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 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 
 
 SOME PRESS OPINIONS 
 
 'Will be of great use to Christian teachers.' 
 
 Methodist Tines. 
 
 A challenge that can hardly be disregarded ' 
 
 Educational News. 
 
 ' A bright, courageous little book.' The Nation. 
 
 'A welcome contribution to the thought of the 
 
 time..' Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 ' An illuminating little book.' Atheiueum. 
 
 ' May be commended without reserve.' 
 
 Westminster Gazette. 
 
 ' A charming and noble book.' Daily News. 
 
 ' A very clear and honest confession of faith. . . . 
 Its sincerity and honesty deserve recognition.' 
 
 Journal of Education. 
 
 LONDON: CONSTABLE AND CO., LTD. 
 NEW YORK : B. P. BUTTON AND CO.
 
 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 BY 
 
 A. GLUTTON-BROCK 
 
 AUTHOR OF THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 
 
 LONDON 
 CONSTABLE AND COMPANY 
 
 LIMITED
 
 Printed in Great Britain 
 First Published, 1918
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 I AM often told by my friends that Christianity is 
 nothing but a set of statements about supernatural 
 history which no one now can honestly believe. 
 When I deny this, they ask me what Christianity is ; 
 and, if I try to tell them, they reply That is not 
 Christianity at all but certain beliefs which were 
 held by men before Christ was born and may be held 
 by them after his name has been forgotten. But, 
 all the while, I am convinced that there is a body of 
 belief, not concerned with supernatural history, which 
 is Christian ; that it began with the teaching of 
 Christ, as Platonism began with the teaching of 
 Plato, that it has been enlarged and enriched with 
 the experience of nineteen centuries and yet has 
 remained itself. I am not anxious to prove the 
 originality of Christ in detail. It may be that he 
 said no single thing which had not been said before 
 him. ~The originality of a great teacher consists, 
 not in particular sayings or doings, but(in his power 
 of giving life to an idea) so that it continues to live 
 in other men's minds and is enriched with other 
 men's thought. The greatest ideas are not those 
 which remain peculiar to their authors. Rather 
 they are those which take on an independent life of 
 a 2 
 
 2024040
 
 vi STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 their own, changing and growing yet remaining 
 always themselves, like a living thing. So, I 
 believe, Christianity has changed and grown and 
 remained itself ; and in this book I have tried to 
 state what it is to us now. 
 
 At all times it has been adulterated with beliefs 
 irrelevant or incongruous. ( Every age has its own 
 peculiar heresies which seem to it part of the Christian 
 faith ; for that faith, being expressed always by the 
 mind of man, is always tainted by man's imper- 
 fections.) But these pass and change, while the 
 faith itself remains. And yet the faith itself also 
 changes in its expression, because in different ages it 
 is confronted with different counter-beliefs ; and it 
 always expresses itself in terms of the prevailing 
 counter-beliefs. But, again, they pass and change, 
 while Christianity remains. For, although it is 
 expressed by the minds of men, yet, for those who 
 believe it, it is a truth independent of those minds, 
 a truth which they recognise and to which they make 
 answer. So our very expressions of it are rather 
 answers to this truth than the truth itself ; and 
 those who are most convinced of this truth know 
 best that their own statements of it are not the 
 truth itself. Was not Christ aware of a truth 
 independent of his own mind,, to which he made 
 his own passionate answer ? To him that truth 
 was not his own word but the word of God. We 
 cannot understand his teaching unless we see it as 
 the answer which he made to the word of God, as
 
 INTRODUCTION vii 
 
 something to which he was moved by the truth of 
 God, as a musician is moved to music by the beauty 
 of the universe. So we are moved by the words of 
 Christ as we are by music ; and at one time we see 
 one truth in them, at another another. But through 
 all generations men are moved by them and discover 
 new truths in them ; it seems to them that his 
 words have never been understood before. So to 
 us now it seems that we understand them in the 
 light of all our new knowledge and experience ; and, 
 even while we are told that Christianity is dead, we 
 see it rising from the grave, as men have always seen 
 it when they were not content to accept it on hear- 
 say. Perhaps every age needs to reject the Christi- 
 anity of the past so that it may discover Christianity 
 for itself. Only through disbelief in what we are 
 told do we attain to belief in that truth which 
 remains independent of all man's expression of it. 
 
 And yet all the past efforts to express it are not 
 vain ; for we can recognise the truth in them as in 
 the words of Christ himself. And they are con- 
 nected with each other by the truth that is in them. 
 That truth is the Christian tradition : it is what 
 persists from generation to generation, while that 
 which is false becomes obsolete. There is, in all the 
 struggle for life of conflicting beliefs, a survival of 
 the true ; and the true is tested by that struggle. 
 But we need to be aware that the true does not 
 necessarily survive in our individual minds. Even 
 when we are most sure of it, we need to be aware that
 
 viii STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 we ourselves are very imperfect mediums of ex- 
 pression for it. And the more surely we know that 
 it is a truth independent of ourselves, the more we 
 shall be aware of that fact. The truth is not some- 
 thing made by man but something that knocks at 
 the mind of man ; and his mind may open to it or 
 be closed against it. But when it enters his mind, 
 he can express it to himself or to others only through 
 his mind. The knocking is that which arouses in 
 him the desire for expression, the desire to make the 
 truth his own. The truth itself is perfect ; but his 
 mind and the language in which alone he can express 
 it are imperfect. So the more urgently it knocks, 
 the more he is aware of its glory and perfection, the 
 greater is his sense of his own failure to express it. 
 Even as he makes it his own by expression, he knows 
 that he has not made it all his own ; that there is 
 that in him which misrepresents whatever it tries 
 to express, an egotism which turns the universal 
 into the particular, and provokes the egotism of 
 other men against it. Only those at whose minds 
 truth has never knocked, or who have never re- 
 cognised the knocking, suppose that they can express 
 the truth perfectly, or that any past expression of it 
 is perfect. 
 
 So the truth knocks still at our minds ; but in 
 many different ways. It may seem to come sud- 
 denly out of our own experience of life ; or it may 
 seem to come in the words of some great man of the 
 past. But, even when it does that, those words are
 
 INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 not enough for us. Because the truth is knocking 
 at our minds in them, we feel the need to make it 
 our own, to give it our own expression. And we 
 know that, until we have done that, we have not 
 received it into our minds. So there is, and can be, 
 no end to the expressions of Christianity ; so long as 
 it is a truth knocking at the minds of men, they will 
 continue to express it for themselves ; and in this 
 unceasing effort at expression the Christian tradition 
 lives from one generation to another. 
 
 The effort which I have made in this book does not 
 pretend to be complete. I meant it to be so when I 
 began it ; but I soon found that the task was beyond 
 my powers. I was not able to express even all that 
 Christianity means to me ; and, if I had tried to do 
 so, I should never have finished the book. I had 
 meant, for instance, to write a chapter on Christianity 
 and politics ; but in writing it I found that it was 
 growing longer than the rest of the book. I there- 
 fore put it aside ; but without it the book is not 
 complete, as any reader can see for himself. So I 
 have called it Studies in Christianity ; but I have 
 tried to maintain a continuity of thought through it, 
 and to produce not merely a set of separate essays. 
 I have also tried to say as little as possible about 
 those points of belief on which I differ from many 
 other Christians, points so important that some of 
 them, perhaps, would refuse to call me a Christian 
 at all. My object has been to state what is positive 
 in my own beliefs, not what is negative. It is
 
 x STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 necessary, I think, to rid Christianity of beliefs that 
 can no longer be held ; but, before we do that, we 
 must state as clearly as possible what we believe to 
 be the eternal essence of it. And we must be aware 
 that what seems incredible to us may seem so only 
 because we misexpress it to ourselves. All through 
 the ages men, individually and in common, have 
 tried to express Christianity ; and, if we know that 
 they have never quite succeeded, we shall be less im- 
 patient of each other's attempts at expression, even 
 when they are unintelligible to us. It is when men 
 pretend that their own expressions are perfect, that 
 other men are provoked to call them false ; and that 
 is so whether the expression is that of an individual 
 or of a church.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION . . . v 
 
 // 
 
 n/t\d* 
 
 gf v^ 
 
 i. CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 
 ii. THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE . 
 
 in. .CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 
 
 'iv. THE GRACE OF GOD . 97 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY . .134
 
 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 
 
 THE nature of religion, like that of man himself, 
 consists in what it is trying to become. Like man, 
 religion tries to free itself more and more from the 
 tyranny of its own past, to grow more and more aware 
 of its own nature, to purge itself of what is foreign to 
 that nature, and to gain in the power of expression 
 by discovering what it has to express. But, for this 
 reason, it is hard to define ; and men still dispute 
 what it is. Some would define it in terms of its 
 origins and discredit it with their definition. So we 
 might define, and discredit, science by talking of 
 the alchemist or the medicine man. There is magic 
 in the past both of science and of religion, but both 
 outgrow magic as they free themselves of the egotism 
 of the individual, as they discover that they are not 
 themselves until they are freed from it. The virtue 
 of both consists in freedom from egotism and at that 
 the man of science and the religious man continually 
 aim. They know that egotism is always producing 
 error in science and in religion ; but they are on 
 their guard against it, and it is a function of both 
 to set men on their guard against it.
 
 2 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 But they are on their guard against it for different 
 reasons. The man of science, because it hinders 
 him from discovering the truth ; for it tempts him 
 to believe what he wishes to believe, as, for instance, 
 that he has discovered the truth before he has dis- 
 covered it. The religious man, because it perverts 
 his conduct, and through his conduct, his thought. 
 For religion asserts a constant interaction between 
 conduct and thought, that interaction which is 
 asserted in the Christian doctrine of faith and works. 
 Indeed religion is an effort to produce a complete 
 harmony in conduct and thought ; and we may 
 describe it imperfectly as the effort to express all 
 that is implied in a right way of living. Men, in all 
 reasoned conduct, necessarily imply certain con- 
 victions about the nature of the universe, convictions 
 about matters that are beyond their own knowledge 
 and experience. ( They may live rightly and imply 
 these convictions' without ever trying to express 
 them, without even being aware of them?) They 
 may even consciously refuse the attempt to express 
 them, as being impossible and sure to lead them into 
 error. But religion makes the attempt and, in 
 making it, assumes that the convictions implied in 
 right living can be expressed ; and that, if rightly 
 expressed, they are true, even about matters beyond 
 the knowledge and experience of man. 
 
 It also makes this assumption about right living ; 
 that what is right is not to be discovered by observa- 
 tion and experiment alone, but that men have a
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 3 
 
 power of recognising it, and a desire for it, as natural 
 as their appetites ; and that this power and desire 
 grow in proportion as they live rightly. So, to 
 religion, this power of recognition and this desire 
 are the most important of all facts. They are the 
 facts upon which man should base his beliefs about 
 the nature of the universe. Through them, and 
 through them alone, is there a connection between 
 the known and the unknown. For they are them- 
 selves a connection between man himself and the 
 unknown ; by means of them he does experience 
 the unknown even while it remains unknown to him. 
 ' It is the way of Heaven not to speak but it knows 
 how to obtain an answer.' That saying of Lao-tze 
 is the basis of all true religion ; and religion only 
 becomes itself when its aim is to make that answer. 
 Heaven does not speak to us ; it does not tell us 
 about itself, for if it did man could not understand it. 
 If an angel came down from Heaven to reveal the 
 nature of the universe to me, he could use only that 
 language which men have developed for and with 
 V their own thoughts, a language capable only of the 
 thoughts of men. And there are thoughts, even of 
 men, which I cannot fully understand, though they 
 have expressed them in human language. I know, 
 from the difference between myself and Plato, how 
 infinite is the capacity of thought and how, in Plato 
 himself, it struggles with the medium of language. 
 Always the poets and philosophers are enlarging 
 that medium, because they, as individuals, think
 
 4 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 beyond the capacity of the common medium of 
 language. But Heaven, if there is a Heaven that 
 would reveal its secret to us, must use the medium 
 of our language and of our intelligence. Whatever 
 / it says to us, we must say to ourselves, and in our 
 own words. Therefore it is true that Heaven does 
 not speak to us in a heavenly language of its own. 
 It speaks to us only through the medium of ourselves, 
 and in the answer we make to it. 
 
 What is this answer ? It is our absolute values ; 
 and we may say of religion that it is the affirmation 
 of absolute values. But this phrase ' absolute 
 values ' needs explanation, for there are those who 
 say that it is meaningless. 
 
 The word value cannot be defined, for it is a fact 
 of the human mind like thought or desire. What I 
 value hi the present I desire to persist. If I value 
 life, I desire to go on living. But religion asserts, 
 and Christianity more consciously than most religions 
 asserts, that two kinds of values are possible to man ; 
 namely the value for life itself, and so the mere 
 desire to go on living ; and that other kind of value 
 which is called absolute value. This absolute value 
 is the answer which man makes to Heaven and the 
 manner hi which Heaven expresses itself to man. 
 
 If a man values life itself above all things and 
 above all things desires to go on living, he will value 
 all things as they help him to go on living. They 
 will, in a useful phrase, have for him only a survival 
 value ; that is to say he will see them only in relation
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 5 
 
 to his own survival. Now there are those who 
 maintain that man is of such a nature that he must 
 value life above all things, and that everything has 
 for him only a survival value. Sometimes they 
 assert that he is capable of valuing the survival of 
 the human race above his own individual survival. 
 They assume the existence of some power, which 
 they often call Nature, more interested in the 
 survival of the race than of the individual, a power 
 which exists apart from the individual yet works 
 in him. This power struggles, sometimes with 
 success sometimes with failure, to make the in- 
 dividual man value the survival of the race above 
 his own survival. This is the struggle we call moral 
 conflict in ourselves. It produces in us the sense 
 of higher and lower values, the higher being those 
 which make for the survival of the race, the lower 
 those which make for the survival of the individual. 
 But it is Nature who, for purposes of her own, makes 
 us call one set of values higher and the other lower, 
 makes us value one set above the other. And in 
 either case our values remain survival values. It 
 is life itself that we value, whether for ourselves 
 or for the race, and we value all things in terms 
 of life. 
 
 This is a dogmatic assertion ; and religion denies 
 it dogmatically, the more dogmatically the more it 
 becomes religion. There are those who assert the 
 existence only of survival values and yet rise into 
 religion, illogically enough, by proclaiming the
 
 6 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 absolute value of Nature. They tell us that, 
 although we can value nothing but life itself for 
 the individual or for the race, yet we are also to 
 value the universe in which only these values are 
 possible. We are to affirm that this force, which 
 makes us value life above all things, is itself good ; 
 that is to say, it is to be valued above life itself, 
 it is what makes life valuable. That is a religion, 
 but an illogical one, a religion trying to escape from 
 its own irreligious affirmations. For religion is, in 
 its essence, the effort to escape from the valuing of 
 life for its own sake and from living for the sake of 
 living. Nor can it be content with living for the 
 sake of the life of the race ; for, if his own life is 
 not to be valued by the individual above all things, 
 why should he sacrifice himself, as an individual, 
 to give that which he does not value for himself to 
 an abstraction called the race ? The race consists 
 of individuals ; and in sacrificing himself, he asserts 
 some value above the value for life. There is some- 
 thing which he himself values more than his life. 
 His desire must be that the race, that is to say other 
 men, should have this something, not that they 
 should have merely life itself, which has no values 
 without this something. 
 
 It may be, of course, that man, in his belief that he 
 values something above life itself, is merely deceived 
 by Nature for her own purpose, which is the survival 
 of the race. But, in that case, he cannot value the 
 Nature that so deceives him. As soon as he finds
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 7 
 
 her out, which he can do by the exercise of his own 
 reason, he will cease to value her, or life, either for 
 himself or for the race. Therefore she must be 
 against his exercise of his reason, at least beyond a 
 certain point ; and man's reason must be dangerous 
 to the existence of man. The further it is exercised, 
 the more it will empty life of values for him, unless 
 he can reconcile himself to the valuing of his own 
 individual life for its own sake. 
 
 In that case he will be rid of religion and of 
 morality altogether, even of that religion which 
 affirms that Nature is good, or of that morality which 
 makes for the persistence of the race. He will be 
 merely an individual concerned for his own survival 
 as an individual. Enlightened self-interest will be 
 the basis of his society, if self-interest, become thus 
 conscious and supreme, can bring him any enlighten- 
 ment. 
 
 But religion asserts that it cannot. All religion 
 asserts that, even the religion of Nature ; and in 
 doing so it affirms, whether consciously or uncon- 
 sciously, the existence of absolute values in the 
 mind of man. Man, it says, does not, cannot, live 
 only so that he may go on living. He does desire 
 to go on living ; he has an instinct of self-preserva- 
 tion. But that is only a part, not the whole, of his 
 mind, nor are the values produced hi him by it all 
 his values. Besides them, and often in conflict with 
 them, he has other values, those which are called 
 absolute because in them he forgets his desire to go
 
 8 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 on living, forgets himself altogether, and values 
 things for their own sake, not as they help him to go 
 on living. It is said sometimes that we cannot 
 value anything thus absolutely ; we must value it 
 in relation to ourselves, as, for instance, because it 
 gives us pleasure. But we do not value beauty 
 because it gives us pleasure. It gives us pleasure 
 because we value it. Without the absolute value 
 for beauty we cannot be aware of it. The pleasure 
 comes when we are aware of it and is therefore the 
 effect, not the cause, of the absolute value. The 
 belief in absolute values implies, not merely that we 
 are capable of valuing things absolutely, but also 
 that there is in things, in the universe, an absolute 
 value, a virtue not dependent on the use which any 
 one thing may have for another. It is possible to 
 see the universe merely in terms of use, to see God 
 Himself in those terms. Many people think that 
 they can explain all things in terms of use. They 
 explain beauty, for instance, as the expression of 
 something useful to man, as the manner in which 
 use presents itself to man's emotions ; when he 
 takes pleasure in the contemplation of use he calls 
 it beauty. So beauty has no real existence ; it is 
 not a quality or a virtue of the thing itself but exists 
 for us because the thing is useful to us. If it ceased 
 to be useful, it would cease to be beautiful. And 
 so there are devout people for whom God Himself is 
 good because He is useful. They are always ex- 
 pressing His goodness in terms of use ; they cannot
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 9 
 
 conceive it otherwise, because they cannot conceive 
 any relation between any one person or thing and 
 another except one of use. There is a sort of com- 
 merce between all existing things which alone gives 
 them their value and apart from it they have no 
 virtue in themselves. They are like the parts of 
 a machine which, if they were separated, would have 
 no function ; or they are like food which, considered 
 as food, is of no value except to those who wish to 
 eat it. 
 
 But it is part of belief in God to affirm the absolute 
 value of God. God is good, we say the two words 
 mean the same thing God is good in Himself and 
 apart from His use to us or to anything else. If we 
 believe in God we believe in absolute good, we affirm 
 it in the very word God ; and the love of God means 
 the love of absolute good. When we speak of the 
 love of God, we assert that there is a relation between 
 ourselves and God, which is not merely one of use or 
 of emotions produced by use. We see God as good 
 in itself and we love that good. But ' no man hath 
 seen God at any time.' What we have seen is good, 
 and to believe in God is to believe that we have seen 
 absolute good in those things which we do see, the 
 good which we call by the names of truth, beauty, 
 and righteousness. One may believe this without 
 believing in God ; and one may believe in God 
 without believing this. But a passionate and real 
 belief in absolute good usually expresses itself as a 
 belief in God ; and a passionate and real belief in
 
 10 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 God usually expresses itself also as a belief in absolute 
 good. In either case there is asserted a relation 
 between ourselves and the universe which is not a 
 relation of use but one of love ; and this relation is 
 also asserted to be more real, more lasting, more 
 valuable, than the relation of use. We need to rise 
 above the relation of use to be aware of it ; but, as 
 soon as we are aware of it, we are aware of its 
 superior reality. We are aware that we live, and 
 fulfil the purpose of our lives, in the relation of love 
 not in the relation of use ; and we have a vision of 
 life that shall be all love and not at all use, that 
 vision which we call Heaven. For love, in the 
 Christian sense of the word, is absolute value. When 
 we say that we love we mean that we value absolutely 
 and not in terms of use. We assert a virtue in that 
 which we love, a virtue that constrains us to love 
 it as soon as we see it ; and, in loving it, to forget 
 ourselves, that is to say the use which it may have 
 for ourselves. Love is self-forgetfulness and the 
 / only way in which we can attain to self-forgetfulness ; 
 but we value self-forgetfulness because it is love, not 
 love because it makes us forget ourselves. The 
 Christian doctrine of love is but a more precise and 
 passionate form of the religious affirmation of 
 absolute values. The saying that God is love means 
 that all God's values are absolute and that we are 
 most like God when our values are absolute. In 
 the utterly real existence of God there is no relation 
 of use but only a relation of love ; and our existence
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 11 
 
 becomes more real as we rise from the relation of 
 use to the relation of love. 
 
 It is the religious instinct that makes us value 
 absolute values above other values, because they are 
 absolute. This instinct is not acquired by men but 
 born in them. Religion itself is but the conscious 
 expression of it ; and the effort of religion is to make 
 this expression more and more conscious both in 
 thought and in action. For it asserts a constant 
 interaction between conduct and belief, between 
 faith and works. Absolute values must be expressed 
 in conduct or they are not real ; love is -not merely 
 a passive thing, for unless it passes into action it 
 ceases to be love. And since we understand only 
 when we love, we understand only when we love 
 in action. So a knowledge of the nature of the 
 universe can be obtained only by love and that 
 interaction of conduct and belief which love produces. 
 A man may attain to that truth which is commonly 
 called scientific without any interaction between 
 conduct and belief, for he is concerned with truths 
 that do not affect his conduct, or affect it only in 
 less important matters. And this kind of truth is 
 called scientific because it is a matter of knowing, 
 not a matter of doing. But there is a further truth 
 about the nature of the universe, not called scientific 
 because it is not merely a matter of knowing, because 
 it cannot be attained to except by the interaction 
 of conduct and belief, of faith and works. This is 
 religious truth, which is often denied to be truth at
 
 12 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 all ; partly because it is hard to express ; partly 
 because it cannot be proved by scientific means, 
 not being a matter of mere knowledge. He who 
 does not act upon it cannot grasp it, however clearly 
 it may be put to him. Only by acting upon it can 
 we understand it ; and this very understanding is 
 itself not merely understanding. Rather it is like 
 the instinct of the craftsman, a matter of practice 
 as well as of thought. Without the practice, the 
 thought cannot be rightly directed. 
 
 Hence the difficulty of attaining to religious truth, 
 and the many failures to attain to it. When a 
 scientific truth has once been discovered, it may be 
 expressed in words once for all and so preserved for 
 the pure intellect of man. But a religious truth, 
 even when an individual man has discovered and ex- 
 pressed it, can be fully understood only by those who 
 act on it. So, if the expression of it be preserved 
 as a dogma and not acted upon, it is emptied of 
 meaning for those who so preserve it. Religious 
 dogmas, for those who profess them without acting 
 / upon them, fail to mean what they meant to him 
 who first expressed them ; and since few of us act 
 upon the religious dogmas of Christ, we may con- 
 jecture that they fail to mean to us what they meant 
 to him, that for us they are often as untrue as the 
 enemies of Christianity assert them to be. To 
 understand them we must act upon them ; for only 
 so will they become religious truth to us, if indeed 
 they are capable of becoming religious truth at all.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 13 
 
 Christ incessantly affirms absolute values. He 
 tells us that we have these absolute values and 
 that we can attain to truth, and to eternal life, only 
 by acting upon them. He that would save his life 
 shall lose it. Christ is a religious teacher, not a 
 philosopher, because for him truth can be attained 
 to only by an incessant interaction of conduct and 
 thought ; and for him that interaction is the main 
 business of man. [Act rightly so that you may think 
 rightly ; think rigntly so that you may act rightly. ") 
 Truth, jtself, that word he uses so often, is not to 
 him merely intellectual or scientific truth. It is 
 to be known through the interaction of conduct and 
 thought, and to be understood only by means of 
 that interaction. The knowledge of this truth is 
 knowledge of the scientifically unknown, and there- 
 fore a knowledge not scientific, a knowledge, rather, 
 designed to provoke certain conduct through which 
 alone it can be understood. So the very statement 
 of it is designed to make men act, and not merely 
 think, in a certain way. It is like the sayings of a 
 craftsman rather than of a philosopher, of one who 
 speaks to other craftsmen and assumes that only 
 they can understand him. 
 
 And, like a craftsman, he makes his appeal first of 
 all to absolute values. The craftsman says ' There 
 is good work ; I will tell you how to do likewise.' 
 He assumes that his pupils think it good work. If 
 they do not, if they are not moved by the goodness of 
 it, he has nothing to say to them. So Christ assumes
 
 14 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the same values in all men; and he says that, 
 through acting upon them, men will attain to truth. 
 In them is the voice of God, speaking to us through 
 our own feelings ; and because He speaks to us 
 through our own feelings, because it is our minds that 
 utter His speech, we are His children. But the 
 feelings by themselves are sterile. Our values are 
 not merely emotions but commands. They are not 
 true values unless they are acted upon ; and when 
 v God commands us, it is we who command ourselves. 
 God is in us and is one with us, if we obey that 
 command which is His and ours ; if we make in 
 our conduct that answer to Heaven which does not 
 speak except hi our values. In the parable of the 
 Prodigal Son the father may be an image of God, 
 but he is also man obeying his values. He is man 
 obeying the voice of God which speaks to him, 
 not by a miracle, but in his own love for his son. 
 And the essence of Christ's teaching, that which 
 makes it religious, is that we are to listen for the 
 voice of God, not in signs and wonders, but in our 
 own hearts. Wherever we are aware of absolute 
 value, of a value that satisfies us utterly and one in 
 which we forget ourselves, there we hear the voice of 
 God. If we act upon that value we shall attain to 
 truth ; and if we act upon that truth we shall attain 
 to further truth, and so to further right action ; and 
 we shall become more and more certain of the voice 
 of God speaking to us through the answer we make 
 to Him. But only by making that answer, which
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 15 
 
 must be made in conduct, can we be aware of the 
 voice and know that it is the voice of God. If we 
 refuse to make the answer, to act upon our values, 
 they cease to be our values to us ; and we come 
 to this that we value nothing but life itself, a 
 life empty of all value. So by valuing life itself we 
 lose it. 
 
 That, put hi very general terms, is the teaching 
 of Christ ; and it is more religious than any other 
 teaching known to us, because it is more utterly an 
 appeal to absolute values. Absolute values are to 
 Christ the most important fact in the mind of man ; 
 they are for him the necessary connection between 
 man's conduct and his thought, and between man 
 himself and his Father which is in Heaven. It is 
 through them and obedience to them that he be- 
 comes aware of his Father and of Heaven. Without 
 obedience to them there is no connection between 
 conduct and thought and each goes astray lacking 
 the guidance of the other. 
 
 But Christ also tells us what it is we value most 
 absolutely. When he speaks of love he is speaking 
 of absolute value. Love is absolute value ; it is 
 the sense of that which is to be valued for its own 
 sake, that sense hi which we forget ourselves. And 
 the exquisite delight of love is not the reason why we 
 love but the effect of loving. We cannot love so 
 that we may have that delight, any more than a man 
 can love a woman because he wishes to marry her 
 for her money. We cannot by any effort of will
 
 16 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 force ourselves to love ; but we can yield ourselves 
 utterly to love when we experience it. We can value 
 love itself above all other experiences ; we can see 
 absolute value in it. And Christ tells us to do that 
 because love itself is absolute value. He tells us to 
 value our absolute values utterly, to trust them and 
 
 V to believe that by acting upon them we shall attain 
 to truth. All those sayings of his about our Father 
 which is in Heaven are, for us, but prophecies and 
 promises of the truth we shall attain to if we act 
 upon them. 
 
