 
 asleep amongst us, believing that there 
 will be the greatest benefit to the souls 
 of those on whose behalf our prayer is 
 offered up while the holy and tremendous 
 sacrifice is amongst us." 1 
 
 I should earnestly wish to see restored 
 amongst us the public commemoration, as 
 in the First Prayer Book, of " the wonder- 
 ful grace and virtue, declared in all Thy 
 saints from the beginning of the world : 
 and chiefly in the glorious and most 
 blessed Virgin Mary, mother of Thy Son 
 Jesus Christ our Lord and God, and in 
 the holy patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and 
 martyrs"; and I would have this general 
 commemoration accompanied not only as 
 in the First Book, by direct prayers for 
 the dead generally, but also by a specific 
 request to God that we may be allowed 
 
 1 Catechesis myst. v. 9.
 
 Cotnprecation and invocation 99 
 
 the benefit of the intercession of the 
 saints. 
 
 This has been called comprecation. But 
 the main body of the church, since the 
 fifth century of its life, has not been satis- 
 fied without directly asking the saints for 
 their prayers (invocation), though it was 
 long before these direct invocations were 
 admitted into the public services. As to 
 this I do not feel that anything could be 
 more natural ; but it cannot be denied that, 
 to sustain it, we need the assurance that 
 we can have direct access to the saints, 
 and that they can directly hear us ; and it 
 is exactly this which the church, by 
 the admissions of its theologians, is not 
 authorized to give us. The theologians of 
 the mediaeval church tell us only that 
 the saints are allowed to see us and our 
 needs in God ; which I suppose may be 
 expressed in other words by saying that, 
 if we cannot get at them to address them 
 directly, yet we can be sure that God will 
 disclose to them what He sees fit that they 
 should know. But, if this is so, it would 
 seem to follow that we had better make 
 our prayers to God that He will be pleased 
 to let the saints know our needs and let 
 us profit by their prayers. The instinct 
 of invocation, however, has been wide- 
 spread and almost irresistible. It is not
 
 100 The catholic faith 
 
 only Romish : for the Christians of the 
 East use it as much as the Christians of 
 the West. They address with familiar 
 confidence not only the famous saints but 
 their own departed friends. Certainly we 
 are not called upon to forbid such invoca- 
 tion. But the sense of what is not revealed 
 to us should restrain our use of it, even 
 in private, and, following the practice of 
 the ancient church, we should admit into 
 our public services no prayers but those 
 addressed to God.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Christian Morality 
 
 PREOCCUPATION with the dead and 
 A curiosity about the world of the dead 
 must, if we are to judge by a Biblical 
 standard, be pronounced morbid features 
 in religion. The New Testament gives us 
 indeed the most complete assurance about 
 the state and prospects of "them that are 
 fallen asleep," and the abiding sense of com- 
 munion with them ; but information about 
 their state is given us with such reserve 
 as to direct our faculties towards this 
 world, which really lies open before us, 
 and which God has given into our charge. 
 Thus the unworldliness of Christians is 
 to make them only more effective in the 
 world. God is to be first in their lives in 
 unquestioned and undisputed supremacy ; 
 but they are to test the reality of their love 
 of God only by their conduct towards their 
 fellow men. Their manner of life is to be 
 heavenly ; it is to draw all its motives and 
 power from that heavenly place where 
 Christ is seated at the right hand of God, 
 101
 
 102 Christian morality 
 
 it is to measure everything by the issues of 
 eternal life and eternal death ; but all this 
 " other- worldliness," so far from making 
 them indifferent to this world, is only to 
 make them feel the importance of every- 
 thing that happens in this world, because 
 of its divine origin and eternal issues. 
 And it is the spectacle of what Christians 
 are in the life which they share with all 
 other men which, by its moral attractive- 
 ness, is to draw men to Christ : that 
 "wherein they speak against you as 
 evil-doers, they may by your good works, 
 which they shall behold, glorify God in 
 the day of visitation." 1 
 
 Thus we come to consider Christian 
 morality or ethics the principles of Chris- 
 tian life, individual and social. And, of 
 course, we must make our beginning from 
 Him who sets the standard for Christians 
 from Jesus Christ our Lord. 
 
 THE MIND OF CHRIST 
 
 What we have to consider is the spirit 
 of our Lord's human life and teaching. 
 Great mistakes have been made through 
 forgetting both what our Lord, in the place 
 in history which He filled, was able to 
 assume, and also what He deliberately 
 
 1 1 S. Pet. ii. 12.
 
 What our Lord assumes 103 
 
 refused to anticipate. Forgetting these 
 considerations, very different classes of 
 people have argued, mistakenly as I think, 
 from the silence of Christ. "He never 
 occupied Himself with social legislation 
 or reform," says one group; "therefore 
 the Christian church ought not to do so." 
 "He said nothing to inspire patriotism 
 or to justify war, and much to require 
 personal meekness and non-resistance," 
 says another group; "and therefore no 
 Christian can rightly be a soldier." " He 
 said nothing about church building or 
 religious ceremonial ; therefore," says yet 
 another group, "it is not really proper 
 for the Christian to be much occupied in 
 the external organization of worship." 
 But all these groups of people who use 
 the same arguments from different points 
 of view forget what is of great importance. 
 Our Lord assumes not only the lofty per- 
 sonal morality but also the social order of 
 the Old Testament, to which he ascribes 
 divine authority, and which was full of 
 detailed social legislation and social in- 
 struction. What He sets Himself to do 
 within the Jewish people is to restore 
 and perfect the spirit which lies behind 
 legislation the spirit of humanity. And, 
 so far as He contemplated the future, He 
 seems deliberately to have abstained from
 
 104 Christian morality 
 
 making laws for His disciples in the main ; 
 but He intends His society to legislate in 
 His own name and Spirit after He should 
 have gone out of sight. And He said, 
 "He that heareth you heareth Me." 1 
 
 Again, war will doubtless cease when 
 the mass of men are really, even if 
 imperfectly, Christians. For their inter- 
 national fellowship will then be based 
 on something better than selfishness, in- 
 dividual or corporate. But meanwhile 
 each nation has a vocation and a divine 
 right to exist. In the recent memory of 
 Israel, when our Lord came, the Macca- 
 bees had been their national heroes, who 
 had fought for their national existence 
 when it was threatened, and had waged 
 a great war of self-defence. Every pa- 
 triotic Israelite gloried in them. There 
 is not the slightest reason to think that 
 our Lord would have repudiated them ; 
 and, though He made it evident that 
 political independence was not now the 
 vocation of Israel, there is no reason to 
 think He would have forbidden a nation 
 which had received the faith He came to 
 impart to defend its boundaries against 
 invaders or assist in defending some other 
 nation. Our Lord does indeed repudiate 
 pride and corporate selfishness, and re- 
 
 ' S. Luke x. 16.
 
 What our Lord assumes 105 
 
 quires us to love our neighbours as 
 ourselves. This is to repudiate a great 
 deal that has paraded itself as patriotism 
 in human history. But there is a true 
 patriotism which believes in the divine 
 purpose for each nation, and cannot, for 
 the sake of all, allow the insolent aggres- 
 sion of others upon its legitimate liberty. 
 It seems to me to be idle to argue from 
 what our Lord says about personal sub- 
 mission to injuries that He would have 
 refused to allow a man to defend either 
 his wife and children or his country. 
 
 Once more, ceremonial observances 
 belong to human nature everywhere. 
 "Duties of religion," says Richard 
 Hooker, "performed by whole societies 
 of men ought to have in them a sensible 
 excellency correspondent to the majesty 
 of Him whom we worship." Our Lord 
 shows not the slightest antipathy to the 
 religious ceremonialism of Israel. There 
 is not a word against it. He condemns 
 not forms but empty forms. When His 
 own redemptive action had so deeply 
 changed the basis of religious observance, 
 it would be the function of His church to 
 provide for suitable religious ceremonial. 
 Meanwhile He contents Himself with re- 
 fashioning the spirit of worship as of 
 human life generally.
 
 106 Christian morality 
 
 How shall we seek to describe the moral 
 spirit of Jesus? 
 
 1. He bases morality in the heart and 
 will. Every settled society must have 
 legislation both negative and positive in 
 order to protect itself, and such legislation 
 is concerned exclusively with outward acts. 
 For the Jews this legislation had a divine 
 sanction. Moreover every settled society 
 develops standards of respectability which 
 its public opinion sedulously maintains. 
 Nowhere was this more marked than 
 in Jewish society. But our Lord ab- 
 solutely refuses to be content with such 
 external standards. He insists on forcing 
 back the standards of personal purity and 
 mutual duty into the inner sphere of 
 motive and desire into the heart of man, 
 which only God can see. He would 
 have us regard the deliberate will to 
 commit adultery as equivalent to the act 
 itself; and the first movement of anger 
 in the heart as a sin deserving of punish- 
 ment ; and He carries back the sin of 
 swearing falsely till its correction is found 
 in a universal truthfulness. He will not 
 allow that outward observances can be 
 the source of moral defilement, but only 
 the inward will of the heart. This He 
 applies equally to all the three aspects of 
 morality our duty to God, our duty to
 
 The moral spirit of Christ 107 
 
 ourselves, and our duty to our neighbour ; 
 and to the corresponding kinds of religious 
 action to prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. 
 The real value of each lies in the inner 
 region where "your Father seeth in secret." 
 
 2. It follows from this that our Lord 
 would have us intensely alive to the perils 
 of living by public opinion. He is for 
 ever pointing out its defectiveness and its 
 blinding effect upon the conscience. The 
 Pharisees, for instance, were intensely 
 conscientious, only their conscience was 
 blinded to the most important considera- 
 tions by their tradition. "Thus have ye 
 made the word of God of none effect 
 because of your tradition." "How can 
 ye believe which receive glory one of 
 another, and the glory that cometh from 
 the only God ye seek not ? " " Take heed 
 that the light that is in you be not dark- 
 ness." 1 This is a tremendously impor- 
 tant consideration. Respectability is not 
 morality. 
 
 Every society in the pursuit of its own 
 ideals tends to draw a distinction between 
 the sins which are disreputable, and merit 
 social reprobation, and those for which 
 there is easy condonation, or which can 
 even be taken for granted. Our Lord 
 will have no such distinction. He carries 
 
 1 S. Matt. xv. 6 ; S. John v. 44 ; S. Luke zi. 35.
 
 108 Christian morality 
 
 sin back to the heart, to the inner relation 
 of a man to God and his neighbour, and 
 He will have no distinction between re- 
 spectable and disreputable sins. No one 
 can accuse our Lord of laxity as to sexual 
 sins. But He will never suffer us to 
 consider the sins of the flesh, or other 
 sins which make a man disreputable, as 
 if they were worse than covetousness or 
 selfishness or pride which are consistent 
 with respectability. Indeed our Lord's 
 deepest indignation is expressed towards 
 the sins of the Pharisees who stood 
 highest in public estimation. This refusal 
 to recognize any moral distinction be- 
 tween respectable and disreputable sins 
 strikes a tremendous blow at the current 
 morality of almost any settled society, 
 especially if it be religious. 
 
 3. If all real morality lies in a right 
 relation to God in the heart, everything 
 depends on the right idea of God. Our 
 Lord was for ever declaring His father- 
 hood, His equal love and care for every 
 one of His children. Here we get to 
 the heart of our Lord's moral teaching 
 and practice. He "hid not Himself from 
 His own flesh." He dealt with every 
 one, however much an outcast from re- 
 spectable society, with an equal regard. 
 He loved every man. Though His
 
 The moral spirit of Christ 109 
 
 special mission was only to Israel, He 
 made it quite plain that this was only a 
 temporary limitation. He welcomed the 
 faith which he found in the Roman 
 centurion and the Syrophenician woman. 
 His love knew no limits. His compas- 
 sion went out towards every one's need. 
 He approached every one with the respect 
 due to manhood and womanhood. He 
 made no account of wealth or intellect 
 or social importance. He treated things 
 which give men privileged positions as 
 if they were positive obstacles to their 
 entrance into the kingdom. He did not 
 think of God as if He were all mildness. 
 He proclaimed the wrath of God as well 
 as His mercy. But the wrath of God and 
 His own wrath is specially directed against 
 the insolence which despises others and 
 which ignores the infinite worth of every 
 human soul. " Take heed that ye despise 
 not one of these little ones." " It is not 
 the will of your Father which is in 
 heaven that one of these little ones should 
 perish." " It were better for a man that 
 a millstone should be hanged about his 
 neck, and that he should be drowned in 
 the depths of the sea, than that he should 
 cause one of these little ones to stumble." 1 
 4. Thus our Lord's moral teaching 
 
 S. Matt, xviii. 10, 14 ; S. Luke xvii. 2.
 
 110 Christian morality 
 
 centres in the profound assertion of 
 God's fatherhood and the equal claim 
 of all His children. His morality is a 
 positive enthusiasm for humanity for 
 every man as such. That is love ; and 
 love carries with it humility, which is the 
 frankest recognition of the equal claim of 
 every one upon life the absolute refusal 
 to exalt oneself at the expense of another, 
 or to use any other as an instrument for 
 one's own profit. The true spirit of man 
 is the joy of service ; and the poorest and 
 weakest, because they need our service 
 more, are to have the first claim upon it. 
 Thus over every awakened soul our Lord 
 seems to stand eliciting, welcoming, and 
 blessing the offer of self-sacrifice. Love, 
 humility, service, and sacrifice these are 
 the things which characterize His life, 
 and which He would have to be the heart 
 and centre of the life of His disciples. 
 This is the spirit in which we are to 
 co-operate with the will of our Father 
 which is in heaven. It is not too much 
 to say that our Lord first really discovered 
 and disclosed to men the power to lift and 
 redeem which lies hid in compassion 
 compassion which is wholly without con- 
 tempt, compassion which has power in 
 it, because it rests upon and is inspired 
 by the compassion of God.
 
