PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
 
 PROBLEMS OF LIVING 
 
 BY 
 J. BRIERLEY, B.A. 
 
 ("J. B.") 
 
 of "Ourselves and the Universe," "Studies of the Soul,' 
 THe Sternal Religion, 1 ' " The O<mm<m IAfe*' *e. 
 
 Seventh Thousand 
 
 iLontion : 
 JAMES CLARKE fe CO., 13 <k 14, FLEET STREET.
 
 Preface. 
 
 IN these pages I have treated the human 
 problem, both in its individual and social 
 aspects, as essentially a transcendental one. 
 The separate studies have been written under 
 the conviction that the spiritual element in 
 man is not only the one feature that gives 
 distinction to life, but is the only adequate 
 clue to our sphinx riddle of a world. The 
 problem, as here dealt with, is followed on 
 many tracks. But whether pursued along its 
 physical, its historical, or its economic sides, 
 or into our most intimately personal realm, it 
 is ever in the sphere of the invisible that the 
 answer is sought. Spite of the modern asser- 
 tion to the contrary, our " problems of living " 
 are finally religious, and look to religion for 
 their solution. 
 
 But what religion ? In these pages I have 
 constantly urged the view that a faith adequate 
 for such a purpose must be one that, free from 
 sectarian limits, allies itself to the soul's 
 
 2031150
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 universal affirmations, and is one with the 
 inmost nature of things. I have argued that 
 Christianity, properly conceived, is that religion, 
 or contains it. But it must be a purified 
 Christianity. Half the difficulties the modern 
 man finds in Christian belief arise from faults 
 of statement. Much of what is written here 
 is accordingly an effort at restatement. The 
 eternal revelation uses for each age its own 
 special language. Happy is that teacher who 
 catches something at least of the note in which 
 the Unseen is uttering itself to his generation ! 
 
 J. B. 
 LONDON, 1903.
 
 Contents. 
 
 PAO 
 
 I. Religion's Impossibles 1 
 
 II. The Moral Impossibles . 12 
 
 III. The Coming Creed 22 
 
 IV. Religion and Justice ... ... 32 
 
 V. Cosmic Free Grace 42 
 
 VI. Of Sacred and Secular 52 
 
 VII. Religion's Silences 62 
 
 VIII. A Doctrine of Remnants 71 
 
 IX. Our Enemy 81 
 
 X. At the Front 91 
 
 XI. Principles and Persons 101 
 
 XII. On Keeping Young Ill 
 
 XIII. The Rebirths of Feeling 120 
 
 XIV. Imagination in Ethics 130 
 
 XV. -Our Links with Lowliness 140 
 
 XVI. By Roads to Faith 150 
 
 XVIL Religion and the Child 159 
 
 XVIII. Our Wilderness Side 168 
 
 XIX.-The Quality of Belief 178 
 
 XX. The Moment After 188 
 
 XXI. The Interplay of Ideas 198 
 
 XXII. Religion's Vocabulary 207 
 
 XXIII. The Discipline of Joy 217 
 
 XXIV. Religion and Physique 228 
 
 XXV. Religion's Higher Energies 237 
 
 XXVI. The Soul's Secret . 247
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 XXVII. The Higher Lawlessness 257 
 
 XX VIII. The Logic of Life 267 
 
 XXIX. The Soul's Bemaking 277 
 
 XXX. The Cosmio Accuracy 287 
 
 XXXI. History's Secret Springs 296 
 
 XXXII. Of Spiritual Appetite 306 
 
 XXXIII. On Being an Outsider 317 
 
 XXXIV. Life's Eefusals 327 
 
 XXXV. Life's Outer Edge 337 
 
 XXXVI. The Furtherance of Life .. . 347
 
 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 Religion's Impossibles. 
 
 IF we can imagine a man of high nature, 
 trained in the science of the modern world, 
 coming, without any prepossession, quite fresh 
 to the study of the New Testament, what may 
 we suppose would be his feeling ? There 
 would probably be a strange mingling of 
 sensations. He would discover there un- 
 questionably, for one thing, a moral infinitude 
 that would stir him profoundly a spiritual 
 deep from without calling to the utmost deeps 
 within. But, side by side with this inner 
 grandeur there would be a strange sense of 
 difficulties, of apparent contradictions, of 
 intellectual and moral impossibles. Against 
 Christianity's assumption of a personal and
 
 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 beneficent God would arise in his mind all the 
 metaphysical arguments from Democritus to 
 Mill ; its miraculous element would seem to be 
 ruled out of court by the modern conviction 
 of the uniformity of nature, and by those 
 anthropological researches which have en- 
 lightened us as to the evolution of the myth. 
 Perhaps even more staggering to our inquirer, 
 bred, as we may suppose, in the principles 
 of political economy, would be some of the 
 Gospel's moral precepts. The Sermon on the 
 Mount would seem made for another world 
 than this. " Resist not evil " ; " lay not up 
 for yourselves treasures on earth " ; " take 
 no thought . . . what ye shall eat or 
 drink " ; would sound strange indeed. Chris- 
 tian people, he would discover, were passing 
 by these words as impossible to their civilisa- 
 tion. Thoreau's verdict would seem to him 
 hardly too severe when, quoting the words, 
 " Sell all thou hast," and " What is a man 
 profited if he gain the whole world ? " he adds, 
 " Let but one of these sentences be rightly 
 read from any pulpit in the land, and there 
 would not be left one stone of that meeting- 
 house upon another." 
 
 And certainly these objections are formid-
 
 RELIGION'S IMPOSSIBLES. 
 
 able ; the difficulties are great. Not the less 
 so that they lie upon the surface, and are the 
 first things that catch the eye. It is interesting 
 to note what their effect has been upon different 
 classes of mind. Of these varieties of result 
 there seem to have been three main types. 
 A great host of devout minds, knowing by 
 another process than that of the intellect 
 the inward truth of religion, convinced by 
 those " arguments of the heart " which, as 
 Pascal says, " the reason does not know," 
 have dealt with the difficulties by ignoring 
 them. In order to believe, they have refused 
 to think. A second class, in whom that inner 
 sense has not been strong, have taken up their 
 mental abode in the region of these contra- 
 dictories and have refused to go farther. 
 Such, with Feuerbach, have regarded Christian 
 sentiment as a kind of mental disease ; or, 
 with Diderot, have denounced the Gospel 
 as " absurd in its dogmas and unsociable 
 in its morals " ; or, with Condorcet, have 
 declared religion to be "a supernatural 
 extravagance founded on ignorance of natural 
 laws." 
 
 But " the irresistible maturing of the human 
 mind," to use Emerson's striking expression,
 
 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 does not seem likely to favour either of these 
 classes. It will not, for one thing, allow a 
 religion that bars thinking. That were to 
 tolerate what Plato calls " the lie in the soul." 
 Even a mediaeval pope could see that. Said 
 Innocent III. : " Falsitas sub velamine sancti- 
 tatis tolerari non debet ; we are not to tolerate 
 falsity under the veil of sanctity," a noble 
 utterance, which it had been well if his Church 
 had better regarded. But the non-believers 
 are not likely to survive any more than the 
 non- thinkers. Feuerbach is not an authority 
 to-day, though George Eliot translated him ; 
 and the reasons for scepticism urged by the 
 eighteenth century encyclopedists are felt 
 to be even shallower than their opponents' 
 arguments for orthodoxy. The future is 
 plainly with that third class who have reached 
 a religion that at once thinks and believes, 
 that believes because it thinks. 
 
 These last have their own way of looking 
 at what we have called religion's impossibles, 
 and it may be helpful to state, in one or two 
 particulars, what that way is. We may glance 
 first at the intellectual contradictories. Here, 
 first of all, it is to be observed that, whether 
 we accept or reject revealed religion, we shall
 
 RELIGION'S IMPOSSIBLES. 
 
 still have to dwell in the region of seeming 
 impossibles. And that by the sheer limita- 
 tions of our mental constitution. Whatever 
 our creed, or no creed, we are, as the most 
 pronounced Agnostic has to acknowledge, in 
 contact with an infinite which, on whatever 
 side we turn, beggars our logic. Both meta- 
 physics and mathematics can construct pairs 
 of propositions which, taken separately, the 
 reason accepts as true, but which, placed 
 together, stand as hopeless contradictions. 
 Kant, and Hamilton after him, have drawn 
 out lists of these in philosophy, and every 
 mathematical student is familiar with similar 
 ones in his own department. Religion, then, 
 as dealing directly with an infinite which 
 is beyond the range of our intellectual 
 machinery, cannot be blamed for offering on 
 its upper side difficulties which are found 
 equally in every other department of human 
 thought. 
 
 " Very well, so far as it goes," replies the 
 Agnostic, " but that is not far. Indeed, so 
 far as Christianity is concerned, it goes no 
 distance at all, for the argument may be used 
 with equal force of Buddhism, Shintoism, and 
 every religion that exists in the world. Are
 
 PEOBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 they also not grounded on an infinite which 
 beats our logic ? It is on the under side, on 
 that sphere of human experience where our 
 reason is at home, and where science can give 
 a positive verdict, that your Christianity 
 shows itself incredible. Its personal Deity, 
 its Incarnation, its miracles, its morality, 
 are to-day tried in the balances and found 
 wanting." 
 
 We may look presently at some of these 
 points separately, but first let us notice one 
 or two considerations, common to them all, 
 that are looming more and more in the modern 
 mind, and that are putting the whole subject 
 in an entirely new light. For one thing, the 
 more the problem of personality is considered, 
 the more clearly is it beginning to be seen that 
 it is in the supposedly impossible Christian 
 doctrine of Incarnation that the idea of a 
 personal God becomes at all intelligible to us. 
 It is being recognised that, on this planet at 
 least, man is the appointed organ and voice 
 of the Eternal Reason, and that only along this 
 channel has the Soul of the Universe come to 
 speaking terms with our consciousness. The 
 personal, as we know it, we admit with philo- 
 sophy, is ipso facto a limitation, and can never
 
 RELIGION'S IMPOSSIBLES. 
 
 be the whole of God. The Absolute in itself 
 is for ever beyond us. It is 
 
 The Somewhat which we name, but cannot know, 
 
 Ev'n as we name a star and only see 
 Hia quenchless flashings forth, which ever show 
 
 And ever hide him, and which are not he. 
 
 But that Infinite Thought and Heart are, we 
 see, on this earth, gradually fashioning for 
 themselves a body and form in humanity. 
 God, through the ages, is steadily pulsing upon 
 man as the tide pulses, in successive waves, 
 upon the shore. The evolution which physicists 
 point us to as going on in nature is a small 
 thing as compared with that evolution which 
 goes on ceaselessly in the inner, the spiritual 
 realm. The world-process is, in short, as 
 far as we discern it, the ever clearer exhibition 
 of God as Person, and that process is by the 
 method of incarnation. 
 
 " But," says our Agnostic, " you are juggling 
 with words. You are asking us to accept 
 incarnation as a natural process, but your 
 Christian incarnation is supernatural : it is 
 full of the miraculous, and the miraculous, we 
 now know, is only another name for the 
 legendary." This has been the talk of culture 
 during the last two or three generations, but
 
 8 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 here again a new consideration is dawning. It 
 may well be that a good deal in the Christian 
 records which hitherto has passed as miraculous 
 will hereafter be regarded as legendary, but 
 that will in no wise dispose of an eternal 
 miraculous and an eternal supernatural in the 
 Gospel. 
 
 What is the supernatural ? When we come 
 to the last analysis we discover that it is always 
 what is above our natural. We are super- 
 natural to our dog. We can do things which 
 would be miraculous in him. We may, we 
 suppose, say with Byron that " dogs have a 
 religion and their gods are their masters." 
 A civilised being with firearms, electricity, 
 and all the modern arts, is as a god to a savage, 
 and often receives worship from him. Each 
 grade of being is supernatural to the one below 
 it. When we toss a stone into the air we tran- 
 scend the laws which belong to the stone. We 
 may say, indeed, that a man of higher genius 
 exhibits all this in relation to the common 
 man. By sheer quality of his nature he does 
 things which, in the lower man, would be as a 
 sign and a wonder. How he came by this 
 nature questions of birth and what not are 
 not the point at all. The point is that he has it.
 
 RELIGION'S IMPOSSIBLES. 9 
 
 It is here precisely that the supernatural 
 in Christianity lies. There is no doubt that 
 the early Christian history is undergoing, in 
 the modern mind, a process of re-setting. We 
 have been accustomed to think of the Apostolic 
 age as one in which, for Christians at least, 
 faith was easy. Beading the Epistles and 
 the Acts we have thought of those early 
 believers as living in a world of constant 
 Divine intervention. Jerusalem, Antioch, 
 Damascus ; the regions of Asia Minor, of 
 Galatia, of Macedonia, were all hallowed by the 
 immediate presence of God, who manifested 
 Himself by constant miracle. To those re- 
 ligiously brought up, it is only by a special 
 effort of mind they realise, what nevertheless 
 was the fact, that for these early Christian 
 messengers the world's processes went on 
 precisely as they do for us to-day. As Paul 
 journeyed across the Taurus, or pursued his 
 way by the coasts of the ^Egean, the same 
 voiceless stars which we now behold looked 
 down upon him from their glittering depths ; 
 the grim mountains, the storm-tossed ocean, 
 the wandering winds, had the message for him 
 they have for us ; " the eternal silence of the 
 infinite spaces " terrified him, doubtless, at
 
 10 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 times, as they did Pascal. Not a grain of 
 sand moved by any other law than moves it 
 now. Whatsoever of God was to be found in 
 the universe was no whit more apparent in it 
 then than to-day. 
 
 What, then, had happened ? Where, then, 
 was the supernatural ? We find it as soon 
 as we begin to look for it in the right way. 
 It was in the sphere, not so much of the 
 physical as of the spiritual, not in man's outer 
 so much as in his inner world. And the new 
 spiritual development had come, as always, 
 through a new personality. We are beating 
 about the bush hi talking about Christ's 
 miracles. Christ is the miracle. He is the 
 spiritual grade above us. He was bound to 
 come ; history was expecting Him, for she had 
 taught that it is thus the Infinite is ever 
 disclosing itself. One grade upon another. 
 First the stone that lies on the ground, and 
 then the man who defies its gravitation and 
 tosses it into the air. When this higher 
 spiritual comes we cannot say what it will do, 
 either in the interior world or the exterior 
 world. We can only wait and see. The 
 witnesses will probably exaggerate what hap- 
 pens here ; their story will grow as it passes
 
 RELIGION'S IMPOSSIBLES. 11 
 
 from hand to hand, and all allowances will 
 have to be made. 
 
 But these will not affect the general result. 
 For unquestionably a new note has been 
 struck. While the external universe remains 
 what it was, in that spiritual world which is 
 man's most real abiding-place we discern a 
 change. The tremors of a new vast move- 
 ment have made themselves felt. A new 
 vision of the Eternal has reached the human 
 consciousness. Men look into the face of 
 Christ and say with a conviction that trans- 
 cends all argument that they have seen God. 
 The outer world is the same as from eternity. 
 But in the inner all things have become new. 
 
 But our opening question is at best only 
 half -answered. It must be left to another 
 chapter to discuss those seeming moral impos- 
 sibles which, not less than the intellectual, 
 front us in the New Testament.
 
 II. 
 
 The Moral Impossibles. 
 
 IN our last chapter, dealing with " Religion's 
 Impossibles," we discussed some of the diffi- 
 culties to thought which lie on the surface 
 of the Gospel. We propose to draw attention 
 to some of the problems it offers as a morality, 
 a system of living. 
 
 As our latest civilisation and the Sermon on 
 the Mount look each other in the face, do 
 they in fact discover in each other any trace 
 of resemblance ? " Lay not up for yourselves 
 treasures upon earth." But the front places 
 to-day are for those who have laid them up 
 most lavishly. " Take no thought what ye 
 shall eat or drink, or wherewithal ye shall be 
 clothed." But Society offers us a carnival 
 of feasting, and is ablaze with splendid apparel. 
 " Resist not evil ; but whosoever shall smite 
 thee on thy right cheek turn to him the other 
 also." But modern civilisation includes the 
 soldier whose whole business it is to strike
 
 THE MORAL IMPOSSIBLES. 13 
 
 back. What can this mean but that civilisa- 
 tion has tried the New Testament and found 
 it impracticable ; that while retaining its 
 precepts as a form it ignores them as a guide 
 for living ? 
 
 Unquestionably we have in all this a 
 difficulty of belief for the modern mind 
 not less urgent than those of a more purely 
 intellectual character which we have already 
 examined. The Gospel seems at the surface 
 as impossible on its economic and ethical 
 side as on that of its supernaturalism and 
 miracle. But here, as we found in dealing 
 with that last aspect, some deeper considera- 
 tions come in which, to a properly-trained 
 judgment, will make all the difference in the 
 verdict. 
 
 To begin with, as modern research has 
 abundantly shown, we are all at sea in our 
 interpretation of the Gospel till we have made 
 allowance for the Orientalism of its form. 
 Dr. Wendt, in his Lehre Jesu, has pointed out 
 a characteristic of the ethical teaching of Christ 
 to which we have not given sufficient attention. 
 It is the rhetorical method, perfectly under- 
 stood by His Eastern hearers, of pushing 
 antithesis to its extremest form. He urged
 
 14 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 what literally were impossibles, in order that 
 His words might, as Guthrie used to say, 
 " strike and stick." In most instances the 
 very form shows they were not intended as 
 literal. It was plainly impossible to receive, 
 as a reward for fidelity, a hundredfold, not 
 only of houses and lands, but of wives and of 
 mothers. The statement in Luke, that if 
 a man hate not father, mother and house- 
 hold he cannot be Christ's disciple, is in 
 Matthew expressly changed into " loveth father 
 and mother more than Me," the two formulas 
 being evidently intended to mean the same 
 thing. So the command not to lay up treasure 
 on earth was perfectly understood by the 
 disciples, explained to them as it was, in 
 fact, by the conduct of Christ Himself. His 
 society had an exchequer, and one that was by 
 no means always empty. And the collections 
 which Paul made amongst his Gentile con- 
 verts, and his instructions to the churches 
 concerning the raising of funds for Christian 
 purposes, show that the first believers did not 
 dream of interpreting Christ's words on this 
 theme as meaning the abolition of capital. 
 As Wendt has here so elaborately shown, 
 the West must learn accurately to translate
 
 THE MORAL IMPOSSIBLES. 15 
 
 the East ; must find the proper equation 
 between the luxuriant metaphors of the Orient 
 and its own cold literalism of expression, 
 before it has grasped the true ethical signifi- 
 cance of the sayings of Christ. 
 
 But an explanation of this kind does not 
 go far. When every allowance has been made, 
 the Gospel ethic stands at so immense a re- 
 move from the average human performance, 
 as to excite despair in some minds and ridicule 
 in others. Utilitarianism finds in it a negation 
 of the general working principles of Society; 
 asceticism regards it as a protest against 
 civilisation. Through the ages we discern 
 a long procession of anchorites, monks and 
 enthusiasts of varied name, who have found 
 in Christ's words a call to leave the world. 
 Of later demonstrations of this order one 
 of the most striking is that of the Danish 
 theologian Kirkegaarde, a writer less known 
 than he should be in this country, who, 
 writing out of a powerful intellect and a pro- 
 found religious feeling, proclaims the Gospel 
 as an eternal protest against all the principles 
 of the world movement of to-day. 
 
 But are these opposite interpretations the 
 only ones from which we may choose ? Does
 
 16 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 the Gospel ethic offer us the dilemma simply 
 of a rejection of Christ's words on the one 
 hand, or of a breach with Society on the 
 other ? Surely not. It is to be remembered 
 that in forming our judgment here we hold 
 an advantage which earlier ages did not possess. 
 We have the ethic p'us eighteen centuries 
 of history, along which we are able to note 
 its action upon the world. To examine a 
 system by analysis of its constituent elements 
 is in itself something. There is much more when 
 we add to this a study of its action over great 
 breadths of time and upon an infinite variety 
 of conditions. No adequate idea can be 
 obtained without combining the two. It is 
 precisely when we take this course and read 
 Christ's precepts in the light, not merely of 
 what they contain in themselves, but of their 
 whole effect upon the world, that we get a 
 proper appreciation of them. And the result- 
 ing judgment, we discover, is a balance between 
 extremes. 
 
 For one thing, the Gospel's moral impos- 
 sibles appear, in this light, not as an objection 
 to Christianity, but as one of its most striking 
 evidences. A religion to be of any service 
 to man must, above all things, be an in-
 
 THE MORAL IMPOSSIBLES. 17 
 
 spiration, an appeal to his soul's highest 
 instincts. Its call must be to the infinite 
 within him, and the morality it offers must 
 partake of that infinitude. That is why 
 religion has always been, for one thing, a 
 prophecy. It is never content with the 
 already attained, but calls for an illimitable 
 progression. It is the soul's eye, which 
 reveals to us spiritual deeps beyond our pre- 
 sent range, just as our physical eye offers a 
 view of unreachables in the starry heavens. 
 It is precisely because Christianity in its 
 ethic opens this moral infinite that it has been 
 the inspiration of the world. Its magnificent 
 imperative, " Be ye perfect," is at once caught 
 at by the spiritual in us as the highest truth 
 and reason of our being. An impossible, but an 
 impossible which somehow claims to be realised. 
 And we are at once set in motion towards it. 
 The movement will be perhaps as that of an 
 asymptote to a curve which ever approaches 
 but never touches, but we know it is a Divine 
 movement all the same. We have only to 
 contrast the effect on us of this high vision, set 
 for us in the sky, with that of some easy-going 
 philosophy of living in everybody's reach, 
 the everyday wisdom, say, of a Horace or an
 
 18 PKOBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 Epicurus, to understand how indispensable 
 it was for human progression that religion 
 should offer us a moral law that lay, not near 
 for our easy grasping, but high up in the 
 heavens for our endless aspiration. 
 
 And the soul's verdict here has been abun- 
 dantly justified by history. Each successive 
 generation has found the Gospel ethic an 
 impossible one to realise, but each has, hi 
 its turn, been, by its mystic drawing, advanced 
 a stage. The world is absorbing this un- 
 attainable bit by bit. If anyone would know 
 the force of the uplift let him read such a work 
 as the Gesta Christi of Loring Brace, and 
 learn how the hideous injustices of the earlier 
 world, its cruelties, its monstrous oppressions, 
 have, one by one, felt the impact of the new 
 ethic, and gone down under it. This "eternity 
 of sympathy and benevolence and purity," 
 as Brace calls it, has, he concludes, " floated 
 everything else in history like straws on its 
 stream thus far." That ardent Spencerian 
 evolutionist, John Fiske, predicts the time 
 when the altruism of the Sermon on the Mount 
 will become the normal social principle. 
 " The meek shall inherit the earth." Christ's 
 doctrine was, he says, a foresight of the moral
 
 THE MOEAL IMPOSSIBLES. 19 
 
 world-process and its result. With this celestial 
 commandment hanging far up above him man 
 marches " from a primitive social state in 
 which he was little better than a brute 
 towards an ultimate social state in which 
 his character shall have become so trans- 
 formed that nothing of the brute can be de- 
 tected in it." 
 
 Nothing, indeed, is more interesting than to 
 watch these results of the Gospel's moralising 
 process upon the world. It has overthrown, 
 not only oppressive interests, but equally 
 oppressive theories. Of late years thoughtful 
 minds have been weighted with the pretensions 
 of a physiological determinism which has 
 declared the moral character to be unchange- 
 able, depending, as in this view it does, upon 
 the organic structure and functions. But this 
 system reckons without the spiritual world, 
 and it is contradicted by the plain facts. The 
 savages of Tierra del Fuego had sustained no 
 radical modifications of organic structure 
 during the period of missionary labour in their 
 midst, but even a Charles Darwin bore witness 
 to the complete moral transformation which 
 the Gospel had wrought in them. When we 
 come from the study of races to that of in-
 
 20 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 dividuals the effect of the Christian ethic 
 and of what lies behind it becomes more 
 visibly wonderful. The past, happily, has 
 yielded us not only histories, but biographies. 
 There are hundreds of them extant, from the 
 story of Paul to that of James Chalmers, 
 and the metamorphoses they reveal are a 
 greater marvel than those of Ovid. The lives 
 of the earliest Methodist preachers alone, as a 
 study hi the possibilities of human psychology, 
 may be matched against all the theorisings 
 of a Schopenhauer and a Bichat. They reveal 
 that a central fact of man's nature is its sus- 
 ceptibility to change under the impact of a 
 higher spiritual power. 
 
 The religious anomalies which modern society 
 exhibits are not then really the contradictions 
 they seem. They reveal the differing curves 
 of a world-process which, despite apparent 
 aberrations, works towards one end. Civilisa- 
 tion is humanity hi the making, and the 
 Gospel ideal, which it often seems to negate, 
 is all the time working at the task. The 
 treasures of pearl and gold which civilisation 
 shows are a part of the world's assets. They 
 were there to be discovered and to be used. 
 But Christ's word about humanity's real
 
 THE MOKAL IMPOSSIBLES. 21 
 
 treasure still holds, and the soul knows its 
 truth. The soldiers whom civilisation uses are 
 symbols of a period of physical force which 
 even now visibly draws to its close. Each 
 succeeding war goes nearer to making war 
 impossible. The temporary setbacks are 
 nothing in the history of an eternal progress. 
 While man strays hither and thither in the 
 search for a completer experience ; while 
 epochs open for him in which the physical 
 and material seem to rule, in which his whole 
 attention seems set upon the possibilities 
 of his surface life ; ever as he strives and 
 fights, there shines upon him from its mystic 
 height this transcendental Gospel, whose 
 beauty and whose message he may never 
 forget. Shine on and ever will it, till it 
 has wooed and won him, till by its soft omni- 
 potence it has conquered his world's last 
 injustice and wrought within and without 
 him its own ultimate of good.
 
 III. 
 
 The Coming Creed. 
 