 So all theological statements are but attempts to 
 give a scientific expression to that which cannot be 
 scientifically expressed, if they pretend to be more 
 than prophecies and promises of the belief that may 
 be attained to through right living. We cannot 
 know God scientifically, like a natural phenomenon. 
 Nor can we know Him by looking for signs and 
 wonders or by reading tales of past signs and wonders. 
 God speaks to us through ourselves. It is through 
 our own values and obedience to them that we attain 
 to knowledge of Him ; and only so can we tell 
 whether others speak truly of Him. When Christ 
 tells us that God is love, he tells us also that we can 
 
 y^know God only through our own love, that, when we 
 love, we are making answer to the God who is love ; 
 and that answer is the only means by which we can 
 become aware of Him. By other means we become 
 aware of an idol of our own making, even though we 
 try to make that idol consistent with a creed. And
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 17 
 
 these idols, to which the name of God is constantly 
 y/given, prevent men from recognising God when He 
 speaks within them. They are not aware that He 
 speaks in the answer they make to Him ; they do not 
 even know that it is an answer. And so perhaps 
 this answer, these absolute values, this love of theirs, 
 seem to them to be but an irrelevant luxury of the 
 human mind, a pleasure that it may allow itself after 
 the business of the struggle for life. But Christ 
 affirms that it is business as well as pleasure. Men 
 live only when they love, and should live so that they 
 may love. Love is wisdom as well as passion ; in it 
 alone wisdom and passion are reconciled. 
 
 But to the assertion of Christ, and of all true 
 religion, that the nature of the universe is to be 
 understood only through our absolute values, there is 
 opposed, now as always, the belief that the nature 
 of the universe is to be understood by the observation 
 of external reality without regard for man's values. 
 This belief is commonly supposed to be modern and 
 scientific ; yet it has always existed, and the worst 
 cruelties of men have been caused by it. 
 
 The enemies of religion maintain that the cruelties 
 of primitive religion, the sacrifice of the firstborn, the 
 car of Juggernaut, are themselves religious. Rather 
 they are scientific, in the sense in which that word is 
 often used. The savage sees that Nature is cruel, is 
 red in tooth and claw. He sees that just as the 
 modern man sees it. The only difference is that he 
 calls Nature God. His conception of God is based, 
 B
 
 18 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 not on his own values, but on his observation of 
 external reality. In that conception he asserts that 
 truth is to be found through such observation rather 
 than through his own values ; that, compared with 
 the surrounding and threatening cruelty of Nature or 
 God, his values are mere illusion. So, in his worship 
 of God, he renounces his own values ; he sacrifices 
 them, not only in thought but hi deed, even to the 
 sacrifice of his own child. ' I the Lord thy God am a 
 jealous God.' Jealousy was not in itself a virtue to 
 the Jews ; but, from their observation of external 
 reality, they believed it to be a quality of God. 
 Therefore they would act contrary to their own 
 values in allaying the jealousy of God and in punish- 
 ing those who had provoked it. It has been said 
 that: 
 
 An honest God 's the noblest work of man. 
 
 Gods have not been honest because men have 
 feared to express their own values in them. Because 
 they have not dared to believe that God is what they 
 themselves would love, gods have been inferior to 
 the men who worshipped them. It is a common 
 gibe that man makes God in his own image. If only 
 
 v he did, there would be less to be said against religion. 
 Man is by nature too much of a snob to make his 
 
 ' God in his own image. He abases himself before 
 that which is lower than himself, as Euripides told 
 the Athenians so often. He dare not believe that 
 God speaks to him in the best of himself. The
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 19 
 
 divine is to him something utterly alien from himself, 
 something which he expresses hi images hideous and 
 bestial, and in practices more hideous and bestial 
 still. 
 
 But it is not only primitive man who does this. If 
 we change the word God for the word Nature, we 
 shall see that civilised man does it also, and for the 
 same reason. Our great-grandparents were of the 
 same nature with ourselves, and we cannot call them 
 primitive. A book has lately been written about 
 the industrial revolution, which should be read by 
 every one who believes that science has delivered us 
 once and for all from the cruelties of primitive 
 religion. 1 Read the chapter in that book on the 
 employment of children and you will see that infant 
 sacrifice is not so far back in our past as we think. The 
 sacrifice of children to Moloch was swift and merciful 
 compared with the sacrifice of children in English 
 factories. But, you may say, the motive was not 
 the same. In one case it was superstition, in the 
 other mere greed. Read also the chajgter on the 
 Mind of the Rich in the same book, and you will see 
 that superstition is but our name for science that 
 has been discredited. The savage sacrifices his 
 children to his god because, from his observation of 
 external reality, he believes that his god is cruel and 
 demands sacrifice. That is his science, only he does 
 not call it by that name. It is a science that teaches 
 
 1 The Town Labourer (1760-1832), by J. L. Hammond and 
 Barbara Hammond. Longmans, 1917.
 
 20 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 him to ignore his own values, to believe that they are 
 contrary to the nature of things, or, as he puts it, to 
 the will of God. Our ancestors called this will of 
 God political economy and believed that science had 
 freed them from superstition. But their political 
 economy made them ignore their own values ; and 
 they sacrificed children to it as the savage sacrificed 
 them to Moloch. They believed that there was in 
 the nature of things a force contrary to their own 
 values and stronger than them. They believed that 
 if they obeyed their own values, this force would 
 make them suffer for their obedience. They did not 
 personify the force and call it Moloch ; but they 
 acted like the savages who did call it Moloch, except 
 that they had no ritual. And it is to be noted that, 
 in their worship of this force, they were as much 
 mistaken as the savages in their worship of Moloch. 
 If they had trusted in their own values rather than 
 in their observation of external reality, they would 
 have discovered that there is no force in the nature 
 of things that compels infant sacrifice ; and England 
 V would now be stronger, happier, and wiser than it is. 
 Their political economy seems to us now a mass of 
 insane delusions. To them it was science, just 
 because it taught them not to trust their own values. 
 The lesson for us and we need to learn it is that 
 only by trusting our own values can we find the way 
 to wisdom, which is the science of conduct. 
 
 We need to learn it still ; for, though the political 
 economy of our ancestors may seem to us absurd, we
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 21 
 
 do not yet know how it was that they fell into this 
 absurdity . No one has laughed more bitterly at it than 
 Nietzsche. But what is his remedy for all the errors 
 of mankind ? Not that we shall trust our values, 
 but that we shall dethrone them for other values. 
 Our values ar,e to him the enemy. His complaint 
 against Christianity, even the Christianity of Christ, 
 and against all the philosophies of the past, is that 
 they have seen the universe in the light of man's 
 values rather than man's values in the light of the 
 universe. He believed that he had attained to a 
 new and true philosophy by rejecting man's values ; 
 that they were the mist with which man hid himself 
 from the truth. If man could rid himself of them, 
 he would see things as they are, and so would be able 
 to attain to other and true values ; would be able to 
 exult in reality itself and not in his own perversion 
 of it. 
 
 But Nietzsche, also, was mistaken when he thought 
 his creed a new one. If he had all old philosophies 
 against him, he had all primitive religion on his side. 
 That new rapture with which he tried to accept the 
 values taught by Nature was the old frenzy with 
 which men have thrown themselves beneath the car 
 of Juggernaut or sacrificed their children to Moloch. 
 In his hymns to strength, to ruthlessness, we hear 
 again the voice of primitive man glorifying his 
 omnipotent idol, that voice which sounds so incon- 
 gruously in some of the hymns and prayers of our 
 own churches. Nietzsche is most archaistic when he
 
 22 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 seems to himself most modern ; his light is but the 
 darkness from which, through so many ages, man has 
 struggled to escape. 
 
 Further, in his effort to escape from the assump- 
 tion of other philosophers, he makes an immense 
 assumption of his own about the nature of man's 
 values ; that those values are themselves the result 
 of our observation of external reality, are wrong 
 conclusions drawn from that observation. They 
 are, in fact, our comment upon the sum of things, 
 a comment so habitual that it has become uncon- 
 scious. But he believes that we can summon up 
 these values of ours into consciousness again ; that 
 we can see them as a mere comment upon the 
 sum of things ; that we can test them by new 
 and more enlightened observation. Doing this, we 
 shall see that they are but theory, and erroneous 
 theory. This theory we shall therefore reject, and 
 so attain to new values ; and for him it is the 
 mark of the superior man thus to see the common 
 values of mankind as mere theory and to reject 
 them. In such rejection is his freedom ; and by it 
 he proves the strength and courage of his mind. 
 For Nietzsche all values are an effect, not a cause, of 
 experience ; except one ultimate value, the value for 
 power, which is absolute and the source of all other 
 values and beliefs. 
 
 That is where he differs from Christ, for whom our 
 values are a cause, not an effect, of our experience ; 
 for whom they are not theory but the answer made
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 23 
 
 by man to God. It is the incompatibility between 
 man's values and his conduct that produces in him 
 the sense of sin, from which he cannot escape by 
 any attempt to change his values. They are not 
 a comment thrown up by his mind but an acting part 
 of it. Comment is their action ; and if man is to 
 get rid of them, he must get rid of his mind altogether. 
 They are above reason, which is their servant and 
 without them would lack all sense of direction. 
 
 Now whether this Christian belief be true or not 
 and it cannot be proved true or untrue it is certain 
 that all who deny absolute values fall into an in- 
 consistency in their very denial of them. Nietzsche, 
 for instance, denies the existence of absolute values. 
 Man values nothing, he says, except power. He 
 seems to think that our value for power is absolute, 
 in that all our other values are to be explained in 
 terms of it. But it is not absolute in the sense that 
 it makes man forget himself. The will to power is 
 purely egotistical ; the love of power is self-love. 
 Or rather the word love is used here only metaphor- 
 ically. All love, like everything else, is an expression 
 of the will to power. Man may persuade himself 
 that he loves truth and aims at it ; but all the while 
 it is his will to power that induces him to believe 
 whatever will increase his power. But, while 
 Nietzsche declares that all beliefs are an expression 
 of the will to power, he declaims against the mis- 
 chievous illusion of our values, as if an illusion must 
 necessarily be mischievous. But why should it be
 
 24 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 mischievous, unless truth has an absolute value ? 
 Nietzsche tells us that we have gathered our present 
 values and beliefs about us, including all belief in the 
 absolute, for the sake of comfort. And then he tells 
 us to give them up because they are not true. He 
 tells us in fact that we are to prefer truth to comfort, 
 like any other philosopher ; and he recommends his 
 own doctrine of the will to power, also like any other 
 philosopher, as being true. What recommendation 
 is that, if man has no value for anything but power ? 
 indeed Nietzsche's own theory of the will to power 
 prevents him from recommending it as true. For, 
 according to that theory, all man's beliefs are ex- 
 pressions of his will to power. Man, though he may 
 not know it, really values them only as they give, or 
 seem to give, him power. He pretends to himself 
 that he thinks them true, but only so that he may 
 believe them. Nietzsche does not explain why man, 
 if he values nothing but power, should find it 
 necessary to believe anything at all, why he should 
 'ever have acquired his illusion of the value of truth. 
 But that is by the way. It is enough for my purpose 
 that his theory cuts its own throat. For, if all men's 
 beliefs are but expressions of the will to power, 
 Nietzsche's belief that that is so is also an expression 
 of the will to power. He cannot use it to destroy all 
 other beliefs without causing it also to commit 
 suicide. It is merely a product of his own individual 
 will to power ; and if he can persuade himself to 
 believe it so that he may be more powerful, that is no
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 25 
 
 reason why any one else should. All our thought is 
 mere anarchy, the product of each individual will to 
 power ; and every theory is cut off from all other 
 theories by the egotism that begot it. Philosophy 
 is but the clamour of competing egotisms, like the 
 barking of hounds for meat. And yet Nietzsche, 
 when he tries to convince us of the truth of his 
 theory, denies this. He appeals from our egotisms, 
 from our competing wills for power, to a universal, 
 uncompeting, and absolute value for truth. He is 
 himself a philosopher because he sees his own value 
 for truth not as a mere comment on experience but 
 as a cause of experience. Without it he could 
 experience nothing as he does ; he could not think 
 at all. 
 
 Into this hopeless inconsistency fall all philosophies 
 which deny absolute values ; for, in denying them, 
 they proclaim the absolute value of truth. That in 
 us which asserts the absolute value of truth speaks 
 truth ; but when it asserts any other absolute value, 
 it lies. Sometimes indeed the absolute value of truth 
 is denied, but even then truth is assumed always 
 to have survival value. It is well that we should 
 know the truth, for it must help us to go on living. 
 But why should we assume this ? If our other 
 values are illusions that we have harboured because 
 they have survival value for us, it is admitted that 
 in some cases a lie, and not the truth, has survival 
 value. In which case we have no right to impute 
 any peculiar survival value to truth ; and we may
 
 26 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 believe what is false without any misgiving. There 
 is indeed no reason why we should wish to know the 
 truth about anything. Our only test of a belief 
 should be has it survival value ? But the mind of 
 man will not work so. He cannot persuade himself 
 to believe anything on the ground that it has survival 
 value for him. He cannot believe at all, or even 
 begin to argue about truth, without assuming its 
 absolute value. And what is stranger still, even if 
 he persuades himself that there are no absolute 
 values that he and the universe are of such a nature 
 that he can live only so that he may go on living he 
 still finds it impossible to value either himself or a 
 universe of such a nature. His value is for a universe 
 that does not exist, and for a self different from his 
 real self ; and, try as he will, he cannot dethrone 
 that value. 
 
 So in the past, when men have believed that some 
 monstrous idol was the real God, they have still been 
 unable to value that God and still have wished to 
 believe in a God they could value. And in those 
 who believe in no God there is always a conflict 
 between values and beliefs based on the observation 
 of external reality. Every theory of the nature of 
 the universe, whether religious or no, if it be contrary 
 to man's values, is slowly undermined by them until 
 it falls in ruins to the joy of all. So it will be with 
 Nietzsche's theory of the will to power. Even in its 
 novelty it does violence to the mind of man ; it 
 seems to be scandal about the universe, which
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 27 
 
 remains scandal even for those who believe it. And 
 they believe it out of exasperation, because they see 
 men so often yielding to the will to power ; they are 
 angry with men because of the incompatibility 
 between their conduct and their values. But this 
 very anger is an assertion of those values. We may 
 yield to the will to power often enough ; but we do 
 not value the yielding either in others or in ourselves ; 
 nor are our values quite unreal because we so often fail 
 to act on them. Indeed we are aware of their reality 
 because our failure to act on them always pains our 
 minds, as a blow pains our bodies. Even if we win 
 material success by that failure, it is still a failure to 
 us behind all the success ; and, in one way or another, 
 we always apologise for it. Even those who say that 
 this is a hard universe and that men need to be hard 
 in it are apologising for their hardness. They do not 
 value the universe because it is hard, and they would 
 rather another in which there was no need of hardness. 
 ' Thou stirrest us to praise Thee,' says Augustine to 
 his God, ' because Thou hast made us to Thyself ; and 
 restless is our heart until it rests in Thee.' Even 
 those who deny the God cannot deny the restlessness. 
 They may say that men could live easy if it were not 
 for their pestilent values ; but only those do live easy 
 whose conduct conforms to their values. 
 
 We may judge other men's values by their 
 conduct ; but which of us would judge his own 
 values so, or would doubt that they were his values 
 because his conduct did not conform to them ? We
 
 28 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 are all to ourselves good fellows at heart ; which 
 means that our values are sound whatever our 
 conduct may be. There is nothing that each man is 
 so certain of as his values ; and what surprises him 
 about himself is, not the values which seem to him 
 more natural than nature itself, but his own failure 
 to conform to them. And yet, because of this 
 failure in others, we believe that their values are 
 unreal ; by which we mean that they are only pre- 
 tending to our values. It is the last and most dis- 
 abling scepticism, to believe that men are all unlike 
 even in their values, that they are a species only 
 physically, and otherwise mere discordant individuals. 
 Christianity, in its affirmation that all men are 
 brothers, denies this. Men are brothers because of 
 their common values ; without them they would be 
 but discordant individuals, utterly cut off from any 
 understanding of each other. It is their common 
 /values that make them able to understand each 
 v other, to recognise the same truth, beauty, and 
 righteousness, when they see it ; and when they 
 recognise it to desire it. Yet it cannot be denied 
 that Christianity itself has seemed to make divisions 
 among men. Those who believe themselves to be 
 Christians have thought that unbelieving nations 
 and races did not share their values, that the heathen 
 in his blindness values the wood and stone that he 
 bows down to. It seems to us that peoples far alien 
 from ourselves do actually hold values different from 
 our own, that there is nothing human but the flesh
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 29 
 
 in them. They are men in natural history, but not 
 in their morals or science or art. 
 
 But this belief disappears with closer knowledge. 
 The missionary who has lived among savages grows 
 fond of them. They are just like ourselves, he will ' 
 always tell you. They may have horrible rites and 
 customs ; but, the better he knows them, the more 
 he sees that these do not express their real values. 
 They may think that they do their duty when they 
 conform to these rites and customs ; but it is a duty 
 which they conceive to be imposed on them from 
 outside by those gods who express their sense of 
 external reality when they see it apart from their 
 own values. But, even while they are cruel, they do 
 not value the cruelty ; it remains for them a painful 
 but necessary exception in their conduct. And all 
 men, everywhere and always, are shocked by the 
 legalised cruelties of another age and country, 
 because they are legalised and seem to deny the 
 common values of mankind. There is legalised 
 cruelty everywhere, among ourselves as among the 
 lowest savages ; but the submission to external 
 reality always seems ugly and absurd to the foreigner, 
 and, the more foreign he is, the more ugly and absurd 
 it seems to him. We are shocked by the cruelty of 
 the Chinese ; yet they value cruelty so little that 
 their favourite goddess is Kwannon, the goddess of 
 pity ; and they are shocked, as they well may be, by 
 the cruelty of Europeans. Always the impartial 
 judgment of mankind approves only conduct in
 
 30 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 accordance with the permanent values of mankind. 
 Morality seems to be diverse because, everywhere 
 and always, men have made their submissions to 
 external reality, have disobeyed their values in their 
 treatment of other men, of their own children, and 
 even of themselves. They have done this, not 
 merely through weakness, but also from a sense of 
 duty, as we say ; duty, in this case, being a course of 
 action imposed on them by external reality, whether 
 they call it God or Nature. And often by a strange 
 perversity it seems to them all the more duty, 
 because it is contrary to their own values. But the 
 secret of this tyrannous sense of duty is always fear, 
 fear of that external reality which seems to them so 
 incompatible with their own values. And opposed 
 to this fear is faith, faith in the values of man in 
 spite of all appearances, a faith which, as it grows 
 stronger, becomes a belief that these values are the 
 answer of man's heart to something, to some one, that 
 is not himself, and yet is like himself in the love of 
 righteousness, truth and beauty. 
 
 But from this faith we fall because, at first, we 
 distrust, not our own values, but the values of other 
 men. We see them hostilely and in the mass, as if 
 we ourselves were not of them. All our tired and 
 frightened beliefs about the nature of man come 
 from seeing other men thus ; and nowadays we 
 think it scientific to see them so, to judge them and 
 their natures by the external symptoms of their 
 conduct, and from these to conclude that they are
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 31 
 
 animals or machines. But we are never animals or 
 machines to ourselves ; and the belief that we our- 
 selves are exceptions to all our generalisations about 
 1 mankind is a mere idol of the consciousness. Yet 
 we are always believing this through the pressure of 
 our own egotism, believing that, the further we travel 
 from ourselves, the less we shall find of our own 
 values ; as if they came from a private fire in our 
 own souls, by which only those near us could be 
 warmed, and outside this narrow circle there were 
 always an inhuman cold. When we free ourselves 
 from egotism we see that the fire is outside us like 
 the sun and that all men feel its warmth as we do. 
 Those who do not see this at last lose faith even in 
 ' their own values ; for what they believe about others 
 they come to believe about themselves, and their 
 dislike and contempt of others becomes a dislike and 
 contempt of themselves. There is a terrible un- 
 conscious sincerity of logic in the human mind by 
 which, if we think that other men are animals or 
 machines, we become animals or machines to our- 
 selves. When we value nothing but ourselves, our 
 egotism takes revenge upon us by emptying our- 
 selves of value for us. But the first Christian 
 command is that we shall love our neighbours as we 
 love ourselves ; and this implies the command that 
 we shall think about them what we think about 
 ourselves. Otherwise we shall think about ourselves 
 what we think about them, and we shall find nothing 
 in ourselves worthy of love.
 
 " 
 
 32 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 jr I 11 those we love we always find our own values ; 
 and we think perhaps that we love them because they 
 \, share our values. It is our natural conceit to believe 
 that these values are peculiar to ourselves and a few 
 elect. Yet if we could look into the minds of those 
 furthest away from us, of the Chinese, or even of the 
 wildest savages, we should find that they shared our 
 conceit as well as our values, and that to them we 
 seemed cold and inhuman. And all the while there 
 is the testimony of the ages, sounding like music from 
 the past into the present, to tell us that these values 
 v of ours have been the values of all men, and that 
 men have always rejoiced to express them in forms 
 of beauty and so to testify to their everlastingness. 
 The ages of wisdom for us are those in which men 
 have seen the universe in the light of their values ; 
 the other ages, in which they have submitted them- 
 selves to external reality, are like a tale told by an 
 idiot, full of sound and fury. That wisdom on which 
 we pride ourselves, the wisdom of ' seeing things as 
 V/ they are ' and trying to consent to them with joy, is 
 a meaningless barbarism when we look back on it in 
 the past. It is the Athenians that we remember, 
 not the Assyrians ; and now, when we wish to insult 
 our enemies, we call them Huns, meaning that, like 
 the Huns, they live according to then- notions of 
 external reality not according to their own values. 
 But there is no German who would deny his own 
 values. Bather he would say that Germany is 
 forced to act as she does because other nations do not
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 33 
 
 share her values. And that is the excuse which 
 all men, not Germans alone, make for the cruelties 
 which they do from a sense of duty. Never will 
 they believe about others what they believe about 
 themselves, never will they make the affirmation 
 that in all men there are the same values. But that 
 is the affirmation which Christianity makes, more 
 consciously and clearly than any other religion. 
 And it tells us that we shall be aware of our common 
 values if we act on them. It is the refusal to act on 
 them that makes us doubt them, first in others and 
 then in ourselves. For man is of such a nature that 
 he cannot keep a belief unless he acts on it ; to act 
 contrary to his beliefs is to destroy them. Hence 
 all the errors that infest our minds ; they are errors, 
 not merely of thought, but also of conduct ; and we 
 cannot preserve ourselves from them by reading 
 what wise men have said in the past, not even by 
 reading the words of Christ. They have no truth for 
 us, and no meaning, unless we act on them ; and, if 
 we act on them, they will lead us to truths that he 
 never uttered. So there is no need for us to believe 
 that he had a monopoly of all truth. Indeed, if we act 
 on his truth, we shall see how many others in all ages 
 and countries have uttered it ; we shall see that 
 Christianity is not merely the Christian religion, but 
 religion, still imperfect because so few have acted on 
 it, still in the making and never in this world to be 
 completed. If men act on it more and more, we may 
 be sure that it will take on forms, and pass into 
 c
 
 34 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 beliefs undreamed of by us. So far from being at 
 the end of religious belief, we are in the first faint 
 dawn of it ; for the mass of those beliefs which are 
 called religious are more often bad science than bad 
 religion. They are based on the observation of 
 external reality rather than on man's values. Seldom 
 yet has man dared to obey the teaching of Christ and 
 V to act on his own values. He would rather listen to 
 the lies that external reality seems to tell him than 
 to the truth of his own heart, which is the truth of 
 God. 
 
 But still he has always the desire to listen to the 
 truth of his own heart, always the desire to know the 
 God who speaks in that truth ; and so the words of 
 Christ are music to him, even though they be nothing 
 but music. Those who say that they are false wish 
 that they were true ; and that wish is the whisper 
 of their values, not acted upon and so not believed. 
 So the common failure to act on them engenders 
 a common disbelief. That is why Christianity tells 
 us that we cannot win our own private salvation ; 
 to aim at it is to miss it. For it is mankind, it is 
 the universe, that needs to be saved. All creation 
 groaneth and travaileth together ; and we are to be 
 saved only by desiring the salvation of the universe. 
 x So there is not one of us shall be saved until all are 
 saved ; for we all share the common mind and its 
 errors of conduct and thought, nor can we escape 
 from, its joys and sorrows into a private heaven of 
 our own. There is in us a desire to love which binds
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ABSOLUTE VALUES 35 
 
 us, whether we wish it or no, to our own kind, to this 
 earth, and to all that is upon it. Our desire is to 
 love, and so we desire that all things may be lovable. 
 Until all things are lovable, we cannot be saved. In 
 that fact we may see the future of Christianity and 
 its undreamt-of achievements, even some hint of 
 its undreamt-of beliefs.
 
 36 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE 
 
 CHRISTIANITY then is, first of all, an affirmation of 
 our absolute values, that they are absolute, that they 
 are common to all men, and that they are an answer 
 made by man to that which is not himself. But 
 these values need to be made plain to us, because 
 they are a part of ourselves and not merely a comment 
 that we make upon our experience. The natural 
 man has them but is not fully conscious of them ; 
 he obeys them only by chance and he does not 
 acknowledge their supremacy over his appetites. 
 Further, he may become, by the misuse of his reason, 
 an unnatural man ; he may deny his values alto- 
 gether, either at the bidding of his appetites, or at 
 the bidding of a duty contrary to his values, which, 
 he thinks, is imposed upon him by an external 
 reality. This unnatural man, whom Christ found 
 in the Scribes and Pharisees, was to him far worse 
 than the natural man. The natural man needed to 
 learn ; but the unnatural man needed to unlearn ; 
 and this he would, and will, very seldom do. 
 
 Christ was always trying to break down the sense 
 of duty in men, the sense of a duty imposed. To
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE 37 
 
 him the hypocrite was not the man whose conduct 
 did not conform to his values, but the man who had 
 denied his values, who was acting an inhuman part. 
 And that is why he was crucified as a blasphemer. 
 He did seem to the Scribes and Pharisees to blas- 
 pheme against their sense of an external duty ; and 
 they seemed to him to blaspheme against the values 
 of man. They made the word of God, which man 
 knows from his own values, of no account through 
 their traditions. Such traditions, such duties, are 
 imposed upon the mass of men ; and they obey 
 them from fear, from ignorance, from mere thought- 
 lessness. For them Christ had only pity ; but he 
 had curses for those who imposed those duties on 
 men, who obeyed their own pride, their own will to 
 power, their own lonely and egotistical fears, and 
 who forced others to obey them. It was they who 
 placed stumblingblocks in the way of the foolish 
 children of men ; and it would have been better 
 for them if a millstone had been hung round their 
 necks and they had been cast into the sea. 
 
 In Christ's denunciation of the Scribes and 
 Pharisees there is a more than moral indignation ; 
 there is an intellectual contempt and an aesthetic 
 disgust. They were playing a silly, private game 
 of their own ; and they would force all other men to 
 turn to it away from the great art of life. They 
 would lay their burdens on the spirit of man and 
 make everything dry and difficult and perverse. 
 They were to him like those pedants who make
 
 38 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Shakespeare seem dull or Michelangelo a draVing- 
 master. It is no wonder that he told them what 
 would happen to them at the Day of Judgment. But 
 his sayings about that are dangerous to those who 
 misunderstand them, as the Pharisees misunderstood 
 the sayings of the Prophets. We can see that, by 
 the Day of Judgment, he meant the surprise that 
 would dumbfounder the Pharisees when they were 
 brought face to face with the truth. The natural 
 man will not be surprised by it ; for he will find it in 
 accordance with his own values that he has never 
 utterly forsworn. But the unnatural man has 
 forsworn it for that which he calls duty ; the ex- 
 ternal law which he obeys himself so that he may 
 impose it on others ; the law which makes men cruel 
 and stupid and pompous on principle. And the 
 truth will strike him dumb. He will find that the 
 law which he has obeyed, and to which he has 
 sacrificed his humanity, does not exist. For him at 
 the Day of Judgment chaos will be come again. 
 