 The ethics of the New Testament 111 
 
 THE ETHICS OF THE EPISTLES 
 
 The Epistles of the New Testament are 
 perfect expressions of the mind of Christ. 
 In them, all alike, we have a wonderful 
 belief in the capacity of every individual. 
 The gift of the Holy Spirit, which is the 
 possession of each member of Christ, is 
 the gift of liberty and sonship liberty 
 meaning the power of self-control, the 
 control of the passions and appetites by 
 the Spirit-enabled will, and also the 
 capacity for intelligent co-operation with 
 the purpose of God in the church and 
 in the world. But this individual liberty 
 is realized by each only as a member of 
 the body in which the law of mutual 
 service enriches each with the gifts of all 
 and binds them together in brotherhood. 
 The Christian Church is "the body" or 
 "the brotherhood," because here only, 
 where the Spirit dwells, can men realize 
 in sonship to God the brotherhood which 
 is meant for all. The principle of brother- 
 hood means that there is to be asked of 
 each the utmost service which each can 
 render, and that there should be given to 
 each according to his need, because if one 
 member suffer, or is in want, the weakness 
 or suffering of each is the weakening of 
 the whole body. Suffering indeed will be
 
 112 Christian morality 
 
 the lot of the whole body and of every 
 member of it, but not the misery of being 
 forgotten or despised by the brotherhood ; 
 so that through all afflictions which they 
 share with Christ, their Master and Head, 
 a spirit of rejoicing, a " spirit of glory and 
 of God," rests upon them. 
 
 We need to read afresh S. Paul, S. James, 
 S. John, S. Peter, to see with fresh eyes 
 how much of the real glory of Christian 
 ethics we have left out of our mental 
 picture. The whole spirit of Christian 
 morality is not the glorification of the 
 individual but the sociable spirit of the 
 community. The ethics of the New 
 Testament are social ethics. And, in- 
 asmuch as fellowship amongst a number 
 of naturally divergent temperaments lays 
 a great strain on the forbearance of each, 
 the test of sincerity in Christian belief 
 is found in the capacity for cheerful 
 membership. 
 
 There is no doubt that it was the love 
 of Christians for one another the care of 
 all for each which was one chief cause 
 of the rapid spread of the church. Men 
 were drawn out of a loveless world into 
 that warm and comfortable fellowship. 
 Equally there is no doubt that it is just 
 this spirit which could win men to-day. 
 One of the most thoughtful of those who
 
 The spirit of brotherhood 113 
 
 have written about our soldiers on the 
 field of battle bears witness to the spirit of 
 brotherliness unselfishness, generosity, 
 cheerfulness, and humility which pos- 
 sesses them ; but adds significantly that 
 they never think of this as having any 
 connection with religion, with Chris- 
 tianity. " This is surely nothing short 
 of tragedy. Here are men who believed 
 absolutely in the Christian virtues of 
 unselfishness, generosity, charity, and 
 humility, without ever connecting them 
 in their minds with Christ ; and, at the 
 same time, what they did associate with 
 Christianity was just on a par with the for- 
 malism and smug self-righteousness which 
 Christ spent His whole life in trying to 
 destroy." ' That is the melancholy fact. 
 We have let charity come to mean some- 
 thing different from brotherly and sisterly 
 love. We have let it become associated 
 with the idea of the patronage of the 
 inferior by the superior. We have allowed 
 men to say that they want "not charity, 
 but justice " as if charity were anything 
 else than justice perfected. 
 
 What we must ask of Churchmen is to 
 bathe themselves again in the spirit of the 
 New Testament and to set themselves so 
 
 1 A Student in Arms, pp. 117-18. London : Andrew 
 Melrose. 1916.
 
 114 Christian morality 
 
 resolutely to reproduce it, that " eccle- 
 siastical " shall once again come to mean 
 brotherly. 
 
 In our idea of duty in our idea of the 
 sacraments in our doctrine of the Spirit, 
 among Catholics and among Protestants 
 we have suffered an excessive individualism 
 to obliterate or hide much that is most 
 essential and central in Christian ethics. 
 
 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 
 
 I cannot but think that this is partly due 
 among ourselves to the over-prominent 
 place which has been assigned in our 
 Prayer Book to the Ten Commandments. 
 Nowhere in ancient Christendom or in 
 modern Catholicism outside our own limits 
 have the Ten Commandments been given 
 so dominant a position. There is no doubt 
 that they had behind them the authority 
 of God as a code of elementary law for 
 the people of Israel. There is no doubt 
 that they set the ancient people of God 
 upon the right lines. The fundamental 
 principles of human society, and the true 
 principles of ethics are to be found there. 
 Interpreted as our Lord interprets them 
 they can become a code for Christians ; 
 but the interpretation is a very thorough 
 transformation. "Thou shalt not take 
 the name of the Lord thy God in vain "
 
 The ten commandments 115 
 
 becomes the profound duty of truthful- 
 ness ; " thou shalt do no murder " be- 
 comes the law of love; and "thou shalt 
 not commit adultery " the law of purity 
 in thought and desire. They are trans- 
 formed, in fact, from negative into positive 
 precepts. They all admit of this sort of 
 transformation. But simply proclaimed 
 from the altar they are not understood 
 in this new sense. That God is against 
 the sinner that they make us feel with 
 trembling. But they are, as they stand, 
 negative precepts " thou shalt not " and 
 they give an unduly negative appearance 
 to Christian morality. They forbid cer- 
 tain vicious actions or tempers, and allow 
 us to be satisfied if these particular offences 
 are avoided. And some of them are pro- 
 hibitions which in their original sense no 
 longer hold. We are no longer prohibited, 
 like the Jews in the second command- 
 ment, from all representations of created 
 things even in connection with worship. 
 The incarnation of the Son of God has 
 hallowed Christian art in our churches ; 
 and sacred pictures have become " the 
 books of the unlearned." And the Chris- 
 tian Sunday, the Lord's Day, is certainly 
 not simply the Jewish sabbath transferred 
 to another day. 
 Of course our Catechism does give a
 
 116 Christian morality 
 
 very liberal interpretation to the Ten 
 Commandments. Let us listen to it. 
 
 " What dost thou chiefly learn by these 
 commandments ? 
 
 "I learn two things: my duty towards 
 God, and my duty towards my neighbour. 
 
 " What is thy duty towards God ? 
 
 "My duty towards God is to believe in 
 Him, to fear Him, and to love Him, with 
 all my heart, with all my mind, with all 
 my soul, and with all my strength ;' to 
 worship Him, to give Him thanks, to put 
 my whole trust in Him, to call upon Him, 2 
 to honour His holy name and His word, 3 
 and to serve Him truly all the days of 
 my life. 4 
 
 " What is thy duty towards thy neigh- 
 bour? 
 
 " My duty towards my neighbour, is to 
 love him as myself, and to do to all men, 
 as I would they should do unto me : to 
 love, honour, and succour my father and 
 mother : to honour and obey the king, 
 and all that are put in authority under 
 him : to submit myself to all my governors, 
 teachers, spiritual pastors and masters: to 
 order myself lowly and reverently to all 
 my betters : 5 to hurt nobody by word 
 nor deed : to be true and just in all my 
 
 1 First Commandment. * Second. 3 Third. 
 Fourth. s Fifth.
 
 The ten commandments 117 
 
 dealing : to bear no malice nor hatred 
 in my heart : l to keep my hands from 
 picking and stealing, 2 and my tongue from 
 evil-speaking, lying, and slandering : 3 to 
 keep my body in temperance, soberness, 
 and chastity: 4 not to covet nor desire 
 other men's goods ; but to learn and labour 
 truly to get mine own living, and to do my 
 duty in that state of life, unto which it 
 shall please God to call me." 5 
 
 This indeed is a transformed version of 
 the Ten Commandments. But very few 
 of our communicants have it in their mind. 
 Even the questions in some books of self- 
 examination which interpret the Ten 
 Commandments present a too negative 
 impression of Christian duty. Thus I 
 cannot but wish that the Ten Command- 
 ments might be publicly recited in church 
 only occasionally, and then with their 
 properly Christian interpretation, while 
 some more easily intelligible summary of 
 Christian morals 6 were in the minds and 
 memories of all our members. 
 
 ' Sixth. 2 Eighth. 3 Ninth. Seventh, s Tenth. 
 
 6 The summary in the Catechism would probably 
 suffice if the statement of the duty of subordinates to 
 superiors were there balanced by an equally simple 
 statement of the corresponding duties of those in 
 any kind of authority or position of advantage. As 
 it stands we cannot deny that it produces a feeling 
 of unfairness. A reference to Murray's Dictionary will 
 show that "betters" cannot be interpreted to mean 
 " those better than ourselves."
 
 118 Christian morality 
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCH 
 
 I began by speaking of what our Lord 
 assumed He assumed the State and the 
 authority of the State. Speaking as an 
 Israelite He assumed the legislation of 
 the Law and the social teaching of the 
 prophets. But if the Jewish State had 
 continued in being and had accepted the 
 teaching of Christ He would have infused 
 into the old legislation and the old moral 
 teaching a new spirit, which would have 
 profoundly modified it. As things actually 
 happened the Jewish people rejected Christ, 
 and the Christian church started on its 
 career wholly divorced from the nation 
 of its origin ; and for some centuries of its 
 life in the Roman Empire it was almost 
 wholly debarred from political action. Its 
 only concern was with the moral discipline 
 of its own members. But so soon as 
 the church in any city or nation rises to 
 a position of political influence, there must 
 arise a new conception of Christian civic 
 duty. Of this important aspect of Chris- 
 tian ethics I shall have to speak in a 
 later chapter. But we cannot think rightly 
 about Christian morality at all without 
 bringing into view the social discipline 
 which the church was intended to exer- 
 cise, and did exercise from the first, over
 
 The authority of the church 119 
 
 its own members. Except in the single 
 matter of marriage, on which our Lord 
 appears to have laid down a law, 1 He 
 abstained from anything like legislation 
 for His church. He expressed in His 
 teaching extraordinarily luminous moral 
 ideas and ideals of duty. But He left it 
 to His church to apply these ideals and 
 ideas in a system of moral discipline, and 
 He gave to the church a divine authority 
 to exercise this discipline. There was not 
 in the church from its beginning any doubt 
 about this. 
 
 Thus the New Testament presents us 
 with a picture, which later church history 
 only elaborates, of a corporate body legis- 
 lating for its members with a divine 
 sanction. The normal Christian is a man 
 under authority the authority of the 
 body he belongs to. In his whole life 
 he ought to feel this corporate authority, 
 and he ought to recognize in detail "the 
 precepts of the church." We know the 
 causes which brought about the great 
 rebellion against church authority which 
 is called the Reformation. Over parts of 
 Europe the church of the papal obedience 
 reasserted its sway, and a much stricter 
 discipline was inaugurated. The stricter 
 
 1 1 Cor. vii. 10, "Not I, but the Lord." He speaks, 
 however, as one restoring not originating a law.
 
 120 Christian morality 
 
 discipline was in theological and eccle- 
 siastical matters rather than in morality. 
 Still, the individual Churchman knew 
 that he must obey the precepts of the 
 church. With us the unhappy fusion of 
 Church and State brought about a situation 
 in which the church was hardly recog- 
 nized as having any authority apart from 
 the State. And now that the State has 
 ceased to act as the guardian of a dis- 
 tinctively Christian morality the individual 
 churchman is allowed to remain with 
 hardly any consciousness of being under 
 obedience to a body which represents 
 Christ. I would give only two examples 
 of this startling deficiency. 
 
 The mediaeval church possessed a noble 
 and carefully formulated tradition of social 
 and political ethics for instance, a really 
 Christian doctrine of property, limiting the 
 rights of property by considerations of the 
 general welfare and of the authority of 
 God. But a philosophy of individual self- 
 interest arose and became dominant, 
 especially in England. It mastered the 
 legislature; and our laws came to care 
 more about the rights of property than the 
 rights of persons, and to push the rights of 
 property to such a point as admitted of little 
 regard being paid to the interests of the 
 community, and especially of its less for-
 
 The authority of the church 121 
 
 tunate members those "who have not." 
 And, in spite of the prevalence of this 
 frankly unchristian theory and practice, the 
 church corporately was silent. Christians 
 were at liberty to make money out of slum- 
 dwellings, degrading to their inhabitants ; 
 or to sweat their workpeople ; or to invest 
 their capital in commercial enterprises 
 without any regard to the good of man- 
 kind without regard to any other con- 
 sideration except the return they would 
 get for their money : and all this in flat 
 defiance of Christian principles, without 
 the church ever seriously warning them 
 that they were guilty of something like a 
 moral apostasy. 
 
 I must give one other example. A 
 generation ago it began to be known that 
 by the use of certain expedients it was 
 possible and even easy for men and women 
 to gratify their sexual appetites without 
 the trouble, expense, and pain involved 
 in the procreation of children. The 
 general verdict of the Christian con- 
 science, where it is at pains to be 
 instructed, condemns such practices as a 
 degradation of marriage and of the sexual 
 relation, severing its inherent pleasure 
 from the conditions which ennoble and 
 restrain it. The Roman Catholic church 
 and the Jewish community made their
 
 122 Christian morality 
 
 condemnation of these practices more or 
 less effective, and within the limits of their 
 influence they were kept in restraint. But 
 outside these communions they have been 
 allowed to gain a fearful prevalence with- 
 out any organized or public expression of 
 the judgement of the church. 
 
 These are instances of a very serious 
 neglect. The conscience of a man is not 
 the voice of God, but a faculty which 
 enables him to keep in touch with God's 
 moral will, as his reason enables him to 
 keep in touch with truth. Both, if they are 
 to be effective, need education. Among 
 the means of educating the conscience of 
 Christians none should be more obvious 
 than the voice of the church. A Christian 
 is meant to live in the light of the judge- 
 ment of the divine society of which he is 
 a member. And the church which neg- 
 lects to enlighten and guide and warn its 
 members on moral questions neglects a 
 vital part of its duty. 
 