 IT is an impressive feature of the present 
 religious situation that such numbers of earnest 
 people are in search of a creed. There is to- 
 day a feeling, not only amongst doubters, 
 but hi the most religious minds, a feeling so 
 widespread that it may almost be called 
 universal, that the creeds which in the orthodox 
 historic churches stand for Christianity are, 
 in their present form, the survival of a thought- 
 world which has been outgrown, and that they 
 are consequently a hindrance to faith rather 
 than its bulwark. Perhaps the most signifi- 
 cant element in this feeling is, not so much 
 the objections on scientific or critical grounds 
 to this or that dogma, as the growing suspicion 
 that, apart altogether from the question of 
 their credibility, these doctrinal propositions 
 are not the highest or final expression of the 
 Christian faith. The feeling crops up in the 
 most unexpected places. Here, for instance,
 
 THE COMING CUBED. 23 
 
 is Westcott, who, speaking of the Thirty- 
 Nine Articles, says : " It is that T object to 
 them altogether, and not to any particular 
 doctrines. I have at times fancied it was 
 presumption in us to attempt to define and 
 determine what Scripture has not defined. 
 . V . The whole tenor of Scripture seems 
 to me opposed to all dogmatism and full of 
 all application." From another side John 
 Wesley, after one of the fullest experiences 
 ever given to mortal of the action of religion 
 in human life, declares in his old age : " I am 
 sick of opinions. I am weary to bear them ; 
 my soul loathes the frothy food. Give me 
 solid, substantial religion ; give me a humble, 
 gentle lover of God and man, a man full of 
 mercy and good faith, a man laying himself 
 out in the work of faith, the patience of hope, 
 the labour of love. Let my soul be with 
 those Christians wheresoever they be and 
 whatsoever opinions they are of." The cita- 
 tion may be fittingly closed with these re- 
 markable words from John Henry Newman : 
 " Freedom from symbols and articles is ab- 
 stractedly the highest state of the Christian 
 communion and the peculiar privilege of the 
 primitive Church. . . . Technicality and
 
 24 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 formalism are in their degree inevitable results 
 of public confessions of faith. . . . When 
 confessions do not exist the mysteries of 
 Divine truth, instead of being exposed to the 
 gaze of the profane and uninstructed, are kept 
 hidden in the bosom of the Church far more 
 fruitfully than is otherwise possible." 
 
 These witnesses had all signed creeds ; they 
 belonged to Churches which bristled with 
 dogmatic propositions. Yet what is evident 
 is that at the back of their minds lay a con- 
 sciousness, not formulated, and therefore all 
 the more powerful, that the strength and 
 vitality of the Church lay quite otherwhere 
 than in its tables of doctrine. And as we 
 look through the history of the Christian 
 centuries we find everywhere confirmation of 
 this truth. The creeds arose out of the specu- 
 lative, not the religious spirit. The " heretics " 
 speculated first, and the Church met them 
 with counter-speculations of its own. To 
 wade through the literature of those early 
 centuries, the literature which lies back of the 
 creeds, is a discipline of incredible tediousness, 
 but it helps one greatly to an estimate of the 
 value of these products. 
 
 The ages that produced the formularies
 
 THE COMING CREED. 
 
 were the least vital ; the periods when they 
 had the fullest sway were those of the greatest 
 licence and degradation of character. Gregory 
 of Nyssa gives us a vivid description of the 
 absorption of the Eastern peoples in doctrinal 
 metaphysics, when " knots of people at the 
 corners of the streets in Constantinople dis- 
 cussed incomprehensibles, when, if anyone 
 asked for a bath, the reply was, ' the Son of 
 God was created from nothing.' " And yet 
 was there ever a more frivolous or licentious 
 population ? And in Europe, during the 
 Middle Ages, when the Roman dogma had 
 the completest outward ascendency, the life 
 of the people was at the farthest remove from 
 the New Testament ideal. Dip into the 
 English chronicles, say, of the fourteenth 
 century, and you find that what religious 
 spirit there is dwells mainly in the rebels 
 against the prevailing dogma. The Lollards 
 did some wild things. They smashed images, 
 and as with the stalwart knight who took 
 home the consecrated wafer and lunched on it 
 with wine and oysters, they took at times odd 
 ways of expressing their dissent. But the 
 genuine Christianity of character and life at 
 that time was, all the same, with Wycliffe's
 
 26 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 " poor preachers " and the disciples they 
 gathered. 
 
 This kind of inquiry wherever pursued 
 gives the same results, and they are not 
 favourable. But while theology and the 
 Church, in the matter before us, yield only a 
 negative outcome, another experience, in a 
 different field, has meantime been accumu- 
 lating its treasures, and at an opportune 
 moment, is able to offer them for the eluci- 
 dation of our problem. That half -expressed 
 feeling of the unsatisfactoriness of the Church 
 formulas, as either a ground or a statement 
 of the faith, which we found in a Westcott, 
 a Wesley and a Newman is, when we turn in 
 another direction, suddenly illuminated, and 
 shown as by a flash in its true logical relations, 
 by the light which comes from another sphere. 
 
 While the Church has been busy with its 
 propositions, another power has been quietly 
 rising by its side, and influencing with an 
 ever-increasing potency the sphere of human 
 affairs. This power is science, in its applica- 
 tion to the arts of life. We talk of creeds. 
 What are the creeds of science and how does 
 it express them ? When we have understood 
 the bearings of that question, and of ita
 
 THE COMING CREED. 27 
 
 answer, we shall possess, if not the solution 
 of our theological problem, at least a sub- 
 stantial help towards it. 
 
 Modern science may be said to be a church 
 which has no infidels in its constituency ; 
 whose decisions are accepted by all classes ; 
 whose work is everywhere recognised as 
 beneficent ; and which advances, with ever- 
 increasing speed, toward the conquest of its 
 world. What, we ask again, of its creed ? 
 Undoubtedly it has one ; but it has come by 
 it, and it uses it, hi a quite different way from 
 that to which the Church of theology is ac- 
 customed. For one thing, it has reached its 
 infallibility by persistently refusing to be 
 regarded as infallible ; by making mistakes 
 and acknowledging them ; and by leaving all 
 its decisions open to every species of test. 
 And theology will only regain the ground it has 
 lost, and secure once more the world's intel- 
 lectual respect, by following in this track. It 
 will have to renounce its bogus infallibility, 
 and gain its certitudes where only they are 
 to be found. 
 
 But this part of the method of science, im- 
 portant though it be, is perhaps not the chief 
 lesson it has to teach. That comes when we
 
 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 study the way science uses its creed. It is 
 not, we discover, occupied in incessantly re- 
 peating it. It does not sing, chant or recite 
 it. It does not impose it as a test, or require 
 a subscription to its articles. Yet its creed 
 is ever present, at the base of all its operations. 
 And it cannot afford to be incorrect in it, for 
 error throws all its operations into confusion. 
 
 Observe an engineer as he plans and builds 
 his bridge. His entire working belief is there. 
 His theories of statics and dynamics ; his con- 
 victions about currents and wind pressures, 
 about leverages, about the properties of the 
 arch and of its thrust on buttresses ; his views 
 on the relation of beauty to utility, all are 
 there. He has- not sung them, or shouted 
 them or subscribed them. He has built 
 them into his bridge. His creed is embedded 
 in his work. And men, when they find the 
 work good, proclaim the creed to be sound. 
 
 Our engineer, it may be observed, has, 
 outside his work, all manner of theories. He 
 may have interesting things to say on the 
 ultimate properties of matter ; may doubt, 
 with Berkeley, whether matter exists at all 
 apart from mind. But the world will take 
 his ideas on these outside questions lightly.
 
 THE COMING CREED. 29 
 
 They are at least " pious opinions," which he 
 may hold or not hold, and no one a penny the 
 worse. What men insist on is that his beliefs 
 on bridge-building and the other things which 
 he contracts to do shall be sound. In that 
 sphere they will tolerate no heresy. 
 
 In this way of using its creed, science, we 
 repeat, has, just now, a lesson of supreme 
 importance to teach theology. The Church, 
 if it be wise, will also discover that its belief 
 is given it, not for incessant subscribing and 
 chanting and repeating, but as a plan to work 
 by. Its creed should be a programme. No 
 article of it should be allowed that cannot be 
 expressed in the form, not so much of words 
 as of works and institutions. Is not this, 
 after all, God's way of expressing Himself ? 
 He has a belief, we may be sure, but He is 
 marvellously sparing of words. Time was 
 when men held that He had shouted pro- 
 positions from the clouds. To-day we are dis- 
 posed to say with Thoreau, " The perfect God 
 in His revelation of Himself has never got to 
 the length of one such proposition as you, 
 His prophets, state." He has said enough 
 to us, but not in words. 
 
 When the Church has found this way of
 
 30 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 expressing itself it will have no trouble with 
 heretics. We put our creed into a word, 
 and straightway our neighbour is ready with 
 his counter- word. The ring of our syllables 
 irresistibly invites opposition. But when we 
 have put our belief into our character, into 
 our deed of kindness, into our hero-sacrifice, 
 there is no room for arguing. And what of 
 our creed cannot be expressed in these ways, 
 what of it remains as mere words, untrans- 
 lateable into things, may well be left out. 
 
 The Church of the future will, there is little 
 doubt, organise itself upon these lines. The 
 coming creed will be a programme ; it will be 
 a statement of the laws of the spiritual forces, 
 and of their application to the regeneration 
 of men. And the business of the Church 
 will lie in that application. Its life will be 
 found, not so much in its verbal affirmations 
 as in the institutions it develops, the character 
 it creates. The great apostles and evangelists 
 of the race have instinctively gone upon these 
 lines. Wesley accepted the theological con- 
 ceptions of his time, but his working power 
 lay in a creed which was a programme. He 
 believed in a living God, revealed to him in 
 Christ, and he believed in a present spiritual
 
 THE COMING CREED. 31 
 
 energy which by faith and prayer could be 
 made operative to the converting of men. 
 With these for working principles he could 
 have cut away most of his speculative notions, 
 and no harm done. 
 
 The Church began without the creeds, and 
 it has no more need of them to-day than in its 
 first age. The missionary will go forth now, as 
 then, equipped with a Power and a Programme, 
 and will find them enough. Taking in his 
 heart the love of God and of his fellow, the 
 mind of Christ and the Spirit's energies, taking 
 with him also, as far as may be, the arts and 
 crafts by which God's revelation of perfect 
 human living is expressed, he will win new 
 victories of faith, and with none to gainsay the 
 triumph.
 
 IV. 
 Religion and Justice. 
 
 ONE of the most significant features of modern 
 thinking is the shifting it discloses in the centres 
 of moral interest. The Church needs to take 
 note of the fact that the questions men are now 
 asking are not those for which its formularies 
 provide answers. What the masses are dis- 
 cussing to-day is not justification, but justice. 
 The artisans of the Continent have become 
 almost fiercely hostile to organised Chris- 
 tianity, because, in their view, it is allied 
 with a social system which oppresses the 
 worker. They scorn its charities and ask 
 that instead they may receive their rights. 
 While ideas of this kind are germinating 
 amongst the people we find some of the best 
 minds moving along a similar track. Tolstoi 
 and Ruskin unite in making the redress of 
 social injustice religion's first work, if not its 
 ration d'etre. The theologian Rothe declared 
 that if Christ were to return to earth now His
 
 RELIGION AND JUSTICE. 33 
 
 interest would lie in social and economical 
 rather than in ecclesiastical developments. 
 The younger generation of religious teachers 
 are possessed more and more by the same 
 thought. In Germany an influential school of 
 theologians is devoting its whole religious 
 ardour to reclaiming, in the name of Chris- 
 tianity, a more equitable basis for the common 
 life. Students at college are being told that 
 in their preparation for the pastorate their 
 study of Numbers must be, not that of a 
 book in the Pentateuch, but of percentages 
 of work and wages, of cubic feet of air allotted 
 in workrooms and sleeping-places, of the death- 
 rate in certain trades. In some prophets of 
 the time the new sentiment has taken the 
 place of the religious passion of an earlier 
 day. The intensity of its note is seen in 
 this typical passage of Maeterlinck : " For 
 it is enough that we should feel the cold a 
 little less than the labourer who passes by, 
 that we should be better fed or clad than he, 
 that we should buy any object that is not 
 strictly indispensable, and we have uncon- 
 sciously returned, through a thousand byways, 
 to the ruthless act of primitive man despoiling 
 his weaker brother." 
 
 8
 
 34 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 The significance of all this, for discerning 
 minds, becomes the plainer when we remember 
 that it is precisely from movements of this 
 kind in the human thought and feeling 
 that history is made. Every action, says 
 Emerson, has a thought for its ancestor. 
 These thoughts before long will bring forth 
 actions. Their general spread and acceptance 
 is the more striking when we consider the 
 past that is behind them. The sentiment of 
 justice, as we now understand it, is one of the 
 world's latest growths. In the great Pagan 
 civilisations, so full as they were of intellect 
 and varied power, the very idea was non- 
 existent. The Greek citizenship, as expounded 
 by an Aristotle, rested on a basis of slavery, 
 in which the slave had no rights. In India 
 the caste system, which shut up each class in 
 limits it could never pass, was wrought not 
 only into the religion but the very life of the 
 people. And amongst the Western nations, 
 so slow has been the perception of rights, that 
 the English Society for the Propagation of the 
 Gospel was, at the beginning of the eighteenth 
 century, an owner of slaves. 
 
 Yet it was in England, amongst the Western 
 peoples, that we discern the first movings of
 
 RELIGION AND JUSTICE. 36 
 
 the public mind towards a true theory of social 
 conditions. Hobbes in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury had made an incursion into this field, 
 but his anti-social system, which regarded 
 man as naturally at war with his neighbour, 
 and Government as a divinely-ordained power 
 for keeping him in check, was early felt to be 
 an unsatisfactory solution. Cumberland, who 
 followed him, argued in opposition, that the 
 social system rested not on mere force but on 
 sentiments of justice and altruism resident in 
 human nature. His argument as to the rights 
 of private property shows, however, by what 
 tentative and halting steps the idea of public 
 justice has progressed. He shows with much 
 acuteness that property holding is justified 
 by the fact that an undisturbed possession by 
 the individual of goods and tools is necessary 
 to the general well-being, but he entirely over- 
 looks the question whether the original dis- 
 tribution of these goods was in any sense a 
 just one. Hume, in his turn, treats of justice 
 in relation to property, and argues that the 
 problem here has arisen from the fact that 
 there is not enough of external goods to go 
 round. The notion of justice has been evoked 
 because, first, the supply of goods is not ade-
 
 36 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 quate to the general need, and, secondly, be- 
 cause man as an individual is selfish. Herbert 
 Spencer's treatment of the theme is more 
 abstract. He defines justice as the principle 
 that every man has freedom to do what he 
 wills, provided he infringes not the equal 
 freedom of any other man. 
 
 The cautious and temperate movement 
 of the English mind on these questions is 
 in striking contrast with the fierce rushes, 
 the wild leaps in the dark, of Continental 
 theorists and leaders. The " Contrat Social " 
 of Rousseau, viewed in the light of modern 
 knowledge, is the absurdest of theories, but 
 it was a call to arms which precipitated the 
 Revolution. Later came the still wilder 
 "phalanstery scheme" of Fourier, and later 
 still, the German Socialism of Marx and 
 Lassalle, whose fundamental assumption was 
 that capital is the people's foe and oppressor. 
 Amongst millions of working men in Germany, 
 France, Belgium, and other European countries 
 that idea still holds sway. With these multi- 
 tudes Socialism is a religion ; the capitalist 
 is the enemy, private property is robbery, 
 and the Church as its upholder is a participator 
 in the crime. The abolition of the whole
 
 RELIGION AND JUSTICE. 37 
 
 existing system is a condition of the worker 
 coming to his own, and of the human progress 
 towards the millennium. 
 
 The movement which has reached this ex- 
 treme has provoked rejoinders of not less 
 violence. The fiery denunciations of a Las- 
 salle have been met with the finished cynicism 
 of a Nietzsche. To the charge that the 
 propertied classes have exploited the workers, 
 the philosopher replies, " Quite so, and it is 
 precisely their business to go on exploiting. 
 It is the proper function of the strong to 
 compel the weak, and they can do so without 
 fear, for the weak will always be weak and in 
 their power." 
 
 Most of us, however, realise that the social 
 question is not to be settled by cynicism. 
 What are the other ways ? There is that of 
 fact and argument. The attack on capital, 
 for instance, which has characterised the 
 cruder Socialism has been, for all thinking 
 persons, conclusively refuted. It is one of the 
 first lessons of political economy that without 
 a reserve force, such as capital represents, 
 there would be no possibility even of living, 
 to say nothing of progress. The idea, also, 
 still cherished amongst the proletariat, that
 
 38 PEOBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 the world's wealth is produced entirely by 
 the "labouring classes," and that capital is 
 largely a robbery of their proper share, has 
 also again and again been disproved. What, 
 for instance, are we to make of the simple 
 fact that three times as much wealth is pro- 
 duced now by the same working population, 
 that is, by the same muscular power, as hi an 
 earlier generation ? What has made the 
 difference ? Not the labourer, but the think- 
 ing brain behind him. The real question here 
 is, " What are the proper wages of ability ? " 
 A calculation has been made that, of the Eng- 
 lish national income, labour produces five- 
 thirteenths, and the fruits of invention and 
 combination that is, of applied ability 
 eight-thirteenths of the whole. In other words, 
 it is the thinker who has been the great wealth- 
 creator ; and as the sum works out, this man 
 behind the labourer call him combiner, in- 
 ventor, capitalist, entrepeneur, what you will, 
 the brain behind the tool appears to have 
 taken for himself actually less rather than more 
 of the balance due. 
 
 Clearly, if the destruction of capital, or even 
 the equal sharing of it amongst men, be the 
 demand, it is for ever an impossible one, for
 
 RELIGION AND JUSTICE. 39 
 
 the nature of things is against it. Were we 
 all put on a pound a week to-morrow, the old 
 inequality would be rampant in a fortnight. 
 Some would have spent all, others would have 
 saved ; there would be the clever use of the 
 pound and the stupid use of it, with the result 
 that the old cry of the " haves " and " have 
 note " would again be heard in the land. The 
 supposition, indeed, that social justice means 
 equality is one of which all sane men should 
 by this time have effectually rid themselves. 
 There is no such thing in heaven or in earth. 
 The universe was not built that way. On this 
 supposition the ant might shriek its wrong in 
 not being an elephant, and the human family 
 in a mass revolt at not being archangels. 
 
 It is strange that amid all these confused 
 cries for " rights " and for " justice " it has 
 occurred so little to men to inquire as to what 
 have been the real factors in men's progress 
 and happiness. For, when we look beneath 
 the surface, we find that the Power behind 
 the scenes that has really created history has 
 worked on a plan that pays no attention 
 seemingly to these watchwords. The human 
 uplift is traceable almost always to something 
 so different. We know astronomy, we travel
 
 40 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 by railway, we read Hamlet, we conquer small- 
 pox, we listen to the " Moonlight Sonata," 
 we experience religion's sublime emotions and 
 inward victories in a word, we enjoy our 
 whole human inheritance, not because of 
 social programmes, but because Newton's 
 and Stephenson's, and Shakespeares and 
 Jenners and Beethovens, and the prophets and 
 apostles of the Spirit have from time to time 
 appeared amongst men and conquered for 
 them a fresh territory of life. " The value of a 
 truly great man," says a modern writer, " con- 
 sists in his increasing the value of all mankind." 
 Somehow heaven's method with us in these 
 matters goes so much deeper than our Par- 
 liamentary prattle. A dozen great souls vouch- 
 safed the world to-day in different departments 
 would be worth all the political manifestoes. 
 
 The key to the social problem is a deeper 
 one than that of political economy. It is the 
 New Testament key. It is a matter not of 
 codes, but of spirit. The French Revolution 
 and kindred attempts have sought to bring 
 the millennium in by force. Sois mon frere 
 ou je vous tue. But men will not become 
 brothers by a threat of being killed if they 
 don't. The art of social living is learned not
 
 RELIGION AND JUSTICE. 41 
 
 in the school of polemic, but in that of the 
 Crucified. We shall only secure the human 
 brotherhood through the Christ love and 
 sacrifice. When by God's mercy a fresh bap- 
 tism of that Spirit comes upon us we shall get 
 our justice. What good men will then come 
 to see is that the real conception of the human 
 relation is that of a household, a family. 
 There is no equality in family life. The 
 parents have a different position, a different 
 influence, a different income from that of their 
 children. But the differences contribute to, 
 rather than take from, the family happiness. 
 The strength of the strong here is for every 
 weak one, and the love is from each for all. 
 The whole question is one of feeling. The 
 sentiment we have inside our door is simply 
 to be carried outside. No child within our 
 doors, while we can help it, will go without food, 
 or clothing, or education, or opportunity, or love, 
 and when we have all transferred this feeling to 
 the other side of our door, have made it the 
 working idea of the community, we shall be solv- 
 ing the social question in the only way in which 
 it can ever be solved. Here is a Church pro- 
 gramme that might well unite us all. It is that 
 of building the State upon the Mind of Christ.
 
 V. 
 Cosmic Free Grace. 
 
 THE immense movement of ideas observable 
 in modern theology has given birth to the 
 fear that a serious portion of the faith held 
 by our fathers has disappeared. That is far 
 from the truth. What has happened is not 
 a disappearance, but a resetting. All that is 
 vital in the earlier creed is still with us, but 
 in a changed form. It is almost a rebirth, 
 but one in which the old lives again in the 
 new. Science, for instance, is giving us back 
 the theological predestination in its concept 
 of law and heredity. And the whole of what 
 the old divines knew as " the doctrines of 
 grace," now almost foreign to our generation, 
 will, we predict, come back upon us with 
 the force of a new conviction when reset hi 
 that greater cosmic conception to which the 
 later research has introduced us. It will be 
 seen that the order of things under which we 
 live is, substantially, none other than that of
 
 COSMIC FREE GEACE. 43 
 
 the " free grace " which Augustine and the 
 Puritans proclaimed. What is more, the 
 range of the doctrine will be found to be far 
 wider than that of theology proper. It affects 
 in the most intimate and vital manner our 
 conclusions as to the economic and social 
 questions about which the world is wrangling 
 to-day. 
 
 The doctrine of the old divines was that 
 we were in the universe as pensioners on a 
 royal bounty ; that, personally undeserving, 
 we had received everything for nothing ; 
 what we held was not a debt paid to us, but a 
 gift bestowed ; our position was one, not of 
 rights, but of privileges. And this doctrine 
 of our position furnished the doctrine of our 
 duties. It was not enough for us to render his 
 " rights " to our fellow. We were to stand to 
 him as, in our turn, we stood to the Higher 
 Power. As we had " freely received," beyond 
 and apart from our desert, we were " freely 
 to give." What we owed our brother was 
 not what he had earned and could demand 
 from us, but the best we had to give. It is, 
 by the way, worth noting in this connection 
 that Augustine, in that great compendium 
 of his doctrine, the " Enchiridion ad Lauren-
 
 44 PEOBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 tium," gives the widest range to the idea of 
 " alms." He speaks of every good we offer to 
 others, such as advice, comfort, discipline, as 
 alms, and he regards the highest " almsgiving " 
 as the forgiveness of sins and the love of our 
 enemies. The whole notion, comprehending 
 every part of life, is that we are not under law, 
 but under grace. 
 
 To-day, as we noted in the last chapter, the 
 world is fascinated by another conception, 
 that of " justice." This is the watchword of 
 the toiling classes. The cry is not for gifts, 
 but for rights. And the reason is that the 
 deepest sense with many of them is of wrongs. 
 Life as they see it is a system in which they, 
 the unprivileged, are shut out from a due share 
 of what is going. Their religion accordingly 
 is an effort to get that share. They see on the 
 one side the luxury of the Park Lane millionaire, 
 and on the other the privations of the sweated 
 labourer in John Street, and find here a mon- 
 strosity which is to be repressed. And this is 
 to be done by a struggle. Man is a belligerent 
 animal, and has an inherent love of a fight. 
 And a fight for his " rights " stirs him to the 
 depths. The modern toilers do not, in this 
 campaign of theirs, look for any extra-mundane
 
 COSMIC FREE GRACE. 45 
 
 assistance. A great thinker has told them 
 "there is no justice in the outside universe; 
 it exists only in the human soul." But they 
 will get then 1 justice, and by their own efforts. 
 The campaign shall be waged in the Press, on 
 the platform, at the polling booth ; if need be, 
 on the stricken field. " We will win our 
 rights, and by our own efforts secure a just 
 world as between man and man." 
 
 And truly a great idea is that of justice as 
 between man and man. If there is nothing 
 better to be had this certainly is something 
 to be striven for. That no one shall be allowed 
 to grind his fellow ; that a surcease shall be 
 put to monopolies which appropriate the 
 greater results of industry to the benefit of a 
 few, leaving only a bare subsistence to the 
 producer ; that old age and helplessness shall 
 not, in a solvent community, be allowed to 
 spell starvation ; that the goods of the world 
 shall be so distributed as to give everyone 
 his opportunity of joy and of development 
 these are results to gain which every honest 
 man may well buckle on his armour. But 
 the question remains, " How are they going to 
 be gained ? " It is precisely here that the 
 modern theory of "justice," as a sort of
 
 46 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 commercial equation between competing indi- 
 viduals, breaks down. It will not work any 
 way, and that because it is contrary to the 
 idea on which this universe is built. 
 
 To take as an illustration the burning ques- 
 tion of the distribution of goods. In the pre- 
 ceding chapter we noticed one of the fallacies 
 of the earlier socialism in the matter of labour 
 and its reward. Thirty years ago it was 
 argued with the utmost vehemence on the 
 Continent, and still is argued in some circles, 
 that the fruits of industry belonged to the 
 manual worker because he earned them. The 
 other classes, in taking the share they held, 
 robbed the worker. We pointed out that, 
 as a matter of business calculation, the enor- 
 mous increase in the world's wealth of these 
 later generations has been due, not to the 
 efforts of the manual labourer, but to the 
 skill, the combinations and the enterprise 
 of the investor and the capitalist. But is 
 this a cynical plea for things as they are ; an 
 argument which shields the monopolist in 
 his exploitation of the suffering million ? 
 
 That would be a very hasty conclusion. 
 The figures we gave, according to which ability 
 and combination gain eight-thirteenths of
 
 COSMIC FREE GRACE. 47 
 
 the national income while labour gains five- 
 thirteenths, tell their own story. But what 
 is the story ? If our social system rests on 
 the modern notion of " right," on the payment, 
 that is, to each man of what is due, the hand- 
 ing over the counter to the separate agent 
 the net result of what his hand, brain, or 
 resources have produced, then the stronger 
 and the cleverer will go on getting most of 
 what there is, and will let the feeble and the 
 unendowed scramble for the leavings. And 
 on the bare " justice " theory how are we to 
 condemn him ? That theory, indeed, offers 
 no logical ground of condemnation. But 
 there is another theory and a sounder, which 
 puts him in his proper place. 
 