 Christ does not argue with men about their values. 
 He presents them so that the natural man can 
 recognise them. In the Sermon on the Mount he 
 does not deliver a series of commands from God ; he 
 does not say that we are to behave in a certain 
 manner because of the divine caprice. Rather he 
 says Behold your own true values. Blessed are the 
 meet, the merciful, the peacemakers, the pure in 
 heart. They are blessed in your eyes as in the eyes 
 of God. And we know that is true ; we know that
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE 39 
 
 the character which Christ blesses is the character 
 which we ourselves bless ; that we should wish it to 
 be our character if we were brave enough to defy 
 external reality and the anger and contempt of all 
 those who submit to it. Blessed above all, he said, 
 are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, 
 that is to say those who are filled with the passion of 
 obedience to their own values. And at the crisis of 
 his fate, when he stood before Pilate, the man of the 
 world, the man who, though not a Pharisee, sub- 
 mitted to external reality and despaired of truth, he 
 said these words ' To this end was I born, and for 
 this cause came I into the world, that I should bear 
 witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the 
 truth heareth my voice.' There he made his appeal 
 to the absolute values in man ; and it was because 
 Pilate did not obey those values that he asked 
 What is truth ? 
 
 So the revelation of Christ, as of all great teachers 
 and artists, is the revelation of man to himself. In 
 it man can recognise what he would be. There is 
 held up to him the mirror of his own nature accord- 
 ing to his own permanent desires. The meek, the 
 merciful, the peacemakers, are blessed, not by the 
 whim of God, but according to the order of the 
 universe of which man himself is a part. Their 
 blessedness is as inevitable as the beauty of spring 
 flowers ; and to see it makes other men desire to be 
 like them, if they are not blinded by a sense of 
 external duty. It is that blindness which makes the
 
 40 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Sermon on the Mount seem a series of violent para- 
 doxes ; and yet we cannot escape from the spell of it. 
 We cannot escape from our values, however much we 
 may deny them ; for they are a part of ourselves and 
 that part by which we judge ourselves and all other 
 things. It is not so much that we are sure of our 
 values as that they are sure ; or that we know them 
 as that they know. And this knowledge of theirs 
 is different in kind from any other. Our knowledge 
 of external reality is imposed on us by circumstance ; 
 it happens to us without our full consent ; it is 
 provisional, and like a working hypothesis, it may 
 be revised or destroyed by further knowledge. But 
 that which our values know cannot be so revised or 
 destroyed. It is not learned from external reality 
 but applied to it, and it is applied also to ourselves. 
 Applied to ourselves, we call it conscience, but that 
 in us which values and judges ourselves is that which 
 values and judges all things. We ourselves are 
 individuals, but the conscience in us is the universal, 
 judging the particular in us as it judges all particulars. 
 For our values, though they are part of us, are not 
 the egotistical part ; they are indifferent to our 
 private fate in this world. In my values it is not I 
 that judge, but all men ; and they cannot be shaken 
 in their judgment by my particular wants. That is 
 why they are terrible to us and why we try to escape 
 from them to an external law which we can interpret 
 as we choose, a law made by individual men because 
 it is external. For, being external, we never know
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE 41 
 
 quite what it is. There is always some clumsiness 
 in it that gives us a chance of adapting it to suit our 
 own purposes. We can interpret it as men interpret 
 statutes, and we can make it press hard on others and 
 softly on ourselves. Every powerful man finds it 
 easy to dodge external duties ; and, as for those who 
 are not powerful, the duties are made for them, not 
 by them, and they must obey. Nietzsche would 
 have been right if he had said only of external duties 
 that they are the product of the will to power ; but 
 when he attacked Christianity, and he did attack 
 essential Christianity, as the product of that will, he 
 was strangely and perversely wrong. For Christ 
 appeals always to our values against duty ; and our 
 values are no respecters of persons. They are not 
 statutes that we can interpret in our own favour ; 
 and that is why we are so afraid of them, afraid of 
 this power within us that is not merely our in- 
 dividual selves but universal man, and which makes 
 affirmations from which the individual self often 
 shrinks in terror. 
 
 For what does it affirm ? Not merely that we 
 value this or that, but that we are right to value it 
 always and above all things that profit our individual 
 selves ; and, further, that what we value is not only 
 some particular thing but a universal manifested in 
 it. For, as our values are the universal in us, so they 
 are always aware of the universal in what they value. 
 It is mercy that we bless in the merciful and righteous- 
 ness in those that hunger and thirst after it ; and
 
 42 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 they are blessed because of this universal that is in 
 them, because they value it and have grown like that 
 which they value. In them the Word is made flesh ; 
 but it is still the Word and has a reality of its own as 
 intense as theirs. This universal, which we value in 
 the particular, is not merely a general term that we 
 use for our intellectual convenience so that we may 
 be able to think about particulars in the mass. For 
 those who are aware of beauty in beautiful things 
 beauty itself is real, it is not a name like the names 
 of colours or shapes. We do not value blue or oval 
 in blue or oval things, as we value beauty in beauti- 
 ful things. We can, and naturally do, separate in 
 thought the beauty from the beautiful thing ; and 
 we can and do value it. Further, we value it for 
 itself and not as a means to anything else ; above all 
 not as it helps us to live. And whenever we have this 
 sense of absolute value, we have also the sense of the 
 universal. The sense of value, indeed, is the instant 
 result of the recognition of the universal by the 
 universal that is in us ; it is the effect produced by 
 the one universal upon the other, as light is the effect 
 produced by the rising sun. We make this answer 
 of absolute value to beauty, truth, and righteousness, 
 as our eyes make the answer of sight to the sunlight. 
 
 Or we should, if there were not a particular in us 
 afraid of this universal both within us and without. 
 For this particular has its own values and judges all 
 things by their use to itself ; and in judging them so 
 it makes all things merely particular. So long as all
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE 43 
 
 things exist for me merely as they help me to sur- 
 vive, so long as they appeal merely to my instinct 
 for self-preservation, they are to me particulars that 
 answer only to the particular in myself. I do not 
 see the universal in them and do not value it ; nor 
 am I aware of the universal in myself. I am a lonely 
 individual finding all things and all men merely 
 useful or harmful to myself. I must free myself 
 from this particular relation before I can be aware 
 of the universal within me or outside me, before I can 
 have the sense of absolute value. And until I attain 
 to this freedom, all things not myself have for me an 
 inferior reality to myself ; for there is no common 
 universal in them and in me. I remain lonely in my 
 unique reality ; and it is from this loneliness that 
 Christianity would free us. 
 
 For the love of which Christianity speaks is the y 
 sense of absolute value. When we love we are 
 aware of the absolute value of that which we love. 
 We cannot love any person or thing because they 
 are of use to us ; nor can we even love them for the 
 pleasure which love will give us. The love must 
 happen to us before the pleasure. We must be aware 
 of their absolute value before they can give us delight ; 
 for the delight is the result of the sense of absolute 
 value and of the freedom which comes with that 
 sense. In it we escape from the loneliness of our own 
 unique reality, from the insignificance of a universe 
 in which we ourselves are merely particulars, and all 
 other things are particulars useful or harmful to us.
 
 44 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 In such loneliness the universe itself will cease to 
 exist when we die ; it is for us entirely parasitic upon 
 ourselves, and it is good or bad for us according to 
 what we think about ourselves. Then what Hamlet 
 said in his distemper actually becomes true. There 
 is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so, 
 thinking or feeling about ourselves. We are, in 
 fact, shut into the darkness of self ; but love is like 
 a light poured into that darkness so that we see an 
 infinite reality that is not ourselves. And it is a 
 light intellectual as well as moral. It tells us what 
 is, no less than what we are to do ; we know what 
 we are to do because we know what is. The whole 
 universe is changed for us because we are changed 
 ourselves, because we have a new experiencing 
 power out of which there comes to us a knowledge 
 surer than any other kind of knowledge. 
 
 Without this knowledge through love man would 
 remain for ever in an impotent scepticism. He 
 would see no reason for living except that he might 
 continue to live ; and that would never be reason 
 enough for him. He might, in sheer despair, resolve 
 to believe what he was told ; but such belief is not 
 knowing ; it is but hearsay, like what a blind man is 
 told about the visible world. Real belief control- 
 ling action always comes through love, and the 
 knowledge obtained in love. Love is the experience 
 upon which belief is based ; and without it we can 
 believe only negations, we can but deny. The 
 knowledge obtained in love gives us a scent for
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE 45 
 
 truth so that we can see what promise of truth 
 there is in different and conflicting theories, so that, 
 in the sheer weariness of scepticism, we do not fall 
 to believing utter nonsense. 
 
 To every man who thinks sincerely there comes 
 sooner or later a season of scepticism, in which he 
 seeks to purge himself of the mere will to believe, 
 that will which, as Nietzsche says, is but the disguised 
 will to power. Then he is resolved to free himself, if 
 he can, of that reproach which Nietzsche casts at all 
 humanity, the reproach that all our beliefs are but 
 efforts to make ourselves comfortable in a universe 
 that is indifferent to us. It does not consult our 
 wishes, Nietzsche says, but we have the power to 
 play a trick upon it ; we can convince ourselves that 
 it is what we wish it to be. In our faith we can live 
 like drunken men who have forgotten all their pains 
 and troubles and sing to the stars as if they were a 
 delighted audience. But sincerity revolts against 
 this way of life and would refute this accusation 
 made by Nietzsche and whispered to every man by 
 something in his own mind. So there comes a time 
 when faith itself seems unfaith and a mere reliance 
 on the achievements of others. Then it is, as Samuel 
 Butler puts it, that men determine to give up Christ 
 for Christ's sake. Others may tell us, then, what 
 they believe ; and they may have earned their faith 
 for themselves ; but they cannot earn it for us. They 
 cannot earn a single value for us any more than they 
 can earn the Athanasian creed. And we resolve to
 
 46 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 live on no inherited riches of the mind but to dare 
 the utmost poverty of faith, so that we may know 
 what face the universe wears to those whose minds 
 possess nothing ; so that we may discover what 
 power we have of earning a faith from it by ourselves. 
 Naked our minds came into the world ; and they 
 shall not be clothed with the garments which other 
 minds have made. 
 
 And what happens then to the naked mind ? It 
 can discover, if it will, that it was not born utterly 
 naked, that the words of St. Paul are true Charity 
 never faileth : but whether there be prophecies, they 
 shall fail ; whether there be tongues, they shall 
 cease ; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish 
 away. When no prophecies are believed, when words 
 seem to bear no likeness to facts, when our knowledge 
 is rejected as no longer our own ; then our absolute 
 values remain to us. We cannot strip ourselves of 
 them ; for it is because of them that we have stripped 
 ourselves of all else ; because we have valued truth 
 for itself we have forgone all the comfort of faith. 
 So our love of truth remains to us. We have acted 
 upon it and we know through our action that truth 
 is ; we know it, not through faith, but through love. 
 
 So these words of St. Paul have a truth which men 
 discover only when they test them with their own 
 experience, a truth which St. Paul himself perhaps 
 could not have expressed in all its fullness. He 
 meant more than he knew, as men always do when 
 they tell the truth with passion, when they have
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE 47 
 
 earned it not merely with their thought but with 
 their whole lives. And yet he says more with his 
 word love than we say with our phrase absolute 
 values. For love does express the richness of the 
 thing itself, of the actual experience ; whereas 
 absolute values impoverish it a little and estrange 
 it from reality for the purposes of thought. When 
 we speak of absolute values we are dangerously near 
 implying that they can be perceived with the pure 
 intelligence. When we speak of love we know that 
 is not so. There is more than the intelligence in 
 love, even in the love of truth. And, further, the 
 phrase absolute values, leading us away from actual 
 experience into thought, tempts us to think of that 
 universal, which we value absolutely, as if it were 
 something altogether different from the particular 
 in which we are aware of it, as if we could value it 
 without valuing the particular. But, when we speak 
 of love, we know that it is also the particular that we 
 love, and that we are aware of the universal only 
 through love of the particular. Absolute values 
 seem to us merely something to think about ; and 
 we cannot be convinced of their existence by thought 
 alone. That fact is insisted upon by the Christian 
 doctrine of love, by the very use of the word. How- 
 ever much we may think about absolute values, we 
 cannot be convinced of them unless we act upon 
 them ; without that action they remain outside us ; 
 but they are real to us only when they act inside us. 
 And the word love makes that plain. For love is
 
 48 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 not thought alone ; it is feeling and thought, finding 
 their satisfaction in act. Though we have the gift 
 of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all 
 knowledge ; and though we have all faith so that we 
 could remove mountains, and have not charity, we 
 are nothing. All these gifts are frustrated unless 
 they complete themselves in action ; without that 
 they do not even become themselves. Without 
 action we think and feel about what has happened to 
 us ; and our faith is not our own but borrowed from 
 others. We may find eloquent words for it, but 
 still we are not sure of it in our own minds ; and we 
 talk to drown the whisper of our own doubt. We 
 may speak with the tongues of men and angels ; yet, 
 if we have not love, which must act if it is to be, we 
 are as sounding brass or as a tinkling cymbal. Love 
 alone beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth 
 all things, endureth all things. For it is both faith 
 and hope carried into action, and without action 
 they waste themselves in the void. And love is the 
 beginning as well as the consummation of faith and 
 hope ; for without it there cannot be that knowledge 
 upon which they are based. 
 
 In the most utter darkness of scepticism a man 
 who still loves is not without hope. He may think 
 that he knows nothing about the nature of the 
 universe ; and external reality may seem to him 
 utterly alien from all his own values. Yet he knows 
 that his values are in him and that they cannot be 
 destroyed by the indifference of external reality.
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE 49 
 
 He knows that they are not a mere expression of 
 his will to power and that, if there is any meaning 
 at all in reality, they must have some meaning as 
 being a part of it. And this meaning is in them and 
 not in something that asks them from them, such as 
 the desire to live. And he knows further that they 
 are in all men, for by his love he understands other 
 men and sees that they are like himself. He is still 
 preserved from the last scepticism, for which men 
 are utterly individuals cut off from each other by 
 their own egotism, so that no one man can assume 
 anything whatever about any other, except his 
 instinct of self-preservation. In all men he knows 
 there is something answering to that which is not 
 themselves. It is the way of Heaven not to speak ; 
 yet it knows how to obtain an answer. That is the 
 furthest scepticism of those who love enough to trust 
 in love. 
 
 But love, as I have said, always knows itself to be 
 love of the particular. When I love a man I know 
 that I love him and not merely some universal in 
 him. The very experience of love assures me of 
 that. And my love could not satisfy itself with the 
 statement that it was for God in him. To say that 
 would be to turn God Himself into an abstraction. 
 Those who love know that they cannot love either 
 God or man in that manner. If it is possible to love 
 God at all, and not merely to think about loving 
 Him, we cannot conceive of Him as the good that is 
 in all men, as a universal, impersonal good. That 
 D
 
 50 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 which we love in men is not even a quality of them, 
 it is the man himself ; as that which loves is ourselves 
 and not merely a quality of us. We love all that 
 is most peculiar and individual in them ; that is 
 what we value, just as we value all that is most 
 peculiar and individual in beautiful things. To seek 
 for the secret of beauty by ignoring character is to 
 miss beauty itself ; and a philosophy which values 
 only the universal in the particular is like an art 
 which tries to separate beauty from character. In 
 all things the Word is completely made flesh. That 
 desperate effort which the Athanasian creed makes 
 to state two seeming incompatibilities with equal 
 force must be made also by all thought about our 
 values and what we value. For it remains true 
 that while we love the particular we are also in 
 the very process of loving made aware of a universal. 
 Out of the love of the particular issues the love of 
 the universal. When we love we are aware of 
 another reality ; we have a sixth sense whereby we 
 apprehend that reality which, without love, would be 
 inconceivable to us. And this reality is not merely 
 righteousness, truth, or beauty ; for, the more 
 intensely we are aware of one of these, the more 
 closely it implies to us the other two. Each of them 
 has, as it were, the scent of the others about it, and 
 is incomplete without them. Nor are we ever 
 content to absorb ourselves in one, without reaching 
 out to the others. We feel that beauty is not fully 
 beauty to us unless we see truth and righteousness in
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE 51 
 
 it ; that truth does not convince without righteous- 
 ness and beauty ; that righteousness must be true 
 ancl beautiful or it is not righteousness. We have 
 a desire to see each of these working beyond its own 
 proper sphere, to test it in the province of the other 
 two. We are troubled if anything seems to be 
 beautiful by means of a lie. We try to discover that 
 beauty in art is always an expression of truth ; nor 
 will we believe that an artist can attain to excellence 
 through some moral defect. And so we will not 
 believe that a man can attain to righteousness by 
 means of illusion ; or that any truth can lead us to 
 unrighteousness. Beauty, we say, cannot lie ; 
 righteousness cannot be ugly ; truth can do no 
 wrong. By such phrases, by such beliefs, we try 
 to express our sense of their unity ; and this sense 
 is truly a sense, something born in us and deeper 
 than reason, something that cannot be permanently 
 confounded by any observations which seem to 
 refute it. 
 
 And the more we see these three universals as one, 
 the more they come to life for us ; the more they exist, 
 not merely in our thought, but in themselves ; beauty 
 is to us most intensely beauty when, in its depths, 
 we seem to find goodness and truth ; and goodness 
 is never so good as when it is beautiful to us. There 
 are times when some beauty of nature, investing the 
 whole visible world, is to us the smile on the face of 
 God. It is not merely beauty but the expression of 
 a divine will ; and it is all the more beautiful because
 
 52 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 it is that. We love all the things that are bathed in 
 it, the cottages, the hills, the meadows, all the more ; 
 but through them we love something else, of whose 
 reality we are for the moment assured. And it is 
 neither beauty nor righteousness nor truth ; all 
 these words fail to express it ; they give to it the 
 unreality of our language, and the separateness of 
 our words. We know then that we understand 
 further than we can say ; and then it is that those, 
 who have the gift, pass into poetry or music or 
 painting. But, except at such moments as these, 
 there always seems to be a part of us making a 
 fragmentary answer to a part of something else ; and 
 we long for an answer made by the unity of ourselves 
 to this unity outside us. Beauty, righteousness, 
 truth, each of these three makes us aware that this 
 unity is possible within us as outside us. Restless 
 is our heart until it rest in Thee ; but still it sees the 
 way to this rest, is made aware of the possibility of 
 it, only through the love of particular persons and 
 things. 
 
 So, in words, one tries to express what really 
 happens in the mind of man ; and by the expression 
 to assure oneself that it does happen. For these 
 experiences are fleeting ; and we wish with words to 
 assure ourselves, when they are past, that they have 
 been. We wish to raise a monument to them in our 
 minds, that we may remember them when we are most 
 tempted to forget them in the mere task of living. 
 And when the mood has changed, we are not sure
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE 53 
 
 of what has happened unless we can say it to our- 
 selves. Language is the instrument of reason ; and 
 things seem to us irrational if we cannot subject 
 them to that instrument. Indeed a great part of 
 our scepticism comes from the impotence of our 
 language. We cannot present our deepest selves to 
 ourselves ; always, when we try to do so, we fall 
 away from the fact through the clumsiness of the 
 instrument. We misrepresent the reality ; and 
 then believe in the misrepresentation, or fail to 
 believe in that which it misrepresents. And the 
 history of thought is full of these misrepresentations 
 and of reactions against them. What every true 
 philosopher tries to do is to represent the reality of 
 the mind of man, his deepest and most valued experi- 
 ences ; and constantly philosophers are drawn away 
 from that reality by their own words and by the desire 
 to be consistent in the error which those words impose 
 upon them. Just because their representation is so 
 poor, they try to prove it. But, if it were more like 
 the reality, it would need no proof. Men would 
 recognise the likeness as they recognise it in a good 
 portrait even when they have never seen the subject 
 of it. They would say That is the truth. Nor 
 would they deny it because it seemed to them in- 
 consistent with some other truth ; at least they 
 would try to remove the inconsistency, not one of the 
 truths. But usually, when we are aware of an in- 
 consistency, we try to remove one of the truths 
 which seem to be inconsistent, because we are not
 
 54 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 sure in our presentment of them that they are both 
 truths. The likeness to both is equally feeble and we 
 take our choice between them. So philosophers are 
 always trying to empty the universe of content that 
 they may make it easy to think about, as painters try 
 to empty the visible world of content so that they 
 may make it easy to paint ; and it is supposed that 
 art and philosophy consist in this emptying. But 
 the result in both cases is mere emptying, against 
 which there always follows a reaction. What is 
 needed, in both cases, is a passion, not for consistency, 
 not for picture or system making, but for the truth 
 itself, or the very beauty. To represent that in its 
 full richness may be impossible ; but only through 
 the effort can the means of representation be im- 
 proved so that the impossible will become possible. 
 Only so can we escape from a jargon of art or philo- 
 sophy, the jargon which misrepresents because its 
 purpose is to make representation easy. 
 
 This is not irrelevant because I wish to insist with 
 equal force upon two facts that seem to be incon- 
 sistent ; namely the fact that, if we love at all, we 
 must love the particular ; and the fact that to love is 
 to love the universal, to become aware of it in the 
 very process of loving the particular. And yet the 
 more we love the universal the more intensely we are 
 aware of the particular. We do not lose our sense of 
 the one in the other but our sense of both is enriched. 
 Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of these 
 little ones, ye have done it unto Me. That is not a
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE 55 
 
 mere edict of God, which He ordains because He will 
 have it so. It is a statement of man's own experience 
 Those who understand it know it to be true of feeling 
 and thinking as well as doing. And the truth of the 
 saying can be understood better through the use of 
 the word love than through the use of a phrase like 
 absolute values, because the word love brings the 
 actual experience more sharply to our minds. We 
 know what love is because we have not merely 
 thought about it but felt it ; and we know that, 
 when we have loved one of these little ones, we have 
 also loved something else which becomes more and 
 more real to us as our love grows in intensity. The 
 very joy with which we perform an act of love is a 
 joy in the universal ; it is something done not merely 
 by the particular ego but by universal man ; and it 
 is done not merely to the particular but to a universal 
 which Christ, in that saying, calls God, calls the 
 Father, using both words to assert the reality of that 
 universal which we perceive through love. But 
 there are many now who will not call that universal 
 God, because the word God means to them not 
 reality but unreality. It is to them a screen between 
 themselves and what it means. They can believe 
 in God only if they call Him by some other name, 
 and often they are hindered from believing in Him 
 because they have no name for Him, no means of 
 presenting their belief to themselves. 
 
 There is for us always, in mere thought, an incon- 
 sistency between the reality of God and the reality
 
 56 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of man. How, if what we love so passionately is the 
 particular man, can we also be loving the universal 
 God in and through that particular ? How can it be 
 literally true that Inasmuch as ye have done it 
 unto one of these little ones ye have done it unto Me ? 
 The little one is not God because he is himself ; and 
 the more we love him the more we are aware that 
 he is himself, and that we love him for himself. 
 And yet, as Christ insists, the good action cannot be 
 done to God at all unless it is done to one of these 
 little ones, to some actual living creature ; nor can 
 we be aware of God unless we love Him through the 
 love of actual living creatures. He prayeth best who 
 loveth best. The aim of Christ is to tell us this 
 truth, to present it so that we know it to be truth ; 
 and not to explain away the seeming inconsistency 
 in it by explaining away some part of the truth. 
 But he warns us that we cannot be aware of the 
 truth except through love. And so it may be hidden 
 from the wise and prudent from those who would 
 rather attain to some consistency than be aware of 
 the truth in all its seeming inconsistency and yet 
 be revealed to babes, to the simple who love. For 
 those who love know it to be true. The truth 
 happens to them so that they do not need to have it 
 proved. They are in love with the particular and 
 with the universal, and the more they are aware of 
 the one, the more they become aware of the other. 
 They do not need to rob the particular of reality so 
 that they may give it to the universal. That which
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE 57 
 
 seems impossible in cold thought happens to them 
 in the warmth of love. They are like the great 
 artist who attains to unity through richness ; no 
 one can say how he does it, but in his work it is 
 done. 
 
 So, according to the Christian doctrine of love, 
 we understand the mystery of the universal and the 
 particular only when we love. Thinking without 
 loving will always make the universe seem impossible 
 to us. We shall say of it what the man said when 
 he first saw a giraffe ' I do not believe it ' and 
 that is the conclusion to which thought without love 
 leads men always, although it is expressed in many 
 diverse ways. They do not believe anything which 
 they are capable of thinking. With all their words 
 they can represent only an incredible universe to 
 themselves, whether they insist on the inconsistencies 
 of fact or ignore some facts so as to make thinking 
 easier. In the one case the inconsistencies glare 
 intolerably at them ; in the other the universe, 
 which they have emptied of so much fact, loses its 
 value for them and they are wearied by its insipidity. 
 So men are wearied alike by their materialist and by 
 their spiritualist conceptions of the universe ; and 
 they rush from one to the other without finding rest 
 in either. Matter is everything ; matter is nothing ; 
 neither of these sayings could be believed by one 
 whose thought had grown out of his love. Both 
 are the result of thought without love, thought gone 
 cold, thought emptied of values. And nothing is so
 
 58 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 incredible to us as the idea of a God conceived, not 
 out of love, but out of logic. He is like the camel 
 which the German evolved out of his inner con- 
 sciousness ; He is something which has never 
 happened to the man who conceives him. There is 
 an idea of God conceived out of logic, not out of love, 
 in Calvinism, and it is a nightmare to us. The 
 logic of Calvinism dragged the minds of men strug- 
 gling and terrified to its conclusion ; and they broke 
 away from it at last as if they were waking from a 
 nightmare. But so it is with all theories of the 
 universe conceived out of logic not out of love. They 
 are incredible to us even while they seem to compel 
 our consent to them ; and we awake from that 
 compulsion with the force of our whole natures. 
 This is not so we cry, as we deny a nightmare 
 with violent joy when we wake from it. 
 
 At this moment the whole mind of Europe is 
 waking from the nightmare of materialism and is 
 making a united effort to purge itself of the terrors 
 of thought with which that nightmare has peopled 
 it. The materialist universe is incredible to us ; we 
 deny its reality with every moment of our experience 
 and with the whole force of our values. Can it be 
 our minds, we ask, that have thought these things ? 
 They seem to us an inheritance not human, as if they 
 were poisonous matter that we would expel out of 
 our bodies. And yet our thought is still infested 
 with the images of materialism. We disbelieve 
 passionately but still we dread ; and we shall dread
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE 59 
 
 until we find a strong counterbelief conceived in 
 love. 
 
 So logic is always lying in wait for those who think 
 without love, whose thought is not directed by their 
 belief in their own values ; and it can drag them to 
 whatever nightmare conclusion it will. All men 
 fear this tyrant logic of their own minds that can 
 force them to believe the incredible even while they 
 revolt against its incredibility ; and yet they will not 
 have faith in the one power that can overcome it. 
 They will strive desperately by argument to escape 
 from those conclusions to which all their arguing 
 forces them, forcing them, which is worse still, to 
 action. There was a fatal logic, no doubt, in the 
 minds of those mothers who gave their children to 
 the fires of Moloch ; there is a fatal logic behind all 
 our iniquities and cruelties to-day. Empty the 
 universe of your values ; believe that love is but your 
 own private and precarious comment on things ; 
 and, whether you profess to believe in a God or 
 whether you do not, you will always see Moloch, 
 incredible but real, in the whole spectacle of the 
 universe, as a child in a nightmare sees a sinister 
 ugliness on the face of its own mother. This night- 
 mare ugliness is expressed in all the writings of 
 Nietzsche. It is the ugliness, not of his own brave and 
 frightened mind, but of what that mind saw because 
 it denied love, and because through that denial 
 it fell into a nightmare. That ugliness he could 
 not overcome with his own desperate sincerity. We
 
 60 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 are always desperately sincere in a nightmare ; but, 
 the more our fevered brains struggle, the more they 
 are forced to incredible convictions ; and so it was 
 with him. Nothing can be more incredible than the 
 universe, and the mind of man, as he conceived them 
 in the intensity of his effort to attain to truth without 
 love. And yet thousands have cried that it is the 
 truth and a glorious truth. They too have trusted 
 in their own sincerity just because it made a night- 
 mare of the universe for them, because it affirmed 
 that Moloch was God. They have not seen that this 
 Moloch is but the phantom that the mind creates 
 in the darkness of its own egotism. 
 