 Even in minor matters it is necessary 
 and wholesome that members of the 
 church should feel their obligation to 
 observe the precepts of the church. It 
 keeps them in mind of their membership, 
 it strengthens their spirit of discipline ; 
 and if the precepts are sound it keeps 
 them in the right way. Whether the
 
 The precepts of the church 123 
 
 precepts of the Roman Church are wholly 
 good I need not discuss ; at least we recog- 
 nize what an advantage it is to a Roman 
 Catholic that he knows, as we say, "ex- 
 actly what he has got to do." And it is 
 the intention of the Church of England 
 that we should live under like precepts. 
 Thus (1) the duty of public worship, 
 especially on Sundays and other holy days ; 
 (2) the duty of hearing and reading Holy 
 Scripture ; (3) the duty of communicating 
 at least three times a year ; (4) the duty of 
 almsgiving and of paying church dues ; 
 (5) the duty of not marrying within the pro- 
 hibited degrees ; (6) the duty of keeping 
 the fast and feast days of the church ; (7) 
 the duty of making one's will are duties 
 which the Church of England in its 
 Prayer Book and canons lays upon its 
 members. 1 Some of us would desire a 
 revision of these rules, at least so as to 
 make attendance at the Lord's own ser- 
 vice the normal obligation of the Lord's 
 Day. But, be the rules never so good, 
 they fail of their object unless they are 
 practically understood of all, and unless 
 the church makes it evident that it in- 
 tends they should be observed. With- 
 
 1 Upon its clergy only it lays the duty of the daily 
 recitation of Morning and Evening Prayer in public or 
 private. It would have made a vast difference if this 
 had never been forgotten.
 
 124 Christian morality 
 
 out such precepts of the church, univer- 
 sally known and loyally accepted within 
 our membership, we shall never have 
 anything approaching to a healthy church- 
 manship; and such practical recognition of 
 membership is an important part of the 
 moral discipline of Christianity. 
 
 THE EVANGELICAL COUNSELS 
 
 Finally, a word must be said about the 
 "counsels" or special vocations for some, 
 as well as about the moral duties of all. 
 Purity, self-control, charity, self-sacrifice, 
 humility these and the like virtues are 
 incumbent upon all. But some, not all, 
 our Lord called to be apostles and evan- 
 gelists, pastors and missionaries, and He 
 gave them special injunctions to secure 
 their entire detachment from worldly 
 cares. Further he set before some, not 
 all, the counsel of voluntary poverty : 
 " Go and sell all that thou hast, and come 
 and follow me." And He also suggested 
 as a vocation for some, not for all, delib- 
 erate virginity. These last calls, welcomed 
 and acted upon, have been the foundation 
 of what is specially called the "religious 
 state." And because these ascetic voca- 
 tions pursued individually lead to all kinds 
 of perilous eccentricities the church has
 
 Evangelical counsels 125 
 
 joined to the vocations of poverty and 
 chastity the vocation of obedience to a 
 superior and a common rule, in order to 
 keep the Religious State sane and healthy. 
 Thus the church has honoured the 
 special vocation of those who consecrate 
 their lives under the three vows of 
 poverty, chastity, and obedience ; and 
 there are very few things in the Church 
 of England for which we need more 
 heartily to give thanks than for the revival 
 amongst us of this special vocation, both 
 among men and women. There is a very 
 difficult theological question about the 
 "merit" of "works of supererogation" 
 that is, good works, such as obedience to 
 these special calls, which are over and 
 above what is required of every one. 
 But I do not propose to discuss this sub- 
 ject here. On the one hand, it cannot be 
 denied that it is very difficult to eliminate 
 the distinction between ordinary require- 
 ments and special merits. It is very 
 difficult to say that any one sins by refus- 
 ing a special call as he would sin by 
 refusing a universal duty. On the other 
 hand, it cannot be denied that the New 
 Testament, especially our Lord's words 
 and S. Paul's, are singularly discour- 
 aging to the idea of acquiring merit ; 
 and, to whatever theological system they
 
 126 Christian morality 
 
 have belonged, we may rejoice that the 
 heroic saints have, for the most part, been 
 singularly averse to claiming merit for 
 themselves. Meanwhile this at least is 
 certain. No church can strike the 
 imagination of men, or enlist their whole 
 loyalty, unless it affords full scope for 
 the exercise of the more heroic kinds of 
 sacrifice, and gives to such sacrifice frank 
 and corporate honour. 
 
 We have at this moment a grand oppor- 
 tunity for proclaiming afresh the true spirit 
 of Christian morality, the gospel of human 
 life. The appalling strife of nations which 
 is drenching in blood so large a part of 
 the world, the threatening strife of classes 
 and many other symptoms of disease in 
 modern life have produced a widespread 
 disillusionment as to the possibilities of 
 any civilization which is based on com- 
 petitive selfishness, whether it be the selfish- 
 ness of individuals, of classes, or of nations. 
 Men are yearning for some adequate and 
 stable basis of human fellowship. And it 
 is this that Christianity offers them. Its 
 ethics are frankly supernatural: for it is 
 only by the help of motives and forces 
 drawn from beyond the world that men 
 can subdue their selfish lusts and appetites 
 and become fit for fellowship. But fellow- 
 ship in the Spirit of God is what Christ
 
 Eternal rewards 127 
 
 offers to men. And while He accepts as 
 a legitimate part of human nature the 
 desire for personal happiness, and frankly 
 bids men strive for eternal rewards, He 
 proclaims deliberate self-sacrifice to be 
 the only road to self-realization, and the 
 only instrument of human redemption.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 Prayer 
 
 ACCORDING to the teaching of our 
 ** Lord and of the New Testament 
 generally prayer is to be one of the chief 
 occupations of men. To a certain extent 
 indeed it has been so all the world over. 
 All the world over man appears as a being 
 moving out towards nature to appropriate 
 its resources, and therein lies the history 
 of civilization ; moving out again towards 
 his fellow men to adjust his relations with 
 them, and therein lies the history of society ; 
 but also as a being moving out towards 
 the unseen, towards God or gods, how- 
 ever ignorantly conceived, and therein 
 lies the history of religion. Of this reli- 
 gious development of man the culminating 
 point is to be found in Christ. In Him, 
 as the church believes, is to be found the 
 relation of man to God perfected in son- 
 ship. In Him, therefore, is to be found 
 the perfection of prayer. And no one can 
 read the Gospels without seeing that it is 
 our Lord's intention to surround Himself 
 128
 
 Prayer 129 
 
 with men of prayer. No one, moreover, 
 can read the Epistles without seeing how 
 diligently the first Christians set themselves 
 to the work of prayer. 
 
 Our Lord may be said to have taught 
 His disciples two great lessons with regard 
 to prayer. First, that prayer is efficacious ; 
 that is, that asking God, persistently and 
 patiently, is one chief means of obtaining 
 results. Plainly our Lord is interested in, 
 and would have us reverence, all kinds 
 of practical human activity. There are 
 multitudes of things which God means 
 for us and for the world that will never 
 be ours unless we work for them. But 
 also, and quite as truly, there are multi- 
 tudes of things which God means for us, 
 and through us for our brethren, which 
 will never be ours or theirs unless we 
 pray for them. Prayer produces results. 
 Prayer accomplishes on the earth what 
 nothing else can accomplish. "Ask, and 
 ye shall receive." As "the Lord's brother" 
 says, " Ye have not because ye ask not." x 
 Thus our Lord would have His disciples 
 possessed by an unhesitating belief in the 
 efficacy of prayer. And we may lay it to 
 heart that, however great the intellectual 
 difficulties of conceiving the interaction of 
 the divine and human wills, there is no 
 
 1 S. Jamei iv. 2.
 
 130 The religion of the church 
 
 intellectual difficulty whatever about the 
 efficacy of prayer which does not apply 
 equally to the efficacy of work. In both 
 directions we are bound to believe that 
 the practical results depend upon our own 
 wills. 
 
 But when His disciples had taken in 
 this lesson, there was another which they 
 had to learn, perhaps more difficult that 
 is, that the efficacy of prayer depends upon 
 our learning to desire and ask what it is 
 the will of God to give. Prayer is not 
 to be an attempt to persuade God to do 
 what He had not intended to do. If we 
 could succeed in doing that, it would be to 
 our loss. Prayer is a method of liberating 
 the hand of God to do what He would do, 
 but cannot do unless we correspond with 
 His will. Intelligent correspondence with 
 the purpose of God that is the spirit of 
 effective work, and the spirit of all 
 science ; and that is the spirit of effective 
 prayer. It is marvellous how many of 
 the objections urged against the reason- 
 ableness of praying fall to the ground at 
 once when this principle is really grasped. 
 And inasmuch as in our Lord we really 
 see the mind of God brought near and 
 made intelligible to us, so our praying 
 becomes effective in proportion as we 
 learn to make Christ's mind our mind, and
 
 Prayer 131 
 
 His desires our desires. This is what I 
 described as the second lesson which our 
 Lord set Himself to teach His disciples 
 about prayer : " If ye abide in me and 
 my words abide in you, ye shall ask what 
 ye will and it shall be done unto you." 
 "Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in 
 my name, he will give it you. Hitherto 
 have ye asked (so many things in your 
 own name, but) nothing in my name." 1 
 
 It hardly needs saying that to ask in 
 Christ's name means something quite 
 different from adding the words ** through 
 Jesus Christ " at the end of our prayers. 
 The ambassador goes abroad "in the 
 name " of king and country, the com- 
 mercial traveller travels "in the name" of 
 his firm, because he goes to express not 
 his own intentions and wishes, but the 
 intentions and wishes of the greater power 
 behind him which he represents. That is 
 what we mean by praying in the name 
 of Christ. The same idea is really 
 implied in the phrase "Whatsoever ye 
 pray and ask, believe that ye have re- 
 ceived it, and ye shall have it " : for we 
 cannot really ask with this confident ex- 
 pectation unless we know in sufficient 
 measure the mind of God and our own 
 mind is identified with it. 
 
 1 S. John xv. 7, 16 ; xvi. 23, 24, 26.
 
 132 The religion of the church 
 
 But nowhere is the idea so effectively 
 expressed as in the Lord's Prayer, which, 
 indeed, is not one prayer among many, 
 but the mould and pattern of all praying. 
 There in the order no less than the 
 content of the petitions is the secret of 
 prayer in the name of Christ. It begins 
 with bidding us lay aside our selfishness. 
 It is "our Father," not "my Father," 
 whom I am to approach the impartial 
 Father with whom is no respect of per- 
 sons : "which art in heaven," whose ways 
 are higher than our ways and His thoughts 
 than our thoughts, even as the heaven 
 is higher than the earth, and who yet 
 bends Himself to the heart of every one of 
 His children. "Hallowed be Thy name." 
 Here we are required at once to do 
 what is most difficult to flesh and blood, 
 to exalt God's honour above man's need 
 into the first place in our desires. "Thy 
 kingdom come, Thy will be done." We 
 are to merge our little schemes in God's 
 great purpose, and bend our stubborn wills 
 into harmony with His. " In earth as it is 
 in heaven." 1 We are bidden to open our 
 imagination to the great angelic world of 
 
 1 This, in all probability, is intended to refer to all 
 the three previous clauses " Hallowed be Thy name," 
 as in heaven so on earth ; "Thy kingdom come," as in 
 heaven so on earth; "Thy will be done" as in heaven 
 so on earth.
 
 The Lord's Prayer 133 
 
 free spirits who are always honouring 
 God with an incessant adoration, amongst 
 whom the order of the divine kingdom 
 is perfectly realized, and who have no 
 other will than God's. Then, only then, 
 when we have exalted God's honour 
 above our need, and merged our plans 
 in His, and bent our wills to His, and 
 opened our imagination to the vastness 
 of the spiritual world only then are we 
 allowed to express our desires for per- 
 sonal and temporal blessings, and then so 
 restrictedly : not "Give me to-day what 
 I should so much wish to have," but 
 " Give us " one and all alike "to-day our 
 bread for the coming day" enough to 
 keep us in life and activity. And, because 
 we cannot do God's work unless we are 
 in His peace, therefore "Forgive us our 
 trespasses " ; and that again, not anyhow, 
 but according to the fixed law by which 
 God deals with us as we deal with our 
 fellow men, "as we have forgiven them 
 that trespass against us." And because 
 we are weak and frail, "Lead us not into 
 temptation (or trial), but deliver us from 
 the evil one." 
 
 That is a marvellous prayer. A child 
 can understand every word of it. But it 
 requires a saint to pray it perfectly. It 
 requires a converted man to pray it sin-
 
 134 The religion of the church 
 
 cerely at all. And it is not an exaggera- 
 tion to say that it contains in itself the 
 philosophy of man's right relation to the 
 Supreme Will and to the whole order of 
 nature the philosophy of correspondence, 
 which so many centuries later was ex- 
 pressed, with reference to the activity of 
 the natural sciences, in the famous aphor- 
 ism of Francis Bacon "Nature can only 
 be controlled by being obeyed." The 
 true liberation of human faculties, that 
 is, lies in the abandonment of all wilful- 
 ness, all foolish imperiousness ; it lies in 
 perfect submission of will to the divine 
 order ; and this perfect submission, so far 
 from leading to quietism or apathy, is to 
 stimulate to vigorous correspondence the 
 man who now knows himself to be a 
 fellow worker with God. 
 
 How many men during this war, who 
 had long given up praying, have flung 
 themselves on their knees and prayed, 
 " O merciful God, I pray Thee to keep 
 my Tom safe !" Truly it is a most welcome 
 return to prayer : and certainly we should 
 never cease to pray thus fervently and 
 thus particularly for the things that we 
 particularly need. Still, this is the prayer 
 of nature, and a great interval separates 
 it from the prayer of enlightened sonship, 
 the prayer in which our personal wants
 
 What may we Pray for? 135 
 
 are deliberately taken up into the large 
 scope of the Lord's Prayer. 
 
 People often ask May we pray for 
 rain? May we pray for this and that? 
 I fancy the answer is fairly simple. There 
 is one prayer which is one day going to 
 receive its perfect answer. That is the 
 prayer of Christ. In that we are called 
 to share. We may pray with perfect con- 
 fidence for what we know to be included 
 in that prayer. We cannot pray at all for 
 what we know not to be God's will, as 
 that we should sin and not be punished, 
 or that those we love should be blessed 
 without being converted. But there is 
 a vast middle region of uncertainty, a 
 region in which we do not really know 
 what God's will is : and in all this vast 
 region we should let God know our 
 desires and wishes, confessing our blind- 
 ness, and imitating the wonderful humility 
 of our Lord Himself. For He prayed 
 "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass 
 from me ; nevertheless, not my will but 
 thine be done " ; and was after all truly 
 content not to be spared, not to have His 
 natural human desire granted. 
 