 For it is, we repeat, not upon the " justice " 
 principle that humanity is being developed, or 
 by which the individual, in body and soul, is 
 to come to his own. The distribution of pro- 
 perty, in a shape that will satisfy the moral 
 consciousness, will not begin till the community 
 at large recognises that the " wage due theory," 
 the " cash-nexus theory," is not good enough. 
 If the men who declare that " there is no 
 justice in the outside universe " will only 
 examine the universe a little more
 
 48 PBOBLEMS or LIVING. 
 
 they may, perhaps, discover that its method 
 is, after all, a great deal better than theirs. 
 For it is a method of grace and not of debt. 
 The lesson it offers on the social question is 
 writ large, for those who look, on every page 
 of life. The capitalist, the inventor, the strong 
 man who produces wealth, would by this law 
 be convicted as the grossest defaulter if he 
 interpreted his duty to labour simply by the 
 figures of the ready reckoner. He will only 
 begin to do it when he discovers himself to be 
 under another principle, not extractable from 
 arithmetic, a law which bids him pay not 
 according to debt but to grace. 
 
 We might get the whole proof of this without 
 stirring from the point where we find ourselves. 
 The very fight for human rights itself offers 
 us all we want. For what is this battle, 
 and how has it come about ? Did it spring out 
 of a debtor and creditor account ? Do the 
 Tolstois and the Ruskins appear on the scene 
 battling for Russian serfs or Dudley nail- 
 makers as the result of a capital calculation 
 or distribution ? When the people get any 
 measure of their " rights " is it not because 
 leaders are given them whose very appearance 
 and endowment is a reversal of the supposed
 
 COSMIC FREE GRACE. 49 
 
 law of equality, and whose work is neither 
 inspired nor paid by any calculable wages ? 
 Herein, surely, is a strange thing. To get 
 our economical justice we have to wait for 
 men who come into the world, not because 
 the world has paid them to come ; who, when 
 here, work for a wage which the world has 
 no means of paying ; and whose leadership, 
 while the truest factor of progress for the 
 mass, annihilates equality by setting them 
 so far apart from the mass ! 
 
 And the law which works so manifestly in 
 this department meets us in every other. Our 
 best work can never be done for wages ; and 
 it can never be paid in wages. We begin 
 by being immeasurable debtors. We come 
 into the world with an endowment of faculty 
 and opportunity that was all unbought. 
 No word passed between us and the universe, 
 but there was the gift waiting. We look back 
 across the ages, and we see that a myriad 
 noble souls were there before us, and we enter, 
 without a farthing of payment, into all the 
 heritage of their suffering and their achieve- 
 ment. It all spells one word, Grace. The 
 universe is built upon free giving and free 
 receiving. If we cannot see that, we are blind
 
 50 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 indeed. And, seeing it, there is only one thing 
 left us to do, and that is to follow in this 
 glorious cosmic way of things, and to offer to 
 our God and to our fellow the best that is in 
 us in return. 
 
 The universe, we say, being interpreted, 
 gives us back again our old Gospel. For a 
 doctrine of grace is a doctrine that by the 
 necessity of things is saturated with the Divine 
 Personality. Law may be conceived of as 
 without a heart, but grace never. It is the 
 sense of a great love that enwraps humanity, 
 that has suffered for it on a Cross, that is at 
 the heart of all genuine reforms. It is this 
 which will win us all our rights. They will 
 come by no other process. Without it we 
 might perhaps capture a world and gain the 
 right to be supremely miserable in it. Whether 
 I am employer, or fellow-worker, or employed, 
 I shall do well if in these relations I am loving 
 well, and am well beloved. The rights of man 
 or woman are the rights secured by the grace 
 in themselves and in their fellows. There 
 are no others worth having. To get this 
 spirit back into the world is the way of its 
 redemption. At the Cross, whence we look 
 into the heart of God, we learn that our highest
 
 COSMIC FREE GBACB. 51 
 
 right is that of a free giving. There, we find 
 no better battle-cry than this : 
 
 O Lord, that I could waste my life for others, 
 
 With no ends of my own, 
 That I could pour my life into my brothers, 
 
 And live for them aloae.
 
 VI. 
 Of Sacred and Secular. 
 
 AMONGST the problems besetting and bewilder- 
 ing our age, not the least puzzling is that which 
 lies around the words " sacred " and " secular." 
 The modern man comes into the world with 
 a tradition on this subject which grips him 
 every day, but of which he can give no 
 satisfactory account to himself. The Church 
 shares his dilemma, and is uneasily conscious 
 that the boundary lines here have been badly 
 drawn, and that a revision is necessary. ' ' Why 
 is this sacred and that secular, and what is the 
 ground for the division between them ? " 
 It is not a new question. The eighteenth 
 century asked it with a characteristic im- 
 patience. Said Rousseau : "As soon as he 
 is born man is wrapped in swaddling clothes ; 
 when he is dead he is sewed up in a shroud. 
 All his life long he is pinioned by laws, manners 
 and customs, decorum and professional obliga- 
 tions." The reply of the Revolution was to
 
 OF SACRED AND SECULAR. 53 
 
 cut out the " sacred " and bring all to a 
 secular level. But the experiment did not 
 turn out well, and we shall not repeat it. To 
 reach a solution that will satisfy us to-day two 
 things are necessary. We need to re-explore 
 the ground on both sides of the dividing lines, 
 and also to study the process, the evolution 
 by which these boundaries themselves came 
 into being. 
 
 To begin with a definition. It will be 
 sufficiently accurate for our purpose if we say 
 that the " sacred " as commonly understood 
 is that which is associated with worship and 
 the exercise of the religious feelings, while in 
 the " secular " is included all that falls outside 
 this category. When, armed with these defini- 
 tions, we set out on the proposed inquiry, we 
 find the first fact meeting us is the remarkable 
 one, that in the history of civilisation it is 
 invariably the sacred that comes first. What 
 we know as the secular is always a later evolu- 
 tion. If, for example, we take the subject of 
 legislation, now regarded everywhere as a 
 secular business, there is not one of the ancient 
 systems that was not originally held to be of 
 Divine origin. The Egyptians referred their 
 code to the god Thoth ; Minos was said to
 
 54 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 receive his from Jove ; that of Lycurgus in 
 Sparta came from Apollo ; Zoroaster in 
 Persia was inspired by Ahura-Mazda ; Numa 
 Pompilius at Rome by the nymph Egeria ; 
 and we are all familiar with the story of the 
 Mosaic law-giving. 
 
 But this is only one illustration out of many. 
 Everywhere does the secular find its origin in 
 the sacred. The Greek drama was originally 
 a religious function ; and its arts of painting 
 and sculpture were immediately associated 
 with worship. In Christendom the same law 
 has obtained. The Church of the earlier ages 
 took upon itself to organise the whole of 
 human affairs. In documents such as the 
 " Apostolical Constitutions " and the later 
 Canon law we have life, from the cradle to the 
 grave, definitely mapped out. What are now 
 known as the secular arts and professions were 
 all of ecclesiastical origin. The modern drama 
 has its root in the mystery plays ; architecture 
 was first mainly concerned hi the building of 
 churches ; painting and sculpture were de- 
 veloped for their adornment. Literature, in 
 the early Christian period, was confined to 
 theology and the lives of the saints. And the 
 history of any new religious movement, we
 
 OF SACRED AND SECULAR. 65 
 
 discover, follows exactly the same process. It 
 resembles always what geologists give us as the 
 story of our planet. The movement is at first 
 molten ; then follows a process of cooling and 
 hardening, until upon the solid crust there 
 appear forms and developments which seem 
 remote and alien from the first fiery phase. 
 The fruits of a revival will, in the next genera- 
 tion, appear often as successful commerce, or 
 as an impulse to scientific and philosophic 
 investigation. 
 
 The question now arises, How came it that 
 developments of civilisation which began in the 
 sphere of the " sacred " should find, as we see, 
 their later resting-place in the " secular " ? 
 The history of the process is the history of the 
 Church's mistakes and shortcomings. The 
 mistakes were of its intellect, the shortcomings 
 of its heart. To understand what happened we 
 need to begin with a diagnosis of religious 
 exclusiveness. One needs a clear insight here, 
 for nowhere have good and evil been more 
 subtly intermixed. At the beginning of reli- 
 gious movements men taste a peculiar rapture. 
 It is an intense emotion associated with a sense 
 of intimate intercourse with the spiritual world. 
 God is known and felt as a Person. The
 
 56 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 dwellers in this inner circle discover that they 
 are the recipients of unutterable things. Into 
 the soul flow tides of energy that translate 
 themselves into the sense of pardon, of fellow- 
 ship with the Highest, of victory over the 
 world, of immortal hope beyond the grave. 
 It is felt, and rightly felt, that in comparison 
 with such experiences life has nothing else 
 that is equal to offer. And most natural is it, 
 further, to conclude that whatever seems to 
 interrupt the flow of such celestial intercourse 
 is harmful, and should be placed under taboo. 
 
 We are here at the secret of the whole 
 business. It is precisely at this point that we 
 discover how the highest individual aspirations 
 may fail to adjust themselves to the wholeness 
 of things. Our religionist will at all cost keep 
 up his fervour. Good ! But he has fed it 
 solely upon one kind of food. And he has no 
 notion of a possibly beneficial change of diet. 
 When for his inner development, in addition 
 to the prayers, the exercises, the spiritual 
 records which have appealed to him hitherto, 
 there is offered a whole new range of ideas and 
 activities, his instinct is to start back and refuse. 
 There is a story of one of the early Methodists 
 who, on being presented in the interests of the
 
 OF SACRED AND SECULAR. 57 
 
 King's English with a grammar, returned the 
 gift with the remark that he could nowhere find 
 Christ in it. Wiser than he, Ignatius Loyola, 
 at a similar point in his history, came 
 to a different conclusion. After the raptures 
 attendant on his conversion he found he 
 was very ignorant, and that if he was to 
 exercise any influence in the world he must 
 conquer learning. But to give up his spiritual 
 communings for such pursuits seemed to be 
 leaving Paradise for the desert. But that 
 way, he saw, lay his duty. The pampering 
 of religious feeling was not everything, might 
 at times be even a harmful thing. He must 
 " leave God for God," " ad majorem gloriam 
 Dei." 
 
 The failure to see this has, with religious 
 men, been at the root of all the mischief. The 
 idea that there was no other food for the 
 soul than that they had known, for one 
 thing, narrowed immeasurably their outlook. 
 Imagine, for instance, the sheer waste of time, 
 in a world with a million things to learn, that 
 has gone on for centuries as the result of the 
 monkish theory of the religious feelings ! Think 
 of people, as in the Eastern Church, year after 
 year, going through the daily repetition of the
 
 58 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 Psalms, going through the same eternal round 
 at Lauds, Prime, Tierce, Sext, Nones and 
 Compline ; with what good to God or man ? 
 How weary the heavens must be of this cease- 
 less grind of words ! And there is so much to 
 do that is useful ! 
 
 But that was not the worst. Into a far 
 more disastrous blunder did the Church fall 
 when it identified its spiritual treasure and its 
 religious feeling with a world-view which 
 science was discovering to be inadequate and 
 erroneous. What that blunder meant for 
 civilisation Lecky has described for us. " Every 
 mental disposition which philosophy pronounces 
 to be essential to a legitimate research was 
 almost uniformly branded as a sin, and a large 
 proportion of the most deadly intellectual 
 vices were deliberately inculcated as virtues. 
 The theologians, by destroying every book that 
 could generate discussion, by diffusing to every 
 field of knowledge a spirit of boundless credulity 
 . . . succeeded in almost arresting the 
 action of the European mind." 
 
 In the light of these hints we discover how 
 our two separate territories came into being, 
 with the boundary wall between them. On 
 the one side was religion, enamoured of its
 
 OF SACRED AND SECULAR. 59 
 
 high emotions, unwilling to admit anything 
 that served to hinder their flow, and in their 
 supposed interests thrusting out or stamping 
 down all that was new and strange. On the 
 other side a whole fresh world of sciences, 
 arts and interests developing out of the religious 
 consciousness, yet disowned by it ; sure of 
 themselves and of their right to exist, yet 
 ostracised by their parents ; growing away 
 from their first home, and so, to a large extent, 
 strange to the inspirations which that home 
 alone could supply. So have we to-day the 
 spectacle of a " sacred " of Sabbath, Church, 
 Bible, ministry, worship and creed, with a 
 " secular " of science, politics, business, art 
 and amusement, each eyeing the other askance, 
 unable to find their true basis of relation, or 
 to exercise reciprocally their proper and 
 legitimate influence. 
 
 It is time this state of things should cease. 
 With a knowledge of the point where the first 
 false steps were taken it is for us to strike 
 afresh the right track. Past ages have wit- 
 nessed a progress from sacred to secular. It 
 is ours to reverse the process and find the way 
 from secular to sacred. The early short- 
 coming was really moral as much as intellectual.
 
 60 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 It lay in a want of faith. The average sense of 
 God was so feeble, the flow so limited, that it 
 could only keep running while in the narrowest 
 channels. Spread over a wider surface it 
 seemed to lose itself. We have to-day to rise 
 above this weakness. The Christian soul has 
 to cultivate a wider receptiveness. In every 
 aspect of the universal life has it to find its 
 food, recognising that at the heart of every- 
 thing is God. That deeper insight by which a 
 St. Francis saw in the natural forces, such as 
 fire and storm, brethren to be loved, because, 
 like himself, they were God's servants indwelt 
 of Him, must more and more be ours. The 
 wider world-sense which enabled a Justin 
 Martyr, one of the earliest Christian writers, 
 to recognise all men " who had lived according 
 to reason as Christians, because the Logos, the 
 Eternal Reason," had been their inspirer, must 
 again be sought and found of the Church. It 
 has, as a modern French writer well observes, 
 "to beware of a religion that substitutes itself 
 for everything ; that makes monks ; and to 
 seek one which penetrates everything, for that 
 makes Christians." 
 
 In a word, religion must found itself on a 
 wider synthesis. Only thus can it reconquer
 
 OP SACRED AND SECULAR. 61 
 
 a world half of which it has allowed to slip out 
 of its grasp. To science, to art, to commerce, 
 to the drama, to amusement, it must resume 
 the relation which it had at the beginning, and 
 which only its own folly has dislocated. No 
 religion is complete without a relation to 
 every department of life. No department of 
 life is complete without a relation to religion. 
 There is no science, no art, no true pleasure in 
 which a properly-adjusted nature cannot imme- 
 diately find and enjoy God. We have to learn 
 to-day the sacredness of the secular, the avenues 
 to the very Holy of Holies which open up from 
 the commonest duties. A great physician of 
 the past, Dr. T. W. Latham, in a lecture to 
 medical students, has put the gist of the matter 
 into one memorable sentence : " Happy indeed 
 is that man whose moral nature and whose 
 spiritual being are all harmoniously engaged 
 in the daily business of his life ; with whom 
 the same act has become his own happiness, 
 a dispensation of good to his fellows, and a 
 worship of God."
 
 vn. 
 Religion's Silences. 
 
 THERE is, perhaps, in the history of religion 
 nothing more striking, nor, in a way, more 
 pathetic, than the human hunger it reveals 
 for a clear, undimmed mental outlook. In 
 every age men have asked from Faith a full 
 explanation of life, and have in succession 
 shown every degree and form of disappoint- 
 ment at not getting it. The dream of a theo- 
 logical chart of the whole universe which 
 haunted the Middle Ages and found its ex- 
 pression in the " De Divisione Naturae " 
 of a Scotus Erigena and in the gigantic 
 " Summa " of an Aquinas, is still with us. 
 Men ask to-day with the same na/ivete as of 
 old for the clearing up of every mystery. 
 Every prominent religious teacher is bom- 
 barded with inquiries for exact definition. 
 Now it is a question of the person of Christ, 
 again of miracles, again of the validity of 
 Genesis ; an explanation is wanted of the
 
 RELIGION'S SILENCES. 63 
 
 Atonement, or the Trinity, or the state after 
 death. Unless the special difficulty of the 
 questioner can be met there is no Faith 
 for him and no Christian life. 
 
 This demand for a religion of absolute and 
 scientific precision of idea on all the subjects 
 of human speculation is entirely natural, 
 and one that we have all shared. But it is 
 time now that we understood what this ex- 
 pectation is really worth. Studied in the 
 light of history, it discovers itself as a will-o'- 
 the-wisp that has steered believers and 
 unbelievers alike into the bog. The Church 
 led the way when, under its influence, it pro- 
 ceeded to define and authoritatively pronounce 
 upon all the questions which its wiser first 
 period had left open. The bog was reached 
 from the opposite direction when the revolting 
 Western mind, declaring these definitions to be 
 unscientific and outgrown, rejected both them 
 and revealed religion with them. It was the 
 strange aberration of the eighteenth century to 
 confound the Church's " Greek metaphysics," 
 as Dr. Hatch calls them, with the essential 
 Christian revelation, and to discard both, as 
 though they were one. When Condorcet 
 tells us " there is not a religious system
 
 64 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 or a piece of supernatural extravagance 
 that does not rest on ignorance of natural 
 laws," and when Diderot, even more ferocious 
 in his attack, speaks of Christianity as "Of 
 all systems the most absurd and atrocious, 
 in its dogmas the most unintelligible, meta- 
 physical and intricate," they are simply 
 confronting one ineptitude with another. It 
 is difficult to say which party to the contro- 
 versy exhibited the more stupidity the Church 
 which claimed to explain everything and de- 
 clared its explanation infallible, or these 
 objectors, too short-sighted to see over the 
 poor wall of ecclesiastical pretension to the 
 immense reality that lay behind. 
 
 In our own day the disappointment is 
 expressing itself in another fashion not less 
 curious. The critics of Christianity, finding 
 it fail to reply with clearness to all the ques- 
 tions proposed, revenge themselves by de- 
 claring it destitute of any distinctive light 
 at all. It brought, they say, no new ideas into 
 the world. Its Golden Rule was anticipated 
 ages before by Confucius. The Sermon on 
 the Mount has its finest maxims forestalled 
 in Hillel and Shammai, in the Egyptian 
 "Book of the Dead," in the Indian Pan-
 
 RELIGION'S SILENCES. 65 
 
 chatantra and Matrabharata. " Why," it is 
 asked, " should we worry other people with 
 our costly and dangerous missionary cam- 
 paigns, when they possess in their own teach- 
 ings all the really essential ideas that Chris- 
 tianity has to offer ? " 
 
 There is in this latest position a miscon- 
 ception just as gross as in that earlier one 
 of the eighteenth century. The mistake be- 
 comes evident when we pass from a priori 
 ideas as to what Christianity ought to do, 
 to what it really proposes to itself, and to 
 what it really accomplishes. One cannot 
 study it understandmgly for five minutes 
 without becoming certain that its role is 
 distinctly not to clear up mysteries, nor to 
 present us with an encyclopaedia of the know- 
 able. Rather does it open to us continually 
 fresh mysteries, and when it has filled us with 
 longing for their comprehension falls into 
 wondrous silences concerning them. It has, 
 for instance, no philosophy either of beginnings 
 or of endings. Genesis is an epic and so is 
 the Apocalypse. Neither is history. The 
 one is a splendid chant of the dawn of life, 
 while the other, in Milton's magnificent words, 
 ifi simply " the majestic image of a high and 
 
 5
 
 66 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 stately tragedy, shutting up and intermingling 
 her solemn scenes and acts with a sevenfold 
 chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies." 
 The same reticence is visible in the whole body 
 of its teaching. 
 
 The central revelation of Christianity is, of 
 course, Jesus Christ, but here note how little 
 of positive knowledge the sources offer us 
 concerning Him. The New Testament calls 
 Christ the Son of God, and theology has ever 
 since been dying with curiosity to know 
 the precise scientific value of the term. It 
 must have its theory of the Incarnation ; 
 it raises discussions as to ousia, hypostasis, 
 prosopon, phusis. Consider what, with all 
 our theological prepossessions thick upon us, 
 we should have expected in an authoritative 
 account of Jesus, and then turn to one of these 
 accounts ! We open the Gospel of Mark, 
 recognised generally as our earliest history ; 
 written, tradition says, under the eye of 
 Peter, to find that the things about which 
 the greatest pother has been made are simply 
 not there. As to the lineage of Jesus, the 
 manner of His entrance into the world, the 
 position of His mother, the metaphysics of 
 His relation to the Father, this writer has
 
 RELIGION'S SILENCES. 67 
 
 no word. The simple wondrous story he offers 
 raises in us a storm of questions to which the 
 answer is silence. The like is true to what- 
 ever part of the New Testament we go. Mar- 
 vellous facts are flung down before us ; immense 
 issues are raised ; we are stirred to the utmost 
 pitch at what we read ; there are a thousand 
 things we want to discuss, but ere our mouths 
 are open the curtain is down and the seance 
 over. 
 
 The same is true of the great Christian 
 doctrines. Enough is said to stir the soul 
 to its depths, but not to give it clear defini- 
 tions. We may quote here some pregnant 
 words of a great German thinker. Says 
 Lotze : " Christian theology calls Christ the 
 Son of God, the most distinctive article of 
 Christian belief. But it does this in a figure, 
 the exact significance of which is by no 
 means positively determined. The figure taken 
 simply indicates that intimate nature of the 
 relationship between God and Christ which is 
 clear to feeling. There is no explanation of 
 the mode of that relation. So, also, religious 
 feeling meets the Christian teaching about 
 the redeeming power of Christ's death with 
 ready faith, but definitions do not help it."
 
 68 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 Christianity, we repeat, does not exist for 
 the sake of its definitions. It gives us facts 
 enough and knowledge enough for the great 
 feelings, for the great beliefs, and for the great 
 life, and leaves the rest undetermined. It 
 recognises from the beginning, what a Goethe 
 has in these later ages put for us into words, 
 that " the highest and most excellent thing 
 in man is formless, and we must guard against 
 giving it shape in anything save noble deeds." 
 Here, too, is the answer to those who to-day 
 complain of the paucity in the Gospel of new 
 ideas. One might say much on this question 
 which the vaunters of Hindoo and Buddhistic 
 morality might find it hard to answer. But 
 the point, after all, is not there. It is hi this, 
 that New Testament religion has made itself 
 potent and necessary in the world, not so 
 much by its speech as by its silence, not so 
 much by its spoken word as by its deed, 
 by its unseen, mysterious work on the human 
 heart and character. The new thing which 
 it has brought into the world, and with which 
 we can never again dispense, is a new temper, 
 a new life. Some of its utterances may have 
 been known before, but a thing never before 
 seen was the societies of men and women
 
 RELIGION'S SILENCES. 
 
 gathered in the name of the Crucified, into 
 whom had been breathed a spirit which 
 triumphed over sin, sorrow and the grave. 
 
 Two points here suggest themselves. Chris- 
 tianity is a religion of silences, of reticences 
 that at times are to us, not only mysterious, 
 but most hard to bear. 
 
 For the drift of the Maker is dark, an Isis hid by 
 the veil 
 
 When, however, we are disposed to repine at 
 this feature of our lot, let us remember that 
 religion's mysteries are great because the life 
 it deals with is on so vast a scale. Science, 
 which in destroying the cheap theologic 
 cosmogonies of an earlier time had seemed to 
 do Faith a disservice, has in reality supplied 
 it with a far nobler pabulum. For in opening 
 up to us a physical universe vaster than any 
 which our fathers conceived, it irresistibly 
 suggests the parallel that in like manner 
 the spiritual universe, the realm of love, joy, 
 holiness and immortal life is a reality, vaster 
 in height and breadth and depth than our 
 highest thought has touched. 
 
 The other point is that religion's silences are, 
 in another point of view, simply the limitations 
 of our present spiritual development. Science
 
 70 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 tells us of a world of sound perpetually rolling 
 around us, but which is at once above and 
 beneath our hearing capacity. Our auditory 
 nerve answers only to a certain range of 
 vibration. So it is in our spiritual culture. 
 When we speak of the awful silences of the 
 unseen world it is only another way of saying 
 that most of us are deaf. That elect souls 
 here and there have heard a " thus saith the 
 Lord," which when uttered has been called 
 " revelation," means simply that our race pro- 
 duces from time to time a certain number of 
 open ears. " Religion's silence " is, after all, 
 a relative term. When our spirits are attuned, 
 the " silence " changes into a still, small, 
 but always recognisable Divine voice.
 
 VIII. 
 A Doctrine of Remnants. 
 
 THE cosmic scheme we live under includes 
 plainly a Discipline of Remnants. The unseen 
 law ordains that at a swiftly coming period 
 of our career we shall seem but a fragment of 
 our former selves. The athlete of thirty years 
 ago walks with stiffened limbs to gaze at the 
 impossible feats of his successor. Faded poli- 
 ticians, actors, preachers, watch from their 
 obscurity the men who now fill the public 
 eye. How the old stars have paled ! Is this an 
 irony of nature ? Is there a sardonic humour 
 overhead which delights in turning our poor, 
 boastful humanity inside out and showing how 
 ridiculous it is ? If there be any jesting in 
 the spheres we certainly lay ourselves open 
 to it. Our modern inflation and frantic 
 self-advertisement invite rebuff, and we get 
 it. Do men who live solely in the breath 
 of popular applause ; who are never easy unless 
 the limelight is on them ; whose attitude is a
 
 72 PEOBLBMS OF LIVING. 
 
 perpetual cry, " Behold me, good people, I 
 am important," ever reflect on what is await- 
 ing them ? They will be taken down in good 
 time. And yet not unkindly. For behind the 
 remnant-discipline there looms a remnant- 
 doctrine, and it is one that should not only 
 console but inspire. There is, doubtless, 
 humour in the universe, a humour which shows 
 in the treatment we get. But it was for some- 
 thing other than laughter that the strokes 
 were ordained that leave us so often only a 
 fragment of ourselves. 
 
 Early in history did our doctrine begin to 
 disclose itself to the finer minds. The Old 
 Testament is full of it. As there stated, it 
 deals with the community rather than the indi- 
 vidual, but it has abundant suggestion for our 
 personal fates. The pressure of moral and 
 political calamity turned the whole Jewish 
 mind upon the significance of the remnant. 
 The study left them with the conviction that 
 the remnant was the essential. In morals it 
 was the minority that saved. Ten righteous 
 would have preserved Sodom. A later voice 
 declared of Israel that " had it not been for a 
 very small remnant we had been as Sodom 
 and even as Gomorrah." After the exile it
 
 A DOCTRINE OF REMNANTS. 73 
 
 dawned upon the prophetic spirits that the 
 shattering of the kingdom was the beginning 
 of a larger destiny. It was not out of the 
 monarchy, out of the State in its vigour and 
 prosperity, but from this broken remnant 
 that the religion was to arise whose later de- 
 velopment should conquer the world. The old 
 organism had been smashed that something 
 imprisoned in it might be liberated for a vaster 
 mission. 
 
