UC-NRLF 
 
 B 3 TSS M3T 
 
 r^ 
 
 --■*#>^' 
 
 >^^ 
 
 ^'■'% 
 
 il- r^ 
 
 
-t^ 
 
 /berkeleyN 
 I LIBRARY 
 
 I UNIVERSITY OF 
 \CALIFORNIA 
 
 
 :,t^ 
 
 ^>.A:^- 
 
IH 
 
 mo 
 
 / ! 
 
 n 
 
 W *0 W-^<x{* 
 
 ^ 
 
 b-d 
 
 ^Zd^ 
 
 u( 
 
LUX MUNDI 
 
OyforS 
 
 HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY 
 
LUX MUNDI 
 
 A SERIES OF STUDIES 
 
 RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION 
 
 By CHARLES GORE. M.A. 
 
 PRINCIPAL OF PDSET HOUSE 
 FELLOW OP TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 
 TENTH EDITION 
 
 A quella Luce cotal si diventa, 
 Che volgersi da lei per altro aspetto 
 h impossibll die mai si consenta. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET 
 
 1890 
 
 \^All rights reserved'\ 
 
J5T/0 
 
 I %1o 
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 CONTmBUTORS. 
 
 1. Faith. 
 
 Eev. H. S. Holland, M.A., Canon of St. Paul's, some- 
 time Senior Student of Christ Church. 
 
 2. The Christian Boctrine of God. 
 
 Eev. Aubrey Mooke, M.A., Hon. Canon of Christ Church, 
 Tutor of Magdalen and Keble Colleges. 
 
 3. The Problem of Pain: its tjearing on faith in God. 
 
 Kev. J. R. Illingwokth, M.A., Eector of Longworth, 
 sometime Fellow of Jesus and Tutor of Kehle 
 Colleges. 
 
 4. The Preparation in History for Christ. 
 
 Eev. E. S. Talbot, D.D., Vicar of Leeds, sometime 
 "Warden of Keble College. 
 
 5. The Incarnation in relation to Development. 
 
 Eev. J. E. Illixgwokth. 
 
 6. The Incarnation as the Basis of Bogma. 
 
 Eev. E. C. MoBEELT, M.A., Vicar of Great Budworth, 
 sometime Senior Student of Christ Church. 
 
 7. The Atonement. 
 
 Eev. and Hon. Arthur Lyttelton, M.A., Master of 
 Selwyn College, Cambridge, sometime Tutor of 
 Keble College. 
 
 307 
 
vi Essays and Contrihttors. 
 
 8, The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 
 
 Eev. C. GoKE, M.A., Principal of Pusey House, Fellow 
 of Trinity College. 
 
 9. The Church. 
 
 Kev. W. Lock, M.A., Sub- Warden of Keble and Fellow 
 of Magdalen Colleges. 
 
 10. Sacraments. 
 
 Eev. F. Paget, D.D., Cauou of Christ Church, and llegius 
 Professor of Pastoral Theology. 
 
 11. Christianity and Politics. 
 
 Eev. W. J. H. Campion, M.A., Tutor of Keble College. 
 
 12. Christian Ethics. 
 
 Eev. E. L. Ottley, M.A., Vice-Principal of Cuddesdou, 
 late Senior Student of Christ Church. 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 1. This volume is primarily due to a set of circumstances 
 which exists no longer. The writers found themselves at 
 Oxford together between the years 1875-1885, engaged in the 
 common work of University education ; and compelled for 
 their own sake, no less than that of others, to attempt to put 
 the Catholic faith into its right relation to modern intellectual 
 and moral problems. Such common necessity and effort led 
 to not infrequent meetings, in which a common body of 
 thought and sentiment, and a common method of commending 
 the faith to the acceptance of others, tended to form itself. 
 We, who once enjoyed this happy companionship, are now 
 for the most part separated. But at least some result of our 
 temporary association remains, which it is hoped may justify 
 and explain the present volume. 
 
 2. For this collection of essays represents an attempt on 
 behalf of the Christian Creed in the way of explanation. 
 We are sure that Jesus Christ is still and will continue to be 
 the ' Light of the world.' We are sure that if men can rid 
 themselves of prejudices and mistakes (for which, it must be 
 said, the Church is often as responsible as they), and will 
 look afresh at what the Christian faith really means, they 
 will find that it is as adequate as ever to interpret life and 
 knowledge in its several departments, and to impart not 
 less intellectual than moral freedom. But we are conscious 
 also that if the true meaning of the faith is to be made 
 sufiiciently conspicuous it needs disencumbering, reinter- 
 preting, explaining. We can but quote in this sense a 
 
viii Preface. 
 
 distinguished French writer who has often acted as an 
 inspiration to many of us. Pere Gratry felt painfully that 
 the dogmas of the Church were but as an ' unknown tongue ' 
 to many of the best of his compatriots. ' It is not enough,' he 
 said, * to utter the mysteries of the Spirit, the great mysteries 
 of Christianity, in formulas, true before God, but not under- 
 stood of the people. The apostle and the prophet are precisely 
 thosB who have the gift of interpreting these obscure and 
 profound formulas for each man and each age. To translate 
 into the common tongue the mysterious and sacred language 
 .... to speak the word of God afresh in each age, in ac- 
 cordance with both the novelty of the age and the eternal 
 antiquity of the truth, this is what S. Paul means by inter- 
 preting the unknown tongue. But to do this, the first con- 
 dition is that a man should appreciate the times he lives in. 
 " Hoc autem tempus quare non probatis M " ' 
 
 3. We have written then in this volume not as ' guessers 
 at truth,' but as servants of the Catholic Creed and Church, 
 aiming only at interpreting the faith we have received. On 
 the other hand, we have written with the conviction that the 
 epoch in which we live is one of profound transformation, 
 intellectual and social, abounding in new needs, new points of 
 view, new questions ; and certain therefore to involve great 
 changes in the outlying departments of theology, where it 
 is linked on to other sciences, and to necessitate some general 
 restatement of its claim and meaning. 
 
 This is to say that theology must take a new development. 
 We grudge the name development, on the one hand, to any- 
 thing which fails to preserve the type of the Christian Creed 
 and the Christian Church ; for development is not innovation, 
 it is not heresy : on the other hand, we cannot recognise as 
 the true ' development of Christian doctrine,' a movement 
 which means merely an intensification of a current tendency 
 
 ^ Gratry, llmri Perreyve, Paris 1880, p. 162. 
 
Preface. ix 
 
 from within, a narrowing and hardening of theology by simply 
 giving it greater definiteness or multiplying its dogmas. 
 
 The real development of theology is rather the process in 
 which the Church, standing firm in her old truths, enters into 
 the apprehension of the new social and intellectual movements 
 of each age : and because ' the truth makes her free ' is able 
 to assimilate all new material, to welcome and give its place 
 to all new knowledge, to throw herself into the sanctification 
 of each new social order, bringing forth out of her treasures 
 things new and old, and shewing again and again her power 
 of witnessing under changed conditions to the catholic capacity 
 of her faith and life. 
 
 4. To such a development these studies attempt to be a 
 contribution. They will be seen to cover, more or less, the 
 area of the Christian faith in its natural order and sequence 
 of parts, but the intention is not to offer complete theological 
 treatises, or controversial defences of religious truths : it is 
 rather to present positively the central ideas and principles of 
 religion, in the light of contemporary thought and current 
 problems. The only one of the essays in fact which has any 
 degree of formal completeness, is that on Christian Ethics, 
 a subject on which the absence of systematic books of a 
 genuine English growth seems to justify a more detailed 
 treatment. 
 
 5. The main omissions of which we are conscious are due to 
 want of space. For instance, we should have been very glad 
 to attempt a separate treatment of the subject of sin ; though 
 we hope the line that would be taken about it has been 
 sufficiently indicated by more than one writer^. Again, we 
 have left aside any detailed discussion of historical evidences ; 
 but it will be seen that our attempt has been so to present the 
 principles of the Christian faith as to suggest the point of 
 view from which evidences are intelligible, and from which 
 
 ^ See pp. 208-211, 292-3, 318-20, 475-6. 
 
X Preface. 
 
 they will, it is firmly believed, be found satisfactory. Once 
 more, if we have not found room for a treatment of 
 miracles, at least we hope that the Church's conception of 
 God, as He manifests Himself in nature and in grace, which 
 we have endeavoured to express, will at once acquit us of any 
 belief in capricious ' violations of law ; ' and will also suggest 
 a view of the world as disordered by sin and crying out for 
 redemption, which will make it intelligible that ' miracles ' 
 should appear, not as violating law, but as a necessary 
 element in its restoration as well as its completer exhibition ; 
 contrary, not to the fundamental order of the Divine work- 
 ing, but only to a superficial or mechanical view of it, or 
 to a view which sin has distorted or preoccupation with 
 physical science has unduly narrowed. 
 
 6. It only remains to explain that we have written not 
 as mere individuals, but as ministers, under common conditions, 
 of a common faith. This unity of conviction has enabled us 
 freely to offer and accej)t mutual criticism and suggestion ; so 
 that without each of us professing such responsibility for work 
 other than his own, as would have involved undue interference 
 with individual method, we do desire this volume to be 
 the expression of a common mind and a common hope. 
 
 C. G. 
 
 PusEY House, 
 
 Michaelmas, 1889. 
 
 PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION. 
 
 The author of the Essay Tlie Holy Spirit arul Inspiration 
 has endeavoured to obviate further misunderstanding of his 
 meaning on one important point by rewriting some sentences 
 on pp. 359-60, in accordance with the Corrigenda inserted in 
 the Fourth Edition. 
 
PREFACE TO THE TENTH EDITION. 
 
 I. 
 
 There are two things which may fairly be regretted in 
 regard to the criticisms — often the very kind and encourag- 
 ing criticisms — which this book has received. There is, 
 first, the disj)roportionate attention which has been given 
 to some twenty pages on the subject of the inspiration of 
 Holy Scripture, an attention so disproportionate as to defeat 
 the object which the writers had in view in assigning to 
 that subject its place in the general treatment of the work 
 of the Holy Spirit — the object, namely, of giving it its proper 
 context in the whole body of Christian truth : and there is, 
 secondly, the fact that we have not generally succeeded in 
 gaining the attention of our critics to the point of view from 
 which these ' studies ' were written, and the purpose they were 
 intended to serve. 
 
 Our purpose was ' to succour a distressed faith ' by en- 
 deavouring to bring the Christian Creed into its right relation 
 to the modern growth of knowledge, scientific, historical, cri- 
 tical ; and to the modern problems of politics and ethics^. We 
 were writing as for Christians, but as for Christians perplexed 
 by new knowledge which they are required to assimilate and 
 new problems with which they are required to deal. What is 
 needed to help men in such perplexity is not compromise, for 
 
 ' By the phrase ' to attempt to in\t ance and the faith only secondary, 
 
 the Catholic faith into its right re- What was intended was that, as 
 
 lation to modern intellectual and holding the Faith, we needed, as the 
 
 moral problems ' (Preface to First Church has often needed, to bring that 
 
 Edition) it was not by any means with which we are ourselves iden- 
 
 intended to suggest that the modern tified, into relation to the claims, 
 
 problems or the modern sciences intellectual and practical, made upon 
 
 were the things of the first import- us from outside. 
 
xii Preface to 
 
 compromise generally means tampering with principle, but 
 readjustment, or fresh correlation, of the things of faith 
 and the things of knowledge. In detail this will, no doubt, 
 involve concessions, and that on both sides, because both sides 
 have been liable to make mistakes ^; but in the main what is 
 to be looked for is a reconciliation which shall at once set the 
 scientific and critical movement, so far as it is simply scien- 
 tific and critical, free from the peril of irreligion, and the 
 religious movement free from the imputation of hostility to 
 new knowledge — as free as any movement can be, which is 
 intensely concerned to nourish and develop what is per- 
 manent and unchanging in human life. Such a reconciliation 
 has more than once been effected in the past, though never 
 without a preliminary period of antagonism^: our confidence 
 that it will be effected anew in the future lies partly in the 
 fact that we see it already taking place in some minds which 
 seem to us to represent the best life and thought of our time 
 both scientific and religious. One such at least ^ we knew 
 and have lost, though only from present intercourse, in 
 Aubrey Moore. Nobody could know him and think of him 
 as ' compromising ' either his faith or his science. He lived 
 primarily and with deepest interest in his religious life and 
 theological study, but he lived also with intense reality in 
 the life of science. And the debt we owe to him, over and 
 above the debt under which his personal character lays us for 
 ever, is that of having let us see how the two lives of faith 
 and of science can melt into one. He felt indeed and wrestled 
 with the difficulties of adjustment. He had not, as it seemed to 
 
 ' Cf. Dr. Pusey, University Sermons, of Christianity to the Copernican 
 
 1864-1879. ' Unscience, not science, astronomy: Salmon, Infallibility of 
 
 contrary to faith,' pp. 18 ff. the Church, p. 230. 
 
 - Cf. the history of the relations of ^ See the tribute to his memory by 
 
 the Church to Aristotelian philosophy : Mr. G. J. Romanes : G-uardian, Jan. 29, 
 
 Milman, Latin Christianity, ed. 4, vol. 1890. 
 ix. pp. no ff. ; and later the relations 
 
the Tenth Edition. xili 
 
 us, nearly finished his work in this respect. But he had done 
 enough for our encouragement : enough to help us to believe 
 that the best minds of the future are to be neither religious 
 minds defying scientific advance, nor scientific minds denying 
 religion, but minds in which religion interprets and is inter- 
 preted by science, in which faith and enquiry subsist together 
 and reinforce one another. The reason why he should have 
 been so soon taken from us and from the Church on earth — 
 taken when 'our need was the sorest' — lies in the im- 
 penetrable mysteries of God. ' Si dolemus ablatum, non 
 tamen obliviscimur quod datus fuit, et gratias agimus quod 
 habere ilium meruimus . . . Pusillus corde eram et confortabat 
 me; piger et negligens, et excitabat me^.' 
 
 11. 
 
 It seems to us that a due regard to the point of view from 
 which these studies were written would have obviated some 
 of the criticisms upon them. For instance, it would have 
 explained why we forbore to enter upon the questions which 
 may be raised as to the seat and methods of Church autho- 
 rity. It was because these questions do not arise practically 
 till the work has been done to which we were attempting to 
 minister. When a man is once reassured that his faith in 
 Christ is capable of rational justification, he begins naturally 
 to enquii-e what exactly the Christian religion involves in 
 this or that detail, and how its manifestly authoritative 
 character, as a Divine Revelation, is to find expression : but 
 these enquiries hardly begin till the preliminary reassurance 
 has been gained. 
 
 The moral authority of Christianity, of Christian lives and 
 characters, does indeed exercise a determining influence on the 
 
 ' From S. Bernard's most touching sermon {in Cant. 26) on the death of his 
 brother Gerard. 
 
xiv Preface to 
 
 promotion and recovery of faith ; but men do not often either 
 win a hold on the creed for the first time, or recover it where it 
 has been lost or impaired, because the theological authority of 
 the Church enables them to take it on trust. The very 
 grounds of that authority are for the moment too much in 
 question to admit of the proper amount of deference being 
 given to it. Thus it seemed to us better in this volume to be 
 content with general statements as to the principle of Church 
 authority^, leaving out its detailed discussion as unsuitable to 
 our present purpose. 
 
 Of course, however, we were conscious all the time that we 
 were ourselves amenable to the bar of authority and were 
 bound to feel sure that nothing we were saying was trans- 
 gressing the laws which the Catholic Church has laid down. 
 We should indeed be unanimous in disclaiming any desire to 
 have ' license to say what we please ' in our position as Church 
 teachers. All meaning would be taken out of the effort and 
 hope this book represents if we could not believe that we were 
 speaking as the Church would have us speak. As the essay on 
 Inspiration has been chiefly called in question on the ground of 
 authority, the author of it must be allowed to plead that he did 
 assure himself he was saying nothing which the Church in her 
 past action had not left him free to say, while for the future 
 he does earnestly desire in due course, and after due enquiry, 
 an action of Church authority on the relation of modern 
 critical methods to the doctrine of Inspiration ; and further 
 he believes that the Anglican churches, holding as they do so 
 conspicuous a place in traditional reverence for the Scriptures, 
 while they are so free on the other hand from the obscu- 
 rantist fear of historical enquiry, are more likely than any 
 other part of the Church to arrive at determinations on the 
 subject such as will be of material service to the whole of 
 
 ^ See Essay VI. pp. 226-227, 250 ff. ; Essay VIII. pp. 324-327 ; and Essay IX. 
 PP- 384-390- 
 
the Tenth Edition. xv 
 
 Christendom. But for the present there can be no doubt the 
 subject is not ripe for any official or formal determinations. 
 
 III. 
 
 It seems to us also that some of the criticisms on the 
 treatment of Inspiration in Essay VIII, which shall be 
 presently dealt with, have been due to the same forgetful- 
 ness of the writer's aim, and of the general aim of the whole 
 book. Our traditional belief in the Bible is at the present 
 time confronted with a body of critical literature which 
 claims to overthrow a great many of the accepted opinions 
 about the Old Testament Scriptures. The criticism is at least 
 grave and important enough to claim attention, to necessitate 
 that we should come to a more or less clear understanding 
 of the relation in which our faith stands towards it. The 
 writer of the essay did not write as a biblical critic but as a 
 theological student and teacher, bound to give a candid con- 
 sideration to a criticism which bears directly upon the sacred 
 books of our religion. His object was not to discuss and 
 determine questions of biblical criticism, but to explain, as 
 it appears to him, the relation which theology is to take up 
 towards them. And he wrote ' in the mind of those who 
 have felt the trouble in the air : ' he wrote to succour a faith 
 distressed by the problems criticism is raising. That faith is 
 very widely distressed by them, and that not merely in 
 academic circles, does not admit of question. Nor did it 
 seem to him to admit of question that the best way to deal 
 with this distress was not to attempt to solve problems, 
 which, because of the immense area over which discussion 
 ranges, do not admit of ready solutions ; but to attempt 
 to state the main conclusions criticism is claiming to have 
 arrived at, as the critics themselves would have us state them ; 
 to show that our Christian faith is not vitally affected by 
 
XVI* Preface to 
 
 them ; and so to divert an anxious mind from problems 
 which it cannot solve, at least at present, and fix it on the 
 central truths of our religion, helping it to feel how, if it be 
 once grounded on these central truths, the issue of the critical 
 discussion can be awaited, with keen interest indeed, but with- 
 out alarm. But this assurance of mind in face of the critical 
 controversy is only possible if we see that the critical positions 
 are in fact compatible with the real inspiration of Holy 
 Scripture. Now the best way to give reassurance on this 
 point seemed to be for the writer to make it plain that he 
 himself felt the great force and appeal of the critical case, 
 and that his conviction that the real Inspiration of the Old 
 Testament was unaffected by it, did not depend upon its being 
 underrated. Had the main purpose of the writer been to help 
 to determine critical positions, he would have been bound 
 to write both at greater length and also with more exact- 
 ness and discrimination. But on the other hand, the purpose 
 of reassurance would have had less chance of being success- 
 fully accomplished — as in some cases we have reason to 
 believe with thankfulness that it has been accomplished or 
 assisted — if the writer had been more reluctant to accept, at 
 least hypothetically, what are claimed as critical results. We 
 all know by experience that freedom and happiness in our 
 attitude as Christians towards problems not easily solved, or 
 even easily brought to crucial tests, are most readily secured 
 if we can feel that our faith is, at the last resort, inde- 
 pendent of the exact solution arrived at. Thus our object 
 was to give to anxious enquirers, of whom there are surely 
 an immense number most deserving of any help which can be 
 given them, a freedom in regard to Old Testament problems 
 as wide as the Catholic faith seemed to warrant. 
 
the Tenth Edition. 
 
 IV. 
 
 We cannot but accept the very general suggestion of our 
 critics that we ought to have attempted a separate treatment 
 of the problem of sin. Some such treatment is now offered 
 in the second appendix, and offered in the form of a re- 
 publication of what has previously seen the light, so that it 
 may be plain that the absence of it from earlier editions 
 was not due to lack of conviction or unwillingness to deal 
 with the subject. The appendix is not in fact more than a 
 drawing out of what is involved in some passages of the essays 
 taken together i. Thus the fifth essay takes up a very clear 
 position as to the practical aspect which sin bears in human 
 life. The fact is emphasized that sin, as our moral con- 
 sciousness knows it and Christianity has successfully dealt 
 with it, is a phenomenon unique in the world: — it is what 
 nothing else is, violation of law. Now this is the essence of 
 the Christian doctrine of sin, as S. John states it : ' Sin is 
 lawlessness^.' Sin and lawlessness are coincident terms. 
 This view of sin is primarily practical ; it may be repre- 
 sented in fact as a postulate required for successfully dealing 
 with sin, a postulate justified and verified by its results. 
 But because it is thus verified and justified, it passes like any 
 other hypothesis which explains facts, in proportion to the 
 range and thoroughness of the experience which tests it, out 
 of the region of mere working hypotheses into that of ac- 
 cepted truths. Thus it is to the Christian consciousness an 
 accepted truth, that sin, all down the long history of hu- 
 manity, has been a violation of the divine order, a refusal of 
 obedience, a corruption of man's true nature. Sin, as such, 
 has always been a source of confusion, not of progress. We 
 
 * See Preface, p. ix. note i. 
 
 ^ Cf. Dr. Westcott's note on i S. John iii. 4, -q anxapTia larXv f] 6.vo\x'ia. 
 
xviii Preface to 
 
 can indeed recognise how the movement and development in 
 humanity has frequently ^ been in fact conditioned by sin ; 
 but we should, still contend that it has never been the sin in 
 itself which has been the spring of force and progress, but 
 the faculties of will and intellect which sin was using. 
 Always the will and intellect would have worked better 
 and more fruitfully in the result if they had been free 
 from the taint of selfishness and rebellion against God. 
 Always sin, as such, has been a lowering and not a raising 
 of human life : a fall and not a rise. Thus sin at the begin- 
 ning of human life must have been not merely the awaken- 
 ing of moral consciousness, but the obscuring and tainting 
 of it by lawlessness and disobedience. Sin, as all down its 
 history, so in its origin, is a fall ; a fall, moreover, entailing 
 consequences on those who come after, in virtue of the in- 
 violable solidarity of the human race. To this view of sin 
 original and actual, Christianity appears to be bound ; and it 
 is a view that, as we have now endeavoured to show ^, brings 
 us into no conflict with scientific discovery. For science 
 never attempts to prove that man might not have developed 
 othei'wise than as in fact he has, or that the actual development 
 has been the best possible : nor has Christianity ever in its best 
 representatives, certainly not in its patristic representatives, 
 been identified with a denial that human history as a whole 
 has been a development upwards from below ^. The Old 
 Testament is in fact among ancient literatures, the literature 
 of development, of progress ■*. 
 
 • Cf. F. Lenormant, ies Orkjhies de * Cf. F. Lenormant, Les Origines, 
 Vhistoire. Paris, 1880, t. i, p. 191. t. i, pp. 63-66. It is a pleasure to refer 
 ' C'est dans la race de Qain que la to this work by a distinguished 
 Bible place I'invention des arts et des Catholic and man of learning. The 
 metiers. " Les fils du sifecle sont plus Preface is an admirable discussion of 
 habiles que les enfants de lumifere." ' the relation of scientific enquiry to 
 
 * Cf. p. 534. belief in Inspiration. 
 ' Cf. p. 535, note I. 
 
the Tenth Edition, xix 
 
 V. 
 
 The criticisms on our treatment of Inspiration have been so 
 abundant, and have gone into such detail, that it will be 
 obvious that any attempt to reply to them must be a more 
 individual effort than the attempt to reply to the criticisms 
 on the general aim and spirit of the book. For while the 
 writers in this volume are at one as to the general attitude 
 which they would wish the Church to assume towards the 
 critical treatment of the Old Testament, as they are at one in 
 the general line of treatment adopted throughout this volume, 
 they cannot pretend to be at one on all the details of a 
 complicated subject. The writer of the particular essay alone 
 can be responsible for these : and with reference to them he 
 must be understood to speak simply in his own person. 
 
 I. The passage about Inspiration was written under the con- 
 viction that recent criticism of the Old Testament represents 
 a real advance in analytical method as applied to Kterature, 
 and thus a most serious movement of thought. As such it has 
 been estimated by the Bishop of Oxford in his recent Charge. 
 He says, ' The Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament are now 
 going through a process of analytical criticism which has, as 
 we believe, had no parallel, for acuteness of investigation, 
 carefulness of method, and completeness of apparatus, since the 
 days in which they began to be regarded as a code of in- 
 spired literature, and certainly not since the days of our 
 blessed Lord's life on earth ; at which period we understand 
 that to all intents and purposes the books which we receive, 
 as the Canonical Old Testament Scriptures, had taken their 
 existing form i.' But like the scientific movement of our time, 
 the critical movement has been accompanied by all the arbitra- 
 riness and tendency to push things to extremes which appears 
 
 * Oxford Diocesan Gazette, July, 1S90 (Parker, Oxford), p. 91. 
 
 b 2, 
 
XX Preface to 
 
 to be an almost inseparable attendant upon living and vigorous 
 movements, ecclesiastical and secular. Further than this, its 
 representatives have been — and here again the conditions of 
 the scientific movement are reproduced — very frequently men 
 personally opposed to the Christian faith, and even thoroughly 
 rationalistic in temper and tone. But it does not follow in 
 the case of criticism, any more than in the case of science, 
 that we are not to learn a great deal from a movement charac- 
 terized even predominantly by ' extremeness ' and unbelief. 
 And in fact, in the past fifty years there appears to have been 
 a solid critical advance, underneath a great deal of contro- 
 versial arbitrariness and irreligious insolence. Now I thought 
 that I should best serve the purpose with which I was writing, 
 if I went as far as I could in ungrudging recognition of the 
 claims of criticism, and involved myself as little as possible 
 in doubtful discussions ; but I did also intend to express, and 
 believed myself to have expressed with sufiicient clearness ^, 
 my own conviction that it was with the more conservative 
 among the recent critics, and not with the more extreme, that 
 the victory would lie. Thus when I said, in a sentence which 
 has been specially criticized (partly because its wording was 
 somewhat ambiguous), that criticism is reaching 'results as 
 sure as scientific enquiry,' what I intended so to characterize 
 was not the extreme conclusions of Wellhausen, but substan- 
 tially the conclusions shared in common by Wellhausen and 
 Dillmann, by critics theologically more conservative, like 
 Konig and Riehm, by Delitzsch in his last position, by the 
 French Catholic orientalist, F. Lenormant, as well as by an 
 increasing body of English scholars 2. Nor is there a single 
 
 1 The summary statements on pp. "^ See Ed. Riehm, Einleitung in das 
 
 351-2 as to the historical character A. T. (Halle, 1889), §§ 15-18, 24, 27. 
 
 of the Old Testament represent, l' F.H. Konig, Offenbarungsbegr iff des A. T. 
 
 believe, a ' conservative' attitude, an (Leipzig, 1882), t. 11, pp. 321 ff. Cf. 
 
 attitude towards the history very also Hauptprohlcme der AUisr.-Religions- 
 
 unlike that, for instance, of Well- gesdi. (Leipzig, 1884). F. Delitzsch, 
 
 hausen. Genesis, Clark's trans. (Edinb., 1888), 
 
the Tenth Edition. 
 
 XXI 
 
 line of what I wrote which would be affected, so far as I see, 
 even if Professor Margoliouth were satisfactorily to make out 
 his case for throwing back the period of the 'Middle Hebrew^.' 
 As to the grounds on which we have been asked to date the bulk 
 of the Psalms below the Captivity, and even in the Maccabean 
 period, they may appear indeed quite unconvincing ; but it 
 would have been utterly beside my purpose, as it would also 
 have been out of my power, to give them adequate discussion-, 
 nor would it seem as if even so improbably late a date as 
 that suggested would really affect their Messianic or spiiitual 
 character. Let us affirm then without any hesitation that 
 there is a good deal of arbitrariness and extremeness in 
 current criticism as applied to the Old Testament. But surely 
 we should be the victims of a dangerous delusion if we were to 
 imagine that because there is a good deal that is unsubstantial 
 in recent criticism, therefore there is no substantial force in 
 what really represents the successive labours of many 
 generations of students. I do not think that we can conceal 
 
 i. 19-38. F. Lenormant, Les Origines, English or German. For a review 
 
 Preface. I venture to think that by a veiy comi^etent critic, see Prof, 
 
 those who want to study the modern Noldeke in the Lit. Centmlblatf, July 
 
 criticism of the Old Testament would 12, 1890. 
 
 be less likely to be prejudiced against ^ I may say that the motive for 
 
 it if they were to begin their study what is said about Ps. ex on p. 359 
 
 with the assistance of Riehm and was simply the conviction that our 
 
 Konig, rather than of more rational- Lord in the passage there in question 
 
 istic scholars. I ought to add that cannot fairly be taken as giving in- 
 
 while the scholars mentioned above stniction on a critical question of 
 
 agree substantially as to the analysis authorship, not the difficulty of as- 
 
 of the Pentateuch, they differ as to signing the particular Psalm to the 
 
 the position assigned to the Priestly age of David. The solution which I 
 
 Code, which Dillmann and Riehm propose, p. 359, as to our Lord's words 
 
 hold to be prior to Deuteronomy, is however only one of several which 
 
 Wellhausen, Konig and Delitzsch are possible even for those who agree 
 
 subsequent to it. with me in the conviction expressed 
 
 ^ Essay on the place of JEcclesiasticus in above. See, for instance, Edersheim, 
 
 Semitic Literature. Oxford : Clarendon Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah 
 
 Press, 1890, pp. 20, 21. I allude to this (London, 1884), ii. p. 406, and Bp. 
 
 essay because it has excited consider- Thirlwall as quoted in Dean Perowne's 
 
 able interest, but it has not received Commentanj on the Psalms (London 
 
 favourable notice from critics either 1871), ii. pp. 302 ff. 
 
xxii Preface to 
 
 from ourselves that if we are to defend a purely conserva- 
 tive attitude in regard to Old Testament literature, we 
 shall require quite different canons of evidence from those 
 which we are able so successfully to use in vindicating the 
 historical character of the New Testament : or again, in vindi- 
 cating the claims of the apostolic ministry and the sacramental 
 system to be part of the original fabric of the Christian 
 Church. In other words, the critical principles of historical 
 enquiry which do so amply justify us in retaining substan- 
 tially the traditional position in regard as well to the New 
 Testament documents as to our Church principles, do not carry 
 us to the same point in the field of the Old Testament. No 
 doubt there the vastness of the field is a permanent obstacle to 
 uniformly certain results. A great deal must remain, and 
 probably for ever, more or less an open question. But this 
 necessary uncertainty, if it imposes on critics an obligation of 
 caution, imposes also on us churchmen an obligation of reserve 
 in dogmatic requirement. We do not wish to run the risk of 
 making a claim on men's minds for the acceptance of positions 
 for which we have only this to urge, that they cannot be abso- 
 lutely disproved. 
 
 2. The changed view of the development of Old Testament 
 literature, such as can be truly said to be proposed for our 
 acceptance by modern critics with a great deal of unanimity, if 
 it he granted for the monient that it is coinpatlhle with the real 
 inspiration of the books, involves no important change in our 
 spiritual use of the Old Testament ; in the use of it for the 
 purposes of ' faith and morals.' This latter use of Scripture 
 depends simply on our rightly interpreting the meaning of the 
 books as they exist. 
 
 There is a great principle enunciated by S. Augustine in 
 regard to the Old Testament which requires to be kept 
 constantly in view. It is that as the Old Testament is 
 manifested in the New, so the New Testament is latent in 
 
the Tenth Edition. xxiii 
 
 the Old^. In order to recognize this there is no discussion 
 necessary of the method by which our 'Old Testament' 
 received its present shape. The evidence of it lies in the Old 
 Testament considered as a finished product. As such, we 
 cannot study that ' divine library ' without being struck both 
 by its unity, so far greater than belongs to any other 
 literature ^, and by the fact that like no other literature it 
 looks forward to an end not yet attained, a divine event in 
 which is to be its justification and its interpretation. The 
 Old Testament demands the New to bring out its true mean- 
 ing : the New appeals back to the Old to bear witness to the 
 continuity of the divine purpose of which it is the outcome. It 
 is from this point of view that we understand the appeal which, 
 in the New Testament, is so constantly made to the older 
 Scriptures. Whether they are appealed to, as in the Sermon 
 on the Mount, as containing the record of a moral education, 
 divine though imperfect, which the Christ was to complete ^ ; 
 or as by St. Paul, as the record of a preparatory and temporary 
 discipline by means of external enactments of God, calculated 
 to awaken the dull conscience of men to the realit}^ and 
 holiness of the divine will, and so to make men conscious of 
 sin against God, and ready to welcome the dispensation of 
 pardon and grace ^ ; or, as in the Epistle to the Hebrews, as a 
 system of ritual and ceremonial observances, in which were 
 
 • S.Augustine, Qimst. 73 in Exod. : ex^i]: it is ' from above ' [from the top, 
 
 ' Quamquam et in vetere [Testamento] A.V.] because it is inspired; it is 
 
 novum lateat, et in novo vetus pateat.' 'woven throughout,' because in its 
 
 Quoted by Dr. Liddon, The worth of the whole force it is from above.' 
 
 Old Testament, -p. 28. ^ S. Matt. v. 17-48, cf. xix. 8: 
 
 ^ Cf. Didymus in Psalm, xxi. 19, 'Moses, because of the hardness of 
 
 where he interprets Christ's * seamless your hearts,' etc. 
 
 robe,' of the Holy Scriptures which * After S. Paul, S. Augustine is 
 
 they ' part ' who accept one and reject the great exponent of this principle 
 
 another. ' This robe of Jesus is also in early days ; see esp. de spiritu et 
 
 indivisible, for it is seamless. Its littera, xix. (34) : Lex ergo data est ut 
 
 unity is not enforced but natural gratia quaereretur : gratia data est ut 
 
 \oi fap ^i^iaa fiivrjv ivwaiv dWd avfxcpv^ lex impleretur. 
 
xxiv Preface to 
 
 shadowed forth by the inspiring Spirit ^ the deep truths of the 
 still-needed sacrifice, and the access to God not yet won for 
 man ; or finally, as by almost all the New Testament writers, 
 as a prophetic dispensation in which the Messianic hope 
 found gradual expression in fuller and exacter lineaments, and 
 produced an anticipation which Christ only could satisfy ^ :-^ 
 from any of these points of view, or from all taken together, 
 we are concerned only with the Old Testament as it finally 
 appears, not with the method by which it came into being. 
 It cannot be too strongly emphasized that when we seek re- 
 assurance in regard to the inspiration of those books of the 
 Old Testament, to which our Lord and His Church refer us, 
 we find it primarily in the substance of the books as they are 
 given to us, not in any considerations of the manner in which 
 they came into existence ^. 
 
 And if this is so, it needs to be borne in mind that the re- 
 sponsibility for bringing it home to the consciences of men, 
 the responsibility for thus preventing that breach in religious 
 continuity which the change in critical and literary concep- 
 tions of the Old Testament might otherwise occasion, lies in 
 a preeminent degree upon those of us who are most impressed 
 with the valid elements of the recent criticism. It belongs to 
 us to see to it that, so far as lies with us, the Bible shall not 
 be less prized by the generations that are coming, as the divine, 
 the inspii'ed volume, than it has been by the generations 
 
 ^ See esp. Heb. ix. 8, 'The Holy wards the more we bestow our labour 
 
 Spirit this signifying ; ' and cf. Dr. in reading or hearing the mysteries 
 
 Westcott on this Epistle, pp. 233 flf. thereof, the more we find that the 
 
 ^ I would venture to recommend thing itself doth answer our received 
 
 Eiehm's Messianic Prophecy (Clark's opinion concerning it.' Later again, 
 
 trans.), as a summary account of as against ' infidels or atheists,' we 
 
 prophecy both reverent and critical. must ' maintain the authority of the 
 
 ^ Of. Hooker's account of our books of God ... by such kind of 
 
 grounds for believing that ' Scripture proofs . . . that no man living shall 
 
 ... is divine and sacred.' ' By ex- be able to deny it, without denying 
 
 perience,' he says, ' we all know, that some apparent principle such as all 
 
 the first outward ntiotive leading men men acknowledge to be true.' E. P. 
 
 so to esteem of the Scripture is the III. viii. 14. 
 authority of God's Church. . . , After- 
 
the Tenth Edition. xxv 
 
 that are gone. It belongs to us to attend to the double 
 admonition of the Be Iriiitatione : ' Every scripture must be 
 read in the same spirit in which it was written : ' and ' Do 
 not enquire who said this, but pay heed to what is said.' 
 
 3. There is one appeal which the New Testament makes to 
 the Old which was not aUuded to above, as it does not in fact 
 fall naturally under S, Augustine's principle of the New 
 Testament lying hid in the Old — namely the appeal to it as 
 to a historical record of God's actual dealings with His people : 
 a record of things which actually ' happened unto them for en- 
 samples, and are written for our admonition.' But this appeal 
 again would not be invalidated unless it were shown — not 
 merely that there is an ideal element mixed with the history 
 in the Old Testament record, but — that the element which is 
 not mere narrative of events as they happened, the element of 
 idealism, reaches to the point of obscuring the real significance 
 of the facts and distorting their divine meaning. Whereas the 
 truth is that the ideal element in the narrative comes from 
 the real divine meaning in the facts being brought into em- 
 phatic prominence rather than overlooked; and we may 
 depend upon it that no results of criticism have tended to 
 weaken our belief that the chroniclers of Israel's history, 
 whether prophetic or priestly, were inspired to see its true 
 meaning and tendency, and from their different points of view 
 to bring it out in its completeness. And it is important to 
 remember in this connection that the Jewish idea of ' history ' 
 was never our modern critical idea of a mere record. They 
 ranked their history from Joshua to the books of Kings under 
 the head of ' prophecy,' and intimate to us by this very 
 classification that they see in the historian one who not only 
 records but interprets facts ^. 
 
 ' The Chronicles and the later his- Moralists, 
 torical books, as is well known, were The truth of this paragraph de- 
 included in the third class of ' Hagio- pends upon (i) the character, (2) 
 grapha' with the Psalmists and the extent of the idealism of Old 
 
xxvi Preface to 
 
 4. The changed view of the Old Testament books which 
 modern criticism asks of us, concerns, then, not so much their 
 contents, as the circumstances of their composition and the 
 method by which they reached their present form. When we 
 pass to this latter class of considerations we are prepared for 
 any information which criticism or tradition can give us, while 
 at the same time our indestructible conviction, fortified by the 
 strongest internal testimony of the books, that here is the 
 Holy Spirit's work, gives us an antecedent expectation that 
 the mode of composition in the case of each book will be such 
 as God in His condescension can have sanctioned and used. 
 God, I say, in His condescension — because undoubtedly the 
 whole Old Testament does represent a condescension of God 
 to a low stage of human development. Here then we need 
 the recognition of a second great principle which S. Augustine 
 lays down, viz. that ' as wrong is done to the Old Testament 
 if it be denied to come from the just and good God, so 
 wrong is done to the New if it be put on a level with the 
 Old \' 
 
 For all the reality of its inspiration the Old Testament is on 
 a lower level than the New. Thus it is now almost univer- 
 sally recognised that God in the Old Testament is seen 
 appealing to the human conscience at a low stage of its develop- 
 ment, tolerating what was not according to His original will 
 or His ultimate purpose 2, as in the case of divorce, and even. 
 
 Testament facts. On this something exist and really represent the divine 
 
 more is said later on. Here I am purpose. 
 
 only concerned to distinguish an ^ De GesfePeto^. v. (15), 'Sicut veteri 
 
 idealism which truly interprets facts, Testamento si esse ex Deo bono et 
 
 even if it throws their spiritual mean- summo negetur, ita et novo fit injuria 
 
 ing into high relief, from a merely si veteri aequetur.' S. Augustine 
 
 imaginative treatment which perverts does not perhaps carry out the recog- 
 
 and distorts them. Thusif theChroni- nition of this principle as fully as 
 
 cler idealizes, it is by emphasizing, some other of the Fathers : for refs. 
 
 beyond the point of actual fact, the see pp. 229 ff. 
 
 priestly element in the history which * S. Matt. xix. 8. 
 at the same time did both really 
 
the Tenth Edition. xxvii 
 
 as in the case of Abraham's sacrifice, appealing to men to do 
 things which in a more fully developed state of the con- 
 science could not be even conceived of as commanded by God, 
 in order that through their very obedience to the appeal they 
 might be led higher into the knowledge of what God could, 
 and could not, enjoin. How fully this principle in God's 
 dealings was recognised and justified by the early Christian 
 authorities has been already brought out in this volume ^. 
 
 Again, the same method of condescending to what was 
 not in itself perfect, but was susceptible of a gi^adual educa- 
 tion, appears in the institutions of the Old Testament law of 
 worship. Modern enquirers are pressing upon us the fact 
 that the ritual law of Israel is closely akin to the common 
 ritual customs of Semite races. 'What I may call the 
 natural basis of Israel's worship,' says Prof Robertson Smith, 
 ' was very closely akin to that of the neighbouring cults -.' 
 The peculiarity of Israel's religion lay in fact not in the 
 ritual itself, but in the moral and theological turn given to 
 the ritual. According to this view God in the law appears 
 as diverting to good uses, by an act of condescension, ritual 
 customs which it would have been premature to abolish. 
 Such a view of the ritual is somewhat strange to the ears of 
 modern Churchmen, but it was undoubtedly the prevalent 
 view of the law among the great writers of Christian 
 antiquity. References to illustrate this have been given 
 in the eighth essay ^. 
 
 But I may add to the passages there referred to another 
 of very striking force. S. Chrysostom is explaining why 
 God should have appealed to the astrological notions of the 
 wise men and led them by no other leading than that of a 
 star. It is because ' in exceeding condescension He calls 
 
 1 See pp. 329 ff. added is from S. Chiysost. in Matt. 
 
 2 Religion oftfie Semites. Ediiiburgh, vi. 3. The same idea is discerned by 
 1889, p. 4. Bp. Lightfoot in S. Paul ; see on 
 
 ^ p. 329, note 2. The passage here Gal. iv. 11. 
 
xxviii Preface to 
 
 them through what is familiar ... In imitation of this Paul 
 too reasons with the Greeks from an altar, and adduces tes- 
 timony from the poets, while he harangues the Jews with 
 circumcision, and makes from the sacrifices a beginning of 
 instruction for those who are living under the law. For since 
 to every one familiar things are dear, therefore both God 
 Himself and the men who were sent from God, with a view 
 to the salvation of the world, manage things on this principle. 
 Think it not then unworthy of Him to have called them by 
 a star ; for by the same rule thou wilt find fault with all the 
 Jewish rites also — both the sacrifices and the purifications 
 and the new moons, and the ark, and the temple itself. For 
 all these things had their origin from Gentile grossness. Yet 
 God, on account of the salvation of those in error, endured to 
 be worshipped by means of the very things through which those 
 outside were worshipping demons, only giving them a slight 
 alteration, that little by little he might draw them away 
 from their customs and lead them up to the high philosophy.' 
 Now if we recognize that God in the Old Testament can 
 condescend for the purposes of His revelation to a low stage of 
 conscience, and a low stage of worship, what possible ground 
 have we for denying that He can use for purposes of His 
 inspiration literary methods also which belong to a rude and 
 undeveloped state of intelligence ? If He can ' inspire ' with 
 true teaching the native Semite customs of ritual, why can 
 He not do the same with their traditions of old time ? How 
 can we reasonably deny that the earlier portions of Genesis 
 may contain the simple record of primitive prehistoric tra- 
 dition of the Semites^, moulded and used by the Holy Spirit, as 
 
 ' I use the word ' myth ' for those is used. On Strauss's application 
 
 primitive stories on p. 356. Tlie of the myth theory to the Gospel 
 
 legitimacy of this use may be dis- narratives, I should quite assent to 
 
 puted, see e. g. Riehm, Eiiileitnng, p. the remarks of Dr. Mill, Mythical In- 
 
 342. But I endeavour to explain terpretation of the Gospels (^Cambridge, 
 
 exactly the sense in which the word 1861), pp. 97, 98. 
 
the Tenth Edition. xxix 
 
 on all showing the record manifestly has been moulded and 
 used, to convey the fundamental principles of all true religion % 
 Or again, granted that, on the 'dramatic' hypothesis, Deu- 
 teronomy written not by Moses, but in Moses' name, to in- 
 corporate the Mosaic tradition, represents a literary method 
 greatly inferior, in sense of exactitude, to the method of per- 
 sonal testimony as we have it in S. John^, or of careful in- 
 vestigation and use of original testimony, as we have it in 
 S. Luke ^ ; granted this — how can we, in view of the manifest 
 facts of God's condescension, find ourselves in a position to 
 deny that He can have used such a method as a vehicle of 
 His inspiration ^ ? There is, it must be emphasized, no critical 
 reason why we should assign the composition of any book of 
 the Old Testament to the motive of fraud. No doubt hostile 
 critics have sometimes suggested, for example, that the ' dis- 
 covery ' of the book of the law in the Temple in the days of 
 Josiah was a 'got up' proceeding, the book having really 
 been written and hidden at the very time in order to be 
 ' discovered ' ; but there is no positive evidence at all to sup- 
 port such a view, while all the evidence is satisfied by the 
 hypothesis that an earlier prophet, some hundred years pre- 
 viously'^, working upon an actual and possibly written tra- 
 dition of Moses' last speech, had cast this tradition into the 
 dramatic form and promulgated, as from Moses' lips, the law 
 which he knew to represent ultimately Moses' authority or 
 the authority of God in Moses. That such a method should 
 have been adopted surprises us surely no more than that 
 
 1 S. John i. 14, xix. 35, xxi. 24 ; 1 on S. Jude's Epistle in the Introduc- 
 
 S. John i. 1-3. tion to the New Testament. 
 
 ^ S. Luke i. 1-4. * Cf. Riehm, Einleitung, i. p. 246 : 
 
 ^ I would call attention in this con- ' Das Gesetzbuch kann nicht erst unter 
 
 nection to Dr. Salmon's remarks on Josia geschrieben sein, sondern es 
 
 S. Jude's use, even in the New Tes- muss spatestens zur Zeit des Hiskia 
 
 tament canon, of the traditions con- entstanden sein, und zwar bevor 
 
 tained in the Assumjition of Moses, dieser Konig seine Eeformation ganz 
 
 and his quotation of the book of durchgefiihrt hatte.' 
 Enoch : see at the end of his lecture 
 
XXX Preface to 
 
 Hosea should have been led to use such extraordinary means, 
 as he seems in fact to have been enjoined to use, of revealing 
 God's mind of love towards His people. It involves no inten- 
 tion to deceive, and the discovery of this ' book of the law,' 
 lost in the careless period which intervened, was a genuine 
 discovery unattended by any element of fraud. 
 
 Once again, if the book of Chronicles contains not pure 
 history but the priestly view of the history, granted that 
 this priestly point of view was morally part of the divinely 
 intended education of the chosen people, even though its 
 intellectual method was as imperfect as ordinarily is the case 
 with the treatment of traditions in ' schools ' or religious 
 orders, in nations or churches or families, is there any a 2^viori 
 reason why God, who used so much that was imperfect, should 
 not have inspired the record of this tradition? Here again 
 we must emphasize that all that criticism requires of us is to 
 recognise in the book of Chronicles the record of the history 
 as it became coloured in the priestly schools ; there is nothing 
 here of a morally unworthy sort from the point of view of 
 the contemporary conscience, but only the same features as 
 are noticeable in the record of tradition all the world over ^. 
 Fraudulent dealing, forgery in literature, always involves the 
 conscious and deliberate use of methods calculated to impose 
 on others, methods other than those sanctioned by the literary 
 conscience of the time ^. 
 
 No doubt a particular writer, like Wellhausen, may make a 
 bias hostile to the supernatural apparent in his use of the 
 
 1 A common feature in all tradi- tradition what is authoritative tends 
 tions is what Wellhausen describes to be represented as what always has 
 as the main characteristic of the been authoritative. 
 Chronicler, ' the timeless manner of ^ Thus the Pseudo-Isidorian De- 
 looking at things which is natural to cretals are properly called forgeries ; 
 him.' He ' figures the old Hebrew and the evidence of this would lie in 
 people as in exact conformity with the fact that the author could not 
 the pattern of the later Jewish com- have afforded to disclose the method 
 munity.' Proleg. to Hist, of Israel and circumstances of their produc- 
 (Edinbm-gh, 1885), pp. 190-193. In tion. 
 
the Tenth Edition, xxxi 
 
 critical method, and may give in consequence an antitheo- 
 logical turn to his reconstruction of history ; just as many a 
 scientific writer has done with scientific facts and scientific 
 method. In view of this we must ' try the spirits ' and not 
 attribute too much force to the point of view of a particular 
 individual. But this will not be at all the same thing as 
 rejecting the modern method of criticism or repudiating those 
 results which are certainly accepted by many critics who are 
 as far as possible from rejecting the supernatural^. 
 
 5. No serious attempt has, I think, been made to show that 
 the view of the development of the Old Testament literature 
 which the modern critical schools, with great unanimity, 
 demand of us, is contrary to any determination of Church 
 authority. By this it is not meant that the theology of the 
 Church suggests this view: it is not the function of the 
 Church to advance literary knowledge, except indirectly ; 
 and thus the Church has not had the power to anticipate 
 the critical, any more than it had to anticipate the scientific 
 movement. The advance of knowledge comes in all depart- 
 ments through the natural processes of intellectual enquiry. It 
 is only now, in fact, that the critical problem is before the 
 Church ; but now that it is before the Church it does not seem 
 that the Church ought to have any more difficulty in wel- 
 coming it and assimilating it, than it has had in welcoming 
 and assimilating the legitimate claims of science. 
 
 With reference to the bearing of Church authority on the 
 present discussion, there are three points which I should wish 
 to urs'e. First, that the undivided Church never took action 
 
 1 Thus Eiehm, whose position is the Pentateuch makes. Anyone who 
 
 described above on p. xx, has a noble reads it, so as to allow its contents 
 
 section (Einleit. pp. 349 if.) on the to work upon his spirit, must receive 
 
 Pentateuch considered as the record the impression that a consciousness 
 
 of a Revelation. The conviction of the of God, such as is here expressed, 
 
 revelation of God is ascribed in part cannot be derived from flesh and 
 
 to ' the immediate impression which blood.' 
 
xxxii Preface to 
 
 on the matter, in spite of an extravagant tendency to alle- 
 gorism in Origen and those who were influenced by him. 
 
 Secondly, that as a result of this the patristic theology 
 leaves a wide opening at least for what we may call the 
 modern way of regarding the opening chapters of Genesis. 
 Thus a Latin writer, of the fifth or sixth century, who gives 
 an interesting summary of the Catholic faith, and is clearly 
 nothing else but a recorder of accepted beliefs, after speaking 
 of the origin and fall of man and woman, continues thus: 
 ' These things are known through God's revelation to His 
 servant Moses, whom He willed to be aware of the state and 
 origin of man, as the books which he produced testify. For all 
 the divine authority (i. e. the scriptural revelation) appears to 
 exist under such a mode as is either the mode of history 
 which narrates only what happened, or the mode of allegory 
 in such sense that it cannot represent the course of history, 
 or a mode made up of these two so as to remain both his- 
 torical and allegorical ^' A great deal more in the same 
 sense as this might be produced. 
 
 Thirdly, it must be urged that since the division of Chris- 
 tendom no part of the Church appears really to have tightened 
 the bond of dogmatic obligation. Our own formularies are of 
 course markedly free from definition on the subject, and the 
 refusal of the Eoman Church to define the scope of inspira- 
 tion, beyond the region of faith and morals, has been remark- 
 able 2. 
 
 6. But does the authority of our Lord bind us to repudiate, 
 in loyalty to Him, the modern views of the origin of the Old 
 Testament books? On this subject I wish to express my 
 
 * De fide Catlwlka. The treatise is of Cassiodorus, 'London, 1 886, jip. 80-1. 
 ascribed to Boethius : see Boetii, ^ See the account in Manning's 
 
 OpwscMto Sacra (Teubner Series), p. 178. Temporal Mission of the HoJij Ghost, 
 
 On the fresh evidence of the author- London, 1S77, pp. 156-160, and p. 
 
 ship of those treatises supplied by the 166. Cf. also Newman's words below, 
 
 AnecdOion Holderi, see Hodgkin's Letters p. 350. 
 
the Tenth Edition. xxxiii 
 
 sincere regret that I should have written so briefly in my essay 
 as to lay myself open to be misunderstood to suggest our 
 Lord's fallibility as a teacher, I trust that the passage, as it 
 has stood since the fourth edition ^, will be at least recognised 
 as plain in its meaning and theologically innocent. I must 
 ask leave to defer to another occasion the fuller discussion of 
 this important subject in connection with the doctrine of the 
 Person of Christ. Meanwhile I would suggest that the longer 
 one thinks of it the more apparent it will become that amj 
 hypothesis as to the origin of any one book of the Old Testa- 
 ment, which is consistent with a belief in its inspired ion, must be 
 consistent also with our Lord having given it His authorisation. 
 If His Spirit could inspire it, He, in that Spirit, could give it 
 His recognition — His recognition, that is to say, in regard to 
 its spiritual function and character. Thus as we scan care- 
 fully our Lord's use of the Old Testament books, we are 
 surely struck with the fact that nothing ^ in His use of them 
 depends on questions of authorship or date ; He appeals to 
 them in that spiritual aspect which abides through all changes 
 of literary theory — their testimony to the Christ : ' Search 
 the Scriptures ... they are they which testify of Me.' He 
 would thus lead men to ask about each book of the Old 
 Testament simply the question, — What is the element of 
 teaching preparatory to the Incarnation, what is the tes- 
 timony to Christ, which it supplies ? I do not see how with 
 due regard to the self-limitation which all use of human forms 
 of thought and speech must on all showing have involved to 
 
 ^ PP- 359~6o. lead the Pharisees to examine their 
 
 ^ Nothing — except, on the custom- own principles. Unless it be so in- 
 
 aiy interpretation, His reference to terpreted it does seem to depend, as 
 
 Psalm ex. This does seem to lay an argument, on personal authorship, 
 
 stress on David's authorship, unless because unless it be by David, it seems 
 
 it be regarded, as it certainly seems very difficult to suppose it written in 
 
 to me fair to regard it, as a question, David's person. It would naturally 
 
 rather than as positive instruction at be a Psalm in which the King is 
 
 all — a question simply calculated to addressed. 
 
 t C 
 
xxxiv Preface to 
 
 the Eternal Son, it can be a difficulty in the way of accepting 
 the modern hypothesis, that our Lord referred to the inspired 
 books under the only name by which His reference would have 
 been intelhgible to His hearers. Unless He had violated the 
 whole principle of the Incarnation, by anticipating the slow 
 development of natural knowledge, He must have spoken of 
 the Deuteronomist as ' Moses ^,' as naturally as He spoke of 
 the sun 'rising.' Nor does there seem in fact any greater 
 difficulty in His speaking of one who wrote ' in the spirit and 
 power ' of Moses as Moses, than in His speaking of one who, 
 according to the prophecy, came ' in the spirit and power of 
 Elias ' as himself, Elias. ' If ye will receive it, this is Elias.' 
 ' Elias is already come ^/ 
 
 Once more: if the Holy Spirit could use the tradition of 
 the flood to teach men about divine judgments, then our Lord 
 in the same Spirit can refer to the flood, for the same 
 purpose. It has however been recently denied that this 
 can be so, unless the tradition accurately represents history. 
 ' I venture to ask,' Professor Huxley writes^, ' what sort of 
 value as an illustration of God's method of dealing with sin 
 has an account of an event that never happened ? ' I should 
 like to meet this question by asking another. Has the story 
 of the rich man and Lazarus any value as an illustration of 
 God's method of dealing with men? Undoubtedly it has. 
 Now what sort of narrative is this ? Not a narrative of 
 events that actually happened, in the sense that there was a 
 particular beggar to whom our Lord was referring. The 
 narrative is a representative narrative ^, a narrative of what is 
 
 ^ S. John V. 46-47. with a single point. 
 
 ^ S. Luke 1. 17; S. Matt. xi. 14; * The proper name 'Lazarus' is 
 
 xvii. 12. presumably used because of its mean- 
 
 3 Nineteenth Century, July, 1890, p. 20. ing. It should be noticed that the 
 
 The bulk of his argument is directed story is not a parable proper like that 
 
 against a position different from of the Sower or the Prodigal Son. 
 mine. Here I am only concerned 
 
the Tenth Edition. xxxv 
 
 constantly occurring under the form of a particular typical 
 incident. Now the narrative of the flood belongs to a quite 
 different class of literature, inasmuch as it is not due to any 
 deliberate action of imagination ; but it resembles our Lord's 
 story at least in being representative. It is no doubt based 
 on fact. The traditions of the flood in all races must run 
 back to a real occurrence. But the actual occurrence cannot 
 be exactly estimated. What we have in Genesis is a tradi- 
 tion used as a vehicle for spiritual teaching. As the story 
 is told it becomes, like that of Dives and Lazarus, a typical 
 narrative of what is again and again happening. Again and 
 again, as in the destruction of Jerusalem, or in the French 
 Revolution, God's judgments come on men for their sin : 
 again and again teachei's of righteousness are sent to warn 
 of coming judgment and are ridiculed by a world which 
 goes on buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage, 
 till the flood of God's judgment breaks out and overwhelms 
 them. Again and again, through these great judgments there 
 emerges a remnant, a faithful stock, to be the fountain head 
 of a new and fresh development. The narrative of the flood 
 is a representative narrative, and our Lord, who used the 
 story of Dives and Lazarus, can use this too ^ 
 
 VI. 
 
 Professor Huxley's article alluded to just now is a somewhat 
 melancholy example of a mode of reasoning which one had 
 hoped had vanished from ' educated circles ' for ever — that 
 namely which regards Christianity as a ' religion of a book ' 
 
 ^ It may be remarked that to regard there is every reason why ' the Gospel 
 
 ' the flood ' as a representative or should have been preached to those 
 
 typical expression of a whole class of who died ' under God's physical 
 
 divine judgments, helps us in inter- judgments of old times, supposing 
 
 preting S. Peter's use of it in i Peter these, as we must suppose them, not to 
 
 iii. 19-20. There is no reason for an represent God's final moral judgment 
 
 exceptional treatment of those who on individuals : see i Peter iv. 6. 
 perished in one particular flood, but 
 
 C 2 
 
xxxvi Preface to 
 
 in such sense that it is supposed to propose for men's accept- 
 ance a volume to be received in all its parts as on the same 
 level, and in the same sense, Divine. On the contrary, 
 Christianity is a religion of a Person. It propounds for our 
 acceptance Jesus Christ, as the revealer of the Father. The 
 test question of the Church to her catechumens has never 
 been: ' Dost thou believe the Bible?' but 'Dost thou believe 
 that Jesus Christ is the Son of God %' If we do believe that, 
 then we shall further believe in the Bible : in the Old 
 Testament as recording how God prepared the way for 
 Christ : in the New Testament as recording how Christ lived 
 and taught, and containing the witness borne to Him by 
 His earthly friends and ministers. The Bible thus ' ought 
 to be viewed as not a revelation itself, but a record of the 
 proclaiming and receiving of a revelation, by a body which 
 is still existent, and which propounds the revelation to us, 
 namely the body of Christians commonly called the Church ^' 
 The Bible is the record of the proclamation of the revelation, 
 not the revelation itself. The revelation is in the Person of 
 Christ, and the whole stress therefore of evidential enquiry 
 should be laid upon the central question whether the Divine 
 claim made for Jesus Christ by the Church is historically 
 justified. The whole evidential battle of Christianity must 
 thus be fought out on the field of the New Testament, not of 
 the Old. If Christ be God, the Son of God, incarnate, as 
 the Creeds assert, Christianity is true. No one in that case 
 will find any permanent difficulty in seeing that in a most 
 real sense the Bible, containing both Old and New Testaments, 
 is an ' inspired volume.' 
 
 Now faith in the Godhead of our Lord is very far from being 
 
 1 These words are Bishop Steere's : It is (i) a criterion, not a teacher ; 
 
 see the Memoir of him by R. M. (2) a record of the proclamation of 
 
 Heanley, London, 1888, p. 404. He the revelation, not the revelation 
 
 admirably characterizes the time itself, 
 function of the Bible in the Church. 
 
the Tenth Edition. xxxvii 
 
 a mere matter of ' evidences.' On this enough is said by 
 more than one writer in this volume ^. But so far as ' historical 
 evidences' go, we have them in our generation in quite fresh 
 force and power. For our New Testament documents have 
 passed through a critical sifting and analysis of the most 
 trenchant and thorough sort in the fifty years that lie behind 
 us. From such sifting we are learning much about the 
 process through which they took their present shape. But in 
 all that is material we feel that this critical investigation has 
 only reassured us in asserting the historical truth of the 
 records on which our Christian faith rests. This reassurance 
 has been both as to the substance, and as to the quality of the 
 original apostolic testimony to Christ. As to its substance, 
 because the critical investigation justifies us in the confident 
 assertion — more confident as the investigation has been more 
 thorough than ever before — that the Christ of our four Gospels, 
 the Christ with His Divine claim and miraculous life-giving 
 power, the Christ raised from the dead the third day and 
 glorified at God's right hand, the Christ who is the Son of 
 God incarnate, is the original Jesus of Nazareth, as they beheld 
 Him and bore witness who had been educated in closest inter- 
 course with Him. We are reassured also as to the quality of 
 the apostolic testimony. In some ages testimony has been 
 careless — so careless, so clouded with superstition and 
 credulity, as to be practically valueless. But in the apostles 
 we have men who knew thoroughly the value of testimony 
 and what depended upon it, who bore witness to what they 
 had seen, and in all cases, save in the exceptional case of 
 S. Paul, to what they had seen over a prolonged period of 
 years ; whose conviction about Christ had been gradually 
 formed in spite of much ' slowness of heart,' and even persistent 
 'unbelief ; formed also in the face of Sadducean scepticism and 
 in the consciousness of what would be said against them ; 
 1 See pp. 29ff,, 229 ff., 337 ff. 
 
xxxviii Preface to 
 
 formed into such irresistible strength and unanimity by the 
 solid impress of facts that nothing could shake it, either in the 
 individual or in the body. Such testimony does all for us 
 that testimony can do in such a case. It supports externally 
 and justifies a traditional faith, which is commended to us at 
 the same time internally by its self- evidencing power. And 
 with that faith as the strength of our life we can await with 
 confidence the issue of minor controversies. 
 
 It may be hoped that the discussion which this book has 
 raised may do good in two ways. 
 
 It may enable people to put the Bible into its right place 
 in the fabric of their Christian belief. It may help to make 
 it plain that in the full sense the Christian's faith is faith 
 only in a Person, and that Person Jesus Christ : that to justify 
 this faith he needs from the Scriptures only the witness of 
 some New Testament documents, considered as containing 
 history : while his belief in the Bible as inspired is, speak- 
 ing logically, subsequent to his belief in Christ, and even, 
 when we include the New Testament, subsequent to his 
 belief in the Church, as the Body of Christ, rather than 
 prior to it^. 
 
 There is also another good result to which we may hope to 
 see the present controversy minister — the drawing of a clear 
 line in regard to development between the Old Testament 
 and the New. For all modern criticism goes to emphasize 
 the gradualness of the process through which, under the 
 Old Covenant, God prepared the way for Christ. Now 
 all that can be brought to light in this sense, the Church 
 can await with indifference from a theological point of view, 
 because it is of the essence of the Old Testament to be 
 
 ' Cp.pp. 338-341, where this is ex- Christ, before they take any heed of 
 
 plained. The ' logical ' order of belief the Church. But to feel the power 
 
 is often no doubt not the order of of inspiration is a different thing 
 
 experience. The Bible can draw from having reasoned grounds for 
 
 men to itself, and through itself to calling certain books inspired. 
 
the Tenth Edition. xxxix 
 
 the record of a gradual self-disclosure of God continuous and 
 progressive till the incarnation of Jesus Christ. It is, 
 on the other hand, of the essence of the New Testament 
 revelation that, as given in Christ and proclaimed by His 
 apostles, it is, as far as this world is concerned, in its 
 substance, final and adequate for all ages. It is this, because 
 of its essential nature. If Christ is ' the Word made flesh,' 
 the ' Son of God made Son of Man,' then finality essentially 
 belongs to this disclosure of Godhead and this exhibition of 
 manhood. ' He that hath seen Him hath seen the Father,' 
 and he that hath seen Him hath seen perfect man, hath seen 
 our manhood in its closest conceivable relation to God, at 
 the goal of all possible spiritual and moral development. 
 All our growth henceforth can only be a growth into ' the 
 measure of the stature of His fulness' — a growth into the 
 understanding and possession of Him who was once mani- 
 fested. Finality is of the essence of the New Covenant, as 
 gradual communication of truth was of the Old. 
 
 If these two results are obtained, we shall not be liable any 
 more to be asked ' where we are going to stop ' in admitting 
 historical uncertainty. ' If you admit so much uncertainty 
 in the Old Testament, why do you not admit the same in the 
 New ? ' We shall not be liable to be asked this question, be- 
 cause it will be apparent that the starting-point as of enquiry, 
 so of security, lies in the New Testament and then proceeds 
 to extend itself to the Old. For us, at least, the Old Testa- 
 ment depends upon the New, not the New upon the Old. 
 
 Nor shall we be liable any more to be asked, ' Why, if you 
 admit so much development in actual substance in the truth 
 revealed under the Old Covenant, cannot you admit a similar 
 augmentation under the New ? ' This question will be pre- 
 vented, because it will be apparent that the essential condi- 
 tions are different in the two cases. Progress in Christianity 
 is always reversion to an original and perfect type, not 
 
xl Preface to the Tenth Editio7t. 
 
 addition to it : it is progress only in the understanding of the 
 Christ. ' Regnum tuum, Domine, regnum omnium saeculorum ; 
 et dominatio tua in omni generatione et generationem.' 
 
 C. G. 
 
 PusEY House, 
 July, 1890. 
 
 The chief changes of any importance in this edition are (i) the addition 
 of a note at the end of the first essay ; (2) the alteration of a few sentences 
 on pp. 289, 296-7 of Essay VII ; (3) the alteration of note 2 on p. 345 and 
 note I on p. 346 in Essay VIII ; (4) the expansion on p. 357, § 6 of the 
 opening sentences ; (5) the addition of an appendix on The Christian Doctrine 
 0/ Sin. 
 
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 I. 
 
 Faith. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Faith ; its situation ; its behaviour ; challenged by novel 
 
 experiences ; alarmed at its own perplexity . . . 3-5 
 
 Yet why alarmed ? 5 
 
 Perplexity consistent with faith, when faith is stripped of its 
 habitual corroborations from without : and summoned to 
 submit itself to internal observation 5-8 
 
 For faith is an elemental act of personal self : and, therefore, 
 like all such acts, e. g. of thought ; will ; love ; is, neces- 
 sarily, incapable of offering itself for scientific examina- 
 tion 8-1 1 
 
 II. What is faith ? 11-12 
 
 The motion in us of our sonship in the Father ; the conscious 
 recognition, and realization, of our inherent filial ad- 
 hesion to God 13-15 
 
 This intimacy of relationship is capable of indefinite growth, 
 
 of ' supernatural ' development 15 
 
 The history of faith is the gradual discovery of this increas- 
 ing intimacy 16-18 
 
 The demand for faith is (a) universal, for aU are sons ; 
 (&) urgeiit, as appealing to a vital fact ; (c) tolerant, as 
 
 reposing on existent fact 1 8-21 
 
 III. Faith, an act of hasal personality, at the root of all out- 
 flowing activities ; is present, as animating force, within 
 all natural faculties. When summoned out, into positive 
 or direct action on its own account = Religion, i. e. the 
 emergence, into open manifestation, of Fatherhood and 
 sonship, which lie hidden within all secular life . . 21-28 
 
 Faith, an energy of basal self, using, as instruments and 
 material, the sum of faculties ; therefore, each faculty, 
 separately, can give but a partial vindication of an integral 
 act of faith 28-29 
 
xlii Synopsis of Contents. 
 
 PARI 
 
 This applies to Reason-^ compare its relation to acts of 
 aifection, imagination, chivaliy; all such acts are acts 
 of Venture, using evidence of reason in order to go beyond 
 evidence 30-34 
 
 So faith makes use of all knowledge, but is, itself, its own 
 motive. It uses, as its instrument, every stage of science ; 
 but is pledged to no one particular stage .... 34-38 
 IV. Faith, simple adhesion of soul to God; yet, once begun, it 
 has a history of its own ; long, complicated, recorded in 
 Bible, stored up in Creeds ....... 38-41 
 
 This involves difficulties, intricacies, efforts ; all this, the 
 necessary consequence of our being born in the 'last 
 days' 41-45 
 
 Yet to the end, faith remains an act of personal and spiritual 
 
 adhesion 45-46 
 
 V. Faith, not only covers a long past, but anticipates the future ; 
 it pledges itself ahead, e. g. in the case of ' ordination vows.' 
 Such pledges justified, because the act of faith is personal ; 
 and the object of faith is final, i. e. ' Christ, the same 
 yesterday, to-day, and for ever ' 46-54 
 
 II. 
 
 The Christian Doctrine of God. 
 
 I. Object of the essay and attitude assumed .... 57^59 
 II. A broad contrast between the God of Philosophy and the 
 
 God of religion 59-60 
 
 Attempts to get rid of the opposition (i) by division of 
 
 territory ; (2) by confusion of terms 60-63 
 
 III. Religion demands that God shall be Personal, and stand in a 
 
 moral relationship with man • 63-65 
 
 IV. Growth and purification of the religious conception of 
 
 God 65-6S 
 
 V. Religion and Morals. Collision between the two in Greece, 
 and its consequences. Synthesis of religion and morality 
 among the Jews : and in Christianity .... 68-7 8 
 Subsequent collisions between religion and morals within 
 the Christian Church. The Reformation a moral protest. 
 Immorality of its later developments. Modern protest 
 against these 7 8-8 2 
 
Synopsis of Contents. xliii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 VI. Religion and Reason. Protest of Greek Philosophy against 
 Polytheism. Christian Theology the meeting-point of 
 Jewish religion and Greek Philosophy .... 82-86 
 
 What Theology is. Objection to it from the side of (i) re- 
 ligion, (2) Philosophy . 86-90 
 
 The Christian doctrine of the Trinity an appeal to the 
 
 reason 90-91 
 
 Its answer to the speculative problems of Greek thought 
 (i) as to what unity is ; (2) as to the immanence of rea- 
 son in nature 9i~95 
 
 The witness of the Fathers ...... 95 
 
 The doctrine of the Trinity the true Monotheism ; the 
 
 doctrine of the Logos as personal yet immanent . . 95-96 
 
 VII. The Christian doctrine of God why challenged in the 
 
 present day 96 
 
 The deism of the last century. The new science of 
 
 nature. Evolution restores the truth of the Divine 
 
 immanence which deism denied. Pantheistic reaction . 96-102 
 The Christian doctrine of God the safeguard of rational 
 
 religion against deism and pantheism .... 102-103 
 
 VIII. The so-called ' proofs ' of the existence of God . . 103-104 
 Parallel between the belief in God and the belief in nature 104-107 
 Verification in experience the only ' proof.' Reason in both 
 
 the interpreter of Faith 107-109 
 
 III. 
 
 The Problem of Pain. 
 
 The problem of pain admits of no new treatment, but the 
 attempt to use it as an argument against Christianity calls 
 for a recapitulation of what may be said on the other side 113 
 
 Pain is (i) animal, (2) human. 
 
 (1) Animal pain is a thing of which we can only form 
 
 imaginative conjectures ; and these, besides being 
 liable to exaggeration, are not of a nature to form 
 premisses for argument 113-116 
 
 (2) Common sense tells us that human pain contributes as 
 
 [a] punitive, (&) purgatorial, (c) prophylactic, to the 
 development of the individual and the race . . . 116-119 
 Natural religion further views it as the necessary condi- 
 tion of approach, by sinful beings, to the Divine ; and 
 looks for its fuller explanation to a future existence . 11 9- 122 
 
xliv Synopsis of Contents. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Christianity carries on tlie view of natural religion, and 
 sees in pain and suffering : — 
 
 («) The antidote to sin 122-124 
 
 (&) The means of individual and social progress . 124-125 
 
 (c) The source of sympathy with man . . . 125 
 
 (fZ) The secret of union with God .... 125-126 
 
 IV. 
 
 Preparation in History for Christ, 
 
 General considerations on the study of the historical prepara- 
 tion, as part of the study of the Incarnation , , . 129-133 
 Special value of such study in the present age of historical and 
 scientific method which 
 
 may be able to gauge finally the value of naturalist 
 
 theories of the origin of Christianity . . . 133-134 
 may find its own congenial ' signs ' in the beauty of 
 manifold preparing process ; in the wonder of an 
 apparently unique convergence of lines of prepara- 
 tion 134-137 
 
 I. General preparation — in the world at large : 
 
 (1) In the shaping of its external oi'der .... 138-142 
 
 (2) Through its inward experiences of 
 
 Failure 142-146 
 
 Progress 146-150 
 
 II. Special preparation — in Israel : 
 
 (1) The singularity of Israel's external position at the 
 
 critical moment of the Christian Era . . . 150-156 
 
 (2) The paradox of its inward character . . . . 156-159 
 (3j The peculiar influences which had made it what it was: 159-160 
 
 ff. Prophecy 160-167 
 
 h. The Law 167-169 
 
 c. The Course of its History 170-175 
 
 III. The independence of the two preparations; the paradox 
 
 of their fulfilment in one Christ 175-17S 
 
 Y. 
 
 The Incarnation and Development. 
 
 I. The theory of evolution has recalled our minds to the 
 ' cosmical significance ' of the Incarnation, which was a 
 prominent thought in (i) the early (2) mediaeval church 181-187 
 
Synopsis of Contents. xlv 
 
 II. Theology and Science move in different but parallel planes : 
 
 one gives the meaning, the other the method of creation 187-188 
 Thus the doctrine of ' the Eternal Word ' is compatible 
 with all the verified results of scientific teaching on 
 
 (i) energy 188 
 
 (2) teleology 188-193 
 
 (3) origin and antiquity of man .... 193-195 
 
 (4) mental and moral evolution .... 195-199 
 
 (5) the relation of philosophy to Theology . . 199-202 
 
 (6) the comparative study of religions . . . 202-205 
 while in the Christian view, it both illuminates and is 
 
 illuminated by those results 205-206 
 
 III. But when the planes intersect, and we say ' the Word was 
 
 made flesh,' we are said to traverse experience . . 207 
 
 (i) This charge is only a critical presumption . . 207-208 
 
 (2) All novelties traverse past experience . . . 208 
 
 (3) Moral experience is as real as physical . . 208-209 
 
 (4) The Incarnation harmonizes with our moral ex- 
 
 perience 209-210 
 
 (5) By reorganizing morality it reorientates cha- 
 
 racter 211 
 
 (6) It has therefore a true relation to all phases of 
 
 human life 21 1-2 14 
 
 VI. 
 
 The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 
 
 The principle of Dogma is not to be attacked or defended 
 on a priori grounds. The real question is whether the 
 Incarnation, as asserted, is true or false. And this is a 
 question for evidence 217-220 
 
 Even scientific ' dogmata ' differ less from religious dogmas 
 than is sometimes supposed, in that (a) both are received 
 on evidence, (6) both require an experimental verifica- 
 tion, or (in so far as either are still held along with 
 error) correction 220-224 
 
 The acceptance of dogmatic truth is essentially reasonable. 
 Its claims to (a) authority, (b) finality, are not the 
 ground for accepting it, but a necessary outcome of the 
 facts accepted in it 224-229 
 
 The evidence for the Incarnation is as many-sided as 
 
 human life . 229-233 
 
Synopsis of Contents. 
 
 Ill, 
 
 IV. 
 
 But primarily historical. The crucial fact is the Resur- 
 rection ... 233-236 
 
 Everything is involved in the answer to ' What think ye of 
 
 Christ?' 236-238 
 
 It is an error to think of the belief of the Church as an 
 
 edifice built up in the age of the Councils . . . 238-239 
 
 The decisions of the Councils represent only a growth in 
 
 intellectual precision through experience of error . . 239-245 
 
 The creed in its whole substance is the direct outcome of 
 
 the fact of the Incarnation 245-250 
 
 The dogmatic creed is to be distinguished from the body 
 
 of theological literature which comments upon it . . 250 
 
 Theological comment is variable : it may err, it may 
 develop. Herein lie most of the disputes of technical, 
 and the advances of popular, theology .... 250-255 
 
 Even the creeds are human on the side of their language . 255-258 
 
 The 'damnatory clauses,' though easily misunderstood, 
 
 really mean what is both true, and necessary . . . 258-260 
 
 Christian dogmatism is after all devotion to truth, for 
 
 truth's sake . 260-261 
 
 The modern reading of the Scriptures without miracle 
 and the Christ without Godhead depends for its justi- 
 fication upon the truth of an hypothesis .... 262-266 
 
 But this hypothesis explains away, instead of explaining, 
 
 the evidence ; while it is itself incapable of proof . . 266-270 
 
 Historical reality is essential to the truth of the Incar- 
 
 . nation. Mere spiritualism ends in unreality . . . 270-272 
 
 VII. 
 
 The Atonement. 
 
 I. Sin and sacrifice in relation to the Atonement 
 
 275-276 
 
 1. Twofold character of sin : — 
 
 (a) A state of alienation from God .... 276-277 
 (6) A state of guilt 277-279 
 
 2. Twofold character of sacrifice : — 
 
 [a) The expression of man's original relation to God 279-280 
 (&) The expiation of sin, and propitiation of vsrath . 2S0-281 
 Both aspects shewn in the ceremonies of the 
 
 Mosaic Law 281-282 
 
 3. Inadequacy of man's offerings to satisfy sense of 
 
 personal guilt. 282-285 
 
Synopsis of Contents. xlvii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 II. The death of Christ answers to the demands of the sense 
 
 of sin and of the desire for forgiveness ... 285 
 
 1. Christ's death a sacrifice of propitiation : — 
 
 (a) Of the wrath of God, which is — 
 
 (i) the hostility of Divine Nature to sin . . 285-287 
 (2) the expression of the eternal law of right- 
 eousness 2S8 
 
 (&) By virtue — 
 
 (i) Of the obedience manifested by Him . . 289-290 
 
 (2) Of His recognition of the Divine justice . 290 
 
 (3) Of His death as the necessary form of both 290-292 
 The propitiatory character of His death 
 
 shewn — 
 
 (i.) By the general relation between 
 
 lohysical and spiritual death . . 292-293 
 (ii.) Because of the nature of Him who 
 
 endured it 293-294 
 
 (iii.) Because of the results flowing from it 294 
 
 (c) On behalf of men, for He is our Representative — 
 (i) As Victim, by His perfect humanity our 
 
 sinbearer 294-297 
 
 (2) As Priest, able to offer what man could not 297-298 
 The true vicariousness of His Priesthood . 298 
 
 2. Christ's death the source of life 298-299 
 
 (a) As delivering us from sin 299 
 
 (6) As bestowing new life 299 
 
 (c) As uniting us to God 299 
 
 But only as connected with and issuing in the 
 
 Resurrection and Ascension .... 300-301 
 
 3. Christ's death in relation to man's responsibility . 301 
 
 (a) The Atonement, being forgiveness, must remit 
 
 some of the consequences of sin . . . 301-302 
 
 (&) But our mystical union with Christ ensures our 
 
 share in the sacrifice 302-303 
 
 (1) Not in its propitiation, which we can only 
 
 plead 303-304 
 
 (2) But by faith which accepts it and recognises 
 
 its justice 304-305 
 
 (3) And by following Him in obedience through 
 
 suff'ering 305-307 
 
 III. Consideration of certain erroneous statements of the doc- 
 
 trine 307 
 
 1. The implied divergence of Will in the Godhead . 307-308 
 
xlviii Synopsis of Contents. 
 
 2. The view of Redemption as wrought for us, not in us 308 
 
 3. The view that Christ redeemed us by taking our 
 
 punishment instead of us 309 
 
 (i) The essential punishment of alienation He could 
 
 not bear 309 
 
 (2) The penal sufferings which He bore are not re- 
 
 mitted to us 309 
 
 (3) But He bore them that we, like Him, may bear 
 
 them sacrificially, not as punishment . . 309-310 
 IV. Short summary. 
 
 1. The death of Christ as propitiatoiy 1 tested by 
 
 2. His death as transforming pain and death ) experience 310-312 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 
 
 Christianity is an experienced or manifested life : because its 
 essence is the possession of the Spirit, and the Spirit is 
 
 Life 315-317 
 
 I. The Holy Spirit the life-giver : — 
 
 In nature . 317-318 
 
 In man 318-319 
 
 In the gradual recoveiy of man from sin , . . 319-320 
 
 In Christ 320-321 
 
 In the Church 321-322 
 
 His work in the Church : — 
 
 1. Social or ecclesiastical 322-323 
 
 2. Nourishing individuality : both of character through 
 
 the Sacraments, and of judgment through authority 323-327 
 
 3. Consecrating the whole of nature, material as well 
 
 as spiritual 327-328 
 
 4. By a gradual method 328 
 
 Imperfection of the Old Testament .... 328-331 
 
 „ of the Church 331-332 
 
 The Holy Spirit personally present and continually opera- 
 tive in the Church 332-333 
 
 II. The Theology of the Holy Spirit. Real but limited know- 
 ledge through revelation 333^334 
 
 He is (a) distinct in Person but very God, (&) proceeding 
 from the Father and the Son, (c) One in essence with the 
 
 Father and the Son 334^335 
 
 The Doctrine of the Trinity not Tritheistic . . . 335-336 
 
Synopsis of Contents. xlix 
 
 III. The Inspiration of Holy Scripture. Fatal results of not 
 keeping this in context with the rest of the Holy Spirit's 
 work in the Church 337-340 
 
 1. It is an article of the Faith, not among its bases . . 340-341 
 
 2. It is a necessary article ....... 341 
 
 3. Its certain and primary meaning, as seen by examina- 
 
 tion of the books of the Old and New Testaments . 341-348 
 
 4. Its practical meaning and obligation .... 349-351 
 Questions raised as to its meaning by Old Testament 
 
 criticism : — 
 
 (ffl) While the Old Testament is, like the New Testa- 
 ment, certainly and really historical, can it admit 
 of elements of idealism in the narrative ? . . 351-354 
 (fe) Can it admit of dramatic composition ? . , 354-356 
 
 (c) Can it admit the presence of primitive myths? . 356-357 
 The Church not prevented from admitting these to be open 
 questions either : — 
 
 (1) By any dogmatic definitions of inspiration . . 357-358 
 
 (2) By our Lord's language as to the Old Testament . 358-360 
 We may expect the criticism of the Old Testament, like 
 
 that of the New, to deepen and enlarge, not impair, our 
 reverence for the ' Word of God ' 360-362 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Church. 
 
 The Church the final satisfaction of certain social instincts, viz. 
 the need of co-operation for life, for knowledge, and for 
 worshij} .......... 365 
 
 These instincts are : — 
 
 (i) Universal 365-368 
 
 (2) Embodied in Judaism, and combined with the 
 
 principle of God's election of one people to be a 
 
 source of blessing to others ..... 368-370 
 
 (3) Fulfilled in the Incarnation 370-372 
 
 I. The Church as the centre of spiritual life : offers its bless- 
 ings, without limitation, to all who are willing to submit 
 
 to spiritual discipline, and combines them in a brother- 
 hood of common service . . . . . . . 372-375 
 
 Hence it is, of necessity : — 
 
 (i) AiJmWebody 375-377 
 
 (2) One, both in its spiritual life and in external or- 
 ganization. This unity implied in the New 
 t d 
 
 / 
 
Synopsis of Contents. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Testament, and explained in the second cen- 
 tury, as centering in the Episcopate. The 
 Apostolical Succession is thus the pledge of 
 historic continuity, and has always been the 
 mark of the English Church. Loyalty to the 
 Church is no narrowing of true sympathy . 377-384 
 
 The Church as the Teacher of Truth : primarily by bearing 
 witness to truths revealed to it; secondarily by inter- 
 preting the relation of these truths to each other . . 384-387 
 Hence : — 
 
 (i) It witnesses to the reality of central spiritual 
 truths and teaches them authoritatively to its 
 members 387 
 
 (2) It trains its members to a rational apprehension of 
 
 these truths 387-388 
 
 (3) It leaves great freedom on points not central . 388-389 
 
 (4) It protects the truths themselves from decay . . 389-390 
 The Church the home of worship : worship the Godward 
 
 expression of its life : its highest expression in the 
 Eucharist : its priestly work earned out from the first by 
 
 a special class of ministers 390-393 
 
 Each aspect of the Church's work completed by the co- 
 operation of the Blessed Dead 394 
 
 Causes of the apparent failure of the Church . . . 394-400 
 Need of its witness and work in modern times . . . 400-402 
 
 X. 
 
 Sacraments. 
 
 Comprehensiveness a characteristic distinction of fmitful and 
 enduring work : which will here be traced in the sacra- 
 mental work of the Church ; with incidental reference 
 to the evidential import of the inner coherence of Chris- 
 tianity, and its perfect aptness for humanity . . . 405-408 
 I Christianity claims to be a way of life for men : whose 
 nature and life involve two elements ; which are usually 
 distinguished as bodily and spiritual .... 408-409 
 The distinction of these two elements real ; their 
 
 union essential 409-411 
 
 It is to be inquired whether this complexity of man's 
 nature is recognised and provided for in the Church of 
 Christ 411 
 
Synopsis of Contents. li 
 
 PAGE 
 
 II. Grounds for anticipating that it would be so : — 
 
 (i) In tlie very fact of the Incarnation; and more 
 
 particularly 411-413 
 
 (2) In the character of the preparatory system whose 
 
 forecasts it met 413-414 
 
 (3) And in certain conspicuous features of Christ's 
 
 ministry 414-415 
 
 The work of Sacraments to be linked with this anticipa- 
 tion 415 
 
 III. The prominence of the Sacramental principle in Christ's 
 teaching : to be estimated with reference to the previous 
 convictions of those whom He taught .... 415-416 
 There is thus found : — 
 
 (1) Abundant evidence that the general principle of 
 
 Sacraments is accepted, to be a characteristic of 
 Christianity 416-417 
 
 (2) The authoritative appointment of particular ex- 
 
 pressions for this general principle : — 
 
 Expressions foreshown in preparatory history: 
 anticipated in preliminary discourses : ap- 
 pointed with great solemnity and em- 
 phasis 417-418 
 
 [These expressions such as may be seen to be in- 
 trinsically appropriate, ethically helpful and 
 instructive, and safeguards against indivi- 
 dualism.] 418-420 
 
 (3) An immediate recognition in the Apostolic Church 
 
 of the force of this teaching, and of the necessary 
 prominence of Sacraments 420-421 
 
 lY. The correspondence between the ministry of Sacraments 
 and the complex nature of man appears in three ways : 
 since :— 
 
 (i) The dignity and the spiritual capacity of the 
 material order is thus vindicated and maintained : 
 so that unreal and negative spirituality is pre- 
 cluded, and provision is made for the hallowing 
 of stage after stage in a human life . . . 422-426 
 (2) The claim of Christianity to penetrate the bodily 
 life is kept in its due prominence by the very 
 nature of Sacraments : the redemption of the 
 body is foreshown ; and perhaps begun . . 426-429 
 
 d2 
 
Hi 
 
 Synopsis of Contents. 
 
 (3) The evidences of mystery in human nature, its 
 moments of unearthliness, its immortal longings, 
 its impatience of finite satisfaction, being recog- 
 nised and accounted for by the doctrine of Grace 
 are met by Sacraments : and led in an ordered 
 progress towards a perfect end .... 
 
 429-433 
 
 XI. 
 
 Christianity and Politics. 
 
 Introductory. — The twofold problem of Christianity in its 
 relation to human society— 
 (i) To consecrate ; (2) to purify 437-440 
 
 I. The Church is neutral as to natural differences, e. g. the 
 
 form of government, autocratic or democratic leaning . 440-442 
 
 II. The Church suppJements the moral influence of the State, 
 in respect of — 
 
 (i) The appeal to higher motives .... 443-445 
 
 e.g. as to the duties of — 
 
 (a) Governors and governed .... 446-451 
 (h) Owners of property ..... 451-452 
 
 (2) The support of the weak against the strong . . 452-455 
 
 (3) The maintenance of religion 455-461 
 
 III. The Church puri/ies the whole social life of mankind — 
 
 (i) By spreading Christian ideas .... 461-462 
 (2) By maintaining the Christian type of character . 462-463 
 Conclusion. — The Church appeals to deeper needs than the 
 State and is therefore fundamentally Catholic, and only 
 incidentally national 463-464 
 
 XII. 
 
 Christian Ethics. 
 
 General characteristics of the Christian ethical system . . 467-468 
 Dogmatic postulates: — 
 
 (i) Doctrine of God : God a Personal and Ethical 
 
 Being 469-470 
 
Synopsis of Contents. 
 
 liii 
 
 (2) Doctrine of Man : his ideal nature ; his destiny as 
 
 related to the good through conscience and 
 freedom ; his present condition 
 
 (3) Doctrine of Christ: Catholic view of His Person 
 
 I. Christ's revelation of the Highest Good 
 
 The Kingdom of God : tv7ofold meaning of the tei-m 
 Christian view of the world 
 
 II. The Moral Law ; its authority, sanctions, and content 
 
 The basis of obligation found in the idea of personal 
 
 relationship between God and Man . 
 The sanctions, and motives of Christian Morality 
 The Law of Duty embraced in the decalogue 
 
 III. Christ the pattern of character 
 
 Conditions required in the perfect example 
 
 Christ the pattern of filial dependence, obedience, and 
 
 love 
 
 Virtuous action seen to imply a harmony of the dif- 
 ferent elements in personality, postulating a three 
 fold virtuous principle supematurally imparted 
 Christian character : the Christian personality in its 
 relation : — 
 
 (i) To God -Christian Wisdom .... 
 
 (2) To Man— Christian Justice .... 
 
 (3) To Self— Christian Temperance 
 
 (4) To the hindrances of environment — Christian 
 
 Fortitude 
 
 IV. Christ the source of the recreation of character 
 
 Claim of Christianity to recreate character 
 Dogmatic truths implied in the recreative process 
 Holiness dependent on a permanent relation to 
 
 Christ 
 
 The Church a school of character, and sphere of indi 
 
 vidual discipline 
 
 Christian ascetics — their ground in reason, and effect 
 
 on character . 
 
 V. The consummation of God's kingdom 
 
 The intermediate stage .... 
 The final stage of glory : 
 
 (i) The kingdom to be finally manifested 
 (ii) and purified through judgment 
 Extent and limits of the final triumph of good 
 
 470-476 
 
 476 
 
 476-480 
 
 477-479 
 479-480 
 
 480-489 
 
 480-482 
 482-484 
 484-489 
 
 489-504 
 490-491 
 
 491-494 
 
 494-496 
 
 497-498 
 498-501 
 501-502 
 
 502-503 
 
 504-512 
 504-505 
 505-506 
 
 506 
 
 506-508 
 
 509-512 
 
 512-518 
 S13 
 
 513-S14 
 
 S14 
 
 514-516 
 
liv Synopsis of Contents. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Perfection of human personality : the perfect state 
 one of 
 
 harmony 516-517 
 
 glory 517 
 
 blessedness 517 
 
 and fellowship in a moral community . . . 517 
 
 VI. Conclusion : relation of Christian Ethics to the products of 
 
 civilization, to individual character, to social life . . 518-520 
 
 Appendix I. On some aspects of Christian Duty . . 521-525 
 
 Appendix II. On the Cheistian Docteine of Sin . . 526-538 
 
I. 
 FAITH. 
 
 HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND. 
 
FAITH. 
 
 I. In proposing to consider the origin and growth of faith, 
 we have a practical, and not a merely theoretical, aim. We 
 are thinking of the actual problems which are, at this moment, 
 encompassing and hindering faith : and it is because of their 
 urgency and their pressure, that we find it worth while to 
 go back upon our earliest beginnings, in order to ask what 
 Faith itself means. For only through an examination of its 
 nature, its origin, and its structure, will it be possible for us 
 to sift the questions which beset us, and to distinguish those 
 to which Faith is bound to give an answer from those which 
 it can afford to let alone. 
 
 We set out then on our quest, in the mind of those who 
 have felt the trouble that is in the air. Even if we our- 
 selves be not of their number, yet we all suffer from their 
 hesitation : we all feel the imparted chill of their anxieties. 
 For we are of one family : and the sickness, or depression of 
 some, must affect the whole body. All of us, even the most 
 confident, are interested in the case of those who are fearing 
 for themselves, as they sadly search their own hearts, and 
 ask, ' What is it to believe ? Do I know what it is to be- 
 lieve ? Have I, or have I not, that which can be called 
 " faith" ? How can I be sure ? What can I say of myself? ' 
 Such questions as these are haunting and harassing many 
 among us who find themselves facing the Cathohc Creed, 
 with its ring of undaunted assurance, with its unhesitating 
 claim to unique and universal supremacy, and contrast with 
 this their own faint and tentative apprehension of the strong 
 truths, which are so confidently asserted. Such men and 
 B 2 
 
4 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 women are anxious and eager to number themselves among 
 those that believe : but can they call this temper ' belief,' 
 which is so far below the level of the genuine response which 
 those Creeds obviously expect? Where is the blitheness of 
 faith 1 Where is its unshaken conviction? Where is its 
 invincible simplicity? Why is it that they only succeed in 
 moving forward with such painful indecision? 
 
 Now, it is to this temper that this essay is addressed. It 
 does not aim at convicting a hostile disbelief, but at succour- 
 ing a distressed faith. And this it does under the conviction 
 that, in so doing, it is responding to the peculiar character 
 and needs of the situation. 
 
 For the urgency, the peril of the hour, lies, not so much in 
 the novelty, or force, of the pressure that is brought to bear 
 against faith, as in the behaviour of faith itself under the 
 pressure. What has happened is, not that faith has been 
 confounded, but that it has been challenged. It has been 
 challenged by new social needs, by strange developments of 
 civilisation, by hungers that it had not yet taken into account, 
 by thirsts that it had not prepared itself to satisfy. It has 
 been challenged by new scientific methods, wholly unlike its 
 familiar intellectual equipment ; by new worlds of facts opened 
 to its astonishment through discoveries which have changed 
 the entire look of the earth ; by immense masses of novel 
 material, which it has been suddenly and violently required 
 to assimilate ; by strange fashions of speech in science and 
 history ; by a babel of ' unknown tongues ' in all departments 
 of learning and literature. 
 
 Faith is under the pressure of this challenge : and the 
 primary question is, how will it behave ? What is it going 
 to say, or do, in face of this exciting transformation which 
 has passed over the entire surface of our intellectual scenery ? 
 How will it deal with the situation? WiU it prove itself 
 adequate to the crisis ? To what extent can it afford to sub- 
 mit to the transforming process which has abeady operated 
 upon the mind and the imagination? If it submit, can it 
 survive ? And in what condition ? with what loss, or damage, 
 or change ? On every side these challenges reach it ; they beat 
 
I. Faith. 5 
 
 at its doors ; they arrive in pelting haste ; they clamour for 
 immediate solutions. 
 
 Now faith, under these rapid and stormy challenges is apt 
 to fall into panic. For this, surely, is the very meaning of 
 a panic — a fear that feeds upon itself. Men in a panic are 
 frightened at finding themselves afraid. So now with faith ; 
 it is terrified at its own alarm. How is it (it asks itself) 
 that it should find itself bafiied and timorous % If faith were 
 faith, would it ever lose its confidence ? To be frightened is 
 to confess itself false : for faith is confidence in God, Who 
 can never fail. How can faith allow of doubt or hesitation ? 
 Surely for faith to hesitate, to be confused, is to deny its 
 very nature. Thus many anxious and perplexed souls retreat 
 before their own perplexities. Because their faith is troubled, 
 they distrust and abandon their faith. The very fact that 
 it is in distress becomes an argument against it. 
 
 It is at this point, and because of this particular peril that 
 we are urgently required to consider very seriously the nature 
 and conditions of faith. For our panic arises from our as- 
 sumption that faith is of such a nature, that the perplexity, 
 into which, now and again, we find ourselves thrown, must 
 be impossible to it, must be incompatible with it. Now, is 
 this so"? Ought we to expect of faith that its confidence 
 should never fail it — that its light should be always decisive ? 
 Is faith incriminated by the mere fact that it is in difficulties % 
 
 Let us, first, consider what has occurred. Perhaps the situa- 
 tion itself, if we quietly review it, will give a reason why it 
 is that, just at the moment when we most need vigour and 
 assurance, we should find ourselves stripped of all that tends 
 to reassure. 
 
 For the peculiarity of the disturbance which we have got to 
 encounter lies in this, that it has removed from us the very 
 weapons by which we might hope to encounter it. Faith's 
 evidential material is all corroborative and accumulative ; it 
 draws it from out of an external world, which can never 
 wholly justify, or account for the internal reality, yet which 
 can so group itself, that from a hundred differing lines, it offers 
 indirect and parenthetic and convergent witness of that which 
 
6 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 is, itself, beyond the reach of external proof. It is this gradual 
 grouping of an outer life into that assorted perspective in 
 which it offers the most effective corroboration of the inner 
 truth, which faith slowly accomplishes upon the matter which 
 human science presents to it. When once the grouping is 
 achieved, so that the outer world, known under certain 
 scientific principles, tallies harmoniously with its inner con- 
 victions, faith feels secure. The external life offers it pictures, 
 analogies, metaphors — all echoing and repeating the inter- 
 nal world. Faith beholds itself mirrored : and, so echoed, so 
 mirrored, it feels itself in possession of corroborating evidences. 
 But the present scientific confusion seems to have shattered 
 the mirror — to have broken up the perspective — to have dis- 
 solved the well-known groupings. It is true, as some of the 
 essays which follow will try to show, that the convulsion of 
 which we speak, lies, chiefly, in a change of position, or of 
 level ; so that great masses of the matter, now throAvn into 
 confusion, will be found to compose themselves afresh, under 
 the newer conditions of review, and will appear again as part 
 and parcel of the scientific scenery. It is a change of perspec- 
 tive more than anything else. But, no doubt, such a change is 
 just of the character to upset us, to disturb us; for, during 
 the change, while shifting from the old position to the new, we 
 are in the very chaos of confusion ; everything seems, for the 
 moment, to be tumbling about around us : the entire scene 
 grows unsteady ; though, indeed, when once we have got our 
 feet firmly placed at the new level of vantage, much, that once 
 was familiar, is discovered to be back again in its place, 
 looking much the same as of old. It is the jivst shock of 
 this enforced transition which is so calculated to terrify : as 
 when, for instance, men see their habitual reliance on the 
 evidence for design in nature, which had been inherited from 
 Paley, yield, and vanish, under the review of the facts with 
 which the theory of evolution acquaints them. What they 
 feel is, that their familiar mode of interpreting their faith, 
 of justifying it, of picturing it, has abruptly been torn from 
 them. That which once seemed to evidence it in the outer 
 world, has ceased to be accepted or trusted. The habitual 
 
I. Faith. *f 
 
 ways of argument, the accepted assumptions, which they had 
 hitherto used as their supports and their instruments — have 
 been withdrawn — have become obsolete. Faith is thrown back 
 on itself, on its own inherent, naked vitality ; it is robbed for 
 the moment of that sense of solidity and security, which forti- 
 fies and refreshes it, when the outer world of natural facts, 
 and the inner world of intellect and fancy, all corroborate its 
 confidence in itself, by harmonious attestations of its validity. 
 The old world of things had been brought into this adaptation 
 with the principles of belief. Faith was at home in it, and 
 looked out over it with cheerfulness, and moved about it with 
 freedom. But that old world is gone ; and the new still lies 
 untested, unsorted, unverified, unassimilated, unhandled. It 
 looks foreign, odd, remote. Faith finds no obvious corrobora- 
 tions in it : there, where it used to feel buttressed and warm, 
 it now feels chilly and exposed ^. 
 
 This is the first consequence, and it is serious enough in itself 
 to provoke alarm. Faith cannot be at ease or confident, until 
 the outer world responds to its own convictions ; and yet ease 
 and confidence are exactly what it is challenged to exhibit. 
 
 And then, when a man, under this sense of fear, de- 
 prived of external testimonies, attempts to exhibit, to evoke, 
 to examine, his inner conviction, in its inherent and vital 
 character, as it is in itself, unsupported by adventitious aids, 
 he is astonished at his own difliculty in discovering or dis- 
 closing it. Where is it all fled — that which he had called his 
 faith? He had enjoyed it, had relied on it, had again and 
 again asserted it in word and deed : and now, when he wants 
 to look at it, when he is summoned to produce it, when he is 
 challenged to declare its form and fashion; he finds himself 
 dazed, bewildered, searching helplessly for that which ever 
 escapes him, grasping at a fleeting shadow, which baffles his 
 efforts to endow it with fixity and substance. And, so finding, 
 he grows yet more desperately alarmed : it seems to him that 
 he has been self-deceived, betrayed, abandoned. He is bitterly 
 sensitive to the sharp contrast between the triumphant 
 solidity with which scientific facts bear down upon him, 
 
 * Cf. on all this, an excellent statement in Mark Pattison's Sermons. Serni. 7. 
 
8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 certified, undeniable, substantial, and the vague, shifty, in- 
 distinct phantom, into which his conviction vanishes as soon 
 as he attempts to observe it in itself, or draw it out for 
 public inspection. 
 
 Yet, if we consider what faith signifies, we shall see at once 
 that this contrast ought to carry with it no alarm. It is a 
 contrast which foDows on the very nature of faith. If we had 
 understood its nature, we could never have expected it to dis- 
 close itself under the same conditions as those which govern 
 the observation of scientific facts. Faith is an elemental 
 energy of the soul, and the surprise that we are undergoing 
 at not being able to bring it under direct observation, is only 
 an echo of the familiar shock with which we learn that science 
 has ransacked the entire bodily fabric of man, and has nowhere 
 come across his soul ; or has searched the heavens through and 
 through with its telescope, and has seen no God. We are up- 
 set for a moment when first we hear this ; and then, we recover 
 ourselves as we recollect that, if God be what we believe Him 
 to be, immaterial and spu'itual, then He would cease to be 
 Himself, if He were visible through a telescope : and that if 
 the spirit of man be what we believe it to be, that is the very 
 reason why no surgeon's knife can ever arrive at it. 
 
 And, as with the soul, so with all its inherent and essential 
 acts. They are what it is : they can no more be visible than 
 it can. How can any of the basal intuitions, on which our 
 knowledge rests, present themselves to our inspection in the 
 guise of external and phenomenal facts % That which observes 
 can never, strictly speaking, observe itself. It can never look 
 on at itself from outside, or view itself as one among the mul- 
 titude of things that come under its review. How can it? It 
 is itself the organ of vision : and the eye cannot see its own 
 power of seeing. This is why natural science, which is an 
 organised system of observation, finds that its own observing 
 mind is absolutely and totally outside its ken. It can take 
 stock of the physiological condition of thoughts or of feelings ; 
 but they themselves, in their actual reahty, are all rigidly 
 shut out from the entire area of scientific research. Wherever 
 they begin, it ends ; its methods abruptly fail. It possesses 
 
I. Faith. 9 
 
 no instrument by which to make good its advance further. 
 For the only instrument which it knows how to use, and 
 by which alone it can search, and examine, is itself the 
 object which it desires to submit to examination. But if 
 it is to be examined, who, and what, is to conduct the ex- 
 amination? The observing mind that turns round to ex- 
 plore itself, carries itself round as it turns. It can never 
 say — 'Let me look at myself, as if I were a phenomenon, 
 as a fact presented to my own consciousness,' for it itself 
 would be engaged in the act of looking : it itself is the con- 
 sciousness to which it proposes to present itself^. So again, 
 the thought itself can never hope, by rigid analysing, to 
 arrive at last at itself, as the final residue of the analysis, 
 for it is itself, all along, employed as analyst. The process 
 of analysis is, itself, the real disclosure of what thought 
 is: and this disclosure is made just as efiectively even 
 though the result of the analysis be to declare that it can 
 discover nothing that corresponds to thought. It is, in- 
 deed, impossible that anything should so correspond, except 
 the power to analyse ; but this power is thought : and every 
 act of the analysis, which issues in the sceptical conclusion, 
 has verified the real existence of thought. It is the same 
 with all profound spiritual acts. None of them can ever be 
 offered to public inspection : they can never be handed across 
 to another, for him to look at. For they are living acts, and 
 not external results. How can an act of will, or of love, be 
 submitted to observation ? Its outward result is there to be 
 examined ; but it, itself, is incapable of transportation. If 
 anyone were to ask ' What is it you mean by thinking, or 
 loving, or willing ? ' who could tell him ? It would be 
 obviously impossible to explain, except to a being who could 
 think, will, and love. You could give him illustrations of 
 what you mean — signs — instances — evidences ; but they can 
 only be intelligible, as evidences, to one who already possesses 
 the faculties. No one can do a piece of thinking for another, 
 
 ^ It is not intended to deny that be won by methods of empirical 
 the mind can ever know itself, but observation, 
 only that such knowledge can ever 
 
lo The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 and hand it over to him in a parcel. Only by thinking, can 
 it be known what thought is : only by feeling can it be 
 understood what is meant by a feeling: only by seeing, 
 willing, loving, can we have the least conception of sight, or 
 of will, or of love. 
 
 And faith stands with these primary intuitions. It is deeper 
 and more elemental than them all: and, therefore, still less 
 than they can it admit of translation into other conditions 
 than its own ; — can still less submit itself to public observation. 
 It can never be looked at from without. It can be known 
 only from within itself. Belief is only intelligible by be- 
 lieving. Just as a man who is asked to say what love is, apart 
 from all its outward manifestations and results, must be driven 
 back on the iteration — ' Love is — what love is : everyone who 
 loves, knows ; no one who does not love, can ever know ; ' just 
 as a man, who is challenged to describe and define his feelings 
 or his desires, when stripped of aU the outward evidences 
 that they can possibly give of themselves, is thrown into 
 inarticulate bewilderment, and can give no intelligible answer, 
 and can fashion to himself no distinct feature or character, 
 and can only assert, confusedly, that he feels what he 
 feels, and that to desire is to desire; — so with faith. 
 The scientific convulsion has shaken and confused its 
 normal modes of self-interpretation, its usual evidences, signs, 
 illustrations : these outer aids at definition, by metaphor or 
 by corroboration, are all brought under dim eclipse for the 
 moment: their relative values have been thrown into un- 
 certainty: they are undergoing temporary displacement, and 
 no one is quite sure which is being shifted, and which can be 
 trusted to stand firm. Faith, robbed of its habitual aids to 
 expression, is summoned to show itself on the field, in its own 
 inner character. And this is just what it never can or may do. 
 It can only reiterate, in response to the demand for definition, 
 ' Faith is faith.' ' Believing is — just believing.' Why, then, 
 let ourselves be distressed, or bewildered, by finding ourselves 
 reduced to this impotence of explanation % Far from it being 
 an incrimination of our faith, to find ourselves caught in such 
 a difiiculty of utterance, it is just what must happen if faith 
 
I, Faith. 1 1 
 
 be a profound and radical act of the inner soul. It is, es- 
 sentially, an active principle, a source of energy, a spring of 
 movement : and, as such, its verification can never take place 
 through passive introspection. It verifies itself only in actions : 
 its reality can only be made evident through experience of its 
 living work. 
 
 II. We may, then, free ourselves from the sinister suspicions 
 which belong to panic. It is not the superficiality of our 
 faith, which is the secret of our bewilderment, but its depth. 
 The deepest and most radical elements of our being are, 
 necessarily, the hardest to unearth. They are, obviously, the 
 most remote from the surface of our lives : they are the 
 rarest to show themselves in the open daylight : they require 
 the severest effort to disentangle their identity : they lie below 
 all ordinary methods of utterance and expression ; they can 
 only be discovered through careful recognition of the secret 
 assumptions which are involved in the acts and words which 
 they habitually produce. By these acts and words their 
 existence and their force is suggested, but not exhausted — 
 manifested, but not accounted for. These form our only 
 positive interpretation and evidence : and such evidence must, 
 therefore, always remain inadequate, imperfect ; we have 
 always and inevitably to go behind it, and beyond it, in order 
 to reach and touch the motive-energy which is disclosed to us 
 through it. No wonder that we find this far from an easy 
 matter. No wonder that, under the pressure of a hostile 
 challenge, we often lose ourselves in a confused babble, as 
 we struggle to make plain to others, or even to ourselves, 
 these innermost convictions of our souls. 
 
 Indeed, such things can never be made plain : no one ought 
 to expect that they should. For, if we think of it, the 
 primary acts of spirit must be the last things that can ever be 
 made plain ; for the entire life issuing from them is their only 
 interpretation, so that only when that life is closed, can their 
 interpretation be complete. And here, in faith, we are at the 
 root of a life which, as we believe, it will take eternity to fulfil. 
 And, if so, only in and through eternity can its full evidence 
 for itself be produced, or its right interpretation be yielded. 
 
1 2 The Religion of the Incarnatioft. 
 
 Surely, this truth clears us from many clamorous de- 
 mands, which ask of us an impossible verification. For if 
 once we saw that we were employed in verifying the nature 
 of that which, if it be real, can, confessedly, present us, on 
 this side of the gi-ave, only with the most fragmentary evi- 
 dence of its character, we should put lightly aside the taunting 
 challenge to produce such proof of our motive principle as 
 will stand comparison with the adequate and precise evidences 
 of a scientific fact, or which will submit to the rigid tests of 
 a legal examination. If faith be faith, it could not, for that 
 very reason, fulfil the conditions so proposed to it. These 
 legal and scientific conditions are laboriously and artificially 
 limited to testing the presence of a motive, or a force, which 
 must be assumed to exist under fixed, precise, complete con- 
 ditions, here and now. They pre-suppose that, for all prac- 
 tical purposes, its quantity cannot vary, or fluctuate. If it 
 be present at all, it is present in a distinct and formal manner, 
 open to definite measurement, expressing itself in unalter- 
 able characteristics. The entire consideration of its activity 
 is strictly confined to the normal horizon of the actual 
 world of present existence. These assumptions are the fii'st 
 necessity of all forms of science, without making which, it 
 could not even begin. They are the conditions of all its 
 success. But they are also its limitations : and as such, they 
 most certainly exclude from their survey, anything that pro- 
 fesses to exist after the manner of faith. For what is faith ? 
 It is no steady force, existing under certified and unvarying 
 conditions which receive their final determination in the 
 world about us. Faith is, while it is here on earth, only a 
 tentative probation: it is a struggling and fluctuating eflbrt 
 in man to win for himself a valid hold upon things that exist 
 under the conditions of eternity. In faith, we watch the early 
 and rude beginnings, amid an environment that but faintly 
 and doubtfully responds to it, of a power still in the womb — 
 still unborn into its true sphere — still enveloped in dark 
 wrappings which encumber and impede. We see here but its 
 blind, uncertain pushings, its hesitating moves, now forward, 
 now back, now strangely vigorous and assertive, and then 
 
I. Faith. 1 3 
 
 again, as strangely weak and retreating. Its significance, its 
 interpretation, its future possibilities, its secret of develop- 
 ment — all these lie elsewhere, beyond death, beyond vision : 
 we can but dimly guess, from its action here, what powers feed 
 it, on what resources it can rely, what capacity of growth is 
 open to it, what final issue determines the measure and value 
 of its efibrts and achievements here. Such a force as this is 
 bound to upset all our ablest calculations. We can never lay 
 down rules to govern and predict its capabilities. It will 
 disappoint every conceivable test that we can devise for 
 fixing its conditions. It will laugh at our attempts to circum- 
 scribe its action. Where we look for it to be weak, it will 
 suddenly show itself strong : when we are convinced that we 
 may expect a vigorous display of its capacities, it will mys- 
 teriously lapse. All this may terribly disconcert us. It may 
 tempt us into angry declarations that such an incalculable 
 existence is unworthy of scientific attention — is fanciful, is 
 unreal. But the only lesson which we ought to learn is that 
 methods adapted for one state of things are bound to prove 
 themselves futile when applied to another. If we are em- 
 ployed in observing a life, which has its ground and its end 
 in a world beyond the present, then all methods framed for 
 the express and definite purpose of examining life as it exists 
 here and now, will necessarily prove themselves ludicrously 
 inapt. The futility, the barrenness, the ineptitude of our 
 researches, lies, not with the faith against which we level our 
 irritable complaints, but with the methods which, by their very 
 terms of definition, proclaim themselves to be misplaced. 
 
 Where, then, must we dig to unearth the roots of faith? 
 What are the conditions of its rise and exercise'? Wherein 
 lie its grounds, and the justification of its claim? 
 
 Faith grounds itself, solely and wholly, on an inner and vital 
 relation of the soul to its source. This source is most certainly 
 elsewhere ; it is not within the compass of the soul's own 
 activity. In some mode, inconceivable and mysterious, our 
 life issues out of an impenetrable background: and as our 
 life includes spiritual elements, that background has spiritual 
 factors : and as our life is personal, within that background 
 
14 The Religion of the Incarnatio7i. 
 
 exists personality. This supply of life in which we begin, 
 from out of which our being opens, can never cease, so long 
 as we exist, to sustain us by one continuous act. Ever its 
 resources flow in : ever its vital support is unwithdrawn. In 
 some fashion or other, we all know that this must be so : and 
 the Christian Creed only lifts into clear daylight, and endows 
 with perfect expression, this elementary and universal verity, 
 when it asserts that at the very core of each man's being lies, 
 and lives, and moves, and works, the creative energy of the 
 Divine Will — ' the Will of our Father Which is in Heaven.' 
 
 We stand, by the necessities of our existence, in the relation- 
 ship of sons to a Father, Who has poured out into us, and still 
 pours, the vigour of His own life. This is the one basis of all 
 faith. Unless this relationship actually exists, there could be 
 no faith : if it exists, then faith is its essential corollary : it is 
 bound to appear. Our faith is simply the witness to this inner 
 bond of being. That bond, which is the secret of our entire 
 existence, accounting for all that we are, or do, or feel, or think, 
 or say, must become capable of recognition by a being that is, 
 in any sense, free, intelligent, conscious : and this recognition 
 by us of the source from whence we derive, is what we mean by 
 faith. Faith is the sense in us that we are Another's creature. 
 Another's making. Even as we not only feel, but feel that 
 we feel ; not only think, but know that we think ; not only 
 choose, but determine to choose : so, below and within all 
 our willing, and thinking, and feeling, we are conscious of 
 Another, whose mind and will alone make possible both the 
 feeling that we feel, and also the capacity to feel it ; both the 
 thought that we think, and also the capacity to know it; 
 both the will that we put forth, as well as the power to 
 determine it. Every act, every desire, every motive of ours, 
 is dependant on the source out of sight : we hang on Another's 
 will ; we are alive in Another's life. All our life is a dis- 
 covery, a disclosure, of this secret. We find it out only by 
 living. As we put out powers that seem to be our own, still 
 even in and by the very act of putting them out, we reveal 
 them to be not our own ; we discover that we are always 
 drawing on unseen resources. We are sons : that is the root- 
 
I. Faith. 1 5 
 
 law of our entire self. And faith is the active instinct of that 
 inner sonship : it is the point at which that essential sonship 
 emerges into consciousness ; it is the disclosure to the self of 
 its own vital secret ; it is the thrill of our inherent childhood, 
 as it makes itself felt within the central recesses of the life ; 
 it is the flame that shoots into consciousness at the recog- 
 nition of the touch of our divine fatherhood ; it is the imme- 
 diate response of the sonship in us to its discovered origin. 
 
 Faith, then, is an instinct of relationship based on an inner 
 actual fact. And its entire ofiice and use lies in realising the 
 secret fact. For the bond is spiritual ; and it can only realise 
 itself in a spirit that has become aware of its own laws. No 
 blind animal acceptance of the divine assistance can draw 
 out the powers of this sonship. The reception of the assist- 
 ance must itself be conscious, loving, intelligent, willing. 
 The natural world can receive its full capacities from God 
 without recognition of the source whence they flow in: but 
 this absence of living recognition forbids it ever to surpass 
 those fixed limits of development which we name ' natural.' 
 But a creature of God that could not only receive but recog- 
 nise that it received, would, by that very recognition, lay 
 itself open to an entirely novel development ; it would be 
 susceptible of infinitely higher influences shed down upon it 
 from God ; it would admit far finer and richer inpourings of 
 divine succours ; it would be fed, not only from underground 
 channels as it were, but by fresh inlets which its conscious- 
 ness of its adherence in God would uncover and set in motion. 
 The action of God upon His creatures would be raised to a 
 new level of possibility : for a living and intelligent will 
 has capacities of receptivity, which were altogether excluded 
 so long as God merely gave, and the creature blindly and 
 dumbly took. Faith, then, opens an entirely new career 
 for creaturely existence ; and the novelty of this career is 
 expressed in the word ' supernatural.' The ' supernatural ' 
 world opens upon us as soon as faith is in being ^. 
 
 * The word ' super- natural ' is ob- of life are not 'natural.' Of course, 
 viously misleading, since it seems to the higher the life, the more intensely 
 imply that the higher spiritual levels ' natural ' it is ; and the nature of 
 
1 6 The Religion of the htcarnation. 
 
 And this career, it will be seen, is markedly distinct from 
 the natural in this — that it is capable of ever advancing 
 expansion. All natural things, which blindly accept their 
 life from God, must, perforce, have a decreed and certified 
 development, limited by the conditions in which they are 
 found existing. Their receptivity is a fixed quantity, deter- 
 mined by the character imposed upon them at creation, and 
 bound to come to an abrupt arrest at some precise point ^. 
 But receptivity through conscious recognition is open to a 
 development of which it is impossible for us to fix the limits. 
 For this living recognition itself advances in its capacity to 
 see and understand. Every act by which it recognises the 
 Giver in the gifts, heightens and intensifies its power to re- 
 cognise Him ; and every increase of its power to recognise 
 Him increases also its capacity to receive ; and this increase 
 will again react on the faculties of recognition. A vision 
 opens out of spiritual growth, in which every step forward 
 made thi'ough incoming grace, makes a new step possible, 
 finds a fresh grace ever waiting to crown its latest gift with 
 ever new endowment. The sonship that is at work under- 
 ground in man, below the level of consciousness, at the hidden 
 base of faith, is one that holds in it capacities which can only 
 be evoked under the appeals of a living and voluntary faith. 
 Faith is the discovery of an inherent sonship, which, though 
 ah-eady sealed to it, already in action, nevertheless cannot but 
 withhold its more rich and splendid energies until this dis- 
 covery is made ; and which discloses them only according to 
 the progressive clearness and force with which the process of 
 discovery advances. The history of faith is the history of 
 this gradual disclosure, this growing capacity to recognise and 
 receive, until the rudimentary omen of God's fatherhood in 
 the rudest savage who draws, by clumsy fetich, or weird in- 
 cantation, upon a power outside himself, closes its long story 
 
 God must be the supreme expression present and visible system of things, 
 
 of the natural. But the word ' super- ^ It is this point of arrest which is 
 
 natural ' is, in reality, only concerned reached and revealed by the process 
 
 with the partial and conventional use of Evolution, under the pressure of 
 
 of ' nature,' as a term under which Natural Selection. 
 we sum up all that constitutes this 
 
I. Faith. 1 7 
 
 in the absolute recognition, the perfect and entire receptivity, 
 of that Son of man, who can do nothing of Himself, ' but what 
 He seeth the Father do,' and, for that very reason, can do 
 everything : for whatsoever ' the Father doeth, the Son doeth 
 also.' 
 
 Faith, then, is not only the recognition by man of the 
 secret source of his being, but it is itself, also, the condition 
 under which the powers, that issue from that source, make 
 their arrival within him. The sonship, already germinal, 
 completes itself, reahses itself in man, through his faith. Not 
 only is the unconscious human nature held by attachment to 
 the Father who feeds it with hidden succours, but faith is, itself, 
 the power by which the conscious life attaches itself to God ; 
 it is an apprehensive motion of the living spirit, by which it 
 intensifies its touch on God ; it is an instinct of surrender, by 
 which it gives itself to the fuller handling of God : it is an 
 affection of the will, by which it presses up against God, and 
 drinks in divine vitality with quickened receptivity ^. 
 
 What then will be its characteristics'? We have only to 
 keep close to the conception of sonship, and we shall under- 
 stand them well enough. Faith is the attitude, the temper, of 
 a son towards a father. That is a relationship that we all 
 can understand for ourselves. We know it, in spite of all the 
 base and cruel corruptions under which, in the homes of man, 
 its beauty lies disfigured. Still, beneath disguises, we catch 
 sight, in rare and happy conditions, of that beautiful intimacy 
 which can spring up between a son and a father, where love 
 is one with reverence, and duty fulfils itself in joy. Such a 
 sonship is like a spiritual instinct, which renders intelligible 
 to the son every mood and gesture of the father. His very 
 blood moves in rhythm to the father's motives. His soul 
 hangs, for guidance, on the father's eyes : to him, each motive 
 of the father justifies itself as a satisfying inspiration. The 
 father's will is felt deliciously encompassing him about ; en- 
 closed within it, his own will works, glad and free in its 
 fortifying obedience. Such a relationship as this needs no 
 
 1 Faith is spolien of, here and else- as if unthwarted by the misdirection, 
 where, in its perfect and true form, and hurt of sin. 
 
 
 
 ^'/ 
 
1 8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 justifying sanction beyond itself: it is its own sanction, 
 its own authority, its own justification. ' He is my father ' : 
 that is a sufficient reason for all this sympathetic response 
 to another's desire. ' I am his son ' : that is the final pre- 
 miss in which all argument comes to a close. The willing 
 surrender of the heart is the witness to a fact which is 
 beyond argument, which accepts no denial, yet which is no 
 tyrannous fate, but is a living and animating bond of blood, 
 which it is a joy to recognise, and an inspiration to confess. 
 
 It is in such a spirit of sonship that faith reveals and 
 realises itself. Faith is that temper of sympathetic and 
 immediate response to Another's will which belongs to a 
 recognised relationship of vital communion. It is the spirit 
 of confident surrender, which can only be justified by an 
 inner identification of life. Its primary note, therefore, will 
 be irttsi— that trust of Another, which needs no ulterior 
 grounds on which to base itself, beyond what is involved in 
 the inherent law of this life. Faith will ever discover, when 
 its reason for action, or belief, are traced to their last source, 
 that it arrives at a point where its only and all-sufficient 
 plea will be ' God is my Father : I am His child.' That 
 relationship is its root ; on the top of that relationship 
 faith works ; as a witness to that relationship, it puts forth 
 all the spiritual temper which, of necessity, follows on this 
 intimacy of contact. 
 
 And, here, we find ourselves in the presence of the law by 
 which faith claims to be universal. Unless this inner relation- 
 ship be a fact, faith could not account for itself: but if it be a 
 fact, it must constitute a fixed and necessary demand upon all 
 men. All are, equally, ' children of God ' : and the answer to 
 the question 'Why should I believe?' must be, for ever and 
 for all, valid ; ' because you are a child of God.' Faith is 
 nothing but the spiritual temper and attitude, which belong, 
 inherently, to such a fact. No one can escape from such a 
 claim: for his existence constitutes the claim. If he be a 
 child, it must be demanded of him, that he should display the 
 characteristics of his childhood: the father must", of necessity, 
 be concerned with the question of his own recognition by his 
 
I. Faith. 19 
 
 son. Our manhood lies in this essential sonship : and, if so, 
 then to be without faith, without the conscious realisation of the 
 sonship, is to be without the fulness of a man's proper nature. 
 It is to be inhuman : to be curtailed of the natural develop- 
 ment : to be maimed and thwarted. It means that the vital 
 outcome of the inner verity has been arrested ; that the sen- 
 sitive perceptions have been blunted and stunted; that the 
 sonship in us has, somehow, lost touch with its true fatherhood. 
 
 We learn at once,as we consider this, the interpretation of that 
 two-sided character, which surprises us in God's dealings with 
 men : — i. e. the imperative rigour of His stated requirements, 
 coupled with His wide and patient tolerance, in actual fact. 
 
 As a Father of all, He cannot, conceivably, be satisfied with 
 anything short of complete recognition by His childi-en. He 
 must look for faith ; He must require it of them all : He 
 must leave no means untried by which to secure it : He must 
 seek to win it at all costs : His love is inevitably and cruelly 
 hindered, unless He can obtain it : and when He obtains it. 
 He must passionately desire to establish, evoke, develope, 
 perfect it : for each rise in faith is a rise in capacities of inter- 
 course, of intimacy, between Father and son. We see how 
 strenuous and zealous will be His efforts to build up faith in 
 men : we understand how urgent, and pressing, and alarming 
 will become His entreaties. His warnings. His menaces. 
 His appeals, if faith is allowed to slide or fail. Loss of 
 faith means a shattered home, a ruptured intimacj^, a sun- 
 dered love ; it means that a Father must look on while the 
 very nature He has made in His image shrivels and shrinks, 
 and all hope of growth, of advancing familiarity, of increasing 
 joy, of assured sympathy, is cut down and blighted. We all 
 know the bitterness of a breach which scatters a family into 
 fragments : and that is but a faint shadow of all which the 
 great Father sees to be involved in the broken contact between 
 Himself and His son. What standard have we by which to 
 sound the abyss of divine disappointment, as God waits ready 
 with gift upon gift of endless grace which He will pour out 
 upon the child of His love, as the endless years open out new 
 wonders of advancing intimacy ; and lo ! the channel by 
 c 2 
 
20 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 which alone the gifts can reach him, is choked and closed? 
 Faith is the son's receptivity : it is that temper of trust, which 
 makes the entry of succours possible : it is the medium of 
 response : it is the attitude of adherence to the Father, by 
 virtue of which communications can pass. If faith goes, all 
 further action of God upon the soul, all fresh arrival of power, 
 is made impossible. The channel of intercourse is blocked. 
 
 The demand, then, for faith by God is bound to be exacting, 
 and urgent, and universal. But, then, this demand holds in 
 reserve a ground of hope, of patience, of tolerance, of charity, 
 which we can, in no single instance, venture to limit. For 
 the faith, which it rigorously asks for, reposes, as we see, on 
 an inner and essential relationship, already existent, which 
 knits man to his God. Not even the Fall, with all its con- 
 sequent accumulations of sin, can avail to wholly undo this 
 primitive condition of existence. The fatherhood of God still 
 sustains its erring children ; the divine image is blurred, but 
 not blotted out. Still, at the close of the long days, our Lord 
 can speak to the wondering men who flock about Him, of One 
 Who is even now their Father in Heaven. This objective 
 and imperishable relationship, the underlying ground of all 
 our being, is the pre-supposition of all faith, without which it 
 would itself be impossible. And, this being so, God can afford 
 to wait very long for faith to show itself. So long as its 
 primary condition is there, there is always hope. The strin- 
 gent demand is not inspired by the mind of a lawgiver, nor 
 pressed home with the austerity of a judge ; it expresses the 
 hunger of a father's heart, to win the confidence and to evoke 
 the capacities of the children of its love. Such a hunger is, 
 indeed, more rigorous and exact than the letter of any law : 
 it aspires after a more accurate correspondence; it is sensitive 
 to more delicate distinctions : but, nevertheless, it holds, in 
 its fatherliness, far wider capacities of toleration than law- 
 giver, or judge. That same heart of the father, which in its 
 hunger of love is so exacting, will, out of the same hunger, 
 never despair, and never forsake: it will never cease from 
 the pursuit of that responsive trust which it desires ; it 
 will make allowances, it will permit delays, it will weave 
 
I. Faith. 
 
 21 
 
 excuses, it will endure rebuffs, it will condescend to per- 
 suasion, it will forget all provocations, it will wait, it will 
 plead, it will repeat its pleas, it will take no refusal, it will 
 overleap all obstacles, it will run risks, it will endlessly and 
 untiringly forgive, if only, at the last, the stubborn child- 
 heart yield, and the tender response of faith be won. 
 
 Here, then, we seem to see why the nature of faith allows 
 for two points which surprise us in God's dealings, as if with 
 a contradiction. On the one hand, we hear Him, though pro- 
 phet and priest, insisting, with severe precision, on the neces- 
 sity of a right and accurate faith. On the other, we cannot 
 but recognise, in the open area of actual life, the evidences of 
 a wide and almost boundless toleration. Again and again it 
 must have seemed to us that the Church and the world gave, 
 thus, antithetical evidence of God's character. Yet, in truth, 
 both speak the voice of one and the same God, Who, in His 
 undivided love, both passionately seeks for the delicate and 
 direct response of an accurate faith ; and, also, in order not 
 to lose this final joy, ' suffereth long, and is kind, beareth all 
 things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all 
 things.' Yes ! — has even to endure that men should pit His 
 toleration against His love, and should argue that, because 
 He will wait so long and quietly for the fruit that He desires 
 to reap, therefore, He does not desire the fruit. In reality, 
 the degree of the toleration, with which God will patiently 
 wait for the fruits of faith, is the measure of the extremity of 
 His desire for it. Just because He wants it so much. He 
 waits so long. 
 
 III. If faith, then, be the witness and the exercise of our 
 sonship in God, we can recognise at once the place it will hold 
 among the other powers and capacities of our nature. We 
 are so unfortunately apt to rank it as one among many 
 faculties, and then to find ourselves engaged in agitating con- 
 troversies concerning its limits and its claims. We have to 
 secure for it, against the rest, a field for free dominion ; and 
 that field is hard to define ; and rival powers beset it ; and 
 there are raids and skii-mishes on every frontier ; and reason 
 is ever making violent incursions on the one side, and feel- 
 
2 2 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 ing is actively besieging it on the other : and the scientific 
 frontiers, which we are ever on the point of fixing, shift, 
 and change, and vanish, as soon as we determine them ; and 
 the whole force of Christian apologetics is spent in aimless 
 and barren border- warfare. 
 
 But, if what we have been saying be true, the whole trouble 
 turns on a mistake. Faith is not to be ranked by the side 
 of the other faculties in a federation of rival powers, but is 
 behind them all. It goes back to a deeper root ; it springs 
 from a more primitive and radical act of the central self than 
 they. It belongs to that original spot of our being, where it 
 adheres in God, and di-aws on divine resources. Out from 
 that spot our powers divide, radiating into separate gifts, — 
 will, memory, feeling, reason, imagination, affection ; but all of 
 them are but varying expressions of that essential sonship, 
 which is their base. And all, therefore, run back into that 
 home where faith abides, and works, and rises, and expands. 
 At the root of all our capacities lies our sonship ; at the root 
 of all our conscious life lies faith, the witness of our sonship. 
 By adherence in God, we put out our gifts, we exercise our 
 functions, we develop our faculties ; and faith, therefore, far 
 from being their rival, whom they are interested in suspect- 
 ing, and curbing, and confining within its limits, is the secret 
 spring of their force, and the inspiration of their gi'owth, and 
 the assurance of their success. All our knowledge, for in- 
 stance, rehes upon our sonship ; it starts with an act of faith ^. 
 We throw ourselves, with the confidence of children, uj)on an 
 external world, which offers itself to our vision, to our touch, 
 to our review, to our calculation, to our handling, to our use. 
 Who can assure us of its reahty, of its truth? We must 
 measure it by those faculties under the manipulation of which 
 it falls : but how can the faculties guarantee to us their own 
 accuracy % How can we justify an extension of our own inner 
 necessities to the world of outward things ? How can we at- 
 tribute to nature that rational and causative existence which 
 we find ourselves forced to assume in it % Our justification, 
 our confidence, all issue, in the last resort, from our sonship. 
 ^ Cf. pp. 105-107. 
 
I. Faith. 23 
 
 Our powers have, in them, some likeness to those of God. 
 If He be our Father, if we be made in His image, then, in our 
 measure, we can rely upon it that we close with Nature in 
 its reality ; that our touch, our sight, our reason, have some 
 hold on the actual life of things ; that we see and know in 
 some such manner, after our degree, as God Himself sees 
 and knows. In unhesitating reliance upon our true sonship, 
 we sally out and deal with the world ; we act upon the sure 
 conviction that we are not altogether outside the secret of 
 objective existence. We refuse absolutely to doubt, or go 
 behind the reports made to us by feeling, by memory, by 
 thought. If once we are clear as to what the report is, we 
 rest on it ; we ask for no power to stand (as it were) outside 
 our own experience, our own knowledge, so as to assure our- 
 selves of their veracity. We are certain that our Father 
 cannot have misguided us ; that we are within His influence ; 
 that we are in modified possession of His truth ; that our 
 capacities reflect His mind. We could not have so confidently 
 recognised, understood, and handled the world, if it had been 
 wholly foreign to us. As it is, we lay instinctive hold upon 
 it ; we take spontaneous possession ; we exert authority upon 
 it ; we feel our inherent right over it ; we are at home in it ; 
 we move freely about it, as children in a father's house. 
 Acting in this faith, all our capacities justify themselves to 
 us ; they respond to our reliance upon them ; they develop 
 into ever advancing strength under the motions of this trust ; 
 they form a continual and increasing witness to the verity of 
 that sonship in which we have believed. 
 
 Faith, then, belongs to our entire body of activities. We 
 live by faith. By faith, under the inspiration of faith, we put 
 out our life, we set to work, we exercise faculties, we close 
 with our opportunities, we have confidence in our environ- 
 ment, we respond to calls, we handle critical emergencies, we 
 send out far abroad our experimental intelligence, we discover, 
 we accumulate experiences, we build, and plant, and develop. 
 An elemental act of faith lies at the root of all this advance ; 
 and every motion that we make, demands a renewal of that 
 primitive venture. In all secular progress ' we walk by faith.' 
 
24 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 Every step revives the demand. Just as the earth, if it neces- 
 sitates the idea of a primal creation, requires, by exactly the 
 same necessity, an incessant renewal of that first creative 
 act, so our life, if it required faith to start it, requires faith 
 every moment to sustain it. Our faculties never arrive at a 
 use which is self-dependent and self-originated, as if they 
 could grow beyond the tentative conditions of their earliest 
 assays. They originate in a venturous experiment ; and, how- 
 ever long, and however complicated that experiment become, 
 it retains its original character ; it remains experimental to 
 the end. The results, no doubt, justify the venture made ; but, 
 then, the first venture involved such immense assumptions, 
 that no results reached can ever complete its justification, 
 and so remove its tentative nature. For, by assuming a real 
 correspondence between our faculties and the world with 
 which they deal, it assumed that such a correspondence would 
 never fail us ; would be capable of infinite verification ; would 
 prove adequate to all possible experiences ; would receive 
 indefinite and progressive extension. No verifications ever 
 reached can, then, exhaust the faith of that primitive venture ; 
 they can only serve to exhibit to it how far more was con- 
 tained within that venture than it could ever have conceived. 
 New knowledge, new experience, far from expunging the 
 elements of faith, make ever fresh demands upon it; they 
 constitute perpetual appeals to it to enlarge its trust, to 
 expand its original audacity. And j^et the very vastness 
 of those demands serves to obscure and conceal their true 
 character. This is the key to much of our present bewilder- 
 ment. The worlds of knowledge and of action have assumed 
 such huge proportions, have accumulated such immense and 
 complicated resources, have gained such supreme confidence 
 in their own stability, have pushed forward their successes 
 with such startling power and rapidity, that we have lost 
 count of their primal assumption. In amazement at their 
 stupendous range, we are over-awed ; we dare not challenge 
 them wdth their hypothetical origin, or remind them that 
 their entire and wonderful structure is but an empty and 
 hollow dream, unless they are prepared to place their utter- 
 
I. Faith. 25 
 
 most trust in an unverified act of faith. Given that trust, 
 which relies on the reality of the bond which holds between 
 our inner faculties and the outer world, then all this mar- 
 vellous vision is rooted on a rock, has validity and substance. 
 Withdraw that spiritual trust in our sonship, and all this 
 fairy- world, won for us by science and experience. 
 
 These cloud-capped towers, these gorgeous palaces, 
 The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
 Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, 
 And, like an unsubstantial pageant faded. 
 Leave not a rack behind. 
 
 Our secular and scientific life is an immense experiment in 
 faith, — an experiment which verifies itself by success, but 
 which justifies itself only if it remembers to attribute all its 
 success to the reality of that hidden relationship to God, which 
 is the key to all its capacities, the justification of all its 
 confidence, and the security of all its advance. 
 
 Such a remembrance is not easy for it : for the exercise of 
 the capacities is instinctive and spontaneous, and it requires 
 an eff"ort of reflection to question the validity of such 
 exercise. And such an effort seems tiresome and impertinent 
 in the heat of successful progress, in the thick of crowding 
 conquests. The practical man is apt to give an irritated 
 stamp on the ground, which to him feels so solid, and to deem 
 this a sufficient answer to the importunate inquiry how he 
 knows that he has any substantial world to know and to 
 handle. For faith lies hehind our secular life, secreted within 
 it : and the secular life, therefore, can go on as if no faith was 
 wanted ; it need not trouble its head with perplexing questions, 
 whether its base be verifiable by the same standards and mea- 
 sures as its superstructure. Its own practical activity is 
 complete and free, whether it discover its hidden principle or 
 not : just as Mr. Jourdain's conversation was complete and 
 free, long before he discovered that he was talking prose. 
 We have to stand outside our secular life and reflect on it, to 
 disclose its true spring. The appeal to faith here is indirect. 
 
 But, in religion, this hidden activity is evoked by a direct 
 appeal : it is unearthed ; it is summoned to come forward on 
 its own account. God demands of this secret and innermost 
 
26 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 vitality that it should no longer lie incased within the other 
 capacities, but that it should throw off its sheltering covers, 
 and should emerge into positive action, and should disclose its 
 peculiar and native character. God, the Father, calls faith 
 out of its dim background into the front of the scene. He 
 does this under the pressure of invocations, which address 
 their appeals through, and by means of, the secular and visible 
 material, within and behind which He is ever at work. This 
 had, indeed, always told of His invisible and eternal Godhead: 
 but it did so indirectly, by requiring Him as its constant 
 pre-supposition and base. Now, it is so used as to bring 
 God into direct and positive evidence, by means of acts, which 
 bring forward the energies of His immediate Fatherhood. All 
 the growth of Eden had always testified to the existence and 
 the name of God : but a new stage was reached when He was 
 felt moving, in evening hours, amid the trees of the garden. 
 And as the Father presses forward out of His silent background, 
 so the secret sonship in man emerges out of its deep recesses 
 in positive response, using its own secular faculties by which 
 to carry itself forward into evidence and action. This definite 
 and direct contact between the God Who is the hidden source 
 of all life, and the faith which is the hidden spring of all 
 human activity — this disclosure by the Father, met by this 
 discovery by the son — this is Religion : and the history of 
 Religion is the story of its slow and gradual advance in sanity 
 and clearness, until it culminates in that special disclosure 
 which we call Revelation ; which, again, crowns itself in that 
 Revelation of the Father through the Son, in which the dis- 
 closure of God to man and the discovery by man of God are 
 made absolute in Him Who is one with the Father, knowing 
 all that the Father does, making known all that the Father is. 
 Now here we have reached a parting of ways. For we 
 have touched the point at which the distinctions start out 
 between what is secular and what is sacred — between virtue 
 and godliness — between the world and the Church. If ' Re- 
 ligion ' means this coming forward into the foreground of that 
 which is the universal background of all existence, then 
 we cut ourselves free from the perplexity which benumbs 
 
I. Faith. 27 
 
 us when we hear of the ' Gospel of the Secular Life ; ' of 
 the ' Religion of Humanity ; ' of doctors and scientific pro- 
 fessors being ' Ministers of Religion;' of the ' Natural Religion' 
 which is contained within the borders of science with its sense 
 of wonder, or of art with its vision of beauty. All this is so 
 obviously true in one sense that it sinks to the level of an 
 amiable commonplace ; but if this be the sense intended, why 
 is all this emphasis laid upon it "? Yet if more than this is 
 meant, we are caught in a juggling maze of words, and are 
 losing hold on vital distinctions, and feel ourselves to be 
 rapidly collapsing into the condition of the unhappy Ninevites, 
 who knew not their right hands from their left. 
 
 The word 'Religion,' after all, has a meaning: and we do 
 not get forward by labouring to disguise from ourselves this 
 awkward fact. This positive meaning allows everything that 
 can be asked in the way' of sanctity and worth, for nature 
 and the natural life. AU of it is God-given, God-inspired, 
 God-directed ; all of it is holy. But the fact of this being so 
 is one thing : the recognition of it is another ; and it is this 
 recognition of God in things which is the core and essence 
 of religion. Natural life is the life in God, which has not yet 
 arrived at this recognition : it is not yet, as such, religious. 
 The sacred and supernatural office of man is to press through 
 his own natural environment, to force his spirit through the 
 thick jungle of his manifold activities and capacities, to shake 
 himself free from the encompassing complexities, to step out 
 clear and loose from all entanglement, to find himself, through 
 and bej^ond all his secular experiences, face to face with a 
 God, Who, on His side, is for ever pushing aside the veil which 
 suggests and conceals Him, for ever disengaging Himself from 
 the phenomena through which He arrives at man's con- 
 sciousness, for ever brushing away the confusions, and coming 
 out more and more into the open, until, through and past the 
 ' thunder comes a human voice ; ' and His eyes burn their way 
 through into man's soul ; and He calls the man by his name, and 
 takes him apart, and hides him in some high and separate cleft 
 of the rock, far from all the glamour and tumult of crowded 
 existence, and holds him close in the hollow of His hand as 
 
28 The Religion of the Incar^mtion. 
 
 He passes by, and names to him, with clear and memorable 
 voice, the 'Name of the Lord, the Lord God, merciful, gracious, 
 long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving 
 iniquity, and Who will by no means clear the guilty.' Here 
 is Religion. It is the arrival at the secret ; the discovery by 
 the son of a Father, Who is in all His works, yet is distinct 
 from them all, — to be recognised, known, spoken with, loved, 
 imitated, worshipped, on His own account, and for Himself 
 alone. 
 