 On the basis of this great principle of 
 prayer, it is worth while to say something 
 about (1) the different kinds of prayer, 
 and (2) the chief aids to prayer,
 
 136 The religion of the church 
 
 1. We accept it as a natural principle 
 that we should begin the day with prayer. 
 "O Lord, in the morning shall Thou 
 hear my voice : in the morning will I 
 order my prayer unto Thee " x that is, 
 I will set out in order before the face of 
 God the day that is coming, and "will look 
 out" for an answer. It is natural also to 
 end the day with prayer thanksgiving, 
 and self-examination, and confession, and 
 self-commendation to God. Such prayer, 
 the first and last thing each day, is the 
 most elementary provision for keeping 
 our life in the way of God. As the 
 man grows in the practice of prayer, he 
 will come nearer to the "seven times 
 a day will I praise Thee." But from the 
 beginning our prayer must not be selfish. 
 There must be intercession, at whatever 
 hour is most convenient. And because 
 a reasonably open-minded Christian has 
 many objects to pray for outside his own 
 family as the whole of Christendom, the 
 evangelization of the world, the Church 
 in England, the clergy, his own parish, his 
 own profession, school, and college, the 
 various classes in society, the tempted and 
 suffering and sick so he will have some 
 method of praying by which he will on 
 each day in the week make his interces- 
 ' Ps. T. 3.
 
 Kinds of prayer 137 
 
 sion for some one or more of these mani- 
 fold districts in the kingdom of God. 
 Also he will constantly remember that, 
 besides asking, his devotion to God should 
 take the form of adoration and quiet 
 repose upon God, and the deliberate ex- 
 pression of thankfulness and praise. 
 
 At the altar the Christian should find 
 the centre of his life of devotion. There 
 in the service of Holy Communion are all 
 kinds of prayer penitence, and devout 
 reception of the word of God, and profes- 
 sion of faith, and intercession, and adora- 
 tion of God in heaven, and thanksgiving or 
 eucharist, and the welcome of God incar- 
 nate brought down to earth, amongst His 
 worshipping people, that they may adore 
 "the Lamb of God which taketh away 
 the sins of the world," and bring all their 
 prayers under the shelter of His sacrifice. 
 There, as the climax of all, they receive 
 Him into themselves, and make to God 
 the glad return of their own lives and wills, 
 being joined in one with the sacrifice of 
 their Lord. And all the moods of this 
 divine worship are meant to spread from 
 the centre of this great common action 
 over all the parts of human life. Thus no 
 household, which aspires to become Chris- 
 tian, should be without some sort of family 
 prayers to consecrate the home. But also
 
 138 The religion of the church 
 
 praying should become the familiar ex- 
 pression of the soul to God, which needs 
 no special solitude or fixed occasion or 
 attitude of body, but can speak to God 
 anywhere in the vacant spaces of a busy 
 life. 
 
 2. We all find prayer very difficult. It 
 is difficult because it is the highest occu- 
 pation of man, and not therefore to be 
 easily learned. " No man can hope to 
 make progress in prayer who does not 
 set about it as a great work." Thus we 
 all suffer from wandering thoughts. But 
 I think the following hints may be useful 
 for the beginner. (1) Concentration in 
 prayer is greatly helped if we study con- 
 centration in all kinds of work. One who 
 will learn forcibly to concentrate himself 
 on an unwelcome piece of work will 
 much more easily learn to concentrate on 
 prayer. (2) The beginning of our prayer 
 is specially important, whether public or 
 private. We should begin by putting our- 
 selves with all possible solemnity and 
 recollection into the presence of God, in 
 the name of Christ and in the power of 
 the Spirit. (3) We should intermingle in 
 prayer the " practice of quiet." We should 
 learn to abide silent and adoring in God's 
 presence. (4) We should vary our attitude. 
 Standing is quite as recognized an attitude
 
 Difficulties in Prayer 139 
 
 for prayer as kneeling. (5) We should 
 never pray as if we were alone, or as if 
 we were initiating a new action. There 
 is one prayer which is always going on 
 it is the prayer of Christ our high priest 
 and the intercession of the Holy Spirit, 
 who dwells in the church, which is Christ's 
 body, and joins in one and interprets all 
 the prayers of all His members. 
 
 Thus whenever we begin to pray we 
 should remember this. There is one 
 prayer which is always being prayed 
 the prayer of the great High Priest and 
 of all His people, joined together in His 
 Spirit. Mary is praying, and Peter and 
 Paul and John, and all the blessed dead, 
 and all the living all the world over. 
 Above me and around me is this mighty 
 prayer, which is one day going to be fully 
 answered. That will be the day of God. 
 Meanwhile it never ceases ; and every 
 feeble prayer of mine is joined to that great 
 stream, which fills up all my silences, and 
 supplies all the gaps of my wandering 
 thoughts, and interprets and perfects all 
 my ignorant and imperfect supplications. 
 
 May God, who has given us "a hearty 
 desire to pray," and who is "able to do 
 more than either we desire or deserve," 
 who also knows our weakness and ignor- 
 ance and wilfulness, so discipline and guide
 
 140 The religion of the church 
 
 and encourage us as that we may persevere 
 and make good progress along the road of 
 prayer: and may He at last crown our 
 experience with this assurance "Praised 
 be the Lord who hath not cast out my 
 prayer, nor turned His mercy from me."
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 The Bible its truth, its inspira- 
 tion, and its use 
 
 THERE is no doubt that the aim of the 
 reformers of the sixteenth century, 
 including such moderate men as Colet and 
 Erasmus, was to make the Christian re- 
 ligion scriptural again to bring back its 
 theology to the standard of Holy Scrip- 
 ture, and to familiarize with Scripture the 
 minds of all its members. This would 
 have been a return to the earliest tradition 
 and practice ; for the Church literature 
 of the first four or five centuries is 
 saturated in Scripture. There was the 
 court of constant reference alike for its 
 theology and its practical life. Thence 
 was the staple of its preaching. Though 
 there were, of course, no printed books, 
 manuscript books were very cheap ; and 
 Christians were exhorted and expected to 
 buy and read the Scriptures for them- 
 selves. They are as necessary to the 
 Christian artisan, says Chrysostom, as the 
 tools of his trade. 
 
 141
 
 142 The religion of the church 
 
 It was to this tradition, then, that the 
 reformers sought to recall us ; and with 
 a large measure of success. The Bible 
 has been the strength of English religion, 
 both of our learned divinity and of our 
 popular devotion, and has largely moulded 
 our national character. But our faith in 
 the Bible had taken the form of a belief 
 in the infallibility of all its statements ; 
 and of late years this has received a rude 
 shock. It is not only that science seems to 
 make it impossible to believe that the 
 Bible gives us an accurate account of 
 the origin of the world and of our race ; 
 it is not only that anthropology seems 
 to assimilate the traditions and reli- 
 gious rites of Israel to those of other 
 nations ; it is not only that much which 
 had been believed to be historical in the 
 Old Testament now seems to be legen- 
 dary; but criticism has also assailed and 
 attempts to dissolve the New Testament 
 and the figure of the Redeemer Himself. 
 This destructive criticism has had its chief 
 origin and home in Germany, but it has 
 its distinguished exponents in France and 
 in England also. And many of our learned 
 men, even clergymen and professors of 
 theology, have published conclusions about 
 the New Testament which seem to simple 
 people to destroy the foundation of our
 
 The Bible 143 
 
 religion, and to plunge their minds into 
 uncertainty and confusion. Thus it is that 
 English popular religion, largely identified 
 with belief in the infallibility of the Bible, 
 has received a great shock. It is commonly 
 supposed that "the Bible has been proved 
 not to be true." 
 
 No doubt the faith of Roman Catholics 
 has been less affected than that of our- 
 selves or of the Protestant world gener- 
 ally ; because they had practically been 
 much less interested in the Bible and 
 much less acquainted with it, and their 
 faith had rested almost solely on the in- 
 fallibility of the church. Now all intelli- 
 gent Christian faith should rest upon the 
 church, and not merely upon the books 
 of the Bible ; and, indeed, it should put the 
 church before the books ; because, as a 
 matter of fact, the church existed and 
 bore witness to the faith before the books 
 were written. The earliest Christian 
 books S. Paul's Epistles are themselves 
 the best proof that the church was there 
 before them, and was witnessing to the 
 faith. Any one who reads the Epistles 
 can see that what is substantially the 
 faith of the Apostles' Creed was already 
 taken for granted as the teaching of 
 the apostles and the faith "once for all 
 delivered to the saints," before any of
 
 144 The religion of the church 
 
 the books of the New Testament were 
 written. 
 
 Nevertheless, we will not desert the 
 way of the ancient catholic church and the 
 way of our own tradition. We will not 
 allow the Bible to be dethroned or ignored 
 or neglected. The church has given us 
 the books of the New Testament as con- 
 taining in its most authentic and inspired 
 form the teaching of its great apostles, and 
 has exhorted us to enlighten our minds 
 and to preserve the purity of our religion 
 by constant reference to the authority of 
 these scriptures, and constant familiarity 
 with their pages. Any ignoring or neglect- 
 ing of the Bible leads assuredly to the 
 deterioration of our religious tradition 
 and religious life. 
 
 THE BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 Let us, then, consider without any 
 shrinking from the light of modern know- 
 ledge, how things stand to-day with these 
 Holy Scriptures ; and let us begin with 
 the epistles of the New Testament, be- 
 cause amongst them are the earliest 
 written documents of our religion. 
 
 Well then, after all the immense and 
 minute attention, much of it markedly 
 hostile attention, given to the Epistles,
 
 The books of the New Testament 145 
 
 we can still read them as the church has 
 given them to us, as the authentic writ- 
 ings of those by whom they profess to 
 be written, with the single, not very 
 material, exception of the Second Epistle 
 of S. Peter. 1 That epistle is edifying 
 indeed. But there certainly are strong 
 reasons for doubting whether it was 
 written by Simon Peter the apostle. As 
 for the rest, the authenticity of no one 
 of them has been disproved or seriously 
 shaken : and the tendency of critical 
 inquiry has been markedly in the con- 
 servative direction. 
 
 Side by side with these epistles you 
 will read the history of the church in the 
 Acts of the Apostles. No triumph of an 
 old tradition in the world of free criticism 
 is so marked as the triumph of the church 
 tradition about the third Gospel and the 
 Acts of the Apostles. After the most 
 prolonged assaults, and the despair of many 
 of their faint-hearted friends, these two 
 
 1 I do not think that the ordinary man need be 
 troubled about the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles. 
 The doubts seem to me to concern their style rather 
 than their matter. It is very likely that S. Paul was 
 more helped by some one else in writing them than in 
 the case of his other epistles. 
 
 The Epistle to the Hebrews is anonymous. But 
 it was written by some one of high standing in 
 the church before the destruction of the temple at 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 U
 
 146 The religion of the church 
 
 volumes have been, by linguistic and 
 historical argument, triumphantly vindi- 
 cated as the trustworthy work of Luke, 
 the beloved physician, the companion of 
 S. Paul. The Church could not have 
 had a better recorder of the acts of the 
 apostles. He had been the personal com- 
 panion of the leading apostle ; and for 
 the earlier period, before he personally 
 came upon the scene, he had unrivalled 
 opportunities for gathering information 
 from those who were intimately concerned 
 in the earlier scenes, such as Philip the 
 Evangelist, one of the seven, with whom 
 in S. Paul's company he stayed at Caes- 
 area, 1 and doubtless many others. So you 
 will read the Acts surely a fascinating 
 book and it will reinforce the impres- 
 sions of the apostolic epistles. 
 
 We are often told that the faith of the 
 church, as it is represented in the Epistles, 
 is no doubt in substance the faith of the 
 later catholic church ; but that it is an 
 accretion upon the earlier faith, and the 
 faith of the earliest disciples is better 
 represented in the first three (called the 
 Synoptic) Gospels. But in truth the 
 Synoptic Gospels only represent a faith in 
 process of being formed. They are not 
 really intelligible apart from what they 
 
 1 Acts xxi. 8.
 
 The Gospels 147 
 
 led up to. They only give the account of 
 how the faith which is represented in the 
 Epistles really grew. 
 
 This makes it of the greatest import- 
 ance for any intelligent study of the New 
 Testament that we should realize that the 
 Gospels were not the first of the books. 
 The church, after Pentecost, was wor- 
 shipping the living and glorified Christ, 
 was living with thankfulness and courage 
 in the fellowship of His Spirit, was cele- 
 brating His atoning death and glorious 
 resurrection, and was confessing the 
 threefold name of the Father, the Son, and 
 the Holy Spirit, as is represented in the 
 Epistles. And in this atmosphere ques- 
 tions and anxieties and conflicts arose, and 
 the apostles sought to deal with the 
 difficulties, as appears in the Epistles, 
 before ever the church possessed written 
 Gospels. But the Twelve can never 
 have ceased to brood on their earlier 
 experiences ; and, from the beginning, 
 they must have imparted their memories 
 to others, and the disciples must have 
 learned about the earthly life of Him 
 whom they now worshipped as their 
 Saviour and Lord. Then there would 
 have been, doubtless, as S. Luke says 
 there were, many early attempts to set 
 down in writing those reminiscences of
 
 148 The religion of the church 
 
 the apostolic witnesses. For witness was 
 their business. When it became necessary 
 to choose a successor to Judas the traitor, 
 S. Peter, in the days before Pentecost, 
 emphasizes their position as witnesses : 
 "Of the men therefore which have com- 
 panied with us all the time that the Lord 
 Jesus went in and went out among us, 
 beginning from the baptism of John, unto 
 the day that He was received up from us, 
 of these must one become a witness with us 
 of His resurrection " ' that is to say, the 
 official witness to the resurrection was to 
 be one also qualified by intimate association 
 with the previous life of our Lord. 
 
 Of this apostolic witness we have the 
 record in the Gospels. The second of 
 these is the earliest ; and there is every 
 reason for accepting the attribution of it 
 to S. Mark that is to John Mark, the 
 companion of Paul and Barnabas, then 
 of Barnabas by himself, then of S. Paul 
 in his captivity, and later of S. Peter at 
 Rome, who calls him " my son." * He had 
 himself been brought up at Jerusalem, 
 where his mother's house had been the 
 haunt of the apostles ; and he probably 
 refers to himself in his narrative of the 
 passion as the young man with a linen 
 garment. A sub-apostolic writer about 
 
 Acts i. 22, 23. * 1 S. Pet. v. 13.
 