 In our dreams we are cut off from the experience 
 of reality and create for ourselves a world, sinister 
 or kind, out of our memories of the experience of our 
 waking hours. Because we are disconnected from 
 the reality around us, we have an infinite freedom 
 with the stuff of our dreams, which is only ourselves. 
 But this very freedom is always within the prison 
 of ourselves ; and, so long as we dream, there is no 
 escape from that prison. Within it we may soar 
 to the most extreme delights or sink to the wildest 
 terrors ; and in a moment we may turn from delights 
 to terrors. There is no external reality to correct 
 us, to remind us of itself and what it is, nothing but 
 dreaming memories that can make what they will 
 of it. We are merely ourselves, shut into ourselves ; 
 and we cannot direct ourselves through any relation 
 with that which is not ourselves, as one could not
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE 61 
 
 stoor in a vacuum. So from dreams we may know 
 that man, when he is merely himself, is at the mercy 
 of himself ; he is in the heaven or hell that he himself 
 becomes ; and he may pass from one to the other 
 in the twinkling of an eye. It is not the universe 
 that acts upon him but only the changes of his own 
 flesh ; and they play what tricks they will upon his 
 mind, filling it with memories lovely or hideous of the 
 reality from which he is cut off. This apparent 
 freedom of his is really an utter slavery to an un- 
 guided self ; it can do what it will ; but it has no 
 power to will, just because it has no material but self 
 to deal with. 
 
 Man without love, without the constant sense of 
 his absolute values, is in his waking hours as he is 
 in his dreams. He is cut off from full experience of 
 reality ; he is shut in the prison of his own egotism 
 where he has a freedom of thought like the slavery 
 of the dreamer to himself. In that freedom he can 
 make silly heavens or vain hells of theory, each 
 turning into the other as each disgusts him with its 
 own incredibility. And there is nothing to protect 
 him from these reactions, because all the while he is 
 cut off from contact with reality by his failure to 
 love. And, as in a dream, he is at the mercy of the 
 changes of his flesh. They interpret reality to him 
 so that he is optimist or pessimist according to the 
 workings of his digestion. And, being aware of this 
 fact, he believes in the supremacy of his flesh, which 
 indeed is supreme. Without love we are slaves of
 
 62 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the matter which is ourselves. And, so the less we 
 love, the nearer we are to that state of madness in which 
 man is utterly and solely himself, in which reality does 
 not exist for him except through the perturbations 
 of his own flesh, and in which he can think himself 
 God Almighty when he happens to be in high spirits. 
 From this prison, Christianity tells us, there is 
 only one escape. It is only by loving that we cease 
 to be merely ourselves and that we become fully 
 aware of the reality of that which is not ourselves, 
 so that we experience that reality as fully as we 
 experience our own thoughts. Through love, through 
 the sense of absolute values, we pass from sleeping to 
 waking, from dreams that we spin out of ourselves 
 to a knowledge of reality. In these dreams, these 
 theories of ours, we are will-less, they turn to Heaven 
 or Hell of their own accord ; and we strangely 
 mistake tin's will-lessness of ours, this utter passivity, 
 for sincerity. Because our theories happen to us, 
 we suppose that they must be the result of a passion 
 for the truth in us ; and the more nightmarish they 
 are, the more they seem to be a result of that passion. 
 We might as well see a passion for the truth in our 
 dreams, which do but dramatise our waking hopes 
 and fears, giving to the drama a happy or an unhappy 
 turn according to the disposition of our bodies. We 
 are not sincere merely because we have no control 
 over what we think, because it is spun out of our own 
 lonely minds and not struck out of the contact 
 between the freed mind and reality. But love
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE 63 
 
 frees us ; and only in that freedom have we the 
 will to believe the truth, and the power to find it, 
 in a universe that becomes credible to us through 
 the knowledge given by love. 
 
 Never, perhaps, has the universe seemed so in- 
 credible as it does now, when we are waking from 
 the nightmare of materialism, yet waging a war that 
 is the result in action of that theoretic nightmare. 
 We are like men who have started fighting in their 
 sleep and wake to find themselves still fighting 
 fiercely for their lives. The dream that set us 
 fighting is discredited everywhere. All of us, except 
 a few determined madmen, long for freedom, light, 
 peace. And yet the habit of the nightmare is still 
 heavy on our minds ; and still we fear that it is true. 
 We see our own values as if they were far above us 
 and no part of ourselves ; there seems to be an 
 infinite distance between them and our actions 
 which are so fearfully ourselves. Our whole society 
 is like a man who has forsworn himself in a rage, who 
 has done what seems to throw him so far below his 
 former self that nothing of it remains to him but the 
 bitter memory of what he was. And how can we 
 have come to this pass in a credible universe ? How 
 can there be this monstrous incompatibility between 
 our values and ourselves ? If men are what their 
 actions seem to prove them, why have their values 
 persisted thus futilely in their incongruous minds, 
 persisted only to mock them with impossible desires ? 
 What function can they have in creatures whom they
 
 64 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 serve only to make wretched ? If there is no reality 
 except in that struggle for life which sets us fighting, 
 why cannot we value that ; why is there this in- 
 cessant whisper within us of an unreality which alone 
 we can value ? 
 
 Christianity makes this answer to us. That which 
 we value is the true reality ; but we are assured of it 
 only through our values ; and we can attain to it 
 only when we act on them, only through love. 
 Without love we dream ; and that which we dream 
 becomes incredible to us as soon as it reaches a pitch 
 of logical madness which we cannot endure. For 
 logic without love will make the universe incredible 
 to us in our action, if not in our thought. Never can 
 we act upon it without reducing it to an absurdity. 
 But when we act on our values we do not reduce 
 them to an absurdity. To act on them is to see that 
 they are true ; it is to confirm faith with works ; it 
 is to find reality with the whole of ourselves and not 
 to lose our way to it in the mazes of more thought. 
 Does Christianity speak the truth ? No one can say 
 who has not tested it in action ; and those who 
 have tested it cannot prove it to those who have 
 not. They can only affirm their utter certainty, as 
 St. Paul does when he says I am persuaded that 
 neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, 
 nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, 
 nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall 
 be able to separate us from the love of God, which is 
 in Christ Jesus our Lord.
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF LOVE 65 
 
 Only through the music of those words can we under- 
 stand their meaning, for that alone tells us what 
 they meant to the speaker. He speaks of his utter 
 certainty like a poet who, with his music, convinces us 
 that he tells the truth about himself. He speaks 
 like a poet in love ; and we know something more 
 from the words of the poet than that he is in love. 
 He makes us share the passionate certainty of his 
 love ; and he makes us value the love itself, as being 
 a truth to which we do not attain when we are 
 occupied with living so that we may continue to live. 
 But this love of the saint is a love of something 
 universal, it is the answer made to another love 
 which he calls the love of God ; and the universal in 
 him speaks for all men. We know it, when we feel 
 the beauty of his speech ; we know that his mind 
 is flushed with the light of a reality which he, seeing 
 it, dares to call by the name of God.
 
 66 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 
 
 So far I have ignored one important fact about 
 Christianity That it is the most personal of all 
 religions. For the Christian, Christ is not, first of 
 all, a teacher, but himself. Whether he be called 
 God or man, these are only words used to insist upon 
 the fact that he is himself and that the Christian's 
 desire is not salvation or righteousness or any 
 generality, but to be like Christ. He is one who has 
 fallen in love with Christ ; and the peculiarity of 
 the Christian religion and of the Christian character 
 springs out of this fact. For the Christian aims at 
 being a real person with all the intense reality and 
 particularity of that person. To him Aristotle's, 
 or any other, ideal man is vague and unreal. He 
 knows the man he would be like ; and that man is 
 Christ. 
 
 Christ is the greatest figure in history, as Hamlet 
 is the greatest figure in art, because of his reality ; 
 and he still has the power, because of this reality, to 
 make men fall in love with him in spite of all their 
 prejudices. Mr. George Moore, who, I suppose, 
 believes no single article of the Creed, has fallen in
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 67 
 
 love with him and has written a book about him as 
 if he had met him. It is like a memoir written with 
 the licence of an artist and a lover, like another 
 gospel, as different from the Gospels as Mr. Moore is 
 different from the evangelists, but still clearly about 
 the same person. And he is more at one with them 
 than he supposes, because his subject and his passion 
 are the same as theirs. 
 
 So great is the reality of Christ to us that we read 
 the Gospels with an interest continually baulked. 
 We guess at more about him than they tell us. We 
 seem to know even when they tell us wrong, when 
 they have misunderstood him, or when they have, 
 unwittingly, changed his words or his acts so as to 
 give him an authority or status which he does not 
 need. For to the Christian it is not Christ's status 
 that gives him authority but himself. Sometimes 
 the Gospels are a little like an official biography ; at 
 least they try to make the message of Christ official 
 and even to prove that it is like other messages of the 
 past ; and always they insist upon his credentials. 
 But his credentials for the Christian are in him ; and 
 all the Christian desires is to know exactly what 
 Christ said and did so that he may know exactly what 
 he was. If only there had been a Shakespeare or a 
 Dostoevsky, or even a Boswell, to watch him ; one 
 who did not wish to prove anything about him 
 but only wished to draw him to the life. As it 
 is, we feel sometimes as if we were reading 
 Horatio's biography of Hamlet, that apology which
 
 68 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Hamlet asked him to write, and not Shakespeare's 
 play. 
 
 And yet, in our eagerness, we are ungrateful and 
 unfair. It is the Gospels that have made us eager. 
 They have given us so much of the reality of Christ 
 that they themselves warn us when they depart from 
 it. And with this reality the Christian can still 
 protect himself against all lunacies of theory and 
 pedantries of fear and vulgarities of egotism ; as 
 Hamlet triumphs still over the commentators and 
 the speculators, and even the actors. The Gospels 
 in their sincerity, even when it may be mistaken, 
 have given us enough to set the imagination working 
 securely. Christ himself, we know, was not in- 
 vented. He was and is himself. And so those who 
 are in love with Christ know what is Christian 
 when they see it ; and this Christian quality is to 
 them the first reality of the Christian faith. Their 
 values are not for abstract qualities but for Christ 
 and for the universe as seen with his eyes. There 
 is for them even a Christian beauty, a beauty as 
 peculiar as if it had been produced by one individual 
 artist ; and we can recognise or miss this Christian 
 quality of beauty in the work of particular artists, 
 We find it in Rembrandt, but not in Raphael ; the 
 Renaissance said good-bye to it firmly and proudly, 
 and therefore the Renaissance is a little tiresome to 
 U8. There is nothing of it in many of Shakespeare's 
 plays ; but we know how Hamlet, if he could have 
 met Christ, would have turned to him, and how
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 69 
 
 Christ would have cured him of his fever. And yet 
 Christ would have known why he hated the king and 
 Rosencrantz and Guildernstern. The murder of his 
 father was to him only a symptom of the worldliness 
 which he hated. It confirmed him to frenzy in his 
 hatred and his loneliness, in his sense of unreality. 
 And he needed a friend more real than Horatio, he 
 needed the reality of one like Christ to answer to his 
 own passionate reality. But there is most of this 
 Christian beauty in King Lear ; there are places 
 where one can almost see Christ pass like a spirit 
 through the play and cast a beauty upon it which 
 Shakespeare had never dreamed of before. 
 
 Christ was not a philosopher ; if you speak of his 
 teaching you seem to do him a wrong, as if you spoke 
 of the teaching of Mozart. He does not prove to us, 
 he reveals ; and what we say is, not even That is 
 true, but, That is what I wish to be. And to be 
 that does not seem impossible. Those who insist on 
 the impossible perfection of Christ have never seen 
 the reality of him. He is possible because he is 
 real ; and because he is real, he is ourselves. For 
 whenever any one is utterly real to us, he is ourselves, 
 projected into different circumstances ; he is e very- 
 man. Every one is Hamlet to himself and every 
 Christian is Christ, if only he could be Christ ; and the 
 unreality is the fact that he fails to be Christ. It 
 is always ourselves, the everyman is most intensely 
 ourselves, that we recognise in the convincing truth 
 of art. I recognise myself, my own glorified ex-
 
 70 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 perience, in The Magic Flute ; and all art, until I 
 can do that with it, is to me merely something to be 
 admired. 
 
 The Christian recognises himself in Christ, as not 
 in other teachers ; and so Christianity is not an effort 
 to be something foreign and ideal and impossible. 
 Rather it seems a growth of ourselves as we might be 
 if we did not hinder our growth, a flowering and 
 fruiting of ourselves in a Paradise that might be 
 here and now, if only we could be true to our own 
 love of it. And at the same time, while we are under 
 the spell, we know that all other men could flower 
 and fruit so, that there is not an utter difference 
 between them and us, but the same desire and the 
 same sense of inadequacy, however pompously 
 concealed. We recognise Christ in ourselves because 
 we recognise his pity and understanding, which are 
 his truth ; and that is a part of us as of him. So, 
 for the Christian, there is no need of that miraculous 
 change of all circumstance which Shelley needed for 
 his millennium ; no need for all mankind to be freed 
 from an external tyranny. The Kingdom of Heaven 
 is within you. The words mean so much that we can 
 only gasp at them. The Kingdom of Heaven is 
 within all of us, even in those whom we hate most. 
 The millennium is in all of us, if only we would yield 
 ourselves to it. And we are sure of this when we are 
 sure of the reality of Christ, for we know then that it 
 was in him, and that he is ourselves, being every- 
 man. We know this even of those whom we call
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 71 
 
 the tyrants of the world ; they too are ourselves 
 and the Kingdom of Heaven is within them, if only 
 they could cease to thwart themselves of it. Christ 
 said of them, when at the height of his suffering he 
 was most himself : ' Father, forgive them ; they 
 know not what they do.' As he knew that he was 
 the child of God, so he knew that they were children 
 of God ; that they were like him in their inmost 
 passions, in their loves, if only they would confess 
 them. 
 
 As for those fierce denunciations of his ; they are 
 part of his reality too, they are the fierce eagerness 
 of one possessed by the truth. The man who is 
 possessed by the truth says naturally Hear the 
 word of God meaning that it is the truth and not 
 his private word. And he says also Why will you 
 not listen to the word of God ? His denunciations 
 are but his effort to destroy the obstructions which 
 men set up between themselves and the word of God. 
 What he curses and would destroy are those lifeless 
 masks, masks of conceit and pomposity and sham 
 certainty, which men put on to protect themselves 
 from the word of God. Woe unto you, Scribes and 
 Pharisees, hypocrites. These are the masks which 
 the real men had put on ; and behind them were 
 still the real men from whom he wished to tear the 
 mask ; Christ knew that most surely when he hung 
 upon the cross. 
 
 Was he perfect ? The question itself misunder- 
 stands. It is not perfection that we love in him
 
 72 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 but himself. And how irrelevant are the efforts to 
 prove that he was right in all he said or did, that he 
 is reported to have said or done ; that he was right 
 for instance to denounce the Scribes and Pharisees, 
 because he was God. There theology, when it is 
 orthodox, is wiser than most people know ; for it 
 insists upon his real humanity, not on a sham 
 humanity put on to disguise the God. Indeed there 
 is only one fatal heresy about Christ, namely the 
 heresy called docetic ; which robs him of all reality, 
 pretending that he was a phantom or a puppet on 
 the earth, while the real God remained safe and calm 
 and painless in His heaven. So the Incarnation was 
 a trick played on mankind ; and there was nothing 
 to admire or love in it, but merely an unintelligible 
 celestial transaction, which we must applaud as if we 
 were courtiers watching the king perform a conjuring 
 trick. -The devout are always falling into this heresy 
 unawares, because they are afraid of the reality of 
 Christ ; because they could not worship him if he 
 were real. But any taint of the docetic heresy robs 
 Christianity of all its power, which lies, not in its 
 sublimity or consistency or even in its common sense ? 
 but in the reality of the Christ that all Christians 
 would like to be, in whom they see themselves as they 
 would be, and not some foreign and unreal perfection, 
 whether God or man. 
 
 When we love a great artist and are utterly subdued 
 to his art, it is not because of his powers which we do 
 not possess, but because of the self, which is also
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 73 
 
 ourselves, that he reveals to us. The powers only 
 reveal ; and the more they reveal the more simple 
 and human they seem, so that his supreme triumph 
 over us is to make us feel that we could do it all our- 
 selves, that we are, with him, doing it all ourselves- 
 And so it is with Christ. We feel that we could 
 ourselves accomplish, not the miracles, which are to 
 us as they were to him nothing, but the life, the 
 character. He does not make his state of being 
 hard to us but easy, not mysterious but simple. 
 You can do it yourselves if you will, he says The 
 Kingdom of Heaven is within you. No doubt he 
 said that suddenly, in a moment, when he saw that 
 all men were one, one with him and he with them. 
 And his great sayings all convince us that they were 
 said so. They cannot be great sayings at all to those 
 for whom they are official utterances ; nor can he be 
 himself to those who think of him as having said 
 everything officially and out of his divine past rather 
 than in his human present. We make the very 
 notion of God impossible when we think of him as 
 doing everything by design and in cold blood, as 
 lacking the most divine, and most human, quality 
 of spontaneity. And how much more impossible 
 and unlike himself does Christ become when we 
 think of him so. 
 
 If Christianity now renews itself, and lives again 
 in joy and pride and laughter and tears, there will 
 soon be an end of all dispute among Christians about 
 the divinity of Christ. Those who called him God
 
 74 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 did so for reasons, whether good or bad, that are now 
 meaningless. The bad reason was that they wished 
 to give him an authority outside himself and his 
 own words. They were partisans for him and 
 would prove that he had no rivals ; or they did not 
 believe him or understand him enough to take him 
 on his own merits. They needed proofs, like 
 Thomas. The good reason was the sense of his 
 supreme reality, and the desire to believe that God 
 was real like him, was indeed utterly a person and 
 not a celestial process ; and the belief that Christ 
 was God did itself exalt men's conception of God. 
 But, though that reason was good once, it is not good 
 now ; for the belief in the divinity of Christ has done 
 its work. It has made us dare the thought that we 
 are all sons of God because of our likeness to Christ, 
 and sons not by metaphor but in reality. God, for 
 all those who really believe in Him now, is always a 
 person, never a process ; and He is better, not worse, 
 than man. It is by the best in ourselves, in Christ, 
 that we know Him. If there is a God, we are the 
 sons of God ; and Christ is one of us. He has his 
 authority for us because he is utterly one of us and 
 not because he is in any way different ; and the 
 more he is himself to us, the less authority or status 
 he needs, whether human or divine. I do not need 
 to think that The Magic Flute is more than human, 
 before I can be aware of its beauty. If it were not 
 beautiful to me, if it were not wise as only such 
 beauty can be, what value to me would it have, even
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 75 
 
 if I knew that it had been communicated straight 
 from God ? In The Magic Flute, in Christ, in all men 
 and things that make us aware of divinity, the Word 
 is utterly made flesh. And we cannot make it more 
 the Word by thinking that there is in the flesh some 
 difference from our own. 
 
 There is no need for the Christian to be a partisan 
 of Christ or to contend that he had a secret no other 
 man ever had. His power to the Christian lies in his 
 intense reality. If any other man can be as real to 
 us, so much the better ; we are not partisans between 
 Mozart and Beethoven. If any one, by whatever 
 means, becomes utterly real to us, we love him and 
 the best in us has power to make us more like him. 
 We only hate those who are hideously unreal to us ; 
 for we are convinced of their reality against our will 
 and by external evidence. They are unreal to us 
 and we hate them, because we see no likeness whatever 
 in them to the reality in us. They may be like, and 
 hideously like, the unreality in us, that part of our- 
 selves which we deny. But Christ is like the reality 
 in us which we affirm ; and he has the power of 
 affirming it for us no less than for himself. He has 
 the power of expressing himself and us ; not merely 
 of telling us what to do, but of being it. His acts are 
 eloquent to us because they are part of his character ; 
 he seems to do them, not because he thinks them 
 right, but as a musician makes his tunes ; and they 
 express him like those tunes and affect us like them. 
 And that no doubt is the reason why Christians
 
 76 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 cannot help being partisans of his. He seems to 
 each his own discovery and to speak personally to 
 each. The Christian may be known, each one 
 thinks, by the fact that he really does know Christ. 
 His values are for Christ ; and his values are himself 
 more completely than his actions, by which he is 
 commonly misinterpreted. And so men are apt to 
 use Christ as a stick for beating each other. They 
 judge each other by their actions, which are so 
 utterly inadequate to the value for Christ that each 
 feels in himself and thinks no other can share. 
 Continually men employ the Sermon on the Mount 
 to put each other out of countenance ; but when it 
 *s so employed against themselves they feel the un- 
 fairness of it. To themselves they are their values 
 and their values are for Christ. 
 
 Often those who proclaim the failure of Christianity 
 in the world do so because they are sure of its inner 
 success for themselves. They see few who are at all 
 like Christ, and they denounce the churches for having 
 made him unreal. But Christianity fails so obvi- 
 ously because it is so real and precise and personal 
 a religion, because all men are sure that they could 
 recognise a Christian if ever they saw one. He 
 would be like Christ ; and men like Christ are rare. 
 Therefore Christianity has failed ; and yet it has 
 failed only as men fail always to conform to their 
 values. The value for Christ remains ; and men do 
 not feel that it is a failure in themselves. Each one 
 of us is shocked by the war now because of his value
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 77 
 
 for Christ. It seems an apostasy of the whole world 
 against that value ; yet we ourselves do not seem 
 apostates to ourselves, only the world is an apostate. 
 We can all feel like Christ when we are under his 
 spell, as we can feel like Mozart when we are under 
 his spell; but we cannot act like Christ as we 
 cannot make music like Mozart'; least of all can we 
 act like Christ as a society. 
 
 And yet this value for Christ does affect our actions 
 even as a society ; an appeal can be made to it which 
 will move the world. When a man gives his life for 
 Christ we do not merely admire his courage ; we 
 recognise his values, that they are right. We are 
 like the people of Rome who abolished the gladia- 
 torial shows because the monk Telemachus gave his 
 life in resisting them. A pagan people might have 
 said that Telemachus was a brave man ; but they 
 would not have been changed in their conduct by his 
 death. Christian Rome recognised Christ in him. A 
 new absolute had been born into the world, a personal 
 absolute, of which the image is the crucifix. Not 
 only are there men who live according to this 
 absolute, but other men are moved by them and 
 know why they are moved. It is because this 
 absolute is Christ ; and they acknowledge it when 
 it is made plain to them, when the Word once more 
 becomes flesh before their eyes. 
 
 But now let us consider what is the character 
 of this personal absolute. It differs from other 
 absolutes because it is personal, not abstract ; and
 
 78 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 because therefore it has a peculiar character of its 
 own. One should be able to paint a portrait of 
 the Christian, not as a type but as an individual. 
 Christ has power over us because he was an individual, 
 is an individual, we may say, so strong is our sense of 
 his reality. The other ideals are not real, because 
 they have not been realised. They consist of general 
 qualities ; but the Christian ideal consists of a man. 
 We know that if we saw him we should recognise 
 him. He differs from the other ideals in that they 
 are academic exercises ; they are like those ideal 
 pictures or statues which express in the artist merely 
 some disgust for reality ; but he is like a portrait of 
 some one the artist has known and loved. 
 
 We know how Christ would have smiled at any one 
 who was trying to be Aristotle's ideal man, or the 
 superman, or the German notion of a hero. And 
 why should he smile ? Because in each case the 
 endeavour would mean merely the acting of a part, 
 and of a part that could not be learned. In these 
 vague abstract ideals there is no ideal. They 
 demand a change, not in the man himself, but only 
 in his circumstances. He dreams of himself as not 
 uplifted to a conformity with his own values, but 
 merely as living in a world which takes him for an 
 ideal. The vision which he sees is of his own ego, 
 as it would be if the universe were contrived to suit 
 it. There is in all these ideals, as Nietzsche truly 
 said, the will to power ; and that is why they are not 
 ideals at all. Aristotle's ideal man, the superman,
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 79 
 
 the German hero, all behave as if the universe were 
 their washpot ; and this behaviour of theirs is 
 supposed to be ideal. So those who follow these 
 ideals can do nothing but behave as if the universe 
 were also their washpot, which it never is. Their 
 conduct is absurd ; and it is only a question how long 
 they will be able to keep it up. They are posed like 
 conquering heroes ; and sooner or later they will 
 have to fall out of the pose and confess that they are 
 as other men. 
 
 Every one of us in youth has his dreams of being a 
 great general, a great orator, a great artist, or some- 
 thing else very great. But in these dreams, which 
 we call our ideals, it is never ourselves that are 
 changed, but the universe that consents to be our 
 washpot. Armies go down before us like ninepins ; 
 crowds hang on our lips ; duchesses weep and fling 
 flowers when we fiddle to them. But we do not 
 know how we annihilate the enemy ; we cannot put 
 this eloquence of ours into words ; nor can we play 
 the fiddle. It is we ourselves, just as we are, with 
 all our natural incompetence, that triumph ; and 
 the ideal is in the triumph, not in a changed self. The 
 most we can do towards achieving it is to behave as 
 if we had achieved it ; in which case the world 
 reminds us very soon that we have not achieved it. 
 
 So there is always something absurd in these ideal 
 supermen and Germanic heroes. They are like the 
 huge statues which the Germans put up to their 
 great men and which look as if their one desire must
 
 80 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 be to come down from their pedestals and cease 
 making fools of themselves. They affront the whole 
 unconscious beauty of earth and heaven with their 
 conscious ugliness ; and what, in Heaven's name, are 
 they so proud of ? The superman cannot impose his 
 will on the universe ; he can only behave as if he had 
 imposed it and be for ever acting the part of a stage 
 king off the stage. His one desire is for power ; and 
 power, in its very nature, is something yielded to 
 him by others, not a quality of himself. It is so, 
 even if he professes to despise the world, if his model 
 is not Alexander but Diogenes. Then too it is he 
 himself that despises the world because of his superi- 
 ority ; he despises it because he thinks he is better 
 than it, not because he wishes to be better than he is. 
 His very scorn is to him a symptom of his power ; 
 and he must show it, he must act the part of the 
 godlike scorner, so that he may be always conscious 
 of his power. 
 
 Now it is a wonderful fact that no amount of mis- 
 understanding and vulgarisation and partisanship, 
 not all the bad pictures and hymns, not all the 
 apologies and explanations and flatteries, have 
 availed to make Christ ridiculous to any man. The 
 fiercest atheist may make his jokes about God ; 
 he does not make them about Christ, but only 
 reproaches Christians with being unlike Him, A 
 determined effort has been made to represent Christ 
 as the first Anglican clergyman, but it has failed. 
 He remains himself for every one, and so much
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 81 
 
 himself that we can see him, not merely in his 
 great moments, showing mercy to the woman taken 
 in adultery, or face to face with Pilate, or hanging on 
 the cross, but also concerned with the most trivial 
 matters ; and still he is himself triumphing over all 
 routine in his reality. We can imagine to ourselves 
 what he would have said on any occasion and to any 
 man, how he talked to Mary while Martha was busy 
 about the house ; how he would have talked to 
 Nietzsche if he had met him ; whom he would have 
 liked and whom he would have disliked. What 
 Horace said of Aristippus is true of him, that he 
 would be equal to every situation ; but it is true 
 with a difference. Aristippus is the accomplished 
 man of the world who can reduce everything to the 
 terms of his own wisdom. He is like a good prose- 
 writer who never fails because he knows the limits 
 of his own art. For him all life is sound, reason- 
 able, sometimes witty, prose. But Christ, without 
 rhetoric or strain, with ordinary words and with a 
 music that steals unnoticed into them, can raise 
 everything to poetry. It is his natural speech, 
 and he seems not to know it himself. We can 
 imagine him at a dinner-party making no one un- 
 easy, saying just what comes into his mind, and 
 yet listened to and remembered by all for the 
 rest of their lives. Often the worldly man resents 
 those who profess to be unworldly ; they practise a 
 counter art to his and do not practise it well. They 
 insist that they are unworldly and not as he is ; and 
 F
 
 82 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 this very insistence sets him against them, for they 
 are evidently taking as much pleasure in their un- 
 worldliness as he in his worldliness. But we can 
 imagine a worldly man listening to Christ as the 
 master of a strange new art worth learning. And 
 it seems so easy ; he does not strive or cry over it ; 
 he is not a professor. He is himself a man of the 
 world and something more, the man of another 
 world, one who has not even refused the kingdom 
 of this world but has transcended it, turning from 
 jewels to flowers like a child. 
 