 Religion, in this sense, is perfectly distinct from what is 
 secular : yet, in making this distinction, it brings no reproach : 
 it pronounces nothing common or unclean. It only asks us not 
 to play with words : and it reminds us that, in blurring this 
 radical distinction, we are undoing all the work which it has 
 been the aim of the religious movement to achieve. For the 
 history of this movement is the record of the gradual advance 
 man has made in disentangling ' the Name of God ' from all 
 its manifestations. Religion is the effort to arrive at that 
 Name, in its separable identity, in its personal and distinct 
 significance. It is the fulfilment of the unceasing cry ' Tell 
 me Thy name ! ' In religion we are engaged in the age-long 
 task of lifting the Name, clear and high, above the clang 
 and roar of its works, that through and by means of all that 
 He is, we may pierce through to the very God of gods, and 
 may close with Him in the blessed soHtude of a love which 
 knits heart to heart and spirit to spii'it, without any with- 
 holding interval, with no veil to hinder or intervene. 
 
 The growth of faith, then, means the gradual increase of 
 this personal contact, this spiritual intimacy between Father 
 and son. To achieve this increasing apprehension of the 
 Father's character and love, faith uses, as instruments and as 
 channels, all its natural faculties, by which to bring itself 
 forward into action, and through which to receive the com- 
 munications, which arrive at it from the heart and will of 
 Him, Who, on His side, uses all natural opportunities as the 
 material of a speech, which is ever, as man's ear becomes 
 sensitive and alert, growing more articulate, and positive, 
 and personal. 
 
I. Faith. 29 
 
 The entire human nature, — imagination, reason, feeling, de- 
 sire, — becomes to faith a vehicle of intercourse, a mediating aid 
 in its friendship with God. But faith itself lies deeper than 
 all the capacities of which it makes use : it is, itself, the primal 
 act of the elemental self, there at the root of life, where the 
 being is yet whole and entire, a single personal individuality, 
 unbroken and undivided. Faith, which is the germinal act of 
 our love for God, is an act of the whole self, there where it 
 is one, before it has parted off into what we can roughly de- 
 scribe as separate and distinguishable faculties. It therefore 
 uses, not one or other of the faculties, but all : and in a sense 
 it uses them all at once, just as any complete motion of will, 
 or of love, acts with all the united force of many combined 
 faculties. A perfect act of love would combine, into a single 
 movement, the entire sum of faculties, just because it proceeds 
 from that basal self, which is the substance and unity of them 
 all. So with faith. Faith, the act of a willing adhesion to 
 God the Father, proceeds from a source deeper than the point 
 at which faculties divide. 
 
 And this has a most vital bearing on the question of faith's 
 evidences. It is here we touch on the crucial characteristic 
 which determines all our logical and argumentative position. 
 
 For, if a movement of faith springs from a source anterior 
 to the distinct division of faculties, then no one faculty can 
 adequately account for the resultant action. Each faculty, 
 in its separate stage, can account for one element, for one 
 factor, which contributed to the result : and that element, that 
 factor, may be of greater or less importance, according to the 
 rank of the faculty in the entire self. But, if the movement 
 of faith has also included and involved many other elements 
 which appear, when analysed out, in the domains of the other 
 faculties ; then the account which each separate faculty can 
 give of the whole act, can never be more than partial. Its 
 evidence must be incomplete. If the central self has gathered 
 its momentum from many channels, it is obvious that the 
 amount contributed by any one channel will be unable to 
 justify the force exerted, or to explain the event that fol- 
 lowed. If we track home each faculty employed to this 
 
30 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 central spring of energy, we shall see that each points to the 
 result, contributes to it, suggests it ; but the result will 
 always be more than the evidence, so collected, can warrant. 
 
 This limitation, which we may allow about other faculties, 
 is apt to become a stumbling-block when we apply it to the 
 high gift of reason. Reason, somehow, seems to us to rise 
 into some supreme and independent throne ; it reviews the 
 other faculties ; and is, therefore, free from their limitations. 
 We fear to hint that it has any lord over it. How can we 
 assume such a lordship without dubbing ourselves irrational 
 obscurantists, who in folly try to stamp out the light ? 
 
 But we are not, in reality, dreaming of limiting reason by 
 any limitations except those which it makes for itself. We 
 are not violently attempting to make reason stop short at any 
 point, where it could go on. We are only asking, is there 
 any point at which it stops of itself, and cannot go further ? 
 We propose to use reason right out, to press it to its utmost 
 limit, to spur it to put forth all its powers ; and we assert that, 
 so doing, reason will, at last, reveal its inability to get right 
 to the end, to carry clear home. And why ? Because the self 
 is not only rational but something more : it combines, with its 
 unbroken, central individuality, other elements besides reason : 
 and therefore, of sheer necessity, whenever that central self 
 puts out an elemental act in which the integral spring of 
 personal energy takes part, — such as an act of will, or love, or 
 faith, — then, reason can be but one factor, but one element, how- 
 ever important, in that issuing act : and if so, then it can give 
 but a partial account of it; its own contribution can not wholly 
 explain, or justify the result. In Bishop Butler's language, 
 the utmost that reason can do is to make it ' very probable.' 
 
 The real root-question in this time-worn controversy is 
 just this: is, or is not, reason the most primal and elemental 
 act of the integral personality ? If it is, then, of course, it 
 regulates and determines all subordinate acts. Everything 
 must finally submit to its arbitration : for everything, if 
 tracked back far enough, must terminate in an act of reason. 
 
 But if, as Christianity asserts, the ultimate and elemental 
 self be a moral will, that can believe, and love, then, though 
 
I. Faith. 3 1 
 
 this self contains in it reason, it also goes back behind reason. 
 Reason is indeed one of its essential elements, but it is not 
 its entire essence, for this includes within itself, that which 
 appears as feeling, and desire, and imagination, and choice, 
 and passion, as well as that which shows itself as reason. When, 
 therefore, the self puts out its primitive power, it will do 
 actions which satisfy reason, indeed, but which reason cannot 
 exhaustively analyse, or interpret, since the entire force of 
 reason, if it were all brought into action, would still be only 
 a partial contribution to the effect. 
 
 As a fact, we all of us are perfectly familiar with this limi- 
 tation, in affairs of affection and friendship. We never have 
 here that paralysing awe of reason, which haunts us in 
 matters of religion. We never allow ourselves to be bullied 
 into submission to its supremacy. We should laugh at it, if 
 it attempted to dictate to us ; or to account for all our motives. 
 Not that we are at war with it : or are shirking it : or are 
 afraid of it. We can have affections and friendships, which 
 have every possible justification which reason can offer. 
 Every conceivable expediency can unite to authorise and 
 approve them. Every interest may be served by them. They 
 may stand every test which a cool common-sense, or a calm 
 impartial judgment, or an acute calculation of consequences 
 can apply to them. They may be the very embodiment of 
 reason. And yet, by no amount of calculated expediencies, 
 by no pressure of rational considerations, could we dream, for 
 one moment, that our friendship was accounted for. If ever 
 it could trace its origin to these motives, it would cease to be 
 what we thought it. The discovery would destroy it. All 
 possible considerations and calculations might have been 
 present, and yet they would be utterly powerless to create 
 in us the love. And the love, however gladly it may recognise 
 the approving considerations, would repudiate, with amaze- 
 ment, and with laughter, any presumption on their part to 
 say, ' this is why you love.' 
 
 It is the same with all primal acts of heroism. They may be 
 absolutely rational : yet, they would cease to be heroic, they 
 would never be done, if they did not call upon a force, which, 
 
32 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 indeed, may determine its direction by reason, but which uses 
 quite other motives to induce itself to act. Utilitarianism, 
 which attempts to account for such heroic momentum by 
 purely rational considerations, finds itself reduced to shifts 
 which all those can see through, who refuse to be juggled 
 out of their own experiences. It is the same with all 
 the higher forms of moral energy. All of them go beyond 
 their evidences. They all lift the rational motives, which 
 suggest and determine the direction of their activity, by 
 an impulsive force, which has in it the power of initiative, 
 of origination. Every high act of will is a new creation. 
 As the gunpowder sleeps, until the spark ahghts upon it, so the 
 dii'ections of reason remain below the level of action, until the 
 jet of a living will fuses its fire with their material. The act 
 which results may, indeed, be capable of complete interpreta- 
 tion on reasonable grounds : it may be able to show reasons 
 which account for every fragment of it : yet, still, the living 
 force which drew together, and combined all those separate 
 reasons into a single resultant act, has a creative and original 
 character. The series of reasons, however complete, cannot 
 account for the result, for they cannot possibly account for 
 their own combination: and without this combination of 
 their momentum the result would not be there. 
 
 It is well to recall briefly this character of the moral wiD, 
 the affections, the love, of man. For these are faith's nearest 
 and dearest allies. It is here, in these elemental motions, that 
 faith finds its closest parallel. It is something very like an 
 act of will, a movement of love, an heroic and chivalrous 
 moral venture. And whenever we desire to understand its 
 relations to reason, we must persistently recall the attitude 
 towards reason taken by these fundamental forms of energy ; 
 only remembering that faith is yet more elemental, yet more 
 completely the act of the central integral self, even than 
 these. Where they leave reason behind, it will do so yet 
 further. Where they call upon something deeper, and more 
 primitive than reason, it wiU do the same, and yet more 
 triumphantly. It is not that either it or they are without 
 reason : or that they stand outside reason, consulting it so far 
 
I. Faith. 33 
 
 as they choose, and then dropping it ; it is not that reason 
 may not be found in every corner and fragment of their 
 activity, pervading, colouring, restraining, limiting, directing, 
 justifying it : but simply that what we call the rational self is 
 not only rational, but also something more : that, if analysed 
 out, the reason will not appear as the root and core of 
 the man, but rather as an element inhering in a yet more 
 central base : and that whenever the energy of vital action 
 is put out, we are driven to look through and beyond reason, 
 if we would unearth the source whence the act springs. 
 
 The relation, then, of reason to faith is not strange, or forced, 
 or unfamiliar to us, if it is much the same as its relation to the 
 affections, or to moral acts and intuitions. We know what to 
 expect, what part it ought to play in such a case. As in a case 
 of heroic moral daring, or high affection, so, in a matter of faith, 
 we shall expect that reason, with its arguments and its 
 evidences, will play all round and about it, will go before it, 
 discussing the path to follow, will follow after it, unravelling 
 the secret forces at work in it : will watch, and analyse, and 
 learn, and warn ; will reconnoitre, and examine, and survey, 
 and discover: will justify, interpret, defend, assist. But yet 
 we shall expect, also, that the act of faith will do more than 
 all the arguments can anticipate : that it will hold itself free 
 from them all : that it will appeal, not to them, but to its 
 own inherent force, for the final decision: that it will move 
 by instinct, by spontaneity, by inspiration : that it will rush 
 past all evidences, in some great stride ; that it will brush 
 through scruples that cannot be gainsaid, and obstacles that 
 cannot be got over ; that it will surprise, that it will outdo, 
 that it will create ; that it will bring novel forces into play, 
 invisible, unaccountable, incalculable ; that it will fly, when 
 reason walks ; that it will laugh, when reason trembles : that 
 it will over-leap barriers which reason deems final. As with 
 love, so with faith, it will take in all evidences, it will listen 
 to all proofs ; but when they have done their utmost, it has 
 yet got to begin ; it itself, after all its calculations, must make 
 the actual spring, which is the decision. Out of itself, it draws 
 its strength : out of itself it makes its effort ; by being what it is, 
 
 D 
 
34 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 it sees what it sees, it does what it does. It uses the evidence ; 
 but uses it to leap from, to go further. Its motives, advances, 
 efforts, issue from within itself Just as the lover's final answer 
 to the question, ' why did you do that ? ' must be, ' because I loved ' ; 
 so the final answer of the believer, in explanation of an act, 
 can never be wrung out of the reasonable grounds for so acting ; 
 it must always be ' because I believed.' Just as man first 
 acts, and speaks, and reason, following behind, can at last 
 discover that his actions were all consecutive, and that his 
 language has a perfect grammar ; so faith has always to make 
 its venture, prompted and inspired from within, and only long 
 afterwards can it expect to learn that if it has been true to 
 itself, to its proper promptings, then its action can, by slow 
 and plodding reason, be thoroughly interpreted and justified. 
 Faith is, above all things, anticipatory. The sonship, within, 
 anticipates what the Father has in store for it : by means of 
 affection, by rapid instincts of love, it assumes what it cannot 
 yet verify, it foretells the secrets that lie hidden within the 
 Father's eyes. So anticipating, it makes its venture ; — a ven- 
 ture which love alone can understand and justify, though the 
 faithfulness of the eternal and supreme Father ensures that 
 the anticipation shall receive its full verification. 
 
 If this be the relation of faith to reason, we see the expla- 
 nation of what seems, at first sight, to the philosopher, to be 
 the most irritating and hypocritical characteristic of faith. 
 It is always shifting its intellectual defences. It adopts this 
 or that fashion of philosophical apology; and then, when 
 this is shattered by some novel scientific generalisation, faith, 
 probably after a passionate struggle to retain the old position, 
 suddenly and gaily abandons it, and takes up with the new 
 formula, just as if nothing had happened: it discovers that 
 the new formula is admirably adapted for its purposes, and 
 is, in fact, just what it always meant, only it has unfortun- 
 ately omitted to mention it. So it goes on, again and again ; 
 and no wonder that the philosophers growl at those humbugs, 
 the clergy ! 
 
 But they are criticising faith as if it were a theory, as if 
 knowledge were its province, while, in truth, the seat of faith 
 
I. Faith. 3 5 
 
 lies back behind the region of knowledge. Its radical acts and 
 motives are independent of any particular condition of thought 
 or science : they are deeper recessed ; they exist in their own 
 right, and under their own conditions. True, they may not be 
 able to express themselves, to get their energies forward, to set 
 themselves free, to manifest themselves, except through the 
 mediation of knowledge, — through the instruments and chan- 
 nels which the science of the day provides them. But this 
 does not confuse their inherent and distinct character. They 
 never identify themselves with the tools they use. They sit 
 quite loose to the particular state of thought, the formula, the 
 terms, through which they make their way out into action. 
 And, moreover, since the acts of faith are more radical than 
 those of reason, and since they belong to the entire man 
 acting in his integrity, they therefore of necessity anticipate, 
 in their degree, all that the man, by slow development, by 
 the patient industry of reasoning, will laboriously disclose. 
 Lying deeper than all knowledge, they hold in them the con- 
 dition under which all knowledge will be arrived at. They 
 constitute the activity which ought to be at the background 
 of all our reasoning. No particular or partial state of know- 
 ledge can exhaust their significance. Each step knowledge 
 makes does but illustrate, in some new fashion, the relation 
 of all knowledge to faith — does but elucidate the character- 
 istics of that primal sonship. In each fresh discovery or 
 generalisation, faith finds a new instrument for expressing its 
 old convictions; it is taught to see the weak points, the 
 imperfections of its former expressions ; it understands where 
 they hold good, and where they failed ; it gets out more of 
 itself than ever before, through the new channels opened to 
 it ; it discovers more of its own character by finding better 
 modes in which to manifest it. It does but half know itself, 
 so long as its expression is encumbered. 
 
 The advance of secular knowledge, then, is for faith, an 
 acquii-ed gain : for by it, it knows itself better ; it sees more 
 of what was involved in its vital convictions. It has a 
 struggle, no doubt, in dropping off the expressions that have 
 grown familiar to it, and in detecting the fresh insight into 
 D 3 
 
36 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 its own nature which it can win by the new terminology: 
 but when once it has mastered the terms, new lights break 
 out upon it, new suggestions flash, new capacities disclose 
 themselves. It has won a new tool: when it has become 
 familiarised with the use of it, it can do great and unexpected 
 things with it. 
 
 But, for all that, it is but a new tool, worked by the old 
 convictions ; they have not changed, any more than love 
 changes, though the slow development of married life may 
 carry the lovers into unknown experiences, in foreign lands, 
 under changed skies. The two, if they be faithful, learn far 
 more of what the love they plighted means, as each sweeping 
 revolution carries them hither and thither, than ever they 
 understood on the wedding day ; yet it is ever the old love 
 then pledged, which they hold fast to the end. Its identity 
 is emphasised by the changes. So with faith. It may absorb 
 its energies in the joy of wielding the particular instrument 
 with which, at any one moment, science supplies it. But it 
 will never the least fear to drop it, so soon as the advancing 
 skill and the pushing minds of men have elaborated for it 
 some yet more delicate and subtle tool, wherewith to give free 
 play to its native vitalities. 
 
 For faith is moved by but one solitary passion — the hope 
 of cleaving, closer and ever closer, to the being of God. It 
 is, itself, nothing but this act of personal adherence, of per- 
 sonal cohesion ; and all else is, for it, material that can be 
 subdued to this single service. Each bettering of knowledge 
 intensifies the possibilities of this cohesion ; and, for that, it 
 is welcomed. It opens out fresh aspects of the good Father : 
 it uncovers new treasures of His wisdom : therefore, for faith, 
 it is an ever-mounting ladder, by which it draws nearer and 
 nearer, spirit to spirit, heart to heart. No idle or indiflferent 
 matter this ; and right knowledge, therefore, is for faith, a 
 serious and pressing need. And, moreover, faith is pledged 
 to use all possible guidance and direction in making its great 
 act of self-surrender to God. And it is the peculiar office 
 of reason, and of the rational conscience, to guard it from 
 any distorted and unworthy venture. Faith has to make its 
 
I. Faith. 37 
 
 leap ; but to make it exactly in that direction, and in no 
 other, where reason points the way. It is bound therefore 
 to use all its intelligent resources : it may not fall below the 
 level of its highest reason without the risk of sinking to a 
 superstition. This is the radical difference between what we 
 here claim, and that which a superstition demands of us. A 
 superstition asks faith to shut its eyes. We ask it to open 
 them as wide as it can. We demand this of it as a positive 
 duty. It is bound, as an act of the whole man, to use every 
 conceivable means and security which knowledge can bring it. 
 For so alone can it secure itself against the hazards which 
 encompass its adventure. It cannot afford to enter on that 
 venturous committal of itself less equipped and instructed 
 than it was open to it to be. It must put all to use that can 
 better its offer of itself to God. 
 
 It is, in this seriousness, that faith is apt to embrace so fast 
 the dominant scientific or philosophical creed. It has found, 
 through this creed, a new and thrilling insight into God's 
 mind, and it fastens on this precious gift ; and dwells delight- 
 edly on it, and spends itself in absorbing the peculiar truths 
 which this particular way of thinking brings to the front. 
 So that, at last, when the smash comes, when the floods break 
 in, when the accumulation of new facts outside the old lines 
 necessitates a total reconstruction of the intellectual fabric, 
 faith seems to have gone under with the ruined scheme to 
 which it had attached itself so firmly. 
 
 Yet, if ever it has implicated its own fate with that of any 
 particular form of knowledge, it has been false to itself. It 
 has no more right to identify itself with any intellectual 
 situation than it has to pin its fortunes to those of any 
 political dynasty. Its eternal task lies in rapid readjustment 
 to each fresh situation, which the motion of time may disclose 
 to it. It has that in it which can apply to all, and learn from 
 all. Its identity is not lost, because its expressions vary and 
 shift : for its identity lies deep in personality ; and per- 
 sonality is that which testifies to its own identity by the 
 variety and the rapidity of its self-adaptation to the changes 
 of circumstance. So with faith. Its older interpretations of 
 
38 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 itself are not false, because the newer situations have called 
 for different manifestations. Each situation forces a new 
 aspect to the front. But ever it is God and the soul, which 
 recognise each other under every disguise. Now it is in one 
 fashion and now in another: but it is always one unalter- 
 able wisdom which is justified, recognised, and loved, by 
 those who are her children. 
 
 We will not, then, be the least afraid of the taunt, that we 
 are all accepting and delivering from our pulpits that which 
 once threw us into anger and dismay. Only let us learn 
 our true lesson ; and, in our zeal to appreciate the wonders 
 of Evolution, let us hold ourselves prepared for the day which 
 is bound to come, when again the gathering facts will clamour 
 for a fresh generalisation : and the wheel will give one more 
 turn ; and the new man will catch sight of the vision which is 
 preparing ; and the new book will startle ; and the new band 
 of youthful professors will denounce and demolish our present 
 heroes ; and all the reviews and magazines will yelp in chorus 
 at their heels, proclaiming loudly that now, at last and for 
 ever, the faith, which has pledged itself so deeply to the 
 obsolete and discredited theory of Evolution, is indeed dead 
 and done with. Faith will survive that crisis, as it has sur- 
 vived so many before : but it will be something, if it does not 
 drag behind it the evil record of passion, and blindness, with 
 which it has too often disgraced its unwilling passage from 
 truth to truth. 
 
 IV. But here our objections take, perhaps, a new turn 
 altogether. ' Ah, yes ! ' it will be said ; ' faith, if it were a 
 simple surrender of the soul to God, a childlike adhesion 
 of the spiritual sonship in us to its Father, Who is in 
 heaven, might sit loose to all formulae, theories, discoveries, 
 in the way described. Faith, if it limited itself to this mys- 
 tical communion, might be beyond the scope and criticism of 
 reason. But this is not the least what you really ask of us. 
 The faith, for which you practically plead, the only form of 
 faith actually open to us, has rashly left these safe confines : it 
 has implicated itself with a vast body of facts recorded in a 
 book. It has involved itself in intricate statements of dogma. 
 
I. Faith. 39 
 
 How can you claim to be free from the control of logic and 
 criticism, in things so directly open to logical treatment? 
 This spiritual faith of yours has mixed itself up with alien 
 matter, with historical incidents, with intellectual definitions : 
 here are things of evidence and proof. Here its locks are 
 shorn ; its mystic strength is gone. Delilah holds it fast ; it 
 is a prisoner in the hands of the Philistines. If you will 
 retreat again back into the region of simple spiritual in- 
 tuitions, and abandon to reason this debatable land, how 
 gladly would we follow you ! But that is just what you refuse 
 to do.' 
 
 Now, here is the serious moment for us of to-day. It is quite 
 true that all would be plain and easy, if we might be allowed 
 to make this retreat — if we might limit our claims for the 
 spirit to that simple childlike intuition which, instinctively, 
 feels after, and surrenders to, the good Father in heaven. 
 But what would that retreat mean? It would mean an 
 attempt, desperate and blind, to turn back the world's story, 
 to ignore the facts, to over-leap the distinctions of time and 
 place, to deny experience, to force ourselves back into pri- 
 mitive days, to imagine ourselves children again. Simple 
 intuitions of God, simple communion with the Father, un- 
 questioned, undistracted, — this is the privilege of primitive 
 days, when minds are simple, when experience is simple, when 
 society is simple. Plain, easy, and direct situations admit of 
 plain, easy, and direct handling. But our situation is not 
 plain, easy, or direct. Our minds are intricate and com- 
 plicated ; our story has been a long and a difficult one ; our 
 social condition is the perplexed deposit of age-long expe- 
 riences. The faith, which is to be ours to-day, must be a 
 faith of to-day. It cannot remain at the level of childhood, 
 when nothing else in us or about us is the least childlike. 
 It cannot babble out in pretty baby-language, when the 
 situation with which it has to deal is terribly earnest, serious, 
 perilous, and intense. It must be level with its work ; and 
 its work is complicated, hard, disciplined : how can it expect 
 to accomplish it without effort, without pain, without train- 
 ing, without intricacy ? The world is old ; human life is old ; 
 
40 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 and faith is old also. It has had many a strange and stormy 
 experience ; it has learned much on the way ; it has about it 
 the marks of old troubles ; the care, the patience, the com- 
 pleteness of age, have left their stamp upon it. It has had a 
 history, like everything else ; and it reaches us to-day, in 
 a form which that history behind it can alone make intel- 
 ligible. Four thousand years have gone to its making — since 
 Abraham fii-st laid hold, in a definite and consistent manner, 
 of the faith which is ours to-day. All those centuries it ha,s 
 been putting itself together, growing, enriching itself, de- 
 veloping, as it faced and measured each new issue, each 
 gathering complication, each pressing hazard. This long ex- 
 perience has built up faith's history : and, by study of that 
 history, we can know why it was that faith could not stand 
 still at that point where we should find it so convenient to 
 rest. Faith appeals to its own story to justify its career ; 
 it bears about that history with it as its explanation, why, 
 and how it has arrived at its present condition. That 
 history is its proof how far it has left its first childhood 
 behind it, how impossible it is, at the end of the days, to 
 return to the beginning. The history, which constitutes 
 our difficulty, is its own answer. For there, in that Bible, 
 lies the recorded story of the facts which pressed hard 
 upon the earliest intuition of God, and drove it forward, 
 and compelled it to fix itself, and to define itself, and to 
 take a firmer root, and to make for itself a secure dwelling- 
 place, and to shape for itself a career. The Bible is the 
 apology which our faith carries with it, and offers as a proof 
 of the necessity which has forced it to go beyond its primitive 
 efforts, until it has reached the stage at which we now en- 
 counter it. It portrays there, before our eyes, how it all 
 began ; how there came to this man and to that, the simple 
 augury, the presage, the spasm of spiritual insight, -the flash, 
 the glimpse, the intimation ; until there came the man, 
 Abraham, in whom it won the emphasis, the solidity, the 
 power, of a call. ' Oh ! that we might be content to feel, as 
 he, the presence of the Everlasting ! Why not leave us in 
 peace, we cry, with the simple faith of Abraham ? ' And the 
 
I. Faith. 41 
 
 answer is plain : ' because it is the nineteenth century after 
 Christ, instead of the nineteenth century before.' We are 
 making a mistake of dates. Let us turn to our Bible and read. 
 There we watch the reasons disclosing themselves why that 
 simple faith could not abide in arrest at its first moment ; why 
 it must open a new career, with new duties, and new respon- 
 sibilities, and new problems. The seed is sown, but it has to 
 grow ; to make good its footing amid the thick of human 
 affairs ; to root itself in the soil of human history; to spread 
 itself out in institutions ; to push its dominion ; to widen its 
 range ; to become a tree that will fill the land. Before 
 Abraham, it was but a flying seed, blown by the winds ; now, 
 it is a stable, continuous, masterful growth. It must be this, 
 if it is ever to make effective its spiritual assertions over the 
 increasing intricacy of human affairs. 
 
 What, let us ask, is that life of faith which historically began 
 with Abraham % It is a friendship, an intimacy, between man 
 and God, between a son and a father. Such an intimacy cannot 
 be idle or stagnant; it cannot arrest its instinctive development. 
 It holds in it infinite possibilities of growth : of increasing 
 familiarity, of multiplied communion. And, thus, such a friend- 
 ship creates a story of its own ; it has its jars, its frictions, its 
 entanglements ; alas ! on one side, its lapses, its quarrels, its 
 blunders, its misunderstandings : and then, on the other, its 
 corresponding indignations, and withdrawals, and rebukes ; 
 and yet again, its reconciliations, its reactions, its pardons, its 
 victories. Ever it moves forward on its chequered path : ever 
 God, the good Friend, spends Himself in recovering the inti- 
 macy, in renewing it, in purging it, in raising it. Its condi- 
 tions expand : its demands intensify : its perils deepen : its 
 glories gather : until it consummates its effort in the per- 
 fected communion of God and man — in Him, Who completes 
 and closes the story of this ever-growing intimacy, by that 
 act of supreme condescension which brings down God to 
 inhabit and possess the heart of man : and by that act of 
 supreme exaltation, which uplifts man into absolute union 
 with the God Who made him. 
 
 This is the story: the Bible is its record. As a body of 
 
42 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 incidents and facts it must be subject to all the conditions of 
 history and the laws of evidence ; as a written record it 
 introduces a swarm of questions, which can be sifted and 
 decided by rational criticism. This entails complications, it 
 must be confessed ; but they are inevitable. The intimacy 
 between man and God cannot advance, except through the 
 pressure of connected and recorded experience. A human 
 society which has no record of its past is robbed of its future. 
 It is savage : it cannot go forward, because it cannot look 
 back. So with this divine friendship. Its recorded experi- 
 ences are the one condition of its growth. Without them it 
 must always be beginning afresh : it must remain imprisoned 
 at the starting-post. The length and complexity of its record 
 is the measure of its progress ; even though they must pre- 
 sent, at the same time, a larger surface to the handling of 
 criticism, and may involve a deeper degree of obscurity in 
 details. 
 
 And, after all, though details di-awn out of a dead past 
 permit obscurity, the nature and character of the main issue 
 become ever more fixed and distinct, as the long roll of 
 circumstances discloses its richer secrets. The very shift 
 and confusion of the surface-material throws out, in emphatic 
 contrast, the firm outlines of the gathering and growing 
 mystery. Ever the advance proceeds, throwing ofi" all that 
 is accidental, immaterial, subservient : ever man becomes 
 clearer in his recognition of the claims made on him by 
 the hope which God keeps ever before Him, ' They shall 
 be my people : I will be their God.' Ever the necessities 
 of such an intimate affection point to the coming of the 
 Christ. Christ is the end, the sum, the completion, of this 
 historic friendship : and His advent is, therefore, absolutely 
 unintelligible unless it is held in relation to the long expe- 
 rience, which He interprets, justifies, and fulfils. Faith in 
 Christ is the last result, the ultimate and perfected condition 
 of that faith of Abraham, which enabled him to become the 
 first friend of God. And the immense experience that lay 
 between Abraham and St. Paul, can alone bridge the interval, 
 can alone exhibit the slow and laborious evolution, through 
 
I. Faith. 43 
 
 which the primitive apprehension of God was transformed into 
 the Christian Creed — that mighty transformation, spread out 
 over two thousand years of varied history, which our Lord 
 summed up in the lightning-flash, ' Your father Abraham 
 rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.' The 
 Book is the record of those tested and certified experi- 
 ments, which justified our Lord in asserting that to believe in 
 God was, necessarily, to believe in Him. No one can under- 
 stand that assertion, unless by seeing it worked out, in detail, 
 by the searching logic of experience. 
 
 Faith in Christ, then, includes faith in the Bible : and, in 
 saying that, we have already cleared away much of the diffi- 
 culty that beset us. For our faith in Christ becomes the 
 measure and standard of our faith in the Bible. We believe 
 in it as the record of our growing intimacy with God. Faith 
 is, still, a spiritual cohesion of person with person, — of the 
 living soul with a living God. No details that intervene 
 confuse this primitive relation. Only, that cohesion was not 
 reached at one leap. It is ancient : it has traversed many inci- 
 dents and trials : it has learned much : it has undergone patient 
 apprenticeship : it has been bonded by the memory of multi- 
 tudinous vicissitudes. Like all else that is human, it has grown. 
 The details of events are the media of that growth. La that 
 character they are vitally essential to the formed intimacy : 
 but in that character alone. They are not valued for their 
 own sake ; but for the cause which they served. Belief in 
 God never changes its character, and becomes belief in facts : 
 it only developes into a deeper and deeper belief in God, as 
 disciplined by facts. The facts must be real, if the discipline 
 is to be real : but, apart from this necessity, we are indifferent 
 to them. We can listen to anything which historical criticism 
 has to tell us, of dates and authorship ; of time and place. It 
 may supply all the gaps in our record, showing how the 
 material there briefly gathered, had, itself, a story, and slowly 
 came together, and had sources and associations elsewhere. 
 All such research adds interest to the record, as it opens out 
 to us the action of the Divine Intimacy, in laying hold of its 
 material. We watch it, by the aid of such criticism, at its 
 
44 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 work of assimilation ; and, in uncovering its principles of 
 selection, we apprehend its inner mind : we draw closer to our 
 God. The more nearly we can ally the early conditions of 
 Israel to those of Arabian nomads, the more delicate and rare 
 becomes our apprehension of that divine relationship, which, 
 by its perpetual pressure, lifted Israel to its marvellous 
 supremacy, and which, by its absence, left the Arabian to 
 be what he is to-day. 
 
 The point at which criticism must hold off its hands is, 
 of course, a most subtle matter to decide. But we can, at 
 least, be sure of this — that such a point will be no arbitrary 
 one ; it will be there, where criticism attempts to trench on 
 the reality and the uniqueness of the Divine Intimacy, which 
 those incidents served to fashion, and those books detected and 
 recorded, and Christ consummated. Our faith in Christ must 
 determine what, in the Bible, is vital to its own veracity. 
 There is no other measure or rule of what we mean by in- 
 spiration. 
 
 The preparation for Christ, then, necessitates such com- 
 plications as these. And the character of His advent in- 
 tensified and thickened them. For, while asking of us the 
 purest form of spiritual adherence, He makes that demand 
 in a shape which is imbedded throughout in concrete his- 
 torical facts, which, as facts, must be subject to the thumb 
 of critical discussion, and to all the external handling of 
 evidence and argument. 
 
 And, then, on the top of this, He has, of necessity, raised 
 the question of His own Personality to such a pitch of vital 
 value, that the full force of man's intellectual activities is 
 drawn towards its consideration, — is summoned to contem- 
 plate, and measure, and apprehend it, — is compelled to examine 
 and face its tremendous issues. The supreme act of personal 
 surrender, for which Christ unhesitatingly asks, cannot con- 
 ceivably pass beyond its child-stage without forming a direct 
 and urgent challenge to the intellect to say how, and why, such 
 an act can be justified, or such a claim interpreted. No faith 
 can reach to such an absolute condition without finding itself 
 involved in anxieties, perils, problems, complications. Its very 
 
I. Faith. 45 
 
 absoluteness is a provocation to the questioning and disputing 
 jnind, — to the hesitating and scrupulous will. And the result, 
 the inevitable result, of such a faith — proposed, as it was, to 
 a world no longer young and childlike, but matured, old, 
 thoughtful, experienced — is the Dogmatic Creeds. We clamour 
 against these intellectual complications : we cry out for the 
 simple primitive faith. But, once again, it is a mistake of 
 dates. We cannot ask to be as if eighteen centuries had 
 dropped out, unnoticed — as if the mind had slumbered since 
 the days of Christ, and had never asked a question. We can- 
 not hope to be in the same condition after a question has 
 been asked, as we were before it had ever occurred to us to 
 ask it. The Creeds only record that certain questions have^ 
 as a fact, been asked. Could our world be what it is, and not 
 have asked them % These difficulties of a complicated faith 
 are only the reflection of the difficulties of a complicated life. 
 If, as a fact, we are engaged in living a life which is intricate, 
 subtle, anxious, then any faith which hopes to cover and embrace 
 that life, cannot escape the necessity of being intricate, subtle, 
 and anxious also. No child's creed can satisfy a man's needs, 
 hunger, hopes, anxieties. If we are asked to throw over the 
 complications of our Creeds, we must beg those that ask us, to 
 begin by throwing over the complications of this social and 
 moral life. 
 
 But still, with the Creeds as with the Bible, it is the per- 
 sonal intimacy with God in Christ which alone is our con- 
 cern. We do not, in the strict sense, believe in the Bible, 
 or in the Creeds : we believe solely and absolutely in Christ 
 Jesus. Faith is our living act of adherence in Him, of cohe- 
 sion with God. But still, once more, we must recognise 
 that this act of adhesion has a history : it has gradually 
 been trained and perfected : and this has been accomplished 
 through the long and perilous experiences recorded in the 
 Old Testament ; and it has been consummated in the final 
 sealing of the perfected intimacy attained in Him, in Whose 
 person it was realised and made possible for us : and it has 
 been guarded and secured to us in the face of the over- 
 whelming pressure of eighteen strong, stormy, and distracted 
 
46 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 centuries. And therefore it is that we now must attain our 
 cohesion with God, subject to all the necessities laid upon us 
 by the fact that we enter on the world's stage at a late hour, 
 when the drama has already developed its plot and compli- 
 cated its situations. This is why we cannot now, in full view 
 of the facts, believe in Christ, without finding that our belief 
 includes the Bible and the Creeds. 
 
 V. Faith is, still and always, a spiritual intimacy, a living 
 friendship with God. That is what we must be for ever 
 asserting. That is the key to all our problems ; and once sure 
 of this in all its bearings, we shall not be afraid of a taunt 
 which is apt to sting especially those of us who are ordained. 
 It is conveyed, in its noblest form, in a book of Mr. John 
 Morley's, on Compromise. No one can read that book without 
 being the better or the worse for it. The intense force of high 
 moral convictions acts upon us like a judgment. It evokes tlie 
 deepest conscience in us to come forward, and stand at that 
 austere bar and justify itself, or, in failing to justify itself, 
 sink condemned. And in that book he asks the old question, 
 with unequalled power: how can it possibly be honest for 
 men to sign away their reason at the age of twenty-three % — 
 to commit themselves to conclusions which they cannot have 
 mastered— to anticipate beforehand all that experience may 
 have to teach ? In committing themselves to positions which 
 any new knowledge or discovery may reverse, they have for- 
 bidden themselves the free use of their critical faculties : they 
 have resigned their intellectual conscience. 
 
 What do we answer to that severe arraignment? Surely 
 we now know well. Faith is an affair of personal intimacy, 
 of friendship, of will, of love : and, in all such cases, we should 
 know exactly what to do with language of this type. We 
 should laugh it out of court. For it is language which does 
 not belong to this region. It is the language, it expresses 
 the temper, of the scientific student — a temper, an attitude 
 specialised for a distinct purpose. That purpose is one of 
 gradual advance into regions as yet untouched and unsus- 
 pected — an advance which is for ever changing the relations 
 and classifications of those already partially known. The 
 
I. Faith. 47 
 
 temper essential to such a purpose must be prepared for 
 discovery, for development, for the unexpected ; it is bound to 
 be tentative, experimental, hypothetical — to be cool, critical, 
 corrective. It deals with impersonal matter ; and it must 
 itself, therefore, be as far as possible impersonal, abstract, 
 non-moral, without passion, without individuality, without 
 a private intention, or will, or fixed opinion. 
 
 But such a temper, perfectly justified for scientific purposes, 
 is absolutely impotent and barren in matters of moral feeling 
 and practice. 
 
 Tlie man who brings this temper into play in affairs of the 
 will, or the heart, or the imagination, in cases of affection, 
 friendship, passion, inspiration, generosity, in the things of 
 home, of war, of patriotism, of love, is in the wrong world : 
 he is a living blunder : he has no cue, no key, no interpretation. 
 He is simply absurd. 
 
 And religion stands with these affairs. Just as we see well 
 enough that if love were approached in this scientific spirit, it 
 could not even begin, so it is quite as certain that, if faith were 
 approached in this spirit, it could not even begin. 
 
 Mr. Morley has mixed up two different worlds. He is 
 criticising that form of knowledge, which consists in spiritual 
 apprehension of another's personality through the whole force 
 of a man's inherent, and integral, and personal, will and 
 desire, by the standard of another form of knowledge altogether, 
 which consists in gradual and experimental assimilation of 
 foreign and unknown matter through specialised organs of 
 critical observation. 
 
 This latter knowledge is bound to be as far as possible 
 emptied of personal elements. But our knowledge is nothing 
 if not personal : it is the knowledge which issues, and issues 
 only, out of the personal contact of life with life. And 
 this is why it can afford to anticipate the future. For 
 a person is a consistent and integral whole: if you know 
 it at any one point, you know it in a sense at all points. 
 The one character, the one will, disclose themselves through 
 every partial expression, and passing gesture, and varying act. 
 Therefore it is that, when two personalities di-aw towards one 
 
48 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 another in the touch of love, they can afford to plight their 
 word. For love is the instinctive prophecy of a future ad- 
 herence. It is the assurance, passing from soul to soul, that no 
 new discovery of what is involved in their after-life together 
 can ever deny, or defeat, or destroy their present mutual 
 coherence in each other. That adhesion, that adaptability, 
 which has been proved at a few points, will necessarily be 
 justified throughout. The marriage-pledge expresses the ab- 
 solute conviction that the present experience is ii'reversible, 
 except by wilful sin. Whatever novelties the years bring 
 with them, those two characters will abide what they are 
 to-day. Growth cannot radically alter them. 
 
 Love, then, is this confident anticipation, which takes the 
 future in pledge. And where this anticipation breaks down, 
 it must be through human infirmity, wrong, misunder- 
 standing. 
 
 And our knowledge of Christ is this knowledge of love ; 
 wherever it exists, and so far as it exists, it issues out of 
 personal contact, personal inter-action. This is why, in its 
 tested and certified form, i. e. in the accumulated and historic 
 experience of the Catholic community, it can rationally justify 
 its anticipation of an unbroken adherence. 
 
 And it can do so with complete confidence, because, here, on 
 the side of Christ, there is no infirmity which can endanger 
 the plighted faith : there is no lapse, no decline possible. 
 Christ must be loyal, for He is sinless. And more : being 
 sinless. He is consistent. Every part of Him is in harmony 
 with the whole: in Him there is no unsteadiness, no in- 
 security. Such a flawless character is identical with itself: 
 wherever it is touched, it can be tested and approved. 
 
 What, then, can upset our trust in Him % What can disturb 
 our knowledge of Him "? What fear of change can the years 
 bring on % We may know but a tiny fragment, a fringe of 
 this love of His to us, yet that is enough : to have felt it at 
 all is to trust it for ever. We cannot hesitate to commit 
 ourselves to One Who, if we know Him in any way, is known 
 to be, by inward, personal, inherent necessity, the ' same 
 yesterday, to-day, and for ever.' 
 
I. Faith. 49 
 
 Yes! — but still it may be pleaded, that this anticipatory 
 adherence, which might justifiably be given to a person 
 beloved, cannot be pledged to dogmatic definitions. These, 
 at any rate, are matters not of love, but of reason : they must 
 be liable to critical examination, to intellectual revision. It 
 is the pledge given to believe these dogmas in the future, 
 which is such an outrage on intellectual morality. 
 
 Now, this protest, forcible and obvious as it looks at first 
 sight, is still guilty of confusing the criticism which belongs' 
 to one province of knowledge with that which belongs to 
 another. These dogmas of faith do not the least correspond 
 to the classifications and laws of physical science ; and for 
 this reason, that the matter to which they relate is wholly 
 different in kind. Dogmas represent reason in its appli- 
 cation to a personal life : scientific generalisations represent 
 reason as applied to matter, from which the conditions of 
 personality have been rigorously and rightly excluded. The 
 difference is vital ; and it affects the entire character of the 
 working of reason. 
 
 The dogmatic definitions of Christian theology can never be 
 divorced from their contact in the personality of Christ. They 
 are statements concerning a living character. As such, and 
 only as such, do they come within the lines of faith. We do 
 not, in the strict sense, believe in them : for belief is never a 
 purely intellectual act ; it is a movement of the living man 
 drawn towards a living person. Belief can only be in Jesus 
 Christ. To Him alone do we ever commit ourselves, sur- 
 render ourselves, for ever and aye. But a personality, though 
 its roots lie deeper than reason, yet includes reason within 
 its compass : a personality cannot but be rational, though it 
 be more than merely rational ; it has in it a rational ground, 
 a rational construction ; it could not be what it is without 
 being of such and such a fixed and organic character. And 
 a personality, therefore, is intelligible ; it lays itself open to 
 rational treatment ; its characteristics can be stated in terms of 
 thought. The Will of God is the Word of God ; the Life is 
 also the Light. That which is loved can be apprehended ; that 
 which is felt can be named. So the Personality of the Word 
 
50 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 admits of being rationally expressed in the sense that reason 
 can name and distinguish those elements in it, which con- 
 stitute its enduring and essential conditions. The dogmas, 
 now in question, are simply careful rehearsals of those inherent 
 necessities which, inevitably, are involved in the rational 
 construction of Christ's living character. They are state- 
 ments of what He must be, if He is what our hearts assure 
 us ; if He can do that for which our wills tender Him their 
 'life-long self-surrender. Unless these rational conditions 
 stand, then, no act of faith is justifiable ; unless His person- 
 ahty correspond to these assertions, we can never be authorised 
 in worshipping Him. 
 
 But, if so, then we can commit ourselves to these dogmas 
 in the same way, and degree, as we commit ourselves to Him. 
 We can do so, in the absolute assurance that He cannot but 
 abide for ever, that which we know Him to be to-day. We 
 know Him indeed, but ' in part : ' but it is part of a fixed and 
 integral character, which is whole in every part ; and can 
 never falsify, in the future, the revelation which it has already 
 made of itself. 
 
 The real question, as to Christian dogma, lies in the prior 
 question^Is Christianity justified in claiming to have reached 
 a jinal position? If the position is rightly final, then the 
 intellectual expression of its inherent elements is final also. 
 Here is the deep contrast between it and science. The 
 scientific man is forbidden, by the very nature of his studies, 
 to assume finality for his propositions. For he is not yet in 
 command of his material. Far, very far, from it. He is 
 touching it on its very edge. He is engaged in slowly push- 
 ing tentative advances into an unknown world, looming, vast, 
 dim, manifold, beyond his frontier of light. The coherence of 
 his known matter with that huge mass beyond his ken, can be 
 but faintly imaged and suspected. Wholly unreckoned forces 
 are in operation. At any moment he may be called upon to 
 throw over the classification which sums up his hitherto ex- 
 perience ; he may have to adopt a new centre ; to bring his facts 
 into a novel focus ; and this involves at once a novel principle 
 of arrangement. In such conditions dogma is, of course, an 
 
I. Faith. 5 1 
 
 absurdity. But, if we are in a position to have any faith in 
 Jesus Christ, then we must suppose that we have arrived at 
 the one centre to all possible experiences, the one focus, under 
 which all sights must fall. To believe in Him at all is to • 
 believe that, by and in 'this Man, will God judge the world.' 
 In His personality, in His character, we are in possession of 
 the ultimate principle, under which the final estimate of all 
 things will be taken. We have given us, in His sacrifice and 
 mission, the absolute rule, standard, test, right to the very 
 end. Nothing can fall outside it. In Him, God has summed 
 up creation. We have touched, in Him, the ' last days,' the 
 ultimate stage of all development. We cannot believe in Him 
 at all, and not believe that His message is final. 
 
 And it is this finality which justifies dogma. If Christian- 
 ity is final, it can afibrd to be dogmatic ; and we, who give 
 our adhesion to it, must, in so doing, profess our adhesion 
 to the irreversible nature of its inherent principles: for, in 
 so doing, we are but re-asserting our belief in the absolute 
 and final sufficiency of His person. 
 
 Let us venture, now, to review the path that we have 
 travelled, in order that we may see at what point we have 
 arrived. Faith, then, is, from fii'st to last, a spiritual act of 
 the deepest personal will, proceeding out of that central core of 
 the being, where the self is integral and whole, before it has 
 sundered itself ofi" into divided faculties. There, in that 
 root-self, lie the germs of all that appears in the separate 
 qualities and gifts — in feelings, in reason, in imagination, in 
 desire ; and faith, the central activity, has in it, therefore, the 
 germs of all these several activities. It has in it that which 
 becomes feeling, yet is not itself a feeling. It has in it that 
 which becomes reason, yet is not itself the reason. It holds 
 in it imaginative elements, yet is no exercise of the imagi- 
 nation. It is alive with that which desires, craves, loves ; 
 yet is not itself merely an appetite, a desire, a passion. 
 In all these qualities it has its part : it shares their nature ; 
 it has kindred motions; it shows itself, sometimes through 
 the one, and sometimes through the other, according to the 
 varieties of human characters. In this man, it can make the 
 
 E 2 
 
52 The Religion of the Incainiation. 
 
 feeling its main instrument and channel ; in that man, it will 
 find the intellect its chief minister ; in another, it will make 
 its presence known along the track of his innermost craving 
 for a support in will and in love. But it will always remain 
 something over, and bej' ond, any one of its distinctive media ; 
 and not one of these specialities of gift will ever, therefore, be 
 able to account wholly for the faith which puts it to use. 
 That is why faith must always remain beyond its realised 
 evidences. If it finds, in some cases, its chief evidences in the 
 region of feeling, it is nevertheless open to deadly ruin, if 
 ever it identifies itself with these evidences, as if it could rely 
 on them to carry it through. It may come into being by 
 their help ; but it is never genuine faith, until it can abide 
 in self-security at those dry hours, when the evidences of 
 positive feeling have been totally withdrawn. And as with 
 feeling ; so with reason. Faith looks to reason for its proofs : 
 it must count on finding them ; it oflTers for itself intellectual 
 justifications. It may arrive at a man by this road. But it 
 is not itself reason ; it can never confuse itself with a merely 
 intellectual process. It cannot, therefore, find, in reason, the 
 full grounds for its ultimate convictions. Ever it retains its 
 own inherent character, by which it is constituted an act of 
 personal trust — an act of willing and loving self-surrender 
 to the dominant sway of another's personality. It is always 
 this, whether it springs up instinctively, out of the roots of 
 our being, anticipating all after-proof, or whether it is sum- 
 moned out into vitality at the close of a long and late argu- 
 mentative process. No argument, no array of arguments, 
 however long, however massive, can succeed in excusing it 
 from that momentous effort of the inner man, which is its 
 very essence. Let reason do its perfect work: let it heap 
 up witness upon witness, proof upon proof Still there will 
 come at last the moment when the call to believe will be 
 just the same to the complete and reasonable man as it 
 always is to the simplest child — the call to trust Another 
 with a confidence which reason can justify but can never 
 create. This act, which is faith, must have in it that spirit 
 of venture, which closes with Another's invitation, which 
 
I. Faith. 53 
 
 yields to Another's call. It must still have in it and about 
 it the character of a vital motion, — of a leap upward, 
 which dares to count on the prompting energies felt astir 
 within it. 
 
 Faith cannot transfer its business into other hands to do 
 its work for it. It cannot request reason to take its own 
 place, or achieve its proper results. There is no possibility 
 of devolution here ; it cannot delegate its functions to this 
 faculty or to that. It is by forgetting this that so many 
 men are to be found, at the close of many arguments of which 
 they fully acknowledge the convincing force, still hovering 
 on the brink of faith, never quite reaching it, never passing 
 beyond the misery of a prolonged and nerveless suspense. 
 They hang back at the very crisis, because they have hoped 
 that their reasoning powers would, by their own force, have 
 made belief occur. They are like birds on a bough, who 
 should refuse to fly until they have fully known that they 
 can. Their suspense would break and pass, if once they re- 
 membered that, to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, they must 
 always be as little children. They must call upon the child 
 within them. At the end, as at the beginning, of all the 
 argumentative work, it is still the temper of a child which 
 they must bring into play. There must still be the energy 
 of self-committal, — the movement of a brave surrender. Once 
 let them turn, enforced by all the pressure of reasonable 
 evidence, to this secret fount of life within the self, and back 
 flows the strength which was theirs long ago, when the in- 
 spiration of their innate sonship moved sweetly in them, 
 breeding confidence, secure of itself, undaunted, and un- 
 fatigued. That sonship abides in us all, cumbered and 
 clouded though it be by our sin ; it abides on and on, fed by 
 the succours of a Father Who can never forget or forsake, 
 and Who is working hitherto to recover and redeem. And 
 while it abides, faith is still possible. For its native motions 
 are the spontaneous outcome of that spiritual kinship which, 
 if once alive and free, impels us towards Him by Whose 
 love we have been begotten. Reason and feeling, proof and 
 argument — these are means and instruments by which we 
 t 
 
54 The Religion of the Incarnaiion. 
 
 can invoke this sonship into action, and release it from much 
 which fetters and enslaves. But it is the actual upspringing 
 force of the sonship itself, which alone can be the source of 
 belief. And as it is given to all to be sons of God, through the 
 eternal sonship of Christ, therefore it is open to all to count 
 upon possessing the conditions of faith in God. 
 
 Note. — This essay has, for its sole aim, the reassurance of an existing faith in 
 face of temporary perplexities. It therefore takes faith as a present and possi- 
 ble fact. It assumes man to be a creature who believes. And it tries to show 
 why such belief, if it be there, should not be discouraged by difficulties 
 which belong to the very nature of its original grounds. For this it recalls 
 the depth and security with which the roots of faith run back into the original 
 constitution of man ; which original constitution, however broken, thwarted, 
 maimed, polluted by sin, remains still in us as the sole pledge and ground 
 of our possible redemption in Christ, Who comes to restore the blurred 
 image of God in us, and Who must find in us the radical elements of the 
 suj^ernatural nature which He enters to renew. To its enduring existence 
 in the heart of man Christ always appeals. Men are still children of their 
 Father Who is in heaven ; and therefore He can demand, as the sole and 
 primal condition of redemption. Faith, which is the witness of the unlost 
 sonship. That faith He still assumes to be possible, by the invitation to 
 man to believe and so be healed. He makes this invitation just as if it were 
 in man's own power to respond to it without for the moment touching on 
 the necessity which, through the very effort to believe, man will discover for 
 himself— i.e. the necessity of God's gift of the Spirit to make such belief 
 exist. Such a gift belonged to the original condition of unfallen man, 
 when his nature was itself supernaturally endowed with its adequate and 
 sustaining grace. Such a gift had to be renewed, after the ruin wrought by 
 sin, both by the restoration of the broken sonship within the man through 
 the beloved Son, as well as by the renewal of the evoking and sustaining 
 Spirit that should lift up, from within the inner sonship, its living cry of 
 Abba, Father. The right to believe, and the power to believe, had both to be 
 re-created. 
 
 But all that was so re-created has, for its preliminary ground, the original 
 constitution of man's sinless nature ; and, in all our treatment of redemp- 
 tion, we must begin by recalling what it was which Christ entered to restore. 
 That original condition was the pledge of the recovery which God would 
 bring to pass ; and, throughout the intei-val between fall and rescue, it 
 could anticipate the coming Christ by the faith which rejoiced to see His 
 Day, and saw His Glory, and spake of Him. Therefore the faith which 
 Christ raises to its new and higher power by concentrating it upon His own 
 Personality, is still, at core, the old faith which was the prophetic witness 
 given, under the conditions of the earlier covenant, by that great army of 
 the Faithful which is marshalled before us by the author of the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews, who most certainly considers it possible and justifiable to 
 emphasise the continuity that holds between the faith of Abraham and the 
 faith of the redeemed. 
 
II. 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 
 OF GOD. 
 
 AUBREY MOOEE. 
 
11. 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD. 
 
 I. The object of this essay is not to discuss the so-called 
 ' proofs ' of the existence of God, but to shew what the Chris- 
 tian doctrine of God is, and how it has grown to be what 
 it is, out of the antagonisms of earlier days ; and then to ask 
 — What fuller realization of God's revelation of Himself is 
 He giving us through the contradictions and struggles of 
 to-day 1 If it is true that ' the only ultimate test of reality 
 is persistence, and the only measure of validity among our 
 primitive beliefs the success with which they resist all efforts 
 to change them ^,' it is of first importance to discover what 
 it is which, through all the struggles of past history, the 
 religious nature of man has persistently clung to. Much 
 which was once dear to the religious consciousness, and 
 which seemed at the time to be an integral part of the 
 religious idea, has been given up. A former age abandoned 
 it with regret, and looked forward with gloomy foreboding. 
 A later age looks back with thankfulness, and recognises 
 ' the good Hand of our God ' leading us to truer knowledge 
 of Himself. 
 
 It would be idle to deny, aftei" all due allowance has been 
 made for the natural tendency to believe that the present 
 is the critical moment, not only for us, but for the world 
 at large, that the crisis of the present day is a very real one, 
 and that the religious view of God is feeling the effects of 
 the change, which is modifying our views of the world and 
 man. When such a fundamental idea is challenged, men are 
 
 ^ Fiske, Idea of God, p. 139, quoting H. Spencer. 
 
58 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 naturally tempted to adopt one of two equally onesided 
 attitudes, to commit themselves either to a policy of unin- 
 telligent protest, or to a policy of unconditional surrender. 
 And if the one is needlessly despairing, the other is un- 
 warrantably sanguine. The one asks, — ' How much must 
 I give up, of what religion has always been to me, that a 
 little of the old may survive amidst the new % ' The other 
 asks, — ' How little of the old need I keep, so as not to inter- 
 fere with the ready acceptance of the new ? ' The one view 
 is pessimist, the other optimist. Both have their representa- 
 tives in our day, and each party is profoundly conscious of 
 the danger to which the other is exposed. The advocates of 
 the one view, finding themselves ' in a place where two seas 
 meet,' think it safer to ' run the ship aground ' ; those of the 
 other ' seeing they cannot bear up against the wind ' prefer 
 to ' let her drive.' But if the spirit of the one is merely 
 protestant, the spirit of the other is certainly not catholic. 
 
 In contrast with these one-sided views, we propose to 
 approach the question in the full conviction that the reve- 
 lation of God in Christ is both true and complete, and yet 
 that every new truth which flows in from the side of science, 
 or metaphysics, or the experience of social and political life, 
 is designed in God's providence to make that revelation real, 
 by bringing out its hidden truths. It is in this sense that 
 the Christian revelation of God claims to be both final and 
 progressive ; final, for Christians know but one Christ and 
 do not ' look for another ' ; progressive, because Christianity 
 claims each new truth as enriching our knowledge of God, 
 and bringing out into greater clearness and distinctness some 
 half-understood fragment of its own teaching. There are, 
 no doubt, always to be found Christians, who are ready to 
 treat new knowledge as the Caliph Omar treated the books 
 in the library of Alexandria, — ' they agree with the Koran 
 and are unnecessary, or they disagree with it and must be 
 destroyed.' But an intelligent Christian will not ask, ' Does 
 this new truth agree with or contradict the letter of the 
 Bible ■? ' but ' How does it interpret and help us to understand 
 the Bible ? ' And so with regard to all truth, whether it 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 59 
 
 comes from the side of science, or history, or criticism, he 
 adopts neither the method of protest nor the method of sur- 
 render, but the method of assimilation. In the face of new 
 discoveries, the only question he is anxious to answer is this, 
 — ' What old truth will they explain, or enlighten, or make real 
 to us? What is this new world of life and interest which 
 is awaiting its consecration ? " Truth is an ever-flowing 
 river, into which streams flow in from many sides ^." What 
 is this new stream which is about to empty itself, as all 
 knowledge must, into the great flood of Divine truth, "that 
 the earth may be filled with the glory of the Lord, as the 
 waters cover the sea " ? ' 
 
 Such a hopeful attitude does not, indeed, imply that the 
 assimilation of the new truths will go on as a matter of 
 course. The Christian knows that the acceptance of truth 
 is a moral, as well as an intellectual, matter, and in the moral 
 world there is no place for laisser faire. He expects to be 
 called upon to struggle ; he expects that the struggle will 
 need his utmost effort, moral and intellectual. His work 
 is both to keep and to claim ; to hold fast the faith ' once 
 for all delivered to the saints,' and yet to see in every frag- 
 ment of truth a real revelation of the mind and will of God. 
 He has no cut and di'ied answer to objections ; he does not 
 boast that he has no difiiculties. But he does claim to look 
 out upon the difficulties of his day, not only fearlessly, but 
 with hope and trust. He knows that Christianity must 
 triumph in the end, but he does not expect all difficulties 
 to be removed in a moment. And he is strong enough, if 
 need be, to wait. 
 
 II. Whether anyone is really guilty of what Hume calls 
 the ' multiplied indiscretion and imprudence ' of dogmatic 
 atheism, whether positivism can rightly be so classed, whether 
 agnosticism is not atheism to all intents and purposes, are 
 questions which fortunately lie outside the scope of the 
 present enquiry. As for polytheism it has ceased to exist 
 in the civilised world. Every theist is, by a rational neces- 
 sity, a monotheist. But we find ourselves, in the present day, 
 
 ^ S. Clem. Alex. Strotn. I. v. 
 
6o The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 lace to face with two different views of God, which though 
 they constantly, perhaps generally, overlap, and even some- 
 times coincide, yet imply different points of view, and by 
 a process of abstraction can be held apart and contrasted 
 with one another. Many devout Christians are philosophers 
 and men of science ; many men of science and philosophers 
 are devout Christians. But the God of religion is not the 
 God of science and philosophy. Ideally, everyone will allow 
 that the religious idea of God, and the scientific and philo- 
 sophical idea of God must be identical, but in actual fact 
 it is not so, and in the earlier stages of the development of 
 both, there is a real antagonism. To accept this antagonism 
 as absolute is, by a necessary consequence, to compel one 
 to give way to the other. We cannot long hold two con- 
 tradictory truths. We find ourselves compelled to choose. 
 We may have Religion or Philosophy, but not both. 
 
 Very few, however, are prepared to go this length. It is 
 much more usual to get rid of the antagonism by adopting 
 one of two alternative methods. 
 
 (i) Of these the first is a suggested division of territory, 
 in which religion is allotted to faith, and philosophy and 
 science to reason. Such an expedient, though not uncom- 
 monly, and perhaps even wisely, adopted by individuals, 
 who refuse to give up either of two truths because they 
 cannot harmonize them, becomes ridiculous when seriously 
 proposed as a solution of the difficulty. Moreover the pro- 
 posed division of territory is unfair to start with. ' Give 
 us the Knowable, and you shall have the rest, which is far 
 the larger half,' sounds like a liberal offer made by science 
 to religion, till we remember that every advance in know- 
 ledge transfers something from the side of the unknown to 
 the side of the known, in violation of the original agreement. 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer calls this division of territory a ' recon- 
 ciliation^.' But if anything in the world could make religion 
 hate and fear science and oppose the advance of knowledge, 
 it is to find itself compelled to sit still and watch the slow 
 but sure filching away of its territory by an alien power. 
 
 ' Cf. Herbert Spencer, First Principles, Pt. I. 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 6i 
 
 We say nothing here of the fact that Mr. Herbert Spencer's 
 division ignores the truth that knowledge of correlatives 
 must be of the same kind^, and that if knowledge has to 
 do with one and faith with the other, either faith must be 
 a sort of knowledge, or knowledge a sort of faith. We merely 
 notice the unfairness of a division which assumes rationality 
 for science, and leaves irrationality to religion. 
 
 Curiously enough, however, there are many devout people, 
 who would be horrified at the thought that they had borrowed 
 from Agnosticism, and who have nevertheless made a simi- 
 lar division of territory. They are the people who stake all 
 upon what reason cannot do. They have no interest in the 
 progress of knowledge. The present gaps in science are their 
 stronghold, and they naturally resist every forward step in 
 knowledge as long as they can, because each new discovery 
 limits the area in which alone, according to their imperfect 
 view, faith can live. Every triumph of science on this 
 theory, as on Mr. Herbert Spencer's, becomes a loss, not a gain, 
 to religion. The very existence of God is bound up with that 
 part of His work in nature which we cannot understand, and, 
 as a consequence, we reach the paradox that the more we 
 know of His working, the less proof we have that He exists. 
 Modern apologetic literature abounds in this kind of argu- 
 ment. It is the devout form of the worship of the unknow- 
 able. Yet it is no wonder that people who take refuge in 
 gaps find themselves awkwardly placed when the gaps begin 
 to close. 
 
 (2) The other alternative is even more commonly adopted, 
 for it fits in well with the vagueness and want of precision 
 in language, which is at a premium in dealing with religious 
 questions. This consists in frittering away the meaning of 
 definite terms till they are available for anything, or adopting 
 a neutral term which, by a little management and stretching, 
 will include opposites. This is the method of indefinite in- 
 clusion. The strength of the former alternative lay in the 
 appearance of sharp scientific delimitation of territory: the 
 strength of the latter in its unlimited comprehensiveness. 
 ^ See this criticism excellently stated in Caird's PTiil. of Religion, pp. 32, etc. 
 
62 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 A term is gradually stripped of the associations which make 
 it what it is, it is ' defecated to a pure transparency,' and 
 then it is ready for use. The term ' God ' is made merely ' a 
 synonym for nature ^ ' ; religion becomes ' habitual and per- 
 manent admiration -,' or ' devout submission of the heart and 
 will to the laws of nature ^ ' ; enthusiasm does duty for wor- 
 ship, and the antagonism between religion and anything else 
 disappears. 
 
 Now so far as this represents, negatively, a reaction against 
 intolerance and narrowness, and positively a desire for unity, 
 there is not a word to be said against it. Its tone and temper 
 may be both Christian and Catholic. But the method is a 
 radically false one. It is not a real, but only an abstract, 
 unity which can be reached by thinking away of differences. 
 As Dr. Martineau says, in his excellent criticism of this 
 method, ' You vainly propose an eirenicon by corruption of a 
 word.' ' The disputes between science and faith can no more 
 be closed by inventing " religions of culture " than the boun- 
 dary quarrels of nations by setting up neutral provinces in 
 the air^,' 'A God that is merely nature, a Theism without 
 God, a Religion forfeited only by the " nil admirari " can never 
 reconcile the secular and the devout, the Pagan and the Chris- 
 tian mind ^.' As well might we attempt to reconcile the par- 
 tizans of the gold and silver shields by assuring them that in 
 reality the shields were silver gilt. 
 
 We are left, then, face to face with the opposition between 
 the religious and the philosophic or scientific view of God. 
 The counter-charges of superstition and anthropomorphism 
 on the one side, and of pantheism and rationalism on the 
 other, serve to bring out the antithesis of the two views. 
 No division of territory is possible. There may be many 
 sciences, each with its defined range of subject-matter ; but 
 there can be only one God. And both religion and philo- 
 sophy demand that He shall fill the whole region of thought 
 and feeling. Nor can any confusion or extension of terms 
 
 1 Natural Religion, iii. p. 45, quoted Address, 1884. 
 
 by Martineau. ■• A Study of Religion, \o\. i. pp. 11, 12. 
 
 2 Ibid., iv. p. 74. 5 Ibid., p. 15. 
 2 Frederic Harrison's New Year's 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 63 
 
 help us to a reconciliation, or blind us long to the true issue. 
 The conflict is too real and too keenly felt to admit of any 
 patched-up peace. The idea of God, which is to claim alike 
 the allegiance of rehgion and philosophy, must not be the 
 result of compromise, but must really and fully satisfy the 
 demands of both. 
 
 III. What then are these demands considered in abstraction 
 from one another? We are at once met by the difficulty 
 of defining religion. But if we cannot define religion, or 
 trace it back to its hidden source, we can at least dis- 
 cover its characteristics, as we know it after it has emerged 
 from the obscurity of prehistoric times, and before any con- 
 scious attempt has been made to reconcile religion and philo- 
 sophy, or find a middle term between them. 
 
 Now traditional definitions of religion, given as it were 
 from within, and constructed with no view of opposition to, 
 or reconciliation with, philosophy, are agreed in representing 
 religion as a relation between man and the object or objects 
 of his worship, and this implies, not only the inferiority of the 
 worshipper to that which he worships, but also something of 
 likeness between the related terms, since, as even Strauss 
 allows, in our inmost nature we feel a kinship between 
 ourselves and that on which we depend^. It is quite indif- 
 ferent which of the rival etymologies of the word 'religion' 
 we adopt -. S. Augustine ^, following Lactantius, speaks of 
 religion as ' the bond which binds us to One Omnipotent 
 God.' S. Thomas * adopts almost unchanged the definition 
 given by Cicero : it is ' that virtue which has to do with the 
 worship of a higher nature known as the Divine.' It is not 
 too much to say that, for the modern religious world, religion 
 implies at least the practical belief in a real and conscious 
 relation between the inner life of man and an unseen Being. 
 And whatever of mystery there may be about that unseen 
 Being, it would seem as if a real relationship demands so much 
 of likeness in the related terms, as is implied in personality. 
 
 1 Old Faifh and New, § 41. pretatus est, a relegendo,' Lact. Inst. 
 
 * 'Hoc vinculo pietatisobstricti Deo iv. 28. 
 
 et religati sumus, unde ipsa religio ^ De vera religione, sub fin. 
 
 nomen accepit, non ut Cicero inter- * Sum. Theol. 2. 2. 81. Art. i. 
 
64 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 It is here that we reach the point at which we are able to 
 distinguish between the religious and the philosophical ideas 
 of God. It is not that religion and philosophy necessarily 
 contradict or exclude one another, but that they approach 
 the problem with different interests. Religion demands a 
 personal object, be that object one or many. It is committed 
 to the beKef in a moral relationship between God and man. 
 Philosophy demands unity, whether personal or impersonal. 
 For philosophy is nothing if it does not completely unify 
 knowledge. And it seems as if each finds lacking in the 
 other that which it values most and thinks of fii'st. The only 
 hope, then, of reconciliation is in the idea of God as per- 
 sonal, and yet one. So long as rehgion retains a trace of 
 polytheism or dualism, philosophy can have nothing to say 
 to it. So long as philosophy has no room for a personal 
 God, religion must exclude philosophy. The whole issue of 
 the controversy lies here. If the belief in a personal God 
 is to be called anthropomorphism, religion is hopelessly an- 
 thropomorphic. With the disappearance of anthropomorphism 
 in this sense, as Professor Fiske rightly sees^, rehgion dis- 
 appears. But we cannot escape anthropomorphism, though 
 our anthropomorphism may be crude or critical-. We do 
 not read our full selves into the lower world, because we are 
 higher than it ; we do not transfer to God all that belongs 
 to our own self-consciousness, because we know that He is 
 infinitely greater than we are. But we should be wrong not 
 to interpret Him by the highest category within our reach, 
 and think of Him as self-conscious life. Christianity refuses 
 to call this anthropomorphism, though it stands or falls with 
 the belief that, in his personality, man is in the image of 
 God. An anthropomorphic view of God for a Christian 
 means heathenism or heresy : a theomorphic view of man 
 is of the essence of his faith ^. 
 
 The religious idea of God may, of course, become philo- 
 
 ^ Mm of God, p. 1 1 7. ^ Justin Martyr {Exhort, ad Graec. , 
 
 ^ See Seth's Hegelianism and Per- ch. xxxiv) explains the anthropo- 
 
 sonality, pp. 223, 224, one or two sen- niorphisms of polytheism as an in- 
 
 tences from which are, almost ver- version of the trii'th that man is in 
 
 batim, transferred to the text. the image of God. 
 
II. The Christiaii Doctrine of God. 65 
 
 sophical without ceasing to be religious. If there is to be a 
 religion for man as a rational being it must become so. But 
 there is a point beyond which, in its desire to include philo- 
 sophy, religion cannot go. It cannot afford to give up its 
 primary assumption of a moral relationship between God 
 and man. When that point is surrendered or obscured the 
 old religious terms become increasingly inapplicable, and we 
 find ourselves falling back more and more on their supposed 
 philosophical equivalents, the ' Infinite ' or the ' Absolute,' or 
 the Universal Substance, or the Eternal Consciousness, or the 
 First Cause, or the Omnipresent Energy. But these terms, 
 which metaphysicians rightly claim, have no meaning for 
 the religious consciousness, while, in metaphysics proper 
 ' God ' is as much a borrowed term as ' sin ' is in non-reli- 
 gious ethics. Moral evil is ' sin ' only to those who believe 
 in God ; and the infinite is only ' God ' to those in whom it 
 suggests a superhuman personality with whom they are in 
 conscious relation. Even when religion and philosophy both 
 agree to speak of God as ' the Infinite,' for the one it is an ad- 
 jective, for the other a substantive. The moment we abandon 
 the idea of God as personal, religion becomes merged in philo- 
 sophy, and all that properly constitutes religion disappears. 
 God may exist for us still as the keystone in the arch of 
 knowledge, but He is no longer, except as a metaphor, ' our 
 Father, which is in heaven.' 
 
 IV. Religion then, properly and strictly, and apart from ex- 
 tensions of the term made in the interests of a reconciliation, 
 assumes a moral relationship, the relationship of personal 
 beings, as existing between man and the Object of his wor- 
 ship. When this ceases, religion ceases : when this begins, 
 religion begins. But of the beginnings of religion we know 
 nothing. Prehistoric history is the monopoly of those who 
 have a theory to defend. But we may take it as proven that 
 it is at least as true that man is a religious, as that he is 
 a rational, animal. ' Look out for a people,' says Hume, 
 ' entirely destitute of religion. If you find them at all, be 
 assured that they are but few degrees removed from brutes ^' 
 
 ^ Hume, Essays, II. 425. 
 F 
 
66 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 Hume's statement is confirmed by the fact that those who 
 would prove that there is no innate consciousness of Deity 
 are driven to appeal to the case of deaf mutes and degraded 
 savages ^. Whether monotheism was a discovery or a re- 
 covery, whether it rose on the ruins of polytheism, or 
 whether pol}~theism is a corruption of a purer faith, is a 
 question we need not attempt to settle. Nor need we de- 
 cide the priority of claim to the title of religion as between 
 nature-worship, or ancestor-worship, or ghost-worship. The 
 farther we go back in history the more obviously true 
 is the charge of anthropomorphism so commonly brought 
 against religion. The natural tendency to treat the object 
 of religion as personal exists long before any attempt is 
 made to define the conditions or meaning of personality, 
 and includes much which is afterwards abandoned. For 
 religion in its earliest stages is instinctive, not reasoned. 
 It is 'naively objective.' It is little careful to clear up its 
 idea of the nature and character of its God. It is still less 
 anxious to prove His existence. It is only when conscience 
 grows strong, and dares to challenge the religion which had 
 been instinctively accepted, that men learn to see that God 
 not only is, but must be, the expression of the highest known 
 morality. It is only when the light of conscious reason is 
 turned back upon religious ideas, that polytheism becomes 
 not merely untrue, but impossible and inconceivable. What 
 religion starts with is not any theory of the world, but an 
 unreasoned belief in a Being or beings, however conceived of, 
 who shall be in a greater or less degree like the worshipper, 
 but raised above him by the addition of power, if not 
 omnipotence; greatness, if not infinity; wisdom, if not omni- 
 science. 
 
 But, while implying from the first something of a moral 
 relationship between man and the object of his worship, reli- 
 gion does not always conceive of that Object as necessarily 
 holy or perfectly wise. There are religions which are both 
 immoral and childish. They have in them no principle of 
 growth, and therefore they are the opponents alike of moral 
 
 ^ H. Spencer, Eccl. Inst, p. i. 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 67 
 
 and intellectual progress. Tantum relUgio potuit suadere 
 nmloruni is the reflexion of Christian apologists, as well as of 
 the Roman poet, on the religions of heathenism. Hence, it is 
 argued, ' Rehgion is the enemy of morals and of science. 
 Away with it. It is a mere matter of feeling, which cannot 
 and ought not to stand before the imperious challenge of con- 
 science and reason.' Such a view has both truth and falsehood 
 in it. The religious idea of God must be able to justify itseK 
 to our moral and to our rational nature, on pain of ceasing to 
 exist. But religion cannot be thus shut up to one part of our 
 nature, nor can one part of our nature be set against the 
 rest. There is, as Herbert Spencer is fond of pointing out^, 
 a kind of idolatry of reason in the present day. Reason has 
 exposed many superstitions only to become itself the final object 
 of superstition. Men forget that, after all, reasoning is only 
 ' re-coordinating states of consciousness ah-eady coordinated 
 in certain simpler ways,' and that that which is unreasoned is 
 not always irrational. Rationality in man is not shut up in 
 one air-tight compartment. ' There is no feeling or volition 
 which does not contain in it an element of knowledge -.' This 
 is the truth which Hegel has seized when he speaks of religion 
 as ' reason talking naively.' You can no more shut up faith 
 to the compartment of feeling than reason to the compartment 
 of the intellect. Religion claims the whole man, and true 
 religion is that which can make good its claim. 
 
 The natural history of religion, then, is the history of the 
 process by which that which has its secret birthplace behind 
 all the distinctions of modern psychology, establishes its claim 
 on man, absorbing into itself all that is best and truest in his 
 moral and intellectual being, as conscience and reason succes- 
 sively emerge into conscious activity : while, from another 
 point of view, it is the progressive purification of the religious 
 idea of God till He is revealed as, what He is to a thinking 
 Clu'istian of to-day, the Object of reverent worship, the moral 
 ideal, the truth of nature and of man. 
 
 Such an end is not attained in a moment. It is the result 
 
 1 Psijch. vol. ii. §§ 3S8-391. ^ Caird, Philosophy of Belig ion, ]i. 162. 
 
 F 2 
 
68 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 of a process with which we are familiar elsewhere, viz. evolu- 
 tion by antagonism. The true has to be separated from the 
 false. Immoral and irrational conceptions of God have to be 
 thrown aside. It is only after what looks like an internecine 
 struggle between religion and morality that man learns the 
 truth about the character of God, and only after a contlict 
 with philosophy and science, which seems to threaten the very 
 life of religion, that he learns what can be known of the 
 Divine Nature. For among religions, too, there is a struggle 
 for existence, in which the fittest survive. And the test of 
 fitness is the power to assimilate and promote moral and 
 intellectual truth, and so to satisfy the whole man. An 
 ideally perfect religion is not ' morality touched by emotion.' 
 but a worship which reflects itself in the highest known 
 morality, and is interpreted and justified to itself by reason. 
 It is this process, as we know it in history, that we proceed 
 to examine. 
 
 V. The statement that religion, even in its most elementary 
 forms, takes for granted some relationship of likeness between 
 the worshipper and the Object or objects of his worship, 
 by no means implies that all religion associates the highest 
 morality with its idea of God. On the contrary, we know 
 that not only are there immoral religions, but that immorality 
 sometimes lingers on in religion long after it is condemned 
 elsewhere, and that a people will permit as a religious duty 
 what, according to their thinking, nothing but religion would 
 justify. We cannot, then, at all accurately gauge the moral 
 condition of a people b}^ the received teaching about its gods, 
 for morality is often far in advance of religion, and the char- 
 acter which in a god or goddess is protected by a religious 
 halo is looked upon as hateful or impure in man or woman. 
 The sense of dependence, which, though it does not constitute 
 the whole, is yet an essential element in the religious con- 
 sciousness, the awe which, in a low state of development, 
 shews itself in a grovelling fear of the invisible beings, 
 makes it impossible for the worshipper to judge his god 
 by the standard he applies to his fellow man. The god 
 may be lustful, but his lusts must be respected ; he is strong 
 
II. The Christiaii Doctrine of God. 69 
 
 and vengeful and must by all means be kept in a good temper, 
 cajoled, or outwitted, or bribed, or humoured. His commands 
 must be obeyed, without question or resistance. But by and 
 bye the moral nature learns its strength, and begins to assert 
 its independent right to speak. Morality outgrows religion. 
 The relations between religion and morals become more 
 strained. Some heretic dares to say that the Gods are 
 immoral ; that they are men ' writ large,' and bad men too. 
 Their claim to reverence is challenged. There is a moral 
 awakening. Soon the old religion is treated with scorn and 
 contempt, and either a new religion takes its place, coming 
 in as it were on the crest of the wave of moral reformation, or 
 the old religion is purified and becomes the foster-mother of 
 the new morality, giving to it a divine sanction, and receiving 
 from it in turn new strength and vitality. Or failing these, 
 men abandon religion in the supposed interest of morals. A 
 religion with mysteries may be tolerated, but a religion once 
 seen to be immoral is at an end. For a time ethics, with a 
 background of metaphysics or politics, prevails, but gradually 
 it tends to drift into a mere prudentialism, while a merely 
 mystical philosophy tries in vain to satisfy those deeper 
 instincts which reach oat to the unseen. 
 
 In the history of Greek thought the collision came in the 
 days of Xenophanes. Long before what is sometimes called 
 the era of conscious morality, Greece had outgrown its tradi- 
 tional religion. Greek philosophy at its birth was mythology 
 rationalized, and the beginning of independent morality in 
 Greece shewed itself in a criticism of the religious teaching 
 of Homer and Hesiod. The scathing satire of Xenophanes 
 reminds us at times of the way in which Isaiah speaks of the 
 idolatry of his day. It is not only wrong, it is capable of 
 a reductio ad absiirdum. Anthropomorphism, immorality, 
 childish folly — these are the charges which Xenophanes 
 brings against the worship of Magna Graecia. Anasagoras 
 had already been banished for suggesting that the god Helios 
 was a mass of molten iron, but Xenophanes turns into open 
 ridicule the religion of his day. 
 
 ' Homer and Hesiod,' he says, ' ascribe to the gods all that 
 
70 The Religio7i of the Incarnation. 
 
 among men is held shameful and blameworthy, theft, adultery, 
 and deceit ^.' 
 
 ' One God there is mightiest among gods and men, who 
 neither in form nor thought is like to men. Yet mortals 
 think the gods are born and have shape and voice and 
 raiment like themselves. Surely if lions and cows had hands, 
 and could grave with their hands and do as men do, they too 
 would make gods like themselves, horses would have horse- 
 like gods, and cows gods with horns and hoofs -.' 
 
 When the age of moral philosophy begins, amidst the un- 
 settlement of the sophistic period, the same protest is taken 
 up by Plato. In Xenophanes the protest of the reason and 
 the conscience went together. In Plato the criticism of the 
 received theology is more distinctly a moral criticism. God 
 cannot lie or deceive. He cannot be the cause of evil. He 
 is good, and only the source of good. He is true in word 
 and deed. If not, we cannot reverence Him. It cannot be 
 true that the gods give way to violent emotions, still less to 
 sensuality and envy and strife^. 'For God cannot be un- 
 righteous. He must be perfectly righteous, and none is like 
 Him save the most righteous among men '^.' 
 
 Here we have a collision between an immoral religious 
 conception of God and a morality which is becoming con- 
 scious of its own strength. And what was the result? 
 Religion in Greece received its death blow. It had no real 
 recuperative power. It could not absorb and claim the new 
 morality. Homer and Hesiod, the ' Bible ' of the Athenian, 
 were too profoundly immoral. A Kephalus might go back 
 in silent protest to his sacrifice, but the youth of Athens 
 turned from religion to morality. When we pass from Plato 
 to Aristotle, the last trace of religion in morals has dis- 
 appeared. Theology has become Metaphysics, and has no place 
 in the world of practical life. The religious element has 
 disappeared from philosophy, and is only revived in. the 
 mysticism of Neo-Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism. In 
 
 1 Ritter and Preller, lUsL Phil. => Plat. Rep. 377-385. 
 
 Graec, 7th ed. § 82. * Thaet. 176 C. 
 
 ■' Ibid., § 83. 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 71 
 
 metaphysics and science we owe everything to the Greeks ; 
 in religion, as distinguished from theology, we owe nothing. 
 
 From the Greeks we turn to the Jews, to whom alone, 
 among the nations of the pre-Christian age, we of the modern 
 world trace back our religious lineage. We speak of the 
 religion of the Old Testament as ' revealed ' in contrast with 
 all other pre-Christian religions. Is that distinction tenable % 
 If so, what does it mean, and what justifies us in making it? 
 It is clear that the answer must be sought in what the Old 
 Testament revelation is, rather than in the process by which 
 the Jews became the appointed depositaries of it. For what- 
 ever were the prehistoric elements out of which the religion 
 of Israel came, whether Assyrian or Accadian or Indo-German 
 or Egyptian, and whatever were the steps by which Israel 
 was led ^ to that doctrine of God which constituted its mis- 
 sion and its message to the world, as we look back from the 
 point of view of Christianity we see that the religion of Israel 
 stands to the teaching of Christ in a relation in which no 
 Pagan religion stands ^. The Law and the Prophets were for 
 all the world ' a sacred school of the knowledge of God, and 
 the ordering of the soul ^.' If it is true that the Bible only 
 records the later and more important stages in a process 
 which began in prehistoric times amidst the various forms 
 of polytheistic worship, even if it could be shewn that the 
 history, as we have it, has been subjected to successive re- 
 visions, that its laws have been codified, its ritual elaborated, 
 its symbolism interpreted, it would still remain true that the 
 religion of Israel, which begins where its history begins, and 
 of which, indeed, its history is little more than the vehicle, is 
 
 ^ H. Sj)encer, of course, follows tianity is connected with the Old 
 
 Kuenen in assuming a polytheistic Testament.' Incredible, no doubt, 
 
 origin of Hebrew monotheism. See But why ? For the very i-eason which 
 
 Kuenen, Religion of Israel, i. 223. makes it 'incredible' that man should 
 
 ^ It is strange that Mr. Darwin be evolved directly from a fish, as 
 
 should have failed to see that this Anaximander is said to have taught, 
 
 was the answer to his difficulty. It and not incredible that he should be 
 
 appeared to him, he tells us (Auto- evolved, as Darwin teaches, from 
 
 biography, p. 308), 'utterly incredible one of the higher vertebrates. The 
 
 that if God were now to make a re- very idea of development, whether in 
 
 velation to the Hindoos, he would species or religions, implies a law, and 
 
 permit it to be connected with the order in the development, 
 
 belief in Vishnu, Siva, &c., as Chris- ^ S. Athan. De Imam. c. xii. 
 
72 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 bound up with the assertion of Monotheism. The central fact 
 of its revelation is this, ' Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is 
 One Lord.' The central utterance of its law is, ' Thou shalt 
 have none other gods but Me.' The unity of God, that truth 
 which other religions were feeling after and tending towards, 
 stands out clearly and distinctly as the characteristic of the 
 religion of Israel, and is fearlessly claimed as an inheritance 
 from the patriarchal age. 
 
 And not less remarkable than the assertion of the unity 
 of God is the assumption that this One God is a God of 
 Righteousness. He is ' a God of truth and without iniquity ; 
 just and right is He.' Here, again, it waS not that the re- 
 ligion of Israel asserted what other religions denied, but that 
 Israel proclaimed clearly and with increasing certainty a truth 
 which the highest contemporary i-ehgions were struggling to 
 express. In the religion of Israel the pre-Christian world 
 rose to articulate religious utterance. Its highest and truest 
 intuitions found a voice, Israel had yet much to learn and 
 much to unlearn as to what true morality is. It had anthro- 
 pomorphisms of thought and language to get rid of. It had 
 to rise in Psalmist and Prophet to moral heights unknown 
 to the patriarchal age. But the remarkable thing is that 
 the claim is made. Morality is claimed for God : God is de- 
 clared to be irrevocably on the side of what man knows as 
 righteousness. And this truth is proclaimed not as a dis- 
 covery but as a revelation from God Himself. It was this, 
 not less than the proclamation of monotheism, which made 
 the teaching of the Old Testament what it was. It con- 
 sciously transformed the natural law of ' might is right ' 
 into the moral truth that ' right is might.' 
 
 And the consequences of this new" departure in the religious 
 history of man w^ere far-reaching. It made the difference be- 
 tween the religion of Israel and all other religions a ditference 
 not merely of degree but of kind. The worship of the Lord 
 and the worship of the heathen gods becomes not only a 
 conflict between the true and the false in religion, but between 
 the moral and the immoral in practice. More than this, it 
 changes the mere emotional feeling of awe and dependence 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. jt^ 
 
 on invisible powers into trust and confidence. If God is 
 irrevocably on the side of right, the nation or the individual, 
 that is struggling for the right, is fighting on the side of 
 God. It was this which made the great Hebrew leaders, 
 and the Psalmists after them, take it for granted that their 
 cause was the cause of God, and that the Lord of Hosts 
 was with them. Even the wars of extermination were the 
 expression in act of the utter antagonism between good 
 and evil, the cause of God and that of His enemies. And 
 when Saul spared A gag it was from no excess of charity, no 
 glimpse of a higher morality ; it was an act of moral weak- 
 ness. Finally, this claim of morality for God precluded the 
 possibility of such a collision as took place in the history 
 of the Greeks. The progressive development of morals in 
 the Old Testament, and the gradual unfolding of a perfect 
 character ^ was also for Israel a progressive revelation of the 
 character of God. Step by step the religious idea advanced 
 with moral progress. And, as they advance, the contrast 
 with other religions becomes more marked. ' It was the final 
 distinction between Polytheism and the religion of Israel 
 that the former emphasized power, the latter the moral 
 element to which it subordinated and conjoined power ^.' 
 And this moral conception of God was constantly kept before 
 the people. If they lapse into idolatry and adopt heathen 
 practices and heathen ideas of God, the prophets are read}'' 
 with the warning that God is the God of Israel, only because 
 Israel is a chosen people to bear His name and His truth 
 before the world ; and if they are false to their mission, they 
 will be rejected. If, again, the sacrificial system loses its moral 
 significance as the recognition of the holiness of God and the 
 sinfulness of the sinner, and the forward-pointing look towards 
 the great moral fact of the Atonement, and becomes merely 
 ritual, and perfunctory, and formal, the prophets dare to de- 
 nounce even the divinely ordered sacrifices as things which 
 God hates. 
 
 Yet it was not that, in the religion of Israel, morality was 
 
 ' Itisneedlesstosaythatthissection Discipline of the Christian Character. 
 is largely indebted to Dean Church's " Edinb. Rev., Apr. 1888, p. 512. 
 
74 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 made the essential thing, a nucleus of morals, as it were, with 
 a halo of religious emotion round it. It was that the religious 
 and the moral consciousness are brought together in a real 
 unity. To love the Lord is to hate evil. God is One who 
 gives His blessing to the i-ighteous, while the ungodly and 
 him that delighteth in wickedness doth His soul abhor. He, 
 then, who would ascend into the hill of the Lord and stand 
 in His holy place, must have clean hands, and a pure heart, 
 and a lowly mind. The Lord God is holy. He has no plea- 
 sure in wickedness, neither shall any evil dwell with Him. 
 Righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat. 
 The sacrifice that He loves is the sacrifice of righteousness. 
 He is to be worshipped in the beauty of hoHness. What He 
 requires of man is that he shall do justly, and love mercy, 
 and walk humbly with his God. 
 
 All this, which comes out no doubt with increasing clear- 
 ness in the Psalms and Prophets, is already implicit in that 
 earlier claim made by the religion of Israel, that the 
 true God is on the side of righteousness, and that to be false 
 to righteousness is to be a traitor to God. In this union of 
 religion and morality neither is sacrificed to the other. Each 
 gains from its union with the other. The religious idea of 
 God, and the religious emotions which gather round it, are 
 progressively purified with the growth of moral ideas ; and 
 morality receives new life and strength when the moral law 
 is seen to be the unfolding of the character of a Righteous 
 God, and moral evil is known as ' sin ' against a Personal 
 Being. The earnest moral protest which in Greece was 
 directed against the national religion, is found in the Old 
 Testament making common cause with the national religion 
 against the immoral beliefs of heathenism. Hence the Jew 
 was not called upon, as the Greek was, to choose between his 
 religion and his conscience. He never felt the strain which 
 men feel in the present day, when a high and pure morality 
 seems ranged against religious faith. For the Jew every ad- 
 vance in moral insight purified, while it justified, that idea of 
 God, which he believed had come down to him from the 
 ' Father of the Faithful.' His hope of immortality, his faith 
 
II. The Christian Doctj-ine of God. 75 
 
 in the ultimate triumpli of the God of Israel, were alike based 
 upon the conviction that God is a God of justice and mercy, 
 and that the Righteous One could not fail His people, or suiFer 
 His holy One to see corruption. Even though with the growth 
 of morality, and the fuller unfolding of the character of God, 
 there came, like a shadow cast by light, the deepening conscious- 
 ness of sin as the barrier between man and God, the Jew re- 
 fused to believe that the separation was for ever. Sin was a 
 disease which needed healing, a bondage which called for a 
 deliverer, a state of indebtedness from which man could not 
 free himself. But Israel believed in and looked forward to, 
 with confidence and hope, the Redeemer who should come 
 to Zion and save His people from their sins. 
 
 The final revelation of Christianity came outwardly as a 
 continuation and development of the religion of Israel, and 
 claimed to be the fulfilment of Israel's hope. It was a ' re- 
 publication ' of the highest truth about God which had been 
 realized hitherto. For it came ' not to destroy but to fulfil.' 
 God is still the Eternally One, the Eternally Righteous. Not 
 sacrifice but holiness, not external ' works ' but inward ' faith,' 
 not the deeds of the law, but the righteousness which is of 
 God — this is what He requires. He is still the God of Israel. 
 But Israel according to the flesh had ceased to be the Israel 
 of God, and the children of faithful Abraham, in whom, 
 according to the ancient promise, all the families of the earth 
 should be blessed, are to be gathered from east and west and 
 north and south, from circumcised and uncircumcised, bar- 
 barian, Scythian, bond or free, and recognised as one family 
 under the one Father. If Christianity had been this and this 
 only, Christ might have claimed to be a great prophet, breaking 
 the silence of 400 years, restoring the ancient faith, and truly 
 interpreting and carrying forward the spii'it of the ancient 
 revelation. But He claimed to be more than this. He claimed, 
 as the Son of God, to be not only the true, but the only, Re- 
 vealer of the Father. For ' no man knoweth the Father but 
 the Son, and he to whom the Son shall reveal Him.' What 
 fresh characteristics, then, has this new revelation to add to the 
 Old Testament teaching about God % He is still One, the only 
 
76 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 God. He is perfect Righteousness, yet, as even the older 
 religion knew, a God of loving-kindness and tender mercy, 
 ' Who wills not the death of the sinner.' But more than all 
 this, He is now revealed to man as Infinite Love, the One 
 Father of humanity, Whose only begotten Son is Incarnate 
 and 'made man that we may be made God.' Not one jot 
 or tittle of the old revelation of God, as a God of Righteous- 
 ness, is lost or cancelled. The moral teaching is stern and un- 
 compromising as ever. God's love, which is Himself, is not the 
 invertebrate amiability, or weak good-naturedness, to which 
 some would reduce it. ' The highest righteousness of the Old 
 Testament is raised to the completeness of the Sermon on the 
 Mount ^.' ' The New Testament,' it has been said, ' with all 
 its glad tidings of mercy, is a severe book ^.' For the good- 
 ness and the severity of God are, as it were, the convex and 
 the concave in His moral nature. But what seized upon 
 the imagination of mankind as the distinctive revelation of 
 Christianity was the infinite love and tenderness and com- 
 passion of this Righteous God for sinful man. It was this 
 which shone out in the character of Christ. He was Very 
 God, with a Divine hatred of evil, yet living as man among 
 men, revealing the true idea of God, and not only realizing 
 in His human life the moral ideal of man, but by taking 
 human nature into Himself setting loose a power of moral 
 regeneration, of which the world had never dreamed. 
 
 The advance which the Gospel of Christ makes upon 
 the Old Testament revelation consists then, not only in the 
 new truth it teaches as to the character of God, but in the 
 new relation which it establishes between God and man. 
 So soon as men learn the Old Testament truth that God 
 is eternally on the side of righteousness, the awe and cringing 
 fear, which lies behind heathen religious, and justifies us 
 in calling them superstitions, gives place to trustful con- 
 fidence, which deepens into faith, and gathers round it those 
 aflTections and desires for union with God which find ex- 
 pression in the book of Psalms. The saints of the Old 
 Testament could ' rest in the Lord ' and wait for the vindi- 
 
 ' Discipline of the Christian Character, p. 85. * Ibid., p. 87. 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 77 
 
 cation of His Righteousness in human life ; they could yearn 
 for His presence and hope for the day when tliey should 
 ' see the King in His beauty.' Eut they were yet separated 
 from Him by the unobliterated fact of sin. Enoch ' walked 
 with God,' Abraham was called ' the friend of God,' Moses ' the 
 Lord knew face to face,^ David was ' a man after God's own 
 heart,' Daniel ' a man greatly beloved.' But one and all 
 of these fell short, and necessarily fell short, of the closeness 
 of that union which is the Christian's birthright. In the 
 Gospel, God is revealed as one with man. And this truth 
 changed the whole attitude and atmosphere of worship. There 
 was worship still, for humanity was not merged and lost 
 in Godhead. There is no Christian ring about the statement ^ 
 that ' in Christianity, in the consciousness that he is partaker of 
 the Divine existence, man no longer sustains the relation of 
 Dependence but of Love.' Rather the antithesis between de- 
 pendence and freedom is destroyed. As perfect love casts out 
 fear, yet leaves reverence, so the consciousness of union with 
 God, as distinct from absorption in Him, while it destroys 
 the last remnant of what is servile and degrading in religious 
 emotion, and gives man freedom, yet gives the freedom of 
 loving dependence upon God. And by this gift it sets free 
 new affections and appeals to new motives. It was the 
 assured consciousness of union with God which gave the 
 first Christians their power in the great moral struggles of 
 their day. Their moral ideal with its loftiness, its purity, 
 its perfect truthfulness, would by its very perfectness have 
 paralyzed effort, had they not believed that they were one 
 with Him Who had not only proclaimed but realized it, that 
 they could do all things through Christ which strengthened 
 them. And the horror of sin, which was a characteristic note 
 of Christian ethics, was due to the same fact. Unrighteousness, 
 not only as under the Old Testament, ranged a man on the 
 side of the enemies of God, but according to its degree tended 
 to break the supernatural bond which through the Incar- 
 nation united men with God. Impurity, which meant so 
 little for the civilized world of the first Christian centuries, 
 1 Hegel, Phil, of Hist., p. 247, Eng. Tr. 
 
78 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 was for the Christian not defilement only, but sacrilege, for 
 his body was God's temple. The love of the world was 
 enmity against God, yet the neglect of social duties, and 
 of all that is now summed up in the ' service of man,' was 
 for the Christian i'pso facto the declaring himself outside the 
 love of God. just as, conversely, the love of the brethren was 
 the proof that he had ' passed from death unto life.' 
 
 Thus in primitive Christianity the religious and the moral 
 consciousness were at one, as in the Old Testament, but both 
 are now raised to their highest level. Free scope is given 
 for the development of both, and the satisfaction of the 
 demands of both, in Christian life and Christian worship. 
 Side by side they fought and triumphed over heathenism, 
 taking up and assimilating all that was best and truest in 
 non-Christian ethics. And though Christians were long in 
 learning what manner of spirit they were of, it seemed as 
 if a real conflict between religion and morals, within the 
 ai*ea of Chi'istianity, was impossible. 
 
 And yet again and again, in the history of Christianity, 
 such a conflict has come about. Every moral reformation 
 within the Church was a protest of the conscience against 
 unworthy views of God ; every new Order that was founded 
 was a nursery of moral reformation. Yet every protest 
 against formalism and unreality in religion, every attack on 
 ecclesiasticism and ' priestcraft ' in the Church, or on worldli- 
 ness and laxity in professing Christians, owed its strength to 
 the reassertion of the truth, that in the Christian idea religion 
 and morals are inseparably united. The moral reformer 
 always claimed Christianit}^ on his side, when attacking the 
 Christianity of his day. This was conspicuously so in the 
 great moral upheaval of the sixteenth century. In actual 
 fact, religion and morality had separated. And the nearer 
 one got to the centre of Western Christendom, the more 
 open and unabashed the neglect of morality was. In Italy 
 of the fifteenth century renaissance we see, in strange 
 confusion, ' all that we love in art, and all that we loathe 
 in man \' It seemed as if, as in the old riddle, a swarm of 
 ' Cont Rev., Oct. 1878, p. 645. 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 79 
 
 bees had settled in the dead lion's carcass, and there was 
 sweetness instead of strength, corruption where once was 
 life. When the new century opened, Borgia was the supreme 
 Bishop of the West, and the strength of the protest of Chris- 
 tianity against immorality may be gathered from the hst of 
 prices to be paid to the pardoner. The devout retired from 
 the contest into the severer discipline of the monastic life, and 
 hoped against hope for the days of a Papa angellcus, who 
 never came. Yet when the strained relations of religion and 
 morals resulted in a revolution, it never occurred to those, 
 who had a moral reformation at heart, to say that religion 
 was outgrown, and morality must henceforth take its place. 
 They appealed from the Christianity of the sixteenth century 
 to the Christianity of Christ. Even of those who, in their fear 
 of popery, broke away farthest from the Christian idea of 
 God, all, if we except the Anabaptists, claimed the Bible on 
 their side. It was a genuine moral revolt against a religion 
 which had come to tolerate immorality. The hatred of ' eccle- 
 siasticism ' and ' sacerdotalism ' was not at first a rejection 
 of the Church and the Priesthood, but a protest against 
 anything which, under the sacred name of religion, becomes 
 a cover for unreality, or makes sin a thing easy to be atoned 
 for. The Reformation was a moral protest, and its results 
 were seen within as well as outside the Roman communion. 
 The Council of Trent was a reforming Council ; the Jesuits 
 were the children of the Reformation ; and Roman Christianity 
 in the strength of its OAvn moral revival, even in the moment 
 of defeat, became again ' a conquering power ^.' 
 
 On the other hand, those whose first impulse was a 
 protest in favour of a moral religion and a belief in a 
 God who hates iniquity, have bequeathed to the world a 
 legacy of immorality, of which they never dreamt, and of 
 which w-e, in the present day, are feeling the full efiects. 
 Lutheranism starts with the belief that God is love : 
 Calvinism with the conception of God as power. With the 
 former, the desire, at all costs, to guard the belief in the 
 freedom of God's grace, led to a morbid fear of righteousness, 
 
 ^ Ranke, Popes, i. 395. 
 
8o The Religion of the Inca7'nation. 
 
 as if it were somehow a rival to faith. With the latter, a 
 one-sided view of the power of God gradually obscured the 
 fact that righteousness and justice eternally condition its 
 exercise. If the one was, as history shews us, in constant 
 danger of Antinomian developments, the other struck at the 
 root of morality by making God Himself unjust. Forensic 
 fictions of substitution, immoral theories of the Atonement, 
 ' the rending asunder of the Trinity ' and the opposing of the 
 Divine Persons, like parties in a lawsuit ^, were the natural 
 corollaries of a theory which taught that God was above 
 morality and man beneath it. 
 
 How deeply these false views of God have influenced 
 English religious thought is shewn by the fact that every 
 attack on the moral, as distinguished from the intellectual 
 position of Christianity, is demonstrably an attack on that 
 which is not Christianity, but a mediaeval or modern per- 
 version of it. J. S. Mill's well-known words ^, ' I will call 
 no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that 
 epithet to my fellow creatures,' was a noble assertion of 
 ' immutable morality ' against a religion, which alas ! he 
 mistook for Christianity. The conscience of to-day, — and it 
 is a real gain that it should be so, — refuses to believe that 
 the i'm-prhnatuY of religion can be given to that which is not 
 good, or that God would put us to moral confusion. It 
 would rather give up religion altogether than accept one 
 which will not endorse and advance our highest moral ideas. 
 
 But men do not always stop to make the necessary dis- 
 tinctions. On the one side they see a traditional view of 
 religion which they cannot harmonise with the highest 
 morality ; on the other, they see a morality, which, though 
 it has grown up under the shadow and shelter of religion, 
 seems strong enough to stand alone. And their fii'st thought 
 is 'Away with religion. We have outgrown it. Henceforward 
 we will have morals unencumbered by religion.' What 
 would be the effect on the morals of a nation of thus 
 renouncing the religious sanction it is not safe to predict. 
 
 ' Dollinger, The Cnurch and the ^ Exmnination of Sir W. Hamilton's 
 
 Cfmrches, p. 239. Philosophy, p. 103. 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 8i 
 
 In individuals certainly it sometimes has disastrous results. 
 But there is one thing which those who talk about the ' secu- 
 larization of morals^' seldom take into account, and that is 
 the effect on what, in contrast to morals, they call religion. 
 The religious consciousness always refuses to be ti-eated as 
 defunct, and the religious emotions, if they no longer find 
 their object in a God of Righteousness, and are no longer 
 controlled by morality, will not be satisfied with the worship 
 of the Unknowable or of idealized humanity, but will avenge 
 themselves, as they have done again and again, in super- 
 stition ^. 
 
 And the attempt to do without religion in morals is as 
 unphilosophical as it is dangerous. It is parallel to what, in 
 the region of morality proper, we all recognise as a false 
 asceticism. It is the attempt to crush out, rather than to 
 purify. When men realize the danger of giving the rein to 
 the animal passions, there are always to be found moralists 
 who will treat these passions as in themselves evil, and 
 advocate the suppression of them. And only after an anti- 
 nomian revolt against that false teaching do men realize that 
 morality is not the destruction, but the purification and 
 regulation of the passions. So with religion and the religious 
 emotions. The function of morality is to purify the religious 
 idea of God, and religion and morality are strong and true in 
 proportion as each uses the help of the other. But neither 
 can treat the other as subordinate. God is more than what 
 Kant makes Him. the ultimate justification of morality: 
 morality is more than what some rehgious people would have 
 it, obedience to the positive commands of even God Himself. 
 In experience we find them separate and even opposed: 
 ideally they are one, united not confused. Separated, religion 
 tends to become superstitious, morality to degenerate into a 
 mere prudentialism, or at least an expanded utilitarianism. 
 United, religion gives to right that absolute character which 
 
 ^ H. Spencer, Data of Ethics, pref. and men were carried either to the 
 
 ^ See Ihne's remarks on the separa- schools of Greek Philosophy or to the 
 
 tion of morals and religion in Kome grossest and meanest superstition.' 
 
 at the time of the Punic wars. 'The Hist, of Rome, vol. ii. pp. 477> 47^. 
 religious cravings were not satisfied, 
 
82 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 makes it defiant of consequences ; morality safeguards the 
 idea of God from aught that is unworthy of the worship of 
 moral beings. 
 
 As the result of all the conflicts which have raged round 
 the idea of God so far as morals are concerned, one truth has 
 burned itself into the consciousness of both the apologists and 
 opponents of religion, a truth as old indeed as the religion 
 of Israel, but only slowly realized in the course of ages, the 
 truth, namely, that the religious idea of God must claim and 
 justify itself to the highest known morality, and no amount 
 of authority, ecclesiastical or civil, will make men worship an 
 immoral God. And already that truth has thrown back its 
 light upon questions of Old Testament morality. We no 
 longer say, ' It is in the Bible, approved or allowed by God, 
 and therefore it must be right.' It was this view which, in 
 every age, has given its protection to religious wars and 
 intolerance and persecution. But we look back and see in the 
 perspective of history how God in every age takes man as he 
 is that He may make him what he is not. We see in the Old 
 Testament not only the revelation of the Eighteousness of 
 God, but the record of the way in which, in spite of wayward- 
 ness and disobedience. He raised His people to the knowledge 
 of the truth. 
 
 VI. But the religious idea of God in our day, as in former 
 ages, is challenged not only by conscience, but by the specu- 
 lative reason. And there is a close parallelism between the 
 two conflicts. When religion and morals are opposed, men 
 naturally say, ' Give us morals ; away with religion.' And 
 the answer is — True religion is moral ; that which is not moral 
 is not true ; and morality without religion will not only leave 
 the religious consciousness unsatisfied, but fall short of its own 
 true perfection. So when religion and philosophy are opposed, 
 men say once more, 'Give us reason; away with religion.' 
 And the answer again is — True religion is rational: if it 
 excludes reason, it is self-condemned. And reason without 
 religion fails of its object, since, if philosophy can find no 
 place for religion, it cannot explain man. 
 
 But here again nothing is gained by confusing the issue, or 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 83 
 
 denying the actual fact of the collision. We may say with 
 Lacordaire, ' God is the proper name of truth, as truth is the 
 abstract name of God.' But it is not a matter of indifference 
 from which point we start, whether with religion we approach 
 God fii"st as a moral Being, or with philosophy seek for Him 
 as the truth of man and nature. The motto of Oxford 
 University, Bominus Illuminatio mea, altogether changes 
 its meaning if we read it Illuminatio Dominus meus. As 
 Rdville says, ' A religion may become philosophical, but no 
 philosophy has ever founded a religion possessing real his- 
 torical power ^.' And it is a fact patent to the observation of 
 all, that it is easier to make religion philosophical than to make 
 philosophy in any real sense religious. The reason of this is 
 obvious. Religion is not only fii-st in the field, it covers the 
 whole ground before either morals or science have attained 
 their full development, or even emerged into conscious life. 
 But when we speak of philosophy, we have reached a stage in 
 which the reason has already separated itself from, and set 
 itself over against, the religious consciousness, and must either 
 absorb religion into itself, in which case religion ceases to be 
 religion, or must leave religion outside, though it may borrow 
 and appropriate religious terms. If, then, the idea of God is to 
 appeal to both the religious consciousness and the speculative 
 reason it must be by claiming philosophy for religion, not by 
 claiming religion for philosophy. It is from within, not from 
 without, that religion must be defended. 
 
 In Greece the traditional polytheism was challenged, as we 
 have seen, at once on the side both of morals and metaphysics. 
 To Xenophanes, indeed, the unity of God is even more essen- 
 tial than His morality, and the attack on anthropomorphism 
 is as much an attack upon the number of the gods of Hesiod 
 as upon the immoral character attributed to them. In the 
 unity, however, which Xenophanes contends for, the reli- 
 gious idea of God is so attenuated, that we hardly know 
 whether the One God is a person, or an abstraction. Indeed, 
 it is hard to see how a champion of Eleaticism could con- 
 sistently have held the personality of God, as we understand 
 
 ^ History of ReUgims, p. 2 2. 
 G 3 
 
84 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 it, without falling under his own charge of anthropomorphism. 
 In Plato the same difficulty appears, only complicated or 
 relieved by the fact that while from the moral side he talks 
 like a theist, from the metaphysical his teaching is pantheistic. 
 Is the ' Idea of Good ' personal % Is it a God we can love and 
 worship, or only a God we can talk about % Is the vision of 
 Er a concession to popular views, or the vehicle of moral and 
 religious truth ? The question is hardly more easy to decide 
 with regard to Aristotle. The religious atmosphere, which 
 lingers on in Plato, has disappeared. What of the religious 
 belief? Did Aristotle in any intelligible sense hold the 
 personality of God % Great names are ranged on both sides of 
 the mediaeval controversy. Who shall decide % But whether 
 or no anything of religion survived in philosophy, it was not 
 strong enough to withstand the attack of the moral and 
 the speculative reason, still less to claim these as its own. It 
 is not on the side of religion, but of speculation, that we are 
 debtors to the Greeks. 
 
 Among the Jews, on the other hand, speculation seems 
 hardly to have existed. Eeligion was satisfied to make good 
 her claim to the region of morals. God was One, and He was 
 Righteous, but the mystery which enveloped His nature the 
 Old Testament does not attempt to fathom. ' Clouds and 
 darkness are round about Him,' yet out of the thick darkness 
 comes the clear unfaltering truth that ' Righteousness and 
 judgment are the habitation of His seat.' Jewish religion and 
 Greek speculation had little contact, and less kinship, tiU the 
 best days of both were passed. But in the days of the dis- 
 persion we get the beginning of the mingling of those streams 
 which were only united under the higher unity of Christianity. 
 ' With the Jews of the East,' it has been said, ' rested the 
 future of Judaism : with them of the West, in a sense, that of 
 the world. The one represented old Israel, groping back 
 into the darkness of the past ; the other young Israel, stretch- 
 ing forth its hands to where the dawn of a new day was about 
 to break ^.' The Septuagint translation threw open to the 
 Greek world the sacred books of Israel. The Apocrypha, 
 ^ Edersheim, Lift and Times, i. p. 17. 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 85 
 
 with all its glorification of Judaism, was both an apology 
 and an eirenicon^. It seemed as if in Wisdom personified 
 might be found a middle term between the religion of Israel 
 and the philosophy of Greece, and the life of righteousness 
 might be identified with the life of true wisdom. The Jews 
 of Alexandria were thus willing to find a strain of truth in 
 Greek philosophy, and Alexandrian Greeks were found ready 
 ' to spiritualize their sensuous divinities ^.' But the result 
 was a compromise, in which the distinctive elements of each 
 were not harmonized but lost. There was no fusion as yet 
 of Jewish and Greek thought, only each was learning to 
 understand the other, and unconsciously preparing for the 
 higher synthesis of Christianity. 
 
 Whether we think of Christ as the ' Son of Man,' or as the 
 Revealer of God, Christianity is bound to transcend national 
 distinctions, and to claim not only the whole of humanity, but 
 the whole of man, his reason, no less than his heart and will. 
 And this Christ did in a special way. He not only speaks of 
 Himself as ' the Truth,' and as having come ' to bear witness 
 to the Truth,' but the very complement (if we may say so) of 
 His revelation of the Father was the sending ' the Spirit of 
 Truth,' who should teach His disciples all things. This pos- 
 session of ' truth ' is always spoken of by Christ as a future 
 thing, implicit indeed in Himself, Who is the Truth, but only 
 to be explicitly declared and brought to remembrance when 
 the Spirit of Truth should come. He was to guide them 
 ' into all truth.' ' Ye shall know the truth, and the truth 
 shall make you free.' It was inevitable, then, that the ques- 
 tion should arise, — Will this religion, which has broken 
 through the narrowness of Judaism, and yet by its belief in 
 a God of righteousness and love combated and triumphed 
 over heathen immorality, have the power to assimilate and 
 absorb the philosophy of Greece ? The great crisis in the 
 world's history, as we see it, looking back from the security 
 of eighteen centuries, was this : — Will Christianity, with all 
 its moral triumphs, become a tributary to Greek philosophy, 
 
 ^ See Edersheim, i. pp. 31, etc. 
 
 * Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 343, Eng. Tr. 
 
86 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 as represented by the Schools of Alexandi-ia, or will it claim 
 and transform the rational, as it has transformed the moral, 
 progress of humanity ? The answer of Christianity is unhesi- 
 tating. Christianity is truth, and there is only one truth. 
 Christianity is wisdom, and there is only one wisdom ; 
 for the wisdom of the world is not wisdom but folly. And 
 at once the rival claim is made. Why not a division of 
 territory ? Knowledge for the philosopher ; faith for the 
 Christian. The Gnostics taught, as a modern philosopher 
 teaches, that religion is ' reason talking naively,' and that, 
 good as it is for ordinary people, the Gnostic can afford to do 
 without it. Every one knows the answer of the Apostles to 
 the insidious suggestions of Gnosticism. To S. Peter it is 
 ' a damnable heresy, even denying the Lord who bought us ^.' 
 To S. Paul it is the ' science falsely so called ^ ; ' the ' know- 
 ledge which puffs up ^ ; ' the ' wisdom of this world *.' To 
 S. John, Cerinthus was ' the enemy of the truth '^! To S. 
 Polycarp, Marcion is 'the firstborn of Satan.' It never 
 occurred to the Apostles, or the Apologists after them, to 
 retreat into the fastnesses of a reasonless faith. For with 
 them faith was implicit knowledge, and the only knowledge 
 that was true. 
 
 It was the collision of Christianity with Greek thought 
 which gave rise to Christian theology in the strict sense of 
 the term. Its necessity was the claiming of Greek as well as 
 Jew ; its justification was the belief in the presence of the 
 Spirit of truth ; its impulse the desire ' to know the things 
 which are freely given to us by God^.' The first Christians 
 were not theologians. They were ' unlearned and ignorant 
 men.' When Christ preached, the common people heard Him 
 gladly, the publicans and the harlots believed Him, the poor 
 found in His teaching ' good news,' and a few fishermen de- 
 voted their lives to Him. But the Scribes and Pharisees 
 stood aloof; and the rationalistic Sadducees asked Him 
 captious questions ; and the Herodians, the Erastians of the 
 
 ' 2 S. Pet. ii. I. * I Cor. iii. 19. 
 
 ^ I Tim. vi. 20. = Euseb. iii. 28. 
 
 ^ I Cor. viii. 6. ® i Cor. ii. 12. 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 87 
 
 day, tried to involve Him with the secular power. It was 
 only when challenged by an earnest, but non-religious philo- 
 sophy, that reason came forward, in the strength of the Spirit 
 of truth, to interpret to itself and to the world the revelation 
 of Christ. Religion and theology in different ways have to 
 do with the knowledge of God and of spiritual truth. They 
 have the same object, God, but their aims and their methods 
 are different. Religion knows God ; theology is concerned with 
 the idea of God. Religion sees ; theology thinks. Religion 
 begins and ends in an almost instinctive attitude of worship ; 
 theology rationalizes and defines the characteristics of the 
 Object of worship. As reason seeks to interpret feeling, so 
 theology interprets religion. It makes explicit what is im- 
 plicit in religion. ' As the intellect is cultivated and expanded, 
 it cannot refrain from the attempt to analyse the vision 
 which influences the heart, and the object in which it centres ; 
 nor does it stop till it has, in some sort, succeeded in ex- 
 pressing in words, what has all along been a principle both 
 of the affections and of practical obedience ^.' It takes the 
 facts which the religious consciousness has seized, seeks to 
 bring them into distinctness before the mental vision, to 
 connect them with one another in a coherent system, and 
 find in them the explanation and unity of all that is. Christian 
 theology grows naturally out of the Christian religion. But 
 religion is a divine life ; theology a divine science. 
 
 This explains the fact that though both religion and theo- 
 logy have to do with the knowledge of God, and ideally 
 work in perfect harmony, yet they are often found opposed. 
 Theology is always in danger of becoming unreal. What is 
 an interpretation for one age becomes ' a tongue not under- 
 standed ' in the next. Hence when a revival of religious life 
 comes, it frequently shews itself in an attack on the received 
 theology. Theology is no longer regarded as the scientific 
 expression of the very truths which religion values ; it is 
 conceived of as the antithesis of religion, and reformers dream 
 of a new theology which shall be for them what, though they 
 know it not, the old theology was to their predecessors, the 
 
 ^ Newman's Avians, ch. ii. § i. 
 
88 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 handmaid and guardian of religious truth. When Martin 
 Luther said that ' an old woman who reads her Bible in the 
 chimney corner knows more about God than the great doctors 
 of theology,' he was emphasising the severance which, in his 
 day, had come to exist between a religious life and theological 
 orthodoxy. And when in his Tahle Talk he says, ' A Jurist 
 may be a rogue, but a theologian must be a man of piety,' 
 he touches a real truth. A hundred years later, amid the 
 confusions and unrealities of the seventeenth century, John 
 Smith ^, the Cambridge Platonist, said the same : ' They are 
 not always the best skilled in divinity,' he says, ' that are 
 most studied in those pandects into which it is sometimes 
 digested.' ' Were I to define divinity, I should rather call it 
 a divine life than a divine science! Technically, no doubt, 
 he was wrong, for theology is a science and not a hfe, but, 
 like Luther, he was vindicating the truth that it is possible 
 for quite simple people to hnoiv God, though they have no 
 knowledge of theology, and that theology, when it becomes 
 speculative and abstract, ceases to be theology. A theologian, 
 as Mazzini says of an artist, ' must be a high-priest or a 
 charlatan.' 
 
 But the world dislikes a high-priest, and good people dis- 
 like a charlatan. And the consequence is that theology, 
 ancient or modern, is attacked from two very different points 
 of view, by those who look upon it as the antithesis of ' the 
 simple Gospel,' and by those who approach it from the side 
 of speculative thought. Theology claims to be a divine 
 science. Religious people attack it because it is a science ; 
 philosophers because it claims to be divine. To the former, 
 religion expressed in rational terms ceases to be religion ; to 
 the latter, that science is no science which claims for itself 
 unique conditions. Yet S. Paul seems to recognise both the 
 necessity and the uniqueness of theology when he says to the 
 Greeks of Corinth, ' We received not the spirit of the world, 
 but the spirit which is of God, that we might know the 
 things that are freely given us by God.' 
 
 It is the relation of Christian theology to philosophy and 
 
 ^ Natural Truth of Christianity, §§ i, 2. 
 
II, The Christian Doctrine of God. 89 
 
 science with which we are specially concerned. But it is 
 impossible to pass by the objection to theology which comes 
 as it were ah intra from the side of religion. For if it is 
 valid, then Christianity may as well give up at once any 
 idea of being the religion of man. Yet people say, ' Why 
 have a theology ? Human reason cannot search out " the deep 
 things of God ;" it will only put new difficulties in a brother's 
 way ; why not rest content with the words of Holy Scrip- 
 ture, with simple truths like " God is love," and simple duties 
 like "Love one another," and leave theology alone ? ' Now 
 without denying what George Eliot calls 'the right of the 
 individual to general haziness,' or asserting that every Chris- 
 tian must be a theologian, we may surely say that Christianity 
 is bound to have a theology. And even individual Chris- 
 tians, if they ever grow into the manhood of reason, must 
 have a theology, or cease to be religious. The protest 
 against theology from the side of religion looks modest and 
 charitable enough till we remember that religious haziness 
 is generally, if not always, the outcome of moral laziness ; 
 that it implies the neglect of a duty and the neglect of 
 a gift ; — the duty of realizing to the reason the revelation of 
 Christ, and the gift of the Spirit of Truth to enable us to do it. 
 More than this, the protest against theology in the interests 
 of religion is irrational and suicidal. To tell a thinking man 
 that he need not interpret to his reason what religion tells 
 him of God, is like saying to him, ' Be religious if you will, 
 but you need not let your religion influence your conduct.' 
 If Christianity had been content to be a moral religion, if it 
 had abandoned its claim to rationality and had left Greek 
 speculation alone, it must have accepted either the Gnostic 
 division of territory, or recognised an internecine conflict 
 between religion and philosophy. And it did neither ; but, 
 under the guidance of the Spirit of Truth, Christian theology 
 arose and claimed the reason of the ancient world. 
 
 Thus as the religion of the Old Testament claims morality 
 for God, so Christianity goes further and claims to hold the 
 key to the intellectual problems of the world. So far as the 
 nature of God is concerned, Christianity met the intellectual 
 
90 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 difficulties of the first centuries by the Doctrine of the 
 Trinity. 
 
 From time to time people make the discovery that the 
 doctrine of the Trinity is older than Christianity, If the 
 discoverer is a Christian apologist, he usually explains that 
 God has given anticipatory revelations to men of old, and 
 points out how they fall short of the revelation of Christianity. 
 If he is an opponent of Christianity, he triumphantly claims 
 to have unmasked the doctrine and tracked it down to a 
 purely natural origin. ' People think,' says Hegel, ' that by 
 pronouncing a doctrine to be Neo-Platonic, they have i'pso 
 facto banished it from Christianity^,' Men have found the 
 doctrine, or something like it, not only in the Old Testament 
 but in Plato and Neo-Platonism, and among the Ophite 
 Gnostics, in the Chinese Tao-Te-Ching and the ' Three Holy 
 Ones ' of Bouddhism, in the Tri-murti of Hinduism and else- 
 where. Why not 1 Revelation never advances for itself the 
 claim which its apologists sometimes make for it, the claim 
 to be something absolutely new. A truth revealed by God is 
 never a truth out of relation with previous thought. He 
 leads men to feel their moral and intellectual needs before 
 He satisfies either. There was a preparation for Hebrew 
 monotheism, as there was a preparation for the Gospel of 
 Christ. There was an intellectual preparation for the doc- 
 trine of the Trinity, as there was a moral preparation for the 
 doctrine of the Incarnation, If the Christian doctrine of the 
 Incarnation is distinguished from the avatars of Hinduism, 
 and the incarnations of Thibetan Lamaism, by its regenerative 
 moral force, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is no less 
 distinguished from the pseudo-trinities of Neo-Platonism and 
 its modern developments by the fact that for eighteen cen- 
 turies it has been the safeguard of a pure Monotheism against 
 everything which menaces the life of religion. 
 
 But Christian theology is not ' a philosophy without as- 
 sumptions,' It does not attempt to prove sola ratlone the 
 doctrine of the Trinity, but to shew how that which reason 
 demands is met and satisfied by the Christian doctrine of God. 
 
 1 Phil, of Hist., p. 343, Eng. Tr. 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 91 
 
 Starting with the inheritance of faith, the belief in the Divi- 
 nity of Christ, and trusting in the guidance of the Spirit of 
 Truth, it throws itself boldly into the rational problem, fights 
 its way through every form of Unitarianism, and interprets 
 its faith to itself and to the world at large in the doctrine of 
 the Triune God, Its charter is the formula of Baptism, where 
 the ' treasures of immediate faith are gathered up into a sen- 
 tence, though not yet formulated into a doctrine ^' 
 
 To the Greek mind two things had become clear before 
 Christianity came into the world, and it w^ould be easy to 
 trace the steps by which the conclusions were reached. First, 
 Reason, as relation-giving, seeks for unity in the manifoldness 
 of which it is conscious, and will be satisfied with nothing less. 
 But Eleaticism had convincingly proved that an abstract 
 unity can explain nothing. Quite apart from questions of 
 religion and morals, the Eleatic unity was metaphysically a 
 failure. Plato had seen this, and yet the ' dead hand ' of 
 Eleaticism rested on Platonism, and the dialogue Pannenides 
 shewed how powerless the Doctrine of Ideas was to evade the 
 difficulty. Thus the Greeks more than 2000 years ago had 
 realized, what is nowadays proclaimed, as if it were a new 
 discovery, that an absolute unit is unthinkable, because, as 
 Plato puts it in the Fhilebus, the union of the one and the 
 many is ' an everlasting quality in thought itself which never 
 grows old in us.' The Greeks, like the Jews, had thus had 
 their ' schoolmaster to bring them to Christ.' They had not 
 solved, but they had felt, the rational difficulty ; as the Jews 
 had felt, but had not overcome, except through the Messianic 
 hope, the separation of man from God. But as the Trinitarian 
 doctrine took shape, Christian teachers realized how the Chi-is- 
 tian, as opposed to the Jewish, idea of God, not only held the 
 truth of the Divine Unity as against all polytheistic religions, 
 but claimed reason on its side against all unitarian theories. 
 They did not, however, argue that it was true because it 
 satisfied reason, but that it satisfied reason because it was true. 
 
 They started, indeed, not with a metaphysical problem to 
 be solved, but with a historical fact to proclaim, the fact of the 
 
 * Dorner, Hist. o/Doct. i. pp. 362, etc. 
 
92 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 Kesurrection, and a doctrinal truth to maintain, the Divinity 
 of Him who rose. And starting from that basis of fact revealed 
 in Christ, they found themselves in possession of an answer 
 to difficulties which at first they had not felt, and thus their 
 belief was justified and verified in the speculative region. 
 
 The truth for which they contended, which was enshrined 
 in their sacred writings, was that ' the Father is God, the 
 Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they 
 are not three Gods, but one God.' But the Fathers do 
 not treat this doctrine merely as a revealed mystery, still 
 less as something which complicates the simple teaching of 
 Monotheism, but as the condition of rationally holding the 
 Unity of God. ' The Unity which derives the Trinity out of 
 its own self,' says Tertullian, ' so far from being destroyed, is 
 actually supported by it^.' 'We cannot otherwise think of 
 One God,' says Hippolytus, ' but by truly believing in 
 Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost ^.' ' The supreme and only 
 God,' says Lactantius, ' cannot be worshipped except through 
 the Son. He who thinks that he worships the Father only, 
 in that he does not worship the Son also, does not worship 
 the Father ^.' Without the Son the Father is not,' says 
 Clement of Alexandria, ' for in that He is a Father He is the 
 Father of the Son, and the Son is the true teacher about the 
 Father *.' So Origen argues, — If God had ever existed alone 
 in simple unity and solitary grandeur, apart from some object 
 upon which from all eternity to pour forth His love. He 
 could not have been always God. His love. His Fatherhood, 
 His very omnipotence would have been added in time, and 
 there would then have been a time when He was imperfect. 
 'The Fatherhood of God must be coeval with His omnipo- 
 tence ; for it is through the Son that the Father is Almighty ^.' 
 This was the line of argument afterwards developed by 
 S. Athanasius when he contended against the Arians that the 
 Son was the reality or truth ^ of the Father, without whom 
 the Father could not exist ; and by S. Augustine, when he 
 argues that love implies one who loves and one who is loved, 
 
 * Adv. Prax. ch. iii. * Strom, v. i. 
 
 ^ Cont. Noet. § xiv. ' De Princ. I. ii. § lo. 
 
 ^ Inst. iv. c. 29. * Adv. Arianos i. § 20. 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 93 
 
 and love to bind them together^. Even one so unphilo- 
 sophically minded as Irenaeus ^, cannot but see in the Chris- 
 tian doctrine of the relation of the Father and the Son, the 
 solution of the difficulty about the infinity of God : 'Immensus 
 Pater in Fiho mensuratus ; mensura Patris Filius.' While 
 philosophy with increasing hopelessness was asking, How 
 can we have a real unity which shall be not a barren and 
 dead unity, but shall include differences? Christianity, with 
 its doctrine of God, was arguing that that which was an 
 unsolved contradiction for non- Christian thought, was a 
 necessary corollary of the Christian Faith ^. 
 
 The other truth which Greek thought had realized was the 
 immanence of reason in nature and in man. When Anaxa- 
 goras first declared that the universe was the work of intelli- 
 gence, we are told that he seemed ' like a sober man amongst 
 random talkers.' But both Plato and Aristotle accuse him 
 of losing the truth which he had gained because he made 
 intelligence appear only on occasions in the world, dragged 
 in, like a stage-god, when naturalistic explanations failed *. 
 The conception of creation out of nothing was of course un- 
 known to Anaxagoras. Intelligence is only the arranger of 
 materials already given in a chaotic condition. With Aristotle 
 too it is reason which makes everything what it is. But 
 the reason is in things, not outside them. Nature is rational 
 from end to end. In spite of failures and mistakes, due to 
 her materials, nature does the best she can and always aims 
 at a good end ^. She works like an artist with an ideal in 
 view*^. Only there is this marked difference, — Nature has 
 the principle of growth within herself, while the artist is 
 external to his materials'^. Here we have a clear and con- 
 sistent statement of the doctrine of immanent reason as 
 against the Anaxagorean doctrine of a transcendent intelli- 
 gence. If we translate both into the theological language of 
 our own day, we should caU the latter the deistic, the former 
 
 1 De Trin. viii. lo and ix. 2. ' p. 455''i7. The references are to 
 
 ^ Iren. Adv. Haer. IV. iv. i. 2. the Berlin edition. 
 
 => Cf. pp. 333-336. " p. 199^8, 18 : 4i5''i7 : 73i'^24- 
 
 * Plat. Phaed. 98 B. Arist. Met. '' p. 1070*7, 1033'^S, 753*3- 
 
 A. 4. 
 
94 The Religio7t of the Incarnation. 
 
 the pantheistic, view ; or, adopting a distinction of supreme 
 importance in the history of science, we might say that we 
 have here, face to face, the mechanical and the organic view 
 of nature. Both were teleological, but to the one, reason was 
 an extra-mundane cause, to the other, an internal principle. 
 It was the contrast between external and inner design, as we 
 know it in Kant and Hegel ; between the teleology of Paley 
 and the 'wider teleology' of Darwin and Huxley and Fiske ; 
 between the transcendent and immanent views of God, when 
 so held as to be mutually exclusive. 
 
 It is these two one-sided views which the Christian doctrine 
 of God brings together. Religion demands as the very condition 
 of its existence a God who transcends the universe ; philosophy 
 as imperiously requires His immanence in nature. If either 
 Religion denies God's immanence, or Philosophy denies that 
 He transcends the universe, there is an absolute antagonism 
 between the two, which can only be ended by the abandonment 
 of one or the other. But what we find is that though Philo- 
 sophy (meaning by that the exercise of the speculative reason 
 in abstraction from morals and religion) the more fully it 
 realizes the immanence of God, the more it tends to deny the 
 transcendence, religion not only has no quarrel with the doc- 
 trine of immanence, but the higher the religion the more unre- 
 servedly it asserts this immanence as a truth dear to religion 
 itself. The religious equivalent for ' immanence ' is ' omni- 
 presence,' and the omnipresence of God is a corollary of a true 
 monotheism. As long as any remains of dualism exist, there 
 is a region, however small, impervious to the Divine power. 
 But the Old Testament doctrine of creation, by excluding 
 dualism, implies from the first, if it does not teach, the omni- 
 presence of God. For the omnipotence of God underlies the 
 doctrine of creation, and omnipotence involves omnipresence. 
 Hence we find the Psalmists and Prophets ascribing natural 
 processes immediately to God. They know nothing of second 
 causes. The main outlines of natural science, the facts of 
 generation and growth, are familiar enough to them, yet 
 every fact is ascribed immediately to the action of God. He 
 makes the grass to grow upon the mountains ; He fashions 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 95 
 
 the child in the womb ; He feeds the young ravens ; He pro- 
 vides fodder for the cattle ; He gives to all their meat in due 
 season ; when He lets His breath go forth they are made ; when 
 He takes away their breath they die and return to dust. 
 
 This doctrine of the omnipresence of God, as conceived by 
 religion, had however yet to be fused with the philosophical 
 doctrine of immanence. And here again the fusion was effected 
 by the Christian doctrine of God, as Trinity in Unity. The 
 earlier Apologists concern themselves first with the vindica- 
 tion of the Divine attributes. God's separateness from the 
 world as against Greek Pantheism, His omnipresence in it as 
 against a Judaising deism. But the union of God's transcen- 
 dence with His immanence, and with it the fusion of the 
 religious with the philosophic idea of God, is only consciously 
 completed by the Doctrine of the Trinity ^ The dying words 
 of Plotinus, expressing as they did the problem of his life, are 
 said to have been, — ' I am striving to bring the God which is 
 within into harmony with the God which is in the universe.' 
 And the unsolved problem of Neo-Platonism, which is also the 
 unsolved problem of non-Christian philosophy in our day, is 
 met by the Christian doctrine of God. All and more than all 
 that philosophy and science can demand, as to the immanence 
 of reason in the universe, and the rational coherence of all its 
 parts, is included in the Christian teaching : nothing which 
 religion requires as to God's separateness from the world, 
 which He has made, is left unsatisfied. The old familiar 
 Greek term AOFOS which, from the days of Heracleitus, 
 had meant to the Greek the rational unity and balance of 
 the world, is taken up by S. John, by S. Clement, by 
 S. Athanasius, and given a meaning which those who started 
 from the Philonian position never reached. It is the L/ 
 personal Word, God of God, the Only Begotten of the Father, 
 who is one in the Holy Spirit with the Father. ' The 
 Word was God.' ' By Him all things were made.' ' He the 
 All-powerful, All-holy Word of the Father spreads His 
 power over all things everywhere, enlightening things seen 
 and unseen, holding and binding all together in Himself. 
 
 ^ Dorner, Rist. of Boct. i. p. 366. 
 
96 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 Nothing is left empty of His presence, but to all things and 
 through all, severally and collectively, He is the giver and sus- 
 tainer of life. . . . He, the Wisdom of God, holds the universe 
 like a lute, and keeps all things in earth and air and heaven 
 in tune together. He it is Who binding all with each, and 
 ordering all things by His will and pleasure, produces the 
 perfect unity of nature, and the harmonious reign of law. 
 While He abides unmoved for ever with the Father, He yet 
 moves all things by His own appointment according to the 
 Father's wilP.' The unity of nature is, thus, no longer the 
 abstract motionless simplicity of Being, which had been so 
 powerless to explain the metaphysical problems of Greece. 
 It is the living Omnipresent Word, coeternal and consub- 
 stantial with the Father, and the philosophical truth becomes 
 an integral part of that Christian doctrine of God, which, 
 while it safeguarded religion and satisfied reason, had won 
 its first and greatest victories in the field of morals. 
 
 VII. The Christian doctrine of God triumphed over heathen 
 morality and heathen speculation neither by unreasoning 
 protest nor by unreal compromise, but by taking up into 
 itself all that was highest and truest in both. Why then is 
 this Christian idea of God challenged in our day % Have 
 we outgrown the Christian idea of God, so that it cannot 
 claim and absorb the new truths of our scientific age ? If 
 not, with the lessons of the past in our mind, we may con- 
 fidently ask, — What fuller unfolding of the revelation of 
 Himself has God in store for us, to be won, as in the past, 
 through struggle and seeming antagonism % 
 
 The fact that the Christian Theology is now openly 
 challenged by reason is obvious enough. It almost seems 
 as if, in our intellectual life, we were passing through a 
 transition analogous to that which, in the moral region, 
 issued in the Reformation. Even amongst those who be- 
 lieve that Christian morality is true, there are to be found 
 those who have convinced themselves that we have intel- 
 lectually outgrown the Christian Faith. ' The only God,' we 
 have been told lately ^ 'whom Western Europeans, with a 
 
 ^ S. Athan. Contra Genies, § 42. ^ Morison's Service of Man, p. 48. 
 
II, The Christian Doctrine of God. 97 
 
 Christian ancestry of a thousand years behind them, can 
 worship, is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ; or rather, 
 of S. Paul, S. Augustine and S. Bernard, and of the innumer- 
 able " blessed saints," canonized or not, who peopled the ages 
 of Faith. No one wants, no one can care for, an abstract 
 God, an Unknowable, an Absolute, with whom we stand in 
 no human or intelligible relation.' ' God, as God,' says 
 Feuerbach ^, ' the infinite, universal, non-anthropomorphic 
 being of the understanding, has no more significance in 
 religion than a fundamental general principle has for a special 
 science ; it is merely the ultimate point of support, as it were, 
 the mathematical point of religion.' Yet it is assumed that 
 this is all that remains to us, and we are left in the following 
 dilemma, — ' An anthropomorphic God is the only God whom 
 men can worship, and also the God whom modern thought 
 finds it increasingly difiicult to believe in^.' 
 
 In such a state of things it is natural that men should turn 
 to pantheism as a sort of middle term between religion and 
 philosophy, and even claim, for the unity of the world, the 
 venerable name and associations of God. But the remarkable 
 thing is that in the numberless attempts to attack, or defend, 
 or find a substitute for Theism, the Christian, or Trinitarian, 
 teaching about God rarely appears upon the scene. Devout 
 Christians have come to think of the doctrine of the Trinity, 
 if not exactly as a distinct revelation, yet as a doctrine 
 necessary for holding the divinity of Christ, without sacri- 
 ficing the unity of God. Ordinary people take it for granted 
 that Trinitarianism is a sort of extra demand made on Ckristian 
 faith, and that the battle must really be fought out on the 
 unitarian basis. If unitarian theism can be defended, it will 
 then be possible to go farther and accept the doctrine of the 
 Trinity. It is natural that when Christians take this ground, 
 those who have ceased to be Christian suppose that, though 
 Christianity is no longer tenable, they may still cling to 
 ' Theism,' and even perhaps, under cover of that nebulous 
 term, make an alliance not only with Jews and Mahommedans, 
 
 ^ Quoted byW. S. Lilly, Nineteenth ^ Movison, Service of Man, p. 49. 
 
 Century, Aug. 1888, p. 292. 
 
98 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 but with at least the more religious representatives of pan- 
 theism. It is only our languid interest in speculation or a 
 philistine dislike of metaphysics, that makes such an un- 
 intelligent view possible. Unitarianism said its last word in 
 the pre-Christian and early Christian period, and it failed, as 
 it fails now, to save religion except at the cost of reason. So 
 far from the doctrine of the Trinity being, in Mr. Gladstone's 
 unfortunate phrase, ' the scaffolding of a purer theism,' non- 
 Christian monotheism was the ' scaffolding ' through which 
 already the outlines of the future building might be seen. 
 For the modern world, the Christian doctrine of God remains 
 as the only safeguard in reason for a permanent theistic 
 belief 1. 
 
 It is not difficult to see how it is that this truth is not more 
 generally recognised. The doctrine of the Trinity, by which 
 the Christian idea of God absorbed Greek speculation into it- 
 self, had but little 'point cVarppui in the unmetaphysical western 
 world. It bore the imprimatur of the Church ; it was easily 
 deducible from the words of Holy Scripture ; it was seen to 
 be essential to the holding of the divinity of Christ. But 
 men forgot that the doctrine was ' addressed to the reason ^ ; ' 
 and so its metaphysical meaning and value were gradually 
 lost sight of. In the days of the mediaeval Papacy, ecclesias- 
 tical were more effective than metaphysical weapons, and 
 Scholasticism knew so much about the deepest mysteries of 
 God, that it almost provoked an agnostic reaction, in the 
 interests of reverence and intellectual modesty. With the 
 Reformation came the appeal to the letter of Holy Scripture, 
 
 1 It is far from our purpose to un- He wavers between a view which 
 dervalue the work of Dr. Martineau. logically developed must result in 
 No more earnest and vigorous, and so pantheism, and a view implying a 
 far as it goes, no truer defence of reli- distinction in the Divine nature, 
 gion has been published in our day. which carries him far in the Trini- 
 But his strength lies mainly in his tarian direction. More often he con- 
 protest against what destroys religion, tents himself with leaving the specu- 
 and in his uncompromising assertion lative question alone, or storming 
 of what religion, as a condition of its the rational position by the forces of 
 existence, demands. He has done religion and morals. See A Study of 
 little to shew tjs how these demands Religion, vol. ii. p. 145 compared with 
 can be rationally satisfied, how the p. 192. 
 
 personal God, which religion de- ^ Newman's Arians, p. 84. 
 mands, is even an intelligible idea. 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 99 
 
 and the age of biblical, as contrasted with scientific, theology. 
 The only scientific theology of the Reformation period was the 
 awful and immoral system of John Calvin, rigorously deduced 
 from a one-sided truth. 
 
 Then came the age of physical science. The break up of 
 the mediaeval system of thought and life resulted in an 
 atomism, which, if it had been more perfectly consistent with 
 itself, would have been fatal alike to knowledge and society. 
 Translated into science it appeared as mechanism in the 
 Baconian and Cartesian physics : translated into politics it 
 appeared as rampant individualism, though combined by 
 Hobbes with Stuart absolutism. Its theory of knowledge 
 was a crude empiricism ; its theology unrelieved deism. God 
 was ' throned in magnificent inactivity in a remote corner of 
 the universe,' and a machinery of ' second causes ' had practi- 
 cally taken His place. It was even doubted, in the deistic age, 
 whether God's delegation of His power was not so absolute as 
 to make it impossible for Him to ' interfere ' with the laws of 
 nature. The question of miracles became the burning question 
 of the day, and the very existence of God was staked on His 
 power to interrupt or override the laws of the universe. 
 Meanwhile His immanence in nature, the ' higher pantheism,' 
 which is a truth essential to true religion, as it is to true 
 philosophy, fell into the background. 
 
 Slowly but surely that theory of the world has been under- 
 mined. The one absolutely impossible conception of God, in 
 the present day, is that which represents Him as an occasional 
 Visitor. Science had pushed the deist's God farther and 
 farther away, and at the moment when it seemed as if He 
 would be thrust out altogether, Darwinism appeared, and, 
 under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend. It has 
 conferred upon philosophy and religion an inestimable benefit, 
 by shewing us that we must choose between two alternatives. 
 Either God is everywhere present in nature, or He is nowhere. 
 He cannot be here and not there. He cannot delegate His 
 power to demigods called ' second causes ^.' In nature 
 everything must bo His work or nothing. We must frankly 
 
 ' Cf. Fiske, Idea of God, pp. 103, 104. Martineau, A Study of EeUgion,ii. i'^2, 1'j^. 
 
 H a 
 
joo The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 return to the Christian view of direct Divine agency, the 
 immanence of Divine power in nature from end to end, the 
 belief in a God in Whom not only we, but all things have 
 their being, or we must banish Him altogether. It seems as if, 
 in the providence of God, the mission of modern science 
 was to bring home to our unmetaphysical ways of thinking 
 the great truth of the Divine immanence in creation, which 
 is not less essential to the Christian idea of God than to a 
 philosophical view of nature. And it comes to us almost like 
 a new truth, which we cannot at once fit it in with the old. 
 
 Yet the conviction that the Divine immanence must be for 
 our age, as for the Athanasian age, the meeting point of the 
 religious and philosophic view of God is shewing itself in the 
 most thoughtful minds on both sides. Our modes of thought 
 are becoming increasingly Greek, and the flood, which in our 
 day is surging up against the traditional Christian view of 
 God, is prevailingly pantheistic in tone. The pantheism is 
 not less pronounced because it comes as the last word of 
 a science of nature, for the wall which once separated physics 
 from metaphysics has given way, and positivism, when it is 
 not the paralysis of reason, is but a temporary resting-place, 
 preparatory to a new departure. We are not surprised then, 
 that one who, like Professor Fiske, holds that ' the infinite and 
 eternal Power that is manifested in every pulsation of the 
 universe is none other than the living God/ and who vindi- 
 cates the belief in a final cause because he cannot believe that 
 ' the Sustainer of the universe will put us to permanent intel- 
 lectual confusion,' should instinctively feel his kinship with 
 Athanasianism, and vigorously contend against the view that 
 any part of the universe is ' Godless ^.' 
 