 The prophetic view here has received the 
 confirmation of history. The evidence has 
 been ever accumulating that the remnant- 
 doctrine represents one of the laws of life. 
 At first sight it might seem a hard and even a 
 senseless one. " What," we exclaim, " sacri- 
 fice the bulk for the sake of the remnant ? 
 Why this waste ? Why so much blossom 
 on the ground for this tiny fruit on the tree ; 
 thousands of blooms for our one little ounce 
 of attar of roses ; a new religious conception 
 at the price of a nation's shattering ? What 
 use to preach economy, when the nature of 
 things under which we live is such a reckless 
 prodigal ? " The objection would be a real 
 one if it represented the whole truth. But it 
 leaves half the fact unstated. We forget here
 
 74 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 that the fabrics and organisms which, in 
 breaking up, yield this remnant are not them- 
 selves really wasted. To be dissolved is not 
 to be lost. The blossom on the ground is as 
 much cared for as the fruit on the tree. The 
 structure that has gone is yet in another sense 
 here, precious, imperishable ; destined, in 
 other forms, to the service of the Whole. 
 
 It is to be noted also that our remnant, 
 while representing on one side an evident loss, 
 exhibits on another a vast accretion. When 
 Michael Angelo had finished his " Moses," 
 the statue was, in a sense, only a fragment of 
 the block out of which he had hewn it. Yet, 
 balancing every piece that had been struck 
 off, a something had been added. Concur- 
 rently with the visible wastage was there a 
 spiritual inflow. The stroke that severed the 
 marble replaced it with a sentiment, with an 
 impress of artistry, with the reflex of a soul's 
 beauty. And so the statue ended by being 
 immeasurably greater than the block. We 
 should miss the whole formative idea of the 
 doctrine of remnants did we not recognise 
 this same process on the wider scale of world- 
 history. Again and again do we find, both 
 in the community and in the individual, that
 
 A DOCTRINE or REMNANTS. 75 
 
 the shrinkage of visibles has been simply a 
 clearing of the road for the passage inward of 
 incomparable invisibles. In a true evolution 
 there is, in fact, no giving up without this 
 answering intake. We have dropped one 
 value to receive a greater. The rude bulk 
 has vanished ; but, could we see, we should 
 find in its place a secret energy and a vast 
 promise. Christianity has translated this cos- 
 mic mystery into its doctrine of renunciation, 
 of dying to live. Giving up is simply making 
 room. Of St. Francis it was said, " Ante 
 obitum mortuus, post obitum vivus " " dead 
 was he before dying, and alive after death." 
 He had hewed away at his externals till there 
 seemed next to nothing left. But so vast was 
 the answer from the Unseen, that this de- 
 nuded life was, in its generation, the richest 
 and most potent of all. 
 
 As, with this clue in our hand, we survey 
 the great world-processes around us, we reach 
 an inward assurance that fears not the most 
 revolutionary changes. The changes are 
 coming. The compacted system of thought 
 and belief which our fathers bequeathed to us 
 is in parts visibly cracking and breaking down. 
 But as we look closer we discover a something
 
 76 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 hidden there, an indestructible fragment of 
 which this system has been the appointed 
 guardian, and which, as the old framework 
 passes, is to be the corner-stone of a new and 
 nobler structure. We need not be afraid of 
 the new when we have learned that it is 
 always the old we cherished carried to a 
 higher expression. We may melt our theo- 
 logy and find in the process a vast shrinkage 
 of the original bulk. But not an ounce of its 
 pure gold will have disappeared. 
 
 We began this theme, however, for the 
 sake mainly of its bearing on our individual 
 lives, and it is time we turned more definitely 
 to that one of its aspects. On the broad scale 
 we have seen that the remnant is the last 
 thing we should despise or despair of. But 
 it is precisely when we apply the doctrine to 
 our personal fates that our faith is apt to fail. 
 We do not like being a remnant. We are not 
 good at fighting what seems a losing battle. 
 " Our line is broken : then sauve qui pent." 
 There are numbers of people who die simply 
 because they have not the courage to live. 
 Chalmers, the great missionary, reports how 
 the natives he worked amongst, when smitten 
 with disease sank, he was convinced in many
 
 A DOCTRINE OF REMNANTS. 77 
 
 instances, simply because from the beginning 
 they gave up hope. And he tells how, on 
 the contrary, he once willed himself back to 
 life. At death's door with fever and believing 
 himself passing, he heard some of his native 
 helpers bewailing then: certain doom in savage 
 New Guinea if their leader died. He realised 
 at that moment that he could not afford to 
 die. His will awoke, he called on his fading 
 energies, and from that moment his face was 
 turned from death. And we remember how 
 Melancthon recovered because Luther's faith 
 would not let him go. 
 
 The world is full of people whose whole 
 happiness and inner salvation depend upon 
 their doctrine and practice of the remnant. 
 We have referred already to the decay and 
 obscurity of later life. But the position is 
 equally true of multitudes in their prime. 
 With them also the fragment is all that seems 
 left. They have lost the thing which made 
 life desirable. Their fortune has gone, or 
 their friend, or their health. Passion has 
 wrought disillusion. The man or woman on 
 whom they had staked their affections is 
 not what they thought. The cup which 
 brimmed and sparkled has turned into a
 
 78 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 draught of bitterness. Is this then life's 
 defeat ? Not unless we choose. Some of 
 us are old enough to recognise that the crush- 
 ing blow of years gone by was the stroke that 
 liberated our true self. It was when we were 
 forced back from the path we craved the 
 entrance gate slammed in our face that 
 we found the road on which our destiny was 
 to be accomplished. There is no loss of 
 fortune, no wreck of personal affection, no 
 disaster in the sphere of the visible, but can be 
 turned by the soul's inner energy into some 
 higher phase of living. Pascal, as his sister 
 tells us, made his ill-health into a means of 
 spiritual perfection. Wesley accepted the 
 wreck of domestic happiness as another call 
 to his public work. 
 
 And as the cultivation of the remnant in 
 ourselves is often our personal salvation, so is 
 it with that of our brother man. In the home 
 and the more intimate relations it is here the 
 question is decided of desert or paradise. 
 The husband, the son, may be large part of them 
 savage. The higher human is in them as a 
 thin streak, a fragment. But to discover 
 that, and work incessantly upon it, ignoring 
 the rest, is the supreme art of wifehood and
 
 A DOCTRINE OF REMNANTS. 79 
 
 motherhood. Here also is the ground and the 
 hope of all evangelising. Noblest work as- 
 suredly is this to which any mortal can lend 
 himself, to believe in and back up the hard- 
 pressed spiritual in our brother, until it can 
 stand of itself against the overwhelming odds, 
 and expel the Philistine and the Canaanite 
 from its promised land. 
 
 If we have correctly stated the facts of 
 life as related to this theme, they point to 
 one conclusion. Exposed as he is to such a 
 destiny, there is for man no middle term 
 between despair and faith. If our seeming 
 failures and disappointments, our loppings 
 and prunings on every side, have not their 
 solution in a higher and infinite destiny, for 
 which these things are a preparation, then 
 indeed is our life a sordid mockery. The 
 sinister advice of the gloomy Roman satirist 
 
 Interea, dum fata sinunt 
 Jungamus amores 
 
 " Meanwhile, as long as the fates permit, let 
 us enjoy our lusts," would to multitudes seem 
 natural and in place. Renan's terrible sug_ 
 gestion in the " Abbesse de Jouarre " that 
 humanity without hope would deliver itself 
 up to unbridled licentiousness has in it a
 
 80 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 ghastly probability. Indeed, to-day where 
 faith is weakening the tendency is all in this 
 direction. Men revenge themselves against 
 the cosmic cruelty by a reckless indulgence. 
 "After a certain age there is nothing left but 
 the pleasures of the table " the remark at a 
 city banquet is the modern echo of " Let us 
 eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." Strange 
 that the revolt of our highest instincts against 
 such a solution should not convince men that 
 it is false and impossible. The whole world- 
 process is against it. If, looming out of his- 
 tory, we see everywhere the doctrine of the 
 remnant ; if nations and systems dying down 
 leave ever behind a something precious that 
 survives ; if physical wasting means so con- 
 stantly an inner and spiritual accretion, why 
 should we not carry the doctrine to its legi- 
 timate conclusion, and hold, as religion's 
 mystic voice affirms, that the break-up of our 
 physical frame means again a survival ; that 
 this last catastrophe is for a new and greater 
 beginning ?
 
 IX. 
 Our Enemy. 
 
 To have an enemy is an experience common 
 to us all. We may be the most pacific among 
 mortals, but we cannot escape being in oppo- 
 sition to somebody. Hostility fronts us some- 
 where, if not in our individual, at least in 
 our corporate and communal capacity. To be, 
 for instance, an Englishman is to stir the bile 
 of a dozen outside nationalities. We are 
 part of the world, whose present aspect would 
 almost justify Hobbes' contention that warfare 
 is man's natural condition, and that peace is 
 a mere truce and interlude. The nations 
 glower at each other from behind their arma- 
 ments. Each people nurtures its grudge 
 against its neighbour. We are fain to believe 
 the cynic couplet : 
 
 Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure, 
 Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure. 
 
 And while this is the result of a world-survey,
 
 82 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 the prospect is not dissimilar as we narrow 
 the view. In England one-half of us is at 
 loggerheads with the other half on account 
 of religion. The odium theologicum still con- 
 tinues to poison the sweetest natures. It was 
 with this in view surely that Lucretius wrote 
 his terrible line : 
 
 Saepius olim 
 
 Religio peperit scelerosa atque 
 impia facta. 
 
 We do not now burn each other alive, but 
 when a Newman, so naturally amiable, 
 described as " like Scott able only to see the 
 best and highest in human character, hoping 
 ever against hope," could write, " a publisher 
 of heresy should be treated as if he were 
 embodied evil," we realise what an abiding 
 and formidable source we have here of human 
 estrangement. 
 
 In addition to these outside and public 
 causes we find our private life, from time to 
 time, yielding us " our enemy." In our 
 journeying onward there falls upon us now 
 and again the shadow of another man's 
 dislike. Without meaning or wishing it we 
 find ourselves standing in some one else's 
 way. Our interests clash, and we become
 
 OUR ENEMY. 83 
 
 the mark for a rival's hostility. Or it may 
 be a matter, not so much of outward interests 
 as of innate antipathies. Human nature has 
 its unaccountable attractions and repulsions. 
 There are temperaments which inevitably 
 jar one upon another. The qualities which 
 draw to us one type of mind produce revulsion 
 elsewhere. " That man dislikes us," we say 
 to ourselves, " and he cannot help it." 
 
 Life, then, as we know it, contains " the 
 enemy " as a part of its usual conditions. 
 The point now is, what place does he take in 
 our philosophy ? Where do we put him in 
 that inner code we have framed of our daily 
 thought and procedure ? That is a Sphinx 
 question which meets us all to-day, and 
 demands an answer under penalties. As the 
 average man looks round for that answer he 
 finds himself confronted by all manner of 
 complicated problems. Human history, cosmic 
 history and the Sermon on the Mount appear 
 hopelessly at issue. And if the seeming 
 quarrel here between science and religion can 
 be settled, is he any nearer a working code ? 
 Is the Sermon " practical politics " ? What is 
 really meant by its doctrine of forgiveness 
 and of non-resistance ? Here are matters
 
 84 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 which it is impossible to discuss with any 
 approach to completeness, but on which, 
 nevertheless, we will venture some hints. 
 
 Without entering on the critical question 
 which scholars raise as to how far Christ's 
 teaching, here as elsewhere, took the form, 
 constantly used and recognised in the East, 
 of rhetorical extreme, let us ask ourselves 
 first how the doctrine, as given us in the Gospel, 
 relates itself to human and to cosmic history. 
 At first sight there seems a gulf. The doctrine, 
 we say, is a peace doctrine, yet the world as 
 we know it appears to be organised on a 
 fighting basis. Everywhere is there the clash 
 of opposites, and it is by these mighty strivings 
 the universe is kept going. Our planet is held 
 in its orbit by the tug of war between a cen- 
 tripetal and a centrifugal force. Evolution is 
 all through a gigantic struggle. Fiske is 
 not exaggerating when he declares, " battles 
 far more deadly than Gettysburg or Gravelotte 
 have been incessantly waged on every square 
 mile of earth's life-bearing surface since life 
 first began." And man from the beginning 
 has been a fighting animal. He has fought 
 for his tribal and national existence, for his 
 territory, for his religion, for his commerce.
 
 OUR ENEMY. 85 
 
 Almost every human result hitherto has been 
 blood-bought. 
 
 In the face of this, what is the meaning of 
 Christ's teaching ? Is it a pronouncement 
 against history and the cosmic scheme ? Does 
 His " I say unto you " declare these imme- 
 morial struggles, with their blood and tears, 
 to have been a blunder and a crime ? Such an 
 interpretation would be an utter misunder- 
 standing both of Christ and the past. It 
 would be an accusation not merely of man 
 but of God. Very different does the message 
 appear when set in its true framework, as 
 part of the nature of things. It then reveals 
 to us Christ as taking His place not against 
 evolution, but in the line of it, and unfolding 
 to us the mystery of its higher law. The earlier 
 fight had been for a purpose ; it was a needed 
 fight, and it was still to go on. But hence- 
 forth with new weapons. What happened 
 to the world in the advent and teaching of 
 Jesus was, in the moral sphere, precisely 
 what had been continuously witnessed in other 
 departments of life the supercession, namely, 
 of a lower power by a higher. Humanity in 
 its progress is continually evolving new forces, 
 each more subtle than the last. In the
 
 86 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 physical region it begins with muscle, gets 
 by-and-by to steam and railway, until elec- 
 tricity promises to supersede both. The fresh 
 instrument is at first handled awkwardly, 
 and leads to all manner of accidents. The 
 primitive sailor would do better steering 
 by the coastline than by a compass he did 
 not understand. The savage prefers his bow 
 and arrow till he learns the mystery of the 
 rifle. There will be a hecatomb of aeronauts 
 before man has conquered the upper air. 
 
 In like manner, in the moral sphere, Christ, 
 with His doctrine of forgiveness and of " non- 
 resistance," brought, we say, into the human 
 conflict a new weapon which, in time, will 
 supersede the old. His " non-resistance " did 
 not mean the discontinuance of fighting. 
 Christ was the greatest fighter the world 
 has seen. Alone He stood up against the 
 mob, against the priesthood, against the 
 empire, against almost everything there was, 
 and with the might of His single personality 
 fought for a new kingdom and a new style of 
 life. The weapon He introduced is only just 
 beginning to be understood, so slowly does 
 human history move. But as surely as electric 
 traction will take the place of animal haulage,
 
 OTJE ENEMY. 87 
 
 so surely will Christ's way of dealing with evil 
 and with " our enemy " supersede the brute- 
 force method of an earlier time. It is not 
 so much theology as science that is to-day 
 affirming this. Herbert Spencer has hinted 
 as much in his " Ethics," and that ardent 
 Spencerian John Fiske declares that the next 
 stage of human evolution will show an enorm- 
 ous increase of altruism and sympathy. The 
 Christian doctrine, he declares, was a foresight 
 of the scientific result. 
 
 Christ's method was to oppose to the enemy 
 the force, not of muscle, but of the soul. That 
 force could not have been used before humanity 
 had reached a certain level, for it was not there. 
 But its mystic pulsations are now being felt 
 over ever-widening areas and with ever-in- 
 creasing distinctness, and there can be no 
 doubt what the result will be. Men are timid 
 at trying a new law. It is like mounting a 
 bicycle for the first time. But the expert 
 knows the new law is as sure as any of the 
 old ones, and will never fail him. The early 
 Christians were experts of the higher knowledge. 
 Those of whom Athenagoras says, " When 
 struck they do not strike again ; when robbed 
 they do not go to law ; they give to those who
 
 88 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 ask of them, and love their neighbours as them- 
 selves," were men who knew themselves as 
 conquerors. They were in charge of a force 
 against which swords and spears were as 
 nought. And wherever since it has been 
 tried the results have been equally unmistak- 
 able. In John Woolman's delightful Auto- 
 biography, we read how he went, single- 
 handed and unarmed, to preach the Gospel to 
 a tribe of Indians, actually on the warpath 
 against his own countrymen, delivered his 
 message, and returned without a hair of his 
 head being injured. And the heroic mission- 
 ary of the South Seas, John G. Paton, records 
 how a band of native Christians visited a 
 cannibal tribe who had threatened with death 
 any who should approach their village. " We 
 come," said the chief and his companions, 
 " without weapons of war. We come only to 
 tell you about Jesus." Spears were thrown 
 at them, which they secured and turned aside 
 with their bare hands. " The heathen were 
 perfectly overawed. They manifestly looked 
 on the Christians as protected by some In- 
 visible One. We lived to see that chief and 
 all his tribe sitting in the school of Christ." 
 The conquest of the world by this new
 
 OUR ENEMY. 89 
 
 spirit may be accomplished sooner than 
 present appearances would seem to indicate. 
 What we have to judge by is not the bristling 
 armaments so much as the new thought that 
 is working in the minds of men. It is astonish- 
 ing how quickly the world can be swept clean 
 by a fresh idea. Never was the stage coach 
 system so developed, so prosperous, so seem- 
 ingly established as on the eve of its disappear- 
 ance. A thought came into the mind of 
 Geordie Stephenson, and stage coachism was 
 gone. History is made not by treaties and 
 diplomacies, but by the working towards the 
 front of a deep, common impulse that possesses 
 the souls of men. 
 
 And while these ideas are preparing to 
 rule and remake the world, it is for us to gladly 
 open our hearts to their sway upon our individ- 
 ual life. He is a babe indeed who has not yet 
 learned the bliss of forgiving his enemy, the 
 bliss of returning good for his evil. There are 
 so many reasons for forgiving him, and all 
 good ones. He may have a just cause of 
 offence against us, and then, plainly, our 
 business is not reprisals, but personal amend- 
 ment. Nine times out of ten, hostility is an 
 affair of misconception. " He threw the water
 
 90 PEOBLEMS or LIVING. 
 
 not on me, but on the man he thought I was," 
 was the calm comment of Archelaus of Macedon 
 on the citizen who thus behaved to him. When 
 abused for what is really foreign to our 
 character the reply is to exhibit our true 
 character. " Not to do likewise is the best 
 revenge." Our enemy is never entirely our 
 enemy. The best part of him is our friend, and 
 the appeal of our highest to his highest will 
 be precisely the help he needs in his conflict 
 against himself. However our material inter- 
 ests may clash, our spiritual ones are the same, 
 and can never be furthered except in this way. 
 And amongst all the delights tasted by the 
 epicures of sensation there is none with a 
 more exquisite flavour than this of gaining, 
 in the simple Christian way, the confidence and 
 esteem of a brother who has been divided from 
 us. In this treatment of " the enemy," 
 whether public or private, the New Testament 
 ethic is the most daring experiment which the 
 book of history records, but it is one whose 
 soundness is revealed by every new test. Here, 
 as elsewhere, Christ has revealed to us the 
 ultimate law of human living.
 
 X. 
 At the Front. 
 
 " AT the front " is a phrase which a great 
 war burns into our minds. It means the line 
 of extremest exposure. It is curious to note 
 the gradations of endurance amongst a people 
 who are waging a campaign. At the farthest 
 rear are the home irresponsibles, who pay no 
 costs, incur no risks, and to whom the war is 
 mainly a subject of gossip. Beyond these are 
 the taxpayers, who have a stake in the matter, 
 who lose with the war's losses, but who per- 
 sonally are shielded from its real horrors. 
 Further in front are the executive government 
 who carry a wearing strain of responsibility. 
 In a totally different position from all these 
 are the men in the actual field of operations. 
 But even here there are gradations. Those 
 on the lines of communication, occupied with 
 the mechanism of transport, may go through 
 the war without being in sight of the foe. But 
 finally there is the man who, by ship, by train, 
 
 91
 
 92 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 by long marchings, has in succession passed 
 all these halting-places of his countrymen, 
 until he is at a point where there is nothing 
 between himself and the bullet of the enemy. 
 He is "at the front." In the firing line each 
 man carries the whole tragedy of the war in his 
 own single breast. He is at exposure's utmost 
 limit, at the very meeting of life and death. 
 In an army this is the post of honour. The 
 man who has stood there and stood well is a 
 veteran. It is a place which the best men 
 choose. In the list of British dead, after 
 a battle, one has noted always the large pro- 
 portion of officers. They fell because they 
 understood that, for honour's sake and for 
 the sake of the rank and file behind, they 
 must be "at the front." 
 
 That is how matters arrange themselves in 
 time of war. Let us look now a moment at 
 the conditions in time of peace. There is up 
 to a certain point a striking parallel. Up to 
 a certain point ; but here emerges an enormous 
 difference, upon which it will be well to direct 
 some attention. In our civil society, just as 
 in our military operations, there is a firing 
 line, a point of uttermost exposure, and behind 
 it, at successive removes, the halting-places
 
 AT THE FRONT. 93 
 
 of the sheltered and protected classes. As to 
 the front rank, any winter's experience enables 
 us to trace its outline with a deadly precision. 
 In that struggle for existence which we call 
 peace we are most of us at a farther or less 
 remove from the firing line. Against the 
 fierce elemental powers, against frost and 
 snow, against cold and hunger, we are sheltered 
 behind the walls of our homes, behind our 
 bank balances, behind our strength and 
 energy. But we read in the papers of men, 
 women and children who, in this battle, have 
 no entrenchments. They are veritably " at 
 the front." The fortunes of our peace- war 
 have thrust them beyond the shelter of homes. 
 The midnight cold finds them in the open. 
 Without employment, without clothing, with- 
 out food, between them and barbaric Nature's 
 wildest onset there is nothing. 
 
 So far the parallel holds. In campaigning 
 abroad, and in the social state as we have it 
 at home, there is equally a line of utmost 
 exposure. As the soldier faces the extremity 
 of hardship, the full brunt of the actual and 
 all the terrors of the unknown, so here, in full 
 view of the rest of us, is it with the files of our 
 unendowed. But now opens the strange and
 
 94 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 sinister difference. In military operations the 
 front line is furnished with leaders. Precisely 
 where the exposure is greatest there, at a 
 pinch, you will find the best stuff in the army. 
 The firing line notes its officers in front, and 
 is heartened by the sight. And the central 
 commanding brain of the force is working 
 at every point of that line. The advance is an 
 organised business. The front is a post of 
 honour and a way to power. But in the other 
 condition all this is reversed. On this firing 
 line we have an endurance that is without 
 leaders and without hope. Its hardships 
 win no battles and gain no glory. There is no 
 presiding genius directing its operations, no 
 gladdening sight of a leader who shares the 
 danger and cheers with inspiring words. The 
 ranks here are a rabble and not an army. 
 They have not chosen the post, but have been 
 driven there by grimmest fate. The foe is 
 armed to the teeth, but these bear no weapons. 
 Their one consciousness is of helplessness and 
 despair. 
 
 Here, truly, is something for us to reflect 
 on ! We decry our militarism, but it is our 
 civism that needs mending. Our war is far 
 less cruel than our peace. What is the remedy ?
 
 AT THE FRONT. 95 
 
 It is when we begin to discuss this question 
 that the vastness of our social disorganisation 
 appears. The masses suffer because they are 
 without a head, without a system, without a 
 programme. An army comes to disaster when 
 every man has his plan, and is left to carry it 
 out, and that at present is our civic state. In 
 crises of this kind the separate impulses of the 
 individual are no remedy. Their very oppo- 
 sition adds only to the confusion. Selfish- 
 ness and generosity defeat each other's ends. 
 In the hunger time one man makes a corner in 
 provisions, and enriches himself through the 
 general starvation. His neighbour, driven by 
 conscience and the sight of the suffering, pro- 
 poses to strip himself of his property and 
 become as poor as the rest. But would the 
 self-sacrifice of the one be any more a solution 
 than the selfishness of the other ? We doubt 
 it. In nine cases out of ten it would be to 
 transfer resources from good and capable 
 hands to hands that were neither good nor 
 capable. The mere impulse to make things 
 easy all round is not a help, but a mischief. 
 Carried out on a general scale, it would result 
 simply in a rush of the improvident to the 
 centres where the good things were going, in
 
 96 PEOBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 a swift deterioration of ability and character, 
 followed at no distant period by social bank- 
 ruptcy. 
 
 We shall not get our solution till we have 
 more squarely faced the question, " What 
 is it that our front line needs ? What are its 
 real foes and how may it be helped in the 
 fight against them ? " Let us understand to 
 begin with that this enemy is not mere physical 
 endurance, mere physical hardship. These are 
 not enemies. In humanity's balance-sheets 
 they can never be reckoned on the adverse 
 side. They are part of the making of man- 
 hood. If they were out of reach we should 
 die for the lack of them. The strenuous fore- 
 most nations have everywhere been brought 
 up on hardship. The Spartan system drew 
 on it as a recipe for victory. In modern life 
 men will rush from the luxury of clubland that, 
 in Thibet or Central Africa, they may satiate 
 the desire within them for hunger and thirst, 
 and weariness and danger. Where men and 
 women give up the strenuous life, the ele- 
 mental conflict with nature, and entrench 
 themselves at the farthest remove from the 
 front, intent only on a soft indulgence, we see 
 speedily the pass they come to. We have the
 
 AT THE FRONT. 97 
 
 spectacle of a fashionable society, diseased at 
 its centre, poisoning the air with the stench 
 of its vices. And in healthier sections the 
 question needs assuredly to be pondered, 
 which Professor William James pointedly asks 
 in his Gifford lectures, " Whether the modern 
 easy system of bringing up children is not 
 developing a certain trashiness of fibre ? " 
 
 Hardship is not the enemy. The foe that 
 haunts our poor front line has a grimmer 
 aspect. His name is Despair. And the way 
 to fight despair is not by alms or by coddling, 
 but by work. We need to reorganise our 
 front line on a basis of work. Work, nothing 
 else and nothing less, is the gospel of social 
 salvation. It is a gospel that has to be 
 taught. Many of the feckless ones on the 
 line of exposure are there from the lack of 
 will rather than of opportunity. Very 
 well, a will must be found for them. If 
 there is not one inside, a will outside must 
 serve. Society must perforce add here to 
 its benevolent compulsions. Knowing, as 
 we now do, that neither State nor individual 
 can prosper apart from labour, the daily 
 task must be made compulsory, just as 
 education or the decent covering of the body
 
 98 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 is compulsory. Here Germany, with her 
 labour colonies, may well instruct us. The 
 loafer must cease out of the land. In a com- 
 munity where everybody is healthily at work, 
 hopelessness and despair die a natural death. 
 But evidently to reach the consummation 
 of a universal, wholesome industry is a question 
 of something more than of the worker himself . 
 Most of our front liners are willing, but where 
 is the work ? It is here we see the chaotic 
 condition of our social system. It is only the 
 rudiment of a formation, a mob rather than 
 an army. We cannot put up much longer 
 with this barbarism. The human family, 
 recognising its essential solidarity, is casting 
 about to-day for the organs of its expression, 
 and will not be long in finding them. One of 
 the first stages in the new evolution will un- 
 questionably be in a municipal and State 
 organisation of labour. Its special function 
 as a beginning will be a supply of alternative 
 tasks. The immense specialisation of modern 
 industry has made our workers helpless out- 
 side of the one detail in which they are pro- 
 ficient. When business is slack in the Leicester 
 shoe factory, or the composing-room of the 
 London printer, the shoemaker and the com-
 
 AT THE FRONT. 99 
 
 positor are straightway " unemployed." That 
 is a condition which the State must remedy. 
 It must have its organisation of alternative 
 industries. There need be no lack of these. 
 The work is waiting. It is the co-ordinating 
 mind that is wanting. Half our cities need 
 rebuilding ; great agricultural areas wait to 
 be developed ; vast treasuries of underground 
 wealth lie unopened. Not a fraction of the new 
 toils need be unremunerative. Denmark has 
 shown us how the State, stepping hi as teacher 
 and director of agricultural enterprise, con- 
 verted in a few years one of the poorest coun- 
 tries in Europe into one of the richest. Eng- 
 land, which spent two hundred and fifty millions 
 in the war in South Africa, can afford to back 
 its own people in their war against want. 
 There is no superfluous population. Every 
 individual can be a wealth-creator, if the 
 community will give him his chance. 
 