 S. Mark's Gospel and miracles 149 
 
 the gospels describes S. Mark as S. Peter's 
 interpreter, who, having constantly heard 
 him, wrote down as accurately as possible 
 what S. Peter used to teach. Is not such 
 a man a good witness ? And when we 
 read the Gospel does it not force upon us 
 the sense of reality? Is not this narra- 
 tive altogether beyond human invention ? 
 Is not this the very Christ? Of course 
 I know that a multitude of critics have 
 in various ways sought to impugn the 
 historical character of its various incidents. 
 But then these critics approach their task 
 with a strong bias, having determined 
 that there can occur no real miracles, so 
 that they are bound to reject any strictly 
 miraculous incidents. This, no doubt, 
 plays havoc with the narrative. For it 
 is miraculous through and through. A 
 critic of the Gospels who refuses miracles 
 is bound to be revolutionary. 
 
 But why should we entertain such 
 a negative dogma ? If we really believe 
 that God, the creator and sustainer of 
 the world, has, for love of man, entered 
 into human life in the person of Jesus 
 Christ to redeem us, is not such a strictly 
 re-creative act of God in itself miraculous 
 that is to say, is it not a fresh act of God, 
 which the ordinary order of the world 
 cannot account for? Is it not credible
 
 150 The religion of the church 
 
 indeed that this divine-human person 
 should have miraculous powers? And, 
 in the Gospel narrative, are not the 
 miracles enwrought with the teaching so 
 as to be of one indissoluble piece? And 
 does not the person Himself carry with 
 Him the stamp of divine authority ? ' This 
 is not really a matter for historical criti- 
 cism. Such criticism can confirm the 
 tradition that the second Gospel was 
 really written by John Mark, who had 
 the best opportunities of the best infor- 
 mation. It can assure us further that 
 the narrative has all the appearance of 
 na'ive truthfulness. All this it does, and 
 beyond this it cannot go. It is for every 
 man to decide for himself whether he 
 will accept the witness. But when we are 
 considering the qualifications for forming 
 a judgement, we cannot help recalling the 
 words of our Lord, " I thank thee, Father, 
 Lord of heaven and earth, because thou 
 hast hid these things from the wise and 
 prudent, and hast revealed them unto 
 babes." The pre-occupation of the mind 
 with an intellectual idea, the prejudice 
 of the learned, may be as great an obstacle 
 
 1 For recent discussions of miracles see Headlam's 
 Miracles of the New Testament (Murray) ; Illingworth's 
 Gospel Miracles (Macmillan) ; and Box's The Virgin 
 Birth of Jesus (Pitman).
 
 S. Luke's Gospel 151 
 
 as pride or worldliness to the obedience 
 of Christ and the admission of the gift of 
 faith into the soul. 
 
 Next to S. Mark's Gospel comes 
 S. Luke's. As I have said, the vindica- 
 tion of S. Luke, in the face of destructive 
 criticism, has been one of the most notable 
 features of modern historical research. 
 The most learned critic in Europe, Adolph 
 Harnack, has abandoned his older opinions 
 and come round to be a strenuous advo- 
 cate of S. Luke's authorship both of the 
 Gospel and of the Acts. In particular the 
 historical background of S. Luke's writ- 
 ings has been wonderfully vindicated by 
 actual discoveries of inscriptions and of 
 a papyrus-leaf containing a census-paper 
 exactly corresponding with S. Luke's 
 description of the method of the census. 
 His statement, "This was the first enrol- 
 ment (or census) made when Quirinius 
 was governor of Syria. And all went to 
 enrol themselves, every one to his own 
 city," 1 used, when I was young, to be 
 the common object of mockery by the 
 critics. But you have only to read Sir 
 William Ramsay 2 to-day to see how 
 historical research has justified S. Luke. 
 
 1 S. Luke ii. 2-3. 
 
 * The Bearings of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness 
 of the New Testament (Hodder & Stoughton), capp. 18 ff.
 
 152 The religion of the church 
 
 Now let us read S. Luke's preface 
 to his Gospel: "Forasmuch as many 
 have taken in hand to draw up a narrative 
 concerning those matters which have 
 been fulfilled among us, even as they 
 delivered them unto us, which from 
 the beginning were eye-witnesses and 
 ministers of the word, it seemed good to 
 me also, having traced the course of all 
 things accurately from the first, to write 
 unto thee in order, most excellent 
 Theophilus, that thou mightest know 
 the certainty concerning the things where- 
 in thou wast instructed." 
 
 This is a simple and honest enough 
 account of his motives and his methods. 
 You may take it at its face-value ; and 
 among the previous writings which he 
 used we must reckon S. Mark's Gospel, 
 and probably a document which in its 
 original form has vanished, but which 
 was the work of S. Matthew, and con- 
 sisted in the main of our Lord's discourses, 
 as they appear both in S. Luke and in the 
 first Gospel. Besides this, S. Luke had 
 other sources of information. Names 
 mentioned incidentally in his narrative, 
 such as "Joanna, the wife of Chuza, 
 Herod's steward," sometimes indicate 
 such sources. And the narrative of our 
 Lord's birth and infancy can have come
 
 S. Matthew's Gospel 153 
 
 from no other source than the circle of 
 Mary, His mother. 
 
 What I have attempted to do so far is 
 simply to indicate up to a certain point 
 what sort of material historical criticism, 
 properly so called, puts into our hands. 
 It is quite true that a great many historical 
 critics are rationalistic in belief, and are 
 therefore bound to explain away all that 
 contradicts their rationalism. But they 
 have not all been rationalists ; and some 
 of those who have been most rationalistic 
 have also been honest and thorough 
 students ; thus I have tried to show that 
 we need not be afraid of their properly 
 historical research. By far the greater 
 part of the New Testament is given back 
 to us with the church tradition simply 
 verified. 
 
 As to the Gospel which bears the name 
 of S. Matthew, I could not say the same. 
 The bulk of it consists of the material of 
 S. Mark's Gospel and of the collection, 
 mainly of our Lord's discourses, made 
 by S. Matthew. And the book as a whole 
 plainly comes from the period before the 
 destruction of Jerusalem, A.D. 70. But 
 there are reasons against our ascribing 
 it as it stands to S. Matthew's hand, 
 and who compiled it we cannot tell. It 
 may rightly be described as "the Gospel
 
 154 S. John's Gospel 
 
 according to S. Matthew "as his collection 
 is what specially distinguishes it ; and the 
 instinct of the church has made this the 
 premier Gospel, regarding it as giving us 
 the fullest narrative of our Lord's words 
 and acts. 
 
 As to S. John's Gospel, there has been 
 and is much controversy. I can only state 
 my conviction that those great scholars 
 are right who point out to us that the 
 evidence concerning this Gospel, internal 
 and external, is quite incompatible with 
 any other authorship except that of S. John 
 the apostle, "the disciple whom Jesus 
 loved." And this has been the assured 
 church tradition from the first. 
 
 In order that no one of the books may 
 be passed over, I must add a word about 
 the Revelation or Apocalypse of S. John, 
 that mystical book of the spiritual conflict, 
 so full of encouragement in the present 
 dark hour. Biblical criticism of recent 
 years has been deeply occupied in apoca- 
 lyptic literature, and has shed no little 
 light on this, the greatest of the apocalypses. 
 But it has not required us in any way to 
 lower the traditional estimate of the book, 
 which claims more than any other book 
 of the New Testament personal inspira- 
 tion for its author. 
 
 Thus, with exceptions that are really
 
 Trustworthiness of the New Testament 155 
 
 unimportant, we may take the books of 
 the New Testament as they are given 
 us in the tradition of the church, with 
 the assurance that it is those who contra- 
 dict rather than those who affirm who do 
 violence to the evidence. The church 
 puts them into our hands as representing 
 the witness and mind of the first repre- 
 sentatives of Christ, and the freshest and 
 highest inspiration of His Spirit. We 
 shall not indeed find in the records minute 
 accuracy as to either our Lord's words 
 and works or the actions or words of 
 the apostles. The difference between the 
 forms in which the different narratives 
 reproduce the same incident makes this 
 quite evident. There are, no doubt, dis- 
 crepancies. S. Chrysostom, one of the 
 greatest of the Fathers, was content to 
 recognize that the discrepancies do not 
 touch the main features of the portrait, and 
 that they guarantee to us the independence 
 of the witnesses. Certainly the compilers 
 of *' memoirs of our Lord " and acts of 
 His apostles show no desire for minute 
 accuracy. But we can rely upon them 
 as truthful narrators and compilers who 
 had thoroughly trustworthy sources of 
 information. 
 
 But I have said all this for a strictly 
 practical purpose. I have sought to re-
 
 156 Meditation 
 
 move a preliminary obstacle to the practical 
 and spiritual use of the New Testament. 
 I have sought to give "the ordinary 
 person " reassurance as to the effect of 
 learned research. But it is the practical 
 use of the New Testament that I want 
 him to recover. What I would advise 
 him to do is to get a Revised Version of 
 the Bible, which, if it often fails in the 
 New Testament to retain the music of 
 the old version, is undoubtedly more 
 accurate ; and I would have him put 
 himself to school with each book in turn, 
 praying first for the help of the Holy Spirit 
 that is, seeking to "read the books in 
 the same spirit in which they were 
 written." I would have him read each 
 book through once or twice so as to 
 grasp its general drift, and then in due 
 course ponder over each passage or sec- 
 tion, leaving out what he cannot under- 
 stand, at least at first, and dwelling most 
 on what strikes his own conscience and 
 heart; and thus to "read, mark, learn, and 
 inwardly digest " the word of God. 
 
 I believe that there is literally nothing 
 in the world which is more effective for 
 keeping our own life in the light of God, 
 and for maintaining the level of the whole 
 church's life, than the enlightenment 
 which results from this sort of familiarity
 
 The Old Testament 157 
 
 on the part of all, clergy and laity alike, 
 with "the message of the books." And, if 
 I may judge by my own experience, the 
 longer one pursues this sort of devout 
 study the more convinced he will become 
 both that the writers of the books were 
 men inspired by the Spirit of Christ, and 
 that in the records of Christ we have the 
 fulfilment of His promise: "The Holy 
 Spirit, whom the Father will send in my 
 name, He shall teach you all things, and 
 bring to your remembrance all that I said 
 unto you." 1 
 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 No doubt the progress of science and 
 of historical inquiry do require of us a 
 somewhat revolutionary change from that 
 estimate of the Old Testament in which 
 our parents were brought up the estimate 
 which was derived both from the me- 
 diaeval and from the Puritan tradition. 
 It was claimed that the inspiration of the 
 Bible made all its statements infallibly 
 true, and that what is there recorded 
 certainly happened as it is set down. 
 This is, I think, unbelievable by any one 
 who is at all familiar either with science 
 or primitive history. But if this particular 
 
 1 S. John xiv. 26.
 
 158 The Old Testament 
 
 claim made for the books of the Old 
 Testament is a mistaken claim, it does 
 not the least follow that we have not in 
 those books both something of the deepest 
 religious value and something which is 
 most certainly the product of divine in- 
 spiration. I believe that if we are faithful 
 both to reason and to religion, the use and 
 estimate of the Old Testament to which 
 we shall be led is not something quite 
 novel, but is closely akin to a use and 
 estimate of it which was widely familiar 
 in the early church. 
 
 The early church knew the value of 
 fact, and treasured the certainty of the 
 Gospel of fact. But it knew also, through 
 the Greeks, that a part of human educa- 
 tion is due to stories which are not 
 true in fact, but which contain a true 
 moral. And it was prepared to apply this 
 principle of " allegory" to the Old Testa- 
 ment. Thus of one of the oldest of the 
 church Fathers, S. Irenaeus, it is recorded 
 that he argued for the "spiritual" (or 
 allegorical), as against the " historical" or 
 " literal " interpretation of the story of 
 the temptation in Genesis iii ; and a later 
 father, S. Gregory of Nyssa, speaks of the 
 same narrative as containing "doctrines 
 in the form of a story." It is something 
 like this way of regarding the opening
 
 Allegorical interpretations 159 
 
 stories of the Bible that we want to 
 popularize again. 
 
 Let us be quite frank. It is a mistake 
 to look for accurate scientific informa- 
 tion in the story of the creation or of 
 Paradise or of the fall or of the flood. 
 These are stories such as all primitive 
 peoples form to embody their childlike 
 speculations about the origin of the world. 
 Doubtless the people of Israel shared 
 such stories with their neighbours ; but 
 the point is that, whereas among their 
 neighbours these stories were full of poly- 
 theism and falsehood, in Israel the Holy 
 Spirit of God inspired the minds of the 
 prophets through which they passed, 
 purged them of evil, and made them 
 vehicles of the loftiest teaching about 
 God, about man's nature and destiny, about 
 the nature of sin, about divine judge- 
 ment, and about God's purpose of re- 
 demption, all conveyed in the childish 
 stories with a most impressive majesty. 
 Really there ought to be no great dif- 
 ficulty in realizing that the change of 
 view asked of us is no spiritual loss at 
 all, and that it is not the purpose of 
 inspiration to teach us science. 
 
 Again, our fathers were brought up to 
 believe that (if I may so speak) Almighty 
 God constructed in His own mind the
 
 160 The Old Testament 
 
 elaborate law of worship which is con- 
 tained in Exodus and Leviticus, and gave 
 it in so many words to Moses, who 
 instituted it. This is the form which 
 Jewish reverence for the Law as divine 
 had given to the narrative. But the early 
 Christian church knew that all these 
 elements of ritual were shared by the 
 Jews with their heathen neighbours : 
 that they all " had their origin," as 
 Chrysostom expresses it, "from Gentile 
 grossness." They would not have been 
 in the least shocked by anything which 
 the comparative study of primitive reli- 
 gions has taught us about the Jewish 
 ceremonial. They were as eager as 
 possible to see in the Jewish law an 
 instance of God's gradual method of 
 education, by which He takes men as He 
 finds them, with all manner of savage 
 customs and rites, and gradually brings 
 them under a discipline which at last 
 shall enable them to dispense with their 
 barbarous rudiments and be ready for a 
 spiritual religion. It would be very easy 
 to quote the Christian Fathers to this effect 
 one after another. 
 
 Again, many of the Fathers had not the 
 least difficulty in recognizing in the moral 
 discipline of the Israelites an instance of 
 the same gradual method. "God," they
 
 A gradual education 161 
 
 said, "condescended to allow and even to 
 command what He is far from finally 
 approving, in order to avoid worse things 
 and to lead men on to better." 
 