 Unfortunately, however, the rediscovery of the truth of 
 God's immanence in nature, coming, as it has done, from the 
 side of a scientific theory, which was violently assailed by 
 the official guardians of the Faith, has resulted for many in 
 the throwing aside of the counter and conditioning truth, 
 which saves religion from pantheism. It seemed as if tradi- 
 tional Christianity were bound up with the view that God is 
 * Idaa of God, cf. § v. and pp. 105-110. 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 
 
 lOI 
 
 wholly separate from the world and not immanent in it. 
 And Professor Fiske has been misled ^ into the belief that 
 S. Augustine is responsible for that false view. It is almost 
 incredible to anyone, who has read any of S. Augustine's 
 writings, that, according to this view, he has to play the 
 role of the unintelligent and unphilosophical deist, who 
 thinks of God as ' a crudely anthropomorphic Being, far 
 removed from the universe and accessible only through the 
 mediating offices of an organized church-.' And not only is 
 S. Augustine represented as a deist, but S. Athanasius is made 
 a pantheist, and the supposed conflict between science and 
 religion is, we are told, really the conflict between Athanasian 
 and Augustinian ideas of God^. Yet, as a matter of fact, 
 S. Athanasius and S. Augustine both alike held the truths 
 which deism and pantheism exaggerate into the destruction 
 of religion. If S. Athanasius says, ' The Word of God is not 
 contained by anything, but Himself contains all things. ... He 
 Avas in everything and was outside all beings, and was at rest 
 in the Father alone * : ' S. Augustine says, ' The same God 
 is wholly everywhere, contained by no space, bound by no 
 bonds, divisible into no parts, mutable in no part of His 
 being, filling heaven and earth by the presence of His power. 
 Though nothing can exist without Him, yet nothing is what 
 He is 5.' 
 
 The Christian doctrine of God, in Athanasian days, 
 triumphed where Greek philosophy failed. It accepted the 
 challenge of Greek thought, it recognised the demands of the 
 speculative reason, and found in itself the answer which, 
 before the collision with Hellenism, it unconsciously pos- 
 sessed. It is challenged again by the metaphysics of our 
 day. We may be wrong to speculate at aU on the nature of 
 God, but it is not less true now than in the first centuries of 
 Christianity, that, for those who do speculate, a Unitarian, or 
 Arian, or Sabellian theory is as impossible as polytheism. 
 If God is to be Personal, as religion requires, metaphysics 
 
 ^ Apparently by Prof. Allen's Con- * Be Incam. c. 1 7. 
 
 tinuity of Giristian TJiought. ° Be Civ. Bei, vii. c. xxx ; cf. too Be 
 
 2 Fiske, Idea of God, p. 94. Gen. ad lit. iv. c. 12 ; Enchir. ad Laur. 
 
 ^ Ibid., § vii. c. 27. 
 
I02 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 demands still a distinction in the Unity which unitarianism is 
 compelled to deny. But, further, the Christian doctrine of God 
 is challenged by the science of nature. Science, imperiously 
 and with increasing confidence, demands a unity in nature 
 which shall be not external but immanent, giving rationality 
 and coherence to all that is, and justifying the belief in the 
 universal reign of law. But this immanence of God in nature 
 unitarian theism cannot give, save at the price of losing 
 itself in pantheism. Deistic it might be, as it was in the last 
 century ; deistic it can be no longer, unless it defiantly rejects 
 the truth which science is giving us, and the claims which 
 the scientific reason makes. 
 
 It remains then for Christianity to claim the new truth 
 and meet the new demands by a fearless reassertion of its 
 doctrine of God. It has to bring forth out of its treasury 
 things new and old, — the old almost forgotten truth of 
 the immanence of the Word, the belief in God as ' creation's 
 secret force,' illuminated and confirmed as that is by the 
 advance of science, till it comes to us with all the power 
 of a new discovery. Slowly and under the shock of con- 
 troversy Christianity is recovering its buried truths, and 
 realizing the greatness of its rational heritage. It teaches 
 still that God is the eternally existent One, the Being on 
 Whom we depend, and in Whom we live, the source of all 
 reality and the goal to which creation moves, the Object alike 
 of religion and philosophy, the eternal Energy of the natural 
 world, and the immanent reason of the universe. It teaches 
 that He is the eternally Righteous One, and therefore the 
 Judge of all, irrevocably on the side of right, leading the 
 world by a progressive preparation for the revelation of 
 Himself as Infinite Love in the Incarnation of the Word, stimu- 
 lating those desires which He alone can satisfy, the yearning 
 of the heart for love, of the moral nature for righteousness, 
 of the speculative reason for truth. When men had wearied 
 themselves in the search for a remedy for that which separates 
 men from God, the revelation is given of Him Who ' shall 
 save His people from their sins.' And when reason had wan- 
 dered long, seeking for that which should be Real and yet 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 103 
 
 One, a God Who should satisfy alike the demands of religion 
 and reason, the doctrine of the Trinity is unfolded. It was 
 the gradual revelation of God answering to the growing needs 
 and capacity of man. 
 
 VIII. It follows from the point of view adopted in the fore- 
 going essay that there can bo no proofs, in the strict sense 
 of the word, of the existence of God. Reason has for its 
 subject-matter, the problem of essence, not of existence, the 
 question, ' What is God 1 ' not ' Is there a God ? ' Proof can 
 only mean verification a posteriori of a truth already held. 
 We approach the problem with an unreasoned conscious- 
 ness of dependence on a Being or Beings who are to us 
 invisible. This we interpret crudely, or leave uninterpreted. 
 The belief may express itself in ancestor- worship, or nature- 
 worship, or what not. But as our moral and intellectual 
 nature develops, its light is turned back upon this primi- 
 tive undefined belief. Conscience demands that God shall 
 be moral, and with the belief that He is, there comes con- 
 fidence and trust, deepening into faith and hope and love : 
 the speculative reason demands that God shall be One, the 
 immanent unity of all that is. And the doctrine of God, which 
 is best able to satisfy each and all of these demands, persists 
 as the permanent truth of religion. But neither conscience 
 nor the speculative reason can demonstrate ^ God's existence. 
 And it is alwaj^s possible for men to carry their distrust of 
 that which is instinctive so far as to assume that it is always 
 false because they have found that it is not always true. 
 Reason cannot prove existence. The so-called proof, a coit- 
 tingentia (which underlies H. Spencer's argument for the 
 existence of the Unknowable), is an appeal to that very con- 
 sciousness of dependence which some people consider a weak- 
 ness, and a thing to educate themselves out of. The appeal 
 to the consensus gentium can establish only the generality, 
 not the strict universality, of religion. It will always be 
 possible to find exceptions, real or apparent, to the general 
 
 ^ S. Thos. Aq. Sum. Theol. I. i. that he does not mean strict demon- 
 Quaest. 2, says that the Existence of stration, demonstratio apodeictica, but de- 
 God is demonstrable, but he explains monstratio ab effectibus. 
 
I04 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 rule ; while as for what is known as the ontological argu- 
 ment, which on principles of reason would justify the in- 
 stinctive belief, it requires a metaphysical training to under- 
 stand it or at least to feel its force. There remain, however, 
 the two great arguments from conscience and from nature, 
 which are so frequently discussed in the present day. 
 
 With regard to the first, there is no doubt that the belief in 
 God will in any age find its strongest corroboration in the 
 conscience. Even in the mind of a Felix the ideas of ' right- 
 eousness, temperance, and judgment to come' had a strange 
 and terrifying coherence. There is that much of truth in the 
 statement that religion is founded in ' fear.' But the argument 
 from conscience has been weakened by being overstated. 
 Conscience, as we know it, has won, not indeed its existence, 
 but the delicacy of its moral touch, and the strength of its 
 ' categorical imperative,' from the assured belief in a real 
 relationship between man and a holy and loving God. When 
 that belief has ceased to exist, conscience still survives, and 
 it is possible and justifiable to appeal to it as a fact which 
 can be explained by religion, but without religion must be 
 explained away. But it is a mistake to suppose that we can 
 take the untrained and undeveloped conscience, and argue 
 direct from it to a righteous God. The himen naturals, in 
 its lowest development, gives but a faint and flickering 
 gleam. We cannot argue back from it to a God of love, or 
 even a God of righteousness, unless we interpret it in the 
 fuller light of the conscience which has been trained and 
 perfected under the growing influence of the belief. The idea 
 of ' duty,' which is so hard to explain on utilitarian grounds, 
 is not to be found, as we know it, in Greek ethics. For it 
 implies a fusion of morals with religion, as we can trace it in 
 the history of Israel, and the teaching of Christian ethics. 
 If it is impossible to explain duty as the result of association 
 between the ideas of public and private advantage, it is no 
 less impossible to make it an independent premiss for a con- 
 clusion which is presupposed in it. 
 
 The argument from nature is closely parallel. It is hard 
 for those, whose lives have been moulded on the belief in 
 
II. The Christian DoctiHne of God. 105 
 
 God, the Maker of heaven and earth, to understand the incon- 
 clusiveness of the argument to those who have abandoned 
 that belief, and start, as it were, from outside. Consequently 
 it has been made to bear more than it can carry. No doubt 
 the evolution which was at first supposed to have destroyed 
 teleology is found to be more saturated with teleology than 
 the view which it superseded. And Christianity can take up 
 the new as it did the old, and find in it a confirmation of its 
 own belief. But it is a confirmation not a proof, and taken 
 by itself is incomplete. It is a great gain to have eliminated 
 chance, to find science declaring that there must be a reason^ 
 for everything, even when it cannot hazard a conjecture as 
 to what the reason is. But apart from the belief of our 
 moral nature, that in the long run everything must make 
 for righteousness, that the world must be moral as well as 
 rational, and that the dramatic tendency in the evolution of 
 the whole would be ii-rational if it had not a moral goal, the 
 science of nature is powerless to carry us on to a Personal 
 God. But the strength of a rope is greater than the strength 
 of its separate strands. The arguments for the existence of 
 God are, it has been said, ' sufiicient not resistless, convincing 
 not compelling^.' We can never demonstrate the existence of 
 God either from conscience or from nature. But our belief 
 in Him is attested and confii-med by both. 
 
 In this matter, the belief in God stands on the same level 
 with the belief in objective reality. Both have been explained 
 away by philosophers. Neither can be proved but by a 
 circular argument. Both persist in the consciousness of 
 mankind. Both have been purified and rationalized by the 
 growth of knowledge. But the moment reason attempts to 
 start without assumptions, and claims exclusive sovereignty 
 over man, a paralysis of thought results. There have been, 
 before now, philosophers who professed to begin at the be- 
 ginning, and accept nothing till it was proved, and the result 
 was a pure Pyrrhonism. They could not prove the existence 
 of an external world. They believed it, even if they did not, 
 like Hume, exult in the fact that belief triumphed over 
 
 * Tlie Existence of God. By Rev. R. F. Clarke, S.J., p. 6. 
 
io6 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 demonstration, but there was no sure ground for beKeving 
 that the world was not a mere cerebral phenomenon, except 
 the curiously rational coherence of its visions. Even Prof. 
 Huxley, in his ultra-sceptical moods, admits this. He says ^ 
 that ' for any demonstration that can be given to the contrary 
 effect, the " collection of perceptions," which makes up our 
 consciousness, may be an orderly phantasmagoria generated 
 by the Ego, unfolding its successive scenes on the background 
 of the abyss of nothingness.' But no one, least of all a man 
 of science, believes this to be so. He takes reality for granted, 
 and only tries to interpret it aright, i. e. in such a way as to 
 make a rational unity of the facts perceived. Tell a scien- 
 tific specialist, — ' I am not going to let you beg the question. 
 You must first prove that nature exists, and then I will hear 
 about the science of nature,' and he will say ' That is meta- 
 physics,' which to him is probably a synonym for an intel- 
 lectual waste of time. ' Look at nature,' he will say, ' what 
 more do you want ? If nature had been merely a phantas- 
 magoria there would have been no science of nature. Of 
 course you must make your " act of faith 2." You must beHeve 
 not only that nature exists, but that it is a cosmos which can 
 be interpreted, if you can only find the key. The proof that 
 nature is interpretable is that we have, at least in part, been 
 able to interpret her. There were people in John Locke's day 
 who professed to doubt their own existence, and he was 
 content to answer them according to their folly. "If any- 
 one," he says ^, " pretends to be so sceptical as to deny his 
 own existence (for really to doubt of it is manifestly impos- 
 sible) let him, for me, enjoy his beloved happiness of being 
 nothing, until hunger, or some other pain, convince him to 
 the contrary." ' We do not call a scientific man uni-easonable 
 if he answers thus, though he is justifying his premisses by 
 his conclusion. We know that he that would study nature 
 
 * Huxley's Rume^ p. 81. act of faith, because, by the nature of 
 
 ^ ' The one act of faith in the con- the case, the truth of such proposi- 
 
 vert to science, is the confession of tions is not susceptible of proof.' 
 
 the universality of order and of the Huxley in Darwin's Life and Letters, 
 
 absolute validity, in all times and vol. ii. p. 200. 
 
 under all circumstances, of the law ^ Essay IV. 10. § 2. 
 
 of causation. This confession is an 
 
 1 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 107 
 
 must believe that it is, and that it is a rational whole which 
 reason can interpret. And ' he that cometh to God must 
 believe that He is, and that He is the rewarder of such as 
 diligently seek Him.' We feel our kinship with both before 
 the instinctive consciousness is justified by reason. 
 
 And there is a remarkable parallelism in the process of 
 verification. The counterpart of the theological belief in the 
 unity and omnipresence of God is the scientific belief in the 
 unity of nature and the reign of law. But that belief, though 
 implicit in the simplest operation of reason ^, is not con- 
 sciously attained till late in the history of science. And even 
 when it is reached, it is not at once grasped in all its wealth 
 and fulness. It is thought of as mere uniformity, a dull 
 mechanical repetition of events, which is powerless to explain 
 or include the rich variety of nature and the phenomena of. 
 life and growth. It is to meet this difliculty that J. S. Mill 
 naively assures us that ' the course of nature is not only 
 uniform, it is also infinitely various^.' But soon the truth is 
 grasped, that the reign of law is a unity which is higher than 
 mere uniformity, because it is living and not dead, and 
 includes and transcends difference. It is the analogue in 
 science to that higher and fuller view of God in which He is 
 revealed as Trinity in Unity. 
 
 But as these parallel processes of verification go on, the 
 truth is forced upon the world that religion and philosophy 
 must either be in internecine conflict, or recognise the oneness 
 of their Object. 'We and the philosophers,' says S. Cle- 
 ment, ' know the same God, but not in the same way ^.' 
 Philosophy and religion have both been enriched by wider 
 knowledge, and as their knowledge has become deeper and 
 fuller, the adjustment of their claims has become more impera- 
 tively necessary. Few in our day would willingly abandon 
 either, or dehberately sacrifice one to the other. Many would 
 be ready to assent to the words of a Christian Father ; ' when 
 philosophy and the worship of the gods are so widely 
 separated, that the professors of wisdom cannot bring us 
 
 ^ Cf. Green's Works, vol. ii. p. 284. 
 2 Log. Bk. III. ch. iii. § 2. ' Strom, vi. 5. 
 
io8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 near to the gods, and the priests of religion cannot give us 
 wisdom ; it is manifest that the one is not true wisdom, and 
 the other is not true religion. Therefore neither is philo- 
 sophy able to conceive the truth, nor is religion able to 
 justify itself. But where philosophy is joined by an insepar- 
 able connection with religion, both must necessarily be 
 true, because in our religion we ought to be wise, that is, 
 to know the true Object and mode of worship, and in our 
 wisdom to worship, that is, to realize in action what we 
 know ^.' 
 
 It is sometimes argued, — You have let in more than the 
 thin end of the wedge. You admit that ' it is the province 
 of reason to judge of the morality of the Scripture'^.' You 
 profess no antagonism to historical and literary criticism. 
 Under the criticism of reason, Fetichism has given way to 
 Polytheism, Polytheism to Monotheism, even Monotheism has 
 become progressively less anthropomorphic. Why object to 
 the last step in the process, and cling to the belief in a 
 Personal God ? Simply because it would make the difference 
 between a religion purified and a religion destroyed. The 
 difference between the 30,000 gods of Hesiod,and the One God of 
 Christianity, is a measurable difference : the difierence between 
 a Personal God and an impersonal reason is, so far as religion 
 is concerned, infinite. For the transition from Monotheism to 
 Pantheism is made only by the surrender of religion, though 
 the term ' theism ' may be used to blur the line of separation, 
 and make the transition easy. 
 
 Religion has, before all things, to guard the heritage of truth, 
 the moral revelation of God in Christ, to ' contend earnestly 
 for the faith once delivered to the saints,' and to trust to the 
 promised guidance of the Spirit of Truth. And reason inter- 
 prets religion to itself, and by interpreting verifies and con- 
 firms. Religion therefore claims as its own the new light 
 which metaphysics and science are in our day throwing upon 
 the truth of the immanence of God : it protests only against 
 those imperfect, because premature, syntheses, which in the 
 
 1 Lact. Insiitt. IV. iii. 
 
 2 Butler's Analogy, Pt. II. cli. iii. p, 183. 
 
II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 109 
 
 interests of abstract speculation, would destroy religion. It 
 dares to maintain that ' the Fountain of wisdom and religion 
 alike is God : and if these two streams shall turn aside from 
 Him, both must assuredly run dry,' For human nature craves 
 to be both religious and rational. And the life which is not 
 both is neither. 
 
III. 
 THE PROBLEM OF PAIN. 
 
 J. R. ILLING WORTH. 
 
m. 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF PAIN. 
 
 The problem of pain, always prominent in a sensitive age, 
 has been exceptionally emphasized in the literature of modern 
 pessimism as an objection to Theism in general, and Chris- 
 tianity in particular. The existence of pain is urged as in- 
 compatible with the belief in a God who is at once omnipotent 
 and benevolent, that is with Theism in its ordinary form ; 
 while Christianity is further charged with being a religion 
 of pain, a religion which has increased the sum of actual, and 
 the expectation of prospective pain, darkening the shadow 
 that lies upon our race. Suffering is not a subject upon 
 which anything new can be said. It has long ago been 
 probed, to the utmost limit of our capacity, and remains a 
 mystery still. But, in face of the adverse use now made of 
 it, it may be well to bear in mind how much has been said 
 and is to be said upon the other side. 
 
 To begin with, there are two classes of pain, animal and 
 human, which however intimately they may be connected 
 must, for clearness, be considered apart. The universality of 
 pain throughout the range of the animal world, reaching back 
 into the distant ages of geology, and involved in the very 
 structure of the animal organism, is without doubt among 
 the most serious problems which the Theist has to face. But 
 it is a problem in dealing with which emotion is very often 
 mistaken for logic. J. S. Mill's famous indictment of nature, 
 for example, is one of the most emotional pieces of rhetoric of 
 which a professed logician was ever guilty. When a certain 
 class of facts is urged in objection to our Christian belief, we 
 
 I 
 
114 ^-^^ Religiojt of the Incarnatio7t. 
 
 are entitled to ask how many of those facts are known, and 
 how many are only imagined. There is of course a scientific 
 use of the imagination, but it is only permissible within the 
 bounds of possible, or at least conceivable, verification. Imagi- 
 native conjectures which, from the nature of the case, will 
 never admit either of verification or disproof are poetry and 
 not science, and must be treated as such in argument. With 
 all the changes that have passed over our knowledge, we may 
 still do well to attend to the caution with which Butler begins 
 his Analogy : — 
 
 ' One cannot but be greatly sensible how difficult it is to 
 silence imagination enough to make the voice of reason even 
 distinctly heard ; as we are accustomed from our youth up to 
 indulge that forward delusive faculty, ever obtruding beyond 
 its sphere ; of some assistance indeed to apprehension, but the 
 author of all error : as we plainly lose ourselves in gross and 
 crude conceptions of things, taking for granted that we are 
 acquainted with what indeed we are wholly ignorant of.' 
 
 This needs repeating, because much of the popular knowledge 
 of the day consists in the acceptance of results without ex- 
 amination of the methods of their attainment ; somewhat as, 
 in the countryman's simple faith, a thing must needs be true 
 because he has seen it in a book. While the case in point is 
 further confused by the fact that imagination has an impor- 
 tant bearing on all our conduct towards the lower animals, 
 and cannot, for that purpose, be too emotionally developed. 
 But it is one thing to err on the safe side in practice, and an- 
 other to convert such possible error into argument. 
 
 What then do we really know about the suffering of 
 animals'? No reasonable man doubts that they suffer. But 
 the degree and intensity of their sufiering is almost entirely 
 a matter of conjecture. We speak of, and are affected by the 
 mass of animal sufifering ; but we must remember that it is 
 felt distributively. No one animal suflfers more because a 
 million suffer likewise. And what we have to consider is the 
 amount which an individual animal suffers. We have no 
 knowledge, but we are entitled to meet conjecture by conjec- 
 ture. We may fairly suppose that the animals do not ' look 
 
III. The Problem of Pain. 1 1 5 
 
 before and after,' and it is this that gives its sting to human 
 pain. Again, they would seem like children to give strong 
 indications of slight pain. Further, many muscular contor- 
 tions which simulate extreme suffering are believed on scien- 
 tific evidence to be due to quite other causes. And then there 
 are the phenomena of fascination, which may well resemble 
 the experience of Livingstone in the lion's mouth. While 
 many pains are prophylactic and directly contribute to the 
 avoidance of danger and maintenance of hfe. All these con- 
 siderations may mitigate our view of animal suffering. But 
 a stronger argument is to be drawn from our profound ignor- 
 ance of the whole question. Animals can perceive colours 
 invisible to us ; they seem to have organs of sensation of 
 whose nature we know nothing ; their instincts are far more 
 numerous and finer than our own ; what compensations may 
 they not have ? Again, what are they ? Had they a past ? 
 May they not have a future % What is the relation of their 
 consciousness to the mighty life which pulses within the uni- 
 verse ? May not Eastern speculation about these things be 
 nearer the truth than Western science? All these questions 
 are in the region of the unknown, and the unknowable ; and 
 in face of them the Theistic position is simply this. We be- 
 lieve, on complex and cumulative proof, in an omnipotent and 
 benevolent Creator. That belief is a positive verdict of our 
 reason, interpreting evidence which we consider irresistible. 
 And against such a conclusion no presumption of the imagi- 
 nation, which from the nature of the case cannot possibly be 
 verified, has any logical validity at all : not to mention that 
 such presumptions admit of being met by as probable pre- 
 sumptions on the other side. We decline to arraign our 
 Creator for a deed which we have not even the means of 
 knowing that He has done. 
 
 ' All difficulties as to how they (the animals) are to be dis- 
 posed of are so apparently and wholly founded in our ignor- 
 ance that it is wonderful they should be insisted upon by any 
 but such as are weak enough to think they are acquainted 
 with the whole system of things.' . . . . ' What men require is 
 to have all difficulties cleared : and this is, or at least for 
 
ii6 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 anything we know to the contrary it may be, the same as 
 requiring to comprehend the Divine nature, and the whole 
 plan of providence from everlasting to everlasting i.' 
 
 But with human suffering the case is different, for here we 
 are in a measure behind the scenes. We watch the process 
 no longer from the outside but from within ; and though it 
 still remains mysterious, its mystery is full of meaning. In 
 saying this we make two assumptions ; first, that moral evil 
 is an ultimate fact for us, in our present state of being, in the 
 sense that it can neither be explained nor explained away : 
 and, secondly, that character and not pleasure, being, and not 
 feeling, or to phrase it more generally, the greatest goodness 
 of the greatest number, is the primary end of ethics. The fii-st 
 of these assumptions most men are willing to admit, while the 
 few philosophical attempts to disprove it have conspicuously 
 failed. The second has the assent of all moralists except the 
 hedonists, and those who without being aware of it are 
 hedonists in disguise ; the pessimism, for example, which 
 makes so much of pain, being simply disappointed hedonism. 
 Starting then from these premises, the problem of practical 
 ethics is the formation of character in the face of moral evil. 
 And in the solution of this problem pain and sorrow have a 
 place which no other known agency conceivably could fill. 
 
 To begin with its simplest if lowest aspect, pain is a 
 punishment ; and without importing any a jirioTi notions 
 into the question, we find punishment to be a necessary ele- 
 ment in the evolution of character. Punishment is a complex 
 thing, and the tendency of civilization is to lay stress upon its 
 corrective rather than its vindictive aspect. But we must 
 remember that with uncivilized races this cannot be the case ; 
 and that pains and penalties, considered simply as retrospec- 
 tive vengeance for the past, have been historically, and in 
 some cases still are, essential to our social development. 
 Indeed, it is a shallow view that regards vengeance as a 
 survival of savagery. Vengeance is intimately bound up 
 with our sense of justice, and the true difference between the 
 savage and the sage is that what the one eagerly inflicts upon 
 
 ' Butler, A)mlo(j\j. 
 
III. The Problem of Pain. 117 
 
 his neighbour, the other would far more willingly inflict upon 
 himself. Plato expressed this once for all when he said that 
 the sinner who is punished is happier than the sinner who 
 escapes scot free. We rightly shrink, as far as possible, from 
 sitting in judgment on our fellow-men ; but we feel none the 
 less that our own ill deeds demand a penalty, which may 
 vary from bodily suffering to interior shame, but which in 
 one form or another must be endured before we can recover 
 our self-respect. And self-respect is a necessary factor in all 
 moral progress. Punishment, then, considered as vengeance, 
 is a necessity for the social development of barbarous races ; 
 and though less obviously, quite as really for the personal 
 progress of the civilized man. 
 
 Now, without committing ourselves to the statement that 
 suffering was introduced into the world by sin, which is not 
 a Christian dogma, though it is often thought to be so, a vast 
 amount of the suffering in the world is obviously punishment, 
 and punishment of a very searching kind. For not only are 
 obvious vices punished with remorse, and disease, and shame, 
 but ignorance, impatience, carelessness, even mistakes of judg- 
 ment are punished too, and that in a degree which we are apt 
 to consider disproportionate ; forgetful that consequences are 
 God's commentaries, and this apparent disproportion may 
 reflect light upon the real magnitude of what we often are 
 too ready to consider trivial things. 
 
 But these punishments, it is urged, fall on the innocent as 
 well as the guilty. And this leads us to another point of 
 view. Pain is not only punitive. It is also corrective and 
 purgatorial. And this again is a fact of ordinary experience, 
 quite apart from the further consideration of why it should be 
 so. Among primitive races the penalties of law, by the merely 
 mechanical process of forcibly restraining certain actions, 
 slowly elevate the social tone. And as men rise in the scale 
 of development and begin to be a law to themselves, the same 
 process is continued within the individual mind. The pains 
 and penalties of evil doing, physical and mental, tend to 
 correct and purify the character ; and when we say that men 
 learn wisdom by experience, we mostly mean by experience of 
 
1 1 8 The Religioit of the Incamiation. 
 
 something painful. Of course, the most obvious form of this 
 correction is that in which the suffering can be recognised by 
 the sufferer as merited, because due to his own misdeeds. But 
 apart from such causal connection, what we call unmerited 
 suffering exercises the same influence in an even greater 
 measure. Its forces, not being exhausted in the work of 
 neutralising past evil, are able to expand and expend them- 
 selves in a positive direction, elevating, refining, dignifying 
 the character to an infinite degree. The men of sorrows are 
 the men of influence in every walk of life. Martyi'dom is the 
 certain road to success in any cause. Even more than know- 
 ledge, pain is power. And all this because it develops the 
 latent capacities of our being as no other influence can. , It 
 requii-es no mystic insight to see the truth of this. However 
 unable we may be to account for it, it is a fact of everyday 
 experience, visible to ordinary common sense. And this being 
 so, there is nothing of necessity unjust in what we call un- 
 merited suffering, not even in the sad inheritance by children 
 of the results of parental sin. For while the sight of the 
 miserable entail may, if rightly used, become the parent's 
 punishment, its imposition may be the child's call to higher 
 things. True, like all other useful agencies, it often fails of 
 its end ; but such failure is of the problem of evil, not of the 
 problem of pain. 
 
 And, lastly, with men, as with animals, suffering is largely 
 prophylactic. Bodily pain sounds the alarm beU of disease in 
 time for its removal. Mental and moral pain arrest the 
 issues of ignorant or evil courses before it is too late. While 
 the desire to remove pain from ourselves, or better still from 
 others, is among the strongest incentives of the scientific dis- 
 coverer, the patriot, the philanthropist. And though it may 
 seem a fallacy to credit pain with the virtues which spring 
 from the desire for its removal, common sense rises above 
 logic and recognises the real value of a spur without which 
 many of our noblest activities would cease. 
 
 Now, though all these considerations naturally lead on into 
 theology for their further treatment, yet it should be noticed 
 that they are in no sense exclusively theological. The penal, 
 
III. The Problem of Pain. 119 
 
 the corrective, the preventive, and the stimulating uses of pain 
 are all recognised in the average man's philosophy of life. 
 Indeed, they are too obvious to need dwelling on at any length. 
 But the point to be noticed is, that taken together, they cover a 
 very great deal of ground. For it is hardly too much to say that 
 in one or other of its various aspects, every human being has 
 need of suffering for the due development of his character. And 
 this is a fact which should go far to outweigh much brilhant 
 declamation of the pessimists. Pessimism, in fact, stereotypes 
 and gives a fictitious permanence to what is only one among 
 our many moods of thought. It harps upon the fact that we 
 naturally shrink from pain. It ignores the fact that we are 
 conscious of being the better for it, and unable to conceive 
 progress without it. And though these considerations afibrd 
 no solution to the speculative mystery of pain, they make in 
 the dii-ection of a speculative solution. They do not explain 
 why pain exists, but they shew us that its existence, in the 
 only region in which we can really test it, is eminently useful, 
 and therefore consistent with providential and beneficent 
 design. Their precise logical relation to the Theistic argument 
 might be put as follows : Arguments drawn from many 
 departments of life and thought converge in favour of Theism, 
 but one large and important department, that of human 
 suffering, blocks the way. When, however, we isolate and 
 examine that department, we find that even within its limits 
 the evidence of provident purpose is prominent, if not prepon- 
 derant. Its prominence is certainly enough to neutralize the 
 negative bearing of the department upon the general argu- 
 ment. Its preponderance, which many if not most men would 
 admit, carries us further and makes the net evidence of the 
 whole department an affirmative contribution to Theism. 
 
 So far common sense carrier us. But when we turn to the 
 place of pain in the religions of the world, two further 
 thoughts are suggested. In the first place, the belief in a 
 future life, which is common to almost all religions, at once 
 opens endless vistas of possibility before us. The pain which 
 has failed to purify here, may yet purify hereafter ; the high- 
 handed wrong-doing, which has seemed to go unpunished here, 
 
1 20 The Religion of the Incai'nation. 
 
 may there meet with its righteous due. The pains which we 
 have thought excessive here, may there be found to have 
 worked out for us a far more exceeding weight of glory. And 
 so the particular difficulty which arises from the unequal 
 incidence of earthly suffering may one day find its adequate 
 solution. No doubt there is an element of truth in the 
 familiar taunt that belief in a future life has been a curse as 
 well as a blessing to the world. In some stages of culture, 
 for example, the future life has been supposed only to em- 
 phasize the inequalities of the present : the slave living on in 
 everlasting slavery, and the warrior in incessant war. But 
 this has been a partial and a passing phase of thought, which 
 rapidly gave way before more ethical conceptions. The ethical 
 conceptions in their turn, which were based on future rewards 
 and punishments, confessedly could not produce a very high 
 type of morality. But they have filled their place, and that a 
 large one in the history of human development, while even 
 after ceasing to be the dominant motives, they still witness 
 to the ineradicable expectation of our race, that holiness and 
 happiness, sin and failure^ shall one day coincide. More 
 serious and sad is the fact that distorted dreams of future 
 punishment have often reflected a lurid light upon the whole 
 of life ; goading zealots into cruelty, sinners into madness, 
 thinkers into unbelief; and have lingered on, as savage sur- 
 vivals, even into Christian times, to the hopeless obscuration, 
 in many minds, of the creed that God is Love. But even here 
 we must draw distinctions. Early races express intensity by 
 an accumulation of material metaphors — fecundity by an 
 hundred breasts, omnipotence and omniscience by an hundred 
 arms or a thousand eyes. And so, when they saw the un- 
 righteous man enjoy the fruits of his unrighteousness, and 
 die in unrebuked defiance of laws human and divine, their 
 sense of outraged justice could not but express itself in 
 terms of material horror. We have grown to be more pitiful, 
 more refined in our moral thinking, less dogmatic about un- 
 known things : yet neither our moral experience nor our 
 Christianity has availed to remove the dread of that unutter- 
 able 'pain of loss,' which the passing of a soul in obdurate 
 
III. The Pi'oblem of Pain. 121 
 
 impenitence has ever suggested to the mind of man. And 
 however confidently therefore we may put aside the dis- 
 tortions, and debasements, and interested exaggerations which 
 have darkened the thought of future punishment, we must 
 remember that the thought itself was no alien introduction 
 into history; but due to the instinctive craving of the human 
 heart for justice; man's own tremendous verdict on his sin^. 
 But the universality, or at least extreme generality of the 
 belief in a continued existence, is quite distinct from the 
 particular pictures of it which the imagination has variously 
 drawn ; much as the universality of conscience is distinct from 
 its varying content among diverse races and in different ages. 
 And the broad fact remains that from the dawn of history 
 the majority of mankind have believed in and looked with 
 confidence to a future life to rectify, and therefore justify, the 
 inequalities of earthly suffering ; however much their views 
 have varied as to what should constitute rectification. 
 
 Secondly, there is an instinctive tendency in all religions, 
 from the savage upwards, to view pain, whether in the form 
 of asceticism or sacrifice, as inseparably connected with an 
 acceptable service of the gods or God. The asceticism of poor 
 Caliban foregoing his little mess of whelks, and that of the 
 Hindoo whose meritorious sufferings are expected to prevail, 
 by intrinsic right with heaven ; the hideous holocausts of 
 Mexico, and the paper substitutes for offerings of the parsi- 
 monious or hypocritical Chinee are widely different things. 
 But they all spring from a common instinct, variously dis- 
 torted, yet persistent through all distortions, and progressively 
 refined, till it culminates in the Hebrew substitution of the 
 broken heart for the blood of bulls and of goats. It is the 
 custom of some modern writers to represent the higher forms 
 of sacrifice as merely survivals of the savage desire to pro- 
 pitiate the gods by food. But this is not an adequate analysis 
 even of the savage creed. Naturally enough the primitive 
 hunter, to whom food is the chief good, may think food the 
 worthiest offering to the gods. But it is not simply food, but 
 his own food, that he ofiers, the choicest morsel, that which it 
 1 Cf. pp. 514-16. 
 
12 2 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 costs him something to forego. In other words, the root of 
 sacrifice is self-sacrifice, however crudely it may be expressed. 
 Of course, the primitive hypocrite would seek to evade personal 
 sufiering as naturally as the civilized hypocrite will give alms 
 at another man's expense. But sincerity must come before 
 hypocrisy, and the sacrificial instinct is in origin sincere. Its 
 first account of itself may be irrational, and its earlier mani- 
 festations often blundering and repulsive ; and if it were now 
 only a survival, the same should be true of its later forms, for 
 survivals are not commonly improved in the process of surviv- 
 ing. But so far from this being the case, it has been refiined 
 by successive developments and is as integral an element of 
 later as of earlier rehgions, being in fact the symbolic state- 
 ment that a more or less painful self-surrender is the necessary 
 condition of all human approach to the divine. Natural 
 religion , then, in the widest use of the term, carries us on 
 beyond common sense, in attributing a mysterious value to 
 suffering here, and expecting an explanation of its anomalies 
 hereafter. The first belief may be called mystical, the second 
 hypothetical, and yet the two together have done more to 
 reconcile man to his Ijurden of sorrow than all the philosophic 
 comments on the uses of adversity ; for they have seemed to 
 lift him, though blindfold, into a loftier region, where he felt 
 himself inbreathing power from on high. And so here, as in 
 other things, natural religion leads on into Christianity. 
 
 The relation of Christianity to the problem of pain, may be 
 best seen by contrasting it with the empirical optimism of 
 common sense. Enlightened common sense, as we have seen, 
 is fully aware of the uses of sorrow ; but it looks at the use- 
 fulness through the sorrowfulness, as a compensation which 
 should make the wise man content to bear his pain. The 
 change which Christianity has effected consists in the reversal 
 of this view of the subject. Once for all, it has put the value 
 before the painfulness in our thoughts. The Author and 
 Finisher of our faith, 'for the joy that was set before Him, 
 endured the Cross, despising the shame,' and ' our light afflic- 
 tion, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more 
 exceeding weight of glory, while we look not at the things 
 
III. The Problem of Pain. 123 
 
 which are seen but at the things which are unseen.' It bids 
 us not wait ' till the sorrow comes with years,' but take up 
 our cross, from the first moment of our conscious discipleship. 
 And accordingly the real Christian looks at sorrow not from 
 without, but from within, and does not approach its specula- 
 tive difficulty till he is aware by experience of its practical 
 power. Consequently he cannot explain himself to the merely 
 external critic. He may urge in argument such general con- 
 siderations as have been touched upon above, and meet the 
 pleas of pessimism with the counterpleas of philosophic optim- 
 ism ; but if pressed for the inner secret of his own serenity, 
 he can only answer with the esoteric invitation, ' Come and 
 see.' Enter the dim sanctuary of sorrow through the shadow 
 of the Cross. Abide there, and as your eyes grow accustomed 
 to the darkness, the strange lines upon its walls which seemed 
 at first so meaningless, will group themselves into shapes and 
 forms of purposeful design. 
 
 Once for all the sinless suffering of the Cross has parted 
 sin from suffering with a clearness of distinction never before 
 achieved. The intellectual Greek had tended to confuse the 
 two as kindred forms of ignorance ; the weary Oriental as 
 kindred consequences of our imprisonment in the body, ' the 
 too too solid flesh ;' the self-righteous Jew viewed blindness, 
 or death from a falling tower, as evidence of exceptional sin. 
 Everywhere in the ancient world the outlines of the two were 
 undefined, and their true relation of antagonism misunder- 
 stood. But the sight of perfect sinlessness, combined with 
 perfect suffering, has cleared our view for ever. Sin indeed 
 always brings suffering in its train, but the suffering we now 
 see to be of the nature of its antidote ; an antidote often ap- 
 plied indeed with inexorable sternness, but in its intention 
 wholly merciful. Thus every sin has its appropriate suffering. 
 Bodily indulgence brings bodily disease; cruelty ends in 
 cowardice ; pride and vanity in shame. And though the 
 suffering of itself cannot convert the sinner, it can and does 
 prevent both the gratification and contagion of the sin. 
 Then comes the more terrible sorrow of remorse ; and remorse 
 is potential penitence, and penitence potential purification. 
 
124 ^^^^ Religion of the Incainiation. 
 
 But -while sin thus involves suffering, suffering does not in- 
 volve sin. It is not only an antidote, but one of those anti- 
 dotes which taken in time is prophylactic. And this is not 
 only true of the pains of self-denial and self-sacrifice, the 
 voluntary bearing of the cross, but of many an involuntary 
 sorrow also. Delicate health, Plato's bridle of Theages, in- 
 herited pain, privation, bereavement, may all refine the char- 
 acter and train the spiritual eye to that purity of heart that 
 shall see God. Pain in fact, in its manifold methods, is like 
 the angel of the Eastern story, changing its form incessantly 
 to cope with the shifting shapes of sin, and passing by turns 
 into a lion, a bird, a sword, a flood, a flame, in sleepless eager- 
 ness to follow and find, and slay and quench and burn away 
 the least last lingering particle of evil. So far from being our 
 enemy it is our safest ally in the battle of life, and we fail 
 through shrinking from the stern alliance. We suffer because 
 we sin ; but we also sin because we decline to suffer. 
 
 Still, the very sharpness of the severance between sin and 
 suffering on the Cross forces upon us the further question — 
 Why should the sinless sufier ? The vicarious suffering of 
 Christ is said to conflict with our sense of justice. And it 
 does so, as misrepresented in much popular theology. But 
 rightly viewed, it is the climax and complete expression of the 
 process to which we owe the entire evolution of our race. 
 The pleasures of each generation evaporate in air ; it is their 
 pains that increase the spiritual momentum of the world. 
 We enter into life through the travail of another. We live 
 upon the death of the animals beneath us. The necessities, 
 the comforts, the luxuries of our existence are provided by 
 the labour and sorrow of countless fellow-men. Our freedom, 
 our laws, our literature, our spiritual sustenance have been 
 won for us at the cost of broken hearts, and wearied brains, 
 and noble lives laid down. And this is only the human 
 analogue of that transference of energy by which all life 
 and movement is for ever carried on. The sun is so much 
 the cooler by the heat it daily gives to earth ; the plant and 
 tree the weaker by the force that has matured their fruit ; 
 the animal generations exhausted in continuing their kind. 
 
III. The P^^oblevt of Pain. 125 
 
 And how should their Creator draw all men unto Him, but 
 through the instrumentality of His own great law of sacrifice ? 
 If we shrink from our share in the conditions of the solemn 
 legacy, it is easy to persuade ourselves that the system of 
 things is wrong. But if we accept it, and resolve that we 
 too in our turn will spend and be spent for others, we find 
 beneath all the superficial sufiering the deep truth of the 
 benediction, ' It is more blessed to give than to receive.' And 
 in the experience of that benediction we see further still into 
 the mysterious significance of sorrow. 
 
 Further; but not yet to the end. For the human heart 
 desires more than merely to work for others. It desires to 
 be one with those for whom it works. Love is the highest 
 form of that unity ; but even short of actual love, we in- 
 stinctively crave communion and sympathy with our kind. 
 And it is no morbid view of life to say that sorrow brings 
 about this union in a way that joy does not. There is some- 
 thing, under our present conditions, in the very expansiveness 
 of joy which dissociates, while sorrow seems to weld us, like 
 hammer strokes on steel. It is the nationality whose mem- 
 bers have together struggled for existence, the soldiers who 
 have faced the shock of battle side by side, the persecuted 
 party, the husband and wife who have known common suf- 
 fering that are most intimately, indissolubly one. Nor is this 
 union merely negative like the bond which fellow-prisoners 
 feel, and yet would eagerly escape from if they could. It is 
 due to a distinct sense that the common crisis has aroused all 
 that is highest and noblest and most spiritual, and therefore 
 most sympathetic in the soul. 
 
 But again, it is only in the light from the Cross, that we 
 can see why pain should possess this power. For in that 
 light we understand how pain unites us to each other, be- 
 cause, as even natural religion dimly felt, it unites us to God, 
 and therefore through Him to those who in Him live and 
 move and have their being. It unites us to God because it 
 purifies us, because it detaches us from earth, because it 
 quickens our sense of dependence, because it opens our spiri- 
 tual vision, and above all because He too, as man, has sufiered. 
 
126 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 But the mystics who have seen furthest into heavenly things 
 have felt that it unites us to God in still more vital wise, as 
 being, at least in its form of sacrifice, the very beating of the 
 heart of love. And so they have raised the question, — Has it 
 not an antitype far in the illimitable depths of the unseen ? 
 For we are told that God is Love ; and love, as we know it, 
 must be shewn in sacrifice ; though the sacrifice grows pain- 
 less in proportion as the love is pure. And when we recall 
 how in the days of our Lord's ministry on earth, Father, Son, 
 and Holy Spirit bore their witness each to other, but no one 
 of the Holy Persons ever to Himself, we are led on to wonder 
 whether ' in the light that no man can approach unto,' where 
 the Three are One, some higher analogue of what we call sacri- 
 fice does not for ever flame ; whose radiant reflection on the 
 universe only becomes shadow when it falls on a world of sin. 
 But however these high things may be, the simplest Christian 
 feels and knows that, in his present state, the unitive way, 
 the way to union with both God and man, is the ' via dolo- 
 rosa,' the way of the cross : — a serious and solemn belief, which 
 is very far from leading to complacency, in presence of the 
 awful spectacle of animal and human pain ; but still is based 
 on suflacient experience to justify the hope that all its mystery 
 will be one day solved. More than this we do not expect, for 
 the intellect, in our Christian view, is as much on its proba- 
 tion and as liable to error as the will ; and inordinate curiosity 
 not less misleading than inordinate desire. 
 
IV. 
 
 PREPARATION IN HISTORY 
 FOR CHRIST. 
 
 EDWARD S. TALBOT. 
 

IV. 
 
 PREPARATION IN HISTORY FOR CHRIST 
 
 The paradox of Divine mystery implied in the words 
 ' The Word was made flesh,' is not exhausted by a right 
 understanding of the Person of Chi-ist. It extends to the 
 relations between Christ and History, On the one hand, the 
 Incarnation of the Son of God appears as supreme, solitary, 
 unique, transcending all analogies of experience, all limitations 
 of nationality or generation, determined before the world was, 
 beyond the power of any antecedents to produce, the entry 
 of a new thing into the world. It appears, in short, as a 
 miracle. But, on the other hand, it appears as an historical 
 event, occurring at a particular date, appealing to the feelings 
 and fulfilling the hopes of the time, a climax and a new point 
 of departure in the historical order. It does this, necessarily, 
 because this is involved in the act of taking flesh, of entering 
 simply, literally, naturally into the conditions of human life. 
 Such a thing occurs, and must occur, in the natural order. 
 To say this is not to dictate what a Divine revelation must 
 be, but only to shew what Christianity asserts of itself. In 
 this way it was good in God's sight that His revelation 
 should come. 
 
 It follows from this, in the first place, that there must be 
 two ways, both valid and necessary, of approaching in thought 
 and study Christ manifest in the flesh. We may treat the 
 fact of His appearing with little or no reference to historical 
 relations, for its own inherent unchanofina; truth and mean- 
 ing. We may also treat it as clothed in historical event, 
 K 
 
1 30 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 to be understood in its relations with what went before 
 and followed after and stood around. The two methods 
 supplement one another. It may be true that the simple 
 personal claim which the solitary figure of Jesus Christ makes 
 upon us, by its unalterable moral dignity and beauty, its 
 typical humanity, its unearthly authority, is the strongest 
 that can be made : none the less may that claim be confirmed 
 and reinforced if we see the same figure as it were upon an 
 historical throne ; if it should become clear that what went 
 before (and what followed after) does, in any way, pay homage 
 to Him ; if the manner of His appearing in place and time 
 be calculated to heighten the impression which the fact of it 
 makes. 
 
 And in the second place, it follows that to start in any 
 historical treatment of the subject of this paper from the 
 central twofold assertion as to Christ, made by S. John in the 
 phrase ' The Word was made flesh,' is to obtain at once the 
 right clue to the lines which it should follow. 
 
 (i) To do so is not to beg the question or to fetter the en- 
 quiry, but only to define what kind of evidence, if any, the 
 study of Christ's relation to foregoing history can yield. 
 We see that it must be such as works in us the conviction 
 that He both does, and does not, occur ' naturally ' at the time 
 and place when He appeared ; that history leads up to Him 
 and prepares His way, and yet that no force of natural 
 antecedents can account for Him or for His work. It is 
 true that evidence for either side of this two-sided impression 
 may have sufficient weight to determine faith especially with 
 individual minds. The contrast between Christ and all else in 
 history, arresting the attention and suggesting the thought 
 of special Divine presence, may of itself be a spring of faith : 
 or, upon the other hand, a clear discernment of His natural 
 supremacy in history may lead a man on to higher truth. 
 But the true evidence, as corresponding to the true and 
 full claim, will be that which suggests the conclusion with 
 simultaneous and equal force from either side. 
 
 (2) If the ; im is not evidence but instruction, and we 
 desire simply to understand better what is true of our Lord's 
 
IV. Prepai'ation in History for Christ. 131 
 
 relation to history, it will still advantage us greatly to start 
 from the same point. We shall be able to recognise freely 
 and without fear of contradiction or confusion, on the one 
 side, the way in which the lines of history, of human ex- 
 perience, aspiration, achievement, character, need, lead up to 
 Christ and issue in Him : and on the other, the unearthly 
 and peculiar greatness of Him Who spake as never man spake. 
 Who taught as one that had authority and not as the Scribes, 
 Who was not convinced by any of sin : Whose daily intimacy 
 with a disciple issued in that disciple's confession, ' Thou art the 
 Christ, the Son of the Living God.' Such a method, starting 
 from the Christian claim, and trying to trace out all that it 
 involves, need not be only for the believer, any more than 
 the quest for evidence or witness is for those only who do not 
 believe. The Christian tests the foundations, and welcomes 
 every corroboration, of his faith: while, in dwelling on the 
 character of the work and of its relations to all else, the non- 
 believer may come to find the conviction grow upon him that 
 it was indeed ' wrought of God.' 
 
 (3) From the same point, we see at once to what double 
 misunderstanding or double attack the Gospel not only may 
 but must be liable. On the one side, it may be refused a 
 hearing as miraculous ; it may be understood as violating the 
 natural order which it transcends ; it may be regarded and 
 resented as an anomaly in history. On the other side, a con- 
 sideration of the aptness of its occurrence when and where it 
 did occur, and of its harmonious relations to many lines of 
 tendency will suggest the suspicion that it may be after all 
 only a result, though a supreme and surprising result, of his- 
 torical forces. In a word, it may be accused at once from 
 separate, possibly from the same, quarters as too supernatural 
 and too natural to be what it claims to be. It is all-important 
 to notice at the outset that liability to this double attack is 
 an inevitable incident of its true character and of that which 
 makes its glory, viz. the presence of true Godhead under truly 
 human conditions. 
 
 But to return to the main point. 
 
 The importance and interest of the subject of this paper 
 
132 The Religion of the Incaiiiation. 
 
 may be inferred, as we have seen, directly from what the 
 Incarnation claims to be. But we are not left to infer it for 
 ourselves. Nothing is clearer or more striking than the place 
 which it occupied from the outset in the declaration of the 
 Gospel. Jesus Himself spoke of the Scribes of the kingdom 
 as ' bringing forth out of their treasure things new and 
 old ' ; and laid it down as a first principle of His kingdom 
 that He was ' not come to destroy, but to fulfil ^' While 
 with surprising and commanding clearness He centres men 
 upon Himself, and distinguishes Himself from all who came 
 before Him, from ' the prophets and the law which prophesied 
 until John ' ; He yet with evident care draws the new out 
 of the old, and fits it on to the old : He dehneates His own 
 mission as a climax in a long appeal of God to Israel ^, and 
 the opposition to Him and His, as a chapter of denouement 
 in the history of an old conflict between God and the un- 
 godly ^. He sees a ' necessity ' for the happening of things 
 to fulfil what had been said of old '^. The very pith of the 
 disciples' ignorance is their failure to see how the features of 
 His work and character had been traced beforehand, and 
 the supreme teaching which they receive from Him is that 
 which discloses His correspondence to the whole tenor of the 
 Scriptures of the past ^. The teaching of the Apostles, and of 
 those who followed them, is faithful to these lines. Though 
 they have to convince the world of an Event which works a 
 revolution, which is to turn men from darkness to light : 
 though their perfect confidence in their own truth makes 
 them see the things that went before as elements, ' weak and 
 beggarly elements *',' and they have moreover battles to fight 
 against these ' elements ' set up again as antagonists : though 
 their adherence to the Old Testament was an ever fruitful 
 source of difficulty and attack (of which Judaizing and Gnostic 
 controversies are the record), yet nevertheless they unswerv- 
 ingly maintained the inspiration of the Old Testament, and 
 stood upon it ; and we distinguish without hesitation as their 
 
 ^ S. Matt. xiii. 52 ; v. 17. ■• S. Mark xiv. 49 ; S. Luke xxii. 37. 
 
 ^ S. Matt. xxi. 33-3S. 5 S. Luke xxiv. 25, 26, .^4. 
 
 ^ S. Matt. V. 12 ; xxiii. 30-37. '^ GaL iv. 9. 
 
 3^ 
 
IV. Preparation in History for Christ. 133 
 
 normal, primary, characteristic method that of appeal to the 
 correspondence between their Gospel and every hope and 
 word of Israel's faith : the ' revelation of the mystery . . is 
 . . by the scriptures of the prophets . . made known to all 
 nations^.' The Hebrews who wistfully look back to their 
 temple, law, and ritual, are not taught a stern forgetfulness of 
 what had been, nor led vaguely to spiritualize its meaning, 
 but are led to recognise in each part of the ancient system 
 a line which leads up to Christ. Finally, the disciple who 
 sets the true being of his Master in monumental and awful 
 splendour as the Word who ' was with God and was God 
 now made manifest in the flesh, in the same breath carries us 
 to the very core and source of all that can be implied in 
 preparation by declaring the same Word to have been ' in 
 the world ' before, to have been the author of all things, and 
 the unseen light of men 2. 
 
 The relation of Christ to history, or the preparation for 
 the Gospel, is then no afterthought of our own or any recent 
 time. It was Augustine's saying that Christianity was as 
 old as the world " : and Tertullian's (one of almost venturesome 
 boldness) that in the previous history Christ was schooling 
 Himself for incarnation ■*. But it is not difficult to see that 
 our own time is one which is specially fitted to appreciate 
 and handle this aspect of the Christian truth. Our cultivation 
 of the historical method, our historical realism or sense of the 
 relation of persons or events to historical setting, our recognition 
 of the part played in forming structure, function, character, 
 by gradual process, by heredity, by evolution, our developed 
 understanding of the links by which the parts and successions 
 in all nature, and not least in what is human, are bound 
 together — all these go to form a habit of mind which in presence 
 of such a Revelation as that of the Gospel will at once busy 
 itself, whether for satisfaction, for edification, for controversy, or 
 
 1 Eom. xvi. 26. So the pages of * De Came CJirisii vi. Eum Christum 
 the early apologists are to our feeling qui jam tunc et adloqui . . . human- 
 almost cumbered by the profuseness um genus ediscebat in carnis habitu : 
 of their appeal to these Scriptures. cp. adv. Prax. xvi. ediscebat Deus in 
 
 2 S. John i. I, 14, 9, 10. terris cum hominibus conversari. 
 ^ £p. cii. 12. 
 
134 ^'^^^' Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 for interpretation, with the relation of the Truth to the world 
 into which it came, to all from amongst which it sprung. In 
 such a time it is natural that attack should try to shew that 
 facts which historical criticism has done much to secure, and 
 a Life which it has become impossible to treat as a myth, are 
 simply explicable according to the natural laws of historical 
 causation. It is natural that Christianity should be explained 
 as the flower and bloom of Judaism, or as sprung from the 
 fusion of Greek and Jewish influences in a Galilean medium. 
 Such explanations may not be new, but they are urged with 
 new resources and a more subtle ingenuity. They have the 
 advantage of being the sort of explanations which are naturally 
 most congenial to the time. But out of the very stress of 
 such attacks may come a special corroboration of Christian 
 truth. The experiment is crucial : it can hardly be expected 
 that attack of this kind can ever command greater skill and 
 resource than it does at present. If therefore it should be 
 proved to fail : if we are able to look men in the face and ask 
 whether when all allowance is made for the subtle ' che- 
 mistries ' of history and for the paradoxical way in which 
 historical results spring from what precedes them, it is pos- 
 sible to think that Jesus Christ and His religion were a mere 
 growth from antecedents — then we have here the prospect of 
 such a confirmation of faith as no age less historically scientific 
 could, in that kind, give and receive. 
 
 But this negative result, great as its value may be, can 
 only be part of what Christian science may yield in this 
 sphere for the elucidation and support of faith. It should 
 surely be able to display with greater breadth and delicacy 
 than ever before that correspondence between the Kevelation 
 of Christ and what went before it, which was of old indicated 
 by saying that Christ came in the ' fulness of the time.' It 
 should be able to enhance, and not (as men fear) to impair, 
 the evidence of a Divine presence and influence, preparing 
 for that which was to come, moulding the plastic material 
 of history for a ' far-off" Divine event.' It may seem as 
 if this was not so. It may seem, for example, as if the 
 severity and activity of historical and linguistic criticism had 
 
IV. Preparation in History for Christ. 1 3 5 
 
 dimmed the clearness of those correspondences between 
 prophetic utterances spoken centuries before Christ and the 
 points in Him or His work Avhereby they were fulfilled, 
 which were once so clear. It may seem, it is evidently true, 
 that stricter canons of interpretation forbid for us that 
 unbounded use of the happy expedient of allegory which 
 could make everything in the Old Testament speak of Christ. 
 But even if this w^ere so (and with regard to prophecies we 
 only partially grant it), is there no countervailing gain to 
 reckon 1 The hand of God may be seen in what is mar- 
 vellous, startling, exceptional, unexplained. Can it not be 
 seen as distinctly and as persuasively in what is orderly, 
 steadfast, intelligible, and where our reason, made in God's 
 likeness, can follow along in some degree with the how and 
 the why of His working? It was Christ's will to give 
 special signs, yet the curiosity which ' sought after a sign ' 
 was not honoured by Christ like that wisdom which ' dis- 
 cerned the signs of the times,' and so could see the force of 
 the special signs that were given because it saw them in 
 their true moral and spiritual context ^. Have we any 
 reason to hope that our time may be suffered to do (and even 
 be doing) something for the interpretation of the witness of 
 history to Christ which has not been done before, and which 
 is even an advance upon what has been done ? Let us* con- 
 sider for a moment (in order to answer this question) what 
 it is which specially engrosses the interest and admiration of 
 all of us in the different branches of modern study and en- 
 quiry. It is the beauty of process. The practical men among 
 us watch process in its mechanical forms as contrived by 
 invention. The naturalists and the men of science have 
 to an extraordinary extent developed our perception of it 
 in nature : they shew us its range, and its incredible deli- 
 cacy, flexibility, and intricacy ; they shew us its enormous 
 patience in the unceasing yet age-long movements which by 
 microscopic or less than microscopic changes accumulate the 
 coal, or lessen the mountain ; they shew us the wonderful 
 power of adaptation by which it accommodates itself to 
 
 ^ S. Matt. xi. 4, 5 ; xii. 39 ; xvi. 3. 
 
136 The Religion of the Incarnatio7t. 
 
 surroundings, and appropriates and transforms them to its 
 need. The embryologist developes its wonders as it makes 
 'the bones to grow in the womb of her that is with child.' 
 And the historians in their sphere do the like : it is for 
 them, if not the beginning and end of their work, at least the 
 most powerful of their methods, to shew the processes by 
 which institutions, customs, opinions, rise and decline ; to 
 arrange the facts so as to display on their chart the steps of 
 growth, the stages of decay ; to shew influences blending to 
 form events, and parting again to destroy or re-shape them. 
 
 There is beauty in all this, more than we can, perhaps, 
 altogether analyse or explain. As living beings we sym- 
 pathise with the life and movement of it all (or, as in the case 
 of intricate machinery, with the imitation of life) compared 
 with what stands stark, solid, unchanging ; as intelligent 
 beings we revel and delight in its intricacy, and, further, we 
 are gratified by the way in which it subdues with explanation 
 what would be anomalous, abrupt, motiveless, in the way of 
 change or event. It gives us something like the pleasure 
 which we take in the beauty of the exquisite subtle curves 
 and shaded surfaces of a Raphael figure compared with the 
 rough outline of a Diirer woodcut. But we could not long- 
 rest in the admiration of mere process, whether delicate or 
 colossal. There is a rational element present in, or con- 
 trolling, our sense of beauty, which asks whence and whither, 
 which demands unity in detail ; and this finds altogether new 
 and delightful gratification when it can see a relation, a 
 meaning, a grouping, a symmetry, of which processes are 
 the ministers and instruments. 
 
 It is, then, this idea of beauty in process that we bring with 
 us as we approach to behold the facts and method of God's 
 Redemptive Work. It is altogether too strong in us to be 
 left behind as we cross the threshold of this region ; it is too 
 much connected with aU our thinking and experience. It is 
 very possible that there may be exaggeration about it in us : 
 and it is indispensable for us to recognise this, ' le defaut de 
 notre quality.' But all the same we cannot disown, though we 
 must control, what is so specially our own. And if our love 
 
IV. Preparation in History for Christ. 137 
 
 of process is prepared to be critical, it is also prepared to be 
 gratified : and there is opened a prospect of fresh witness to 
 the truth of the unchanging Gospel, if it should be found that 
 its introduction into this world is ushered in by all the beauty 
 of process, with all the grandeur of slow unhasting pre- 
 paration, the surprises of gradual transformation, the deli- 
 cacies of combination, which process allows. 
 
 Such a sight is much more than wonderful, and has in it, 
 if our ideas of what is Divine are not very narrow, much 
 more evidence of God's hand than any mere wonder can 
 have. But it is as wonderful as anj^thing can be. And if we 
 still plead that our sense of wonder stipulates for exceptional- 
 ness, it has its own way of satisfying this — the way of 
 uniqueness. For those features which we admire in process 
 are capable, if combined with a certain degree of grandeur, 
 completeness, and particularity, of conveying to us the 
 impression of a unique thing. We may dismiss as a dia- 
 lectical refinement the objection which has been made that, 
 as is doubtless true, ' everything is unique.' None the less, 
 there is a meaning in our ordinary language when it applies 
 the epithet ' unique ' to certain persons, classes, or things. 
 A man of science may properly speak of a certain uniqueness 
 in the way in which natural conditions are combined so as to 
 make life possible : a historian will certainly miss truth if he 
 does not recognise a special uniqueness in certain historical 
 epoch-making moments. In proportion as we believe in 
 Mind ordering the things of nature and history, such unique- 
 ness will have speaking significance. And as uniqueness has 
 its degrees, and rises according to the scale, quantity, cha- 
 racter and completeness, of that which goes to make it up, so 
 its significance will rise proportionately, until at last, arriving 
 at uniqueness, which seems to us absolute, we gain evidence 
 that there is before us a Supreme Thing, a true centre to the 
 world. The evidence is not indeed demonstrative, but it is 
 in a high degree corroborative, and it is the highest which 
 history can offer. It is this evidence of uniqueness which, as 
 it seems to me, we of the present day may with special 
 fitness seek, and shall with special welcome find : 
 
138 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 (i) in the shaping of world-history towards the Christian 
 era, 
 
 (2) in the special preparation of the Jewish nation. 
 
 Within the compass of a paper like the present, it is 
 impossible to do more than indicate the lines which, even 
 without any high degree of special education, a Christian's 
 thought may travel in tracing the Divine work of prepara- 
 tion and witness. 
 
 I. In the first part of our enquiry the distinction between 
 an outward and an inward working suggests itself as con- 
 venient, though necessarily imperfect: the one consisting in 
 a moulding of the material facts of history, such as the geo- 
 graphical distribution of peoples, and the political and social 
 order ; the other in a like use of the changes in thought, 
 feeling, and the like. 
 
 (1) It can never be altogether too hackneyed to dwell on 
 the strange value to the world's history of the two peninsulas 
 which we know as Greece and Italy, thrust out into that 
 Mediterranean Sea, which was itself so remarkable as a centre 
 and ' medium ' of the western world, binding its many nations 
 together. They share with other lands of the temperate zone 
 all its possibilities of hardy and vigorous life : but, besides this, 
 their sky and sea, their conveniences and difficulties, had 
 a special stimulus to give to their early inhabitants. They 
 were extraordinarily well suited to be the seed-plots of 
 civilization. And these seed-plots were aptly fertilized, first 
 by the Phoenicians, those carrier-birds of antiquity dropping 
 seed along the Mediterranean coasts : and then by the happy 
 contact between Greece and the other Greece opposite, to 
 which the island bridges of the Aegean linked it, where, on 
 the narrow strip of coast plain and rich river valley between 
 the sea and the high plateaus of Asia Minor, the lonians 
 enjoyed, as Herodotus says^, the fairest climate in the world. 
 Upon this debouched, with the rivers from the interior, the 
 highways along which travelled westward the civilization 
 or the power of the dimly known but highly important early 
 Phrygian monarchy, or from yet farther east, of the mighty 
 1 Hdt. i. 142. 
 
IV, Preparation in History for Christ. 139 
 
 Assyria. The recent discoveries of Prof. Eanisay and others 
 re-interpret and emphasize to us this early connection between 
 the Asian lands and Greece in Europe, of which the Lion Gate 
 of Mycenae is a monument. What Greece thus took with her 
 left hand she could pass across with her right to yet another 
 Greece, ' Great Greece,' in Sicily and Southern Italy. But 
 we may easily fail to recognise how much all this delicate 
 and tender growth depended on favourable circumstance, and 
 we cannot too carefully mark how space was made awhile for 
 it to spring. The ' hills stood about ' both peninsulas on the 
 North to shelter them from intrusion : but this barrier, suf- 
 ficient for ordinary times, would hardly have resisted the heavy 
 thrust of the later pressure of population from the East and 
 North-East, which, when it did begin, so nearly crushed Rome, 
 and which, if it had come earlier, might have easily stifled 
 Greek and Roman civilization in the cradle. The reader 
 of the Persian Wars will watch almost with awe within how 
 little Greece came of what appeared alike to Asiatic and 
 Greek a certain subjection to the Persian. A difference of 
 twenty years earlier, the chance of a different temper in the 
 little Athenian people, the use by Darius of the methods of 
 Xerxes, would, humanly speaking, have decided the other 
 way the fate of western civilization. It is easier again to 
 admire than to explain the happy fortune which brought the 
 mountain kingdom of Macedon to its moment of aggression 
 just too late to hurt the flowering and fruitage of Greece, just 
 in time to carry its seed broadcast over Eastern, Syrian, and 
 Egyptian lands. From all the sequence of the Graeco-Roman 
 history which follows, and in which nothing is more important 
 to all the purposes of Providence than the simple fact of the 
 order of these two, Greek first, Roman second, we can here 
 select only one feature of capital importance, viz. the trans- 
 formation of a world intensely localized and sub-divided into 
 one as singularly united and homogeneous. Follow S. Paul and 
 see his circuits, watch him claiming the safeguard of the same 
 Roman citizenship in the Macedonian town and in the capital 
 of Palestine, laying hold at Caesarea on the horns of a central 
 tribunal of justice at Rome, borne thither by the sails of the 
 
140 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 carrying trade in the ' ship of Alexandria,' meditating a journey 
 into Spain, numbering among his Roman converts, as seems 
 probable, one who had a direct connection with Roman 
 Britain, writing in the same Greek to Rome and to the 
 highlanders of Galatia, never crossed in his journeys by any 
 track of war, never stopped by any challenge of frontier or 
 custom-house: these are so many object-lessons to shew what 
 the ' Pax Romana ' and the Roman unity of power and organi- 
 zation imported for the growth of a world-religion. This was 
 the time when it could be complained that it was impossible 
 to flee from the Caesar's wrath because the Caesar owned the 
 world. And to make the impression more distinct, let the eye 
 travel backward a little, or forward a little : backward into 
 the second or even the first century B.C., when this same Medi- 
 terranean world was still in greater part an unconsolidated 
 chaos of political d(^bris ; when the tumult of the Macedonian 
 and Syrian wars of Rome and then of her desolating civil 
 strife tilled the world with noise and occupied its thought 
 and destroyed its peace ; when the sea was impassable because 
 of pirates, and when the West was still in great part un- 
 subdued and formidable barbarism : or forward, across the 
 space during which the Gospel had spread its influence and 
 struck its roots and won its power, to the time so soon 
 following, when the lands that had known no war were again 
 traversed by the armies of rival emperors, and the barbarians 
 began to dismember the West, and the gloom of a great fear 
 preoccupied men's hearts. To say nothing of the middle 
 ages, what unity of the Mediterranean world and the lands 
 afliliated to it has the whole of later history got to shew, that 
 can compare for a moment with the unity of the early 
 Empire, focussed in its cosmopolitan capital Rome ? 
 
 And in this there is much more than a mechanical pro- 
 vision for the progress of a world-religion. It is not merely 
 that its heralds find a complete facility of communication, 
 peaceful conditions, and a ' lingua franca ' ready for their use. 
 We must realize how the unity had been obtained. It had 
 been by pulverizing separate nationahties, separate patriotisms, 
 separate religions ; by destroying or leaving only in a muni- 
 
IV. Prepai^ation in History for Christ. 141 
 
 cipal form the centres round which human energy and loyalty 
 had been wont to gather. Thus the world had been turned 
 into that ' cold and icy plain ' of which M. Renan speaks. 
 And it is not too much to say that this process had destroyed 
 just so many barriers to the entrance of Christianity. We 
 have only to realize what had been previously the universal 
 character of the worships of the western world, viz. that they 
 had been local, the common and exclusive possession of the 
 citizens of one place or state, and inextricably bound up 
 with the being and welfare of that particular community. 
 Such religions, and people bred under them, would have met 
 Christianity, not so much with criticism of its doctrines, or 
 with rival doctrines of theii* own, as with ideas and a frame 
 of mind so alien to a spiritual and universal religion like 
 the Gospel that it would have found no foothold in attacking 
 them. Conceive the force with which what even in the 
 second century after Christ the heathen objector urged, ' it is 
 not creditable to alter the customs handed down to us from 
 our fathers^,' would have come from the Roman of the earlier 
 Republic, or the Greek of the times of freedom. Nay, we may 
 without rashness hazard the conjecture that had it been pos- 
 sible for the Gospel to overcome these conditions it would have 
 done so prematurely and with loss : that they were in their 
 time and place ministers of good : that they were bound up 
 with that vigorous energy of development within one small 
 limited horizon, by which, as we shall see, the preparation 
 of the heathen world was carried out. 
 
 It was the negative aid of the Empire to Christianity that 
 it destroyed these. But it lent more positive help. It created 
 a demand, or at least a need, for a universal religion. Of this 
 there are several proofs. The religious phenomena of the 
 time other than Christianity supply the fii'st. There is an 
 attempt, or more than one attempt, to provide such a religion. 
 There is the attempt by way of comprehension, of making 
 all the gods live together as joint inhabitants of a common 
 Pantheon. There is the attempt by way of construction, in the 
 worship of the one Power about which there was no doubt, the 
 
 ^ Clem. Alex. Protrept. ex. init. 
 
142 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 Goddess Rome, and of tbe Emperor her deified representative. 
 There is also, we may perhaps add, the attempt by way of 
 philosophic thought. For philosophy at this time had a 
 religious bent which increased not improbably as the circula- 
 tion of Christian thought stole unknown through the veins 
 of society: and it felt after the One Being whose Personal 
 existence and Fatherhood it waveringly discerned, but whom 
 yet it could not steadily distinguish from a personified order 
 of nature. Such a religious idea, needed to complete Cicero's 
 commonwealth of the Universe comprehending Gods and men, 
 may be seen with increasing clearness in Seneca, Epictetus, 
 and Aurelius. The need of a universal religion is thus 
 directly shewn. But other proofs, as clear though less direct, 
 are to be drawn from the other departments of human thought. 
 For literature was already a unity, into which whatever the 
 genius of provincials like Lucan, or Seneca, or Pliny contii- 
 buted was gathered up. And it is a commonplace that the 
 greatest constructive result of the imperial period was the 
 creation or development of a universal code of law. 
 
 (2) In what has been last said we have almost crossed the 
 imaginary line by which we were to divide the preparation 
 in external fact from that which was more inward in thought 
 and feeling. To deal with this latter may seem almost 
 ridiculous : since to do so must involve the presumption of 
 summarizing in a few lines the drift of the literature and 
 thought of antiquity. Yet, in the briefest words, it may be 
 possible to suggest a few true outlines of the shape which an 
 account of that drift should take. It would certainly repre- 
 sent the mental history of the classical world in its relation 
 to the Gospel as supplying a double preparation, positive and 
 negative : a positive preparation by evolving ideas which the 
 Gospel could work into its own fabric, or a frame of mind 
 which would make for it a suitable ' nidus ' and a receptive 
 soil : a negative preparation by the breakdown of human 
 nature's own constructive and speculative efibrts, and by the 
 room thus left for a revelation which would unite the broken 
 and useless fragments of thought and minister to unsatisfied 
 needs. And of these the negative seems the more predomi- 
 
 I 
 
IV. Prepa7'atioii in History for Christ. 143 
 
 nant and the more direct. In so saying we are guided by 
 what appears to be the teaching of the New Testament. It 
 seems as though the main upshot of that time was, and was 
 meant to be, the failure of the world ' by wisdom ' ^ to find the 
 truth : though when this has been recognised and acknow- 
 ledged, then the world might find, as we may find, that all 
 the while in this unattaining and abortive thought God had 
 put imj)ulses from His own wisdom, and prepared materials 
 for His own coming work. It is the typical history of the 
 ' natural man ': and though what is primary and indispensable 
 is that the natural man should learn the poverty and misery 
 of his own state, and be ready to die to his life, yet the 
 natural man too is the true though perverted work of 
 God, and in his thoughts and instincts, his emotions and 
 speculations, must be found a witness to which the revela- 
 tion will appeal, and a response which it will elicit. It is 
 impossible not to follow the track so suggested, and to see 
 in the early stages of Greek life, the lusty youth-time of the 
 natural man. Casting off the bright and truthful sim- 
 plicity, and the happy story-telling of its childhood, it begins 
 (we speak of the times between 600 and 450 b. c.) to try its 
 young energies upon the problems of the world: it suggests its 
 explanations, quick, ingenious, one-sided, changing, of how the 
 world came to be : ' it came from water,' ' from air,' ' from 
 fire : ' ' it came from the dance of atoms : ' ' nay, but these give 
 us only the liow, it came from something more than these, it 
 came from mind : ' ' are you sure what it is ? fix upon any 
 part of it and you will find it slip through your fingers, for 
 all is change, and change is all we know;' these are the quick 
 IpTeniieres ebauches of its young speculation. But already 
 there is a sound of alarm in the air. That challenge asking 
 whether there was an ' it ' at all ; and if so, whether by parity 
 of cavil there was any solidity in the other assumptions of 
 thought, in 'good' and 'evil,' 'truth' and 'falsehood,' 'beauty' 
 and ' ugliness ; ' or at least anything beyond such mere rela- 
 tive and convenient meaning as there is in ' big ' or ' little,' 
 ' thick ' or ' thin,' ' wet ' or ' dry ' — this sobers men. Thought 
 ' I Cor. i. 21. 
 
144 '^^^^ Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 feels its own dangers. It must try its hand more seriously 
 at some true constructive work : and so there follows that 
 great period in which, steadied by the strong grip and sharp 
 discipline of the great prophet of natural conscience and 
 natural instinct, Socrates, it addi*esses itself to its great task 
 of wringing her secret from the world. It is done and neces- 
 sarily done in the sheer self-reliance of the unaided mind, yet 
 of the mind in the fullest sense of the word ; not the mere 
 critical understanding, but the whole spiritual and rational 
 energy of the man, not disowning its dependence on a disci- 
 pline of character and a severe and painful training of its own 
 powers. The results, so splendid and yet so inadequate, so 
 rich in great intuitions and suggestions, so patient and suc- 
 cessful in much of its detail, is preserved to us in the work of 
 Plato and Aristotle. Christian thought can never be interested 
 in disparaging that work: Christian thinkers at different 
 times have done special honour to different aspects of it : 
 and the position of Aristotle in the works of Dante, and of 
 Aquinas, and in the frescoes of the Spanish chapel, is the sign 
 of the ungrudged admiration given by what in our modern 
 way we might regard as among the least appreciative and 
 discriminating of Christian times. But the most ungrudging 
 admiration cannot prevent our seeing, and histor}^ compels 
 us to see, what it lacked. It lacked a foundation upon a 
 Rock. It had the certainty, if certainty at all, which belongs 
 to profound intuitions and to a wide interpretation of experi- 
 ence, not that which makes a definite, settled, and above all 
 communicable conviction. All the while narrower, pettier, 
 more captious, or more ordinary minds had been asking ' what 
 is truth ' in a very different spirit ; had displayed the inde- 
 pendence and captiousness of youth, and not its hopeful and 
 trustful creativeness. And more and more this lower element 
 began to prevail. When it became a question not of projecting 
 systems which should impress and absorb the higher minds 
 of a few generations, but of providing that which should 
 pass on with men, the common run of men, into the advancing 
 years, and stand the strain of the world's middle life ; then it 
 was found that the human mind unaided was more powerful 
 
IV. Preparation in Histojy for Christ. 145 
 
 to destroy than to build or to maintain. The dark horse of 
 Plato's chariot pulled down his fellow : in the unaided human 
 understanding the critical faculty proved stronger than the 
 constructive : without the point of attachment in a central 
 truth to which men's high thoughts could reach and cling, or 
 (to change the figure) without a clearly-disclosed goal of truth 
 towards which they could be seen to tend and converge, thej^ 
 could not maintain or justify themselves: 'the carnal mind' 
 was against them and unworthy of them : as regards any real 
 adoption of them by mankind for fruitful and trustworthy 
 convictions, they passed away, according to that law of which 
 the modern poet speaks : — 
 
 Eternal hopes are man's 
 Which when they should maintain themselves aloft 
 Want due consistence : like a pillar of smoke 
 That with majestic energy from earth 
 Rises but, having reached the thinner air, 
 Melts and dissolves, and is no longer seen i. 
 
 We shall not be wrong in saying that the course of philo- 
 sophy after Aristotle displayed increasingly the collapse of 
 the experiment of speculative self-reliance. Scepticism was 
 not confined to the ' Sceptics,' nor even shared only by the 
 Epicureans : it deeply underlay the philosophy of the Stoics. 
 But as with advancing life men baflled in their early san- 
 guineness fall back (both for good and evil) and content them- 
 selves with the energies of practical life, so the mind of that 
 day bafiled and despairing of the speculative problem did not 
 abandon, but transferred, its self-reliance ; men threw them- 
 selves with a sort of defiance into the organization of conduct ; 
 'imperturbableness' and 'self-sufiiciency' became watchwords 
 of their thought ^. This is the ch^-acter of Stoicism : this 
 explains its vogue and wide indirect influence ; its curious 
 likeness to its apparently quite alien contemporary, Epicurean- 
 ism, in a common cultivation of self-suflicingness ; and, finally, 
 its ready alliance with the natural tendencies of Koman 
 character when it passed from Greece to Rome. 
 
 Here again was a great experiment, which had no mean 
 success. We admire almost with awe its unsparing thorough- 
 
 * Wordsworth, Excursion iv. ^ 'Arapa^ia (Epicurean) : avrapKua. 
 
 L 
 
146 The Religion of the Incarnatio7i. 
 
 ness, its austerity, its unworldliness, its courage, its endurance. 
 In its later forms, when some power has touched it with 
 gentleness, we yield it even a warmer and tenderer admira- 
 tion. Only what we cannot do is to disguise its failure as a 
 great spiritual experiment. We cannot forget how it left the 
 mass of men untouched, how it concentrated strength by what 
 it neglected of human sympathy and effort, how it revealed 
 a disease and palsy of human nature which it could not 
 cure : how at its heart it had no certainty of conviction to 
 give peace and to resist the forces of decay. Humanity will 
 never, perhaps, wind itself higher. But it was a height on 
 which human strength is insufficient to stand. There lacked 
 a sure word of truth: the joy and fruitfulness of an in- 
 spiration: a grace which could minister to the weakness, as 
 well as summon the forces, of human nature. We cannot 
 be blind to its failure unless we share it : unless, that is, we 
 are trying to satisfy ourselves by some philosophy of life which 
 misses its secrets, has no key to many of its problems, and 
 at heart despairs of its solution. The experiment of moral 
 self-reliance, then, failed in its turn. 
 
 But we spoke of a positive as well as a negative upshot to 
 all this Gentile history : a positive contribution to the prepa- 
 ration for Christ. Where shall we look for this ? Surely 
 alongside of, and in the same plane with, the failures. If one 
 chief result of the history of the ancient world was to exhibit 
 the insufficiency of man's efforts to find truth and right- 
 eousness and life, this must be completely shewn in propor- 
 tion as the efforts were noble, and therefore in proportion as 
 they realized (though, at the moment, only for disappointment) 
 the capacities, the possibilities, the true desires and ideals of 
 man. If man the race, like man the individual, was finally 
 to find salvation by dying to himself, to his own natural man, 
 he could only do this when it had been adequately and mag- 
 nificently proved both that he could not save himself, and how 
 splendidly worth saving he was. He must do his best, that he 
 may despair of his best. Do we not feel that this is just what 
 was worked out by the histories of Greece and Rome'? They 
 are splendid experiments of human power. Diverse in their 
 
IV. Preparation in History for Chi'ist. 147 
 
 method, they combine in this result. In Greece the experiment 
 is by way of spontaneity, of free lively development, con- 
 ditioned only by its own instincts of taste and beauty. And 
 Rome represents the alternative plan of seeking strength by 
 discipline, by subordination, by distrust of novelty, by sacrifice 
 of individuality to the corporate life, and of sentiment and 
 opinion to the rule of law. Both realize deathless types of 
 matured human life, of its beauty, its brilliant graces, its dig- 
 nity, its honour, its strength. Perhaps, according to the one- 
 sidedness which limits so severely the works and lives of men. 
 it might have been impossible that these possibilities of his 
 nature should have been jirst realized with the same solidity 
 and fulness in presence of those mighty truths, speaking of 
 what was above man, which brooded over the history of the 
 Jews and came forth into the world with the Gospel. Yet they 
 are indispensable to the fulness of the Christian work : they 
 are the human material : and that material must be first-rate 
 in its kind. We owe it perhaps permanently to Greece and 
 Rome that we recognise fully the grace of God's original 
 workmanship in man, the validity of his instincts, his indi- 
 vidual value, the sacredness and strength of all his natural 
 social bonds, the wisdom and power possessed by his incorpo- 
 rated life. These are things which we could never have 
 realized if all the world had been brought up in the barbarous 
 societies of ancient Europe or under the great despotisms of 
 Egypt and Asia. The religions of Asia may perhaps shew us 
 by contrast the immense importance to a religion of being- 
 able to build with sound and adequate materials on^ the 
 human side. That Greece and Rome did contribute specially 
 in this way to the work of the true religion may be shewn 
 by the way in which men have again and again turned back 
 to these original sources for fresh impulses of liberty or 
 vigour. 
 
 But these things had their day and passed. The age of 
 Pericles and of Demosthenes, the great days of the Roman 
 Republic, are only epochs in the history, long past at the era 
 of our Lord. We look to see whether there is any positive 
 preparation for Him and His Gospel in the whole drift of that 
 L 2 
 
148 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 history, and especially in tendencies which took a developed 
 form closer to the era of Christianity^. 
 
 General and popular impressions about the character and 
 course of the history will put us on the track of a true 
 answer. It is impossible to look at the history of the 
 classical world without getting a double impression, that it is 
 a history of failure and degeneracy, and yet that it is a history 
 of bettering and progress. If we take the world at the Chris- 
 tian era, the times of political brilliancy and energy are over, 
 and men are sinking into a uniformity of servility and stag- 
 nation : morally the ancient severity is lost, and the laws of 
 Augustus are feebly coping with the results of a general dis- 
 soluteness as to morality and marriage : economically society 
 is disfigured by a vast slave system, by the disappearance of 
 honest and thriving free labour, and by great developments of 
 luxury and pauperism : in literature, though it is the 'golden 
 age,' the signs are not wanting, in artificiality and the 
 excessive study of form, of imminent rapid decline into 
 the later rhetorical culture : in philosophy speculation had 
 run itself out into scepticism and self-destruction: and in 
 religion a disbelief in the ancient gods and a doubt of all 
 Divine providence is matter of open profession. And yet there 
 is a bettering. The laws of the Empire become a model of 
 humanity, equitableness, and simplicity. Seneca and Epictetus 
 rise to thoughts of moral purity and sublimity and delicacy 
 which at times seem hardly unworthy of the New Testament : 
 and their humane and comprehensive ideas have cast off the 
 limitations which the narrow life of Greek cities set to those 
 of their greater predecessors. 
 
 Here then is a great clearing of the stage, and a great pre- 
 disposing of thought and sentiment, for a religion which pro- 
 claimed a good tidings for all men without distinction of ' Jew 
 or Greek. Barbarian and Scythian, bond or free ' ; for a religion 
 
 ' The words ' era of Christianity' world through the first and even the 
 
 ai"e used intentionally rather than tlie second century of the era to receive 
 
 more precise ' era of Christ,' because the Gospel may be fairly included as 
 
 anything which (without being in- preparation for the revelation of 
 
 tiuenced unless in the most impalpable Christ, 
 way by Christianity) prepared the 
 
IV. Preparation in Histojy for Christ. 149 
 
 of compassion ; for a religion wholly spiritual and unpolitical. 
 There are traces distinct and widespread of special tendencies 
 to such a religion, and they are connected with the best side of 
 the life of the time. The enormous diffusion of the ' collegia ' 
 or clubs, in which the members were drawn together without 
 distinction of rank, or even of free and slave, in a partly 
 religious bond, shews the instinct of the time feeling for a 
 religion of brotherhood. There is a delicacy of family life as 
 seen in Plutarch, in Pliny, in Fronto, which shews readiness 
 for a religion such as should regenerate the simple instincts and 
 relations of humanity. In the position and function of the 
 philosophers (who sometimes half-remind one of mendicant 
 friars ^, sometimes of the confessor or chaplain in families of 
 rank, in their relation to education and to the vicissitudes of 
 later life) there is implied a concentration of thought and 
 interest upon character and upon the discipline of individual 
 life, a sensibility to spiritual need, which all indicates a ground 
 prepared for Christian influence. And, finally, whether it be from 
 the stealing in of Eastern influences, or from a reaction against 
 the cold scepticism of Ciceronian times, or from a half-political 
 half-genuine sense of the necessity of religion to society, or 
 from a sort of awed impression created by the marvellous for- 
 tune of Rome, or from the steady impact of the clear strong 
 deep religious faith of the Jews scattered everywhere, and 
 everywhere, as we know, to an extraordinary extent leavening 
 society, or, as time went on, from a subtle influence of Chris- 
 tianity not yet accepted or even consciously known, — there was, 
 it is notorious, a return towards religion in the mind of men. 
 The temples were again thronged : priests became philosophers. 
 In Neo-Platonism thought again looks upward, and the last 
 phase of Greek philosophy was in the phrase of the dry and 
 dispassionate Zeller- 'aphilosophy of Revelation' which sought 
 knowledge partly in the inner revelation of the Deity and 
 partly in religious tradition. This movement was indeed a 
 rival of Christianity ; it came to put out some of its strength 
 in conscious rivahy, or it tried in Gnostic heresies to rearrange 
 
 * Capes, Age of Anfonines. 
 
 " Philosophy of the Ch'eeks : Eclectics, p. 20 (tr. Alleyne). 
 
1 50 The Religion of the Incarnation. . 
 
 Christianity on its own lines ; but it was the result and wit- 
 ness of a disposition of men's hearts which made way for the 
 Gospel. 
 
 It was not, then, merely true that the failures of the heathen 
 world left it empty, hungering, distrustful of itself ; nor merely 
 that the world of that particular epoch gave extraordinary 
 facilities of an outward kind for the diffusion of a world- 
 religion : but also that in some of its most characteristic 
 and deepest workings, in thoughts and dispositions which 
 it had purchased at a great cost of ancient glories and liber- 
 ties and of all that was proud and distinctive in Greek and 
 Roiiian religion, there was that which would make men ready 
 for Christianity and cause it to be to them, as it could not 
 have been to their ancestors, intelligible, possible, and con- 
 genial. 
 
 II. Dr. Westcott has drawn, in a useful phrase, the in- 
 valuable distinction between a tendency towards, and a 
 tendency to produce, the truth of Christianity^. 
 
 If we have been able to trace a real shaping of the lines 
 inward and outward of the world's order disposing it for a 
 true religion, the impression which this makes on us must 
 be enormously increased if (i) we can see that that religion, 
 when it comes, is most obviously a thing which comes to the 
 Gentile world, and does not grotv out of it either by blending 
 of tendencies, or by constructive individual genius : and if 
 (2) we are able to indicate another and perfectly distinct 
 course of shaping and preparation which at the required 
 moment yielded the material and equipment for the religion 
 which was to go out upon the world. 
 
 * Gospel of the Resurrection f3rd ed.), principles of general humanity, but 
 
 J). 72. It is interesting to notice that there was no hint of a possibility of 
 
 according to so dispassionate an ob- an end to slavery. There were some 
 
 server as M. Gaston Boissier {La Re- signs of mutual interest between 
 
 Ikjion Romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins), classes, but no progress towards the 
 
 who has done so much to trace the effective appearance of a true philan- 
 
 better tendencies of the Imperial thropy such as the Christian. In such 
 
 period, the evidence suggests some cases, however, the validity of the 
 
 such distinction, even as regards some distinctions must be debateable and 
 
 of the main practical results of Chris- fluctuating. It is absolute as regards 
 
 tianity. For example, there was a the Incarnation, 
 tendency to ameliorate slavery on 
 
IV. Preparation in History for Christ. T 5 1 
 
 That this was so is in a sense upon the face of history. 
 The Christian Church, it has been said, appeared at first as 
 a Jewish sect. ' The salvation ' Christ declared was ' of the 
 Jews.' He came (' not to destroy but) to fulfil ' the system 
 amidst which He arose. Such sayings put us upon the track 
 of a special preparation for the Gospel. Let us follow it. 
 And (as the phrase is chosen to imply) we look here for 
 something kindred indeed in many of its methods to that 
 general preparation which we have hitherto traced, but yet 
 more coherent, positive, and concentrated. For we pass in 
 a sense at this point (to use language of the day), from the 
 preparation of an enviix)nment suitable to the Gospel, to a 
 preparation of the organism itself. Such language is ob- 
 viously open to criticisms and misconceptions of more kinds 
 than one. But it is sufliciently defensible historically and 
 theologically to justify us in gaining the clearness which it 
 gives. 
 
 I shall attempt to present the signs of this preparation by 
 considering successively these three points. 
 
 (i) The relations between Israel and the world at the 
 Christian era. 
 
 (2) The fitness of Israel to be the seed-plot of a world-religion, 
 and of the world-religion given by Christ. 
 
 (3) The character of the process by which the Israel, so fitted, 
 and so placed, had come to be. 
 
 (1) Many a reader of Mommsen's Hi dory of Rome will have 
 been surprised by finding that the ideal political construction 
 which the writer's knowledge and imagination have ascribed 
 to Caesar was to consist of three elements — the Roman, the 
 Hellenic, and the Jewish^. Yet striking as the paradox is, 
 it is chiefly in the facts themselves. Whether we look at 
 the ethnological character of the Jews amidst a system 
 whose strength is from the West ; or at their historical 
 position, as a nation in some sense in decadence, with a 
 history of independence and glories long lost ; or at the 
 minuteness of their original seat, and its insignificance at that 
 time as (ordinarily) a subordinate district under the Roman 
 
 ^ Bk. V. c. xi. Tlie Keic Monarchy. 
 
152 The Religion of the Incainiation. 
 
 province of Syria, it is alike surprising that it should be 
 possible to speak of them as the third factor of the Roman 
 Empire. Yet, in the main, the same surprise is created by 
 any acquaintance with the circumstances of the Jewish 
 Dispersion, as it may be learnt from easily accessible books, 
 such as Edersheim's or Schiirer's ^. There is first the ubiquity 
 of the race : testified alike by Josephus, Strabo, and Philo, 
 and by the witness of inscriptions. They are everywhere, 
 and everywhere in force, throughout the Roman world. Out- 
 side the Roman world their great colonies in Babylon and 
 Mesopotamia are another headquarters of the race. They are 
 an eighth part (one million) of the population of Egypt: 
 they yield 10,000 at the least to one massacre in Antioch. 
 To numbers and ubiquity they add privilege in the shape of 
 rights and immunities, begun by the policy of the successors 
 of Alexander, but vigorously taken up and pushed by Rome 
 as early as 139 B.C., greatly developed by Caesar round whose 
 pyre at Rome they wept, and maintained by the almost con- 
 sistent policy of the earlier Empire : rights of equal citizen- 
 ship in the towns where they lived, and equal enjoyment of 
 the boons granted to citizens : rights of self-government 
 and internal administration : and rights or immunities 
 guarding their distinctive customs, such as their observance 
 of the Sabbath or their transmission of tribute to Jerusalem. 
 The opportunities thus secured from without were vigorously 
 turned to account by their trading instinct, theii- tenacity, 
 their power of living at a low cost, and above all by their 
 admirable freemasonry among themselves, which bound Jews 
 throughout the world into a society of self-help, and must 
 have greatly assisted the enterprises which depend on 
 facility of information, communication, and movement. So 
 far we merely get an impression of their importance. But 
 there are other points which, while they greatly heighten this 
 impression, add to it that of remarkable peculiarity. To 
 ask what was their influence plunges us into a tumult of 
 paradoxes. They had, for example, everywhere the double 
 
 ' Edersheim's Life, and Times of Jesus the Messiah : Schiirer, History of the 
 Jewish People in the time 0/ Jesus Christ. 
 
IV. Preparation in History for Christ. 153 
 
 character of citizens and strangers, speaking the language of the 
 countries where they dwelt, ' being Antiochenes,' as Josephus 
 says, ' at Antioch, Ephesians at Ephesus,' and so forth : possess- 
 ing and using the rights and franchises of citizens, and yet 
 every one of them counting the Holy Land his country and 
 Jerusalem his capital : respecting the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem 
 as the supreme authority of the race : sending up their tribute 
 annually, flocking thither themselves in vast numbers to 
 keep the feasts, or again not seldom returning there to die. 
 They possessed in fact the combined advantages of the 
 most elastic diffusion, and the strongest national con- 
 centration. Such a position could hardly make their rela- 
 tions to their neighbours entirely simple or harmonious. It 
 ' involved an internal contradiction ^.' It could not but be 
 felt that while enjoying all the advantages of citizenship, 
 their hearts were really elsewhere. From all the religious and 
 social side of the common life, which in the ancient world 
 was far less separable from the political than it is now, they 
 were sensibly aliens. They were visibly making the best of two 
 inconsistent positions. And accordingly the irritation against 
 them in the towns (we have a glimpse of it in Acts xix. 34) 
 and the ensuing encroachments and riots, form as chronic a 
 feature of the position, as does their protection by the Empire. 
 But the causes of irritation went wider and deeper. It has 
 been said that 'the feelings cherished towards the Jews 
 throughout the entire Graeco-Roman world were not so much 
 those of hatred as of pure contempt-.' Their exterior was 
 doubtless unlovely : a Jewry, as M. Renan reminds us, was 
 perhaps not more attractive in ancient than in modern times. 
 But what was even more offensive, especially to that cosmo- 
 politan age, and what struck it as altogether the dominant 
 characteristic of the Jews, was their stubborn and inhuman 
 perversity. They would be unlike all the rest of the world. 
 Tacitus has even formulated this for them as the principle 
 guiding their whole action, reduced to practice in details which 
 were singularly well fitted to exhibit its ofFensiveness ^. His 
 picture should be read by any one who wishes to realize how 
 
 1 Schurer, II. ii. 273. ^ Sehurer, II. ii. 297. ^ Tac. Hist. v. 4. 
 
154 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 cultivated opinion thought of them : and, even if evidence 
 were lacking, we can see that this was just the kind of 
 dislike to be shared by all classes, cultivated and un- 
 cultivated alike. Yet it is against the background of this 
 intense prejudice, ever more scornful and irritated as it 
 was exasperated by the incidents of daily contact at close 
 quarters, that we have to paint the phenomena, as striking 
 and as abundantly testified, of the vast and penetrating in- 
 fluence of the Jews over their neighbours. These also lie 
 upon the surface. In very various degrees multitudes (of 
 whom women doubtless formed a considerable majority) 
 adopted the customs and brought themselves into con- 
 nection with the religion of the Jews. The boasts or claims 
 of Josephus, who refers any sceptical contemporary to ' his 
 own country or his own family,' are confirmed by the ad- 
 missions of classical writers, by the indignant sarcasms directed 
 against the converts, and by the vivid touches in the Acts of 
 the Apostles ^. ' Victi victoribus leges dederunt ' is the strong 
 phrase of Seneca, and it was a very persuasive influence 
 which could cause it to be said that in Damascus ' nearly 
 the whole female population was devoted to Judaism' : which 
 could give S. Paul's Jewish opponents in the towns of Greece 
 and Asia Minor the power at one time of raising the mob, at 
 another of working upon the ' chief and ' honourable women,' 
 the ladies of the upper classes : or which could bring ' almost 
 the whole city ' together in a provincial town because a new 
 teacher appears in the Jews' synagogue^. This influence had 
 its results in a considerable number of actual proselytes who 
 through circumcision received admission, somewhat grudg- 
 ing indeed and guarded, within the Jewish pale, but still 
 more in a much larger number of adherents (the ' devout 
 persons,' ' devout Greeks,' &c., of the Acts ^) attracted by the 
 doctrines, and acquainted with the Scriptures of Israel, who 
 formed a fringe of partly leavened Gentile life round every 
 synagogue. 
 
 We hardly need evidence to shew us that to this picture of 
 
 * Schiirer, II. ii. 308. - Acts xvii. 5, xiv. 5, xiii. 50, 44. 
 
 ^ Acts xiii. 43, &c. 
 
IV. Preparation in History for Christ. 155 
 
 the influence of Jew over Gentile, there need to be added 
 another which will shew how the subtle, persuasive, and 
 powerful culture of the Graeco-Roman world made itself felt 
 upon the Jews of the Dispersion. The contrast between the 
 Jews of Palestine and those of the Dispersion, the translation of 
 the Scriptures into Greek, the rise of a literature which in dif- 
 ferent ways tried to recommend what was Jewish to the heathen 
 or to fuse what was Jewish with what was Greek, the single 
 flgure of Philo at Alexandria, are all evidences of an influence, 
 which must have told continually with penetrating power 
 on all that was ablest and most thoughtful in the Jewish 
 mind. It was not the least considerable result of this that 
 all the great thoughts and beliefs of Israel learned to talk 
 the language of the civilized world, and so acquired before 
 the time of Christ an adequate and congenial vehicle. 
 
 Such was the position of Israel at the Christian era. It 
 was one which had been gradually brought about during the 
 last three centuries B. c. : but it only came to its full growth 
 in the last few decades (the Jewish settlement in Rome may 
 date from Pompey's time) under favour of the imperial policy 
 and the peace of the times : and it was soon to change ; indeed 
 the fall of Jerusalem A. D. "o altered it within and without. 
 Thus it stood complete during the half-century in which the 
 work of founding the Christian Church throughout the 
 Empire was accomplished, and then passed away. We remark 
 upon it how admirable an organization it ofiered for the 
 dissemination of a world-religion, originated upon Jewish 
 soil. The significance of this, occurring at the time when 
 such a religion actually appeared, is heightened when we 
 observe that the position had continued long enough fully to 
 try the experiment of what by its own forces Judaism could 
 accomplish for the world. As S. James argued ^ ' Moses had,' 
 now for a long time, ' in every city them that preach him, 
 being read in the synagogues every Sabbath day ' — and it 
 might have so gone on for ever without any conversion of the 
 Gentile world. That world could never have been drawn 
 within a system, which, however zealous to make proselytes, 
 
 ^ Acts XV. 21. 
 
156 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 had nothing better to offer to those whom it made than that 
 they might come in, if they liked, and sit down in the lowest 
 place, tolerated rather than welcomed, dependents rather than 
 members of an intensely national community, leaving father 
 and mother and all that they had, not for a position of spiritual 
 freedom, but for a change of earthly nationality. 
 
 (2) But we trench upon the second question. What was 
 the nation that held this position of vantage ? What signs 
 are there about it which suggest a special preparation for a 
 purposed result ? 
 
 It is one answer to this question to say that this wonder- 
 fully placed people had, alone among the nations, a genuine 
 faith, a genuine hope, and a genuine charity. They at least, 
 says Seneca, when he complains of then influence, ' knew the 
 reasons of their customs.' There was a raison d'etre to their 
 religion. In a world which still kept up the forms of wor- 
 ship and respect for gods whose character and existence could 
 not stand the criticism of its own best moral and religious 
 insight, any more than that of its scepticism ; or which was 
 framing for itself thoughts of Deity by intellectual abstrac- 
 tion ; or which was betraying its real ignorance of the very 
 idea of God by worshipping the two great powers which, as 
 a matter of fact, it knew to be mighty. Nature and the 
 Roman Empire, — the Jew had a faith, distinct, colossal, and 
 unfailing, in a Living God, Maker of heaven and earth. 
 This we may be sure was the inner secret of the true at- 
 traction which drew the hearts of such men as Cornelius the 
 centurion to the despised and repulsive Jew. This God, they 
 further believed, was their God for ever and ever. ' Let us 
 kneel,' they said, ' before the Lord our Maker, for He is the 
 Lord our God.' And therefore, let them have gained it how 
 they may, they had an indomitable Jiope, or rather, confidence, 
 which all unpropitiousness of outer appearances had only 
 served to stimulate, that He would bring them through, that 
 He had a purpose for them, and that He would bring it to pass : 
 that the world was no mechanical system of meaningless 
 vicissitudes, but an order, of which indeed they little realized 
 the scope, moving under the hand of a Ruler for a purpose of 
 
IV. P^'eparation in History for Christ. 157 
 
 glory and beneficence. That the confidence of the extra- 
 ordinary destiny which, under this order, was reserved for 
 Israel, as well as the present possession of the Divine law 
 and covenant, should have produced an intense sense of 
 unity and fellowship was a matter of course. The Roman is 
 obliged to recognise their mutual diarit'i), however deformed, 
 a? he thinks, by their antipathy to all who were not of their 
 kindred and faith. 
 
 But such an answer to our question, though it brings before 
 us a sign, and a sign of the very highest, that is of the moral 
 and spiritual, order, does not perhaps set us at the point 
 from which the whole meaning of the position opens to us 
 most naturally. It may do this more effectually to ask 
 whether there was any material in Judaism for a world- 
 religion, and for that world-religion which grew out of it % 
 
 Perhaps if we performed the futile task of trying to 
 imagine a world-religion, we should, with some generality of 
 consent, define as its essentials three or four points which it 
 is striking to find were fundamentals of the religion of Israel, 
 and at that time of no other. We should require a doctrine 
 of God, lofty, spiritual, moral : a doctrine of man which should 
 affirm and secure his spiritual being and his immortality : 
 and a doctrine of the relations between God and man. which 
 should give reality to prayer and to the belief in providence, 
 and root man's sense of responsibility in the fact of his 
 obligation to a righteousness outside and above himself, a 
 doctrine in short of judgment. It needs no words to shew how 
 the religion of Israel in its full development not only taught 
 these truths, but gave them the dignity and importance which 
 belong to the cornerstones of a religion. 
 
 But then along with these that religion taught other beliefs 
 as clearly conceived, which seemed to be of the most opposite 
 character : just as distinctive and exclusive as the former 
 were universal. It taught the obligation in every detail of a 
 very stringent written law, and of a ceremonial and sacri- 
 ficial system, centred at Jerusalem, and forming the recognised 
 communication between God and man. It taught a special 
 election of Israel and covenant of God with Israel, a special 
 
158 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 purpose and future for Israel. Nor was the conception of the 
 participation by other nations in the blessings of Messiah's 
 rule, (to which we, reading for example the prophecies of 
 Isaiah in the light of the sequel, cannot but give a dominant 
 place,) more to an Israelite than a striking incident in a dis- 
 tinctively Israelite glory. 
 
 It would seem then, combining these two sides, that 
 there was in Israel the foundation on which a religion 
 for the world could be laid, but that it could only be 
 made available under stringent and, as it might appear, 
 impossible conditions. An attempt to make a religion 
 by extracting the universal truths in Judaism would have 
 been simply to desert at once the vantage-ground which it 
 was proposed to occupy, because it would have conflicted 
 directly with every Jewish instinct, belief, tradition, and 
 hope. If the thing was to be done, it must be done by some 
 power and teaching which, while extricating into clearness all 
 that was truest in the theology and morality of Israel, was 
 also able to shew to the judgment of plain men and earnest 
 seekers, that it constituted a true climax of Israel's history, 
 a true fulfilment of the promises and prophecies which Jews 
 had now made matters of notoriety everywhere, a true final 
 cause of all the peculiar and distinctive system of Israel. It 
 must be able to take Israel to witness, and therefore it must 
 be able to convince men not only that it had a high theology 
 and a refined morality, but that God had ' visited His people ' : 
 and that ' what He had spoken unto the fathers He had so 
 fulfilled.' It must produce accordingly not only doctrine, but 
 fact. It must carry on, what was implied in the whole 
 discipline of Israel, the assertion that truth was not a matter 
 of speculation, but a word from God ; or the knowledge of 
 a dealing of God with man clothing itself with reality, 
 embodying itself in fact, making a home for itself in history. 
 It is true that the Judaism of the synagogue in its idolatry of 
 the law, had assumed the appearance of a paper system, but 
 in that form it had no promise or power of expansion: and on 
 the side where the religion of Israel admitted of development 
 into some higher and wider state, it was distinctly a religion 
 
IV. Preparation in History for Christ. 159 
 
 not of theory or teaching only, but of Divine action revealing 
 itself in history. 
 
 It will not escape any observer of the beginnings of Chris- 
 tianity that it was precisely this attempt which the Gospel of 
 Jesus made. If we watch S. Paul speaking to his Gentile 
 audiences at Lystra or Athens, he brings to bear upon the 
 instincts of his hearers the strong magnet of a clear and 
 definite Theism. But these addresses themselves implicitly 
 contain another element : and we must now look to them for 
 examples of the process, the careful earnest process, by which 
 the Gospel did its rapid and yet most gradual work of conver- 
 sion. Unquestionably, as S. Paul himself affirms, and as the 
 Acts and the early apologetic writers shew us, it was done by 
 asserting, and making good the assertion with careful proof 
 and reasoning, that in the historical appearance and character 
 of Jesus Christ, in His treatment while on earth, in His 
 resurrection and heavenly exaltation, was to be found the 
 true, natural, and legitimate fulfilment of that to which the 
 Scriptures in various ways, direct and indirect, pointed, and 
 of that which the hope of Israel, slowly fashioned by the Scrip- 
 tures under the discipline of experience, had learnt to expect. 
 This could be pressed home most directly on Jews, but it was 
 available also for the large prepared class among Gentiles, 
 to whom the pre-existence of these prophecies and anticipa- 
 tions was known matters of fact, and to some of whom the 
 Jewish Scriptures had been a personal discipline : the truth 
 of the Gospel was one ' now made manifest and by the Scrip- 
 tures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the 
 everlasting God, made known to all nations for the obedience 
 of faith.' The double requirement was fulfilled, and a religion, 
 intrinsically universal and eternal, was seen by spiritually 
 clear-sighted eyes to be in a most real and oi'ganic sense the 
 flower of Israel's stalk. 
 
 (3) If it has appeared that in the placing of the nation at 
 the era, and in its character and belief, there was something 
 much to be ' wondered at,' and, more definitely, something 
 marvellously suited, not indeed to generate such a religion 
 as that of the Gospel, but to foster and assist its growth when 
 
i6o The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 the seed of Divine fact should be sown on the prepared soil ; 
 then we shall ask, finally, whether there is anything of like 
 striking significance in the way in which this state of things 
 had come about? Let us pass by the causes by which the 
 people of Israel obtained their external position. These, even 
 including a thing so remarkable as the spontaneous restoration 
 by an Oriental Empire of a deported people, are not in them- 
 selves different from the ordinary workings of history ; though 
 in combination they may contribute to deepen the impression 
 of a hand fashioning out of many elements, and in many 
 ways, a single great result. But how had the Jews come to be 
 what they were ? how had they gained the religious treasure 
 which they possessed, and the tenacity of religious and 
 national life which played guardian to it? The whole 
 course of Israel's history must, in one sense, give the answer 
 to this question : and there are no controversies more difficult 
 or more unsolved than those which are now raging round the 
 problem of that course, its origin, stages, and order. But it 
 may be possible to make some reflections on it without 
 entangling ourselves very much in those controversies. 
 
 {a) At the outset it is impossible not to be struck by the 
 interest which the Jews themselves felt in the process of their 
 history. That interest belongs to the very centre of their life 
 and thought. It is not an offshoot of national vainglory, for 
 (as has been so often remarked) it resulted in a record full- 
 charged with the incidents of national failure and defection : 
 it is not the result of a self-conscious people analysing its own 
 moral and other development, for though the moral judgment 
 is indeed always at work in the narratives and the poems, 
 it is more occupied in drawing out the teaching of recurring 
 sequences of sin and punishment than in framing a picture of 
 the whole. The result is to lay a picture of development 
 before us, but the aim is to treasure and record every detail 
 of God's dealings with the nation of His choice. This is what 
 gives continuity and unity to the whole : this is what lends to 
 it its intense and characteristic uuiqueness. And when we 
 look steadily at this, we perceive afresh, what familiarity 
 almost conceals from us, the distinctive quality of Israel's 
 
IV. Preparation in History for Christ. 1 6 1 
 
 religion ; that it is not a system of teaching, nor a tradition of 
 worship, nor a personal discipline, though it may include all 
 these ; but that it is in itself a belief in the working of God, 
 Who is the God of all the earth, but specially the God of 
 Israel, and Who works indeed everywhere, but in an altogether 
 special sense in Israel. In reflecting on their history they 
 contemplate the object of their faith. Hence truth is to 
 them not a philosophic acquisition, but lies in the words 
 which had come from God faithfully treasured and received: 
 it is revealed in word and act : goodness, in man or nation, is 
 the faithful adherence to those conditions, under which the 
 good purpose of God can work itself out and take effect : it is 
 a correspondence to a purpose of grace : and the centre and 
 depositary of their hope is neither the human race, nor any 
 association for moral and religious effort, but an organism 
 raised by Him who raises all the organisms of nature from a 
 chosen seed, and drawn onwards through the stages by which 
 family passes into nation and kingdom, and then through 
 that higher discipline by which the natural commonwealth 
 changes into the spiritual community of the faithful ' remnant.' 
 If any one will try to realize the impression which Christianity 
 made upon the heathen world, he will not fail to see how the 
 new truth was able to impress men because it found these con- 
 ceptions of revelation, grace, and an organic society of God's 
 choice and shaping, all so strange and so impressive to the 
 heathen world, ingrained as the natural elements of religion 
 in the men whom it made its instruments. 
 
 But why did the Jews so regard their history? For the 
 answer we may revert to the other question. What made them 
 what they were at the Christian era? For they had gone 
 through a crisis calculated to destroy both their existence and 
 their religion. It has been in fashion with some writers to 
 emphasize the resemblances, and minimize the differences, 
 between the religion of Israel and that of its neighbours. In 
 view of this it becomes important to note the specific peril 
 of ancient religions. That peril was that the close association 
 of the nation with its god caused the failure of the one to 
 appear a failure of the other, and to endanger or destroy the 
 
 M 
 
1 62 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 respect paid to him. The religion of a subdued or ruined 
 people was, as we may say, a demonstrated failure. Senna- 
 cherib's defiance of Hezekiah urges this with a conqueror's 
 irony ^. The case of the Ten Tribes had, probably, given an 
 illustration of it within the circle of Israel itself. And in 
 Judah, upon any shewing, there was enough of the feeling 
 that Jehovah was responsible for His people, of the convic- 
 tion that He would certainly protect His own, of the confi- 
 dence resting on prosperity and liable to be shaken by its 
 loss, to make the. downfall of the state, carrying with it that 
 of the Temple and the outer order of religion, an enormous 
 peril to the religion itself and with it to the very existence 
 of Israel. It is not difiicult to discern the agency by 
 which the peril was averted. That agency was Prophecy. 
 Modern criticism, though it may quarrel with the inspiration 
 or predictive power of the prophets, has given fresh and 
 unbiassed witness to their importance as an historical pheno- 
 menon. Kuenen^, for example, points out how at every 
 turning-point in Israel's later history there stands a man 
 who claims to bring a word of God to the people. Prof. 
 Huxley^, in a recent article, has told us that 'a vigorous 
 minority of Babylonian Jews,' that is, the Jews upon whom 
 the full forces of prophecy bore, ' created the first consistent, 
 remorseless, naked Monotheism, which, so far as history re- 
 cords, appeared in the world . . . and they inseparably united 
 therewith an ethical code, which, for its purity and its efficiency 
 as a bond of social life, was, and is, unsurpassed.' Of what- 
 ever fact may underlie this description, the prophets are at 
 once evidence and authors. 
 
 Now prophecy confronted the impending peril in the name 
 of Jehovah : on the one side it displayed the enemy (whether 
 as by Isaiah it prescribed a bound to his advance, or as by 
 Jeremiah announced the catastrophe to be wrought by him) 
 as himself utterly in Jehovah's hands. His axe or saw for 
 discipline upon the trees of the forest ; on the other side it 
 shewed that Jehovah's obligation to Israel was conditioned by 
 
 ^ Isaiah xxxvi, i8. ^ Bibhert Lectures, 18S2, p. 231. 
 
 ^ Nineteenth Century, April, 1886. ^ 
 
IV. Preparation in History fo7' Christ. 163 
 
 His essential righteousness ; that national disaster might be 
 Jehovah's necessary vengeance, and that His purpose for 
 Israel — which it re-asserted with fullest emphasis — might need 
 to be realized for an Israel purified by such discipline, a shoot 
 from the stock of the felled tree, the remnant of an ' afflicted 
 and poor people ^.' And prophecy was beforehand with all this : 
 it was not an afterthought to explain away a calamity : 
 and so it fashioned in Israel at least a core of spiritual faith, 
 to which outward disaster of polity and religion, however 
 destructive, was not confounding, and which had stamina 
 enough in it to draw wholesome though bitter nourishment 
 from the hard Captivity discipline. This, when the flood 
 came, was an ark for Israel's religion, and, in its religion, for 
 the national life, which re-organized itself under new con- 
 ditions round the nucleus of the religion. 
 
 Thus, at the crisis and hinge of the historical development 
 which issued in the wonderfully placed and constituted Israel 
 of Christ's time, and which was crowned by the New Religion, 
 we find this agency, which in itself would arrest our wonder. 
 The more we look at it, the more wonderful it is. Every 
 suggestion of comparison with heathen oracles, divination and 
 the rest, can only bring out with more vivid effect the 
 contrast and difference between it and all such things. It 
 claims by the mouth of men transparently earnest and honest, 
 to speak from God. It brings with it the highest credentials, 
 moral, spiritual, historical : moral, for it spends what at first 
 sight seems all its strength in the intrepid and scathing 
 rebuke of the evils immediately round it, especially in the 
 high places of society, against the lust, cruelty, avarice, 
 frivolity, insolence, foul worships, which it found so rankly 
 abundant : spiritual, for it speaks the language of an abso- 
 lutely unworldly faith, and accomplishes a great spiritual 
 work, such as we can hardly over-estimate, unless indeed with 
 Prof. Huxley we distort its proportions so as to prejudice the 
 earlier religion from which it sprang or the Christianity to 
 which it contributed : historical, because occurring at the 
 very crisis of Israel's history (750-550), it gained credence 
 
 ^ Isaiah x. 15 ; xi. i ; Zeph. iii. 12. 
 M Z 
 
1 64 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 and authority from the witness of events, and dealt with an 
 emergency of the most perilous and bewildering kind, as not 
 the most skiKul opportunist could have dealt with it, by a use, 
 as sublime as simple, of the principles of righteousness and 
 faith. If we compare what the prophets did for their con- 
 temporaries and what they did for the future of Israel and 
 the world, and see that this was done, not by two sets of 
 utterances working two different ways, but by a single 
 blended strain of prophecy, we gain a double impression, of 
 which the twofold force is astonishing indeed. It is gained 
 without pressing their claim to predictive power, at least 
 beyond the horizons of their own period. But it is impos- 
 sible for any careful and candid reader of the words of the 
 prophets to stop there, and not to feel that there is another 
 element in them, not contained in a passage here and there 
 but for ever reappearing, interwoven with the rest, and 
 evidently felt by the prophets themselves to be in some 
 sense necessary for the vindication and completion of their 
 whole teaching. It is an element of anticipation and fore- 
 sight. We see that this is so, and we see in part the 
 method of it. It is bound up with, it springs out of, all that 
 is spiritually and morally greatest in the prophets. Their 
 marvellous, clear-sighted, steady certainty that the Lord who 
 sitteth above rules all, that He is holy, and that unrighteous- 
 ness in man or nations cannot prevail ; their insight piercing 
 through the surface of history to underlying laws of 
 providential order ; the strange conviction or consciousness, 
 felt throughout the nation but centring in the prophets, that 
 this God had a purpose for Israel :— these deep things, which, 
 however they came and whatever we think of them, make 
 Israel's distinctive and peculiar glory, were accompanied by, 
 and issued in, anticipations of a future which would vindicate 
 and respond to them. Just as the belief in a future hfe for 
 God's children was not taught as a set doctrine to the Jews, 
 but grew with the growth of their knowledge of the Living 
 and Holy God, and of man's relation as a spiritual being to 
 Him, so with the predictions of which we speak. As it was 
 given to the prophets to realize the great spiritual truths of 
 
IV. Preparation in History for Christ. 165 
 
 present because eternal moment which they taught, it was 
 given to them also to discern that these truths pointed to 
 a future which should bring them vindication. The cloudy- 
 time of trial and confusion would one day come to a close ; 
 the Sun whose rays they caught would one day shine 
 out ; the partial and passing deliverances in which they 
 taught men to see God's hand must one day issue in 
 a deliverance of deeper moment, of lasting and adequate 
 significance ; there would be an unbaring of God's arm, a 
 manifesting of His power to decide, to justify, to condemn, 
 and it would be seen in some final form why and how Israel 
 was, in a distinctive sense, the people of the God of the whole 
 earth ; that union between God and His people, of which the 
 prophets were themselves mediators and which was so miser- 
 ably imjDerfect and so constantly broken, would one day be 
 complete ; and, finally, even the very instruments which He was 
 using in the present, the Anointed King, the chosen Royal House, 
 the Prophet- Servant of God, the holy hill of Zion, were charged 
 with a meaning of which the significance was only in the 
 future to become clear. Thus, in this free, deep, spiritual — 
 let us say it out, inspired — manner the predictions of prophecy 
 emerge and gather shape. Thus among the people which was 
 most conservative and jealous of its own religious privilege, 
 the promise most deeply cherished was one in which all 
 nations of the earth should be blessed, and there is heard the 
 strange announcement of a 'new covenant.' Thus it comes 
 about that the most satisfying and satisfied of all religions 
 becomes the one which, in its deepest meaning, in the minds 
 of its most faithful followers, strains forward most completely 
 beyond itself. Thus, as it has been said, ' Prophecy takes ofl' 
 its crown *and lays it at the feet of One who is to be.' Thus 
 a people who have become intensely and inexorably mono- 
 theistic and to whom the Deity becomes more and more 
 remote in awful majesty so that they do not dare to name 
 His Name, carry down with them Scriptures which discover 
 the strange vision of a human King with Divine attributes 
 and strain towards some manifestation of God in present 
 nearness. Thus amidst the pictures in which, with every 
 
t66 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 varying detail, using the scenery, the personages, the nations, 
 the ideas of its own day, the instinct of prophetic anticipa- 
 tion finds expression, there emerges, with gradually gathering 
 strength, a definite Hope, and some clear lineaments of that 
 which is to be. 
 
 For, be it observed, at this point interpretation, declaring 
 what the prophets seem to us to-day to mean, passes into and 
 gives way to historical fact. The most sceptical cannot deny 
 either that the words in which the prophets spoke of the 
 future, did as a matter of fact crystallize into a hope, a hope 
 such as has no parallel in history, and of which distorted 
 rumours were able to stir and interest the heathen world : or 
 that they were, long before the time of Jesus, interpreted as 
 sketching features, some general and shadowy, some curiously 
 distinct and particular, of Messiah's work and kingdom. 
 
 And then, face to face with this, stands another fact as 
 confessedly historical. For, ' in the fulness of the time,' it did 
 appear to men of many kinds who had the books in their hands, 
 men with every reason for judging seriously and critically, 
 and in most cases with the strongest prejudice in favour of an 
 adverse judgment, that these prophecies were fulfilled in a King 
 and a Kingdom such as they never dreamt of till they saw them. 
 It would be a strange chapter in the history of delusion, if 
 there were no more to add. Bat there is to add, first, that the 
 King and the Kingdom whereto, (in no small part upon the 
 seeming perilous ground of this correspondence with prophecy.) 
 these men gave their faith, have proved to win such a spiritual 
 empire as they claimed : and, further, that men like ourselves, 
 judging at the cool distance of two thousand years, are unable 
 to deny that in the truest sense of ' fulfilment,' as it would be 
 judged by a religious mind, Jesus and His Kingdom do ' fulfil 
 the prophets,' fulfil their assertion of a unique religious destiny 
 for Israel by which the nations were to profit, of a time when 
 the righteousness of God should be revealed for the dis- 
 comfiture of pride and sin and for the help of the meek, of 
 a nearer dwelling of God with His people, of a new covenant, 
 and of the lasting reign of a perfect Ruler. 
 
 To some minds it may weaken, but to others it will cer- 
 
IV, Preparation in History for Christ. 167 
 
 tainly intensify, the impression thus created, if they are asked 
 to observe that now and again there occur in the Jewish 
 Scriptures words, passages, events, in which with staj-tling 
 distinctness, independence, and minuteness there stand forth 
 features of what was to be. It is as if the anticipation which 
 fills the ai r with glow focussed itself here and there in spark- 
 ling points of light which form and flash and fade away again. 
 We may confidently assert that in the case of such passages as 
 the 22nd and iioth Psalms or the 9th and 53rd Chapters of 
 Isaiah the harder task is for him who will deny, than for him 
 who will assert, a direct correspondence between prediction 
 and fulfilment. If they stood alone, general scientific con- 
 siderations might make it necessary to undertake the harder 
 task. Standing out as they do from such a context and 
 background as has been here indicated, the interpretation 
 which sees in them the work of a Divine providence shaping 
 out a ' sign ' for the purpose which in each Christian age, 
 and especially in the first, it has actually subserved, is the 
 interpretation which is truest to all the facts. They are the 
 special self-betrayal of a power which is at work throughout, 
 of which the spiritual ear hears the sound, though we are 
 often unable distinctly to see the footprints. 
 
 It seems then impossible, upon such a view of the phenomena 
 of prophecy as has been here roughly and insufficiently indi- 
 cated, to deny that whatever appearance of preparation we 
 may discern in the condition outward and inward of the Jews 
 in the time of Christ, is strongly corroborated by a like ap- 
 pearance of preparation in the process by which they had 
 become what they were. 
 
 (1)) We have selected out of all the foregoing history the 
 epoch and the influence of the prophets for several reasons. 
 They preside over the most critical period of Israel's history. 
 They seem to bring to most pronounced expression the spirit 
 and character which pervades the whole of that history. They 
 are known to us through their own writings : and we are 
 therefore on ground where (comparatively speaking) the pre- 
 mises are uncontroverted. And as it is the fashion perhaps 
 to discredit the argument of prophecy — partly, no doubt, on 
 
r68 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 account of the technical form in which it was ordinarily pre- 
 sented — it is important to re-assert that in all its main 
 strength that argument holds its ground, reinforced in- 
 deed, as we think, by the increased power to apprehend its 
 breadth and solidity which our more historically trained 
 modern minds should have gained. But selection of what is 
 most salient should imply no neglect of the rest ; and the 
 argument, or view of the facts, — which has here for clearness 
 sake been abbreviated, and mainly centralized upon the work 
 and implications of prophecy, — can be deepened as the drift of 
 the great lines of Israel's discipline is more deeply realized. 
 Thus, for example, little or nothing has been here said of the 
 Law. Yet, without foreclosing any discussion as to its sources 
 and development, we can see that the law of God was a factor 
 in every stage of Israel's history, and that in the making 
 of the prepared Israel of Christ's time, the law in its fuUest 
 and most developed shape was, and had been for ages, a 
 paramount influence. No influence more concentrated and 
 potent can be found in history. And to see the deepest drift 
 of it we have no need to speculate on what might have been, 
 or was sure to be. Historical documents point us to what 
 was. The Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians, and the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews, lay open respectively two ways of its 
 working. On the one side it appears as a great witness for 
 righteousness. Men were schooled to live under a sense of 
 peremptory obligation ; to comply scrupulously, exactly, sub- 
 missively with an unquestioned authority. This sense and 
 temper is liable to great abuse : it lends itself when abused to 
 a mechanical morality, to a morbid casuistry, to the com- 
 placency of an external perfectness. It was so abused very 
 widely among the Jews. But it is nevertheless an indispensable 
 factor in a true morality, to which it lends the special power of 
 command: and in Israel it conferred this power because it 
 connected obligation with the will of a righteous God. This is 
 expressed in the repeated sanction ' I am the Lord your God,' 
 following precept after precept of the law, and in the sum- 
 mary claim ' Be ye holy, for I am holy.' Evidently here there 
 is that which transcends all mechanical schemes of obedience ; 
 
IV. Preparation in History for C/u'ist. 169 
 
 there is an infinite standard. As such it pointed and im- 
 pelled onwards towards the true religion in which faith and 
 holiness should be entirely at one. As such meanwhile it 
 stimulated and dismayed the deeper spirits : stimulating them 
 by the loftiness of its demand, dismaying them by the proved 
 impossibility of that perfect compliance which alone was com- 
 phance at all. Thus the foundations were laid of a temper at 
 once robust and humble, confident and diffident ; though they 
 were laid upon a contradiction which the law had in itself 
 no power to resolve. There was indeed (here we take up the 
 guidance of the Epistle to the Hebrews) one part of the law 
 which acknowledged that contradiction, which half promised 
 to resolve it, but having no real power to do so, could only 
 shape and deepen the demand for some solution. This was, 
 of course, the sacrificial system. The sacrificial system opens 
 up quite other thoughts from those of strict demand and strict 
 obedience. It points to quite another side of religious and 
 moral development. Yet it starts from the same truth of a 
 Holy God Who requires, and inasmuch as He is holy must 
 require, a perfect obedience. Only it acknowledges the in- 
 evitable fact of disobedience. It embodies the sense of need. 
 It appeals to, and as part of the Divine law it reveals, a 
 quality in the Supreme Goodness which can go beyond com- 
 manding and condemning, to forgive and reconcile. It creates 
 in a word the spirit of humility, and it feels, at the least, after 
 a God of love. 
 
 What a profound preparation there is in this for the life 
 which Christ blessed in the Beatitudes and inaugurated by 
 all that He was and did, and for the truth of the Divine being 
 and character which was set forth in Him. Yet the law 
 only prepared for this, and made the demand which this met. 
 It made no answer to its own demand. It could not reconcile 
 its own severity, and its own hopes of mercy : its apparatus 
 of sacrifice was in itself absolutely and obviously insufficient 
 for any solution of the contradiction. It was a marvellous 
 discipline which, while it trained its people so far, demanded 
 the more urgently something which all its training could 
 never give nor reach. 
 
1 yo The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 [c] The work of prophecy and the work of the law was 
 also (if we can distinguish causes which were so much affected 
 by one another) the work of history. To the work of the 
 prophets, indeed, the history of both the past and the succeed- 
 ing times was essential, the former to supply their work with 
 a standing ground, the latter to engrain its teaching into the 
 life of the nation. We look back, and we ask. What gave 
 the prophets their advantage, what was the fulcrum of their 
 lever ? Trained to observe the processes of religious evolution, 
 we must refuse to believe with Professor Huxley that a lofty 
 monotheism and a noble morality sprang out of the ground 
 among a ' minority of Babylonian Jews.' But we shall be 
 prepared to find that the rudimentary stages differ much 
 from the mature. The beginnings of life, as we know them, 
 are laid in darkness : they emerge crude and childish : the 
 physical and outward almost conceals the germ of spiritual 
 and rational being which nevertheless is the self, and which 
 will increasingly assert itself and rule. It may be so with that 
 organism which God was to make the shrine of His Incarnation. 
 We may have to learn that the beginnings of Israel are more 
 obscure, more elementary, less distinctive from surrounding 
 religions, than we had supposed. We need not fear to be as 
 bold as Amos in recognising that what was in one aspect the 
 unique calling of God's Son out of Egypt ^ was in another but 
 one among the Divinely ruled processes of history, such as 
 brought up the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from 
 Kir ^. We need not be more afraid than Ezekiel to say that 
 the peculiar people were an oflshoot (if so it should be) of 
 natural stocks, with the Amorite for father and the Hittite 
 for mother ^. But all this will hardly take from us that 
 sense of continuous shaping of a thing towards a Divine 
 event which has always been among the supports of faith. 
 We shall see that the prophetic appeals imply a past, and 
 that their whole force lies in what they assume, and only 
 recal to their hearers ; the special possession of Israel by 
 Jehovah, His selection of them for His own, His deliverances 
 
 ' Hosea xi. i. "^ Amos ix. 7. 
 
 2 Ezekiel xvi. 3. 
 
IV. Preparation in History for Christ. 1 7 1 
 
 of them from Egypt and onwards, giving the earnest of a 
 future purpose for which they were preserved, and for which 
 His definite promises were committed to them, to the seed of 
 Abraham, the house of Israel, the line of David, These things 
 the prophets imply, standing upon these they speak with all 
 the force of those who need only bid the people to realize 
 and to remember, or at most to receive from God some fresh 
 confirmation and enlargement of their hopes ^. 
 
 Or again, from the work of the prophets we look forward, 
 and when we have recovered from our surprise at seeing that 
 a dreary interval of five centuries separates the Evangelical 
 prophecy, which seemed so ready for the flower of the Gospel, 
 from the time of its blooming, we discern how the processes of 
 that interval were utilized in realizing, ingraining, diffusing 
 the great truths of prophetic teaching. The return without 
 a monarchy and under an ecclesiastical governor, and the 
 dispersion through many lands, necessitated in act that trans- 
 formation of the poHtical into the spiritual polity, almost of 
 the nation into the Church, of which Isaiah's work was the 
 germ. The institution of the synagogues, which belongs to 
 this time and in which public worship was detached from all 
 local associations and from the ancient forms of material sacri- 
 fice, was, as it were, the spiritual organ of the new ubiquitous 
 cosmopolitan Jewish life. Yet contemporaneously the cen- 
 tralizing influences gained strength. The conservative work 
 of Ezra and of the Scribes and Kabbis at whose head he stands, 
 gathered up and preserved the treasures which gave a con- 
 sciously spiritual character to Israel's national loyalty ; and 
 guarded with the hedge of a scrupulous literalism, what needed 
 some such defence to secure it against the perils implied in 
 
 ' It is interesting to note that, ac- own likeness. The prophets do not 
 cording to the record preserved by imagine an earlier row of prophets 
 Israel of their own history, that which like themselves, put in like the por- 
 Kueneu says of later times, — that * at traits of the early Scottish kings at 
 each turning-point of the history Holyi'ood, to fill the blanks of history, 
 stands a man who claims to bring a The early figures are not cut to pro- 
 word from God,' — is exactly true of phetic pattern ; they have each their 
 the older history too ; Abraham. Moses, distinct individuality of character and 
 Samuel, David, are all in this sense office, only they have a unity of Divine 
 prophets. Yet there is no appearance commission and sei-vice. 
 of a later age forming a past in its 
 
172 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 being carried wide over the world. By the resistance in 
 Palestine under Syrian rule to Hellenizing insolence, and in 
 the Dispersion to the fascinations and pleasures of Hellenizing 
 culture, and by the great Maccabean struggle, the nation was 
 identified with religious earnestness and zeal in a way of 
 which we only see the caricature and distortion in the Phari- 
 saism which our Lord denounced. 
 
 Thus, if we compare our Lord's time with the great age of 
 prophecy, we see how much has been acquired. Time has 
 been given for the prophetic influences to work. There has 
 been loss, but there has also been gain. That conscious, ex- 
 plicit, and magnificently uncompromising Monotheism, which 
 in the mouth of the Evangelical prophet was quivering with 
 the glow and passion of freshly inspired realization, has by 
 'the end of the age' had time to bring everything in the 
 sphere of religion under its influence. It had discovered its 
 points of contact with the highest aspirations of the Greek 
 thought which on intellectual lines felt its way towards God. 
 And it had unfolded its own corollaries : it had drawn along 
 with it the great spiritual truths which cohere with the belief 
 in one Living and True God : and Israel in the Pharisee epoch 
 had passed, we hardly know how, into secure if not undisputed 
 possession of the belief in a future life, in a world of spirits, 
 and in the spiritual character of prayer. 
 
 But there was another and more direct manner, in which 
 the work of history interlaced with what we have indicated 
 as the work of the law. In the formation of the temper of 
 chastened confidence which is so characteristic of later Israel, 
 a part must evidently be given to the discipline of national 
 experience saddened by departed glory, and with the shadows 
 thickening over it. Just as we can see that the populations 
 of the Empire were in a sense more ready to learn of Christ 
 than the young self-reliant Greeks of Sparta or Athens could 
 have been, so we can see in such language as that of the 1 1 9th 
 Psalm or of the 9th chapter of Daniel a temper to which the 
 meek and lowly Christ would make an appeal which might 
 have been lost upon the rough times of the judges or the 
 prosperous age of the monarchy. Old age has come and with 
 
IV. P7'eparation in History fo7' Christ. 173 
 
 it the wisdom of a chastened spirit. This is not difficult to 
 see, and it is important to take it into account. It means that 
 the comparatively normal discipline of life has brought with 
 it (as doubtless it is meant to do alike in personal and national 
 life) a spiritual gain. But it is important to see how much of 
 the process and the effect remains unexplained. The chastening 
 is obvious, but whence the confidence ? 
 
 It is in some far less normal cause, in something which 
 seems distinctive of Israel, that we have to find the adequate 
 explanation of the whole result. We have to ask (as Pascal 
 so keenly felt^) why a nation records its failures and mis- 
 fortunes as being chastisements of wilful, repeated, and dis- 
 graceful fault, and then jealously guards the record as its most 
 cherished possession. It would be easy to suggest that there 
 is in this an egotism clothing itself in humility : and to point 
 out that this egotism would explain the confidence which still 
 looked forward to the future, which anticipated greatness for 
 an ' afilicted and poor people,' and a blessing to all the nations 
 of the earth from its own history. Only this is just to slur 
 the difficulty, and under the invidious word ' egotism ' to 
 disguise that wonderful instinct of a destiny and a mission 
 which is so strangely unlike egotism, and which allowed, or 
 even produced, in so profound a form the self-condemnation 
 which egotism refuses. 
 
 Doubtless the effects of these preparing forces were felt, 
 and their meanings discerned, only by a few. Not only were 
 they ' not all Israel that were of Israel,' but the bulk of the 
 nation and its representative and official leaders were blind. 
 They were off the way, down the false tracks of literalist 
 Rabbinism, or of one-sided Essene asceticism, or of earthly 
 visions of a restored kingdom, or (as in Alexandria) of a 
 philosophized Judaism. The issues were the crucifixion of 
 the Lord, and all which Judaism, without and within the 
 Church, did to extinguish the Gospel and persecute its fol- 
 lowers in its first age. It is right to refer to this, but there 
 are probably few to whom it would cause any difficulty. 
 To the observer of the world's history it is a common sight 
 
 3, ii. 7 § 2. 
 
1 74 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 that the true issues and the distinctive work of a people is 
 worked out not by the many or by the prominent, but by 
 the few, and often the obscui-e. To the student of Jewish 
 history that which has made Israel what it is in world-signi- 
 ficance appears throughout the course of its history as a gold 
 thread running through a web of very different texture. It can 
 be no surprise that the end should be of a piece with the rest. 
 There, in a climax of sharpest contrast, we see the antithesis 
 which marks the history throughout. The training issues in 
 a S. Mary, a Simeon, in those who ' waited for the consolation 
 of Israel ' on the one side, and in the ' Scribes and Pharisees, 
 hypocrites,' on the other. The natural issue of Israel's life and 
 tendencies is seen in the cold and sterile impotence which, 
 because it is the 'corruption of the best/ is the most irreversible 
 spiritual ruin ; while beside and amidst this there was 
 fashioned by a grace and power above nature, though in a 
 perfectly natural way, the true Israel which realize all that 
 ' Israel according to the flesh ' professed yet betrayed, guarded 
 yet obscured. And if we have at all rightly discerned as a 
 principle of Divine preparation that it should be negative as 
 well as positive, and should demonstrate to the world before 
 Christ was given, how little the world's own wisdom or effort 
 could supply His place : we shall not wonder that time was 
 thus given for Israel to try out as it were its second experi- 
 ment, and to shew that by its selfishness and arrogance, by 
 its ' carnalness,' it could warp and distort its later spiritual 
 constitution, even more than its former temporal one, out of 
 all likeness of what God would have it be. ' The last state 
 of the man ' was 'worse than the fii'st^.' 
 
 But the observation of these predominant currents and 
 forms of Jewish life and thought and religion has this further 
 value, that it shews the variety, the energy, and the unlike- 
 ness to one another of the tendencies present in Israel. 
 They emphasize the fact that the history of Israel was in no 
 sense working itself out towards the lyrodxutlon by its own 
 forces of the true religion which went forth from the midst of 
 
 * S. Matt, xii 45. It should be observed that the words were spoken of ' this 
 wicked generation.' 
 
 I 
 
IV. Preparation in History for Christ. 175 
 
 it. They remind us how intractable the problem of finding by 
 human ingenuity the solution which could harmonize in one 
 issue elements so powerful and so alien from each other ; 
 which with a perfect spiritual liberty could combine an asser- 
 tion of the permanent value of the law ; which with no 
 withdrawal from and despair of the world could secure all 
 that was sought by Essene purity and self-denial ; which, itself 
 utterly unworldly, could satisfy the idea of a restored monarchy 
 and a glory for Israel ; which while bringing no philosophy 
 could achieve what Jewish philosophizing had desired, in a 
 capture of the world's reason by Jewish truth. 
 
 III. In the last words we touch that with which this 
 may perhaps fitly end. If its drift has been in any sense true, 
 there stands before us, as perhaps the most striking feature of 
 the whole situation, the co-existence of the two preparations, 
 the one general, indirect, contributory, and consisting only 
 in an impressive convergence and centering of the lines of 
 ordinary historical sequences ; the other special, directly intro- 
 ductory, and characterized by the presence of a distinctive 
 power, call it what we may, a genius for religion, or more 
 truly and adequately a special grace of the Spirit of God, 
 which is new and above ordinary experience, even as life is 
 when it enters the rest of nature, and reason is when it appears 
 in the world of life. The two preparations pursue their course 
 unconscious of one another, almost exclusive of one another. 
 Greek wisdom and Roman power have no dream of coming 
 to receive from the narrow national cult of humbled and 
 subject Israel. And Israel, even taught by the great prophets, 
 could hardly find a place in her vision of the future for any 
 destiny of the nations of the world. To this antagonism, or 
 more strictly this ignoring of one another, there are excep- 
 tions, exceptions of the kind which emphasize the character 
 of the situation which they hardly modify. Two streams of 
 such force and volume as those of Jewish religion and classical 
 life or culture could not touch and leave one another altogether 
 uninfluenced, though the influence was characteristically dif- 
 
I ']6 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 ferent. On the side of the world the spu^itual needs of indi- 
 viduals caused numbers, not inconsiderable, to receive influences 
 which made them ready to act as seeding ground and ferment for 
 the Gospel. On the side of Israel, the strong sense of mission 
 and of truth made the contact with Greek culture suggest the 
 ambition to use it as a great instrument, to teach it to 
 acknowledge and witness to the God of Israel, who was God 
 of the whole earth : and the results, in the Greek of the 
 Septuagint and in the Helleno-Judaic writings of Alexandi'ia 
 and elsewhere, were invaluable in fashioning language and 
 thought for Christ's service. But all the more distinctly, 
 in the first case, does the antagonism, the gulf fixed, the 
 mutual aversion, the impossibility humanly speaking of fusion 
 between Jew and Gentile come out before our eyes. And, in 
 the second case, the unreal romancings of the Sibylline works, 
 the apparently isolated work of Philo, and the opportunism 
 of a politician like Josephus, have all the character of hybrids, 
 and shew no sign of the vital fusion by which out of a great 
 wedlock a new thing comes to be. 
 
 The two preparations stand apart : they go their own way. 
 There is indeed in them a strange parallelism of common 
 human experience and human need. Both have tried their 
 experiments, made their ventures, won their successes, gone 
 thi'ough their disciplines of disenchantment and failure. 
 Both are conscious of the dying of life : in Israel there is ' no 
 prophet more ' ; outside it philosophy has not the creative- 
 ness and energy of youth but the quiet acquiescence and mild 
 prudence of age, and life, public and private, is without ade- 
 quate scope or aim. In both the ' tendencies towards ' a Gospel 
 are as far as possible from making a ' tendency to produce ' 
 one. In both there is the same desire for which the Jew alone 
 can find conscious expression : it is ' Quicken me ! ' Both 
 need life. Both have no help in themselves. But in the 
 lines which they follow and the hopes which they frame there 
 is neither likeness nor compatibility. ' The Greeks seek after 
 wisdom^.' The intellect, and those who are distinctively 
 men of the intellect, can hardly imagine human advance 
 
 ^ 1 Cor. i. 2 2. 
 
IV. Preparation in History for Christ. 177 
 
 otherwise than in terms of the intellect. Philosophy conceives 
 of it as a conquest of philosophical result, or even as an increase 
 of philosophical material. It is the pain of an advanced and 
 critical time, like that of which we speak, to feel this, and 
 yet to feel that the experiments of speculation have gone far 
 enough to shew that by none of their alternative ways can 
 there be any way out to the peace of certain truth. And 
 yet it seems that, without abdication of reason, there is no 
 possibility of going any other way : the Greeks (and in this 
 sense all the world was Greek) could only look for what they 
 wanted in the form of a new philosophy. 
 
 But ' the Jews require a sign.' Totally different, but equally 
 exclusive, were the conditions under which the Jew could 
 conceive of a new epoch. The dread of exhausted resources 
 did not haunt him, for he looked not to human capacity but 
 to Divine gift and interposition. But he thought that he 
 knew the form in which such interposition would come ; it 
 was not to be primarily a teaching, (it is the Samaritan and 
 not the Jew who is recorded as expecting in Messiah one who, 
 ' when He is come, will tell us all things ^ '); it must appear in 
 action, ' with observation-,' with pomp and scenic display, with 
 signs, and signs which, in a very visible and tangible sense, 
 should seem to be from heaven ^, in particular with circum- 
 stances of triumph and conquest, and with an exaltation of 
 Israel to the glories of her monarchy many times enlarged. 
 