 What is his secret ? But one cannot call it a 
 secret for it is so open, and yet so difficult to express. 
 We do not know what discipline he underwent 
 perhaps the story of the forty days in the wilderness 
 conceals it. Perhaps for a time he really was 
 tempted to desire all the kingdoms of the world, and 
 then was tempted to believe that God would grant 
 him anything because of his refusal of them. But 
 he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, 
 and said that he was appointed to preach the gospel 
 to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted and to preach 
 deliverance to captives. He refused every kind of 
 material and spiritual pride. And we are convinced 
 that he really did refuse them, that he was not like 
 Diogenes, who trampled on the pride of Plato with 
 greater pride. 
 
 It seems to us easy and natural, this return to 
 Nazareth, this preaching to peasants who knew him 
 for Joseph's son ; or else we suppose that he did it
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 83 
 
 on principle, that he did everything on principle. 
 But that is the way to make him unreal. Suppose 
 rather that the struggle within him was over and 
 that he went back to his own people because he 
 wished to speak to them, to be with them, now 
 that his mind was purged of all the most tempting 
 nonsense that Satan has to whisper. And then they 
 too began to whisper their irrelevant nonsense, as 
 that he was the carpenter's son. They would not 
 receive him as he came to them. He had forgotten 
 all about status ; but he found them still thinking 
 about it, still asking why they should listen to one 
 who knew no more than themselves since he was 
 only a carpenter's son. Against such stupidity 
 Christ himself fought in vain. They might have 
 believed in him if he would have done a miracle for 
 them ; but he told them that he would not, so they 
 thrust him out of the city. After that he might 
 easily have given up the poor for their stupidity and 
 talked only with the intelligent rich, such as Joseph 
 of Arimathea. Then he would have been in no 
 danger from the stupid rich, who would merely have 
 shrugged their shoulders at the strange things he 
 said. But the best of the rich were to him only a 
 diversion. He would dine with them ; but he 
 returned always to his own people, with whom he 
 could talk of realities, even though they would 
 rather see miracles than hear his words. For them 
 he had a kind of lovely folksong of wisdom. We 
 can believe that he was always best inspired in a
 
 84 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 pushing, chattering crowd, like a strolling fiddler of 
 genius. Their silly chance-sayings called out the 
 wisdom within him. He looked on them and knew 
 what the unsheltered beauty and pity of life were ; 
 and how the Kingdom of Heaven was not here, or 
 there, far away, but within them, if only they could 
 be aware of it. And all the others who were aware 
 of a kingdom of heaven that did not exist were 
 insipid to him. That young man who had great 
 possessions and who did everything that was right, 
 there was nothing for him but to become poor and 
 expose himself to realities. And yet, when the 
 apostles took Christ too literally and would turn his 
 impatient answer to the young man into a universal 
 command, he rebuked their pedantry. With God 
 all things are possible ; and therefore man, with his 
 laws, offends against the infinite possibilities of God 
 which are in all men. 
 
 We cannot understand the teaching of Christ 
 unless we are aware of his perpetual refusal to lay 
 down laws and the perpetual attempt, even in the 
 Gospels, to make laws out of what he said. His 
 sayings happened ; they flowered suddenly out of 
 the moment, in the midst of a scrambling, chattering 
 crowd ; and we are always falling into the belief 
 that they were edicts. We suppose that the Sermon 
 on the Mount consists of edicts, particularly that 
 part of it, in the fifth chapter of St. Matthew, which 
 gives examples of the manner in which the law 
 should be exceeded. The law, Christ says, is not
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 85 
 
 enough. Except your righteousness shall exceed the 
 righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall 
 in no wise enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. To 
 Christ the law is always a limitation upon righteous- 
 ness. It is meant to be a minimum ; and men 
 take it for a maximum. So he gives his examples 
 of the law and then of the manner in which it 
 ought to be surpassed. And in all of these there is 
 a kind of extravagance ; for he means that man 
 must give lavishly out of the joy of his own freedom. 
 He is to be a volunteer, not a pressed man. He is 
 to obey his own sense of values and not a duty im- 
 posed on him ; and his values will exact far more 
 of him than any duty. And yet out of these very 
 sayings men, and churches, have tried to make 
 another code of laws. There is a Church law of 
 divorce based upon the example given by Christ of 
 the manner in which the husband ought to surpass 
 the Jewish law of divorce. The worst of it is that 
 this law-making is always partial, literal in one place 
 and not in another. The Church does not take 
 literally the command : ' Give to him that asketh 
 thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn 
 not thou away ' ; because to make a law of that 
 would be to make the life of the rich impossible. It 
 does take literally the words about divorce, because 
 they do not affect the rich more than the poor, and 
 because therefore it has some chance of enforcing 
 them. 
 
 There is no way out of this difficulty except to
 
 86 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 understand that all these sayings are not laws at all, 
 not laws of the Church any more than of the State. 
 They are appeals to the values of man and they 
 end with the words : ' Be ye therefore perfect even 
 as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.' He 
 does not make any laws ; it is His perfection that 
 constrains us. To that we can be drawn, if we will, 
 like a flower to the sun, like the sunflower in Blake's 
 poem: 
 
 ' Ah, Sun-flower weary of time 
 
 Who countest the steps of the sun ; 
 Seeking after that sweet golden clime, 
 Where the traveller's journey is done ; 
 
 Where the youth pined away with desire, 
 And the pale virgin shrouded in snow, 
 
 Arise from their graves and aspire 
 Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.' 
 
 What Christ offers to man is the inexorable freedom 
 of his own spiritual growth, instead of the rule of the 
 law ; desire for obedience, passion for restraint, 
 fulfilment for refusal. God Himself does not 
 command ; He is ; and if men are aware what He 
 is, they will turn to Him as the sunflower to the 
 sun. They will imitate His prodigality of righteous- 
 ness with their own ; and as for justice, it will exist 
 for them no more than it exists for God. In the most 
 authentic and the most surprising sayings of Christ 
 he is always telling us that God is not just, that He 
 exceeds justice. He maketh His sun to rise on the
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 87 
 
 evil and on the good ; and sendeth rain on the just 
 and on the unjust. He rewards the workers in the 
 vineyard all alike, no matter how long they have 
 worked. There is more joy in Heaven over one 
 sinner that repenteth than over ninety-nine just 
 men; and the father of the prodigal son forgets 
 justice in the divine excess of his love. 
 
 It is a dangerous doctrine, so dangerous that 
 men have always ignored it except in moments of 
 divine excess that come to them rarely. But these 
 moments, Christ tells us, are wisdom. They are the 
 experience by which we must judge all other ex- 
 perience ; without them we should know nothing 
 either of ourselves or of God. In them we become 
 the free children of God ; at other times we are 
 the slaves of circumstance. But because we are all 
 afraid of each other, we deny this freedom even to 
 ourselves ; we bind ourselves with the laws we make 
 for each other. Incessantly we externalise con- 
 science, which is the desire to be perfect as our 
 Father in Heaven is perfect, the desire to grow in the 
 sunlight of God ; and we make of it a law of God, as 
 if His light could be a law, as if it were something 
 limiting and artificial like the statutes in which men 
 express their power or their fear. This we do 
 because we have no faith in the universal desire of 
 man to grow in the light of God. Each man may be 
 a sunflower to himself ; but he will not believe about 
 others what he knows about himself ; and so he 
 comes to disbelieve it about himself also, and subjects
 
 88 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 himself to that law which seems to him so necessary 
 for others. For we cannot escape from the universal ; 
 and we must accept a universal tyranny if we will 
 not dare a universal freedom. But Christ tells us to 
 dare the freedom ; and that is why men have always 
 feared even while they have loved him. That is 
 why they have insisted that he was God, that he 
 was in some essential different from themselves. 
 They could not dare the freedom that he practised. 
 It frightened them even in thought, so fearfully 
 exacting did it seem to them. Never have they been 
 able to forget that it carried him to the cross ; and 
 they have said therefore, with the strangest per- 
 version of all his teaching, that he suffered on the 
 cross by the command of God, being. God himself. 
 They wished to believe that so much could never be 
 demanded of them, being men. They wished for a 
 law without them, rather than a desire within them, 
 a law that, with its limitations suited to the fears and 
 weaknesses of man, might preserve them from such a 
 test. They were ready to believe that God made 
 His demands of man and laid His laws upon man, 
 provided they themselves might put their bounds to 
 these. They would submit to statutes if only they 
 might interpret them. 
 
 And yet that belief that he suffered on the cross 
 by the command of God, being God himself, has 
 truth in it, if only we could see it. It was his divine 
 answer to the divine perfection, not to the divine 
 command, that carried him to the cross. He tells
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 89 
 
 us to make the same divine answer, because we are of 
 the same nature with himself, no matter where it 
 may carry us ; and his power lies in the fact that he 
 did make this an answer even to the cross, and 
 that he made it as a man like ourselves, assuring 
 us that we too can make it, and frightening us with 
 the thought. That is why we turn to him and 
 away from him, why at one moment we love him 
 as a man, and at the next, refuse to judge ourselves 
 by him as being a God. He is our ideal but he is no 
 standard for us. Rather than dare that dangerous 
 freedom which he dared and which he offers to us 
 through his own example we will submit to the 
 belief that he is different in kind from us. And we 
 will appoint priests to tell us exactly where he 
 differs, we will persuade ourselves that they are 
 experts in supernatural history. And they have 
 always been only too ready for the duties we commit 
 to them. By some means they have acquired this 
 knowledge of supernatural history ; it is handed 
 down to them, not merely by one man to another, 
 but through a medium called the Church ; and this 
 medium makes it truth, superseding even that truth 
 which a man recognises in his own mind, as he re- 
 cognises righteousness or beauty. The Church has 
 a truth of its own, external but with more than the 
 validity of internal truth, a truth to which internal 
 truth must yield. So great is the frightened desire 
 of man to escape from that freedom which Christ 
 offers to him, that he will set up, between himself
 
 90 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 and that freedom, an obstacle which he calls the 
 Church of Christ. 
 
 Yet this Church itself is also possessed by the love 
 of Christ ; nor can it turn itself utterly away from 
 his truth and his freedom. While it insists that he 
 is God and different in kind from man, it also main- 
 tains that he is utterly man. While it tries to turn 
 his sayings into laws, it yet sees that the life is gone 
 out of them when they are laws. Always there 
 remains in it, perpetually renewed, perpetually re- 
 asserting itself, the honesty born of the love of 
 Christ. Christ is always there, like nature for the 
 artist, to quicken the churches, to make them 
 distrust their own rules, to inspire new saints. He is 
 the living model, through whom the past of the 
 Church really is connected with the present, as all 
 the art of the past is connected with the art of the 
 present by the passion for nature. Because he 
 remains real, men can still love his reality and still 
 make a new effort after that freedom which he 
 offers to them. 
 
 This freedom, as I have said, is to be found in man's 
 complete surrender to his values. He must utterly 
 forget himself in them and forget all the temptations 
 and intimidations of the world. Compared with 
 them, duty itself is the world as much as ambition ; 
 and, if a man surrenders himself to his own values, if 
 he hears in them the voice of God, then he will utterly 
 forget his own status in every form which it may take. 
 He will not be to himself wise or good, any more than
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 91 
 
 he will be well born ; he will be neither proud nor 
 ashamed of himself. And therein will lie his freedom. 
 For the moment we rely on any kind of status we are 
 slaves to it, tied and bound by our own past. Status 
 is always the past. It is what we have done or what 
 our fathers have done for us. If the German is 
 proud of being a German, he is tied and bound by his 
 past, he is predestined, to triumph perhaps, but still 
 predestined. And any man who is proud of his 
 birth or of his intelligence has committed himself 
 to the notion of a static and iniquitous universe. 
 The past lies heavy upon him even though it has 
 given him a prize he has not earned. A man cannot 
 dare to conceive of freedom except by stripping 
 himself of all status, by purging himself of all pride 
 in what he is. And it is Christ who makes men 
 sometimes dare to do this. He, more than any 
 other man, has discovered freedom for the soul. 
 Again and again before him men had dreamed of it, 
 but they never quite attained to it ; they never even 
 saw how it could be quite attained to, because they 
 did not desire to purge themselves of all pride of 
 status. Every Greek was to himself a Greek ; 
 every philosopher was to himself a philosopher. 
 The Stoic morality, even, did not quite free the Stoic 
 of the sense that he had acquired wisdom ; it was 
 based on his pride in what he had made himself. 
 Marcus Aurelius is always telling himself that he must 
 bear with mankind because they are like children. 
 But Christ said : ' Suffer little children to come unto
 
 92 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 me, and forbid them not : for of such is the Kingdom 
 of Heaven ' and what is more we are sure that he 
 meant it. We see him as a man who yielded himself 
 to his values like a boy to his first love ; and in all his 
 moral sayings there is a beauty of passion as in the 
 love-songs of Schubert. Even to call them moral 
 sayings is to do them a wrong. Spirit has for him 
 and in him the close alluring delight of sense ; and 
 yet it is spirit. It is he who has taught Christian 
 art to make a more piercing beauty out of the 
 mother and child than the Greeks ever made out of 
 Aphrodite. 
 
 That is what Christian humility means ; there is 
 nothing slavish or oriental about it. The Christian 
 is not humble so that he may please God ; he is 
 humble because he is a child of God and all other men 
 are children of God too, so what can he have to be 
 proud of ? He and all men are children of God ; 
 they are not grown up, not middle-aged and accom- 
 plished and dull. The wisdom of the ages is not 
 behind them but before them ; the book of the 
 universe has not all been read ; they are just learning 
 to read snatches of it. Their father teaches them 
 lessons and they must listen to them wondering, 
 never saying, We have heard all that before 
 
 Wise men, all ways of knowledge past, 
 To the Shepherd's wonder come at last. 
 
 Only when they do that are they beginning to be 
 wise.
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 93 
 
 I have said that the docetic heresy is the one fatal 
 heresy about Christ and it is more insidious than we 
 know. It is in the Gospels from the very first and 
 has perverted their account of the Crucifixion and all 
 men's ideas about it. Never can we rid our minds 
 of the notion that the Crucifixion is an allegory or a 
 ritual or both ; as St. Matthew could not rid his 
 mind of the notion that every event in it was the 
 fulfilment of a prophecy. We cannot understand it 
 unless we see it as a failure, and one that really 
 happened, unforeseen, disastrous, undesigned. It 
 would have been better if Christ could have lived 
 and taught and converted the Scribes and Pharisees. 
 It was a waste that he should die so young, as the 
 early death of Mozart and Schubert and Keats was a 
 waste. The world lost all that he might have said 
 and done ; think otherwise and you surrender your 
 reason ; you believe that all is for the best in this 
 best of all possible worlds ; you cease really to 
 believe in evil, except for those who are born evil and 
 predestined to damnation. But the mystery of evil 
 is that it does really exist, that there is this waste, 
 that Christ could cry on the cross My God, my God, 
 why hast Thou forsaken me ? that he could see the 
 waste of his own death, the meaningless waste of it, 
 as Keats saw meaningless waste in his own disease 
 mastering him before his pen had reaped his teeming 
 brain, as Mozart wept because he was dying before 
 he had finished his Requiem. 
 
 Never have Christians really faced the Crucifixion
 
 94 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 and the mystery of evil that is in it. They have not 
 had enough faith for that, and, in their lack of faith, 
 they have allegorised and ritualised it and seen it as 
 part of a great scheme of salvation, designed by 
 Christ himself with foreknowledge of the future and 
 the triumph of Christianity. But, if only they would 
 see it, Christianity has not triumphed ; and, when- 
 ever it has triumphed, it has done so by ceasing to be 
 itself. 
 
 Face loved of little children long ago, 
 
 Head hated of the priests and rulers then, 
 
 If thou see this, or hear these hounds of thine 
 
 Run ravening as the Gadarean swine, 
 
 Say, was not this thy Passion to foreknow 
 
 In death's worst hour the works of Christian men ? 
 
 Because we are always talking of the triumph of 
 Christianity, meaning thereby the triumph of certain 
 institutions which have triumphed, as the survival of 
 the fittest means the survival of that which has 
 survived, we think of Christ himself as consciously 
 triumphing on the cross and of the Crucifixion as a 
 ritual sacrifice. We cannot face the fact that Christ, 
 like us, lived in time, that there was a future before 
 him utterly unknown as there is before us, that pain 
 was to him a terror because its future also was 
 utterly unknown, and that its pressing unknown 
 future wrung from him the cry My God, my God, 
 why hast Thou forsaken me ? 
 
 It is with Christ as with all the heroes and martyrs 
 of the world. We never dare to face their true faith
 
 CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN 95 
 
 or to see their true courage, even in imagination. 
 We lessen them with the fiction that they had de- 
 signed all they did and all that happened to them, 
 as the Evangelists lessened Christ. They have 
 told the story of the Crucifixion, and made it half 
 unintelligible, with that fiction in their minds. To 
 this day we do not know why he was silent at his 
 trial silent to all except Pilate ; why he should have 
 explained himself to that Roman and said not a 
 word to his own people. All we do know is that a 
 trap was laid for him, that the poor themselves 
 turned against him, that his own disciples fled, that 
 he gave up the hope of prevailing by reason and 
 died silent. 
 
 Beyond that silence there is nothing, except its 
 effect upon the mind of man. Out of that arises 
 the Christian faith, but men are afraid of the 
 Christian faith always and would turn it into some 
 kind of inferior certainty. They would make of 
 Christ no hero but a God, and not a real God facing 
 the unknown darkness with the omnipotence of His 
 faith and love, but a God who had turned the 
 terrible and beautiful reality of life into a mechanism, 
 a God certain of His own triumph and so by nature 
 incapable of the heroism of man. William Morris 
 found in the religion of the Norsemen the nearest 
 expression of his own faith, because in that religion 
 the Gods themselves were heroes who failed like men, 
 with a dark future before them. And we shall never 
 attain to the true Christian faith, the faith of Christ
 
 06 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 himself when he was most faithful, until he also is 
 a hero to us and one who failed, one whose death was 
 part of the unintelligible waste of life. 
 
 We say that he triumphed by his death and then 
 slip into the notion that he knew, dying, of his own 
 triumph. But what is the nature of that triumph ? 
 This, that it tells us what unforeseeing man can 
 endure ; and that we too value above all things the 
 endurance of unforeseeing man, the faith which is 
 faith because it does not know, the purpose which is 
 maintained even when it seems to be frustrated. 
 Our faith is in the fact that we value these above all 
 things, that there is something in our minds which 
 answers to them as to music, and that we, weak and 
 cowardly as we are, would do likewise if we could.
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 97 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 
 
 IN matters of religion now we are bewildered by a 
 divorce between the names of things and the things 
 themselves. Often those for whom religious facts 
 are real enough do not call them by their religious 
 names, or by any name at all ; while those who use 
 the religious names know nothing of the facts. 
 Thus the experience of God may come to men who 
 will not use the word God because it is commonly 
 used by those who have emptied it of all meaning 
 and who hope to acquire merit by the mere use of it, 
 who express in it a certainty they have not earned 
 and a passion they have not felt. They believe that 
 God likes to be mentioned by men and that His name 
 is a spell to attract His blessing. So often, when a 
 preacher utters the word God, the interest of his 
 congregation is instantly lessened. They know that 
 he is saying what he ought to say and that they are 
 hearing what they ought to hear. They acquire 
 merit by the use of the word in their presence ; and 
 they do not expect to acquire merit and to be 
 interested at the same time. 
 
 Thus the word infects with unreality every phrase 
 G
 
 98 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 in which it occurs and none more so than the phrase 
 The Grace of God. Many attach no meaning to that 
 phrase at all ; for others it means only an outworn 
 superstition ; and yet even now, indeed now more 
 than ever, it might be the battle-cry of one army in 
 the great everlasting conflict of thought. We ought 
 to be able to ask a man Do you believe in the Grace 
 of God ? and to know from his answer which army 
 he belongs to. 
 
 For the doctrine of the Grace of God, expressed in 
 the most general terms amounts to this That man 
 is born within a natural order in which he is governed 
 by his instinct for self-preservation ; but that it is 
 possible for him to rise out of that natural order into 
 another order in which he is no longer governed by his 
 instinct of self-preservation but by his relation with 
 a power above humanity, yet personal ; and that he 
 attains to this relation, which is love, by the help of 
 that power, a help which is called the Grace of God. 
 
 This doctrine is not merely a dogmatic statement. 
 It is based upon man's experience ; but there are 
 many who do not know that, because they suppose 
 that when men experience that which is called the 
 Grace of God they themselves must be aware of a 
 God and a Grace, must give those names to both, and 
 must hold the doctrine of the Grace of God. Yet the 
 doctrine itself does not assert this. It merely gives 
 the name of the Grace of God to certain experiences 
 which all men, perhaps, have known at some time in 
 their lives ; and with that name it implies that these
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 99 
 
 experiences are of the greatest significance, that they 
 are real and not illusions, and that men in their 
 conduct and their beliefs ought to be guided by them. 
 But the full meaning of the doctrine is often unknown 
 even to the devout, because they are not aware of all 
 the ways in which the Grace of God comes to men. 
 They suppose that a man who is possessed by it must 
 himself be devout in an orthodox manner, must be 
 full of the praises of that God whose Grace has 
 possessed him. They do not know that the Grace of 
 God comes to us in beauty and in truth, in beauty 
 that they would call pagan, in truth that would seem 
 to them merely scientific. Whenever a man forgets 
 himself utterly in either of these, he has some ex- 
 perience of the Grace of God, though he may deny 
 the existence of a God or of His Grace. Indeed, we 
 cannot be aware of beauty until we are freed from the 
 instinct of self-preservation ; until we see things no 
 longer in a merely economic relation to ourselves. 
 Sheep, for instance, become beautiful to us only 
 when they cease to be potential mutton ; nor can 
 we be aware of the truth latent in a mass of facts 
 until we cease to see those facts in a purely economic 
 relation with ourselves. We must escape from that 
 concern with our own individual survival, which is 
 called selfishness, before we can be artists or men of 
 science or philosophers, just as much as we must 
 escape from it before we can be saints. This fact 
 is not recognised by many of the conventionally good, 
 because no action is to them unselfish except moral
 
 100 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 action. They regard art and science as selfish 
 activities, because they give pleasure to those who 
 practise them. They are not aware that the Grace 
 of God fills all who are possessed by it with delight, 
 that it heightens both joy and sorrow, so that they 
 are no longer selfish, no longer the slaves of the 
 instinct of self-preservation. 
 
 There are, of course, those who do not believe in 
 the Grace of God however it may be presented to 
 them, who maintain that we cannot rise out of that 
 natural order in which we are governed by the 
 instinct of self-preservation ; and that, when we 
 seem to rise out of it, it is merely the instinct of self- 
 preservation itself that deludes us. For them there 
 is not a God, whatever God may mean, nor is there 
 a Grace. There is merely self-deception by which 
 men put themselves in love with life. But even they 
 cannot deny the fact that men are possessed by a 
 lasting desire to rise out of the natural order into 
 another order, to exchange the will to live for the will 
 to love. This desire may have to them no signi- 
 ficance ; they may say that it deceives rather than 
 enlightens us about the nature of the universe ; but 
 they cannot deny its existence. It may be that we 
 can live only so that we may go on living ; but, if so, 
 we resent this necessity as a tyranny imposed on us. 
 Our resentment, our desire to escape from the 
 necessity, is as much a fact for us as the necessity 
 itself. Indeed more so, for we may deny the 
 necessity but we cannot deny the desire in ourselves,
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 101 
 
 however much we may deny it in others. And what 
 we wish to escape from is not merely the labour and 
 sweat of the struggle for life but the conviction that 
 it controls us in all things and especially in our 
 relations with each other. It is not the certainty 
 that we must die which irks us so much as the sense 
 that in all our activities we are merely avoiding 
 death. Men have faced death with joy because in 
 doing so they have convinced themselves that they 
 did not live to avoid death. Not death but the will 
 to live is the enemy which men have always tried 
 to overcome. 
 
 So far we can all agree with Schopenhauer. The 
 will to live is to us all something foreign and hostile 
 within us ; and we despise a man who has utterly 
 capitulated to it, even when he wins power or wealth 
 by his capitulation. It is that which impels in- 
 dividuals and whole societies to actions which they 
 detest. Even when we believe that it has made us 
 what we are we cannot conceal our dislike of it. But, 
 while to Schopenhauer the will to live is the enemy, 
 it remains for him the sole positive force in us or 
 outside us ; and, since for him it is evil, for him evil 
 alone is positive. Good is negative and consists in 
 freedom from the will to live. He says that men can 
 attain to that freedom ; but even in saying it he 
 remains a pessimist. One way out of his pessimism 
 is to affirm that the will to live is itself good, to praise 
 it as men have praised God ; or, with Nietzsche, to 
 call it the will to power ; I am not concerned here
 
 102 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to decide whether this affirmation can ever be 
 honestly made the other way is to affirm the Grace 
 of God. 
 
 According to the doctrine of the Grace of God we 
 can attain to a positive freedom from the will to live, 
 a freedom not by mere suppression but through 
 another will, another passion. We can rise from the 
 will to live to the will to love, because there is 
 outside us that which calls for our love and which 
 loves us, that which is of such a nature that it can be 
 loved for itself. For Schopenhauer the universe 
 outside ourselves is a void, and our desire to escape 
 from the will to live is not an answer to anything 
 not ourselves. Our love of righteousness, truth and 
 beauty, is merely a love of something man-made and 
 made in the effort to escape from the will to live. 
 Indeed the joy we have in these things is in its nature 
 a negative joy, the joy of escape, and not of escape to 
 anything positive. Our highest values are for this 
 negative ; but, if we hold the doctrine of the Grace 
 of God, we believe that our highest values are for a 
 positive ; and that our delight in righteousness, 
 truth, and beauty is not delight in mere release from 
 a burden, but our answer to a reality more real 
 than ourselves, through which we ourselves become 
 more real. 
 
 Both Schopenhauer and Christianity recognise a 
 great fact of the human mind ; but for Schopenhauer 
 there is no cause for that fact outside the mind of 
 man ; for Christianity there is. Physically man
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 103 
 
 answers to his environment, and his spirit also 
 answers to an environment. He has passions which 
 are not sensual and are for a reality not perceived 
 by the senses. For Schopenhauer the passions 
 which are not sensual are for something merely 
 negative, for an escape from certain realities. He 
 will not postulate a reality to which we can escape. 
 Christianity postulates that reality in the doctrine of 
 the Grace of God ; and its postulate is based on our 
 experience. For to us the passion for truth, right- 
 eousness and beauty is positive. It never seems to 
 us merely a desire for freedom from the will to live. 
 When we are possessed by it we seem to ourselves to 
 be loving some reality and not merely desiring escape 
 from a reality. Indeed in that love we accept life 
 itself passionately and do not reject it as a thing of 
 no value. We ourselves seem to be lost in it like 
 lovers ; and we find that all our experience is 
 heightened by our love ; we do not escape from 
 sorrow but our sorrow and joy alike are exalted in 
 quality. 
 
 For Schopenhauer both joy and sorrow are enemies, 
 sorrow because it is to him mere evil like pain, and 
 joy because it increases the will to live and so leads 
 to sorrow. For him everything is a temptation and 
 in that he represents all the pessimists. The idea of 
 God is a temptation of the will to live, it is merely a 
 lure that we set for ourselves, or that this malign 
 will to live sets for us. It is a phantom with which 
 we people the void ; and to this pessimism there is
 
 104 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 no answer except in the affirmation of the Grace of 
 God and in a life controlled by that affirmation. We 
 may say that the pessimism does not work and that 
 the affirmation of the Grace of God does work ; that 
 the pessimism is barren and the affirmation fruitful ; 
 but in merely saying this we cannot convince. The 
 affirmation convinces only those who live according 
 to it. One must experience the Grace of God, and 
 know what it is, to be convinced of its reality. 
 