 In fact, the minds of many of the Fathers 
 were full of this principle of a gradual 
 discipline for men a gradual leading from 
 barbarism up to a spiritual level and they 
 applied this principle freely to the Old 
 Testament. The chief instrument of this 
 divine leading was prophecy. In the 
 teaching of the Hebrew prophets they 
 discerned " the sacred school of the know- 
 ledge of God and of the spiritual life for 
 all mankind." I believe that this great 
 saying of S. Athanasius contains the most 
 profound insight into the Old Testament. 
 Every divine vocation or special election 
 of any man or body of men is for the sake 
 of all mankind. As the Greeks for art 
 and intellect, as the Romans for order 
 and empire, so the Hebrews had a divine 
 vocation for religion, and that for the 
 sake of all mankind. The Jewish prophets 
 were men specially susceptible of religion, 
 who were chosen as the special vehicles 
 and instruments of the divine Spirit. They 
 were allowed to feel and know the will of 
 God. They truly spoke the word of the 
 Lord His message to the people of Israel, 
 and so indirectly to mankind at large.
 
 162 The Old Testament 
 
 I believe that nothing is more morally 
 certain than that those prophets, from 
 Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha down to the 
 second Isaiah and Malachi, were really 
 inspired, really enabled to receive and 
 to utter the message of God, through a 
 number of centuries and under great 
 variation of circumstance and tempera- 
 ment, but with marvellous consistency, 
 till the great spiritual doctrine about 
 God and man, which we owe to the 
 Jews, and which is the basis of the 
 catholic religion, was formed and ac- 
 cepted as divine in the heart of the whole 
 people. And this spiritual doctrine which 
 was uttered by the prophets gradually 
 reformed the thoughts of Israel, inspiring 
 their stories of the beginning of the world, 
 inspiring their national legends, inspiring 
 their history, moulding their traditional 
 ritual to express a spiritual purpose, con- 
 trolling their speculation, as in Job and 
 Ecclesiastes, giving tone to their practical 
 wisdom, as in Proverbs and the like 
 books, expressing itself in the profound 
 religious feeling of the psalms of the sanc- 
 tuary, inspiring also later "stories with a 
 moral," like Esther, Jonah, and the stories 
 of the Book of Daniel all no doubt based 
 on a historical tradition above all ex- 
 pressing itself in the certain anticipation
 
 The spirit of the prophets 163 
 
 of the Day of the Lord and the appear- 
 ance of the divine Christ. Can we not 
 learn to take this view of the Old 
 Testament? It is in most thorough har- 
 mony with the great words in which 
 the New Testament writers expound to 
 us the purpose of the Old Testament. 
 
 "God having of old times spoken unto 
 the fathers in the prophets by divers 
 portions and in divers manners, hath at 
 the end of these days spoken unto us 
 in his Son." 1 "Whatsoever things were 
 written aforetime were written for our 
 learning, that through patience and en- 
 couragement of the scriptures we might 
 have hope." 2 "Every scripture inspired 
 of God is also profitable for teaching, for 
 reproof, for correction, for instruction in 
 righteousness, that the man of God may be 
 complete, furnished completely unto every 
 good work." 3 In fact, if a man will take 
 such a modern and scientific interpreter 
 of the Old Testament as Dr. Driver or 
 Dr. George Adam Smith, or Dr. Robert- 
 son Smith, and really enter into his spirit, 
 I think he will be brought to believe in 
 the inspiration of the writers of the 
 Old Testament as he never believed in 
 it before, and will experience a con- 
 stantly deepened conviction that " salva- 
 
 1 Heb. i. 1. - Rom. xv. 4. 3 2 Tim. iii. 16-17.
 
 164 The Holy Scriptures 
 
 tion was of the Jews "that they were 
 the divinely chosen nursery of the catholic 
 religion, and that the divine Spirit really 
 did inspire their prophets and mould their 
 institutions to prepare the way for the 
 Christ. 1 
 
 And must it not be said at this moment 
 of the war that our interest in the Old 
 Testament has been marvellously deepened 
 and intensified by our experiences ? Have 
 we ever felt the Psalms or the Prophets as 
 we have felt them the last two years ? Do 
 we not know, as we never knew it before, 
 that they are the faithful interpreters of 
 the judgements and purposes of God? 
 
 The Bible in all its parts is the record of 
 God's revelation of Himself. It embodies 
 and conveys to us His word. May He, 
 who by the entrance of His word gives 
 light to the soul, help us with the Spirit of 
 understanding, that being taught of Him 
 in His Holy Scriptures we may understand 
 the words of eternal life and be made 
 wise unto salvation ! 
 
 ' The most useful commentary of a comprehensive 
 kind for the beginner to have at hand is, I think, 
 Dummelow's One Volume Bible Commentary (Macmilhn).
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 The Church of England in the 
 Larger World 
 
 1. THE OTHER PARTS OF CHRISTENDOM 
 
 I HAVE tried to expound the religion of 
 the church and of the Bible saying 
 nothing, I trust, that our special Anglican 
 formulas do not admit of, but endeavour- 
 ing to speak as one who remembers that 
 our Church of England and the whole 
 Anglican communion is only a portion of 
 a larger whole which embraces and 
 controls it. What I believe in is not the 
 Church of England but the one holy 
 catholic church. But unfortunately this 
 one holy catholic church has, as far as 
 this world is concerned, fallen into divi- 
 sions ; and I must say something about 
 the relation of the Church of England to 
 other parts of a divided Christendom. 
 
 Thus, first we find ourselves confronted 
 
 with the great church of the Roman 
 
 communion which, since we repudiated 
 
 the authority of the Roman pontiff in the 
 
 165
 
 166 The church of England 
 
 sixteenth century, superciliously repudi- 
 ates our claim to be part of the catholic 
 church at all, and claims to be by itself 
 alone the one holy catholic church. 
 Superciliousness, however, and contemp- 
 tuous ignoring of others are not always 
 marks of a true claim. ' 
 
 So far as concerns the claim of the 
 Church of Rome to be the whole church, 
 we had better leave it to be dealt with 
 by the Eastern and Russian churches, 
 which are likely to bulk bigger on the 
 horizon of the West in the future. There 
 is not in truth any sound reason at all 
 in the Roman attempt to ignore the great 
 Eastern communion. That has simply and 
 persistently maintained its ancient position. 
 The church of the great Greek fathers has 
 all along steadily repudiated the claim 
 of the Bishop of Rome to be by divine 
 appointment the necessary head of the 
 catholic church, and all the accompany- 
 ing dogmatic and disciplinary claims. 
 It has steadily refused to alter its position. 
 And, as I said, this Russian and Eastern 
 Christendom is too great to be ignored. 
 It is like a vast breakwater, meeting and 
 throwing back the Roman claim long 
 before it reaches us. It simply disposes 
 of the demand of the Roman communion 
 
 1 Ezek. xvi. 44-63 is very instructive.
 
 and the church of Rome 167 
 
 to be regarded as the whole church. But 
 more than that, it represents a type of 
 Catholicism strangely and deeply different 
 from the Roman type. 1 It establishes the 
 invaluable principle that Catholicism is a 
 comprehensive thing, admitting of different 
 national and racial types, all of which 
 are necessary for the full development 
 of the religion of Christ. And if it be 
 once granted that the Eastern and Russian 
 church is as legitimate and regular a part 
 of the church (to say the least) as the 
 Church of Rome, I do not think that we 
 in our turn shall find it difficult to maintain 
 our position. If there is a providence 
 to be seen in history anywhere, its action 
 is surely apparent in the circumstances 
 which have given to our Anglican com- 
 munion its special character and vocation 
 in Christendom. The ancient catholic 
 church had four outward and visible 
 bonds of unity universally accepted : there 
 was the tradition of the faith to be main- 
 tained, which was embodied in the catholic 
 creeds and dogmatic definitions of the un- 
 divided church ; there was the system 
 of the sacraments ; there was the due 
 succession of the bishops ; and there were 
 the Scriptures, the inspired books of the 
 
 1 See Lectures on the Russian Church (S.P.G.K., 1915). 
 " Its dectrine." By W. J. Birkbeck.
 
 168 The church of England 
 
 church, the constant ground of appeal in 
 matters of doctrine and the perpetual 
 standard of spiritual life. 
 
 All these elements of catholic commu- 
 nion we, in the providence of God, have 
 retained through all periods of peril and 
 weakness ; the last we have restored to 
 its true position. The appeal to Scripture 
 and antiquity ' as limiting and restraining 
 the dogmatic power of the church is un- 
 mistakably the principle of the ancient 
 church ; and, if it be accepted, it prevents 
 the accumulation of dogma beyond the 
 limits of the original doctrine. The 
 church has no other dogmatic function 
 but to protect, interpret, and hand on 
 the " faith once for all delivered to the 
 saints." This is the safeguard of liberty 
 and comprehensiveness. Thus we stand, 
 over against Rome, a part of the catholic 
 church which has repudiated nothing that is 
 properly authoritative, seeking to embody 
 a Catholicism true to history and Scrip- 
 ture and to the ancient liberties of Christ- 
 endom ; treating Roman Christianity with 
 
 1 The Holy Scriptures stand as a court of appeal 
 distinct from antiquity, in virtueof the special inspiration 
 and authority of the writers. This is unmistakably 
 the case in the mind of the great Christian fathers. 
 But in fact there is not, as far as I know, any doctrine 
 which can fairly claim the support of antiquity as being 
 part of the faith, which is not also plainly in the New 
 Testament.
 
 and the "Free churches" 169 
 
 the respect and reverence which it de- 
 serves, but as a one-sided development 
 of Catholicism a development which, in 
 accordance with the natural genius of 
 Rome, has over-emphasized and exag- 
 gerated the dogmatic and governmental 
 elements in the church at the expense 
 both of liberty and of truth ; consistently 
 making our appeal behind the middle 
 ages to the ancient and undivided church 
 and to Scripture. And if we are wise 
 we shall never imagine that we can, in 
 admiration of Roman efficiency, seek to 
 acclimatize amongst ourselves the Roman 
 system without the Pope. The whole 
 ecclesiastical development in the West 
 during the later middle age and subse- 
 quently has centred in the papacy, and 
 is of one piece with it. And if we are not 
 intending to submit to the Pope on his 
 own terms, we must in all respects seek 
 to maintain and build up our system on 
 the principles of the ancient church and 
 the holy Scriptures. 
 
 But we are confronted also with the 
 "Free churches," the churches that are 
 frankly Protestant. Now it is impossible 
 to deny or ignore the fact that, whereas 
 the Anglican church, in its reformation, 
 carefully maintained the properly catholic 
 tradition in structure and doctrine of the
 
 170 Our attitude towards 
 
 undivided church, the Protestant churches 
 of the continent and of Scotland definitely 
 did not. The Reformation with them be- 
 came a thoroughgoing rebellion against the 
 old church, and in particular a repudia- 
 tion of the ancient ministry. The succes- 
 sion which we retained they repudiated. 
 Thus in claiming (with Luther) that each 
 group of "faithful" Christians could ap- 
 point and ordain its own ministers, or 
 (with Calvin) that, owing to the apostasy 
 of the ancient priesthood, God had origin- 
 ated a new ministry, they were alike 
 definitely rebelling not only against par- 
 ticular laws, but also against a fundamental 
 principle of the ancient church. The same 
 thing has been true of the later-formed 
 " nonconformist " bodies ; and it follows 
 that we could not accept their ministers 
 as validly ordained ministers, or their 
 sacramental ministrations as valid minis- 
 trations, without cutting off ourselves with 
 them from the fellowship of the ancient 
 church, and from all hope of reunion on 
 a catholic basis, for instance, with the 
 Eastern and Russian church. There 
 seems to me to be no escape from this 
 conclusion. But we can only say this with 
 much compunction. 
 
 We know quite well how the noncon- 
 formist bodies in England grew up. We
 
 non-conformists 171 
 
 know quite well under what conditions 
 they have been recruited and gained their 
 strength. It has been largely, at least, be- 
 cause of our failure to be what a church 
 ought to be. We have by our sins and short- 
 comings supplied them with only too much 
 excuse for separation. It will cause us, 
 therefore, the less surprise to find the tokens 
 of the action of the Holy Spirit most plainly 
 evident among them, not only among those 
 who in virtue of baptism are individually 
 members of the church, but quite as 
 obviously among the Quakers and else- 
 where where baptism is rejected. We 
 know how often the zeal and holiness of 
 individual nonconformists puts us to shame, 
 and we know too how often the spirit of 
 brotherhood and the " preparedness of the 
 gospel of peace " have been found in their 
 organizations when they have been sadly 
 lacking in ours. I am sure we ought to 
 recognize, as frankly as possible, that God 
 has been pleased to work with a full 
 measure of His grace far beyond all 
 normal channels and laws of validity. I 
 trust that the attitude of contempt which 
 is so common in Romanists towards us, 
 and has been so common, alas ! in Anglicans 
 towards nonconformists, will become very 
 rapidly a thing of the past. I trust we shall 
 learn to hold with them the fullest measure
 
 172 The meaning and spirit 
 
 of Christian fellowship which we can hold 
 without faithlessness to the principles we 
 stand for. And if I am asked whether in 
 making such admissions as these I am not 
 practically abandoning my principles, I dare 
 to reply with a very emphatic denial. 
 
 Whatever apology the shortcomings and 
 abuses of the church make for Protestant- 
 ism, I cannot but feel that Protestantism 
 whether it be considered as a Christianity 
 which seeks to stand upon the Bible 
 divorced from the authority of the church, 
 or as a repudiation of the sacramental 
 system, or as an appeal from the visible to 
 an invisible church, or as a repudiation of 
 the apostolic succession is less and less 
 able to justify itself by an appeal to original 
 Christianity, and bears with increasing 
 plainness the appearance of a temporary 
 rebellion which lacks in itself the condi- 
 tions of reconstruction and permanence. 
 