 Such are the demands ; the things sought and needed ; the 
 conditions prescribed ; definite, severally uncompromising, 
 mutually unlike, and even conflicting. And then from out of 
 Israel, without moral or political earthquake, without over- 
 whelming display of supernatural force, nay even, to a super- 
 ficial eye, with all the appearance of weakness and failure, 
 without any rescue for Israel, with no attempt to present 
 itself in philosophical form, with none of the strain and 
 elaboration of a conscious effort to combine many in one, 
 but rather with a paradoxical and offending ' simplicity ' and 
 
 ^ S. John iv. 25. in each case following some of our 
 
 * S. Luke xvii. 20. Lord's own signs. 
 
 * S. Matt.xii. 38 ; S. John vi. 30, 31, 
 
 N 
 
1 78 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 ' foolishness ' of mere assertion : — there comes forth a Thing in 
 which on the one side Jews — whom we all recognise to be the 
 best Jews, Jews in the truest and deepest sense — find the 
 whole spirit and meaning, even down to its detail, of the life 
 and the hope of Israel summed up and fulfilled ; which left 
 them no sense of disappointment, but rather a consciousness of 
 having had hopes only too narrow and low ; which gave them 
 the exulting sense of ' reigning as kings,' with a ' King of 
 Israel ' : while on the other side this same Thing was felt by 
 ' Greeks' as a ' wisdom ' flooding their reasons with a light of 
 truth and wisdom (sophia), which met the search of philosophy 
 (philo-sophia) ^, but also in simple and wise alike drew forth 
 and ministered to needs which philosophy had but half seen 
 and wholly failed to satisfy, enabling conscience to be candid 
 and yet at peace, building up a new cosmopolitan fellowship. 
 and restoring to human life dignity and value, not only in 
 phrase and theory, but in truth. ' There came forth a Thing,' 
 or rather there came forth One, in Whom all this was done. 
 The question rises, ' Whom say we that He is ? ' And though 
 the answer must be reached in different ways by different 
 men, and the witness to Him in Whom is the sum of all, 
 must needs be of many kinds ; yet the convergence of many 
 lines (as we have been permitted to trace it) to One in whom 
 they are all combined and yet transcended, to One whom they 
 can usher in but were powerless to produce, may be no slight 
 corroboration of the answer which was accepted, as we have 
 to remember, by the lowly Jesus with significant solemnity : 
 ' Thou art the Christ,' the Fulfiller of all high and inspired 
 Jewish hope ; ' the Son of the Living God -,' His Son, — 
 as the Son of Man, in whom all that is human reaches ful- 
 ness ; and as the Son of God, who brings down to man what 
 he has been allowed to prove to himself that he cannot dis- 
 cover or create. 
 
 * This comes before us vividly in and for this reason I am a philo- 
 Justin Martyr's account of his own sopher.' 
 conversion. 'Dial. c. Tnjph. 3 ff. 'Thus ^ S. Matt. xvi. 16. 
 
V. 
 
 THE INCARNATION AND 
 DEVELOPMENT 
 
 J. R. ILLINGWORTH. 
 
 N- 2 
 
THE INCARNATION AND DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 I. The last few years have witnessed the gradual acceptance 
 by Christian thinkers of the great scientific generalization of 
 our age, which is briefly, if somewhat vaguely, described as 
 the Theory of Evolution. History has repeated itself, and 
 another of the ' oppositions of science ' to theology has proved 
 upon inquiry to be no opposition at all. Such oppositions 
 and reconciliations are older than Christianity, and are part 
 of what is often called the dialectical movement ; the move- 
 ment, that is to say, by question and answer, out of which all 
 progress comes. But the result of such a process is some- 
 thing more than the mere repetition of a twice-told tale. It 
 is an advance in our theological thinking ; a definite increase 
 of insight ; a fresh and fuller appreciation of those ' many 
 ways ' in which ' God fulfils Himself.' For great scientific 
 discoveries, like the heliocentric astronomy, are not merely 
 new facts to be assimilated ; they involve new ways of look- 
 ing at things. And this has been pre-eminently the case 
 with the law of evolution ; which, once observed, has rapidly 
 extended to every department of thought and history, and 
 altered our attitude towards all knowledge. Organisms, 
 nations, languages, institutions, customs, creeds, have all 
 come to be regarded in the light of their development, and 
 we feel that to understand what a thing really is, we must 
 examine how it came to be. Evolution is in the air. It is 
 the category of the age ; a ' partus temporis ' ; a necessary 
 consequence of our wider field of comparison. We cannot 
 place ourselves outside it, or limit the scope of its operation. 
 And our religious opinions, like all things else that have 
 
1 82 The Religion of the Incarnatio7i. 
 
 come down on the current of development, must justify their 
 existence by an appeal to the past. 
 
 It is the object of the following pages to consider what 
 popular misconceptions of the central doctrine of our religion, 
 the Incarnation, have been remedied ; what more or less for- 
 gotten aspects of it have been restored to their due place ; 
 what new lights have been thrown upon the fulness of its 
 meaning, in the course of our discussion of the various views 
 of evolution. 
 
 In face of the historical spirit of the age, the study of past 
 theology can never again be regarded as merely a piece of 
 religious antiquarianism. And there are two classes of mind 
 to which it should be of especial service. Many an earnest 
 worker in the Christian cause, conscious how little the 
 refinements of philosophy can influence for good or evil the 
 majority of men, and generously impatient of all labour wasted, 
 when the labourers are so few, is apt to under-estimate what 
 he considers the less practical departments of theology ; for- 
 getful that there are souls, and those among the noblest, to 
 whom the primary avenue of access is the intellect, and 
 who can only be led homeward by the illuminative way. 
 The Christian of this type may be materially helped 
 towards welcoming wider views, by being convinced that 
 what he has been too easily apt to regard as metaphysical 
 subtleties, or as dangerous innovations, or as questionable 
 accommodations of the Gospel to the exigencies of passing 
 controversy, are after all an integral part of the great Ca- 
 tholic tradition. On the other hand, many plausible at- 
 tacks upon the Christian creed are due to the inadequate 
 methods of its professed interpreters. Fragments of doc- 
 trine, torn from their context and deprived of their due 
 proportions, are brandished in the eyes of men by weU- 
 meaning but ignorant apologists as containing the sum 
 total of the Christian faith, with the lamentable consequence 
 that even earnest seekers after truth, and much more its 
 unearnest and merely factious adversaries, mislead themselves 
 and others into thinking Christianity discredited, when in 
 reality they have all along been only criticising its carica- 
 
V. The hicarnation and Development. 183 
 
 ture. Such men need reminding that Christianity is greater 
 than its isolated interpreters or misinterpreters in any 
 age ; that in the course of its long history it has accumu- 
 lated answers to many an objection which they in their 
 ignorance think new ; and that, in the confidence of its 
 universal mission and the memory of its many victories, 
 it still claims to be sympathetic, adequate, adaptable to the 
 problems and perplexities of each successive age. 
 
 The general tendency of thought since the Eeformation 
 has been in the direction of these partial presentations of 
 Christianity. The Reformers, from various causes, were so 
 occupied with what is now called Soteriology, or the scheme 
 of salvation, that they paid but scant attention to the other 
 aspects of the Gospel. And the consequence was that a 
 whole side of the great Christian tradition, and one on which 
 many of its greatest thinkers had lavished the labours of a 
 lifetime, was allowed almost unconsciously to lapse into com- 
 parative oblivion ; and the religion of the Incarnation was 
 narrowed into the religion of the Atonement. Men's views 
 of the faith dwindled and became subjective and self-regard- 
 ing, while the gulf was daily widened between things sacred 
 and things secular ; among which latter, art and science, 
 and the whole political and social order, gradually came to 
 be classed. 
 
 Far otherwise was it with the great thinkers of the early 
 Church ; and that not from an under-estimate of the saving 
 power of the Cross, which was bearing daily fruit around them, 
 of penitence, and sanctity, and martyrdom ; but from their 
 regarding Christian salvation in its context. They realized 
 that redemption was a means to an end, and that end the 
 reconsecration of the whole universe to God. And so the 
 very completeness of their grasp on the Atonement led them 
 to dwell upon the cosmical significance of the Incarnation, 
 its purpose to ' gather together all things in one.' For it 
 was an age in which the problems of the universe were 
 keenly felt. Philosophical thinking, if less mature, was not 
 less exuberant than now, and had already a great past behind 
 it. And the natural world, though its structural secrets were 
 
184 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 little understood, fascinated the imagination and strained the 
 heart with its appealing beauty. Spiritualism, superstition, 
 scepticism, were tried in turn but could not satisfy. The 
 questionings of the intellect still pressed for a solution. And 
 the souls of Christians were stirred to proclaim that the 
 new power which they felt within them, restoring, quicken- 
 ing, harmonizing the whole of their inner life, would also 
 prove the key to all these mysteries of matter and of 
 mind. 
 
 So it was that the theology of the Incarnation was gra- 
 dually drawn out, from the teaching of S. Paul and of 
 S. John. The identity of Him Who was made man and dwelt 
 among us, with Him by Whom all things were made and 
 by Whom all things consist; His eternal pre-existence as 
 the reason and the word of God, the Logos ; His indwelling 
 presence in the universe as the source and condition of all 
 its life, and in man as the light of His intellectual being ; 
 His Resurrection, His Ascension, — all these thoughts were 
 woven into one magnificent picture, wherein creation was 
 viewed as the embodiment of the Divine ideas, and therefore 
 the revelation of the Divine character ; manifesting its Maker 
 with increasing clearness at each successive stage in the 
 great scale of being, till in the fulness of time He Himself 
 became man, and thereby lifted human nature, and with it 
 the material universe to which man is so intimately linked ; 
 and triumphing over the sin and death under which creation 
 groaned and travailed, opened by His Resurrection and then 
 by His Ascension vistas of the glorious destiny purposed 
 for His creatures before the world was. 'Factus est quod 
 sumus nos, uti nos perficeret esse quod est ipse^.' 
 
 Such is the view of the Incarnation in what may be called 
 its intellectual aspect, which we find gradually expressed 
 with increasing clearness by the Fathers, from Justin to 
 Athanasius. And with all its deep suggestiveness, it is still a 
 severely simple picture, drawn in but few outlines, and those 
 strictly scriptural. It was born of no abstract love of meta- 
 physic, and stands in striking contrast to the wild specu- 
 ^ Irenaeus. 
 
V. The Incarnation and Developmejii. 185 
 
 lations of the time. Its motive and its method were both 
 intensely practical ; its motive being to present Christianity 
 to the mind as well as to the heart ; and its method no 
 more than to connect and interpret and explain the definite 
 statements of S. Paul and S. John. Passing over the dark 
 ages, when thought was in comparative abeyance, and the 
 energies of the Church absorbed in the work of conversion 
 and organization, we come, in the twelfth and following 
 centuries, to a second period of intellectual ferment, less 
 brilliant than that which characterized the decadence of the 
 old civilization, but instinct with all the fire and restlessness 
 of youth. Unsobered as yet by experience, and unsupplied 
 with adequate material from without, thought preyed upon 
 itself and revelled in its new-found powers of speculation. 
 Fragments of the various heresies which the Fathers had 
 answered and outlived reappeared with all the halo of 
 novelty around them. Religions were crudely compared and 
 sceptical inferences drawn. Popular unbelief, checked in a 
 measure by authority, avenged itself by ridicule of all things 
 sacred. It was a period of intense intellectual unrest, too 
 many-sided and inconsequent to be easily described. But 
 as far as the anti-Christian influences of the time can be 
 summarized they were mainly two : — the Arabic pantheism, 
 and the materialism which was fostered in the medical 
 schools ; kindred errors, both concerned with an undue es- 
 timate of matter. And how did Christian theology meet 
 them? Not by laying stress, like the later Deists, upon 
 God's infinite distance from the world, but upon the closeness 
 of His intimacy with it : by reviving, that is, with increased 
 emphasis the Patristic doctrine of the Incarnation, as the 
 climax and the keystone of the whole visible creation. There 
 is a greater divergence of opinion, perhaps, among the School- 
 men than among the Fathers ; and a far greater amount 
 of that unprofitable subtlety for which they are apt to be 
 somewhat too unintelligently ridiculed. But on the point 
 before us, as on all others of primary importance, they are 
 substantially unanimous, and never fail in dignity. 
 
 ' As the thought of the Divine mind is called the Word, 
 
1 86 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 Who is the Son, so the unfolding of that thought in external 
 action (per opera exteriora) is named the word of the 
 Word \' 
 
 ' The whole world is a kind of bodily and visible Gospel of 
 that Word by which it was created ^.' 
 
 ' Every creature is a theophany ^.' 
 
 ' Every creature is a Divine word, for it tells of God ^' 
 
 ' The wisdom of God, when first it issued in creation, came 
 not to us naked, but clothed in the apparel of created things. 
 And then when the same wisdom would manifest Himself to 
 us as the Son of God, He took upon Him a garment of flesh 
 and so was seen of men ^.' 
 
 ' The Incarnation is the exaltation of human nature and 
 consummation of the Universe ".' 
 
 Such quotations might be multiplied indefinitely from the 
 pages of the Schoolmen and scholastic theologians. And the 
 line of thought which they indicate seems to lead us by a 
 natural sequence to view the Incarnation as being the pre- 
 destined climax of creation, independently of human sin. 
 The thought is of course a mere speculation, 'beyond that 
 which is written,' but from its first appearance in the twelfth 
 century it has been regarded with increasing favour ; for it is 
 full of rich suggestiveness, and seems to throw a deeper 
 meaning into all our investigations of the world's gradual 
 development. 
 
 Again, from the relation of the Word to the universe follows 
 His relation to the human mind. For ' that life was the light 
 of men,' 
 
 ' The created intellect is the imparted likeness of God,' says 
 S. Thomas ; and again, ' Every intellectual process has its 
 origin in the Word of God Who is the Divine Keason,' ' The 
 light of intellect is imprinted upon us by God Himself 
 (immediate a Deo).' 'God continually works in the mind, 
 as being both the cause and the ffuide of its natural light.' 
 
 ' S. Thom. Aq. c. Gent. iv. 13. ■• S. Bonav. In Ecdes. ci. t. ix. 
 
 ^ H. de Boseham (Migne) v. 190. ' H. de S. Victor. i^Migne) v. 177. 
 
 p. 1353. p. 580. 
 
 ^ Scot. Er. (Migne) v. 122. p. 302. ^ S. Thorn. Aquinas. 
 
V. The Incarnation and Development. 187 
 
 ' In every object of sensitive or rational experience God Himself 
 lies hid ^.' ' All intelligences know God implicitly, in every 
 object of their knowledge^.' 'Christ is our internal teacher 
 and no truth of any kind is known but through Him ; though 
 He speaks not in language as we do, but by interior illu- 
 mination^.' 'The philosophers have taught us the sciences, 
 for God revealed them to them ^.' 
 
 II. The point to be noticed in the teaching of which such 
 passages are scattered samples, is that the Schoolmen and 
 orthodox mystics of the middle age, with Pantheism, mate- 
 rialism, rationalism surging all around them, and perfectly 
 conscious of the fact, met these errors, not by denying the 
 reality of matter, or the capacity of reason, as later apologists 
 have often done, but by claiming for both a place in the 
 Theology of the Word. And this Theology of the Word was, 
 in reality, quite independent of, and unaffected by, the subtleties 
 and fallacies and false opinions of the age, cobwebs of the 
 unfurnished intellect which time has swept away. It was 
 a magnificent framework, outside and above the limited 
 knowledge of the day and the peculiarities of individual 
 thinkers ; an inheritance from the Patristic tradition, which 
 the Fathers, in their turn, had not invented, but received 
 as Apostolic doctrine from Apostolic men, and only made 
 more explicit by gradual definition, during centuries when, 
 it has been fairly said, 'the highest reason, as indepen- 
 dently exercised by the wise of the world, was entirely 
 coincident with the highest reason as inspiring the Church ^.' 
 We have now to consider whether this view of the Incarnation, 
 which, though in the countries most influenced by the Kefor- 
 mation it has dropped too much out of sight, has yet never 
 really died out of the Church at large, is in any way incom- 
 patible with the results of modern science ; or whether, on the 
 contrary, it does not provide an outline to which science 
 is slowly but surely giving reality and content. 
 
 And at the outset we must bear in mind one truth which is 
 
 ^ S. Bonav. de Reduct. sub fin. * Id. Lum. Eccles. S. 
 
 ^ S. Thom. Aq. de Verit. 22. 2. i. ^ Mark Pattison. 
 
 ' S. Bonav. Lum. Eccles. S. 12. 
 
1 88 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 now recognised on all sides as final — viz. that tlie finite 
 intellect cannot transcend the conditions of finitude, and 
 cannot therefore reach, or even conceive itself as reaching, an 
 absolute, or, in Kantian phraseology, a speculative knowledge 
 of the beginning of things. Whatever strides science may- 
 make in time to come towards decomposing atoms and forces 
 into simpler and yet simpler elements, those elements will 
 still have issued from a secret laboratory into which science 
 cannot enter, and the human mind will be as far as ever from 
 knowing what they really are. Further, this initial limitation 
 must of necessity qualify our knowledge in its every stage. 
 If we cannot know the secret of the elements in their sim- 
 plicity, neither can we know the secret of their successive 
 combinations. Before the beginning of our present system, 
 and behind the whole course of its continuous development, 
 there is a vast region of possibility, which lies wholly and for 
 ever beyond the power of science to afiirm or to deny. It is 
 in this region that Christian theology claims to have its roots, 
 and of this region that it professes to give its adherents certi- 
 tude, under conditions and by methods of its own. And of 
 those conditions and methods it fearlessly asserts that they 
 are nowise inconsistent with any ascertained or ascertainable 
 result of secular philosophy. 
 
 As regards the origin of things, this is obvious. Science 
 may resolve the complicated life of the material universe into 
 a few elementary forces, light and heat and electricity, and 
 these perhaps into modifications of some still simpler energy ; 
 but of the origin of energy {ro Tipwrov klvovv) it knows no 
 more than did the Greeks of old. Theology asserts that in 
 the beginning was the Word, and in Him was life, the life of 
 all things created : in other words, that He is the source of 
 all that energy^, whose persistent, irresistible versatility of 
 action is for ever at work moulding and clothing and 
 peopling worlds. The two conceptions are complementary, 
 and cannot contradict each other. 
 
 But to pass from the origin to the development of things : 
 the new way of looking at nature was thought at first both 
 by its adherents and opponents alike to be inimical to the 
 
V. The Incarnation and Development. 189 
 
 doctrine of final causes. And here was a direct issue joined 
 with Theology at once : for the presence of final causes or 
 design in the universe has not only been in all ages one of 
 the strongest supports for natural religion ; it is contained in 
 the very notion of a rational creation, a creation by an 
 Eternal Reason. And this was supposed to be directly 
 negatived by the doctrine of the survival of the fittest 
 through natural selection : for if of a thousand forms, 
 which came by chance into existence, the one which hap- 
 pened to correspond best with its environment survived, 
 while the remainder disappeared, the adaptation of the sur- 
 vivor to its circumstances would have all the appearance of 
 design, while in reality due to accident. If, therefore, this 
 principle acted exclusively throughout the universe, the result 
 would be a semblance of design without any of its reality, 
 from which no theological inference could be drawn. But 
 this consequence of natural selection obviously depends upon 
 the exclusiveness of its action. If it is only one factor among 
 many in the world's development ; while there are instances 
 of adaptation in nature, and those the more numerous, for 
 which it fails to account, what has been called its dysteleo- 
 logical significance is at an end. Now its own author soon 
 saw and admitted the inadequacy of the theory of natural 
 selection, even in biology, the field of its fii'st observation, to 
 account for all the facts : while countless phenomena in 
 other regions, such as the mechanical principles involved in 
 the structure of the universe, the laws of crystallography 
 and chemical combination, the beauty of nature taken in 
 connection with its effect upon the mind, irresistibly suggest 
 design, and render the alternative hypothesis, from its mere 
 mathematical improbability, almost inconceivable. And there 
 is now, therefore, a general disposition to admit that the force 
 of this particular attack upon the doctrine of final causes has 
 been considerably overstated. 
 
 But in the course of its discussion an important difference 
 has been brought to light between external and internal 
 purposes or ends. The kind of design in nature which fii-st 
 arrested early thinkers was its usefulness to man. Even in 
 
1 90 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 scenery, it has been suggested, they saw the utility before 
 the beauty. And so they came to look upon all natural 
 phenomena as having for their final cause the good of man; 
 and the world as a machine, a contrivance of which the parts 
 have no value except as contributing to the work of the 
 whole, and the whole exists only to produce a result outside 
 and independent of itself, an external end, as if corn should 
 exist solely to provide food for man. This was not an untrue 
 conception ; a shallow thing to say of the reason for which 
 Socrates believed in God ; but it was partial and inadequate, 
 as Bacon and Spinoza shewed. And we have now come to 
 regard the world not as a machine, but as an organism, a 
 system in which, while the parts contribute to the growth of 
 the whole, the whole also reacts upon the development of the 
 parts ; and whose primary purpose is its own perfection, 
 something that is contained within and not outside itself, an 
 internal end: while in their turn the myriad parts of this 
 universal organism are also lesser organisms, ends in and for 
 themselves, pursuing each its lonely ideal of individual com- 
 pleteness. Now when we look at nature in this way, and 
 watch the complex and subtle processes by which a crystal, 
 a leaf, a lily, a moth, a bird, a star realize their respective 
 ideals with undisturbed, unfailing accuracy, we cannot help 
 attributing them to an intelligent Creator. But when we 
 further find that in the very course of pursuing their primary 
 ends, and becoming perfect after their kind, the various parts 
 of the universe do in fact also become means, and with in- 
 finite ingenuity of correspondence and adaptation, subserve 
 not only one but a thousand secondary ends, linking and 
 weaving themselves together by their mutual ministration 
 into an orderly, harmonious, complicated whole, the signs of 
 intelligence grow clearer still. And when, beyond all this, we 
 discover the quality of beauty in every moment and situation 
 of this complex life ; the drop of water that circulates from 
 sea to cloud, and cloud to earth, and earth to plant, and plant 
 to life-blood, shining the while with strange spiritual sig- 
 nificance in the sunset and the rainbow and the dewdrop 
 and the tear; the universal presence of this attribute, so 
 
V. The Incarnatiojt and Development. 191 
 
 unessential to the course of nature, but so infinitely powerful 
 in its appeal to the human mind, is reasonably urged as 
 a crowning proof of purposeful design. 
 
 The treatment which these various aspects of teleology have 
 received, during the last few years, may be fairly called ex- 
 haustive : and the result of all the sifting controversy has 
 been to place the evidence for design in nature on a stronger 
 base than ever : partly because we feel that we have faced the 
 utmost that can be urged against it ; partly because, under 
 scientific guidance, we have acquired a more real, as distinct 
 from a merely notional apprehension of the manifold adapta- 
 tions of structure to function, which the universe presents ; 
 and these adaptations and correspondences, when grasped in 
 their infinite multiplicity, furnish us with a far worthier and 
 grander view of teleology than the mechanical theory of 
 earlier days. 
 
 All this is in perfect harmony with our Christian creed, that 
 all things were made by the Eternal Reason ; but more than 
 this, it illustrates and is illustrated by the further doctrine of 
 His indwelling presence in the things of His creation ; render- 
 ing each of them at once a revelation and a prophecy, a thing 
 of beauty and finished workmanship, worthy to exist for its 
 own sake, and yet a step to higher purposes, an instrument 
 for grander work. 
 
 God tastes an infinite joy 
 In infinite ways— one everlasting bliss, 
 From whom all being emanates, all power 
 Proceeds : in whom is life for evermore, 
 Yet whom existence in its lowest form 
 Includes ; where dwells enjoyment, there is He : 
 With still a flying point of bliss remote, 
 A happiness in store afar, a sphere 
 Of distant glory in full view. 
 
 And science has done us good service in recalling this 
 doctrine to mind. For it has a religious as well as a theo- 
 logical importance, constituting, as it does, the element of truth 
 in that higher Pantheism which is so common in the present 
 day. Whether the term higher Pantheism is happily chosen 
 or not, the thing which it denotes is quite distinct from 
 
192 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 Pantheism proper, with its logical denial of human personality 
 and freedom. It is the name of an emotion rather than 
 a creed; that indescribable mystic emotion which the poet, 
 the artist, the man of science, and all their kindred feel in 
 contemplating the beauty or the wonder of the world. Vague 
 as it is, and indefinite, this sentiment is still one of the 
 strongest of which our nature is susceptible, and should be 
 recognised as an integral element in all true religion. Yet 
 for want of such recognition on the part of Christians it is 
 often allowed to gravitate nearer and nearer to pure Pantheism, 
 with which it has, in reality, no essential affinity. We cannot 
 therefore over-estimate the importance of restoring to its due 
 place in theology the doctrine of the Divine immanence in 
 nature, to which this sentiment is the instinctive witness. 
 Fathers, schoolmen, mystics, who were quite as alive to any 
 danger of Pantheism as ourselves, yet astonish us by the 
 boldness of their language upon this point ; and we need not 
 fear to transgress the limits of the Christian tradition in 
 saying that the physical immanence of God the Word in 
 His creation can hardly be overstated, as long as His moral 
 transcendence of it is also kept in view. 
 
 ' God dwelleth within all things, and without all things, 
 above all things and beneath all things ^,' says S. Gregory the 
 Great. 
 
 ' The immediate operation of the Creator is closer to 
 everything than the operation of any secondary cause,' says 
 S. Thomas 2. 
 
 And Cornelius a Lapide, after comparing our dependence 
 upon God to that of a ray on the sun, an embryo on the 
 womb, a bird on the air, concludes with the words, ' Seeing 
 then that we are thus united to God physically, we ought also 
 to be united to Him morally^.' 
 
 Here are three typical theologians, in three different ages, 
 not one of them a mystic even, using as the language of sober 
 theology words every whit as strong as any of the famous 
 Pantheistic passages in our modern literature ; and yet when 
 
 * Mmj. Mur. ii. 12. ^ S. Thom. Aq. ii. Sent. i. i. 
 
 ^ In Act. Apost. c. 17. V. 28. 
 
V. The Incarnation and Development. 193 
 
 met with in that literature they are commonly regarded as 
 pleasing expressions of poetic dreams, very far away from, if 
 not even inconsistent with what is thought to be dogmatic 
 Christianity. 
 
 To sum up then, the reopening of the teleological question 
 has not only led to its fuller and more final answer, but has 
 incidentally contributed to revive among us an important 
 aspect of the Theology of the Word. 
 
 The next point upon which the theory of evolution came in 
 contact with received opinion, was its account of the origin of 
 man. Man, it was maintained, in certain quarters, was only 
 the latest and most complex product of a purely material process 
 of development. His reason, with all its functions of imagi- 
 nation, conscience, will, was only a result of his sensibility, and 
 that of his nervous tissue, and that again of matter less and less 
 finely organized, till at last a primitive protoplasm was reached; 
 while what had been called his fall was in reality his rise, 
 being due to the fact that with the birth of reason came self- 
 consciousness ; or the feeling of a distinction between self and 
 the outer world, rip'fening into a sense, and strictly speaking 
 an illusory sense of discord between the two. 
 
 Theologians first thought it necessary to contest every 
 detail of this development, beginning with the antiquity of 
 man ; and some are still inclined to intrench themselves in 
 one or two positions which they think impregnable, such as 
 the essential difference in kind between organized and in- 
 organic matter, or again between animal instinct and the 
 self-conscious reason of man : while others are content to 
 assume a sceptical attitude and point to the disagreement 
 between the men of science themselves, as sufficient evidence 
 of their untruth. But none of these views are theologically 
 needed. The first is certainly, the second possibly unsound, 
 and the third, to say the least of it, unkind. It is quite true 
 that the evolution of man is at present nothing more than an 
 hypothesis, and an hypothesis open to very grave scientific 
 objections. The attempts to analyse reason and conscience 
 back into unconscious and unmoral elements, for all their 
 unquestioned ingenuity, are still far from being conclusive ; 
 o 
 
194 ^'^^^ Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 and then there is the geological admissibility of the time 
 which it would require, and that is still a matter of hopeless 
 controversy between scientific experts. And even if these 
 and numerous kindred difficulties were to be removed in time 
 to come, the hj^othesis would still be no nearer demonstra- 
 tion ; for the only evidence we can possibly obtain of pre- 
 historic man is his handiwork of one kind or another, his 
 implements or pictures, things implying the use of reason. In 
 other words^ we can only prove his existence through his 
 rationality ; through his having been, on the point in ques- 
 tion, identical in kind with what now he is. And suspense 
 of judgment therefore upon the whole controversy is, at 
 present, the only scientific state of mind. 
 
 But there are facts upon the other side ; the undoubted an- 
 tiquity of the human race ; the gradual growth which can be 
 scientifically traced, in our thought and language and morality, 
 and therefore, to the extent that functions react upon their 
 faculties, even in our conscience and our reason too ; and then 
 the immense presumption from the gathering proofs of all other 
 development, that man will be no exception to the universal 
 law. All these positive indications at least suggest the 
 possibility that the difficulties of the theory may one day 
 vanish, and its widest chasms close. And we cannot there- 
 fore be too emphatic in asserting that theology would have 
 nothing whatever to fear from such a result. When we see 
 energy and atoms building up an harmonious order, we feel 
 there is an inner secret in the energy and atoms, which we 
 cannot hope to penetrate by merely watching them at work. 
 And so, when we see human minds and wills weaving a veil 
 over the universe, of thought and love and holiness, and are 
 told that all these things are but higher modes of material 
 nature, we only feel that the inner secret of material nature 
 must be yet more wonderful than we supposed. But though 
 our wonder may increase, our difficulties will not. If we 
 believe, as we have seen that Christian Theology has always 
 believed, in a Divine Creator not only present behind the 
 beginning of matter but immanent in its every phase, and 
 co-operating with its every phenomenon, the method of His 
 
V. The Incai'iiation and Developinent. 195 
 
 working, though full of speculative interest, will be of no 
 controversial importance. Time was when the different kinds 
 of created things were thought to be severed by impassable 
 barriers. But many of these barriers have ah-eady given way 
 before science, and species are seen to be no more inde- 
 pendent than the individuals that compose them. If the 
 remaining barriers between unreason and reason, or between 
 lifelessness and life should in like manner one day vanish, 
 we shall need to readjust the focus of our spiritual eye to the 
 enlarged vision, but nothing more. Our Creator will be 
 known to have worked otherwise indeed than we had 
 thought, but in a way quite as conceivable, and to the 
 imagination more magnificent. And all is alike covered by 
 the words ' without Him was not anything made that was 
 made : and in Him was life.' In fact the evolutionary origin 
 of man is afar less serious question than the attack upon final 
 causes. Its biblical aspect has grown insignificant in pro- 
 portion as we have learned to regard the Hebrew cosmology 
 in a true light. And the popular outcry which it raised was 
 largely due to sentiment, and sentiment not altogether un- 
 tinged by human pride. 
 
 We may pass on therefore from the evolution of man and his 
 mind in general, to his various modes of mental activity in 
 science and philosophy and art. Here the Christian doctrine 
 is twofold : first, that all the objects of our thought, mathe- 
 matical relations, scientific laws, social systems, ideals of art, 
 are ideas of the Divine Wisdom, the Logos, vsrritten upon the 
 pages of the world ; and secondly, that our power of reading 
 them, our thinking faculty acts and only can act rightly by 
 Divine assistance ; that the same ' motion and power that 
 impels' 'all objects of all thought' impels also ' all thinking 
 things.' And both these statements are met by objection. 
 In the first place, it is urged, there is no fixity in the universe, 
 and it cannot therefore be the embodiment of Divine ideas. 
 All things live and move under our eyes. Species bear no 
 evidence of having been created in their completeness ; on the 
 contrary they are perpetually undergoing transmutation, and 
 cannot therefore represent ideas, cannot have been created on 
 o 2 
 
196 The Religioii of the Incarnation. 
 
 a plan. For ideas, in proportion to their perfection, must be 
 definite, clean-cut, clear. The answer to this objection is 
 contained in what has been already said upon the subject 
 of organic teleology. But an analogy drawn from human 
 thinking may illustrate it further. It is in reality the ideas 
 which our mind has done with, its dead ideas which are clean- 
 cut and definite and fixed. The ideas which at any riioment 
 go to form our mental life are quick and active and full of 
 movement, and melt into each other and are ever developing 
 anew. A book is no sooner finished and done with, than it strikes 
 its author as inadequate. It becomes antiquated as soon as its 
 ideas have been assimilated by the public mind. And that 
 because the thought of author and public alike is alive, and 
 ever moving onward ; incapable of being chained to any one 
 mode of expression ; incapable of being stereotyped. The 
 highest notion we can frame therefore of a mind greater than 
 our own is of one that has no dead ideas, no abstract or 
 antiquated formulae, but whose whole content is entirely, 
 essentially alive. And the perpetual development which we 
 are learning to trace throughout the universe around us would 
 be the natural expression therefore of that Logos Who is the 
 Life. 
 
 But when we turn from the objective to the subjective side 
 of knowledge, we are met with a second objection. The 
 doctrine that the Divine Logos co-operates with the human 
 reason, is supposed to be inconsistent with the undoubted fact 
 that many earnest and successful thinkers have been if not 
 atheistic, at least agnostic ; unable, that is, to attain to the 
 very knowledge to which, as it would seem on the Christian 
 hypothesis, all intellectual effort should inevitably lead. But 
 this difficulty is only superficial. When we say that the 
 Divine reason assists, we do not mean that it supersedes the 
 human. An initiative still lies with man; and he must 
 choose of his own accord the particular field of his intel- 
 lectual pursuit. When he has chosen his line of study, and 
 followed it with the requisite devotion, he will arrive at the 
 kind of truth to which that particular study leads, the physi- 
 cist at laws of nature, the philosopher at laws of thought, 
 
V. The Incarnation and Development. 197 
 
 the artist at ideal beauty, the moralist at ethical truth ; and 
 in each case, as we believe, by Divine assistance, his discoveries 
 being in fact revelations. But the method, the education, the 
 experience involved in different studies are so distinct, that few 
 in a lifetime can reach the eminence that teaches with autho- 
 rity, or even the intelligence that thoroughly appreciates, more 
 than one department of the complex world of thought. And 
 if a man wanders from his own province into unfamiliar 
 regions, he naturally meets with failure in proportion to 
 his hardihood. In the case of the special sciences this is 
 universally recognised. No astronomer would think of dog- 
 matizing on a question of geology, nor a biologist on the 
 details of chemistry or physics. But when it is a question 
 between science and philosophy, the rule is often forgotten ; 
 and the spectacle of scientific specialists blundering about in 
 metaphysics is painfully common in the present day : while 
 strange to say, in the case of theology this forgetfulness reaches 
 a climax, and men claim casually to have an opinion upon 
 transcendent mysteries, without any of the preparation which 
 they would be the first to declare needful for success in the 
 smallest subsection of any one of the branches of science. 
 
 Nor is preparation all that is wanted. Science is impossible 
 without experiment, and experiment is the lower analogue of 
 what in religion is called experience. As experiment alone gives 
 certainty in the one case, so does experience alone in the other. 
 And it is only the man who has undergone such experience, 
 with all its imperative demands upon his whole character and 
 life, that can justly expect satisfaction of his religious doubts 
 and needs; while cnly those who, like S. Paul or S.Augustine, 
 have experienced it in an exceptional degree, are entitled to 
 speak with authority upon the things to which it leads. 
 Here again a human analogy may help us. For in studying a 
 human character there are different planes upon which we may 
 approach it. There are the external aspects of the man, the 
 fashion of his garments, the routine of his life, the regulation 
 of his time, his official habits ; all which, it may be noted 
 in passing, in the case of a great character, are uniform, not 
 because thev were not once the free creation of his will, but 
 
198 The Religioji of the Incai'nation. 
 
 because he knows the practical value of uniformity in all such 
 things ; and all these externals are open to the observation even 
 of a stranger. Then there are the man's thoughts, which 
 may be withheld or revealed at his pleasure ; and these can 
 only be understood by kindred minds, who have been trained 
 to understand them. Lastly, there are his will and affections, 
 the region of his motives, the secret chamber in which his real 
 personality resides ; and these are only known to those in- 
 timate friends and associates whose intuition is quickened by 
 the sympathy of love. Now all these stages are gone through 
 in the formation of a friendship. First we are struck by a 
 man's appearance, and so led to listen to his conversation, and 
 thence to make his acquaintance, and at last to become his 
 friend. And so with the knowledge of God. The man of 
 science, as such, can discover the uniformities of His action in 
 external nature. The moral philosopher will further see that 
 these actions ' make for righteousness ' and that there is a 
 moral law. But it is only to the spiritual yearning of our 
 whole personality that He reveals Himself as a person. This 
 analogy will make the Christian position intelligible ; but for 
 Christians it is more than an analogy. It is simply a state- 
 ment of facts. For, to Christians, the Incarnation is the final 
 sanction of ' anthropomorphism,' revealing the Eternal Word as 
 strictly a Person, in the ordinary sense and with all the 
 attributes which we commonly attach to the name ^. 
 
 Consequently, upon all this we are quite consistent in 
 maintaining that all great teachers of whatever kind are 
 vehicles of revelation, each in his proper sphere, and in 
 accepting their verified conclusions as Divinely true ; while 
 we reject them the moment they transgress their limits, 
 as thereby convicted of unsound thinking, and therefore de- 
 prived of the Divine assistance which was the secret of their 
 previous success. And though such transgression may in many 
 cases involve a minimum of moral error, there are abundant 
 instances in the histoiy of thought that it is not always so. 
 Francis Bacon, and the penitent, pardoned Abelard are typical, 
 in difi'erent degrees, of a countless multitude of lesser men. 
 1 Cp. p. 64. 
 
V. The Incarnation and Development. 199 
 
 ■ 'For our knowledge of fu'st principles,' says S. Augustine, 
 ' we have recourse to that inner truth that presides over 
 the mind. And that indwelling teacher of the mind is 
 Christ, the changeless virtue and eternal wisdom of God, 
 to which every rational soul has recourse. But so much 
 only is revealed to each as his own good or evil will 
 enables him to received' 
 
 ' Nor is it the fault of the Word,' adds S. Thomas, ' that 
 all men do not attain to the knowledge of the truth, but 
 some remain in darkness. It is the fault of men who do 
 not turn to the Word and so cannot fully receive Him. 
 Whence there is still more or less darkness remaining among 
 men, in proportion to the lesser or greater degree in which 
 they turn to the Word and receive Him. And so John, to 
 preclude any thought of deficiency in the illuminating power 
 of the Word, after saying " that life was the light of men," 
 adds " the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness com- 
 prehended it not." The darkness is not because the Word does 
 not shine, but because some do not receive the light of 
 the Word ; as while the light of the material sun is shining 
 over the world, it is only dark to those whose eyes are 
 closed or feeble^.' 
 
 It has been necessary to dwell upon this doctrine because 
 it has an important bearing upon two further questions, 
 which the philosophy of evolution has brought into new 
 prominence, the relation of Christianity to previous philoso- 
 phy and other religions. It was the fashion, not long ago, 
 to give an undue value to the part played by environment 
 or surrounding circumstances in the creation of characters 
 and institutions and creeds, to the exclusion of all elements 
 of native originality. And the attempt was made accordingly, 
 in various ways, to represent Christianity as the natural 
 product of the different religions and philosophies which 
 were current in the world at the time of its appearing. 
 But the further study of evolution has qualified this whole 
 mode of thought by the way in which, as we have seen 
 above, it has led us to look at things as organisms rather 
 
 I S. Aug. cleMagist. 38. t. i. p. 916. ^ S. Thorn. Aq. cont. Gent. iv. 13. 
 
200 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 than machines. A machine has no internal principle of 
 unity. Its unity is impressed upon it from without. And 
 it may be granted therefore, for the sake of argument, that 
 wo might conceive a machine or number of machines as 
 formed like the patterns in a caleidoscope by a happy coin- 
 cidence of atoms ; and man, if he were only a machine, as 
 strictly the creature of circumstance. But an organism is 
 a different thing. Dependent as it is upon its environment 
 in an hundred various ways, it is yet more dependent upon 
 its own selective and assimilative capacity, in other words 
 upon its own individuality, its self. And so the notions 
 of individuality, originality, personal identity have been 
 restored to their place in the world of thought. The 
 old error lingers on, and is sometimes crudely re-asserted, 
 especially in its anti-Christian bearing ; but it has been 
 discredited by science, and is in fact a thing of the past. 
 And in consequence of this, the attempt can no longer be 
 plausibly made to account for Christianity apart from the 
 personality of Jesus Christ. The mythical theories have 
 had their day. And it is recognised on all hands that mere 
 aspiration can no more create a religion than appetite can 
 create food. A foundation needs a founder. 
 
 But the attack thus diverted from our religion glances off on 
 our theology. The Christian religion, it is granted, was founded 
 by Jesus Christ; but its theological interpretation is viewed 
 as a misinterpretation, a malign legacy from the dying philo- 
 sophies of Greece. This objection is as old as the second cen- 
 tury, and has been revived at intervals in various forms, and 
 with varying degrees of success. Modern historical criticism 
 has only fortified it with fresh instances. But it has no 
 force whatever if we believe that the Divine Word was for 
 ever working in the world in co-operation with human 
 reason; inspiring the higher minds among the Jews with 
 their thirst for holiness, and so making ready for the coming 
 of the Holy One in Jewish flesh: but inspiring the Greeks 
 also with their intellectual eagerness, and preparing them 
 to recognise Him as the Eternal Reason, the Word, the Truth ; 
 and to define and defend, and demonstrate that Truth to the 
 
V, The Incarnation and Development. loi 
 
 outer world. The fact that Greek philosophy had passed its 
 zenith and was declining did not make its influence upon 
 Christianity an evil one, a corruption of the living by the 
 dead. It was only dying to be incorporated in a larger life. 
 The food that supports our existence owes its power of nu- 
 trition to the fact, that it too once lived with an inferior 
 life of its own. And so the Greek philosophy was capable 
 of assimilation by the Christian organism, from the fact 
 that it too had once been vitally inspired by the life that is 
 the light of men. And the true successors of Plato and Aris- 
 totle were the men of progress who realized this fact ; not 
 Celsus, Lucian, Porphyry, but the Fathers of the Church. 
 
 Clement and Origen, Athanasius and Augustine, the Grego- 
 ries and Basil understood Greek philosophy as clearly as 
 S. Paul understood Judaism, and recognised its completion 
 as plainly in the Incarnation of the Word. Nor was this 
 view of the Incarnation in the one case, any more than in 
 the other, assumed for a merely apologetic purpose. These 
 men were essentially philosophers, among the foremost of 
 their age. They knew and have testified what philosophy 
 had done for their souls, and what it could not do ; how 
 far it had led them forward; and of what longings it had 
 left them full. True, philosophy had as little expected Wis- 
 dom to become incarnate, and that amongst the barbarians, the 
 outcast and the poor, as Judaism had expected Messiah to 
 suffer, and to suffer at the hand of Jews. But no sooner 
 was the Incarnation accomplished, than it flooded the whole 
 past of Greece no less than Judaea with a new light. This 
 was what it all meant ; this was what it unwittingly aimed 
 at ; the long process of dialectic and prophecy were here 
 united in their goal. 
 
 ' Those who lived under the guidance of the Eternal Eeason 
 (/Liera Ao'you i3i(ocravTes) as Socrates, Heraclitus, and such-like 
 men, are Christians,' run the well-known words of Justin 
 Martyr, ' even though they were reckoned to be atheists in 
 their day.' (Ap. i. 46.) Different minds have always differed, 
 and will continue to differ widely as to the degree in which 
 Greek thought contributed to the doctrines of the Trinity and 
 
202 The Religion of the Inca7'nation. 
 
 the Incarnation. It is a difficult and delicate question for 
 historical criticism to decide. But the essential thing to bear 
 in mind is that the Christian doctrine of the Logos amply 
 covers any possible view which criticism may establish upon 
 the point. For, in the light of that doctrine, it is merely 
 a question of the degree in which the Eternal Word chose 
 to reveal Himself through one agency rather than another. 
 
 Any attack, therefore^ upon our theology for its connection 
 .with Greek thought, is powerless to disturb us ; since we 
 accept the fact but give it another, a deeper interpretation : 
 while we rejoice in every fresh proof that the great thoughts 
 of the Greek mind were guided by a higher power, and 
 consecrated to a nobler end than ever their authors dreamed 
 of; and that the true classic culture is no alien element but a 
 legitimate ingredient in Catholic, complete Christianity. 
 
 And the same line of thought gives us a clue to the 
 history of religious development, the latest field to which the 
 philosophy of evolution has been extended. For though a 
 superficial comparison of religions, with a more or less 
 sceptical result, has often been attempted before, as for 
 instance in the thirteenth century with its well-known story of 
 the three impostors ; anything like a scientific study of them 
 has been impossible till now. For now for the fh^st time we 
 are beginning to have the facts before us ; the facts consisting 
 in the original documents of the various historic creeds, and 
 accumulated observations on the religious ideas of uncivilized 
 races. In both these fields very much remains to be done ; 
 but still there is enough done already to j ustify a few general- 
 izations. But the subject is intensely complex, and there has 
 been far too great a tendency, as in all new sciences, to rush 
 to premature conclusions. For example, there is the shallow 
 scepticism which seizes upon facts, like the many parallelisms 
 between the moral precepts of earlier religions and the sermon 
 on the Mount, as a convincing proof that Christianity contains 
 nothing that is new. No serious student of comparative 
 religions would justify such an inference; but it is a very 
 common and mischievous fallacy in the half-culture of the 
 day. Then there is the rash orthodox}^, that is over eager to 
 
V. The Incarnation and Development. 203 
 
 accept any result that tallies with its own preconceived 
 opinions as, for instance, the belief in a primitive monotheism. 
 No doubt several very competent authorities think that the 
 present evidence points in that direction. But a majority of 
 critics equally competent think otherwise. And meanwhile, 
 there is a mass of evidence still waiting collection and inter- 
 pretation, which may one day throw further light upon the 
 point. Under such circumstances, therefore, it is as impolitic 
 as it is unscientific to identify Christian apology with a 
 position which may one day prove untenable. Attention has 
 already been called to a similar imprudence in connection 
 with Eiogenesis, and the history of past apology is full of 
 warnings against such conduct. Then, again, there is the 
 converse view which is often as glibly stated as if it were al- 
 ready a scientific truism ; the view that religion was evolved 
 out of non-religious elements, such as the appearance of dead 
 ancestors in dreams. This rests, to begin with, on the sup- 
 position that the opinions of uncivilized man, as we now find 
 him, are the nearest to those of man in his primitive 
 condition ; which, considering that degradation is a re- 
 cognised factor in history, and that degradation acts more 
 powerfully in religion than in any other region, is a very 
 considerable assumption. But even granting this, the psy- 
 chological possibility of the process in question, as well as 
 the lapse of time sufficient for its operation, are both as yet 
 unproved. It is an hypothetical process, happening in 
 an hypothetical period ; but, logically considered, nothing 
 more. 
 
 All this should make us cautious in approaching the com- 
 parative study of religions. Still, even in its present stage, it 
 has reached some general results. In the fii'st place, the 
 universality of religion is established as an empirical fact. 
 Man, with a few insignificant exceptions which may fairly 
 be put down to degradation, within the limits of our observa- 
 tion, is everywhere religious. The notion that religion was 
 an invention of interested priestcraft has vanished, like many 
 other eighteenth century fictions, before nineteenth century 
 science. Even in the savage races, where priestcraft is most 
 
204 ^^^^ Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 conspicuous, the priest has never created the religion, but al- 
 ways the religion the priest. Beyond this fact it is unsafe to 
 dogmatize. There is abundant evidence of early nature-wor- 
 ship in very various forms, but whether this was the degraded 
 offspring of purer conceptions, or as is more generally supposed 
 the primitive parent from which those conceptions sprang, is 
 still an open question. The universality of the fact is all 
 that is certain. 
 
 Again, there is a progressive tendency observable in the 
 religions of the world ; but the progress is of a particular kind, 
 and largely counteracted by degeneracy. Individuals elevate, 
 masses degrade religion. There is no progress by insensible 
 modifications ; no improvement of a religion in committee. 
 Councils like those of Asoka or Chosroes can only sift and 
 popularise and publish what it needed a Buddha or Zara- 
 thustra to create. And so religion is handed on, from one 
 great teacher to another, never rising above the level of its 
 founder or last reformer, till another founder or reformer 
 comes ; while in the interval it is materialized, vulgarized, 
 degraded. 
 
 And from the nature of this progress, as the work of great 
 individuals, another consequence has historically followed ; viz. 
 that all the pre-Christian religions have been partial, have 
 emphasized, that is to say, unduly if not exclusively one re- 
 quirement or another of the religious consciousness, but never 
 its complex whole. For the individual teacher, however great, 
 cannot proclaim with prophetic intensity more than one aspect 
 of a truth ; and his followers invariably tend to isolate and 
 exaggerate this aspect, while any who attempt to supply its 
 complement are regarded with suspicion. Hence the parties 
 and sects and heresies of which religious history is full. The 
 simplest illustration of this is the fundamental distinction 
 between Theism and Pantheism, or the transcendence and 
 immanence of God ; the one often said to be a Semitic, the 
 other an Aryan tendency of thought. But however this may 
 be, both these principles must be represented in any system 
 which would really satisfy the whole of our religious instincts ; 
 while, as a matter of fact, they were separated by all the pre- 
 
V. The Incarnation and Development. 205 
 
 Christian religions, and are separated by Mahometanism and 
 Buddhism, the only two religious systems which compete with 
 Christianity to-day. 
 
 These, then, are a few broad results of our comparative survey 
 of religions. That rehgion, however humble the mode of its 
 first appearing, is yet universal to man. That it progresses 
 through the agency of the great individual, the unique person- 
 ality, the spiritual genius ; while popular influence is a counter- 
 agent and makes for its decay. That its various develop- 
 ments have all been partial, and therefore needed completion, 
 if the cravings of the human spirit were ever to be set at rest. 
 
 And all this is in perfect harmony with our Christian 
 belief in a God Who, from the day of man's first appearance 
 in the dim twilight of the world, left not Himself without 
 witness in sun and moon, and rain and storm-cloud, and the 
 courses of the stars, and the promptings of conscience, and the 
 love of kin : and Who the while was lighting every man that 
 Cometh into the world, the primaeval hunter, the shepherd 
 chieftain, the poets of the Vedas and the Gathas, the Chaldaean 
 astronomer, the Egyptian priest, each, at least in a measure, 
 to spell that witness out aright ; ever and anon when a heart 
 was ready revealing Himself with greater clearness, to one or 
 another chosen spirit, and by their means to other men ; till 
 at length, in the fulness of time, when Jews were yearning 
 for one in whom righteousness should triumph visibly ; and 
 Greeks sighing over the divorce between truth and power, 
 and wondering whether the wise man ever would indeed be 
 king; and artists and ascetics wandering equally astray, in 
 vain attempt to solve the problem of the spirit and the flesh ; 
 ' the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace 
 and truth.' The pre-Christian religions were the age-long 
 prayer. The Incarnation was the answer. Nor are we tied 
 to any particular view of the prehistoric stages of this develop- 
 ment. We only postulate that whenever and however man 
 became truly man, he was from that moment religious, or 
 capable of religion ; and this postulate deals with the region 
 that lies beyond the reach of science, though all scientific 
 observation is, as we have seen, directly in its favour. 
 
2o6 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 In short, the history of the pre-Christian religion is like 
 that of pre-Christian philosophy, a long preparation for the 
 Gospel. We are familiar enough with this thought in its 
 Jewish application from the teaching of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews. But it seems to be often forgotten that the princi- 
 ples laid down in that Epistle admit of no limitation to any 
 single race of men. They are naturally illustrated from 
 Hebrew history in a writing addressed to Hebrews. But 
 their scope is universal. They compel their own application 
 to every religious history, which the growth of our knowledge 
 brings to light. And from this point of view the many pagan 
 adumbrations of Christian doctrine, similarities of practice, 
 coincidences of ritual, analogies of phrase and symbol, fall 
 naturally into place. The fathers and early missionaries 
 were often perplexed by these phenomena, and did not 
 scruple to attribute them to diabolic imitation. And even 
 in the present day they are capable of disturbing timid 
 minds, when unexpectedly presented before them. But all 
 this is unphilosophical, for in the light of evolution the 
 occurrence of such analogies is a thing to be expected ; while 
 to the eye of faith they do but emphasize the claim of 
 Christianity to be universal, by shewing that it contains 
 in spiritual summary the religious thoughts and practices and 
 ways of prayer and worship, not of one people only, but of all 
 the races of men. 
 
 ' In the whole of our Christian faith,' says Thomassin, ' there 
 is nothing which does not in the highest degree harmonize 
 with that natural philosophy which Wisdom, who made all 
 things, infused into every created mind, and wrote upon the 
 very marrow of the reason ; so that, however obscured by the 
 foul pleasures of the senses, it never can be wholly done 
 away. It was this hidden and intimate love of the human 
 mind, however marred, for the incorruptible truth, which 
 won the whole world over to the gospel of Christ, when once 
 that Gospel was proclaimed^.' 
 
 But when all this has been said, there is a lingering sus- 
 picion in many minds, that even if the details of the doctrine 
 
 ^ Thomassin, Incarn. i. 15. 
 
V. The Incarnation and Development. 207 
 
 of development are not inconsistent with Christianity, its 
 whole drift is incompatible with any system of opinion which 
 claims to possess finality. And if Christianity were only a 
 system of opinion, the objection might be plausible enough. 
 But its claim to possess finality rests upon its further claim 
 to be much more than a system of opinion. The doctrine of 
 development or evolution, we must remember, is not a doc- 
 trine of limitless change, like the old Greek notion of per- 
 petual flux. Species once developed are seen to be persistent, 
 in proportion to their versatility, their power, i. e. of adapting 
 themselves to the changes of the world around them. And 
 because man, through his mental capacity, possesses this 
 power to an almost unlimited extent, the human species is 
 Anrtually permanent. Now in scientific language, the In- 
 carnation may be said to have introduced a new species into 
 the world — a Divine man transcending past humanity, as 
 humanity transcended the rest of the animal creation, and 
 communicating His vital energy by a spiritual process to 
 subsequent generations of men. And thus viewed, there is 
 nothing unreasonable in the claim of Christianity to be at 
 least as permanent as the race which it has raised to a higher 
 power, and endued with a novel strength. 
 
 III. But in saying this we touch new ground. As long as 
 we confine ourselves to speaking of the Eternal Word as ope- 
 rating in the mysterious region which lies behind phenomena, 
 we are safe it may be said from refutation, because we are 
 dealing with the unknown. But when we go on to assert 
 that He has flashed through our atmosphere, and been seen 
 of men, scintillating signs and wonders in His path, we are 
 at once open to critical attack. And this brings us to the 
 real point at issue between Christianity and its modern 
 opponents. It is not the substantive body of our knowledge, 
 but the critical faculty which has been shaA'pened in its ac- 
 quisition that really comes in conflict with our creed. As- 
 suming Christianity to be true, there is, as we have seen, 
 nothing in it inconsistent with any ascertained scientific fact. 
 But what is called the negative criticism assumes that it can- 
 not be true, because the miraculous element in it contradicts 
 
2o8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 experience. Still criticism is a very different thing from 
 science, a subjective thing into which imagination and per- 
 sonal idiosyncrasy enter largely, and which needs therefore 
 in its turn to be rigorously criticised. And the statement 
 that Christianity contradicts experience suggests two re- 
 flections, in limine. 
 
 In the first place the origin of all things is mysterious, 
 the origin of matter, the origin of energy, the origin of 
 life, the origin of thought. And present experience is no 
 criterion of any of these things. What were their birth 
 throes, what were their accompanying signs and wonders, 
 when the morning stars sang together in the dawn of their 
 appearing, we do not and cannot know. If therefore the 
 Incarnation was, as Christians believe, another instance of a 
 new beginning, present experience will neither enable us to 
 assert or deny, what its attendant circumstances may or ma}" 
 not have been. The logical impossibility of proving a nega- 
 tive is proverbial. And on a subject, whose conditions are 
 unknown to us, the very attempt becomes ridiculous. And 
 secondly, it is a mistake to suppose that as a matter of strict 
 evidence, the Christian Church has ever rested its claims 
 upon its miracles. A confirmatory factor indeed, in a compli- 
 cation of converging arguments, they have been, and still are 
 to many minds. But to others, who in the present day are 
 probably the larger class, it is not so easy to believe Chris- 
 tianity on account of miracles, as miracles on account of 
 Christianity. For now, as ever, the real burden of the proof 
 of Christianity is to be sought in our present experience. 
 
 There is a fact of experience as old as history, as widely 
 spread as is the human race, and more intensely, irresistibly, 
 importunately real than all the gathered experience of art 
 and policy and science, — the fact which philosophers call 
 moral evil, and Christians sin. It rests upon no questionable 
 interpretation of an Eastern allegory. We breathe it, we 
 feel it, we commit it, we see its havoc all around us. It is no 
 dogma, but a sad, solemn, inevitable fact. The animal 
 creation has a law of its being, a condition of its perfection, 
 which it instinctively and invariably pursues. Man has a 
 
V. The Incarnation and Development. 209 
 
 law of his being, a condition of his perfection, which he 
 instinctively tends to disobey. And what he does to-day, 
 he has been doing from the first record of his existence. 
 
 Video meliora proboque, 
 Deteriora sequor. 
 
 Philosophers have from time to time attempted to explain 
 this dark experience away, and here and there men of happy 
 temperament, living among calm surroundings, have been 
 comparatively unconscious of the evil in the world. But the 
 common conscience is alike unaffected by the ingenuity of 
 the one class, or the apathy of the other ; while it thrills to 
 the voices of men like S. Paul or S. Augustine, Dante or John 
 Bunyan, Loyola or Luther ; recognising in their sighs and 
 tears and lamentations, the echo of its own unutterable 
 sorrow made articulate. Nor is sin confined to one depart- 
 ment of our being. It poisons the very springs of life, and 
 taints its every action. It corrupts art ; it hampers science ; 
 it paralyses the efforts of the politician and the patriot ; and 
 diseased bodies, and broken hearts, and mental and spiritual 
 agony, are amongst its daily, its hourly results. It would 
 seem indeed superfluous to insist upon these things, if their 
 importance were not so often ignored in the course of anti- 
 Christian argument. But when we are met by an appeal to 
 experience, it is necessary to insist that no element of ex- 
 perience be left out. 
 
 And moral evil, independently of any theory of its nature 
 or its origin, is a plain palpable fact, and a fact of such stu- 
 pendous magnitude as to constitute by far the most serious 
 problem of our life. 
 
 Now it is also a fact of present experience that there are 
 scattered throughout Christendom, men of every age, tem- 
 perament, character, and antecedents, for whom this problem 
 is practically solved : men who have a personal conviction 
 that their own past sins are done away with, and the whole 
 grasp of evil upon them loosened, and who in consequence 
 rise to heights of character and conduct, which they know 
 that they would never have otherwise attained. And all this 
 they agree to attribute, in however varying phrases, to the 
 P 
 
2IO The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 personal influence upon them of Jesus Christ, Further, these 
 men had a spiritual ancestry. Others in the last generation 
 believed and felt, and acted as they now act and feel and 
 beheve. And so their lineage can be traced backward, age 
 by age, swelling into a great multitude whom no man can 
 number, till we come to the historic records of Him whom 
 they all look back to, and find that He claimed the power on 
 earth to forgive sins. And there the phenomenon ceases. 
 Pre-Christian antiquity contains nothing analogous to it. 
 Consciousness of sin, and prayers for pardon, and purgatorial 
 penances, and sacrifices, and incantations, and magic formulae 
 are there in abundance ; and hopes, among certain races, of 
 the coming of a great deliverer. But never the same sense of 
 sin forgiven, nor the consequent rebound of the enfranchised 
 soul. \Qt neither a code of morality which was not essen- 
 tially new, nor the example of a life receding with every age 
 into a dimmer past, would have been adequate to produce this 
 result. It has all the appearance of being, what it historically 
 has claimed to be, the entrance of an essentially new life into 
 the world, quickening its palsied energies, as with an electric 
 touch. And the more we realize in the bitterness of our own 
 experience, or that of others, the essential malignity of moral 
 evil, the more strictly supernatural does this energy appear. 
 When, therefore, we are told that miracles contradict expe- 
 rience, we point to the daily occurrence of this spiiitual 
 miracle and ask ' whether is it easier to say thy sins be forgiven 
 thee, or to say arise and walk ? ' We meet experience with 
 experience, the negative experience that miracles have not 
 happened with the positive experience that they are hap- 
 pening now : an old argument, which so far from weakening, 
 modern science has immensely strengthened, by its insistence 
 on the intimate union between material and spiritual things. 
 For spirit and matter, as we call them, are now known to in- 
 termingle, and blend, and fringe off", and fade into each other, 
 in a way that daily justifies us more in our belief that 
 the possessor of the key to one must be the possessor of the 
 key to both, and that He who can save the soul can raise the 
 dead. 
 
V. The Incarnation and Development. 211 
 
 Here then is our answer to the negative criticism, or rather 
 to the negative hypothesis, by which many critics are misled. 
 Of course we do not expect for it unanimous assent. It is 
 founded on a specific experience ; and strangers to that ex- 
 perience are naturally unable to appreciate its force. But 
 neither should they claim to judge it. For the critic of an 
 experience must be its expert. And the accumulated verdict 
 of the spiritual experts of all ages, should at least meet with 
 grave respect from the very men who are most familiar with 
 the importance of the maxim, ' Cuique in sua arte credendum.' 
 Christianity distinctly declines to be proved first, and 
 practised afterwards. Its practice and its proof go hand in 
 hand. And its real evidence is its power. 
 
 We now see why the Atonement has often assumed such 
 exclusive prominence in the minds of Christian men. They 
 have felt that it was the secret of their own regenerate life, 
 their best intellectual apology, their most attractive mission- 
 ary appeal ; and so have come to think that the other aspects 
 of the Incarnation might be banished from the pulpit and the 
 market-place, to the seclusion of the schools. But this has 
 proved to be a fatal mistake. Truth cannot be mutilated with 
 impunity. And this gradual substitution of a detached doc- 
 trine for a catholic creed, has led directly to the charge which 
 is now so common, that Christianity is inadequate to life ; 
 with no message to ordinary men, in their ordinary moments, 
 no bearing upon the aims, occupations, interests, enthusiasms, 
 amusements, which are human nature^s daily food. 
 
 But we have already seen what a misconception this im- 
 plies of the Incarnation. The Incarnation opened heaven, for 
 it was the revelation of the Word ; but it also reconsecrated 
 earth, for the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us. 
 And it is impossible to read history without feeling how pro- 
 foundly the religion of the Incarnation has been a religion 
 of humanity. The human body itself, which heathendom 
 had so degraded, that noble minds could only view it as the 
 enemy and prison of the soul, acquired a new meaning, ex- 
 hibited new graces, shone with a new lustre in the light of 
 the Word made Flesh; and thence, in widening circles, the 
 
 P % 
 
212 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 family, society, the state, felt in their turn the impulse of the 
 Christian spirit, with its 
 
 touches of things common, 
 Till they rose to touch the spheres. 
 
 Literature revived ; art flamed into fuller life ; even science 
 in its early days owed more than men often think, to the 
 Christian temper and the Christian reverence for things once 
 called common or unclean. While the optimism, the belief in 
 the future, the atmosphere of hopefulness, which has made 
 our progress and achievements possible, and which, when all 
 counter currents have been allowed for, so deeply differentiates 
 the modern from the ancient world, dates, as a fact of history, 
 from those buoyant days of the early church, when the creed 
 of suicide was vanquished before the creed of martyrdom, 
 Seneca before S. Paul. It is true that secular civilization has 
 co-operated with Christianity to produce the modern world. 
 But secular civilization is, as we have seen, in the Christian 
 view, nothing less than the providential correlative and 
 counterpart of the Incarnation. For the Word did not desert 
 the rest of His creation to become Incarnate. Natural religion, 
 and natural morality, and the natural play of intellect have 
 their function in the Christian as they had in the pre-Christian 
 ages ; and are still kindled by the light that lighteth every 
 man coming into the world. And hence it is that secular 
 thought has so often corrected and counteracted the evil of a 
 Christianity grown professional, and false, and foul. 
 
 Still, when all allowance for other influence has been made ; 
 and all the ill done in its name admitted to the full ; Chris- 
 tianity remains, the only power which has regenerated 
 personal life, and that beyond the circle even of its professed 
 adherents, the light of it far outshining the lamp which has 
 held its flame. And personal life is after all the battle-ground, 
 on which the progress of the race must be decided. Nor ever 
 indeed should this be more apparent than in the present day. 
 For materialism, that old enemy alike of the Christian and the 
 human cause, has passed from the study to the street. No one 
 indeed may regret this more than the high-souled scientific 
 
V. The Incarnation and Development. 213 
 
 thinker, whose life belies the inevitable consequences of his 
 creed. But the ruthless logic of human passion is drawing 
 those consequences fiercely ; and the luxury of the rich, and 
 the communistic cry of the poor, and the desecration of 
 marriage, and the disintegration of society, and selfishness in 
 policy, and earthliness in art, are plausibly pleading science in 
 their favour. And with all this Christianity claims, as of old, 
 to cope, because it is the religion of the Incarnation. For the 
 real strength of materialism lies in the justice which it does to 
 the material side of nature — the loveliness of earth and sea 
 and sky and sun and star ; the wonder of the mechanism which 
 controls alike the rushing comet and the falling leaf ; the human 
 body crowning both, at once earth's fairest flower and most 
 marvellous machine. And Christianity is the only religion 
 which does equal justice to this truth, while precluding its 
 illegitimate perversion. It includes the truth, by the essential 
 importance which it assigns to the human body, and therefore 
 to the whole material order, with which that body is so 
 intimately one ; while it excludes its perversion, by shewing 
 the cause of that importance to lie in its connection, communion, 
 union with the spirit, and consequent capacity for endless 
 degrees of glory. 
 
 And though its own fii'st vocation is to seek and save souls 
 one by one, it consecrates in passing every field of thought and 
 action, wherein the quickened energies of souls may find their 
 scope. It welcomes the discoveries of science, as ultimately 
 due to Divine revelation, and part of the providential educa- 
 tion of the world. It recalls to art the days when, in catacomb 
 and cloister, she learned her noblest mission to be the service 
 of the Word made Flesh, It appeals to democracy as the 
 religion of the fishermen who gathered round the carpenter's 
 Son, It points the social reformer to the pattern of a perfect 
 man, laying down His life alike for enemy and friend. While 
 it crowns all earthly aims with a hope full of immortality, as 
 prophetic of eternal occupations otherwhere. And however 
 many a new meaning may yet be found in the Incarnation, 
 however many a misconception of it fade before fuller light ; 
 we can conceive no phase of progress which has not the 
 
214 ^'^^ Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 Incarnation for its guiding star ; no age which cannot make 
 the prayer of the fifth century its own — 
 
 ' O God of unchangeable power and eternal light, look 
 favourably on Thy whole Church, that wonderful and sacred 
 mystery ; and by the tranquil operation of Thy perpetual 
 Providence, carry out the work of man's salvation ; and let 
 the whole world feel and see that things which were cast down 
 are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being 
 made new, and all things are returning to perfection through 
 Him, from whom they took their origin, even through our 
 Lord Jesus Christ ^.' 
 
 ^ Gelasian, quoted by Bright, Andmt Collects, p. 98. 
 
VL 
 
 THE INCARNATION AS THE 
 BASIS OF DOGMA. 
 
 R. C. MOBEELY. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE INCABNATION AS THE BASIS OF 
 DOGMA. 
 
 I. Many years ago, in undergraduate days, I was speaking 
 once to a friend of my hope of beginning some little acquaint- 
 ance with Theology. I well remember the air of nicely 
 mingled civility and contemptuousness, with which my friend, 
 Avishing to sympathize, at once drew a distinction for me 
 between speculative and dogmatic Theology, and assumed that 
 I could not mean that the mere study of dogmatic Theology 
 could have any sort of attractiveness, I do not think that I 
 accepted his kindly overture ; but it certainly made me 
 consider more than once afterwards, whether the ' mere study 
 of dogmatic Theology' could after all be so slavish and pro- 
 fitless an employment as had been implied. On the whole, 
 however, I settled with myself that his condemnation, however 
 obviously candid and even impressive, must nevertheless re- 
 main, so far as I was concerned, a surprise and an enigma. 
 For what, after all, did the study of dogmatic Theology mean, 
 but the study of those truths which the mind of Christ's 
 Church upon earth has believed to be at once the most certain 
 and the most important truths of man's history, nature and 
 destiny, in this world and for ever ? 
 
 It is impossible, however, not to feel that my friend, in his 
 objection, represented what was, and is, a very widespread 
 instinct against the study of dogma. Some think, for instance, 
 that to practical men exactnesses of doctrinal statement, even 
 if true, are immaterial. Others think that any exactness of 
 doctrinal statement is convicted, by its mere exactness, of 
 untruth ; for that knowledge about things unseen can only 
 
2i8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 be indefinite in character. If, indeed, religious knowledge is 
 a process of evolution simply, if it means only a gradual 
 development towards ever-increasing definiteness of religious 
 supposition, then no doubt its exactness may be the condem- 
 nation of dogma. But then, no doubt, to make room for 
 such a view, the whole fact of historical Christianity must 
 be first displaced. 
 
 Is it put as an impossibility, that there cannot be any 
 definite or certain Theology ? Can there, then, be a Revelation "? 
 Can there be an Incarnation ? Those only are consistent, who 
 assert that all three are impossible, and who understand that 
 in so doing they are limiting the possibilities, and therefore 
 pro tanto questioning the reality of a Personal God. But if 
 there be a Pei'sonal God, what are the adequate grounds on 
 which it is nevertheless laid down that He cannot directly 
 reveal Himself? Or, if He can reveal Himself, on what 
 ground can the a priori assertion rest, that theological truth 
 must be uncertain or indefinite 1 The Christian Church claims 
 to have both definite and certain knowledge. These claims 
 can never be met by any a p)Tiori judgment that such know- 
 ledge is impossible. Such a judgment is too slenderly based 
 to bear the weight of argument. To argue from it would 
 be to commit the very fault so often imputed to the dogmatist. 
 It would be a flagrant instance of dogmatic assertion (and that 
 for the most important of argumentative purposes) of what 
 we could not possibly know. 
 
 The claim of the Church to knowledge through the Incar- 
 nation can only be rationally met, and only really answered, 
 when the claim itself, and its evidence, are seriously examined. 
 Herein lies, and will always lie, the heart of the struggle for 
 or against the dogmatic character of the Church. Anything 
 else is only the fringe of the matter. Any rebutting of a 
 priori presumptions against dogma is a mere clearing of the 
 way for battle. Thus it is said, perhaps, that the objection is 
 to the degree of definiteness, or to the tone of authority. It 
 is fancied that dogma in its very nature, quite apart from its 
 contents, is a curtailment of the rights, and a limitation of the 
 powers, of mind. Is dogma, the most definite and authori- 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 1 1 9 
 
 tative, fettering to the freedom of intellect ? We can see in a 
 moment the entire unreality of the objection, by simply 
 substituting for it another question. Is truth fettering to 
 intellect % Does the utmost certitude of truth limit freedom of 
 mind? Because, if not, dogma, so far as it coincides with 
 truth, cannot fetter either. If perfect knowledge of truth 
 could paralyse the intellect, what (it is worth while to ask) 
 do we mean by intellect ? Do we mean something which 
 must for ever be struggling with difficulties which it cannot 
 overcome ? Is it necessary for the idea of mind that it should 
 be baffled % Is it a creature only of the tangle and the fog 1 
 And if ever the day should come, when after struggling, more 
 or less ineffectually, with the tangle and the fog, man should 
 emerge at last in clear sunshine upon the mountain top, will 
 mind cease to have any faculty or place, because the know- 
 ledge of truth has come % At least, if we understand this to 
 be the conception of mind, it need not frighten us quite so 
 much as it did, to be told that dogma interferes with mind. 
 But if, however different from our experience the employment 
 of mind would be in the presence of perfect knowledge, we 
 cannot so conceive of mind as to admit that truth could 
 possibly be its enemy or its destruction, then we may cer- 
 tainly insist that no amount of dogma, so far as it is true, 
 can limit or fetter the freedom of intellect. But then we are 
 at once thrown back upon the question ; is the dogmatic 
 teaching of the Church true % No statement which absolutely 
 coincides with truth can hurt the freedom of mind. But 
 mistaken presumption of truth can, and does, limit it ; and 
 so does authority, if it prevents the examination of truth. 
 Dogma, then, is, as dogma, a wrong to mind, just so far as it 
 can be convicted of either of these things ; so far as it forbids 
 examination, or so far as it asserts what is not strictly true. 
 
 As to the first of these two suggestions against dogma, it is 
 quite enough simply to deny it. The Church, as a teacher of 
 dogmatic truth, does not forbid the freest and completest 
 inquiry into the truths which she enunciates. The question 
 is not whether dogmatic theologians have ever dreaded in- 
 quiry into truth ; but whether the dogmatic Church, as such, 
 
2 20 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 precludes or forbids it. True, she enunciates some truths as 
 true ; and holds those, in different measures, unwise and 
 wrong, who contradict her truths. But she does not. therefore, 
 forbid the fullest exercise of intellect upon them ; nor tremble 
 lest intellect, rightly wielded, should contradict them. Indeed 
 for eighteen centuries she has been engaged, and will be 
 engaged to the end, in examining with a power and discipline 
 of intellect, which »he alone ever has, or could have, evoked, 
 into the meaning and exactness of her own knowledge. But 
 she does warn inquirers that successful inquiry into her truths 
 is no work of merely ingenious disputation, but needs the 
 exactest discipline and balance of all the faculties of our 
 human nature. 
 
 We return, then, to the second suggestion ; and I repeat 
 that the question has for us become, not whether dogma in 
 the abstract is desirable or undesirable, but whether the 
 dogmas of the Christian Church are true or not true. Dogma 
 that is true can only be undesirable in so far as truth is un- 
 desirable. 
 
 Whether the dogmas of the Church are true or not true, is 
 itself a question of evidence. 
 
 Before, however, making any remark upon the nature of 
 this evidence in the case of religion, we may remember that 
 the possession of dogma is in no way peculiar to religion. 
 There is no region of research or knowledge which does not 
 present to the student its own ' dogmata,' or truths ascertained 
 and agreed upon ; nor does any one, in the name of freedom of 
 intellect, persist in treating these always as open questions. 
 
 But perhaps if we venture thus to claim the ascertained 
 truths of any science as dogmas, the scientific answer will be 
 ready. They differ, it will be felt, from the nature of religious 
 dogmas, in two important respects. The first difference is, 
 that they are offered for acceptance with their full proofs, from 
 the first moment that they are offered at all. The student 
 could not, it may be, have discovered for himself the law of 
 gravitation, or the circulation of the blood ; but he can, when 
 these discoveries are once set before him by another, see forth- 
 with not only the coherency of the principles, but the cogency 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 221 
 
 of their proof. The second difference is, that when they have 
 been accepted by the student, proof and all, they still claim 
 no allegiance beyond what his intelligence cannot but freely 
 give ; he is still free to supersede or upset them, if he can. 
 He accepts them indeed provisionally, as identical with the 
 truth so far as the truth on the subject is yet known ; yet not 
 necessarily as final truth. He accepts them as truths which 
 all his further study will comment upon ; presumably indeed 
 in the way of continual illustration and corroboration, — so 
 that what he accepts for study will be more and more cer- 
 tainly proved by the study — but also, if you please, in the 
 way of correction ; for if his study can supersede, or even 
 in any measure correct or alter them, — why, so much the 
 better both for science and for him ! Why should not this be 
 equally true of Theology? Why should religious dogmas be 
 received without these conditions, as certainly and finally 
 true "? 
 
 To begin with, then, some exception may be taken to the 
 statement that the student who accepts a scientific doctrine, 
 has the full evidence before him from the beginning. That it 
 is not altogether so is evident from the simple consideration, 
 just mentioned, that his work is a progressive one; and that 
 the whole course of his experience tends, and will tend, to 
 deepen the certainty of his first principles. But in so far as 
 the proof of any leading principle is being deepened and 
 strengthened by the student's daily work, so far it is clear 
 that the amount of certainty about his principles with which 
 at first he began, must be less than that with which he ends 
 at last ; and therefore that the proof presented to him at the 
 beginning, however much it may have been adequate to the 
 purpose, (even though it may have been the completest proof 
 capable of being presented in the way of exposition from the 
 lip to the ear) was nevertheless most incomplete in comparison 
 with the fulness of attainable proof. And further, it may 
 certainly be said also, that in the convincingness of this 
 evidence as at first presented, authority, whether more or 
 less, had an undoubted part. At the very least it had a 
 negative place, as a guarantee to the young mind rejoicing 
 
22 2 The Religion of tJie Incarnatio7i. 
 
 in the ingenuity of the apparent demonstration, that the 
 apparent demonstration was not vitiated by some unseen 
 fallacy, or that there was not a series of other consider- 
 ations behind, which would rob the lesson just learnt 
 of its practical usefulness. Often, indeed, the degree of 
 authority in the fii'st scientific convictions would be very 
 much higher. Often, however helpful the arguments or 
 illustrations of a principle may seem, the really overruling 
 consideration will at first be this, that the whole scientific 
 world has absolutely accepted the principle as truth. So much 
 is this the case, that if an average student should find himself 
 unable in any point to receive the ascertained truths of his 
 science with intelligent agreement, he would not hesitate to 
 assume that the whole fault lay with himself; he would really 
 be convinced in his soul that the dicta of his scientific teachers 
 were right, and that he himself would see the certainty of 
 them by and by. 
 
 Now in both these two respects the acceptance of religious 
 dogma is not essentially in contrast, but rather is parallel, with 
 that of scientific principles. For religious truth is neither in 
 its first acceptance a mere matter of blind submission to 
 authority, nor is it stagnant and unprogressive after it is 
 accepted. However difierent in other ways the leading truths 
 of the Creed may be from scientific principles ; in this respect 
 at least they are not different, — that not one of them is ever 
 brought for the acceptance of men without some really in- 
 telligent evidence and ground for acceptance. If any man is 
 asked to accept them, without any intelligent ground for the 
 acceptance, we may be bold perhaps to assert that it would be 
 his duty to refuse. Of course, however, authority will itself 
 be a large part of his intelligent ground ; a larger part or a 
 smaller according to circumstances. But then there is no 
 proper antithesis between believing in deference to authority, 
 and believing in deference to reason, unless it is understood 
 that the authority believed in was accepted at first as authority 
 w'itliout reason, or maintained in spite of the subsequent re- 
 fusal of reason to give confirmatory witness to its assertions. 
 Even in the cases in which there seems to be least use of 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 223 
 
 reason, the case of a young child learning at his mother's knee, 
 or of a man whose spiiit has suffered and been broken, and 
 who gives himself up at last to the mere guidance of a friend 
 or a teacher, the authority, when accepted at all, is accepted 
 on grounds essentially reasonable. The child's reasoning may 
 differ in quality from the prodigal's ; but the child trusts 
 father or mother on grounds which are wholly, if uncon- 
 sciously, a product of the strictest reason ; and the prodigal 
 has felt in his inmost soul alike the deadness of his own 
 spiritual being, and the power and the beauty which are in 
 the life of the teacher upon whom he throws himself. And 
 this is not the only point ; for the reasonable mind in one is 
 not a thing different in nature from the reasonable mind in 
 another, or from the eternal reason which is in God. The 
 truths, therefore, which we are taught about God, and man, 
 and Christ, about sin, and redemption from sin, and the heaven 
 of holiness, and which seem to be accepted as a mere act of 
 not unreasonable dutifulness, do reasonably withal commend 
 themselves, in some shape or measure, even to the callow 
 mind from its earliest immaturity. There is that in the very 
 consciousness of child, or of criminal, with which they are in 
 essential harmony. That in him with which they are in 
 essential correspondence bears witness of them. Nor is any- 
 one, in his acceptance of them, wholly insensible of this 
 witness to their truth, which is, in fact, engraven upon his 
 own conscious being. 
 
 To ' take religion on trust,' then, as it is sometimes de- 
 risively called, is not really to act in defiance of, or apart from, 
 reason. It is an exercise of reason up to a certain point, — ■ 
 just so, and so far as, the experience of the person warrants. 
 He sees what to trust, and why. He sees where understanding 
 and experience which transcend his own would point. And 
 he seeks for the rational test of further experience in the only 
 way in which it can be had. He defers to the voice of ex- 
 perience, in faith that his own experience will by and by 
 prove its truthfulness. On a medical question, men would 
 not dispute, they would loudly proclaim, the reasonableness 
 and wisdom of such a course. Yet there are those who sup- 
 
2 24 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 pose that the truths of religion are to admit of a complete 
 preliminary intellectual verification, a verification apart from 
 special training and experience, such as they might more 
 reasonably expect in any other subject-matter than religion, 
 but such as, in fact, they hardly expect elsewhere. 
 
 The doctrines of the Church, then, accepted at first on 
 reasonable evidence, which in a greater or less degree, but per- 
 haps never wholly, consists in authority reasonably accepted as 
 authority, are then in all the experience of spiritual life re- 
 ceiving continual comment, explanation, corroboration. The 
 whole experience of Christian life must be a growth in the 
 apprehension and certainty of Christian truth. A Christian 
 neophyte may believe every word of his Creed, and believe 
 neither ignorantly nor unintelligently. But the veteran 
 Christian of four-score will transcend the child at least as 
 much in the degree of certainty, with which the doctrines of 
 the Church are to his entire faculties mental, moral, and 
 spiritual, proved and known to be true, as he can possibly do 
 in his merely intellectual apprehension of the history or 
 meaning of the words. We may say, indeed, that the life of a 
 professing Christian which is not a life of growth in the ap- 
 prehension of doctrinal truth, must necessarily be a retro- 
 gression ; just as the life of so-called scientific study, which is 
 not continually illuminating afresh, and deepening the cer- 
 tainty of its own scientific principles, must gradually come to 
 hold even its own scientific princij^les less and less certainly, 
 and to mean by them less and less. 
 
 But even if it may be shewn that there is not quite so 
 essential a contrast as there seemed to be, between the charac- 
 ter of theological and scientific dogmas, by reason of the proofs 
 which are offered, along with his principles, to the student of 
 any science ; yet still it will be felt that they differ essentially 
 in the tone and manner with which they respectively speak to 
 intellect. The truths of the one claim at once to possess an 
 intellectual finality, and to command a moral allegiance, which 
 the truths of the other do not. 
 
 It may be worth while to say in reply, first of all, that there 
 cannot be a real contrast of finality between them, so far as 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 225 
 
 they are both really true. What is really true is really true. 
 Neither ' absolutely,' ' finally,' nor any other adverb in the 
 language will make the statement a stronger one. What we 
 call scientific truths are not in fact liable to correction, except 
 in so far as they may perhaps, after all, not be quite scientific 
 truths, except (that is) in respect of such admixture of 
 erroneous supposition, as still has clung to them after general 
 acceptance. And on the other hand, so far as any mistaken 
 assumptions are mixed up with our apprehension of religious 
 truths, so far these too are liable to receive, and in the history 
 of Church doctrine are continually receiving, correction. It 
 is, after all, a truism. In either sphere the truths, so far as 
 they really are truths, are true absolutely : but are corrigible 
 in so far as our statement of them still contains anything that 
 is other than truth. W^e may put it, perhaps, in another way 
 still. If, to assume an impossible hypothesis, any one could 
 really prove, not merely that there were some exaggerations 
 or misconceptions in the traditional mode of statement of some 
 doctrinal truths, but that our really essential Faith was wrong, 
 we may grant hypothetically (seeing that truth is supreme) 
 that he would do us all a mighty service, at however tre- 
 mendous a cost. Similarly of course it must be owned, that 
 if any one could prove the earth to be flat and stationary, and 
 the law of gravitation to be the precise contradictory of truth, 
 he would do immense service to science. But none the less, 
 the scientific certainty on these points is so complete, that if 
 anyone seriously assailed them, it would be felt that he 
 could only be dealing with the evidence in a way which 
 tended to compromise the credit of his own reason ; and he 
 would therefore be reasonably held to be, as it is roughly 
 phrased, a fool or a madman. And we must claim that for us 
 the certainty of some theological propositions is so complete, 
 that when anyone assails them, we are no less reasonable in 
 regarding him with concern, rather for his own truth's sake 
 than for the truth of our religion ; and that, if miracles or ' an 
 angel from heaven ' should seem to bear witness for him, it 
 would still be no bigotry, but in the strictest sense our 
 reasonable course, to refuse the witness, and to treat it as 
 
2 26 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 merely an attempt to ensnare us into falsehood to the real 
 requirements of our reason and conscience. 
 
 Is the conclusion, then, that there is after all no difference 
 at all between the truths of Theology and of Science, in respect 
 of theii' claim to authority ? On the contrary, there remains 
 a perfectly real contrast of authority between them ; only it 
 is to be looked for elsewhere than among the conditions upon 
 which our belief in them respectively is based. 
 
 There are two distinct senses in which the doctrines of the 
 Creed may be said to be authoritative. It may be meant that 
 the authoritativeness is in the manner in which they are pre- 
 sented to us ; that is to say, that (whatever their content may 
 be) they are statements which we believe, and are to believe, 
 on the sole gi-ound that we are told to do so, without any 
 appeal to reason of our own ; or it may be meant that they are 
 statements whose content is of such nature and inherent im- 
 portance, that we cannot, in fact, believe them, without thereby 
 necessarily being involved in a train of consequential obliga- 
 tions of thought and life. In this latter case the authori- 
 tativeness lies not in the manner of their presentation to us 
 or our acceptance of them, but in that which is involved in 
 the nature of the truths themselves, if and ivhen they are be- 
 lieved. 
 
 Is it true to say of the Creeds that they are ' authoritative ' 
 in the former sense 1 that is to say that they challenge our 
 allegiance, and we are bound to believe them, because we are 
 told that they are true, without examination on our part, and 
 without reason? It has indeed been stated already that, as 
 between pupils and teachers, there is in religious learning, as 
 there is in all human learning whatever, scientific or otherwise, 
 a certain legitimate and important field for authority reason- 
 ably accepted as authority, that is, the authority of men more 
 learned and experienced than ourselves. Even this, of course, 
 means that the pupil believes the things taught to be strictly 
 rational to the teacher, though they be not so, as yet, to him- 
 self. But is it true, in speaking of religion, to carry this one 
 step further ; and to say that in this sphere our rvliole belief, 
 and duty of belief, rests upon authority as its ultimate found- 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 227 
 
 ation, the authority not of man's experience, but of God's 
 command % It must, no doubt, be freely owned on all sides, 
 that if there be a creed commanded of God, we certainly are 
 bound to believe it. But is there ? or when, or how, was it 
 commanded % Does anyone answer, through our Lord Jesus 
 Christ % or through His Church % or through the Bible ? But 
 who is He % or what is the Bible ? or how do we know % To 
 accept doctrines, which we otherwise should not accept, be- 
 cause we are told to do so, without knowing first who told us, 
 or why we should believe him, is simply not a reasonable 
 possibility. But to ask these questions and to have answers 
 to them, and believe because we are satisfied in some way as 
 to the answers to them, is certainly not to rest the act of be- 
 lieving on a foundation of mere authority : essentially rather 
 it is, to go over part of the ground of the Creed first, and be 
 satisfied as to the correctness of its main substance, and there- 
 fore to believe it. A Christian will not deny that the doctrines 
 of the Creed are entitled in fact to be held as authoritative, in 
 both of the senses distinguished above. But we cannot be- 
 lieve them on God's authority till we have first believed in 
 the authority of God. And, therefore, their authoritativeness 
 in what we have called the first sense is not really the ultimate 
 ground of our accepting them : for it is not itself accepted and 
 apprehended by us, except as a consequence of our first be- 
 lieving that which is the main substance of the Creed. It may 
 be the warrant to us of this or that detail considered apart : 
 but it is not, and cannot ever be, the original and suflicient 
 cause of our believing the whole. Credo ut intelligam may 
 be the most true and most reasonable motto of the large part 
 of Christian faith and life : but it is not inconsistent with — it 
 is founded upon — an ultimate underlying intellexi ut crederem. 
 There is, then, a real and abiding difference between theo- 
 logical and scientific dogmas, in respect of the authority 
 with which they speak to us. But the difference is one 
 which does not affect at all the method or grounds of our 
 original belief in them respectively: it is to be found ex- 
 clusively in the different subject-matter of the two when 
 believed. 
 
 Q3 
 
2 28 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 And herein, also, it is that we find the real answer to the 
 other form of question, viz., why should Theology claim to 
 be so much more final than science % Much as science has 
 conquered of the realm of truth, it does not profess to have 
 conquered more than a little. Of the vast residuum it 
 says nothing. It has no idea how small a proportion 
 its present knowledge may bear to that which will one day 
 be known. Nay, the further it advances in knowledge of 
 truth, so much the smaller a proportion does its realized 
 truth seem to it to bear to that which remains unexplored. 
 Why should the theologian be less patient of additions to 
 theological knowledge, such as may some day throw all his 
 present creeds into comparative obscurity? Why should the 
 Christian Creed be fixed and inexpansive ? The question is 
 formidable only in an abstract form. The reasonable answer 
 to it confronts us the moment we consider what is the subject- 
 matter of the Creed. Scientific principles are in their very 
 nature fragments of a truth which is practically infinite. But 
 the Christian Creed, if true at all, cannot possibly be a fragment 
 of truth. For the Christian Creed does not simply enunciate 
 so many abstract principles of natural or supernatural life 
 or governance. It introduces us straight to a supreme Person, 
 Himself the beginning and end, the author and upholder of 
 aU. Such a doctrine may be false ; but it cannot be a frag- 
 ment. The child who believes in God, believes in every- 
 thing, though he knows hardly anything. He has infinitely 
 more yet to learn, as to what his own belief means. But he 
 has nothing to add to it. The perfect knowledge of the 
 universe would not add to it, but would only explain it. 
 It is, then, by vntue of his personal relation to a Personality 
 which is Itself supreme and aU inclusive, that he is guilty of 
 no presumption, even though in the face of the modest dis- 
 avowals of scientific men, he must maintain that his own 
 creed is, in its proper nature, even when all admissions have 
 been made, rather a complete and conclusive, than a partial or 
 a tentative, statement of truth. But this diflference between 
 him and them is the result neither of any arrogance in his 
 temper, nor any lack in his logic, but it follows necessarily 
 
VI. The Iitcarnatiou as the basis of Dogma. 229 
 
 from the nature of the subject-matter of his creed, if and 
 when it is believed. 
 
 But still this fact that, if true, they are truths which by 
 the obvious necessity of their subject-matter speak to our 
 intellects and consciences with a tone of such Divinely com- 
 manding authority, ought not to make me or anyone accept 
 them as true, unless the evidence for them is adequate. The 
 question is not how authoritative they would be, if true ; 
 nor how important or inclusive they would be, if true ; nor 
 is any amount of contingent importance or authority adequate 
 evidence for their truth, but only a motive for inquiring into 
 its evidence. The question is, are they true % or are they not 
 true % and the question is a question of evidence, 
 
 II. And now, in recurring once more to the subject of the 
 evidence by which the dogmas of religion are proved, from 
 which we diverged just now, we find, in respect of it, a 
 second reality of contrast between theological truths and the 
 truths of material science. For whilst in both cases equally 
 we depend upon evidence, and evidence that is adequate ; it 
 does not follow that the evidence for both is in all points 
 similar in kind. In great part indeed it is so ; but it is 
 certainly not so altogether. For when we speak of the 
 evidence of religious truths, it is to be remembered that the 
 full evidence by which our consciences are wholly convinced 
 of them, is not of one kind only, but of all kinds. The facts 
 of religion address themselves to the whole nature of man ; 
 and it is only by the whole nature of man that they can 
 ever be fully apprehended. Man is not a being of intel- 
 lectual conceptions or faculties only. And because he is not 
 so, therefore no set of principles which could be apprehended 
 by the intellect alone (as the theorems of Euclid may appear 
 to be), and which make for their acceptance no demand at 
 all upon the qualities of his moral or spiritual being, could 
 really present, as religion professes to present, a system of 
 truth and life which would be adequate to the scope of his 
 whole nature. It is undoubtedly the case that just as the 
 truths of religion account for, and appeal to, his whole being, 
 so the evidence for them appeals to his whole being also. 
 
230 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 For its complete appreciation there are requirements other 
 than intellectual. There must be not only certain endow- 
 ments of mind, but the life of a moral being. There must 
 be moral affections, moral perceptions, spiritual affinities and 
 satisfactions. Even if the primary conviction of his reason 
 may be apart from these, yet of the fully developed evidence, 
 which is the real possession of the Christian believer, these 
 are a most impoi'tant and necessary part. Without these, 
 his certainty, adequate though it might be, would be far less 
 profound than it is. These are to him essential ingredients 
 in the richness and the fulness of the evidence which to him 
 is everywhere. Now for this necessary width of the full 
 confirmatory evidence of religion, it is impossible for the 
 religious man, with the utmost desire to make every allow- 
 ance and apology that is possible, to offer any apology at all. 
 So far from being a mark of inconsistency or feebleness, it is 
 a necessary note of the completeness of religion. Keligion 
 professes to have for its subject-matter, and in a measure 
 incomplete, but relatively adequate, to include, to account 
 for, and to direct, the whole range of all man's history, all 
 man's capacities, explored or unexplored, all man's destiny 
 now and for ever. If its truths and their evidence were 
 found to address themselves exclusively to the intellect, in 
 isolation from the other qualities and experiences of man's 
 nature, it would be self-convicted of inadequacy. If men 
 full of worldliness of heart and self-indulgence could be 
 capable of understanding the revelation of religious truth 
 as accurately, of embracing it as completely, of apprehending 
 the depth and the width of the evidence for it (with which 
 all human nature really is saturated) as thoroughly as the 
 prayerful and the penitent, this would not mean that religion 
 or religious evidence had been lifted up, on to a higher and 
 more properly scientific level, but' rather that it had shrunk 
 down into correspondence merely with a part, and not the 
 noblest part, of man's present nature. 
 
 It would be far beyond the scope of this paper to discuss 
 kinds of evidence, or argue in defence of the position that 
 there is real evidence for religious truth, which is none the 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dog^na. 231 
 
 less properly evidence, because it is different in kind from 
 the evidence for the propositions of material science : but it 
 may be permissible, at least, in passing to record the claim, 
 and to insist that religious men, in confining themselves to 
 strictly historical or logical arguments, are necessarily omit- 
 ting much which is nevertheless, to them, real ground. There 
 are evidences which can speak to the heart, the imagination, 
 the conscience, as well as the intelligence. Or, perhaps, we 
 shall come nearer to an exact expression of the truth, by 
 saying that the intelligence, which can apprehend and pro- 
 nounce upon the evidence of truths of spiritual conscious- 
 ness, is an intelligence identical in name, but not identical 
 in nature, with that which can well weigh and judge purely 
 logical — or even that which can pronounce upon moral — 
 problems. The intelligence of a moral character, or of a 
 spiritual personality, differs not in range only, but in quality, 
 from that of a merely 'rational animal.' If the moral and 
 the spiritual intelligence did not contain quite other elements, 
 drawn from quite other experiences and possibilities, they 
 could not work upon their higher subject-matter at all. To 
 the religious man, therefore, it must seem strictly unreason- 
 able, in the examination of truths which professedly corre- 
 spond to man's whole nature, and need his whole nature 
 and experience for the interpretation of them, to begin by 
 shutting out, as irrelevant, what we will modestly call the 
 half of man's nature ; and to demand that the truths shall 
 be so stated and so proved, as that the statements and proofs 
 shall correspond exclusively with the other half, and find in 
 that other half their whole interpretation, and their whole 
 evidence. 
 
 It may, indeed, be desirable to guard against a miscon- 
 ception, by the express admission that there is some neces- 
 sary ambiguity in the terms employed. We may seem to 
 have unduly extended both the verbal meaning, and the 
 sphere of importance, of ' evidence ' and ' proof.' Undoubtedly 
 there is a sense in which it would be, not merely true to 
 admit, but important to insist, that in the acceptance of 
 rehgious truth. Faith neither is, nor ever can be, displaced, 
 
232 The Religio7i of the Incarnation. 
 
 in order that Demonstration may be enthroned in her place. 
 But then Demonstration is a word which belongs to strictly 
 logical nomenclature. And the very point here insisted on 
 is that the strictly logical presentment of religion is, in refer- 
 ence to the real presentment of religion, most inadequate. 
 Undoubtedly, if everything else is shorn away, and religion 
 remains solely and only in the form of strict logic, without 
 sentiment, without imagination, without experience of duty, 
 or sin, or right, or aspiration, or anything else which belongs 
 to the spiritual consciousness of human personalities, the logic 
 of it is, and must be^ imperfectly conclusive. 
 
 Now words such as ' evidence,' ' proof,' ' intelligence,' are no 
 doubt often used in connection with processes of the intellect 
 taken apart — the intellect of a being merely rational. In 
 insisting, therefore, that the word evidence, when used in 
 reference to religious subject-matter, must include data which, 
 to the observer of physical phenomena, would seem vague 
 and impalpable ; and that intelligence, as adequately trained 
 to apprehend and give judgment upon religious evidence, is 
 in some respects other, and more, than that intelligence which 
 can deal with evidence into which no element of spiritual con- 
 sciousness enters ; we differ, perhaps, at the most, more in 
 form than reality, from those who simply deprecate the appeal 
 to ' evidence ' or ' proof ' in matters of faith. 
 
 To the religious man, then, the fulness of Christian evidence 
 is as many-sided as human life. There is historical evidence, 
 — itself of at least a dozen different kinds, — literary evidence, 
 metaphysical evidence, moral evidence, evidence of sorrow 
 and joy, of goodness and of evil, of sin and of pardon, of 
 despair and of hope, of life and of death ; evidence which 
 defies enumerating ; into this the whole gradual life of the 
 Christian grows ; and there is no part nor element of life 
 which does not to him perpetually elucidate and confirm the 
 knowledge which has been given him. Everything that is 
 or has been, every consciousness, every possibility, even every 
 doubt or wavering, becomes to the Christian a part of the 
 certainty— an element in the absorbing reality — of his Creed. 
 
 But this is rather the end than the beginning. Certainly it 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma, i^^) 
 
 is not thus that the Creed of the Church can present itself 
 to those whose life is still independent of the Creed. 
 
 Let us consider, then, how the truths of the Creed did first, 
 in fact, introduce themselves to human consciousness. There 
 are three several stages of its presentment in history, of which 
 the central one is so overmastering in impoi-tance, that it 
 alone gives their character to the other two. They are, first, 
 the leading up, in the world's history and consciousness, to 
 the life of Jesus Christ ; secondly, the life and death of Jesus 
 Christ ; thirdly, the results, in history and consciousness, of 
 the life and death of Jesus Christ. We may say. perhaps, 
 that of the first of these the main outcome was belief in God ; 
 and such a God, that belief in Him carried with it the two 
 corollaries of aspiration after righteousness, and conviction of 
 sin. We may say that the third of these means the establish- 
 ment of the Church upon earth, and the articulating of her 
 consciousness according to the Creeds. But in any case all 
 the three are plainly historical, matters of historical inquiry, 
 of historical evidence ; and all plainly depend entirely upon 
 the intermediate one, the history of a certain human life 
 which purports to be — which either is, or is not — the hinge- 
 point of all history whatever. 
 
 All turns, then, upon a certain passage of history. Is the 
 history, as believed by Christians, true or false? The Chris- 
 tian record of that history is the New Testament. Indeed, of 
 that history, the New Testament is the only record. Is, then, 
 the history of the teaching and the work, the life and the 
 death, of Jesus Christ, presented to us in the New Testament 
 as a chapter of historical fact, — is it historical fact, or is it 
 nof? The Incarnation is either a fact, or a fiction. The In- 
 carnation means also for Christians the Atonement. For our 
 present purpose, the Incarnation may be taken as necessarily 
 including the Atonement. But still of this complex fact the 
 dilemma stands. If it is not true, it is false. There is no 
 middle term. If it is not true, then, whether dogma in itself 
 is, or is not, desirable, at least all the dogma of the Christian 
 Church is false. 
 
234 ^^^^ Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 The Incarnation and the Atonement together are not pre- 
 sented in the New Testament as, by their own mere state- 
 ment, guaranteeing themselves. On the contrary, there is one 
 single, definite, historical fact, which is represented there as 
 the central heart and core of the evidence upon which the 
 conviction of their truth depends. This fact is the resur- 
 rection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Though this is not 
 the whole of the Christian Creed, yet this, according to 
 S. Paul, is, to the whole of the Christian Creed, crucial. 
 ' If there be no resurrection from the dead, then is Christ 
 not risen ; and if Christ be not risen, then is our preach- 
 ing vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are 
 found false witnesses of God ; because we have testified of 
 God, that he raised up Christ ; whom He raised not up, if so 
 be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is 
 not Christ raised ; and if Christ be not raised, your faith is 
 vain, ye are yet in your sins.' To be direct personal evidence 
 of a certain fact, and that fact the resurrection ; — this was, in 
 the view of S. Peter and the Apostles, the first qualification, 
 and the central meaning, of Apostleship : ' must one be or- 
 dained to he a witness with us of His resurrection ;' ' this 
 Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses.' 
 Upon the historical truth or falsehood, then, of the resurrec- 
 tion, hangs the whole question of the nature and work of Jesus 
 Christ, the whole doctrine of Incarnation and Atonement. 
 
 But in saying this, it is necessary to guard our proper 
 meaning. If we admit the fact of the Resurrection to be 
 cardinal, what is the fact of the Resurrection which is in 
 question ? It is as far as possible from being simply a ques- 
 tion whether ' a man ' could or could not, did or did not, re- 
 appear, after death, in life. When we speak of the historical 
 fact, we must mean at least the whole fact with all that it 
 was and meant, complex as it was and many-sided ; not with 
 its meaning or its proof isolated upon a single page of the 
 book of history, but having far-reaching affinities, parts es- 
 sentially of its interpretation and of its evidence, entwined in 
 the depths of the whole constitution of our nature, and the 
 whole drama of history from the first moment to the last. 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 235 
 
 However much Christians may have at times to argue about 
 the simple evidence for the ' yes ' or ' no ' of the Resurrection 
 of Jesus, as if it were the alleged resurrection of any other 
 man that was in question, neither the question itself, nor the 
 evidence about it, can possibly be, in fact, of the same nature 
 or upon the same level, as the evidence about another. No 
 amount of conviction of the reappearance in life of any other 
 man, would have any similar meaning, or carry any similar 
 consequences. The inherent character of Him who rose, and 
 the necessary connection between what He was, and had said 
 and claimed for Himself, on the one hand, and on the other 
 His rising out of death ; this is an essential part of that fact 
 of the resurrection, which comes up for proof or disproof. 
 The fact that Jesus Christ, heing what He ^(.'«s, the climax 
 and fulfilment of a thousand converging lines — nay, of all 
 the antecedent history of mankind— rose from the dead, and 
 by that fact of resurrection (solemnly fore-announced, yet none 
 the less totally unlooked for) illuminated and explained for 
 the first time all that before had seemed enigmatical or 
 contradictory in what He was, — and indeed in all humanity ; 
 this is the real fact of the resurrection which confronts us. 
 It is this vast fact which is either true or false. The resur- 
 rection of the crucified Jesus cannot possibly be a bare or 
 simple fact. When viewed as a material manifestation of the 
 moment only, it is at least misunderstood ; it may be unin- 
 telligible. It is, no doubt, an event in history ; and yet it 
 confronts us, even there in its place and witness in history, 
 not simply as a finite historical event, but as an eternal 
 counsel and infinite act of God. 
 
 Yet there are times when we must consent to leave much 
 of all this, for the moment, on one side. Whatever else the 
 event in history may carry with it, of course it must stand 
 its ground as a mere historical event. The mere fact may 
 be but a part of it ; yet all will be overthrown if the fact be 
 not fact. And so, though the truths of the Christian religion, 
 and the evidence for them, be at least as wide as was repre- 
 sented above, yet they present themselves to our minds still, 
 as they presented themselves at fii-st to the minds of men, 
 
236 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 within the sphere and the rules of ordinary human history 
 and historical evidence. Here are events written on the 
 page of history. Examine them. Are they historically false 
 or true ? If they be not false, what do they mean and in- 
 volve 1 This is the modest way in which they present them- 
 selves. 
 
 No one will now dispute that Jesus died upon the Cross. 
 If He did not, on the third day, rise again from that death to 
 life ; — cadit quaestio — all Christian dogma, all Christian faith, 
 is at an end. Something might still be true which might be 
 of interest ; something, even, which for sheer want of a better, 
 might be still the most interesting fact in the world's long 
 history ; but something which, from the first line to the last, 
 would be essentially different from the Catholic faith. But, 
 on the other hand, if He did so rise again, then the fact of 
 His resurrection necessarily raises further questions as to His 
 nature and being, — necessarily requires the understanding of 
 further truths for its own intelligent explanation. Now the 
 present paper is not an evidential treatise. It is no part of 
 our task to attempt to prove the historical reality of the 
 resurrection. What it does concern us to notice is the way in 
 which the determination of all Christian truth hinges upon it. 
 If it falls, all the rest will drift away, anchorless and unsub- 
 stantial, into the region of a merely beautiful dreamland. As 
 dreamland, indeed, it may still captivate and inspire ; but 
 anchor of sure fact there will be none. It will only be a 
 beautiful imagination, — a false mirage reflected from, based 
 upon, falsehood. No doubt imagination is sovereign in the 
 lives of men. But then imagination means the vivifying of 
 truth, not the spectral embodiment of a lie. 
 
 On the other hand, if the fact of the resurrection stands, 
 then it cannot stand alone. If Jesus Christ so lived and 
 taught as even the most indefinite believers concede that He 
 lived and taught, if He then died on the Cross, and rose again 
 the third day fror)i the dead, you have indeed already the 
 foundation dogma of the Creed ; and having that, you cannot 
 possibly rest in it : that foundation fact will absolutely 
 compel you to ask and to answer certain further necessary 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 237 
 
 questions ; and whatever intelligible answer you may choose 
 to give to them will be essentially a dogmatic definition. 
 Who or what was this man who thus lived, thus spoke, thus 
 died, and thus rose from the dead ? As a matter of fact, the 
 whole Church of Christ in history (including the men who 
 had been His own companions, trained and inspired by Him- 
 self,) taught and believed, without shadow of hesitation, that 
 He was very God. Very gradually, indeed, had they advanced 
 to this ; step by step, through their growing intimacy with a 
 character whose very excellences were only enigmatical and 
 confounding, so long as the master-truth, which lay behind 
 them, was ignored. And very tentative, on His side, was the 
 method of His self-revelation ; through qualities, through in- 
 herent powers, thi'ough explicit teachings, slowly felt, slowly 
 recognised, as transcendent, as impossible, except in relation 
 to a truth which, after long misconceptions and perplexities, 
 is seen by them at last not only to be true, but to be the 
 essential truth which He Himself requires of them. For, be 
 the method as gradual and as tentative as you please, these 
 witnesses, who are, in fact, the only witnesses the world ever 
 has had, or can have, of His inner life and teaching, testify 
 unhesitatingly not only that all true acceptance of Him was, 
 in their judgment, acceptance of Him as God, but that His 
 life and death were penetrated by the consciousness of His 
 own Godhead ; and by the deliberate purpose (through what- 
 ever unexpected patience of method) of convincing the whole 
 world in the end of His Godhead, and receiving universal belief, 
 and universal worship, as God. 
 
 Now no one to-day disputes that He was truly man. Is it 
 true that He was very God ? It is either true or false. As 
 to the fact there are only the two alternatives. And between 
 the two the gulf is impassable. If it is not false, it is true. 
 If it is not absolutely true, it is absolutely false. According 
 to the faith of the Catholic Church it is absolutely true. Ac- 
 cording to the highest form of Arianism, not less than accord- 
 ing to the barest Socinianism, it is (however you may try to 
 gloss it over) absolutely false. 
 
 Once more, it is quite beyond our province to marshal or 
 
238 The Religio7i of the Incarnation. 
 
 press argumentatively the proofs that He was indeed God. 
 But it is necessary to see with perfect clearness, how the 
 question must have been raised, and being raised must have 
 been answered. The very life of the Church was belief in 
 Him ; and she could not remain fundamentally uncertain as 
 to who or what He was in whom she believed. This was 
 the one thing which had never been allowed to those who 
 drew near Christ. All through His ministry those who came 
 near Him, and felt the spell of His presence. His holiness, His 
 power, were undergoing a training and a sifting. Moment 
 by moment, step by step, the accumulating evidence of His 
 transcendentl}'' perfect humanity kept forcing more and more 
 upon them all the question which He would never let them 
 escape, the question by which they were to be tested and 
 judged; ' What think ye of Christ ? ' ' If ye believe not that 
 I am He, ye shall die in your sins.' 
 
 If there is a true historical sense in which the clear defini- 
 tion of the doctrine of the Divinity of Jesus Christ must be 
 assigned to the Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, yet 
 it would be a great historical blunder to state or imagine, as 
 inference, that till then the doctrine was only held partially 
 or with imperfect consciousness in the Catholic Church. 
 The Church did not, as a result of those controversies, de- 
 velop the consciousness of any new doctrine : the develop- 
 ment of her consciousness was rather in respect of the shallow 
 but tempting logic which would deform, or the delusions which 
 might counterfeit, her doctrine, and of the perils to which 
 these must lead. It may be a question, indeed, how far the 
 words imphcit and explicit do, or do not, represent the distinc- 
 tion between the dogmatic consciousness of the Apostolic and 
 the Conciliar ages. The difficulty in determining depends 
 solely on this, that the words themselves are used with 
 diflferent meanings. Thus, sometimes men are said to hold 
 implicitly what they never perhaps suspected themselves of 
 holding, if it can be shewn to be a more or less legitimate 
 outcome, or logical development, of their belief. If such men 
 advance inferentially from point to point, their explicit belief 
 at a later time may be, in many particulars, materially 
 
VI. The Incarnatio7i as the basis of Dogma. 239 
 
 different from what it had been at an earlier ; even though it 
 might be logically shewn that the earlier thought was, more 
 or less directly, the parent of the later. Now in any such 
 sense as this we shall stoutly maintain that, from the 
 beginning, the Church held dogmatic truths not implicitly, 
 but explicitly and positively. They who baptized into the 
 threefold Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the 
 Holy Ghost ; whose blessing was ' The grace of the Lord 
 Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of 
 the Holy Ghost ; ' who, living in the Spirit, lived in Christ ; 
 whose highest worship was the Communion of the Body and 
 the Blood of Christ, and whose perfectness of life was Christ ; 
 they, so living and worshipping, did not hold the Godhead of 
 Jesus Christ implicitly ; they did not hold something out of 
 which the doctrine of the Trinity might come to be unfolded. 
 On the other hand, you may use the same contrast of words, 
 meaning merely that you have, through cross-questioning or 
 otherwise, obtained a power which you did not possess, of 
 defining, in thought and in words, the limits of your belief, 
 and distinguishing it precisely from whatever does not belong 
 to it. You hold still what you always meant to hold. You 
 say still what you always meant to say. But it is your 
 intellectual mastery over your own meaning which is altered. 
 Like a person fresh from the encounter of a keen cross-exami- 
 nation, you are furnished now, as you were not before, with 
 distinctions and comparisons, with definitions and measure- 
 ments, — in a word, with all that intellectual equipment, that 
 furniture of alert perception and exact language, by which you 
 are able to realize for yourself, as well as to define to others, 
 what that meaning exactly is, and what it is not, which itself 
 was before, as truly as it is now, the very thing that you 
 meant. 
 
 In this sense, no doubt, the definitions of councils did make 
 Christian consciousness more explicit in relation to positive 
 truth. They acquired, indeed, no new truth. Primarily they 
 were rather, on this side or on that;, a blocking ofi" of such 
 false forms of thought or avenues of unbalanced inference, as 
 forced themselves forward, one by one, amidst the intellectual 
 
240 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 efforts of the time, to challenge the acceptance of Christian 
 people. Primarily they are not the Church saying ' yes ' to 
 fresh truths, or developments, or forms of consciousness ; but 
 rather saying ' no ' to untrue and misleading modes of shaping 
 and stating her truth. Only indirectly, in that effort, the 
 Church acquires through them a new definiteness of mastery 
 for the intellect in reference to the exactness of her own 
 meaning. 
 
 It is comparatively easy for those who are convinced of a 
 truth to struggle against its open contradiction. But false 
 modes of stating their truth, and unbalanced inferences from 
 their truth, are often staggering to minds which would be 
 unperplexed by any less insidious form of error. It may be 
 that, in all ages of the Church, even those who are born and 
 bred in undoubting faith in the Person of Jesus, have to pass, 
 more or less explicitly, through tlieir own experience of 
 hesitation and exaggeration, of reaction and counter-reaction, 
 before they are quite in a position to define, or maintain by 
 argument in the face of insidious alternatives, the exact pro- 
 portion of their own Catholic belief. 
 
 Not unsuggestively, indeed, nor indirectly, do the oscilla- 
 tions of the public consciousness in the era of the councils, as 
 to the due expression of Catholic belief, reproduce on a larger 
 scale, and therefore with more magnified clumsiness, the 
 alternating exaggerations of such a single struggling mind. 
 The natural thought begins, as a matter of course, as Apostles 
 had begun of old, with the perfect and obvious certainty that 
 Jesus was a man. Then comes the mighty crisis to natural 
 thought. With infinite heavings and stragglings, and every 
 conceivable expedient of evasion, it strains to avoid the im- 
 mense conclusion which challenges it, catching eagerly at 
 every refinement, if so be it may be possible to stop short of 
 full acceptance of a truth so staggering (when it comes to 
 be measured intellectually) as that the Man Jesus was 
 Himself the Eternal God. Now however grossly unjust it 
 might be to think of Arianism as if it ever meant, or 
 held, Jesus Christ to be merely a man ; yet it is true that 
 in respect of the one great question which is at the root 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 241 
 
 of Christian faith, — is He God, or is He not? — it stands 
 as offering alternatives and expedients, by which the plain 
 answer ' yes ' may be avoided ; by which therefore the 
 answer ' no ' is in effect maintained ; for between ' God ' and 
 ' not God ' the distinction cannot be bridged. This, then, 
 is the real hinge-point of the Catholic faith. But when this, 
 the greatest of all battles of belief, is won at last, in spite of 
 every variety of Arian and semi-Arian refining ; forthwith the 
 undisciplined mind, always ready to exaggerate, always difficult 
 of balance, begins so to run into ardour of expression of its 
 truth, as in effect to make unreal the other half of the doc- 
 trine of the Incarnation. The fii'st great wonder once grasped, 
 it is so natural, in fervour of insistance on the very Godhead, 
 to forget or deny the simple completeness of the very Man- 
 hood ! It seems so hard, — almost wanting in reverence, — 
 still to conceive of Him then as perfectly human, — human 
 body and human soul ! What more obvious reaction in the 
 mind of any pupil not yet perfectly steadied and balanced ? 
 Yet these few short sentences represent not untruly the real 
 process of education, painfully accomplished by those intel- 
 lectual struggles which culminated in the councils of Nicaea 
 and Constantinople, in 335 and 381 respectively. And when 
 the pupil is steadied from this second excess, and the Godhead 
 and the Manhood are both grasped, each severally, each com- 
 pletely, there follows again a perfectly natural result in a 
 new uncertainty about the union of the two in Jesus. Again 
 it seems an instinct of reverence which shrinks from the truth. 
 For the Manhood, it is urged, though complete, body, soul, 
 and spirit, must yet remain, in Him, a thing separable and 
 separate from His own original Divine personality. But 
 if the human nature was not verily His own nature, if it was 
 animated by any consciousness which was not absolutely His 
 own consciousness, the consciousness of His one undivided 
 personality, — what or whence in Him was this other than 
 His own individual consciousness % Is it so, then, the mind 
 begins necessarily to ask itself, that the mystery of the Incar- 
 nate Life was the mystery of a double consciousness, a double 
 personality ? two distinguishable existences, two selves, two 
 
242 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 identities, side by side, harmonious, allied, yet nowhere really 
 meeting in any one underlying principle of unity % It was 
 necessary that the doubt should be raised, that its meaning 
 and results might be measured. But it is this which becomes 
 the Nestorianism against which the council of Ephesus in 431 
 set the seal of Catholic belief. Once more, the natural re- 
 action from Nestorianism, when the believer is keenly alert 
 against its danger, is so to insist upon the indivisible Per- 
 sonal unity, as to shrink from the admission of any distin- 
 guishableness in Him, actual or possible, between the two 
 natures or characters which He united, between the human 
 and the Divine elements in His one consciousness. But this 
 is either once more to curtail the true completeness of the 
 human nature, or to fuse it with the Divine into some new 
 thing not truly identical with either. And this is the Mono- 
 physitism of 451, the subject-matter of the fourth great general 
 council at Chalcedon. 
 
 It is said, indeed, that the ages of councils were uncritical 
 ages ; and that their decisions are therefore not to be accepted 
 as authoritative on questions of minute theological criticism, 
 for which their uncritical spirit made them specially unfit. 
 The assertion is perhaps a little beside the mark. You have 
 not to plead that they were likely to be uncritical, but to 
 shew that they were in fact wrong. It is clear that they 
 were not specially unfit either to arrive at a definiteness of 
 meaning, or to express what they meant. They were sure 
 what they meant ; and have expressed it with perfect clear- 
 ness. The question is not how critical they were likely to be, 
 but whether their meaning — which is clear — is right or wrong. 
 Whatever antecedent probability there may be either in the 
 minds of nineteenth century critics against their correct- 
 ness, or in the minds of Churchmen accustomed to defer to 
 them in favour of it ; it is certain that no one who is really 
 doubtful about the truth of Christianity, will be called upon 
 to accept it in deference to the mere authority of the Councils. 
 However much more they may be to ourselves, to such an one 
 as this they must stand at least as witnesses of what the con- 
 sciousness of the Christian community set its seal to, in the 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 243 
 
 way of interpretation of its own original deposit of belief. 
 We do not much care to argue whether they belonged to an 
 age of criticism or not. Yet we must needs be ready to listen 
 to anyone who can prove that their determinations were wrong. 
 Councils, we admit, and Creeds, cannot go behind, but must 
 wholly rest upon the history of our Lord Jesus Christ. If 
 anyone could seriously convict the Creeds of being unscrip- 
 tural, we must listen to him and bow, — as scientific men 
 would have to bow to anyone who really could prove the 
 fundamental propositions of their science to be wrong. But 
 meanwhile, so complete is the historical acceptance of the 
 Creeds, and their consecration in the consciousness of the 
 Church ; that there is at least as clear a presumption that we 
 are uncatholic in differing from them, as there would be that 
 we were unscientific if we dissented from the most universally 
 accepted faiths of science. 
 
 Now even this, the most commonplace statement of the 
 growth of Christian definitions, will serve to mark what the 
 nature of dogma is. So far from faith without it being a 
 thing more spiritual or pure, faith without it is a thing ir- 
 rational. Faith in what? I cannot have faith without an 
 object. Faith in Jesus Christ % But who is Jesus Christ ? 
 Is He a dead man ? Is He, as a dead man, no longer in any 
 existence % Or am I, at least, necessarily ignorant as to 
 whether He and other dead men have any existence, actual 
 or probable % Or is He a man indeed, — no more ; and dead 
 indeed ; but, as other good men, alive after death somehow in 
 the blessedness of God % And what then did His life mean 1 
 or His strange deliberate dying? or what connection have 
 they of meaning or power with me ? And this God that you 
 speak of; do I know anything of Him? or what? or how? 
 Or again, is Jesus Himself the living God? And are the 
 things true which are handed down to me in the Church as 
 taught by Himself about the relations of God ? Is He my 
 living Master ; my very Redeemer by the Cross ; my eternal 
 Judge ? and where and how have I contact in life or soul 
 with the benefits of His Cross, or the power of His help ? If 
 indeed I have nothing to do with Him, and no interest in His 
 K 3 
 
244 '^^^^ Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 history, it is possible for me to go on without caring to answer 
 such questions. But faith in Him can have no meaning 
 while these are ignored. The question whether He is or is 
 not God, is one which cannot but be asked and answered. 
 
 And either answer to the question is alike dogmatic. The 
 Arian is no less dogmatic than the Catholic. A dogmatic 
 faith is only a definite faith ; and that upon questions upon 
 which it has become irrational to remain indefinite, after 
 I have once been brought to a certain point of acquaintance 
 with them. The question between the Catholic and the 
 Arian is, not whose doctrine evades definiteness of determi- 
 nation, but whose dogma is in accord with the truth and 
 its evidence. The negative answer to the question proposed 
 would only be unjudicial, not undogmatic. Meanwhile, the 
 afiirmative answer would be so complete a concession of the 
 whole position, that if it has once been made, as much has 
 really been admitted, so far as any battle about dogma goes, 
 as if the whole formal statement of the Athanasian Creed 
 had been expressly, as it will have been implicitly, included. 
 There is nothing, then, really to fight against in these words, 
 ' The right faith is, that we believe and confess that our 
 Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man ; God, 
 of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds: 
 and Man, of the substance of His mother, born in the world ; 
 perfect God, and perfect Man: of a reasonable soul and 
 human flesh subsisting ; equal to the Father, as touching 
 His Godhead ; and inferior to the Father, as touching His 
 Manhood, Who although He be God and Man : yet He is 
 not two, but one Christ ; One ; not by conversion of the 
 Godhead into flesh ; but by taking of the Manhood into God ; 
 One altogether ; not by confusion of substance, but by unity 
 of Person.' 
 
 Another thing which perhaps the same commonplace state- 
 ment may illustrate as to the character of Christian dogma, 
 is its largeness and equity. It is harmony ; it is proportion ; 
 it is the protest of balanced completeness against all that 
 partiality, which, by exaggerating something that is true, 
 distorts the proportion and simplicity of truth. Every several 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 245 
 
 form of error, — we admit it willingly, — grew out of, and re- 
 presented, a truth. Catholic doctrine alone preserves the 
 proportion of truth. To work and to think within the lines 
 of dogmatic faith, is to work and to think upon the true 
 and harmonious conception of the Person of Jesus Christ — 
 ' Quem nosse vivere, Cui servire regnare.' In this knowledge 
 certainly there is no limitedness, and in this subordination 
 no slavery. 
 
 The meaning of Christian dogma, then, so far as we have 
 at present had anything to do with it, is simply this. It is 
 the self-realizing of the consciousness of the Christian com- 
 munity in respect of the answer to be given to that one 
 great question, fundamental and inevitable, with which all 
 in all times who would approach Christ must be met, — 
 ' Whom say ye that I am % ' 
 
 But, it will be felt, it is all very well to insist so much 
 upon this one point, which it is comparatively easy to repre- 
 sent as the necessary answer of a truthful conscience to a 
 question which is forced upon it by the plainest evidence ; — 
 but are there not a great many Christian doctrines besides? 
 What of the rest of them, — 'all the articles of the Christian 
 faith,' as the Catechism says ? I have ventured to speak at 
 length upon this one, not because it is easier to handle con- 
 veniently than the others, but because it directly carries, if 
 it does not contain, everything. It is not only that this is 
 in itself so tremendous a dogma, that no one who affirms this 
 can possibly quarrel any longer with the principle of dogmatic 
 definition, but that this so inevitably involves all the other 
 propositions of the Creed, that no one, whose conscience has 
 accepted this, will find it easy to separate between it and 
 the whole Christian faith. 
 
 The Christian Creed consists of three parts only ; and all 
 three are, ' Belief in God.' ' I believe in God, the Father, the 
 Son, and the Holy Ghost ' is, in brief, the whole Christian 
 Creed. Its shortest expression is in three words (which three 
 words are but one), ' Holy, Holy, Holy.' The definitions of 
 the Apostles', of the Nicene, and of the Athanasian Creeds, 
 none of them really travel outside of this. Take, for example, 
 
246 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Intellectually it is, of 
 course, antecedent to the doctrine of the Incarnation and the 
 Atonement. But it will be observed that it is made known 
 to us not antecedently, but as a consequence of our previous 
 conviction of the Incarnation. Moreover, when it is made 
 known, it is made known rather incidentally than directly. 
 Even though it is, when revealed and apprehended, the in- 
 clusive sum of our faith, yet there is, in the revelation, no 
 formal unfolding of it, as of a mysterious truth set to chal- 
 lenge our express contemplation and worship. There is 
 nothing here to be found in the least corresponding with the 
 explicit challenge, ' Whom say ye that I am ? ' or ' On this 
 rock will I build My Church ; ' but rather indirectly, so far 
 as our contemplation of the Incarnation, and its abiding con- 
 sequences, requires for its own necessary interpretation to our 
 understanding, that we should have some insight into the 
 mystery of the distinction of Persons in the Godhead, so far, 
 and in reference to that purpose, the mystery of the Holy 
 Trinity grows gradually into clearness of revelation to our 
 consciousness. It is clear that any distinctness of conception 
 whatever as to the meaning of Incarnation would be im- 
 possible, without some revelation of mutual relations between 
 the Sender and the Sent, the Immutable and the Incarnate, 
 the Father and the Son. If it is less clear from the first, it 
 is surely not less certain, that any conception we may have 
 of the relation so revealed between the Father and the Son, 
 would be fainter by far, and less intelligible than it is, if it 
 were not for that which our Lord Jesus Christ has told us 
 as to the office and nature of the Holy Spirit ; if with our 
 growing conception of distinctness and relation as between 
 the Sender and the Sent, we had not also some added con- 
 ception of that Blessed Spirit of Holiness, Who, emanating 
 from both, is the Spirit of both alike, and is thereby also the 
 very bond of perfectness of Love whereby both are united in 
 One ; and whereby, further, all spirits in whom God's presence 
 dwells, are united, so far, in a real oneness of spirit with one 
 another and with God. And it is quite certain, that whether 
 we seem to anyone to be right or no in treating this reve- 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 247 
 
 lation of the Holy Ghost as a necessary, if incidental, part of 
 what we had need to be taught of the revelation of the 
 Father and the Son, in order to make Incarnation propei'ly 
 intelligible ; it is altogether essential for that other purpose, 
 in connection with which the revelation is more immediately 
 made, that is, for any understanding on our part of the abiding 
 work of God in His Church, after the Resurrection and Ascen- 
 sion. ' The holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, 
 the Forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body, and 
 the life everlasting ;' these are not miscellaneous items thrown 
 in at the end of the Creed after the doctrine of the Holy 
 Trinity is finished, but they are essential parts of the under- 
 standing of the doctrine of the Holy Ghost : and on the other 
 hand, without the revelation of the Person and work of the 
 Holy Ghost, these doctrines, practical though they be, and 
 vital for practice, — no less indeed than the very essence and 
 meaning of the work of the Incarnation from the day of 
 Ascension forwards, that is to say the whole historical effect 
 and fruit of the Incarnation, — would be evacuated of all living 
 meaning, and would become for us only the empty phrases 
 of a far-away baseless yearning, which even now (apart from 
 the life of the Holy Spirit informing us) they are ever too 
 ready to become. 
 
 It is hoped that even such brief statements may at least 
 serve to indicate how it is true that the whole of our Chris- 
 tian creed, even those parts which seem most separable from 
 it, or antecedent to it, are for us really contained in the one 
 crucial doctrine of the Incarnation, that is, of the eternal 
 Godhead of the Man Christ Jesus. And this will compel us 
 once more to recognise the simplicity of Christian dogma. 
 It does not mean a complicated system of arbitrary definitions 
 upon a great variety of subjects of religious speculation, for- 
 mulated one after another by human ingenuity, and imposed 
 by human despotism upon the consciences of the unthinking 
 or the submissive ; it means rather the simple expression 
 (guarded according to experience of misconception) of the 
 fundamental fact of the Incarnation, together with such reve- 
 lation as to the relations of the Divine Being, and the wonder 
 
248 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 of His work amongst men, as is clearly lit up by the event 
 of the Incarnation itself, and is required for such apprehen- 
 sion of the meaning and effects of the Incarnation, as Jesus 
 Christ held to be meet and necessary for us. 
 
 And so it is with all parts of Christian doctrine. If they 
 would be found to be necessarily contained in a full un- 
 folding of the great truth which the Creed so briefly and 
 simply declares, then they really are parts of our faith, 
 because they are really involved in the understanding of 
 the threefold revelation to man of the Name of God, which 
 is the sum total of our faith. But if the Name of our God 
 does not contain them, they are not in our creed or our faith. 
 Is there, for example, a visible Church % Is there an Apostolic 
 Ministry % The answer depends on the inquiry as to what 
 is revealed, first in Scripture, and then in history, as to the 
 method of the working of the Spirit of Christ in the world. 
 Did the Old Testament prefigure, in action and in utterance, 
 did the Incarnation require, did the Gospels interpret or com- 
 ment upon, did the Apostles organize or govern, any definitely 
 articulated society, with ceremonies or oflicers, rules or dis- 
 cipline, of its own 1 Was this, the method of association and 
 membership, or was some other, the mode of the working of 
 the Spirit of the Christ among men ? Is the work of Christ, 
 in redeeming and reconciling to God, is His present relation 
 to the world, properly intelligible, or not, — apart from the 
 Church % Is the ministry of the Church, or are the sacraments 
 of the Church, to those who thoughtfully read Scripture and 
 history, a demonstrable part, or normal condition, of the 
 working of the Holy Ghost in the Church ? If so, belief in them 
 is contained in my words, not only when I say, ' I believe in 
 the holy Cathohc Church,' but also, though less plainly, when 
 I say, ' I believe in the Holy Ghost.' But if not, it is not 
 contained. If they are really separable from the Catholic 
 Church, truly understood, or from the understanding of the 
 Holy Spirit and His work, then they are no part of what 
 any Christian need believe. But so far as the holy Catholic 
 Church, — so far as the orderly, covenanted work of the Holy 
 Spirit in the world, — involves and contains the idea of the 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 249 
 
 ministry or the sacraments, so far every Christian will know, 
 just in proportion as he knows the true meaning of his creed, 
 that he is bound to them. It is no part of my business to 
 pursue the question of the sacraments or the ministry further 
 here. 
 
 It may be observed, perhaps, that the Creed contains no 
 proposition expressly about ourselves, — about the fall, for 
 instance, oj- about sin. Yet in and from the first word of the 
 Creed, I of course am present there : and as to formal propo- 
 sitions about myself, it may be that they are not so much 
 articles of belief, as, rather, conditions of mind antecedent to 
 belief, conditions of self-consciousness to which belief fits and 
 responds, and without which the Creed itself would be un- 
 intelligible. But what is thus necessarily implied and in- 
 volved in the terms of the Creed, is after all substantially 
 contained in that Creed to which it is a condition of intelligible- 
 ness. Of course my creed necessarily presupposes myself. I 
 cannot believe at all, except I am, and have a certain history 
 and faculties. I cannot believe in God as Father, as Almighty, 
 as Creator, without implying and including within that 
 belief the fundamental facts of my nature and relation to 
 Him. I cannot believe in the Incarnation and the Redemp- 
 tion, their meaning or their consequences, I cannot believe 
 in the Holy Spirit, or have any intelligent apprehension of 
 His working, except there be implied, as conditions of my 
 consciousness necessary to that intelligence, some apprehen- 
 sion of that which is meant by the fall, some inalienable sense 
 of evil, of sin, of the banishment from God which is the fruit 
 of sin, of the inherent contradiction to my nature, the un- 
 natural penalty and horror, which the banishment of sin 
 involves. So probation, judgment, heaven, hell, are beliefs 
 which grow by inevitable consequence out of the apprehen- 
 sion, once grasped, of the nature and distinction of good and 
 evil ; they are necessary corollaries from the full perception of 
 the eternal rightness of right, the eternal wrongness of wrong, 
 the eternal separation and contrast between right and wrong ; 
 in a word, from belief in God on the part of man. 
 
 Perhaps this illustration may serve to shew how much, 
 
250 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 that is not obvious in the letter, may nevertheless be really 
 contained in man's utterance of the Name of God. 
 
 III. But while the doctrines of the Church which her Creeds 
 express are thus as simple as they are profound, it is 
 no doubt true that there has grown up round about them 
 a considerable body of theological teaching, more or less com- 
 plicated, which is really of the nature of comment upon them, 
 or explication of their nature and meaning. When we speak 
 of the dogmas of Christianity, it is right to distinguish, with 
 the clearest possible line of demarcation, between all this 
 mass of explanatory teaching (more or less authoritative as it 
 may from time to time appear to be) and the central truths 
 themselves, which are our real certainties. The doctrine itself 
 is one thing : the theories explicative of the doctrine are 
 another. They may be of the highest value in their own 
 time and place ; but they are not the immutable principles of 
 Church truth. To say this is not really to depreciate the work 
 of theological writers and teachers of different ages ; but it is 
 to assign to their work its true position. The current mode 
 of explaining a doctrine in one age, and bringing it home by 
 illustrations to the imagination of men, may be discredited 
 and superseded in another. When the current mode of state- 
 ment or illustration begins to be more or less discredited, the 
 minds of quiet people are apt to be distressed. This is 
 because very few of us can distinguish between the truths 
 themselves which we hold, and the (often mistaken) modes of 
 expression by which we seem to explain our truths to our- 
 selves. Even when our explanation is substantially true, the 
 doctrine is still a different thing from our explanation of it ; 
 and if any imperfection is detected in our explanation of it, it 
 is not truth which suffers ; it is only that truth is being dis- 
 tinguished from our imperfect and unconscious glosses ; and 
 thereby in the end the truth can only be served. Perhaps no 
 illustration of this can be more convincing than that which 
 the history of the doctrine of Atonement supplies. That 
 Christ died upon the cross for us, that He offered Himself as 
 a sacrifice, and that we are redeemed through His blood, this 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 2 5 1 
 
 is a belief fundamental to Christianity; nor has the Church 
 ever wavered for an instant in her strong faith in this. But 
 when we go further, and come to the different illustrations 
 that have been given to make the precise nature of Atonement 
 clear to human logic, when in fact we enter upon the domain 
 of explicative theories, we have not only left the sure ground 
 of the Creeds, and embarked upon views which may or may 
 not be correct, but we find, as a fact, that the modes of 
 thought which seemed adequately to explain the doctrine to 
 the conscience of some ages, have not only failed to satisfy, 
 but have actually shocked and offended, others. The teaching 
 that God was angry, but that Jesus, as a result of gentler 
 mercy, and through His innocent blood, appeased, by satisfy- 
 ing, the wrath of the Father, and so reconciled God to us ; 
 the teaching that Satan had obtained a right over man, but 
 that Jesus, by giving up Himself, paid a splendid ransom 
 into the hands of Satan ; the teaching that a debt was due 
 from humanity to God, and that Jesus, clothed as man, alone 
 could deliver man by discharging God's debt : these — be they 
 popular blunderings, or genuine efforts of Theology — may, 
 in their times, have both helped and wounded consciences; 
 but whether they be to us as helps or hindrances, it is of 
 the utmost importance that we should discriminate them, 
 or others which may have succeeded to them as theories ex- 
 planatory of the Atonement, from our cardinal belief in the 
 Atonement itself. We may have rightly seen what is vicious 
 in these statements, and we may have greatly improved upon 
 them, but however much more helpful our modes of exposi- 
 tion may prove themselves to our own minds or those of our 
 hearers, we may only be repeating the old error, and leading 
 the way to fresh distresses in the future, if we confound our 
 mode of explanatory comment with the truth of the doctrine 
 itself, and claim that the mysterious fact of the Atonement 
 means exactly that which is our own best approach to a 
 statement, in illustrative words, of what it expresses to us. 
 
 But it may be asked, Are you not saying too much ? 
 Does not this seem to mean that the doctrines themselves 
 are little better than unintelligible symbols, which need not 
 
252 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 indeed be changed for the simple reason that they can be 
 made to mean whatever is necessary to suit the times 1 No, 
 the truth of them does not change ; and even the changeful 
 modes of presenting them are less changeful, after all, than 
 they seem. They cannot indefinitely vary ; there is one 
 thing which unites them all, and that is the truth itself which 
 lies behind them all. The Atonement is a fact, whether I 
 can adequately expound it or no. The Atonement is a fact, 
 which my attempted expositions do indeed represent, more or 
 less correctly, more or less clumsily, even when I seem most 
 to have failed. Much as they may seem to differ, and in- 
 consistent as they may appear with each other, yet not one 
 of them really represents untruth but truth. Imperfect 
 images they may bo, and in respect of their imperfections, 
 diverse and distorting ; yet there is not one of the theories of 
 Atonement referred to above — not even such as are now seen to 
 contain most error — which did not, as seriously held, represent 
 and convey some real image of the truth. It may be that 
 the truth which they represented was conveyed in an inexact 
 way ; and that afterwards, when attention was concentrated 
 on the points of inexactness, the statement became, and 
 would have become, more and more misleading; it was no 
 longer then a possible vehicle of truth ; but what it had 
 really conveyed to those to whom it was living, was a real 
 soul-enlightening image of the truth of the Atonement. It 
 was an imperfect image ; it was even in part a distorted 
 image, — as everything that I see through my window is in 
 part distorted. But it was a real image of the real truth 
 none the less. 
 
 Local and popular modes of exposition then are often 
 as the medium through which dogmatic truth is seen and 
 apprehended, — not always, certainly, without distortion. 
 But the more catholic the truth, the more it retains its 
 identity of form, however remote from each other, in place 
 or time, the diverse types of mind which view and teach it, 
 so much the purer must it be from accidental or temporary 
 conditionings ; so much the nearer, in rank, to a fundamental 
 doctrine of the Catholic Church. 
 
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 253 
 
 We do not, of course, distinguish Catholic dogma from 
 theological literature, as though the one were bare facts, and 
 the other all explanations of the facts. But we may rightly 
 confine the use of the word ' dogma ' to the fundamental facts, 
 together with such explanation of them as the Church has 
 agreed, by universal instinct, or by dogmatic decree en- 
 dorsed through ecumenical acceptance, to be essential to a 
 reasonable apprehension of the facts. 
 
 It is the more important to guard with unfaltering clearness 
 this distinction between dogma on the one hand, and theo- 
 logical literature on the other, because it is, no doubt, in the 
 sphere of explanatory theories and expressions, that most of 
 those controversies find their place, which distress quiet minds, 
 and rouse hot battles of orthodoxy between sincere Christian 
 combatants. If it could be recognised at the time how far the 
 apparent innovators of successive generations were really ques- 
 tioning not the doctrines themselves, but certain traditional 
 modes of thought and teaching which have wrongly ad- 
 hered to the doctrines, there would be fewer accusations of 
 heterodoxy, and less distress and perplexity amongst the 
 orthodox. But it is natural enough that this should not be 
 perceived by the defenders, when the innovators themselves 
 are so often both blind and indifferent to it. And it is just 
 herein that the different innovators are apt to make them- 
 selves indefensible. Too often they think that they are 
 making real advance upon the doctrines of the Church and 
 her Creeds, and they are elated, instead of being ashamed, at 
 the thought. They make light of loyalty, they despise the 
 birthright of their Churchmanship, and find their own self- 
 exaltation in the very consciousness of offending their 
 brethren. This, whether done under provocation or no, is to 
 depart from the spirit of the Church of Christ, in temper and 
 meaning at least, — even though their work in the long run 
 should prove (as it must so far as there is truth in it) only to 
 serve the interest and work of the Church. 
 
 It is easier to see this in retrospect than in struggle. But 
 perhaps those who look back upon the struggles of the last 
 generation within the Church, will recognise that the orthodox 
 
2 54 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 thought of the present day has been not a little cleared and 
 served, not merely by the work of orthodox defence, but in no 
 small part by the work of the ' liberalizers ' also. To say 
 this, is by no means necessarily to acquit the liberalizers, or to 
 cast a slur upon those who fought against them. Such con- 
 demnations or acquittals depend upon other considerations, 
 which do not concern us here. But putting wholly aside as 
 irrelevant all condemnation or acquittal of individuals, we 
 may yet acknowledge that the work done has in the end 
 served the cause of the truth and the Church. This is 
 said, of course, of its real intellectual outcome ; certainly 
 not of the unsettling of souls by the way. And it is 
 also to be noted that even when the fruit of their work has 
 been in a real sense, after all, accepted and incorporated, it is 
 hardly ever in the sense, and never quite with the results, 
 which they, so far as they had allowed themselves to be mal- 
 contents, had supposed. But if whatever is good and true in 
 their work becomes, after all, an element in the conscious- 
 ness of the Church, might not the work itself have been 
 done, all along, in perfect Church loyalty % In so far as 
 different earnest writers of a generation ago, or of to-day, 
 are really, whether consciously or not, making a contribution 
 to one of the great theological tasks of our time, in so far (that 
 is) as they are helping towards the correction of erroneous 
 fancies of popular theology, — helping, for instance, to modify 
 that superstitious over-statement about 'justification' which 
 would really leave no meaning in ' righteousness ; ' or to limit 
 the grossness of the theory often represented by the word 
 ' imputation ; ' or to rebuke the nervous selfishness of reli- 
 gionists whose one idea of the meaning of religion was ' to be 
 saved ;' or to qualify the materialism or superstition of ignorant 
 sacramentalists ; or to banish dogmatic realisms about hell, or 
 explications of atonement which malign God's Fatherhood ; 
 or the freezing chill and paralysis of all life supposed before 
 now to be necessarily involved in the Apostolic words 'pre- 
 destination' and 'election;' so far they are really, though it 
 may be from the outside and very indirectly, doing the work 
 of the Church. But the pity of it is that the men who do 
 
VI. The incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 255 
 
 this kind of service are so apt to spoil it, by overvaluing 
 themselves and forgetting the loveliness and the power of 
 perfect subordination to the Church. We may own that Church 
 people and Church rulers have too often been the stumbling- 
 block. It is they who again and again have seemed to fight 
 against everything, and by intellectual apathy, and stern moral 
 proscription of every form of mental difficulty (wherein often- 
 times are the birth-throes of enlightenment) to drive living 
 and growing intelligence out of the Church. It is true that 
 the greatest of Churchmen would, if the badge of their work 
 were submissiveness, have sometimes to wait awhile, and bear 
 delay, and wrong from inferior minds, with the patience of 
 humility. Yes ; but that work of theirs, if it once were 
 stamped with this seal of patient submissiveness, would be a 
 glory to the Church for ever, like the work of her quiet 
 confessors, the work of a Scupoli, a Ken, or a Fenelon ; 
 instead of being, as it more often seems to be, a great 
 offending and perplexing of thousands of the very consciences 
 which deserve to be treated most tenderly, and therefore also 
 a wrong and a loss to the conscience and character of the 
 writer. 
 