 But the communal responsibility here does 
 not destroy our own. If war's code of honour 
 sends the officers to the firing line the Christian 
 code in this other fight has something not less 
 stringent to say to the religious man. The 
 asceticism of some of the great saints was 
 evidently their answer to this call. They
 
 100 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 wanted to be in humanity's firing line. " Where 
 my brothers are, at the point of utmost ex- 
 posure, there must I be, to share their feeling 
 and to hearten them by my faith," was evi- 
 dently the argument that went on in their 
 soul. And it cannot be well with us, either 
 in this world or the next, if we skulk in our 
 entrenchments, or seek only to penetrate 
 nearer the centre, while on the far periphery, 
 where the guns are booming, our brothers are 
 left by us to fight their grim battle uncom- 
 passionated and unhelped. Says Bunyan, 
 "Woe be to those against whom the Scriptures 
 bend themselves." Against none do they bend 
 with a sterner menace than those who, in the 
 absorption of their own self-regard, have for- 
 gotten their neighbour. When we have ceased 
 to care for and help our brother we have 
 turned our back upon God.
 
 XI. 
 Principles and Persons. 
 
 OUR moral and religious loyalties are continually 
 posing us with difficult problems. Of these 
 none are more confusing than the rival attrac- 
 tions of principles and of persons. We are 
 here continually pulled in opposite ways. 
 The people who most fervently utter our 
 shibboleth are often those we least admire. 
 " So and so," we say, " is perfectly sound on 
 our position. But oh, if only he were a 
 gentleman ! " On the other hand, we meet 
 somebody whose views have been a bugbear 
 to us for years and straightway fall in love 
 with him. " Don't introduce me to that 
 man," said Lamb once. " I feel it my duty 
 to hate him, and you can't hate a man when 
 you know him ! " One might, indeed, at first 
 sight suppose there was really no connection 
 between persons and principles, that the labels 
 were there by chance, and had nothing to do 
 with the essential character. Could one 
 101
 
 102 PEOBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 imagine a greater difference between the formu- 
 lated theology of General Gordon and the 
 views of Charles Darwin ! And yet these 
 two men produced on Huxley the same moral 
 impression. Says he of Gordon : "He and 
 Darwin, of all the people I have known in 
 my life, are the two in whom I have found 
 something bigger than ordinary humanity 
 an unequalled simplicity and directness of 
 purpose a sublime unselfishness." 
 
 To conclude, however, from observations 
 of this kind, that principles have no causal 
 or effective relation to persons would be 
 to take a most superficial view of the matter. 
 The search for the truth here leads through 
 winding and difficult ways, but the path is at 
 every point full of interest, and it opens 
 finally upon the widest prospects. It brings 
 us to the old-fashioned conclusions, but with 
 new reasons for them. Everywhere, as our 
 fathers taught us, principles rule character 
 and create it. The seeming anomalies clear 
 themselves away when we look a little deeper 
 into what we mean by principles, and into 
 the way in which they work. 
 
 In such a quest one of the first discoveries 
 is that people's so-called views, religious or
 
 PRINCIPLES AND PERSONS. 103 
 
 otherwise, are often enough not their life 
 principles at all. A remark of Bishop Creigh- 
 ton, in one of his mediaeval studies, illustrates 
 what we mean. " In mediaeval times," says 
 he, " men were much more concerned to 
 have an ideal than they were interested to 
 realise it. They rejoiced in the possession 
 of principles, but they were chary in applying 
 them." The Bishop might have gone further 
 here. In the religious wars he was depicting 
 the opposing theological propositions of the 
 combatants were not really their principles. 
 They were simply watchwords, rallying points, 
 for the concentration of opposing hosts whose 
 real motor power was the fighting instinct. 
 There are, of course, times when the written 
 or spoken formulary does express the inner 
 passion, but it is by no means always. The 
 distinction here is simple enough, but we are 
 continually overlooking it, and floundering 
 in consequence. 
 
 With the mediae valists, as with ourselves, 
 principles governed character, but the prin- 
 ciples did not, and do not, always lie in formu- 
 lated propositions. The deepest things in 
 us are ideas, but ideas that as yet have 
 not got into human speech. They are, in
 
 104 PEOBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 Tennyson's words, " deep-seated in our mystic 
 frame." They constitute what Milton speaks 
 of as " the utterless facts." One of the axioms 
 of M. Taine's philosophy was that every 
 man is a theorem a bundle of principles work- 
 ing out. It is a far cry from Taine to Plato. 
 The world-views of the two men were most of 
 them as the poles asunder. Yet in the Greek 
 thinker's position, that all things and persons 
 have as their essence an antecedent type, 
 an eternal idea that is expressed hi the forms 
 we see, there is an unmistakable kinship 
 with this latest utterance of French culture. 
 
 It is along this line, indeed, that we get 
 within sight of the conclusion that persons, 
 in the ultimate of their character, are, despite 
 all surface appearances to the contrary, the 
 creation of principles. The history, both of 
 individuals and of generations, is the harvest 
 of vast, Divine ideas that lie behind the 
 visible, and that are working themselves 
 out on the plane of human affairs. These 
 ideas wait their appointed time, wait that 
 they may incarnate themselves in flesh and 
 blood, in character and action. How long 
 many of them have to wait ! One might 
 almost think that at times they grow im-
 
 PRINCIPLES AND PERSONS. 105 
 
 patient and seek to make a premature en- 
 trance on the scene. We read, for instance, 
 how, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, 
 the principle of universal peace was floating 
 over Europe. Says Erasmus : " There is a 
 project to have a Congress of Kings at Cambrai, 
 to enter into mutual engagements to preserve 
 peace with each other and through Europe. 
 But certain persons, who get nothing by 
 peace and a great deal by war, throw obstacles 
 in the way." In this matter, alas ! the 
 " persons " and the " obstacles " are not yet 
 out of the way. But the day will come when 
 the human developement will have reached 
 the point at which man and the principle 
 will fit each other, and then the nations will 
 learn war no more. 
 
 It is indeed a high day in the human story 
 when a great principle reaches its hour. For 
 ages it may have been working silently along 
 the subterranean channels of the world's 
 life. At times it has, for a brief moment, shown 
 itself above the surface, only to be hunted 
 back again, with scoff and insult. But it is 
 already in the blood, and will, by-and-by, 
 mount to the brain's throne. There had been 
 Luthers before Luther, assertors of the soul's
 
 106 PEOBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 immediacy of access to God without mediation 
 of priests. But they were swallows before 
 the summer. Spiritual history has its own 
 rate of progress, as inevitable as the process 
 of the suns. When the appointed time is 
 come the idea creates its man, and the credential 
 of his authority is the echo of his word in 
 every soul. 
 
 To watch this steady, ceaseless infiltration 
 of the Divine ideas into humanity is one of 
 the fascinations of history. Of the great 
 moral divisions, one is into those with whom 
 a principle is merely a watch-word, a battle- 
 cry, and those in whom it is a working force. 
 There have been centuries in which Christianity 
 has been little more than the former. Men 
 thought they had done enough when they had 
 baptised their passions into the Church name. 
 The Renaissance abounded with characters 
 like that of .Eneas Sylvius Piccolomini, known 
 afterwards as Pope Pius II., who, while in 
 his earlier years a debauchee who gloried 
 in his shame, thought it enough, on gaining 
 the Popedom, to bid the world " renounce 
 ^Eneas but accept Pius." It would be absurd 
 to bracket characters of this order with 
 Christianity, as in any sense responsible
 
 PRINCIPLES AND PERSONS. 107 
 
 for them. One might as well try to judge 
 the quality of an inn from the picture on its 
 sign-board. The forces at work in such 
 lives have their origin in quite another quarter. 
 In distinction from them, and as illustrating 
 the outcome of a genuinely formative principle, 
 one may take Hazlitt's fine description of 
 some Dissenting ministers of his day : " They 
 were true priests. They set up an image 
 in their own minds it was truth. They 
 worshipped an idol there it was justice. 
 They looked on man as their brother, and 
 only bowed the knee to the Highest. Separating 
 from the world, they walked humbly with 
 their God, and in thought with those who 
 had borne testimony of a good conscience, 
 with the spirits of just men in all ages." 
 
 The principles at work in good men, which 
 are at once fashioning them, and enabling 
 them to fashion others, are often beyond their 
 own comprehension. They blunder badly when 
 they try to express them. We find strangely 
 narrow creeds professed by the noblest cha- 
 racters. Yet men cleave to and reverence 
 these teachers because of an inner persuasion 
 that, behind their spoken words, operating 
 as their real motor-power, are principles
 
 108 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 greater and nobler than their own theological 
 propositions. As we listen to the wits who 
 make the affirmations of these men the butt 
 of their ridicule, and who plume themselves 
 on their own deliverance from " childish 
 superstitions," the inmost of us laughs quietly 
 to itself. " Ah ! my fine gentlemen," it 
 seems to say, " and are you so very sure 
 of your own position ? These humble people, 
 with a great spiritual ideal flashing before 
 them, and in the strength of it devoting 
 themselves heart and soul to the service of 
 humanity, are they the right quarter for 
 your sneers ? Their fault, if they have one, 
 is simply a want of knowledge of the grandeur 
 of their principle. Whereas your fault, 
 well, the heavens will perhaps have something 
 to say to it presently." 
 
 The road we have travelled should help us 
 to unravel the puzzle with which we began. 
 The characters that, on opposite sides to our 
 own in the world's controversies, yet hold us 
 by their beauty, are not anomalies, nor con- 
 tradictions of spiritual truth. Wherever noble- 
 ness appears it is the outworking of eternal 
 principle. It could come in no other way 
 than by conformity to the highest. A physical
 
 PRINCIPLES AND PERSONS. 109 
 
 or an intellectual charm has ever some truth 
 of God for its origin. It tells of an ancestor, 
 maybe, who, while others were chaffering 
 about propositions, sought the fresh air, 
 and the open spaces, or mastered some ele- 
 mentary lessons in God's book of right living. 
 The grace of manner, the sweetness of temper 
 in our opponent, work back to that primal 
 law and ultimate gospel in which we and he 
 are one. Its appearance in him is an invita- 
 tion to us to betake ourselves, for our own 
 improvement, to the place where that lesson 
 was learned. 
 
 Principles and Persons. Perhaps we should 
 have inverted the title. For, as we think the 
 thing out, we find that in the order of being, 
 person must ever stand first. As we cross- 
 examine our mind we find it an unthinkable 
 proposition that " a principle of righteousness " 
 can exist apart from a pre-existent personality. 
 Righteousness is a characteristic of a soul, and 
 can be no otherwise imagined. When, there- 
 fore, we talk of Divine ideas filtering into 
 human history, the implication is always of 
 One in whom, finally, they inhere. The 
 principles that are slowly evolving themselves 
 in the human story are nothing less than the
 
 110 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 Incarnation of God in humanity. That is 
 how the early fathers interpreted Christianity. 
 How noble is this utterance of Justin Martyr, 
 writing from the edge of the Apostolic age ! 
 " He (Christ) is the Word of whom every 
 race of men were partakers ; and those who 
 live reasonably are Christians, even though they 
 have been thought atheists, as among the 
 Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus and men like 
 them." 
 
 There have we the world's great secret. 
 The uttermost truth of the Gospel is the 
 uttermost truth of life. In Christ the ultimate 
 Divine Principle has become the ultimate 
 Divine Person.
 
 XII. 
 On Keeping Young. 
 
 DUMAS, in one of his stories, pictures a com- 
 pany of old men to whom magician Cagliostro 
 administers one of his secret elixirs. It 
 works wonders. The wrinkles disappear from 
 the withered cheeks ; the aged eyes are lit 
 with the old fires ; the thoughts, the talk 
 are of twenty-five. The world and them- 
 selves are remade. But, alas ! the change 
 is not permanent. The glorious hour passes, 
 and leaves the company back in its senility, 
 with an added sense of weariness. Elderly 
 men read the page with a sigh. Ah, to be 
 young again ! Age is coming to be regarded 
 by the moderns as the shadow upon life. 
 Men exclaim that Nature here drives too 
 hard a bargain with them. What a wail 
 is that which Beranger raises when fifty ! 
 
 En maux cuisants la vieillesse abonde 
 G'est la goutte qui nous meurtrit ; 
 La excite, prison profonde, 
 La sui-dite, dont chacun rit. 
 ill
 
 112 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 And so on to the gloomy end. But even 
 his picture is not so dismal as that of Amiel, 
 who, at forty-seven, finds this as his out- 
 look : " All the swarm of my juvenile hopes 
 fled. I cannot conceal my outlook as one 
 of increasing isolation, interior mortification, 
 long regrets, inconsolable sadness, lugubrious 
 old age, slow agony, death in the desert." 
 
 What a gospel! Is this, then, all that 
 life, in its later stages, has to offer us ? If 
 so, we might honour the wisdom of those 
 Hyperboreans, of whom Clement speaks in 
 the " Stromata," who " took those who were 
 sixty years old without the gates and made 
 away with them." With Tithonus, we might 
 pray to be delivered from those burdened 
 years. We find ourselves, however, unable 
 to pass any such judgment on the order of 
 things under which we live. If there is a 
 mistake anywhere, it is not in the cosmic 
 system, but in our interpretation of it. For, 
 in the way, at least, in which Amiel and other 
 moderns picture the business, there is abso- 
 lutely no need to grow old. Life may be, 
 and was meant to be, an immortal youth. 
 
 Of course there is here a qualification. 
 We cannot put back the clock, and no phil-
 
 ON KEEPING YOUNG. 113 
 
 osophy can obliterate the difference between 
 seventy and twenty-one. Of each one of 
 us, if we live long enough, the poet's words 
 will be true : "He heard the voice that tells 
 men they are old." The march of the physical 
 processes is unceasing, and goes on without 
 our consent being asked. Our consciousness 
 is a kind of lodger in a vast establishment 
 whose business is carried on to a large extent 
 outside its cognisance. The heart is a labourer 
 to whom we pay no wages, with whom we hold 
 no conversation, who gets his orders else- 
 where, who elects to work, and at the end, 
 to cease to work without any say of ours in 
 the matter. And so of the other organs. 
 In some mysterious way they run the machine. 
 Someone has wound them up to go for a certain 
 time. When their energies slacken we feel 
 it, but cannot alter the situation. The body 
 ages, as a plant or a planet ages, by a rhythmic, 
 immutable process. 
 
 That at least is how it seems to us. It is 
 the way a biologist would talk. And yet 
 even here it is very easy to make a mistake. 
 Indeed, a vast blunder would it be to conclude 
 from such data that the body's work and 
 growth were independent of the soul. It is,
 
 114 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 let us remember, one thing to talk of our con- 
 sciousness, and quite another to talk of the 
 soul. The latter is as an iceberg floating in 
 ocean, the greater part of whose bulk is 
 beneath the surface. What we feel is only 
 a tithe of what we spiritually are. And 
 so it comes about that the apparent inde- 
 pendence of the physical processes is only 
 apparent. At every moment and at every 
 point the soul is influencing them nay, in a 
 manner creating them. Every physical state 
 has, inwoven with it, a mental one. A 
 gloomy mood blocks every bit of work the 
 organs are trying to do. Worry is a foe 
 to the heart, to the digestion, the circulation, 
 to every nerve, vesicle and brain cell, and 
 will leave on them all its evil mark. The 
 science of life is realising ever more clearly 
 the exact co-ordination between the spiritual 
 and the physical states. Our bodily weather 
 originates, all of it, in the uppermost spheres. 
 To the extent in which the soul is wrong 
 every part of us, from top to toe, is out of 
 gear. We see, then, that while the inevitable 
 years produce their results, the inner spiritual 
 conditions are at every point profoundly 
 modifying them.
 
 ON KEEPING YOUNG. 115 
 
 It is not, however, of this side of us that 
 we are chiefly thinking in our study of the art 
 of " keeping young." Indeed, in the process 
 of getting old it seems often as though the 
 body and the years had least to do with it. 
 There are men who are young at eighty, 
 and others who are old at thirty. One meets 
 people in their third decade who already are 
 disillusioned, disenchanted, aged at heart. 
 Their world, instead of being a wonder, 
 a temple, a mystery of delight, is banal and 
 empty. Bagehot, in writing of Lady Wortley 
 Montague, sketches for us the mental interior 
 of a blasee woman of fashion : " Society is 
 good, but I have seen society. What is the 
 use of talking or of hearing bon mots ? I 
 have done both till I am tired of doing either. 
 I have laughed till I have no wish to laugh 
 again, and made others laugh till I have hated 
 them for being such fools." What is left 
 to such people ? They have exhausted all 
 the springs that are in sight, and have no 
 inclination to bore for deeper ones. One 
 encounters all varieties of character and con- 
 dition, but, so far as we have seen, God's 
 earth contains no such specimens of sheer 
 hopelessness as your comfortably placed youth
 
 116 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 of both sexes, whose one discovery is that 
 life is not worth living. And their life cer- 
 tainly is not. To keep young is a secret of 
 the soul. This great achievement, the greatest, 
 shall we say that the earthly career presents, 
 demands in the first place some renunciations. 
 We have, for one thing, to weed our pleasure 
 garden of ignoble satisfactions. We are to 
 be resolutely human and not animal. The 
 debauchee, in seeking his delight, destroys 
 all chance of it. His satyr feast ends before 
 he can get the morsel to his mouth, and he 
 finds: 
 
 Both table and provision vanished quite 
 With sound of harpies' wings and talons heard. 
 
 The wisdom of the ages is unanimous here. 
 Across thousands of years the Indian Bhagavad 
 Gita warns us that "it is the enemy, lust 
 or passion, offspring of the carnal principle, 
 by which the world is covered, as the flame 
 by the smoke, as the mirror by rust." And 
 the twentieth century, still panting after 
 the best, echoes that old Eastern testimony. 
 Maeterlinck speaks for it in saying, " Sterile 
 pleasures of the body must be sacrificed ; 
 all that is not in absolute harmony with a 
 larger, more durable energy of thought."
 
 ON KEEPING YOUNG. 117 
 
 But no man will enter a discipline of this 
 kind till he has something more to go upon, 
 some motive power of definite inducement. 
 And it is at this point we come at the secret 
 of the whole matter. The one and only 
 prescription for perpetual youth is the life 
 of faith. Justification by faith has to be 
 restated in our age, and it is time it were done, 
 for society is going to pieces for want of it. 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was a youth at 
 eighty, puts the matter in a nutshell : "It 
 is faith in something, an enthusiasm for some- 
 thing, that makes life worth living." The 
 faith may take on manifold forms, may attach 
 itself to various creeds, but in essence it 
 is always the same the soul's grasp of what 
 is higher than itself, a conviction of a spiritual 
 order, pure and holy, regnant in the universe, 
 which though at present invisible, will in 
 the end make its triumph known. And so 
 we find people of all religions made young 
 by faith. Tolstoi, ere he had reached middle 
 age, was a pessimist of the deepest dye. 
 How old and withered was that heart ! To- 
 day, at the utmost term of life, he is as a child 
 just born. The miracle that made him young 
 was the new hope that the Gospel brought.
 
 118 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 Some day humanity will know more probably 
 than now of the psychological mystery that 
 is involved in these transformations. It will, 
 perhaps, be found that just as waves of energy 
 pass through earth and rock, and certain 
 forms of light penetrate our bodies, so the 
 spiritual forces, where our receptive condi- 
 tions are favourable, pour into us from above, 
 producing their subtle and enduring results 
 not only upon our consciousness, but over 
 the entire area of our being. 
 
 Here have we the daily renewing that keeps 
 the soul young. This juvenescence does not 
 necessarily carry with it animal health, strength, 
 or length of days. But it means throughout 
 life a feeling of youth, a glorious exultancy, 
 a growing and aspiring soul. This is the art 
 of living carried to its highest point. The 
 examples are everywhere, and of all ages. 
 Olympia Morata, of the sixteenth century, 
 who before she was sixteen had written Greek 
 and Latin dissertations on the deepest sub- 
 jects, died young. As life ebbed she said 
 smilingly to her husband : "I can scarcely 
 see you any longer, but everywhere seems 
 full of the most beautiful flowers." John 
 Wesley was over eighty when he passed,
 
 ON KEEPING YOUNG. 119 
 
 but his concluding words were : " The best of 
 all is God is with us." These two, whom we 
 should call young and old, were both youthful 
 souls. They knew they had only begun. 
 
 How strange that, with the path so clearly 
 marked for us, we of this age should still 
 on this vital matter, be blundering along the 
 wrongest of roads ! Men waste themselves 
 in accumulating giant fortunes. For what ? 
 To build mansions whose vastness precludes 
 comfort, and which will be white elephants 
 to their successors, or to multiply residences 
 whose number abolishes for the owner the 
 very idea of home ! To build oneself into 
 bricks and mortar, when one might be fashion- 
 ing the soul for the sublimest possibilities ! 
 By-and-by men will cease this fooling. The 
 absurdity will be too apparent. They will 
 discover that the only wealth is life ; that 
 the only way to make the best of this world 
 is to make the best of the other. For the 
 two are one. The highest gleams ever through 
 this lower. The pilgrim to the better country 
 is the man who, living or dying, knows the 
 bliss of a perpetual youth.
 
 XIII. 
 The Rebirths of Feeling. 
 
 OUR histories, both of individuals and of 
 nations, are at best but the clumsiest of make- 
 shifts. They are only approximations, at a 
 long remove from the reality. What can be 
 expressed in words is always a husk, a body, 
 and the body is never the same thing as the soul. 
 The true story of the man, the story which, 
 with our present instruments, can never be 
 told, is that of his Feeling. The measurement 
 of a life, whether it has been a success or a 
 failure, is here and nowhere else. When, in 
 your appraisement of a man, you discuss his 
 station, his property, the figure he makes 
 before his fellows, you are occupied with 
 irrelevancies. The decisive point in a life's 
 prosperity is in the quality and range of its 
 consciousness. To talk of fortune in terms 
 only of the money market is simply to show 
 our limitations. How does a man front life 
 of a morning ? The whole question is there :
 
 THE REBIRTHS OF FEELING. 121 
 
 Can he step out at dawn from his door with 
 an unspeakable sense of renewal ; feeling 
 every breath he draws, every movement of 
 his limbs, every glance at the open sky, to be 
 a new wedding of himself with the infinite, a 
 participation in a boundless wealth of being ? 
 Is it a sense of rapture, this early greeting of 
 his soul and the world ? If so, what need to 
 go further into his affairs ? 
 
 But this view of prosperity, which to some 
 of us appears so simple, is as yet apparently 
 a quite neglected piece of the world's educa- 
 tion. There is a general rush for good things, 
 but the movement is so woefully undiscriminat- 
 ing. Humanity, for its next step upward, 
 will have to learn a little psychology. It will 
 then discover that the only world it can possess 
 is an inner world, that the outside is only the 
 shadow of the inside ; that its material pos- 
 sessions are ever the reflex of its spiritual ones. 
 It will learn further that the higher qualities 
 of feeling which constitute life's true riches 
 are related to an inner organism whose delicacy 
 is proportioned to the rare results it produces. 
 Here are we in the region of inexorable law. 
 The finer the product the greater the com- 
 plexity of the producing organ, and the greater
 
 122 PEOBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 its liability to injury. You may run a pin into 
 your hand and no great harm will be done. 
 Let there be a lesion of the optic nerve and the 
 visible world has become for ever a blank. 
 While everybody knows this as a law of the 
 body, it has not yet occurred to the generality 
 that precisely the same law holds of the soul. 
 This magnificent possession, which, properly 
 tended, will secure to a man through life a 
 consciousness ever ascending, both hi range 
 and quality, until it can reach angelic heights, 
 is treated with the crassest disregard both of 
 its possibilities and of the laws of its working. 
 Ignorance is the true original sin. Men are 
 bankrupts morally because they do not know 
 the gold mine that is in them. 
 
 It is here we get a true view of the nature 
 and function of religion. When we come to 
 its genuine sources we find it always as a 
 form of the highest feeling. Christianity is 
 known to us as a church, a ceremonial, a body 
 of doctrine, a history of deeds, a mass of con- 
 troverted opinions. At its purest we have it 
 in the reported words of Christ and the apostles. 
 But the highest Christianity that has been in 
 this world is, in a way, veiled from us. What 
 we do not know, and would give worlds to
 
 THE REBIBTHS OP FEELING. 123 
 
 know, is the precise feeling that was in Christ's 
 own breast, the daily consciousness with 
 which He fronted life and the universe. That 
 was the original Christianity. The words He 
 uttered, the deeds He performed, the influ- 
 ences He rained upon others were sparks from 
 that central glow, but not the thing itself. 
 Christ's quality of feeling was the greatest 
 thing that has been in the world. The next 
 greatest was the answering consciousness 
 created in His disciples. The organisms here 
 were immeasurably lower than His own ; the 
 faculties all untrained to the highest exercises. 
 But at this distance of time we catch a reflex 
 of the thrill that went through them as they 
 communed with that radiant soul. To trans- 
 mit that feeling, to develop the organs in 
 which it can reside, to warm the heart of 
 humanity everywhere with this central heat 
 that is the business of religion to-day. 
 