 It has become, for instance, increasingly 
 evident that the Bible will not stand as 
 a basis of doctrine divorced from the 
 authority of the visible church. But some- 
 thing much larger is also becoming evident. 
 There is a growing disgust with our divi- 
 sions, both the divisions in our national 
 Christianity and the divisions between 
 national churches. These, it is widely 
 felt, have in effect destroyed the moral
 
 of Protestantism 173 
 
 force which the catholic church as a super- 
 national society holding all nations to- 
 gether on the basis of a wider fellowship 
 was intended to exercise. But if the desire 
 for this catholic fellowship should really 
 revive among the nations, if we should 
 begin again seriously to consider afresh 
 that our Lord willed us all to be one in a 
 visible church, nothing surely is more cer- 
 tain than that the only possible road to 
 reunion will be found to be upon the basis 
 of the ancient catholic tradition. 
 
 The spirit and meaning of that tradition 
 I have tried to describe. The idea of the 
 visible church, the idea of the sacraments, 
 the idea of the ministerial succession, co- 
 here as indissoluble elements in one idea 
 and one institution. And this idea and 
 institution cohere in turn with the incarna- 
 tion. Thus Christ is the embodiment of 
 God. God was, and is, at work in the 
 world outside the incarnate Christ : but 
 as soon as Christ has been presented to 
 us we cannot reject Him and still keep 
 our hold on God. So the visible church 
 is the embodiment of Christ the exten- 
 sion of the incarnation ; and, as soon as 
 the church is really presented to us, we 
 cannot reject the church and still hold 
 Christ. "As the Father hath sent me, even 
 so send I you." "He that heareth you
 
 174 The principle of church 
 
 heareth me ; and he that rejecteth you 
 rejecteth me ; and he that rejecteth me, 
 rejecteth him that sent me." 1 The 
 same principle unites Christ to God and 
 the church to Christ. It is the mani- 
 festation of God in a definite visible form. 
 It is exactly this principle as applied to 
 the church which Protestantism seems 
 to me to reject. I think its rejection is the 
 heart of Protestantism. Let us listen to 
 such familiar protests as these : "I cannot 
 believe that material things can be such 
 necessary instruments of the gifts of the 
 Holy Spirit." " 1 cannot believe that the 
 Holy Spirit can wait upon the ministra- 
 tions of a man who may be an unspiritual 
 and wicked man, because he happens to 
 have received the laying on of a bishop's 
 hands." "I will not have a priest stand- 
 ing between me and God." "Surely, if 
 my faith in Christ is real, it matters 
 comparatively little what body of Chris- 
 tians I belong to, or what outward forms 
 I use." 
 
 It is worth while spending a little 
 time over such protests. I have no doubt 
 that they make a strong appeal to a great 
 many religious Englishmen. But as re- 
 gards the first two protests, I would ask 
 any one who is impressed by them to con- 
 
 1 S. John xx. 21 ; S. Luke x. 16.
 
 and sacraments 175 
 
 sider what is, after all, the basis of spiritual 
 life on earth, the way in which the human 
 spirit has its origin. Is any spiritual power 
 that a man can exercise so portentously 
 great or so fundamental as the power to 
 bring into the world an immortal soul, 
 a spiritual personality with its infinite 
 capacities ? Does any power claimed for 
 any priesthood equal this? And is it 
 not an undeniable fact that in the order 
 of God this tremendous spiritual power is 
 embedded in the physical and sexual nature 
 of man, just at the point where the physi- 
 cal most easily degenerates into the sensual ? 
 Does not this mean that God, the life- 
 giving Spirit, does confessedly choose to 
 commit Himself to physical channels and 
 to the will of even wicked men ? Is not 
 the sacramental principle affirmed here, 
 if I may say so, in its most perilous form ? 
 The fact is so staggering, and yet so unde- 
 niable, that it seems to me to silence once 
 and for all the objections which naturally 
 rise in our minds against the sacramental 
 system, on the ground of its apparent sub- 
 jection of the action of the Holy Spirit to 
 physical methods and to the wills of men. 1 
 I believe it destroys fundamentally any 
 
 1 I say "apparent subjection" because I should not 
 admit that in the sacramental system there is any real 
 subjection. " God is not tied to the sacraments."
 
 176 The church of England 
 
 justification for protests against the idea 
 of material things as channels of spiritual 
 grace, or against the idea that " the un- 
 worthiness of the minister does not hinder 
 the grace of the sacraments." 
 
 God the eternal Spirit has plainly no 
 horror of taking material means, however 
 liable to be misused, as instruments of His 
 spiritual action. This is strictly all the 
 conclusion that I would draw from the 
 above consideration. What we are to be- 
 lieve positively about the sacraments and 
 their conditions must depend upon what 
 we actually find to be the message of the 
 Gospel. But there, I contend, at the heart 
 of the original Gospel, we find the church 
 with its sacraments and its ministry. 
 
 As to the other familiar protests of Pro- 
 testantism the two last expressed above 
 I would say : God does mean the 
 individual soul to have full personal 
 communion with Him in Ghrist ; and 
 nowhere, in fact, has this communion been 
 more personal or more intense than in the 
 catholic church. But also He has willed 
 that the individual should enter into this 
 covenant of communion with Himself only 
 in fellowship with other men, only as a 
 member of a body, in due subordination to 
 the body. Sacraments are no more oppo- 
 site to faith than food is opposite to hunger.
 
 and Church Reform 177 
 
 But the sacraments supply the soul with 
 its necessary nourishment in such a way 
 as to keep it in dependence upon the body, 
 the church. The ministry, again, if it be 
 rightly used, no more stands "between 
 the soul and God " than the father and 
 mother necessarily stand between the 
 soul and God : nor does the church as 
 a whole "stand between the soul and 
 God." But membership in the church 
 is the divinely-imposed condition of the 
 soul entering into and continuing in that 
 communion with God which Christ came 
 to make possible for man. And that be- 
 cause, at the bottom, it is the will of God 
 that only in communion with, and in 
 subordination to, our fellows should we 
 be enabled to realize the end of our 
 being. 
 
 2. CHURCH REFORM 
 
 A Church-of-England man who finds 
 himself called upon to vindicate the posi- 
 tion and claim of the part of the church 
 to which he belongs can only do so with 
 much compunction. It is not our business 
 to compare ourselves with other parts of 
 the church. But it is our business to be 
 deeply conscious of our defects. And there 
 is no denying that we have tolerated, and 
 are tolerating, with an almost incredible 
 
 2A
 
 178 The church of England 
 
 acquiescence conspicuous abuses in our 
 system. That a clergyman, in virtue of 
 the "parson's freehold," should be allowed 
 manifestly to neglect his duties as a parish 
 priest, and to be in all respects not an 
 incumbent but an incubus, and still to 
 retain his position, defying parish and 
 bishop alike, so long as he does not 
 commit some flagrant breach of the law, 
 is undoubtedly a grave scandal, and it is 
 difficult to exaggerate the mischief done 
 by a few such cases in each diocese. 
 Again, that the right of presenting a 
 clergyman to the pastoral charge of a 
 parish should be a piece of property, 
 which can still be sold or bought with 
 lamentably little restriction, is a like 
 scandal, which would not be tolerated if 
 what were in question were a public 
 school mastership or a professorship. 
 Again, that an incumbent should be able, 
 owing to the collapse of ecclesiastical dis- 
 cipline, arbitrarily to alter the customs of 
 worship in a parish, almost without re- 
 straint, is another abuse which has deeply 
 alienated reasonable Englishmen from the 
 church. But the most fundamental of all 
 these scandals the cause at bottom of all 
 the others is that we should have been 
 content and should still be content, in 
 defiance of the intentions of Christ and
 
 and the democratic principle 179 
 
 of the spirit of the church, to suffer the 
 Church of England to lack the power of 
 self-government. In consequence of this 
 loss we drag on our way with largely 
 antiquated rules. We are constantly in- 
 volved in obscure discussions as to the 
 meaning of ancient rubrics, instead of 
 making new canons and rules to suit our 
 present needs. The result of such par- 
 alysis of the church's action has been a 
 lamentable lawlessness which has infected 
 bishops, clergy, and laity alike. An 
 almost unrestrained individualism has 
 taken the place of the corporate loyalty 
 and subordination which is the mark of 
 a healthy society. It cannot be doubted 
 that a "converted church" would im- 
 periously demand, at whatever cost, the 
 restoration to it of its normal, divinely- 
 given, power of self-government. 
 
 And in a democratic age we should seek 
 a scheme of self-government such as will 
 give to every element of the community, 
 to bishops and clergy and laity alike, in 
 each parish and diocese and in the church 
 as a whole, its legitimate place and func- 
 tion in the system of government. The 
 Christian church can never be a pure 
 democracy. For the church is first of all 
 a monarchy, and the will of Christ, ex- 
 pressed through the dogmatic and disci-
 
 180 The church of England 
 
 plinary authority of the church catholic, is 
 a law over every local or national church. 
 Moreover it is by the will of Christ and 
 the fundamental law of the church that 
 the hierarchy holds its proper place, and 
 there is entrusted to bishops and clergy 
 a ministry of the word and sacraments 
 which the body of the church has neither 
 conferred upon them nor can take away. 
 But in the early church the democratic 
 element in government was much more 
 conspicuous than in subsequent ages from 
 a variety of causes it became. The 
 method of government in the church 
 naturally tends to conform itself to the 
 spirit and method of government which 
 prevails in society as a whole. Thus 
 in imperialist and feudal times the demo- 
 cratic spirit in the government of the 
 church was weakened and almost lost. 
 But in days when democracy is the spirit 
 of the times the church should revive 
 in the whole body of the laity powers of 
 control both in parochial affairs and in the 
 church at large which have been allowed 
 to sleep, but have never been and never 
 can be abolished. A few years ago the 
 archbishops appointed a committee, thor- 
 oughly representative of the various 
 schools of thought in the church, to con- 
 sider how best the church could set itself
 
 Its demand for autonomy 181 
 
 to recover its legitimate and inalienable 
 function of self-government. This year 
 (1916) this committee has reported, and its 
 report is in the hands of the church. It 
 is not asking too much to urge that every 
 member of the church who wants to fulfil 
 his function in " loosing his mother from 
 her chains" should study this report and 
 co-operate in a vigorous and insistent de- 
 mand for the restoration of the church's 
 liberty. I do not think that the proposals 
 of this committee will be found to con- 
 travene any principle of catholic order. 
 I see no other real hope for our sorely 
 crippled and weakened church than that 
 it should resolutely set itself in correspon- 
 dence with the purpose of our Lord and 
 in obedience to His Spirit, to the task of 
 self-reform, remembering that it is the 
 whole church, and not only the clergy, 
 which is the royal and priestly body, and 
 that every member who has received the 
 unction of the Holy Spirit in confirma- 
 tion should take his part or her part in the 
 blessed work of liberation and recovery. 
 
 3. THE EVANGELIZATION OF THE WORLD 
 
 Of course the Church of England, like 
 every part of the church, must refuse to 
 be content with its home concerns, and
 
 182 The evangelization of the world 
 
 must take its place in the fulfilment of 
 a world-wide mission " Go ye into all the 
 world, and make disciples of all the 
 nations." To-day in the political field we 
 Englishmen have to learn the duties and 
 opportunities which a world-wide empire 
 lays upon us. We have to organize the 
 empire for the fulfilment of its mission. 
 And in the religious sphere our empire, 
 in India and Africa, lays upon us a very 
 special obligation for bringing to the non- 
 Christian peoples who are our fellow 
 subjects not only such secular advantages 
 as their fellowship in our empire ought to 
 confer, but the opportunity of that deeper 
 fellowship which only the catholic gospel 
 can bestow. But the obligation to evan- 
 gelize the world is far wider than the 
 empire. It is an obligation to China and 
 Corea and Japan as well as to India. 
 
 No doubt " missionary work " has made 
 great advances among us. We no longer talk 
 of its being "better to leave the heathen to 
 their own religions." We understand that 
 such a policy is not only faithlessness to 
 Christ, but also an impossibility. The 
 authority and discipline of the old heathen 
 religions is weakened inevitably by the 
 spread of Western science and by the min- 
 gling throughout the world of European 
 influences with native customs and modes
 
 Religion and science 183 
 
 of thought. By our mere presence among 
 them we inevitably tend to destroy the old 
 religions. The question is, What are we 
 going to promote in their place ? It is the 
 Christian church only which has an answer 
 to the question. It is Christianity alone 
 which can claim to be a catholic religion. 
 The obligation to assist in the evangeliza- 
 tion of the world lies upon every one who 
 accepts the allegiance of Christ. To be 
 content to keep our religion for home con- 
 sumption is truly to forfeit our allegiance. 
 Every consistent and intelligent church- 
 man must take his part in the spread of 
 the kingdom of Christ. To be narrow and 
 merely national in our religious sympathies 
 is to cease to be in any real sense Christian. 
 
 4. RELIGION AND SCIENCE 
 
 Freedom should be the spirit of the 
 church and not least intellectual freedom. 
 Freedom means that the churchman who 
 has really assimilated his religion should 
 find, as S. Paul says, that "all things are 
 his " that he can feel at home in the 
 whole universe, as a son in the Father's 
 house and this cannot be without in- 
 tellectual liberty. He should be un- 
 shackled and open-eyed in the whole 
 world of investigation and discovery.
 
 184 The church of England 
 
 There should be no conflict between reli- 
 gion and science, and no restraint on 
 free inquiry. There is, in fact, in the 
 New Testament no trace of obscurantism, 
 but a love of the light, without limit or 
 boundary. 
 
 There has been, however, undoubtedly 
 a very often renewed conflict between 
 religion and science using the term in its 
 broadest sense as covering historical science 
 and the study of the history of morality 
 and religion, as well as the physical sciences. 
 And the cause of it has, perhaps, been 
 threefold. 
 
 (1) Christianity quite definitely claims 
 that the self-revelation of God, given 
 through the Hebrew prophets and in 
 Christ, has pushed back the boundary of 
 darkness, and given mankind a definite 
 knowledge of divine things which it could 
 not otherwise have had. 
 