 Are statements like these a concession to the antidogmatist ? 
 If so, they are one to which, in the name of truth, he is 
 heartily welcome. And perhaps, under the same high sanc- 
 tion we may add what will look, to some minds, like another. 
 We claimed some time since that the Creed must be, to 
 Christians, rather a complete and conclusive than a partial or 
 a tentative statement of truth. Yet there is one sense in 
 which we may own that even the definitions of the Creeds may 
 themselves be called relative and temporary. For we must 
 not claim for phrases of earthl^^ coinage a more than earthly 
 and relative completeness. The Creeds are temporary, in that 
 they are a complete and sufficient statement of truth only 
 for time. And therefore they are only quite perfectly adequate 
 to express those truths which have their place in time. But 
 we, in respect of truths which transcend time, if we cannot 
 as yet be freed from the trammels and limits of earthly 
 thought and expression, yet can recognise at least the fact, 
 
256 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 that we are, even in our Creeds, still labouring within those 
 trammels. We may have ground for believing the Creeds of 
 the Church to be the most perfectly balanced and harmonious 
 expression of the truth whereof our earthly knowledge is, or 
 will be, capable. Yet when we struggle, as in the language 
 of the Athanasian Creed, to express the relations which 
 have been exhibited to us in the eternal Godhead through 
 the use of the words ' Person ' and ' Substance,' or v-noaTaais 
 and ov(rio. ; or when we thus profess our belief in the Person 
 of the Holy Ghost, ' The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of 
 the Son : neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but pro- 
 ceeding,' need we fear to own that the instruments which, 
 perforce, we make use of upon earth, even in the Creeds of 
 the Church, are necessarily imperfect instruments ; the power 
 of conception imperfect ; the power of phrase and imagery 
 imperfect also ; and that their sufficiency of truth (though 
 not their correctness meanwhile) is so far temporary that it 
 is limited to earth and to time ; and that, in the perfect light 
 and knowledge of the presence of God, the perfectest know- 
 ledge represented by them will be superseded and absorbed, 
 while the glosses and materialisms with which, in various 
 ways, we may have been unconsciously clothing them to our 
 own imaginations, will be — not superseded only but corrected, 
 and, it may be, reproved ? Moreover, if the truths represented 
 in the Creeds are wider and deeper than our conceptions of 
 them, we can admit that there may possibly be particulars 
 in which, even now, the experience of spiritual life may 
 deepen and enlarge the meaning, to us, of our Creeds ; as, for 
 instance, the words heaven and hell may present to us ideas 
 differing, in the direction of more correctness, from those 
 which they presented to some of our forefathers. It is not 
 that the Creeds will be some day corrected. It is not 
 that we shall see hereafter how false they were, but how 
 far the best conceptions which they opened to us, — the 
 best, that is, that our earthly faculties were capable 
 of, lagged in their clumsiness behind the perfect apprehen- 
 sion of the truths which they had, nevertheless, not untruly 
 represented ; but which we then shall have power to see and 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 257 
 
 know as they are. The truth which is dimly imaged for us 
 in the Creeds, will never belie, but will infinitely transcend, 
 what their words represented on earth. 
 
 But it will very naturally be asked by what right we speak 
 thus of the Creeds. In the very moment of admitting, in 
 one sense, their incompleteness and want of finality, by what 
 right do we lay down still that they are final and complete 
 to the end of time ; that is, perhaps, through ages of human 
 advance, of which we may have now no conception at all ? 
 Such a question does not apply to the strictly historical state- 
 ments which constitute the foundation of our creed, but to 
 those interpretations of historical fact, and to those assertions 
 about the Divine Being and its relations, which necessarily 
 transcend time and experience. And after all, perhaps, the 
 answer is not difficult. We have to consider, first, that for 
 the very reason that these beliefs do absolutely transcend 
 time and experience, therefore no human development which 
 belongs merely to time and experience, can, in itself, displace 
 or improve upon them ; and secondly, that our knowledge 
 of these truths is really derived from a Divine revelation, 
 which took place, as we believe, within time and experience. 
 We may say, indeed, that the statements of this Divine reve- 
 lation are corroborated to us, by such elements of thought as 
 our reason (which we believe to be also in its reality Divine) 
 is able to supply. It remains, however, that they can only 
 really be proved or disproved, by arguments which go to 
 prove or disprove the truth of the historical Incarnation, and 
 of the revelations which it contains. 
 
 It follows from hence that we have a valid right to hold 
 them not only true, but final in their statement of truth for 
 this present world, exactly so far as we have a right to 
 believe that our historical revelation is, for time, a final 
 one. Should there, indeed, be a wholly fresh revelation, the 
 amount of truth hitherto revealed might be superseded ; but 
 nothing short of a revelation can supersede it. The idea that 
 any advance of human reason could be inconsistent with it, 
 involves for the Christian who believes human reason to be 
 divinely reflected and divinely implanted, nothing less than 
 
 s 
 
258 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 an unthinkable contradiction. We may therefore believe it 
 in any case to be final, till the coming of a further revelation : 
 and so far as there is anything in the truth already revealed 
 to us, which may warrant us in feeling confident that 
 there is no fresh revelation in store, within the limits of 
 time, by which the revelation of Jesus Christ will be super- 
 seded, just so far and no further are we justified in claim- 
 ing for those clauses in the Creed, whose subject-matter 
 transcends time and experience, that they are the com- 
 pletest expressions of their truths which can be reached in 
 time. 
 
 IV. It may, perhaps, be a matter of prudence to refer for a 
 moment to what are called the ' damnatory clauses ' of the 
 Athanasian Creed ; though it would not be necessary to do 
 so for the purpose of any positive statement or explanation 
 of Christian doctrine. These clauses, however, to the positive 
 statement add a negative. It is easy to misunderstand them, 
 and even, by misrepresenting, to make them appear gro- 
 tesque. But if the question be as to what they really mean, 
 they are, after all, to the Christian, an obvious and necessary 
 corollary of the Creed which is his life. There is but One 
 God, and One Heaven, and One Salvation ; not a choice of alter- 
 native salvations, or heavens, or gods. There is One Incar- 
 nation, One Cross, One Divine restoring and exalting of 
 humanity. There is One Spirit of God, One Church — the 
 fabric and the method of the working of the Spirit, — One 
 Spiritual Covenant with man. Man must have part in this 
 One, or he has part in none ; for there is no other. Man must 
 have knowledge of this One, belief in this One ; or there is 
 none for him to believe in or to know. God's covenant is 
 with His Church on earth ; and the statements of the Creed 
 are the representation in words of that knowledge of the 
 truth which the Church possesses, the possession of which is 
 her life. The Athanasian Creed is not addi-essed to outsiders, 
 but to those who are within the Church. For encouragement, 
 or (if necessary) for warning, it insists to them on the uniqueness 
 of their faith. To have hold on God is to have hold on Life. 
 To revolt from God is to revolt from Life. This is so, to 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 259 
 
 those who have or ought to have learnt that it is so, both in 
 fact and in thought. Thus, in fact, to di"op out of communion 
 with the Incarnation of Christ, is to drop out of communion 
 with the inner realities and possibilities of humanity. But 
 the mind, and its convictions and meanings, cannot wholly be 
 separated from the facts of the life. There comes, at least in 
 most lives, a time when the man's own allegiance to the facts 
 is a necessary condition of his identification with them. ' If 
 ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins.' 
 There comes a point at which the mind's refusal of the doc- 
 trines of religion is the man's revolt from the facts ; and sncli. 
 a revolt is repudiation of the One revelation of God, the One 
 Incarnation, the One Salvation, the One Church or Covenant. 
 This must be broadly true, true in the abstract, as principle, 
 unless truth and falsehood, right and wrong, are fundamentally 
 false distinctions, and every man is to be equally good, and 
 equally compelled to heaven. At what point any individual 
 pers,on, or class of persons, does, or does not, in the sight of 
 the Judge who knows the whole inward history, and tries 
 the most secret motive, fall within the scope of this principle, 
 and incur the final condemnation of rebellion against the one 
 light and hope of all humanity, is another question altogether. 
 Any such application of the principle to the case of individuals 
 belongs only to God the Judge, and would be an arrogant im- 
 piety in any man. Even when such a question may have to 
 be determined ecclesiastically, the ecclesiastical condemnation 
 and sentence, though expressly representing in shadow the 
 eternal sentence, is none the less quite distinct, and indeed 
 in its ultimate motive even contrasted with it. But however 
 unchristian it may be to say that A or B will perish ever- 
 lastingly, the principle nevertheless is true, that the truth 
 which the Creed embodies, the truth of which Christ's In- 
 carnation is the pivot and centre, is tlie only deliverance from 
 everlasting perishing ; and that whole-hearted union and 
 communion with this truth, is that true state of Church life 
 which alone has the certain seal of the covenant of God. 
 This broad truth it is, the necessary complement of any hold- 
 ing of the Christian creed as true, which these clauses affii'm. 
 S 2. 
 
26o The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 If it be said, ' your Athanasian Creed is simple and tren- 
 chant ; it has no qualifications such as you admit ' ; our reply 
 would be threefold. First, the Creed is part of our heritage 
 from the past, and its phraseology is not our handiwork ; 
 but we know that the necessary qualifications with which 
 we understand its phraseology have been generally recognised 
 by the Church from which we inherit it. Secondly, the 
 Quicunque vult \b, strictly, not so much a creed as a canticle ; 
 it has never been used as a test of Church communion ; and 
 it speaks, on a point like this, as the Te Deum would speak, 
 in the language not of judicial award but of devotional 
 loyalty. Thirdly, the qualifications with which we say that 
 any generalisation about man's responsibility for belief, 
 whether in this ' canticle ' or in scripture, must necessarily 
 be understood, are only such as all men apply to any similar 
 generalisation about responsibility for conduct. ' If ye be- 
 lieve not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins,' is paralleled 
 by ' They which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom 
 of God.' We claim only to interpret the one as rationally as 
 all men understand the other. 
 
 It has seemed to be desirable, while insisting upon the 
 claims of dogma, not indeed in the name of allegiance to 
 imposed authority, but in the name of truth, and on the ground 
 of its simple identity with truth, to try to state, with the utmost 
 possible plainness, whatever could be truly admitted in the 
 way of apparent qualification of those claims. Truth is 
 supreme, and eternal ; and dogma, so far as it coincides with 
 truth, is, of course, all that truth is. For the dogmatic posi- 
 tion of the Church and her Creeds, we claim that it is the 
 true and simple expression upon earth of the highest truth 
 that is, or can be, known. But dogmatic theologians are not 
 infallible, and so far as the name of dogma has been claimed 
 for mistaken presumption or misleading statement of truth, 
 so far may dogma have seemed to fight against truth. The 
 words, indeed, 'dogmatic' and ' dogmatism' have acquired a bad 
 reputation. But this is not the fault of dogma. A dogmatist, 
 in the invidious sense of the word, does not mean one who 
 studies dogma, but rather one who foolishly utters what are 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 261 
 
 not dogmas as if they were. The dogmatic temper is the 
 temper of one who is imperiously confident that he is right 
 when he is not. That is to say, the words dogma, dogmatic, 
 dogmatize, etc., are commonly used of something which is the 
 mere abuse and travesty of their proper meaning. It is hard 
 that dogma itself should be prejudiced by this caricaturing 
 misuse of its name. 
 
 Meanwhile, if real charges be brought against any part of 
 our dogmatic creed, we are willing most honestly to examine 
 into them. In so far as they are made against current 
 suppositions, which are separable from our essential belief, - — 
 separable as, for example, we now see various details of tradi- 
 tional belief about the fii-st chapter of Genesis to be separable 
 — we join our critics in the examination with a mind as open 
 as they could desire. And it must, in simple candour, be 
 admitted further, that upon the appearance of any new form 
 of thought. Churchmen have not generally been quick of mind 
 to discriminate the essential from the non-essential, so as to 
 receive at first, with any openness of mind, what they had 
 afterwards to admit that they might have received from the 
 first. But not even this admission must prevent us from 
 claiming, that when that to which exception is taken does 
 really belong to the essential truths of our creed, which to us 
 are more absolutely established certainties than anything in 
 heaven and earth besides, they must pardon us if, while we 
 are still willing to give the most candid hearing possible to 
 everything that they have to urge, we yet cannot, if we 
 would, divest ourselves of the deepest certainties of our exist- 
 ence ; — cannot therefore pretend to argue with more openness 
 of mind than would scientific professors — say with a cham- 
 pion who undertook to prove that the globe was flat, or that 
 the sun went round the earth. We are ready to listen to 
 everything. We are fully prepared to find that the champion 
 may produce in evidence some phenomena which we shall be 
 unable to account for. We have found it before ; we are 
 not unaccustomed to finding it (though, in good time, the 
 perplexity always unravels itself) ; and we shall be in no way 
 disconcerted if we find it again. But we cannot pretend 
 
262 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 meanwhile to liold all the truth which our consciences have 
 known in suspense. 
 
 V. What was said just now about the Creeds will not, it is 
 hoped, appear to any minds to fail in the entu-e respect which 
 is due to them. Yet it makes it, perhaps, the more incum- 
 bent upon us to take notice of another form of attack upon 
 dogma, which connects itself with an attitude about the 
 Creeds, such as may seem at first sight to be not wholly 
 dissimilar ; though presently all the foundations of dogma 
 are dissolved by it. But in point of fact, if we admit that 
 what the Creeds mean on earth, is less than what the same 
 truths will mean in heaven, or that there may be, even 
 here, a clumsier, and a completer, understanding of them ; 
 this is a position essentially different from maintaining 
 that what the Creeds both say and mean, is not only 
 less than, but (if strictly taken) inconsistent with, the 
 real truth ; and that not in any transcendent sense, as 
 celestial beings, with wholly other faculties, may conceiv- 
 ably have power of apprehending it in heaven, but as the 
 more intelligent among us may, and do, see it now. This 
 is not only to admit that the Creeds are built up, perforce, of 
 materials which belong to this earth ; but to treat them as 
 mere serviceable fictions for the teaching of the uncivilized 
 or the young. The deliberate unbeliever, indeed, assumes 
 that the Creeds mean what they say, and that the Church 
 understands the Creeds. Assuming this, he parts company 
 with the Church, because he holds that the statements of her 
 Creeds are, in fact, fictitious. But it may surprise us to find 
 that there is another form of this view of the fictitiousness of 
 Creeds, and that here the critic speaks, not at all in the 
 character of an unbeliever, but rather in that of an enlight- 
 ened Churchman. All Christian truth, he says, is true. Even 
 the Creeds in a real sense represent the truth. But the 
 Church's understanding and expression of Christian truth in 
 the Creeds, is, none the less, strictly, a misrepresentation of the 
 truth. Though the truth of Christ lies behind the Church's 
 Creeds, yet they have so overlaid, and thereby, in strict speech, 
 misstated it, that it is only the patience of criticism, which 
 
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dog^na. 263 
 
 cutting bravely adrift from the authority of traditional in- 
 terpretation, has succeeded in discriminating between the 
 Creeds and the meaning of the Creeds, and behind what are 
 practically the fictions of dogmatic Christianity, has re-dis- 
 covered the germs of Christian truth. Neither the facts of 
 the life of Jesus Christ, nor His teaching, nor His consciousness 
 in regard of Himself, were as we have been taught, but were 
 something different. He never thought nor taught of Himself 
 as personally God, nor did He perform any miracles, nor did 
 He rise on the third day from the dead. Whatever scrip- 
 tures state these things explicitly, are proved by that very 
 fact to be glosses or errors. And yet, all the while, every- 
 thing is true spiritually. The record of the Incarnate Life is 
 true literally, it may be, at comparatively few points ; cer- 
 tainly not the story of the Birth ; certainly not the story of 
 the Resurrection ; certainly not any incident which involves, 
 or any expression which implies, miracle. But the Birth, the 
 Resurrection, the miracles, every one of them, represent, in 
 the most splendid of imaginative language and portraiture, 
 essential spiritual truths. They are fictions, but vivid repre- 
 sentations, in fiction, of fact ; splendid truths, therefore, so 
 long as they are understood to be literally fictitious, but per- 
 versions of truth, if taken for truth of fact. 
 
 It is this conception which was set forth not long ago with 
 a singular power and persuasiveness by the author of TAe 
 Kernel and the Husk. The lofty level of thought, the 
 restraint and felicity of language, above all the deeply religious 
 spirit of the author, invest his arguments with a charm of 
 unusual attractiveness. The arguments are not such as it is 
 wholly pleasant to see thus recommended. He deals in 
 detail, in the course of the volume, with much of the narra- 
 tive of Scripture, with the purpose of shewing how one by 
 one the various records, including of course the Birth and 
 Resurrection, have grown to their present form out of realities 
 which contained no miracle, and which therefore differed 
 essentially from the historical scriptures and faith of the 
 Church. 
 
 It is no part of our task to enter upon such details. Nor 
 
264 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 is it necessary. The struggle against such a theory of Chris- 
 tianity will not be fought out on details. It may be conceded 
 that many of the miracles, taken singly, can easily be made 
 to fall in with conjectural theories as to a mythical origin, if 
 only the antecedent conviction against their reality as miracles 
 be cogent enough really to require that the necessary force 
 should be put upon the evidence. Some indeed may lend 
 themselves to the process with a facility which fairly surprises 
 us. Others seem still to be very obstinate, and force the 
 rationalizer into strange hypotheses. But after all, the real 
 question, through one and all, is not how easily this or that 
 miracle can be made, by squeezing of evidence, to square with 
 a rationalizing hypothesis ; but what is the strength of the 
 argument for the rationalizing hypothesis itself, which is the 
 warrant for squeezing the evidence at all. 
 
 The Evangelists say that Jesus taught in the synagogue at 
 Capernaum. Our author takes for granted that He did so. 
 The Evangelists say that Jesus miraculously multiplied loaves 
 and fishes in the wilderness. Our author takes for granted 
 that He did not so. Now why this contrast? Incidentally, 
 indeed, it may be remarked that on the author's own general 
 method, this multiplication of loaves ought to be one of the 
 most certain facts in the life of Christ, as it is emphasized in 
 every Gospel. But this is by the way. The real ground of 
 the contrast in the treatment of the same evidence is a certain 
 prior conviction with which the evidence is approached. 
 Now we are not contending that any such sifting of evidence 
 in the light of prior tests is inadmissible. On the contrary, 
 there is hardly anyone who does not, on a similar principle, 
 explain the differences (for example) in the accounts of the 
 title upon the Cross, or the difiiculty as to whether Jesus 
 healed one blind man or two, on the way into, or out from, 
 Jericho ; but we do say that the admissibleness of such 
 a method of interpreting absolutely depends upon the cer- 
 tainty of the correctness of the prior conviction itself. 
 
 The various details of ingenuity, then, with which he 
 explains away particular incidents, are to us of quite sub- 
 ordinate intej-est. Everything depends upon the cogency of 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma, 265 
 
 the grounds for explaining away at all. A large part of the 
 book is occupied in explaining away the facts of Christianity, 
 as the Christian Church has hitherto understood them ; an 
 explaining away which may be more or less necessary, more 
 or less satisfactory, if the premisses which require it are once 
 admitted ; but which certainly is wholly unnecessary, and 
 wholly unsatisfactory, if those premisses are denied. 
 
 The prior conviction in the book in question is that miracles 
 neither do, nor did, happen in fact, and therefore that any 
 narrative which involves them is incredible. All the ingenui- 
 ties of conjecture on individual points become relevant subse- 
 quently to, and in reliance upon, this underlying principle. 
 Admit this, and they are forthwith interesting and valuable. 
 Deny this, and they lose their importance at once. It is the 
 pressure of this prior conviction which seems to give life and 
 force to a number of suggestions, about other stories, and 
 particularly about that of the Resurrection, which, apart from 
 this animating conviction, would be felt to be very lifeless ; 
 and to a total experiment of subjective reconstruction, which, 
 but for the strength of the antecedent conviction, would have 
 been impossible to men of reverent thought and modest 
 utterance. The teaching of the book will therefore really be 
 accepted or the reverse, precisely according as the minds of 
 its readers do, or do not, incline to admit the hypothesis upon 
 which it depends. 
 
 It is probable, indeed, that the author would demur to this 
 statement, at least when put so simply ; on the ground that, 
 though he avows the conviction, yet he has reached the con- 
 viction itself by no a 'pviori road, but as the result of wide 
 observation and unprejudiced scrutiny of evidence. Now it 
 is not at all meant to be asserted that the conviction against 
 miracle is itself reached merely by an a piHori method. No 
 doubt it has, in fact, been arrived at, in those minds which 
 have fully arrived at it, not a jwiori, but as the result of 
 a great induction from experience ; practically indeed, as it 
 seems to them, from experience as good as universal. The 
 weight of the evidence in this direction is neither denied nor 
 forgotten. Yet even when it most impresses us, of course it 
 
266 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 is obvious still to reply to ourselves that however powerful 
 this array of experience may appear so long as there are no 
 instances to the contrary, yet any one contrary instance will 
 break at once the cogency of the induction. The case of 
 Jesus Christ is put forward as being unique. Its uniqueness 
 is not really qualified by the fact that some others, among 
 those nearest to Himself, were by Him enabled — avowedly in 
 His power, not their own, — to do acts which were impossible 
 to other men. This is only a wider extension of His unique 
 power, not a qualification of it. Against such a case, put for- 
 ward on evidence definite and multiform, and put forward as 
 essentially unique, an argument from induction is no argu- 
 ment at all. It is a misnomer to call the induction an argu- 
 ment. The induction, in fact, is merely an observation that 
 other persons did not perform similar miracles ; and that, if 
 Jesus Christ did so. He was unique. But this is no answer 
 to the Christian position. It is part of the position itself 
 
 And so the matter must be referred for settlement to the 
 evidence that is actually forthcoming about Jesus Christ. But 
 it is plain that the inductive presumption against miracle, 
 derived from experience of other men, must not come in to 
 warp or rule this evidence. It may be present indeed as 
 a sort of cross-examining counsel, as a consideration requiring 
 that the evidence should be most minutely scrutinized, and 
 suggesting all sorts of questions with a view to this. But 
 into the evidence itself, it cannot be permitted to intrude. 
 
 Now, it is part of our complaint against such writers as the 
 author of Tlie Kernel and the Hut<lc, that however much 
 their general presumption against miracle may have been 
 inductively and patiently reached ; yet when they come to 
 deal with the evidence about Jesus Christ, this conviction 
 (which ought to stand on one side inquiringly) becomes 
 to them an underlying postulate ; it is settled beforehand ; 
 it is present with them in their exegesis, not simply as a 
 motive for sifting the evidence carefully, but as a touchstone 
 of truth by which it may all be tried. Probably the author 
 would believe that he has reached his conviction against the 
 miracles of Jesus of Nazareth, not merely from a general 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 267 
 
 induction as to the absence of miracle in the lives of others, 
 but also from an unprejudiced scrutiny of the evidence of the 
 life of Jesus Christ Himself. But this is just what we are 
 not at all prepared to concede. On the contrary, we main- 
 tain that his scrutiny is wholly prejudiced. Examine the 
 evidence with a bias sufficiently powerful against belief in 
 miracle ; and you may end in the result which this author 
 reaches. Examine it without such a bias : and you will find 
 yourself at every turn protesting against his mode of treating 
 the evidence. It is a scrutiny of the evidence on the basis of 
 the inadmissibleness of '^miracles, which gives him that coherent 
 theory about the growth of the Christian tradition, and those 
 consequent principles of interpretation of the text of the 
 Gospels, which he appears to regard as the simple result of 
 the evidence itself. 
 
 We shall very likely be surprised to find that, after all, the 
 abstract impossibility of miracle is not laid down,- — nay, is 
 expressly disclaimed, — by him. Miracle (if we rightly under- 
 stand) is not impossible absolutely, — not even, he adds, d 
 jpviori improbable ; yet it is equivalent to an impossibility, 
 because the will of the Father indwelt wholly in Jesus, and 
 because the perfect uniformity of natural processes as we 
 have experienced them, is, in fad, and with no exceptions, 
 the will of the Father ^. No general reflections upon our 
 dependence, in ordinary life, on the good faith of an uni- 
 form nature, ought to blind us to the fact that this last 
 position neither has, nor can have, any adequate ground at 
 all. It is surprising that with so weak a statement of the 
 impossibility of miracle, the principle of the impossibility of 
 miracle should have to bear the extraordinary weight that 
 is put upon it. Nothing short of a demonstration of this 
 impossibility would fully justify the critical position that is 
 adopted. For it is, in fact, upon this impossibility that the 
 whole re-reading of the history is based. 
 
 It is probably true that if once the hj'pothesis of the im- 
 possibility of miracle be accepted as practically certain, an 
 earnest mind, penetrated with this as its overruling principle, 
 
 1 See especially the concluding paragi-aplis of letter xix. 
 
2 68 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 and dwelling upon the Gospels always and only in the light 
 of this, will be compelled gradually to re-read in one place 
 and re-interpret in another, until the whole has been, by 
 steps that upon the hypothesis were irresistible, metamor- 
 phosed into a form as unlike as possible, indeed, to what it 
 wore at first, but still one which can be felt to be precious 
 and beautiful. But we are entitled to point out how abso- 
 lutely this re-reading of the evidence depends upon the truth 
 of the principle which underlies it. For the sake of this, 
 all sorts of violence has to be done to what would otherwise 
 be, in one incident after another, the obvious meaning of 
 words, the obvious outcome of evidence. Without the cer- 
 tainty of this, the new method of reading must be critically 
 condemned as baseless and arbitrary. This alone makes it 
 rationally possible. Without the strong cogency of this it 
 falls instantly to pieces. 
 
 Now orthodox Christians are sometimes accused of reading 
 their historical evidence in the light of a preconception. They 
 begin with the doctrine of the Creed, and read all records 
 of fact with the conviction of that doctrine in their hearts 
 and consciences. We need not be altogether concerned to 
 combat this statement. Perhaps few records are read, or 
 would ever be read intelligently, except in the light of the 
 reader's preconceptions. But our point is to see clearly that 
 at all events the new reading of the Gospel history is itself 
 so entirely the outcome and creature of its antecedent prin- 
 ciple, that it cannot without that hold together for an instant. 
 
 Let us be content, for the moment, to view the orthodox 
 Christian and the new rationalist as both alike really reading 
 the Gospel narrative in the light of a preconceived principle ; 
 the one viewing everything on the basis of the perfect 
 Divinity of the historical Jesus Christ (with the corollary 
 that it is impossible for us to determine a 'priori what power 
 His perfect Humanity — for which we have no precedent — 
 would, or would not, naturally and necessarily exhibit) ; the 
 other viewing everything on the basis of the absolute im- 
 possibility, or at least the incredibleness, of miracle. We 
 might point out that the former in his hypothesis has a 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 269 
 
 prmcip]e which absolutely fits and perfectly accounts for 
 every part of the evidence which confronts him ; while the 
 latter is compelled, by the cogency of his principle, to recon- 
 struct for himself almost every chapter of the evidence. And 
 if we go one step further back, and ask, what is the antecedent 
 reasonableness of the one hypothesis, or of the other? from 
 what source is each derived % We must claim it as simple 
 fact, that the former hypothesis is itself the direct outcome 
 of the evidence, — the inevitable outcome, indeed, so long as 
 the evidence stands: while the other is, at bottom, an as- 
 sumption, held absolutely in the teeth of the evidence actually 
 existing in respect of the life and consciousness of Jesus of 
 Nazareth, and itself on other grounds not merely unproved, 
 but essentially incapable of proof ^. 
 
 But if our hypothesis is itself the outcome of the evidence, 
 and fits with perfect exactness into all its intricacies, then 
 we yield far too much if we treat it as on the level of a mere 
 preconception. To persist in reading the New Testament by 
 the light of the preconception of the dogma of Christ's God- 
 head (with the corollary that no miracle is incredible as 
 miracle), is to be prejudiced only in the same sense in which 
 the scientist is prejudiced who persists in studying the 
 records of astronomy in the light of certain preconceptions 
 as to the parabola or the law of gravitation. 
 
 But what is the case with the other hypothesis? By it 
 the historical Jesus Christ is swept away ; and another per- 
 sonality, which does not exist in the history at all, but which 
 the history has suggested to certain earnest-minded critics of 
 our own day, is substituted in His place. All those who 
 witnessed of His words and deeds to the Church, all those 
 whose witness the Church has accepted and sealed, are 
 thoroughly mistaken, mistaken in the very points which to 
 them were fundamental. However honest they may have been 
 in their superstitious ignorance, they certainly bore to the world 
 what was, in fact, false testimony. It is impressive, with a 
 
 ^ 'The question of miracles seems fessor Huxley as of the Duke of 
 
 now to be admitted on all hands to Argyll. Nineteenth Cenhmj, April 1887, 
 
 be simply a question of evidence.' p. 483: cp. Feb. 1887, pp. 201, etc. 
 These are the words as much of Pro- 
 
270 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 strange impressiveness, to follow this hypothesis through the 
 story of Christ's life ; and see with what ingenuity, often 
 plausible, often pathetic, the old facts are refashioned to meet 
 the new principle. 
 
 Cardinal, of course, in difficulty as in importance, is the 
 narrative of the Resurrection ; that plain statement of fact, 
 to testify whereto was the primary qualification, and primary 
 function, of Apostleship ; and which, from S. Peter and 
 S. Paul downwards, has always been recognised as cardinal 
 to the faith of the Church. 
 
 Now given ; first, the certain conviction that no miracle 
 occurred ; and secondly, a working hypothesis as to the 
 growth of the Christian Scriptures, which not only enables, 
 but requires, you to set aside, on grounds of subjective 
 criticism, all such evidence as seems to you to be improbable ; 
 and it follows that, if you are still of a very religious mind, 
 you will probably have to take refuge in what may yet be 
 to you the beautiful story of a Resurrection exclusively 
 spiritual. 
 
 You must, of course, deal very violently with the direct 
 evidence. But that is already covered by the general theory 
 you have reached as to the historical genesis and value (or 
 lack of value) of the books of the New Testament. And, of 
 course, in adopting such a view of the books of the New 
 Testament, you are reducing to a phantasm the reality of 
 your belief in the Holy Catholic Church, which has enshrined 
 and consecrated, as perfectest truth, what are really at best 
 only fables, — capable, indeed, of clumsily representing the 
 truth to the childish or the stupid, but beginning to be abso- 
 lutely pernicious to minds which have reached a certain point 
 of intelligent education. 
 
 Tolerating these things, however, you may admit the truth 
 of the Resurrection (as you may admit every proposition of 
 the Creed) in words ; only in a sense so refined, so exclu- 
 sively spii-itual, that no bodily reality of resurrection is left. 
 There is no resurrection in your creed correlative to the 
 dying. There is no resurrection more, or more demonstrable, 
 than what we believe to be true of men in general. There 
 
VI. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 271 
 
 is no resurrection which enters within the ordinary sphere 
 of human history, or admits any direct contact with the 
 normal methods of human evidence or human proof. The 
 question raised is not whether current imaginations of the 
 Resurrection may possibly be more or less exaggerated in 
 the way of materialism, but whether there was any corporeal 
 reality of resurrection at all. And the question is settled in 
 the negative. The foundation fact of the Creed is etherealized 
 away ; and all the rest, with it, becomes together impalpable 
 and subjective. 
 
 We do not say that there is not a large element which is 
 true, in the thought of such a writer as we have been con- 
 sidering. Where the mind is so devoutly in earnest, it is no 
 hard task to believe that it too must be animated originally 
 by truth. We need not say, therefore, that the work of this 
 earnestness may not serve us all, and contribute to the 
 thought of us all. It may well be true that in our bald 
 understanding of the doctrine of the Resurrection, — or indeed 
 of the whole Incarnation, from beginning to end, — we have, 
 many of us, too little imagined the scope and depth of its 
 spiritual import. If our orthodoxy has been so well content 
 with insisting mechanically upon the literal fact, as not only 
 to forget, but to disdain or disown in any measure, the vast 
 spii'itual realities which it ought to express to us ; then our 
 stupidity, or narrowness, in orthodoxy, is in part to blame, 
 for the distaste which they have created towards orthodoxy 
 in some natures more sensitive than our own. In so far as 
 they can, in this respect, return good for evil, we will not 
 be slow to acknowledge our debt to them. We will be grate- 
 ful for any new suggestion they can discover, as to the moral 
 beauty or import of the Resurrection, or of the Incarnation, 
 or of any or every other miracle, considered upon its moral 
 side as allegory. Some ways at least there may be, in which 
 their insistance may tend to deepen for us our understanding 
 of truths, whose more spiritual aspects we had dwelt upon 
 perhaps, in some cases, — perhaps had even imagined, — far 
 too little. But doubtless that true element of their work, 
 which the mind of the Catholic Church wiU assimilate, will 
 
272 The Religion of the Incajiiation. 
 
 be greatly modified from the form in which it now presents 
 itself — to them as to others. It will, to say the least, be 
 positive rather than negative ; stimulating spiritual sensi- 
 bilities, but not by explaining away the facts of the body ; 
 mdening (it may be) our insight into the divineness of history, 
 and the depth of the meaning of certain events which hap- 
 pened in it, — but not shattering both it and them, by dis- 
 solving their historical truth. 
 
 Meanwhile of the one-sided aspect we can but say that no 
 doubt transcendental spiritualism has a great attractiveness. 
 The Magian aspiration always was fascinating. Individuals, 
 indeed, of enthusiastic sympathies, trained themselves in dog- 
 matic truth, and indulging then- freest speculations always on 
 a backgi-ound of inveterate dogmatic instinct, may fancy the 
 ' spiritualized Christianity ' to be in itself a stable and a 
 living completeness ; but as a system, it will neither produce 
 life nor perpetuate it. It is an attempt to improve upon the 
 Church of Christ, upon the conditions of human nature, upon 
 the facts of history. The Church of Chi-ist is not so. The 
 Church of Christ does not ignore the fundamental conditions 
 of human experience. The Church of Christ is balanced, 
 harmonious, all-embracing, all-adjusting. The Incarnation 
 was the sanctifying of both parts of human nature, not the 
 abolition of either. The Church, the Sacraments, human 
 nature, Jesus Christ Himself, all are twofold ; all are earthly 
 objective, as well as transcendental spiritual. And so long 
 as this world is real as well as the next ; so long as man is 
 body as well as soul ; so long all attempts to evaporate the 
 body and its realities are foredoomed to a necessary and a 
 salutary failure. The religion, which attempts to be rid of 
 the bodily side of things spiritual, sooner or later loses hold 
 of all reality. Pure spiritualism, however noble the aspira- 
 tion, however living the energy with which it starts, always 
 has ended at last, and will always end, in evanescence. 
 
VII. 
 
 THE ATONEMENT, 
 
 ARTHUE LYTTELTON. 
 
I 
 
VII. 
 
 THE ATONEMENT. 
 
 I. Theological doctrine, describing, as it professes to do, 
 the dealings of an all-wise Person with the human race, must 
 be a consistent whole, each part of which reflects the oneness 
 of the will on which it is based. What we call particular 
 doctrines are in reality only various applications to various 
 human conditions of one great uniform method of Divine 
 government, which is the expression in human affairs of one 
 Divine will. The theological statement of any part of this 
 method ought to bear on its face the marks of the whole from 
 which it is temporarily separated ; for though it may be neces- 
 sary to make now this, now that doctrine prominent, to isolate 
 it and lay stress on it, this should be done in such a way that 
 in each special truth the whole should, in a manner, be con- 
 tained. We must be able to trace out in each the lines of the 
 Divine action which is only fully displayed in the whole. 
 Neglect of this not only makes our faith as a whole weak 
 and incoherent, but deprives the doctrines themselves of the 
 illumination and strength which are afforded by the discovery 
 in them of mutual likeness and harmony. They become first 
 unintelligible and then inconceivable, and the revelation of the 
 character of God, which should be perceived in every part of 
 His dealings with men, becomes confused and dim to us. 
 This has been especially the case with the Atonement. In 
 the course of religious controversy this doctrine has become 
 separated from the rest, at one time neglected, at another over 
 emphasized, till in its isolation it has been so stated as to be 
 almost incredible. Men could not indeed be brought to dis- 
 believe in forgiveness, however attained, and the conviction of 
 remission of sins through and in the Blood of Christ has sur- 
 T a 
 
276 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 vived all the theories which have been framed to account for 
 it ; but nevertheless, the unreality of these theories has been a 
 disaster to the Christian faith. Some of them have strained 
 our belief in the moral attributes of God, others have given 
 men easy thoughts of sin and its consequences. This has been 
 so because they have treated the Atonement apart from the 
 whole body of facts which make up the Christian conception 
 of God and His dealings with men. In this essay the attempt 
 will be made to present the doctrine in its relation to the 
 other great Christian truths : to the doctrines, that is, of God, 
 of the Incarnation, of sin. 
 
 (i) On the human side the fact with which we have to deal 
 is the fact of sin. Of this conception the Bible, the most com- 
 plete record of the religious history of man, is full from the 
 first page to the last. Throughout the whole course of Jewish 
 development, the idea that man has offended the justice of 
 God was one of the abiding elements in the religious conscious- 
 ness of the race. But it was by no means confined to the Jews. 
 They have been truly called the conservators of the idea of 
 sin ; but it has never been permanently absent, in some form 
 or other, from the human mind, although we learn most about 
 it, and- can see it in its clearest, most intense form, in the 
 Hebrew religion. Now this conception of sin in its eftect on 
 the human soul is of a twofold character. Sin is felt to be 
 alienation from God, Who is the source of life, and strength, 
 and peace, and in consequence of that alienation the whole 
 nature is weakened and corrupted. In this aspect sin is 
 a state in which the will is separated from the Divine will, 
 the life is cut ofl" from the life of God which He designed us 
 to share. When men come to realize what is meant by union 
 with God, and to feel the awful consequences of separation, 
 there arises at once the longing for a return, a reconcilia- 
 tion ; but this longing has by itself no power to efiect so great 
 a change. To pass from alienation to union is to pass from 
 darkness to light, from evil to good, and can only be accom- 
 plished by that very power, the power of a life united to God, 
 which has been forfeited by sin. Only in union with God 
 can man accomplish anything that is good ; and, therefore, so 
 
VII. The Atonement. 277 
 
 long as he is alienated from God, he can only long for, he can- 
 not obtain, his reunion with the Divine life. Sin therefore, 
 thus considered, is not only wickedness ; it is also misery and 
 hopelessness. Sinners are ' without God in the world,' and 
 for that reason they ' have no hope.' 
 
 This is the aspect of sin as a state of the sinful soul, and 
 as affecting the present relation between man and God. It 
 has destroyed the union, has broken down even the sacrificial 
 bridge, for it has made all acceptable offerings impossible. 
 Man's will is weakened, therefore he has not strength to offer 
 himself completely and unreservedly to God ; his nature is 
 corrupted and stained, therefore his offering, could he make 
 it, could not be accepted. Sin is a hopeless state of weak- 
 ness and uncleanness. But there is another, in one sense an 
 earlier, more fundamental aspect of sin. The sins of the past 
 have produced not merely weakness and corruption, but also 
 guilt. The sinner feels himself guilty before God. If we 
 examine the idea of guilt, as realized by the conscience, it 
 will be seen to contain the belief in an external power, or 
 law, or person against whom the offence has been committed, 
 and also an internal feeling, the acknowledgment of ill-desert, 
 a sense of being under sentence, and that justly. Whether 
 the punishment which is felt to be the due reward of the 
 offence has been borne or not, the conception of punishment, 
 when the offence has been committed, cannot be avoided, 
 and it brings with it a conviction of its justice. These 
 two elements, the external and the internal element, seem 
 to be necessary to the full conception of guilt. The common 
 fallacy that a self-indulgent sinner is no one's enemy but his 
 own would, were it true, involve the further inference that 
 such a sinner would not feel himself guilty. But it is pre- 
 cisely because the consciousness of sin does not and cannot 
 stop here that, over and above any injury to self, any weak- 
 ness or even coiTuption produced by sin, we speak of its guilt. 
 ' Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done that which 
 is evil in Thy sight.' This belief in an external power, whose 
 condemnation has been incurred by sin, may take various 
 forms ; for the power may be represented as impersonal or as 
 t 
 
278 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 personal, as law or as God. For our present purposes, how- 
 ever, the distinction is immaterial : the essential point is that 
 it is something external to ourselves, not merely the echo of 
 the sinner's own self-inflicted pain and injury. We cannot, 
 however, limit it to this. For it is not merely an external 
 power, it is also a just power that is presented to the sense 
 of guilt. Before bare power, unrighteous or non-moral, an 
 offender may be compelled to submit, but he will not feel 
 guilt. The state of mind expressed by Mill's well-known 
 defiance is his who has offended a superior power which he 
 cannot believe to be just, and it is very far removed from the 
 feeling of guiltiness ^. The sense of guilt implies the right- 
 eousness as well as the power of that against which we have 
 offended ; it is a moral conviction. Guiltiness, then, regarded 
 in one aspect is the sense of sin, in another it is the recogni- 
 tion of the law of righteousness, or, if we may now assume 
 the religious point of view, it is the conviction of the wrath 
 of God against sin. 
 
 It is plain, if we will only scrutinise closely and candidly 
 the conception of sin and guilt, that no merely 'subjective' 
 explanation will account for the facts revealed by our con- 
 sciousness. Even if we had no scriptural evidence to guide 
 us, the evidence, that is, to take it at the lowest, of a series 
 of specially qualified witnesses to religious phenomena, our 
 own hearts would tell us of the wrath of God against sin. 
 It is irresistibly felt that there is a Power hostile to sin, and 
 that this Power has decreed a righteous punishment for the 
 offences which are the external signs and results of the sinful 
 state. Whatever the punishment may be, a question we need 
 not now discuss, the sinner's conscience warns him of it. He 
 may apparently, or for a time, escape it ; but it is none the 
 less felt to be the fitting expression of Divine wrath, the 
 righteous manifestation of the hostility of God's nature to 
 sin and all its consequences. Guilt, then, like sin, has its 
 twofold character. It is the belief in an external hostility to 
 
 ^ Mill, Examination of Sir W. epithet to my fellow-creatures ; and 
 
 Hamilton's Philosophy, p. 103. 'I if such a being can sentence me to 
 
 will call no being good, who is not hell for not so calling him, to hell 
 
 what I mean when I apply that I will go.' 
 
VII. The Atonement. 279 
 
 sin expressing itself in punishment, and also the conviction 
 that such punishment is righteous and just. Thus, when once 
 God is recognised as the offended Person, the acknowledgment 
 of the righteousness of His judgment follows. ' Against Thee, 
 Thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy 
 sight ; that Thou mightest be justified when Thou speakest, 
 and be clear when Thou judgest.' 
 
 (2) Corresponding to the sense of sin in its twofold aspect 
 we find, not only in the Mosaic system or in the scriptural 
 history, but almost universally established, the system of 
 sacrifice. It is not necessary to maintain that sacrifice, in 
 its essential idea, was intended to express the consciousness 
 of sin. Rather, it seems to be, essentially, the expression 
 of the very opposite of sin, of that relation of man to 
 God which sin destroyed ^ It is sometimes said that sacri- 
 fice is the recognition of God's sovereignty, the tribute paid 
 by His subjects. This is, of course, a necessary element 
 in the conception of sacrifice, for God is our King ; but it 
 does not satisfy the whole consciousness which man has of 
 his original relation to God. That is a relation, not of sub- 
 jection only, but of union at least as close as that of sons 
 to a Father, a union whereby we derive life from His life, 
 and render back absolute unquestioning love to Him. Sacri- 
 fice is, in its highest, original meaning, the outward expres- 
 sion of this love. As human love naturally takes outward 
 form in gifts, and the closer, the more fervent it is, makes 
 those gifts more and more personal, till at last it wholly 
 gives itself; so sacrifice should be the recognition of our 
 union with God, an expression of our love for Him, giving 
 Him all that we have and all that we are. Submission, 
 reverence, love are the original feelings which sacrifice 
 was intended to represent ; and it may be called, therefore, 
 the expression of man's relations to God in their purest form, 
 unmarred and unbroken by sin. But this is only the original, 
 ideal meaning, for with the intrusion of sin another element 
 appears in sacrifice ; and men attempt, by their ofierings, to 
 expiate their offences, to cover their sins, to wipe out their 
 
 ^ Cf. Holland, Logic and Life, pp. 107, 108. 
 
28o The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 guilt, to propitiate Divine wrath. But though this new ele- 
 ment is introduced, the original intention is not altogether 
 lost. The union has been destroyed by sin, but even in the 
 sin-offerings under the Law there was expressed the endeavour 
 to regain it, to enter once more into living relations with 
 God: while the normal sacrifices of the congregation went 
 beyond this, and represented the exercise of a right based 
 on union with God, the presentation of the people before 
 Him. Thus we must recognise in the Mosaic sacrifices — the 
 most complete and typical form of the sacrificial idea — the 
 twofold aspect which corresponds to the twofold effect of 
 sin on the human race. There is the offering, sometimes the 
 bloodless offering, by which was typified simply man's de- 
 pendence on God, his submission to Him, his life derived 
 from Him and therefore rendered back to Him. From this 
 point of view the sacrifice culminated, not in the slaying and 
 oftering of the victim, but in the sprinkling of the blood, 
 the 'principle of life,' upon the altar. The priestly mediators 
 brought the blood, which ' maketh atonement by reason of 
 the life,' before God, and sprinkled it upon the altar, in order 
 that the lost union with God in the covenant might be re- 
 stored, and life once more derived from God as it had been 
 offered to Him. The whole system was indeed only partial, 
 temporary, external. The Mosaic sacrifices ' sanctified unto 
 the cleanness of the flesh,' they did not ' cleanse the conscience 
 from dead works to serve the living God.' So the restoration 
 which the special sin-offerings accomplished was merely ex- 
 ternal and temporary, the reunion of the offender with the 
 congregation of Israel from which his fault had separated 
 him. But as this excommunication symbolised the loss, 
 brought about by sin, of life with God, so the reunion with 
 the congregation typified the reunion of the sinner with 
 God. As a system, then, the Mosaic sacrifices both corres- 
 ponded to a deep desire of the human heart, the desire to 
 recover the lost relation to the Divine life, and also by their 
 imperfection pointed forward to a time when, by means of 
 a more perfect offering, that restoration should be complete, 
 accomplished once for all, and eternal. This is one aspect of 
 
VII. The Atonement. 281 
 
 the sacrificial system. But before this typical restoration of 
 life, tliere came the mysterious act which corresponded to the 
 sense of guilt. Leaving aside the lesser offerings of the shew- 
 bread and the incense, it may be said generally that in every 
 sacrifice the slaying of a victim was a necessary element. 
 And there is deep significance in the manner in which the 
 slaying was performed. The hands of the offerer laid upon 
 the victim's head denoted, according to the unvarying use of 
 the Old Testament, the representative character of the animal 
 offered, and thus the victim was, so to speak, laden with the 
 guilt of him who sought for pardon and reconciliation. The 
 victim was then slain by the offerer himself, and the death 
 thus became an acknowledgment of the justice of God's 
 punishments for sin : it was as if the offerer declared, ' This 
 representative of my guilt I here, by my own act, doom to 
 death, in satisfaction of the righteous law of vengeance 
 against sin, for " the soul that sinneth it shall die." ' It was 
 not, therefore, till the sense of personal guilt had been ex- 
 pressed by the act which constituted the victim a repre- 
 sentative of the offerer, and by the slaying which typified 
 the need of expiation by suffering for sin, that the sacrifice 
 was fit to be presented before God by the mediation of the 
 priest, and the blood, 'the life which had willingly passed 
 through death ^,' could be sprinkled as a token of restored 
 life in God. A careful study of the Mosaic sacrifices will 
 shew the twofold character impressed upon them. Both 
 aspects are necessary, they may even be described as two 
 sides of the same fact. Before God can be approached by 
 a sinner he must expiate his sin by suffering, must perfectly 
 satisfy the demands of the law, must atone for the past which 
 has loaded him with guilt : and then, as part of the same 
 series of acts, the life so sacrificed, so purified by the expiatory 
 death, is accepted by God, and being restored from Him, be- 
 comes the symbol and the means of union with Him. For- 
 giveness for the past, cleansing in the present, hope for the 
 future, are thus united in one great symbolic ceremony. 
 
 The Mosaic system was only external, ' sanctifying unto the 
 
 ^ Milligan, The Besurredion, p. 278. 
 
282 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 cleanness of the flesh ' ; partial, for it provided no expiation for 
 the graver moral transgressions ; temporary, for the sacrifices 
 had to be repeated ' day by day ' ; provisional, for ' if there was 
 perfection through the Levitical priesthood . . . what further 
 need was there that another priest should arise after the order 
 of Melchizedek % ' In spite, however, of these obvious defects 
 and limitations in the Mosaic system, there was a constant 
 tendency among the Jews to rest content with it, to rely upon 
 the efficacy of these external sacrifices and ceremonies for 
 their whole religion, to believe that ' the blood of bulls and 
 goats ' could ' put away sin,' and that no inner spiritual re- 
 pentance or renovation was required. And the highest minds 
 of the nation, represented by the prophets, were keenly alive 
 to this danger : their rebukes and remonstrances shew how 
 strongly they felt the imperfection of the sacrificial system, 
 how it failed to satisfy the really religious cravings of spiritual 
 minds. Yet there it was, divinely ordained, clearly necessary 
 as the expression of the national religious life, profoundly 
 significant. It could not be dispensed with, yet it could not 
 satisfy : in its incompleteness, as well as in its symbolism, it 
 pointed forward, and foreshadowed a perfect expiation. 
 
 (3) This examination of the sacrificial system of the Old Tes- 
 tament is necessary in a discussion of the doctrine of the Atone- 
 ment, for several reasons. The institutions of the Law were, 
 in the first place, ordained by God, and therefore intended to 
 reveal in some degree His purposes. His mind towards man. 
 We thus find in them traces of the fuller revelation which 
 came afterwards, and the two dispensations throw light on 
 each other. Then again, it was from the Law that the Jews 
 derived their religious language : their conceptions of sacrifice, 
 of atonement, of the effects of sin, were moulded by the in- 
 fluence of the Mosaic ceremonies. For this reason the apostolic 
 doctrine of the Atonement must be looked at in connection 
 with the ideas inspired by the Law, although, of course, the life 
 and work of our Lord so enlarged the religious conceptions of the 
 Apostles as to constitute a fresh revelation. But it was a revela- 
 tion on the lines, so to speak, of the old ; it took up and con- 
 tinued the ideas implanted by the Mosaic religion, and displayed 
 
VII. The AtonejJient. 283 
 
 the fulfilment of the earlier promises and forecasts. It is, 
 therefore, from the Old Testament that we have to learn the 
 vocabulary of the apostolic writings. As the Messianic hopes 
 and phraseology throw light upon the apostolic conception 
 of the Kingdom of Christ, so the sacrificial ceremonies and 
 language of the Law throw light upon the apostolic con- 
 ception of the Sacrifice, the Atonement of Christ. But this 
 is not all. The Mosaic institutions, in their general outlines, 
 were no arbitrary and artificial symbols, but corresponded to 
 religious feelings, needs, aspirations that may truly be called 
 natural and universal. This conception of sin in its twofold 
 aspect of alienation and of guilt, and this idea of sacrifice as 
 effecting man's restoration to union with God, and also as 
 expiating his guilt by suffering, correspond to what the human 
 conscience, when deeply and sincerely investigated, declares to 
 be its inmost secret. Every man who has once realized sin, 
 can also realize the feelings of the Jew who longed to make an 
 expiation for the guilt of the past, to suffer some loss, some 
 penalty that would cover his sin, and who therefore brought 
 his offering before God, made the unconscious victim his re- 
 presentative, the bearer of his guilt, and by slaying it strove 
 to make atonement. We feel the same need, the same longing. 
 This load of guilt has to be laid down somehow : this past 
 sinfulness must meet with a punishment which will make ex- 
 piation for it : before this lost union with God can be restored 
 we must be assured of pardon, must know that the wrath of 
 God no longer abides on us, but has been turned away, and 
 finds no longer in us the sin which is the one obstacle to the 
 free course of Divine love. And then we know further that 
 bitter truth which came to the loftiest minds among the Jews, 
 that no sacrifice of ours can have atoning value, for God 
 demands the offering of ourselves, and we are so weakened by 
 sin that we cannot give ourselves up to Him, so polluted by 
 sin that we cannot be well-pleasing in His eyes. In order to 
 atone, sacrifice must be no outward ceremony, the offering of 
 this or that possession, the fulfilment of this or that externally- 
 imposed ordinance, but the entire surrender of self to God, and 
 to His law, a surrender dictated from within by the free 
 
284 The Religion of the Incarnation, 
 
 impulse of the will. Therefore, just as the spiritually-minded 
 Jew felt the continual discrepancy between the external 
 ceremonies which he was bound to fulfil, and the complete 
 submission to the will of God which they could not effect, 
 and without which they were wholly inadequate, so every 
 awakened conscience must feel the fruitlessness of any out- 
 ward expression of devotion and obedience so long as there 
 is no complete sacrifice of self. 
 
 These, then, seem to be the conditions which must be 
 satisfied before an atonement can meet the needs of the 
 human heart and conscience, whether these are inferred from 
 an examination of the Hebrew religious institutions or are 
 gathered from our own knowledge of ourselves and of others. 
 There is, first of all, the consciousness of guilt, of an offended 
 God, of a law transgressed, of punishment impending, to 
 expiate which some sacrifice is necessary, but no sacrifice 
 adequate to which can be offered by us as we are. Pro- 
 pitiation is the first demand of the law, and we cannot, 
 of ourselves, propitiate Him whose anger we have righteously 
 incurred. Secondly, we long for an abiding union with 
 Him, and for the full bestowal of the Divine life which 
 results from that union alone. Propitiation is not enough 
 by itself, though propitiation is the necessary first step in 
 the process of reconciliation. Aliens, by our own sinful acts, 
 and by the sin of our forefathers, from the life of God, we 
 yet long to return and to live once more in Him. But this is 
 equally impossible for us to accomplish of ourselves. By sin 
 we have exiled ourselves, but we cannot return by mere force of 
 will. Both as propitiation, therefore, and as reunion, the Atone- 
 ment must come from without and cannot be accomplished 
 by those who themselves have need of it. But there is a 
 third condition, apparently irreconcileable with the other two. 
 This same consciousness of guilt which demands an expiation 
 demands that it shall be personal, the satisfaction of the sense 
 of personal responsibility, and of the unconquerable conviction 
 of our own freedom. The propitiatory sacrifice which is to 
 effect our reunion must, for we are powerless to offer it, come 
 from without : but at the same time we cannot but feel that 
 
VII. The Atonement. 285 
 
 it must come into contact with the will, it must be the inward 
 sacrifice, the freewill offering of the whole nature that has 
 sinned. 
 
 n. If the redemptive work of Christ satisfies these conditions 
 it is evident that it is not a simple, but a very complex fact. 
 The fault of many of the theories of the Atonement has been that, 
 though none of them failed to be partially true, they were 
 limited to one or other of the various aspects which that 
 mysterious fact presents. It is certain, again, that of this com- 
 plex fact no adequate explanation can be given. At every 
 stage in the process which is generally summed up in the one 
 word Atonement we are in presence of forces which issue from 
 infinity and pass out of our sight even while we are contem- 
 plating their efiects. And even if the Atonercfent could be 
 altogether reduced, so to speak, to terms of human experience, 
 it will be shewn that man's forgiveness, the nearest analogy 
 of which we have any knowledge, is an experience of which 
 no logical explanation can be given, which seems to share, 
 indeed, something of the mystery of its Divine antitype. 
 But though it is almost blasphemous to pretend to fathom 
 the depth of the Atonement, to lay out the whole truth so as 
 to satisfy the formulae of human reason, it is necessary so to 
 understand it as to discern its response to the imperative 
 demands of the sense of sin and the desire for forgiveness. 
 Whatever the ultimate mysteries of the death of Christ may 
 be, it is certain that it has had power to convince men of 
 forgiveness and to give them a new life. It must therefore in 
 some way satisfy the conditions which, as we have seen, are 
 laid down by human consciousness and experience. It is 
 under the threefold aspect required by those conditions that 
 the doctrine of the Atonement will be here presented. 
 
 I . The death of Christ is, in the first place, to be regarded 
 as propitiatory. On the one hand there is man's desire, 
 natural and almost instinctive, to make expiation for his 
 guilt : on the other there is the tremendous fact of the wrath 
 of God against sin. The death of Christ is the expiation for 
 those past sins which have laid the burden of guilt upon the 
 human soul, and it is also the propitiation of the wrath of 
 
286 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 God. As we have seen, over against the sense of sin and of 
 liability to the Divine wrath there has always existed the 
 idea of sacrifice by which that wrath might be averted. Man 
 could not offer an acceptable sacrifice : it has been offered for 
 him by Christ. That is the simplest, and it would seem the 
 most scriptural way of stating the central truth, which is also 
 the deepest mystery, of the Atonement, and it seems to sum 
 up and include the various other metaphors and descriptions 
 of the redemptive work of Christ. But its mere statement at 
 once suggests questions, the consideration of which will lead 
 to a fuller understanding of the doctrine. Thus we have to ask, 
 What is it which is pj'opitiated by Christ's death ? In other 
 words, What is meant by the wrath of God against sin % 
 
 (a) It should be remembered that though there is great danger 
 in anthropomorphism, and though most of the superstition 
 which has ever been the shadow cast by religion on the 
 world has arisen from an exaggerated conception of the like- 
 ness of God to ourselves, yet there is, after all, no other way 
 of knowing God than by representing Him under conceptions 
 formed by our own consciousness and experience, and this 
 method is pre-eminently incumbent upon us who believe 
 that man is made ' in the image of God.' We are certain, 
 for instance, that love, pity, justice, are aflfections which, 
 however imperfectly they may be found in us, do make for 
 goodness, and if we may not ascribe these same afiections, 
 infinitely raised and purified, to God, we have no means of 
 conceiving His character, of knowing ' with whom we have 
 to deal.' 
 
 Our knowledge, even of ourselves, is after all frag- 
 mentary ^, and thus truths of whose certainty we are con- 
 vinced may seem irreconcileably opposed to each other. 
 Our conception of love, for example, is a fragment, and 
 we cannot trace it up to the meeting-point at which it is 
 reconciled with justice, so that in our moral judgments we 
 
 ^ Cf. Mozley, Universiiy Sermons, p. indeed are they but great vistas and 
 
 177 (2nd ed.) : 'Justice is a fragment, openings into an invisible world in 
 
 mercy is a fragment, mediation is a which is the point of view which 
 
 fragment ; justice, mercy, mediation brings them all together ? ' 
 as a reason of mercy — all three ; what 
 
VII. The Atonement. 287 
 
 are continually oscillating, as it were, between the two. 
 But this fact should not hinder us from ascribing to God 
 in their fullest degree both love and justice, confident that in 
 Him they are harmonized because we are confident from the 
 verdict of our own consciences that both are good, and 
 because even in such imperfect reflections of His image as, for 
 instance, parental love, we see at least a partial harmony of them. 
 When then a doubt arises as to the literal explanation of the 
 phrase ' the wrath of God,' the difficulty must not be met by 
 the simple assertion that we cannot reconcile the idea of 
 wrath with that of the love of God : we must ask whether 
 wrath, as it exists in us, is a good and righteous affection, or 
 whether it is always and entirely evil. To this question 
 there can be but one answer. We are conscious of a righteous 
 anger, of an affection of displeasure that a good man ought to 
 feel against sin and evil, and this is amply justified by the 
 scriptural references to righteous anger, and by the accounts 
 of our Lord's displays of indignation against evil. But though 
 we are thus compelled to find room, so to speak, for anger in 
 our conception of God's character, it is not therefore necessary 
 to ascribe to Him that disturbance of the spiritual nature, or 
 that change in the direction of the will, which are almost 
 invariable accompaniments of human anger. These are the 
 defects of the human affection, from which arises the sinful 
 tendency in our anger, and which cannot be thought of in 
 connection with the all-holy and all-wise God. On the 
 other hand, it is not possible to limit the conception of the 
 ' wrath of God ' to the acts whereby sin is or will be punished, 
 which was the explanation of some of the Fathers, or to think 
 of it as in the future only, to come into existence only on 
 the day of judgment, as has been attempted by some modern 
 theologians. The scriptural expressions, including as we 
 must the passages which speak of our Lord's anger, cannot 
 be so weakened. ' The wrath of God ' seems to denote no 
 changeful impulse or passing feeling, but the fixed and 
 necessary hostility of the Divine Nature to sin ; and the 
 idea must further include the manifestation of that hostility, 
 whenever sin comes before God, in external acts of vengeance. 
 
288 The Religion of the Incarnatioji. 
 
 punishment and destruction. God's anger is not only the 
 displeasure of an offended Person : it is possible that this is 
 altogether a wrong conception of it : it must be further the 
 expression of justice, which not only hates but punishes. 
 The relation of the Divine Nature to sin is thus twofold : it 
 is the personal hostility, if we may call it so, of holiness 
 to sin, and it is also the righteousness which punishes sin 
 because it is lawless. The two ideas are intimately con- 
 nected, and not unfrequently, when we should have expected 
 to find in the Bible the wrath of God spoken of, the language 
 of judgment and righteousness is substituted for it. Sin is 
 necessarily hateful to the holiness of God, but also, because 
 sin is lawlessness, it is judged, condemned, and punished by 
 Him in accordance with the immutable law of righteousness, 
 which is the law of His own Nature. Therefore, to turn 
 from God's wrath against sin to the mode in which that 
 wrath may be averted, it results that the sacrifice offered for 
 sin must be both a propitiation and a satisfaction. Anger, 
 so we think, is but a feeling, and may be ousted by another 
 feeling : love can strive against wrath and overcome it ; the 
 Divine hatred of sin need raise no obstacle to the free forgive- 
 ness of the sinner. So we might think ; but a true ethical 
 insight shews us that this affection of anger, of hatred, is in 
 reality the expression of justice, and derives from the law of 
 righteousness, which is not above God, nor is it dependent on 
 His Will, for it is Himself. ' He cannot deny Himself ' ; He 
 cannot put away His wrath, until the demands of Law have 
 been satisfied, until the sacrifice has been offered to expiate, to 
 cover, to atone for the sins of the world. The reconciliation 
 to be effected is not merely the reconciliation of man to God 
 by the change wrought in man's rebellious nature, but it is 
 also the propitiation of God Himself, whose wi^ath unappeased 
 and whose justice unsatisfied are the barriers thrown across 
 the sinner's path to restoration. 
 
 (6) But how, we ask further, was this propitiation made by 
 the Sacrifice on the Cross ? Or, to put the question rather 
 differently, what was it that gave to the death of Christ its 
 propitiatory value ? In attempting to suggest an answer to 
 
VII. The Atonement. 289 
 
 this question, it is necessary to bear in mind the distinction 
 between the actual event, or series of events, which consti- 
 tuted the Propitiatory Sacrifice, and that inner element which 
 was thereby manifested, and which gave to the actual event 
 its worth. S. Bernard expressed the distinction in the well- 
 known words ' Not His death, but His willing acceptance of 
 death, was pleasing to God,' and there can be no doubt that 
 throughout the New Testament special stress is laid upon the 
 perfect obedience manifested in the life and death of Christ, 
 upon the accomplishment of His Father's will which He ever 
 kept in view, and upon the contrast thus marked between the 
 Mosaic sacrifices and the one atoning offering. ' Sacrifices 
 and offerings and whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin 
 Thou wouldest not, neither hadst pleasure therein . . . then 
 hath He said, Lo, I am come to do Thy will.' 
 
 That the perfect obedience displayed in the passion and 
 death of our Lord was the element which gave to the sacrifice 
 its propitiatory value will be more readily understood when it 
 is remembered that the essence of man's sin was from the first 
 disobedience, the rebellion of the human will against the 
 commands of God. The perfect sacrifice was offered by One 
 Who, being man with all man's liability to temptation, that is 
 with all the instruments of sin at His disposal ^, and exposed 
 to every suggestion to set up His will against that of the 
 Father, yet throughout His life continued unswervingly bent 
 on doing ' not His own will, but the will of the Father Who 
 sent Him,' and Who thus displayed the original perfection of 
 human nature, the unbroken union with the life of God. 
 On the cross the final struggle, the supreme temptation took 
 place. The obedience shewn throughout His life was there 
 manifested in death. ' He became obedient unto death, even 
 the death of the cross.' At any moment of the passion 
 a siugle acquiescence in evil, a single submission to the 
 law of unrighteousness, a single swerving of His will from 
 its choice of absolute obedience, would, we may believe, have 
 
 ^ Cf. Ch. Quarterly Reriew,-xv\. p. 289 of human nature, everything that 
 on ' Our Lord's Human Example.' man sins with, and therefore every 
 ' Christ, of course, had every faculty instrument or faculty of sin.' 
 
 t U 
 
290 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 ended all the shame and torture. And therefore there was 
 needed at every moment a real effort of His human will 
 to keep itself in union with the will of God ^ ; it was not a 
 mere submission at the outset once for all, but a con- 
 tinuous series of voluntary acts of resignation and obedience. 
 Here then is the spirit of sacrifice which God demands, 
 and which could not be found in the saci'ifices of the 
 Mosaic law, or in any offering of sinful man. The essence 
 of the Atonement was the mind of Christ therein displayed, 
 the obedience gradually learnt and therein perfected, the will 
 of Christ therein proved to be one with the Father's will. 
 
 But we may discern a further element of propitiation in 
 the death of our Lord. The law of righteousness, the justice 
 of God, demands not only obedience in the present, but 
 retribution for the past, ' The sins done aforetime ' had been 
 ' passed over in the forbearance of God ' for His own pur- 
 poses, which are not revealed to us : this ' passing over ' had 
 obscured the true nature of sin and of the Divine justice. 
 Men had come to have easy thoughts of sin and its con- 
 sequences ; the heathen felt but vaguely the burden of guilt, 
 the Jew trusted in the mere external works of the law. In 
 the death of Christ a manifestation was made of the right- 
 eousness of God, of His wrath, the absolute hostility of His 
 nature to sin. ' God set Him forth to be a propitiation, 
 through faith, by His blood, to shew His righteousness, 
 because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the 
 forbearance of God.' But this manifestation of Divine justice 
 might have been made by mere punishment: it became a 
 propitiation, in that He, the self-chosen victim, by His 
 acceptance of it, recognised the righteousness of the law 
 which was vindicated on the cross. Men had refused to 
 acknowledge God's justice in the consequences of sin ; nothing 
 
 ^ In the last two sentences a slight which could be amply justified by 
 
 change has been made in coiise- such a passage as e. g. S. Anselm, Cw 
 
 quence of a criticism which showed Baus Homo, ii. 10, ' Possumus igitur 
 
 that it was possible to misunderstand dicere de Christo quia potuit mentiri, 
 
 the language originally employed, si subaudiatur, si vellet.' Cf. also 
 
 which however was intended to con- [Boetius]c. EuiychenetNestorimH,e.yiu. 
 
 vey precisely the same meaning, and {Ojniscida Sacra, ed. Peifer, pp. 214 ff.) 
 
VII. The Atonement. 291 
 
 but the willing acceptance of suffering, as the due portion of 
 the human nature in which the sin was wrought, could have 
 so declared the justice of God's law as to he a propitiation of 
 Divine wrath. The cross was, on the one hand, the procla- 
 mation of God's ordinance against sin, on the other it was 
 the response of man at length acknowledging the righteous- 
 ness of the condemnation ^. 
 
 But on looking more closely into the matter, it is obvious 
 that these explanations are not by themselves enough to 
 account for the scrij)tural facts which w^e call the Atonement. 
 We cannot ignore that, whether we consider the Old Testa- 
 ment anticipations, or the New Testament narrative of our 
 Lord's work, His death, apart from the obedience manifested 
 in it, occupies a unique place, and that stress is laid on it 
 which would be unaccountable were it only the extreme trial 
 of His obedience. The frequent declaration that it was 
 necessary, that ' it behoved Christ to die,' seems to point to 
 something exceptional in it, something more than the mere 
 close of His spotless life. So again the mysterious dread and 
 horror with w^hich He looked forward to it testify to some- 
 thing in it w^hich goes far beyond any human experience of 
 death ^. And what we gather from the New Testament must 
 be combined w^ith the Old Testament premonitions of Christ's 
 death, as typified by the Mosaic sacrifices. There can be no 
 question that death was, speaking generally, an integral part 
 of the idea of sacrifice for sin, and that the distinguishing 
 ceremonial of the slaying of the victim points to a special 
 significance in death as connected with expiation and 
 propitiation. Therefore, although we may still recognise 
 that it was the spirit of obedience and voluntary submission 
 
 ' Cf. M<=Leod Campbell, The Nature humanity to the judgment of God on the 
 
 oftheAtunement,i>Tp. 117, 118,119, 127, sin of man.' ' In Christ tasting death 
 
 347 : ' That oneness of mind with the [ as] the wages of sin . . . was a per- 
 
 Father, which towards man took the fecting of the Divine response in 
 
 form of condemnation of sin, would humanity to the Divine condemna- 
 
 in the Son's dealing with the Father tion of sin.' 
 
 in relation to our sins, take the form ^ See Dale, Atonement, pp. 49 &. ; 
 
 of a perfect confession of our sins. Schmidt in Herzog's Beal. Encykl. xvi. 
 
 This confession, as to its own nature, 403. 
 must have been a perfect Amen in 
 
 V 2 
 
292 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 which gave atoning value to the death of Chiist, we cannot 
 ignore the necessity of death as the appointed form which 
 the obedience took. Had He not obeyed, He would not 
 have atoned ; but had He not died, the obedience would 
 have lacked just that element which made it an atonement 
 for sin. The obedience was intended to issue in death. 
 S. Bernard's saying, though true as he meant it, is, if taken 
 quite literally, too sharp an antithesis. There is nothing well- 
 pleasing to God in death alone, it is true ; but there is, so He 
 has revealed it, something well-pleasing to His righteous- 
 ness, something propitiatory in death, if as a further condition 
 the perfect obedience of the victim is thereby displayed. 
 
 We are driven to the same conclusion by the second 
 explanation of our Lord's sacrifice given above. It is not 
 enough to say that He died in order to manifest God's 
 righteous judgment against sin, for the question remains, 
 Why is death the requisite manifestation of judgment ■? If 
 He endured it because it is the only fitting punishment, 
 why is it in such a signal manner the penalty of sin ? AYe 
 can point indeed to the Divine principle, ' The soul that 
 sinneth, it shall die.' as we can point to God's declared will 
 that expiation shall be made by means of death, but in 
 neither case, whether death be looked upon as the punish- 
 ment or as the expiation of sin, is there any explanation of its 
 unique position. It may well be that here we are confronted 
 by the final mystery, and that the propitiatory virtue of 
 Christ's death, typified by the slaying of animal victims 
 under the law, foreshadowed by the almost universal belief in 
 the expiation of blood, acknowledged with wondering grati- 
 tude by the human heart, depends upon the unsearchable will 
 and hidden purposes of God, except in so far as we can see in it 
 the manifestation at once of Christ's perfect obedience and of the 
 righteousness of Divine judgment. If an attempt is made to 
 penetrate further into the mj'stery of Redemption, it can be 
 but a speculation, but it will be saved from overboldness if it 
 follows the general lines of God's action as revealed in His 
 Word. 
 
 Some light may be thrown upon the mystery of Christ's 
 
VII. The Atonement. 293 
 
 death by considering the scriptural view of death in general 
 as the penalty of sin. It is not the mere physical act of 
 dying, for that, as S. Athanasius says, is natural to man ^, and 
 can be traced in the animal world in the ages before man 
 existed. Besides, our Lord is said to have delivered us from 
 death, and this clearly cannot mean physical death, since to 
 this all men are still subject, but rather spiritual death ; and the 
 death which is spoken of as the penalty of sin must therefore 
 also be spiritual. In this sense death can be no other than the 
 final removal from us of God's presence, the completion of the 
 alienation from the Divine life which sin began. But, con- 
 sidering the close connection, throughout the Bible, of physical 
 and spiritual death, ma.y it not be that the former is more than 
 the symbol and type of the latter, that it is actually its consum- 
 mation % If, again, death be truly represented by the Chris- 
 tian consciousness as the close of man's probation, does not 
 this also point to its being the moment when the light of 
 God's presence, the strength of His life, is finally withdi-awn 
 from the impenitent sinner, and the spiritual death, which is 
 the one essential punishment of sin, falls upon him? The 
 sentence of death, then, under which the whole world lay 
 apart from the Atonement ^, was the declaration that every man 
 who by inheritance and by his own act shared in Adam's sin, 
 should at the moment of physical death experience also the 
 full measure of spiritual death. The common lot of death 
 thus involved the consciousness of separation from the 
 life of God, and when we so regard it, we can under- 
 stand something of the horror which its anticipation brought 
 upon the soul of the Son of God 2. He must pass through 
 this last and most awful human experience ; not only 
 because it was human, but because by the victorious endurance 
 
 1 Be Imam. Verbi 4, 'Man is by ^ It should be remembered that 
 
 nature mortal.' S. Athanasius held, the Church has always regarded the 
 
 however, that this ' natural corrup- Atonement as having a retrospective ef- 
 
 tion ' would have been suspended, feet, extending back to the first repre- 
 
 but for the Fall, by the help of the sentatives of the human race. 
 
 Logos empowering man to live the ^ Cf. Schmidt in Herzog's Real. 
 
 Divine life. See on the whole sub- Enctjkl., Art. Versonung, vol. xvi. p. 
 
 ject, The Christian Doctrine of Sin, App. 403. 
 ii. p. 536. 
 
294 ^^'^^ Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 of it alone could the propitiation be accomplished. The 
 thought throws light upon the prominence given to the death 
 of Christ, upon His dread of it, upon His mysterious cry of 
 dereliction upon the cross. It shews us how, though the 
 experience was common to man, yet in Him it was in a two- 
 fold manner unique. The withdrawal of God's presence, 
 awful as it is to the sin-hardened nature of man, must have 
 been immeasurably more bitter to Him Who was One with 
 the Father, whose ' meat was to do the will of His Father.' 
 Just as we may believe the tortures of the cross to have been 
 specially grievous to the perfect body which was unstained 
 by sin, though other men have endured them, so, though all 
 have to pass through death with its accompanying terror of 
 the loss of God's presence, none can realize what that ex- 
 perience was to Him, because He was the Son of God. The 
 death of Christ was therefore unique because of the nature of 
 Him Who underwent it. But it was also unique in its results. 
 No other death had been a propitiation for sin, for in no other 
 death had this overwhelming consciousness of dereliction been 
 endured victoriously, with no failure of perfect obedience, no 
 shrinking of the will from the ordained task. In this final 
 experience the offering was complete, the essence of the pro- 
 pitiation was secured, for the actual result of all human sin 
 was herein made the very revelation of holiness itself, the 
 means whereby the union with the will of God, so far from 
 being finally broken, was finally perfected. The propitiatory 
 value, therefore, of the sacrifice of Christ lay in His absolute 
 obedience, in His willing acceptance of suffering which was 
 thereby acknowledged as the due reward of sin, and in the 
 death which was the essential form of both, for death is the 
 culminating point of the alienation from God, which is both 
 sin and its punishment. He alone endured it victoriously and 
 without sin ; He alone, therefore, transformed it from the sign 
 and occasion of God's wrath into a well-pleasing offering ; He 
 took the punishment and made it a propitiation. ' The chas- 
 tisement of our peace was upon Him ; and with His stripes we 
 are healed.' 
 
 ((•) So far we have considered the sacrifice of Christ in its 
 
VII. The Atonement. 295 
 
 aspect Godwards: we have tried to find an answer to the 
 question, How did the death of Christ propitiate the wrath 
 of God % There remains the further question, How was it a 
 sacrifice for us % It was, we can see, a perfect oflTering accept- 
 able to God : but how has it availed ' for us men ' ? The mind 
 shrinks from a purely external Atonement, and part of the 
 imperfection of the Mosaic sacrifices consisted in the merely 
 artificial relation between the offender and the victim. In 
 the perfect sacrifice this relation must be real ; and we are 
 thus led to the truth, so often overlooked, but impressed on 
 every page of the New Testament, that He who died for our 
 sins was our true representative in that He was truly man. 
 Without for the present going into the more mystical doctrine 
 of Christ as the second Adam, the spiritual head of our race, 
 what is here emphasized is the reality and perfection of His 
 human nature, which gave Him the right to offer a representa- 
 tive sacrifice \ ' For verily not of angels doth He take hold, 
 but He taketh hold of the seed of Abraham. Wherefore it 
 behoved Him in all things to be made like unto His brethren, 
 that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things 
 pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the 
 people.' Being thus ' taken from among men/ He was 'ap- 
 pointed for — or, on behalf of — men' and the justification of 
 His Priesthood is the complete reality of His humanity, which, 
 if we may so speak, overlay and hid His Divinity, so that 
 ' though He was a Son,' unchangeably ' in the form of God,' 
 ' yet learnt He obedience by the things which He suffered,' 
 and thus became for us a perfect Priest. The sinless perfection 
 of Christ, far from removing Him out of the sphere of our 
 sinful lives, made Him perfectly representative ; for He not 
 only possessed in their greatest perfection all the powers and 
 capacities which are the instruments of sin, but in the strength 
 of His sinlessness and of His love He could feel for all men 
 
 ^ Irenaeus is full of this thought, also Athanasius, de Incarn. Verbi g, in 
 
 though it is not disentangled from which he suggests that it was the 
 
 other explanations of the death of Divine power of the Logos in the 
 
 Christ. Cf. especially V. xxiii. 2 : bodily nature of Christ that made 
 
 ' Recapitulans enim universum homi- His sacrifice representative, as well 
 
 nem in se ab initio usque ad finem, as His death victorious over death, 
 recapitulatus et mortem ejus.' Cf. 
 
296 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 and accept them as His brethren, though they were sinners. 
 Our High Priest ' hath been in all points like as we are, yet 
 without sin.' The holiest man has some part of his nature 
 stunted and repressed by sin, and is so far incomplete, unre- 
 presentative : but He, unweakened and unmarred in any point 
 by sin, can without holding anything back represent human 
 nature in its perfection and entirety. 
 
 The representative character of Christ is manifested in a 
 different aspect, according as He is regarded as the victim or 
 as the priest offering the sacrifice. As the victim He must 
 be the sin-bearer, for the transfer of guilt — which under the 
 Mosaic system was merely symbolised by the act of laying 
 hands on the victim's head — must for a true propitiatory 
 sacrifice be more than external and artificial. That is to say, 
 there must be a real meaning in S. Paul's tremendous words, 
 ' Him Who knew no sin He made to be sin on our behalf,' in 
 the passages in which He is described as bearing our sins ^, in 
 the great prophecy which told that ' the Lord hath laid on 
 Him the iniquity of us all.' How can we find an explanation 
 of the paradox so boldly stated by S. Paul, that He who knew 
 no sin was yet made sin? We may not surely take all these 
 plain phrases to mean that He bore the ininislutneni of our 
 sins : it would have been easy to say that had it been meant. 
 No, the relation typified by the Mosaic offerings must be real, 
 and yet the expression ' He made Him to be sin ' cannot 
 without blasphemy be understood to mean that God the 
 Father actually made His Son to sin. The solution of the 
 difficulty can only be found in the truth of the Incarnation. 
 In order that the sacrifice might be representative, He took 
 upon Him the whole of our human nature, and became flesh, 
 conditioned though that fleshly nature was throughout by 
 sin-. It was not only in His death that we contemplate 
 Him as the sin-bearer, but throughout His life He was, as 
 it were, conditioned by the sinfulness of those with whom His 
 
 ^ See especially Heb. ix. 28, which ' Hominem sine peccato, non sine 
 
 is an echo of the LXX. of Is. liii. 12. peccatoris conditione suscepit. Nam 
 
 ^ Athan. c. Ar. i. 43: 'He put on et nasci humanitus, et pati et mod 
 
 the flesh which was enslaved to sin.' voluit.' I owe this reference to 
 
 Cf. also Augustine, lU Musica VI. iv : Norris, Rudiments o/Theologij, p. 61 n. 
 
VII. The Atonement. 297 
 
 human nature brought Him into close and manifold relations. 
 The Crucifixion does not come as the unexpectedly shame- 
 ful end of a glorious and untroubled life, though it was 
 undoubtedly in a special sense the manifestation of the 
 ' curse ' under which He laid Himself. We cannot say 
 that at a given moment in His life, as when the sinner's 
 hands were laid upon the victim's head and his guilt 
 was transferred, He began to bear our iniquity, for the very 
 nature which He took, freed though it was in Him from here- 
 ditary guilt, was in itself, by its necessary human relations, sin- 
 bearing. Nor did His personal sinlessness make this impossible 
 or unreal ; rather it intensified it. As S. Matthew tells us, even 
 in relation to bodily sickness and infirmity, that He bore 
 what He took away — ' Himself took our infirmities, and bare 
 our diseases ' — so it was with our redemption from sin. In 
 taking it away. He had to bear its weight, intensified by 
 reason of that very self-sacrificing love which made Him 
 realize with more than human keenness the sinfulness of the 
 human nature into which He had come. There is thus no- 
 thing artificial or external in His sin-bearing, for His human 
 nature was so real and so perfect that He was involved, so to 
 speak, in all the consequences of the sin which is so tremendous 
 a factor in human life, even to the enduring of the very suf- 
 ferings and death which in us are the penal results and final 
 outcome of sin, but in Him were the means of His free self- 
 sacrifice. 
 
 Once more He was our representative as the Priest who 
 offered the sacrifice. The requisite conditions of such an ofiice 
 are stated, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, to be complete 
 human sympathy, and yet such separateness from sin, and 
 from all limitations of incompleteness, as can only be Divine. 
 ' It behoved Him in all things to be made like unto His 
 brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful high 
 priest ; ' ' but He, because He abideth for ever, hath His 
 priesthood unchangeable . . . for such a high priest became us, 
 holy, harmless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and made 
 higher than the heavens ; ' ' for the law appointeth men high 
 priests, having infirmity ; but the word of the oath, which 
 
298 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 was after the law, appointeth a Son, perfected for evermore ^.' 
 In these and similar passages the doctrine of the Priesthood 
 of Christ is developed, and it is obvious that quite as much 
 stress is laid on His unlikeness, as on His likeness to us ^. 
 He is our representative as Priest, because He is both man and 
 more than man, and can therefore perform for us what we could 
 not and cannot perform for ourselves, in offering the perfect 
 propitiatory sacrifice. Here is the true vicariousness of the 
 Atonement, which consisted, not, as we shall see later, in the 
 substitution of His punishment for ours, but in His offering 
 the sacrifice which man had neither purity nor power to offer. 
 From out of the very heart and centre of the human nature 
 which was so enslaved and corrupted by sin that no human 
 offering was acceptable to God there is raised the sinless 
 sacrifice of perfect humanity by the God-Man, our great 
 High Priest : human in the completeness of His sympathy. 
 Divine in the unique power of His Priesthood. So is the 
 condition of the law of righteousness fulfilled, and the sacri- 
 fice of obedience unto death is offered by His submission to 
 all that constitutes in sinners the consummation and the 
 punishment of their sin, which He transformed into the 
 occasion and the manifestation of His perfect holiness. And 
 it is a representative sacrifice, for unique though it is, it con- 
 sists of no unheard-of experience, of no merely symbolical 
 ceremony, unrelated and unmeaning to us ; but of just those 
 universal incidents of suffering which, though He must have 
 felt them with a bitterness unknown to us, are intensely 
 human — poverty, misunderstanding, failure, treachery, re- 
 jection, bodily anguish, spiritual desolation, death. 'Surely 
 He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows . . . The 
 chastisement of our peace was upon Him,' and therefore ' by 
 His stripes we are healed.' 
 
 2. It is not enough to consider the death of Christ only as 
 propitiatory, or as standing alone in relation to our redemp- 
 
 1 Heb. ii. 17; vii. 24, 26, 28: cf. Man, by taking created flesh; that, 
 
 ix. 13, 14, 24, 25, 26; X. 11, 12, 13, since all were under sentence of 
 
 14. death. He, heing other than them all, 
 
 ■•' Cf. Athan. c. Ar. ii. 69: 'He sends might Himself for all offer to death 
 
 His own Son, and He becomes Son of His own body.' 
 
VII. The Atonemeiit. 299 
 
 tion. We have seen how it secured our propitiation, and in 
 what sense it has a unique place in relation both to our Lord 
 Himself and to man. There remains the further aspect of 
 His redemptive work, in which it is regarded as effecting our 
 reunion with God by delivering us from the power of sin, 
 and by filling us with the Divine gift of life. This, it should 
 be noticed, is the conception of our Lord's work which was 
 chiefly in the minds of the early Christian writers, though in 
 almost all it was combined with the acknowledgment of His 
 deliverance of man from guilt and from the wrath of God by 
 His representative propitiation^. But to their consciousness 
 the power of sin and of the spiritual forces with which man 
 is surrounded was so continually present, that they were 
 naturally inclined to look mainly at that side of the Atone- 
 ment which represents it as the victory over sin and Satan 
 and the restoration of man to the life of God. And this view, 
 though by no means to the exclusion of the propitiatory 
 aspect, is amply justified by the Bible. Considered as re- 
 storation, there seem to be three grades or stages of redemp- 
 tion indicated in the New Testament. First, there is the 
 unanimous declaration that the object of our Lord's life and 
 death was to free us from sin. In the most sacrificial de- 
 scriptions of His work this further result of the Atonement is 
 implied. The ' Lamb of God ' is to ' take away the mn of 
 the world ' ; His Blood was to be ' shed for the remission of 
 sins ' ; by ' the precious Blood of Jesus Christ as of a Lamb 
 without blemish ' men were ' redeemed from their vain con- 
 versation ' ; He ' gave Himself for us, that He might redeem 
 us from all iniquity.' In the next place, this deliverance 
 from sin is identified with the gift of life, which is repeat- 
 edly connected with our Lord's life and death. ' I am come 
 that they might have life ' ; for * I will give My flesh for the 
 life of the world.' ' He died for all, that they which live 
 
 * The two aspects of the Atone- fresh beginning of life, in that He 
 
 ment are frequently presented by S. bestowed on us the hope of resur- 
 
 Athanasius, delncarn. Verhi. Thus (ch. rection.' Cf. also chs. 8 and 9. Again 
 
 10) 'By the sacrifice of His own (ch. 25), 'As He offered His Body 
 
 Body He both put an end to the law unto death for all ; so by it He again 
 
 which was against us, and gave us a threw open the way to heaven.' 
 
300 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him 
 who died for them and rose again.' He ' bare our sins in His 
 own body on the tree, that we being dead to sins might live 
 unto righteousness.' Lastly, this new life is to issue in union 
 with the life of God in Christ. ' Christ suffered for sins, the 
 just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.' ' In 
 Christ Jesus ye that once were far off are made nigh in the 
 Blood of Christ.' In such passages the Apostles ai-e only 
 drawing out the meaning of our Lord's own declaration, ' I, 
 if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.' 
 
 Our Lord's death is thus intimately connected by the New 
 Testament writers with the restoration of man to union with 
 God by means of the gift of life ; but it should be noticed that, 
 unique and necessary as His death was, it is continually 
 spoken of in close connection with the Eesurrection or the 
 Ascension, for in these, as was foreshadowed by the typical 
 ceremonies of the Law, the sacrifice culminated by the pre- 
 sentation of the 'life which had willingly passed through 
 death' before the altar of God's presence. The reason is clear. 
 Pardon for the past, deliverance from guilt, propitiation of 
 the just wrath of God, are necessary and all-important; but 
 they cannot stand alone. They must, for man is helpless 
 and weak, be succeeded by the gift of life, and for this we 
 must look to those mighty acts in which the One Sacrifice 
 reached its full consummation. Thus our Lord Himself 
 declares that He died in order to rise again ; ' I lay down 
 My life that [in order that] I may take it again.' So to 
 S. Paul the Resurrection is the necessary completion of the 
 process which was begun by the death. ' He was delivered 
 for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.' 
 ' If while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through 
 the death of His Son, much more being reconciled, shall we 
 be saved through [in] His life.' ' We were buried with Him 
 through baptism unto death ; that [in order that] like as 
 Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the 
 Father, so we also might walk in newness of life.' Even the 
 passages which speak of our salvation as effected by virtue of 
 Christ's Blood, refer, according to the Jewish conception of 
 
VII. The Atoneiuent. 301 
 
 the ' blood which is the life,' not only, or even chiefly, to the 
 bloodshedding in death, but to the heavenly ' sprinkling ' of 
 the principle of life, its presentation in heaven by means of the 
 Kesurrection and Ascension. The whole process is described 
 in what may be called the central core of S. Paul's theology, 
 the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. ' It is Christ 
 Jesus that died, yea rather, that was raised from the dead, who 
 is at the Right Hand of God, who also maketh intercession for 
 us.' It has been the fault of much popular theology to think 
 only of our deliverance from wrath by the sacrificial death of 
 Christ, and to neglect the infinitely important continuation 
 of the process thus begun. The Gospel is a religion of life, 
 the call to a life of union with God by means of the grace 
 which flows from the mediation of the risen and ascended 
 Saviour. We need not discuss the comparative importance 
 of the two aspects of the work of Atonement, for propitiation 
 and reunion, pardon and life are alike necessary elements in 
 salvation, and by the love of God in Christ are united in the 
 sacrifice which was begun on Calvary, and is for ever presented 
 for our redemption before the throne of God in heaven. 
 
 3. So far we have been considering the Atonement as 
 our Lord's work on behalf of men : we have now to consider 
 it as meeting the inevitable demand of the human conscience 
 that this vicarious sacrifice shall in some way satisfy man's 
 sense of personal responsibility ; that by means of the Atone- 
 ment man shall, so far as he can, make amends for his own 
 sin. The charge of injustice, as it is generally urged against 
 the doctrine of the Atonement, rests, as will be shewn, upon 
 a fundamental misconception as to the nature of Christ's 
 work for us ; but it is also commonly assumed that by the 
 death of Christ all was done for man, and nothing in man, 
 so that we are thereby relieved of all responsibility for our 
 own wilful acts. It is this notion that we have now to 
 investigate. First, however, we must acknowledge the truth 
 contained in it. The Atonement is, after all, God's forgive- 
 ness of us in Christ, and no forgiveness is conceivable which 
 does not in some degree relieve the offender of the conse- 
 quences of his offence. Human forgiveness, though it may 
 
302 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 in some cases, perhaps, remit no part of the external penalt}' 
 due to wrong-doing, must, in the very act of forgiving, put 
 away and abolish the anger of the offended person, the alien- 
 ation which the offence has caused, and which is certainly 
 part, sometimes the greatest part, of the penal consequences 
 of an offence. Human forgiveness, therefore, necessarily 
 transgresses the strict law of retribution: yet no one can 
 seriously contend that forgiveness is either impossible or 
 immoral. And more than this, there is even in our imper- 
 fect forgiveness a power to blot out guilt, and to restore 
 the offender to new life. Inexplicable though the fact 
 may be, experience tells us that forgiveness avails to lift 
 the load of guilt that presses upon an offender. A change 
 passes over him that can only be described as regenerative, 
 life-giving ; and thus the assurance of pardon, however con- 
 veyed, may be said to obliterate in some degree the conse- 
 quences of the past ^. It is true that this result of forgiveness 
 cannot be explained logically so as to satisfy the reason, but 
 the possibility and the power of pardon are nevertheless facts 
 of human experience. The Atonement is undoubtedly a 
 mystery, but all forgiveness is a mystery. The Atonement 
 undoubtedly transgresses the strict law of exact retribution, 
 but all forgiveness transgresses it. And we may believe that 
 human forgiveness is, in spite of all its imperfection, like that 
 of God, for this is surely the lesson of the Lord's Prayer, 
 ' Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass 
 against us.' Experience and conscience, therefore, lead us to 
 expect that the Divine method of forgiveness will both dis- 
 prove the exaggerated idea of personal responsibility, which 
 is based on a false estimate of man's power, and will also 
 transcend reason by rising into a region of mystery and of 
 miracle^. We have to deal in this sphere of pardon with 
 a God Who ' declares His almighty power most chiefly in 
 showing mercy and pity.' 
 
 1 Cf. Wt'stcott. Historic Faith, p. 1 33. ment of sin (cf. against this Dale, 
 
 ^ Cf. Magee, The Gospel and the Age, The Atonement, Lect. viii) and to over- 
 
 pp. 270 ft". Bishop Magee, however, look the foi'ce of the analogy from 
 
 seems to exaggerate the certainty and human experience of forgiveness, 
 releutlessness of the temporal punish- 
 
VII. The Atonement. 303 
 
 One aspect of this mystery is to be found in the truth, 
 stamped on every page of the New Testament, of the mystical 
 union between Christ and His people. By vii-tue of this union 
 His acts are ascribed to us ; and thus, according to S. Paul, we 
 died in Him, we are raised in Him, and the sacrifice which 
 He offered, we have also offered, as in Him. The doctrine of 
 the Second Adam, of the spiritual headship of Christ, would not 
 indeed if it stood alone satisfy the demands of the conscience ; 
 but when taken in connection with the practical sacramental 
 teaching which is based upon it, it points to the solution of the 
 problem. By the Incarnation we are taken up into Him, and 
 therefore the acts that in His human nature He performed are 
 our acts, by virtue of that union which is described by Him as 
 the union of a vine with its branches, by S. Paul as that of the 
 head with the members of a body. But in considering the 
 results of this union, the reciprocal communication of the 
 weakness of our bodily nature to Him, of His victorious deeds 
 in the body to us, a distinction must be drawn between that 
 part of His work which can, and that which cannot be shared 
 by us. Of one part of His work, of the sacrifice which He 
 offered for man's guilt, the essence was its vicariousness. Man 
 could not and never can offer a sacrifice which can avail to pro- 
 pitiate for the sins of the past. It is only in virtue of that one 
 final and perfect propitiation that we can draw nigh to God, can 
 accomplish anything good, can recognise that we are delivered 
 from wrath. The sins of the past are cancelled, the guilt is 
 wiped out : in this respect all was accomplished by Him for 
 us who are in Him, and nothing remains for us to do. He as 
 our Eepresentative, because He shares our nature, can offer 
 for us a prevailing sacrifice ; only as His brethren, because He 
 has united us to Him, are we enabled to plead the sacrifice which 
 He offered. It is indeed offered for us, for it was utterly im- 
 possible that we could offer it for ourselves ; it was the neces- 
 sary initial step, which man could not take, towards union 
 with the righteous Father. As our spiritual head, the second 
 Adam, the captain of our salvation. He had the right of offer- 
 ing on our behalf ; as in Him by virtue of the Incarnation we 
 are empowered to claim the infinite blessings of the redemption 
 
304 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 so obtained ^. If this is mysterious, irrational, transcendental, 
 so is all morality ; for at the root of all morality lies the power 
 of self-sacrifice, which is nothing but the impulse of love to 
 make a vicarious offering for its fellows, and the virtue of such 
 an offering to restore and to quicken ^. The righteousness of 
 God required from the human nature which had sinned the 
 sacrifice of a perfect obedience manifested in and through 
 death : that is the unique and unapproachable mystery of the 
 Atonement ; but that the sacrifice should be offered by a sin- 
 less Man, and that we should be accepted by God in virtue of 
 His propitiation and because of our union with Him, that, 
 though mysterious enough, as human reason counts mystery, 
 is prefigured and illustrated and explained by all the deepest 
 experiences of the race, by all that is most human, though it 
 most evades logical analysis, in our moral consciousness ^. 
 
 There is then no additional propitiation demanded from 
 us. The Atonement, in this aspect, requires nothing from 
 us, for the forgiveness is there, bestowed upon us by God 
 in consequence of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Eut like 
 the gifts of grace which come after forgiveness, the forgive- 
 ness itself has to be personally accepted by us : it must be 
 brought into contact with each man's will. So regarded, the 
 Atonement, though the great gift of reconciliation is absolutely 
 free, the product of the spontaneous love of God, does lay 
 upon us an obligation. On our part faith is demanded that 
 we may realize, and appropriate, and associate ourselves with 
 the pardon which is ours in Christ, This is not the place for 
 a full discussion of justifying faith: it is enough to indicate 
 what seems to be its relation to the Atonement, as being man's 
 share in the propitiatory work of Christ. It is often said that 
 the faith which justifies is simply trust ^, but it must surely 
 be a more complex moral act than this. If faith is the 
 
 1 Cf. Ath. c. Ar. iii. 34. 'As the see Holland, Creed and Character, pp. 
 
 Lord in putting on the body, became 2 1 2 ff. 
 
 Man, so we men are made gods by " On the truth of the solidarity of 
 
 the Word, being taken into Him all men in Christ, see Westcott, The 
 
 through His Flesh, and from hence- Vkiory of the C»oss, pp. 6-53. 
 
 forth inherit life eternal.' * See e. g. Moule, Outlines ofCJiristian 
 
 ^ For this thought fully drawn out, Doctrine, p. 185. 
 
VII. The Atonement. 305 
 
 acceptance of Christ's propitiation, it must contain, in the first 
 place, that longing for reconciliation which springs from the 
 personal consciousness of sin as alienation from God, and 
 from horror of its guilt and power. There must then ensue 
 the recognition of man's complete powerlessness to free him- 
 self from sin, and a deeply humble sense of dependence on 
 God's mercy ; but this mere trust in His mercy is not enough, 
 for it would not satisfy the sense of sin. The sinner has to 
 own that God is not merely benevolent, and that sin must be 
 punished. Therefore faith must contain the recognition of 
 the justice of the Divine law against sin, manifested in the 
 death of Christ. Faith, in short, starts from the longing for a 
 representative to atone for us, and it ends with the recognition 
 of Christ as our representative, of His Atonement as sufficient, 
 and of His death as displaying the due reward of sin. For 
 the Atonement cannot be a mere external act. If Christ is 
 our representative, He must be acknowledged by those whom 
 He represents : otherwise His endurance of suffering would 
 avail nothing for them, for God will not be satisfied with the 
 mere infliction of punishment. But if the result of His death 
 is that men are brought, one by one, age after age, to acknow- 
 ledge the righteousness of the law for which He suffered, to 
 recognise the result of sin to which sin has blinded them, then 
 there has been made on their part the first step towards the 
 great reconciliation. Faith identifies the individual with the 
 sacrifice which has been offered for him, and therefore with 
 Christ's attitude towards God and towards sin, and though it 
 is but the first step, yet it is emphatically that by reason of 
 which we are justified. For since we are thus identified with 
 the sacrifice, God accepts the first step for the whole course, of 
 which it is the pledge and anticipation. We are justified be- 
 cause we believe in God, but also because God believes in us^ 
 Faith, being what it is, a complex moral act whereby Christ's 
 propitiation is accepted by man, implies an attitude of mind 
 towards sin so right that, though it is but the first movement 
 
 1 Cf. Aug. de Trin. i. lo : ' Tales nos amat Deus, quales futuri sumus, non 
 quales sumus.' 
 
 t ^ 
 
3o6 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 of the soul in Christ, God takes it for the whole, sees us as 
 wholly in Him, reckons it to us as righteousness. But only 
 because it is as a matter of fact the first, the hardest, perhaps, 
 and the most necessary, but still only the first step towards com- 
 plete sanctification. And, if we now ask what is the further 
 course of sanctification, the answer will shew the full relation 
 of the sacrifice of Christ to man's will and conscience. For 
 the life of sanctification is nothing else but the ' imitation of 
 Christ ' in that task of ' learning obedience ' to which His life 
 was devoted, and which His death completed. In us, too, as 
 in Him, that task has to be accomplished by suffering. ' He 
 learnt obedience by the things which He sufifered.' ' It be- 
 came Him ... in briuging many sons unto glory, to make the 
 Captain of their salvation perfect thi'ough sufferings.' That 
 same path towards perfection lies before all who are justified 
 by faith in His atoning sacrifice. For justification is a spiritual 
 act answering to the spiritual act of faith. The spiritual germ 
 of vitality thus implanted in us has to be developed in the 
 sphere in which the consequences of sin naturally and inevit- 
 ably work themselves out, in the bodily nature of man. ' Even 
 we,' says S. Paul, ' which have the fh-stfruits of the Spirit,' 
 even we are waiting for the further process, for ' the adoption, 
 to wit, the redemption of our body.' And the process consists 
 in so following ' the Captain of our salvation ' that, like Him, 
 we accept every one of those sufferings which are the conse- 
 quences of sin, but accept them not as punishment imposed 
 from without upon unwilling offenders, but as the material of 
 our freewill sacrifice. From no one pang or trial of our 
 nature has He delivered us, indeed, He has rather laid them 
 upon us more unsparingly, more inevitably. But the suffer- 
 ings from which He would not deliver us He has transformed 
 for us. They are no longer penal, but remedial and peniten- 
 tial. Pain has become the chastisement of a Father who 
 loves us, and death the passage into His very presence. And 
 this He has done for us by the bestowal upon us of spiritual 
 vitality. The germ is implanted by the act of forgiveness 
 which removes the wrath and the impending death, and this 
 germ of life, cherished and developed by the gifts which flow 
 
VII. The Atonement. 307 
 
 from His mediation and intercession, by the Holy Spirit 
 Whom He sends to dwell in us, works on all the penalties of 
 sin, and makes them the sacrifice which we offer in Him. 
 This is the ' law of the Spirit of life.' ' If Christ be in you, 
 the body is dead because of sin ; but the Spii-it is life because 
 of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him that raised up 
 Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ 
 from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His 
 Spirit that dwelleth in you.' 
 
 Our personal share then in the Atonement is not mere 
 passivity. It consists, first, in the acceptance of God's for- 
 giveness in Christ, our self-identification with Christ's atoning 
 attitude, and then in working out, by the power of the life 
 bestowed upon us, all the consequences of forgiveness, the 
 transformation of punishment into sacrifice, the imitation of 
 Christ in His perfect obedience to the law of righteousness, the 
 gradual sanctification of body, soul and spirit by the grace 
 which enables us to ' suflfer with Him.' 
 
 III. The doctrine of Atonement, more than any of the great 
 truths of Christianity, has been misconceived and misrepre- 
 sented, and has therefore not only been rejected itself, but has 
 sometimes been the cause of the rejection of the whole Chris- 
 tian system. The truth of the vicarious sacrifice has been iso- 
 lated till it has almost become untrue, and, mysterious as it un- 
 doubtedly is, it has been so stated as to be not only mysterious, 
 but contrary to reason and even to conscience. One most 
 terrible misconception it is hardly necessary to do more than 
 mention. The truth of the wrath of God against sin and of 
 the love of Christ by which that wrath was removed, has been 
 perverted into a behef in a divergence of will between God 
 the Father and God the Son, as if it was the Father's will 
 that sinners should perish, the Son's will that they should be 
 saved ; as if the Atonement consisted in the propitiation of 
 the wrathful God by the substituted punishment of the inno- 
 cent for the guilty. It will be seen that while this statement 
 seems to represent the Catholic doctrine^ in reality it intro- 
 duces a most vital difference. There can be no divergence of 
 will between the Persons of the Blessed Trinity ; and, in regard 
 
3o8 
 
 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 to this special dealing with man, we have the clearest testimony 
 of Revelation that the whole Godhead shared in the work. 
 Here, as always, God the Father is revealed as the source and 
 origin of all good. ' God so loved the world that He gave 
 His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him 
 should not perish, but have everlasting life.' ' God was in 
 Christ reconcihng the world to Himself.' The beginning and 
 the end of the Atonement is the love of God : the death of Christ 
 was not the cause, but the revelation of that love^. That it 
 was the second Person of the Trinity who was actually the 
 means of our redemption may be ascribed to that original 
 relation of the Logos to the human race, by which He was 
 both its Creator and its perfect exemplar ^. But nothing can 
 be further from the truth than to imagine that His was all the 
 love which saved us, the Father s all the wrath which con- 
 demned us. If the death of Christ was necessary to propitiate 
 the wrath of the Father, it was necessary to propitiate His 
 own wrath also ; if it manifested His love, it manifested the 
 Father's love also. The absolute, unbroken, unity of will 
 between the Father and the Son is the secret of the atoning 
 sacrifice. 
 
 Again, the isolation of the truth of the Atonement from 
 other parts of Christian doctrine has led to a mode of stating 
 it which deprives us of all motive to action, of all responsi- 
 bility for our own salvation. Just as the misconception noticed 
 above arose from a failure to grasp the whole truth of our 
 Lord's Divinity, so this error springs from ignoring His per- 
 fect Humanity. Christ is regarded as having no vital or real 
 relation to us, and His work is therefore wholly external, a 
 mere gift from above. But what has already been said will 
 shew that from the first the Atonement has been taught as 
 the offering of our spiritual Head, in Whom we are redeemed, 
 and whose example we are able to follow as having Him in 
 
 ^ This is well stated by M'^Leod 
 Campbell, 1. c. p. i6. 
 
 ^ Cf. Athan, de Inc. passim, esp. 
 chs. 20 and 42. Hooker, Ecdes. Pol. V. 
 li. 3, 'Itseemeth a thing unconsonant 
 
 that the world should honour any 
 other as the Saviour but Him Whom 
 it honoureth as the Creator of the 
 world.' 
 
VII. The Atonement. 309 
 
 us. Salvation is thus given to us indeed, but it is given to 
 us because we are in Christ, and we have to work out our 
 share in it because of the responsibility, the call to sacrifice 
 which that union with Him lays upon us. ' Work out your 
 own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God which 
 worketh in you both to will and to do.' It is all from God 
 and of God ; but God has come into our life, and taken us up 
 into Him, and called upon us to follow Him in the way of the 
 cross. 
 
 And this leads us to consider another error, or rather an- 
 other form of the same error. Nothing is more common than 
 to hear the doctrine of Atonement stated as if the work of 
 Christ consisted in His endurance of our punishment in order 
 that we might not endure it. This view of the doctrine leads 
 to the objections — perhaps the commonest of all the difficulties 
 found in what men take for Christianity — that the punish- 
 ment of the innocent instead of the guilty is unjust, and that 
 punishment cannot be borne by anyone but the sinner. We 
 have seen that the real vicariousness of our Lord's work lay 
 in the offering of the perfect sacrifice : the theory we are now 
 considering holds, on the contrary, that it lay in the substi- 
 tution of His punishment for ours. A partial truth is con- 
 tained in this theory ; for our Lord did endure sufferings, and, 
 as has been already said, they were the very suff"erings which 
 are, in sinners, the penalties of sin. But as a simple matter 
 of fact and experience, the sufferings and the pains of death 
 which He endured have not been remitted to us ; and that 
 which is remitted, the eternal penalty of alienation from God, 
 was not, could not be endured by Him. For alienation from 
 God is, essentially, a state of sin ; it is sin, regarded both in 
 its origin and in its necessary result. It could not, therefore, 
 be borne by Christ, ' in Whom was no sin,' between Whom and 
 the Father was no alienation. Attempts have been made to 
 establish a quantitative relation between our Lord's sufiferings 
 and the punishment which is thereby remitted to us, to prove 
 that the eternal nature of the Sufferer made His death equi- 
 valent to eternal punishment. But even if such attempts, in 
 so mysterious a region, could succeed, it would be vain to 
 
3IO The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 establish a quantitative equivalence where there is no quali- 
 tative relation. Eternal punishment is ' eternal sin ^' and as 
 such could never be endured by the sinless Son of God. 
 
 But we have to face the question which naturally follows. 
 What, then, did His sufferings and death mean? Why did 
 He endure what are to us the temporal penalties, the diverse 
 consequences of sin ? And if He endured them, why are 
 they not remitted to us % It is true, as has been shewn, that 
 He bore just those sufferings which are the results and 
 penalties of sin, even to that tremendous final experience 
 in which man loses sight of God as he enters the valley of 
 the shadow of death ; but He bore them, not that we might 
 be freed from them, for we have deserved them, but that 
 we might be enabled to bear them, as He did, victoriously 
 and in unbroken union with God. He, the Innocent, suffered, 
 but the guilty do not 'go free ;' for the very end and object 
 of all the obedience that He learnt was, that He might lead 
 man along the same path of suffering, not ' free,' but gladly 
 submissive to the pains, which, but for Him, would be the 
 overwhelming penalties of our sins. It may be true that 
 ' punishment cannot be borne by anyone but the sinner ^,' 
 and therefore it may be right not to call Christ's sufferings 
 punishment, especially as the expression is significantly 
 avoided in the New Testament. But it is certainly not true 
 that the sufferings which result from sin cannot be borne by 
 anyone but the sinner: every day demonstrates the falsity 
 of such an assertion. Sufferings borne in the wrong spirit, 
 unsubmissively or without recognition of their justice, are 
 penal ; but the spirit of humility and obedience makes them 
 remedial and purgatorial. Christ, by so bearing the pains 
 which sin brought upon human nature, and which the special 
 sin of His enemies heaped upon Him, has not only offered 
 the one perfect sacrifice, but has also given us strength to 
 make the same submission, to learn the same obedience and to 
 share the same sacrifice. 
 
 IV. There are many topics connected with the Atonement 
 
 * Cf. the true reading of S. Mark iii. 29, R. V. ' W. R. Greg. 
 
VII. The Atonement. 311 
 
 which it is impossible here to discuss, but which seem to fall 
 into their right place and proportion if those aspects of 
 Christ's redeeming work which have been dwelt upon are 
 kept firmly in mind. The central mystery of the cross, 
 the forgiveness, the removal of wrath, thereby freely bestowed 
 upon us, remains a mystery, and must always be an insuper- 
 able difficulty to those who depend wholly on reason, or who 
 trust wholly in man's power to extricate himself from the 
 destruction wi'ought by his sin, as it was an offence to the 
 Jew, and foolishness to the Greek. But mystery though it is 
 to the intellect, there is a moral fitness ^ in the bestowal of 
 forgiveness because of the obedience of Christ shewn in His 
 sacrificial death, which appeals irresistibly to the moral con- 
 sciousness of mankind. The witness of this is the trustful 
 gratitude with which the doctrine of Christ crucified has been 
 accepted by Christians, learned and unlearned, from the age 
 of its first preaching. The human heart accepts it, and by 
 the cross is assured of forgiveness : 'to them which are 
 called ' it is ' Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of 
 God.' 
 
 But if we may appeal to experience in support of this 
 mysterious truth, much more may we claim the same support 
 for the plainer, more human aspect of the Atonement. As 
 S. Athanasius in his day ^, so we in ours may appeal for the 
 practical and visible proof of the Atonement, to the complete 
 change in man's relation to sorrow and suffering, and in the 
 Christian view of death ^. This is no small matter. When 
 we realize what suffering is in human life, the vast place 
 which it has in our experience, its power of absorbing the 
 mind, its culmination in the final pangs of death, and when 
 
 1 It should be noticed that the ^ Cf. Carlyle's apostrophe to Marie 
 
 Greek Fathers and the English divines Antoinette on her way to the scaffold : 
 
 for the most part confine themselves ' Think of Rim Whom thou wor- 
 
 to shewing this moral fitness and shippest, the Crucified, — Who also 
 
 consonance with God's moral nature treading the winepress alojie, fronted 
 
 in the Atonement, and do not attempt sorrow still deeper ; and triumphed 
 
 to prove its absolute necessity. Cf. over it, and made it Holy, and built 
 
 Athanasius, de Incarn. Verbi, ch. 6; of it a " Sanctuaiy of Sorrow " for thee 
 
 Hooker, Ecdes. Pol. V. li. 3 ; Butler, and all the wretched.' Miscellaneous 
 
 Analogy, pt. ii. c. 5. \ Essays, vol. V. p. 165 (ed. 1872). 
 
 ^ Cf. Be Incarn. Verbi, chs. 27, 28, 29. 
 
312 The Religion of the Incarnatiori, 
 
 we see the transformation, however gradual and imperfect it 
 may be, of all this into the means and material of the sacrifice 
 which the follower of Christ is gladly willing to offer to the 
 Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we realize the full force of 
 the great words telling of the destruction ' through death of 
 him that liad the poiver of death, that is the devil,' and of the 
 deliverance of ' them who through fear of death were all their 
 lifetime subject to bondage.' And the transformation, the 
 destruction, the deliverance, consist in this that from these 
 sufferings His sacrifice has removed the element of rebellion, 
 the hopelessness of alienation, the sting of sin. They are ours, 
 because they were His ; but they are ours as they were His, 
 purified and perfected by obedience, by the offering of a holy 
 Will ; 'by the which Will we are sanctified through the 
 offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.' 
 
VIII. 
 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT AND 
 INSPIRATION. 
 
 CHARLES GORE. 
 
VIII. 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT AND INSPIRATION. 
 
 I. The appeal to ' experience ' in religion, whether personal 
 or general, brings before the mind so many associations of 
 ungoverned enthusiasm and untrustworthy fanaticism, that it 
 does not easily commend itself to those of us who are most 
 concerned to be reasonable. And yet, in one form or another, 
 it is an essential part of the appeal which Christianity makes 
 on its own behalf since the day when Jesus Christ met the 
 question ' Art thou He that should come, or do we look for 
 another ? ' by pointing to the transforming effect of His 
 work ; ' The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk ; 
 the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear ; the dead are 
 raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to 
 them.' 
 
 The fact is that in current appeals to experience the 
 fault, where there is a fault, lies not in the appeal but in 
 the nature of the experience appealed to. "What is meant 
 by the term is often an excited state of feeling, rather than 
 a permanent transformation of the whole moral, intellectual, 
 and physical being of man. Or it is something which seems 
 individual and eccentric, or something confined to a particular 
 class of persons under special conditions of education or of 
 ignorance, or something which other religions besides Chris- 
 tianity have been conspicuous for producing. When a mean- 
 ing broad and full, and at the same time exact enough, has 
 been given to experience the appeal is essential to Chris- 
 tianity, because Christianity professes to be not a mere 
 record of the past, but a present life, and there is no life 
 where there is no experience. 
 
3i6 The Religion of the Incantation. 
 
 It will be worth while, then, to bear in mind how freely 
 the original defenders of the Christian Church appealed, like 
 their Master, to facts of experience. Thus we find an in- 
 dividual, like S. Cyprian, recalling the time of his baptism, 
 and the personal experience of illumination and power which 
 it brought with it : — 
 
 ' Such were my frequent musings : for whereas I was en- 
 cumbered with the many sins of my past life, which it seemed 
 impossible to be rid of, so I had used myself to give way to 
 my clinging infirmities, and, from despair of better things, 
 to humour the evils of my heart, as slaves born in my house, 
 and my proper ofispring. But after that life-giving water 
 succoured me, washing away the stain of former years, and 
 pouring into my cleansed and hallowed breast the light 
 which comes from heaven, after that I drank in the Heavenly 
 Spirit, and was created into a new man by a second birth, — 
 then marvellously what before was doubtful became plain to 
 me, what was hidden was revealed, what was dark began 
 to shine, what was before difficult, now had a way and 
 a means, what had seemed impossible, now could be achieved, 
 what was in me of the guilty flesh, now confessed that it 
 was earthy, what was quickened in me by the Holy Ghost, 
 now had a growth according to God ^,' 
 
 Again, we find an apologist like S. Athanasius, resting the 
 stress of his argument on behalf of Christ upon what He 
 has done in the world, and specially on the spiritual force 
 He exercises on masses of men, ' drawing them to religion, 
 persuading them to virtue, teaching them immortality, lead- 
 ing them to the desire of heavenly things, revealing the 
 knowledge of the Father, inspiring power over death, shewing 
 each man to himself, abolishing the godlessness of idolatry ^Z 
 
 The Fathers of the Christian Church appealed in this way 
 to experience, because Christianity, as they knew, is essen- 
 tially not a past event, but a present life, a life first manifested 
 in Christ and then perpetuated in His Church. Christianity 
 is a manifested life, — a thing, therefore, like all other forms 
 
 * Cyprian, adDonatum 3. Trans, in Library of the Fathers, ill. p. 3. 
 ^ Athanasius, de Incarnaiione, 31, 48-52. 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 317 
 
 of life, known not in itself but in its effects, its fruits, its 
 results. Christianity is a manifested life, and it is this 
 because it is the sphere in which the Spirit, the Life-giver, 
 finds His freeest and most unhindered activity. The Chris- 
 tian Church is the scene of the intensest, the most vigorous, 
 the richest, the most ' abundant ' life that the universe 
 knows, because in a preeminent sense it is the ' Spirit-bearing 
 body.' The Spirit is life ; that is His chief characteristic. 
 We may indeed elucidate the idea of spirit by negations ; by 
 negation of materiality, of circumscription, of limitation ; but 
 the positive conception we are to attach to spirit is the con- 
 ception of life ; and where life is most penetrating, profound, 
 invincible, rational, conscious of God, there in fullest freedom 
 of operation is the Holy Spirit ^. 
 
 Thus, obviously enough, the doctrine of the Spirit is no 
 remote or esoteric thing ; it is no mere ultimate object of the 
 rapt contemplation of the mystic ; it is the doctrine of that 
 wherein God touches man most nearly, most familiarly, in 
 common life. Last in the eternal order of the Divine Being, 
 ' proceeding from the Father and the Son,' the Holy Spirit 
 is the first point of contact with God in the order of human 
 experience ^. 
 
 ' I believe in the Holy Ghost, the giver of life.' All life is 
 His operation. ' Wherever the Holy Spirit is, there is also 
 life; and wherever life is, there is also the Holy Spirit ^.' Thus 
 if creation takes its rise in the will of the Father, if it finds its 
 law in the being of the Word or Son, yet the effective instru- 
 ment of creation, the ' finger of God,' the moving principle 
 
 ^ See S. Basil's fine definition of the with the Distributor ; then we come to 
 
 term in his treatise on the Holy Spirit, consider the Sender ; then we carry 
 
 ix. 22. This treatise has been trans- back our thought to the Fount and 
 
 lated by the Rev. G. Lewis for the Cause of the good things.' Cf. xviii. 
 
 ' Religious Tract Society.' 47 : ' The way of the knowledge of 
 
 2 See Basil, as above, xvi. 37 : 'We God is from one Spirit, by the one 
 
 must not suppose because the Apostle Son, to the one Father: and reversely, 
 
 (1 Cor. xii. 4) mentions the Spirit first, the natural goodness of God, His 
 
 and the Son second, and God the holiness of nature, His royal rank 
 
 Father third, that the order at the taking their rise from the Father, 
 
 present day has been quite reversed. reach the Spirit though the Only- 
 
 For he made his beginning from our begotten.' 
 
 end of the relation : for it is by receiv- ^ Ambrose, de Spiritu Sancto, i. 15, 
 
 ing the gifts, that we come in contact 172. 
 
3 1 8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 of vitalization is the Holy Spirit, ' the divider and distributor 
 of the gifts of life ^.' 
 
 Nature is one great body, and there is breath in the body ; 
 but this breath is not self-originated life, it is the influence 
 of the Divine Spirit. ' By the word of the Lord were the 
 heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of 
 His mouth.' The Spirit, the breath of God, was brooding 
 upon the face of the waters of chaos ere life and order were. 
 It is the sending forth of the breath of God, which is the 
 giving to things of the gift of life ; it is the withdrawal of 
 that breath which is their annihilation^. So keenly indeed 
 were the Christians of the early period conscious of the one 
 life of nature as the universal evidence of the one Spirit, 
 that it was a point of the charge against Origen that his 
 language seemed to involve an exclusion of the Holy Spirit 
 from nature, and a limitation of His activity to the Church ^. 
 The whole of life is certainly His. And yet, because His 
 special attribute is holiness, it is in rational natures, which 
 alone are capable of holiness, that He exerts His special 
 influence. A special in-breathing of the Divine Spirit gave 
 to man his proper being ^. In humanity, made after the 
 Divine Image, it was the original intention of God that the 
 Spirit should flind His chiefest joy, building the edifice of a 
 social life in which nature was to find its crown and justi- 
 fication : a life of conscious and free sonship, in which the 
 gifts of God should be not only received, but recognised as 
 His, and consciously used in willing and glad homage to 
 the Divine Giver, in reverent execution of the law of 
 development impressed by the Divine Reason, in the realized 
 fellowship of the Blessed Spirit of knowledge and love. 
 The history of humanity has in fact been a development, but 
 a development the continuity of which is most apparent in 
 that department in which man appears simply as the child of 
 nature, the most perfect and interesting of her products, con- 
 
 ^ So Irenaeus, Cyril of Jerusalem, 29, 30. 
 Athanasius, Basil, Didymus, Victori- ^ Huet. Ch-igeniana, L. ii. Qu. 2. 
 
 nus, express the relation of the Divine e. xxvii. Cf. Athan. Epp. ad Sera- 
 
 Persons in Creation. pion. i. 23-31 ; iv. 9-12. 
 
 ^ Ps. xxxiii. 6 ; Gen. i. 2 ; Ps. civ. * Gen. ii. 7. 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 319 
 
 sciously adapting himself to his environment and moulded by- 
 it. This indeed has been so much the case that the facts of 
 the history of civilization have been used, at least plausibly, 
 as an argument against our race really possessing moral 
 freedom at all. Such a use of the facts is, we recognise, not 
 justifiable. It leaves out of consideration some of the most 
 striking elements in human history, and some of the most 
 certain facts of human consciousness. But the very plausible- 
 ness of the argument is suggestive. It means that compara- 
 tively very few men have been at pains to realize their true 
 freedom ; that men in masses have been dominated b}"" the 
 mere forces of nature ; or, in other words, that human history 
 presents broadly the record of a one-sided, a distorted develop- 
 ment. For man was not meant for merely natural evolution, 
 mere self-adaptation to the ' things that are seen.' The con- 
 sciousness that he was meant for something higher has tinged 
 his most brilliant physical successes, his greatest triumphs of 
 civilization and art, with the bitterness of remorse, the misery 
 of conscious lawlessness. 
 
 Our race was created for conscious fellowship with God, 
 for sonship, for the life of spirit. And it is just in this depart- 
 ment that its failure has been most conspicuous. It is here 
 that the Divine Spirit has found His ehiefest disappointment. 
 Everywhere He has found rebellion — not everywhere without 
 exception, for ' in every age entering into holy souls. He has 
 made them sons of God and prophets ' : but everywhere in 
 such a general sense that sin in fact and in its consequences 
 covers the whole region of humanity. In the highest depart- 
 ment of created life, where alone lawlessness was possible, 
 because what was asked for was the co-operation of free 
 service to cany out a freely accepted ideal ^, — there alone is 
 the record of lawlessness, the record of the Spirit striving with 
 man, but resisted, rejected, ignored, quenched. Thus the 
 word, which in fact most forcibly characterizes man's spiritual 
 history, so far as it has been according to the mind of God, is 
 not progress, but recovery, or redemption. It is not natural 
 but supernatural — supernatural, that is, in view of the 
 
 ^ Athan. rfe Incarn. xliii. 3. 
 
320 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 false nature which man made for himself by excluding God. 
 Otherwise the work of redemption is only the reconstitution 
 of the nature which God designed. It is the recovery within 
 the limits of a chosen race and by a deliberate process of 
 limitation, of a state of things which had been intended to be 
 universal ^ The ' elect ' represent not the special purpose of 
 God for a few, but the universal purpose which under the 
 circumstances can only be realized through a few. The 
 hedging in of the few, the drawing of the lines so close, the 
 method of exclusion again and again renewed all down the 
 history of redemption, represents the love of the Divine 
 Spirit ever baffled in the mass, preserving the truth of God in 
 a 'remnant,' an elect body; who themselves escaping the 
 corruption which is in the world, become in their turn a 
 fresh centre from which the restorative influence can flow out 
 upon mankind. Rejected in the world, He secures for 
 Himself a sphere of operations in the Jews, isolating 
 Abraham, giving the law for a hedge, keeping alive in the 
 nation the sense of its vocation by the inspiration of 
 prophets. Again and again baffled in the body of the 
 Jewish nation. He falls back upon the faithful remnant, and 
 keeps alive in the^i that prospective sonship which was 
 meant to be the vocation of the whole nation : sometimes in 
 narrower, sometimes in broader channels, the purpose of love 
 moves on till the Spirit finds in the Son of Man, the 
 Anointed One, the perfect realization of the destiny of man, 
 the manhood in which He can freely and fully work : * He 
 came down upon the Son of God, made son of man, 
 accustoming Himself in His case to dwell in the human race, 
 and to repose in man, and to dwell in God's creatures, working 
 out in them the will of the Father, and recovering them 
 from their old nature into the newness of Christ ^.' 
 In Christ humanity is perfect, because in Him it retains no 
 part of that false independence which, in all its manifold 
 forms, is the secret of sin. In Christ humanity is perfect and 
 complete, in ungrudging and unimpaired obedience to the 
 movement of the Divine Spirit, Whose creation it was, Whose 
 
 1 Athan. I.e. xii. 5, xliii. 4. * Iren. c. Hor. iii. 17, i. 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 321 
 
 organ it gave itself to be. The Spirit anoints Him ; the 
 Spirit drives Him into the wilderness ; the Spirit gives Him 
 the law of His mission ; in the power of the Spirit He 
 works His miracles ; in the Holy Spirit He lifts up the voice 
 of human thankfulness to the Divine Father ; in the Spirit 
 He offers Himself without spot to God ; in the power of the 
 Spirit He is raised from the dead ^. All that perfect human 
 life had been a life of obedience, of progressive obedience, a 
 gradual learning in each stage of experience what obedience 
 meant - ; it had been a life of obedience which became pro- 
 pitiatory as it bore loyally, submissively, lovingly, all the 
 heritage of pam and misery in which sin in its long history 
 had involved our manhood, all the agony of that insult and 
 rejection in which sin revealed itself by antagonism to Him — 
 bore it, and by bearing it turned it into the material of His 
 accepted sacrifice. He was obedient unto death. And be- 
 cause He thus made our human nature the organ of a life of 
 perfect obedience, therefore He can go on to make that same 
 humanity, freed from all the limitations of this lower world 
 and glorified in the Spirit at the right hand of God, at once 
 the organ of Divine supremacy over the universe of created 
 things, and (itself become quickening Spirit ^) the fount to all 
 the sons of obedience and faith of its own life. Christ is the 
 second Adam, who having 'recapitulated the long develop- 
 ment of humanity into Himself'*,' taken -it up into Himself, 
 that is, and healed its wounds and fructified its barrenness, 
 gives it a fresh start by a new bii-th from Him. The Spirit 
 coming forth at Pentecost out of His uplifted manhood, as 
 from a glorious fountain of new life ^, pei'petuates all its 
 richness, its power, its fulness in the organized society which 
 He prepared and built for the Spirit's habitation. The 
 Church, His Spirit-bearing body, comes forth into the world, 
 not as the exclusive sphere of the Spirit's operations, for ' that 
 
 1 S. Mark i. lo, 12. S. Luke iv. ^ i Cor. xv. 45, 'The last Adam 
 I, 18; X. 21. S. Matt. xii. 28. Heb. ix. became a life-giving Spirit.' S.John 
 14. Rom. viii. 11. (These two last vi. 63, ' Spirit and Life.' 
 
 passages at least imply the action of * Iren. iii. 18, i, and frequently 
 
 the Holy Spirit in the Sacrifice and elsewhere. 
 
 Resurrection of Christ.) ^ Iren. iii. 24, i. 
 
 2 Heb. V. 7-10. Phil. ii. 8. 
 
32 2 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 breath bloweth where it hsteth ^ ; ' but as the special and 
 covenanted sphere of His regular and uniform operation, the 
 place where He is pledged to dwell and to work ; the centre 
 marked out and hedged in, whence ever and again proceeds 
 forth anew the work of human recovery ; the home where, in 
 spite of sin and imperfection, is ever kept alive the picture of 
 what the Christian Hfe is, that is, of what common human 
 life is meant to be and can become. 
 
 Of the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church we may note 
 four characteristics. 
 
 I. It is social. It treats man as a 'social being,' who 
 cannot realize himself in isolation. For no other reason 
 than because grace is the restoration of nature^, the true, 
 the redeemed humanity, is presented to us as a society or 
 Church. This is apparent with reference to either of the 
 gifts which summarize the essence of the Church's life, grace, 
 or truth. Sacraments are the ordained instruments of grace, 
 and sacraments are in one of their aspects social ceremonies 
 — of incorporation, or restoration, or bestowal of authority, or 
 fraternal sharing of the bread of life. They presuppose a 
 social organization. Those who have attempted to explain 
 why there should be in the Church an apostolic succession 
 of ministers, have seen the grounds of such appointment in the 
 necessity for preserving in a catholic society, which lacks the 
 natural links of race or language or common habitation, a 
 visible and obligatory bond of association ^. 
 
 The same fact appears in reference to the truth, the 
 knowledge of God and of the true nature and needs of man, 
 which constitutes one main part of the Christian life. That 
 too is no mere individual illumination. It is 'a rule of 
 faith,' an ' apostolic tradition,' ' a pattern of sound words,' 
 embodied in Holy Scripture and perpetuated in a teaching 
 Church, within the scope of which each individual is to be 
 brought to have his mind and conscience fashioned by it, 
 
 1 S. John iii. 4. The intention of * Grace is not the negation of nature, 
 this passage is to express not that the but its restoration.' 
 
 Spirit is lawless in His operations, but ^ Raymund of Sabunde, Tlieol. Nat. 
 
 that He is beyond our control. tit. 303. 
 
 2 Aug. de Spiritu et Littera, xxvii. 47, 
 
VIII. The Holy SpuHt and Inspiration. 323 
 
 normally from earliest years. It would be going beyond the 
 province of this essay to stop to prove that from the 
 beginnings of the Christian life, a man was understood to 
 become a Christian and receive the benefits of redemption, 
 by no other means than incorporation into the Christian 
 society. 
 
 2. But none the less on account of this social method the 
 Spirit Tiotirishes individual ity. The very idea of the Spirit's 
 gift is that of an intenser Hfe. Intenser life is more 
 individualized life, for our life becomes richer and fuller only 
 by the intensification of personality and character. Thus 
 Christianity has always trusted to strongly marked character 
 as the means by which religion is propagated. It does not 
 advance as an abstract doctrine, but by the subtle, penetrating 
 influences of personality. It is the illuminated man who 
 becomes a centre of illumination. 'As clear transparent 
 bodies if a ray of light fall on them become radiant them- 
 selves and diffuse their splendour all around, so souls 
 illuminated by the indwelling Spirit are rendered spiritual 
 themselves and impart their grace to others ^.' Thus, from the 
 first, Christianity has tended to intensify individual life in a 
 thousand ways, and has gloried in the varieties of disposition 
 and character which the full life of the Spirit develops. The 
 Church expects to see the same variety of life in herself as 
 she witnesses in Nature. 
 
 ' One and the same rain,' says S. Cyril of Jerusalem to his 
 catechumens, ' comes down upon all the world, yet it becomes 
 white in the lily, and red in the rose, and purple in the 
 violets and pansies, and different and various in all the 
 several kinds ; it is one thing in the palm tree and another in 
 the vine, and all in all things. In itself, indeed, it is uniform 
 and changes not, but by adapting itself to the nature of each 
 thing that receives it, it becomes what is appropriate to each. 
 Thus also the Holy Ghost, one and uniform and undivided in 
 Himself, distributes His grace to every man as He wills. He 
 employs the tongue of one man for wisdom ; the soul of 
 
 ^ Basil, de Spiriiu Sancfo ix. 23 Univ. Sermons, 'Personal Influence 
 (Lewis' translation). Cf. Newman's the means of propagating the truth.' 
 
 Y 2 
 
324 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 another He enlightens by prophecy ; to another He gives 
 power to drive away devils ; to another He gives to 
 interpret the Divine Scriptures ; He invigorates one man's self- 
 command ; He teaches another the way to give alms : another 
 He teaches to fast and train himself ; another He trains for 
 mart3^rdom ; diverse to different men, yet not diverse from 
 Himself 1.' 
 
 Nor was this belief in the differences of the Spirit's work 
 a mere abstract theory. In fact the Church life of the early 
 centuries did present an aspect of great variety : not only 
 in the dispositions of individuals, for that will always be 
 observable where human nature is allowed to subsist, but in 
 the types of life and thought cultivated in different parts of 
 the Church. Early in the life of Christianity did something 
 like the Roman type of Catholicism shew itself, but it 
 shewed itself as one among several types of ecclesiasticism, 
 easily distinguishable from what Alexandria or Africa or 
 Antioch nourished and produced. 
 
 And what is true in the life of religion as a whole is true 
 in the department of the intellect. Here again the authority 
 of the collective society, the ' rule of faith,' is meant to 
 nourish and quicken, not to crush, individuality. Each 
 individual Christian owes the profoundest deference to the 
 common tradition. Thus to ' keep the traditions ' is at all 
 times, and not least in Scripture, a common Christian ex- 
 hortation. But this common tradition is not meant to be a 
 merely external law. It is meant to pass by the ordinary 
 processes of education into the individual consciousness, and 
 there, because it represents truth, to impart freedom. Thus 
 S. Paul speaks of the developed Christian, ' the man who is 
 spiritual,' as 'judging all things and himself judged of none.' 
 And S. John makes the ground of Christian certainty to 
 lie not in an external authority, but in a personal gift : ' ye 
 have an unction from the Holy One and ye know all things ; ' 
 
 1 Cyril, Catech. xvi. 12. The atten- Monast. 4. Also in the writings of 
 
 tion to the differences of individual Gregory of Nazianzus, Chrysostom, 
 
 character is very noticeable in S. and Gregory the Great on the Pastoral 
 
 Basil's monastic rule : see the Bcgulae Office. 
 Justus iractatae, resp. 1 9, and the Co7islit. 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 325 
 
 ' ye need not that any one teach you ^.' There is then an 
 individual 'inspiration^,' as well as an inspiration of the 
 whole body, only this inspiration is not barely individual 
 or separatist. As it proceeds out of the society, so it ends 
 in it. It ends by making each person more individualized, 
 more developed in personal characteristics, but for that very 
 reason more conscious of his own incompleteness, more ready 
 to recognise himself as only one member of the perfect 
 Manhood. 
 
 The idea of authority is in fact a perfectly simple one. It 
 never received better expression than by Plato when he 
 describes it as the function of the society by a carefully 
 regulated education to implant right instincts, right affections 
 and antipathies, in the growing mind of the child, at a time 
 when he cannot know the reason of things : in order that as 
 the mind develops it may recognise the right reason of things 
 by a certain inner kinship, and welcome truth as a friend ^. 
 Authority, according to such a view of it, is a necessary school- 
 ing of the individual temperament. Thus, we are told that 
 in the judgment of the philosopher Hegel, ' The basis of sound 
 education was . . . the submission of the mind to an external 
 lesson, which must be learnt by every one, and even learnt by 
 rote, with utter disregard of individual tastes and desires ; 
 only out of this self-abnegation, and submission to be guided 
 and taught, could any originality spring which was worth 
 preserving*.' In fact, we all recognise the necessity for such 
 external discipline in all departments. Few people like good 
 art, for instance, at first. Probably they are attracted by 
 what is weak but arrests attention by obvious and superficial 
 merits. The standards which artistic authority has erected, 
 the accepted canons of good taste and judgment, do not com- 
 mend themselves at first as right or natural. But modest and 
 well-disposed people take it for granted at starting that the 
 orthodox judgment will turn out to be right ; and they set 
 themselves to school to learn why the artists and poets of 
 
 ^ I Cor. ii. 15. I S. John ii. 20- ^ Republic, 401 D, 402 A. 
 
 27. * Caird's Hegel (Blackwood's Philo- 
 
 ^ Clement Alex. Strom, v. 13. 88. sophical Classics), p. 72. 
 
326 The Religion of the Incamiation. 
 
 great name are great, till their own judgment becomes en- 
 lightened, and they understand what at first they took on 
 trust. It was the instinctive perception of this function of 
 authority which made the Church insist so much on the 
 principle ' credo ut intelligam.' The Creed represents the 
 catholic judgment, the highest knowledge of God and the 
 spiritual life granted to man by the Divine Revelation. Let 
 a man put himself to school in the Church with reverence and 
 godly fear, and his own judgment will become enlightened. 
 He will come to say with S. Anselm, ' I give thee thanks, good 
 Lord ; because what first I believed by Thy gift, I now under- 
 stand by Thy illumination ^.' 
 
 Such an idea of authority leaves much for the individual to 
 do. It is the reaction of the individual on the society which 
 is to keep the common tradition pure and unnarrowed. The 
 Church has in Holy Scripture the highest expression of 
 the mind of Christ. The familiarity of all its members with 
 this flawless and catholic image is to ward off" in each genera- 
 tion that tendency to deteriorate and to become materialised 
 which belongs to all ' traditions.' The individual illumination 
 is thus to react as a purifying force upon the common mind of 
 the Christian society. The individual Christian is to pay the 
 debt of his education, by himself ' testing all things and hold- 
 ing fast that which is good.' Sj^ecially gifted individuals 
 from time to time will be needed to effect more or less sudden 
 ' reversions to type,' to the undying type of apostolic teaching^. 
 But such a true reformer is quite distinct in idea from the 
 heretic. He reforms ; he does not innovate. His note is to 
 restore ; not to reject. And the absence of necessity for funda- 
 
 1 Anselm, Proslog. 4 ; he adds, ' So assign to having such an authoritative 
 that even if I were unwilling to believe standard of the right time does not 
 that Thou art, I could not cease to prevent our recognising the import- 
 understand it.' But the whole rela- anee of having it regulated. 'And if 
 tion of authority and reason is most we desired to remove an error which 
 completely grasped and stated by had accumulated during a long season 
 S. Augustine : see Cunningham, of neglect, it would be veiy unfair to 
 6'. Austin (Cambridge Univ. Press, represent us as wishing to silence the 
 1886), pp. 9, 157 ff. clock, or else as wishing to allow every 
 
 ^ Dr. Salmon, Infallibility, p. 115, townsman to get up and push the 
 
 has a clever comparison of the hands backwards and forwards as he 
 
 authority of the Church to that j^leased.' 
 of the town clock. The value we 
 
I 
 
 VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 327 
 
 mental rejection comes from this simple fact, that the Christian 
 Creed is rational and true. If any man comes to us and says 
 that he has studied and assimilated the Christian Creed with 
 all the care and reverence in his ability, and has rejected it be- 
 cause he finds it irrational and false, we cannot complain of him ^. 
 We cannot ask him to accept it though he thinks it false. 
 We do not at all complain of his having inquired and thought 
 freely — only we venture to assure him, with a confidence 
 which can hardly fail to be irritating, because it is confident, 
 that he is mistaken, that he has thought not only freely, but 
 erroneously. When Christianity adopts, as in the modern 
 Romanist system, a diflferent tone, proscribing free inquiry as 
 ' rationalistic,' and making the appeal to antiquity, in order to 
 test the present teaching of the Church, a 'treason and a 
 heresy"",' it is abjuring its own rational heritage, and adopt- 
 ing a method which Charles Kingsley had good reason to call 
 Manichaean. It is the test of the Church's legitimate tenure 
 that she can encourage free inquiry into her title-deeds. 
 
 3. Thirdly, the Spirit claims for His own, and consecrates the 
 whole of nature. One Spirit was the original author of all 
 that is ; and all that exists is in its essence very good. It is 
 only sin which has produced the appearance of antagonism 
 between the Divine operation and human freedom, or between 
 the spiritual and the material. Thus the humanity of Christ, 
 which is the Spirit's perfect work, exhibits in its perfection 
 how every faculty of human nature, spiritual and physical, is 
 enriched and vitalized, not annihilated, by the closest con- 
 ceivable interaction of the Divine Energy. This principle, as 
 carried out in the Church, occupies a prominent place in the 
 earliest theology ; in part because Montanism, with its pagan 
 idea of inspiration, as an ecstasy which deprived its subject of 
 reason, gave the Church an opportunity of emphasizing that 
 the fullest action of the Spirit, in the case of her inspired men, 
 intensified and did not supersede their own thought, judgment, 
 and individuality; still more because Gnostic dualism, turning 
 every antithesis of nature and grace, of spirit and flesh, of 
 
 ' But cf. pp. 196-8, 229-232, 258-260. 
 
 ^ Manning, Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost, third edit. pp. 9, 29, 238-240. 
 
 t 
 
328 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 natural and supernatural, into an antagonism, forced upon the 
 Church the assertion of her own true and comprehensive 
 Creed, That everything in Christianity is realized ' in flesh as 
 in spirit ' is the constantly reiterated cry of S. Ignatius, who of 
 all men was most ' spiritual.' That the spiritual is not the 
 immaterial, that we become spiritual not by any change or 
 curtailment of nature, not by any depreciation or ignoring of 
 the body, is the constantly asserted principle of S. Irenaeus ^. 
 And the earliest writers in general emphasize the visible 
 organization of the Church, and the institution of external 
 sacraments, as negations of the false principle which would 
 sunder nature from God, and repudiate the unity of the 
 material and the spiritual which the Word had been made 
 Flesh in order to reveal and to perpetuate. 
 
 4. But the unity of the spirit and the flesh, of faith and ex- 
 perience, of God and the world, is certainly not an accomplished 
 fact. On the contrary, dualism is always making appeals 
 which strike home to our present experience. Thus if the 
 Church was to maintain the unity of all things, it could only 
 be by laying great stress upon the ravages which sin had 
 wrought, and upon tlie gradualness of the S2:)irit's method in 
 recovery. The Old Testament, for example, presented a 
 most unspiritual appearance. Its material sacrifices, its low 
 standard of morals, its worldliness, were constantly being 
 objected to by the Gnostic and Manichaean sects, who could 
 not tolerate the Old Testament canon. ' But you are ignor- 
 ing,' the Church replied, ' the gradualness of the Spirit's 
 method.' He lifts man by little and little. He condescends to 
 man's infirmity : He puts up with him as he is, if only He can 
 at the last bring him back to God. 
 