 The first appearance of this highest con- 
 sciousness in the race is, we have said, a 
 mystery. For its origin we have to refer back 
 to a cause that is ultra-planetary, to that 
 spiritual universe which presses at every point 
 on our visible, and out of which all our good 
 and great has come. But when we study the
 
 124 PROBLEMS or LIVING. 
 
 persistency of the feeling, its continual rebirth 
 in nations and in individuals, we come upon a 
 group of facts that it is of the highest import- 
 ance to classify and to use. One of these is 
 the extraordinary relation of the feeling to 
 outer circumstance. What has become a 
 scientific certainty is the essentially spiritual 
 character of events. The roughest, the most 
 painful of experiences, are only marks of 
 divinest things underneath. If the true wealth 
 of life lies in its noblest feeling where, in our 
 world, are we most likely to find it ? The 
 answer of history is a strange one, but it offers 
 clues which, properly followed, should lead to 
 the solution of more than one problem. For 
 the place and time of the rebirth of divinest 
 feeling has been the place and time of out- 
 ward stress and pain. There is no doubt of 
 this. Says Lecky, in his history of European 
 morals : " There has probably never existed 
 upon earth a community whose members were 
 bound to one another by a deeper or purer 
 affection than the Christians in the days of 
 the persecutions." How near this is to the 
 fact those only who have closely followed the 
 story of Christianity from the beginning can 
 properly realise. As a single instance let any
 
 THE REBIRTHS OF FEELINQ. 125 
 
 one read the account of the trials of the Church 
 in Alexandria during the Valerian persecution, 
 as related by its Bishop, Dionysius. Says he : 
 " Then with one impulse they all rushed upon 
 the houses of the God-fearing, and robbed and 
 plundered them. . . . The brethren, however, 
 simply gave way and withdrew, and like 
 those to whom Paul bears witness, they took 
 the spoiling of their goods with joy." He 
 then describes how many of his people, old 
 and young, and of both sexes, were put to 
 death with every imaginable torture ; how, in 
 the midst of all this, the plague broke out in 
 the city, and how, while the pagan population 
 in their panic left their sick untended and the 
 dead unburied, the Christians remained ten- 
 derly nursing both foes and friends ; how their 
 own people died in triumph, while those who 
 remained " rejoiced deeply in the peace of 
 Christ, which He committed to us alone." 
 
 And that story has been repeated in every 
 age. Here from the seventeenth century is 
 the testimony of a humble Huguenot woman 
 persecuted under Louis XIV. When stripped, 
 bound with cords and whipped, she declares : 
 " At this moment I received the greatest con- 
 solation I can ever receive in my life, since I
 
 126 PBOBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 had the honour of being whipped for the name 
 of Christ. Why can I not write down the 
 inconceivable influences, consolations and 
 peace which I felt interiorly ? To understand 
 them one must have passed through the same 
 trial." And to take one more instance : in 
 the eighteenth century we have Methodist 
 John Nelson, when imprisoned in a filthy, ill- 
 smelling hole for the crime of preaching the 
 Gospel, exclaiming : " My soul was as a watered 
 garden, and I could sing praises to God all day 
 long. For He turned my captivity into joy, 
 and gave me to rest as well on the boards as if 
 I had been on a bed of down." Any one, 
 indeed, who takes the trouble to study history 
 must realise that he is in these instances 
 dealing with no chance phenomenon, no mere 
 freak of temperament, but with a spiritual law 
 as certain as the movement of the planets. 
 
 Another significant fact in this group is in 
 connection with the spread of the higher feel- 
 ing. There is a law of multiple action here 
 more wonderful than any of the contagions of 
 the physical world. Science tells amazing 
 stories of the propagation of germs, bearing it 
 may be disease, or its cure, from one organism 
 to another. But on the spiritual sphere these
 
 THE REBIRTHS OF FEELING. 127 
 
 activities are all transcended. It is as algebra 
 to arithmetic. The quantities are limitless. 
 The secret of great revivals is that a single 
 soul filled with the Divine consciousness will 
 communicate itself to innumerable other souls, 
 the while suffering no diminution of its own 
 store of energy. Have we properly studied 
 this phenomenon, that whereas all partition in 
 the natural world means diminution and 
 exhaustion of the original stock, in the spiritual 
 realm the contrary obtains ? A voice for God 
 charged with feeling, a Christian act saturated 
 with love, spreads its mystic power over 
 thousands of souls, and while each recipient 
 gets his fill, he has thereby lowered no whit 
 the original stock. Carried out to its legitimate 
 deductions, the experience here is another 
 evidence that while the body has to do with 
 the finite and the measurable, the soul's trans- 
 actions are, by right of its inherent nature, 
 with the imperishable and the infinite. 
 
 The Churches are just now inquiring anxi- 
 ously how they may regain their lost hold over 
 the masses. They will regain their hold of 
 the masses when they have regained their hold 
 of the laws and forces of the spiritual life. If 
 they want a revival, they must understand the
 
 128 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 psychology of a revival. The laws here are 
 as sure as those of electricity. Men ought not 
 at this time of day to be groping about for 
 the right way of winning souls. It is as old as 
 the hills. What is the meaning of the state- 
 ment that the great spiritual renewals have 
 been always preceded by earnest prayer ? It 
 is the formula of the soul's dynamic. It 
 means, in other words, that in a few disciplined 
 spirits the inner organs, developed and purified 
 by these exercises, have become recipients and 
 reservoirs of the higher forces, and come in the 
 end to a condition in which these forces pass 
 out with resistless power upon their fellows. 
 We are here at the science of the soul's evolution 
 and of the generation and transmission of 
 spiritual energy. People talk of the Church's 
 obscurantism. They may well do so. When, 
 in all its sections, the Church has begun to 
 learn the real science of its department, men 
 will become religious as naturally and as 
 universally as they have become human. 
 
 Meanwhile, it is for those who know, to 
 exhibit to their fellows the joy of the right 
 living. Their experience must be a reaffirma- 
 tion of religion's ultimate truths. They must 
 make it evident that no music is comparable
 
 THE REBIRTHS OF FEELING. 129 
 
 to that which the universe sings through a 
 soul in tune. Who can deny damnation 
 when he sees men around him losing the 
 capacity for all the higher notes ? Who can 
 deny heaven when he knows of souls that 
 live there to-day ? Our poor human race ! 
 Prodigal son that has wandered into the far 
 country and fed on the husks that the swine 
 eat ! But it will come back again. The 
 Heimweh is already upon it. It is already 
 sated with its ignoble feast and straining its 
 ears to the Father's voice. A rebirth of 
 spiritual feeling is ahead. It will be the 
 greatest the world has known since Christ.
 
 XIV. 
 Imagination in Ethics. 
 
 ERASMUS tells a merry story of a company 
 riding to Richmond, when a jocose member 
 of the party stopped suddenly, staring into 
 the sky, " God avert this prodigy ! " " What?" 
 " Can you not see that large dragon there with 
 horns of flame and tail looped into a circle ? " 
 " No." But finally one said he saw it. Then 
 the others in quick succession. In three 
 days the report ran through the land of a 
 great portent. The jest might be taken as an 
 experiment in the force of imagination. And 
 the faculty is as potent in the twentieth 
 as in the sixteenth century, but it is for us 
 to make a more profitable use of it than did 
 the Richmond pilgrims. Now that we are 
 beginning to see how life's upward move- 
 ment depends on the better and saner de- 
 velopment of our inner powers, the cult of 
 the imagination will become more and more 
 a feature of education. It is perhaps the
 
 IMAGINATION IN ETHICS. 131 
 
 greatest of character-builders. Out of it man 
 makes his world ; it creates his happiness 
 or his woe. Pascal's mot that " If an artisan 
 were sure of dreaming every night that he 
 was king, he would be almost as happy as a 
 king who should dream every night he was 
 an artisan," would apply here. For man 
 dreams almost as much awake as when asleep. 
 What he imagines is a great part of what he is. 
 It would be a mere repetition of the obvious 
 to point out the place imagination occupies 
 in what we may call the decorative side 
 of life. That the painter, the poet, the 
 dramatist, the romancer find here their chief 
 material is what we all know. The exact 
 sciences, even as much as the arts, depend on it 
 for aliment and furtherance. George Henry 
 Lewes is strictly within bounds when he says, 
 " No man ever made a discovery (he may have 
 stumbled on one) without the exercise of 
 as much imagination as, employed in another 
 direction and in alliance with other faculties, 
 would have gone to the creation of a poem. 
 To imagine a good experiment is as difficult 
 as to invent a good fable." All this has become 
 a truism. What, however, is not so fully 
 recognised is the part played by imagination
 
 132 PROBLEMS or LIVING. 
 
 in our working, e very-day ethics. The moral 
 teacher of the future, instead of generalising 
 on the subject of sin and reclamation, will 
 specialise on the laws of action of the different 
 inner powers, and on their training and co- 
 operation for the best results. 
 
 When, with this object, we study the 
 imaginative faculty, we find an admittedly 
 enormous power, whose relation to morals 
 seems at first quite undefined. In the battle 
 of good and evil it would appear to resemble 
 those mercenary troops of the mediaeval 
 time who were ready with equal alacrity 
 to fight on either side. Human nature is 
 still in the making, probably at a very early 
 stage of the making, and the action of its 
 visualising power has hitherto been of a corre- 
 spondingly crude and unregulated kind. Over 
 vast tracts of history its influence would 
 seem as often evil as good. What infernal 
 cruelties have had imagination for their 
 source ! People dreamed of gods that lusted 
 for blood, and slaughtered old and young 
 to satisfy them. Arnobius, one of the early 
 Christian apologists, devotes whole chapters of 
 his principal work to disprove the view univers- 
 ally held amongst the pagans, and which was
 
 IMAGINATION IN ETHICS. 133 
 
 one of the main causes of persecution, that 
 the famines, earthquakes, plagues, and other 
 calamities of the times had as their reason the 
 anger of the gods against the Christians. 
 
 It is undeniable also that an unregulated 
 imagination is one of the most powerful 
 auxiliaries of private vice. In that interior 
 region of the mind where we are beyond the 
 reach of public opinion, beyond the judgment 
 even of our most intimate friends, the real 
 tussle comes, and there is it that imagination 
 often plays its most sinister part. Moving 
 outwardly amid the primmest of conventions, 
 paying ostentatious respect to the proprieties, 
 a man may in the secret chamber of his 
 imagery, be feasting his vision with every 
 kind of lubricity. It is here, indeed, that the 
 impressionable temperament which makes poet 
 and artist finds often its sorest trial, its most 
 frequent stone of stumbling. To how many, 
 in this way, has genius proved a damnosa 
 hereditas ! The strongest have barely escaped 
 with their lives. Bunyan in his " Grace 
 Abounding," tells how, long after his pro- 
 fession as a Christian, the old thought-springs 
 of his earlier life at times burst upward from 
 beneath, and poured their black floods over
 
 134 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 the inner realm ; and what mighty wrestlings 
 and acts of faith were needed ere he had secured 
 a clean interior. 
 
 Yet none the less true is it that this same 
 imagination, so disastrous in its unregulated 
 activities, will, in a true scheme of life, rank 
 as one of the chief redeeming and cleansing 
 forces. Was it not by the imagination, 
 indeed, that man became first of all a moral 
 being ? It was the vision of something 
 higher than himself that made him at once 
 moral and immoral, which gave him at the 
 same moment the sense of sin and the promise 
 of saintship. It is worthy of note, also, 
 that the early legislators who, hi different 
 parts of the world, gave to mankind in their 
 codes the first great ethical disciplines, were 
 unanimous in their call on the imagination 
 as their chief auxiliary. It was to visions 
 and voices and mystic rites they appealed 
 as props to their authority. And this with 
 entire sincerity. When the great lawgivers 
 of Egypt, of Greece, of Persia, of Rome, 
 and of Palestine declared their Codes to 
 have originated with the deities of the land 
 they were simply expressing in their own way 
 the truth, which one of the early fathers so
 
 IMAGINATION IN ETHICS. 135 
 
 finely sums up in the remark that "the 
 different human laws were all fed from one 
 Divine law." 
 
 It is, however, when we come to the prac- 
 tical business of our own daily living that 
 we see most clearly the part a cultivated 
 imagination can play in ethics. We shall, 
 for instance, only be able to do justice to our 
 neighbour in proportion as we are able to 
 visualise him. By justice here we mean far 
 more than what is demanded by law or by 
 public opinion. Our greatest crimes against 
 him may be committed in a sphere where 
 these powers never reach. As we advance 
 in spiritual culture those sins of calumny and 
 of scandal which make so much of the misery 
 of human life will become less and less possible 
 to us, and the power which keeps us from them 
 will be that of imagination. We have only, 
 in discussing an absent acquaintance, to 
 picture him to ourselves as of the company, 
 and the base spirit of disparagement is exor- 
 cised. So, too, where the tendency is to 
 Schadenfreude, to use the expressive German 
 phrase, the base exultancy over a rival's 
 discomfiture ; the moment a man can visualise 
 for himself this other's interior he will recoil
 
 136 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 from the thought of taking pleasure in view 
 of that inner sadness. The misunderstandings, 
 the jealousies, the ignoble satisfactions of 
 triumphant rivalry will die out of men when 
 they have gained the faculty of seeing their 
 brother not, as now, from without, but from 
 within. When we have constructed his life 
 from his own standpoint, and seen its struggle 
 and its sorrow, it will be so easy to forgive, 
 so easy to help, so impossible to hate ! That 
 is why Christ, the great seer, was the great 
 forgiver. " Put yourself in his place," was 
 the dictum of a great novelist. It is one of 
 the necessities of the higher ethic, and it 
 is by vision power the miracle is wrought. 
 
 To a more cultured imagination, also, 
 is it we shall have to look for an improvement 
 in what we may call negative morality, the 
 abstention, that is, from vicious or criminal 
 acts. Half the follies and badness of the 
 world will be done with when men have brain 
 enough, ere the deed is done, to project 
 themselves mentally into " the moment after." 
 When people can present to themselves the 
 exact feeling which follows upon a debauch 
 or an infamy, they will repent of it before- 
 hand, instead of after, when it is too late.
 
 IMAGINATION IN ETHICS. 137 
 
 What vastly greater sweetness would come 
 into many a home circle were there only a 
 little more vision in it ! Ah ! could the man 
 at his fireside realise what the homely face 
 before him, which he has so often smitten 
 into grief by his hard words, will mean to him 
 when so soon it may be ! it has gone for 
 ever from his sight ! It is a good word, one 
 for us all to remember, that of Siebenkas in 
 Richter's " Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces " : 
 " Every morning, every evening, he said to 
 himself : How much ought I not to forgive, for 
 we shall remain so short a time together ! " 
 
 The visualising faculty is also the great 
 feeder of our sympathies. It is when we 
 " see together " that we " feel together." 
 The cool complacency of the well-to-do, 
 who nurse their own comfortable sensations, 
 while ignoring the wretchedness beyond their 
 boundary wall, would break up the moment 
 they saw clearly into those other interiors. 
 The tortures which in barbarous ages men 
 inflicted on each other had been impossible 
 could the oppressor have had a clear view 
 of the inner actuality of his victim. We are 
 beyond that stage, but still are woefully 
 dim sighted. The world's habitations of
 
 138 PBOBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 cruelty will be dealt with in drastic fashion 
 when the civilised peoples have had their 
 vision. When, in the seventies, the tidings 
 of the Turkish massacres in Bulgaria were 
 flashed to Europe, the present writer found 
 himself one summer day walking through 
 a lovely English village. He had been reading 
 of what the Bashi-Bazouks had been doing 
 at Batak and elsewhere. Suddenly the account 
 was visualised before him in the scene where 
 he found himself. He saw the village church 
 in flames, the street startled from its quietness 
 by the inrush of armed savages, the rural 
 quiet changed in a moment to a pandemonium, 
 the little girls and boys, who before had been 
 playing in the streets, spitted on the ends of 
 bayonets, the ah" filled with shrieks and groans, 
 the gutters red with blood. As he saw it all, 
 " This," he said to himself, " is precisely what 
 has happened in a few days' journey of where 
 I am standing now." That flash of vision gave 
 him a feeling for oppressed peoples, such as he 
 had never before experienced, and which all 
 the following years have never dimmed. 
 
 What has been here said is only the fringe 
 of a great subject. Indeed, so much has been 
 left unsaid that, as it stands, the theme thus
 
 IMAGINATION IN ETHICS. 139 
 
 handled might easily lead to misconceptions. 
 So we end with a warning hint or two. It 
 must not, for instance, be supposed that the 
 mere culture of the imagination is of itself 
 going to bring about great ethical reforms. 
 The great imaginers have not by any means 
 been all great moralists. Else the musicians and 
 the painters were all saints which they are not. 
 It is only in alliance, at every point, with the 
 will that our visualising can be morally helpful. 
 Could Coleridge have linked that imagination 
 which, as Hazlitt says, " had angelic wings and 
 fed on manna," with a healthy volition, what 
 a sublime career would England have seen ! 
 
 And here we come upon something deeper 
 yet. Behind the imagination the will, but 
 
 behind the will ! Science is beginning 
 
 to discover that our separate faculties are 
 not themselves originators. They are but 
 the organs of a deeper life, fed from sources 
 that are otherwhere. Man is constructed so 
 as not to be complete in himself. He is 
 a planet that moves round a sun. He can 
 never know the true harmony or the healthy 
 development of his being till his earthly 
 is consciously linked with a heavenly.
 
 XV. 
 Our Links with Lowliness, 
 
 MAN is unquestionably the aristocrat of this 
 planet. His thought-world is a royalty than 
 which nothing can be imagined more supreme, 
 more august. Let one side of him speak, 
 and you are in contact with infinitudes. 
 We compare him with what else lives and 
 moves in the world, only to realise the re- 
 moteness, the lonely grandeur of his position. 
 As Professor Fiske has it : " While for zoological 
 man you can hardly erect a distinct family 
 from that of the chimpanzee and orang, 
 for psychological man you must erect a 
 distinct kingdom ; nay, you must dichotomize 
 the universe, putting man on one side and 
 all things else on the other." And it is, on 
 the whole, a healthy tendency of our modern 
 culture to put the stress on this loftier side 
 of humanity. Our question is, and rightly, 
 not so much what we have come from, as 
 what we can grow to. Aspiration we recog-
 
 OUR LINKS WITH LOWLINESS. 141 
 
 nise as one of our greatest faculties. For- 
 getting the things that are behind we press 
 toward the prize in front. A sense of boundless 
 human possibility is the note of the twentieth 
 century. We feel that victory will be to the 
 race that believes in itself, in the greatness 
 of its destiny. 
 
 But we are not permitted to talk in this 
 vein without checks and reminders of other 
 things. There is another side of life that can 
 never, for long, be kept out of sight. The 
 cosmic arrangement under which we live has 
 wedded our ambitions to the strangest of 
 circumstances. We must needs study the soil 
 in which we are rooted as well as the heavens 
 to which we aspire. Science traces our origin 
 to the dust. The proofs stare us in the face. 
 Every child born into the world has, in its 
 pre-natal, embryo period, recapitulated the 
 whole humbling story of man's ascent to 
 his present stature. What, perhaps, is even 
 more striking is that the child's mind, from 
 babyhood on, reproduces the successive mental 
 developments of the human race on its way 
 upward from the primitive savage beginnings. 
 
 But our links with lowliness do not end 
 here. The career of each one of us shows
 
 142 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 another element than that which soars and 
 triumphs. The most favoured, the most 
 fortunate of mortals do not escape this under 
 side. It is the successful, the high - soaring 
 man, indeed, that has the keenest sense 
 of the human limitations. Strange that his 
 mind, "that wanders through eternity," should 
 be partnered with a bodily life, with functions, 
 that seem so coarse and degrading ! And 
 then, as surely as a man goes up, he comes 
 down. He reaches his culminating point, 
 and decline begins. His strength decays ; 
 he has, men say, " seen his best days," he 
 falls to the rear, and takes some lowlier post. 
 By-and-by he fades out of life, dies, and is 
 forgotten of his fellows. This is the human 
 story which each one of us, with variations 
 that make no difference to the main result, 
 will in his turn repeat. What a vast and 
 intimate relationship have we to the lowly, 
 the sordid, the perishable ! 
 
 There are moments, indeed, when the link 
 with lowliness seems the one overshadowing 
 feature of life. It is on this feature that 
 modern pessimism has planted itself. Numbers 
 of first-class minds have been permanently 
 gloomed by their inability to get away from
 
 OUR LINKS WITH LOWLINESS. 143 
 
 this obsession. We have Taine as a young 
 man, telling us how " the sight of mutilated 
 human nature. . . . of man, who, wounded 
 in his innermost being, drags his incurable 
 hurt along the roads which Time opens to 
 him, moved him like the sight of ships in 
 danger on the sea." To Nietzsche the human 
 existence appears at times, not always, as 
 an absurdity, " a side show on some ridiculous 
 star." Schopenhauer thinks we should all 
 commit suicide were the business a purely 
 negative one, simply " a sudden stoppage of 
 existence." Our own Watson, reviewing the 
 limitations of life, asks if man is not " some 
 random throw of heedless nature's die ? " 
 The modern pessimists are unanimous also 
 in rejecting the argument of a future perfection 
 as counterpoise to present ills. " How," 
 they cry, " can a supposed future good make 
 any alteration in the fact that the present 
 is bad ? What has your as yet unexistent 
 millennium to do with our now existent and 
 too evident slum ? " Thus our pessimist, 
 who refuses to be comforted. 
 
 But while the writers of this school are, 
 many of them, our contemporaries, they 
 have almost ceased to be modern. Their
 
 144 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 day is already over. Before long the world 
 will wonder that able men could be so parochial, 
 could build themselves on so short-sighted 
 a philosophy. It can hardly be called a 
 " view," for there is no insight in it. What, 
 i at this time of day, is to be said for a system 
 which begins with the vulgar error of taking 
 appearances for the ultimate reality ? The 
 later metaphysic is already constructing a 
 new standpoint for these studies. When 
 astronomy, discovering the real position and 
 relations of our planet in space, destroyed 
 the old notion of " upper " and " under," 
 showing that what was " above " with us was 
 " below " at Melbourne, that " going up " 
 and " going down " were, in a cosmic view, 
 merely relative and local terms, it opened 
 a wider range of inferences than were contained 
 in matter and space. And it shattered for 
 ever our trust in appearances as representing 
 the ultimate truth. So, when our pessimist 
 compels our attention upon the present fact, 
 and will have the whole of life judged from it, 
 we will admit his claim provided he will, 
 for himself and us, gauge the fact in its entirety. 
 As a simple test of his capacity here, suppose 
 we were to take, what has been in all time a
 
 OUR LINKS WITH LOWLINESS. 145 
 
 stock material of pessimism, the condition 
 of bodily limitation and weakness, and ask 
 for a complete analysis ? What is our bodily 
 weakness ? Shall we say that the particles 
 which make up our physical frame are weak ? 
 That evidently is only a bit of the truth. In 
 themselves they are just as strong as the ever- 
 lasting hills. They are one with the same 
 cosmic system as the hills. They have flowed 
 into us out of that eternal complex of matter 
 and force which makes the outside world, 
 and perpetually go out to reunite with it 
 that complex which is never weary, never 
 weak, never dies. There is no weakness even 
 in a dead body. All its constituents are 
 entering into the eternal play of the universe, 
 and are mighty with its might. The weakness 
 we know and talk of is at most only a fraction 
 of the reality, a passing phase of our con- 
 sciousness ; the limitations it imposes are 
 an equation between ourselves and the sum 
 of things, whose results it would require 
 an infinite mind to work out. And our pessi- 
 mist's mind is plainly not of that dimension. 
 
 Our links with lowliness will take a quite 
 other than pessimistic interpretation when, 
 further, we consider how, in the scheme 
 
 10
 
 146 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 of things, what we call highest and lowest 
 are ever inextricably blended. Here again 
 " upper " and " under," we find, are only 
 relative and local terms. It is precisely the 
 shadow upon life that ought to inspire us with 
 the greatest hopes about it. It is when we 
 peer into that darkness that the divinest 
 things seem, in the dimness, to be shaping 
 themselves. When a man is stricken with 
 his mortal illness, when his income falls off, 
 when the world's pleasure and applause are 
 done with him, when all the supports have 
 given way and he falls back helpless upon the 
 void, what does he find ? The instructed 
 soul finds that as the seemingly solid earth 
 on which he built his house rests upon nothing, 
 and yet is upheld, so he, launched upon the 
 abyss, is also miraculously upstayed. What a 
 wonderful word is that which Socrates uttered 
 to his judges after being condemned to death ! 
 He had spoken to them of the Daimon or 
 guardian spirit which, warning him throughout 
 his career against all evils, did not, he said, 
 warn him against his trial and death. " What, 
 then," he continues, " do I suppose to be the 
 reason thereof ? I will tell you. I think it is 
 that what has happened to me has been a
 
 OUR LINKS WITH LOWLINESS. 147 
 
 good thing ; and we must have been mistaken 
 when we supposed that death was an evil." 
 
 That limitation, poverty, weakness, death 
 itself have behind them a reality quite other 
 than what seems that they are, in short, 
 veiled forms of the highest, is a conception 
 that grows upon us the more closely we 
 study them. The spiritual gifts which crown 
 man's being come all in this dress. Are we 
 to imagine it a mere chance that the purest 
 religion began this way ? The new philosophy 
 of the cosmos, which finds highest in lowest, 
 life's choicest treasures lurking in humblest 
 disguises, will have things of its own to say 
 about the doctrines both of Incarnation 
 and of the Cross. The translation into modern 
 thought of the apostolic utterances on these 
 themes will tell substantially the same story 
 as that which has inspired the heart of Christen- 
 dom through all the centuries. The universe's 
 spiritual highest, humbling itself to human 
 birth, clothing itself with poverty, walking 
 in lowliest ways, and enduring pain to its 
 last extremity in the service of good this 
 will be accepted as the centre of philosophy, 
 as it is the heart of religion. 
 
 By no chance coincidence is it either that
 
 148 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 the wedding of highest and lowest, which 
 received such illustration at the beginning 
 of Christianity, has been perpetually repeat- 
 ing itself in religion's history since. Earthen 
 vessels carry the heavenly treasure. When 
 Arnobius reports what paganism said of the 
 Christians of his time, that " they were un- 
 learned, rude, unpolished, rustic, barbarous, 
 madmen, nondescripts of trivial and sordid 
 speech," we are reminded curiously of Cowley's 
 gibe at the Puritans, of Sydney Smith's 
 criticism of cobbler William Carey, and of 
 the opinion entertained of the early Methodists 
 amongst polite society of the eighteenth 
 century. And the gibes had point, for who 
 can deny the rudeness and the rusticity of 
 these professors ? And yet who to-day will 
 deny that these humble peoples were the 
 bearers to their fellows and to after generations 
 of some of the most precious gifts of life ? 
 