 Christianity is not concerned to deny 
 that God has given some measure of 
 revelation of Himself among all nations ; 
 it is not concerned to minimize the 
 elements of truth to be found among 
 them. Quite the contrary. But it is 
 concerned to maintain a special vocation 
 of the Jews to be the instruments of divine 
 revelation, and to maintain that this 
 revelation as consummated in Christ
 
 The conflict of science and religion 185 
 
 supersedes, not only the Jewish religion, 
 but all other religions, not by a method 
 of exclusion, but by the inclusion in a 
 completer whole of all the elements of 
 truth which each contains. And this 
 belief in a positive revelation of God 
 consummated in Christ does exclude all 
 manner of contradictory ideas about God, 
 about sin, about human destiny, such as 
 have been current among men. Chris- 
 tianity, for instance, must be in ever- 
 lasting opposition to any religion or 
 philosophy or school of thought which 
 is based on pantheism, or which denies 
 to man the real freedom of his will, as 
 the basis of moral responsibility, or which 
 treats sin as if it had its seat and root in 
 our material nature instead of being a 
 rebellion of the will, or which denies 
 any other element in the positive revela- 
 tion given in Christ. That is the point. 
 Christianity claims that God has given to 
 man, by revelation, a positive knowledge 
 about God, coupled with, and involv- 
 ing, a positive knowledge about human 
 nature and sin and divine redemption. 
 This from the first made it necessary, and 
 must for ever make it necessary, that 
 Christianity should be a controversial 
 religion, waging war against every idea 
 or philosophy which would undermine 
 
 2B
 
 186 The church of England 
 
 its foundation principles. It is prob- 
 able that these principles would never 
 have been discovered by the groping 
 of the human intellect. At any rate they 
 were not so discovered. Men do in fact 
 owe them to the Hebrew prophets and to 
 Christ. But, once accepted as true, they 
 become the basis of a philosophy which, 
 better than any other philosophy (so the 
 Christian must contend), can interpret 
 and co-ordinate all the facts and phases 
 of experience. And it is a disastrous 
 mistake on the part of Christian philoso- 
 phers to allow the world to forget what 
 is the real source of our knowledge of 
 God and of ourselves. In this sense 
 that is in so far as science is using a 
 background of false assumptions conflict 
 between religion and science is inevit- 
 able. 
 
 (2) But so far as scientific research is 
 using no such false assumptions, a Chris- 
 tian ought to enjoy the fullest freedom 
 in the world of knowledge. I have myself 
 from time to time been a respectful spec- 
 tator of the conversion of a man of science 
 from agnosticism or a very vague belief 
 in God to a full Christian belief. Such 
 conversions have come about from various 
 causes, intellectual or moral. But when 
 the Christian faith has once been frankly
 
 Religious liberty 187 
 
 accepted as " the word of God," it has 
 been very interesting and reassuring to 
 see that the man of science has not 
 suffered in his scientific freedom that, 
 while he has found himself in corre- 
 spondence with a new world of spiritual 
 experiences, he has not found himself 
 hampered or restrained in his old world 
 of scientific research. 
 
 But it cannot be denied that it has not 
 always been so. It cannot be denied that the 
 church has often been really obscurantist, 
 has often laid upon the intellect illegitimate 
 claims, and has occasioned in intellectual 
 circles suspicion and rebellion for which 
 there was too much justification. The 
 Roman church has been, no doubt, a 
 great offender. When S. Ignatius of 
 Loyola bids his retreatants "always to 
 hold the principle that the white that I 
 see I would believe to be black, if the 
 hierarchical church were so to rule it," 1 
 he is laying upon the intellect a claim 
 which I do not think anything can justify. 
 Wisely, with Bishop Butler, we should 
 repudiate such a claim. We should hold 
 that it is an important test of the divine 
 origin of our religion that it frees us to 
 observe all that can be observed, to examine 
 
 1 Spiritual Exercises, edited by J. Rickaby, S.J. (Burns 
 & Gates, 1915), p. 223.
 
 188 The church of England 
 
 all that can be examined, and to know 
 all that can be known by our natural 
 faculties in the world of God. But it 
 cannot be denied that we have been also 
 offenders against the light. We took surely 
 too long a time before we were ready to 
 recognize, even if we are quite ready to 
 recognize it to-day, that the early chapters 
 of Genesis are not to be treated as con- 
 veying scientific information ; and that it 
 is not a dogma of the faith that the books 
 of Jonah and Daniel are historical records. 
 We ridicule working people nowadays 
 who ask about Cain's wife. But we are 
 responsible for their asking the question. 
 We were afraid where no fear was. We 
 perpetuated a needless conflict between 
 religion and science, and we alienated a 
 great many honest inquirers, through being 
 much too slow to welcome new light. 
 
 (3) But it must not be forgotten that 
 a vast part of the conflict in the minds of 
 individuals between the claims of religious 
 faith, as they have inherited it, and the 
 conclusions of intellectual inquiry, is due 
 to the doubter never having really given 
 his faculties to the study of religion. My 
 grandmother Lois and my mother Eunice 
 were excellent teachers of spiritual lessons, 
 and they brought me up to know what a 
 Christian ought to know. But it does not
 
 Citizenship 189 
 
 follow that I am justified in taking the 
 lessons exactly as they taught them me out 
 into the intellectual world, as if they were 
 final statements of Christian doctrine. It 
 is very strange how few well educated 
 men and women are at all at pains really 
 to apply their minds either to studying 
 some rational account of their religion or, 
 if they are able, to studying the documents 
 of their religion for themselves. I do not 
 think it is possible to exaggerate the differ- 
 ence it would make to men and women 
 without number, if they would only give 
 themselves the time, not without prayer, 
 but also not without a real effort of 
 their minds, to win for themselves a 
 clear perception of the coherence, the 
 solidarity, and the meaning of the articles 
 of the Christian faith. 
 
 5. GHURCHMANSHIP AND CITIZENSHIP 
 
 Our Lord took for granted the political 
 life of man, and said little about it. But 
 He set to work in the world a principle 
 of humanity which could not but have a 
 profound effect on politics the principle 
 of the absolute and equal value of every 
 human soul. At the beginnings of Chris- 
 tianity, under the Roman Empire, the 
 members of the church found themselves
 
 190 The church and politics 
 
 debarred from imperial politics, though 
 they developed fruitful principles for the 
 regulation of their own internal life. But 
 in time Christian states arose ; and it 
 would seem to be obvious that a com- 
 munity dominated by the Christian spirit 
 must feel the obligation to legislate and 
 fashion its institutions so as at least to 
 facilitate and not to hinder the develop- 
 ment of the Christian ideal of life. 
 
 The result has no doubt been very dis- 
 appointing. States have been Christian in 
 the sense that they have sought to enforce 
 by law the profession of Christianity. But 
 society has not been so really converted as 
 to break the tyranny of custom and tradi- 
 tion, or to make the strong ashamed to prey 
 upon the weak. On the whole Christian 
 states, so-called, have given but a very 
 disappointing picture of the social applica- 
 tion of Christian principles. Especially 
 in recent history they have too readily 
 acquiesced in a political economy, really 
 anti-Christian in principle, which by 
 substituting unrestrained competition for 
 co-operation has undermined the very 
 basis of fellowship. 
 
 Let us take one example of this failure. 
 In the early days Christians could not 
 affect the laws or institutions of the 
 empire. They could only combine to
 
 Almsgiving 191 
 
 keep one another from want. Almsgiv- 
 ing, the relief of the needs of the poor by 
 the rich, or of the sick by the healthy 
 members of the community, was effective 
 on the whole and not demoralizing ; for 
 Christians were running a common risk ; 
 the tie of brotherhood was very close ; 
 and the claim for almsgiving, according 
 to a man's means, was accompanied by an 
 equal insistence that each man must do 
 his best to support himself. " If a man 
 will not work, neither let him eat." 
 
 But when Christians gained control of 
 legislation another duty ought to have 
 arisen into prominence that of so mould- 
 ing the institutions of the state as to pre- 
 vent pauperism and disease. It seems to 
 be only now that we are waking up to our 
 vast neglect in this respect. The church 
 has constantly been occupied in picking up 
 the wounded in the battle of life in pro- 
 viding medicines and staunching wounds 
 when it ought to have been thundering 
 at the gates of tyranny. It ought not to 
 have allowed the organized forces of vice 
 and selfishness to entrench themselves and 
 build their castles and provide themselves 
 with munitions. It ought to have been 
 militant in such sense as to force men to 
 see in it the determined and constant 
 enemy of selfishness and wrong; it ought
 
 192 The religion of the church 
 
 to have had discernment enough to tear 
 the cloak of respectability off the strong- 
 holds of evil, and courage enough to force 
 men to choose, not only in their private 
 lives but on the public stage, between 
 their Christian profession and their selfish, 
 anti-social, claims. Now there is no longer 
 in any modern state any question of 
 compelling men to be Christians ; there 
 is indeed hardly any question of the 
 state definitely maintaining the Christian 
 standard as such ; but there is a great and 
 fresh opportunity for Christians of all 
 kinds to combine and show the world 
 what an organized Christian public opinion, 
 making the most of its citizenship, can 
 effect a great and fresh opportunity to 
 make it evident that the laws and institu- 
 tions which the church can support must 
 be laws and institutions which really em- 
 body and promote the Christian ideal of 
 brotherhood. 
 
 I have come to the end of what has 
 proved a very difficult task that of pro- 
 viding within a very short compass a 
 comprehensive account of the Christian 
 religion. A book of this kind, which 
 must advance so many statements without 
 being able to buttress them with proofs, 
 lays itself open to manifold criticism.
 
 Conclusion 193 
 
 So I will venture to conclude with the 
 words with which S. Ignatius prefaced his 
 Spiritual Exercises "It must be pre-sup- 
 posed that every good Christian should be 
 more ready to approve than to condemn 
 a proposition advanced by his neighbour : 
 and if he cannot approve it, let him 
 inquire into his meaning ; and if it be 
 erroneous, let him correct him lovingly ; 
 and if that does not suffice, let him employ 
 all suitable means that his neighbour may 
 be brought to a right mind and stand 
 approved." 
 
 2C
 
 INDEX 
 
 Acts of the Apostles, 145. 
 
 Affinity and consanguin- 
 ity, 67. 
 
 Allegorical interpreta- 
 tions, 159. 
 
 Almsgiving, 107, 123, 191. 
 
 Angels, 35. 
 
 Apocalypses, 75. 
 
 Apostolic Succession, 68, 
 167. 
 
 Ascension, 22. 
 
 Atonement, 24. 
 
 Attributes of God, 19. 
 
 Authority of the Church, 
 118. 
 
 Autonomy, Demand for, 
 180. 
 
 Baptism, 2, 4, 49. 
 Bible, 12, 141, 167. 
 Bishops, 68, 167, 180. 
 Brotherhood, Spirit of, 
 
 112, 171. 
 Burial Service, 5. 
 
 Catechism, 15, 115. 
 Ceremonies, 105. 
 Church, 1, 39 and passim. 
 Church of England, 1, 165 
 
 and passim. 
 Church Reform, 177. 
 Citizenship, 189. 
 Coming of Christ, 77. 
 Commandments, The Ten, 
 
 114. 
 Communion, Holy, 2, 4, 
 
 53, 137. 
 
 Communion of Saints, 95. 
 Comprecation, 99. 
 Confirmation, 51. 
 
 Counsels, The Evangeli- 
 cal, 124. 
 Creeds, 21, 33, 167. 
 
 Day of God, 74. 
 Deacons, 69. 
 
 Dead, Prayer for the, 96. 
 Death, 80, 88. 
 Democratic principle, The, 
 
 70, 179. 
 Devils, 35. 
 
 Difficulties in prayer, 138. 
 Divorce, 65. 
 Duty towards God, 116. 
 Duty towards neighbour, 
 
 116. 
 
 Eastern Church, 166. 
 End of the world, 73. 
 Epistles, 144. 
 Ethics of the Epistles, 111. 
 Evangelization of the 
 
 world, 181. 
 Example, Our Lord's, 24. 
 
 Fasting and Fast Days, 
 
 107, 123. 
 
 Fatherhood of God, 16, 108. 
 Feast-days, 123. 
 Free Churches, The, 169. 
 Freehold, The Parson's, 
 
 178. _ 
 Free-will, 33. 
 
 God, 16. 
 Gospels, 1, 147. 
 
 Heaven, 79. 
 
 Hell, 89. 
 
 Human nature, 33. 
 
 195
 
 196 
 
 Index 
 
 Identification with Christ, 
 
 27. 
 
 Incarnation, 21. 
 Inspiration, 142, 155, 188. 
 Intermediate state, 92. 
 Invocation of Saints, 96. 
 
 Jesus Christ, 21. 
 Judgement, 87, 93. 
 
 Last things, The, 73. 
 Liberty, Religious, 187. 
 Lord's Prayer, 132. 
 Lost, State of the, 87. 
 
 Marriage, Misuse of, 121. 
 Matrimony, 5, 65, 123. 
 Meditation, 156. 
 Membership, 1, 40, 48, 
 
 111, 177. 
 
 Mind of Christ, 102. 
 Miracles, 149. 
 Missions, Foreign, 181. 
 Moral spirit of Christ, 106. 
 Morality, Christian, 101. 
 
 New Testament, 144. 
 Nonconformists, 170. 
 
 Old Testament, 157. 
 Orders, Holy, 68. 
 
 Patronage, Church, 178. 
 
 Penance, 5, 60. 
 
 Politics, The Church and, 
 
 189. 
 
 Prayer, 107, 128. 
 Prayer-Book, 4. 
 Precepts of the Church, 
 
 122. 
 
 Priests, 68. 
 Property, 120. 
 
 Prophecy, 161. 
 Prophets, Jewish, 161. 
 Protestant Churches, 170. 
 Protestantism, 172. 
 Public opinion, 107. 
 Purgatory, 92. 
 
 Reformation, The, 4, 141, 
 
 170. 
 
 Religious state, The, 124. 
 Resurrection of our Lord, 
 
 22, 82, 86. 
 Resurrection of the dead, 
 
 80. 
 
 Revelation of S. John, 154. 
 Rome, The Church of, 165. 
 Russian Church, 166. 
 
 Sacraments, 44, 167. 
 Sacrifice, The Christian, 
 
 57. 
 
 Schism, 43. 
 
 Science, Religion and, 183. 
 Sin, 3-3, 60, 106. 
 Spirit, The Holy, 29. 
 Spiritualism, 85. 
 Sunday, 59, 123. 
 Symbolism, 23. 
 
 Trinity, The Holy, 30. 
 Trustworthiness of the 
 New Testament, 155. 
 
 Unction, 67. 
 Univcrsalism, 91. 
 
 Visitation of the sick, 5, 
 62. 
 
 War, 104. 
 Wills, 123. 
 
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