 ^ See, for instance, c. Haer. v. 10, 2. proved condition, and is no longer 
 'The wild olive does not change its . described as iiesh and blood, but as 
 substance [when it is grafted in, see a spiritual man.' So also v. 6, i, 
 Rom. xi. 17], but only the quality of 'whom the apostle calls "spiritual" 
 its fruit, and takes a new name, no because they have the Spirit, not be- 
 longer being called an oleaster but an cause they have been robbed of the 
 olive ; so also man when he is by faith flesh and become bare spirit.' It is 
 grafted in, and receives the Spirit of the recognition of this principle that 
 God, does not lose his fleshly sub- makes most of the language of the 
 stance, but changes the quality of the Fathers on fasting so healthy and 
 works which are his fruits, and takes sensible. The end of fasting is not to 
 another name indicating his im- destroy the flesh, but to free the spirit. 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 329 
 
 It is of the essence of the New Testament, as the religion 
 of the Incarnation, to be final and catholic : on the other hand, 
 it is of the essence of the Old Testament to be imperfect 
 because it represents a gradual process of education by which 
 man was lifted out of depths of sin and ignorance. That this is 
 the case, and that in consequence the justification of the Old 
 Testament method lies not in itself at any particular stage, but 
 in its result taken as a whole, is a thought very familiar to 
 modern Christians ^. But it is important to make plain that it 
 was a thought equally familiar to the Fathers of the Christian 
 Church. Thus S. Gregory of Nazianzus, speaking of God's 
 dealings with the Jews of old, describes how, in order to gain 
 the co-operation of man's goodwill in working for his recovery, 
 He dealt ' after the manner of a schoolmaster or a physician, 
 and while curtailing part of their ancestral customs, tolerated 
 the rest, making some concession to their tastes, just as 
 physicians make their medicines palatable that they may be 
 taken by their patients. For men do not easily abandon 
 what long custom has consecrated. Thus the first law, while 
 it abolished their idols, tolerated their sacrifices ; the second, 
 while it abolished their sacrifices, allowed them to be circum- 
 cised : then when once they had accepted the removal of what 
 was taken from them, they went further and gave up what 
 had been conceded to them — in the first case their sacrifices, 
 in the second their practice of circumcision — and they became 
 instead of heathens, Jews, instead of Jews, Christians, being 
 betrayed as it were by gradual changes into acceptance of the 
 Gospel ^.' Again, S. Chrysostom explains how it is the very 
 merit of the Old Testament that it has taught us to think 
 things intolerable, which under it were tolerated. ' Do not 
 ask,' he says, ' how these (Old Testament precepts) can be good. 
 
 ' See especially Mozley's Lectures on tion of the Ten Commandments was 
 
 the Old Testament, x. : 'The end the too spiritual : so Jerome m Isa(. 1,12, 
 
 test of progressive revelation.' Jw Jen vii. 21. Cf. Justin, 2'j7/p/;o 19. 
 
 ^ Greg. Naz. Oiat. xxxi. 25. Many Chrys. adv. Jud. iv. 6. Epiphan. Haer. 
 
 ofthe greatest ofthe ancient Christian Ixvi. 71. Constt. ap. i. 6; vi. 20. 
 
 writers depreciate the sacrificial law This method of interpretation is 
 
 as a mere concession, made to avoid perha2>s derived from the Epistle of 
 
 worse things, when the incident of Barnabas, 2-4. 
 the calf shewed that the first legisla- 
 
330 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 now when the need for them is past : ask how they were good 
 when the period required them. Or rather, if you wish, do 
 inquire into their merit even now. It is still conspicuous, and 
 lies in nothing so much as what now enables us to find fault 
 with them. Their highest praise is that we now see them to 
 be defective. If they had not trained us well, so that we 
 became susceptible of higher things, we should not have now 
 seen their deficiency.' Then he shews how under the old law 
 swearing by the true God was allowed to avoid swearing by 
 idols, the worse ill. ' But is not swearing at all of the evil 
 one ? ' he asks. ' Undoubtedly, now, after this long course of 
 training, but then not. And how can the same thing be good 
 at one time and bad at another ? I ask rather, how should it 
 not be so, when we have regard to the plain teaching of the 
 fact of growth in all things, fruits of the earth or acquirements 
 of man? Look at mans own nature; the food, the occupations 
 which suit his infancy, are repulsive to his manhood. Or 
 consider facts of history. All agree that murder is an inven- 
 tion of Satan, yet this very act at a suitable time made Phineas 
 to be honoured with the high priesthood. Phineas' murder 
 " was reckoned to him for righteousness." Just in the same 
 way Abraham obtained an even higher honour for being not 
 a murderer only but what was much worse, a child-murderer. 
 We must not then look at the facts in themselves only, but in- 
 vestigate with attention the period also, the cause, the motive, 
 the difference of persons, and all the attendant circumstances : 
 so only can one get at the truth ^.' 
 
 Once more S. Basil : ' Surely it is absolutely infantile and 
 worthy of a child who must be really fed on milk, to be ignor- 
 ant of the great mystery of our salvation — that just as we 
 received our earliest instruction, so, in exercising unto god- 
 liness and going on unto perfection, we were first trained by 
 lessons easy to apprehend and suited to our intelligence. He 
 Who regulates our lives deals with us as those who have been 
 reared in darkness, and gradually accustoms our eyes to the 
 light of truth. For He spares our weakness, and in the depth 
 
 * Chrys. in Maffh. Homil. xvii. 5-6 Faustin. et Marcellin. in Bibl. Vet. Patrum. 
 (slightly abbreviated). Cf. Libell. torn. v. 657 d. 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 331 
 
 of the riches of His wisdom and the unsearchable judgments of 
 His understanding adopts this gentle treatment, so well adapted 
 to our needs, accustoming us first to see the shadow of objects, 
 and to look at the sun's reflection in water, so that we may not 
 be suddenly blinded by the exposure to the pure light. By 
 parity of reasoning, the law being a shadow of things to come, 
 and the typical teaching of the prophets, which is the truth 
 darkly, have been devised as exercises for the eyes of the 
 heart, inasmuch as it will be easy for us to pass from these to 
 wisdom hidden in mystery ^.' 
 
 In the same spirit was the Church's answer to the difficulties 
 which facts of personal experience were constantly putting in 
 the way of her claims. Churchmen were frequently seen to 
 be vulgar, ignorant, imperfect, sinful. If, in spite of manifold 
 evils existing within her, the Church could still appeal to her 
 fruits, it must be by comparison with what was to be found 
 elsewhere, or by taking in a large area for comparison, or by 
 appealing to her special grounds of hope. In fact, what she 
 represented was a hope, not a realization ; a tendency, not a 
 result ; a life in process, not a ripened fruit. But then she 
 claimed that this was God's way. ' He loves us not as we are, 
 but as we are becoming ^.' Let but a man once lay hold of 
 the life-giving principle of faith, and God sets a value on him, 
 life has a promise for him, altogether out of proportion to 
 present attainments. For God estimates him, in view of all 
 the forces of a new life which are set loose to work upon him, 
 and he can assure himself that the movement of recovery which 
 he has begun to feel stirring within him will carry him on 
 through eternal ages, beyond what he can ask or think. 
 
 It is because of this gradualness of the Spirit's method that 
 it lays so great a strain on human patience. The spiritually- 
 minded of all ages have tended to find the visible Church a 
 very troubled and imperfect home. Most startling disclo- 
 sures of the actual state of ecclesiastical disorder and moral 
 
 ^ On the Hohj Sinrit, xiv. 33 (Lewis' trine of 'imputation* so far as it is 
 
 trans.). true. God deals with us, e.g. in 
 
 - Aug. de Trin. i. 10, 21. This prin- absolution, by anticipation of what is 
 
 ciple alone gives a basis for the doc- to come about in us, in Christ. 
 
332 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 collapse, may be gathered out of the Christian Fathers. Thus 
 to found a ' pure Church ' has been the instinct of impatient 
 zeal since Tertullian's day. But the instinct has to be re- 
 strained, the visible Church has to be borne with, because it 
 is the Spirit's purpose to provide a home for the training and 
 improvement of the imperfect. ' Let both grow together 
 unto the harvest.' ' A bruised reed will He not break, and 
 smoking flax will He not quench.' The Church must have 
 her terms of communion, moral and intellectual : this is es- 
 sential to keep her fundamental principles intact, and to pre- 
 vent her betraying her secret springs of strength and recovery. 
 But short of this necessity she is tolerant. It is her note to 
 be tolerant, morally and theologically. She is the mother, not 
 the magistrate. No doubt her balanced duty is one difficult 
 to fulfil. At times she has been puritanical, at others morally 
 lax ; at times doctrinally lax, at others rigid. But however 
 well or ill she has fulfilled the obligations laid on her, this is 
 her ideal. She is the guardian, the depository of a great gift, 
 a mighty presence, which in its essence is unchanging and 
 perfect, but is realized very imperfectly in her experience and 
 manifested life. This is what S. Thomas Aquinas means 
 when he says ' that to believe in the Church is only possible 
 if we mean by it to believe in the Spirit vivifjdng the Church ^^ 
 The true self of the Church is the Holy Spirit, but a great 
 deal in the Church at any date does not belong to her true 
 self, and is obscuring the Spirit's mind. Thus the treasure is 
 in earthen vessels, it is sometimes a light hid under a bushel ; 
 and the Church is the probation of faith, as well as its en- 
 couragement. 
 
 It will not be out of place to conclude this review of the 
 Spirit's method in the Church by calling attention to the 
 emphasis which, from the first. Christians laid upon the fact 
 that the animating principle both of their individual lives 
 and of theii" society as a whole, was nothing less than the 
 Holy Spirit Himself. To know Him was (as against all the 
 philosophical schools, and in a sense in which the same could 
 not be said even of the Divine Word) their peculiar privilege, to 
 
 ^ Thorn. Aq. Summa Theol. pars sec. sec. Qu. i. Art. ix. 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 333 
 
 possess Him their summary characteristic. Under the old cove- 
 nant, and in all the various avenues of approach to the Church, 
 men could be the subjects of the Spirit's guidance and could 
 be receiving gifts from Him ; but the ' initiated ' Christian, 
 baptized and confirmed, possessed not merely His gifts but 
 Himself. He is in the Church, as the ' Vicar of Christ,' in 
 Whose presence Christ Himself is with them. He is the 
 consecrator of every sacrament, and the substance of His 
 own sacramental gifts. The services of ordained men indeed 
 are required for the administration of sacraments, but as 
 ministers simpl}^ of a Power higher than themselves, of a 
 Personal Spirit Who indeed is invoked by their ministry, 
 and pledges Himself to respond to their invocations, but 
 never subjects Himself to their power. Therefore the un- 
 worthiness of the minister diminishes in no way the efficacy 
 of the sacrament, or the reality of the gift given, because the 
 ministry of men neither creates the gift nor adds to or 
 diminishes its force. He is the giver of the gift, and the 
 gift He gives is the same to all. Only the meagreness of 
 human faith and love restrains the largeness of His bounty 
 and conditions the Thing received by the narrowness and 
 variability of the faculty which receives it. According to our 
 faith is it done to us, and where there is no faith and no love 
 there the grace is equally, in S. Augustine's phrase, present 
 and profitless ^. 
 
 II. In something of this way the early Christian writers — • 
 and it has seemed better to let them speak for us — teach the 
 doctrine of the Holy Spirit. What they teach is grounded 
 
 1 The above paragraph is a summary the gift of Himself. Ep. cxciv. : ' aliter 
 
 of expressions constantly met with in adiuvat nondum inhabitans, aliter 
 
 the Fathers. It is S. Ambrose who inhabitans : nam nondum inhabitans 
 
 protests against the ideathat the priest adiuvat ut sint fideles, inhabitans 
 
 can be spoken of as having power over adiuvat iam fideles.' Didymus, de 
 
 the Divine Things which he ministers, Spiritu Sancfo 1 5, calls attention to the 
 
 see Be Spiritu Sando, praef. 18, lib. i. distinction in the New Testament 
 
 II, 118 : 'nostra sunt servitia sed tua between irvevfia (without the article) 
 
 sacramenta. Neque enim humanae i.e. 'a spiritual gift,' and to irvevfia, 
 
 opis est divina conferre.' S. Angus- i.e. the Spirit Himself: cf. Westcott 
 
 tine, among others, draws the distinc- on S. John vii. 39. 
 tion between gifts from the Spirit and 
 
334 "^^^^ Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 in part on actual experience, in part on the revelation of the 
 being and action of God made once for all in the Person of 
 Jesus Christ and recorded in the New Testament. On this 
 mingled basis of experience and Holy Scripture they passed 
 back from the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as He is operative 
 in the world, to the Theology of His Person. They passed 
 back but slowly, with great hesitation, even unwillingness. 
 Nothing, we may say, was further removed from the Fathers 
 than the easy-going assumption that because we are the 
 subjects of a revelation, therefore we are able to speculate 
 with tolerably complete information about the mysteries 
 which lie beyond experience. The truth that ' we know in 
 part,' we see ' in a glass darkly,' was profoundly impressed 
 upon their minds. God manifested Himself, S. Gregory of 
 Nazianzus tells, in such a way as to escape the nets of our 
 syllogisms, and to shew Himself superior to our logical dis- 
 tinctions. If we expect to find our logic equal to express 
 Him, we shew only our mad presumption, ' we who are not 
 able even to know what lies at our feet, or to count the waves 
 of the sea, or the drops of rain, or the days of the world, 
 much less to fathom the depths of God, and give account of 
 His nature which transcends alike our reason and our power 
 of expression ^.' Besides this, the early theologians realized 
 the obligation of keeping to Holy Scripture — of not being 
 wise ' above that which is written ' — and they were conscious 
 of the danger of building on isolated texts of Scripture or of 
 treating its ' simple and untechnical ' language as if it was the 
 language of a formal treatise ^. 
 
 For these reasons they were cautious in theological specula- 
 tion. Yet the facts and relationships introduced into the world 
 of experience by the revelation of the Son represent eternal 
 realities, if under great limitations yet still truly, and thus 
 make possible a real security up to a certain point on what 
 lies beyond the unassisted human knowledge. Thus, first, 
 when the Arian movement passed from the denial of the true 
 
 * Greg. Naz. Orai. xxxi. 8. v. 13, 2. Basil, de Spiritu Sando, 
 
 ^ See Atlian. Epp. ad Serapion. i. iii. 5. 
 1 7. Cyril Hieros. Cat. xvi. 24. Iran. 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspii^ation. 335 
 
 Godhead of Christ to a similar position with reference to the 
 Holy Spirit, the Christian Church felt itself fully justified 
 alike by its past traditions ^, and by its Scriptures, in empha- 
 sizing the personal distinctness and the true Godhead of the 
 Holy Spirit. Unless all Christ's language was an illusion, 
 the Holy Spirit wag really personal and really distinct from 
 Himself and the Father ; nor could One who was associated 
 with the Father and the Son in all the essentially Divine 
 operations of nature and grace, be less than truly and really 
 God, an essential element in the Eternal Being. The Arian 
 controversy in its earlier stages had disposed of the notion that 
 Christian theology could at any cost admit the conception of 
 a created personality, clothed with Divine attributes and. 
 exercising Divine functions. 
 
 Secondly, the consideration that the relations manifested in 
 the Incarnation in terms of our experience between the 
 Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, express transcendent 
 and eternal relations, led the Church to speak of the Holy 
 Ghost as proceeding from the Father, as the unique fount of 
 Godhead, through the Son : or in somewhat less nicely dis- 
 criminated language ' from the Father and the Son ^.' In the 
 fifth century there is a tendency to use in the East the former, 
 in the West the latter mode of expression, but without any 
 essential difference. Nor can it be said that the causes which 
 were at work later to divide the Eastern and the Western 
 Churches on the subject of the procession of the Holy Ghost, 
 were so much really theological as ecclesiastical and 
 political. 
 
 Thirdly, the accurate consideration of the language in 
 which is expressed the relation of Christ to the Holy Spirit, 
 helped the Church to guard the doctrine of the Trinity from 
 the associations of Tritheism. For the coming of the Holy 
 Spirit is clearly spoken of in Holy Scripture as coincident 
 with and involving the coming of Christ. ' While we are 
 illuminated by the Holy Spirit, it is Christ who illuminates 
 
 1 The Bid. of Chr. Biog., Art. Holt subject. 
 Ghost (by Dr. Swete), has an admir- ^ See Godet on S. John xv. 26, 27. 
 
 able summary of the theology of the 
 
336 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 us : when we drink in the Spirit, it is Christ we drink.' The 
 Spiiit is distinct from Christ — ' another Paraclete ' — yet in 
 His coming, Christ comes : in His indwelling is the indwelling 
 of the Father and the Son ^. How can this be ? Because the 
 ' Persons ' of the Holy Trinity are not to be thought of as dis- 
 tinct individuals, as three Gods. No doubt in our ordinary 
 language, persons are understood to be separate, and mutually 
 exclusive beings. Even in regard to ourselves deeper reflection 
 shews us that our personalities are very far from being as 
 separate as they appear to be on the surface: and with 
 regard to God, it was only with an expressed apology for the 
 imperfection of human language that the Church spoke of the 
 Divine Three, as Three Pe)-soyis at all. But 'we have no celestial 
 language,' and the word is the only one which will express 
 what Christ's language implies about Himself, the Father, 
 and the Spirit. Only while we use it, it must be understood 
 to express mutual inclusion, not mutual exclusion. 
 
 Wherever the Father works, He works essentially and 
 inevitably tkrough the Son and the Spirit ; whenever the Son 
 acts, He acts from the Father by the Holy Spirit ; whenever 
 the Holy Spirit comes, He brings with Him in His coming 
 the Son and the Father. Thus when an image was necessary 
 to interpret in part the Divine relationships, the Fathers 
 sought it nowhere so much as in the three distinct yet 
 inseparable elements of man's spiritual nature ; the triune 
 character of which Plato had already brought into notice, and 
 which is in fact an earthly image, however inadequate, of the 
 Triune God 2. 
 
 1 Athan. Epp. ad Scrap, i. 19. S. upon Himself,' 'the bond of the 
 
 John xiv. 16, 18, 23. Father and the Son.' This eternal 
 
 ^ Plato's human trinity is made up function would interpret His tem- 
 
 of reason, spirit [9v/i6i]. and desire : S. poral mission to bring all creatures 
 
 Augustine's of memory [i. e. personal back into union with God. Not very 
 
 identity:, reason, and will ; or mind, differently S. Augustine speaks of 
 
 knowledge, and love. Nothing has Him as the Love of the Father and 
 
 been said in the text of Patristic and the Son : ' Vides Trinitatem si cari- 
 
 more recent attempts to express the tatem vides. Ecce tria sunt ; amans 
 
 function of the Holy Spirit in the et quod amatur et amor.' And 
 
 inner relations of the Trinity. Some this Love is itself personal and co- 
 
 of the Fathers speak of the Holy ordinate : ' commune aliquid est 
 
 Spirit as completing the circle of the Patris et Filii ; at ipsa communio 
 
 Divine Life, or as ' the return of God consubstantialis et coaeterna.' But 
 
VIII. The Holy Sphdt and Inspiration. 'X,'^^ 
 
 III. Hitherto nothing has been said about that part of 
 the Holy Spirit's work which is called the inspiration of 
 Scripture. It has been kept to the last because of the great 
 importance of putting it in context with less familiar truths. 
 The Scriptures have, it is a commonplace to say, suffered 
 greatly from being isolated. This is as true whether we are 
 considering them as a source of evidence or as the sphere of 
 inspiration. 
 
 As a source of evidence they contain the record of historical 
 facts with some of which at any rate the Creed of Christendom 
 is inseparably interwoven. Thus it is impossible for Christians 
 who know what they are about, to depreciate the import- 
 ance of the historical evidence for those facts at least of 
 which the Creed contains a summary. But the tendency with 
 books of historical evidence has been, at least till recently, to 
 exaggerate the extent to which the mere evidence of remote 
 facts can compel belief. What we should make of the New 
 Testament record, what estimate we should be able to form 
 of the Person of Jesus Christ and the meaning of His life and 
 work, if it was contained simply in some old manuscripts, or 
 unearthed in some way by antiquaries out of the Syrian 
 sand, it is impossible to say. In order to have grounds for 
 believing the facts, in order to be susceptible of their evidence, 
 we require an antecedent state of conception and expecta- 
 tion. A whole set of presuppositions about God, about the 
 slavery of sin, about the reasonableness of redemption, must 
 
 in such speculation they allow them- is selfish or unsatisfied : it demands 
 selves with much reserve and ex- anobjectandaproductof mutual love, 
 pression of unwillingness. See especially Richard of S. Victor, 
 In fact it is easy to see that an de Triyi. Pars i. lib. iii. cc. 14, 15: 
 eternally living God, knowing and * Communio ajnoris non potest esse 
 loving, must be a God Whose Being omnino minus quam in tribus perso- 
 involves eternal relationships. Know- nis. Nihil autem f^ut dictum est) glori- 
 ledge involves a relation of subject osius, nihil magnificentius, quam quic- 
 and object : to make love possible quid habes utile et dulce in commune 
 there must be a lover and a loved. deducere : . . . . hujusmodi dulcedinis 
 It is more difficult to see how a delicias solus non possidet qui in 
 perfect relationship must be three- exhibita sibi dilectione socium et con- 
 told ; but there are true lines of dilecium non habet ; quamdiu con- 
 thotight which lead up to this, such, dilectum non habet, praecipui gaudii 
 for instance, as make us see first in the communione caret.' See also Sarto- 
 family, the type of complete life. rius, Doctrine of Divine Love (Clark's 
 Love Avhich is only a relation of two, Foreign Theol. Libr.), p. 16. 
 
 t Z 
 
338 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 be present -with us. So only can the facts presented to us in 
 the Gospel come to us as credible things, or as parts of an 
 intelligible universe, correlated elements in a rational whole. 
 Now the work of the Spirit in the Church has been to keep 
 alive and real these presuppositions, this frame of mind. He 
 convinces of sin, of righteousness, of judgment. He does this 
 not merely in isolated individuals however numerous, but in 
 an organized continuous society. The spiritual life of the 
 Church assures me that in desiring union with God, in 
 feeling the burden of sin, in hungering for redemption, I am 
 not doing an eccentric, abnormal thing. I am doing only 
 what belongs to the best and richest movement of humanity. 
 More than this, it assures me that assent to the claims and 
 promises of Jesus Christ satisfies these spiritual needs in such 
 a way as to produce the strongest, the most lasting, the most 
 catholic sort of human character. The historical life of the 
 Church thus in every age ' setting to its seal ' that God's ofier 
 in Christ is true, reproduces the original ' witness,' commends 
 it to conscience and reason, spans the gulf of the ages, and 
 brings down remote and alien incidents into close and in- 
 telligible familiarity. Lotze speaks of revelation as ' either 
 contained in some divine act of historic occurrence, or con- 
 tinually repeated in men's hearts^.' But in fact the antithesis 
 is not an alternative. The strength of the Christian Creed is 
 that it is both. It is a revelation continuously renewed in 
 men's hearts by an organized and systematic operation of the 
 Spirit in the Church, while at the same time it finds its 
 guarantee and security in certain Divine acts of historic 
 occurrence. 
 
 Once more, the belief in the Holy Scriptures as inspired re- 
 quires to be held in context by the belief in the general action 
 of the Holy Spirit upon the Christian society and the individual 
 soul. It is, we may perhaps say, becoming more and more 
 difiicult to believe in the Bible without believing in the 
 Church. The Apostles, indeed, — and the New Testament 
 canon consists largely of the words of Apostles — have an 
 authority which, reasonably considered, is unique, and stands 
 
 * M'icrocosmus, B. ix. C. iv. (E. T. vol. ii. p. 660.) 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 339 
 
 by itself as that of the accredited witnesses of Christ ; but when 
 we find them appealing to members of the Church, they 
 appeal not as the possessors of an absolute authority or of a 
 Spirit in which others do not share. They are the ministers 
 of a ' tradition ' to which they themselves are subject, a tradition 
 ' once for all delivered^:' they appeal to those who hear them 
 as men ' who have an unction from the Holy One and know 
 all things.' The tone in fact of the apostolic writers forces 
 us to regard the spirit in which the Church lives, as co-operat- 
 ing with, and in a real sense limiting, the spirit in which they 
 themselves speak and write. Thus in fact the apostolic 
 writings were written as occasion required, within the Church, 
 and for the Church. They presuppose membership in it 
 and familiarity with its tradition. They are secondary, not 
 primary, instructors ; for edification, not for initiation. Nor, 
 in fact, can a hard and fast line be drawn between what lies 
 within and what lies without the canon. For example, 
 Protestantism of an unecclesiastical sort has built upon the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews as much as upon any book of the 
 New Testament. This book is of unknown authorship. If 
 ' Pauline ' it is pretty certainly not S. Paul's. In large part it 
 is the judgment of the Church which enables us to draw a 
 line between it and S. Clement's ' scripture,' The line indeed 
 our own judgment approves. The Epistle to the Hebrews 
 and S. Clement's letter are closely linked together, but the 
 latter depends on the former : it is secondary and the other 
 is primary. Yet how narrow is the historical interval between 
 them. How impossible to tear the one from the other. How 
 seemingly irrational to attribute absolute authority to the 
 anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews which represents apostolic 
 teaching at second hand ^, and then to interpret it in a sense 
 hostile to the Epistle of Clement, which represents exactly 
 the same stream of apostolic teaching only one short stage 
 lower down. For Clement interprets the high priesthood of 
 Christ in a sense which, instead of excluding, makes it the 
 basis of, the ministerial hierarchy of the Church. Or to put 
 the matter more broadly, how irrational it is, considering 
 
 ^ See especially Gal. i. 8, 9. - Heb. ii. 3. 
 
 Z 2 
 
340 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 the intimate links by which the New Testament canon 
 is bound up with the historic Church, not to accept the 
 mind of the Church, especially when we have its consent 
 down independent lines of tradition, as interpreting the 
 mind of the apostolic writers. Most rational surely is 
 the attitude of the early Church towards Scripture. The 
 Scripture was regarded as the highest utterance of the Spirit, 
 the unique and constant test of the Church's life and teaching. 
 But the Spirit in the Church interpreted the meaning of 
 Scripture. Thus the Church taught and the Scripture tested 
 and verified or corrected her teaching : and this because all 
 was of one piece, the life of the Church including the Scrip- 
 tures, the inspired writers themselves appealing to the Spirit 
 in the Churches ^ . 
 
 And now, what is to be said about this, at present, much 
 controverted subject of the inspiration of Holy Scripture? 
 What does the doctrine imply, and what attitude does belief 
 in it involve towards the modern critical treatment of the 
 inspired literature % 
 
 I. Let us bear carefully in mind the place which the 
 doctrine holds in the building up of a Christian faith. It is 
 in fact an important part of the superstructure, but it is not 
 among the hases of the Christian belief. The Christian creed 
 asserts the reality of certain historical facts. To these facts, 
 in the Church's name, we claim assent : but we do so on 
 grounds which, so far, are quite independent of the insjnration 
 of the evangelic records. All that we claim to shew at this 
 stage is that they are historical : not historical so as to be 
 absolutely without error, but historical in the general sense, 
 so as to be trustworthy. All that is necessary for faith in 
 Christ is to be found in the moral dispositions which pre- 
 dispose to belief, and make intelligible and credible the thing 
 to be believed : coupled with such acceptance of the generally 
 historical character of the Gospels, and of the trustworthiness 
 
 1 See further on the fatal results ii8; or quoted by Hare, Mission of the 
 
 of separating the Spirit's work in Comforter, Note H. vol. ii. pp. 468, 
 
 Scripture, from His work in the 474. 
 Church, Coleridge, Remains iii. 93, iv. 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 341 
 
 of the other apostolic documents, as justifies belief that our 
 Lord was actually born of the Virgin Mary, manifested as 
 the Son of God ' with power according to a spirit of holiness,' 
 crucified, raised again the third day from the dead, exalted to 
 the right hand of the Father, the founder of the Church and 
 the source to it of the informing Spirit. 
 
 In all this no claim is made for any special belief as to the 
 method of the Spirit's work in the Scripture or in the Church. 
 Logically such belief follows, does not precede, belief in Christ. 
 Indeed, in the past. Christian apologists have made a great 
 mistake in allowing opponents to advance as objections 
 against the historical character of the Gospel narrative, what 
 are really objections not against its historical character — not 
 such as could tell against the substantially historical character 
 of secular documents — but against a certain view of the mean- 
 ing of inspiration. Let it be laid down then that Christianity 
 brings with it indeed a doctrine of the inspiration of Holy 
 Scriptures, but is not based upon it ^. 
 
 2. But such a doctrine it does bring with it. Our Lord and 
 His Apostles are clearly found to believe and to teach that the 
 Scriptures of the Old Testament were given by inspiration of 
 God ; and the Christian Church from the earliest days postu- 
 lated the same belief about the Scriptures of the New Testa- 
 ment. To disbelieve that ' the Scriptures were spoken by the 
 Holy Ghost,' was equivalent to being ' an unbeliever-.' 
 
 Thus, when once a man finds himself a believer in Christ, 
 he will find himself in a position where alike the authority of 
 his Master and the ' communis sensus ' of the society he belongs 
 to, give into his hand certain documents and declare them 
 inspired. 
 
 3. What in its general idea does this mean ? 
 
 S. Athanasius expresses the function of the Jews in the world 
 in a luminous phrase, when he describes them as having been 
 the ' sacred school for all the world of the knowledge of God 
 and of the spiritual life •\' Every race has its special vocation, 
 
 1 This distinction was drawn by H. E. v. 28. 
 Bishop Clifford, Fortnightly Review, ^ Athan. de Incarn. 12. Cf. Ewald's 
 
 Jan. 1887, p. 145. preface to his History of Israel. 
 
 ^ Cf. the quotation in Eusebius, 
 
34^ The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 and we recognise in the great writers of each race the inter- 
 preters of that vocation. They are specially gifted individuals, 
 but not merely individuals. The race speaks in them : Rome 
 is interpreted by Virgil, and Greece by Aesch^dus or Plato. 
 Now every believer in God must see in these special missions 
 of races, a Divine inspiration. If we can once get down to the 
 bottom of human life, below its pride, its wilfulness, its pre- 
 tentiousness, down to its essence, we get to God and to a move- 
 ment of His Spirit^. Thus every race has its inspiration and 
 its prophets. 
 
 But the inspii'ation of the Jews was supernatural. What 
 does this mean ? That the Jews were selected — not to be 
 the school for humanity in any of the arts and sciences which 
 involve the thought of God only indirectly, and can therefore 
 be carried on without a fundamental restoration of man into 
 that relation to God which sin had clouded or broken, — but to 
 be the school of that fundamental restoration itself There- 
 fore, in the case of the Jews the inspiration is both in itself 
 more direct and more intense, and also involves a direct con- 
 sciousness on the part of its subjects. In the race, indeed, the 
 consciousness might be dim ; but the consciousness, as the 
 prophets all assure us, did belong to the race, and not merely 
 to its individual interpreters. They speak as recalling the 
 people to something which they know, or ought to know, 
 not as preachers of a new religion. They were 'the con- 
 science of the state ^.' But special men, prophets, psalmists, 
 moralists, historians, were thus the inspired interpreters of the 
 Divine message to and in the race : and their inspii'ation lies 
 in this, that they were the subjects of a movement of the Holy 
 Ghost, so shaping, controlling, quickening their minds and 
 thoughts and aspirations, as to make them the instruments 
 through which was imparted 'the knowledge of God and of the 
 spiritual life.' 
 
 Various are the degrees of this inspii-ation : the inspiration 
 of the prophet is direct, continuous, absorbing. The inspiration 
 
 ^ See Gratry, TLmri Perreyre, pp. 162, tion, p. 106. Cf. Prof. Robertson Smith, 
 163. Vroplids 0/ Israel, p. 108. 
 
 ^ Delitzsch, 0. T. History of Redemp- 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 343 
 
 of the writer of Ecclesiastes, on the other hand, is such as to 
 lead him to ponder on all the phases of a worldly experience, 
 passing through many a false conclusion, and cynical denial, 
 till at the last his thought is led to unite itself to the great 
 stream of Divine movement by finding the only possible solu- 
 tion of the problems of life in the recognition of God, and in 
 obedience to Him. 
 
 Various also are the sorts of literature inspired : for the 
 supernatural fertilizes and does not annihilate the natural. 
 The Church repudiated the Montanist conception of inspira- 
 tion, according to which the inspired man speaks in ecstasy, 
 as the passive unconscious instrument of the Spirit ; and the 
 metaphors which would describe the Holy Spirit as acting 
 upon a man ' like a flute player breathing into his flute,' or 
 ' a plectrum striking a lyre,' have always a suspicion of heresy 
 attaching to their use ^. As the humanity of Christ is none 
 the less a true humanity for being conditioned by absolute one- 
 ness with God, so the human activity is none the less free, 
 conscious, rational, because the Spirit inspires it. The poet is 
 a poet, the philosopher a philosopher, the historian an his- 
 torian, each with his own idiosyncrasies, ways, and methods, 
 to be interpreted each by the laws of his own literature. And 
 just as truly as physiology, in telling us more and more 
 about the human body, is telling us about the body which the 
 Son of God assumed, so with the growth of our knowledge 
 about the kinds and sequences of human literature, shall we 
 know more and more about the literature of the Jews which 
 the Holy Spirit inspired. 
 
 What then is meant by the inspiration of Holy Scripture 1 
 If we begin our inquiry with the account of creation with 
 which the Bible opens, we may take note of its afiinities 
 in general substance with the Babylonian and Phoenician 
 cosmogonies ; but we are much more struck with its difier- 
 ences, and it is in these we shall look for its inspiration. We 
 observe that it has for its motive and impulse not the 
 satisfaction of a fantastic curiosity, or the later interest of 
 
 ' See Ei:>iplian. Kaer. xlviii. 4. West- App. B, sect. ii. 4, sect. iv. 4. Mason, 
 cott, Introd. to the Study of the Gospels, Faith of the Gospel, p. 255. 
 
344 ^-^^ Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 scientific discovery, but to reveal certain fundamental reli- 
 gious principles : that everything as we see it was made by 
 God : that it has no being in itself but at God's will : on the 
 other hand, that everything is in its essence good, as the pro- 
 duct of the good God : that man, besides sharing the physical 
 nature of all creation, has a special relation to God, as made 
 in God's image, to be God's vice-gerent: that sin, and all that 
 sin brings with it of misery and death, came not of man's 
 nature but of his disobedience to God and rejection of the 
 limitations under which He put him : that in spite of all that 
 sin brought about. God has not left man to himself, that there 
 is a hope and a promise. These are the fundamental principles 
 of true religion and progressive morality, and in these lies the 
 supernatural inspiration of the Bible account of creation ^. 
 
 As we pass on down the record of Genesis, we do not find 
 ourselves in any doubt as to the primary and certain meaning 
 of its inspiration. The first traditions of the race are all 
 given there /ro77i a special jioint of view. In that point of 
 view lies the inspiration. It is that everything is presented 
 to us as illustrating God's dealings with man — God's judg- 
 ment on sin : His call of a single man to work out a uni- 
 versal mission : His gradual delimitation of a chosen race : 
 His care for the race : His over-ruling of evil to work out His 
 purpose. The narrative of Genesis has all the fuUest wealth 
 of human interest, but it is in the unveiling of the hand of God 
 that its special characteristic lies. As we go on into the 
 history, we find the recorders acting like the recorders of 
 other nations, collecting, sorting, adapting, combining their 
 materials, but in this inspired — that the animating motive 
 of their work is not to bring out the national glory or to 
 flatter the national vanity, nor, like the motive of a modern 
 historian, the mere interest in fact, but to keep before the 
 chosen people the record of how God has dealt with them. 
 This, as we perceive, gives them a special sense of the value 
 of fact ^. They record what God has done, how God did in 
 
 1 See Professor Driver's admirable ^ Professor Cheyne, speaking of 
 
 article on ' the cosmogony of Gene- such narratives of Scriptures as the 
 sis.' Expositor, Jan. 1 886. record of Elijah, protests against the 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 345 
 
 such and such ways take action on behalf of His peculiar 
 people, delivering them, punishing them, teaching them, keep- 
 ing them, disciplining them for higher ends. And none who 
 have eyes to see God's spiritual purposes can doubt that those 
 historians read aright the chronicles of the kings of Israel. 
 The spiritual significance which they see is the true signi- 
 ficance. God's special purpose was on Israel. 
 
 It is not necessary to emphasize in what consists the special 
 inspiration of psalmists or of prophets. The psalmists take 
 some of the highest places among the poets of all nations, but 
 the poetic faculty is directed to one great end, to reveal the 
 soul in its relation to God, in its exultations and in its self- 
 abasements. ' Where . . . did they come from, those piercing 
 lightning-like gleams of strange spiritual truth, those magni- 
 ficent out-looks upon the kingdom of God, those raptures at 
 His presence and His glory, those wonderful disclosures of 
 self-knowledge, those pure out-pourings of the love of God ? 
 Surely here is something more than the mere working of the 
 mind of man. Surely . . . they repeat the whispers of the 
 Spirit of God, they reflect the very light of the Eternal 
 Wisdom ^.' 
 
 In the case of prophets once more we get the most obvious 
 and typical instances of inspiration ^. The prophets make a 
 
 supposition that they are ' true to question, in what does the inspiration 
 
 fact.' ' True to fact ! Who goes to the of the Old Testament consist, 
 
 artist for hard dry facts ? Why even ^ Cf. pp. 161-167. In view of criti- 
 
 the historians of antiquity thought it cisms it may be explained that in the 
 
 no part of their duty to give the mere account of the prophet given above 
 
 prose of life. How much less can only that view of his inspiration is 
 
 the unconscious artists of the imagi- taken into consideration which ap- 
 
 native East have described their peals first to the enquirer (cf. the 
 
 heroes with relentless photographic words in the next paragraph ' in this 
 
 accuracy!' (r/*e Hallowing of Criiicism, general sense at least'). When once 
 
 p. 5.) But it seems to me that such this primary assurance of inspiration 
 
 a passage, by treating the recorders of is gained the evidence of detailed 
 
 the Old Testament as 'artists,' ignores prophecies will be found cogent. As 
 
 their obvious intention to lay stress we compare the anticipations of the 
 
 on what God has actually done, the Messiah or of the ' Righteous Servant ' 
 
 deliverances He has actually wrought. in such passages as Ps. xxii., Is. liii., 
 
 They, at least, like the Greek historical vii. 14, or ix. 6, 7, with their fulfil- 
 
 ' artist ' of the defeat of Persia, would ment in Jesus Christ, we recognise a 
 
 have laid great stress on the facts special action of the Holy Ghost, 
 
 having happened. marl< ing even in details the continuity 
 
 ^ Church, Discipline of the Christian of His method. Cf. p. 167 referred to 
 
 Character, p. 57. This work seems to above, 
 me the best existing answer to the 
 
34^ The Religion of the Incainiation. 
 
 direct claim to be the instruments of the Divine Spirit. Not 
 that the Divine Spirit supersedes their human faculties, but 
 He intensifies them. They see deeper under the surface of life 
 what God is doing, and therefore further into the future what 
 He will do. No doubt their predictive knowledge is general, 
 it is of the issue to which things tend. It is not at least 
 usually a knowledge ' of times and of seasons which the 
 Father hath put in His own power.' Thus at times they 
 foreshorten the distance, and place the great deliverance and 
 the ' day of Jehovah ' in the too immediate foreground ^. 
 The prophetic inspiration is thus consistent with erroneous 
 anticipations as to the circumstances and the opportunity of 
 God's self-revelation, just as the apostolic inspiration admitted 
 of S. Paul expecting the second coming of Christ within his 
 own life-time. But the prophets claim to be directly and 
 really inspired to teach and interpret what God is doing 
 and commanding in their own age, and to forecast what in 
 judgment and redemptive mercy God means to do and must 
 do in the Divine event. The figure of the king Messiah dawns 
 upon their horizon with increasing definiteness of outline and 
 characteristic, and we, with the experience of history between 
 us and them, are sure that the correspondence of prophecy 
 and fulfilment can be due to no other cause than that they 
 spoke in fact the ' word of the Lord.' 
 
 Thus there is built up for us in the literature of a nation, 
 marked by an unparalleled unity of purpose and character, a 
 spiritual fabric, which in its result we cannot but recog- 
 nise as the action of the Divine Spirit. A knowledge of God 
 and of the spiritual life gradually appears, not as the product of 
 human ingenuity, but as the result of Divine communication : 
 and the outcome of this communication is to produce an or- 
 ganic whole which postulates a climax not yet reached, a 
 redemption not yet given, a hope not yet satisfied. In this 
 general sense at least no Christian ought to feel a difficulty in 
 believing, and believing with joy, in the inspiration of the Old 
 
 ^ See for instance Micah v. 2-6. On ject of prophecy, let me refer to Dr. 
 the subject of the limitations of pro- Ed. Riehm, Messianic Prophecy (Clark's 
 phetic foresight, as on the whole sub- trans.) pp. 79, 86 &., 114, 157-162. 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspi7^ation. 347 
 
 Testament : nor can he feel that he is left without a standard 
 by which to judge what it means. Christ, the goal of Old 
 Testament development, stands forth as the test and measure 
 of its inspiration. 
 
 The New Testament consists of writings of Apostles or of 
 men of sub-apostolic rank, like S. Luke and probably the 
 author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. There is not, except 
 perhaps in the case of the Apocalypse, any sign of an inspira- 
 tion to write, other than the inspiration which gave power to 
 teach. What then is, whether for writing or for teaching, the 
 inspii-ation of an Apostle ? 
 
 If Jesus Christ both was, and knew Himself to be, the 
 Revealer of the Father, it almost stands to reason that He 
 must have secured that His revelation should be, without 
 material alloy, communicated to the Church which was to 
 enshrine and perpetuate it. Thus, in fact, we find that He 
 spent His chief pains on the training of His apostolic wit- 
 nesses. And all the training which He gave them while He 
 was present among them was only to prepare them to receive 
 the Holy Ghost Who, after He was gone, was to be poured out 
 upon them to qualify them to bear His witness among men. 
 
 ' Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Ghost is come upon 
 you, and ye shall be My witnesses : ' ' These things have I 
 spoken unto you while yet abiding with you. And the Com- 
 forter, even the Holy Ghost, Whom the Father will send in My 
 name, He shall teach you all things, and bring to your remem- 
 brance all that I said unto you.' ' I have yet many things to 
 say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when 
 He, the Spirit of truth, is come. He will guide you into all the 
 truth 1,' 
 
 Thus the Church sees in the Apostles men specially and 
 deliberately qualified to interpret Christ to the world. It 
 understands by their inspiration an endowment which enables 
 men of all ages to take their teaching as representing, and 
 not misrepresenting. His teaching and Himself. In S. John's 
 Gospel, for example, we have an account of our Lord which 
 has obviously passed through the medium of a most remark- 
 
 ^ Acts i. 8. S. John xiv. 25, 26 ; xvi. 12, 13. 
 
348 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 able personality. We have the outcome of the meditation, as 
 well as the recollection, of the Apostle. But, as the evidence 
 assures us that the Gospel is really S. John's, so the Church 
 unhesitatingly accepts S. John's strong and repeated assevera- 
 tion that he is interpreting and not distorting the record, 
 the personality, the claims of Jesus Christ. ' He bears record, 
 and his record is true ^ .' 
 
 This assurance is indeed not without verification : it is 
 verified by the unity of testimony which, under all differ- 
 ences of character and circumstance, we find among the 
 apostolic witnesses. The accepted doctrine of the Church 
 when S. Paul wi^ote his 'undoubted Epistles,' — the points of 
 agreement amidst all differences between him and the Judaizeis 
 — gives us substantially the same conception of the Person of 
 the Incarnate Son of God as we find in S. John ^. The same 
 conception of what He was, is required to interpret the record 
 of what He did and said in the Synoptic Gospels. Further, 
 the witness of the Apostles, though it receives its final 
 guarantee through the belief in their inspiration, has its 
 natural basis in the prolonged training by which — 'company- 
 ing with them all the time that He went in and out among 
 them, beginning from the baptism of John, until the day that 
 He was received up,' — they were prepared to be His witnesses. 
 Thus if an act of faith is asked of us in the apostolic inspira- 
 tion, it is a reasonable act of faith. 
 
 If we pass from the writings properly apostolic to those like 
 S. Luke's records, which represent apostolic teaching at 
 second hand, we do not find that the inspiration of their 
 writers was of such sort as enabled them to dispense with the 
 ordinary means or guarantees of accuracy. The simple claim 
 of S. Luke's preface to have had the best means of informa- 
 tion and to have taken the greatest care in the use of them, 
 is on this score most instructive. We should suppose that 
 their inspiration was part of the whole spiritual endowment 
 of their life which made them the trusted friends of the 
 
 S. John xix. 35 ; xxi. 24. i S. John Cliristians thought about Christ. (Oxford 
 -3. House Papers : Rivington.) 
 
 See Prof. Sanday's What the first 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 349 
 
 Apostles, and qualified them to be the chosen instruments to 
 record their teaching, in the midst of a Church whose quick 
 and eager memory of ' the tradition ' would have acted as a 
 check to prevent any material error creeping into the record. 
 
 4. It will be remembered that when inspiration is spoken 
 of by S. Paul, he mentions it as a positive endowment which 
 qualifies the writings of those who were its subjects, to be 
 permanent sources of spiritual instruction. ' Every Scripture 
 inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, 
 for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness^.' 
 Following out this idea of Holy Scripture then, we are led to 
 think of the belief in inspiration as having this primary 
 practical result : that we submit ourselves to the teaching of 
 every book which is given to us as inspired. We are to put 
 ourselves to school with each in turn of the inspired writers ; 
 with S. James, for example, in the New Testament, as well 
 as with S. John and S. Paul ; with S. Luke as well as with 
 S. Matthew ; with the Pastoral Epistles as well as with the 
 Epistle to the Galatians^. At startiug each of us, according 
 to his predisposition, is conscious of liking some books of 
 Scripture better than others. This, however, should lead us to 
 recognise that in some way we specially need the teaching 
 which is less attractive to us. We should set ourselves to 
 study what we like less, till that too has had its proper eflfect 
 in moulding our conscience and character. It is hardly 
 possible to estimate how much division would have been 
 avoided in the Church if those, for example, who were most 
 ecclesiastically disposed had been at pains to assimilate the 
 teaching of the Epistle to the Romans, and those who most 
 valued 'the freedom of the Gospel' had recognised a special 
 obligation to deepen their hold on the Epistles to the Corin- 
 thians and the Pastoral Epistles and the Epistle of S. James. 
 
 To believe in the inspiration of Holy Scripture is to put 
 ourselves to school with every part of the Old Testament, as of 
 the New. True, the Old Testament is imperfect, but for that 
 
 1 2 Tim. iii. i6. in this quality of impartial regard to 
 
 ^ Mr. Horton's book on Inspiration inspired books. 
 and the Bible is almost naively lacking 
 
350 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 very reason has a special value. ' The real use of the earlier 
 record is not to add something to the things revealed in 
 Christ, but to give us that clear and all-sided insight into the 
 meaning and practical worth of the perfect scheme of Divine 
 grace which can onl}^ be attained by tracing its growth^,' 
 We see in the Old Testament the elements, each in separation, 
 which went to make up the perfect whole, and which must 
 still lie at the basis of all rightly formed life of individuals 
 and societies. 
 
 Thus to believe, for instance, in the inspiration of the Old 
 Testament forces us to recognise a real element of the Divine 
 education in the imprecatory Psalms. They are not the 
 utterances of selfish spite ^ : they are the claim which 
 righteous Israel makes upon God that He should vindicate 
 Himself, and let their eyes see how ' righteousness turns again 
 unto judgment.' The claim is made in a form which belongs 
 to an early stage of spiritual education ; to a time when tlds life 
 was regarded as the scene in which God must finally vindicate 
 Himself, and when the large powers and possibilities of the 
 Divine compassion were very imperfectly recognised. But 
 behind these limitations, which characterize the greater part 
 of the Old Testament, the claim of these Psalms still remains 
 a necessary part of the claim of the Christian soul. We must 
 not only recognise the reality of Divine judgments in time 
 and eternity, bodily and spiritual ; we must not only 
 acquiesce in them because they are God's ; we must go on to 
 claim of God the manifestation of His just judgment, so that 
 holiness and joy, sin and failure, vshall be seen to coincide. 
 
 To recognise then the inspiration of the Bible is to put 
 ourselves to school in every part of it, and everywhere to bear in 
 mind the admonition of the Delmitatlone 'that every Scripture 
 must be read in the same spirit in which it was written.' So 
 far it will not be a point in dispute among Christians what 
 inspiration means, or what its purpose is. ' The Councils of 
 Trent and the Vatican,' writes Cardinal Newman, ' tell us 
 
 1 Prof. Robertson Smith, Prophets of vii. p. 207 : ' Another point in \vhie]i 
 
 Israel, p. 6. criticism removes a serious difficulty 
 
 ^ Cf. Prof. Robertson Smith, Die is the interpretation of the impreca- 
 
 Old Testament in the Jewish Church, Lect. tory psalms.' 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 351 
 
 distinctly the object and the promise of Scriptural inspiration. 
 They specify '" faith and moral conduct " as the drift of that 
 teaching which has the guarantee of inspiration^.' Nor can 
 it be denied that the more Holy Scripture is read from this 
 point of view, the more confidently it is treated as the in- 
 spired guide of faith and conduct, no less in the types of 
 character which it sets before us than in its direct instruction, 
 the more the experience and appreciation of its inspiration 
 grows upon us, so that to deny or to doubt it comes to mean 
 to deny or to doubt a matter plain to the senses. Indeed 
 what has been said under this head will probably appear to 
 those practised in the spiritual use of Holy Scripture as an 
 understatement, perhaps not easy to justify, of the sense in 
 which the Scripture is the Word of God^ and the spiritual 
 food of the soul". 
 
 5. But here certain important questions arise. («) The re- 
 velation of God was made in a historical process. Its record 
 is in large part the record of a national life : it is historical. 
 Now the inspiration of the recorder lies, as we have seen, 
 primarily in this, that he sees the hand of God in the history 
 and interprets His purpose. Further, we must add, his 
 sense of the working of God in history, increases his realiza- 
 tion of the importance of historical fact. Thus there is a 
 profound air of historical truthfulness pervading the Old 
 Testament record from Abraham downward. The weaknesses, 
 the sins, of Israel's heroes are not spared. Their sin and its 
 punishment is always before us. There is no flattering of 
 national pride, no giving the reins to boastfulness. Li all 
 this the Old Testament appears to be in marked contrast, as 
 to contemporary Assyrian monuments, so also to a good deal 
 of much later ecclesiastical history. But does the inspiration 
 of the recorder guarantee the exact historical truth of what he 
 records? And in matter of fact can the record, with due 
 
 ' See Nimteenth Century, Feb. 18S4, to anyone of you, at once the voice 
 
 p. i8q. of exultation and thankfulness for 
 
 ^ 'When from time to time,' says the nourishment of spiritual food 
 
 S. Bernard to his monks, ' anything that has been received, must rise as 
 
 that was hidden or obscure in the from a banquet to delight the ears of 
 
 Scriptures has come out into the light God.' 
 
352 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 regard to legitimate historical criticism, be pronounced true ? 
 Now, to the latter of these two questions (and they are 
 quite distinct questions), we may reply that there is nothing 
 to prevent our believing, as our faith certainly strongly dis- 
 poses us to believe, that the record from Abraham downward 
 is in substance in the strict sense historical. Of course the 
 battle of historical truth cannot be fought on the field of the 
 Old Testament, as it can on that of the New, because it is so 
 vast and indecisive, and because (however certainly ancient is 
 such a narrative as that contained in Genesis xiv.) very little 
 of the early record can be securely traced to a period near the 
 events. Thus the Church cannot insist upon the historical 
 character of the earliest records of the ancient Church in detail, 
 as she can on the historical character of the Gospels or the Acts 
 of the Apostles. On the other hand, as it seems the more 
 probable opinion that the Hebrews must have been acquainted 
 with the art of writing in some form long before the Exodus, 
 there is no reason to doubt the existence of some written 
 records among them from very early days ^. Internal evi- 
 dence again certainly commends to our acceptance the history 
 of the patriarchs, of the Egyptian bondage, of the great 
 redemption, of the wanderings, as well as of the later 
 period as to which there would be less dispute. In a word 
 we are, we believe, not wrong in anticipating that the Church 
 will continue to believe and to teach that the Old Testament 
 from Abraham downwards is really historical, and that there 
 will be nothing to make such belief and teaching unreasonable 
 or wilful. But within the limits of what is substantially his- 
 torical, there is still room for an admixture of what, though 
 marked by spiritual purpose, is yet not strictly historical — for 
 instance, for a feature which characterizes all early history, 
 
 ^ See the Annual Address (18S9) states of Palestine . . . This inter- 
 delivered at the Victoria Institute by course was carried on by means of 
 Prof. Sayce, on the cuneifoi-m tablets the Babylonian language and the 
 of Tel el-amarna, pp. 4, i4f. : 'We complicated Babylonian script. How 
 learn that in the fifteenth century educated the old world was, we are 
 before our era — a century before the but just beginning to learn. But we 
 Exodus— active literary intercourse have already learnt enough to discover 
 was going on throughout the civilized how important a bearing it has on the 
 world of Western Asia, between criticism of the Old Testament.' 
 Babylonia and Egypt and the smaller 
 
VIII. The Holy Spi7'it and Inspiration. 353 
 
 the attribution to first founders of what is really the remoter 
 result of their institutions. Now historical criticism ^ assures 
 us that this process has been largely at work in the Pentateuch. 
 By an analysis, for instance, the force of which is very great, it 
 distinguishes distinct stages in the growth of the law of worship : 
 at least an early stage such as is represented in ' the Book of 
 the Covenant-,' a second stage in the Book of Deuteronomy, 
 a last stage in ' the Priestly Code.' What we may suppose to 
 have happened is that Moses himself established a certain 
 germ of ceremonial enactment in connection with the ark and 
 i ts sacred tent, and with the ' ten words ' ; and that this developed 
 always as ' the law of Moses,' the whole result being constantly 
 attributed, probably unconsciously and certainly not from any 
 intention to deceive, to the original founder. This view 
 would certainly imply that the recorders of Israel's history 
 were subject to the ordinary laws in the estimate of evidence, 
 that their inspiration did not consist in a mii-aculous com- 
 munication to them of facts as they originally happened : but 
 if we believe that the law, as it grew, really did represent the 
 Divine intention for the Jews, gradually worked out upon the 
 basis of a Mosaic institution, there is nothing materially un- 
 truthful, though there is something uncritical, in attributing 
 the whole legislation to Moses acting under the Divine 
 command. It would be only of a piece with the attribution 
 of the collection of Psalms to David and of Proverbs to 
 Solomon. Nor does the supposition that the law was of 
 gradual growth interfere in any way with the symbolical and 
 typical value of its various ordinances. 
 
 Once again, the same school of criticism would assure us 
 that the Books of Chronicles represent a later and less 
 historical version of Israel's history than that given in Samuel 
 and Kings ^ : they represent, according to this view, the ver- 
 sion of that history which had become current in the priestly 
 schools. What we are asked to admit is not conscious 
 perversion, but unconscious idealizing of history, the reading 
 
 ' See Driver, Crit. notes on Siindmj- ^ The Books of Kings seem to be 
 
 School lefinons (Scribner : New York). compiled from the point of view of the 
 
 ^ Ex. XX. xxii-xxiii. xxxiii. Deuteronomist. 
 
354 ^-^^^ Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 back into past records of a ritual development which was 
 really later. Now inspiration excludes conscious deception 
 or pious fraud, but it appears to be quite consistent with this 
 sort of idealizing ; always supposing that the result read back 
 into the earlier history does represent the real purpose of God 
 and only anticipates its realization. 
 
 Here then is one great question. Inspiration certainly 
 means the illumination of the judgment of the recorder. ' By 
 the contact of the Holy Spirit,' says Origen, ' they became 
 clearer in their mental perceptions, and their souls were filled 
 with a brighter light ^.' But have we any reason to believe 
 that it means, over and above this, the miraculous communi- 
 cation of facts not otherwise to be known, a miraculous com- 
 munication such as would make the recorder independent of 
 the ordinary processes of historical tradition ? Certainly neither 
 S. Luke's preface to his Gospel, nor the evidence of any 
 inspired record, justifies us in this assumption. Nor would it 
 appear that spiritual illumination, even in the highest degree, 
 has any tendency to lift men out of the natural conditions of 
 knowledge which belong to their time. Certainly in the 
 similar case of exegesis, it would appear that S. Paul is 
 left to the method of his time, though he uses it with inspired 
 insight into the function and meaning of law and of prophecy 
 as a whole. Thus, without pronouncing an opinion, where we 
 have no right to do so, on the critical questions at present under 
 discussion, we may maintain with considerable assurance that 
 there is nothing in the doctrine of inspiration to prevent our 
 recognising a considerable idealizing element in the Old Tes- 
 tament history. The reason is of course obvious enough why 
 what can be admitted in the Old Testament, could not without 
 results disastrous to the Christian Creed, be admitted in the 
 New. It is because the Old Testament is the record of how 
 God produced a need, or anticipation, or ideal, while the New 
 Testament records how in fact He satisfied it. The absolute 
 coincidence of idea and fact is vital in the realization, not in 
 the preparation for it. It is equally obvious, too, that where 
 fact is of supreme importance, as in the New Testament, the 
 
 ^ Origen, c. Cels. vii. 4. 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 355 
 
 evidence has none of the ambiguity or remoteness which 
 belongs to much of the record of the preparation. 
 
 (6) But once again ; we find all sorts of literature in the 
 inspired volume : men can be inspired to think and to write 
 for God under all the forms of natural genius. Now one 
 form of genius is the dramatic : its essence is to make cha- 
 racters, real or imaginary, the vehicles for an ideal presenta- 
 tion. It presents embodied ideas. Now the Song of Solomon 
 is of the nature of a drama. The Book of Job, although it 
 works on an historical basis, is, it can hardly be denied, 
 mainly dramatic. The Book of Wisdom, which with us is 
 among the books of the Bible, though in the second rank out- 
 side the canon, and which is inside the canon of the Roman 
 Church, professes to be written by Solomon ^, but is certainly 
 written not by him, but in his person by another author. 
 We may then conceive the same to be true of Ecclesiastes, 
 and of Deuteronomy ; i. e. we may suppose Deuteronomy to 
 be a republication of the law ' in the spirit and power ' of Moses 
 put dramatically into his mouth. Criticism goes further, and 
 asks us to regard Jonah and Daniel, among the prophetic 
 books, as dramatic compositions worked up on a basis of his- 
 tory. The discussion of these books has often been approached 
 from a point of view from which the miraculous is neces- 
 sarily unhistorical. With such a point of view we are not 
 concerned. The possibility and reality of miracles has to be 
 vindicated first of all in the field of the New Testament ; and 
 one who admits them there, cannot reasonably exclude their 
 possibility in the earlier history. The question must be treated 
 simply on literary and evidential grounds ^. But we would 
 contend that if criticism should shew these books to be probably 
 dramatic, that would be no hindrance to their performing 'an 
 important canonical function,' or to their being inspired. 
 
 ^ E. g. chs. vii. ix. The Roman admitted into the canon a book the 
 
 Church admits that it is, to use literary method of which is thus 
 
 Newman's phrase, 'a prosopopeia ' ; confessedly dramatic. Newman makes 
 
 ' our Bibles say, " it is written in the this the ground for saying that the 
 
 person of Solomon " and " it is un- same may be true of Ecclesiastes. 
 
 certain who was the writer,"' I.e. ^ On the evidence of 0. T miracles 
 
 p. 197. It is important to bear in I may refer to Mr. Samuel Cox's 
 
 mind that the Western Church in Essay : Miracles, an Argument and a 
 
 general has, since S. Augustine's day, Challenge. (Kegan Paul, 1884.) 
 
 A a 2 
 
356 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 Dramatic composition has played an immense part in training 
 the human mind. It is as far removed as possible from a 
 violation of truth, though in an uncritical age its results may 
 very soon pass for history. It admits of being inspired as 
 much as poetry, or history, and indeed there are few who 
 could feel a difficulty in recognising as inspired the teaching 
 of the books of Jonah and Daniel ^. It is maintained then 
 that the Church leaves open to literary criticism the question 
 whether several of the writings of the Old Testament are 
 or are not dramatic. Certainly the fact that they have 
 not commonly been taken to be so in the past will be no 
 evidence to the contrary, unless it can be denied that a 
 literary criticism is being developed, which is as really new 
 an intellectual product as the scientific development, and 
 as such, certain to reverse a good many of the literary judg- 
 ments of previous ages. We are being asked to make con- 
 siderable changes in our literary conception of the Scriptures, 
 but not greater changes than were involved in the accept- 
 ance of the heliocentric astronomy. 
 
 (c) Once again : an enlarged study of comparative history 
 has led to our perceiving that the various sorts of mental or 
 literary activit}'' develop in their difierent lines out of an 
 earlier condition in which they lie fused and undifferentiated. 
 This we can vaguely call the mythical stage of mental evolu- 
 tion. A myth is not a falsehood ; it is a product of mental 
 activity, as instructive and rich as any later product, but its 
 characteristic is that it is not yet distinguished into history, 
 and poetry, and philosophy. It is all of these in the germ, as 
 dream and imagination, and thought and experience, are fused 
 in the mental furniture of a child's mind. ' These myths or 
 current stories,' says Grote writing of Greek history, 'the 
 spontaneous and earliest growth of the Greek mind, consti- 
 tuted at the same time the entire intellectual stock of the age to 
 which they belonged. They are the common root of all those 
 
 * Of course the distinction must be will probably solve the special diffi- 
 
 maintained in the case of the book of culty which on the critical hypothesis 
 
 Daniel between a ' pious fraud ' which attaches to the book of Daniel from 
 
 cannot be inspired, and an idealizing this jjoint of view : see Stanton, 
 
 personification which, as a normal Jnvish and Christian Messiah, p. 109, 
 
 type of literature, can. Further study note i. 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 357 
 
 different ramifications into which the mental activity of the 
 Greeks subsequently diverged ; containing as it were the 
 preface and germ of the positive history and philosophy, the 
 dogmatic theology and the professed romance, which we shall 
 hereafter trace, each in its separate development.' Now has 
 the Jewish history such earlier stage : does it pass back out of 
 history into myth 1 In particular, are not its earlier narratives, 
 before the call of Abraham, of the nature of myth, in which we 
 cannot distinguish the historical germ, though we do not at all 
 deny that it exists ? The inspiration of these narratives is as 
 conspicuous as that of any part of Scripture, but is there any- 
 thing to prevent our regarding these great inspirations about 
 the origin of all things, — the nature of sin, the judgment of 
 God on sin, and the alienation among men which follows 
 their alienation from God, — as conveyed to us in that form of 
 myth or allegorical picture, which is the earliest mode in 
 which the mind of man apprehended truth ? 
 
 6. In spite of the arbitrariness and the irreligion which have 
 often been associated with the modern development of histo- 
 rical criticism in its application to the Old Testament, the 
 present writer believes that it represents none the less a real 
 advance in literary analysis, and is reaching results as sure, 
 where it is fairly used, as scientific inquiry, though the results 
 in the one case as in the other are often hard to disentangle 
 from their less permanent accompaniments. Believing this, 
 and feeling in consequence that the warning which the name 
 of Gahleo must ever bring before the memory of churchmen, is 
 not unneeded now, he believes also that the Church is in no 
 way restrained from admitting the modifications just hinted at, 
 in what has latterly been the current idea of inspiration. 
 
 The Church is not restrained, in the first place, by having 
 committed herself to any dogmatic definitions of the meaning 
 of inspiration ^. It is remarkable indeed that Origen s almost 
 reckless mysticism, and his accompanying repudiation of the 
 historical character of large parts of the narrative of the Old 
 
 ^ This is certainly true of the Roman Church, see Newman in the 
 Church as a whole. For the most that article above cited, 
 can be said in the same sense of the 
 
358 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 Testament, and of some parts of the New \ though it did not 
 gain acceptance, and indeed had no right to it (for it had no 
 sound basis), on the other hand never roused the Church to 
 contrary definitions. Nor is it only Origen who disputed the 
 historical character of parts of the narrative of Holy Scripture. 
 Clement before him in Alexandria, and the mediaeval Anselm in 
 the West, treat the seven days' creation as allegory and not his- 
 tory. Athanasius speaks of paradise as a ' figure.' A mediaeval 
 Greek writer, who had more of Irenaeus than remains to us, de- 
 clared that ' he did not know how those who kept to the letter 
 and took the account of the temptation historically rather than 
 allegorically, could meet the arguments of Irenaeus against 
 them.' Further than this, it cannot be denied that the mystical 
 method, as a whole, tended to the depreciation of the historical 
 sense, in comparison with the spiritual teaching which it con- 
 veyed ^. In a different line, Chrysostom, of the literal school 
 of interpreters, explains quite in the tone of a modern apologist, 
 how the discrepancies in detail between the difierent Gospels, 
 assure us of the independence of the witnesses, and do not 
 touch the facts of importance, in which all agree. 
 
 The Church is not tied then by any existing definitions. 
 We cannot make any exact claim upon any one's belief in 
 regard to inspiration, simply because we have no authoritative 
 definition to bring to bear upon him. Those of us who believe 
 most in the inspiration of the Church, will see a Divine 
 Providence in this absence of dogma, because we shall perceive 
 that only now is the state of knowledge such as admits of the 
 question being legitimately raised. 
 
 Nor does it seem that the use which our Lord made of the 
 Old Testament is an argument against the proposed concessions. 
 Our Lord, in His use of the Old Testament, does indeed endorse 
 
 1 De Principiis, iv. 15, 16, 17. His reader may notice . . . innumerable 
 
 point is that incidents which could other passages, like these, so that he 
 
 not have occurred in fact, or at least will be convinced that in the histories 
 
 did not occur, are inserted in the that are literally recorded, circum- 
 
 narrative of the Old and New Testa- stances are inserted that did not 
 
 ments, that their very historical im- occur.' Cf. Bigg, Christian Platonists, 
 
 possibility or improbability may drive pp. 137-8. 
 
 to the consideration of their ^ Cf. Jerome, ad Nepotian. ep. lii. 2. 
 
 spiritual significance. ' The attentive 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 359 
 
 with the utmost emphasis the Jewish view of their own history. 
 He does thus imply, on the one hand, the real inspiration of 
 their canon in its completeness, and, on the other hand, that He 
 Himself was the goal of that inspired leading and the standard 
 of that inspiration. ' Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My 
 day : ' ' I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.' This, and it is 
 the important matter for all that concerns our spiritual educa- 
 tion, is not in dispute. What is questioned is that our Lord's 
 words foreclose certain critical positions as to the character of 
 Old Testament literature. For example, does His use of Jonah's 
 resurrection, as a type of His own, depend in any real degree 
 upon whether it is historical fact or allegory ^ ? It is of the 
 essence of a type to suggest an idea, as of the antitype to 
 realize it. The narrative of Jonah suggested certainly the 
 idea of resurrection after three days, of triumph over death, 
 and by suggesting this gave our Lord what His discourse re- 
 quired. Once more, our Lord uses the time before the flood ^ 
 to illustrate the carelessness of men before His own coming. 
 He is using the flood here as a typical judgment, as else- 
 where He uses other contemporary visitations for a like pur- 
 pose. In referring to the flood He certainly suggests that He is 
 treating it as typical, for He introduces circumstances — 'eating 
 and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage ' — which have 
 no counterpart in the original narrative. Nothing in His use 
 of it depends on its being more than a typical instance. Once 
 more, He argues with the Pharisees on the assumption of the 
 Davidic authorship of Psalm cx^. But it must be noticed 
 that He is asking a question rather than making a state- 
 ment — a question, moreover, which does not admit of being 
 turned into a statement without suggesting the conclusion, 
 of which rationalistic critics have not hesitated to avail 
 themselves, that David's Lord could not be David's son. 
 There are, we notice, other occasions when our Lord asked 
 questions which cannot be made the basis of positive proposi- 
 tions*. It was in fact part of His method to lead men 
 
 * S. Matt. xii. 40. * See especially S. Mark x. 17-18 
 
 * S. Matt. xxiv. 37-39. (and parallel passages^ where our 
 ^ S. Matt. xxii. 41-46. Lord's question, if converted into a 
 
360 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 to examine their own principles without at the time sug- 
 gesting any positive conclusion at all. 
 
 It may also fairly be represented, on a review of our Lord's 
 teaching as a whole, that if He had intended to convey in- 
 struction to us on critical and literary questions, He would 
 have made His purpose plainer. It is contrary to His whole 
 method to reveal His Godhead by any anticipations of natural 
 knowledge. The Incarnation was a self-emptying of God to 
 reveal Himself under conditions of human nature and from the 
 human point of view. We are able to draw a distinction be- 
 tween what He revealed and what He used. He revealed 
 God, His mind, His character, His claim, within certain limits 
 His Threefold Being : He revealed man, his sinfulness, his 
 need, his capacity : He revealed His purpose of redemption, 
 and founded His Church as a home in which man was to be 
 through all the ages reconciled to God in knowledge and love. 
 All this He revealed, but through, and under conditions of, a 
 true human nature. Thus He used human nature, its relation 
 to God, its conditions of experience, its growth in knowledge, 
 its limitation of knowledge ^. He feels as we men ought to 
 feel : he sees as we ought to see. We can thus distinguish more 
 or less between the Divine truth which He reveals, and the 
 human nature which He uses. Now when He speaks of the ' sun 
 rising' He is using ordinary human knowledge. He willed 
 BO to restrain the beams of Deity as to observe the limits of 
 the science of His age, and He puts Himself in the same 
 relation to its historical knowledge. Thus He does not reveal 
 His eternity by statements as to what had happened in the 
 past, or was to happen in the future, outside the ken of exist- 
 ing history-. He made His Godhead gradually manifest by 
 
 positive proposition, suggests a repu- Christ to take it upon Himself, 
 diation of personal goodness. Cf. ^ Of course He gave proplietic indi- 
 
 also the question in S. John x. 34-36 cations of the coining judgment, but 
 
 where, though the argument is a on the analogy of inspired prophecy. 
 
 fortiori, still the true character of our He did not reveal 'times and seasons,' 
 
 Lord's sonship is hardly suggested. and declared that it was not within the 
 
 * This limitation of knowledge scope of His mission to do so. Seeesp. 
 
 must not be confused with fallibility S. Mark xiii. 32. He exhibits super- 
 
 orliabilityto human delusion, because natural insight into men's characters 
 
 it was doubtless guarded by the and lives. But He never exhibits the 
 
 Divine purpose which led Jesus omniscience of bare Godhead in the 
 
VIII. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 361 
 
 His attitude towards men and things about Him, by His 
 moral and spiritual claims, by His expressed relation to His 
 Father, not by any miraculous exemptions of Himself from the 
 conditions of natural knowledge in its own proper province. 
 Thus the utterances of Christ about the Old Testament do 
 not seem to be nearly definite or clear enough to allow of 
 our supposing that in this case He is departing from the 
 general method of the Incarnation, by bringing to bear the 
 unveiled omniscience of the Godhead, to anticipate or fore- 
 close a development of natural knowledge. 
 
 But if we thus plead that theology may leave the field 
 open for free discussion of these questions which Biblical 
 criticism has recently been raising, we shall probably be bidden 
 to 'remember Tubingen,' and not be over-trustful of a criticism 
 which at least exhibits in some of its most prominent repre- 
 sentatives a great deal of arbitrariness, of love of ' new views ' 
 for their own sake, and a great lack of that reverence and 
 spiritual insight which is at least as much needed for under- 
 standing the books of the Bible, as accurate knowledge and fair 
 investigation. To this the present writer would be disposed 
 to reply that, if the Christian Church has been enabled to 
 defeat the critical attack, so far as it threatened destruction to 
 the historical basis of the New Testament, it has not been by 
 foreclosing the question with an appeal to dogma, but by facing 
 in fair and frank discussion the problems raised. A similar 
 treatment of Old Testament problems will enable us to dis- 
 tinguish between what is reasonable and reverent, and what 
 is high-handed and irreligious in contemporary criticism 
 whether German, French, or English. Even in regard to 
 what makes prhna facie a reasonable claim, we do not 
 prejudice the decision by declaring the field open : in all 
 probability there will always remain more than one school of 
 
 realm of natural knowledge ; such as 2 Cor. viii. 9 and Phil. ii. 7. Indeed 
 
 would be required to anticipate the God ' declares His almighty power 
 
 results of modern science or criticism. most chiefly ' in this condescension, 
 
 This 'self-emptying' of God in the whereby He 'beggared Himself of 
 
 Incarnation is, we must always re- Divine prerogatives, to put Himself 
 
 member, no failure of power, but a in our place, 
 continuous act of Self-sacrifice : cf. 
 
362 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 legitimate opinion on the subject: indeed the purpose of the 
 latter part of this essay has not been to inquire how much we 
 can without irrationality believe inspiration to involve ; but 
 rather, how much may legitimately and without real loss be 
 conceded. For, without doubt, if consistently with entire 
 loyalty to our Lord and His Church, we can regard as open the 
 questions specified above, we are removing great obstacles from 
 the path to belief of many who certainly wish to believe, and 
 do not exhibit any undue scepticism. Nor does there appear 
 to be any real danger that the criticism of the Old Testament 
 will ultimately diminish our reverence for it. In the case of 
 the New Testament certainly we are justified in feeling that 
 modern investigation has resulted in immensely augmenting 
 our understanding of the difierent books, and has distinctly 
 fortified and enriched our sense of their inspiration. Why 
 then should we hesitate to believe that the similar investiga- 
 tion of the Old Testament will in its result similarly em-ich 
 our sense that ' God in divers portions and divers manners 
 spake of old times unto the fathers,' and that the Inspiration 
 of Holy Scriptures will always be recognised as the most 
 conspicuous of the modes in which the Holy Spirit has 
 mercifully wrought for the illumination and encouragement 
 of our race 1 
 
 ' For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written 
 for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the 
 Scriptures might have hope.' 
 
IX. 
 
 THE CHURCH. 
 
 WALTER LOCK. 
 
IX. 
 
 THE CHURCH. 
 
 Christianity claims to be at once a life, a truth, and 
 a worship ; and, on all these accounts, it needs must find 
 expression in a church. For, in the first place, the life of an 
 individual remains dwarfed and stunted as long as it is lived 
 in isolation ; it is in its origin the outcome of other hves ; it 
 is at every moment of its existence dependent upon others ; it 
 reaches perfection only when it arrives at a conscious sense of 
 its own deficiencies and limitations, and, therefore, of its 
 dependence, and thi-ough such a sense realizes with thankful- 
 ness its true relation to the rest of life around it. Again, the 
 knowledge of truth comes to the individual first through the 
 mediation of others, of his parents and teachers ; as he grows, 
 and his own intellect works more freely, yet its results only 
 gain consistency, security, width, when tested by the results of 
 other workers ; and directly we wish to propagate these 
 results, they must be embodied in the lives of others, in 
 societies, in organizations. Without these, ideas remain in the 
 air, abstract, intangible, appealing perhaps to the philosophic 
 few, but high above the reach of the many, the simple. ' All 
 human society is the receptacle, nursery, and dwelling-place of 
 ideas, shaped and limited according to the nature of the 
 society — ideas which live and act on it and in it ; which are 
 preserved, passed on, and transmitted from one portion of it 
 to another, from one generation to another; which would be 
 merely abstractions or individual opinions if they were not 
 
366 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 endowed with the common life which their reception in 
 a society gives them^.' 
 
 These two principles are, obviously, not confined to religious 
 questions. They apply to morality, to society, to politics. 
 They are assumed in all ethical and political treatises. The 
 need of co-operation for common life underlies the whole 
 structure of the Republic of Plato ; it is implied in Ai-istotle's 
 definition of man as a social animal, and in his close asso- 
 ciation of Ethics with Pohtics : it has created the family, the 
 tribe, the state ; each fresh assertion of the principle, each 
 breaking down of the barriers which separate family from 
 family, tribe from tribe, nation from nation, has been a step 
 forward in civilization. The strength of co-operation for the 
 propagation of ideas is seen in the persistence with which 
 certain nations retain hold on political theories or peculiar 
 features of character ; it is seen in the recurring formation 
 of philosophic schools or religious sects or guilds, as soon as 
 any new truth, intellectual or religious, has been discovered, 
 or any moral quality, such as temperance or purity, has 
 needed to be emphasized. The most individualistic of Chi'is- 
 tian sects have found themselves forced to be ecclesiastical, to 
 define their creeds and to perfect their organization, as soon 
 as they have begun to be missionary. 
 
 These principles are as wide as society ; but religion takes 
 them up and applies them on the highest level. Religion is, 
 almost universally, the fink which binds man to man, no 
 less than that which binds man to a Power above him. So 
 in the Christian Church — if we may anticipate, for a moment, 
 our special application of the principle — the new-born child is 
 taken at once and incorporated into a body of behevers ; from 
 the first it draws its life from God thi-ough the body ; it is 
 taught that throughout life it must keep in touch with the 
 body ; it must be in a right relation to the other members ; it 
 must di-aw life from them ; it must contribute life to them. 
 And, further, this body has existed always and exists still as 
 
 * The Dean of S. Paul's on The cellently worked out and applied to 
 Cliristian Church. Oxford House Papers, the Church. 
 No. xvii. where this truth is ex- 
 
 1 
 
IX. The CImrch. 367 
 
 the home of certain ideas, ideas about God and about human 
 life, which were revealed in Jesus Christ, and which it has to 
 attest in its teaching and embody in its life. It is to be 
 a body of visible persons, themselves the light of the world, 
 expressing so that others can see the manifold wisdom of God, 
 winning others to belief in the unity of God, by the sight of 
 their own one-ness. The first principle might be expressed in 
 the words of Festus to Paracelsus, when the latter had claimed 
 to be God's special instrument in the world ; 
 
 Were I elect like you, 
 I would encircle me with love, and raise 
 A rampart of my fellows : it should seem 
 Impossible for me to fail, so watched 
 By gentle friends who made their cause my own. 
 They should ward off fate's envy : — the great gift, 
 Extravagant when claimed by me alone, 
 Being so a gift to them as well as me ^ : 
 
 the second principle by lines applied originally to the In- 
 carnation, but which we may legitimately transfer to the 
 Church, which continues the work of the Incarnation, 
 
 And so the Word had breath, and wrought 
 With human hands the Creed of Creeds 
 In loveliness of perfect deeds, 
 
 More strong than all poetic thought ^. 
 
 But, further, religion adds a third application of its own to 
 this principle of co-operation : for a church grows also out of 
 the necessities of worship. The ritual needed for the ofiering 
 of sacrifice almost necessitates of itself a number of persons 
 for its performance. No doubt, an individual can worship 
 God in private, but so his worship tends to be self-centred 
 and narrow : for the full expression of his religious relation 
 to others, for expiating a wrong done by him to his neigh- 
 bours or to the whole community, for expressing gratitude for 
 mercies which have come to him through others, there must 
 be the common meeting : and the community as a whole has 
 its great victories for which to thank God, its national 
 dangers for which to pray, its national sins for which to ofier 
 
 1 Browning, Paracelsus, ii. p. 30, ed. ^ Tennyson, In Memoriam, xxxvi. 
 
368 The Religion of the Incarnatiojz. 
 
 expiation ; and hence, common religious acts have been the 
 universal accompaniment of national life, and have in their 
 turn reacted upon it. 
 
 The idea of a Church, then, as conceived in its most 
 general form, and without especial reference to the Christian 
 Church, is this, that it widens life by deepening the sense of 
 brotherhood; that it teaches, strengthens, and propagates 
 ideas by enshrining truth in living witnesses, by checking 
 the results of isolated thinkers by contact with other thinkers, 
 and by securing permanency for the ideas ; and that it ex- 
 pands and deepens worship by eliminating all that is selfish 
 and narrow, and giving expression to common aims and feel- 
 ings. 
 
 We pass from such cl priori ideas to the evidence of the 
 Bible. There we find that these principles were embodied 
 first in Judaism. There the whole nation was the Church. 
 The Jew entered into the religious privileges of his life, not 
 by any conscious act of his own, but by being born of Jewish 
 parents ; he retained his true life by remaining in contact 
 with his nation. The union of the different members of the 
 nation with each other is so intimate that the whole nation is 
 spoken of as a personal unit. It is called ' God"s Son,' His 
 ' first-born Son,' ' Jehovah's servant.' The ideal of prophecy 
 is essentially that of a restored nation rejoicing in the rule 
 of national righteousness. Again, the nation was chosen out 
 specially to bear witness to truth, truth about the nature of 
 God, the Almighty, the Eternal, the Holy ; truth embodied in 
 the facts of history, and deepened in the revelations of 
 prophecy ; truths which the fathers teach their children, ' that 
 they should not hide them from the children of the generations 
 to come^' In the striking phrase of S. Athanasius, the law 
 and the prophets were ' a sacred school of the knowledge of 
 God and of spiritual life for the whole world 2.' Their worship, 
 too, was essentially social and national. From the first it 
 centred round great national events, the fortunes of the 
 harvest, or the crises of national history : the individual was 
 
 1 Ps. Ixxviii. 3, 4. " De Lie. 12. 
 
IX. The Chuixh. 369 
 
 purified from sin that he might be worthy to take pai"t in the 
 national service ; the events of the nation's history were 
 celebrated in rehgious hymns ; the capital of the nation 
 became the one and only recognised centre for the highest 
 worship. 
 
 But Judaism adds to these principles a further principle of 
 its own. It claims that such privileges as were granted to it, 
 were not granted to it for its own sake, but that it might be 
 a source of blessing to all nations : it assumes that they are on 
 a lower religious level than itself ; that instead of each nation 
 progressing equally along the line of religious life, truth, and 
 worship, other nations have fallen backward and the Jew has 
 been chosen out for a special privilege. It is the principle 
 that God works by 'limitation,' by apparent ' exclusiveness,' 
 by that which is in its essence ' sacerdotalism ' ; the principle 
 that God does not give His gifts equally to all, but specially 
 to a few, that they may use them for the good of the whole. 
 This principle seems at fii'st sight to ofi'end some modern 
 abstract ideas of justice and equality ; but the moment we 
 examine the facts of life, we find it prevailing universally. 
 Each nation has its peculiar gift: the Greek makes his 
 parallel claim to be specially gifted with the love of knowledge 
 and the power of artistic expression ; the Roman with the 
 power of rule and the belief in law. Or, again, within 
 a single nation, it is the artist who enables us to see the 
 beauty of a face or a landscape which had escaped us before : 
 
 Art was given for that, 
 God \ises us to help each other so, 
 Lending our minds out. 
 
 It is the poet who interprets our inner nature or the magic of 
 the external world, and becomes 
 
 A priest to us all 
 Of the wonder and bloom of the world, 
 ^^^lich we see with his eyes and are glad : 
 
 he sings 
 
 Till the world is wrought 
 To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not '. 
 
 And this principle does not stop short of religious influences 
 
 ' Browning, Fra LijuK Lippi : M. Arnold, The Youth of Nature : Shelley. 
 The Skylark. 
 
 Bb 
 
370 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 Conscience is itself a witness to it, as it implies that all parts 
 of our nature are not sufficient guides to themselves, but that 
 God has gifted one special faculty with power to control the rest. 
 ' Men of character,' it has been said, ' are the conscience of the 
 society to which they belong.' In the Jewish nation itself, 
 the prophets were the circle of Jehovah's friends ; they knew 
 His secrets, they kept alive the ideal of the nation. ' What 
 the soul is in the body, that are Christians in the world ' was 
 the parallel claim of an early apologists Analogies crowd in, 
 then, on every side, to shew how rational is this claim on the 
 part of Judaism. 
 
 Revelation only accepts this fact, and adds to it the asser- 
 tion that it is no accident but a part of the Divine Purpose. 
 It is the result of God's election. The Jewish nation, and 
 subsequently the Christian Church, is not only a blessing to 
 the rest of the world, but it is conscious that it is a blessing. 
 This truth has been revealed to it partly to keep it ever 
 mindful of its sense of dependence upon the Giver of all good 
 gifts, partly to give it tenacity and courage to cling to a gift 
 which it knows to be of inestimable value for all mankind. 
 ' The election was simply a method of procedure adopted by 
 God in His wisdom by which He designed to fit the few for 
 blessing the many, one for blessing all -.' 
 
 It must be from considerations such as these that we 
 approach the foundation of the Christian Church and the 
 Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ on which it rests. We 
 approach it with the expectation that we shall find these 
 principles embodied in it, for Christianity sprang directly out 
 of Judaism, and so would naturally inherit its principles : and 
 to go deeper still, the very essence of the Incarnation lies in 
 the consecration of human life and human means. He who 
 before had been acting invisibly upon the world as the Word, 
 implanting life and light in man, now entered visibly into 
 human fiesh. All tendencies which made for the fulness of 
 life and truth before His coming, all that tended to enlighten, 
 elevate, combine men, had been His unknown working : now 
 
 ' Ep. ad Dlogn. vi. 
 
 2 Bruce, The Chief End of Revelation, p. Ii6. 
 
 I 
 
IX. The Church. 371 
 
 they are known to be His. The Infinite appears in finite 
 form ; the spiritual takes the material in which to express 
 itself; human media are consecrated to deeper ends, and 
 charged with a fuller meaning than before : so that, in 
 Hooker's words, ' We cannot now conceive how God should, 
 without man, exercise Divine power or receive the glory of 
 Divine praised' ' What you do now even after the flesh, that 
 is spiritual ' is the bold paradox of S. Ignatius ; and he adds 
 the reason, 'for you do all in Christ Jesus ^.' Thus — 
 
 In this twofold sphere, the twofold man 
 Holds firmly to the natural, to reach 
 
 The spiritual beyond it 
 
 The whole temporal show related royally 
 And built up to eterne significance 
 Through the open arms of God '. 
 
 The Incarnation, then, takes up all the three principles of 
 which we have spoken : but, from the very finality which it 
 claims for itself, it puts a mark of finality upon each of them, 
 and so, in this respect, marks off the application of them in 
 the Christian Church from all other applications of the same 
 principles. The principle of co-operation for spiritual life is 
 taken up ; the Jewish nation is expanded into an universal 
 brotherhood ; this includes all men, without any distinction 
 of race ; it includes the quick and the dead ; it aims at the 
 highest spiritual perfection. It is final in this sense, that 
 nothing can be wider in extent or deeper in aim ; but it is 
 final also in the sense that the life has been manifested. 
 Christians do not combine to work up to some unsuspected 
 ideal: they combine to draw out and express in their com- 
 mon life the perfection that was in Christ. The principle of 
 association for the propagation of ideas is taken up, but they 
 are truths about God and His relation to human nature : they 
 are truths which have been revealed, which have been once 
 for all delivered to the saints. Finally, the principle of asso- 
 ciation for worship is taken up ; the worship is made as wide 
 
 1 SccZ. Po/. V. 54. Cf. Iren. adv. Haer. ' Ign. ad Eph. viii. a Si Kal Kara 
 
 iii. 20: 'Gloria enim hominis Deus ; aapua TrpdaafTf,TavTa TrvfVf/aTtKd (anv 
 
 operationis vero Dei et omnis sapi- ey 'l-qaov yap XpiffrQ navra npaaaere. 
 
 entiae Ejus et virtutis i-eceptaculum ^ Aurora Leigh, vii. p. 302. 
 homo.' 
 
 B b 3 
 
372 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 as humanity ; it is to be as spiritual as God ; but it, too, rests 
 on final facts, on the facts of creation and redemption: it 
 centres round the one complete sacrifice for sin. 
 
 Let us consider each of these points more in detail. 
 
 I. The Church is an organization for the purpose of 
 spiritual life ; an universal brotherhood knit together to 
 build up each of its members into hohness ; ' the only great 
 school of virtue existing.' But if this is so, if it is universal, 
 is the principle of ' limitation,' of ' exclusiveness,' gone % Cer- 
 tainly not. It is there, and it is most instructive to notice 
 how it arises ^. Chi-ist chose a small body of disciples to be 
 in close contact vrith Himself, to share His work, and to 
 receive His deeper teaching. This will not surprise us after 
 the analogies of the prophets, the poets, the artists of the 
 world. The saints too may be few, and God may lend theii' 
 spirits out for the good of others. But, moreover, in the 
 first formation of the Church we are able to watch the 
 process of limitation, as historically worked out ; and we see 
 that it arises not from any narrowness, any grudging of 
 His blessings, on the part of Chi'ist, but from the narrow- 
 ness, the limitations in man. Man is ' straitened ' not in 
 God, not in Christ, but in his own affections. God willed 
 all men to be saved : Chiist went about doing good and 
 calling all to a change of heart, to a share in the king- 
 dom of Heaven : but such a call made demands upon His 
 hearers ; it required that they should give up old prejudices 
 about the Messianic kingdom, that they should be willing to 
 leave father and mother and houses and lands for the truth's 
 sake, that they should lay aside all the things that defile a 
 man, that they should aim at being perfect, that they should 
 not only hear but understand the word, that they should 
 trust Him even when His sayings were hard. And these 
 demands produced the limitations. The Pharisees preferred 
 the glory of men to the glory which came from God ; the 
 masses in Galilee cared only for the bread that perisheth ; 
 many of the disciples turned back ; and so He could not 
 commit Himself unto them, because He knew what was in 
 
 ' Cp. H. S. Holland, Creed and Character, Sermons III — VIII. 
 
 I 
 
IX. The Church, 'i^']^ 
 
 man. Not to them, not to any chance person, but to the 
 Twelve, to those who had stood these tests, to those who had, 
 in spite of all perplexity, seen in Him the Son of the Living 
 God, to them He could commit Himself, they could share His 
 secrets ; they could be taught clearly the certainty and the 
 meaning of His coming death, for they had begun to learn 
 what self-sacrifice meant ; they could do His work and or- 
 ganize His Church ; they could bind and loose in His Name ; 
 they could represent Him when He was gone. These are the 
 elect ; they who had the will to listen to the call ^ ; they who 
 were ' magnanimous to correspond with heaven ' ; to them He 
 gave at Pentecost the full conscious gift of the Holy Spirit, 
 and so at last formed them into the Church, the Church which 
 was to continue His work, which was to convey His grace, 
 which was to go into the whole world, holding this life as a 
 treasure for the sake of the whole world, praying and giving 
 thanks for all men, because the unity of God and the unity of 
 the mediation of Christ inspires them with hope that all may 
 be one in Him^. 
 
 The day of Pentecost was thus the birthday of the Church. 
 Before there were followers of the Lord ; now there was the 
 Church : and this as the result of a new act, for which all that 
 preceded had been but preparation : now the Church was born 
 in becoming the possessor of a common corporate life. The 
 Spirit was given to the whole body of Christians together : it 
 was not given to an individual here and there in such a way 
 that such Spirit-bearing individuals could then come together 
 and form a Church. It was given corporately, so that they 
 who received the Spirit realized at once a unity which pre- 
 ceded any individual action of their own. So the Church 
 has gone forth offering its message freely to all ; in Christ 
 Jesus there is neither Jew nor Gentile ; the message is given 
 openly, ' without any veil,' to all ; all are accepted who will 
 submit themselves to Baptism, i. e. all who recognise the ele- 
 ment of evil and of weakness in their own life, who are willing 
 to die to it and receive fresh life and strength from the Risen 
 
 * UcLVTOiv Toivw dvOpwTTwv Ke/ikrj/jLevaiv, oi vnaKOvaai ^ov\r]9evTfs, kXtjtoi uvofia- 
 aOrjaav, Clem. Alex. Strom. I. xviii. 89. ^ Cp. i Tim. ii. 1-6. 
 
374 ^-^^^ Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 Lord, and to submit their life to His discipline. That is the 
 Church as presented to us in the New Testament. Metaphor 
 after metaphor is lavished upon it by our Lord and by S. Paul 
 in order to make clear the conception of it. He is the Vine, 
 His disciples are the branches ; they draw all theii- life from 
 Him : apart from Him they can do nothing ; if in union with 
 Him, they bear fruit. The Church is a household, a scene of 
 active work, of ' skilled and trained activity ' : each member 
 with his own work, some as mere members of the household, 
 others as rulers set over the household to give them meat in 
 due season, each with talents to be used faithfully for the 
 Master. It is a family, in which ' all ye are brethren,' laying 
 obligations of love between brother and brother, calling out 
 self-sacrifice for the good of others, deepening in each the 
 sense of the value of the lives of others. It is the Body of 
 Christ, that which grows stronger and stronger, that which 
 draws its life from the Head and must hold to Him, that in 
 which Christian is linked to Christian in sympathy and com- 
 plete interdependence, that without which the Head would be 
 incomplete, the necessary organ for completing Christ's work 
 on earth, that which the Spirit takes as its channel for mani- 
 festing to the world the very ' life of God.' It is God's 
 Temple ; visible, made up of parts, which are fitted in to one 
 another in symmetry ; beautiful with a spiritual beauty ; for 
 there a living God is present ; there He speaks to His own ; 
 there they offer to Him a rational service ^. It is the Bride of 
 Christ, the dearest object of Christ's love, which gives herself 
 to Him for His service, which for His sake keeps herself 
 pure in life and doctrine ; which receives from Him all the 
 treasures of His love, so that as He had received the 
 fulness of God, ' the aggregate of the Divine attributes, 
 virtues, and energies ' from the Father, the Church receives 
 all this from Him and manifests it forth to the world of 
 men and of angels. 
 
 But this picture, it will be urged, is only a prophecy of the 
 future ; the evidence of S. Paul's Epistles will also shew us 
 
 1 For the whole of this hxst paragraph cf. H. S. Holland, On lehalf of Belief , 
 Sermons VI and VII. 
 
IX. The Church. 375 
 
 a very different scene in real life, a body with tendencies to 
 divisions, to selfishness, to sin. This is quite true, but the 
 ideal is never thought of as something different from the real ; 
 the ideal is not simply in heaven nor the real simply on 
 earth ; the real is the ideal, though not yet completely de- 
 veloped ; the ideal is the actual basis of the real as much as 
 the goal to which the real is tending. The members of the 
 Church have been consecrated ; they are holy ; they are 
 ' unleavened ' ; they have put on Christ ; they have by their 
 self-committal to Him received a righteousness which they 
 can work out into perfection. Again, they are brothers ; 
 they have been made children of God by adoption : as they 
 have realized the sense of sonship, they reahze also the close- 
 ness of the tie between themselves and the other sons, their 
 common sympathies, hopes and aims. True, they are not yet 
 perfect either in holiness or in love : the very purpose of the 
 Church is to make them perfect. It takes the individual at 
 his birth, it incorporates him into its own hfe, it watches over 
 him from beginning to end, it feeds him with spiritual food, 
 it disciphnes him by spiritual laws, it blesses him at all the 
 chief moments of life, it takes him away from his own isola- 
 tion, trains him in social aims and social duties by social sacra- 
 ments, finally, gives him back to God with its benediction. 
 
 Such a conception of the Church as a nursery, a school, a 
 home, implies of necessity that it should be visible, and that 
 it should be one. It is a visible body, because it has in some 
 sense to represent the Incarnate Lord. In the Incarnation 
 spirit took material form and expressed itself thereby ; in the 
 risen Lord — and it is the risen Lord who gives the Spirit to 
 the Church — there was still a spiritual body. This is not to 
 deny the invisible reality of spiritual unity which underlies 
 the external visible unity. It is only to say that complete- 
 ness means both. In the language of S. Ignatius, as Christ 
 Jesus was at once material and spiritual, so, the unity of the 
 Church should be at once material and spiritual ^. 
 
 The idea of an invisible Church to express the body of true 
 
 ' S. Ignatius, ad Eph. vii. efs iarpSs Ian, aapKiKos koI nvev/MTiKos, as compared 
 with, ad Magn. xiii. I'va 'ivujis 17 aap/CL/cTj re Kal wfy/utTiKTi, 
 
37'6 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 believers, who alone are the Church, to whatever community 
 they belong, so that the visible Church becomes an unimportant 
 thing, is an idea entirely at variance with Scripture and all 
 pre-reformation teaching. The phrase is first found in almost 
 contemporary writings of Luther and of Zwingli ; it is akin 
 to the teaching of Hus and of Wiclif ; and, no doubt, there are 
 thoughts and phrases in earher writers that are more or less 
 akin to it. From the first there was obviously a distinction 
 between the true and untrue Christian, between the spiritual 
 and the fleshly, between the vessels to honour and the vessels 
 to dishonour, and the first of these classes, those who persevere 
 to the end, whom man cannot know and God only knows, 
 those who, if thought of in the light of God's eternal pur- 
 poses, are the predestined, these were treated and spoken of 
 as ' the Church properly so called,' ' the true body of Christ.' 
 Christians ' who do the will of the Father will belong to the 
 first Church, the spiritual Church founded before the sun and 
 moon.' Those who have lived in perfect righteousness accord- 
 ing to the Gospel 'will rest in the holy hill of God, in the 
 highest Church, in which are gathered the philosophers of 
 God^' 
 
 Again, the Church on earth is regarded as ' a copy of the 
 Church in heaven in which God's will is done ' : but in each 
 case there is no contrast between the visible and the invisible 
 Church. The invisible Church is in these cases either the 
 ideal of the visible ; or that part of the visible organized 
 Church which has remained true to its aims. So too with 
 regard to those who are not conscious believers ; the possibility 
 of their salvation, in a qualified way, is heartily recognised, 
 but the confusion is not made of calling them members of 
 the Church. 
 
 The fatal danger is when the behef in the invisible 
 Church is used to discredit the visible Church and the im- 
 portance of belonging to it. It is scarcely too much to 
 say, that all stress laid upon the invisible Church tends to 
 
 1 Pseudo-Clem. Rom. Ep. ii. 14; Begriff der chtisilichen Kirche {'Erlangeii, 
 Clem. Alex. S<r. vi. 14; iv. 8. Forthese i885),cap.i; and Qore, CJiurch and the 
 and other illustrations cf. Seeberg, Der Ministry, ed. i. pp. 19, 28, 136. 
 
IX, The C /lurch. t^'j'j 
 
 lower the demands of holiness and brotherhood. It is a 
 visible Church, and such a Church as can attract outsiders, 
 which calls out the fruits of faith into active energy ; it is a 
 visible Church such as can combine Christians in active work, 
 which tests brotherhood, which rubs away idiosyncrasy, which 
 destroys vanity and jealousy, which restrains personal ambi- 
 tion, which trains in the power of common work, which, as 
 our own powers fail, or are proved inadequate, for some task 
 on which our heart had been set, still fills us with hope that 
 God will work through others that which it is clear He will 
 not work through us. It is a visible Church alone which is 
 ' the home of the lonely.' Encompassed as we are now from 
 our birth by Christian friends and associations, we tend to 
 forget how much we depend on the spiritual help and sym- 
 pathy of others. The greatness of our blessings blinds us to 
 their presence, and we seem to stand in our own strength 
 while we are leaning upon others. The relation of the soul 
 to God is a tender thing ; personal religion, which seems so 
 strong, while in a Christian atmosphere, tends to grow 
 weak, to totter, to fall, as we stand alone in some distant 
 country, amid low moral standards and heathen faiths. Such 
 solitude does indeed often, in those who are strong, deepen, in 
 a marvellous way, the invisible communion with (^od and the 
 ties that knit us with the absent ; but the result is often fatal 
 to the weak. It throws both strong and weak alike into 
 closer sympathy with those who share a common faith. It is 
 a visible Church which supplies this sympathy, which gives 
 the assurance that each soul, as it is drawn to God, shall not 
 stand alone ; but that it shall find around it strengthening 
 hands and sympathetic hearts, which shall train it till, as in 
 the quiet confidence of a home, it shall blossom into the full 
 Christian life. 
 
 The principle of the unity of the Church is very similar. 
 That, again, is primarily and essentially a spiritual unity. 
 The ultimate source is, according to the Lord's own teaching, 
 the unity of the Godhead : ' that they may be one, even as we 
 are one.' The effect of the outpouring of the Spirit is to 
 make the multitude of them that believed ' of one heart and 
 
378 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 one soul.' Baptism becomes the source of unity, ' In one 
 Spirit were we all baptized into one body : ' the ' one bread ' 
 becomes the security of union. ' We who are many are one 
 bread, one body, for we all partake of the one bread.' More 
 fully stiU is the unity drawn out in the Epistle to the Ephe- 
 sians. ' There is one body and one Spirit, even as ye are 
 called in one hope of our calling, one Lord, one faith, one 
 baptism, one God and Father of all.' The unity starts with 
 being spiritual ; it is the power of the One God drawing men 
 together by His action upon their spirits ; uniting them in the 
 service of one Lord who has redeemed them, but it issues in 
 ' one body.' Nothing can be stronger than the assertion of 
 such unity. But in what does this unity lie, and what is to 
 be the safeguard of it? No one answer is possible to this 
 question. Clearly, one part of the answer is, a unity of 
 spiritual aim, ' one hope of your calling : ' another answer is, 
 a common basis of belief, common trust in the same Lord, 
 ' one faith ; ' a further answer is, common social sacraments, 
 ' one baptism,' ' one bread.' All these lie on the face of these 
 passages of S. Paul. Are we to add to them ' a common 
 government,' ' an apostolical succession ? ' Was this of the 
 essence or a late addition, a result of subsequent confederation 
 intended to guarantee the permanence of dogma % No doubt, 
 the circumstances of subsequent history moulded the exact 
 form of the ministry, and emphasized the importance of ex- 
 ternal organization under particular circumstances ; but this 
 is no less true of the other points of unity ; the unity of 
 spiritual life was worked out in one way in the times of 
 public discipline and penance, in another way when these fell 
 into disuse : the unity of faith was brought into prominence in 
 the times of the formulating of the Creeds. So the unity of 
 external organization was emphasized when it was threatened 
 by the Gnostic, Novatian, and Donatist controversies. But 
 the germ of it is there from the first, and it was no later 
 addition. The spiritual unity derived from the Lord is 
 imparted through Sacraments ; but this at once links the 
 inward life and spiritual unity with some form of ex- 
 ternal organization. And so the writer of the Epistle 
 
IX. The Church. 379 
 
 to the Ephesians after his great description of Christian unity, 
 goes on at once to speak of the ministry. The apostles, 
 prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, these are special gifts 
 of the ascended Lord to the Church ; and they are given for 
 the very purpose of securing unity, ' for the perfecting of the 
 saints unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of 
 the body of Christ, till we all attain unto the unity of the 
 faith.' No less significantly, when S. Paul is applying to the 
 Church the metaphor of the body and its members in order 
 to emphasize the unity of the whole, does he rank apostles, 
 prophets, teachers, as the most important members of the 
 body ^. 
 
 The history of the early Church, so far as it can be traced, 
 points the same way. The Lord appointed His body of 
 twelve : He gave them the power to bind and to loose, the 
 power to exercise discipline over offending members of the 
 Church. At fii-st, the Christian Church is a purely Jewish 
 body ; it continues in the Apostles' fellowship as well as doc- 
 trine ; they distribute its alms ; they punish unworthy mem- 
 bers ; they arrange its differences ; they appoint subordinate 
 officers ; they ratify their actions, and sanction the admis- 
 sion of Samaritans and proselytes to the Church ; but the 
 various members throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria, are 
 embraced in the single conception of one Church 2. Then 
 under the guidance of Paul and Barnabas, the Gentiles are 
 brought in and formed into churches ; the danger to unity 
 becomes acute. According to the Acts of the Apostles, it is 
 surmounted by reference to the Church at Jerusalem ; the 
 Apostles and Elders there decide the question, and the Gentile 
 Churches are thus kept in communion with it. S. Paul's 
 letters, with all the difficulty there is of reconciling every detail 
 with the historian's account, present us with essentially the 
 same picture. In dealing with his own Churches, he claims 
 absolute right, as apostle, to hand on and lay down traditions, 
 to punish, to forgive, to govern: he leaves some class of 
 ministers in every Church under his guidance ; each Church 
 
 ' I Cor xii. 28. '6\-r]s rrjs 'lovBaias Kal raXiXaias Kai 2a- 
 
 ^ Cp. Acts ix. 31 T) eicK\r]<Tia Ka9' /xapdas. 
 
38o 
 
 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 is to administer discipline over unworthy members. But the 
 Churches cannot act independently : the Church at Corinth is 
 not to act as though it were the fountain head of Christianity, 
 or the only Gentile Church ; it is to remember the customs in 
 other Churches. Further than this, above ' all the Churches,' 
 appears already as one body ' the Church,' in which God has 
 set apostles ^ ; within it there are separate spheres of work, 
 Paul and Barnabas are to go to the Gentiles, the leading 
 Jewish apostles to the Jews ; S. Paul will not intrude beyond 
 the province assigned to him ; he makes his Gentile Churches 
 to contribute to the needs of the Jewish Church, and realize 
 the debt which they owe to them. Any divisions in a local 
 Church cannot be tolerated, as being inconsistent with the 
 unity of Christ, with His cross, and with the significance of 
 baptism. Peter stands condemned when he wishes to separate 
 himself and so causes division between Jew and Gentile. 
 
 The importance attached to external organization is surely 
 implied in all of this, and the circumstances of the second 
 century forced out into clearness what was so implied. 
 Gnosticism, Montanism, Novatianism all tended to found new 
 bodies, which claimed to be the true Church. How was the 
 individual Christian to test their claims % It was in the face 
 of this question that Church writers, notably S. Cyprian and 
 S. Irenaeus, emphasized the importance of historical continuity 
 in the Church as secured by the apostolical succession of the 
 episcopate. The unity of the Church came primarily, they 
 urged, from God, from heaven, from the Father ; it was secured 
 by the foundation of the Church upon the Apostles ; the 
 bishops have succeeded to the Apostles and so become the 
 guardians of the unity of the Church. As soon then as we 
 find the Christian episcopate universally organized, we find it 
 treated as an institution received from the Apostles and as 
 carrying with it the principle of historic continuity. So it 
 has remained ever since, side by side with the other safeguards 
 of unity, the sacraments and the common faith. The Roman 
 Church has added to it what seemed a further safeo-uard of 
 
 ' 1 Cor. xii. 28, XV. 9 ; Gal. 
 iS, 24 ; I Tim. iii. 15. 
 
 [3 ; Phil. iii. 6 ; Eph. i. 22, iii. 10, 21 ; Col. 
 
 I 
 
IX. The C/mrck. 381 
 
 unity, the test of communion with itself ; but this was a later 
 claim, a claim which was persistently resented, and which was 
 urged with disastrous results. The Reformed Churches of the 
 Continent, in their protest against that additional test, have 
 rejected the whole principle of historic continuity ; they have 
 remained satisfied with the bond of a common faith and of 
 common sacraments : but the result can scarcely be said to 
 be as yet a securer unity. Even an Unitarian historian 
 recognises heartily that the characteristic of the Church in 
 England is this continuity. ' There is no point,' urges Mr. 
 Beard ^ ' at which it can be said, here the old Church ends, 
 here the new begins. . . . The retention of the Episcopate by 
 the English Reformers at once helped to preserve this con- 
 tinuity and marked it in the distinctest way. ... It is an 
 obvious historical fact that Parker was the successor of 
 Augustine, just as clearly as Lanfranc and Becket.' 
 
 This, then, is what the Church claims to be as the home of 
 grace, the channel of spiritual life. It claims to be a body of 
 living persons who have given themselves up to the call of 
 Christ to carry on His work in the world ; a body which was 
 organized by Himself thus far that the Apostles were put in 
 sole authority over it ; a body which received the Spirit t(j 
 dwell within it at Pentecost ; a body which propagated itself 
 by spiritual birth ; a body in which the ministerial power 
 was handed on by the Apostles to their successors, which has 
 remained so organized till the present day, and has moved on 
 through the world, sometimes allied with, sometimes in sepa- 
 ration from the State, always independent of it ; a body which 
 lays on each of its members the duty of holiness, and the 
 obligation of love, and trains them in both. 
 
 But two objections arise here, which must be dealt with 
 shortly. It is urged first, this is an unworthy limitation : we 
 ought to love all men ; to treat all men as brothers ; why 
 limit this love, this feeling of brotherhood to the baptized, to 
 the Church 1 True, we ought to love and honour all m.en, to 
 do good to all men. The love of the Christian, like the love 
 of Chi-ist, knows no limits ; but the limitations are in man 
 
 ' Hibbert Lectures, 1883, p. 311. 
 
382 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 himself. All human nature is not lovable : all men are not 
 love-worthy. Love must, at least, mean a different thing ; 
 it must weaken its connotation if applied to all men ; there 
 may be pity, there may be faith, there may be a prophetic 
 anticipating love for the sinner and the criminal, as we recall 
 their origin and forecast the possibilities of their future ; but 
 love in the highest sense, love that delights in and admires its 
 object, love that is sure of a response, the sense of brotherhood 
 which knows that it can trust a brother — these are not pos- 
 sible with the wanton, the selfish, the hypocrite. Though man 
 has social instincts which draw him into co-operation with 
 others ; he has also tendencies to selfishness and impurity 
 which work against the spirit of brotherhood and make it 
 impossible. Not till we have some security that the man's 
 real self is on the side of unselfishness, can we trust him ; and 
 baptism with its gifts of grace, baptism with its death to the 
 selfish nature, baptism with its profession of allegiance to the 
 leadership of Chi-ist, this, at least, gives us some security. 
 Even Comte, with his longing for brotherhood, tells us that in 
 forming our conception of humanity we must not take in all 
 men, but those only who are really assimilable, in virtue of a 
 real co-operation towards the common existence, and Mr. 
 Cotter Morison would eliminate and suppress those who have 
 no altruistic affection. We limit, then, only so far as seems 
 necessary to gain reality ; we train men in the narrower circle 
 of brotherhood, that they may become enthusiasts for it, and go 
 foith as missionaries to raise others to their own level. As for 
 those who lie outside Christianity, the Church, like our Lord 
 Himself in the parable of the sheep and the goats, like S. Paul 
 in his anticipation of the judgment day, recognises all the good 
 there is in them ; like Justin Martyr and many of the early 
 Fathers, it traces in them the work of the Divine Word ; and 
 yet none the less did these writers claim and does the Church 
 still claim for itself the conscious gift of spiritual life, in a 
 sense higher than anything that lies outside itself. 
 
 But many, who would follow thus far, would draw another 
 line, and would include within the Church all the baptized, 
 whether professing churchmen or not. Once more, so far as 
 
IX. The Church. 383 
 
 we draw any distinction within the limits of the baptized, it 
 is for the sake of reality. We recognise that every atom of 
 their faith is genuine, that so far as they have one Lord, one 
 faith, one baptism, they are true members of the Church ; that 
 so far as they have banded themselves together into a society, 
 they have something akin to the reality of the Church, and 
 gain some of its social blessings. But then it is they who have 
 banded themselves together into a society : and that means 
 they have done it at their own risk. We rest upon the 
 validity of our sacraments, because they were founded by 
 the Lord Himself, because they have His special promises, 
 because they have been handed down in regular and valid 
 channels to us. Have they equal security that their sacra- 
 ments are valid? Again, we must hold that schism means 
 something of evil: that it causes weakness: that it thus 
 prevents the full work of brotherhood, of knitting Christian 
 with Christian in common worship: that so it prevents 
 the complete witness of the Church in the world ; that in so 
 far as such Chiistians are schismatic, they are untrue and 
 harmful members of the Church. The full complete claim of 
 the Church is that it is a body visibly meeting together in a 
 common life, and forming by historical continuity a part of 
 the actual body founded by our Lord Himself. It would be 
 unreal to apply this conception of a complete historic brother- 
 hood to those who have separated themselves from the Church's 
 worship, and whose boast is that they were founded by Wesley, 
 or Luther, or Calvin. A Church so founded is not historically 
 founded by Christ. It may have been founded to carry on 
 the work of Christ, it may have been founded in imitation of 
 Him, and with the sincerest loyalty to His person, but it 
 cannot be said to have been founded by Him. Even if cir- 
 cumstances have justified it, it is at any rate not the ideal : 
 and whatever confessions the historic Church may have to 
 make of its own shortcomings, it still must witness to the 
 ideal of a visible unity and historical continuity. Amid the 
 divisions of Chiistendom, and in face of her own shortcomings, 
 the Church of England does not claim to be the full complete 
 representation of the Church of Christ. She is only one 
 
384 '^^^^ Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 national expression of the Catholic Church : she feels that 
 ' it is safer for us to widen the pale of the kingdom of God, 
 than to deny the fruits of the Spirit ^ ; ' she has ever on her 
 lips the prayer, 'Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the 
 offences of our forefathers, neither take vengeance of our sins,' 
 and yet she must make her claim boldly and fearlessly to 
 have retained the true ideal of the Church ; to be loyal to the 
 essential principle that her life comes historically from Christ 
 and not from man. 
 
 II. But the Church is the school of truth as weU as the 
 school of virtue. Its ministers form a priesthood of truth as 
 well as a priesthood of sacrifice. Its priests' lips have ' to 
 keep knowledge.' Chi'istianity is, as the School of Alexandria 
 loved to represent it, a Divirie philosoj)hy, and the Church its 
 school. 
 
 This conception of the Church starts from our Lord's own 
 words. His Apostles are to be as scribes instructed unto the 
 kingdom of Heaven ; they are to have the scribes' power to 
 decide what is and what is not binding in the kingdom ; the 
 Spirit is to lead them into all truth ; they are to make dis- 
 ciples of all the nations, ' teaching them to observe all things 
 whatsoever I commanded you.' The function of the Church 
 then with regard to truth is primarily to bear witness to that 
 which has been revealed. It does not primarily reveal, it tells 
 of the truths which have been embodied in the historic life 
 of Jesus Christ or explained in His teaching. ' One is its 
 teacher ; One is its master, even the Christ.' It holds a ' faith 
 once delivered to the saints.' Hence, from the first, there grew 
 up some quasi-authoritative formula, in which we can see the 
 germ of the later Creeds, which each Christian Missionary 
 would teach to his converts. S. Paul himself received from 
 others and handed on to the Corinthians, as his first message 
 to them, some such half-stereotyped Creed, narrating the 
 central facts of the Death and Resurrection of the Lord ; his 
 teaching was as a mould which shaped the lives of the 
 converts as they were poured, like so much molten metal, 
 into it. It was authoritative, not even an angel from 
 
 ^ Bp. Forbes, Explanation of the Nicene Creed, p. 290. 
 
 
IX. The Ckzirck. 385 
 
 heaven could preach another gospel. As time went on 
 and false teaching spread, this side of the Church's work 
 is emphasized more and more. The Church is to be the 
 pillar and ground-work of the truth. Timothy and Titus 
 are to hold fast the deposit, to prevent false teaching, to 
 secure wholesomeness of doctrine no less than sobriety of life. 
 The contests of the next centuries bring out this idea of 
 witness into clearer prominence, and the Episcopate, as it had 
 been the guarantee of unity, becomes now the guarantee of 
 truth. Thus, S. Ignatius is face to face with Docetic and 
 Gnostic teaching ; with him the bishops are ' in the mind of 
 Jesus Christ ; ' they are to be treated ' as the Lord ; ' to avoid 
 heresy, it is necessary to avoid ' separation from the God of Jesus 
 Christ, from the Bishop and the ordinances of the Apostles ; ' 
 the one bishop is ranked with the one Eucharist, the one flesh of 
 Jesus Christ, the one cup, the one altar, as the source of unity ; 
 submission to the Bishop and the Presbyters is a means towards 
 holiness, towards spiritual strength and spiritual joy^. These 
 are incidental expressions in letters written at a moment of 
 spiritual excitement : but the same appeal reappears in calmer 
 controversial treatises. S. L-enaeus argues against Gnosticism 
 on exactly the same grounds. Truth is essentially a thing 
 received ; it was received by the Apostles from Christ. He 
 was the truth Himself; He revealed it to His Apostles ; they 
 embodied it in their writings and handed it on to the Bishops 
 and Presbyters who succeeded them ; hence the test of truth is 
 to be sought in Holy Scripture and in the teaching of those 
 Churches which were founded directly by the Apostles-. 
 With equal strength Tertullian urges that the truth was 
 received by the churches from the Apostles, by the Apostles 
 from Christ, by Christ from God ; it is therefore independent 
 of individuals ; it must be sought for in Holy Scripture, but 
 as the canon of that is not fixed, and its interpretation is at 
 times doubtful, it must be supplemented by the evidence of 
 the apostolic Churches ; and he challenges the heretics to pro- 
 
 ' ad Eph. ii. iii. vi. xx ; ad Trail. ' Irenaeus, adv. Haer., cp. esp. I. lo, 
 
 vii. xiii ; ad Phil. iv. vii ; ad Stnyrn. II. 9, III. i, 2, 3, 5, 12, 24. 
 
 VUl. IX. 
 
 C C 
 
386 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 duce the origin of their churches and shew that the series of 
 bishops runs back to some Apostle or apostolic man ^, 
 
 The Church is thus primarily a witness : the strength of its 
 
 authority lies in the many sides from which the witness comes : 
 
 but the exigencies of controversy, and indeed of thought even 
 
 apart from controversy, rendered necessary another function in 
 
 respect to truth. The Church was compelled to formulate, to 
 
 express its witness in relation to the intellectual difficulties 
 
 of the time. Christianity is indeed essentially a matter not 
 
 of the intellect, but of the will, a personal relation of trust 
 
 in a personal God. Its fii-st instinct is, as the first instinct 
 
 of friendship would be, to resent intellectual analysis and 
 
 dogmatic definition. But as the need of telling others about 
 
 a friend, or defending him against slander, would compel us to 
 
 analyse his qualities and define his attractiveness ; so it was 
 
 with the Church's relation to the Lord. It bore witness to 
 
 the impression which His life had made upon His followers 
 
 that He was Divine; it bore witness to the facts of the life 
 
 that attested it and to His own statements. But the claim 
 
 was denied ; it needed justifying; it needed to be shewn to 
 
 be consistent with other truths, such as the unity of God, and 
 
 the reality of His own human nature, and so definition was 
 
 forced upon the Church. The germ of such definitions is 
 
 found in the New Testament ; the deeper Christological teach- 
 
 ino- of the Epistles to the Ephesians and to the Colossians, and 
 
 of the prologue of S. John are instances of such intellectual 
 
 analysis and formulation, and were evidently written in the 
 
 face of controversy. The technical decisions of the great 
 
 councils of the fourth and fifth centuries and their expression 
 
 in the Nicene and 'Athanasian' Creeds are the outcome 
 
 of the same tendency. Yet even in them, the Church acts, 
 
 in a sense, as a witness ; the Scriptures are appealed to as 
 
 the ultimate authority ; the Creed is the summary of its 
 
 chief doctrines : the one aim is to secure and express the truth 
 
 witnessed to by churches throughout the world, to eliminate 
 
 novelty and caprice ; the new definitions are accepted, because 
 
 they alone are felt to express the instinct of the Church's 
 
 ^ Praescript. adv. Haereticos ; cp. esp. 3, 6, 15-21. 
 
 I 
 
IX. The Clmrch. 
 
 o^i 
 
 worship. By this time the canon of Holy Scripture was 
 fixed. It becomes thenceforth an undying fountain of life 
 from which the water of pure doctrine can be di-awn. Tradi- 
 tion and development can always be checked by that. 
 
 In the truths then which the Church teaches we may dis- 
 tinguish two classes. First, there are the central truths to 
 which it bears absolute witness ; such as the Fatherhood of 
 God, the Person and work of Jesus Chiist, the Eedemption of 
 all mankind, the origin and purpose of human life. These it 
 teaches authoritatively. Its conduct is exactly analogous to 
 that of a parent teaching the moral law to his childien ; teach- 
 ing the commandments authoritatively at first, till the child 
 can be educated to understand the reason of them. So the 
 Church says to her childi-en, or to those who are seeking after 
 truth ' there is an absolute truth in rehgion as well as in 
 morality : we have tested it ; generations of the saints have 
 found it true. It is a truth independent of individual 
 teachers ; independent of the shifting moods of opinion at any 
 particular period ; and you must accept it on our authority 
 fii-st. Further, these are truths which affect life, therefore they 
 cannot be apprehended merely by the intellect. You must 
 commit yourself to them ; act upon them ; there is a time 
 when the seeker after truth sees where it lies ; then it must 
 cease to be an open question. " You must seek tiU you find, 
 but when you have once found truth, you must commit your- 
 seK to it ^." You must believe that you may understand ; but 
 it is that you may understand.' The dogma is authoritatively 
 taught, that the individual may be kept safe from mere indivi- 
 dual caprice and fancifuhiess, but also that he himself may 
 come to a rational understanding of his belief. No doubt the 
 truth is so wide that to the end of our lives we shall still feel 
 the need of guidance and of teaching. ' As long as we live,' 
 said Calvin, ' our weakness will not allow us to be discharged 
 from school.' Like S. Ignatius on his way to martyrdom, the 
 Chi'istian may feel at his dying day, ' Now I begin to be a 
 disciple ; ' but the aim of the Church is to make each member 
 
 1 Tertullian. Praesa: 9 : ' Quaerendum est donee invenias, et credendum 
 ubi inveneris.' 
 
 C C 2 
 
388 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 have a rational hold upon his faith. When we are young 
 we accej)t a doctrine because the Church teaches it to 
 us ; when we are grown up, we love the Church because it 
 taught us the doctrine. ' The Churchman never surrenders 
 his individual responsibiUty. But he may and must sur- 
 render some portion at least of his independence, and he 
 benefits greatly by the surrender \' ' Submission to the 
 authority of the Church is the merging of our mere indivi- 
 dualism in the whole historic hfe of the great Chi-istian 
 brotherhood ; it is making ourselves at one with the one 
 rehgion in its most permanent and least merely local form. It 
 is surrendering our individuality only to empty it of its 
 narrowness ^.' 
 
 Secondly, there are other truths, which are rather deductions 
 from these central points or statements of them in accordance 
 with the needs of the age ; such as the mode of the relation of 
 the Divine and human natures in Christ, of free-will to pre- 
 destination, or the method of the Atonement, or the nature of 
 the Inspiration of Holy Scripture. If, in any case, a point of 
 this kind has consciously come before the whole Church and 
 been reasoned out and been decided upon, such a decision 
 raises it into the higher class of truths, which are taught 
 authoritatively; but if this is not so, the matter remains 
 an open question. It remains a question for the theologians ; 
 it is not imposed on individual Christians ; though it may at 
 any time become ripe for decision. The very fixity of the 
 great central doctrines allows the Church to give a remark- 
 able freedom to individual opinion on all other points. 
 Practically, how much wider is the summary of the rule 
 of faith as given in L-enaeus (III. 4), or Tertullian (Praescr. 
 13), or Origen (De Princijnis), or in the Apostles' or Nicene 
 Creed, than the tests of orthodoxy that would be imposed 
 in a modern religious, or scientific circle ! S. Vincent 
 of Lerins is the great champion of antiquity as the test of truth ; 
 yet he who lays it down that ' to declare any new truth to 
 Catholic Christians over and above that which they have re- 
 
 ^ Hawkins' Sermons on the Church, ^ Rev. C. Gore, Roman Catholic 
 
 p. 77. aaims, p. 51. 
 
IX. The Church. 389 
 
 ceived never was allowed, nowhere is allowed, and never will 
 be allowed,' also insists on the duty of development, of growth, 
 within the true lines of the central truths. ' Is there,' he 
 assumes an objector to urge, ' to be no growth within the 
 Church ? Nay, let there be growth to the greatest extent ; 
 who would be so grudging to man, such an enemy to God, as to 
 attempt to prevent it ; but yet let it be such that it be growth, 
 
 not change of the faith As time goes on, it is right 
 
 that the old truths should be elaborated, polished, filed down; 
 it is wrong that they should be changed, maimed or mutilated. 
 They should be made clear, have light thrown on them, be 
 marked off from each other ; but they must not lose their ful- 
 ness, their entirety, their essential character^.' So it has 
 happened in the course of the Christian history ; doctrines 
 like that of the Atonement have been restated afresh to meet 
 the needs of the age. So it is happening still ; doctrines like 
 that of the method of creation or of the limits of inspiration 
 are still before the Church. The Church is slow to decide, to 
 formulate : it stands aside, it reiterates its central truths, it says 
 that whatever claims to be discovered must ultimately fit in 
 with the central truths ; creation must remain God's work; the 
 Bible must remain God's revelation of Himself; but for a time 
 it is content to wait, loyal to fact from whatever side it comes ; 
 confident alike in the many-sidedness and in the unity of 
 truth. While he accepts and while he searches, the Church- 
 man can enjoy alike the inquiry of truth which is the love- 
 making or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth which is the 
 presence of it, and the belief of truth which is the enjoying of 
 it, and all these together, says Lord Bacon, are the sovereign 
 good of human nature ^. 
 
 Thus far we have in this part considered the Church's func- 
 tion with regard to truth from the point of view of those 
 whom it has to teach. Its function is no less important from 
 the point of view of the truth itself. As spiritual life is a 
 tender plant that needs care and training ; so spiritual truth is 
 a precious gem, that may easily be lost and therefore needs 
 careful guarding. ' The gem requires a casket, the casket a 
 
 ' Commonitorium ix. and xxiii. ^ Bacon, Essay on Truih. 
 
390 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 keeper.' Truth is indeed great and will prevail, but not apart 
 from the action of men: not unless there are those who believe 
 in it, take pains about it and propagate it. This is the case 
 even with scientific truths ; a fortiori therefore, with moral and 
 religious truths which affect hfe and need to be translated into 
 life before they can be really understood. The comparative 
 study of religions is shewing us more and more how much of 
 deep spiritual truth there is in heathen religions, but it is 
 shewing us equally how little power this truth had to hold its 
 own, how it was overlaid, crushed out, stifled. The truth of 
 the unity of God underlies much of the polytheism of India, 
 Greece, and Rome ; but it is only the philosopher and the 
 scholar that can find it there. It is only in the Jewish 
 Church, the nation which stood alone from other nations as a 
 witness to the truth, that it retained its hold as a permanent 
 force. The Fatherhood of God is implied in the very names 
 and titles of most of the chief heathen gods ; but what a 
 difference in its meaning and force since the time of Jesus 
 Christ! It is not only that He expanded and deepened its 
 meaning, so that it implied the fatherhood of all men alike, 
 and a communication of a spiritual nature to all ; it is also, and 
 much more, that He committed the truth as a sacred deposit to 
 a Church, each member of which aimed at shewing himself as 
 the son of a perfect Father, and which witnessed to the uni- 
 versal Fatherhood by the fact of an universal brotherhood. 
 
 The very truths of natural religion, which heathenism tended 
 to degrade, found a safe home within the Church ; the know- 
 ledge of the Creator, His eternal power and Godhead, which 
 the nations had known but lost, because they glorified Him not 
 as God, neither were thankful, has been kept alive in the 
 Eucharistic services of the Church, repeating through the ages 
 its praise of the Creator : ' We praise Thee, we bless Thee, we 
 worship Thee, we give thanks to Thee, for Thy great glory, 
 Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty.' 
 
 III. We pass naturally to the third point : the Church is 
 the home of worship. It is the Temple of the Lord. As a 
 teaching body, it had carried on and spiritualized the work of 
 the Jewish Synagogue : it also took up and spiritualized the 
 
IX. The Church. 391 
 
 conceptions of prayer and praise and sacrifice which clustered 
 round the Jewish Temple. The Body of Christ was to take 
 the place of the Temple when the Jews destroyed it ^. And 
 here, as in all other respects, the body is the organ and repre- 
 sentative of the risen Lord. He, when on earth, had been a 
 priest in the deepest sense of the word : He, as the repre- 
 sentative of the Father, had mediated the Father's blessings to 
 man : He, as one with man, had become a merciful and faith- 
 ful high-priest for man ; He had offered His whole life to God 
 for the service of man ; He had by the offering of His pure 
 will made purification of sins : He lives still, a priest for ever, 
 pleading, interceding for mankind. 
 
 And so the Church, His body, carries on this priestly work 
 on earth. ' Sacerdotalism, priestliness, is the prime element 
 of her being ^.' She is the source of blessing to mankind ; 
 she pleads and intercedes and gives herself for all mankind. 
 Christians, as a body, are ' a royal priesthood.' Christ made 
 them ' priests unto His God and Father,' they can ' enter in 
 into the holy place,' like priests, ' with hearts sprinkled from 
 an evil conscience and bodies washed with pure water.' They 
 are ' the genuine high-priestly race of God : ' ' every righteous 
 man ranks as a priest : ' ' to the whole Church is a priesthood 
 given ^.' This priesthood is exercised throughout life, as each 
 Chi'istian gives his life to God's service, and the whole Church 
 devotes itself for the good of the whole world. But it finds 
 its expression in worship, for worship is the Godward aspect 
 of life. It expresses, it emphasizes, it helps to make perma- 
 nent the feelings that mould life. It is the recognition that 
 our life comes from God : that it has been redeemed by God ; 
 it is the quiet joyous resting upon the facts of His love ; it is 
 the conscious spiritual offering of oar life to God ; it is the 
 adoration of His majesty. This worship the Church leads and 
 organizes. ' In the Church and in Chi-ist Jesus ' is to Le given 
 ' the glory to God unto all generations for ever and ever.' In 
 
 ' S. John ii. 19-21. 19. Justin Martyr, Dialog, c. Tnjph. 
 
 2 From a striking and bold article 116 ; Irenaeus iv. S ; Origen, Horn. vi. 
 
 by Prof. Milligan, in the Expositor, in Lev. 5. For other instances, cp. 
 
 March, 1889. Seeberg, uM supra, or Gore, Church and 
 
 ^ I S. Peter ii. 9 ; Rev. i. 6 ; Heb. x. the Ministry, pp. 87-90. 
 
392 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 the Apocalypse, it is pictured as praising God alike for His 
 work in Creation and in Redemption. In the Eucharist the 
 Church shews forth the Lord's Death till He come^. Hence 
 this act of Eucharistic worship, above all others, has become 
 the centre of unity. In it the Church has offered its best to 
 God : all the more external gifts of art, such as architecture, 
 painting, and music, have been consecrated in worship: but 
 deeper still, in it each Christian has taken up his own life, his 
 body and soul, and offered it as a holy, lively, and reasonable 
 sacrifice unto God, a service in spirit and in truth : and deeper 
 still, he recognises that his life does not stand alone ; through 
 the common ties of humanity in Chi-ist he is linked on by a 
 strange solidarity with all mankind ; his life depends on 
 theirs and theirs on his, and so he offers it not for himself only 
 but for all ; in the power of Chi'ist he intercedes for all man- 
 kind : and deeper still, he feels in the presence of the Holiness 
 of God how unworthy his own offering and his own prayers 
 are, and he pleads, he recalls before the Father, as the source 
 of his own hope and his own power of self-sacrifice, the one 
 complete offering made for all mankind. 
 
 So the Church performs its universal priesthood ^ ; so it leads 
 a worship, bright, joyous, amidst all the trials and perplexities 
 of the world, for it tells of suffering vanquished ; simple in its 
 essence, so that poor as well as rich can rally round it ; yet deep 
 and profound in its mysteries, so that the most intellectual can- 
 not fathom it. It is an universal priesthood, for it needs the 
 consecration of every life : and yet this function too of the 
 Church naturally has its organs, whose task it is to make its 
 offerings and to stand before it as the types of self-consecration. 
 The Church has from the first special persons who perform its 
 liturgy, its public ministering to the Lord^. It is in connection 
 
 ^ Eph. iii. 21 (R.V.) ; Rev. iv. ii, se ipsumobtulit in passione pro nobis, 
 
 V. 11-14 ; I Cor. xi. 26. ut tanti capitis corpus essemus . . . 
 
 2 Cf. the striking account of the Hoc est sacrificium Christianorum, 
 
 true Christian sacrifice in S. Aug. muUi unum corpus in Chrisio. Quod 
 
 De Civ. Dei, x. 6 : ' Profecto eiBcitur etiam sacramento altaris fidelibus 
 
 ut tota ipsa redempta civitas, hoc est noto frequentat ecclesia, ut ei de- 
 
 congregatio societasque sanctorum monstretur, quod in ea re, quam 
 
 universale sacrificium ofiferatur Deo ofl'ert, ipsa ofi'eratur.' 
 
 per sacerdotem magnum, qui etiam ^ Acts xiii. i . 
 
IX. The Clmrch. 393 
 
 with worvship, and the meetings of the Cliurch that S. Paul 
 emphasizes the need of unity and subordination, and dwells 
 upon God's special setting of Apostles, Prophets and Teachers 
 in the Church^, The Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians 
 may be open to difficult questions of interpretation in its 
 language about the ministry, but this at least is clear that 
 order and subordination are treated as the necessary outcome 
 of love, which is of the essence of the Church ; that this order 
 and subordination is specially needed in all details of worship ; 
 that it had been so in Judaism, and must be so, a fortiori, in 
 the Christian Church ; that as Christ came from God, so the 
 Apostles from Christ, and their successors from them ; and 
 therefore it must be wrong to throw off subordination to those 
 who were so appointed and who have blamelessly offered the 
 gifts ^. 'The Church,' said S. Augustine, 'from the time of 
 the Apostles, through most undoubted succession of the 
 bishops, perseveres till the present moment, and offers to God 
 in the Body of Christ the sacrifice of praise ^.' As the teaching 
 function of the whole Church does not militate against the 
 special order of teachers, so the priestly function of the whole 
 does not militate against a special order of priests. We can- 
 not speak of those who are ordained as ' going into the 
 Church ' — and it is hard to estimate the harm done by that 
 fatal phrase — for that implies that the laity are not of the 
 Church, but we can call them priests in a special sense ; for 
 they give themselves up in a deeper way to the service of 
 God ; they are specially trained and purified for His service ; 
 they are put as representatives of the whole Church in a way 
 in which no other is, able to know and to sympathize with its 
 wants, its joys, its failings ; able therefore to intercede for 
 it with God and to bring His blessings to it. As the Church 
 stands in relation to the world, so they stand to the Church ; 
 they fill up that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in 
 their flesh for His body's sake which is the Church, whereof 
 they are made ministers ; they convey spiritual gifts and 
 benediction to the Church. 
 
 ' I Cor. xi-xiv. ; cp. i Tim. ii. ^ Clem, ad Cor. i. esp. 40-45. 
 
 ^ Contra Adv. Leg. et Proph. xx. 39. 
 
394 ^'^^ Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 To complete the conception of the Church, it would be 
 necessary to add the thought of the Church expectant and 
 triumjjhant, the presence of the blessed dead. For they too 
 strengthen and complete each aspect of the Church's work. 
 The great cloud of witnesses, the heroes of faith, who watch 
 their brethren on earth, they, by their example, aid the 
 spiritual life and strengthen us to lay aside every weight 
 and the sin that doth so easily beset us : their virtues reflect 
 parts of the manifold glory of the Son of Man. With their 
 heirs noblesse oblige ; each Christian born of such ancestry is 
 able to be Uke the Athenian Lycurgus, independent of the 
 world, bold and outspoken, because of his noble bii-th ^. The 
 record of their writings strengthens the witness to the faith 
 once delivered to the saints, and binds us to loyalty to that 
 which has stood the test of ages. They, ' the general assembly 
 and church of the firstborn enrolled in heaven,' themselves, 
 we believe, worship God with a purer worship than ours ; 
 the thought of their presence in worship, as we join with 
 angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, lifts our 
 hearts to a wider, more spiritual adoration. 
 
 But for our present purpose it is with the Church militant 
 we have to deal : the Church on earth, the visible organ of the 
 risen Lord, the organ of redemption, of revelation, of wor- 
 ship ; the chief instrument designed by the Lord for the 
 establishment of the kingdom of Heaven upon earth. That is 
 our ideal of it. But what of the reality? of the historical 
 facts'? Has not the Church crushed out individual life and 
 freedom 1 has it not thrown its shield over laxity ? has it not 
 repressed zeal and so driven piety into nonconformity 1 has it 
 not tried to check scientific truth and condemned a Galileo ? 
 has it not made worship a matter of form and reduced it to 
 externalism ? So its opponents ask, and its defenders admit 
 that there is much of truth in these charges. They admit 
 that it has looked very different from its ideal. ' It has 
 looked like an obscure and unpopular sect ; it has looked Uke 
 a wonderful human institution vying with the greatest in age 
 and power ; it has looked like a great usurpation ; it has 
 
 ' nappTiaiaaTTjs dia ttjv evyiveiav, Plutarch. Vilae x Orat. 7. 
 
IX. The Church. 395 
 
 looked like an overgrown and worn-out system ; it has been 
 obscured by the outward accidents of splendour or disaster ; 
 it has been enriched, it has been plundered ; at one time 
 throned above emperors, at another under the heel of the 
 vilest ; it has been dishonoured by the crimes of its governors, 
 by truckling to the world, by the idolatry of power, by greed 
 and selfishness, by their unbelief in their own mission, by the 
 deep stain of profligacy, by the deep stain of blood ^' The 
 Church has, indeed, many confessions to make, of its failure 
 to be true to its ideal. But there are several considerations 
 which must be borne in mind when we pass judgment 
 upon it. 
 
 In the first place, it was committed to human hands, ' the 
 treasure is in earthen vessels ; ' and while it gains thus in 
 reality, in human sympathy, in touching the facts of every- 
 day life, it is exposed to all the risks of imperfection, mistake, 
 perversion. But further, as S. Augustine said, we still can 
 say, ' Non adhuc regnat hoc regnum.' The Church has never 
 had free play ; it has never been in a position to carry out its 
 ideal. At first, a persecuted sect, it had not the power ; then, 
 when it became estabUshed and gained the power, there burst 
 into it an influx of half-Christianized converts who lowered 
 its moral level or misunderstood its doctrines ; then, with the 
 break up of the Eoman Empire, it had to tame and civihze 
 the new races of Europe ; and finally, the divisions of the 
 Reformation have weakened its witness in the world. But, 
 more important still, the very greatness of the ideal has 
 caused the difiiculty of its reahzation, and has exposed itself 
 to caricature and to one-sidedness. The richer, the more 
 many-sided, the more complete an ideal is, the less possible is 
 it for any one generation to express it completely, the more 
 likely is it that one side of truth will be pressed to the exclu- 
 sion of some, if not of all the rest. 
 
 This may be tested in each of the points which we have con- 
 sidered. The Church is an organization for spiritual life, for 
 hohness. It makes the bold claim to be the society of saints ; 
 but at once there arises the conflict between the ideal and the 
 
 ^ The Dean of S. Paul's, Advent Sermons, p. 73. 
 
396 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 actual state of men. Press the ideal, and you will narrow 
 the Church to those who are externally leading good lives or 
 who are conscious of conversion to Christ. This was the line 
 taken by the Novatians, by the Donatists, by the Puritans, 
 by the Baptists, and the Church was thereby narrowed. On 
 the other hand, dwell only on the actual state, the weakness, 
 the failures of human nature, and you acquiesce in a low 
 level of morality. The Church aims at being true to both ; 
 it will not exclude any from its embrace who are willing to 
 submit to its laws ; it takes childi-en and trains them ; it takes 
 the imperfect and disciplines them ; it rejects none, save such 
 as rejoice in their iniquity and deliberately refuse to submit to 
 discipline. 
 
 But again, this suggests another class of difficulties, all those 
 which are associated with the relation of the individual to the 
 society, difficulties which are parallel to the difficulties in 
 politics, which are not yet solved there, and which are always 
 needing readjustment. Here again it is possible to overpress 
 either side: the claims of the society may be urged to the 
 detriment of the individual, the central organization may 
 crush out national life and give no scope for individual 
 development, and so there arises the imperial absolutism of 
 the mediaeval Church. On the other hand, it is equally 
 possible to exaggerate the claims of individualism, of in- 
 dependence, of freedom, and the result is division and disaster 
 to the whole society ; the individual is only anxious to save 
 his own soul, and religion is claimed to be only a thing 
 between a man and his God ; common Church life becomes 
 impossible, and the witness of the Church to the world, and 
 thereby its power for missionary work, becomes weakened. 
 As before, the Church ideal strives to combine both sides of 
 the truth. It values, it insists on, the rights of each individual 
 soul ; its mission is to convey the Spirit to it, that is to say, 
 to waken it up to a consciousness of its own individual relation 
 to God, its own personal responsibility in God's sight ; it does 
 bid each individual save his own soul. But it keeps also 
 before him the claims of the society ; it says to him that in 
 saving his soul he must lose it in service for others ; when his 
 
IX. The Church. 397 
 
 soul is saved, it must be used for active service with others ia 
 joint work. It does say that the society is more important 
 for the world than any one individual member of it, and that 
 each individual gets real strength when he speaks and acts 
 not for himself but as representing the society behind him. 
 It is possible to think of the Church as an organization exist- 
 ing for the spiritual good of the individual ; but it is possible 
 also, and it is a deeper view, to think of the individual as 
 existing for the good of the Church, hke a singer training 
 himself not to display his own voice but to strengthen the 
 general effect of the whole choir. That is the ideal of the 
 Church, a body which quickens the individual into full 
 conscious life, that the individual may devote his life to the 
 service of the whole. Its life is like that of a great moving 
 flight of birds, each with its own life, yet swaying and rising 
 and turning as by a common impulse, 
 
 Their jubilant activity evolves 
 Hundreds of curves and circlets, to and fro, 
 Upwards and downwards ; progress intricate 
 Yet unperplexed, as if one spii-it swayed 
 Their indefatigable flight ^. 
 
 The Church, again, is the teacher of truth ; but in the acqui- 
 sition of truth there are always two elements. There are the 
 fixed facts of life, with which theory deals, and the accumulation 
 of past thought upon the facts ; there is also the creative spirit 
 which plays upon these, which re-adapts, combines, discovers. 
 The teacher of any science has to convey to his pupil the 
 accumulated theories of the past and to quicken in him fresh 
 power of thinking : he speaks first with authority, though of 
 course with assurance that his authority is rational, and that 
 the pupil will understand it ultimately. The teacher of 
 morality, the parent, teaches even more strongly with au- 
 thority, though he too trusts that the child will ultimately 
 accept the law on rational grounds. The pupil needs at once 
 a receptive and a critical faculty. The absence or exaggera- 
 tion of either is equally fatal. Here again the Church ideal 
 tries to combine both sides and to insist upon the real unity 
 
 ^ Wordsworth, The Recluse. 
 