 Hence the value of the doctrine. It is an ex- 
 planation of certain experiences which heightens 
 their value for us. The experiences themselves 
 happen to men as naturally as other experiences ; 
 but they may be wasted, they may seem chance 
 pleasures and the result merely of some unintelligible 
 peculiarity in the human mind. There are times 
 when every man escapes from the will to live in a 
 passion for that which is not himself ; but if he does 
 not hail this passion as true living, if he does not 
 affirm it to be a passion for a reality, it may have no 
 cumulative power over him and may come to him 
 more and more rarely until he forgets that he ever 
 experienced it. And men may even be constantly 
 possessed by some form of it and yet see no signi- 
 ficance in it. Thus an artist may sacrifice all desire 
 for pudding or praise to the practice of his art, and 
 yet may regard this sacrifice as a private whim of his 
 own. It may not seem an answer in him to that 
 which is not himself nor throw any light for him on 
 the nature of the universe. In that case he will be
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 105 
 
 to himself merely a man with an itch for painting, 
 as others have an itch for golf or for postage-stamps. 
 There will be for him no connection between his 
 passion and other passions of the same kind. He 
 will see the saint as possessed by one whim, the man 
 of science as possessed by another, the artist as pos- 
 sessed by a third ; and he will recognise no common 
 humanity in them all answering to a common 
 divinity. As for those sacrifices which he makes for 
 his art, he will make them because he is an artist, not 
 because he is a man ; and they will be to him part 
 of the unreason, not of the divine reason, of the 
 universe. Shadows we are and shadows we pursue. 
 That is the comment upon the Grace of God made by 
 those who do not recognise it in themselves. 
 
 But to recognise the Grace of God, to affirm it, is 
 to be aware of the very scent of God and to be drawn 
 by it the more powerfully because it is known for 
 what it is. The scent of bluebells is stronger and 
 sweeter to us if we know what it is than if we think 
 it comes from a soap factory or is produced in us 
 by some digestive process of our own. So men who 
 are aware of the Grace of God in all its forms, for 
 whom it is the actual scent of God, do live better 
 according to all standards than those who are not 
 aware of it. They are those whom other men love, 
 because their sense of the Grace of God, while it 
 heightens all their activities, delivers them from 
 egotism. The man who is aware of the Grace of 
 God cannot impute it to his own righteousness, for
 
 106 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 he is not aware of his own righteousness. He knows 
 that to think of himself instantly cuts him off from 
 the Grace of God and throws him back into that 
 natural order from which the Grace of God is de- 
 liverance. So he has a clear reason for the suppression 
 of egotism. It means to him happiness, and a happi- 
 ness which he need not fear as all the religious 
 egotists fear it. To them, as to the pessimist, 
 positive happiness is a temptation because they 
 suppose that a man can gain it only by pursuing it, 
 and to pursue it is selfish. For them God, though 
 they worship Him, is in His nature malignant ; He 
 tempts men to happiness, but it is not His will that 
 they should be happy. He has made them so that, 
 when they are happy in this life, they are evil. But 
 for him who believes in the Grace of God, and who 
 can recognise it in all its forms, God also has a 
 passionate desire that men should be happy. He 
 offers them happiness as the sun offers them light 
 and warmth ; and His sorrow is in their refusal of 
 His happiness. His frustration is in their egotism. 
 He refuses us nothing, it is we ourselves that 
 refuse ; and it is not He that punishes us, we punish 
 ourselves. There is no need for us to torment 
 ourselves ; our task is neither to love nor to hate 
 ourselves, but to forget ourselves in the love of this 
 reality which is not ourselves, which is God. 
 
 There is often a great bewilderment and incon- 
 sistency in the ideas of those who are intensely aware 
 of absolute values but who cannot make the affirma-
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 107 
 
 tion that these values are the scent of God, and for 
 whom the doctrine of the Grace of God has no 
 meaning. I find an example of this bewilderment 
 in Mr. Bertrand Russell's Principles of Social Recon- 
 struction, a book in which absolute values are every- 
 where implied, in which, as it seems to me, the 
 doctrine of the Grace of God is implied ; but in 
 which that doctrine is never consciously expressed 
 and has no control of the writer's thought. 
 
 * All human activity,' says Mr. Russell, ' springs 
 from two sources, impulse and desire, and impulse 
 is blind. Blind impulses sometimes lead to destruc- 
 tion and death, but at other times they lead to the 
 best things the world contains. Blind impulse is the 
 source of war ; but it is also the source of science 
 and art and love.' So there are some impulses 
 which he values supremely, the creative impulses as 
 he calls them ; and others, the possessive impulses, 
 which he values not at all. But both to him are 
 blind ; and their power, their very virtue, if they 
 have any, is in their blindness. ' Only passion can 
 control passion, and only a contrary impulse or 
 desire can check impulse. Reason, as it is preached 
 by traditional moralists, is too negative, too little 
 living, to make a good life.' And again ' the complete 
 control of impulse by the will, which is sometimes 
 preached by moralists and often enforced by 
 economic necessity, is not really desirable. A life 
 governed by purposes and desires to the exclusion 
 of impulse is a tiring life ; it exhausts vitality and
 
 108 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 leaves a man in the end indifferent to the very 
 purpose which he has been trying to achieve.' 
 Nothing could be more true ; it is the very truth 
 which Christ preaches when he tells us to take no 
 thought for the morrow. But Mr. Russell is be- 
 wildered by this truth, because for him all impulses 
 are blind, and nothing can control them but blind 
 contrary impulses. We remain therefore a battle- 
 ground of different impulses, and the we, the whole of 
 ourselves, seems to have no function except to judge 
 them futilely by their results. For, so far as I can 
 see, Mr. Russell thinks that we value our impulses 
 only by their results ; but this valuing of them does 
 not enable us to control them ; it is merely a com- 
 ment we pass on them when they have done their 
 work for good or evil. Miserable we to have this 
 power of judgment only after the event ! And yet I 
 am sure that Mr. Russell does not really believe this 
 or he would never have written his book. In it he 
 implies throughout that our values have some 
 efficacy, that they are not a mere futile comment. 
 His appeal is to them and not to blind impulse, 
 which must also be deaf. 
 
 Now the doctrine of the Grace of God, while 
 affirming the value of certain impulses, like Mr. 
 Russell, affirms also that they are not blind but 
 seeing. There are the impulses connected with the 
 instinct of self-preservation, which are not necessarily 
 evil but which need to be controlled by the other 
 impulses, that Mr. Russell calls creative. These are
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 109 
 
 for God ; and they come to us through the Grace of 
 God. Further, we ourselves value the creative 
 impulses above the possessive, not merely by their 
 results, but because they are for God and because 
 they come to us from God. We ourselves desire 
 to rise above the struggle for life to be possessed by 
 these impulses in which we forget it ; and it is the 
 whole self that has this desire ; except in this desire 
 the self is not whole, is not a unity. This desire is 
 the will ; where it is not, there is no will but a mere 
 anarchy, that conflict of blind impulses which Mr. 
 Russell appears to see in us always. 
 
 From that anarchy men may deliver themselves, 
 as Mr. Russell sees, by mere prudence, which is often 
 called will, but which is only a negative kind of will, 
 being the fear of all impulse. But this negative will, 
 which men call reason, is, as he says, too negative, 
 ' too little living to make a good lif e. A life governed 
 by it is a tiring life ; it exhausts vitality and leaves 
 a man indifferent to the very purpose he has been 
 trying to achieve,' because that purpose is itself 
 negative, is the purpose of the pessimist for whom 
 the universe outside man is a void and for whom 
 there is safety only in refusal. Reason by itself, 
 that is to say, a mere judgment by results, will not 
 give us life at all ; it will give us only the refusal to 
 live. It is the instrument of man when he sees 
 himself as lonely in the universe, when he trusts 
 utterly in himself for want of anything better to 
 trust in. And this trust of his is merely distrust of
 
 110 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 all his actual content, of all his impulses. Whenever 
 they are strong they seem to him dangerous ; and 
 so he tries to weaken them all, and exhausts his 
 own vitality. For, in weakening them, he weakens 
 himself, he lessens himself. And, though he may 
 not know it, it is the instinct of self-preservation 
 always that causes him so to lessen himself. He 
 that would save his life shall lose it. Whether a 
 man is possessed by the desire for worldly prosperity 
 or by the desire for salvation, he cuts himself off 
 from the impulse towards God, the creative impulse, 
 as Mr. Russell calls it, and from the Grace of God 
 which is in that impulse, and becomes a mere puppet 
 moved by a purpose that grows ever fainter and 
 fainter within him. And as it is with individuals, 
 so it is with whole societies. When they are utterly 
 controlled by the instinct of self-preservation be- 
 come a conscious purpose, when all their politics 
 and institutions are conceived in terms of it, then 
 the very instinct grows fainter and fainter within 
 them, and they become more and more mere machines 
 with an incessant dwindling of motive force. The 
 instinct may present itself to all the members of such 
 a society as the sense of duty, the householder's 
 sense of duty to his wife and family. In that case it 
 is a sense without courage and without joy, capable 
 of frightful cruelties, incapable of any sacrifice 
 except for self-preservation, which becomes more and 
 more worthless and meaningless. 
 
 Against this aimless and joyless sense of duty Mr.
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 111 
 
 Russell rightly affirms the value of impulse ; but he 
 will not persuade men to value it without the further 
 affirmation of a supreme object of those impulses 
 which are to be valued. And when the object is 
 affirmed, we learn the use of impulses which in them- 
 selves seem to be meaningless and purposeless. For 
 there are in us impulses, as Mr. Russell points out, 
 which are neither good nor bad. * Ghildren,' he 
 says ' run and shout, not because of any good which 
 they expect to realise, but because of a direct impulse 
 to running and shouting.' Yes ! and in a society 
 governed by the instinct for self-preservation, and 
 the negative reason in which that instinct expresses 
 itself, their running and shouting will be suppressed, 
 because it is not business, because it will not bring 
 them success either in this world or in another. But 
 by the Grace of God this running and shouting may 
 be transmuted into dance and song. The mere 
 blind sound and movement become sound and 
 movement to the glory of God. The impulse that 
 was meaningless expresses itself in a beauty which 
 all can recognise ; and this beauty is good in itself, 
 as God is good in Himself; it is the Grace of 
 God. 
 
 Nothing assures us more of the Grace of God than 
 these exaltations of impulses otherwise meaningless. 
 Men do not dance and sing with any further purpose ; 
 but in their dancing and singing, in all their art, they 
 make their answer to God, and in that answer, 
 become expressive like God Himself. They are freed
 
 112 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 indeed from the will to live, not negatively but in a 
 living that is utterly of the present, that is like the 
 lilies of the field and yet has all the complexity of 
 man's heart in its beauty. How should man learn 
 this transformation of himself except from a glory 
 not himself to which he makes answer ? But he 
 must lose himself in that glory, if he is to make his 
 answer. Dancing and singing, and all art, practised 
 for the honour and glory of the artist are like lilies 
 that fester and smell far worse than weeds. They 
 are the most foolish and ugly of all human products, 
 so foolish that when they go out of fashion they seem 
 like the lunacy of devils. And all men have so great 
 a desire for the Grace of God, even when they do not 
 call it by that name, that they are constantly misled 
 by counterfeits of it in themselves and in others, 
 counterfeits of all its forms in which egotism hides 
 itself even from itself. There is sham art, sham 
 sanctity, and sham truth ; and we are so beset by 
 these shams that often we lose faith in the reality and 
 think that all the higher passions of man are but 
 illusions with which he hides from himself the dull 
 truth about his own nature. 
 
 Even those who believe most firmly in the Grace 
 of God are often tempted to believe that they have 
 attained to the whole of it when they have not. It 
 means to them certainty ; and they desire the 
 certainty more even than the Grace. They obtain 
 it by an effort of will ; but so obtained it is not Grace. 
 There is a touch of this willed certainty even in St.
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 113 
 
 Paul and St. Augustine ; and sometimes they make 
 us remember the words of the poet : 
 
 Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul 
 When hot for certainties in this our life. 
 
 In seeking for the revelation of God they sometimes 
 overlook that in which He is revealed. They would 
 force Him to reveal Himself, to put off the disguise 
 in which He is hidden from them ; and all the while 
 it is no disguise but the beauty of God Himself. So 
 the God they find and declare to men is impoverished 
 of content ; and what they get from Him is more 
 certainty than Grace, since they get it partly from 
 themselves. They are like artists so possessed by 
 the desire to create that they will not let the visible 
 world say to them all it has to say. They speak for 
 themselves rather than make their answer. 
 
 But it is only when man makes answer that he 
 attains to a certainty which he does not need to 
 confirm by his own too precise statements of it, or by 
 his anger against those who doubt it. The Grace of 
 God is in St. Paul's words about love far more than in 
 his theology. Those words transcend the natural 
 order and are not mere speech but music. They 
 are beautiful like the sunset ; and yet there are the 
 precision of human thought and the tenderness of 
 human feeling in them. Only once or twice in his 
 life does it happen to the greatest of men to be moved 
 and to speak thus. 
 
 For, because the Grace of God is the Grace of 
 H
 
 114 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 God, no man can will it for himself. It is a free gift 
 which not even St. Paul or St. Augustine could 
 compel ; and sometimes it comes to those who may 
 seem to men to deserve it least. For that reason 
 there has always been a false doctrine about it, that 
 God has His favourites, chosen no one knows why ; 
 and this doctrine has caused disbelief in the fact of 
 the Grace of God, and of God Himself. Clearly the 
 Grace of God, if it exists, cannot be given to some 
 men and withheld from others, like the honours of a 
 king or a government, by mere caprice. It is not 
 God who is capricious, if there is a God, but we our- 
 selves ; and to invest Him with our caprices is to 
 cease to believe in Him or in His Grace. If, then, we 
 are still to believe in His Grace, we must see that it is 
 a free gift from Him offered to all men, as the sun 
 offers its light and heat. He pours out His Grace in 
 all things that happen to us, in beauty that we may 
 see or not see, in truth that we may discover or not 
 discover, in the sacred goodness of other human 
 beings that we may feel or not feel. And it is to be 
 noticed that this sense of beauty or truth or goodness 
 does not depend on mere ability of any kind. Simple 
 and humble people may have it, men of great gifts 
 may lack it. There are painters, writers, musicians, 
 who can do anything except produce moving works 
 of art ; there are brilliant speculators who can 
 discover anything except the truth ; there are 
 successful men of action who can do anything except 
 what is right. Everywhere we see powers that
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 115 
 
 remain futile and perverse, even when they win 
 fame, because they lack the Grace of God. That is 
 a plain fact which no one can deny, even though he 
 refuse to call that which is lacking the Grace of God. 
 There is a sense of direction in all the higher human 
 activities which seems to be independent of all 
 other powers and which must be a sense of direction 
 towards something. According to the doctrine of 
 the Grace of God, it is a sense of direction towards 
 God Himself. God is a fact, like the sun. He 
 exercises an attraction upon us all. But because 
 He is a person and it is the attraction of His desire, 
 and because we are persons with a freedom to desire 
 or not desire, we are not utterly subject to His 
 attraction, as other bodies are to the attraction of the 
 sun. We can refuse it or yield to it. We can forget 
 God in ourselves or we can forget ourselves in God. 
 We have an independence of God, because we have 
 life ; we are not utterly subject to His omnipotence, 
 for, if we were, we should not be alive. There must 
 be either an alliance or a connict between us and God ; 
 and what He desires is an alliance on the equal 
 terms of love. But this, again, we can refuse. There 
 is the mystery of evil which is the mystery of choice, 
 the mystery of life. And of that we can only say 
 that it exists as life itself exists ; and, if we deny it, 
 we deny life. Life is the power of choice ; and the 
 more fully it is life, the more it is the power of choice. 
 We have more power of choice than the brutes, 
 because we are more completely alive and less
 
 116 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 subject to the mechanical processes of the body. 
 But this choice of ours, the choice between an 
 alliance with God or a conflict, is not made once for 
 all and in a moment. It is a choice that we have to 
 be making always ; it is never finally achieved either 
 one way or the other. The man who seems utterly 
 cut off from the Grace of God by his own choice may 
 suddenly open himself to that Grace ; the man who 
 seems to lie open to it always may suddenly shut 
 himself against it. We are always growing and 
 changing because we live ; and the adventure of life 
 is never determined for us one way or the other, 
 because there is always the Grace of God pouring out 
 for all men, and always in them the power to accept 
 or refuse it. 
 
 What then is the difference between acceptance 
 and refusal ? And why do we say that refusal is 
 wilful and acceptance is not ? Why is it maintained 
 that the Grace of God is a free gift from God and not 
 the merit of man ? In that statement also a plain 
 but difficult fact is expressed, a fact implied in the 
 whole Christian faith. For the Grace of God is 
 something not to be willed by man but to be ex- 
 perienced by him. In his relation to God man is a 
 passive, not an active being. He cannot will to 
 possess the Grace of God ; he can only lay himself 
 open to it when it comes to him. And in saying this 
 we merely state a fact about the human mind 
 ignored by most men in modern Europe, because 
 they have ceased to believe in a real God, and in His
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 117 
 
 Grace. We suffer from the disease of wilfulness ; 
 we believe that the universe is mere material for us 
 to work our will upon, that we can make of it what 
 we will and that every impulse in us, whether good 
 or bad, comes wholly from ourselves. So our 
 business in this life is to exercise our wills on the 
 universe ; and as for the sense of direction, it comes 
 to us from our instinct of self-preservation, from our 
 will to live, either individual or collective. This is 
 believed by many who think themselves orthodox 
 Christians ; at least it is believed about all those 
 activities which they call secular. But if there is 
 really a God who pours out His Grace, no activities 
 are secular, none are cut off from His Grace ; and 
 our business in life is to experience the Grace of God, 
 to be passive to it, and not to make of the universe 
 what we will. 
 
 Put thus in theological language this statement 
 will seem to many empty of meaning. I will there- 
 fore try to put it in other language, for the moment 
 speaking neither of God nor of His Grace ; and, put 
 so, I think it will have meaning for all. 
 
 The common belief of the western world is that the 
 will is always exercised in action, that it is a will to 
 work a change on external circumstances or on other 
 men, and that this change rightly presents itself to 
 us as the proper purpose of our lives. The contrary 
 belief, the Christian, is that we have to work a change 
 on ourselves and on the passive part of ourselves, on 
 the manner in which we experience people and
 
 118 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 things. That is the business of the will, and, unless 
 it is exercised thus, it will never accomplish that 
 which it sets before itself. It may accomplish some- 
 thing, but its results will be accidental ; and this is 
 true of a whole society no less than of individuals. 
 
 Now the question between these two theories of the 
 will is one of fact ; and yet most of us are not even 
 aware that it exists. That is why we are so much 
 bewildered by many of the sayings of Christ. We 
 see them as commands to an impossible perfection, 
 as the commands of a God who is utterly dissatisfied 
 with us as we are and who tells us to be impossibly 
 different. Or else we say that they are the desires 
 of an amiable dreamer. It never occurs to us that 
 they are meant to make life easier for us by teaching 
 us where to apply the will, that they are the in- 
 structions of one who was a master of the craft of 
 life. And so we do not try to understand the 
 principle that underlies them. We do not really 
 believe that there is one, whether we profess to be 
 Christians or no. 
 
 And yet there is a principle underlying them ; and 
 it is this that man must enrich himself with his 
 passive experience before he can act rightly ; that to 
 act without this enrichment is to act wrongly. We 
 learn wisdom, not by wilful action, but by a right 
 passive experience, not by aiming at the glory of 
 Solomon but by considering the lilies of the field. 
 The will exists ; but we cease to believe in its 
 existence because we apply it at the wrong point.
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 119 
 
 We act, and then the results of our action are not 
 what we expect. So it seems to us that we are but 
 links in an endless chain of cause and effect and that 
 the will is merely an illusion of the mind which sees 
 the link in front of it but not the link behind. This 
 disbelief in the will is the result of a misdirection of 
 it which fills us with a sense of impotence. We 
 are indeed impotent if we try to work a change on 
 the world outside us rather than a change on our- 
 selves. But if we can work the change on ourselves 
 and experience rightly, then our action will be right 
 as a necessary result of our exercise of the will upon 
 ourselves. This rightness will seem to others to be 
 unwilled, because it is the character of our passivity, 
 not of our activity, that we have willed. A man 
 cannot be active according to his own values unless 
 he has first been passive according to them. They 
 must strengthen and enrich themselves in passivity 
 before they can express themselves in action. Thus, 
 I cannot act rightly to a man unless I have first 
 learned to love or at least to like him. And I can 
 learn to love or to like him only by a right passive 
 experience of him. It is the manner in which his 
 actions and speech affect me that controls my actions 
 and speech to him. If the passive part of me resents 
 him, the active part of me will betray it. Even if I 
 exercise my will actively to do good to him, he will 
 know that I dislike him and will dislike me. So my 
 action will fail, because it is willed activity without 
 willed passivity.
 
 120 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 All hatred, all dislike, is really the refusal to ex- 
 perience. If I hate a man, I will have none of him, 
 as a man. He is no man to me but merely a type of 
 things that I dislike. So I am not aware of his 
 reality ; I reject it as a queasy stomach rejects food. 
 This rejection seems to me willed action ; but it is 
 mere wilfulness, and a mechanical wilf ulness like that 
 of the queasy stomach. My real will, if only I knew 
 it, is the will to experience him and all men and 
 things rightly, to know them and to discover what is 
 to be loved in them. My real will is for the knowledge 
 of God and the love of God manifested in all things. 
 The impulse towards that knowledge and love is the 
 only one to which the whole of me can consent ; the 
 only one capable of being that unity which we call 
 will. But this knowledge and love are in their 
 nature passive ; they happen to us, and we cannot 
 ourselves make them happen. There again we are 
 faced with the paradox of the Grace of God. We 
 cannot make it happen to us by any exercise of the 
 will. But we can, with the will, remove obstructions 
 to it, the obstructions of mere wilful refusal. We 
 can open ourselves to love and knowledge ; we can 
 let these happen to us when they offer themselves ; 
 we can see in them the Grace of God and not a mere 
 impediment to our own wilfumess. 
 
 To take another example. The artist must have 
 a right passive experience before he can express it 
 in his art. But many artists fail through mere 
 wilfulness. The painter tries to find his picture in
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 121 
 
 the visible world before he has laid his mind open to 
 its beauty. He looks at it as an artist, not as a man. 
 He begins to pick and choose, to arrange and reject, 
 before reality has had time to stir and enrich his 
 mind. His art to him is not his answer to the beauty 
 of the earth ; rather it is the exercise of his will upon 
 the chaos of nature. And so we see an empty 
 wilfulness in it. Artists talk of composition, as if 
 their task were to rearrange nature in their pictures. 
 They should talk rather of emphasis, laid naturally 
 by the mind upon that which has moved it. But 
 before this natural emphasis can be laid, the mind 
 must be moved by its passive experience of beauty ; 
 it must see that relation which is beauty, and which 
 exists for it to see. It must not will to impose its 
 own beauty on the chaos of nature. The artist must 
 be impressed as a man before he can express as an 
 artist. And when he is thus impressed as a man, 
 when his mind is enriched by a beauty seen and not 
 made, then, if he is an artist, he can express it and 
 men will be aware of the Grace of God in his work. 
 We are not all capable of being artists or of thus 
 expressing the Grace of God. But whatever a man's 
 natural gifts, he cannot be an artist without this will 
 to experience as a man, without this right passivity. 
 In the mere wilfulness to create he may produce 
 works that will seem artistic. He may surprise with 
 his skill or with the daring of his experiments, but 
 they will not produce the aesthetic feeling in others 
 because they are not the expression of it in himself.
 
 122 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Many religious artists fail thus. They will to express 
 some religious emotion ; but it is all wilfulness that 
 they express. The religious emotion has not happened 
 to them through their passive experience. They 
 have not seen the glory of God and so they cannot 
 paint it. All they give us is a sentimental emptiness, 
 even more unsatisfying than the artistic emptiness of 
 the virtuoso. 
 
 So it is with the strong, wilful man of action, the 
 Napoleon, the Germanic hero, whom the modern 
 world so much admires. His effort is to work a 
 change on the world, not on himself ; and he may 
 work one, but it is like the change worked by an 
 explosion. And at the' end of his life he stands 
 among the ruins he has made, seeing himself merely 
 as a blind force and admiring himself because he is 
 stronger than other blind forces. The cynicism 
 which overcomes these wilful men of action is the 
 result of their growing sense of their own impotence. 
 Since they can change anything but themselves, they 
 believe that they themselves are part of a blind 
 process of change. There is nothing in them but 
 energy unenriched and undirected by experience ; 
 and they differ from other men only in that their 
 energy is greater. It is this wilfulness that produces 
 what Mr. Russell calls the merely destructive im- 
 pulses. But the creative impulses are produced by 
 the exercise of the will in a right passivity, out of 
 which men are moved to create, or rather to express 
 what they have experienced, to give out what they
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 123 
 
 have taken in, as a flower gives out the light and heat 
 of the sun in form and colour and scent. 
 
 This expression in its highest forms we rightly call 
 inspiration, admitting thereby that it is the result of 
 passivity, that it is not mere wilfulness in action. 
 Inspiration, we say, finds its own expression, as if it 
 were something in a man that masters him, as indeed 
 it is. And inspiration is a better word than genius 
 because it insists upon this power from outside a man 
 through which the greatest things are done. Genius 
 has lost this meaning for us and implies merely the 
 power of the man himself. But we have to be on our 
 guard against a common misunderstanding of the 
 manner in which inspiration works, of the manner in 
 which the Grace of God works in all its forms. We 
 must not suppose that inspiration, or the Grace of 
 God, comes to a man as a message which he has 
 merely to deliver. Pictures of a muse or an angel 
 whispering in the poet's ear misrepresent the fact of 
 inspiration. It is not automatism, which is seldom 
 inspired. It is not a message ready made, but the 
 answer the mind gives out of a right passivity. And 
 always there is in it the character of the mind that 
 gives it. Mozart's tunes did not come to him ready 
 made from heaven ; his mind gave them out of its 
 passive experience. That exquisite activity sprang 
 from an exquisite passivity. And so it is with the 
 men who seem to give out goodness as a rose pours 
 out its scent. Their speech and action and thought 
 are morally inspired because they have experienced
 
 124 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 rightly. So, because we see in them none of the 
 blind violence of the misapplied will, we are apt to 
 suppose that there is no will in them at all. But 
 they have known how to use their wills for passive 
 enrichment. They are like those pictures of Chinese 
 sages dreaming in the moonlight, pictures which them- 
 selves explain to us how they came to be painted. 
 The man who is filled with the Grace of God has 
 opened his mind, not only to moonlight and all the 
 beauty of the earth and sky, but to all things in 
 action and thought that are of the same nature as 
 beauty. Passively he has experienced them as if his 
 mind were a meadow steeped in moonlight ; and 
 actively he gives them out again, having made them 
 his own with all his own character in them. 
 
 Many suppose that there is less vigour and richness 
 in this life of right passivity than in the wilful life of 
 the man of action. But they mistake violence for 
 strength and calm for weakness : 
 
 The Gods approve 
 The depth and not the tumult of the soul. 
 
 It is the lack of experiencing power that drives 
 men to violent action. It is because enough does 
 not happen to them that they are so eager to make 
 things happen ; and there is a weakness in their 
 refusal of experience. A Napoleon is halfway 
 between a saint and a madman, in that his egotism 
 is unable to face reality as it is. He may not, like 
 the madman, create in himself delusions to satisfy
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 125 
 
 the demands of his own egotism. He may not think 
 himself God Almighty. But he does try, with his 
 own will, to work a change upon reality so that it 
 shall recognise his greatness. And the world bows 
 down to the greatness of a Napoleon because it too 
 lacks settled values of its own through its lack of 
 experiencing power. 
 
 It is, of course, a common belief now that man can 
 have no permanent values, except survival values. 
 And there is another belief, held by religious people, 
 that man can have values for evil or values for good. 
 Here they agree really with Mr. Russell's doctrine 
 that man is a battleground of blind impulses, some 
 creative, others merely destructive. For them he is 
 a battleground of blind values, some for good, some 
 for evil. But the doctrine of the Grace of God, and 
 indeed the whole Christian faith when it is under- 
 stood, implies that only one set of permanent values 
 is possible to man, namely the values for God. 
 Unless a man has those, he has not really any values 
 at all but merely impulses, desires, appetites, none 
 of which he is able to value permanently or with 
 the whole of himself. There is always something in 
 himself which refuses to value them and which 
 remains unsatisfied in that refusal. Man becomes a 
 unity only in his value for God, a value which he can 
 attain to only by the passive experience of God in 
 all those ways through which God manifests Himself. 
 But where this passive experience is lacking, the 
 value for God is necessarily lacking, and man is
 
 126 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 without>alues, is a battleground of impulses and 
 appetites and desires, all blind. The question 
 whether or no this is true is of great practical im- 
 portance ; for it involves the whole question of the 
 value of passive experience. Our modern Christi- 
 anity, especially that of the northern and protestant 
 nations, distrusts passive experience because, having 
 no quick sense of the reality of God, it does not 
 believe that the passive experience of God in all His 
 manifestations is necessary to man. Rather it thinks 
 that all passive experience is idleness and it agrees 
 with the poet that : 
 
 Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do. 
 