 The man who has mastered his philosophy 
 of lowliness will be free of many things. He 
 will not be disappointed at his limitations 
 or his weakness ; and that not because he 
 is in love with limitations or littleness, but 
 because he discerns behind all this an infinite 
 greatness looming. It is here also he will
 
 OUR LINKS WITH LOWLINESS. 149 
 
 find his strength to be honest and fearless 
 as a truth-seeker and a truth-utterer. Your 
 true independents are the men who are at 
 their ease in lowliness. One of the greatest 
 weaknesses of public life to-day, in politics 
 as in religion, is the slavery of men to out- 
 ward position and to popular applause. We 
 shall not get a revival of moral and spiritual 
 force till leaders and public teachers, renewing 
 themselves at the sources of highest life, 
 have won their emancipation from the false 
 high in its every form, and speak and act in 
 absolute loyalty to the true high, though 
 it be linked with a manger or a cross. Here 
 find we, indeed, our emancipation from all 
 that is called evil. When we have reached this 
 deeper view have realised for ourselves that 
 what, in its inner aspect, is a limit, opens on 
 its other side to infinite freedom ; that ex- 
 periences which, in our present appeal to our 
 consciousness, are gloomy and painful, have be- 
 hind them immeasurable other aspects, vastest 
 transformations ; that death itself is an appear- 
 ance with a quite other reality behind the day 
 of our freedom will have dawned. We shall 
 accept life in its totality as a Divine gift. In its 
 highest and lowest we shall alike touch God.
 
 XVI. 
 By- Roads to Faith. 
 
 " IT is faith in something, an enthusiasm for 
 something, that makes life worth living." So 
 spoke the veteran, Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
 and his words find echo in all healthy minds. 
 It is the everlasting " Yea," and not some 
 miserable, croaking " No," that creates great 
 history and great character. An affirmation 
 of ultimate good is creation's ground- tone. 
 The soul carries in itself an inextinguishable 
 belief in a final, triumphant answer to its 
 problems, in the satisfaction of its highest 
 longing. We are hi an age of criticism, of the 
 dissolution of belief, of the apparent triumph 
 of the negative. But a survey of the past 
 should do away with our panics. It reveals 
 to us, in a thousand iterations, that roads that 
 seemed to lead to the abyss have turned out 
 to be the by-ways of faith ; that agencies which, 
 in then* terror, men denounced as the enemies 
 of the kingdom, have done some of the best 
 work for its spread and establishment. 
 
 150
 
 BY-ROADS TO FAITH. 151 
 
 The most interesting thing this planet could 
 show would be a universal experience-meeting, 
 in which the world should be summoned to 
 witness how, collectively and individually, it 
 had come by its faith. The answer, supposing 
 the inquiry to be pursued with thoroughness 
 and accuracy, would be full of surprises. It 
 would be seen, for one thing, how many so- 
 called aids to faith have been no aids ; how in 
 his endeavours to rear this particular plant, 
 the professional religious horticulturist has 
 proved to be the most clumsy and bungling 
 of workers. The history of his attempts has 
 so often been a history of how not to do it ' 
 So often has he been putting in the wrong 
 seed, and producing a crop of superstitions, in 
 place of the tree of healing. Plutarch, him- 
 self one of the most devout of men, in his 
 " De Superstitione," argues that even dis- 
 belief in God is less mischievous than a base 
 perversion of belief concerning Him. " For," 
 says he, " the atheist does not see God at all, 
 but the superstitious sees Him malevolent 
 instead of benign." What kind of a faith 
 was likely to be grown in Catholic Europe by 
 those " theologasters," whom Erasmus scathes 
 as being " endowed with the most rotten
 
 152 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 brains, the most barbarous tongues, the most 
 unfruitful learning, the coarsest manners, the 
 spitefullest tongues, the blackest hearts ! " 
 It was these people, the professional agents 
 and monopolists of faith, who, could faith 
 have been destroyed from the earth, would 
 have had to be named as its destroyers. 
 
 But it is not to be destroyed, and we see 
 this just as clearly when, on the other hand, 
 we survey the efforts of those who in pious 
 circles have been regarded as the enemy. 
 When our religious communities have reached 
 a further enlargement of view, they will regard 
 with quite another aspect the results of what 
 is often called destructive criticism. We are 
 learning something to-day of the real nature 
 of these " destructions." We know that 
 every living organism has, going on perpetu- 
 ally within it, a destructive process, which is 
 one of the most essential functions of its life. 
 Within our bodies is an elaborate apparatus 
 occupied incessantly in the breaking down 
 and removal of the decaying tissues, in the 
 perpetual replacement of material that has 
 done its work. Were that process to be stopped 
 in us, we should stop. And we are discover- 
 ing now that the organic life of the Christian
 
 BY-ROADS TO FAITH. 153 
 
 community is under a precisely similar law, and 
 that what faint hearts were imagining to be the 
 deadliest assaults on the religious principle were 
 really parts of faith's great vital process. 
 
 We need here, indeed, to be continually 
 discriminating between the apparent and the 
 real. Our talk about the direction of given 
 movements needs to be a very cautious one. 
 When a man appears to be walking westward 
 he is really being carried eastward by the earth's 
 rotation at the rate of a thousand miles an 
 hour. There are vast under-motions that are 
 so much greater than the surface ones. So 
 it is emphatically in the human movements 
 in their relation to the spiritual kingdom. 
 Our man shall be walking furiously westward 
 and be travelling eastward all the time. The 
 path he starts on takes, by-and-by, such 
 unexpected turnings. Our Saul of Tarsus sets 
 out to imprison Christians, and is on his road 
 to his own conversion. When Strauss wrote 
 that Life of Christ which, while it contains so 
 much, omits Jesus, he started scholars on the 
 track of that genuine historical investigation 
 which has done so much to give us back the 
 Master. That was an excellent thing which 
 the Empress Eugenie said of Kenan's " Vie
 
 154 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 de Jesus " : "It will do no harm to those who 
 believe in Christ, and to those who do not it will 
 do good." Assuredly. The book, with its pro- 
 digious defects, both in fact and sentiment, 
 made Jesus interesting to multitudes who cared 
 nothing for Him before. And when men become 
 interested in Jesus, they are on a good road. 
 
 The age-long knowledge of the human soul 
 and its motions which history secures to us, 
 should indeed, by this time, have made us 
 tolerably sure of it, in all its relations to 
 religious doubt and to religious certainty. We 
 see, as we glance over the long record, how the 
 denial of one generation has led in the next 
 to a new grand affirmation, including in its 
 sweep the truth that lay in the denial ; how, 
 underneath the seeming spiritual death of a 
 given period, as in the age before the Reforma- 
 tion, and the years that preceded the eigh- 
 teenth-century evangelical revival, lay working 
 forces that, when things seemed at the worst, 
 burst forth into glorious spiritual manifestation. 
 
 That world's experience- meeting we have 
 suggested, in its quest for the sources of faith, 
 would indeed have to go far down. It would 
 have to acquaint itself with the law of trans- 
 mutations. It would discover how the finest
 
 BY-ROADS TO FAITH. 155 
 
 issues are woven out of the strangest raw 
 material. We are, for instance, accustomed 
 to trace revivals of faith to the influence of 
 the great spiritual leaders ; but nobody troubles 
 himself to inquire as to the genesis of these 
 leaders. Yet this is of the essence of the 
 matter. The natural history of a prophet 
 opens up the most curious questions as to 
 the interplay of matter and spirit. We think 
 of the doctrine he preaches, of his fervour 
 and height of soul, of his evangelic gifts, his 
 saving power. But there would have been 
 none of this, and our evangelist's name had 
 never emerged, but for long previous processes, 
 which seemed at the time to have no connection 
 with faith at all. The inquiry here would 
 have to concern itself with the fresh air breathed 
 by generations of long -gone ancestors, with 
 that eager wrestling of theirs with the world 
 that built up our prophet's vigour, his com- 
 bativeness ; that gave him his red blood, his 
 trumpet voice, his eye of fire. As we trace back 
 these winding tracks we discover how the roads 
 to faith start from the very roots of the world. 
 One of the strangest of these byways has 
 been that of illusion. There is a mission of 
 illusion which we are only just beginning to
 
 156 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 understand. Theology has suffered grievously 
 from its failure to realise that we are treated 
 in this world with a certain humour. If only 
 our dogmatists could have recognised that the 
 celestial powers have laughed at us a little ! 
 We have been dealt with in these matters 
 exactly as we deal with our children. We give 
 them the oddest answers to some of their 
 questions, and smile meantime up our sleeves. 
 And we are nowise ashamed of this, for the 
 exact truth is not for them as yet. They will 
 know it when they are ready for it. And 
 Nature, we say, has dealt with us so. She 
 had the truth within her bosom, but was in no 
 hurry to impart it. She allowed uncounted 
 generations to believe that the sun went round 
 the earth. The belief was good enough for 
 these child races. It would be time enough to 
 learn more when they had grown up. So has 
 it been with religious faith. It does not 
 shock us now* to discover that the Christian 
 Church itself was, as to a multitude of subjects, 
 cradled in illusions. Its view both of the past 
 and of the future was largely imaginative. 
 Wise men to-day are satisfied to recognise that 
 these views in no way interfered with, rather 
 indeed contributed to, its distinctive spiritual
 
 BY-ROADS TO FAITH. 157 
 
 power ; that they in no way turned it from the 
 redemptive road which God had set it to travel. 
 But there is another of the hidden roads to 
 faith which we of the present day especially 
 need to take account of. In the region of 
 physical research nothing more wonderful has 
 been discovered than the capacity which 
 living bodies possess of creating the organs of 
 which they stand in need. We know now 
 that the eye is developed out of a hair. From 
 touch we have mounted to sight. And in 
 life's highest regions the same process is going 
 on. Here, as in the physical realm, humanity 
 will develop the organs which its ever-mounting 
 aspiration calls for. Not for ever will the soul 
 walk blindly in its world. Already it sees 
 men as trees walking. An Edison declares 
 his conviction that we are on the edge of a 
 new revelation of God along the road of science. 
 Maybe ; but the road of science, the road of 
 weighing and measuring, is not the only or 
 the highest path the soul traverses. That 
 spiritual sense whose potency Schleiermacher 
 revealed to his age, is yet, we may well believe, 
 only in the dawn of its powers. When it 
 reaches its next stage of faculty we shall have 
 revelations indeed.
 
 158 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 The personal applications of this theme are 
 innumerable, and can only be hinted at here. 
 Few earnest souls reach faith by a plain or easy 
 road. Oftenest there is a plunge through 
 morasses and a fight with dragons. A man 
 who has never doubted can hardly know what 
 conviction really means. And the road is so 
 often not one of logic at all. The heart, as 
 Pascal says, " has reasons which the reason 
 knows not of." It is life that convinces 
 us more than syllogisms. Have we not bowed 
 to the mystical influence of a good man, 
 without being able to give account of his power 
 over us ? There is, indeed, no arguing against 
 the saintliness of a saint. When the Church 
 has absorbed the Sermon on the Mount it will 
 not need to publish Apologias. 
 
 And for final word. The road to faith for 
 some is the longest in the world. At present 
 there are souls which have to make so vast a 
 circuit on their way thither that they do not 
 complete the round in the present life. To us 
 they seem at the end still going westward. 
 But at some point, beyond our mortal ken, 
 there will be a bend in the road, and they also 
 shall see God,
 
 XVII. 
 Religion and the Child. 
 
 IN the art galleries of Europe what perhaps 
 ot'tenest strikes the eye is the subject, inces- 
 santly repeated, and by the world's greatest 
 artists, of a Mother and a Child. Genius, 
 with its fine intuition, offers us here the highest 
 religion as centred in a birth. It is strange 
 that, with such an object-lesson before it, 
 the world, and especially the religious world, 
 should have failed so signally in recognising 
 the spiritual significance of childhood. The 
 Churches have wrangled prodigiously over 
 baptism, and have had much to say of infancy 
 in its relation to original sin. But of the 
 deepest, most central, and withal most in- 
 spiring teaching that is here offered us, one 
 may turn over many theological tomes and 
 find no word. Men to-day, concerned for 
 the prospects of religion, take anxious note 
 of its visible resources. They count up 
 churches, revenues, adherents. They take
 
 160 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 note of prevailing mental tendencies, and also 
 of those spiritual reinforcements which their 
 doctrinal systems admit. What really, when 
 properly understood, will be found to bulk 
 greatest in any such calculation, is the least 
 thought of. It is that of the birth into the 
 world of children, the perpetual renewal in 
 humanity of the child-nature. 
 
 The modern world is vastly concerned as to 
 what is the proper teaching it should offer to 
 childhood. It is time it began to understand 
 the teaching which childhood offers to it. 
 Has it occurred to us yet that the greatest 
 religious force in the world is not the pulpit, 
 but the cradle ? Man has two points of imme- 
 diate contact with the Unseen that of birth 
 and that of death. With the latter, especially 
 as he grows older, he becomes more and more 
 preoccupied ; the link between religion and 
 death is always visible. But this other 
 contact-point of birth, in its whole significance 
 for the spiritual life of men, offers a region 
 of thought where the footprints are few and 
 uncertain. Yet do we but explore it for our- 
 selves over never so small a portion of its sur- 
 face, and we shall discover how extraordinary 
 is its richness. It sends us back at least with
 
 RELIGION AND THE CHILD. 161 
 
 this conviction, that of all the reinforcements 
 of religion there is none more potent ; that 
 of all the guarantees for the progress of the 
 world's spiritual evolution there is none more 
 certain than what is furnished by the constantly 
 renewed appearance in it of the child. 
 
 What these guarantees amount to will 
 perhaps appear most clearly when we discuss 
 the child's own relation to the Unseen. But 
 its religious work does not commence there. 
 Science is beginning to instruct us as to the 
 wonderful way in which infancy, considered 
 simply as helpless and dependent, has worked 
 towards the evolution of the human soul. 
 It was through the child that altruism first 
 came into the world. It was in the care of 
 their helpless offspring that our primitive 
 ancestors got their first dim apprehensions 
 of unselfish regard for others ; it was here 
 that motherhood and fatherhood, in the high 
 senses which now attach to the words, were 
 born ; here were wrought out the ideas that 
 made possible the religious teaching about a 
 Father in heaven ; here also was it that man, 
 as he nursed his offspring, nursed also the first 
 glimmerings of that conception of self-sacrifice 
 which was to form its culmination in the cross. 
 
 u
 
 162 PEOBLEMS or LIVING. 
 
 This in itself, it will be admitted, forms a 
 not inconsiderable contribution to the world's 
 spiritual life. But another aspect of the 
 matter opens when we begin to study the 
 nature of childhood and its immediate rela- 
 tions with the Unseen. On the point as to 
 what birth actually signifies in its spiritual 
 relations, it is remarkable that two great 
 English poets have lighted upon the same 
 thought. Wordsworth in his magnificent " Ode 
 on Immortality " tells us 
 
 Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. 
 The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 
 And cometh from afar ; 
 Not in entire forgetfulness, 
 And not in utter nakedness, 
 But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
 
 From God who is our home. 
 
 To him, on the same theme, answers Mrs. 
 Browning in " Aurora Leigh " : 
 
 I, writing thus, am still what men call young ; 
 I have not so far left the coasts of life 
 
 As not to hear the murmur of that outer Infinite 
 Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep 
 
 When wondered at for smiling. 
 
 The thought of both here is, of course, pure 
 Platonism, and Platonism, in its doctrine of 
 souls and of birth, is again the echo of a mystic
 
 RELIGION AND THE CHILD. 163 
 
 teaching that seems to have haunted mankind 
 from the beginning. The teaching is that birth 
 is the entrance into this life of a being that 
 has come from the realm of pure spirit, and 
 that is, in its earliest years, vaguely yet deeply 
 conscious of this, its celestial origin. A bold 
 and inspiring affirmation if only it were true ! 
 Well, there is evidence, which to the finer 
 natures at least carries far, though its voice 
 be low and indistinct. Such natures can 
 certainly affirm that in those earliest years 
 there was a sense of this world as a Temple, 
 the sense of a Divine nearness, of celestial 
 meanings in earth and sky, of strange mystic 
 stirrings of the soul, such as have not been 
 realised since. Who can fathom the religion 
 of a child ? Who has not recognised himself 
 in that young correspondent of Goethe, who 
 felt the world to be alive and struggling to 
 express its meaning ? While men and women 
 are absorbed in the vulgar rush for wealth 
 and place, in the nursery there are little ones 
 who stand in the ways of Paradise, who hear 
 the ripple of its rivers of water, who see its 
 white-winged angels, and who recognise the 
 voice of the Lord God as He walks therein. 
 Away from the arid dust of the arena, these
 
 164 PROBLEMS or LIVING. 
 
 little ones dwell at the sources of life and 
 touch the Infinite at every point. 
 
 Marvellous is it to note, also, that what 
 transpires in the life of a child is precisely the 
 history over again that is written for us in the 
 early chapters of Genesis. The history of 
 humanity, as Pascal pointed out, is the history 
 of the individual writ large. The drama of 
 Paradise and of the Fall is re-enacted in each 
 living soul. Evolution and the Bible may 
 be read here together without any sense of 
 discord. The slow ascent of life which the 
 former teaches brings us first to the threshold 
 of the moral life, to the state of inferior, un- 
 conscious moral innocence where sin was un- 
 known, because the higher, inner law had not 
 yet dawned on the soul. A step yet further 
 in the human development and sin has become 
 possible because moral choice between higher 
 and lower has become possible. Humanity 
 falls as one of the incidents of its way up- 
 wards, and one of the signs of its progress. 
 That is the drama of humanity as told by 
 evolution. But this is precisely what, told 
 in its own mystic language, is given us in the 
 Scriptures, and the child who comes into the 
 world to greet the twentieth century will be
 
 RELIGION AND THE CHILD. 165 
 
 the latest stage on which the drama is repeated. 
 Born into the paradise of the lower innocence, 
 it will leave it, driven by a Destiny that is 
 stern but kindly, to fare through a wilderness 
 of toil and of failure, that nevertheless is the 
 way to a nobler paradise that lies in front. 
 
 We have said earlier that the child is the 
 guarantee of religion in the world. We here 
 repeat it, with the addition that the child thus 
 signified is not simply the new-born infant, 
 but also that element of our grown-up man- 
 hood which, despite all our years and experi- 
 ences, remains as the survival of our childhood. 
 It is this part of a man, not the disputer in 
 him, not the logician, but the child, the 
 wonderer, the mystic, the bit of him that from 
 the beginning has felt secret ineffable yearnings 
 for something his eye hath not seen but his 
 soul hath wotted of ; it is at this side of him 
 the preacher and religious teacher should 
 chiefly aim. When Guthrie, as he lay a-dying, 
 asked the watchers to " sing a bairn's hymn," 
 he was revealing the whole secret. The child 
 in us is our doorway to the Infinite. It is so 
 with the good, and just as much so with the 
 bad. In presence of his child the worst man 
 has a moral longing. He conceals his vices
 
 166 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 from him. That his boy should imitate him 
 there is a thought he cannot endure. If the 
 Church knew only how to touch this instinct ! 
 It has worried itself about infant baptism ; it 
 has split itself in twain on the subject of infant 
 communion. Had it eyes it would see that 
 its vital question lies not in such things, but 
 in adequately meeting that child yearning 
 of each human soul which, mightier in it than 
 logic, mightier in it than science, is the evidence 
 of the Paradise Lost which it seeks to regain. 
 In a chapter on " Religion and the Child " 
 most readers would expect some observations 
 on religious training, and of this there has 
 been, so far, no word. One could indeed say 
 much, but we content ourselves with a hint. 
 Men and women should begin to train their 
 children long years before they are born. It 
 sounds a paradox, but there is nothing truer. 
 In what we are doing now, as young men and 
 women, with our own souls we are training 
 the children that are yet to be. We begin 
 generations even before they are born. The 
 ancestors of John Wesley the fine old non- 
 juring clergyman on the one side, and the 
 Puritans who suffered for conscience' sake 
 on the other were shaping, all unwittingly
 
 RELIGION AND THE CHILD. 167 
 
 to themselves, the spiritual fibre and sinew 
 of the great evangelist that was to come. When 
 the children are actually with us, a curse will 
 surely rest on the man or woman of us who 
 obstructs their view of the heavenly kingdom. 
 Religion is the basis of child-life, and when 
 it is not also the basis of parent-life Nature 
 in her holiest part has been outraged. The 
 best dowry for a child, more in value than all 
 the world can offer, is the memory of a mother 
 who prays. To be chosen by our child as its 
 ideal is, perhaps, the highest honour that we 
 could receive. But even that is not enough. 
 We have failed unless, in embracing us as his 
 ideal, our child is thereby set on the direct 
 route to the Highest.
 
 XVIII. 
 Our Wilderness Side. 
 
 A LARGE part of our planet will always be a 
 wilderness. When the last cultivable acre 
 has been reached, there will stretch beyond 
 it the wild moorland and the eternal hills. To 
 the end of time the mountains will be a solitude ; 
 so will the wastes of sandy desert, and the 
 interminable stretches of the lonely ocean. We 
 are all of us glad that it is so. For the wilder- 
 ness side of our world answers so perfectly 
 to the wilderness side in ourselves. You 
 may case a man in all the conventionalities 
 and all the proprieties, but there is a bit of 
 " Chaos and old night " inside him, a frag- 
 ment of the original formless infinite, that 
 refuses to be cabined or confined. The best 
 drilled of us cannot forget his relation to the 
 original immensity. The city clerk on thirty 
 shillings a week looks up to the shining stars 
 at night and finds in himself some kinship 
 with them.
 
 OUR WILDERNESS SIDE. 169 
 
 The more civilisation presses us the more 
 insistent becomes our instinct for the wilder- 
 ness. It shows in all classes. West-end ex- 
 quisites will take the train at Waterloo and 
 disappear for a year or more. They are next 
 heard of as hunting big game in Central 
 Africa, or finding new pathways across the 
 Himalayas. The rush in the holiday season 
 means not so much a search for health as the 
 desire to mate the wilderness within us to 
 the wilderness without. It is Mother Nature 
 that calls, and there is no resisting her appeal. 
 By her rivers or on her moorlands we lie in 
 her bosom, taking our 
 
 Fill of deep and liquid rest, 
 Forgetful of all ill 
 
 The men who in their regular life are the 
 most entombed in routine are often the most 
 tranced listeners to the mystic voice. In 
 the published letters of T. E. Brown, of 
 Clifton College, we see how the learned, 
 conscientious schoolmaster of term time was, in 
 the holidays, and, indeed, inwardly all the 
 year through, the Manxman, the poet, whose 
 soul was by the sea and the mountains, and 
 in the land of dreams. Jerome became a 
 monk largely because he loved the wilderness
 
 170 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 and hated cities. We get a touch of his 
 feeling where in one of his commentaries 
 he speaks of Elijah and Elisha as monks, 
 and praises the condition as one of solitude 
 and liberty. Speaking of himself and his 
 friends he says that after the freedom of 
 their lonely life they found confinement in 
 cities as bad as imprisonment. Indeed, most 
 leaders have been wilderness men. It is 
 in solitude they have found themselves and 
 their mission. 
 
 This instinct for the wilderness outside 
 answers, we have said, to a related realm of 
 the soul. There are, indeed, two sorts of 
 desert within us one like that of the moun- 
 tains and the sea primitive eternal, beyond 
 the touch of plough and harrow ; the other a 
 waste that cries for cultivation. The first 
 is one of our most precious possessions. Has 
 it ever occurred to us to appraise the value to 
 life of that vast inner region whose dim boun- 
 daries impinge at a hundred points on our 
 consciousness, without ever becoming fully 
 recognisable in it ? Outside the narrow area 
 of our definite knowing looms the vast realm 
 of that Formless which inscrutably creates 
 our knowing. There, in a way that is hidden
 
 OUR WILDERNESS SIDE. 171 
 
 from us, is manufactured the light of ou/ 
 seeing. How the soul exults in this inner 
 infinite ! It is the open air of thought. 
 From out of our creeds and our definite know- 
 ledge we emerge, as from time to time we 
 escape from our crowded cities, to exult in 
 the sense of these vaster horizons beyond. 
 
 But there is a wilderness side in man of 
 which very different things are to be said. 
 It is that part of him which was meant to be 
 cultivated, and that still lies waste. In this 
 respect we are as settlers in a new country. 
 The centre of the estate has been cleared, 
 the trees cut down, roads made here and there, 
 and a goodly acreage put under crops. But 
 there is no sense of finish. The stumps of oak 
 and elm are still in the ground ; outside the 
 middle area are bog and uncultivated bush, 
 and here and there are neglected points 
 where the primeval forest, pushed back for a 
 space, is again asserting itself. 
 
 We are so accustomed to ourselves as we 
 are, that most of us pass through life without 
 realising the amount of waste ground there 
 is lying about within us. The crop we raise 
 out of our mere physical capacity might be 
 quadrupled by a better farming. What is
 
 172 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 the difference in value between a trained 
 and an untrained finger ? A Paderewski 
 might instruct us on the point. And the 
 eye, the ear, the foot, every limb, organ and 
 physical power can be lifted to almost in- 
 credible capacities by the sheer power of 
 drill. A new stage of the human evolution 
 will be in sight when a system of thorough 
 physical culture, beginning from infancy, 
 has been universally recognised as an essential 
 condition of securing to our race the full 
 wealth of its inheritance of life. 
 
 It is, however, when we reach the sphere of 
 moral dispositions and actions that we be- 
 come most conscious of our wilderness con- 
 dition. We may have reformed our actions 
 and brought our speech under control, but 
 what of our thoughts ? In his " Grace Abound- 
 ing," that marvellous portraiture of a struggling 
 soul, Bunyan sketches for us the stages 
 of his moral progress under the influence of 
 religion. There was the start, in the open 
 avowal of himself as a Christian disciple, 
 and then the breaking of old habits and asso- 
 ciations. But long after the taking of these 
 steps there was inward chaos. Rebel thoughts, 
 inspired as it seemed by demons, chased
 
 OUE WILDERNESS SIDE. 173 
 
 through the bck chambers of his brain 
 and made hideous turmoil. To gain the 
 mastery there was the last and hardest fight. 
 Bagehot says somewhere that mediaeval Chris- 
 tianity was occupied largely in fighting and 
 even dying for principles which it was utterly 
 careless about carrying into practice. There 
 are people to-day who disbelieve altogether 
 in the practice. The present writer once 
 found himself in an argument in France 
 with a cultivated sceptic, whose position 
 was that Christianity was impossible as a 
 religion because it demanded purity even 
 in a man's thoughts ! He preferred the 
 motto of the Renaissance humanists : " Intus 
 ut libet, foris ut moris est : In private do what 
 you like, in public follow the custom." And 
 the modern man, in some sections at least, 
 has not got much further than this. 
 