398 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 of all truth, and this makes its task so difficult. At times the 
 whole stress has been laid on the permanent elements in the 
 faith, and the result has been, as often in the Oriental Church, 
 a tendency to intellectual stagnation: at other times the 
 present speaking voice of the Church has been emphasized, 
 and any theory has been hastily adopted as absolutely true, 
 without due consideration of its relation to other truths. At 
 times authority has been over-emphasized, and the acceptance 
 of dogma has seemed to be made the equivalent of a living 
 trust in a personal God : at others the duty of individual 
 search after truth, of individual conviction has been pressed ; 
 the traditions of the past have been ignored ; nothing has been 
 of value except that which has commended itself to the indi- 
 vidual reason, and the result has been confusion, uncertainty, 
 the denial of the greatness and the mystery and the width of 
 truth, and too often a moral and spiritual paralysis. Mean- 
 while the Church has tried to hold to both sides : it has 
 insisted ou the ultimate unity of all knowledge : starting from 
 the axiom that One is our teacher, even Christ, and believing 
 that all truth comes from His inspiration as the Word of God, 
 it has refused to acquiesce in intellectual contradiction ; it has 
 ever held, with King Lear, ' that "ay" and "no" too is no good 
 divinity.' The truths of philosophy and religion must be one : 
 the truths of science and religion must be one ^. In the desire 
 to see this, the Church has been hasty, it has rejected scientific 
 truth, because it did not fall in with its interpretation of the 
 Bible. It has made its mistakes, but it has done so out of a 
 noble principle. It would be easy to gain consistency by 
 sacrificing either side ; it is hard to combine the two : and 
 this is what the Church has tried to do : it has upheld the 
 belief of the ultimate synthesis of all knowledge. In exactly 
 the same way, the sects have often gained force, popularity, 
 effectiveness for the moment by the emphasis laid on some one 
 truth ; the Church has gained strength, solidity, permanence, 
 by its witness to the whole body of truth. 
 
 * Cp. Socrates iii. 16 To -^ap koKov, bonusveriisqueChristianusest,Domini 
 ivQa Uv r], 'iSiov t^j dKrjOeias iOTLv. S. sui esse intellegat ubique invenerit 
 Aug. de dodr. Chr. ii. 18 : ' quisquis veritatem.' 
 
IX. The Church. 399 
 
 The same tendency may be shortly illustrated with regard 
 to the function of worship. That too is a complex act ; in that 
 there should be the free conscious act of the individual, wor- 
 shipping in spirit and in truth a God whom he knows as a 
 personal God ; but clearly this is not all ; the whole society 
 must express its corporate Hfe in corporate worship. Its in- 
 fluence is something over and above the influence of its 
 individual members, and that influence must be exercised on 
 the side of God ; it must be recognised as coming from God ; 
 it must be solemnly consecrated to God's service. The society 
 has a right then to call upon its individual members to join 
 in this corporate action. On the one hand lies the danger of the 
 overpressure of the society, where the service of the individual 
 is unwilhng or apathetic: on the other hand the danger of 
 individualism and sectarianism, in which the whole conception 
 of public worship is lowered and the individual is never 
 trained in religious matters to feel the kindling power of a 
 common enthusiasm, to be lifted above himself in the wave of 
 a common joy. The Church has aimed at combining both ; 
 by the insistance on confession and absolution it has tried to 
 train the individual to a sense of personal penitence and 
 personal gratitude : but these have only prepared him to 
 share in the common worship of the society. 
 
 But the Church has had to do even more than this. Not 
 only has it aimed at keeping in due proportion the conflicting 
 elements in Ufe, in truth, and in worship ; it has also had to 
 keep alive the three sides at once, and to keep them in their 
 true relation to each other. To be at one and the same time 
 the home of life and truth and worship, this belongs to its 
 ideal and this adds new difiiculties. Sometimes one element 
 has preponderated, sometimes another : but its aim is always 
 to preserve the three. It has historically preserved the 
 synthesis of the three more than any other Christian 
 body. It has moved through the ages doing its work, how- 
 ever imperfectly. It has kept historic continuity with the 
 past : it has disciplined life and raised the standard of 
 morality and united the nations of the world. It has been a 
 witness to a spiritual world, to the fact that men have 
 
400 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 interests above material things, and that these deeper spiritual 
 interests can combine them with the strongest links. It has 
 gone out as a Catholic Church, knowing that it contains in its 
 message truths that can win their way to every nation ; and 
 therefore it has never ceased to be a Missionary Church, as it 
 needs that each nation should di-aw out into prominence 
 some aspect of its truth, and reveal in life some side of its 
 virtue. It has enshrined, protected, witnessed to the truth ; both 
 as an ' authoritative republication of natural rehgion,' keeping 
 alive the knowledge of God, and of His moral government of 
 the world ^, and as a revelation of redemption. It has di'awn 
 up the canon of Holy Scripture and formulated its Creeds : 
 it still witnesses to the unity of knowledge : it has held up 
 before the world an ideal of worship, at once social and indi- 
 vidual. Its truths have indeed spread beyond itself, so that 
 men find them now in bodies opposed to it ; and therefore are 
 perplexed and do not know where their allegiance is really 
 due. It has indeed been itself often untrue to its mission ; 
 but ever and again it has re-asserted itself with a strange recu- 
 perative power, for, as the fountain of its life, there is ever 
 the power of the Holy Spirit, sent by the risen Lord ; to check 
 temporary failures or accretions of teachings, there has been 
 the perpetual re-appeal to Holy Scripture and the Creeds ; to 
 control idiosyncrasies of worship, there has been the perma- 
 nent element of its Liturgies. Its very failures have come 
 from its inherent greatness ; they are the proof of great 
 capacities, the omen of a greater future. Like S. Paul, it 
 holds on its way ' by glory and dishonour, by evil report and 
 good report, as deceiving and yet true, as unknown and yet 
 well-known ; as dying and behold it lives ; as chastened and 
 not killed ; as sorrowful yet always rejoicing ; as poor and 
 yet making many rich ; as having nothing and yet possessing 
 all things.' 
 
 Does the world need the witness of the Chui-ch's life less 
 now than in past ages 1 Less ? nay, for many reasons more. 
 The widening opportunities of intercourse are opening up new 
 nations, whose existence had only been suspected before; they 
 
 ^ Butler's Analogy, Pt. ii. ch. i. 
 
IX. The Church. 401 
 
 are bringing the various parts of human kind into a closer 
 touch with each other. The problems of civilization are more 
 complex ; and the more complicated a piece of machinery is, 
 the more difficult it is to keep it in order; so small a defect 
 may throw the whole out of gear. The wider our knowledge 
 of humanity, the greater need of a Catholic Church, which 
 shall raise its voice above the din of conquest and the bustle 
 of commerce, and insist that all races shall be treated 
 with justice and tenderness as made of one blood ; which 
 shall welcome all men freely into its own brotherhood, and 
 conveying to them the gifts of the Spirit, shall help them 
 to shew forth in their lives fresh beauties of the richly- 
 variegated wisdom of God. The growth of our huge towns, 
 ' where numbers overwhelm humanity,' and the accumulation 
 of wealth bring the danger nearer home : amidst social up- 
 heavings and the striving of class with class, there is need of a 
 Church to rise above rich and poor alike, which shall embrace 
 both ; which shall teach both a real visible brotherhood amid 
 all external inequalities ; which shall teach the poor the 
 dignity of labour wrought for the good of the whole society, 
 and teach the rich the duty and the blessing of the consecra- 
 tion of their wealth. With the wider use of machinery and 
 the restless rush of money-getting, it is important that there 
 should be the appeal of the Church that no man or woman 
 shall be degraded into being a mere machine ; because each is 
 a living soul, capable of personal responsibility, capable of a 
 pure life, capable of a knowledge of God. 
 
 Amid the increasing specialization of studies, amid all the 
 new discoveries of science and historical criticism, with all 
 the perplexities that arise as to the interpretation and inspira- 
 tion of the Bible, now, if ever, there is need of a Church, 
 which conscious of its own spiritual life, knowing that its 
 spiritual truths have stood the test of centuries, has patience 
 and courage to face all these new facts and see their bearing 
 and take their measure ; which all the while shall go on teach- 
 ing to its children with an absolute but rational authority the 
 central facts of the spiritual life, and shall never doubt the 
 ultimate unity of all truth. 
 
 Dd . 
 
402 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 Amid the uncertainties of individualism, the fantastic ser- 
 vices of those who tend to reduce worship to a mere matter of 
 emotion, amid the sorrows and perplexities of modern life, the 
 world needs the witness of a rational and corporate worship, 
 which recognises the deepest sufferings of human nature en- 
 shrined in its very heart, yet recognises also the way in which 
 suffering when accepted freely, is blessed of God ; which 
 worships at once a crucified and a risen Lord. Over against 
 the divisions of race and continent the Church raises still its 
 witness to the possibility of an universal brotherhood : over 
 against despair and dispersion it speaks of faith and the unity 
 of knowledge : over against pessimism it lifts up a perpetual 
 Eucharist. 
 
X. 
 
 SACRAMENTS. 
 
 FRANCIS PAGET. 
 
 D d 2 
 
f 
 
 I 
 
SACRAMENTS. 
 
 It is the characteristic distinction of some men's work that 
 they are resolute to take into just account all the elements and 
 conditions of the matter with which they deal. They will not 
 purchase simplicity at the expense of facts ; they will not, by 
 any act of arbitrary exclusion or unreal abstraction, give up 
 even the most distant hope of some real attainment for the 
 sake of securing a present appearance of completeness. They 
 recognise and insist upon all the complexity of that at which 
 they look ; they may see many traits in it to which they can 
 assign no definite place or meaning, but they will not ignore 
 or disparage these ; they will not foi'get them, even though for 
 a while they may have to defer the closer study of them ; 
 they will dutifully bear them in mind, and carry them along 
 through all their work ; they will let them tell with full 
 weight in qualifying, deferring, or precluding the formation 
 of any theory about that of which these traits, trivial or im- 
 portant, explained or unexplained, are a genuine part. It is 
 difficult to find a name for this rare and distinctive excellence. 
 But it is that which more than any other quality gives per- 
 manence and fruitfulness to work : for even the fragmentary 
 and loosely ordered outcome of such thought is wont to 
 prove germinant and quickening as time goes on. Patience, 
 honesty, reverence, and unselfishness, are virtues which 
 appear congenial with such a character of mind ; and the high, 
 
^JP 
 
 406 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 undaunted faith which is the secret of its strength and the 
 assurance of its great reward has been told by Mr. Browning 
 in A Grammarians Funeral : — 
 
 Was it not great? did not he throw on God 
 
 (He loves the burthen) — 
 God's task to make the heavenly period 
 
 Perfect the earthen 1? 
 
 It will be the chief aim of this essay to shew that in the 
 embodiment and presentation of Christianity by the Church 
 of Christ there may be seen an excellence analogous, at least, 
 to this distinctive characteristic of the work that all approve 
 as best and truest upon earth ; that in contrast with many 
 religious systems, attaining a high degree of moral beauty 
 and spiritual fervour, the historic Church meets human life in 
 full front ; that it has been taught and enabled, in its ministry 
 of Sacraments, to deal with the entirety of man's nature, not 
 slighting, or excluding, or despairing of any true part of his 
 being. But it is necessary at the outset to define, in general 
 and provisional terms, the nature and the principle of that 
 element in the Church's faith and life which is here under 
 consideration, and in which especially this amplitude and 
 catholicity of dealing with human nature is to be sought. 
 By the Sacramental system, then, is meant the regular use of 
 sensible objects, agents, and acts as being the means or instru- 
 ments of Divine energies, ' the vehicles of saving and sanctify- 
 ing power -.' The underlying belief, the basal and character- 
 istic principle of this system, ma}'" be thus stated. As the 
 
 • In Rahhi Ben Esra the true measure of such work's beneficence is 
 shewn : — 
 
 Not on the vulgar mass 
 
 Called 'work,' must sentence pass, 
 Things done, that took the eye and had the price ; 
 
 O'er which, from level stand, 
 
 The low world laid its hand, 
 Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice : 
 
 But all the world's coarse thumb 
 
 And finger failed to plumb. 
 So passed in making up the main account ; 
 
 All instincts immature, 
 
 All purjDOses unsure. 
 That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount. 
 
 ^ Cf. A. Knox, Remains, ii. 138. 
 
X. Sacraments. 407 
 
 inmost being of man rises to the realization of its true life, to 
 the knowledge and apprehension of God and of itself, in the 
 act of faith, and as He whose Spiiit quickened it for that act, 
 greets its venture with fresh gifts of light and strength, it is 
 His will that these gifts should be conveyed by means or 
 organs taken from this world, and addressed to human senses. 
 His Holy Spirit bears into the faithful soul the communication 
 of its risen Lord's renewing manhood; and for the convey- 
 ance of that unseen gift He takes things and acts that can be 
 seen, and words that can be heard ; His way is viewless as 
 the wind ; but He comes and works by means of which the 
 senses are aware ; and His hidden energy accepts a visible 
 order and outward implements for the achievement of its 
 purpose. 
 
 The limits of this essay preclude the discussion of the 
 larger questions which beset the terms of these definitions. 
 Previous essays have dealt with those truths which are ne- 
 cessarily involved in any declaration of belief about the 
 Christian Sacraments. The Being of God, the Incarnation of 
 the Eternal Word, the Atonement, the Resurrection and As- 
 cension of Christ, the Person and Mission of the Holy Ghost, 
 these are indeed implied in the Sacramental system of the 
 Church, not simply as component and essential pai-ts of the 
 same building, nor as mere logical data, but rather as the 
 activities of the bodily life are pre-supposed in the exei-tion 
 of the body's strength. But these cannot here be spoken of : 
 it is from preceding pages of this book that thoughts and con- 
 victions must be gathered, without which much that is here 
 said will seem either unsubstantial, or merely technical. It 
 must be owned that the severance of any subject from its 
 context entails not only incompleteness, but also a certain 
 disproportion and obscurity in its treatment ; since the lines 
 of thought which run out into the context are lines down 
 which light comes, light that is lost if they are closed. Indeed 
 anything hke a full presentation or a formal defence of a 
 detached part of Christian teaching and practice seems 
 intrinsically very difficult, and within the limits of an essay 
 impossible. There are, however, two questions which must be 
 
4o8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 asked concerning each several part of the whole structure, 
 and in regard to which something may here be said. The 
 first is : Does this part match with its surroundings in Chris- 
 tianity ; is it a harmonious and congenial element in the 
 whole order, in the great body of doctrine to which it claims 
 to belong % The second is : Does it match with the surround- 
 ings on which it claims to act, with its environment in human 
 life ; is it apt for the purpose to which it is addressed and 
 the conditions among which it comes ? It is here proposed, as 
 has been said, to consider in regard to the Sacramental system 
 the second especially of these two questions : but its consider- 
 ation will involve some thoughts which may perhaps be a 
 sufficient answer to the first. And thus something may also 
 be gained beyond the range of the present inquiry ; for it 
 seems fair to hold that any part of Christian teaching in 
 regard to which both these questions can be answered in the 
 affirmative, has a strong tendency at all events to commend the 
 claim of the whole scheme with which it is inwoven and 
 essentially continuous. For the perfection of inner coherence 
 in a structure whose main lines, at least, were projected in 
 the world under circumstances which preclude the thought of 
 scientific or artificial elaboration, and the perfection of adapta- 
 tion, not to the wishes and tastes of men, nor to the arrange- 
 ments of society, but to the deepest, fullest, surest truth of 
 humanity ; these are characteristics which we should expect 
 to find in a revelation from God to man, and be surprised to 
 find elsewhere. 
 
 I. Probably there come to most men who have got beyond 
 the happy confidence of youth, and the unhappy confidence of 
 self-satisfaction, times at which they seem to themselves to be 
 living in a somewhat perplexed and dimly lighted world, with 
 tasks for which their strength is insufficient, among problems 
 which they cannot solve. And Christianity is held out to 
 them, or has been received by them, as a way of life under 
 these circumstances, as a method and a means of living rightly ; 
 a system which does not indeed take all the perplexity out of 
 the world, or all the difficulties out of their course, but which 
 will give them light and strength- enough to keep in the right 
 
X. Sacraments. 409 
 
 track, to use their time well, to take their proper place, and 
 do their proper work, and so to move towards the realization 
 of all the many parts and possibilities of their nature ; a goal 
 which may seem to grow both larger and more distant the 
 more one thinks about it. Christianity professes to be that 
 Divine word, which was faintly surmised of old ^, and in due 
 time was sent forth to bear men wisely and surely through 
 this world. Plainly one of the first and fairest questions which 
 may be asked in regard to it is, whether it shews a perfect 
 understanding of the nature with which it claims to deal, and 
 the life which it claims to guide. 
 
 Now when we set ourselves to think what we are for whom 
 a possible and satisfactory way of life is sought, what that 
 nature is, whose right principles and conditions of develop- 
 ment are to be determined, one of the first things which we 
 discern is an apparently invincible complexity. The life we 
 have to order is a twofold life, it moves through a twofold 
 course of experience : the facts, the activities in which we are 
 conscious of it, are of two kinds ; and men ordinarily distin- 
 guish them as bodily and spiritual. Some such distinction 
 is recognised and understood by the simplest of us : it is 
 imbedded beyond possibility of expulsion in all language : 
 stubbornly and successfully it resists all efforts to abolish 
 it. We know for ourselves that either of the two groups 
 of facts may stand out in clearer light, in keener conscious- 
 ness, at certain times : we may even for a while, a little 
 while, lose sight of either of them and seem to be wholly 
 occupied with the other: but presently the neglected facts 
 will re-assert their rights: neither the one group nor the 
 other may long be set aside without risk of the Nemesis which 
 avenges slighted truths : — the Nemesis of disproportion and 
 disease. We may confuse our sense of the distinction; we 
 may shift or blur or bend whatever line had seemed to mark 
 it : we may insist on the qualifying phenomena which forbid 
 us to think of any barrier as impenetrable ; but we cannot so 
 exalt or push forward either realm as utterly to extrude, ab- 
 sorb, or annihilate the other : we cannot, with consistency or 
 
 ' Cf. Plato, Phaedo, 85 C, D. 
 
4IO The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 sanity, live as though our life were merely spiritual or merely 
 bodily. It is as impossible steadily to regard the spirit as a 
 mere function or product of the body, as it is to treat the body 
 with entire indifference, as a casually adjacent fragment of the 
 external world. But further, as the distinction of the two 
 elements in our being seems insuperable, so does their union 
 seem essential to the integrity of our life. Any abstraction 
 of one element, as though it could detach itself from the 
 other and live on its own resources, is felt to be unreal and 
 destructive of our proper nature. So it has been finely said, 
 ' Materialism itself has here done valuable service in correct- 
 ing the exaggeration of a one-sided spiritualism. It is 
 common, but erroneous, to speak of man's body as being 
 related to his spirit only as is the casket to the jewel 
 which it contains. But, as a matter of fact, the personal spirit 
 of man strikes its roots far and deep into the encompassing 
 frame of sense, with which, from the first moment of its 
 
 existence, it has been so intimately associated The spirit 
 
 can indeed exist independently of the body, but this inde- 
 pendent existence is not its emancipation from a prison-house 
 of matter and sense ; it is a temporary and abnormal divorce 
 from the companion whose presence is needed to complete its 
 life ^.' If we try to imagine our life in abstraction from the 
 body we can only think of it as incomplete and isolated ; as 
 impoverished, deficient, and expectant. And certainly in our 
 present state, in the interval between what we call birth and 
 death, the severance of the two elements is inconceivable : 
 they are knit together in incessant and indissoluble commu- 
 nion. In no activity, no experience of either, can the other 
 be utterly discarded : ' for each action and reaction passing 
 between them is a fibre of that which forms their mutual 
 bond^.' Even into those energies of which men speak as 
 purely spiritual, the bodily life will find its way, will send its 
 help or hindrance : sickness, hunger, weariness, and desire : 
 these are but some of its messengers to the spirit, messengers 
 
 ' H. P. Liddon, Some Elements of Be- of life, in the Dream of Geronlius : and 
 
 ligion, pp. 1 16, 117. Cf. the wonderful also in Battle and After, by R. St. John 
 
 venture towards a conception of the Tyrwhitt, p. 7. 
 disembodied soul and of its manner ^ Lotze, Microcosmus, Bk. III. c. i. § 2. 
 
X. Sacraments. 411 
 
 who will not always be denied. And in every conscious 
 action of the bodily life the presence of the spirit is to be 
 discerned. The merely animal fulfilment of merely animal 
 demands, devoid of moral quality, is only possible within that 
 dark tract of instinct which lies below the range of our con- 
 sciousness. When once desire is consciously directed to its 
 object, (wherever the desire has originated and whatever be the 
 nature of the object,) a moral quality appears, a moral issue 
 is deteripined : and the act of the body becomes an event in 
 the life of the spirit^. The blind life of brute creatures is 
 as far out of our reach as is the pure energy of angels : we 
 can never let the body simply go its own way ; for in the 
 essential complexity of our being, another sense is ever waiting 
 upon the conscious exercise of those five senses that we share 
 with lower animals : — the sense of duty and of sin. 
 
 Thus complex are we, — we who crave more light and 
 strength, who want to find the conditions of our health and 
 growth, who lift up our eyes unto the hills from whence 
 cometh our help. It would be interesting to consider from 
 how many different points of view the complexity has been 
 recognised, resented, slandered, or ignored ; and how steadily 
 it has held its own. It may need some exercise of faith (that 
 is to say, of reasonable patience amidst half-lights and frag- 
 ments) to keep the truth before one, and to allow it its just 
 bearing upon thought and conduct, without exaggeration, or 
 self-deception, or one-sidedness ; but there is neither health of 
 body nor peace of mind in trifling with it. 
 
 To us, then, being thus complex, Christianity presents a 
 plan, a principle, a rule of life. And that primary and in- 
 evitable question which has been already indicated may there- 
 fore take this definite form : — Does the scheme proposed to us 
 acknowledge this our complexity % does it provide for us in 
 the entirety of our nature, with all that we feel to be essential 
 to our completeness % or must a part of our being be huddled 
 out of sight as we enter the precinct of the Church % 
 
 II. (i) Certainly the whole history and character of the 
 Christian Revelation would encourage us to hope that its 
 
 ^ Cf. T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, Bk. II. ch. ii. §§ 125, 126. 
 
4 1 2 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 bearing upon life would be as broad as the whole of human 
 nature ; and that no true part of our being would be excluded 
 from its light, refused its welcome, or driven from its feast. 
 When we consider how Christianity came into the world, it 
 would seem strange and disappointing if its hold on human 
 life were partial and not inclusive : if, for instance, the body 
 found no place prepared, no help or hope provided for it. 
 This was excellently said by Alexander Knox : ' The gospel 
 commenced in an accommodation to man's animal exigencies 
 which was as admirable as it was gracious ; and which the 
 hosts of heaven contemplated with delight and wonder. 
 The Incarnation of the co-eternal Son, through which S. 
 John was enabled to declare what he and his fellow Apostles 
 " had seen with their eyes, what they had looked upon, and 
 their hands had handled, of the Word of Life," was in the 
 first instance, so to consult human nature in its animal and 
 sensitive capacity, as to give the strongest pledge that a dis- 
 pensation thus introduced would, in every subordinate 
 provision, manifest the same spirit and operate on the same 
 principle. For could it be thought that the fii-st wonderful 
 accommodation of Godhead to the sensitive apprehensions of 
 man should be wholly temporary? and that though that 
 mystery of godliness was ever to be regarded as the vital 
 source of all spiritual benefits and blessings, no continuance 
 of this wise and gracious condescension should be manifested 
 in the means, whereby its results were to be perpetuated, and 
 made effectual ^ ? ' It would be possible to follow this mode of 
 thought to a remoter point, and to mark in the revealed 
 relation of the Eternal Word to the whole creation a sure 
 ground for believing that whensoever, in the fulness of time, 
 God should be pleased to bring the world, through its highest 
 type, into union with Himself, the access to that union would 
 be as wide as the fulness of the nature in which He made 
 man at the beginning : that the attractive and uplifting bands 
 of love would hold and draw to Him every true element of 
 
 ' A. Knox, Remains, vol. ii. pp. 228, help he has found in the remarkable 
 229. The writer of this essay desires treatise here referred to. 
 to acknowledge with gratitude the 
 
X. Sacraments. 4 1 3 
 
 that nature. But it is enough for our present purpose to look 
 steadily at the Advent and the Life of Christ : to see how 
 carefully and tenderly every fragment of the form He takes is 
 disentangled from the deforming evil which He could not take : 
 how perfect are the lineaments of the humanity He wears, 
 how freely and clearly all that is characteristic of our nature 
 is displayed in His most holy life ; where 'the hiding of His 
 power,' the restraining of the beams of Deity ^ leaves room for 
 the disclosure in Him of whatever weakness and limitation 
 properly belongs to us. Surely it would be strange if the 
 grace and truth which came among us thus, proved partial or 
 restricted in their later deahng with our manhood: if any 
 tract of our life were unvisited by their light and blessing : if 
 anything which He took were slighted in His kingdom, for- 
 gotten in His ministry, precluded from His worship. The 
 Incarnation was indeed in itself a great earnest of the recog- 
 nition which would be accorded in the Christian life to the 
 whole of our complex nature. But there are, more particu- 
 larly, two points in the coming and work of our Lord which 
 seem peculiarly intended to foreshow some abiding elevation 
 of the material and visible to share the honour of the spiritual 
 element in our life. They are so familiar to us that it may 
 not be easy to do full justice to their significance. 
 
 (3) For it does seem deeply significant that when the Word 
 was made flesh and dwelt among us. He took up the lines 
 of a history replete with forecasts of the consecration of 
 material things : He met the truest aspii-ations of a people 
 trained to unhesitating exultation in a visible worship, en- 
 couraged by manifold experience to look for the blessings 
 of Divine goodness through sensible means, accustomed and 
 commanded to seek for God's especial presence in an ap- 
 pointed place and amidst sights on which their eyes would 
 rest with thankful confidence. That Church and nation 
 ' of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came,' must have 
 seemed indeed irrevocably and essentially committed to the 
 principle that when man is brought near to God it is with the 
 entirety of his manhood : that God is to be glorified alike in 
 1 Cf. Hooker, V. liv. 6. 
 
414 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 the body and in the spirit : and that His mercy really is over 
 all His works. Doubtless barriers were to be broken down, 
 when the time of prophecy and training passed on into the 
 freedom of realization: limitations were to be taken away, 
 distinctions abrogated by Him in Whom is neither Jew nor 
 Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female : but 
 religion would surely have grown in reality narroiver and not 
 wider, if the body had been dismissed from its duty and 
 gladness in the light of God's countenance, if the spirit alone 
 had been bidden to draw near, to worship, to taste and see 
 how gracious the Lord is. Through all the amplitude of the 
 Christian dispensation, there would have been a sense of loss, 
 of impoverishment, of expectation encouraged and unsatisfied, 
 had this been so ; for in the preparatory system of Judaism, 
 whatever had been lacking, still the whole nature of man had 
 felt the Hand of God and heard His Voice. It would have 
 seemed strange if with the wider extension of God's light to 
 all the world there had been a narrowing of its range in the 
 life of each several man ^. 
 
 (3) And then, again, it is to be marked that our Lord Him- 
 self by repeated acts sustained and emphasized this acceptance 
 of the visible as the organ or vehicle of the Divine. His 
 blessing was given by the visible laying on of hands, and His 
 miracles were wrought not by the bare silent energy of His 
 Almighty will, not even in many cases by the mere utterance 
 of His word, but through the employment of acts or objects, 
 impressive to the bodily element in man, and declaring the 
 consecration of the material for the work of God. Alike in the 
 blessings bestowed and in the manner of their bestowal men 
 must have felt that there was with Him no disparagement of 
 the body, no forgetfulness of its need, no lack of care for its 
 welfare, its honour, or its hope. Perhaps it may even be that 
 had we watched the scene in the Galilean town as the sun 
 was setting, and in the cool of the evening they that had any 
 sick with divers diseases brought them unto Him ; as He 
 moved about among those wasted, suffering forms, and on 
 one after another laid His hands and healed them; it may 
 ' Cf. A. Knox, ii. 210. 
 
X . Sacra men ts. 415 
 
 even be that what would have struck us first of all would 
 have been the bringing in of a better hope for the bodily life 
 of man and the replenishing of a familiar act, a common 
 gesture, with a grace and power that it had but vaguely hinted 
 at before. 
 
 We have, then, (i) in the Incarnation of the Son of God, 
 (2) in the essential character of the history ordered as an 
 especial preparation for His coming, and (3) in certain con- 
 spicuous features of His ministry on earth, a strong encourage- 
 ment to expect that in the life thus brought into the world, 
 in the way thus opened out, there would be evinced a large- 
 hearted care for the whole nature of men : that no unreal 
 abstraction would be demanded, and no part of humanity be 
 disinherited: that in the choice of its means, in the scope 
 of its beneficence, and in the delineation of its aim, Christianity 
 would deal with us as we are, and prove that God has not 
 made us thus for nought. An endeavour will be made to 
 shew how this great hope is greeted in the Sacramental system, 
 and uplifted and led on towards the end of all true hope. 
 But it seems necessary first to adduce the grounds for saying 
 that that system has been from the beginning an integral part 
 of Christianity. 
 
 in. When we turn to look at the presentation of the 
 Sacramental principle in the Gospels, our first impression may 
 be that the place it holds there is less than that which is 
 given to it in the teaching and practice of the Church : that it 
 is by a disproportionate growth that the doctrine of Sacra- 
 ments has gained so much space and so great prominence in 
 Catholic theology. But the impression certainly ought not 
 to be lasting. For it is due to our forgetfulness of the con- 
 ditions under which Christianity came into the world : the 
 characteristics and habits of religious thought with which it 
 had to deal. We can draw no reasonable inference from the 
 brevity or length with which a truth is enunciated in the 
 Gospels until we have inquired what were the previous con- 
 victions of those to whom our Lord spoke : what preparation 
 had in that particular regard been made for His teaching. We 
 ought to look for some difference in the manner of revelation 
 
41 6 The Religion of the Incantation. 
 
 corresponding to the difference of need when a wholly new 
 principle of thought has to be borne into unready minds, 
 and when a fresh direction has to be given to an expectation 
 already alert and confident, a new light to be thrown on the 
 true worth and meaning of an existing belief about God's ways 
 towards men. Amplitude and iteration would indeed have 
 been necessary for any teaching which was to dislodge the 
 Sacramental principle out of the minds of those among whom 
 our Lord came — to preclude them from seeking the mercy of 
 God through visible means. But if the Divine purpose was 
 not to destroy but to fulfil ; not to discredit as mere misappre- 
 hensions the convictions men had received, but to raise and 
 purify them by disclosing the response which God had pre- 
 pared for them : to disengage them from that which had been 
 partial, preparatory, transient, and to fasten them on their true 
 satisfaction : then we might reverently expect that the method 
 of this teaching would probably be such as in the New Testa- 
 ment is shewn to us in regard to the doctrine of Sacraments. 
 
 (i) For, in the first place, we find abundant and pervading 
 signs that the general principle is taken up into Christianity 
 and carried on as a characteristic note of its plan and work. 
 The regular communication of its prerogative and character- 
 istic gift through outward means : the embodiment of grace 
 in ordinances: the designation of visible agents, acts, and 
 substances, to be the instruments and vehicles of Divine 
 virtue : — this principle is so intimately and essentially woven 
 into the texture of Christianity that it cannot be got out with- 
 out destroying the whole fabric. As our Saviour gradually 
 sets forth the outlines of His design for the redemption of the 
 world, at point after point the Sacramental principle is 
 affirmed, and material instruments are designated for the 
 achievement of His work. ' He proclaims Himself the Founder 
 of a world-wide and imperishable Society,' ' the Kingdom of 
 Heaven' or 'the Kingdom of God^;' and while the claims and 
 energies of this kingdom penetrate the hidden depths of life, 
 so that it is indeed ' a moral empire,' and ' a realm of souls,' 
 yet none the less is it openly to take its place in human 
 * H. P. Liddon, Bampton Lectures, pp. 101-105. 
 
X. Sacraments. 4 1 7 
 
 history. It is not an unsubstantial haze of vague spirituality, 
 precarious and indistinct, hovering or said to hover half way 
 between earth and sky, with no precise attachment to either. 
 At once, it is the kingdom of Heaven, and it is to have all the 
 apparel of a visible society : it touches this earth with a 
 definite and inclusive hold ; it ennobles material conditions 
 by a frank acceptance. As in the Incarnation, so also in the 
 preparation of the Church to be the ever-present witness to 
 Christ, the guardian of His truth, and the home of His people, 
 the principle was sustained that, in the redemption of the 
 world, God would be pleased to take the instruments of His 
 work out of that world which He was renewing: that the 
 quickening Spirit would not repel or destroy the material 
 order, but would assume, pervade, and use it. 
 
 (2) And, in the second place, the particular expressions of 
 the general principle thus reaffirmed were authoritatively ap- 
 pointed: the approved anticipation of men was left in no 
 uncertainty as to its response and sanction : men were told 
 plainly what were the outward and visible signs which God 
 had chosen in this world to be the means whereby His inward 
 and spiritual grace should be received. It is difficult indeed to 
 imagine any way in which more weight and incisiveness could 
 have been given to the appointment of the two great Sacra- 
 ments than in the way which Christ was pleased to use : — 
 any way in which Baptism and the Eucharist could have been 
 more firmly and impressively designated as the vital and 
 distinctive acts of the Christian Church. We can hardly 
 wonder at their pre-eminence in Christian thought and life 
 when we remember how they were fastened upon the con- 
 sciousness of the Church. Their antecedents lay in that long 
 mysterious course of history which Almighty God had led on 
 through the strange discipline of the changeful centuries to 
 the coming of Christ. And then, there had been in Christ's 
 teaching certain utterances which seemed to have a peculiar 
 character : which were plainly of essential importance, con- 
 cerning things necessary for all His disciples, bearing on the 
 primary conditions of their life : and yet utterances which 
 were left unexplained, however men might be troubled, 
 E.e 
 
41 8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 offended, overstrained, discouraged by them : left as though 
 their explanation was impossible, until the occurrence of 
 events which could not be forestalled ^ But such utterances, 
 if they could not be understood, could still less be forgotten : 
 they lived in the memory, they haunted the imagination, they 
 sustained expectancy : they were as a prophetic conviction in 
 the mind, strong, deep, fragmentary, and unsatisfied. Who 
 can measure the consilient force with which, in moments of 
 intensest thought and feeling, moments when all the besetting 
 conditions seemed quick with some imminent disclosure, the 
 Divine commands, meeting, illuminating, establishing those 
 former utterances, would be riveted upon the hearts of men 
 and clenched for ever into the faith and practice of the 
 Church, with a dominance never to be forgotten or infringed, 
 as a very primal law of life ? In the unique, controlling awe 
 of His impending agony and crucifixion : — in the heralded 
 majesty of His appearance to the disciples upon the mountain 
 where He had appointed them, and Avith the proclamation of 
 the absolute authority given to Him in heaven and in earth : 
 so did our Lord enact the ordinances to which His earlier 
 words had pointed, and in which at length their meaning was 
 made clear : so did He institute His two great Sacraments : 
 so did He disentangle the Sacramental principle from all that 
 had been temporary, accidental, disciplinary, accommodated, 
 in its past embodiment, and determine what should be the 
 form of its two main expressions, for all ages and for all men 
 in His Church ' until His coming again,' ' even unto the end 
 of the world.' 
 
 It may be in place here briefly to suggest a few thoughts 
 with regard to that which was secured by this authoritative 
 designation of the outward sign in each great Sacrament, 
 beyond all that could have been attained by the general 
 enunciation of the Sacramental principle. 
 
 Much might be said — and much more, doubtless, be still 
 left unsaid — about the especial fitness of the very elements 
 thus chosen from the material world to be the vehicles of 
 saving grace : — for the waier and the bread and wine are 
 
 1 Cf. S. John iii. 3-13 ; vi. 51-67. 
 
 \ 
 
X. Sacraments. 419 
 
 called to their place in the Divine work with deep and far- 
 reaching associations already belonging to them. Again, the 
 very simplicity and commonness of the elements taken into 
 God's nearest service may have been a part of the reason why 
 they were appointed : for in no other way could the minds of 
 men have been more surely and permanently hindered from 
 many of the mistakes to which in the past they had been 
 prone : in no other way could the Sacramental principle have 
 been more perfectly disengaged from the misconceptions which 
 had confused its purity: in no other way could men have 
 been more plainly taught that in no expense of this world's 
 goods, in no labour of their own hands, in no virtue of the 
 material elements, but only in the sustained energy of His 
 will, who took and penetrated and employed them, lay the 
 efficacy of the Sacrament. The very plainness of the element 
 hallowed in the Sacrament was to urge up men's thoughts 
 from it to Him. But, above all, the decisive appointment of 
 particular signs and acts may seem to have been necessary 
 in order that the Sacraments might take their places as acts 
 emanating from, upheld by, and characteristic of the Church's 
 corporate life, and not merely concerned with the spiritual 
 welfare of the individual. So S. Paul appeals to Baptism 
 and to the Eucharist as both effecting and involving the 
 communion of saints ^. By Sacraments men are to be taken 
 out of the narrowness and isolation of their own lives, out 
 of all engrossing preoccupation with their own state, into the 
 ample air, the generous gladness, the unselfish hope of the 
 City of God : they are to escape from all daily pettiness, 
 all morbid self-interest, all preposterous conviction of their 
 own importance, into a fellowship which spans all ages and 
 all lands. By Baptism and the Eucharist the communion of 
 saints is extended and sustained : they are the distinctive 
 acts of the Body of Christ : and as such He designated their 
 essential form, to abide unaltered through all that changed 
 around them. And even those who stand aloof from them 
 and from the faith on which they rest, may feel the unmatched 
 greatness of an act that has held its place in human life 
 
 ^ I Cor. X. 17 ; Gal. iii. 27, 28 ; Eph. iv. 5. 
 E e 3 
 
420 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 through all the revolutions of more than 1 800 years : an act 
 that in its essential characteristics is to-day what it was when 
 imperial Rome was venerated as eternal : an act that is every 
 day renewed, with some measure, at least, of the same faith 
 and hope and love, in every land where Christ is owned. 
 
 (3) The Sacramental principle had been most plainly 
 adopted by our Lord: the spiritual forces with which He 
 would renew the face of the eai-th were to be exerted through 
 material instruments : and He Himself had secured the prin- 
 ciple from uncertainty or vagueness or individualism in its 
 expression by appointing, with the utmost weight and pene- 
 tration of His authority, the definite form of two great ordin- 
 ances, which were to begin and to advance the supei'natural life 
 of His members, to extend the range of His Church, and to 
 maintain its unity. In the acts and letters of His apostles 
 we see how His teaching and bidding had been understood : 
 how promptly and decisively His Church declared its life, its 
 work, its mission, to be Sacramental. The meaning and em- 
 phasis of His commandment appear in the obedience of those 
 to whom it was given: in the fii'st words of authoritative 
 counsel uttered by an apostle : in the first act of the Spirit- 
 bearing Body: and thenceforward in the characteristic habits 
 of the Christian life ^. 
 
 From the first the prominence of Sacraments and Sacra- 
 mental rites is constant. In the teaching of later ages their 
 prominence may have been relatively greater, in contrast 
 with the poverty of faith and life in those who insisted on 
 their power while they forgot their meaning ; but absolutely 
 it would be hard to devise a higher place for them than 
 that which they hold in S. Paul's Epistles. To be living a 
 life received, nourished, and characterised by Baptism and by 
 the Eucharist — this is the distinctive note of a Christian — 
 thus does he diflfer from other men. The Sacrament by which 
 he became a member of Christ's body must determine 
 throughout the two distinctive qualities of his inner life : its 
 severance from all forms of worldliness, all dependence on 
 natural advantages, or natural strength, all confidence in the 
 ^ Acts ii. 38, 41, 42. 
 
X. Sacraments. 421 
 
 satisfaction of external rules ; and its unfailing newness, as 
 issuing from Him who, being raised from the dead, dieth 
 no more, and as carrying through all its activities the air 
 and light of heaven ^ And the Sacrament which continually 
 renews in him the presence of his Lord, meeting with un- 
 stinted wealth the demands of work and growth, assuring 
 and advancing the dominance of the new manhood in him : 
 this in hke manner must determine the sustained simplicity 
 of his bearing towards those who with him are members 
 of the one Body, quickened and informed by the one Life ^. 
 That men may receive eternal life through Jesus Christ : 
 this is the end of all labours in His name: to this all else 
 is tributary and conducive : and there is no hesitation as to 
 the visible means by which God will effect this end in all those 
 who have ' faith to be healed.' And in this sense it may 
 perhaps be said that in Christianity even doctrine holds not 
 iudeed a subordinate but (that which involves nothing but 
 dignity) a subservient place ; since it is the strength and glory 
 of Christian doctrine that it essentially 'leads on to some- 
 thing higher — to the sacramental participation in the atoning 
 sacrifice of Christ ".' 
 
 IV. Thus then there appears at the beginning the domin- 
 ance of that note which has sounded on through all succeed- 
 ing ages ; thus may we trace from the first days the 
 dispensation of Divine energy through agents and acts and 
 efficacious symbols gathered out of this visible world. It 
 remains to be shewn with what reason it can be alleged that 
 herein the Church evinces its recognition of the complexity of 
 human nature, and guards the truth, that in the entirety of 
 his being man has to do with God, the Creator, Redeemer, 
 Sanctifier of his soul and body. Along three lines of thought 
 this may in some degree appear ; and if the evidence that 
 can be indicated is recognised as in any measure real, it would 
 be unphilosophic to set it aside because it may be fragmentary 
 and inconclusive: since fragments are all that in such a 
 matter we are likely as yet to see. 
 
 ' Cf. Eom. vi. 3, 4 ; Gal. iii. 27, 28 ; ' W. Shirley, Tlie Church in the Apos- 
 
 Col. ii. 12, 20-23. ioUc Age, p. 103. 
 
 " Cf. I Cor. X. 17, xii. 25, 26. 
 
42 2 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 (i) First, then, there is a profound far-reaching import in 
 the bare fact that material and visible means are thus hal- 
 lowed to effect the work of God, to bear His unseen grace. 
 For it must not be thought that in this Sacramental union of 
 the visible and the invisible we have only an interesting 
 parallel to the twofold nature of man, a neat and curious 
 symmetry, a striking bit of symbolism or accommodation. 
 Nor is the deepest significance of the Sacramental principle 
 brought out when it is said quite truly that ' it has pleased 
 God to bind His invisible operations to outward and visible 
 methods,' ' lest that which is thus invisible should for that 
 reason be disbeheved or counterfeited or in any of the various 
 ways in which human incredulity or human enthusiasm might 
 do it wrong, abused to the injury of man ^.' We may see in this 
 aspect of the system that it has indeed secondary advantages 
 of the highest worth ; but its surpassing glory is in its primary 
 and essential character, as the regular employment of visible 
 means for the achievement of Divine mysteries. For thus our 
 whole estimate of this world is affected. Its simplest objects 
 have their kindred, as it were, in the court, in the very 
 presence chamber of the Most High ; and actions such as we 
 see in it day after day have been advanced to a supreme 
 distinction. 
 
 And so through Sacramental elements and acts Christianity 
 maintains its strong inclusive hold upon the whole of life. 
 The consecration of material elements to be the vehicles of 
 Divine grace keeps up on earth that vindication and defence of 
 the material against the insults of sham spiritualism which 
 was achieved for ever by the Incarnation and Ascension of 
 Jesus Christ. We seem to see the material world rising from 
 height to height ; pierced, indeed, and, as it were, surprised at 
 every stage by strange hints of a destiny beyond all likeli- 
 hood ; yet only gradually laying aside the inertness of its 
 lower forms, gradually seeming to yield itself, not merely to 
 the external fashioning of spmt, but also to its inner and 
 transforming occupation: till in humanity it comes within 
 sight of that which God has been preparing for it, even the 
 
 * Moberly's Bampton Lectures, pp. 29, 30. 
 
X. Sacraments. 423 
 
 reception of His own image and likeness. And yet this is 
 but the beginning : and though sin delays the end, and holds 
 back the crown of all, it is but for a time ; in due season 
 there is made known that absolutely highest honour to which 
 God has been leading on the work of His hands, even that in 
 its highest type it should be taken into God ; that the Eternal 
 Word should be made man, and from a human mother receive 
 our nature, so that a material body should be His body ; His 
 in birth, and growth, and death ; His in all its relations with 
 the visible world ; His for suffering, for weariness, for tears, 
 for hunger ; His upon the cross and in the tomb ; His to rise 
 with ; and, at length, His at the right hand of God. Thus 
 was the visible received up into glory ; thus was the forecast 
 of spiritual capacity in the material perfectly realized ; and 
 by the body of the ascended Saviour, an entrance for the 
 whole being of man into the realm of spirit is assured. 
 ' There is a spiritual body^:' no part of the material order can 
 be quite untouched by the light that issues from those 
 astounding words, and from the triumph they record. And 
 that truth, that triumph, that possibility of unhindered inter- 
 penetration between the spiritual and the material is pre- 
 eminently attested upon earth by the two great Sacraments 
 of the. Christian Church. In those mysteries where water is 
 sanctified to the washing away of sin, and where material 
 substances are made spiritual food, there is a continual 
 witness of the victory that has been won, a real earnest of 
 that which shall hereafter be achieved, a vivid declaration 
 that the barrier between the spiritual and the material is not 
 absolute or eternal. 
 
 Nor is this deep truth without practical and far-reaching 
 consequences in human life. For immediately it thus appears 
 that the unreal spirituahty which consists in a barren and 
 boastful disparagement of ritual observance or of outward 
 acts ^, of earthly relationships or of secular life, of natural 
 feelings or of bodily health, clashes with Christian teaching 
 as sharply as it does with human nature and with common 
 
 1 I Cor. XV. 44. 
 
 * Cf. Professor Milligaiij The, Eesurrection of Our Lord, Lect. vi. Pt. i. § c. 
 
424 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 sense. And then, in perfect accordance with this principle, 
 the spiritual enei'gy of the Church is sacramentally conveyed 
 for the hallowing of stage after stage in the due order of a 
 human life, as body, soul, and spirit are advanced towards the 
 end for which they were created. Not only in the initial act 
 whereby all are bidden to enter into the kingdom of God. 
 and, at the dawn of consciousness, the onset of evil is fore- 
 stalled by the cleansing and regenerating work of God the 
 Holy Ghost— not only in the ever-needed, ever-ready mystery 
 of glory whereby, amidst the stains and sorrows of the world, 
 all may again and again be ' tilled with the very essence of 
 restoration and of life ^•,' but at other moments too, when the 
 soul of man rises up towards God in the divinely-quickened 
 venture of faith, the strength of the Most High is perfected 
 in human weakness, and in Sacramental acts the things that 
 are not seen enter into the histor}^ of the things that are 
 seen. It is most unfortunate that the associations of con- 
 troversy should hinder men from frankly and thankfully 
 recognising the wide range of Sacramental action in Chris- 
 tian life. The dispute as to the number of the Sacraments 
 is indeed ' a question of a name ^ : ' and it ought to have been 
 acknowledged all along that the name was being used with 
 different and shifting meanings. That men knew that it did 
 not designate an essentially distinct class of exactly equiva- 
 lent units is shewn on all sides ; S. Thomas Aquinas seems to 
 doubt, at least, whether there are not more than seven Sacra- 
 ments, divides the seven into groups with very important 
 notes of difference, and decides that the Eucharist is ' Sacra- 
 mentorum omnium potissimum ^ : ' Calvin was not unwilling 
 that the laying on of hands should be called a Sacrament, 
 though he would not reckon it 'inter ordinaria Sacramenta"*;' 
 the Council of Trent has an anathema for anyone who says 
 that the seven Sacraments are so equal that none is more 
 worthy than another ^ : Richard Baxter distinguishes between 
 ' three sorts of Sacraments ; ' in the second sense of the name, 
 
 > Bright's Ancient Collects, p. 152. = S. Th. iii. Qu. LXV. Art. i, 4, 3. 
 
 ^ C. Gore, Roman Catholic Claims, * Calv. Inst. IV. xiv. 20. 
 
 p. 1 70. 5 Cone. Trident. Sess. VII. Can. iii. 
 
X. Sacra?nents. 425 
 
 in which it is taken to mean ' any solemn Investiture of a 
 person by ministerial delivery, in a state of Church-privileges, 
 or some special gospel-mercy,' he grants ' that there are five 
 Sacraments — Baptism, Confirmation, Absolution, the Lord's 
 Supper and Ordination ; ' and elsewhere he declares that 
 ' they that peremptorily say without distinguishing that there 
 are but two Sacraments in all, do but harden them (the 
 Papists) by the unwarrantable narrowing of the word ^' There 
 is indeed no reason why anyone should hesitate to mark the 
 Love of God meeting in Sacramental ordinances the need of 
 man at point after point in the course of his probation. 
 Difi'erences in the manner of appointment or in the range of 
 application may involve no difference at all in the reality of 
 the power exercised and the grace conveyed. And so we 
 may see the vSpirit-bearing Church, with whole-hearted recog- 
 nition of all the elements and wants of human life, proffering 
 to men through visible means the manifold gifts of grace 
 needed for their progress and welfare in the way until they 
 reach the Country. As temptation grows more complex and 
 severe, and the soul begins to reahze the warfare that it has 
 to wage, the Personal indwelling of the Holy Ghost, vouch- 
 safed by the laying on of hands, completes the preparation of 
 Christ's soldier : as the desolating sense of failure threatens 
 to unnerve the will and to take such hold upon the soul that 
 it is not able to look up, the authoritative message of for- 
 giveness brings again the strength of purity and the light of 
 hope, and recalls the scattered forces of the inner life to expel 
 the encroaching evil and to regain whatever had been lost. 
 For special vocations there are special means of grace ; by 
 ordination God vouchsafes to guilty men the glory of the 
 priesthood: and in Christian marriage He confers the grace 
 that hallows human love to be the brightness and the safe- 
 guard of an earthly home, and the earnest of the home in 
 Heaven. And thus in the manifold employment of the 
 Sacramental principle there again appears that characteristic 
 
 ' Richard Baxter, Confirmation and Pollock, Richard Baxter on the Sacra- 
 Restauration, pp. 88, 89 ; Ecclesiastical ments, § 58. 
 Cases of Conscience, Qu. 99. Cf. J. S. 
 
426 The Religion of the Incarjiatioit. 
 
 excellence of Christianity which is secured in the very nature 
 of Sacraments : namely, its recognition of the whole problem 
 with which it claims to deal. It speaks to us as we are : 
 there is no true need of which it will not take account : it 
 will lead us without loss to the realization of our entire being. 
 (2) Secondly, Sacraments are a constant witness against 
 our readiness to forget, to ignore, or to explain away the 
 claim of Christianity to penetrate the bodily life, and to affect 
 the body itself, replenishing it here with powers which are 
 strange to it, lifting it out of the reach or mastery of passions 
 which falsely boast that they are congenial with it, leading it 
 on towards its everlasting rest, beyond all weakness and 
 dishonour, in the glory of God. This claim, with the deeply 
 mysterious but wholly reasonable hope which it engenders, 
 has been set forth by Hooker, with his unfaltering strength of 
 thought and words : ' Doth any man doubt that even from 
 the flesh of Christ our very bodies do receive that life which 
 shall make them glorious at the latter day, and for which they 
 are already accounted parts of His blessed body ? Our 
 corruptible bodies could never live the life they shall live, 
 were it not that here they are joined with His body, which is 
 incorruptible, and that His is in ours as a cause of immor- 
 tality, a cause by removing, through the death and merit of 
 His owTi flesh, that which hindered the hfe of ours. Christ is 
 therefore, both as God and as man, that true Vine whereof we 
 both spiritually and corporally are branches. The mixture of 
 His bodily substance with ours is a thing which the ancient 
 Fathers disclaim. Yet the mixture of His flesh with ours 
 they speak of, to signify what our very bodies through 
 mystical conjunction receive from that vital efficacy which we 
 know to be in His : and from bodily mixtures they borrow 
 divers similitudes rather to declare the truth, than the manner 
 of coherence between His sacred and the sanctified bodies of 
 saints^.' The body, as well as the spirit, is accessible to 
 
 1 Hooker V. Ivi. 9 : cf. E. B. Pusey. flesh into Himself, as to impart to it 
 
 University Senno)is, p. 11, 'This is ^if His own inherent life; so then we 
 
 we may reverently so speak ) the order partaking of it, that life is trans- 
 
 of the mystery of the Incarnation, niitted on to us also, and not to our 
 
 that the Eternal Word so took our souls only, but our bodies also, since 
 
X. Sacrame7its. 427 
 
 the Divine life : there are avenues by which the energy 
 of Christ's perfect and glorified manhood can penetrate, in- 
 form, affect, transfigure our whole being, bodily and spiritual. 
 His prevalence in the life of the body and the change He 
 works in it, may be very gradual, discerned in incoherent 
 fragments, interrupted by surprising disappointments, ham- 
 pered by limitations which it would be unlike Him now to 
 overbear : but the change is real. The body is not left inert 
 and brutish and uncheered, while the spmt is being carried 
 on from strength to strength, with growing hght and freedom 
 and majesty: it also rises at its Saviour's touch, and finds 
 from Him the earnest of its liberation and advancement. 
 
 The work of grace upon the bodily nature of man may 
 indeed be a matter of which we ought not to think save very 
 humbly and tentatively: it is easy and perilous to over- 
 state or to mis-read the evidence : but there is peril also in 
 ignoring it. The language of our Blessed Lord ; the clear 
 conviction of His apostles ; the intrepid quietude of His 
 martyrs ; the patience of the saints ; their splendid and un- 
 rivalled endurance in His service ; the change that may be 
 marked in the looks and voices and instinctive acts of some 
 who seem to be most nearly His : — here is such guidance for 
 thought and hope as we ought not to dismiss because we 
 cannot make up a theory about it. There are real facts — 
 though they may be fragmentary, and require very careful 
 handling — to warrant us in praying that our sinful bodies 
 may be made clean by His body, as well as that our souls 
 may be washed by His most precious blood. 
 
 It is this truth, with the higher aspirations, the more ven- 
 turous hopes and efforts which it suggests, that the Sacra- 
 mental system of the Church keeps in its due prominence. 
 It is at all events not incongruous to think that the spiritual 
 grace which is conveyed by visible means may pass through 
 
 we become flesh of His flesh, and circling and vivifying our whole na- 
 
 bone of His bone, and He who is ture, and then, through that bread 
 
 wholly life, is imparted to us wholly. which is His flesh, finding an en- 
 
 The Life which He is, spreads around, trance to us individually, penetrating 
 
 first giving its own vitality to that us, soul and body and spirit, and 
 
 sinless flesh which He united indis- irradiating and transforming us into 
 
 solubly with Himself, and in it en- His own light and life.' 
 
428 The Religion of the Inca^niation. 
 
 our spiritual nature to tell upon that which is visible. He 
 who comes spiritually under a visible form may well be be- 
 lieved to work spiritually upon a visible nature. It is not, of 
 course, to be thought for a moment that our bodies can at all 
 after their own manner receive that Food which is wholly 
 spiritual: nor that the visible element in a Sacrament gives to 
 our bodies any hold upon the invisible grace, any power to 
 appropriate to themselves by their own proper energies that 
 which is incorporeal and supra-sensuous. ' Only the soul or 
 spirit of man can take in and feed upon a spiritual nutriment^ : ' 
 it is only (so far as our thoughts can go) through the avenue, 
 by the medium of the faithful soul that the spiritual force of 
 the Sacrament can penetrate to the body. But the fact that 
 the spiritual virtue comes to us under a form of which our 
 bodily senses take cognizance is at least a pledge that the 
 body is not forgotten in the work of sanctification. And 
 it is something more than this : — it is an assurance of that 
 invasion and penetration of the material by the spiritual 
 which is the very ground of all our hope for the redemp- 
 tion of the body. There is in the very nature of a Sacra- 
 ment the forecast of some such hope as this : — that He who 
 said of the material bread ' This is My Body,' may, in His 
 own time, through changes which we cannot imagine, take 
 to Himself and lift into the transfiguring realm of spirit our 
 material bodies as well as our souls ; seizing, disclosing, per- 
 fecting capacities which under their present conditions we 
 hardly suspect in them. And, perhaps, yet more than this may 
 be said : for there would seem to be warrant for trusting that, 
 in spite of all hindrance and delay, His word of power even 
 now goes forth towards this work, and in the holy Eucharist 
 has its efficacy throughout our whole nature. It is the thought 
 to which Hooker points in words of endless import : ' there 
 ensueth a kind of transubstantiation in us, a true change both 
 of soul and body, an alteration from death to life ; ' words 
 which rest on those of S. L-enaeus : ' As bread from the earth 
 receiving the invocation of God is no longer common bread 
 but the Eucharist, consisting of two things, an earthly and a 
 
 * J. B. Mozley, Lectures and other Theological Papers, p. 204. 
 
X. Sacraments. 429 
 
 heavenly ; so our bodies also receiving the Eucharist are no 
 longer corruptible, having the hope of the Resurrection ^.' 
 Alike in us and in the Sacrament the powers of the world to 
 come invade the present, and already move towards the victory 
 which shall be hereafter. 
 
 (3) And thus, in the third place, the ministry of Sacraments is 
 a perpetual prophecy of the glory that shall be revealed in us ; 
 the glory that shall pervade and transfigure our whole being. 
 ' Till He come ; ' ' until His coming again ; ' that note of ex- 
 pectancy, of looking towards the east and watching for the 
 return of a great light, discloses a deep truth about the Christian 
 Sacraments. They sanction and confirm, as ever-present wit- 
 nesses of a Divine assent, certain thoughts which will not let 
 men rest in any low contentment with the things of time — 
 with the approval, the success, the gratification, or the systems 
 of this world. They declare with a perpetual insistance the 
 mysteriousness of our present being : they have a certain 
 fellowship with those strange flashes and pulsations we have 
 felt of a life which seems astray and alien here, which yet' 
 somehow suggests the thought that could we commit ourselves 
 wholly to its guidance, could we be replenished with its 
 power, we should not walk in darkness, but rather, even in 
 this world, be as the children of fight : — and so they take the side 
 of faith and patience against the attractions of completeness and 
 security and achievement and repose. For they ofier to guide 
 into the way of peace, to welcome into an ordered, hallowed, 
 course of loving service and of steady growth, those passing 
 thrills of an intenser fife, which if they be forgotten, denied, 
 misunderstood, or surrendered to the abuse of wilfulness and 
 vanity, may so subtly and terribly be unto us an occasion of 
 falling. 
 
 It is given sometimes to a poet to sink a shaft, as it were, 
 into the very depths of the inner life : to penetrate its secret 
 treasuries, and to return, Prometheus-like, with a gift of fire 
 and of light to men. The venturesome words that record such 
 a moment of penetration and insight never lose their power : 
 they seem to have caught something of the everlasting fresh- 
 
 ^ Hooker V. Ixvii. ii ; S. Irenaeus iv. i8. 
 
430 The Religiojt of the Incarnation. 
 
 ness of that world of which they speak : and one man after 
 another may find in them, at some time of need or gladness 
 or awakening, the utterance of thoughts which else he might 
 have been too shy or too faint-hearted to acknowledge even to 
 himself. There is such a splendid venture of courage for the 
 truth's sake in those lines of Wordsworth which surely no 
 familiarity can deprive of their claim to reverence and grati- 
 tude ; the lines in which he tells his thankfulness, 
 
 For those obstinate questionings 
 
 Of sense and outward things, 
 
 Fallings from us, vanishings ; 
 
 Blank misgivings of a creature 
 Moving about in worlds not realized, 
 High instincts before which our mortal nature 
 Did tremble like a guilty thing surprized : 
 
 Those first affections. 
 
 Those shadowy recollections. 
 
 Which, be they what they may, 
 Ai-e yet the fountain-light of all our day, 
 Ai"e yet a master-light of all our seeing ; 
 
 Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 
 Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
 Of the eternal Silence. 
 
 It may be doubted whether any life is left wholly un- 
 visited by some misgiving, some dim, faltering instinct, some 
 pulse of hope or sorrow, which is akin to that which these 
 words disclose ; and the moments of such visitation are the 
 supreme opportunities of a human soul, the crises of its 
 tragedy. Then the things that belong to its peace are being 
 profiered to it ; then the Sibyl stands before it with the trea- 
 sures of unimagined wisdom. We rise, and we live and grow 
 and see by the right understanding and employment of such 
 moments ; by the fresh acts of self-committal which they 
 render possible: and in all the infinite pathos of this world 
 there is no misery comparable with this — that they should 
 cease to trouble us. Whatever a man may beheve or dis- 
 believe, he will do well to trust these moments when they 
 come : and, perhaps, if he has grace to know and use them, he 
 may be nearer to the kingdom of God than he at all suspects. 
 But Christianity does not leave such ' shoots of everlasting- 
 ness ' wholly unexplained or unprovided for. 
 
X. Sacraments. 431 
 
 They are in truth the fountain light of all our seeing, 
 for they are the disclosure, the assertion, the stepping forward 
 of His presence who alone sustains our life, our thought, our 
 love. And, being this, they are therefore also the tokens, the 
 emerging witness of a work that has begun in us, a life that 
 is astir, a process of change that may be carried foi*ward to an 
 issue which, even faintly surmised, might make all other 
 desire die away in us. 
 
 That we should be perfectly set free from sin ; that God 
 should so dwell in us and pervade our whole being that no 
 part should lag behind the other ; that whatsoever weakness or 
 reluctance or coarseness may have clung about the body here 
 should utterly pass away, being driven back by the victorious 
 onset of the Spu-it of God, claiming us wholly, body, soul, and 
 spirit for His own; that whatsoever pure and true delight 
 has here engaged us should be found, faultless and unwearied, 
 in that energy which shall be at once our work and our rest 
 for ever ; — this is how Christianity represents to us the end 
 of our development : and if indeed the powers which are to 
 achieve so vast a change are already setting about their work 
 in us, it is not strange that we should be disturbed now and 
 then with some suspicion of it. We may understand alike 
 the severity of external discipline, and the sharp disturbance 
 and upheaval of anything like complacency, in a nature that 
 is being here led on towards so splendid and inconceivable a 
 transfiguration. 
 
 But Christianity does not merely declare to us the origin 
 and meaning of these strange invasions of our ordinary life ; 
 these emergings, as it were, of that which is behind our normal 
 activity, when the light, the strength, the love in which alone 
 we live seems to push aside the curtain on which the back- 
 ground of our daily life is painted, and to appear unveiled 
 among the things of time. He who telleth the number of the 
 stars and calleth them all by their names, He who sendeth the 
 springs into the valleys, and sweetly and mightily ordereth all 
 things ; He would not have these moments of intenser life, of 
 keener consciousness, of quicker and more excellent growth, to 
 be precarious and unaccountable, to be abrupt and arbitrary 
 
432 The Religio7i of the Incarnation. 
 
 as the rush of the meteor which is gone before the eye has 
 clearly seen it, or could use its light. They come from Him ; 
 they are the moments in which He makes His power to be 
 known ; in which His hand is felt, and His voice pervades the 
 soul ; the moments when His presence advances, as it were, 
 and bends over us, and we know that it is He, Himself. And 
 must we merely wait in blank and idle helplessness for that 
 which we so greatly need ; for that which is our only source 
 of strength and growth % Must we wait, flagging and fruitless, 
 with just a vague hope that the quickening presence may 
 chance to visit us again, lighting on us with arbitrary bene- 
 ficence, as the insect lights upon the plant, that it may bring 
 forth fruit in due season? Must we wonder through days 
 and months, yes, and through years perhaps of dim and de- 
 solate bewilderment, whether it was a real presence that came 
 to us ; with nothing but the fading memory of an individual 
 and unconfirmed impression to sustain our hope, to keep the 
 door against the gathering forces of doubt and worldliness 
 and despair? Must we find our way as best we can, by 
 guidance given long ago, imperfectly realized even then, and 
 more and more hazily remembered, more drearily inadequate 
 as time goes on, and the path grows rougher and less clear ? 
 Is the greatest efibrt to be demanded of us just when our 
 strength is least and our light lowest ^ ? Surely it is not His 
 way to be thus arbitrary in compassion, thus desultory and 
 precarious in shewing mercy. Surely He would not have 
 us stray and faint and suffei- thus. No, His compassions fail 
 not ; and, with the orderliness of a father's love. He has made 
 us sure of all we need ; and the historic Church and the 
 triumphs of His saints declare that He is true. He has, 
 with the certainty of His own unchanging word, promised 
 that the unseen gift, which is the power of saintliness in sinful 
 man, shall be given to all faithful, humble souls by ordered 
 means through appointed acts. We need not vaguely hope 
 that we may somehow receive His grace ; for He has told us 
 where and how we are to find it, and what are the conditions 
 of its unhindered entrance into our souls. We need not be 
 
 * Cf. A. Knox, ii. 234-6. 
 
X. Sacraments. 433 
 
 always going back to wonder whether our sins have been 
 forgiven, or laboriously stii-ring up the glow of a past con- 
 viction ; for there is a ministry which He has empowered to 
 convey to us that cleansing glory which is ever ready to 
 transfigure penitence into peace and thanksgiving. We need 
 not live an utterly unequal life, stumbling to and fro be- 
 tween our ideal and our caricature ^ ; for He has prepared 
 for us a way which leads from strength to strength ; and we 
 know where He is ready to meet us and to replenish us with 
 life and light. There is a glory that shall be revealed in us ; 
 and here on earth Ave may so draw near and take it to our- 
 selves that its quiet incoming tide may more and more per- 
 vade our being ; with radiance ever steadier and more trans- 
 forming ; till, in this world and beyond it, He has made a 
 perfect w^ork : till Ave are wholly ruled and gladdened by His 
 presence, and wholly wrought into His image. For not by vague 
 waves of feeling or by moments of experience which admit 
 no certain measure, no unvarying test, no objective verification, 
 but by an actual change, a cleansing and renewal of our man- 
 hood, a transformation which we can mark in human lives 
 and human faces, or trace in that strange trait of saintliness 
 which Christianity has wrought into the rough fabric of 
 human history, may the reality of Sacramental grace be known 
 on earth ; known clearly enough, at all events, to make us 
 hopeful about its perfect work in those who shall hereafter 
 be presented faultless in body, soul and spirit before the throne 
 of God. 
 
 * Cf. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, p. 182. 
 
 Ff 
 
n 
 
XI. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS. 
 
 W. J. H. CAMPION. 
 
 F f 2 
 
XI. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS. 
 
 The aim of this essay is to investigate some of the relations 
 of Christianity to human society, and to point out some of 
 the main lines of influence which the Christian Church brings 
 to bear on the organized centres of social life. 
 
 We are met at the outset by two widely-differing con- 
 ceptions of the mode and direction in which Christianity acts 
 as a regenerating influence on the life of mankind. On the 
 one side, Christianity is identified with civilization, and the 
 function of the Church is regarded as simply the gathering up, 
 from age to age, of the higher aspirations of mankind : her 
 call is to enter into, to sympathize with, and to perpetuate 
 whatever is pure, noble, and of good report, in laws and insti- 
 tutions, in art, music, and poetry, in industry and commerce, 
 as well as in the moral and religious usages and beliefs of 
 mankind. Christianity is thus not a higher order, standing 
 over against and correcting a lower, but is itself the product 
 or rather the natural outgrowth of the progi-essive moral con- 
 sciousness of mankind. The value of this mode of thought is 
 in emphasizing the sacredness of secular interests and duties, 
 and in its protest against dividing the field of conscience, and 
 assigning to the one part a greater sanctity than to the other. 
 ' As our salvation depends as certainly upon our behaviour in 
 things relating to civil life, as in things relating to the service 
 of God, it follows that they are both equally matters of 
 conscience and salvation^.' Its weakness lies in its not 
 
 ^ Law, Third letter to the Bishop of Bangor, second edition, 1762, p. 66. 
 
438 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 sufficiently recognising one decisive fact of human nature, the 
 fact of sin. No one, as it seems to us, looking at human 
 nature, in himself or others, with clear, open, unprejudiced 
 eyes, can doubt the existence of sin, its corrupting influence 
 on the whole nature, and yet its fundamental unnaturalness. 
 But if states and societies are as the individuals who compose 
 them, then any theory of society must rest on a theory of 
 man ; and the theory of man is imperfect unless it recognises 
 the fact of sin. 
 
 On the other hand, the recoil from secularism, or the over- 
 whelming sense of the power and destructiveness of sin in the 
 lives of men and of societies, leads others to draw sharp the 
 distinction between things sacred and things secular. The 
 order of things, it is said, of which the Incarnation is the 
 starting-point, is admittedly higher than that secular order 
 which existed before it, and which even now surrounds it as 
 darkness encompasses light. Let us put on one side political 
 life, local and national interests, all that sphere of mixed 
 social relations, which is so imperfect, so full of fierce passions, 
 of strife, envy, and ambition, so productive of distractions and 
 entanglements. Let us concentrate our own thoughts on sin, 
 and devote our own lives to its remedy. Let us at least 
 keep our own hands clean, and use for our own discipline 
 that narrower sphere which is sufficient. No doubt indi- 
 viduals will find their vocation in some such attitude as this : 
 and for some it may be wise to abstain from political and 
 social interests, in order thus to strengthen their influence in 
 other directions. But we are not now considering the call of 
 individual Christians, but the attitude of the Chi-istian Church 
 as a whole : and it would be easy to accumulate references to 
 shew that the leading minds of Chiistendom have declined to 
 recognise, except in cases of special vocation, as the duty of 
 Christians, the abdication of responsibility for the problems, 
 the entanglements, the more or less secular issues of the 
 ordinary social life of mankind. Chi'istianity, in the words of 
 a modern wi'iter, has both to deliver humanity from its 
 limitations, and to bring it to a true knowledge of itself ^ 
 
 \ Martensen, Christian Ethics, special part, second division, Eng. Trausl. p. 9S. 
 
 ^ 
 
XI. Christianity and Politics. 439 
 
 These two conceptions of the relation of the Christian 
 society to the issues and interests of the life amid which it 
 moves, correspond to two aspects of the Incarnation, which 
 the deepest Christian thought holds in solution. On the one 
 side, the human life of the Word of God may be regarded as 
 a fulfilment, the restoration of an order, marred, indeed, and 
 broken, but never completely lost, the binding together of all 
 truth, all goodness, all beauty, into one perfect life ; on the 
 other, it is a reversal, the beginning of a new order, the 
 undoing of a great wrong which has eaten deep into human 
 nature, the lifting up of mankind out of the helpless slavery 
 of sin into the freedom of righteousness. These two aspects 
 of the Incarnation are not contradictory but complementary. 
 However difficult it may be for us to find their unity in 
 thought, they had their unity in a life. 
 
 In the same way, the problem with which Christianity has 
 to deal in its relations to human society has two sides. It 
 cannot hold itself aloof from the great currents and move- 
 ments of that ever-flowing and ebbing human life, in which it 
 shares, which it has to redeem, to purify, and to quicken. 
 ' In the great sea of human society, part of it, yet distinguish- 
 able from it, is the stream of the existence of the Church^.' 
 And yet it has to maintain, as a debt it owes to future 
 generations as well as the present, the purity of its own moral 
 standard, the independence of its own deepest life. 
 
 To spiritualize life without ceasing to be spiritual, to 
 maintain a high morality while at the same time inter- 
 penetrating a non-Christian or very imperfectly Christianized 
 society with its own moral habits and manners, is a task 
 which presupposes great cohesion and tenacity on the part of 
 the Christian Church. And it is for that reason that in 
 speaking of the Church we shall have mainly in view that 
 solid, highly articulated, permanent core of Christendom^, 
 which, however broken into fragments, and weakened by its 
 own divisions, maintains a clearly-marked type, on the side 
 of doctrine in its creeds and sacred writings, on the side of 
 
 1 Church, Oxford House Papers, ^ Holland, Creed and Character, first 
 
 No. xvii, The Christian Church, p. lo. edition, 1887, p. 156. 
 
440 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 worship in its sacraments and traditional liturgies, on the side 
 of organization in its ministry, as well as holding the life of 
 Christ its standard of perfect living. Those Christian bodies 
 which float, more or less closely knit together, around the 
 central core of the Church, have often rendered great services 
 in advancing on special points the standard of social and 
 personal morality, and they are more flexible, and able rapidly 
 to throw themselves into new crusades ; but it may well be 
 doubted if their work could have been done at all without the 
 more rigid and stable body behind them, with its slow move- 
 ments, but greater Catholicity of aim and sympathy; and 
 certainly it would in the long run have been better done, if, 
 hke the great monastic bodies, they had remained as distinct 
 organizations within the Church. 
 
 What, then, is the attitude of the Church towards human 
 society, and especially towards human society as gathered up 
 and concentrated in States'? What duties does it recognise 
 towards nations, towards human society as a whole % 
 
 I. There is a certain order of debated questions, on which 
 it cannot be said that the Christian Church is pledged to one 
 side or the other — she leaves them open. Individual Christians 
 take one side or the other. The Christian society recognises 
 that the differences are due to diversities of temperament and 
 national character, and to the varying conditions under which 
 human societies live, and therefore that they may be best left 
 to human experience to solve. 
 
 In this class of questions would come the problem debated 
 since the time of Herodotus, but to which no general answer 
 is really possible, Wliat is the best form of government ? On 
 this problem the Church is, so to speak, frankly opportunist. 
 Here we may quote the view of S. Augustine, as stated in 
 the Be Civitate Dei ^ : ' The Heavenly City, in its wanderings 
 on earth, summons its citizens from among all nations .... 
 being itself indifferent to whatever differences there may be 
 in the customs, laws, and institutions by which earthly peace 
 is sought after or preserved, not rescinding or destroying any 
 of them, but rather keeping and following after them as 
 
XI. Christianity and Politics. 441 
 
 different means adopted by different races for obtaining the 
 one common end of earthly peace, provided only they are no 
 obstacle to the religion by which men are taught the worship 
 of the one suj)reme and true God.' In the same spirit, in his 
 dialogue Be libero Ao-hitrio'^, he dwells on the mutable 
 character of human law. That law is temporal, which, 
 ' though just, may yet be justly changed from time to time,' 
 i.e. as the conditions change. Thus, a Democracy is best 
 adapted to a grave and temperate people, public-spirited and 
 willing to make sacrifices for the common good ; while it is 
 better for a more corrupt, more easily flattered people, greedy 
 of private gain, to be under an Aristocracy or a Monarchy. 
 Or if we wish for a more modern statement of the traditional 
 view of the Christian Church, we shall find it in an encyclical 
 letter^ of Leo XIII : ' The right of sovereignty in itself is not 
 necessarily united with any particular form of government: 
 it can rightly assume, now one form, now another, provided 
 only that each of these forms does in very deed secure useful 
 results and the common good.' It will be noticed that two 
 qualifications are introduced, the one by S. Augustine, the 
 other by Pope Leo, limiting their acceptance of all forms of 
 government. It is possible for Christian citizens to take an 
 active part in every de facto government which ( i ) does not 
 hinder the free and peaceable practice of the Christian re- 
 ligion, and (2) whose real aim is the common good, and which 
 does, in fact, work for the advantage of its subjects. Not all 
 governments, even in the nineteenth century, satisfy these 
 tests. 
 
 In the same way, there have been the widest differences 
 between Christian thinkers on the most important questions, 
 in which autocratic and democratic leanings shew themselves, 
 such, for instance, as that of the origin of sovereignty, i. e. of 
 that rule of man over man, which is the foundation of civil 
 society. The view indicated, though not worked out by 
 S. Augustine^, that the rule of man over man had its origin 
 in the Fall, and was therefore part of the secondary, not the 
 primary condition of mankind, is used by Gregory VII as 
 
 ' i. 6. '^ Immoiiale Dei. ^ Aug. De Civ. Dei, xix. 14, 15. 
 
442 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 a weapon of assault on the temporal power, by Bossuet as 
 a safe ground on which to rest the duty of obedience to an 
 absolute Monarchy. The other side is taken by S. Thomas 
 Aquinas. He finds the origin of temporal rule in the social 
 nature of man, accepting and making his own the Aristotelian 
 account of man as by nature a being fitted for a common 
 fife. Thus, in a state of innocence, there would have been no 
 slavery indeed, but government, with its recognition of the 
 differences in ability and knowledge among men, and of the 
 consequent duty incumbent on the wise and experienced of 
 using their faculties for the common good. Political rule 
 would thus be, not a consequence of sin, but a result of 
 man's inherently social nature. 
 
 Differences such as these among those who equally start from 
 fundamentally Christian presuppositions can only be taken 
 to shew that we are wrong in supposing that the Christian 
 Church is bound up with either of the two great political 
 leanings which have appeared in civil communities in all ages 
 of the world, and which have their ground in human nature 
 itself. ' In every country of civilized man, acknowledging 
 the rights of property, and by means of determined bound- 
 aries and common laws, united into one people or nation, the 
 two antagonist powers or opposite interests of the State . . . 
 are those of permanence and of progression i.' The Church re- 
 cognises these diverse powers or interests as natural, and 
 therefore accepts the fact of their existence, without identify- 
 ing herself with either of them. 
 
 11. But it would surely be a mistake to suppose that 
 because the Church is neutral on certain questions of Politics, 
 that therefore she has no direct teaching to give on the vital 
 questions which arise with regard to the organized common 
 life of mankind. In the rebound from the minimizing views 
 of the function of the State, which were associated in England 
 with the Ricardian School of Economics and the philosophic 
 Radicalism of J. S. Mill, men are ready to go all lengths in 
 exalting the position of the State as the moral guide of 
 social life. The tendency is to assign the whole sphere of 
 
 ^ S. T. Coleridge, Church and State, edited by H. N. Coleridge, 1839, p. 24. 
 
XL Christianity and Politics. 443 
 
 public morals to the State, and ' private ' morals to the in- 
 dividual, acting, if he pleases, under the guidance of one or 
 other of the Christian bodies. However much we may welcome 
 the freer recognition of corporate responsibility, and the nobler 
 conception of the State as having a moral end ; yet we cannot 
 help perceiving that certain limitations are, as by a self-acting 
 law, imposed on its moral influence. 
 
 (i) The State has been called the 'armed conscience of the 
 community ^.' Looked at on the moral side, as a guide of the 
 conscience of individuals, its arms are its defect. But that 
 defect is not remediable : it is inevitable. For the State has 
 to deal with various grades of character, responding to a vast 
 complexity of motives, which may be roughly classified under 
 three heads, those of duty, self-interest, fear of punishment. 
 To some ' you ought ' is a sufficient appeal, to others ' you 
 had better,' while to a third class the only effective appeal is 
 'you must,' Now the State in order to perform its most 
 elementary business, that of securing the conditions of an 
 ordered and civilized life, has to deal first of all with those 
 who are only susceptible of the lowest motive, the di-ead of 
 punishment. And in deahng with them, it must of necessity 
 use coercive force ^. But the force-associations which thus 
 grow up around all State-action weaken and enervate its 
 appeal to the higher motives, those of duty and rational self- 
 interest. The very suspicion of compulsion taints the act 
 done from duty. 
 
 Again, there can be little doubt of the vast influence 
 exercised on morals by human law and institutions. It is 
 well known to those who are at all acquainted with the life 
 of the poor in large towns, that in many cases conscience is 
 mainly informed by positive law. But all that human law 
 can do is to secure a minimum of morality ^. No doubt it is 
 true that indirectly positive law can do something more than 
 this, because good citizens will abstain from all actions which, 
 in however remote a degree, are likely to bring them into 
 
 ^ A. C.Bradley, 'Aristotle's Concep- ^ ' Metu coercet,' Aug. Be Uh. Arb. 
 
 tion of the State,' in Hellenica, 1880, i. 15. 
 p. 243. ^ Compare Aug. De lib. Arh. i. 5. 
 
444 ^'^^^ Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 collision with the law. But in the main it is true to say that 
 what law can secure is the observance on pain of punishment 
 of a minimum moral standard, which itself shifts with the 
 public opinion of society, rising as it rises, falling as it falls. 
 
 Certainly the State is sacred : it is ' of God ' : it is no ne- 
 cessary evil : but a noble organ of good living. But yet there 
 are these natural limitations to the effective exercise of its 
 functions, as a moral guide. Firstly, it has to use force, 
 and, therefore, its appeal to the higher motive is weakened. 
 Secondly, it can only secure a minimum of morality, shifting 
 with the general morality of the community. 
 
 Now it is exactly at these points that the Church steps in 
 to supplement the moral action of the State, not as one part 
 supplements another part of a single whole, but rather as a 
 higher supplements a lower order. 
 
 It is in its appeal to the higher motives that the State is 
 weak : it is in its appeal to the higher motives that the 
 Church is strong. If there have been times when the Church 
 has allowed herself to claim or to assume temporal power, or 
 without assuming it, to be so closely implicated with the 
 secular authority that Church and State appeared to men as 
 one body interested in and maintaining the existing order, if 
 she has used the weapons of persecution, or handed men over 
 to the secular arm, then has she so far weakened and loosened 
 her own hold on the higher motives which move men to action. 
 She may have become apparently more powerful, but it has 
 always been at the cost, perhaps unperceived at the time, of 
 some sacrifice of her own spirituality, and of the loftiness of 
 that moral appeal in which her true strength lies. ' There is 
 something in the very spirit of the Christian Church which 
 revolts from the application of coercive force ^' 
 
 And so, alongside of the moral minima of the secular law, 
 the Christian Church maintains moral maxima, moral ideals, 
 or rather a moral ideal, ' Be ye therefore perfect, even as your 
 Father which is in heaven is perfect 2.' ' Till we all come 
 unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the 
 
 ' Ai-t. on 'Future Retribution,' Church Quarterly, July, 1888. 
 => S. Matt. V. 48. 
 
XI. Christianity and Politics. 445 
 
 fulness of Christ^.' It is not that the law is undervalued, or 
 contemned, but that Chi-istians are urged to bring their con- 
 duct under principles which will carry them far beyond the 
 mere obedience to law. It is sufficient to quote from the 
 Sermon on the Mount, ' Blessed are the meek . . . Blessed are 
 ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and say all 
 manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake ... I say unto 
 you, that ye resist not evil : but whosoever shall smite thee 
 on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any 
 man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let 
 him have thy cloke also ^.' 
 
 The law and institutions of a people rest upon and give 
 expression to a group of moral principles and ideals : they are 
 not the only realization of those princij^les and ideals, but 
 one ; art and literature would be others ; further, they realize 
 them mainly on the negative side, in the mode of prohibition. 
 As that group of principles and ideals changes, they change, 
 sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. At first 
 sight it seems as if there was no essential difference in this 
 respect between the laws and institutions of a nation, and the 
 manners and institutions of the Christian Church, except that 
 the one gives a more positive and constructive expression to 
 the moral standard of the time than the other. But there is 
 this difference, that the Christian Church has its moral 
 standard in the past, in the life of the Son of Man ; it too 
 recognises change, as age succeeds age, but the new duties are 
 regarded not as new, but as newly brought forth out of an 
 already existing treasure, as the completer manifestation under 
 new conditions of the meaning of the life of Christ. On the 
 threshold of Christian morality there lies that by which all 
 its subsequent stages may be tested, and which is the measure 
 of advance or retrogression. It is this permanent element, 
 preceding the element of change and of development, in 
 Christian morahty, which gives it its authority as against the 
 moral product of one nation or one age. 
 
 It is exactly this authority which has enabled the Church 
 to appeal with such force to duty as precedent to right, and 
 1 Eph. iv. 13. 2 g_ jji.^tt_ y_ -^ jj^ 29, 4c. 
 
446 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 to love as higher than justice. We can best illustrate this 
 steady appeal to higher motives by tracing the steps by 
 which Christian teachers have brought out, one by one, the 
 different aspects of the relations of governors and governed 
 looked at in the light of Christian anthropology and Chris- 
 tian sociology. The first principles governing the attitude of 
 individual Christians towards the various organizations of 
 human society are laid down in the words of Christ, ' Render 
 unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the 
 things that are God's ^.' The command, taken in connection 
 with its context, involves two principles, first, the recogni- 
 tion of the claims of civil society, and, secondly, their limi- 
 tation by a higher order of claims, where they come into 
 conflict with the first. The passage in the Epistle to the 
 Romans 2, in which S. Paul deals with the duties of Christians 
 towards ' the powers that be,' is a commentary on his Master's 
 teaching. It shews the connection of the first of these prin- 
 ciples with the second, by tracing it back to its ground in 
 the will of God. It brings it into relation to love, the central 
 motive of the Christian character. Briefly summarized, the 
 stages of S. Paul's argument are as follows: (i) he shews 
 that all power is of Divine origin : ' there is no power but of 
 God.' Thus those who wield secular power are ministers 
 of God. (2) The administration of earthly rewards and 
 punishments b}^ the secular power makes for good, and for 
 this reason God uses it in His governance of the world. 
 Therefore temporal authority is to be obeyed 'not only for 
 wrath, but also for conscience sake,' i. e. not merely to avoid 
 earthly punishment, but as a duty. (3) This duty may be 
 regarded as one application of the general maxim of justice, 
 ' Render to all their dues.' But (4) all these scattered dues 
 are to a Christian summed up under one vast debt, always in 
 process of payment, but never completely paid. ' Owe no man 
 anything, but to love one another.' ' Love is the fulfilling of 
 the law.' These passages of the New Testament put in the 
 clearest fight the duty of obedience to civil authority. They 
 
 * S. Matt. xxii. 21. 
 
 " Eom. xiii. i-io. Compare S. Peter's teaching in i S. Pet. ii, 13-17. 
 
XI. Christianity a7id Politics. 447 
 
 lay down its theological ground in the derivation of all power 
 from God ; and its moral ground by shewing that such obedience 
 is one form of justice, and justice itself one aspect of love. 
 They thus give to the commands of those wielding authority 
 in human society the firmest sanctions. If on the one side 
 Christianity seems to set up conscience, as the guardian of the 
 things of God, against positive law, it gives on the other a 
 Divine sanction and consecration to the whole order of things 
 connected with the State by shewing its ministerial relation to, 
 its defined place and function in, God's ordering of the world. 
 This was the side of our Lord's saying which needed en- 
 forcing on the Christians of S. Paul's time. The civil 
 authority was the Roman Empire with its overwhelming 
 force and its almost entire externality to Christianity. The 
 danger, then, was the spirit of passionate revolt against the 
 secular power. Men who were filled with the new wine of 
 the Spirit, who were turning the world upside down, found it 
 hard to submit to the decrees of an alien power, wielded by 
 heathen : they pleaded their Ckristian liberty ; they could not 
 understand that such a power was ' ordained of God.' The 
 early Christian Fathers found it sufficient, even when the 
 Roman Empire was gradually becoming Christian, to bring 
 home to consciences the teaching of S. Paul. There was no 
 need then to emphasize in words the other side of our Lord's 
 saying. There was little danger of undue subservience to the 
 civil power being regarded with anything but disapproval: 
 the danger was of men not giving it the obedience which was 
 its due. 'We honour the Emperor,' says TertuUian^, 'so far 
 as we may, and so far as honour is due to him, as the first 
 after God .... as one who has only God for his superior.' 
 'If the Emperor demands tribute,' says Ambrose^, 'we do not 
 refuse it : the lands of the Church pay tribute ; if the Emperor 
 wishes for our lands, he has the power to take them — none of 
 us will resist him .... we render to Caesar what is Caesar's.' 
 S. Augustine, with his Stoical leaning and his Roman sense 
 of order, was little inclined to encourage men to resist, in any 
 case, established powers. ' What matters it under whose rule 
 
 ^ Ad Scap. II. ^ Oraiio in Auxentium cle basiUcis traclendis. 
 
448 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 a man lives who is to die, provided only his rulers do not 
 force him to do impious and unjust things^?' Only in one 
 passage of S. Chrysostom", among the writers of the fii'st four 
 centuries, is a gloss given to S. Paul's words, ' There is no 
 power but of God,' which distinguishes the delegation of 
 power in general from God, and the delegation of power by 
 God to any particular ruler, and so suggests the possibility of 
 a de facto ruler to whom obedience was not due. 
 
 But this attitude of the early Christian teachers was a very 
 different thing from that attitude of the English Caroline 
 divines, which gave so fatal a bent to the teaching of the 
 English Church of the seventeenth century in the sphere 
 which lies on the borderland of Theology and Politics. What 
 the early Fathers taught their Christian followers was that it 
 was their duty to obey in secular matters the powers lawfully 
 set over them. What the English divines taught was the 
 Divine right of princes and the subjects' duty of non-resist- 
 ance. In the great battle which was being fought out in 
 England between arbitrary power and freedom, they threw 
 the whole weight of the English Church on the side of the 
 former. It was a fatal error as a matter of policy, for it was 
 the losing side. But, what is hardly sufficiently realized, it 
 was most untrue to the tradition of the Church, and of the 
 Church in England. 
 
 It was contrary to the tradition of the Church. For after 
 the rise of Christianity to the high places of the world, 
 followed by the break-up of the Roman Empire, and the 
 formation of the mediaeval States, weakly knit together by 
 personal ties, and with uncertain claims on the allegiance of 
 their subjects, two new aspects of the relations of governors 
 and governed had been brought out in Christian teaching. 
 First, stress was laid on the duty of those holding power. 
 Emperors and kings, magistrates and officers, who were 
 Christians, had a claim for guidance and instruction in the 
 exercise of their various functions. The claim was met by 
 
 ^ Aug. Be Civ. Dei, v. 17, but cp. legitimate power. 
 Be bono Conj. 16, for a recognition of * Horn, xxiii. on liom. xiii. 1. 
 
 the possibility of the unjust use of 
 
XI. Christianity and Politics. 449 
 
 shewing them that, whatever the earthly source of authority 
 may be, all just power is of God^ and therefore must be 
 regai-ded, not as a privilege, nor as a personal right, but as 
 a ti'ust to be undertaken for the good of others, and as 
 a ministry for God and man. Thus a government which has 
 for its aim anything else than the common good is, properly 
 speaking, not a government at all. Whether its form is 
 monarchical or not, it is simply a tyranny^. Secondly, the 
 Middle Age theologians supplemented S. Paul's teaching by 
 shewing the possible right of resistance to an unlawful 
 government, or to one that failed to perform its duties. Such 
 right of resistance might arise in two cases : (i) that of unjust 
 acquisition of power, (2) that of its unjust use. Unjust 
 acquisition might take place in two ways : [a) when an un- 
 worthy person acquired power, but by legitimate means : in 
 this case it was the duty of subjects to submit, because the 
 form of power came from God ; (6) when power was acquired 
 by force or fraud : in this case, subjects had the right to depose 
 the ruler, if they had the power, supposing, however, that the 
 illegitimate assumption of power had not been legitimated by 
 subsequent consent. Unjust use might also take place in two 
 ways : {u) when the ruler commanded something contrary to 
 virtue, in which case it was a duty to disobey ; or (6) when he 
 went outside his rights, in which case subjects were not bound 
 to obey, but it was not necessarily their duty to disobey. And 
 so cases might arise in which it was lawful to enfranchise one- 
 self, even from a legitimate power. ' Some who have received 
 power from God, yet if they abuse it, deserve to have it 
 taken from them. Both the one and the other come of 
 GodV 
 
 Nor was the political teaching of the Caroline divines in 
 agreement with the tradition of the Church in England. It is 
 not necessary to go back to the great Archbishops who led, in 
 
 ' Tyrannicide was defended by some the sounder judgment of Aquinas 
 
 of the more extreme opponents of the (Z>e Reg. Princ. I. 6, ' Hoc apostolicae 
 
 temporal power, like .John of Salis- doctrinae non congruit '). 
 
 bury, the secretary of Thomas Becket ^ Thomas Aquinas, Comm. Sent. 
 
 {PoUcratiais yill. 17, 'Tyrannuspravi- XLIV. q. 2 a. 2 ; q. i a. 2. In Comm. 
 
 tatis imago ; plerumque etiam occi- Pol. v. i § 2 he goes so far as to make 
 
 dendus'). But it was condemned by Insurrection in certain cases a duty. 
 
 Gg 
 
450 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 earlier days, the struggle for English freedom. It is sufficient 
 to recur to the teaching of the greatest of English post- 
 Reformation theologians, at once soaked through and through 
 with the spirit of Catholic antiquity, and in complete agree- 
 ment with the Enghsh Reformation settlement. Richard 
 Hooker had no sympathy with that doctrine of Divine right 
 which his mediaeval masters looked upon as a quasi-heretical 
 doctrine^. He found the first origin of government in the 
 consent of the governed, and he anticipates Hobbes and Locke 
 in his account of the ' fu-st original conveyance, when power 
 was derived from the whole into one^.' Further, he points 
 out that the king's power is strictly limited (except in the 
 case of conquest or of special appointment by God), not only 
 by the original compact, but also by after-agreement made 
 with the king's consent or silent allowance^. And men are 
 not bound in conscience to obey such usurpers ' as in the ex- 
 ercise of their power do more than they have been authorized 
 to do*.' But on the other hand, he maintains strongly, as 
 against those who thought that human laws could in no sort 
 touch the conscience, the duty of civil obedience in agreement 
 with the law of God, and the sacredness, the ' Divine institu- 
 tion,' of duly-constituted authority, whether ' God Himself doth 
 deliver, or men by light of nature find out the kind thereof.' 
 
 Thus, the main points which have been brought out by 
 Christian teaching as to the relation of Christian citizens to 
 the civil authority are: (i) first and foremost, the duty of 
 obedience for conscience' sake, a duty which stands on the 
 same level, and is invested with the same sanctions as the 
 most sacred claims ; (2) the duty, in case of the civil authority 
 issuing commands contrary to- virtue or religion, of dis- 
 obedience on the same grounds as those which lead to obedi- 
 ence in the former case ; (3) the duty of those wielding 
 authority to use it for the common good, and so as not to 
 hinder, if they cannot promote, the Christian religion ; (4) the 
 right, which may be said in certain extreme cases to rise 
 
 * Janet, Hlsiovre de la Science politique, ' Ecd. Pol. VIII. ii. ii. 
 
 third edition, 1887, vol. i. p. 330. * Eccl. Pol. VIII. App. No. I. (ed. 
 
 2 Hooker, Eccl. Pol. VIII. ii. 5, 9. Keble.) Cp. I. x. 8. 
 Cp. I. X. 4. 
 
XI. Christianity and Politics. 451 
 
 almost to a duty, of resistance to the arbitrary or unconsti- 
 tutional extension of authority to cases outside its province. 
 
 The same emphasis on higher motives is characteristic of 
 Christian treatment of the questions connected with property. 
 Christianity is certainly not pledged to uphold any particular 
 form of property as such. Whether property had better be 
 held by individuals, or by small groups, as in the case of the 
 primitive Teutonic villages, or of the modern Russian or 
 Indian village communities, or again by the State, as is the 
 proposal of Socialists, is a matter for experience and com- 
 mon sense to decide. But where Christian ethics steps in is, 
 firstly, to shew that property is secondary not primary, 
 a means and not an end. Thus, in so far as Sociahsm looks 
 to the moral regeneration of society by a merely mechanical 
 alteration of the distribution of the products of industry or of 
 the mode of holding property, it has to be reminded that a 
 change of heart and will is the only true starting-point of 
 moral improvement. On the other hand, it cannot be too 
 often asserted that the accumulation of riches is not in itself 
 a good at all. Neither riches nor poverty make men better in 
 themselves. Their effect on character depends on the use 
 made of them, though no doubt the responsibility of those 
 who have property is greater, because they have one instru- 
 ment the more for the purposes of life. And so, secondly, 
 Christianity urges that if there is private property, its true 
 character as a trust shall be recognised, its rights respected 
 and its attendant duties performed. These truths it keeps 
 steadily before men's eyes by the perpetual object-lesson of 
 the life of the early Church of Jerusalem, in which those who 
 had property sold it, and brought the proceeds and laid them 
 at the Apostles' feet, and distribution was made unto every 
 man according to his needs ^, an object-lesson enforced and 
 renewed by the example of the monastic communities, with 
 their vow of voluntary poverty, and their common purse. So 
 strongly did the early Fathers insist on the duty, almost the 
 debt, of the rich to the poor, that isolated passages may 
 be quoted which read like a condemnation of all private 
 
 1 Acts iv. 34, 35. 
 G ec3 
 
452 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 property \ but this was not their real drift. The obligation 
 which they urged was the obligation of charity. 
 
 (2) So far we have considered the way in which Christianity 
 has strengthened and defined on the side of duty, which 
 itself is one form of charity or love, the motives which make 
 men good citizens, good property-holders, and so has supple- 
 mented the moral forces of the State, by raising the common 
 standard of opinion and conviction on which ultimately all 
 possibility of State-action rests. But the word charity is used 
 not only in the wider, but also in a narrower sense, of one 
 special form of love, the love of the strong who stoops to 
 help the weak. 
 
 It is admitted on all hands that charity in this sense has 
 been a mark of the Christian type of character, but the 
 uniqueness of Christian charity has probably been exaggerated. 
 The better Stoics recognised the active service of mankind, and 
 especially of the poor and miserable, as part of the ideal of a 
 perfect life. Their severity was crossed by pity. As Seneca 
 puts it in one pregnant phrase, they held that ' wherever a 
 man is, there is room for doing good^.' And so Stoicism 
 had its alimentationes, or homes for orphan children, its 
 distributions of grain, its provisions for the sick and for 
 strangers ^. Christianity and Stoicism, it may seem, were 
 walking along the same road ; but the difference was this, 
 ' what pagan charity was doing tardily, and as it were with 
 the painful calculation of old age, the Church was doing, 
 almost without thinking about it, in the plenary masterfulness 
 of youth, because it was her very being thus to do ^.' She 
 did it with all the ease and grace of perfect naturalness, not 
 as valuing charity without love, for ' if I bestow all my goods 
 to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but 
 have not love, it profiteth me nothing^,' but because love forth- 
 
 ' Especially in S. Ambrose ; the * Sen. Be vita heata, 24. 
 
 passages are collected in Dubief, Essai ^ Uhlhorn, Christian Charitij in the 
 
 sur les iclees politiques de S. Augustin, Ancient Church, Eng. Transl. 1883, Bk. 
 
 1859, ell. vi. S. Augustine himself I. ch. i. pp. 18-21, 41, 42. 
 
 opposed the obligatory Communism, * Pater, Marius the Epicurean, Vol. 
 
 advocated by Pelagianism ; cp. Ep. II. ch. xxii. p. 127. 
 
 157 (Ed. Bened.) to Hilary, quoted by ^ i Cor. xiii. 3 (R.V.). 
 Dubief. 
 
XI, Christianity and Politics. 453 
 
 with blossomed forth into chanty. 'And the disciples were 
 called Christians first in Antioch. And in these days came 
 prophets from Jerusalem unto Antioch. And there stood up 
 one of them named Agabus, and signified by the spirit that 
 there should be great dearth throughout all the world . . . 
 Then the disciples, every man according to his ability, deter- 
 mined to send relief unto the brethren which dwelt in Judsea^.' 
 And so it became the recognised and traditional duty of the 
 Church to maintain the cause of the weak against the strong, 
 of the poor against the rich, of the oppressed against the 
 oppressors. The Bishops of the fourth and fifth centuries 
 exercised 'a kind of religious tribunate^.' In the Middle 
 Ages, the Church urged on those in public and private 
 stations the duties of charity, pity, humanity. The author 
 of the latter part of the Be Regmi'me Principum^ ascribed 
 to S. Thomas Aquinas lays down as one of the chief duties 
 of a king, the care of the weak and the succour of the 
 miserable. Nor did the Church in England in pre-Reforma- 
 tion times fail in her duty in this respect. She pleaded 
 for the manumission or at least the humane usage of the 
 serfs. She undertook through her monasteries the relief 
 of the poor. Her prohibition of usury, however mistaken it 
 may seem to us, was a real protection to debtors against one 
 of the worst forms of tyranny, that of the unscrupulous 
 creditor. Since the Reformation her record has not been so 
 clean. The shock of the Reformation left her weak. The 
 traditional sanctions of her authority were shaken. In the 
 long struggle of the seventeenth century her close association 
 with the Stuart cause left her powerless to touch the stronger 
 half of the nation. She was not independent enough to act 
 as arbiter, and in committing herself without reserve to oppo- 
 sition to the national claim for freedom she was untrue to 
 her earlier and better traditions. At the same time allow- 
 ance must be made for the licence, the disorder, and the 
 recklessness with which the claims of hberty were associated, 
 and for the identification of the popular party with views of 
 
 ^ Acts xi. 26-29 ; cp. also Acts iv. ^ Dubief, p. ii. 
 
 34i 35> quoted above, ^ II. 15. 
 
454 ^'^^^ Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 religion, which, whatever else may be said for them, are not 
 those of the Church. The leading churchmen believed that 
 its triumph meant the disappearance of that historical Church, 
 w^hich they rightly regarded as the only effective safeguard of 
 EngHsh Christianity. After the Restoration the Church was 
 stronger, and the increase of strength shews itself on the one 
 side in greater independence of the Crown, and on the other 
 in the outburst of numerous religious and charitable societies 
 and foundations. Queen Anne's Bounty is an instance of the 
 charity, if it be not rather the justice, of one distinguished 
 daughter of the Church. The ' Religious Societies ' which in 
 a quiet and unassuming way were a great influence in 
 social life, had among their objects the visiting and relief of 
 the poor, the apprenticing of the ybung, the maintenance of 
 poor scholars at the University. Charity schools were estab- 
 lished throughout the country : hospitals and parochial libraries 
 founded, while societies hke the Society for the Propagation of 
 the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and the Society for Promoting 
 Christian Knowledge date back to the last years of the seven- 
 teenth and the first of the eighteenth centuries ^. Then as the 
 Georgian period begins, all this vigorous life seems for a long 
 period to die down, or only to find vent in the great Wesleyan 
 movement which, beginning within the Church, passes out 
 beyond it, and ultimately becomes stereotyped in more or less 
 pronounced separation from her communion. It was the 
 policy of the ruling Whig oligarchy to keep down the Church, 
 and they succeeded — to the grave loss of English morahty. 
 If in some degree the Church in England at the present time 
 is speaking with firmer accent on questions of personal and 
 class morality, and giving more effective witness against the 
 luxury and neglect of their work-people, which are the be- 
 setting sins of the great English manufacturing classes, it is 
 due partly to the revival in England of the true idea of the 
 Church as a great spiritual society, and partly to the fact that 
 English statesmen, from sheer inabihty owing to the conditions 
 of political fife to do otherwise, have left her more free to 
 manage her ow^n business and to develop her mission to 
 ' Overton, Life in the English Church, 1660-1714, Ch. v. 
 
XI. Christianity and Politics. 455 
 
 the English people in accordance with the laws and aspirations 
 of her own inner hfe. 
 
 It is especially necessary in a great industrial society such 
 as that of modern England that the Christian law of self- 
 sacrifice, which crosses and modifies the purely competitive 
 tendency leading each individual to seek his own interest 
 and that of his family, should be strongly and effectively 
 presented. No doubt it is true that the increased knowledge 
 of the structure and laws of social life which we possess, have 
 made charity more difficult than in the Middle Ages : they 
 have not made it less necessary, or a less essential feature of 
 the Christian character. And so, in a democratic age, the 
 protection of the weak and the oppressed will take a diflferent 
 colour. Whether supreme control is in the hands of one or 
 many, it may be used tyrannically. And the most effective 
 exercise of the tribunate of the Church will lie in guarding 
 the rights of conscience and the great national interest of 
 religion against hasty and unfair pressure. And this brings us 
 to our next point. 
 
 (3) The drift of the argument has been to shew the incom- 
 pleteness and inevitable limitations of the State, considered 
 as a moral guide of the social life of mankind. But that 
 incompleteness rises to its maximum, those Hmitations press 
 most closely when we pass from morahty to religion. If 
 it is the highest duty of the State to maintain true and 
 vital rehgion^, it is a duty which of itself it is altogether 
 incompetent to perform. If the experience of the Middle 
 Ages shewed conclusively that the subordination of the State 
 to the Church did not tend either to good government, or to 
 the maintenance, pure and undefiled, of the Christian religion, 
 the experience of English post-Reformation history has as 
 conclusively shewn that the subordination of the Church to 
 the State leads on the one hand to the secularization of the 
 Church, and on the other to a grave danger to national life, 
 through the loss of a spiritual authority strong enough, as well 
 
 1 Hooker, Ecd. Pol. VIII. i. 4. In for. And of things spiritual, the 
 all commonwealths, things spiritual chiefest is religion. Cp. V. i. 2. 
 ought above temporal to be provided 
 
456 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 as vigilant and independent enough, to reprove social sins and 
 to call to account large and influential classes. The conditions 
 under which the Tudor idea of a Christian commonwealth 
 was possible have passed away, and there seem to remain two 
 possible conclusions from the premises. 
 
 The first is that it is expedient in the interests of both that 
 Church and State should be separate from one another, as e. g. 
 in America, and left free to develop, each on its own lines, 
 their respective missions in the national service — ' a free 
 Church in a free State.' The current of opinion in England 
 in favour of disestablishment, undoubtedly a strong, though 
 probably not at the present time an increasing one, is 
 fed from many smaller streams. There are Agnostics who 
 beheve that religion is the enemy of progress, and that 
 Christianity especially shackles free thought, and hinders the 
 advance of social reformation, and to whom therefore it seems 
 a clear duty to undermine by every means open to them the 
 hold of Christianity on the centres of social and intellectual 
 life, on schools and universities, families and states. They 
 favour disestablishment as one means to this end. Two 
 principal causes seem to move those who are primarily states- 
 men in the direction of disestablishment. One is the con- 
 ception of the State as the great controlling and guiding 
 organization of human life ^5 supreme over all partial societies 
 and voluntary associations formed to guard parts or sides of 
 life, and the attempt to mould national life by this guiding 
 idea and its logical consequences. This attempt is encouraged 
 by the extreme simphcity of the English Constitution in its 
 actual working, and by the legally unlimited power of 
 Parliament^. The other is their practical experience that in 
 view of the divided condition of English Christianity, the 
 most stubborn and intractable difficulties in legislation arise 
 
 ^ We have already shewn reasons sovereignty means neither more nor 
 
 for thinking that though no doubt the less than this, namely, that Parlia- 
 
 State has a great co-ordinating and ment thus defined has, under the 
 
 regulative function in regard to English Constitution, the right to 
 
 human life, it is not fitted for the make or unmake any law whatever ; 
 
 part of the moral guide of mankind. and, further, that no person or body is 
 
 ^ Dicey, Law of the Constitution, recognised by the law of England as 
 
 second edition, 1886, lecture ii. p. 36, having a right to override or set aside 
 
 ' The principle of Parliamentary the legislation of Parliament.' 
 
XI. Christianity and Politics. 457 
 
 from, or are aggravated by, religious differences. They sup- 
 pose that these would be lessened if the State took the 
 position of impartial arbiter between rival denominations. 
 Among Nonconformists there are no doubt some who, look- 
 ing at the Church as the natural rival of their own society, 
 think to weaken her by disestablishment, but there are also 
 many who believe that disestablishment would be a gain to 
 English religion, and that the life of the Church would be 
 more real, more pure, more governed by the highest motives, 
 if she were freed from all direct connection with the State. 
 Lastly, there is no doubt that the idea of the return to the 
 looser relations between Church and State which prevailed in 
 the earliest Christian centuries, has a great attraction for a 
 considerable body of churchmen. They would perhaps have 
 been willing enough to accept the royal supremacy under a 
 rehgious sovereign in thorough harmony with the beliefs and 
 modes of working of the Church, but the revolution by which 
 the House of Commons has risen to supreme power in 
 England, has given it, not in the theory, but in the actual 
 working of the constitution, the ultimate control over matters 
 ecclesiastical as well as civil, and they hold that by stifling 
 the free utterance of the voice of the Church the House of 
 Commons is doing an injury to religion compared to which 
 disestablishment would be a lesser evil. 
 
 On the other hand, if we look beyond our own country, we 
 have the opinion of the venerable Dr. Dollinger, reported by 
 Dr. Liddon, that the disestablishment of the Church in England 
 would be an injury to the cause of religion throughout Europe. 
 And so weighty an opinion may well make us carefully scru- 
 tinize those difiiculties and tendencies which make for dis- 
 establishment. It is no doubt true that from one point of 
 view the idea of the Church as a great spiritual society seems 
 to require her entire freedom to control her own development, 
 and therefore the absence of all formal connection with the State. 
 But there is nothing more deeply illogical and irrational, in 
 any sense of logic in which it is near to life and therefore true, 
 than the attempt to solve a great problem, spiritual, moral, 
 political, social, by neglecting all its factors but one, even if it 
 
458 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 be the most important one. Nor does it follow that, because 
 we recognise that in a certain condition of things, more harm 
 than good will be done by a particular application of a truth 
 which we accept, therefore we have ceased to hold that truth. 
 It only shews that our ideal is complex. 
 
 And so from another point of view the most perfect order- 
 ing of things would seem to be one in which Church and 
 State were two parts of one whole, recognising one another's 
 functions and limits, and mutually supporting one another. 
 Thus religion would be put in its true place as at once the 
 foundation and the coping stone of national life. And the 
 State with all its administration would be given a distinctly 
 Christian character. The difficulty in England is to maintain 
 this point of view in connection with the increasingly non- 
 religious (not necessarily anti-religious) colouring of the State, 
 and of the fierce struggles of party government which destroy 
 the reverence which might otherwise attach to the State and its 
 organs. As the State has become increasingly lay, its moral 
 weight has sunk, its hold on consciences become less. But 
 the truth remains that religion is an element in the highest 
 national life. 'A national Church alone can consecrate the 
 whole life of a people '.' And a national Church can only 
 mean an estabhshed Church, and a Church which either has 
 great inherited wealth of its own, or is supported in part by 
 national funds. ' Of all parts of this subject,' says Mr. Glad- 
 stone ", ' probabl}^ none have been so thoroughly wrought out 
 as the insufficiency of the voluntary principle.' It is in- 
 sufficient (i.e. for maintaining national religion), first, because 
 after a certain level of moral deterioration has been reached 
 by individuals or masses of people, the demand for religion is 
 least where the want is greatest ; and secondly, because in 
 consequence of the structure of social life there are always 
 large classes of the community who, while just provided 
 with the bare necessaries of life, have not sufficient means 
 to enable them to sustain the expense of the organs of the 
 higher fife in any form. We recognise this in the case of 
 
 ^ Westeott, Social Aspects of Chris- '^ The State in its relations ivith the 
 
 iianity, ch. v. p. 76. Church, p. 41. 
 
XI. Christianity and Politics. 459 
 
 education ; we can hardly refuse to recognise it in the case of 
 rehgion. 
 
 For these reasons we are thrown back on the second possible 
 conclusion from the data, viz. that it is desirable that there 
 should be some definite and permanent connection between 
 Church and State, but not such connection as will either sub- 
 ordinate the State to the Church or the Church to the State. 
 And such a result would seem to be best attainable by some 
 such system of relations as that between the Established 
 Church and the State in Scotland, or the Roman Catholic 
 Church and the State in France. Thus in Scotland, on the 
 critical point of jurisdiction, the position is this. The Church 
 Courts are final : there is no appeal to a Civil Court except on 
 the ground of excess of jurisdiction. And the judgment of 
 the Church Courts, so far as it involves civil consequences, 
 may be enforced by application to the Civil Courts ^. In 
 France we have to distinguish the relations of Church and 
 State as constitutionally defined from those relations in their 
 actual working. No constitutional relations, however admir- 
 able, can work when the State constantly encroaches, and 
 where its whole attitude is one of hostility to the'Church. In 
 theory, however, the position in France is, except on one point, 
 much the same as in Scotland. There is a complete system of 
 ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the Eoman Catholic Church based 
 on the Canon Law and administered by the bishops acting 
 as judges. From their decisions there is no appeal to the Civil 
 Courts except on the ground of abuse (appel d'abus). On the 
 other hand, the Ecclesiastical Courts have no coercive juris- 
 
 * Report of the Ecclesiastical Courts Com- the Civil Court entertain an appeal 
 
 mission, Vol. II. p. 6oi. Answers from a judgment of an Ecclesiastical 
 
 to questions, — Scotland, Established Court on a question of doctrine, or 
 
 Church. enter on an examination of the sound- 
 
 ' No appeal lies to a Civil Court in ness of such a judgment before en- 
 matters of discipline or on the ground forcing its civil consequences, 
 of excess of punishment. But if 'Any questions which have arisen on 
 under the form of discipline the points of ritual .... have hitherto 
 Church Courts were to inflict Church been decided exclusively by the Church 
 censures(invohdngcivil consequences) Courts.' (A qualifying sentence follows 
 on a minister for e. g. obeying the law as to possible extreme cases justifying, 
 of the land, a question .... might on the failure to obtain redress from 
 be brought before the Civil Court on the General Assembly, an appeal to the 
 the ground of excess of jurisdiction. Civil Court.) 
 It is believed that in no case would 
 
460 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 diction, nor are their sentences carried out by the Civil 
 Courts^. They bind, therefore, only in foro conscientiae and 
 this is found sufficient. There is one point worthy of special 
 notice in the French system, that while the relations of the 
 State to the Roman Catholic (once the Gallican) Church are 
 regulated by a special Concordat, two leading Protestant bodies, 
 the French Reformed Church, and the Church of the Augsburg 
 Confession, as well as the Jewish body, are also endowed. 
 Alongside of a system by which the Church is established 
 there is a concurrent endowment of other Christian and even 
 non-Christian denominations. 
 
 In Scotland the relations of Church and State rest on the 
 Act of Union, in France on the Concordat made by Napoleon 
 with the Pope in 180 1, In England there is no definite 
 formulated agreement ; and any such agreement would be 
 entirely contrary to the English genius. But in a deeper 
 sense, there is a contract, which is the product of 1200 years 
 of history, of which the terms vary from generation to gene- 
 ration, and which is commended by each age to the forbear- 
 ance and the statesmanship of its successors. The terms of 
 that contract are in the main fixed by the State. In any 
 case, whether the Church remains established or not, the State 
 has ultimate power over her temporal possessions, as over all 
 temporal possessions held within its territory. But, if the 
 Church is to remain connected with the State, perpetual dif- 
 ficulties must arise, unless means are found to leave the 
 Church free, in matters as well of doctrine as of ritual, both to 
 legislate through her own organs, and to exercise an inde- 
 pendent spiritual jurisdiction. It is for the interest of the 
 State that the Church should be allowed to make her service 
 
 ^ Eeport of Ecd. Courts Commission, repress abuses and annul the ads of 
 
 Vol. II. p. 605. Answers to ques- abuse (actes d'abus) on the part of the 
 
 tions, — France. clergy. 
 
 ' The State remains lay, and does not ' To recapitulate, the minister, as 
 
 intei-pose, except when the acts of the citizen, has to submit to the Common 
 
 clergy are offences at Cornmon Law, Law ; as priest, he belongs entirely to 
 
 or when there is a cas d'ahus in which the jurisdiction of the Church, with 
 
 either the public order or individual which the State does not interfere, and 
 
 interests are injured. In which case with which it has not to interfere, 
 
 the Council of State is summoned at for it is solely in the domain of con- 
 
 the instance of the Government, or science.' 
 on the complaint of the citizens, to 
 
XI. Christianity and Politics. 461 
 
 for the English nation as fruitful, as powerful, and as little a 
 hindrance to her own spirituality as possible. 
 
 III. Lastly we may consider the way in which the Church, 
 quite irrespective of any direct connection with the State, as 
 a natural consequence of its position as a spiritual society and 
 of its teaching as to fundamental moral and sjDiritual truths, 
 acts as a purifying and elevating agent on the general social 
 life of mankind, on all its manifestations and organs. 
 
 If man is ' metaphysical nolens volens,' it is equally true that 
 he is metapolitical, to use Martensen's happy word, nolens 
 volens. And metapolitic means ' that which precedes the 
 political as its presupposition, that which lies outside and be- 
 yond it as its aim and object, and by which the political element 
 is to be pervaded as by its soul, its intellectually vivifying 
 principle^.' Every statesman, every real leader of men, has 
 consciously or unconsciously, such a metapolitic ; he holds, 
 that is, certain views as to man's place in the world, as to the 
 meaning and possibility of progress, as to the aims as distinct 
 from the machinery of government, as to the relations of 
 nations to one another and to humanity, which determine his 
 general attitude towards all kinds of questions with which he 
 has to deal. It is clear, for instance, that the groups of ideas 
 which govern the fatalist, the pessimist, and the humanitarian, 
 are widely different. 
 
 Now the Church is the home and dwelling-place of certain 
 great regulative ideas as to man's destiny and function, and 
 his relation to God and other men, the treasure-house to 
 which they were committed, or the soil in which they germi- 
 nated. These ideas, if accepted and acted on, or so far as ac- 
 cepted and acted on, must transform and remodel, not only the 
 inward life, but also the whole outward life in all its spheres. 
 Thus S. Paul deduces from the Christian conception of man, 
 the duties of husbands, wives, fathers, children, masters, ser- 
 vants, subjects, rich persons, old men, old women, young men, 
 young women. And so, now rapidly, now slowly, according 
 to the vigour and purity at successive periods of the Christian 
 
 ' Martensen, Christian Ethics, special part, second division, English Trans- 
 lation, p. 100. 
 
462 The Religion of the Inclination. 
 
 society, now thrown inwards by periods of persecution or by 
 the rising tide of evil, now borne outwards in periods of rapid 
 expansion and missionary enterprise, now brought to bear on 
 new conditions of life and new social groupings, now traced 
 back to their source, and tested by the life and words of the 
 Word of God, the Christian ideas of man, and of his relation 
 to God radiate through the life of mankind, at once sustaining 
 and correcting its aspirations, and its ideals of righteousness. 
 
 The root ideas of this Christian anthropology rest on the 
 Christian conception of God as one yet threefold. Thus on 
 the one side, Christianity attaches to the individual per- 
 sonality a supreme and infinite value as the inmost nature of 
 one made in the image of God, redeemed by the self-sacrifice 
 of Christ, and indwelt by the Spirit of God. And thus it 
 develops the sense of separate personal responsibility. It is 
 on this basis that what is true in humanitarianism rests. Be- 
 hind all class and social differences lies the human personality 
 in virtue of which all men are equal ^. But on the other side 
 it frankly recognises man's inherently social nature. It is 
 not good for man to be alone. And family, State, and the 
 Church on earth are training places for a perfected common 
 life in the City of God. 
 
 The efliect of this conception of man and his destiny is to 
 place the State and its associations in their true position as 
 not ultimate but secondary, as means and not ends. Along- 
 side of the earthly kingdom, with its wealth, its honours, its 
 ambitions, its wide and far-reaching influence, it sets another 
 kingdom, the City of God, with its own standards, its own 
 principles, its own glory, its own blessedness, as the end of 
 mankind, the goal of history. ' The nations shall walk amidst 
 the light thereof, and the kings of the earth do bring their 
 glory into it ^.' And, in so doing, it judges and corrects the 
 splendour of earthly States. 
 
 In thus contrasting the eai-thly State with the City of God, 
 Christianity is no doubt exposed to the old accusation, that it 
 
 1 Cp. Aug. De Civ. Bei, v. 24, of Christian Emperors, ' we think them 
 happy if they remember themselves to be men' 
 ^ Eev. xxi. 24 (^R.V.). 
 
XI. Christianity and Politics. 463 
 
 makes men bad citizens. And the old answer is still true, ' let 
 those who think that the doctrine of Jesus Christ cannot con- 
 tribute to the happiness of the State, give us soldiers and officers 
 such as it bids them to be, subjects and citizens as faithful as 
 Jesus Christ commands, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, 
 children, masters, servants, kings, judges, living according to 
 the laws of religion, men as punctual in theii- payment of 
 taxes, as pure in their handling of public funds as are the true 
 Christians : they will be soon forced to admit that the maxims 
 of the Gospel when practised cannot but give a State great 
 happiness and great prosperity^.' It is not too much but 
 too little Christianity which destroys States ; for passion and 
 wilfulness are the great disintegrating forces of the world, 
 and everything which strengthens individuals to resist them, 
 so far strengthens the bonds of social union. But the service 
 which Christianity renders to States goes far beyond this 
 negative result. If the true meaning of progress be moral, 
 and not material, there can be no greater contribution to the 
 well-being of society than that of maintaining the Christian 
 type of character with its humility, its purity, its sincerity, and 
 again its strong and beneficent activity. 
 
 In the present discussion the State has been put first and 
 the Church second. In order of time the State is first. And 
 what has been attempted has been to shew how starting with 
 the State and its institutions, the higher order which was 
 initiated by the historical Incarnation (though not without 
 preparatory and imperfect anticipations in earlier and espe- 
 cially in Jewish history), comes in to mould, to purify, and to 
 supplement. But these words only express partial aspects of 
 the whole process by which a higher order acts on a lower. 
 It interpenetrates far more deeply than can be expressed in 
 any classification of the modes of its operation. The Chris- 
 tian religion has been acting on the group of States which we 
 call Christendom from the first days when stable organiza- 
 tions formed themselves after the entrance of the new life of 
 the Germanic races into the remains of the dying Roman 
 Empire. It has been the stronge&t of all the influences that 
 
 ^ Aug.-iiJ. ad MarcelUnu7n, 138, 15. 
 
464 The Religion of the Incmitation. 
 
 have moulded them throughout their history. It has pierced 
 and penetrated the life of individuals, the life of families, the 
 life of guilds, as well as the laws and institutions, the writings 
 and works of art in which they have embodied their thoughts 
 and hopes. They are in a sense its children. It is impos- 
 sible to regard them as S. Augustine regarded pagan Rome. 
 But deep and penetrating as has been her influence and mani- 
 fold her consequent implications with the existing national and 
 social life of mankind, the Church is essentially Catholic, and 
 only incidentally national. It is their Catholic character so 
 far as it remains, at least their Catholic ideal, which gives to 
 the different fragments of the Church their strength and power. 
 The 'Church of England' is a peculiarly misleading term. 
 The Church of Christ in England is, as Coleridge pointed 
 out, the safer and truer phrase. And this fundamental 
 Catholicism, this correspondence not to one or another nation, 
 but to humanity, rests on the appeal to deeper and more 
 permanent needs than those on which the State rests. It is 
 thus that the true type of the Church is rather in the family 
 than in the State, because the family is the primitive unit of 
 organized social hfe. Not in the order of time, but in the 
 order of reason, the Church is prior to the State, for man is 
 at once inherently social and inherently religious. And thei'e- 
 fore it is only in the Church that he can be all that it is his 
 true nature to be. 
 
XII. 
 
 CHRISTIAN ETHICS, 
 
 ROBERT OTTLEY. 
 
 Hh 
 
XII. 
 CHRISTIAN ETHICS. 
 
 The study of early Church History suggests the conclusion 
 that the Christian religion was recognised as a rule, or 
 fashion of life, before it was discovered to be a philosophy 
 and a creed. To be complete, therefore, any account of 
 Christianity must include the presentation of it as a Divine 
 ' way of life ' — a coherent system of practical ethics, marked 
 by characteristic conceptions of freedom, duty, the moral 
 standard, the highest end of life, and the conditions of human 
 perfection. Such is the task we are about to attempt. To 
 the necessary limitations of a sketch in outline, the reader 
 may ascribe a general avoidance of controversial, and a pre- 
 ference for positive, statements ; as also the fact that some 
 large and interesting branches of the subject are dismissed 
 with no more than a passing allusion. 
 
 It may be admitted, at the outset, that non-religious ethical 
 speculation has in a measure paved the way for a re-state- 
 ment of the Christian theory, by its inquiries into the source 
 and nature — the rational basis and binding force — of moral 
 obligation. For it may be maintained that in Christianity, 
 rightly understood, is to be found an adequate answer to the 
 question which all schools of thought agree in regarding as 
 fundamental — the question ' Why must I do right V 
 
 On the other hand, the Christian Church claims to meet the 
 plain needs of average human nature by her answer to the 
 question, 'How am I to do right?' She claims to have at 
 command practical means of solving a problem which is 
 admittedly abandoned as hopeless by the ethics of naturalism. 
 H h 3 
 
468 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 If Jesus Christ gave profound extension to the ideas of duty 
 and obligation, He was also the first who pointed humanity 
 to the unfailing source of moral power. In this respect 
 Christianity presents a favourable contrast to other systems, 
 the tendency of which is to be so concerned with the Ideal as 
 to underrate the importance and pressure of the Actual. 
 Christianity claims to be in contact with facts ; such facts as 
 sin, moral impotence, perverted will, the tja-anny of habit. 
 And while she is large-hearted and eagle-spirited in her 
 scope — dealing with all possible relationships in which a 
 human being may stand, whether to God above him, his 
 fellow-men about him, or the sum of physical life below him ; 
 the Church is none the less definite and practical in method 
 and aim ; witness the importance she attaches to the indi- 
 vidual character, the recreation of which is at least a step 
 towards a regeneration of society. 
 
 The chief point of distinction, however, between Christian 
 and non-Christian ethics is to be found in a difference of 
 view as to the relation existing between morality and 
 religion. A system which so closely connects the idea of 
 Good with the doctrine of God, must needs at every point 
 present conduct as inseparably related to truth, and cha- 
 racter to creed. It has been noticed indeed that Pliny's 
 letter to Trajan — the earliest record we possess of the im- 
 pression produced on an intelligent Pagan by the new religion 
 — testifies to the intimate connection of morals with dogma 
 and worship. What the Christian consciousness accepted as 
 truth for the intellect, it embraced also as law for the will. 
 Whether then we have regard to the practical purpose, or 
 the wide outlook of the Chiistian system, we shall feel the 
 difficulty of giving even a fail* outline of so vast a subject 
 in so limited a space. If the idea of Good corresponds in 
 any sense to the conception of God, that idea must have an 
 infinite depth of significance, and range of application. If 
 the recreation of human nature be a practicable aim, no 
 department of anthropology or psychology can be without its 
 interest for ethics. It must suffice to indicate, rather than 
 unfold, the points which seem to be of primary importance. 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 469 
 
 Chiistian Morals are based on dogmatic postulates. The 
 foundation of our science is laid, not merely in the study of 
 man's nature, his functions and capacities, but in revealed 
 truths as to the nature and character of God, His creative 
 purpose, His requirement of His creatures. We believe that 
 Christ came to liberate human thought from systems of 
 morality having their centre or source in man ^. 
 
 Man is not God, but hath God's end to seiTe ; 
 A Master to obey, a course to take, 
 Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become . . . 
 How could man have progression otherwise? 
 
 The postulates may conveniently be distributed under three 
 main heads : the doctrine of God, of Man, of Christ. 
 
 For the purpose of ethics, two simple truths as to the 
 Being of God require attention. 
 
 God is an Infinite, but PeTsonal Being ; existing from 
 eternity in the completeness of His own blessedness, yet 
 willing to become the centre of a realm of personalities. 
 To this end He called into existence a world of personal 
 beings, in a sense independent of Himself, but destined, in 
 communion and intercourse with Himself, to find and fulfil 
 the law of their creaturely perfection. To these free and 
 rational beings, Almighty God deigns to stand in self-imposed 
 relations. 
 
 Again, God is an Ethical Being ; He is essentially Holy and 
 Loving. 
 
 He is Holy ; and appoints that for the entire realm of 
 personality, as for Himself, holiness should be the absolute 
 law. He alone can communicate to His creatures the idea of 
 holiness ; of a supreme, eternal, ethical Good. The Good 
 exists only in Him ; is the essential expression of His Nature, 
 the reflected light of His Personality. The idea of ethical 
 Good is not therefore due to a natural process by which the 
 accumulated social traditions of our race are invested with 
 the name, and sanction, of moral Law. The idea is com- 
 municated, derived from the living Source of Good freely 
 acting on the faculties of intelligent creatures who are 
 
 * I S. Pet. i. 21 ware ttiv maTiv v/xuv koI kXmta uvai els Otov. 
 
470 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 capable of receiving such communications ' in divers parts 
 and in divers manners ^.' 
 
 The apprehension of moral Law thus appears to correspond 
 with a progi-essive apprehension of God. Along with the idea 
 of the unity and absoluteness of God, heathendom lost the 
 sense of an absolute moral Law^; and conversely, in pro- 
 portion as the Divine Nature manifests Itself more fully to 
 human intelligence, the idea of moral Good gains expansion 
 and depth. 
 
 God is also Love : a truth which as it helps our thought to 
 a more profound and consistent view of His mysterious Being, 
 so implies that God must needs will His rational creature to 
 be what He Himself is, ' holy and blameless before Him^;' 
 to engage itself in activities resembling His own ; to be free 
 with His Freedom ; enlightened by His Light *. Nor can 
 we think that Divine Love is content with a bare revelation 
 of moral requirement. We believe that what God requires, 
 He is ready and able to impart ; He will empower man to 
 render what His righteousness exacts. Finally, if His 
 purpose for man be interrupted or thwarted, He will ' devise 
 means ' for its final and victorious fulfilment. He, the Author 
 of Creation, will in due time provide for a recreation, not less 
 potent and complete in its efiects than the evil power which 
 has invaded and marred the first creation^. For we can form 
 no idea of Love other than that of an active, energizing 
 principle by which a personal Being reveals Himself; a Being 
 tenacious of His purpose, multiform in His expedients, 
 supremely patient in His beneficent activity. The God pre- 
 supposed in Christian Ethics is One who displays holiness 
 combined with power, love controlled by wisdom : in a word. 
 He is the God of redemptive history. Thus morality finds 
 its starting-point in theology^. 
 
 The Christian account of Man next engages attention. We 
 
 *■ Heb. i. I. 6 Clem. Alex. Qnis Dives, etc. vii. 
 
 * See Dorner, S^Jst. of Christian Ethics, apxv ''°'' uprjms ^corjs, iTnaTr]fxt] 6eov, tov 
 § 35' ovTOus ovros . . . i) ntv yap tovtov dyvoia 
 
 ^ Eph. i. 4. 6dvaTus iOTiv, fj bi emyuojais avrov Kai 
 
 * Cp. Plato, Tim. xxix. E. oiKi'iooai^, nal irpus avrov dydin] nat 
 
 * Athan. de Incarn. x. (^ofioiooats, fiovr] ^wi;. 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 471 
 
 confine ourselves to an inquiry into three points : what is 
 man's essential nature, his ideal destiny, his present con- 
 dition % 
 
 We have already observed that in Christian Ethics man is 
 not the central object of study. The moral universe tends 
 towards a more comprehensive end than the perfection of 
 humanity. Nevertheless Christianity is specially marked 
 by a particular conception of man. Regarding him as a 
 being destined for union with, capable of likeness to God, 
 she ofiers an account of man's failure to fulfil his true 
 destiny, and witnesses to a Divine remedy for his present 
 condition. The familiar contrast between humanity as it 
 might become, and as it is, gives significance to the peculiarly 
 Chi"istian doctrine of sin. It is the dignity of the sufierer 
 that makes the mischief so ruinous ; it is the greatness of the 
 issue at stake that makes a Divine movement towards man 
 for his recovery at once credible, and worthy of God^ 
 
 First, then, we presuppose a certain view of man's nature. 
 Christianity lays stress on the principle of 'personality, with 
 its determining elements, will and self-consciousness. It is 
 for psychology to accurately define personality. For ethics 
 it is simply an ultimate, all-important fact. It is that 
 element in man which makes him morally akin to God, and 
 capable of holding communion with Him ; that which places 
 him in conscious relation to Law ; gives him a representative 
 character as God's vice-gerent on earth, and conveys the right 
 to dominion over physical nature. If religion consists in 
 personal relations between man and God, religious ethics must 
 be concerned with the right culture and development of per- 
 sonality. 
 
 But in virtue of his creaturely position, man's personality 
 cannot be an end to itself^. The tendency of Greek thought 
 was to regard man as a self-centred being; to look for the 
 springs of moral action, and the power of progress, within 
 human nature itself. Thus Aristotle's ideal is the self- 
 
 * Aug. de morihus Eccl. xii. ning in ' self-contemplation ' (eavroiis 
 
 ^ Athan. cont. Gentes,iii. describes the Karavoiiv fjp^avTo). 
 aversion of man from God as begin- 
 
472 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 development of the individual under the guidance of reason, 
 and in accordance with the law of his being. The question is, 
 what is this law, and what the ground of its obUgation? 
 Personality, we answer, marked man from the first as a being 
 destined for communion with, and free imitation of God^ 
 Personality enables man to be receptive of a message and 
 a call from God. It confers on each possessor of it an 
 absolute dignity and worth. Personality — here is our crucial 
 fact ; enabling us to take a just measure of man, and of our 
 duty towards him. One of the deepest truths brought to 
 light by the Gospel was the value of the personal life, of the 
 single soul, in God's sight. Man is gi-eat, not merely because 
 he thinks, and can recognise moral relationships and obliga- 
 tions ; but chiefly because he was created for union with God ; 
 and was destined to find blessedness and perfection in Him 
 alone. Christianity therefore rates highly the worth of the 
 individual ; and her task is to develop each human person- 
 ality — to bring each into contact with the Personality of God -. 
 
 For, secondly, man has an ideal destiny^ — life in union 
 with God, a destiny which, as it cannot be realized under 
 present conditions of existence, postulates the further truth of 
 personal immortality*. Man is capable of progressive assimi- 
 lation to God, of ever deeper spiritual affinity to Him ^. Such 
 must be the ideal end of a being of whom it is revealed that 
 he was made ' in the image of God.' 
 
 But the thought of the ' Divine image ' leads us a step 
 further. WTiatever be the precise import of the expression, it 
 at least implies that the Good, which is the essence of the 
 Divine, is also a vital element in the perfection of Human 
 nature. It remains to indicate the way in which man is 
 capable of recognising Good as the law of his being, and 
 embodying it in a character. Christianity, as a moral system, 
 offers an account oi conscience and oi freedom. 
 
 ' Ath. c. Gent. ii. vita praesens et corporalis beata esse 
 
 ' Wace, BoijU Lectures, ser, i, Lect. non potest, quia malis est subjecta 
 
 vii. Cp. Col. i. 28. per corpus ... Si cadit beatitudo, ergo 
 
 ^ 2 Cor. V. 4, 5 o Kanpfaaanivos et immortalitas cadit in bominem, quae 
 
 fifias fh avTo tovto Of 6s. beata est.' 
 
 * Lactant. Div. Inst. iii. 12, ' Haec ^ Eph. v. i. Ep. ad Biog. x. 
 
xii. Christian Ethics. 473 
 
 The Scriptural doctrine of conscience represents it as the 
 faculty which places man in conscious relation to moral Law, 
 as the expression of the Divine nature and requirement. In 
 a brief sketch it is enough to lay stress on two points. 
 
 1. Conscience appears to be an original and constant 
 principle in human nature. To assign to it a merely empuical 
 origin — to derive it from social evolution, from the circum- 
 stances, prevalent beliefs, traditional customs of a human 
 community, is inadequate, inasmuch as no such supposed 
 origin will satisfactorily account for the authoritativeness, 
 the spontaneity, the ' categorical imperative ' of conscience ^, 
 Further, the functions attributed to this faculty in Scripture, 
 e.g. 'judging,' 'accusing,' 'witnessing,' 'legislating' — all 
 convey the idea that man stands in relation to moral Law as 
 something outside and independent of himself, yet laying an 
 unconditional claim on his will. Li the Christian system the 
 existence of conscience in some form is regarded as a primary 
 and universal fact. Its permanent character is everywhere 
 the same ; its function, that of persistently witnessing to man 
 that he stands in necessary relation to ethical Good. 
 
 2. The language of the Eible throughout implies that 
 conscience in its earliest stage is an imperfect organ, capable 
 like other faculties of being cultivated and developed. Our 
 Lord's reference to the inward ' eye ' (S. Matt. vi. 22) suggests 
 a fruitful analogy in studying the growth of conscience. In 
 its germ, conscience is like an untrained sense, exercising 
 itself on variable object-matter, and hence not uniform in the 
 quality of its dictates. It is enough to point out that this 
 fact is amply recognised by New Testament writers. S. Paul 
 speaks more than once of progress in knowledge and per- 
 ception as a feature of the Christian mind, and the faculty of 
 discerning the Good is said to grow by exercising itself on 
 concrete material^. So again, the moral faculty is impaired 
 by unfaithfulness to its direction ; the moral chaos in which 
 the heathen world was iinally plunged resulted from such 
 
 * Bp. Butler's sermons emphasize leet. vii. 
 this side of the doctrine of conscience, ^ See Phil. i. 9, and Heb. v. 14 (the 
 
 esp. the Preface. Cp. Flint, Theism, Greek). 
 
474 ^-^^ Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 unfaithfulness on a wide scale. The Gentiles knew God, but 
 did not act on their knowledge. They 'became darkened;' 
 they lost the power of moral perception^. 
 
 To enlarge on this subject forms no part of our present 
 plan. It is fair, however, to cordially acknowledge that 
 Christian thought is indebted to psychological research for 
 deeper and more accurate conceptions of the moral faculty ; 
 and the possibility of large variation both in the dictates of 
 conscience, and the certainty of its guidance, may be freely 
 admitted. And yet it has been justly observed that the 
 question of the origin of this faculty is not one with which 
 ethics are primarily concerned. That inquiiy is wholly 
 distinct from the question of its capacities and functions 
 when in a develojjed state ". The unconditional claim of 
 conscience — this is the constant factor which meets us amid 
 all variations of standard and condition. It is enough that 
 conscience is that organ of the soul by which it apprehends 
 moral truth, and is laid under obligation to fulfil it. A 
 Christian is content to describe it as God's voice ; or, in a 
 poet's words, 
 
 God's most intimate presence in the soul 
 And His most perfect image in tlie world. 
 
 For Conscience, while making an absolute claim on man's 
 will, appeals to him as a being endowed with a power of 
 choice : and thus we pass to the subject of freedom. What 
 is freedom, in the Christian sense? In the New Testament 
 freedom is connected with truth. ' The truth,' it is said, 
 ' shall make you free.' If man stands in a real relation to 
 the Good, his true freedom can only mean freedom to corre- 
 spond with, and fulfil the law of his nature ^. The formal 
 power of choice with which man is born — a power which in 
 fact is seen to be extremely limited ^ — is only the rudimentary 
 stage of freedom. Will is as yet subject to numberless re- 
 strictions, such that they seem utterly to preclude an un- 
 fettered choice. It is limited, for example, by the influence 
 
 * Rom. i. 21. Athan. cont. GenteSjiii- ' Libertas non est nisi ad hoc quod 
 
 xi. expedit aut quod decet.' 
 
 ^ Wace, Boyle Led., ser. i, Lect. * See Martineau, r;/peso/^C/t. r/ieor?/, 
 
 II. vol. i. 93 ; ii. 39 [Ed. 2]. Holland, 
 
 ^ Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, I. xii. Creed and Character, Serm. X- 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 475 
 
 of heredity to an extent which often appears to determine 
 unconditionally the choice between ditferent courses of action. 
 ' Determinism ' has at least liberated our thinking from the 
 crude idea of freedom as man's power ' to do as he likes.' 
 True liberty can only mean freedom from false dependence, 
 emancipation of the will from the undue pressure of external 
 forces, or inherited tendencies. The condition of ' perfect free- 
 dom ' is that in which man yields an unforced accord to the 
 Good — his correspondence with it as the law of life. And 
 as his formal power of choice becomes by habit more and 
 more determined towards a fixed adherence to the Good, he 
 begins to taste the ' glorious Kberty ' of a right relation to God 
 and His Law. He becomes free with the liberty which is 
 ' freedom not to sin,' he finds himself ' under the sole rule of 
 God most free ^.' 
 
 Lastly, Christianity as a moral system is distinguished by 
 her view of man's present condition. His upward deve- 
 lopment has been interrupted. In theological language he 
 is a ' fallen ' being, and the path of ethical progress is a way 
 of recovery'^. Man's capacity of coiTesponding with the 
 ideal, of free self-conformity to it, though not destroyed, is at 
 least seriously impaired. His spiritual capacities are not 
 what they were once in a fair way to be ; they are weakened 
 and depraved, and man's advance towards a free power of 
 self-determination is in fact hindered by a radical defect of 
 will — in Christian language by the principle of Sin. The 
 Bible gives an account of sin, its first cause, its consequences 
 in human history. Christian Ethics make allowance for this 
 factor ; systems which overlook it or minimize it inevitably 
 lose contact with the actual problem to be solved, with life 
 as it is. Their tendency at best is to treat moral, as on a 
 level with physical, evil : as an obstruction, a hindrance, 
 but not a vital defect inherent in human nature. Not 
 such is the Christian view of sin. For sin conditions the 
 
 * Aug. de mor. Eccl. xxi. ' [Deo] solo x. 23). Cp. Pet. Lomb. Sent. ii. xxv. 7. 
 dominante liberrimus.' Observe that ^ Cyp. de op. et eleem. i. 'Pater Filium 
 
 as freedom grows, the choice becomes misit ut reparare nos posset. ' Such 
 
 more restricted by the law Travra language is usual with the Fathers. 
 «f earti', d\A' ov irdvTa avfjLffpd (i Cor. 
 
476 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 work of the Incarnate Son Himself. Not only does Christ 
 set Himself to re-erect the true standard of character. He 
 devotes Himself also to dealing with the actual ravages of 
 moral evil. He teaches its intrinsic nature, its source in 
 the will, the inviolable law of its retribution ; He reveals the 
 destructive potency of its effects ; He labours as the Good 
 Physician to remove its temporal penalties ; He provides, in 
 His atoning Sacrifice of Himself, the one and only counter- 
 vailing remedy^. 
 
 Such postulates respecting the Nature of God and of Man 
 find their complement and point of contact in the Catholic 
 doctrine of the Incarnation. As to the Person of Christ, it is 
 enough to premise that the Christian system of ethics is in- 
 telligible only on the basis of a complete recognition of all 
 that our Lord claimed to be. He came to reveal among men 
 the nature, the ways, the will of the All-Holy ; to present 
 the true pattern of human goodness ; to be the perfect repre- 
 sentative of man before God ^. He is the Pevealer of God, as 
 being Himself in the fullest sense One with God ; He is the 
 pattern of humanity, in virtue of His sinless manhood ; the 
 representative, through His organic union with our race. 
 His Resurrection and Ascension together are the condition of 
 His recreative action as a quickening Spirit on the entire 
 nature of man. In a word His Person, His work, His cha- 
 racter form the central point of ethical inquiry and con- 
 templation^. To arrive at the true differentiae of Clmstian 
 morals we need to study more profoundly the character and 
 purpose of Jesus Christ. 
 
 I. Christ's Revelation of the Highest Good. 
 
 To the Christian moralist the entire universe presents itself 
 in the light of a revealed purpose as capable of receiving a 
 
 ^ The whole subject of sin, guilt, avva-yayuv, kol Oeai fiiv napaffTTjcrai tov 
 
 punishment is germane to our sub- avOpoi-rov, dvOpdunois Se yvajpiaai rov 
 
 ject, but for present purposes must Qtov. 
 
 be left on one side. ^ Heb. iii. i. Cyp. de idol. van. xi. 
 