 To it all the external world, not being in any way a 
 manifestation of God, is a mere danger to the passive 
 mind of man. His only safety is in the active 
 exercise of his will, upon it and upon other men. 
 This view is held by the religious and by the irre- 
 ligious. Both put their trust in the active will of 
 man ; and for both idleness is the chief enemy. 
 Hence our distrust of beauty, which seems, not a 
 manifestation of God to the passive mind of man, but 
 a mere temptation to idleness and self-indulgent 
 dreaming. And we have the same distrust of 
 thought which does not lead to immediate and 
 practical action. Those who lay their minds open 
 passively to the influence of truth and beauty, which 
 are to the believer in God God Himself , are called mere 
 dreamers or worse. The good life is the life of the
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 127 
 
 active will in action ; and the man of action is to us 
 the good man, whether or no we call ourselves 
 Christians. The world for us exists only to be 
 conquered, it is raw material for us to make what we 
 will of ; and as for beauty, if it exists at all for us, it 
 is something that man makes for himself in his 
 triumphant leisure after conquering the world. 
 
 There is in all our morality the notion that man 
 must never let himself be at the mercy of external 
 influences, that he can be kept out of the public-house 
 only by business ; and for us the function of morality 
 and of religion is to keep us out of the public-house 
 by setting us other tasks to do. The active will 
 must glut itself in some kind of activity, and there is 
 no alternative for it but business or ' vice.' So for 
 us the chief sinner is the idler, the tramp, the wastrel. 
 We are not aware that Satan finds some mischief still 
 for busy hands to do. And yet if only we would 
 look about us we should see that it is the busy hands 
 that do the most mischief. It is the most dutiful, 
 the most industrious, nation in the world that has 
 made this war. Wastrels themselves are made, 
 poverty and misery are made, not by idleness but by 
 our 'industrial system.' Nor is it merely greed, 
 merely a wrong set of values that works in that 
 system. Rather it is the blind energy of men, whose 
 will and industry we all admire. Mr. Russell would 
 say that they are governed by the possessive impulses, 
 but there, I think, he does them an injustice. Their 
 impulse is too blind to be called possessive. Rather
 
 128 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 it is like that impulse which makes children run 
 about and shout. Children do so because they have 
 not learned the art of passive experience. If they 
 learn it, their running and shouting become ex- 
 pressive of that experience, become dance and song. 
 Our admired ' organisers ' never learn it ; and so 
 their impulses remain blind. But these impulses 
 are good to them and the world so long as they find 
 a vent in work and not in ' vice ' ; and there is no 
 alternative for them but work or vice, the one good 
 and the other evil. But work means to them the 
 exercise of the active will upon all men and things. 
 Men and things exist for them only to be made use 
 of ; when they are not making use of them, they are 
 idle and in danger of becoming vicious. The result 
 is the defilement of the earth with our manufacturing 
 towns and the debasement of men into tools. Can 
 we wonder that more and more we see mere futility 
 or perversity in the will of man, or something 
 malignant in the whole nature of the universe which 
 turns that will to futility or perversity ? 
 
 There is in us a growing sense of sin which expresses 
 itself in different ways. In the belief that man must 
 be incessantly active if he is not to be vicious, and 
 in particular that the poor must be set to work so 
 that they may not waste their time and money ; or 
 in the belief that there is some fatal incompatibility 
 between man and his conditions, that he will never 
 make a good job of his task of adapting himself to 
 them ; or in Nietzsche's theory that all our values
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 129 
 
 are wrong and that we must change them. But all 
 these theories ignore the question implied in the 
 doctrine of the Grace of God, the question whether or 
 no God really exists. For most of us, whether we 
 profess to be Christians or no, He does not really 
 exist ; at best He is the expression of our desire that 
 He should exist ; and so we never think of living as 
 if He did exist, as if it were possible for us to lay our 
 minds open to Him. We are always talking about 
 the will to believe. It is to us like all other will, an 
 active will. Our notion is that we must set our teeth 
 and say I will believe, just as some of us set our 
 teeth and say I will be an artist. But if there 
 really is a God, we shall not believe in Him unless we 
 experience Him ; and we shall experience Him only 
 in passivity to all those forms in which He manifests 
 Himself. If there is a God, He is not far away in His 
 heaven, telling us by messages through His favourites 
 what we are to do. He is actually present always, 
 in all righteousness, all truth and all beauty, and we 
 must be aware of them if we are to be aware of Him. 
 He has no favourites, nor does He reveal Himself at 
 one moment and hide Himself at another. He is 
 present always, for all men to be aware of ; in the 
 beauty of the earth ; in that meaning of things which 
 we call truth and which is there for all to see ; in the 
 minds of men themselves, in their will when it is 
 will, when it expresses their values which are for God 
 if only they knew it. 
 
 To know it, to be aware of God in our own values 
 I
 
 130 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 and in the values of all men, to be aware of Him 
 incessantly in the beauty of the earth and in the 
 meaning of all things, that is to be possessed by the 
 Grace of God. And when men are possessed by it, 
 they are not lost in mere idle contemplation of it. 
 The artist is not an idler. He cannot but express all 
 that his mind is enriched with by passive experience. 
 And so the Grace of God in all its forms finds its ex- 
 pression in right action. But this is always the 
 result of right passivity and without that there 
 cannot be right activity or anything but the venting 
 of blind impulse ; at least if the doctrine of the Grace 
 of God be true. Certainly we have not got much 
 wisdom or happiness out of our belief that it is false. 
 
 But there is one reason why men disbelieve it that 
 deserves some respect. They think of the Grace of 
 God as a private matter between God Himself and 
 those who are possessed by it. And they are en- 
 couraged to think of it so by our failure to conceive 
 of Christianity as a religion, as a faith, entirely 
 social. God Himself for us is not a social being, any 
 more than a king is a social being. We do not see 
 the real meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity, 
 namely that personality exists only in relation to 
 other personality, and that, if God were alone, He 
 would be inferior to man as He would be lacking in 
 personality. Therefore, if God exists, He is not 
 alone, but a society ; and the Athanasian Creed is 
 not a mere lunacy of logic but an effort to express 
 this paradox, with a little bad temper caused by the
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 131 
 
 difficulty of expressing it. But if God is a social 
 being in His relation to God, He is social also in His 
 relation to man. His desire is to rescue, not in- 
 dividual men only, but the society of mankind, of 
 the universe. His desire is that all men shall be 
 possessed by His Grace ; nor is it possible for any 
 one man to be possessed by it fully until all are 
 possessed by it. 
 
 We cannot understand the doctrine of the Grace 
 of God until we know that ; and from that it follows 
 that the Grace of God in this life does not ensure 
 happiness ; nor will the desire for happiness give it 
 to us. Often the desire to love brings unhappiness 
 to those who are most possessed by it. The more a 
 man is filled with it, the more he is aware of his 
 incapacity to love other men and so to love God 
 through them. He looks about him and sees 
 millions whom he cannot love, millions who are 
 made unlovable by being too poor, or too rich. They 
 live trivial lives, and the saint himself feels that his 
 own life is trivial so long as there is all this iniquity 
 in the world. He is, as it were, in a room full of foul 
 air and can see the sun and the mountains and the 
 meadows and the flowers only through shut windows. 
 So there are men like Tolstoy and Morris who will 
 not enjoy what they see through the shut windows. 
 Rather they try to open the windows so that all 
 may enjoy what they see. They seem even to refuse 
 their own private portion of the Grace of God. They 
 will not be exquisite products of a society based on
 
 132 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 slavery ; for they do not believe that God is a con- 
 noisseur of beautiful souls, works of art produced no 
 matter at what cost. They rebel utterly against the 
 doctrine of the survival of the fittest, either in this 
 world or in another, and whether the fitness be 
 spiritual or physical. For them there can be no 
 hope of happiness except in the salvation of all 
 through all ; and so they will sacrifice their own 
 fitness, their own peculiar grace, rather than that it 
 should be peculiar. In such men with their wrath, 
 their heroic loss of reason and beauty and all private 
 treasures of the spirit, there is a new and more 
 difficult Christianity or is it the Christianity of 
 Christ himself, who could not be happy in the world 
 as he saw it ? Through them, perhaps, we can 
 understand the strange passage in St. Paul's Epistle 
 to the Romans where, just after he has risen to the 
 height of joyful certainty in the Grace of God, he 
 says : ' I have great heaviness and continual sorrow 
 in my heart. For I could wish that myself were 
 accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen 
 according to the flesh ' (Rom. ix. 2, 3). He could 
 not be happy in the Grace of God while it was 
 not shared by all his brethren, because he knew 
 that they were utterly his brethren, because he knew 
 that the Grace of God could not be complete until 
 it was shared by all. That is one of Paul's sayings 
 that makes us love him, showing that he was too full 
 of the desire for love to be content with a private 
 happiness. So in all those who really attain to a
 
 THE GRACE OF GOD 133 
 
 portion of the Grace of God it breeds not happiness 
 but desire, as it bred desire in Christ himself. They 
 cannot be content with a private Grace of God ; for 
 they know enough of God, through their portion of 
 His Grace, to be sure that He is not content with it. 
 It is the very view through the windows that makes 
 them aware of the foul air within. So they become 
 angry and unhappy and seem perhaps to lose the 
 Grace they possessed. They may transcend the 
 struggle for life, but they know that in all material 
 things they are transcending it through the labour of 
 others who cannot transcend it. So they refuse high 
 and tranquil moments of joy, they seem to refuse 
 the Grace of God itself ; for they know that they 
 have not earned it until all men possess it. Take no 
 thought for the morrow. What is the use of saying 
 that in a world where most men can take no thought 
 for anything else ? As for the beauty of the earth, 
 it has no meaning while so many are cut off from 
 it. It speaks in a solitude which the rich have 
 made and which it is a mockery to call peace. 
 
 From the restlessness of such men, from their 
 unhappy greatness of thwarted desire, we may learn 
 that mystery of faith, hardly yet dared by Christi- 
 anity itself ; that God is not happy until the whole 
 universe partakes of His Grace. His heart also is 
 restless until we all rest in Him ; and a man is most 
 like God when his heart cannot rest because other 
 men do not know what he knows or love what he 
 loves.
 
 134 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 '!T is the weakness of Christianity,' a friend wrote 
 to me lately, ' that it is an alien religion imported 
 from a remote country and civilisation ; so that 
 people say in their hearts of it " This is not for us 
 or for our day." ' They do indeed ; and many even 
 of those who most desire to be Christians think of 
 Christianity as something strange and romantic. 
 Christ remains for them a foreigner clothed in an 
 eastern dress and performing miracles such as do not 
 happen nowadays. His very sayings are mysterious ; 
 they mean far more than they say, and so they do 
 not mean what they say. Above all, they are not 
 what any man would naturally say or think now ; 
 they were provoked by his experience, not of this 
 world, but of another ; and, even if they were 
 provoked by his experience of his world, it was not 
 like ours. We do not think of Christ as subject to 
 the routine of life as we know it. His world seems to 
 us exotic, exciting, vivid ; and we think that it must 
 have been so to all who lived in it. We see it as 
 a contrast between primitive Jews and splendid, 
 sinister Romans, and as a turbulent mixture of both.
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 135 
 
 And in this mixture and contrast we imagine a 
 universal consciousness of something wonderful 
 about to happen, as if all were waiting hushed for a 
 new birth of time. There was terror in it and beauty, 
 and towering evil and entrancing innocence, as in a 
 great tragedy ; but never for a moment the dullness 
 of reality as we know it. The triumph of Christ is 
 not for us over routine and dullness but over evil. 
 Then a man could take sides for good or evil once and 
 for all ; but now there are no sides to be taken. The 
 sharp contrast and conflict between the two is to us 
 unreal ; it belongs to art rather than to life. For 
 us there is no Satan who tempts us in the wilder- 
 ness ; and we never go out into the wilderness to be 
 tempted. We live in the Cromwell Road, and are 
 men of business, for whom life is full, not of good and 
 evil, but of problems which no one can solve. We 
 never meet men like Pilate or Herod or Caiaphas, 
 still less like Christ. 
 
 And yet for Pilate and Herod and Caiaphas there 
 must have been dullness and routine. Probably the 
 whole trial of Christ was routine to Pilate ; and all 
 these men may have cherished in their romantic 
 hearts some religion that had never been naturalised 
 there. We forget that Christ was always warning 
 men against this very delusion. The Kingdom of 
 Heaven is within you, he said. It comes like a 
 thief in the night. But so incurably romantic are 
 we that we make a romance even of that saying. 
 We think that the Kingdom of Heaven, if there were
 
 136 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 such a thing, would come in the night and wake us 
 all up. But the saying means that it comes while 
 we remain asleep. It is always with us ; but we 
 look for it to be advertised by signs and wonders ; 
 and, looking so, we are never aware of its presence 
 and come to believe that there is no such thing. 
 
 So, thinking of Christ as a foreign and romantic 
 figure, we miss the plain meaning of his words. We 
 expect, if we are devout, that it will suddenly be 
 revealed to us by magic ; and then we shall under- 
 stand the secret of the universe. Or else, by re- 
 action, we believe that there is no meaning in his 
 words for us, that he was a kind of Dervish unin- 
 telligible to civilised man. This notion of magic 
 has always beset and perverted Christianity, for it is 
 one of the persistent infirmities of the human mind. 
 There is some form of words that will change the 
 whole aspect of reality for us, if only we know how 
 to use it ; that will force God Himself to yield up His 
 secret to us. So people talk of the blood of Jesus, 
 and nauseate others with the phrase. We shall all 
 be washed pure in his blood ; and then we shall see 
 God and rise above dullness and routine. It is the 
 dullest people who tell themselves these things ; 
 and it is stupid to laugh at them, for we are all dull 
 and all hope to escape from our dullness by some 
 magic, new or old. 
 
 But Christ tells us that God has no secrets. He 
 confides always to those who have ears to hear. He 
 has no more secrets than a piece of music, in which
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 137 
 
 can be heard the vast omnipotent yearning of the 
 love of God. It is possible, in the playing of a piece 
 of music, to see merely a number of men behaving 
 in an unintelligible manner, to hear disconnected, 
 inarticulate noises. A savage might ask If these 
 men have anything to say, why do they not say it ? 
 Or he might think they were performing some magic 
 and look for a miracle to happen. And all the while 
 there is no miracle but they are simply speaking, 
 as plainly as they or the composer can, to those who 
 have ears to hear. And they are not speaking of 
 another unknown world but of this one, of experience 
 common to all men. The beauty which they pour 
 out, for those who have ears to hear it, is only the 
 answer of the composer made to the universe as we 
 all see it and know it. Beethoven did not see angels 
 or hear them ; he saw men and women such as we 
 see, and the same stars and the same changes of the 
 seasons ; and, if he speaks to us like the love of God, 
 it is by no magic nor do we need magic to understand 
 him. Only through the experience common to us 
 all can we understand him ; and, if we think he has 
 a secret to tell us, if we tax ourselves to express it in 
 thoughts and words, we shall find nothing at all, or 
 only some nonsense of our own making. 
 
 So it is with Christ. He speaks of our common 
 experience and not of unseen worlds and secrets 
 known only to him. So only through our common 
 experience, only through what has happened in that 
 which we call the routine of our lives, can we under-
 
 138 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 stand him ; and if his words are to have any 
 meaning for us, we must look for their simplest and 
 most obvious meaning. Christianity, like great art, 
 is also common sense ; it is what all men might think, 
 if they would not try to think too far and so did 
 not think astray. Consider, for instance, how many 
 of our worst follies and crimes come of theories that 
 nothing in heaven or earth justifies, not even our 
 own self-interest. Wars, for instance : no one in 
 Europe wishes to wage them ; yet we do wage them 
 for some empty concept, forgetting men and women, 
 and even children, in it. We say, the Germans say, 
 that this war is between England and Germany ; but 
 that is not the truth of it. It is between men who 
 call themselves English, and men who call themselves 
 German, it is not nations or races or ideas that fight 
 but flesh and blood. It is men who die and women 
 who are widowed and children who are left fatherless. 
 A low, cowardly, material view, the romantic patriot 
 says ; but it is the Christian view ; and, if all men 
 held it, there would be no war ; nor would those who 
 hate war, and all the nonsense that provokes it, be 
 forced to fight for their own wives and children. 
 
 The great error of the Germans in this war, an 
 error shared by all men more or less, except perhaps 
 the Chinese, is that they see a nation or a race as a 
 person ; and in that error they no longer see them- 
 selves or others as persons, they cease to act like 
 men, or to treat other men as men, or women aa 
 women, or children as children. They have their
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 139 
 
 theories about Teutonic and Latin races which do 
 not exist. They make for themselves images of 
 Germania in shining armour with a mailed fist ; and 
 there is a stale, tawdry ugliness in the very language 
 they use about this idol of theirs. They must even 
 call a row of stinking trenches, in which men suffer 
 and die for nothing, the Siegfried line ; and there is 
 no such person, as they well know, to make a line. 
 There are only Germans, men like ourselves, to suffer 
 and die in holding it, for Siegfried, for Germania, for 
 glory ; and there is no glory at all but only gas and 
 stench and pain. 
 
 If Christ could have spoken to those Germans who 
 willed the war, he would not have met their theoris- 
 ing by some other theory ; he would not have 
 countered the lunacy of a professor with some divine 
 madness of his own ; he would only have told them 
 all to think no more about their theories, but to 
 think of men and women and children. ' Inasmuch 
 as ye have done it unto one of these little ones ye 
 have done it unto me.' That saying might make 
 them remember what they have done, if it were 
 possible for them to think in terms of real things at 
 all, if they knew the real from the vapours of their 
 own minds. Men are not less men if you label them 
 German or French or English. Souls are not 
 Spaniards too, as Crashaw said. That way madness 
 Lies, the pedantic madness, that has possessed man- 
 kind all through the ages, that expresses itself in the 
 theories of professors, as in the war dances of savages,
 
 140 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 only more dully. The Germans, at their maddest, 
 talk of their Realpolitik. Realpolitik is to be aware 
 of men, women and children, not of idols who demand 
 their sacrifice. 
 
 But we are possessed by the same madness at 
 home, and use phrases of our own no wiser than 
 theirs. Instead of thinking of men and women, 
 our own countrymen, we think of labour and capital, 
 and demand and supply, and the class-war. And 
 when we see human beings in want, we tell ourselves 
 that their want is caused by natural forces. When 
 we pay less than we should for the work of men and 
 women, we say that we are obeying the laws of 
 demand and supply ; which means that we demand 
 as much as we can force others to give us. These 
 others are not men at all to us while we think of our 
 laws ; but Christ tells us that we should think of 
 them always as men, not as the proletariate or as 
 producers or as labour, or any other word that hides 
 their joys and sorrows from us. For if we saw them 
 as other men, that is to say as they are, we should 
 pity them ; and our pity would be like a bodily pain 
 warning us not to harm them, as bodily pain warns 
 us not to harm ourselves. Pity indeed is a warning 
 pain of the mind which tells men when there is some 
 danger to their common happiness ; and yet we use 
 all the dull opiates we can devise to numb this pity, 
 as if it were itself dangerous. 
 
 When Christ tells us to be merciful, he is not 
 telling us of a strange, unnatural accomplishment
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 141 
 
 that we need to learn. He is telling us to clear our 
 minds of the nonsense that dulls the pang of our own 
 natural pity. But just as there have been ascetics 
 who tortured themselves and felt no pain because 
 they were dazed by a false theory of righteousness ; 
 so all through the ages men have tortured each other 
 and felt no pity, because they have forgotten their 
 own hearts in some cold pedantic frenzy of thought. 
 From such frenzy neither art nor science nor religion 
 nor the sense of duty can preserve mankind. Aris- 
 totle believed that slavery was a necessity because, 
 he said, some men were born slaves. That was his 
 theory ; but he forgot the plain fact that they were 
 born men. Augustine thought nothing of his cast-off 
 mistress because he was thinking of God ; and no 
 men have ever been so dutiful as the Prussians are 
 now. But if it had been possible for those dutiful 
 Prussians to see the Belgian country people in the 
 summer weather of 1914 making ready to gather in 
 their harvest, if it had been possible for them with 
 their duty-blinded eyes to see one mother and father 
 with their children in a cottage, and not only to see 
 but, like a poet or some other poor fool, to feel their 
 hopes and fears, to be like them, to be them for a 
 moment ; and then in another moment to see a smok- 
 ing ruin and the father hanging from his apple-tree, 
 and the mother mad, and the forgotten baby crying 
 for milk then they could never have done what 
 they have done. For then to them it would not have 
 been Germany invading Belgium, one abstraction
 
 142 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 doing a necessary wrong to another, but men killing 
 men and driving women mad and starving children 
 who had done them no wrong, and all through a 
 sense of duty to a word. 
 
 Their crime seems to us monstrous ; but we shall 
 understand it better if we look at home. For at 
 home too our own countrymen suffer, not such 
 sudden calamities, but slow miseries ; and, though 
 we do not wilfully cause them, yet we do cause them 
 and say that they are a necessary evil, as the Germans 
 said that the invasion of Belgium was a necessary 
 wrong. And in our politics, instead of being driven 
 to action by pity, we theorise and do nothing. Our 
 theories of the present seem to us very wise ; yet 
 we know what folly the theories of the past have 
 been, and we cannot understand how men were 
 drawn away by them from their plain duty and from 
 the wisdom of their own hearts. But men are 
 drawn so by new theories that change with every 
 generation, because they forget actual men and 
 women. Nothing is so easy as to seem wise to your- 
 self, if you empty your mind of all facts ; and the 
 chief facts for us, as Christ told us, are men and 
 women. Forget them and you may be the wisest 
 fool in Christendom. So we all forget them in our 
 politics and seem wise to ourselves and fools to 
 posterity. 
 
 For we never ask ourselves the simple question 
 why we should have politics at all ; and so we never 
 learn the simple answer, which is So that we may
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 143 
 
 make our love and pity for each other stronger in its 
 united force than our individual instinct of self- 
 preservation. The true political will is the will to 
 rise through and above the struggle for life, and to 
 rise all together ; not the will to regulate that struggle 
 so that those who have succeeded in it may remain 
 secure in their success. That is not the political 
 will at all but the will to power, disguising itself in 
 theories and phrases. And there is no political 
 wisdom at all except in this will to rise together 
 above the struggle for life. But this will, in which is 
 all political wisdom, is begotten in men simply by the 
 love and pity of actual men, that love and pity which 
 fools of the world call sentiment. But real love and 
 pity are the opposite of sentiment ; for they must 
 express themselves in action and, the stronger they 
 are, the more they will express themselves in success- 
 ful action. Love and pity, as Christ told us, are not 
 brainless passions ; the brainless passions, that breed 
 mad theories, are hatred, greed, mercilessness ; for 
 they can be satisfied with any theory thrown up to 
 justify themselves, as we see now so clearly in the 
 lunacies of German professors. Love and pity do 
 not seek to justify themselves but only to express 
 themselves in action ; and so now if we, the mass of 
 prosperous people in this country, consented to our 
 love and pity for the poor, we should be moved to 
 action and to wise action. We should not believe 
 any more that we were masters of political wisdom 
 and could make no further advance on the experience
 
 144 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of the ages ; for we should know that, since there are 
 so many poor among us, with all our power and 
 wealth, political wisdom has not begun among us. 
 We should know that it is to be found by experiment, 
 by daring, by sacrifice, having their source in pity 
 too sharp to be ignored. 
 
 For all wisdom, for all right exercise of the in- 
 tellect, there is needed first of all right experience. 
 Things must happen to us rightly before we can act 
 rightly ; and our right experience of men is to love 
 them, and to pity them if they lack what we possess. 
 But life seems dull to us and we are oppressed with 
 a meaningless routine, not because there is more 
 routine and dullness now than ever before but because 
 we are not moved to love and pity by our fellowmen. 
 And so it has always been, even in that age of Christ 
 which seems to us so momentous. We may be sure 
 that it did not seem more momentous to Pilate, or to 
 Caiaphas, than our age seems to us. They were men 
 of business and, between them, caused the Crucifixion 
 as a matter of business. Behind that crime there was 
 worldly wisdom and some dull theory ; and, if 
 Christ had experienced things as they did, life would 
 have been a dull routine to him too. But we are 
 apt to miss the meaning of his life because we think 
 of him as God and so as different in all his capacities 
 from ourselves. We suppose that he knew secrets 
 we cannot know. How easy it would be to be both 
 wise and passionate if you could see the glory of 
 heaven as well as the dullness of earth, if you could
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 145 
 
 hear the voice of God saying to you through the 
 chatter of men This is my beloved son in whom I 
 am well pleased. But we misunderstand Christ and 
 all men whom we call inspired, if we think of them 
 as miraculously gifted with some knowledge of the 
 nature of things which is withheld from us. If they 
 hear the voice of God, it is because they are moved 
 so passionately by the chatter of men. Those men 
 whom Michelangelo saw, and from whom he drew his 
 athletes, were like the men we see. The sounds 
 which Mozart heard were the sounds we hear ; and 
 Shakespeare witnessed the life we witness. If, as 
 may be, he drew Hamlet from a real man, we might 
 meet such a man and see nothing out of the common 
 in him. The power of all these was their power of 
 experiencing what happens to all men ; and so it 
 was with Christ. The churches tell us to be like 
 him ; but they tell us also that he was different in 
 kind from us ; and how then can we be like him ? 
 
 But he tells us that we are none of us different in 
 kind from each other. The secret of wisdom can be 
 learnt by all of us, for it is no secret. God Himself 
 is not hiding from us ; He is always revealing Him- 
 self to us in all things, if only we will look for Him in 
 all things, in men and women and in the lilies of the 
 field, and not in our own dull theories. 
 
 All through the ages, to philosophers, to priests, to 
 moralists, wisdom and passion have seemed to be 
 opposites. The aim of wisdom, it has been thought, 
 is to rid men of those hard taskmasters the passions ;
 
 146 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 and that riddance has been promised by Stoics, by 
 Buddhists, by their modern follower Schopenhauer, 
 as an end desirable in itself. Even Plato, himself a 
 poet, would banish the poets and their incentives to 
 passion from his Republic. Yet he would crown 
 them with garlands, thereby confessing that there 
 is something which mankind values in the passions 
 and in the poets' expression of them ; and the fact 
 remains, for all the philosophers may say, that 
 mankind do not value wisdom without passion ; in 
 their heart of hearts they do not think it wise. Nor 
 does Christ ; for he affirms that only through passion 
 can we attain to wisdom, and in him wisdom forgot 
 its dull dignity and became passionate. Through 
 the ages men had been over-awed by the figment of 
 the cold, wise man who withdraws himself from 
 human emotions and becomes like God, knowing, 
 but not feeling, good and evil. But the cold, wise 
 man, like the cold, wise God, has never existed ; 
 sanity itself comes of warmth not of coldness, and 
 coldness is a symptom of insanity. It is not God, 
 but the lunatic imagining himself to be God, who 
 looks on the world with an imperturbable calm. No 
 man who is or tries to be cold ever is wise. Catch 
 him off his guard and you will find that he is the 
 slave of some secret absurdity begotten of his own 
 egotism. And all the mass of cold, worldly wisdom, 
 which intimidates us all so much, is generated among 
 individual men, each of whom believes some particular 
 prosaic nonsense of his own. Their common wisdom.
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 147 
 
 as it is called, is merely their refusal or their failure 
 to be passionate. 
 
 For Christ there was no necessary conflict between 
 wisdom and passion ; rather he knew the passions 
 that are themselves wise, and he rose to the con- 
 ception of a God passionate like the father in the 
 parable of the Prodigal Son. Love and pity, he 
 said, are the wise passions, the passions felt by God ; 
 but before he told this to men wisdom was a chance 
 thing, for men did not know how to experience life 
 so that they would gain wisdom as a plant draws 
 light and heat from the sun. They knew, perhaps, 
 that love and pity were good ; but they did not 
 know that they were wise and the source of wisdom. 
 They saw that the passions bring joy and sorrow, and 
 no man can tell which they will bring ; but they 
 supposed that wisdom must bring joy, or at least the 
 absence of sorrow ; and so they divorced it from the 
 passions. But when Christ said Blessed are they 
 that mourn, for they shall be comforted he pro- 
 claimed that wisdom does not imply joy or the 
 absence of sorrow. It is born of the sorrow of those 
 who have opened their hearts to love and pity. 
 What matters to us, he taught, is not whether we are 
 joyful or sorrowful, but the quality of our joy and 
 sorrow, the quality of our passion. Before him 
 men had found quality only in joy ; and the wise 
 man was he who escaped sorrow, even he who refused 
 passionate joy lest it should turn to sorrow. But 
 those who would escape sorrow by such a refusal do
 
 148 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 not know the meaning even of joy, do not know that 
 a high passionate joy is of the same nature as a 
 high passionate sorrow. They are kindred in their 
 quality and in the wisdom which they bring; for 
 both are gifts from God. 
 
 Unless you know this, joy itself will be merely a 
 chance to you and you will learn no wisdom from it. 
 You will seek it blindly not caring about its quality. 
 But joy, without the quality it shares with sorrow, 
 is sterile ; and there was some sterility in the 
 magnificent joy of the Greeks, for, even when it was 
 true joy, in the sunlight, in the beauty of the earth, 
 in the noble works of man, they did not see that it 
 was of the same quality as true sorrow. And to 
 them sorrow was always a riddle, ' a blast of the envy 
 of God,' or at best a warning to man not to be over- 
 weening in his joy. The sun shone for them, and 
 then was hidden, and a cold wind blew. There was 
 the caprice of the weather in all life, because joy 
 meant something to them and sorrow did not. And 
 for that very reason joy itself did not mean all it 
 might mean. Pindar can say Blessed is joy and 
 the joyful life of the gods ; but the joy which he 
 sings consummates and exhausts itself in his glorious 
 art because he cannot also say Blessed are they 
 that mourn. The art is there and lovely in itself ; 
 but it does not flow into a wisdom beyond itself. 
 Beyond his music and the succession of his radiant 
 images there is nothing but silence and vacancy. It 
 contents while it lasts, like sunlight ; but a cloud
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 149 
 
 can veil it and it is gone. His joy does eternalise 
 itself in expression ; and in that expression man 
 does become God, but only in terms of art, only in 
 music which is a beauty of the mind like the beauty 
 of mountain tops flushed by the sunrise. But when 
 that music, with its mood of joy, is passed, the mind 
 is no nearer to God than before. The outpouring of 
 the mind is divine, like the beauty of the earth, but 
 not the mind itself. The divinity has passed out of 
 it into music, and there is an end of it. The passion 
 has exhausted itself in art ; and so that passion was 
 valued by the philosopher only as the material of 
 art, and he might refuse to value art just because its 
 material was passion. 
 
 So there was a conflict in the ancient world 
 between the recklessness of art and the caution of 
 philosophy ; and there has always been, ever since, 
 this conflict between all art and all philosophy that 
 are not Christian. The Puritan hated art because 
 for him it could not be Christian, since he himself was 
 not fully Christian. But in the doctrine of Christ, 
 though he never spoke of art, there is implied a 
 harmony between art and philosophy, because there 
 is a harmony between wisdom and passion, because 
 for him only the passionate life is wise. He never 
 spoke of art ; but he told men to make an art of 
 their lives, and not merely a science. He told them 
 to aim at living with the creative freedom of the great 
 artist, the freedom that comes of mastery in the 
 expression, not in the refusal, of passion. He told
 
 150 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 men to turn their passions into actions, as the artist 
 burns them into art ; and he told them which 
 passions are fruitful in action and which are sterile. 
 All the passions of love, all those in which we forget 
 ourselves for something not ourselves, are fruitful. 
 If we trust them and turn them into action, we shall 
 never be confounded ; never shall we be wearied by 
 that conflict between wisdom and passion of which 
 the philosophers talk, by that life of the will which, 
 as Mr. Bertrand Russell says, is a tiring life and 
 leaves a man at last out of conceit with the goal as 
 he attains to it. In the wisdom of Christ there is the 
 warmth and freedom of appetite itself, the richness 
 and ease of nature ; for it is a wisdom that refuses no 
 faculty of the human mind and is dismayed by no 
 weakness. Its aim is to transform and not to reject 
 whatever is man. All that passion of his which may 
 degrade him to a beast can uplift him to a God. 
 Whatever he may be by nature, that nature, in all 
 its qualities, is stuff to be transfigured ; there is 
 nothing in him that he need reject or despair of, and 
 nothing in other men. And why ? because true life 
 is positive, it is the life of passion ; and all things in 
 the nature of man may feed that passion. There are 
 no waste products, unless man chooses to waste them 
 in refusal, in hatred or fear or contempt, in all those 
 passions which frustrate themselves, being in their 
 origin not passionate. 
 
 Those Christian mystics, who see in the meeting of 
 the bride and bridegroom an image of the union of
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 151 
 
 the soul with God, do in their audacity attain to the 
 uttermost meaning of the teaching of Christ. For 
 this physical passion of love is a true passion, in that 
 it accepts and does not reject, in that it creates and 
 does not destroy ; and in it is the wisdom that 
 secures the physical life of man, the wisdom that sees 
 beauty and does not fear it. So Christ proclaims a 
 spiritual passion of the same nature, as positive, as 
 real, as warm, as reckless ; a passion concerned with 
 what is and not with what is not, which pursues and 
 does not flee ; a virtue that it is never fugitive or 
 cloistered. 
 
 The thwarted lover of Modern Love cries : 
 
 Cold as a mountain in its star-pitched tent, 
 Stood high Philosophy, less friend than foe : 
 Whom self-caged passion, from its prison bars, 
 Is always watching with a wondering hate. 
 Not till the fire is dying in the grate, 
 Look we for any kinship with the stars. 
 
 That is the reproach which poor passionate men 
 have always cast at the philosophy which rejects 
 passion. At best it offers us only a consolation and 
 a cold one. But Christ has been misunderstood by 
 those who think of him as offering a consolation 
 prize. He told men how to keep the fire living in the 
 grate ; told them that the fire itself was of the same 
 nature with the stars. He promised them a passion 
 freed from its cage ; seeing in it not a danger to the 
 soul but the soul itself, passionate for that which is 
 not itself, the soul become all a lover and finding
 
 152 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 everywhere the scent and beauty, the allurement, of 
 that which it loves. He knew the error of those 
 philosophers who see nothing between their own 
 lonely selves and God in an infinite distance ; for 
 him man was not a lonely spirit on the earth, lonely 
 in his private search for a far distant God. God is 
 to be found and seen, not through an illimitable 
 vacancy between Himself and the spirit of man, but 
 in and through all things that stir man to love. He 
 is to be seen in the light of a cottage window as well 
 as in the sun or the stars. 
 
 Only those who know this escape from the dullness 
 and routine of life. Blake has told us that Satan is 
 the God of things that are not, ' the lost traveller's 
 dream under the hill.' He is the God of the rainbow- 
 end in the next field but one, in seeking whom men 
 miss the true God in the meadow where they stand. 
 And men always miss God, if all things are but 
 fingerposts pointing the way to Him, to be used and 
 valued only because they point the way. Christ 
 tells us to value men and things for their own sake ; 
 we must have a passion for men if we are to have one 
 for God. ' Inasmuch as ye have done it to one of 
 these little ones ye have done it unto me.' It is not 
 only of conduct that those words are true. If we are 
 to understand Christianity, we must extend them 
 and say Inasmuch as ye have seen one of these 
 little ones ye have seen me ; and Inasmuch as ye 
 have understood one of these little ones ye have 
 understood me. God is revealed to us in the known,
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 153 
 
 not hidden in the unknown ; and we have to find 
 Him where we are. 
 
 All through the ages men have dreamed of seeing 
 God face to face, as Semele saw Him. She was 
 granted her wish ; but the sight of God face to face 
 shrivelled her up. There is more truth in the story, 
 perhaps, than was meant by it. Man is of such a 
 nature that he cannot see God face to face. For us 
 the Word must always be made flesh, made matter ; 
 and we must look for the Word not disguised but 
 revealed in matter, in the actual character and in- 
 dividuality of men and things. No man has ever 
 seen God, like King Charles, hidden in an oak tree. 
 To seek Him that way madness lies ; for, if you 
 believe that God will reveal Himself to you directly 
 because of some special merit or perceptions of your 
 own, you are in danger of seeing a phantom created 
 by your own egotism. If you are to see God in an 
 oak tree, you must see the oak tree, see it not in any 
 relation to your own wants and desires, but in all 
 its own peculiar character and beauty. A Chinese 
 artist has said that a tree in a picture should look as 
 if it had been painted by a tree ; and the Chinese 
 have been able to paint trees as we paint men, and 
 to express a religious passion in their pictures of 
 them, because they have learned to look at trees for 
 their own sake and so to see God in them. 
 
 No man hath seen God at any time. It is strange 
 how often the truest words in the New Testament 
 are ignored, or their meaning missed. That saying
 
 154 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 should warn us not to look back to the past for those 
 who have seen God, nor to suppose that we shall find 
 a peculiar and pure revelation of God in any words 
 of the past. As God has been revealed, so He is 
 revealed now ; and we can understand the words of 
 those to whom He has been revealed only if He is 
 revealed to us also. But because this is not under- 
 stood either by those who believe in God or by those 
 who do not, there is a division between them which 
 grows always sharper. To both Christianity seems 
 to belong to the past ; and the former despise it, the 
 latter prize it, for that reason. The former trust 
 in their intellects, the later in their emotions ; and 
 by both a harmony of intellect and emotion is 
 despaired of. 
 
 There is the failure of Christianity ; or rather the 
 failure both of those who accept it and of those who 
 do not. Neither attain to, or even hope for, a 
 harmony of intellect and emotion. Hence the 
 malaise, the sentimentality, and the futile cleverness 
 of our time. For many of the best and ablest men 
 there is a sharp discrepancy between their intellect 
 and their emotions, between their values and their 
 sense of truth. The Christian values are what make 
 life worth living to them ; but these values seem to 
 them inherited from the past and not confirmed in 
 the present. They are romantic and pathetic, like 
 a beautiful old building which we love but could not 
 build now. And even the devout often see them so, 
 though they will not confess it to themselves. For
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 155 
 
 them also the Christian values have lost their logic 
 and are an isolated fact in a hostile universe. And 
 God Himself is an isolated fact, of which they know 
 only by hearsay and from the words of the prophets 
 of old. They believe in Him, that He is in His 
 heaven ; but they see this world despondently as a 
 place in which Christian morals will not really work. 
 We are told by Christ to behave in a certain way ; 
 and we must do so because he tells us. But it is 
 not business, and it is right because it is not business. 
 By religion men are to be trained like dutiful per- 
 forming dogs to perform strange, unnatural acts 
 of piety, for which they will be rewarded with harp 
 and crown. 
 
 So Christianity now is not enriched with the in- 
 telligence of the world ; and the intelligence of the 
 world is not enriched with Christianity, because it 
 does not try to understand Christianity, because it 
 despairs of that harmony between values and truth 
 which is the aim of the Christian life. And this lack 
 of harmony betrays itself in all thought and art of 
 modern Christianity ; especially in the art, where 
 the betrayal is most complete because unconscious. 
 In the thirteenth century there was a Christian con- 
 ception of the universe, limited or false in many 
 details, which was expressed in all thought and in 
 all art. The great philosopher of that age was a 
 Christian, and his aim was to apply the Christian 
 faith to all thought, since for him it was a theory of 
 the universe. And so also the aim of the art of that
 
 156 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 age an art richer, more spontaneous, and more 
 highly organised, than any which we have seen since 
 was to express a Christian attitude towards the 
 universe. And it did express that attitude in a 
 peculiar beauty different from that of the pagan art 
 of Greece. So, if then a philosopher or an artist 
 wished to express himself as a Christian, he did not 
 need to limit his intelligence or his passions, to be 
 less adventurous, less single-minded, less concerned 
 with the pure subject matter of his activity, because 
 he was a Christian. His faith enriched rather than 
 impoverished his mind. Compare, for instance, a 
 French church of the thirteenth century with one of 
 our modern churches. The builders of the thirteenth 
 century were eager discoverers, both as engineers and 
 as artists ; they exercised all their faculties, scientific 
 and artistic, in their building. Christian art was for 
 them not different from other art, not more timid, 
 more limited, or more traditional ; it was simply 
 art, and science as well, the natural expression 
 of Christian faith, which was also thought and 
 emotion. 
 
 But, for the modern church builder, his art is not 
 a natural expression of anything. He must by 
 means of a peculiar style, archaistic and acquired, 
 insist on the fact that he is building a sacred building 
 in the midst of a secular world. And the clergy, 
 and the devout laity, are usually afraid of all ad- 
 venture and spontaneous expression in the art of the 
 church, lest it should remind them of secular art. It
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 157 
 
 must be labelled sacred by its style ; and, provided 
 it has that label, no one asks whether there is any 
 sense or passion in it. So this art is commonly pro- 
 vided by ecclesiastical tradesmen ; and it has the 
 peculiar ugliness of all commercial articles that 
 pretend to be works of art. Consider also the case of 
 painting. Religious painting may be taken seriously 
 as religion ; it is not taken seriously as art. The 
 serious painting of our time is not Christian, nor is it 
 even anti-Christian. You would not gather from it 
 that there was such a thing as a religion in Europe. 
 The religion of the great painter now is purely 
 aesthetic ; if he calls it a religion, he uses the word 
 metaphorically. He would not think of calling it 
 Christian, nor does he recognise anything Christian 
 in his passion for the beauty of the earth or the 
 character of men, in his refusal to produce prettiness 
 to please the mob, in his desire to forget himself in 
 the expression of his values. And there is some 
 excuse for him, since there are very few clergymen, 
 or devout laymen, who would not be shocked by the 
 spectacle of a good modern picture in a church. 
 They would say it was secular if not blasphemous. 
 They would be horrified by those works of Gauguin 
 in which a religious emotion is consciously expressed 
 in a religious subject. 
 
 Or, to turn to the art of literature, compare any 
 modern hymn with the great religious poem of the 
 fifteenth century, Quia amore langueo. In both 
 there may be the same subject, the love of Christ
 
 158 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 for mankind. But the modern hymn scarcely tries 
 to be poetry. It is written in verse, because verse 
 is the proper medium for hymns ; and the writer 
 seems to be paying compliments, to be doing some- 
 thing unnatural in the hope of acquiring merit by it. 
 At least, if he does not, there is little chance that his 
 hymn will be sung in any place of worship, where the 
 English hymnal is not used. Nearly all our modern 
 hymns are like our patriotic poetry in this, that their 
 merit is in their intention rather than in their 
 achievement. It is assumed that no one would 
 write sacred verse because he wished to. Any one 
 who does so is like a dog walking on its hind legs ; the 
 wonder is that he can do it at all. So no one expects 
 it to be as good as secular poetry. ' Lead, kindly 
 light,' is so much admired because it is almost as 
 good as secular poetry. If it were secular poetry, 
 we should never hear of it. 
 
 But Quid amore langueo is not merely as good as 
 the secular poetry of its age. In a time of academic 
 versifiers, it is beautiful natural folk song, as natural 
 as any love poetry could be now. For it is love 
 poetry ; and in speaking of the love of Christ the 
 poet was able to express his own passion and his 
 uttermost values with all his natural poetic power. 
 To him the love of Christ for man is really the chief 
 force in the universe. It is not something that he 
 forces himself to believe in from a sense of duty, any 
 more than a lover forces himself to believe in his own 
 love:
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 159 
 
 Long thou for love never so high, 
 
 My love is more than thine may be. 
 
 Thou weepest, thou gladdest, I sit thee by : 
 
 Yet wouldst thou once, love, look unto me ! 
 
 Should I always feede thee 
 
 With children's meat ? Nay, love, not so. 
 
 I will prove thy love with adversity, 
 
 Quia amore langueo. 
 
 That is music, not merely church music, but 
 the sweetness of the heart, in which is the scent 
 of spring flowers and the song of birds and the 
 freshness of rain. All that the poet can feel in 
 the beauty of the universe is set to music in it, 
 because the love of Christ means all that beauty 
 to him. 
 
 No one could write naturally in that manner now ; 
 no one, perhaps, could think just those thoughts. 
 But we have no natural manner of our own in which 
 to express our Christianity ; and so we cannot 
 express it so as to make others believe in it. If, for 
 instance, I said that the love of Christ was to me the 
 chief force in the universe, a man of science would 
 smile at me or be angry with my vague pietism. My 
 words would have no meaning for him, whether I 
 expressed myself thus in prose or wrote a hymn ; and 
 the orthodox would be pleased with them thoroughly 
 because of their orthodoxy. It would be enough for 
 them that I was saying what I ought to say, what we 
 all ought to believe for the good of our souls, not 
 what we do believe with all our passion and intel-
 
 160 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ligence, not what we express naturally with the best 
 of our art and thought . 
 
 Art and science go on their way, not, perhaps, 
 hostile to Christianity, but as if it did not exist. The 
 man of science may think that Christian morals are 
 the best, may see an almost miraculous rightness in 
 them. Yet science now has strangely little curiosity 
 about the manner in which this rightness was 
 achieved. It is content to accept it and to see it 
 as a merely moral rightness. But we are beginning 
 to discover that morals are not a separate activity 
 of the human mind. For us reality now consists in 
 actual persons and things, and not in our comments 
 upon them ; and we see that our division into moral, 
 aesthetic, and intellectual is merely a comment of 
 our own upon the mind of man. The reality is the 
 mind itself in which these activities are not separate, 
 in which that which happens is not merely moral or 
 intellectual or aesthetic, but all three in one. And 
 yet the moral discoveries of Christ remain for us 
 merely moral, when they are not merely super- 
 natural ; and we do not ask what is their connection 
 with the nature of the universe. We are content to 
 regard them merely as a rule of conduct, and so to 
 cut them off from all our intellectual passions. 
 
 The Church of course would deny this for itself. 
 It would maintain that it has a Christian conception 
 of the nature of the universe. But it fails to impose 
 this conception on the mass of men it is a concep- 
 tion which even the devout adopt when they enter
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 161 
 
 a church and leave behind them when they go out 
 into the open air because it is maintained with a 
 limited intelligence, with the purpose of preserving 
 Christianity unchanged, not of discovering the 
 truth whatever it may be. The churches, when they 
 think, are not taken seriously, because they think 
 officially, because they seem to be tied by the leg to 
 certain dogmas however long their tether may be. 
 Their apologetics, when most liberal and intelligent, 
 remain apologetics, having for their aim, not the 
 discovery of truth, but the proof that there is still 
 some vestige of truth in Christianity. What is 
 needed is the discovery by the disinterested lay in- 
 telligence that there is more truth in it than has ever 
 been dreamed of. But this can only be made by 
 those who have no past dogmas to defend ; that is to 
 say for whom it really is a discovery, made out of 
 their own experience and expressed with their own 
 passion. 
 
 It is the peculiar danger of all old and settled 
 societies to be overcome by the tyranny of the past 
 both in thought and in action, that tyranny which 
 makes men disbelieve in the power of the human 
 will. And we are threatened by it not only in the 
 form of tradition, status, custom, but in the still 
 more intimidating form of a morbid sense of causa- 
 tion. We tend more and more to believe that all 
 things, men included, are what they have been 
 made. Science, no less than superstition, can 
 persuade us that we are born either to a meaningless 
 
 L
 
 162 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 salvation or to an unjust damnation. We talk of 
 heredity, of the born criminal, of races born to 
 conquer or be conquered, as the Calvinist talked of 
 predestination. And so we see ourselves more and 
 more as essentially different from each other, 
 separated like animals into distinct species, by 
 nature herself forbidden that brotherhood which 
 we still desire. We become Calvinists without 
 believing in God, predestined to castes higher or 
 lower, to races of rulers or slaves. The old sense of 
 fate, with a new name, overcomes us, and we call it 
 an unpleasant truth which sentimentalists try to 
 hide from themselves. The rich and the poor cannot 
 be brothers, they are born and made different ; the 
 German, being a Teuton, cannot be a brother to the 
 Latin, who is born decadent and therefore must be 
 conquered. Criminals are a type, and must be 
 treated as such. But those who know them as men, 
 not as criminals, know that they are not a type, and 
 do not humanely despair of them. 
 
 There still sounds the cry of the heroic lover of 
 men that no men are types or at the mercy of their 
 past. But this cry is lonely, and has not the in- 
 tellectual power of the world behind it, because the 
 world dare not put it in practice. It remains only a 
 cry ; and even those who utter it are not aware of 
 its full truth. Often they utter it in old-fashioned 
 pietistic language, which fails to convince mankind. 
 They are good, we say, but they are not wise ; we wish 
 that their words were true, but we know that the
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 163 
 
 truth is with those who despair scientifically and 
 humanely ; for the man or the race that has failed 
 will fail for evermore. 
 
 But whenever men consent to be slaves of the 
 past, no matter what terms they may use to justify 
 or conceal their slavery, then joy dies out of their 
 society ; and their society itself dies slowly in 
 weariness and mutual disgust. Despairing of the 
 power to change itself, it suffers changes that seem 
 to it a mere process of natural decay. It seems to 
 us now, or did seem before the war, that we lived in 
 a time of constant, busy, and futile reform, reform 
 that was always imposed on us against our own 
 wills. And with it all status grew steadily stronger. 
 The proletariate, as we call them, became more and 
 more fixedly of one class ; the rich, the free, the 
 educated, of another. There was bargaining between 
 the classes, but no brotherhood ; until they fought 
 together for their country. Then suddenly they 
 were all discovered to be men, because they had 
 found a common cause for which they were ready 
 to give their lives. The war has, at least, done this 
 for us ; it has made us believe in the brotherhood 
 of man and so in the human will ; and it has stirred 
 us to an exercise of that will which we should have 
 thought impossible before it. But what an irony it 
 is, that only war can convince us of the brotherhood 
 of man, and can stir us to a common exercise of will. 
 Still, while we fight, our enemies are not of that 
 brotherhood ; and we may be sure that, until the
 
 164 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 brotherhood is universal for us, we shall not maintain 
 our belief in it. For there is a logic in Christianity 
 that cannot be violated ; either it is true of all men 
 or it is not true at all ; and we must act on its truth 
 if we are to believe it. We must utterly free our- 
 selves, both in conduct and in thought, from our sense 
 of our own superiority not merely to our own poor 
 but to all men of all nations, if we are to attain to the 
 freedom and joy of Christianity. ' Judge not that ye 
 be not judged,' says Christ ; and the saying means 
 more than we know. It means that we must not 
 judge other men by their past if we would free our- 
 selves from our own past, if we would live in hope 
 rather than in memory, if we would attain to the 
 eternal life of the present. 
 
 So far, in the history of the world, a few individuals 
 have dared to live this eternal life. Once or twice a 
 nation has made a sudden rapturous advance towards 
 it ; Athens after the Persian war ; France in the 
 first joy of her Revolution. But always that advance 
 has been checked by fear or pride ; never has a 
 nation dared a conscious political acceptance of 
 the Christian faith. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 
 those are Christian words ; but the great Republic, 
 which chose them with an inspiration so divine, did 
 not know that they were Christian ; and soon her 
 pride and her fear made them mere words to her, the 
 battle-cry of men who fought for power. Now 
 again all the democracies of the world are fighting for 
 liberty, equality, and fraternity. But again they are
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 165 
 
 fighting against other men. Again these words 
 sound only in war and we have not yet learned to 
 make them sound in peace ; nor have we learned to 
 think of them as anything but an aspiration of 
 mankind to which the universe is indifferent. 
 They express men's values rather than their con- 
 victions ; and they cannot come true until they are 
 both politics and religion for us, until we believe in 
 them and act on them, not only in a war where we 
 are forced into fraternity by a common danger, but 
 in peace and security. For we can always persuade 
 ourselves that the brotherhood of war is merely the 
 instinct of the pack attacked by another pack. And 
 of this we shall persuade ourselves, if the other pack 
 remains merely a hostile pack to us ; and then we 
 shall fall back into the belief that in our own country 
 also there is one pack of the rich and another of the 
 poor, and an incessant war between them, only in- 
 terrupted by occasional wars with a foreign pack. 
 We must accept the Christian logic altogether if it is 
 to come true for us. We must believe that it is true, 
 and that salvation is to see its truth. 
 
 But is there any one who doubts that, if liberty, 
 equality, and fraternity were a guide to the life of the 
 nation no less than to the life of the individual soul, 
 all arts and science would nourish as never before, 
 and there would be wisdom and beauty in the very 
 air men breathed ? No one doubts it or his own 
 passion for these things. What we do doubt is the 
 passion of other men. We think that we ourselves
 
 166 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 have attained to a unique disinterestedness, through 
 education, through breeding, through race. The 
 mass of men remain to us the mob, blind, dangerous 
 at the mercy of their appetites. But no man is a 
 member of the mob to himself ; every one leaves 
 himself out of all his hostile generalisations ; and yet 
 we all judge mankind by what we observe of them 
 in our moods of fear and disgust, not by what we 
 know of ourselves. In ourselves there is the will of 
 Christ ; but the common will is not the will of Christ. 
 And, believing this, we do create a common will that 
 is not the will of Christ, nor the will of any individual 
 man ; and then we believe that it is the will of in- 
 dividual men not ourselves. Always Christianity 
 has failed to convince mankind of its truth because 
 they will not believe that it is true of each other, 
 because they will not think about their neighbours 
 what they think about themselves. And, in all the 
 arguing about it, men have never seen this, that 
 they must act upon it in the mass, must act upon it 
 politically, if they are to believe it true. There is 
 the difficulty that has always baulked mankind in 
 the past ; but now at least we are becoming aware of 
 it. We are no longer content with a Christian Church, 
 practising its devotions apart from a secular State 
 as if it were trying to ignore an unpleasant noise. 
 We no longer believe that Christianity is designed to 
 console the oppressed, and the oppressors. 
 
 If it is to exist at all, it must exist in the common, 
 and political, will that there be no oppressed or
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 167 
 
 oppressors. And that will is no will at all unless it 
 is political. I may be determined, as an individual, 
 to oppress no one. No doubt William Wilberforce 
 was so determined to oppress no one ; but he found 
 reasons why the State, which meant his own class, 
 should oppress all the poor ; and the effect was 
 just the same as if he himself had oppressed 
 them. Indeed he himself did oppress them, for his 
 own prosperity and status, through the State of 
 which he was one of the governors. And the cause 
 of his tyranny and self-deception was the belief that 
 other men were not as he was, that they were too 
 ignorant and selfish to profit by the freedom which 
 he enjoyed. He would dare to act like a Christian 
 privately ; he did not dare to let the State act like 
 one. And so the Christianity of men like him has 
 become a byword with the poor; and even the 
 rich no longer believe in it. It has failed utterly, 
 failed even to be an opiate. But the Christianity of 
 Christ remains undiscredited, because we have not 
 dared yet to try it, where it must be tried if it is to 
 be believed, in our politics. We have tried other 
 things in our politics, and they have not succeeded, 
 judged by any test. Let us, if we will, say that 
 Christianity is the only way to succeed in the struggle 
 for life. It may be that we must forget all its familiar 
 language for a time and put it into a scientific jargon 
 of our own. As I said before, there are many now 
 who cannot believe in God unless they call Him by 
 another name. But if, forgetting the very name of
 
 168 STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Christianity, we do at last exercise a Christian will 
 in politics, we shall find that the old familiar words 
 are becoming true to us, true not only by revelation 
 and in some unknown state of being, but here and 
 now and in our own experience. And then we shall 
 cease to dispute about the meaning of Christ's words, 
 because we shall know, out of our own experience, 
 that they are true and true in the same sense for all. 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press
 
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