 ' Iren. iii. iS. 7 [Stieren] eSei yap ' Quod homo est, esse Christus voluit, 
 
 TOV nea'tTTju Oeov re Kai avdpwirwv 5id ut et homo possit esse quod Christus 
 
 TTjS iSlas irpus (Karepovs olicetOTrjTCS (h est.' 
 (pt\iav Kai ufJ-ovoiav tovs apL<poTipovs 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 477 
 
 spiritual impress, and as moving towards an ethical con- 
 summation. For although man is the crown of the physical 
 creation, he cannot be independent of it in his advance towards 
 the proper perfection of his being. The destiny of nature is 
 bound up with that of humanity, in so far as nature tends 
 towards some form of ethical consciousness, presents the 
 material conditions of moral action, is capable of being ap- 
 propriated or modified by moral forces — will and personality. 
 Thus an inquiry into the Highest Good for man gives to 
 ethics a natural point of contact with metaphysics ^. 
 
 Christ Himself points our thought to this ideal region by 
 presenting to us as the Highest Good, as the ultimate object 
 of moral effort, the kingdom of God^. A precise definition 
 of this expression may be left to a formal treatise ; but a 
 certain complexity in the idea may be briefly elucidated. 
 
 In the first instance the kingdom of God is spoken of by 
 our Lord as a Good to be appropriated by man, through con- 
 scious and disciplined moral effort. In this sense the kingdom 
 is already ' within ' men ^, though not in its mature, or per- 
 fected stage. It is an actual state, spiritual and moral ; an 
 inward process or movement ; a present possession. The 
 attainment of this state involves ' Blessedness ' — a word the 
 true meaning of which is open to misconception. ' Blessed- 
 ness ' is not ' a mere future existence of imaginary beatitude * ; ' 
 not a bare independence of natural necessities ; nor is it iden- 
 tical with, though it may include, ' happiness.' The instinct 
 in human nature to which Christ appealed is more funda- 
 mental than the desire of 'happiness.' The word employed 
 by Him to convey His meaning had by ancient usage been 
 connected with supposed conditions and modes of the Divine 
 existence. ' Blessedness ' in fact consists in a living relation 
 to God, in a progressive likeness to Him ; in its final stage it 
 
 * Bern, de consid. v. i, ' Quid quod ^ S. Matt. vi. 33. 
 
 et inferioribus eges ? . . Noiine prae- ^ S. Luke xvii. 2 1 ; S. Matt. xiii. 45 
 
 posterum hoc et indignum ? Plane foil. (Parable of the Pearl). Cp. Rom. 
 
 superiorum quaedam injuria est in- xiv. 17 97 ^aaiXeia rod Oeov . . kariv . . 
 
 ferioruni operam desiderare : a qua hiicaioavvq koX dprjvt] Kal xapci kv nvevjxaTi 
 
 injuria nemo hominum perfects ayiw. 
 
 vindicabitur nisi cum quisque eva- * Wace, uM sup. Lect. VIII. Ambr. 
 
 serit in libertatem filiorum Dei.' de off. min. ii. 3, 4. 
 
478 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 is nothing less than the possession of God. God is the 
 Highest Good ^. 
 
 The kingdom of God is also to be conceived as the goal of 
 the entire movement of the universe : but while nature tends 
 blindly towards some ideal end, the history of mankind is the 
 record of a Divinely-directed movement carried on through 
 free human agency^. For an ethical world two factors are 
 required ; physical nature, the sphere of force and necessity ; 
 rational personality, conscious of freedom and of the claim of 
 authority. The goal of the universe is therefore a kingdom 
 in which each element, physical nature and personality, finds 
 its appropriate sphere, the one subordinate, the other domi- 
 nant. We discern a prophecy of this result in Bacon's great 
 conception of a ' regnum hominis ' attainable by intelligent 
 obedience to nature. The Bible is full of a greater thought. 
 It foresees a kingdom of intelligent beings whose law is the 
 service of God ; a state in which the inner harmony of man's 
 restored nature will be reflected in a worthy outward environ- 
 ment. This ideal kingdom, however, has its preparatory stage 
 on earth. Though the present condition of it only faintly 
 foreshadows the promised glory of the future, it has never- 
 theless been in fact set up among men, ' not in word, but in 
 power.' For the main factor that makes such a kingdom 
 ideally possible, already operates — namely, creaturely life 
 realizing its true dependence on God, human will and human 
 character responding to the will and purpose of God ^. 
 
 Such is the kingdom for which we look, and its Centre and 
 Head is the living Christ ^. He is the type after which the 
 new personality is to be fashioned. He who unveils this 
 world of spiritual beings and powers, is Himself the source 
 
 * Aug. (le mor. Eccl. xiii. ' Bonorum naturalem inclinationem quasi ab 
 
 summa Deus nobis est ; Deus est alio mota, non autem a seipsis, cum 
 
 nobis summum bonum.' lb. xviii. non coguoscant rationem finis ; et 
 
 'Secutio Dei, beatitatis appetitus est; ideo nihil in finem ordinare possunt, 
 
 consecutio, ipsa beatitas.' sed solum in finem ab alio ordinan- 
 
 ^ Thorn. Aquin. Summa, i. ii"'". Qu. i. tur.' 
 
 2, ' Ilia quae rationem habent seipsa ^ See Godet, Comm. on i Corinthians 
 
 movent ad finem, quia habent domi- [Clark], vol. i. p. 236. 
 
 nium suorum actuum per liberum * S. Matt. xix. 28 ; S. Luke xxii. 
 
 arbitrium . . . Ilia vero quae ratione 30. 
 carent tendunt in finem propter 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 479 
 
 of its movement, the centre of its attraction, the surety of its 
 final triumph. 
 
 There cannot but result from this hope a particular view of 
 the present world. It is characteristic of the Christian spirit 
 frankly to recognise the natural world in its due subordina- 
 tion to personality, in its subserviency to ethical ends. An 
 absolute idealism is not less alien to this standpoint than 
 a crude materialism. The Christian is not blind to the 
 tokens of interdependence between the worlds of matter and 
 spirit ; the fact indeed of such relation gives peculiar colour 
 to the Christian regard for nature. Nature is precious as the 
 sphere in which a Divine Life is manifested, as the object of 
 Divine Love ^. And yet, in the light of revelation, the uni- 
 verse cannot be contemplated without mingled emotion^. The 
 Christian knows something of the pain, and of the satisfaction 
 which in their unchastened form we call Pessimism and 
 Optimism. For there must be sorrow in the recollection of 
 the causal link that unites physical to moral evil. Though 
 pain has value as the condition of nobler phases of life, and 
 heightened spirituality of character, it is nevertheless an evil 
 producing in a healthy nature something more than a tran- 
 sient disturbance. Pain is the sensible, even if remote, out- 
 come of moral perversity, of misdirected desire. It pervades 
 impartially the physical universe, but seems in manifold 
 instances to point beyond itself to its source in human sin. 
 
 And yet there is a Christian optimism — a thankful joy 
 even amid present conditions. There is the joy of at least 
 a rudimentary realization of the chief Good ; the joy of setting 
 a seal, as it were, to the truth of God 2. The ' powers of the 
 world to come ' are already within reach ; they can be set in 
 motion, felt, tested, enjoyed. There is a known end of 
 creation by the light of which all forms and products of 
 human enterprize can be judged. Thus even the growth and 
 organized strength of evil does not dismay the Christian ; 
 for he knows that the advance of the kingdom is certain, 
 whatever be the hindrances opposed to it, and that God's 
 
 ^ S. John iii. i6. 
 
 ^ S. John iii. 33. See Dorner's Sysltm of Ethics [Clark], § 47. 
 
480 The Religion of the Iitcarnation. 
 
 invincible will controls and overrules all that seems most 
 lawless, and hostile to His purpose. ' The city of God,' says 
 S. Augustine, 'is a pilgrim sojourning by faith among evil 
 men, abiding patiently the day when righteousness shall turn 
 to judgment, and victory bring peace.' In his assurance that 
 ' all things work together for good to them that love God,' 
 that the end is certain, and human fears are blind, the Chris- 
 tian can be free from illusions or extravagant hopes, yet not 
 cast down, 'sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing,' 'perplexed, but 
 not in despair ^' 
 
 II. Christ's Revelation of the Moral Lavj, its authority, 
 sanctions, and content. 
 
 On the place and meaning of freedom in Christian Ethics 
 we have akeady touched. Our formal freedom is the ground 
 of moral responsibility — that element in us to which Law 
 makes its authoritative appeal. From the thought of freedom 
 in relation to a moral universe we pass naturally to that of 
 Law. 
 
 And first, it is convenient to inquire what is the revealed 
 basis of ohligation in general? 
 
 The most conspicuous feature of the Sermon on the Mount 
 — that first great outline of Christian morality — is its authori- 
 tative tone. We instinctively turn to it in searching for a 
 fundamental principle of obligation, a ground of authority 
 for Law. Nor are we disappointed, for oar question is met 
 by the consideration that this great discourse is primarily a 
 revelation of the personal God in His holy relation to man- 
 kind. It is with this personal relationship that the claim of 
 moral Good on man's will is seen to be uniformly connected. 
 The Good in fact presents itself to man in the shape of a 
 personal appeal: 'Be ye holy, for I am holy.' Morality 
 appears as God's exhortation to man to embrace and fulfil 
 the true law of his nature. ' Be ye perfect,' it is said, ' even 
 as your Father which is in heaven is perfect-.' The Good is 
 
 1 2 Cor. iv. 8; vi. 10. Cp. Eom. its being the Law of your nature . . . 
 yjii. 28. • . • The correspondence of actions 
 
 2 S. Matt. V. 48. Butler, Serm. 3 to the nature of the agent renders 
 'Your obligation to obey this Law is them natural.' 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 481 
 
 thus at once the explicit declaration of the Divine will, and 
 the condition of human perfection. Already the coldness of 
 abstract Law begins to disappear. Law is seen to be not an 
 abstraction merely, but inseparably connected with the living 
 Personality behind it. It is the self-revelation of a loving 
 Being, appealing to the object of His Love, and seeking its 
 highest welfare. Obligation is transformed, and is seen to 
 be the tie of vital relationship between persons ^. 
 
 Further, it must be borne in mind that Christ's teaching as 
 to obligation was accompanied by the promise of a super- 
 natural gift — the gift of a new capacity to fulfil the Law. 
 The Good had hitherto been known, howsoever imperfectly, 
 as requirement. Ethical progress before Christ's coming 
 could only tend to deepen this knowledge. We know indeed 
 what was the object of that long providential discipline of 
 humanity which culminated in the Incarnation : how it ended 
 by driving man to look and long for a condition of things 
 which should no longer be marked by hopeless severance of 
 the actual from the obligatory. With the advent of the 
 Redeemer, a new joy dawned on the world — the possibility of 
 goodness. 
 
 We learn then that the ground of obligation is Gods will 
 for the perfection of His creatures — His desire that they 
 should be like Himself^. The sense of obligation is indeed 
 never absent from the consciousness of Christ Himself. ' We 
 must work,' He says, ' the works of Him that sent Me while 
 it is day.' ' My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, 
 and to finish His work ^ :' — in which utterances we discern 
 the principle we need. Only when duty presents itself in 
 the form of personal appeal, only when obedience is kindled 
 and enriched by feeling, can law become a bond, not of 
 constraint, but of love. 
 
 It follows that obligation, thus founded on personal relation- 
 ship to God, is absolute and independent of variation in the 
 specific demands of Law. Human goodness will consist in 
 
 ^ Cp. Bp. Ellicott, The Being of God, God's unll, he knows his chity. 
 p. 120. 3 g_ John ix. 4 ; iv. 34. Cp. vi. 40 ; 
 
 ^ Rom. ii. 18 (yivdxjKfis to OfXij/xa) S. Luke iv. 43. See also Eom. xii. 2; 
 
 implies that when a man knows Eph. v. 17, etc. 
 
 I i 
 
482 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 correspondence to the will of God, and the degi-ee of clearness 
 with which a man apprehends that will is the measure of 
 his obligation. This principle seems to preclude any idea 
 of ' supererogatory works,' and tends to neutralise for the in- 
 dividual conscience the distinction between ' commands ' and 
 ' counsels of perfection,' the spirit in which Law is ideally 
 fulfilled being that of sonship, eager, loyal, and generous ^ 
 
 The universal obligation of moral Law is by Christ con- 
 nected for practical purposes with a system of sanctions. As 
 to the Christian doctrine of rewards and punishments it is 
 only necessary to observe, that any ethical system which has 
 regard to the condition of man as he is, finds itself constrained, 
 for disciplinary ends, to lay a certain stress on this point. 
 Further, it should be noticed that the nature of these sanc- 
 tions is seldom clearly understood. They occupy a place in 
 Christ's teaching, because it is His wont to deal with human 
 nature as He finds it : He points, however, not so much to a 
 future state, as to a present spiritual sphere in which con- 
 duct is indissolubly linked to consequence, and there operate 
 ' the searching laws of a spiritual kingdom -.' The sanctions 
 with which Christ enforces His doctrine may thus be regarded 
 as pointing to a reign of Law in the spiritual realm which 
 He reveals to mankind. He seems indeed to recognise the 
 occasional need of appeals to fear, as likely to rouse the con- 
 science and will. He sets before us the prospect of spiritual 
 judgments acting, at least partially, in the sphere of the 
 present life. His more frequent appeal, however, is to what 
 may be called the enlightened self-interest of men. Their 
 true life, He tells them, is to be found or acquired in a con- 
 secration, a sacrifice of the natural life to the claims and calls 
 of the Divine kingdom ^, Such sacrifice, such co-operation 
 with God, is its own ineffable reward. 
 
 ^ The case of the young man ^ Wace, Lect. II. 
 
 (S. Matt. xix. 21) shews how obliga- '■' S. Matt. xvi. 25, 26. The dis- 
 
 tion is extended by contact with cussion of ' Christian consohitions,' 
 
 Christ, i. e. by closer relation to God, by Mr. Cotter Morison, Seirice of Man, 
 
 The general principle is that each is overlooks the fact that Christ's object 
 
 bound to follow the law of his per- was not to ' console ' men, but to set 
 
 sonal perfection as it unveils itself before them the truth, and the law 
 
 to him. See Bengel in loc. and cp. of their own perfection. The ' con- 
 
 S. Luke xvii. 10. solations ' of Christianity can be won 
 
 \ 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. \ 483 
 
 What then, it may be asked, are the motives, the induce- 
 ments to action, appealed to by Christianity'? how far are. 
 imperfect motives recognised? and in view of the fact that 
 no mere sense of relation to Law is in general likely to move 
 the human will, where does the Gospel find its ' moral dy- 
 namic ' — its highest motive ? 
 
 We have seen that Christianity in a peculiar degree com- 
 bines the presentation of duty with an appeal to feehng. In 
 the same way by connecting obligation to obey God with a 
 revelation of His Love, Jesus Christ solves the most difficult 
 problem of ethics. The highest motive is Love to God, 
 kindled not only by the contemplation of His Perfections, but 
 also by a passionate sense of what He has wrought in order 
 to make possible the fulfilment of His Law. ' We love Him,' 
 says S. John, ' because He first loved us.' We do not, however, 
 expect the motive of actions to be in all cases identical, or 
 uniformly praiseworthy. A practical system must recognise 
 very diiFerent stages of maturity in character ; and the possi- 
 bility of imperfect or mixed motives is frankly allowed by 
 Christian thinkers, and seems to be sanctioned by our Lord 
 Himself^. It may be said on the whole that while the 
 Gospel ever appeals to man's desire for his own good, it 
 adapts itself and condescends to widely varying forms and 
 degrees of that desire, by way of educating it to greater dis- 
 interestedness and purity ^. We may fittingly speak of ' a 
 hierarchy of motives,' and can view with equanimity those 
 attacks on Christianity which represent it as a thinly-dis- 
 guised appeal to selfishness. For the reward promised to 
 man is one which will only appeal to him in so far as he 
 has parted with his old self, and has made the Divine purpose 
 his own. The reward is joy — the 'joy of the Lord ; ' the 
 
 only if they are never made the object marks on this point. ' The parabolic 
 
 of life. They are a ?«i;a*fZ, but never, form of instruction does not afford 
 
 in the higher forms of Christian con- scope for the play of the highest class 
 
 sciousness, an aim. See Church Qiiaii. of motives. It is essentially popular 
 
 Bev., Jan. 1888, p. 268. wisdom, and it is the way of that 
 
 ^ Witness the discussions on fear which aims at teaching the million, 
 
 commonly found in mediaeval theo- ioinake actio7i spring from homely motives.' 
 logy. Bruce, Parabolic teaching of ^ Butler, Analogij, i. 5. 
 
 Christ, p. 359 foil., has some good re- 
 
 I i 3 
 
484 The Religion of the Inca7'nation. 
 
 jo}' of a worthy cause embraced and advanced ; of a task 
 achieved, of labour crowned by nobler and wider service. 
 Such joy could only be an inspiring motive to self-forgetful 
 love, which finds the fulfilment of every aspiration, the satis- 
 faction of every desire in God and in His work ^. 
 
 Christian duty, the content of the Law. demands somewhat 
 larger treatment. It has been suggested that the conception 
 of morality as a Divine code, as ' the positive law of a theo- 
 cratic community,' which seems characteristic of early Christian 
 writings on morals — is a legacy from Judaism '^. Be this as 
 it may — the distinctive feature of Christianity is that hence- 
 forth the Law is not contemplated apart from the Personality 
 of God. The Law is 'holy, just, and good,' because it reflects 
 His character. Obedience to it is acknowledged to be the in- 
 dispensable condition of true union between God and His 
 creatures. For Jesus Christ teaches us to discern in the Law 
 the self-unveiling of a Being whose holiness and love it re- 
 flects, as well as His purpose for man. 
 
 The revealed Law is comprised in the Decalogue. It seems 
 needless to vindicate at length the paramount place which 
 this fundamental code occupies in Christian thought '■'. Suffice 
 it to say that in broad outline it defines the conditions of a 
 right relation to God, and to all that He has made. And 
 the Law is ' spiritual *.' Though for educative purposes 
 primarily concerned with action, it makes reference to in- 
 ward disposition, and thereby anticipates the main character- 
 istic of Christian goodness. It also recalls the great land- 
 marks of God's redemptive action ; it sets forth His gracious 
 acts, partly as an incentive to gratitude, partly as a ground 
 of obligation. 
 
 In our Lord's teaching we find two truths implied: 
 
 ' See H. S. Holland, Ci-eed and ideo [verba] similiter permanent apud 
 
 Character, Serm. XVIII. Cp. S. Matt. nos, extensionem et augmentum sed 
 
 XXV. 21, Heb. xii. 2. Thorn. Aquin. non dissolutionem accipientia per 
 
 Summa, ii. ii"®, xxviii. carnalem Eius adventum.' Thorn. 
 
 ^ Sidgwick, Outlines of the Hist, of Aquin. Summa, i. ii'i®. Qu. c. Art. 3, 
 
 Ethics, chap. 3. ' Omnia praecepta [moralia] legis 
 
 ^ Iren. iv. 16, § 3 [Stieren]. God sunt quaedam partes praeceptorum 
 
 appears in the decalogue ' praestruens decalogi.' 
 
 liominem in suam amicitiam . . . et * Rom. vii. 14. 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 485 
 
 (1) The absolute priority and permanence of the Decalogue 
 in relation to all other precepts of the Jewish Law. (2) Its 
 essential unity viewed as a Law of love. This latter aspect 
 is anticipated in the book of Deuteronomy, and is explicitly 
 set forth by our Lord. There are, He tells us, two command- 
 ments : the first and greatest, love to God ; the second ' like 
 unto it/ love to man, with the limitation annexed, ' Thou 
 shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' 
 
 Thus guided by precedent, a Christian, in examining the 
 Law's content, may take the Decalogue as a natural basis of 
 division. It may be shortly analysed as embracing a com- 
 prehensive outline of man's duty towards (i) God, (ii) his 
 fellow-men, and implicitly towards himself and non-personal 
 creatures. 
 
 First stand duties towards God, resulting dii'ectly from the 
 personal contact assumed to be possible between God and 
 man. The all-embracing command which involves the ful- 
 filling of the Law is contained in the words, ' Thou shalt 
 love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy 
 soul, and with all thy mind^' In this 'great commandment' 
 we find the widest point of divergence from Pagan ethics. 
 Mans true centre is God. His perfection is to be sought in 
 creaturely subjection and free conformity to the Divine 
 purpose". The general sphere of God-ward duty is defined 
 in the first four commandments, which are seen to give moral 
 sanction, not only to the outward expression, but to the actual 
 substance of belief; the distinctive duties enjoined therein 
 have been summarily described as faith, reverence, service^. 
 The fourth precept lays down the principle that man is bound 
 to honour God by consecrating a definite portion of time to 
 His worship, and by providing space for the due recreation 
 of that human nature which by creative right is God's, and 
 is destined for union with Him. 
 
 The duty of love to our fellow-men follows upon that of 
 
 ' S. Matt. xxii. 37. Cp. Aug. de ^ Thorn. Aquin. Su»wia, i. ii"''. c. 5, 
 
 mor. Eccl. xviii-xx ; cledoc. Christ, i. 29. ' Principi communitatis tria debet 
 
 ■■^ Aug. I.e. ' Maxima Ei propinquat homo, fidelitatem, reverentiam, famu- 
 
 [homo] subjectione ista qua similis latum.' Cp. Butler, Analogu, pt. ii. i. 
 tit.' 
 
486 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 love to God. Every man's personality gives him absolute 
 and equal worth in God's sight, and therefore lays us under 
 obligation towards him. Heathen moralists confined the 
 sphere of obligation to a few simple relationships, e. g. family- 
 life, friendship, civic duty. But the revealed law of love to 
 man embraces every relationship. ' Every man is neighbour 
 to every man ^.' It is clear that any adequate outline of this 
 precept involves the whole treatment of social duty. Men 
 have their riglds, i. e. lay us under obligation, both indivi- 
 dually and collectively. The individual has his ' duty ' to 
 fulfil to the family, the association, the class, the city, the 
 state, the Church which claims him. The immense field of 
 our possible duties towards society, and towards each indivi- 
 dual, so far as he comes in contact with us, may be regarded 
 as embraced in the second table of the Decalogue. Thus the 
 fifth commandment lends important sanction not only to the 
 parental claim, but also to the authority of fundamental moral 
 communities — the family, the state, the Church. The fol- 
 lowing precepts regulate the security of life and personality, 
 of marriage and sexual distinctions, of property, honour, and 
 good name. The tenth commandment anticipates that ' in- 
 wardness ' which constitutes the special feature of Christian 
 morality. 'It is the commandment,' says an ethical writer, 
 ' which perhaps beyond any of the rest was likely to deepen 
 in the hearts of devout and thoughtful men in the old Jewish 
 times, that sense of their inability to do the will of God, and 
 to fulfil the Divine idea of what human life ought to be, 
 which is indispensable to the surrender of the soul to God ^.' 
 
 But according to the Christian theory there are duties to 
 f<elf, which seem to follow from the relation in which man 
 stands to God, and form the true measure of his regard 
 for others : ' Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' 
 There is a right self-love, a right care of the personality 
 as being itself an object of God's Love, and so included in 
 the category of things ethically good. What the Christian 
 
 ' Aug. de disc. Christ, iii. ' Proximus \>. 241. Cp. Thorn. Aquin. Summa, i. 
 est omni homini omnis homo.' etc. ii'ie. c. 6; Martmeau, Ti/iJes, etc., ii. 
 
 '■' K, W. Dale, The Ten Commandments, 26. 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 487 
 
 ought to love, however, is not the old natural self, but the 
 'new man,' the true image of himself which has absolute 
 worth \ A moral complexion is thus given to all that con- 
 cerns the personal life — the care of health, the culture of 
 faculties, the occasions of self-assertion. Every moment of 
 conscious existence, and every movement of will, — all in fact, 
 that relates to the personality — is brought within the domain 
 of Law. Christianity ' claims to rule the whole man, and 
 leave no part of his life out of the range of its regulating 
 and transforming influence -.' For in every situation, trans- 
 action, or display of feeling, will is required to declare itself: 
 moral activity takes place. Duties to self, as loved by God, 
 are thus implied in the ' great commandment.' For God 
 therein requires of man a consecration of the entire seZ/, an 
 inward self-devotion, a reasonable, heartfelt service : He asks 
 for love. From this point of view, sin — the false claim to 
 independence — is simply wrong self-love. 
 
 Some would even class all shapes of sin as falling under 
 two main forms of self-assertion, arrogance and sensuality. 
 And S. Augustine suggests a profound view of the develop- 
 ment of the true, as compared with the false society, when he 
 says : ' The two cities, owe their being to two forms of love ; 
 the earthly, to self-love; the heavenly, to the love of God ^.' 
 
 It remains to extend the principle of love to the non- 
 personal sphere with which man is in contact. We have 
 seen that absolute worth belongs only to personality. But 
 man's relation to the cr<eatures below him in the scale of 
 development, implies a field of duties of which ethics must 
 take cognizance. The non-personal part of nature is ordained 
 for subjugation by man. It is included in his dominion: 
 terram dedit fillis hominum. Yet even in the Mosaic Law 
 we find respect enjoined for certain distinctions of nature, 
 which are not to be overridden or confounded. The physical 
 
 1 Summa, i. iia«. c. 5, ' Dilectio sui Dei.' Pascal, Pensees, Art. xviii. 15, 
 
 ipsius includitur in dilectione Dei et ' Que I'homme s'cdme, car il a en lui 
 
 proximi ; in hoc enim homo vere se nne nature capable de bien.' Cp. 
 
 diligit quod se ordinat in Deum.' lb, Butler, Serin, i. etc. 
 
 ii. ii^e-xix. 6, 'Homo se propter Deuni, ^ Sidgwick, Ow^Hwes efc., p. 108. Cp. 
 
 et in Deo diligit.' Aug. Serm., ccxvi. 8, Dorner, System, etc., p. 459 [Clark]. 
 
 'Amate quod eritis : eritis enim lilii ^ Aug. de Civ. Dei, xiv. 28* 
 
488 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 order, like the moral, was to be regarded as sacred ^. Duties, 
 then, of this kind exist : and they are apparently compre- 
 hended in the fourth commandment, which expresses God's 
 creative claim on typical orders of living creatures, ordaining 
 that ' cattle ' are to share the benefit of the Sabbath rest. 
 The sixth and eighth commandments again imply the sanctity 
 of physical life, and of personal property. And if we pass 
 behind the decalogue, we find animals included in a sense 
 within God's original and irreversible covenant ^. The control 
 therefore of human will over nature, animate and inanimate, 
 though comparatively absolute, is yet subject to the restric- 
 tions which love suggests. For the natural world also dis- 
 plays the omnipresent control, and watchful providence of a 
 Being ' Whose mercy is over all His works.' Physical life in 
 this sphere may be treated as a means ; but it must also be 
 dealt with ' in harmony with the creative Thought ^.' 
 
 In quitting the subject of duty, we do well to mark the 
 infinite extension given to the idea by the treatment of it in 
 connection with the doctrine of an Infinite and Holy God. 
 Our Lord, illustrating His exposition of the ancient Law 
 by a few significant examples, not only opened to His hearers 
 the possibility of a spiritual, transcendent morality, but also 
 laid down a far-reaching principle of obligation. The self- 
 unveiling of the Infinite Being evidently makes an infinite 
 claim on the will and affection of intelligent creatures. 
 
 With this extension of morality we might compare a some- 
 what parallel feature in the aesthetic sphere. 
 
 Into the arts also, notably into architecture and music, 
 the Christian spiiit introduced the element of mystery, and 
 found expression in them for the idea of infinity — an idea so 
 alien to the Greek genius, which had ever contemplated 
 beauty, and therefore ethical Good, as something essentially 
 limited, measurable, symmetrical, exact*. Such a thought 
 
 * See Ex. xxi. 33 foil. ; Deut. xxii. 9 viii. i ; Prov. xii. 10, etc. 
 
 foil. ; Levit. xix. etc. Summa, i. ii"®. ^ Martensen, Special Ethics (lyidiv.), 
 
 i. 2, 'Tota irrationalis natura com- p. 278 [Clark]. 
 
 paratur ad Deum sicut insti-umentum * See Trench, Mediaeval CJiurch History, 
 
 ad agens principale.' Lect. XXVII. Cp. Plato, Phileb. 64 E 
 
 ^ Consider Gen. ix. 10. Cp. Gen. foil. 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 489 
 
 might suggest a line of abstract discussion ; but practical 
 needs remind us that the true range of obligation is best in- 
 terpreted to us by a living ideal. As the writer of Ecce 
 Homo remarks, ' The law which Christ gave was not only 
 illustrated, but infinitely enlarged, by His deeds. For every 
 deed was itself a precedent to be followed, and therefore to 
 discuss the legislation of Christ is to discuss His character ; 
 for it may be justly said that Christ Himself is the Christian 
 Law ^.' 
 
 The transition from the discussion of moral Law to that 
 of Christian character seems at this point natural and simple. 
 
 III. Christ the Pattern of Character. 
 
 The stress which in Christian Ethics is laid upon person- 
 ality scarcely requires further illustration. The principle of 
 personality underlies our fundamental assumption that man 
 is capable of free communion with, and imitation of, God. 
 We believe that the union between God and man was con- 
 summated in and through a Person. Further, the spirit in 
 which fulfilment of the Law is possible — the spirit of filial 
 love — can only exist in personal relations. It corresponds 
 with this general prominence of pei'sonality that Christianity 
 presents the ideal standard of human character in a Person. 
 
 In passing may be noted the fact that this principle to 
 some extent emerges in ancient systems. Aristotle's definition 
 of virtue naturally occurs to us as admitting the function of 
 an ' expert ' (6 ^/jo/'tjuos, 6 (nrovbalus), in the right estimation of 
 moral action. The Stoic again seeks or invents a trustworthy 
 standard in his ideal conception of the ' wise man.' It seems 
 possible that modern non-Christian ethics will ultimately 
 substitute for the cultivated sense of mankind some form of 
 personal ideal ^. For ' the Law attains its lovable form, its 
 beauty, only when it becomes personal ^ ; ' and it might be 
 said with truth that no idea can be formed of virtues in the 
 harmony of their combination, until they are seen embodied 
 
 1 Ecce Homo, c. x. Cp. S. John cusses personal types of Christian 
 
 xxi. 25. saintliness. 
 
 ^ It is significant that Mr. Cotter ^ Corner, System, etc., p. 377. 
 
 Morison in his Service of Man dis- 
 
490 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 in a person. Just as theology has in the study of Divine 
 truth concentrated her gaze on the Person of Jesus Christ as 
 a revelation of God ; so ethics, in the effort to formulate the 
 law of moral perfection, must study the same Divine Person 
 as a tyjje of character. 
 
 It is necessary therefore at the outset to recall some salient 
 features of the great Example. 
 
 The character of Jesus Christ has been a subject of study 
 to thinkers of every period in Christian history, and of in- 
 finitely varied qualifications for the task. Some have in the 
 supposed interest of morality been tempted to lay dispro- 
 portionate stress on the fact of our Lord's manhood. They 
 ask how Christ can be an example to humanity, unless he be 
 a Man like other men ^ ? From a Christian standpoint, how- 
 ever, it is clear that the efficacy of that Example depends 
 on Christ's being a Man unlike other men — unlike them in 
 His relation to the Divine requirement, unlike them in His 
 power of contact with the entire race. Thus we find our- 
 selves in correspondence with dogmatic truth. The mystery 
 of atonement necessitates a sinless Victim ; the Christian 
 conception of human life requires a sinless Example. The 
 perfect pattern of mankind must in one material respect be 
 as far as possible isolated and removed from the race He 
 came to redeem : for sinlessness is a part of the Divine 
 thought concerning human nature. 
 
 If again we take into account the scope and significance of 
 His redemptive work, it is vain to compare Christ with 
 ' other great men.' He came not merely as the Example, but 
 as the Redeemer and Saviour of humanity. Were He merely 
 the Example, His departure would have left mankind in 
 even deeper anguish and helplessness than before His coming. 
 Man would have seen the Light, and felt its attraction, only 
 to find himself powerless to follow. 
 
 And thus, because Christ is a Man unlike all other men, we 
 need in contemplating His character the caution that ' the 
 
 * See some remarks on this tendency 1883, on 'Our Lord's Human Ex- 
 in Liddon, Bampton Lectures, viii ; and ample.' For what follows, cp. Mar- 
 an Alt. in the Church Quart. Rev., July, tensen, Ethics (^General), pp. 242, 256, 
 
xir. Christian Ethics, 491 
 
 Divine Reality is apart from, and even greater than v^^hat the 
 greatest have thought of it and said of it^.' The ideal con- 
 ception of character presented either in Pagan thought, or 
 even in the volume of Messianic prophecy, has been in- 
 definitely enriched, and illuminated by the Life which had 
 before been only dimly foreshadowed, or at tlie best darkly 
 understood. 
 
 Now it may be said, with no violation of the proportion of 
 truth, that the most important part of the Gospel revelation 
 concerned man's true relation to God. In the forefront of 
 Christ's teaching is set the doctrine of the Divine Father- 
 hood. He impressed this truth on men not more by His ex- 
 press utterances, than by the example of His own habitual 
 attitude towards God. It may be justly allowed that our 
 Lord taught, and displayed among men ' a new type of 
 goodness, the filial and dependent.' In Him we see the 
 activity of 'a perfectly filial will".' 
 
 It will be useful to expand this suggestive thought some- 
 what more fully. 
 
 Fii-st, then, we see in Chi'ist the perfect example oi filial 
 dependence on God ^. This dependence is not mere passivity 
 of will — such as the record of the Temptation exhibits ; 
 not simply a confiding trust in the providence and sustain- 
 ing power of God. We rather see in Christ's spirit of de- 
 pendence a motive which impels Him to fearless, unfettered 
 activity, and supports Him under the keenest stress of trial 
 and suffering. He speaks and acts ever as One who, in each 
 situation, is aware of the controlling hand of infinite Wisdom 
 and Love, He has that entire security in the certainty of 
 Divine guidance, to which no emergency comes as a surprise, 
 no call for action brings disturbance. He knows that ' the 
 works ' which tax His human faculties, and weary His bodily 
 
 ^ Dean Church, Serm. on CJirist's ^ See Trench, Sijn. of the N. T. § 42 
 
 Example [Gifts of Civilisation, Serm. III]. (on Taireivocppoavvi}). ' In His Human 
 
 ■•^ E. H. Hutton, Essay on the Incar- IS'ature [Christ] must be the pattern 
 
 nation and Princi2)les of Evidence. Cp. of all humility, of all creaturely de- 
 
 the remarkable definition of Lactan- pendence ... He evermore, as Man, 
 
 tius, Div. Inst. iii. 9, ' Pietas nihil took the place which beseemed the 
 
 aliud est qnam Dei parentis agnitio.' lb. creature in the presence of its Crea- 
 
 10, ' Efiicitur ut is agnoscat Deum, tor.' 
 qui unde ortus sit, quasi recordetur.' 
 
492 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 frame, are such as the Father ' has given Him to perfect.' A 
 filial trustfulness is thus the secret at once of His energy and 
 His repose ; His promptness in action and His calmness in 
 awaiting the suitable moment for it ; His unbroken heavenly- 
 mindedness and His self-spending devotion in ministry and 
 works of love. It makes possible the majestic serenity which 
 never deserts Him during the scenes of His Passion. ' I am 
 not alone,' He says, ' because the Father is with Me ^' 
 
 In such a spirit of dependence may be recognised the 
 true law of creaturely life ; and there is nothing in that 
 spirit which degrades or impairs the true dignity of human 
 nature. Nay, there is something in this dependence of a 
 filial heart, which seems to chasten and exalt the character, 
 while it quickens the intelligence of man. For in fulfilling 
 his own true law, and responding to the will of his Maker, 
 man finds himself admitted to the secret of the universe ; he 
 is in harmony with the purpose that underlies and guides 
 its entire movement. So also, we venture to say, it is with 
 the Ideal Man. ' Everywhere He sees the Divine unity of 
 thought which permeates, embraces, and binds all things 
 together, the spiritual and the material, the visible and the 
 invisible, the earthly and the heavenly, in one vast eco- 
 nomy -.' To Him the promise seems fulfilled, ' Thou shalt be 
 in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the 
 field shall be at peace with thee.' To Him the world of 
 humanity, and the world of physical nature disclose their 
 inner law ; He knows what is in them ; He intuitively reads 
 their secret ; He can trace beneath the apparent discords of 
 the universe the outlines of a broken, but recoverable, har- 
 mony. And thus the attitude of filial dependence on God is 
 found to be the condition of a right relation to all that He 
 has made ; it opens the way to a true understanding of God's 
 ways, and of that living principle of Love which binds all 
 things in one — binds them indeed 
 
 by gold chains about the feet of God. 
 
 Next, we may contemplate Christ's character as the type 
 
 ' S. John xvi. 32. 
 
 ^ Maz-tensen, Ethics {GemraV], p. 255. Cp. Job v. 23. 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 493 
 
 oi filial obedience ^, — of a complete harmony between human 
 will and the law of holiness. In Christ the ideal of free 
 will is realized ^. We are not now concerned with the vast 
 issues of that sinless obedience. It is enough to study it as 
 embodying a principle of purely human perfection, enjoined 
 indeed repeatedly in the Old Testament as the one condition 
 of covenantal union with God, but once only in history 
 adequately fulfilled in a human life. Obedience, based on 
 absolute trust in the character and purpose of God ; an 
 ' obedience of faith,' yet in its essence the obedience not of 
 a servant, but of a son ; an obedience that refuses nothing, 
 shrinks from nothing, questions nothing that presents itself 
 as Divine requirement : such is seen to be the law of Christ's 
 Life, the law to Him of action and of endurance, the rule of 
 prayer, the principle of sacrifice, the motive of service, the 
 well-spring of thanksgiving and joy. If the entire complete- 
 ness of this obedience becomes One who wears ' the form of a 
 servant ; ' the willingness of it marks the glad service of a 
 Son. And because the fulfilment by Jesus of the Father's 
 will is spontaneous, free, whole-hearted, sacrificial, it wins 
 acceptance as the oflfering of One ' well-pleasing ' and ' be- 
 loved.' Perfected by submission to suflfering and death, the 
 obedience of Jesus is stamped with the token of Divine 
 satisfaction by His rising from the dead. 
 
 And finally, Chi'ist is the perfect pattern of filial love. 
 He taught the human heart that the All-Holy God can be 
 the object of its highest affection, its purest passion, its deepest 
 joy. In Christ we see the filial character consummated ; in 
 Him we find the union of serene repose with consuming zeal, 
 unwavering loyalty, and sympathetic self-devotion to the 
 Father's work ; in other words we find creature ly perfection, 
 combined with the spirit of sonship. In many and mysterious 
 ways indeed, does this filial love of the true Son display itself: 
 in a hunger and thirst after righteousness ; in a patience 
 
 ' Christ's earthly life and work are in Illo non libera voluntas erat, ac 
 
 described summarily as vnaKur], Rom. non tanto magis erat, quanto magis 
 
 V. 19. Cp. Phil. ii. 8. peccare non poterat?' Quoted by 
 
 '^ Aug. de Praed. Sand. xxx. * An . . Liddon, Bampt. Led. [ed. ii], note c. 
 
494 ^-^^^ Religio7i of the Incarnation. 
 
 which can bide the time, and endure the chastisements, of 
 God ; in an overflowing tenderness towards all God-created 
 beings because they are His and in their measure bear witness 
 of Him ; in a faith which ' hopeth all things ' and labours to 
 make all things perfect. Such is the spuit of the Son: and 
 we ' learn of Him ' the loftiness of the height to which a 
 filial love of God may raise human character, the tenacious 
 strength it may impart to human will, the peace it may shed 
 on a human heart. Love is ' the bond of perfectness,' and to 
 wear the imago of the Son is to be conformed through Love 
 to the likeness of the Father Himself^. 
 
 The example of virtue is thus seen in a character, of which 
 some aspects have been just considered : and we may pause 
 at this point, in order to form some conclusion as to the 
 factors of virtuous action judged from the Christian stand- 
 point. 
 
 To have moral worth, an action must be the outcome of an 
 entire bent, or disposition of the agent. Good fruit is to be 
 expected only from a good tree ^. In the virtuous act the 
 agent's personality is engaged «s a ivhole ; his whole nature 
 is directed towards a single object. This inward unity is 
 perhaps what we really mean by 'simplicity.' In such action, 
 the human being most nearly approaches the concentrated 
 and harmonious energy of the Divine Life ". The person acts 
 as an undivided whole, each part of his nature is for the time 
 directed aright. 
 
 But we are here reminded that man's nature is disordered : 
 it can produce nothing truly good, except in so far as it is 
 restored to harmony by Divine power. God, says Thomas 
 Aquinas, calls us to a supernatural end, which by his natural 
 powers man could not attain. God Himself must therefore 
 impart the supernatural principle necessary to aid man in 
 resj)onding to the call"^. No act, in short, can be strictly 
 
 ' Aug. de mor. Eccl. xxiii. ' Fit ergo (ottA^), adding (ird, n rov fj cpiian dir\fj 
 
 per caritatom ut conformemur Deo.' e'ir) dei t) avrf) irpa^ts rjSicjTrj earai. Aid 
 
 ^ Dorner, pp. 336, 3SS. Cp. Ecce 6 6eus del fxiav Kal air\riv xo'pe« r)^ovr}V, 
 
 Homo, p. 136. K.T.K. Cp. Bk. x. cc. 4. § 9, and 7. § 8. 
 
 ^ Arist. Eth. vii. 14. 8 remarks * Summa, i. ii"^ Qu. Ixii. Ai-t. i. Cp. 
 
 that human nature is not simple S. Matt. xix. 17. 
 
XII. Christian Ethics, 495 
 
 called ' good ' which is dissociated from the direct action of 
 God : for ' there is none good but One, that is God : ' 
 
 work thy works in God ; He can rejoice in nought 
 Save only in Himself, and what Himself has wrought '. 
 
 We conclude that in a good action there is a true harmony 
 of the different elements in personality — intelligence, affection, 
 will ; and further that such harmony presupposes the action 
 of supernatural power on man's nature. It agrees with this 
 that Christian moralists give to the chief principles of virtu- 
 ous action the name of ' theological virtues,' and regard them 
 as supernaturally imparted. 
 
 A good action, then, implies right intelligence. There must 
 be an exercise of faith, which is a principle of knowledge — 
 a correspondence between human faculties and an unseen 
 object. Faith accepts the good as the proper element of 
 man's perfection ; takes God at His word, and aims at 
 pleasing Him. ' Without faith it is impossible to please 
 Him^.' Next, vjill asserts itself. Will is directed towards 
 an end desirable and attainable by effort : and thus is in- 
 spired by Hope. A study of Christ's example suggests that 
 the highest object of hope for man is the perfection of his 
 nature through the means appointed by God ". We see in 
 Christ something of the desire, and the joy of moral achieve- 
 ment. When He said that ' the ivorkman is worthy of his 
 reward,' He pointed to the possibility of a true, unselfish 
 pleasure in good work as such : of that thirst for perfection 
 and self-dissatisfaction which distinguishes the true artist 
 from common men. 
 
 Lastly, there remains that which is the dominant factor in 
 Christian goodness, Love. There is an element of imssion in 
 
 ^ Abp. Trench. caritatem.' 
 
 ^ Heb. xi. 6, Cp. i S. John iv. 1 6 ; ^ S. John iv. 34 ; v. 36 ; xvii. 4. Cp, 
 
 Eom. xiv. 23. Summa, i. ii"®. Qu. Ixii. H. S. Holland, Senn. on ' The Energy 
 
 art. 3, ' Quantum ad intelledum ad- of Unselfishness.' With regard to 
 
 duntur homini quaedam principia the relation of Pleasure to action, we 
 
 supernaturalia, qviae divino lumine may observe that pleasure is insepar- 
 
 capiuntur ; et haec sunt credibilia de able from the right and effective 
 
 quibus est fides.' lb. art. 4, ' Per fidem exercise of any faculty ; and therefore 
 
 apprehendit intellectus ea quae sperat accompanies virtuous activity, but can 
 
 et amat. Unde opportet quod ordine never be the moral end of action. Cp. 
 
 generationis fides praecedat spem et Arist. Eth. vii. 12, § 3, etc. 
 
496 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 Christlike holiness, -which differentiates it from philosophic 
 conceptions of vii-tue as a tranquil, balanced state \ Love 
 gives worth to the fulfilment of duty ; embraces, in union 
 with God, the Divine aim of creation ; and manifests itself 
 in spontaneity^ and inventive activity, transforming the ful- 
 filment of obligation into an occasion of joyous and delightful 
 service. Our Lord represents this ' ardent, passionate, devoted 
 state ' of heart as the real root of virtue. Without it the 
 most punctilious obedience is nothing ; for not to love is 
 not to live -. 
 
 Having thus indicated the place of intelligence, will, and 
 affection in virtuous activity, we are free to study the Chris- 
 tian character, and perhaps ascertain its permanent features 
 —those elements in it which have survived the test of such 
 wide variety of historical conditions. We have to inquire 
 what is common to the types of Christian life which different 
 ages, states of civilization, and forms of nationality have pro- 
 duced ■? For character is that which is capable of develop- 
 ment in varied situations, of free and spontaneous self- 
 adaptation to every change of environment. Circumstance 
 proves its quality, offers it a field of exercise, and ministers 
 to its growth. 
 
 Our task is rather to sketch a character than to classify 
 virtues. ' The earliest Christians,' says the writer of Ecce 
 Homo, ' felt a natural repugnance to describe the goodness 
 at which they aimed by the name of Virtue.' Within limits 
 indeed such a classification is possible : and a principle of 
 division may be applied even to a thing so mysterious, so 
 subtle in its shapes and gradations, so fruitful in surprises, as 
 character. We may, for instance, take as a basis the prin- 
 ciple of personality, and consider the Christian personality in 
 its thi-eefold relationship : to God, to itself, to its neighbour, 
 and in contact with the hindi-ances, moral and physical, pre- 
 sented by its environment^. 
 
 ' See Ecce Homo, c. xiii. * Such classification, corresponding 
 
 " Aug. de mor. Eccl. xix. ' Id ipsum to three cardinal ^^rtues. seems to be 
 
 quo diligimus Deum mori non potest, implied in S. Paul's words, Tit. ii. 12 
 
 nisi dum non diligit Deum: cum 'iva . . . <Tu<pp6voJs, kcu diKaiws nal eiiaffiSis 
 
 mors ipsa sit non diligere Deum.' ^rjaojfxev. 
 
 Cp. Cyp. dv Unit. xiv. 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 497 
 
 I. The Christian personality in relation to God. 
 
 The distinctive feature of Christian character consists in 
 consciousness of that filial relation to God which Grace 
 restores ; of the spiritual bond that exists between the human 
 soul and ' Him who is invisible.' Hence the goodness at 
 which the Christian aims is that which will bear the search- 
 ing light of the Divine eye. ' He chose us out of the world,' 
 says S. Paul, ' that we might be holy and blameless hefore 
 Him.' Thus in its essence Christian character is based on a 
 peculiar sense of relationship to God ; there underlies it a 
 constant desire of union with God, a temper of loyalty, a 
 spii'it of thankful dependence, a feeling of nearness to the 
 Divine presence. Were it true, as has been said, that ' the 
 Divine service ' had ' become human service ^,' Christian cha- 
 racter as a distinct type would have ceased to be. 
 
 From this attitude of mind and will two results follow : 
 first, singleness of aim, — the ' single eye.' The sense of personal 
 relation to God gives directness, ti'uthfulness, simplicity to 
 speech, action, and thought. So far as he is true to his pro- 
 fession a Christian is independent of the current opinions of 
 his age, or community, seeking only to live ' in all good con- 
 science ' towards God. The conviction of an unseen Presence 
 guides his actions ; an unseen Witness penetrates his thought ; 
 an unseen Master holds him accountable. Indeed, S. Paul 
 seems to regard holy living as consisting simply in the 
 endeavour to ' please God ^.' 
 
 And a second characteristic of the Christian is his view of 
 life in the world, of nature, of humanity itself. He observes, 
 judges, estimates all things from the standpoint of the spmtual 
 mind. He aims at bringing his own thoughts and desires 
 into harmony with the Divine will and purpose. He looks 
 out on the world, with its complex social order, its fascinating 
 interest, its appealing needs, as a sphere in which for a while 
 he is called to move, and to labour. Into the varied tasks 
 
 ' J. Cotter Morison, The Service of i Tliess. iv. i. An instructive contrast 
 
 Man, p. 194 [ed. 3]. See Eph. i. 4 ; might be drawn between the Pagan 
 
 Col. i. 22 ; S. Luke i. 75. and Christian use of the word 
 
 ^ Rom. viii. 8 ; i Cor. vii. 32 ; dpiCKfia. 
 
 Kk 
 
498 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 and interests of life he can throw himself with large-hearted 
 sympathy, and with the greater fervour because the time is 
 short, and the need of self-forgetful activity urgent. ' Once a 
 real Christian,' writes Lacordaire, ' the world did not vanish 
 before my eyes ; it rather assumed nobler proportions as I 
 myself did. I began to see therein a noble sufferer needing 
 help. I could imagine nothing comparable to the happiness 
 of ministering to it under the eye of God, with the help of 
 the Cross, and the Gospel of Christ ^.' 
 
 But the world is not the Christian's ' abiding city.' He 
 walks in it, and passes through it in pilgrim fashion, with 
 heart detached from it and all that it can give. He cannot 
 commit himself to the world, nor identify himself with it. He 
 has the internal freedom of a heart that has found its true 
 centre ; he is able to estimate visible things at their real 
 worth, and 
 
 To stand in freedom loosened from this world-. 
 
 Thus to have the ' mind of Christ ' is to judge of life and 
 the things of time with His j udgment, to see with His eyes, 
 to be inspired by His WisdoDi. So we find ourselves in natural 
 contact with the division of character by ' cardinal virtues.' 
 ' Prudence ' or ' Wisdom ' is the outcome of a right relation to 
 God. God only, S. Augustine says, is to be loved; this world, 
 and all sensible things, are to be used. Prudence is love dis- 
 cerning between the things which bring it nearer to God, and 
 those which hinder it from approaching Him ^. 
 
 II. In relation to humanity, and creaturely life in general, 
 the Christian finds scope for ' active morality *,' for minister- 
 ing love. The life of union with God inspires and prompts 
 the life of service to mankind. The infinitely varied rela- 
 tionships of life constitute so many forms of moral obligation. 
 Christian Judice means nothing less than rendering to all 
 their due. The desire to imitate God is at once the motive 
 
 ^ Lacordaire, a hirxjraphkal sketch, civil virtues. 'Ma.rtenseu, Elhics {Social) , 
 
 H. S. Lear, p. 34. § 82. 
 
 - Wordsworth, Tlie Excursion. Ep. * Be mor. Eccl. xxxvii and xxv. Cp. 
 
 ad Diog. v. nacra f iVt; irarpis (otiv avTojv, Bern, cle Consid. v. I. 
 Ka\ vatra irarpls iifrj. This spirit does * See the chap, with this title in 
 
 not exclude a true 2Kitrio(isiu, and other Ecce Homo. 
 
 I 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 499 
 
 and the rule of Christian activity ^. And this desire finds 
 expression in two distinctively Christian graces : the spirit 
 oi forgiveness and the spirit of compassion. 
 
 The inculcation of forgiveness is ' the most striking innova- 
 tion ' in the ethics of the Gospel ^. Greek thought on the sub- 
 ject presents a i-emarkable contrast. Aristotle is inclined to 
 regard forgiveness as a form of weakness, but allied to virtue 
 in so far as it involves resistance to passion. The ground of 
 Christian forgiveness is very different. The duty of it follows 
 partly of course from a consideration of the common human 
 nature which the offender shares with the injured ; partly 
 also from a dispassionate view of the injury inflicted. In 
 exercising forgiveness we suppress that false self-love or par- 
 tiality which magnifies a private injury. The Christian loves 
 himself not more than he loves his neighbour. He can put 
 himself in the offender's place, and consider what is for his 
 highest good. He will not allow the sense of injury to inter- 
 fere with, or override the exercise of good-will even towards 
 enemies. Certainly, the sense of his own moral frailty, and of 
 his indebtedness to Divine mercy, will restrain the Christian 
 from vindictiveness or harshness in regard to the faults of 
 others ; while the fact of the equality of men in relation to 
 their common Father, invests even the anti-social sinner with 
 the dignity of brotherhood ^. But forgiving love is no mere 
 expression of self-distrust. It is fired by something of the 
 generous hopefulness, the quickness to detect latent capacities 
 of nobleness even in the worst, which is the glory of the Divine 
 forgiveness. It 'rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth with 
 the truth ; ' ' believeth all things, hopeth all things.' The Greek 
 indeed had his idea of forbearance ; to him it meant some- 
 thing less than strict justice ; it was a virtue difficult to 
 place or estimate. Logically, it was scarcely to be praised. 
 
 * S. Matt. V. 44 foil. Leo, Serm. in ^ Ecce Homo, c. xxii. Cp. Butler, 
 
 Quad. vii. ' Forma conversationis Serm. ix. etc. 
 
 fidelium ab exemplo venit operum ^ Leo, Seim. in Quad, passim, esp. 
 
 divinorumetmeritoDeusimitationem v, vi, ix. Ecce Homo, c. xxiii. For 
 
 Sui ab eis exigit, qiios ad imaginem what follows, see Arist. Eth. v. lo. Cp. 
 
 et similitudinem suam fecit. Cp. Eph. iv. 32. 
 Iren. iv. 13. 3. 
 
 K k 2 
 
500 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 At the best it would never have implied the habitual duty of 
 active forgiveness. 
 
 Not less distinctive of the Chi'istian character is compassion'^, 
 and the active beneficence which results from it. Humanity, 
 by Jesus Christ, was transformed : it was ' changed (to adopt 
 a celebrated phrase) from a restraint to a motive.' Compas- 
 sion may display itself in readiness both to relieve the 
 physical needs of another, and to edify his character. To love 
 one's fellow-man as one's self implies willingness to benefit him 
 in body and estate by every means ; but it is also incom- 
 patible with unconcern or apathy as to his spii'itual and 
 moral welfare. Love is communicative, and will not with- 
 hold its best treasure. Hence compassion prompts mis- 
 sionary activity, and zeal for moral and social reforms. Nor 
 has ' humanity ' ceased to be a restraint by becoming a 
 motive. Christian justice contains the principle of ' inno- 
 centia ' as well as of ' henevolentia.^ ' Love worketh no ill to 
 his neighbour ; ' it can inflict no wrong, it can withhold no 
 good ; ' therefore love is the fulfilling of the Law ^.' 
 
 Active morality has many departments. Duty to the 
 ' powers that be ' — the order of society, human law, the state, 
 the Church : all this, into which the science of politics in- 
 quires, forms part of the obligation involved in love to man. 
 How comprehensive is the reply of an early Apologist 
 to the charge of disloyalty, ' we behave towards Emperors 
 exactly as we do towards our neighbours. To wish, or 
 to do, or to think evil is equally forbidden to us in any 
 case ^' ' Thou,'' cries S. Augustine, apostrophizing the Church, 
 — ' Thou bringest within the bond of mutual love every 
 relationship of kindi-ed, every alliance of afiinity; Thou 
 
 * Mozley, Univ. Serm. ix. ' Ancient eis, ad uniim ilium finem refer- 
 philosophy never opened the mine of endum est . . . Hinc efficitur ut ini- 
 happiness which lay in this principle. micos etiam nostros diligamus. . . 
 It was a discovery, like that of a new Misereamur. quia tanto magis nos 
 scientificprinciple, when it was made; oderunt, quanto ab illo quern diligi- 
 and Christianity made it.' mus separati sunt.' Cp. de disc. Chr. 
 
 * Rom. xiii. lo. Note the follow- v. ' Necesse est ut quem diligis tan- 
 ing words of S. Aug. (de doci. Omst. quam te ipsum, ilhic ilium trahas ad 
 i. 29) : 'Velle debemus, ut omnes quod et tu anias.' Ecce Homo, cc. xvii, 
 nobismm diligant Deum, et totum quod xviii. 
 
 vel eos adjuvamus vel adjuvamur ^ Tert. Apol. 36. 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 501 
 
 unitest citizen to citizen, nation to nation, man to man, not 
 only in society, but in fraternity. Thou teachest kings to 
 seek the welfare of their peoples, and peoples to be subject to 
 kings . . . Thou shewest how to all love is due, and injury to 
 none ^ ! ' 
 
 III. In the life of active beneficence, self-sacrifice is no 
 ' occasional heroism,' but an ' habitual mood^.' And yet from 
 the very nature of Christian love it follows that there is 
 a right self-regard, a zeal for God's kingdom in the soul, 
 a desire for the highest welfare of the personality as an 
 object of worth in itself, and destined to find its perfection in 
 God. 
 
 Love to self becomes Temperance, that is, the spirit of 
 purifying discipline. Thus, a mark of Christian character is 
 the passion for holiness: i.e. the desire to combine inward 
 purity of thought, desire, and motive, with the external fulfil- 
 ment of duty. 
 
 This process of self-purification is both mental and moral. 
 It includes the culture of imagination not less than the 
 control of appetite; 'sobriety' not less in judgment and 
 reflection than in the indulgence of desire ; humility in self- 
 estimate, not less than restraint of passion^. The dominant 
 feature of Christian character in this connection is a peculiar 
 self-severity, a deep sense of the ideal as something not yet 
 attained, a strict fidelity to known truth and the claim of 
 moral law, sensitiveness to moral evil, and watchfulness 
 against even its distant approach ; in a word, disciplined rule 
 in the affections, intellect, and will. For as the Hellenist 
 sage says of Wisdom, ' The very true beginning of Her is the 
 desire of discipline, and the beginning of discipline is love*.' 
 Temperance includes that reverent care of the body which 
 receives so high a sanction in the New Testament ; indeed, 
 respect for the sanctity of the body may be viewed as 
 
 ' Be mor. Eccl. Ixiii. [Clark] Obs. Lamps of Architecture, vi. § 9. 
 
 There are duties imposed by our re- ^ Dean Church, Disc, of the Christian 
 
 lationship even to the dead, to posterity, Character, p. 101. Cp. Ecce Homo [ed. 
 
 and of course to the impersonal creature. 13], p. 178. 
 
 See Martensen, Ethics {Indiv.), §§116- ^ See Rom. xii. 3 ; 2 Cor. x. 5. 
 
 118. On duties to posterity, see a * Wisdom vi. 17. 
 beautiful passage in Ruskin, Seven 
 
502 The Religion of the Incai^naiion. 
 
 reverence for the presence of God Himself, and for the place 
 of His abode ^ 
 
 IV. Finally, in relation to the hindrances which Virtue 
 encounters — the stress of circumstance, the pressure of mis- 
 fortune, persecution, loss, temptation, and the like — Love 
 displays itself as Fortitude, and finds both a passive and 
 active sphere of exercise. 
 
 As a passive virtue fortitude is the ' world-resisting ' 
 element in character. The hostility of the world to virtue is 
 only one form of its hostility to God-. Fortitude is thus 
 essentially the same in all stages of social development. 
 When the world-principle was embodied in a concrete form, 
 and became in the imperial power of Rome a definite force 
 hostile to the Church^, fortitude displayed itself for the most 
 part as patience under persecution (S. Augustine in his 
 treatment of this virtue naturally contemplates it under this 
 aspect) ; but the precise form of influence to be resisted will 
 obviously vary from age to age, while the element of redstance 
 in Christian character remains constant. 
 
 The name of ' fortitude,' however, must not be restricted to 
 passive endurance, prominent as this virtue is in Christ's 
 teaching. Fortitude embraces spheres of action, and will 
 display itself on occasion as resentment. Eighteous anger 
 has its source in the temper exactly opposed to Stoic apathy 
 respecting sin — that ' loveless view ' of mankind which said 
 ' Trouble not thyself ; thy neighbour sins, but he sins for 
 himself'^.' There can be no true love of good without a just 
 abhorrence of evil. Hence it sometimes occurs that love takes 
 the form of indignation and holy zeal — when directed, for 
 example, against oppression, cruelty, ingratitude, deceit, 
 selfishness. Such resentment is a natural and generous 
 emotion, born of sympathy with God Himself. Comparing 
 with the Christian conception of resentinont Aristotle's 
 
 1 I Cor. vi. 19. S. John's Epp.]. 
 
 ^ Ep. ad Diog. vi. fxiau Xpianavovs * Trench, Syn. of N. T. § xxxvii. 
 
 o k6(j/xos ixTjSiv dStKovfieyos, oti rals On ' Kesentment ' see Ecce Homo, c. 
 
 TjSovats dvTiTaaaovTai. xxi ; Butler, Serm. viii. Cp. Arist. Eth. 
 
 ^ See Westcott, Essay on The iv. 5. See also Dale, The Atonement, 
 
 Church and the World [in his ed. of Lect. VIII. 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 503 
 
 discussion of anger, we find tbat Christian teachers lay stress 
 on the social end of resentment. What the good Christian 
 resents is not a personal hurt, but injury and wrong-doing 
 viewed as injurious to his neighbour or the community ; such 
 resentment is distinguished by purity of motive ; in certain 
 circumstances it is not unwilling to inflict pain. 
 
 Moral courage, again, is the form which fortitude assumes 
 under other circumstances, too numerous to be specified. 
 Generally it is displayed on occasions when the Christian is 
 bearing witness to the cause of truth or righteousness before 
 men. No Christian can rid himself of his share in the 
 function of witness, committed to His followers by Christ. 
 And fortitude, or manliness, is the virtue of a witness — of the 
 solitary champion of a good cause confronting opposition in 
 any of its forms. The name ' athlete,' which we find applied 
 to martyrs in early times, may remind us that the task which 
 beyond others must needs test a man's power to endure, and 
 to stand alone, is that of witnessing stedfastly for righteous- 
 ness and truth. Yet the call to bear witness comes in ways 
 unexpected, and difficult to define or classify : it may, for 
 example, be a man's difiicult duty to withstand not opponents, 
 but adherents and friends ; to hold his own not against ' the 
 sneers and opposition of the bad, but the opinion and authority 
 of the good ^.' With this passing remark we quit the subject. 
 
 In the above sketch of Christian character we have confined 
 ourselves to some salient features. We have said nothing of 
 the gracious union it presents of delicacy with strength, of 
 communicativeness with reserve, of energy with restfulness, 
 of passion with tenderness. It is difiicult to delineate 
 character without giving a look of formality to what is 
 essentially a mysterious, albeit well-marked, product. In 
 Chi-istian goodness we see the handiwork of the Spirit of 
 God, and where He is, there is liberty. 
 
 It is indeed objected that this type of character is too rare, 
 too exalted for the majority of mankind. It is said that a 
 standard of perfection is set before them which it is hopeless 
 
 * Dean Church, Gifts of Civilization, p. 323. Cp. Martineau, Types of Eth. 
 Theory, vol. ii, pp. 200-202. 
 
504 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 to think of attaining ; that men are disheartened ; that 
 Christian teachers ' ask for the impossible,' and undermine 
 belief in the possibility of virtue. It is further suggested that 
 the rarity of the type proves that the saint ' is born, not 
 made ; ' and that radical change of character and disposition 
 is impossible ^ 
 
 The last point may be noticed in another connection. At 
 present we may suggest, in reply to these reflections, one 
 consideration. The objector forgets that Christianity does 
 not merely present a moral standard to men ; it provides 
 them with an entire system of moral education. The Church 
 recognises different degrees of maturity and attainment in her 
 children. It is no part of her method, though possibly an 
 accident of a particular age or set of conditions, that she 
 sets strong meat before babes, and appeals to children as if 
 they were grown men. That very ' individual treatment ' 
 of characters on which the writer of the Service of Man 
 insists, is a fundamental principle of the Christian system^. 
 
 IV. Christ the Source of the Recreation of Character. 
 The subject which we now approach is, taken as a whole, 
 peculiar to Christian Ethics. For it will be admitted that 
 Christianity alone offers a solution of the practical problem, 
 how is the ideal of virtue to be translated into life and 
 practice 1 ' It is the essential weakness,' says a living wi'iter, 
 ' of aU mere systems of morality, and of most, if not all, other 
 religions, that they confine themselves to pointing out what 
 the facts of life ought to be, and make no provision whatever 
 for dealing with facts as they are. ... It is their main defect, 
 not that they conflict with Christianity, but that they fail to 
 touch the problem with which it most dii-ectly deals ^.' Of 
 course, in advancing this claim for Chiistianity, we imply 
 
 ' See Service of Man, ce. vii and non corporis tantum, sed et animi 
 
 ix. These objections have been often aetas est, exerces ac doces etc. ' Cp. 
 
 met. See Dean Church, Serm. on Amb. de Off. Min. i. 17. 
 
 ' Christ's Example.' Liddon, Bampt. » Wace, Boyle Led. (ser. i) v. Cp. 
 
 Led. [ed. 11] p. 130. Ecce Homo, c. ix. We may consider 
 
 ^ Aug. de mor. Ecd. Ixiii. ' Tu how Christ gives a pradical turn to 
 
 [Ecclesia] pueriliter pueros, fortiter speculative inquiries. S. Luke xiii. 
 
 juvenes, quiete senes prout cuiusque 23, 24 ; S. John xxi. 21 foil. 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 505 
 
 that it is something vastly greater than a system of morals. 
 It is a Divine way of salvation, that is, of deliverance from 
 sin, as well as from its effects ; the process by which the 
 ideal becomes actual in life and character is also, as we have 
 seen, a process of restoration. Christianity, in fact, professes 
 to be a Divinely-provided remedy for disorder and disease ; 
 strictly speaking, therefore, a treatise on ethics must in- 
 vestigate the pathology of sin, regarded as the violation of 
 moral order, and the fatal misdirection of desire. This aspect 
 of the Gospel has been too much disregarded, even by 
 Christian thinkers ^ It follows, however, from the Scriptural 
 account of man that he has lost something which can only be 
 supernaturally restored: and it is the practical task of ethics 
 to point out the means of renewal, which Divine Wisdom has 
 provided. 
 
 The mysterious facts which lie at the root of the recreative 
 process must be briefly noticed. Christian holiness is the 
 reproduction in the individual of the life of the Incarnate 
 Son of God. That this might be possible, there took place 
 that series of events which S. John describes as the glorifi- 
 cation of Jesus Christ. The life, perfectly well-pleasing to 
 God, and therefore the supreme standard of holiness, passes 
 through the stage of death. The Sacrifice on Calvary removes 
 the barrier raised between tlic Creator and His creatures by 
 sin. The Eesurrection is, on the one hand, the seal of God's 
 acceptance stamped upon His Son's atoning work ; on the 
 other, marks the final stage in that process by which Christ's 
 human nature is ' perfected ^.' For by the Resurrection that 
 Nature is spiritualized, is released from earthly limitations, 
 and becomes available as a recreative force. The Ascension 
 is the condition of Christ's manifestation as ' a quickening 
 Spirit,' as the ' power of God.' By sacramental channels He 
 communicates to our entire nature His life-giving humanity, 
 as the means of our recreation after the image of God. Thus 
 the life of the Incarnate is extended in the life of the 
 
 1 E. g. Clem, of Alexandria. See Cp. i Cor. xv. 45 ; and see Gal. ii. 20, 
 
 Bigg, The Christian Platonists of Alexan- iv. 19. Also an Art. in Ch. Qii. Rev. 
 
 dria, p. 80. No. xxxii, on ' Our Lord's Human Ex- 
 
 ^ S. Luke xiii. 32 ; Heb. ii. 10, v. 9. ample.' 
 
5o6 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 redeemed, and by a natural and orderly growth, the character 
 of Chi-ist is reproduced in His members through the con- 
 tinuous operation of the Spirit, whose office it is to ' take of 
 the things of Christ and sheAV them unto ' men. He who is 
 outwardly our example thus becomes an inward principle of 
 life. 
 
 We now are in a position to estimate the extent to which 
 Christian morality depends on dogmatic truths. Apart from 
 Jesus Christ there can be no true life. The secret of holiness 
 lies in a 'permanent relation to a living Christ. He, by His 
 life and death, ' became unto us Wisdom, Righteousness, 
 Sanctification, Redemption ^' The example was not upheld 
 in vain ; for Christ placed within our reach the spiritual 
 forces by which alone the pattern can be reproduced in 
 human life. ' Sanctification ' means the progressive appro- 
 priation by man of the life of the Son of God ; the formation 
 in him, by successive stages, of the very image of Christ. 
 The objective aspect of sanctification is clearly presented in 
 the Old Testament ; holiness there implies consecration, and 
 is thought of chiefly as an objective work of God. In the 
 Kew Testament, the idea of holiness passes from the sphere of 
 worship to that of morality. But the Old Testament con- 
 ception is not lost ; it is expanded. - Holiness, according to 
 the Christian view, results not from the efibrts of man, but 
 from the outflow and operation of a Divine Life. Holiness is 
 spoken of as 'the righteousness of God,' as a 'free gift' 
 imparted to man ; and in the first instance requires receptivity 
 rather than activity on the part of the human soul. 
 
 The ethical significance of baptism is thus intelligible. 
 By baptism the individual is brought into vital contact with 
 the Source of the new fife, and enters the sphere within 
 which radiate the spiritual forces that flow from the glorified 
 humanity of Christ ; the germ of a neiv 'p^i'sonality is im- 
 parted; the kingdom of God is entered. But in this new 
 birth the work is only begun ; for the ' Grace of God that 
 bringeth salvation' has an abiding home among men. It is 
 
 ' 1 Cor. i. 30. Cp. Rom. viii. 29. Bruce on Heb. ii. 11-18 in Expositor, 
 For the thought that follows, see Prof. No. 50. 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 507 
 
 misleading to speak of Grace as ' an unknown factor.' Still 
 more so to assert that ' Theology has always been celebrating 
 the power of Grace to the depreciation of Ethics ^.' Grace 
 has its fixed channels and methods, its orderly movement and 
 outflow, its certain conditions, its appointed places and 
 seasons, its definite, though mysterious, laws of operation^. 
 Grace is, so to speak, stored and dispensed within the 
 mediatorial kingdom which Christ founded in His Church. 
 From an ethical standpoint the Church of God is before all 
 else a school of character ^, the Divinely-appointed sphere in 
 which, normally, the recreation of personality proceeds, in 
 which men are sanctified by being kept in living union and 
 contact with Jesus Christ Himself. 
 
 To enumerate the several ' means of grace ' committed to 
 the stewardship of the Church is the task of theology, 
 as also to explain the conditions of fruitfully using them. 
 On one point only it may be worth while to make a few 
 remarks. 
 
 To Christianity, as we have seen, each individual personality 
 is an end in itself. Each has a right to moral education ; each 
 was called into being that it might embody a particular 
 thought of God, that it might fulfil good works prepared 
 specially for it, and correspond with its own separate ideal ^. 
 Hence, true to the spirit of Him who was a Physician of the 
 sick, Christianity offers her Divine remedies to the worst and 
 most hardened natures. She believes in her power to renew 
 and transfigure them, to achieve in them a moral miracle. 
 Nobler natures, again, she endeavours to train up to the full 
 stature of Chi-ist-like character, sanctifying, consecrating, and 
 elevating the innate capacities of each. Her healing mission 
 extends to all men. She knows nothing of the aristocratic 
 temper of ancient ethics, which would confine the very 
 possibility of a moral life to the few. She rejoices in the 
 
 ^ Service of 3Ian, pp. 84, 85. natbevovaa r/jj-ds. S. Matt, xxviii. 19, 
 
 ^ Chrys. in Joli. horn. x. 2 afia Si 20. Aug. cle disc. Chr. i. ' Disciplinae 
 
 Kal hSei^aaOai ^ovKiTai on oux dirXws domus est Ecclesia Christi.' Butler, 
 
 ov8e t] x«/"J etreiaiv, dWa tois Pov\o- Analogy, pt. ii. c. I. 
 fievois Hal laiTovSaKoai, K.T.X. * Consider Col. i. 28 ; Eph. ii. 10. 
 
 ^ See Tit. ii. 11, 12 ^ X"P'^ • • • 
 
5o8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 infinite variety of typical forms which character roay assume, 
 A Christian poet has said — 
 
 There is not on the earth a soul so base 
 
 But may obtain a place, 
 
 In covenanted grace ; 
 So that his feeble prayer of faith obtains 
 
 Some loosening of his chains 
 And earnests of the great release, which rise 
 From gift to gift, and reach at length the eternal prize. 
 
 All may save self ; — but minds that heavenward tower 
 
 Aim at a wider power, 
 
 Gifts on the world to shower. 
 And this is not at once ; by fastings gained 
 
 And trials well sustained ; 
 By pureness, righteous deeds, and toils of love, 
 Abidance in the truth, and zeal for God above*. 
 
 Now this idea of individual perfection, so characteristic of 
 Christianity, is in the New Testament not dissociated from 
 the idea of a society, family, or household of God, in 
 which alone the full development of Christian character can 
 be achieved. Corporate life, with its network of relation- 
 ships, its mutual services, its common worship, its visible 
 pledges of brotherhood — this is God's great instrument in 
 the edification of character. So far, indeed, as the body is 
 divided or weakened, the pressure it exerts on the individual 
 is hindered, and the free play of its forces diminished^. 
 
 In the Church, then, we have the true school of character, 
 the true ' home of individuality,' and sphere of spiritual 
 edification. The normal course of spiritual growth is one of 
 widely varied experiences: it passes through the stage of 
 repentance with its appropriate works ; it is schooled by the 
 chastening discipline of common life^; it is marked by pro- 
 gressive power of submission to the leadings of grace. This 
 
 ' ij/?-rt^/>osfo?ica,No. xxxvii[signed5]. 'God's paternal discipline, our own 
 
 ^ Consider Phil. ii. 2, where the de- self-effoit, Christ's example, priestly 
 
 scription of the Christian example influence and sympathy, all contri- 
 
 and character is prefaced by an im- bute to the same end, persistency and 
 
 pressive appeal for Unity. The moral progress in the Christian life.' It is 
 
 guilt of heresy partly lies in its being specially instructive to contrast the 
 
 a principle of disunion. Cyp. de Christian with the Pagan estimation 
 
 Unit. xxvi. complains of particular of Labour, as a factor in the formation 
 
 ways in which disunion injures Chris- of character. See Martensen, Ethics 
 
 tian character. {Social), p. 129. 
 ^ Bruce {Expositor, No. 50, p. 84). 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 509 
 
 would suggest an interesting line of study, and one suitable 
 for ethical treatment, but must not now detain us. It is 
 advisable, however, in this connection not to overlook the 
 subject of Christian ascetics : a word which has often excited 
 unjust suspicion and contempt, and thereby been robbed of 
 the noble associations which rightfully belong to it. 
 
 The name ' ascetics ' is suitably applied to those Divinely- 
 sanctioned exercises which, by precept and example, Christ 
 commended as aids to holiness — Prayer, Almsgiving, and 
 Fasting. Reflection, indeed, shews that these ordinances 
 occupy a conspicuous place in the Gospel, because they have 
 a natural connection with the three principal spheres of 
 Christian duty, — duty towards God, towards man, towards 
 self. They are ways in which devotion to God, love to 
 man, discipline of self, find each an appropriate expression. 
 Reason and experience alike suggest that the Christian 
 character, with its harmonious beauty and delicate strength, 
 can only be the product of continuous spiritual discipline, 
 wise restraint, and regulated effort. A feature, therefore, of 
 Christ's practical teaching is His provision for what is, to 
 average human nature, at least a moral necessity. Presenting 
 Himself as the supreme example of the freedom which can 
 control and use circumstances for a spiritual end, He lays 
 down the threefold rule of Christian ascetics, to guide the 
 wills and affections of those whom He calls to follow His 
 steps. 
 
 The end of discipline is, of course, freedom : that is, the 
 perfect dominion of the Spirit in man. Aiming at this liberty 
 the Christian looks on the threefold ordinance of prayer, 
 almsgiving, and fasting as a help to his development ; it 
 is to him no mere arbitrary direction imposed by authority, 
 no vexatious restraint on lawful pleasure ; but an efficacious 
 aid to Christ-like holiness commended by the practice, and 
 proved by the experience, of holy men in every age, and 
 expressly enjoined by our Lord Himself \ 
 
 It may surprise us somewhat to find Prayer included 
 
 ' For what follows, see especially a very useful book by Canon Furse, 
 the Lenten sermons of S. Leo. Also Helps to Holiness. 
 
5ro The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 among ascetic exercises. Fov prayer is the ordinary activity 
 of the human spirit in relation to God: man's natural expres- 
 sion of self-dedication : his effort to embrace God's Will 
 as his choice, God's Law as his rule, God's Perfection as 
 his pattern. Yet because prayer implies regularity, discipline, 
 persevering effort ; because it has its different parts, its proper 
 occasions, and methods ; because it is the exercise of a distinct 
 faculty ; in short, because it is an arduous work, it finds 
 a place among exercises which seem at fii'st sight to be of a 
 more formal character. 
 
 This will appear more clearly on consideration of the 
 different parts of prayer. Thus prayer is in part to be 
 viewed as humble acknowledgment of an ideal unattained, 
 and consequent renewal of desire in that direction. As con- 
 taining, therefore, an element of self-purification, of striving 
 after deeper self-knowledge, prayer includes the practice of 
 self-examination and confession of sin. Regarded, again, as 
 an exercise of affection and intellect, prayer takes the form 
 of contemiplation, and communion with God, as the supreme 
 object of reverence and love. Thus it is evident that prayer 
 is a real exercise, well fitted to be an education of the 
 soul, and arduous because it implies an intense activity of 
 the entire personality. Even the body has its share in this 
 exercise. It is the appointed instrument of man's spiritual 
 self-oblation ; and prayer is the acknowledgment not onl}^ 
 that God is the ' Father of spirits,' but that the body also ' is 
 for the Lord ^.' 
 
 Almsgiving is placed by Christ among known and admitted 
 forms of devotion. Viewed simply as an action, it is an 
 obvious outlet of Christian love to man 2. But almsgiving 
 has another aspect, on which early writers insist with some 
 fullness. It is a means of grace, a purifying element in the 
 spiritual life of the agent. It is not often, perhaps, that this 
 
 ^ I Cor. vi. 13. SeeCj^). deorat.Dom. out the way in which the Christian 
 
 iv, on the part of the hoihj in prayer. spirit is likely to regard social pro- 
 
 - The particular shape which Alms- blems. Cp. Martensen, ^/Zu'cs (So«V(0, 
 
 giving will assume is obviously to be p. 132. This point seems completely 
 
 ' suggested by the special conditions ' overlooked in the Service of Man, c. 
 
 of the age. See a noble passage in vii. 
 Ecce Homo [ed. 13], p. 184, pointing 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 511 
 
 side of the duty is adequately taught. The danger of ' charity ' 
 becoming reckless or ill-dii-ected is real, and may cause 
 Christian teachers to be reticent on the subject. Yet this 
 aspect of the truth must not be suppressed. And after all, 
 almsgiving seems to be specially mentioned by our Lord as 
 a type of all works of mercy ^. Love, in its effort to imitate 
 God, need not be less discriminating than communicative. 
 The Fatherly providence of God is in fact the Chi-istian's 
 inspiration and his model : and we interpret the scope of our 
 Lord's commandment by study of Hia life who ' for our 
 sakeSj though rich, became poor,' and ' went about doing- 
 good,' and who taught us in one pregnant sentence the 
 mysterious efficacy of almsgiving 2. It need not be added 
 that true Christian charity is ever controlled by a due sense 
 of the dignity of human nature, and of the moral bond that 
 unites giver and receiver. 
 
 Each of the three exercises under consideration is con- 
 ditioned and aided by the other two. There is a specially 
 close connection, however, between prayer and fasting. As 
 a means of self-discipline, fasting has been strangely neglected. 
 Some regard it as a burdensome restraint on the will ; others 
 as ' unsuited to a spiritual religion ; ' others as unduly inter- 
 fering with Christian liberty. Chiefly, perhaps, the neglect of 
 fasting is due to inexperience of its value as a condition of 
 spiritual power, and forgetfulness of the place assigned to it 
 in the teaching of our Lord and of the early Church. It is 
 thus right to insist, fii'st, on its claim to be a Divine ordi- 
 nance^. There can be nothing superfluous or incongruous in 
 a practice which Christ is so careful to regulate, and which 
 He commends by His own example. But the practice of 
 fasting justifies itself as a point of simple wisdom in the care 
 of the personal life. Christian holiness requires, as we have 
 seen, an inward unity of the personality, in which no one 
 
 ^ Aug. Enchii: Ixxii. 'Multa sunt some striking remarks, 
 genera eleemosynarum, quae cum ^ S. Luke xi. 41. 
 
 facimus af?;MramMr.' See also Cyp. de ' Leo, m Quad. xii. 2, 'In caelesti- 
 
 op. et eleem. xxv. Leo, in Quad. v. 4 ; rfe bus Ecclesiae disciplinis, multum 
 
 Kes. i. I ; de Pent. i. 6, etc. Bruce, Para- utilitatis adfenint dirinUus instituta 
 
 bolic Teaching, etc., pp. 371-375, has jejunia.' Cp. Hooker, Bk. v. § 72. 
 
512 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 element has undue predominance. Bodily instincts and 
 passions, the powers of thought and imagination, the bias of 
 temperament— all have to be brought into subjection to the 
 controlling will. And the result is a character exhibiting 
 a due balance of different elements : a chastened spirit of 
 dependence, spii-itualized affections, subdued thoughts, sober 
 judgment, a purified heart, a sensitive conscience, a just fear 
 of unbridled appetite, a true simplicity. Such is Christ-like 
 holiness ; and one great condition of its attainment is fasting, 
 chiefly in its literal sense of regular abstinence from food^, 
 though its forms may be as varied as are the avenues of 
 sense-impressions. The motive of fasting may not be always 
 the same : sometimes it is the expression of penitential sorrow 
 for sin, or of the passion for inward purity ; sometimes it is 
 used as a special aid to prayer ; sometimes, again, it is the 
 sign of wearisome conflict with the lower nature ; in any case 
 it should be an exercise of love. Thus we regard fasting, not 
 as mere soulless, joyless abstinence ; but as a needful con- 
 dition of purity, energy, vigour of will, clearness of moral 
 insight, and capacity to impart spiritual gifts to our fellow- 
 men. ' Wise souls,' says S. Leo, ' mortify their bodies and 
 crucify their senses ; and therein set before themselves God's 
 will, loving themselves the more, in proportion as for the love 
 of God they love not themselves ^.' 
 
 Our apology for touching on topics so homely might well 
 be that the practical aim of ethics gives such points im- 
 portance. There can be no excuse needed, however, in days 
 of wide-spread luxury, and of much needlessly imperfect 
 Christianity, for recalling and re-asserting the necessity of 
 the discipline, as well as of the moral precepts, of the Sermon 
 on the Mount. 
 
 V. Chrisfs teaching as to the Consummation of God's 
 Kingdom. 
 An outline of Christian Ethics would be incomplete without 
 some reference to those eschatological truths which occupy so 
 
 ^ Ep. ad Diogn. vi. KaKovpyov/xivrj sen, Ethics (Indiv.), -p. i6o ; Mai'tineau, 
 aiTiois Kal noTots fi ip^xr) 0t\TiovTai. Types, etc., vol. ii. 381. 
 
 2 Serm. de Pass. xix. 5. Cp. Marten- 
 
XII. Ch'istian Ethics. 513 
 
 large a place in theology, and have so direct a bearing on 
 morals. We have already touched on them in connection 
 with the Christian doctrine of the Cliief Good. It remains to 
 consider them in relation to the perfection of man's nature. 
 
 The word ' perfection ' reminds us that there is a goal of 
 the moral process exhibited in history. The visible order of 
 the universe and the history of mankind, are verging towards 
 a consummation, a catastrophe, which relatively to us must 
 be regarded as an end. 
 
 It is no part of our task to discuss the intermediate stage 
 through which the kingdom of God is destined to pass : that 
 stage in which there is to be a supreme manifestation of moral 
 evil, a culmination of those tendencies and an outburst of 
 those forces which already seem to thi-eaten not the frame- 
 work merely, but the foundations of society. The decay of 
 Christian Churches, the profound corruption of social life, the 
 tyranny of materialistic lawlessness — these seem to be plainly 
 foretold in Scripture, and with a purpose : that of shielding 
 men from a moral despair which miglit paralyse their efforts, 
 or undermine their patience, as they witness the beginnings 
 of these ' birth-pangs ^ ' of a new order. The Christian will 
 ever guard against such a temper of alienation, or self- 
 isolation, from the world, as will lead him to depreciate the 
 national, political, or civil movements of his time. For 
 civilization is appointed to reach, through whatever con- 
 vulsions, an ethical consummation, the prospect of which 
 must inspire strength to labour, and patience to endure. 
 
 The last stage of the kingdom of God is one of glory, to 
 be exhibited in the perfection of the moral community. It is 
 for this that creation waits: to this, as the goal of history, 
 that inspired prophecy points. Two revealed truths are 
 intended to guide our conception of this prospect. 
 
 In the first place, the kingdom of God is to be finally 
 'manifested in its true character^: an event which must 
 involve momentous consequences for the physical creation. 
 Scripture sometimes speaks as if beneath the outer semblance 
 of visible nature there lay concealed an inner glory, destined, 
 
 ' S. Matt. xxiv. 8 d/)xv aiSiVwi'. ^ Rom. viii. 19. 
 
 t Ll 
 
514 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 when the semblance passes, to shine forth in full radiance and 
 splendour ^ The truth is thus symbolically conveyed that 
 since man is the crown and lord of the physical universe, his 
 final emancipation will carry with it a corresponding change 
 in his outward environment. But this consummation, no less 
 than the progressive movement of mankind towards it, is due 
 to the deliberate working and intervention in history of God 
 Himself. Naturalism points to a precarious prospect of 
 human happiness in the future, as contingent upon ' a perfect 
 adjustment of society -.' Christianity does not look to any 
 improvement in material conditions, nor to any social process, 
 as likely to bring about an ideal state of humanity. Neither 
 the physical universe, nor man himself, can attain to the goal 
 of their development, or to the perfection of their nature, 
 apart from God ^. 
 
 Again, the kingdom of God is to be purified through 
 judgment. The exact nature of this judgment it is im- 
 possible for thought to anticipate. But the teaching of 
 revelation is at least so explicit as to discredit any conception 
 of the judgment which would confine its operation to this 
 present scene, or restrict its meaning to any merely natural 
 process. The judgment is, in fact, appointed for a definite 
 hour, and is prefigured in definite historical catastrophes. It 
 will be parallel to, but transcending, those manifestations of 
 Divine power in history which mankind has already ex- 
 perienced. And the efiect of this final intervention will be to 
 put an end to that mixed condition of human things which 
 it is our tendency to accept and assume as inevitable and 
 perpetual. Out of God's kingdom will be gathered 'all 
 things that ofiend ;' and the collective mass of humanity will 
 be, with whatever gradations in the stage of perfection 
 attained by each individual, a ' congregation of saints *.' The 
 principle of Good will so achieve its final triumph. 
 
 "When we further inquire, as we are impelled to do, what 
 will be the extent of this final triumph, we are met by the 
 
 1 1 Cor. vii. 31 ; I S. John ii. 17, Belfort Bax, p. 19. 
 etc. ^ Cp. Bern, de consid: v. II. 
 
 ^ Cp. The Ethics of Socialism, by E. * Ps. cxlix. i. 
 
XII. Christian Ethics. 515 
 
 fact of our own ignorance, and of Christ's reserve. His 
 simple, severe statements seem intended to discourage fruit- 
 less speculation. We are thrown back in this as in other per- 
 plexities, on our unfailing assurance of God's character, and 
 on the faint analogies furnished by the present order of things. 
 The Gospel speaks of a righteous dominion, the sphere of 
 which is to be without limit. We read of a gathering into 
 the kingdom of all that is in true harmony with its purpose. 
 We find warrant for the belief in an intermediate state in 
 which imperfect character may be developed, ignorance en- 
 lightened, sin chastened, desire purified. And yet we are 
 assured that the consequences of action and choice abide, and 
 are eternal in their issue ; and we know that impenitence 
 must finally, and under awful conditions, separate the soul 
 from God. But we have not enough for a coherent system. 
 All that we can affirm is that the victory of Good seems to 
 demand the preservation of all that has not wilfully set itself 
 in antagonism to Divine Love, Holiness, and Power. We 
 cannot think that helpless ignorance, or inevitable poverty of 
 character will finally sever a human soul from God. Analogy 
 suggests that there will be scope in a future dispensation for 
 the healing ministries, and inventive service of Love. So again, 
 Scripture does not expressly teach that the lost will for ever 
 be in a state of defiance and rebellion. Even in the awful 
 state of final severance from the Divine presence there is room 
 for assent, order, acceptance of penalty ; and so far, evil^ in 
 the sense of the will antagonistic to God's righteous Law — 
 may have ceased to exist. Truth will have prevailed ; and all 
 orders of intelligent creatures will render it homage. The final 
 issue will be seen, and the justice confessed, of all those 'ways' 
 of God which are ' unsearchable and past finding out.' In a 
 word, there will be a complete manifestation of supreme Holi- 
 ness and Love : of Him, whose ' mercy is over all His works,' 
 and who will continue to stand in direct relation to every 
 soul that He has made, revealing Himself to each either as 
 loving Father or as righteous Judge ^. 
 
 ^ See the Bp. of Exeter's Primarij tion ' see an impressive passage in 
 Charge on this subject. On the prin- Martineau, Types, etc., ii. 65-69. 
 ciple involved in this ' dual classifica- 
 
 L 1 2 
 
5 1 6 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 It must however be added that what is called 'Universalism' 
 finds no support either in the solemn statements of Jesus 
 Christ, or in the analogy of nature. Man's very power of choice 
 implies the possibility of a sinful state admitting neither of 
 repentance nor of remedy ; not of repentance — for character, 
 growing by separate acts of choice, may become fixed and 
 hardened in its persistent refusal of the good ; not of remedy 
 — for, as even the Greek moralist, with all his belief in the 
 moulding power of law, confesses, there is a degree of moral 
 perversion ' incurable ' — that namely which ensues when sin 
 has finally destroyed the faculties to which moral appeal is 
 possible— desire, fear, hope, affection, the sense of shame. 
 
 With the end of history corresponds that of the indi- 
 vidual man. The ultimate perfection of human character 
 is not only regarded as possible in Scripture — but is sug- 
 gested by analogy ^ : and of the conditions of perfected human 
 nature, we are enabled to form some idea partly by our 
 knowledge of angelic beings, partly by a study of our Lord's 
 Humanity in its risen state ^. 
 
 i. Thus human personality, in its perfected form, implies a 
 state of harmony. As each element in human nature will 
 be preserved in its appropriate condition, so each will fulfil 
 its rightful function ^. The relation between body and spirit 
 will be that which is ethically the highest conceivable. In 
 man will be represented, as in a microcosm, a state of being 
 in which the first creation has been appropriated by, and made 
 the organ of the Divine Spii-it"*. The material body will be- 
 come one perfectly subservient to, and expressive of, the free 
 movements of a purified spirit^. And to this state of per- 
 sonality will belong a final harmony between moral law 
 and freedom. Human beings will have become ' partakers 
 
 ' 2 Cor. V. 5 ; Col. i. 28 ; Butler, differentia permanebit.' 
 
 Analogy, i. c. 5. * Corner, System, etc., § 2. ^ 
 
 ^ S. iliuke XX. 36 IffayyeKoi . . . Kai ® Aug. de Fid. et Symb. xiii. ' Spirit- 
 
 vloi flaiv Oeov rijs dvaardafois viol ovres. uale corpus intelligitur quod ita 
 
 Cp. Leo Magn. Serm. in Res. Dom. i. spiritui subditum est, ut caelesti habi- 
 
 c. 4. tationi conveniat.' The Kesurrection 
 
 ^ Vine. Lirin. Common, c. xiii. 'Uno- of the flesh is thus seen to have 
 
 quoque hominum sine fine victuro, vital relation to the idea of moral 
 
 in unoquoque hominum sine fine perfection. Cp. Thom. Aquin. Swwima, 
 
 necessario utriusque substantiae i. ii"". Qu. iv. Art. 6-8. 
 
xiT. Christian Ethics. 
 
 517 
 
 of the Divine Nature,' so far as to experience in themselves 
 the union of liberty, holiness, and love : 
 
 Indulging every instinct of the soul 
 
 There where law, life, joy, impulse, are one thing 1. 
 
 ii. Perfection further implies a state of glory ; a word 
 which, whether used of Christ Himself or of His followers, 
 seems in the New Testament to mean the outward manifesta- 
 tion of a holy character. The gradual assimilation to God, 
 which is the law of true human development on earth, is 
 the law of an unending progress. But in the perfect state, 
 character will find due splendour of outward expression. 
 Man's bodily frame will pass through successive stages ' from 
 glory to glory,' to a semblance faithfully reflecting the in- 
 ward supernatural life ". And in the marvellous union of out- 
 ward with inward recreation consists the 'glory,' of which 
 human nature is capable. 
 
 iii. Perfection is consummated by blessedness. The concep- 
 tion of bliss as transcending happiness (evbaiixovLa) is peculiar 
 to Christian Ethics. Happiness is a word of earth, and 
 represents a good which may be attained independently of 
 life in God. Bliss is inseparable from a living relation to 
 God. It implies union with God. 
 
 But though it is true that ' man possesses the plenitude of 
 his perfection in God,' the analogy of the present dispensation 
 points to a further element in ' blessedness,' namely, that of 
 fellowship in a moral community : the redeemed ' have 
 fellowship one with another,' in an ' indissoluble life ^.' In 
 fact the perfection of the individual, according to God's sepa- 
 rate ideal for each, demands that of the moral community. 
 Blessedness thus means that state wherein, by a society of 
 renewed personal beings, ' the Highest Good is loved and en- 
 joyed \' 
 
 This community of free and perfected beings, with God as 
 
 ' Iren. iv. 28. 2, ' Hi semper per- 1 S. John iii. 2. 
 
 cipiunt regnum, et proficiunt.' Pet. ^ i S. John i. 3-7 ; Heb. vii. 16 ; 
 
 Lomb. Sent. ii. xxv. 7, ' Post confirma- Westcott, Hist Faith, p. 147. 
 
 tionem vero . . . nee vinci poterit nee * Aug. de mor. Ecd. iv. [' Beata vita,] 
 
 premi [homo] : et tunc habebit non cum id quod est hominis optimum, 
 
 posse peccare.' amatur et habetur.' 
 
 * S. Matt. xiii. 43; 2 Cor. iii. 18; 
 
5 1 8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 its Centre, is the revealed ethical consummation of our race. 
 And as the manifestation of God's kingdom is to Christians 
 the supreme object of aspiration, and the highest matter of 
 prayer, so the effort to advance and extend its sphere is the 
 worthiest task that can be embraced by the will. The con- 
 ception of such a kingdom, to be made actual through the 
 exertion of human faculties co-operating with the invincible 
 energy of the Divine will, is the greatest thought that ever 
 enriched mankind. In the attempt to further the limits, or 
 promote the welfare of this kingdom, man finds his truest 
 happiness, and his noblest field of activity. For he is engaged 
 in the same work as God Himself^ : he has the same interest 
 in its accomplishment. He has found the absolutely good 
 sphere of effort and desire ; all else in which men busy them- 
 selves can only be ethically good in proportion as it bears on, 
 or hastens the approach of, that ' one far off Divine event.' 
 
 VI. Conclusion. 
 
 It is our Lord's method to present to men an ideal, before 
 He descends to the requirements of practical life. The Sermon 
 on the Mount describes the life of ' blessedness ' before it 
 treats of duty ; and from duty, passes to the means of holi- 
 ness. Such an example suggests one or two concluding 
 reflections. 
 
 First we may recall the true bearing of a methodical in- 
 quiry into Christian Ethics. The kingdom of God stands in 
 contrast with, but in special relation to, all modes and 
 products of social activity. It makes use of all the material 
 which human life offers, or human faculties supply, so far as 
 it is capable of serving a Divine purpose, or revealing any 
 aspect of the Divine Life. For that Life having once for all 
 intervened in history, continues ever to appropriate and 
 hallow all that comes within the wide range of Its outflow ; 
 Education, Criticism, Science, Art ; Industry, Wealth ; Law, 
 Polity — all these are capable of becoming ethical forces, of 
 ministering to man's true end, of contributing something to 
 
 ^ 'ipya Biov, S. John vi. 28. Cp. S. Matt. vi. 33. 
 
XII. Ch?'istian Ethics. 519 
 
 the highest life. Into the Holy City the kings of the earth 
 bring their glory and honour : and to a Christian Church are 
 addressed the far-reaching words, ' All things are yours ^.' 
 
 There is in fact a ' world-appropriating ' element in Chris- 
 tianity, as the ethical religion ; and it is essential that the 
 significance of this fact should be grasped, if Christian 
 morality is to be rightly apprehended, or fairly presented in 
 systematic form. 
 
 Further, in advancing a claim to mould and regenerate 
 human society, the Christian Church can only continue to 
 rely on her traditional instrument, — the recreation of indi- 
 vidual character. The social movements which an en- 
 lightened Christian judgment approves, are those gradual 
 and irresistible changes which result from the slowly-reached 
 apprehension of some neglected moral truth, as it gradually 
 commends itself to individual consciences. And such move- 
 ments are to be judged as they display, or bear upon character. 
 If for example a Christian mistrusts the extravagant schemes 
 of some forms of Socialism, — it is not because he is insensible 
 to the wrongs and miseries which suggest a violent remedy, 
 but because all such sweeping proposals would merge the 
 individual life, would repress and mar the fulness of that 
 organized social life which gains elements of richness and 
 diversity from the free play of individuality. 
 
 The study of ideals will also have suggested the relation 
 which the Church bears to modern life. The Church, we 
 have seen, is the school of human character ; the nurse, there- 
 fore, of such civil and social virtues as give stability to human 
 institutions. In her midst. Divine forces are really and 
 manifestly at work, tending to bring about the regeneration 
 of mankind. And in connection with this view of the Church, 
 we need to observe the power of chai-acter ; the practical 
 ' supremacy of goodness,' or at least its tendency to be 
 supreme ; its capacity to control and modify the pressure of 
 circumstance. A condition of all true thinking about the 
 social future will surely be a just estimate of character as a 
 social and industrial force ; it is a growing sense of this 
 
 ^ I Cor. iii. 22. 
 
520 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 truth that is doing much to revolutionize our economic theories. 
 We are learning perhaps that manfulness, mercy, self-control, 
 pity are among the forces which must be taken into account 
 by social science. 
 
 And if the Church is a gift of God to mankind, and there 
 be but one end of all His gifts, namely, the restoration of His 
 image in man, we must believe that the fairest fruits of 
 Christianity, and the many-sided fulness of Christlike cha- 
 racter, can appear only in those who live loyal to the moral 
 discipline of the Church, who are ruled by her wisdom, 
 chastened by awe of her beauty, penetrated by her spirit. 
 The kingdom of God is more — infinitely more — than an ideal 
 condition of human society ; but we know that the kingdom, 
 even in this limited sense of the word, will be the heritage 
 only of a nation ' bringing forth the fruits thereof.' 
 
APPENDIX ON SOME ASPECTS OF 
 CHRISTIAN DUTY. 
 
 The conception of morality as a system of positive Divine Law, 
 and the ^juridical method ' which is said to mark early Christian 
 writers on ethics \ is perhaps attributable to the growth of an 
 imperial spirit in the Church when she found herself confronted 
 with the task of reducing to order the social chaos into which the 
 fall of the Empire plunged Europe. S. Leo may be said to em- 
 body this spirit in a majestic personal form. The mark of Eoman 
 authority rests on the ordinances of the Church of this period. 
 It may be that her rules of duty wear something of the aspect of 
 a fixed, unvarying code. The moral problems with which she 
 has to deal are comparatively simple ; they admit of clear, concise 
 treatment, in accordance with a fixed system of discipline ; sharp 
 distinctions are possible : and the Gospel thus presents to the 
 world the features of an external Law. 
 
 Be this as it may, widely different conditions seem now to 
 demand a definite system of Christian duty, — a study of * special ' 
 or 'applied ethics.' The main feature of modern life is not social 
 disorganization, but complexity of relationships ; and although in 
 the abstract no such thing is possible as a ' conflict of duties ; ' 
 yet it is clear that duty is not always simple, or obvious. We 
 need in fact something like a system of casuistry ; of ethics ap- 
 plied to novel spheres, and special points of obligation. It is in- 
 deed reasonable to expect that as civilization advances, and new 
 realms open up which the Christian spirit must appropriate, the 
 Law of duty will be enriched ; there will be expansion of its con- 
 tent : e. g. the development of Industry makes desirable the for- 
 mulation of the ' Ethics of Labour ; ' the rise of a special class 
 may raise the question whether ' class virtues ' are to be recog- 
 nised, and how they are to be estimated, by Ethics ^. 
 
 In this appendix some purpose may be served by noticing a 
 few pressing moral problems of our time ; some spheres of 
 duty as to which guidance or development of principles seems 
 called for. 
 
 ' Sidgwick, Outlines, etc., p. io8. 
 
 * These are perhaps implied in S. Luke iii. 10-14. 
 
52 2 TJie Religion of the Incamatioii. 
 
 i. In the sphere of self-regarding duty a point which needs 
 attention is the truth of 'personal responsibility. There are in- 
 fluences at work which threaten the sense of accountability, whether 
 for conduct or belief. There are of course speculative difficulties 
 surrounding the question of freedom ; there is wide misconception 
 of its true meaning ; but it needs to be clearly taught, that 
 granted all limitations of the power of choice, moral responsibility 
 remains for the use of the character, as of the property, which a 
 man inherits ^ A man's moral constitution, rigidly defined 
 though it be by heredity, is yet his 'heritage,' his natural en- 
 dowment, for the right direction of which he is responsible. The 
 weak sense of this plain fact is noticeable in the lax and indulgent 
 tone often used respecting criminals. ' To some of us,' it has been 
 justly said, ' the individual is always innocent and society always 
 guilty I' The degree of guilt, however, may be minimized (e. g. 
 by the plea of ignorance), while the fact of it remains. 
 
 In this connection statistics of crime have a value which needs 
 to be estimated. Do they point to conditions of society which 
 must be faced as unalterable ? or do they not rather usefully 
 indicate the proper channels into which the stream of social 
 energy should be directed ? 
 
 Again, in the matter of j)ersonal Ijelkf, it is often assumed that 
 there is no responsibility. The question, however, for each indi- 
 vidual, if rightly stated, is simply this, ' What has been my atti- 
 tude towards that which has presented itself to me as truth ^ ? ' 
 
 Another point of importance is the moral culture of Imagina- 
 tion, in relation chiefly to aesthetic recreation in its different 
 forms, the Theatre, the pursuit of Art, the reading of Fiction. 
 We are learning by serious experience the enormous power of 
 fancy to kindle passion, and to colour human actions. In view 
 of the spread of depraving literature, energetic assertion of duty 
 towards this department of personality is needed. Such duty 
 seems to be recognised in Phil. iv. 8. 
 
 ii. Passing to the sphere of family obligations, it is natural to 
 remark on the break-up of family life which is so common a con- 
 sequence of highly-developed industry. The employment of 
 women in factories, etc., tends to make them unfit for domestic 
 duties ; while that of children encourages a spirit of independence 
 which is not without social danger ; thus not only the sense of 
 
 * Cp. Mr. Cotter Morison, Service of Consider S. Luke xxiii. 34. 
 Man, p. 214. 3 ggg Dean Church, Human Life and 
 
 ^ R. W. Dale, Cont. Eev.,Kay, 1SS9. its Conditions, Serm. III. init. 
 
Appendix. 523 
 
 parental duty, but the respect for parental authority, is impaired. 
 Christians are bound to discountenance, or at least to counteract, 
 this state of things so far as it interferes with the rudiments of 
 moral discipline. 
 
 The pressing need of our day, however, would appear to be 
 some clear teaching on the subject of marriage. There are dif- 
 ferent aspects of the marriage contract recognised in Scripture. 
 But Christianity can make no terms with those theories which 
 have borne fruit in lax legislation on divorce, with all its mis- 
 chievous results. Marriage, according to the Christian view, is a 
 serious vocation, with its own sacred duties, and special consecra- 
 tion. Improvident marriage is as immoral from a Christian as 
 from an anti- Christian point of view\ Ethical considerations 
 ought to guide or restrict the intention to marry ; and with re- 
 gard to the question of population, Christianity condemns any 
 theory which offers a substitute for rational self-restraint. The 
 true end of marriage, again, is something higher than ' happiness ' ; 
 it is appointed for the mutual enrichment of personality, mutual 
 freedom to fulfil the true ideal of human life. The whole subject 
 has indeed become involved in difficulties which cannot be en- 
 countered by any mere statement of j^rinciples. There is no doubt, 
 however, of the end which the Christian treatment of this point 
 must keep in view. 
 
 iii. As to the social sphere generally, we begin by remarking 
 that, from the Christian standpoint, every transaction between 
 man and man is to be regarded as personal, and therefore ethical. 
 The most significant fact perhaps of our time is the process of 
 transition from (so-called) political to ethical economics. To 
 reason rightly on social problems we must ever have regard to 
 personality. For ethical purposes the abstract terms Capital, Labour, 
 Production, Wealth, etc., must be replaced hy personal terms, Em- 
 ployer, Employe, Producer, Man of Wealth, etc. Our problem is 
 how to supersede the technical and legal relation by the personal \ 
 
 This being our fundamental point of view, we find that ethics 
 will treat equally of rights and duties. A Christian theory of 
 rights is requu-ed. The prevailing view of them is individualistic. 
 It is forgotten that the rights of one man have their ground in the 
 
 ^ See Service of Man, pref. xxv. foil. economists are led to leave out of 
 ^ See Ingram, Pres. Condition and account some of the considerations 
 Prospects of Pol. Economy, p. i8 : 'By which most seriously affect the con- 
 habitually regarding labour from the dition of the working man,' etc. Cp. 
 abstract point of view, and overlook- Carlyle, Past and Present, the last book, 
 ing the personality of the labourer, 
 
524 The Religion of the Incarnation. 
 
 obligations of another ; they are limited by the claims of other 
 personalities on our own ; ' right ' is, in fact, a condition making 
 possible the fulfilment of duty. It is thus a matter of Christian 
 concern (to suggest mere examples) that workers should attain to 
 the possibility of free self-development : healthy conditions of 
 work, the enjoyment of domestic life, security of maintenance, 
 perhaps permanence of contract, opportunities of recreation and 
 culture, — everything, in fact, which will give them fair chance of 
 healthful and worthy human life. Christianity can be content 
 with nothing short of this. 
 
 On the other hand duties call for notice. Modern capitalists 
 form a class whose responsibilities it is difficult adequately to 
 measure. The general principle, however, is easily repeated : that 
 it is the duty of the wealthy, or those who employ workers, to 
 respect the personality of their employes, to treat them not as 
 machines, but as men. Thomas Carlyle well describes the aim 
 that should guide this influential class : ' to be a noble master 
 among noble workers, the first ambition : to be a rich master, 
 only the second.' 
 
 Industrial development indeed brings into prominence many 
 questions of duty and right, which can be solved only by deej^er 
 apprehension of the Christian standpoint : and of ' morality as an 
 industrial force ^ : ' for the ties which bind men in the relation of 
 brotherhood and sonhood are the noblest and strongest. 
 
 The duties of a state are matters of controversy, and open a field 
 not lightly to be entered. It is clear, however, that adequate 
 pressure can only be brought to bear on governing classes by an 
 educated public opinion, rather we should say an enlightened moral 
 sense, in the community. It is impossible to foresee the results 
 that might ensue from the growth of moral opinion on such 
 points as the state regulation of vice, the just causes of war, the 
 restriction of the hours of labour, the treatment of semi-civilized 
 dependencies, the true lines to be followed by education. It is 
 this tremendous potency of public opinion that points to the great 
 need of modern democracy : the education, namely, of feeling 
 and character ; the cultivation of reverence and the faculty of ad- 
 miration, of self-control and sobriety in judgment and thought. 
 How far a merely intellectual tx-aining will produce this character 
 can scarcely be a matter of controversy. A vast field of inquiry 
 and study is thus evidently open to economic moralists : and it 
 
 ' See the chapter with this title in T. E. Brown, Studies in Modem Socialis77i 
 and Labour Problems, c. xii. 
 
Appendix I. 525 
 
 has been opportunely suggested that the effort to study, * in the 
 light of the revealed will of God, the intricate problems of society,' 
 might be a common bond between different sections of Christen- 
 dom, and might promote that unity of God's Church, which is the 
 true condition of effectual social reform \ 
 
 iv. In the Church, or moral community which embraces and 
 leavens the state, special points of duty arise : e. g. respecting the 
 limits of the Church's self-adaptation to the tendencies of the age, 
 and her relation to the anti-Christian principle in society. Hence 
 arise difficult questions as to the true bases of Toleration, and of 
 submission to the civil power. We may be sure that principles 
 of action and thought can be reached only by closer study of 
 Christ's words in i*elation to modern life ^, as the practical in- 
 stinct of the Church has interpreted them. A similar problem is 
 raised by the advance of Science and Criticism. Christians are 
 charged with being behind scientific men in their apprehension of 
 'the morals of assent ^' Whatever truth there is in such a re- 
 proach, it at least utters a note of warning. 
 
 V. Once more, if w^e consider the non-personal realm with 
 which man is brought in contact, we must face the problem of 
 duties towards the lower animals. We have seen that such duties 
 have a ground in reason : but their nature and extent are not well 
 defined. It is important to study our Lord's attitude towards 
 nature, for which He uniformly exhibits, especially in His parables 
 and miracles, such feeling and love. The practice of vivisection, 
 for example, raises a question as to the limits of the dommium 
 naturae committed to man ; and his right to employ creaturely 
 life as a means. There is of course a practice of vivisection which 
 is utterly immoral : as when it is prompted by mere pleasure in 
 experimenting, or by idle curiosity ; or is carried on without strict 
 intention and reasonable prospect of meeting a particular need. 
 
 Within the limits of an essay it would be presumj^tuous to do 
 more than raise such questions as the foregoing ; we perhaps best 
 display a sense of their gravity by leaving them as suggestions 
 for systematic discussion. For it has been justly observed with 
 regard to ethical problems that ' the actual solution is itself an 
 art, a gift which cannot be taught.' 
 
 ^ See an Article on ' Christian Dean Churcli, Gifts of Civilisation, 
 
 Union,' by Earl Nelson, Cont. Rev., Serm. II. 
 
 Feb. 1 8 89. ^ Mr. Huxley in Nineteenth Century 
 
 ^ See Martensen, i'i/iics (Ind.), § 93. for Nov. 1887. 
 
APPENDIX 11. 
 
 ON THE CHRISTIAN DOCTEINE OF SIN^. 
 
 'Jesus did not commit Himself unto them, because He knew all men, 
 and needed not that any should testify of man : for He knew what was in 
 man.' — S. John ii. 24, 25. 
 
 ' Sin is lawlessness.' — i S. John iii. 4. [R.V.] 
 
 'He knew what was in man,' The words describe our Lord 
 in presence of a fact universally recognized — man's moral un- 
 satisfactoriness. He looks steadily at man's first offer of service, 
 at man's first enthusiasm, when ' many believed in His name,' 
 and He discerns behind it a disqualifpng cause ; something which 
 prevents Him from trusting man as he is, and from committing 
 to him the great work of His kingdom. He sees sin in man and 
 all that sin involves of moral failure, of refusal to endure, of 
 spiritual blindness, of lawless self-assertion, of passion, of selfish- 
 ness, of self-will. That there is in human nature this disqualify- 
 ing taint of sin is, we may say, a fact universally recognized. It 
 is the fact which in slow embittering experience has turned 
 philanthropists into cynics and saddened the wisest. But to our 
 Lord it was a fact present from the first. ' He needed not that 
 any should testify of man.' He reckoned with sin to start with. 
 Therefore He could not use mankind, as it offered itself, for His 
 purposes. It needed a fresh start, a vital re-creation, to fit it 
 for such high ends. ' Except ye be converted and become as 
 little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.' 
 ' Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of 
 God.' 
 
 Christ recognizes the fact of sin. All men more or less come 
 
 ^ A sermon preached before the inti-oduction of a Sermon into a 
 
 University of Cambridge, at Great volume of Essays. But it was felt (i) 
 
 St. Mary's Church, on Sunday, March that there was under the circum- 
 
 17, 1889, by the Rev. Charles Gore, stances an advantage in producing 
 
 and printed in the Guardian, March what was not written in view of the 
 
 27. A. paragraph of practical exhor- criticisms on Lw.r ilf(/«rf/ ; (2) that the 
 
 tation is omitted at the end. Some sermon was not specially homiletic. 
 apology is no doubt needed for the 
 
App. II.] Oil the Christian Doctrine of Sin. 527 
 
 to recognize it within them and without. But yet there have 
 been very different ways of explaining it. 
 
 For upon the surface it is tempting to interpret the struggle 
 between good and evil, as we know it so sadly well in our narrow 
 experience, as representing a universal conflict between opposite 
 principles. The world is a composite thing, men have supposed, 
 the result of the antagonism of two Principles, two kingdoms, 
 two Gods, one good and the other evil ; or they have explained 
 the world as representing the action of a good God upon an 
 intractable material, eternal as Himself, which limits His power 
 and restrains His hand. On either of these cognate theories^ 
 the soul of man is naturally represented as a creation of the 
 good Principle or a particle of it, embedded in a vile body of 
 material evil w^hich clogs and hinders and impedes it, which is 
 the seat of lusts and passions, defiling the purity of the spiritual 
 element. The spirit is good and the body is evil. This is the 
 theory upon which so much of Oriental asceticism has proceeded. 
 The object of such asceticism is to liberate the pure spirit from 
 the trammels of the corrupting and imprisoning body. That is 
 most spiritual which is least material. Purification is abstrac- 
 tion from the body. The spirit is akin to God, and will one day 
 win its way up to be re-absorbed in God. The body is material 
 and evil, the seat of sin, and to be dealt with as such. Hence 
 the remorseless persecution of the body which has been ex- 
 hibited by the devotees of Gnosticism or Brahmanism — the de- 
 nunciation of marriage, of animal flesh and wine. Hence, on 
 the other hand, the wild rebound into licentiousness which has 
 sometimes characterized Gnostic or Manichaean sects. For, after 
 all, when asceticism has done its utmost we are still in the body. 
 If connection with the body is sin, eating and drinking at all is 
 as sinful as excess ; marriage the same as licence. Outward acts 
 become indifferent — indifferently bad. This principle explains 
 the reaction from extreme mortification to extreme licence which 
 characterizes Orientalism. 
 
 Once more, in modern times, from a different point of view, 
 materialism has again interpreted sin as an essential part of 
 nature. Ignoring the distinction of what is moral and what is 
 
 * The first is that of the Manichaeans among Orientals and in Europe. 
 
 and some Gnostics. The second that Recently John Stuart Mill was dis- 
 
 of the Platonists and other Gnostics. posed to embrace the latter theory : 
 
 But both the theories represent ten- see Thi-ee Essays on Religion, 3rd edition, 
 
 dencies very commonly at work both London, 1874, pp. 58, 243. 
 
528 The Religion of the Incaj'nation. [app. ii. 
 
 physical, the materialistic Positivism, for instance, of Mr. Cotter 
 Morison represents goodness and badness in men as the simple 
 product of natural forces like goodness and badness in fruits of 
 the earth, each class of good and bad men being essentially and 
 inevitably what it shows itself to be. 'Nothing is gained,' he 
 says, ' by disguising the fact that there is no remedy for a bad 
 heart and no substitute for a good one \' 
 
 It is common to all the anti-Christian views of sin that at the 
 last resort they make sin natural, a part of nature. It is cha- 
 racteristic of Christ's view of sin — of the Scriptural view of it — 
 that it makes it unnatural. It is characteristic, again, of the 
 non-Christian view that it makes the body, the material, the 
 seat of sin. It is essential to the Christian view to find its seat 
 and only source in the tvUl ^. 
 
 Take the vilest crime, and Christianity assures you that 
 throughout the transaction, as you may observe it, there is 
 nothing evil in the natural material which is employed, there is 
 only the lawless misuse of material which is in itself good. The 
 worst passions are but the disorderly exercise of feelings and 
 faculties in themselves good and capable of redemption. Lust is 
 only love uncontrolled by the will, and, therefore, lawless. 
 Take the lowest criminal, and Christianity assures you that, 
 however habituated all his nature to run to evil, if you can once 
 get his will — what Scripture calls his 'heart' — set right and 
 given to God, that right direction of the will, the heart, will after 
 long battle at last carry with it all the nature ; the forces of 
 grace are set free to act when the obstacle of the will's rebellion 
 or apathy is removed, and (though it takes ages beyond this 
 mortal life) at last the whole being will be purified, and what 
 began in the surrender of the will will take effect in the illumina- 
 tion of the intellect and the purifying of the affections. Thus it 
 is that Christianity can represent God as justif3dng the sinner in 
 virtue of faith. Faith is the first movement of the will and 
 heart by which the sinner, from the far-off country of his exile, 
 seeks his true home, from the depth of his sin, claims Christ as 
 his own. At this first movement God welcomes him. He 
 meets him with His acceptance. He claims him as His true 
 
 * The Service of Man, London, 18S7, idea of moral responsibility is got rid 
 p. 295. Cf. p. 293, ' It will perhaps of, the better it will be for society- 
 be said that this view does away with and moral education.' 
 moral responsibility .... To which ^ See, for instance, Tcrtullian, de 
 the answer is, that the sooner the paenit.^; Anselm, Cur Dens Homo, i. 11. 
 
APP. II,] On the Christian Doctrine of Sin. 529 
 
 son, because in that first movement of the moral being God sees 
 the pledge of all that is to come. He sees the forces let loose 
 which will bring the final victory. He deals with the sinner by 
 a Divine anticipation, not as he is, bvit as he is on the way to 
 become ^. ' His faith is reckoned for righteousness. ' 
 
 Let us dwell on the Christian view of sin, in its essence, in its 
 appeal, in its practical justification, in its anthroi^ological results. 
 
 (i) In its essence. It is expressed by S. John, 'Sin is law- 
 lessness :' 17 duapria eariu r) avotxin. The two terms are coincident. 
 For God, and God only, made the world, and there is no other 
 Creator, no other creation. He made it, and pronounced it very 
 good in its completeness. The universe, in all its sum of forces 
 and existences, is good, and of God. The very existence of any- 
 thing is a pledge of its natural goodness. It exists only becavise 
 God created it and sustains it and dwells in it. It must cease to 
 exist, S. Augustine tells us, if it were simply evil '-. Positive 
 existence is always, so far, good. 
 
 What then is sin in men or in devils ? In one word, lawless- 
 ness — the violation of nature, the misuse of good by rebellion of 
 the will. Physical decay, death, dissolution, change, these are of 
 nature ; sin, on the other hand, is contrary to nature. It is 
 simply misuse, disorder. It has no positive substance. A sinful 
 man is not the man as God made him with something else intro- 
 duced called sin. He is simply the man as God made him, 
 disordered by ignoring God, by claiming independence of God, 
 by lawlessness. The same act may constitute either the sin of 
 murder or the heroism of a soldier fighting in his country's 
 defence ; either the sin of adultery or Christian mai-riage, because 
 in the one case the act is done in accordance with the God-given 
 law of our being ; in the other case in defiance of it. The 
 humanity of Christ and the humanity of the greatest criminal 
 are consubstantial the one with the other. All that the criminal 
 sins with belongs to Christ's nature ; He has all the faculties that 
 are used for sin. ' He could sin if He could ivill to sin,' the 
 Fathers tell us, ' but God forbid that we should think of His 
 willing it ^' What is disordered, ungoverned in the criminal is 
 in Christ perfectly subordinated to a will, itself controlled in 
 
 ^ Augustine, de Trin. i. lo. 21. malum nisi in aliquobono ; quia non 
 
 ^ Aug. de imr. Man. ii. 3, 'Ut ab potest esse nisi in aliqua natura ; 
 
 essentia defieiant et ad non esse ten- omnis autem natura, in quantum 
 
 dant ? quod malum generale esse natura est, bonum est.' 
 clamat verissima ratio.' Op. imp. c. ^ For references, see p. 290, note. 
 
 Jul. i. 1 14, ' Nonenim potest esseullum 
 
 \ M m 
 
530 The Religion of the Incarnation, [app. ii. 
 
 loving harmony by the Divine Spirit. If it sounds prej)ostei*ous 
 to say that the nature of the criminal is not of itself sinful, to 
 make the statement reasonable and true we have only to bear in 
 mind the results of sin which have taken slow effect upon his 
 nature in the sequence of generations of bad habit. The body 
 may have become so accustomed to sin, so moulded to sin by 
 forces within and without as to justify S. Paul calling it a 
 'body of sinV but only in the sense in which our Lord calls 
 money or mammon 'the mammon of unrighteousness^.' Money, 
 our Lord meant, has become so accustomed, so to speak, to lend 
 itself to the purposes of imrighteousness that it requires attention 
 as alert, wisdom as far-sighted, as that of the unjust steward, in 
 the children of light, to divert it again to its true uses. The body 
 in the same way has been so moulded to sin, accustomed to sin, 
 that it requires the strong hand of an asceticism, rightly motived, 
 to 'keep it under,' to lead it as a slave, to wrest it to good uses. 
 It requires the cvitting off of the right hand or the plucking out 
 of the right eye — the disuse for a time, that is, by doing violence 
 to oneself of what has become so misused, so lawless. The bow 
 must be bent violently back, if it is to be made straight. But 
 the end of all this Christian asceticism is the restoration of our 
 whole nature to its true law. We mortify our bodies only to 
 offer them at last a living sacrifice of rational service. At last all 
 the impulses and passions and parts of even the criminal nature 
 shall be subjugated again to the law of the Spirit. Christ shall 
 purify the impure and harmonise the disorderly. Thus down 
 the vista of an endless future Christianity forces us to see the 
 nature of the criminal, if he will but turn Godwards, only recon- 
 stituted, not substantially changed, one with Christ in glory. 
 This is the Christian doctrine of sin, the doctrine that Athanasius 
 and Augustine and Anselm, the Christian Fathers as a whole, 
 repeat and reiterate ; that sin has no substance ; that there is 
 no positively sinful nature ; that sin lies not in things, but in 
 our relation to things ; that the introduction of sin is simi)ly the 
 privation of order ; that moral recovery waits for nothing but the 
 conversion of will ^ 
 
 1 Rom. V. 6 : see Godet's Commcn- index to S. Augustine s. v. malum. 
 
 tm-y in loc. Clark's Foreign Tlieol. Libr. So far, however, as each individual 
 
 i. p. 416 ; and cf. Col. ii. 11, to aw/xa identifies himself with sin, it becomes 
 
 T^s aapKos. ' his nature ' : a false nature, obscur- 
 
 '^ S. Luke xvi. 9. ing the time, but never annihilating 
 
 ^ See Origen, C. Cds. iv. 65-66; it ; cf. TertuUian, f/tJ^lJi. 41, ' Naturae 
 
 Athau. C. Gentes, 6-7 ; and cf. the corruptio alia natura est,' etc. ; and 
 
APP. II.] On the Christian Doctriiie of Sin. 531 
 
 (2) This is the Christian doctrine, and its appeal is to moral 
 experience. Looking at the world from the point of view of 
 physical science, it may appear as if goodness and badness were 
 like good and bad fruit ; but to suppose this is to leave out of 
 sight the whole witness of moral experience. It was not 
 Christian belief but inextinguishable consciousness that made 
 Byron cry — 
 
 ' Our life is a false nature — 'tis not in 
 The liarmony of things.' 
 
 Or Shelley: — 
 
 ' The universe 
 In Nature's silent eloquence declares 
 That all fulfil the works of love and joy, 
 All but the outcast man^' 
 
 In proportion as the moral consciousness is keen and active, in 
 that proportion men know that sin is not nature, but its viola- 
 tion ; that they are not what they are meant to be in sinning ; 
 that sin has no analogy in the failures of nature, because it is 
 what they are not, avoidable and morally wrong ; that it violates 
 what they fulfil, the law of the world. Natural failure is part of 
 the world's fruitfulness. The seeds that fail supply material for 
 the seeds that grow. Moral failure — sin, that is, as distinguished 
 from mere imperfection — is never fruitful. Sins are always the 
 'unfruitful works of darkness^.' 
 
 (3) And the justification of this Christian theory lies in its 
 success. The moral triumphs of the Church depend upon it. 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer constantly assures us that the fundamental 
 postulates of human experience are assumptions or hypotheses 
 at the bottom, which are continuously verified and justified by 
 the correspondence of the results reached. That is true of the 
 Christian postulate of sin. The hypothesis that sin is not nature, 
 bvit lack of will, is verified by the victory which follows action 
 upon it. 'According to thy faith be it done to thee ' — that 
 is Christ's challenge. Man after man sick of moral paralysis 
 lies at Christ's feet explaining why he cannot get up. ' Take 
 up thy bed and walk,' 'According to thy faith be it unto thee,' 
 is the word of Christ. Claim for your own the morally best. 
 Act on Christ's promise as if it were true and you find it is. 
 This is faith — to act on what transcends experience, to act on 
 
 Bernard, in Cant. Senn. 82. 2,— ad- 159. 
 
 mirable passages. ■' Cf. in explanation of this, the 
 
 ^ See in Mozley, Lectures, etc., x. p. Preface, p. xviii. 
 
 M m 3 
 
532 The Religion of the Incarnation, [app. ii. 
 
 what you do not feel possible, to act in faith on a promised 
 strength, and to find it really given only in the using. Faith 
 involves the recognition of our own weakness, the surrender of 
 our own independence into the hands of God ; it gains as its 
 reward the promised help ; it sets free the ' virtue which goes 
 out' of Christ. Eeason can only analyse and rationalise what 
 it already experiences. Faith can do what reason, what under- 
 standing, at any rate, cannot do — it can yield life up to higher 
 forces than it has yet known. Only when the forces have be- 
 come in experience thoroughly familiar can they be subjected 
 to the analysis of reason. Credo ut inteHigam. The justification 
 of the Christian view of sin as something which is not nature, 
 but failure or disorder of will — something therefore which faith, 
 that is the right direction and use of will, can overcome, or put 
 in the way to be overcome — the justification of this view is, 
 I say, to be found in experience. Act against sin, in Christ's 
 name, as if you had strength, and you will find you have. 
 Expect and you receive. It finds its justification not in the 
 recovery of our own lives only, but in that of others. The 
 Christian lifts others by believing in them. He sees in each 
 the subject of redemption. Behind heaps of sin, ingrained 
 habits of sin, he sees a man's true self, true nature, as God made 
 it and intended it to grow, and to this he appeals. * According 
 to thy faith be it unto thee ' means not only ' You can be saved, 
 if you believe ; ' it means also ' You can save others ' — save them 
 by believing in them and in God, save them, not accoi'ding to 
 your own foolish desires, but in accordance with God's intention 
 for them, with the original law of their being. The best modern 
 novel literature is full of this truth. What are the moral re- 
 coveries of Jean Valjean in Les Miscrablcs, and of Sidney Carton 
 in the Tale of Two Cities, and of the selfish old peer in the child 
 story of the Little Lord Faiintleroy, but so many instances of the 
 redemptive power of Christian love because it 'believeth all 
 things, hopeth all things,' believes past belief, hopes beyond 
 hope. The justification of the Christian view of sin lies, then, 
 in its success ; partly in the results it actually produces, partly 
 in the larger promise which it opens out beyond the horizon of 
 what we see. ' There is no remedy for a bad character and no 
 substitute for a good one' — that is the only outcome of the 
 physical view of sin. 'According to thy faith, be it unto 
 thee ' — that is the Christian answer ; there is for thyself no 
 limit to what thou mayest become, on the lines, that is to say, 
 
APP. II.] On the Christian Doctrine of Sin. 533 
 
 not of thine own ambition, but of God's purpose, except what thou 
 settest by thine own want of faith, thine own failure of moral 
 appetite ; there is in the case of others no limit to what thou 
 mayest help them to become, on the lines, once again, of their 
 fundamental nature — excej^t the limits of their faith and thine. 
 
 {4) This Christian view of sin determines in part its whole an- 
 thropology. What sin is in us, and now, and in recorded history, 
 sin is also in the whole of humanity. Sin actual is of a piece 
 with sin historical, with sin original. Each man does not start 
 afresh. He inherits the moral conditions from which his life 
 starts. I am aware that a modern school of biologists, headed 
 by Professor Weissmann, is modifying the current doctrine of 
 heredity so far as to deny that acquired character can be trans- 
 mitted, so far as to deny that the acts or habits of men can 
 physically modify the organisation of their descendants. It is 
 not yet clear that this view, in its extreme form, is at all likely 
 to gain acceptance. But I suppose Christianity can await the 
 result with patience. It may not be in any region to which 
 scientific analysis or investigation can penetrate, but at least in 
 the inner region of man's personality Christianity must main- 
 tain that the individual does not start afresh. He starts the 
 subject of sinful tendencies which he did not originate, but 
 which those who went before him did, if not originate, at least 
 let loose from restraint, and so make sinful. Sin is in the race 
 as well as in the individual ; stayed more or less by moral effort 
 and resistance here ; let loose by self-indulgence or luxury there : 
 in varying force and alterable sway therefore, but everywhere 
 more or less present, everywhere making a man conscious not 
 merely of imperfection, but of inward taint, everywhere needing 
 re-creation, recoveiy, redemption. And everywhere sin is of a 
 piece. My sins are only fresh specimens of what has been going 
 on all along. They work just the same result upon humanity 
 as a whole as the sins of my predecessors, as the first sin : I am 
 driven logically as well as theologically to extend my theory of 
 sin and to generalise it beyond present experience. Sin, not in 
 the individual, as I know him merely, but in the whole of 
 humanity from the first, has been always rebellion, not nature. 
 At the beginning of human life, properly so called, when first 
 a being truly called a man woke up to consciousness of his 
 relation to God, to nature, to himself, he did not find sin part 
 of his being ; he might have obeyed the movement of the 
 Spirit of God and realised his true sonship by keeping his 
 
534 ^-^^^ Religion of the Incarnation, [app. ii. 
 
 animal nature under the control of the spirit : so he would have 
 fulfilled the law of his destined manhood. Sin at the origin 
 of our human life, as through all its history, was treason to our 
 higher capacity, which made man the slave of the flesh. The 
 ' slave of the flesh, ' because he was not meant to be an animal : 
 he was meant to be a spiritual being. And it was the capacity 
 for the higher life which turned to sin his choice of a lower ; 
 which tinged it with the colour of 'remorse,' with the bitterness 
 of ' self-contempt \' 
 
 As the essential Christian doctrine of sin finds the guarantee 
 of its permanence in the moral consciousness, so it would not 
 appear to involve any conflict with the disclosures of science. 
 Yet it has been sufficiently distorted in statement for a conflict 
 to have arisen. And the points at issue are briefly three. 
 
 (a) Broadly, it is said, the Christian religion represents man 
 as starting in a state of perfection and gradually degrading. 
 Science, with all the evidences on its side, represents man as 
 starting in a state of savagery and gradually rising. 
 
 This is a most delusive antithesis. It is certainly true that 
 progress has not been uniform. There is such a thing as moral 
 deterioration. A history of the progress of sin from will to 
 intellect, from intellect to heart, till it penetrates the whole 
 nature and plunges it into the lowest depths of denaturalisation 
 represents what has been a fact both in the individual and in 
 society. Such a record of one element in human experience 
 S. Paul gives us in Eomans i^ Its truth cannot be denied. 
 But so far is this from representing the Christian view of 
 human history as a whole that, on the contrary, the Scriptures 
 stand alone among ancient literatures in presenting the idea of 
 gradual progress, gradual education, movement onwards to a 
 climax. The Bible is the book of development. ' God Who 
 in many parts and many manners spoke of old time .... 
 
 ' There is a fundamental mistake If he tries to act as a mei-e animal he 
 
 in the popular excuse for sensual becomes sinful. The evidence of this 
 
 sin— that it is ' natural.' The mistake lies in the fact that while the physical 
 
 lies in the idea that man's animal nature of animals contains within 
 
 and spii'itual natures are separable, itself the check on sensual indul- 
 
 that he can live as pure animal in gence, the check in man's case lies 
 
 one part of his life, and pure spirit in in his spiritual faculties. You can 
 
 another. But as a fact man's life is have a ' dissipated ' man, i. e. a man 
 
 only lived ' according to nature,' whose bodily impulses are uncon- 
 
 where every part of it is lived ' in trolled by will or spirit ; you cannot 
 
 ilesh and in spirit ' : the spiritual have a ' dissipated ' animal, 
 
 motive must control the bodily organ. ^ It is not intended as a comiMe 
 
 Only so are his acts really human. account, cf. Rom. ii. 14-15. 
 
APP. II.] 071 the Christian Docti'ine of Sin. 535 
 
 hath in the end of these days spoken by His Son ;' and still 
 we move on in the realisation and appropriation of all that is 
 revealed and given in Christ ' till we all come .... unto the 
 perfect man.' Nor is it the least true to say that this develop- 
 ment is only the attempt to regain the platform on which man was 
 first placed. The idea of the first man as a being of developed 
 intellectual and spiritual capacity, perfect in all the range of his 
 faculties— the idea which would admit of our saying -\vith Robert 
 South that 'an Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and 
 Athens but the rudiments of Paradise ' — may be, indeed has been, 
 found in theologians, it may have passed into the imagination of 
 the English nation as part of the debt, theologically very largely 
 a debt of evil, which we owe to the great poem of Milton ; but it 
 is not Scriptural, it is not Christian theology at its best \ All the 
 fabric of civilisation the Bible represents as being gradually built 
 uj), whether by Jabal, ' who was the father of such as dwell in 
 tents and have cattle,' or by Jubal, ' who was the father of all such 
 as handle the harp and organ,' or by Tubal Cain, 'who was the 
 instructor of eveiy artificer of brass and iron.' There is no im- 
 pression given us that any of the arts or the knowledge of 
 civilisation existed before. All that we are led to believe is that 
 the historical development of man has not been the development 
 simply as God meant it. It has been tainted through its whole 
 fabric by an element of moral disorder, of human wilfulness. 
 We cannot draw a picture of how human nature was intended to 
 fight the battle of progress. We cannot relate the state of the 
 savage to the intention of God, any more than we can relate the 
 present state of our great cities to that intention ^. All we can 
 say is that the state of things as they were in days of savagery, 
 or as they are in days of civilisation, represents a parody of the 
 Divine intention for the childhood and manhood of the race. 
 Man was made to grow by gradual effort in range and exercise of 
 every faculty of his being. But all this gradual growth might 
 have been conditioned by a conscious fellowship with God, which 
 would have introduced into it an element of nobility and stability 
 which in fact it has lacked. For the historical develoi^ment of 
 
 ^ In answer to the question whether Iren. .c. haer. iv. 38. 
 
 Adam was formed perfect or imperfect ^ But we can recognize that before 
 
 [riKiios ri drcAiysj, Clement replies: civilisation had developed the checks 
 
 ' They shall learn from us that he was which society supplies against abrupt 
 
 not perfect [i. e. complete in develop- deterioration, collapse into savagery 
 
 ment,TeA€toj] in respect of his creation, would have been much more rapid 
 
 butinafit condition to receive virtue.' than it can be in a more developed 
 
 Clem. Alex. Strom, vi. 12. 96. Cp. state. 
 
536 The Religion of the Incarnation, [app. ii. 
 
 man has been a development with God only too often left out. 
 the development under conditions of merely physical laws of a 
 being meant to be spiritual \ 
 
 (6) 'But no,' the biologist rejoins; 'you will not get off thus 
 easily. Christianity regards even so absolutely natural a fact as 
 death, a fact so inextricably interwoven into the structural 
 growth of the world, as a mere consequence of sin. Christianity 
 is refuted by every e\idence of death being a law of physical 
 nature.' So far from this being true, it is the case that the early 
 Christian writei's, S. Augustine as well as S. Athanasius, 
 emphasise the truth that death is the law of physical nature ; that 
 when man died he was undergoing what belonged to his animal 
 nature. 'Paul,' says Augustine, 'describes man's body as dead, 
 not as mortal, because of sin. Mortal it was by nature, because, 
 as being animal, it was subject to death \' In being left to 
 death, Athanasius teaches, man was only left to the law of his 
 physical being". What, in fact, the Christian teachers hold is 
 not that death, but death as it has been known among men, is 
 the penalty of sin, because man's spiritual or supernatural life 
 would have blunted the forces of corruption and lifted him into 
 a higher immortal state. Man would not have died because he 
 would have been spiritual rather than animal. And even here, 
 if we are asked what this means, we must hesitate in our answer. 
 If sin is said to have brought human death, Christ is said to have 
 abolished it. ' This is the bread which cometh down from heaven 
 that a man may eat thereof and not die.' 'If any man eat of 
 this bread he shall live for ever.' 'Whosoever liveth and be- 
 lieveth on Me shall never die.' 'Christ Jesus .... abolished 
 death.' Sin, we may suppose, only introduced death in the sense 
 in which Christ abolished it\ Christ has not abolished the 
 physical transition, but it ceases to be what death implies : — 
 
 ^ Cf. Aubrey Moore's Ecolutmi and tual advance which man has made, 
 Christianity (Oxford House Papers), he is always and everywhere the 
 PP- 32-3- 'The change which took worse for the Fall. However great 
 place at the Fall was a change in the his development has been, it is still 
 moral region ; but it could not be a retarded development, a develop- 
 without its effect elsewhere. Even ment slower than it need have been, 
 the knowledge of nature becomes con- less regular and less sure than God 
 fused, without the governing truth of meant it to be.' 
 
 the relation of man to God. The " Aug. De gen. ad lilt. vi. 36, ' Mor- 
 
 evolution which should have been talis erat conditione corporis ani- 
 
 the harmonious development of the malis.' 
 
 whole man, is checked and impeded ^ Athan. de Incarn. 4. 
 
 in one part, and that the highest part * Cf. Westcott's Ep. to Hie Hebrews, 
 
 of his nature. And therefore, in p. 54 (on Hebr. ii. 16). 
 spite of all the physical and intellec- 
 
APP. II.] On the Christian Doctrine of Sin. 537 
 
 ' Henceforth is death 
 But the gate of life immortal.' 
 
 Death as it has come upon sinful man has been the sad ending of 
 hopes, the rending of his heart-strings, the collapse of his plans, 
 the overshadowing fear, the horrible gulf, the black destruction. 
 In all that makes it death, it has been the result of sin, of the 
 misdirection of his aims and hopes. Had man not sinned there 
 might, indeed, have been a passage from one state to another, 
 a physical dissolution, a moral victory— but it would not have 
 been what men have known as 'death.' 
 
 If this be the right way of regarding the matter, as it is cer- 
 tainly permissible, we shall be able to echo in all its breadth 
 Athanasius's teaching, that sin did not directly alter tilings, but 
 only our attitude towards them \ 
 
 (c) But, once again, and for the last time, the opponent objects : 
 ' All this theory of original sin is built simply on the supposition 
 that the early chapters of Genesis represent literal history. It falls 
 to the ground if they are myth and not history.' Once again, this 
 is not at all the case. The Christian doctrine of sin finds its 
 chief authorisation in Christ's attitude towards it. Sin (if Christ's 
 witness is true) is not nature ; it does not rejDresent God's 
 intention, but something that has baffled for a time God's in- 
 tention, something that Christ is come to conquer. Moreover, 
 this doctrine of sin is not a mere dogma enunciated on external 
 authority ; it finds its verification in experience. The moral 
 experience of Christendom confirms it, and this experience of 
 eighteen centuries reflects itself inevitably on the whole of human 
 life. What interprets sin within this area interprets it through 
 the whole histoiy. With this authority of Christ, verified in the 
 Christian experience, as his firm foundation, the Christian does 
 not hesitate to see in the early chapters of Genesis the action of 
 the inspiring Spirit. It was only the inspiring Spirit Which 
 could assure man that the whole universe was of God's making 
 and very good, that the state in which he found himself repre- 
 sented not his nature, as God meant it to be, but the result of his 
 rebellion, the result, moreover, which God meant to counter- 
 work, nay, which in gradual process He was countei'-working. 
 In all the account then of the creation, of the nature of man, 
 
 ' Athan. C. Gentes 7 ; ef. Aug. on of sin ; but we may understand that 
 
 Gen. iii. 18 (De Gen. ad litt. iii. 18, 28 , they then first began to be obstacles to 
 
 where it is said that it is difficult to man in the cultivation of the ground : 
 
 suppose that ' thorns and thistles ' ' spinas et tribulos pariet tibi.' 
 were first produced on the occasion 
 
538 The Religion of the Incarnation, [app. ii. 
 
 of the origin of sin, the Christian sees an action of the inspiring 
 Spirit. He sees it all the more when he compares the record of 
 Genesis with those which are parallel to it in other races. But 
 if an Irenaeus, a Clement, an Athanasius, an Anselm could treat 
 the record or part of it as rather allegorical than historical, we 
 can use the same liberty. This is not our present subject. All I 
 want to make clear is that the Christian doctrine of sin rests on 
 a far broader and far surer foundation than the belief that the 
 early chai:)ters of Genesis belong to one form or stage of inspired 
 literature rather than to another. It rests on the strong founda- 
 tion of the authority of our Lord, accepted and verified by man's 
 moral consciousness. 
 
14 DAY USE 
 
 Return to desk from which borrowed 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or 
 
 on the date to which renewed. 
 
 Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 
 
 rfitJgtiClb 
 
 APR 2 0'64 -2 P I* 
 
 DEC 2 1 1376 
 
 i£&ei>L «2 >''» 
 
 JUN 3 066 
 
 i 
 
 ~^^ 
 
 i^ 
 
 RECF.IVFn BY 
 
 btP 1 A iuO 
 
 R^EC^D LD 
 
 CIRCULATION DEPT. 
 
 W2 5'84.3 
 
 APR 2 8 1970 1 2 
 
 m- 
 
 L^>g;^ 
 
 APR 1 5 i^rr 
 
 u^ehd of SPRING QuJr^ 
 
 subject to recall after 
 
 J- MA/H'^ 
 
 M 
 
 Kttrtr 
 
 LD 21.'.- 
 
 tfr 
 
 JUN 1 
 
 ?>7?-5PM4S 
 
 -40/n-4,'63 
 ;D6471sl0)476B 
 
 General Library 
 
 University of California 
 
 Berkeley 
 
 :^': 
 
 ■',////£//. 
 
 ^1 
 
^r:^ 
 
 GENERAL LIBRARY -U.C.BERKELEY 
 
 iiiiiiiii 
 
 km 
 
 
 
 
\Ay^ 
 
 i^:s