 Yet certain is it that no one has come 
 to his inheritance, has tasted the fulness and 
 sweetness of life, who has not brought this 
 part of himself into order. That has been 
 seen plainly enough outside of Christianity. 
 What a word is that of Plato which speaks of 
 the true man, " the kingly man," as "a 
 living law " ! It was here that the great
 
 174 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 melancholy emperor-stoic, Marcus Aurelius, 
 placed the real worth of life. " The one 
 thing worth living for," says he, " is to keep 
 one's soul pure." Seneca, with his Si vis 
 tibi omnia svbjicere, te subjice rationi " If thou 
 wouldest bring all things into subjection subject 
 thyself to reason " is on the same track. He 
 would cultivate the ground by a rigorous self- 
 examination. " I blink no unpleasant part. 
 I pass nothing over. For why should I fear 
 to face any one of my faults when it lies in 
 my power to say, ' For to-day I pardon thee, 
 but sin no more ' ? " 
 
 But while heathenism made brave incursions 
 into this ground it is in the school of Christ 
 that the true farming of it has been learned. 
 There is no truer refreshment than to come 
 upon those " pastures of great souls," where 
 the green verdure, the laden trees, the waving 
 grain, and the scented air are all the fruit 
 of this incomparable culture. How these 
 husbandmen of the spirit know each other 
 across the ages ! They each drop their 
 pregnant word of experience as they pass. 
 It is a Clement of Alexandria who says that 
 " fastings signify abstinence from all evils 
 whatsoever, both in action and hi word,
 
 OUR WILDERNESS SIDE. 175 
 
 and in thought itself," or yet more powerfully, 
 where he insists that our inner goodness 
 must infect our neighbour : "If the neigh- 
 bours of an elect man sin, the elect man has 
 sinned. For had he conducted himself as 
 the Word prescribes, his neighbour also would 
 have been filled with such reverence for the 
 life as not to sin." Or it is Friar Laurence 
 with his " practice of the presence of God," 
 or that sweet saint of the Middle Ages the 
 Anchoress Julian : " As long as we be meddling 
 with any part of sin we shall never see clearly 
 the Blissful Cheer of our Lord." As we glance 
 across fields like these there is no doubt 
 about the farming or the results. 
 
 But finished husbandry of that kind is 
 exceptional. Man is at an early stage of his 
 evolution, and has only just begun to be 
 spiritual. His farm is on the edge of the 
 wilderness, and the savage growths are 
 perpetually reasserting themselves. How be- 
 wildering are these intrusions ! Every section 
 of our life has its new kind of weed. We 
 struggle through youth to find in manhood 
 that we have to begin again. Further on the 
 discovery is made that old age has its special 
 vices. The weeds come up in our best flower-
 
 176 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 beds. An Indian mystic said that one of 
 the most ineffaceable things was the vanity 
 of a saint. Our very religion is full of wilder- 
 ness. Pious people are as eager to-day as 
 were the Pharisees of old for the chief seats 
 in the synagogue. At meetings for spiritual 
 edification a speaker will declaim with seraphic 
 fervour, while robbing the man who comes 
 after him of his time allowance in the spirit 
 of a highwayman. We are moral along the 
 beaten tracks, and outside make the strangest 
 exhibitions of ourselves. A little success and 
 our head is turned. The enriched Christian 
 has lost the charm of his poorer day. All the 
 time the swamp and morass are so close out- 
 side. Every now and then comes from them 
 a poisonous breath which brings fever to the 
 blood, and we are no longer ourselves. Men 
 remember with a shudder the barbaric " pos- 
 sessions" that for a time have held them. 
 They wonder what would have happened 
 had favouring circumstances been allied with 
 certain moods. 
 
 Nevertheless man, so raw a settler in this 
 higher realm, will yet conquer it, and make 
 it his home. The surrounding swamps will 
 be drained and the air made wholesome.
 
 OUR WILDERNESS SIDE. 177 
 
 The high dreams of his uppermost part will 
 all be fulfilled. His aspiration for inner per- 
 fection is a prophecy, a dawn of the coming 
 day. This always is the method of life. 
 It never comes unannounced. Before the 
 main body, often far in advance, are the 
 avant-couriers, the flying messengers that 
 tell of what is to follow. Herein is the supreme 
 significance for us of the character of Christ. 
 The significance is that in this He is " the 
 first-born of many brethren." In that sinless 
 career, in which the whole inner life moves 
 with absolute harmony, in which imagination, 
 thought, feeling, will and desire, in a con- 
 tinued perfect co-operation make one celestial 
 music, we perceive, as though it were written 
 on the sky, the glorious promise for our race. 
 For the height on which Christ moved is a 
 human height. The destiny of this Divine 
 Son, " made perfect," is for ever mingled 
 with our own. 
 
 12
 
 XIX. 
 The Quality of Belief. 
 
 " DIFFERENCES of belief " is a familiar phrase, 
 but its real significance is only imperfectly 
 realised. With the mass of people, including 
 a good many moral and religious teachers, 
 the emphasis is placed almost entirely on the 
 something believed. And assuredly that is of 
 prime importance. In some directions it is 
 everything. If an engine driver believes that 
 a signal shows white when it is red, or a pilot 
 that a sunken reef on to which he is steering 
 is a mile away, it will not in these cases matter 
 greatly how the conviction was reached. The 
 whole result will follow from the conviction 
 itself. Indeed, in every department of life, 
 the " what " we believe in, whether it be true 
 or false, is of such enormous import that we 
 may easily reach the notion that the whole 
 content of faith lies there. Whether, in the 
 trade we are engaged in, we believe in this 
 method or that ; whether in science we accept 
 
 178
 
 THE QUALITY OF BELIEF. 179 
 
 evolution or reject it ; whether in finance we 
 hold by the soundness or otherwise of this 
 investment ; hi religion whether we believe 
 in a God or not ; throughout the whole circle 
 of affairs the thing we believe in, its actual 
 Tightness or wrongness, seems so to fill the 
 whole view, as to leave room for nothing else. 
 
 Yet, when we examine more closely we 
 discover that, in one sphere at least, the thing 
 believed in is not nearly the whole of belief. 
 In the region of morals and religion the " what " 
 we believe is, to a degree not nearly enough 
 understood, conditioned by the " how." The 
 study of religious history, both in the gross 
 and in individual careers, shows us that the 
 body of a creed, its doctrinal content, as an 
 influence upon character, has been often 
 subordinate to this other question, how the 
 belief has been come at, and the way in which 
 it has been held. In other words, what has to 
 be ever taken into account in the estimate is 
 not only the quantity but the quality of the 
 belief. The question is a practical one, and 
 there are some present-day applications of it 
 that are urgent. 
 
 What we have to realise is that the sublimest 
 belief may be held nobly or ignobly ; and
 
 180 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 on the other hand that a belief, poor and 
 meagre in itself, may be so worthily held as to 
 be an instrument of genuine progress. M. 
 Taine, in one of his earlier letters, puts well 
 one aspect of this theme when he says : " Re- 
 ligion, though one, differs with different minds. 
 Some interpret it well, and on it feed generous 
 feelings, exalted hopes, great thoughts. Others 
 falsify it, and make it a matter of kneeling, 
 processions, penances, bows, ridiculous prac- 
 tices, tending to destroy health, to injure the 
 intelligence, and to banish peace of mind." 
 With the same creed, that is, one man is 
 growing to nobleness, and another to a despic- 
 able meanness. It is a question of use. 
 
 As we survey our credal furniture of to-day 
 and compare it with that of some of the past 
 Christian times, we find that, great as is the 
 divergence on some matters of knowledge, the 
 real difference lies quite outside the intellec- 
 tual sphere. If we want convincing of this, 
 we have only to compare the average twentieth- 
 century holding of Christianity with that, say, 
 of the ages of persecution. The creed of the 
 Church to-day, in its general statements, 
 is very much that of Tertullian's time. The 
 views of the great African as to the person of
 
 THE QUALITY OF BELIEF. 181 
 
 Christ, the Salvation by Him, the Christian 
 community, the resurrection, the future state, 
 are reflected in the formularies that are now 
 in use. But let anyone turn to the literature 
 of that time and he will understand what we 
 mean by the quality of belief. As we look from 
 one period to the other we are inclined to ask : 
 " Is there anything in common between the 
 easy-going life-system of our British Church- 
 man, with a creed which he inherits as part of 
 his position in society, and that second-century 
 fellowship lived within view of the flames ? " 
 It were worth while for our good citizen, as a 
 change in his reading, to substitute one morn- 
 ing for the money article of The Times such a 
 document, say, as Tertullian's " Ad Martyras," 
 a letter which it would be difficult for the 
 hardest of us to read without emotion. Fancy 
 something of this sort, addressed to us in view 
 of what might be our lot to-morrow ! " The 
 flesh, perhaps, will dread the merciless sword 
 and the lofty cross, and the rage of wild beasts, 
 and that punishment of the flames, of all 
 most terrible, and all the skill of the execu- 
 tioner in torture." Or this from his exhorta- 
 tion on Patience : " We who carry about our 
 very soul, our very body, exposed in this world
 
 182 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 to injury from all, and exhibit patience under 
 that injury, shall we be hurt at the loss of 
 less important things ? " To call our citizen's 
 correct recital of his creed at Sunday morning 
 service by the same name as the faith of these 
 men and women, held in view of the torture 
 chamber and under the very heat and smoke 
 of the pyre, is surely to invoke our sense of the 
 ludicrous. 
 
 It seems, then, that the conditions under 
 which we obtain and hold our belief, as well as 
 the content of it, have to be weighed in any 
 estimation of its real value. A man has 
 signed his thirty-nine articles, and his neigh- 
 bour finds himself unable to put his name to a 
 single one, and often enough heaven has more 
 hopes of this last than of the other. What the 
 first holds may be in itself the most important 
 truth, but he holds it in such a way that it is 
 practically of no good to himself or to anyone 
 else. Our creedless man, on the other hand, 
 may be in his present condition on his way from 
 a formalism which meant nothing to a faith 
 which, agonised and fought for, shall be a power 
 to reform the world. Its articles will probably 
 be less in number than thirty-nine, but they 
 will be enough for life and victory. It is
 
 THE QUALITY OF BELIEF. 183 
 
 convictions of this order and parentage that 
 make history. Robertson of Brighton, after the 
 first shaking of his traditional creed, tumbled 
 from negation to negation, until the only 
 thing left him was the eternal difference 
 between right and wrong. But from that 
 one certitude he climbed step by step to others, 
 proved each to his inmost soul, until he found 
 again a Christian Gospel which was a message 
 of life to multitudes. 
 
 Religious belief is for the sake of the religious 
 life. The moment we realise that, we recog- 
 nise how much more must enter into it than 
 the definitions which the intellect furnishes. 
 Its roots lie so much deeper than the intellect. 
 Flourishing hi the midst of gross superstitions 
 we find sweet natures, that select instinctively 
 from their system all that is morally helpful 
 and live on that. And there are natures that 
 touch the highest truths only to degrade them. 
 In lowliest things some find suggestions of the 
 noblest ; in the noblest others see nothing 
 but the sordid. A book has just been issued 
 which finds the ultimate origins of Christianity 
 in the lowest obscenities of Paganism. " It grew 
 originally out of Phallic worship ! " Put a hog 
 into a palace and it will make of it a sty.
 
 184 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 Amongst simple races the moral quality of 
 belief shows almost exclusively in the way it 
 is used. There is hardly a question here as to 
 how it has been come by. It is like the 
 elements around them, a primitive fact, into 
 the midst of which they were born, which 
 they accept and live in, as they accept and 
 live in the air and the sunshine. With the 
 educated man of to-day the quality of belief 
 is a question of much farther reach. For a 
 creed to be acceptable he must recognise in its 
 texture the elements of knowledge and of 
 veracity. He realises with Pascal, that " the 
 first of all Christian truths is that truth shall be 
 loved above all." And as to what constitutes 
 -truth some fine old crusted formulas no longer 
 attract him. A certain order of mind will 
 doubtless for a long while to come bow down 
 to ecclesiastically manufactured authority, and 
 accept as religion a sentiment of this sort, 
 uttered not long ago by a Jesuit professor at 
 Maynooth : " The principle of liberty of 
 conscience is one which is not, and never has 
 been and never will be, approved by the 
 Church of Christ." But Rome, with the best 
 will for the work, no longer creates the beliefs 
 of the world. Before resuming that role she
 
 THE QUALITY OF BELIEF. 185 
 
 will have to purge herself of her sins against 
 truth ; she must renounce her bogus infalli- 
 bilities, her habit of persecution, her veto 
 upon research, her fostering of superstition, 
 and other deadly intellectual vices. A religious 
 belief that can show no better credentials than 
 this will not survive in the future. What 
 survives must ring true to the intellect. It 
 will be nothing more nor less than the spiritual 
 interpretation of proved facts. 
 
 And how will that interpretation be gained ? 
 Always in one way by a personal experience. 
 The experience not, perhaps, so much of the 
 multitude, as of the leaders whom God from 
 time to time vouchsafes to the world. As long 
 as humanity endures there will probably be 
 this difference in faith ; the difference between 
 the simple human devotion of earnest men with 
 their eyes fixed upon the teacher who guides 
 and inspires them, and the faith of the leader 
 himself who, in advance of the crowd, his eyes 
 lifted to the heavens, guided not by authority, 
 but by inner voices, and by the breaking dawn 
 far in front, goes " sounding on his dim and 
 perilous way." It is a Luther with his Ich 
 kann nicht anders, a Jesus who, with face set 
 towards Jerusalem, walks solitary while the
 
 I 
 
 186 PKOBLBMS OF LIVING. 
 
 disciples behind are amazed and afraid. The 
 great teacher of each age is one who, on the 
 one side, gathers up into himself all the life 
 of his time, and through that sees God : who, 
 on the other, having found God for himself, 
 makes the atmosphere of his day the medium 
 through which he brings God afresh to the 
 experience of his fellows. Thus is it that the 
 eternal Christ is reborn in each true teacher, 
 and found afresh in each true disciple. 
 
 The final moral test of a religious belief is 
 that " it works." A genuine conviction is a 
 spring of inculcable power. There is no force 
 in the world to compare with it. That was 
 the argument which struck Darwin at Tahiti. 
 Said he : " The lesson of the missionaries is 
 the enchanter's wand ; the march of improve- 
 ment consequent on the introduction of 
 Christianity through the South Seas probably 
 stands by itself in the records of history." 
 The apostolic word that " faith without works 
 is dead," is a fragment of natural history. A 
 creed that is doing nothing is not faith. It is 
 its grinning skeleton from which the life is 
 departed. A Church whose members recite 
 formularies that have no relation to their 
 active life is rotting at the core. It breathes
 
 THE QUALITY OF BELIEF. 187 
 
 putrescence and is a danger to the moral 
 health of the community. Than continue 
 thus, it were better it should dissolve and 
 refound itself upon a single affirmation, if only 
 it can be sure that the affirmation is true. 
 Happily, there is no need for extremities of 
 this kind. Our moral world is full of the 
 materials for great convictions. Humanity 
 can never lose again the revelations that have 
 been made to it. But the treasure is hid in 
 the field, and each soul of us must dig until he 
 find it.
 
 XX. 
 The Moment After. 
 
 A MODEEN writer asks, " What moment should 
 we choose as the one from which we could pass 
 our surest verdict upon life ? " A tantalising 
 question, to which, however, there is no 
 satisfying answer. For there is no one moment 
 whose verdict, taken by itself, is entirely 
 trustworthy. The scene changes so utterly 
 as we view our life from the standpoints, now 
 of expectation, now of fruition, and again of 
 memory. From no one of these do we get the 
 whole. But we could spare no one of them 
 in the final summing. Of a quite peculiar 
 significance is the view-point we now propose 
 to examine. A thoughtful man will the more 
 eagerly, the longer he lives, look for the answers 
 which come to him from " the moment after." 
 Every experience we go through yields this 
 particular product, and it has always a quality 
 entirely its own. Nowhere else do we find 
 so immense a rebound, so intense an energy of
 
 THE MOMENT AFTER. 189 
 
 self-realisation. The results consequently are 
 of the first importance, both for our personal 
 guidance as individuals, as well as for the data 
 they offer for a philosophy of life. 
 
 We have just said that every experience 
 has " its moment after." As we study these 
 moments, we find that, while varying immensely 
 in their contents, they have a significant 
 unanimity in the lesson they point. They all 
 turn us in one direction towards the relation 
 of the soul to our animal life. We take, for 
 instance, " the moment after " of our sensuous 
 pleasures. One of those many things, the 
 commonness of which hides from us their 
 intrinsic strangeness, is the way in which, 
 in the cosmic constitution, our so-called 
 " pleasures " are organised for us. They are 
 in every case the pursuit of something we 
 never reach. Whatever the pleasure may be, 
 whether the gratification of an appetite, the 
 rush of the chase, or the listening to a thrilling 
 story, the experience is, in essence, the same 
 the eager movement towards a consummation, 
 which, when gained, is a vacuity, a throwing 
 us back on an empty self. Goethe, an epicure 
 in sensation, has registered for us this result 
 in the memorable words : " We are never so
 
 190 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 far removed from the object of our desires as 
 when we imagine we possess that which we 
 desire." To the pleasure-seeker " the moment 
 after " is generally a moment of pessimism. 
 Every one of us to a more or less degree has 
 tasted the bitterness of this disgust. But it 
 is strange that more of us do not inquire why 
 it should be so. Why is it that such a result, 
 issuing evidently from the inmost nature of 
 things, should invariably, at these moments 
 confront us ? If the scheme under which we 
 live offered us no other considerations, we 
 might, surely, find in this one alone the evidence 
 that, for man, the satisfaction of the animal 
 nature offers no key to the real solution of his 
 life. 
 
 But " the moment after " opens other prob- 
 lems not less baffling. Its position in the 
 natural history of passion, for instance, con- 
 fronts us with mysteries which go beyond the 
 measure of our sounding lines. We are 
 appalled at the vindictive cruelty, or if not 
 that, the cynical mockery, with which some 
 men's careers seem mapped out. They are the 
 victims of a delusion which first blinds and 
 then cheats them. No man follows evil as 
 such. He follows always what seems to him
 
 THE MOMENT AFTER. 191 
 
 a good, and so often the pursuit of his good 
 becomes his ruin. There comes a time when 
 between him and a fancied gain the acquisi- 
 tion of wealth, the winning of a position, the 
 gratifying of an imperious desire lies a deed 
 which, in his hurry, he will not stop to analyse. 
 The blow is struck, and he leaps forward for the 
 reward. It is then that the universe plays on 
 him its deathly trick. The very objects which 
 drew him on to his deed undergo a ghastly 
 transformation. He realises, all too late, 
 the baleful energy of " the moment after." 
 The anticipated pleasure has disappeared in 
 this tremendous unforeseen preoccupation. It 
 is not the crown to be worn but the blood that 
 is shed that in his " moment after " fills the 
 soul of Macbeth, making the world for him 
 " one red." And this human tragedy, with 
 every variety of detail, is being every day 
 
 The spectacle here offered is one on which 
 men have pondered, doubtingly, despairingly, 
 cynically, according to their mood, from the 
 beginning. " Why," it is asked, " should so 
 cruel a comedy be played upon mortal man ? 
 We pity the victim in a great crime, but ought 
 we not to pity the criminal more ? He has
 
 192 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 been such a plaything for the unseen powers ! 
 Why cheat him so utterly ? Why could not 
 the revelation of " the moment after " have 
 been given him the moment before ? Why 
 reserve the knowledge of the true character of 
 his deed to the hour when it is irremediably 
 done ? The old Greek dramatists were 
 full of this problem. For them the solution 
 was hi a remorseless fate. Continually in 
 ^schylus and Sophocles do we get this note 
 of a pitiless Necessity, which first blinds the 
 eyes of men to the real nature of their projected 
 deed, and then for ever pursues them with its 
 fell results. A grim solution, and a curious 
 commentary, surely, on that modern teaching 
 which bids us forsake our present religious 
 abiding-places for " the happier life-outlook 
 of that old Greek world " ! 
 
 There is a later exposition of guilt's "moment 
 after " which, differing from the Greek, is yet 
 hardly an improvement. Nietzsche has de- 
 voted some of his most caustic pages to what 
 he calls an analysis of " bad conscience." 
 In his view man has no business with a " bad 
 conscience " at all. It is a result of the wrong 
 turn in the road which he took when he " inter- 
 nalised himself " when, that is, he turned
 
 THE MOMENT AFTER. 193 
 
 inwards on his own nature the instincts which 
 had been accustomed to discharge themselves 
 outwardly. Man now attacks himself, turns 
 the war upon his own instincts, his own 
 pleasures, instead of, as in the good old 
 days, upon the world and upon his enemy. 
 He tells us the time has come to reverse this 
 action of conscience, to turn its force " against 
 all unnatural bents, against all those aspirations 
 for another life, for all that is hostile to the 
 senses, the instincts, animality in a word, 
 against all the old ideals." 
 
 One would hardly notice such utterances 
 were it not that they are having their vogue 
 in certain circles, with a sinister result both 
 upon ideals and upon morals. Sensualists 
 love to hear of a philosophy which is an apologia 
 for their vices ; they will accept it, even when 
 it dates from Bedlam. The Nietzsche theory 
 here serves only to illustrate what Cicero 
 had already learned in his day that " Nihil 
 tarn absurde did polest, quod non dictatur ab 
 aliquo philosophorum" (There is no utterable 
 absurdity which has not been uttered by some 
 philosopher.) When a man brings an indict- 
 ment against the world's sanitj 7 it is time for 
 his friends to look after his own. We ma be
 
 194 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 sure the slow, universal development of the 
 human moral consciousness has been something 
 else than a blunder. And the deepest difficulties 
 connected with it, including this age-long puzzle 
 of passion's blinding till " the moment after," 
 has, we may be certain, a significance better 
 than that of the Greek fatalism, and better 
 than that of our latest philosophic cynicism. 
 The cosmic scheme, as it unfolds before us, 
 is so healthy and so large-minded as a whole 
 that we may trust it for its mysteries. 
 Could the history of the soul's ascent be fully 
 opened to us, it would be seen that, for some 
 at least, there was no way up except by this 
 one tremendous path of tragic disillusion. 
 As Lessing has said, in spiritual matters it is not 
 always the straightest road that is the nearest. 
 Reculer peur mieux sauter is again and again 
 the rule. How serene in its faith, as against 
 the despairs and denials outside, is that word 
 of Clement of Alexandria, who, dealing with 
 these mysteries of evil, affirms on the one 
 hand that " nothing exists the cause of whose 
 existence is not supplied by God ; nothing, 
 then, is hated by God nor yet by the Word " ; 
 and, on the other hand, declares of those whose 
 career has seemed nought but catastrophe,
 
 THE MOMENT AFTER. 195 
 
 " Some are ill to cure, and, like iron, are 
 wrought into shape with fire and hammer and 
 anvil." To him the universe meant not faith 
 and not mockery, but uttermost redemption. 
 
 But the verdict on our pleasures and on our 
 lapses is not the only one delivered by " the 
 moment after." It has others, whose signifi- 
 ance as related to the cosmic order is not less 
 arresting. There is that, for instance, which 
 follows upon misfortune and calamity. After 
 our pleasures we have seen that the soul 
 laughs with a certain scorn. " Is this, then," 
 it seems to say, " the thing you were after ? " 
 In the other case, that of disaster, it also has 
 its laugh, but it is this time one of gaiety and 
 assurance. " Your catastrophe, about whose 
 oncoming you shivered so pitifully, has it turned 
 out so bad an affair after all ? " One of the 
 most wonderful things in life is this note of 
 our inmost nature in face of some crash of the 
 outward. Often and often has a man had 
 to wait till then for his most ecstatic 
 moment. With his world gone to pieces below, 
 his soul is singing high up in the empyrean. 
 Granted that the experience may be transient, 
 yet that the soul should give out such a note 
 at such a time is a fact which no explorer in this
 
 196 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 field may overlook. Ally it on one side with 
 the truth which we found at the threshold of 
 our study, that the sphere of animal sensation 
 gives no real satisfaction, and on the other 
 with this further truth (which would take an 
 essay of itself properly to develop), that an 
 act of goodness yields always for its " moment 
 after " a consciousness not only wondrous 
 sweet, but celestial and supernal in the char- 
 acter of its sweetness, and we have here a co- 
 sensus of inner testimony, the united blend 
 of voices from life's " moment after," which 
 compels the belief that the one solution of our 
 existence in this world is in its link with an 
 order of things invisible, spiritual and holy. 
 
 And such a result leads inevitably to one 
 other. To study " the moment after " is to 
 be fronted ultimately with the greatest of the 
 world-enigmas. What of death's " moment 
 after " ? Aristotle spoke of death as " a limit," 
 and Horace, in a well-know line, echoes the 
 word. But our knowledge of to-day is abolish- 
 ing limits and destroying finalities. Nature's 
 every end is only a new beginning. Were all 
 the suns and systems to clash together in 
 universal ruin the sum of things and of forces 
 would be there just the same, ready to begin
 
 THE MOMENT AFTER. 197 
 
 afresh. And the sum of mind assuredly not 
 less than of matter. The testimony of science 
 to-day is to a hidden world possessing " the 
 power of an endless life." Blended with 
 religion, it proclaims for every hurt a healing, 
 for every sin a cleansing, for every catastrophe 
 a reparation, for death the renewal of life. 
 It is the exacter expression of what for ages 
 has been the cry of the human heart. Ancient 
 Egypt buried its dead crowned with the 
 emblems of immortality. Greece in its sacred 
 drama asked : 
 
 Who knows if life be death and death life ? 
 
 The Indian oracle declared " the end of death 
 is birth." These mingled voices were a 
 Preparatio Evangelica, the avant-couriers of 
 that final Gospel which has crowned humanity 
 with " glory, honour and immortality."
 
 XXI. 
 The Interplay of Ideas. 
 
 IN that weird book by Balzac, the " Peau de 
 Chagrin," one of the characters thus expresses 
 himself on the subject of ideas : " Our ideas 
 are complete, organised beings, which live in 
 an invisible world, and have power on our 
 destinies." The speaker is in a vein of rhe- 
 torical exaggeration, but in what he says here 
 he skirts the edge of some deep truths. It 
 would be absurdly incorrect to speak in such 
 terms of every notion that surges in our own 
 or our neighbour's brain. Yet there is a king- 
 dom of ideas about which these words express 
 hardly more than the sober fact. Certaink 
 our world is ruled by ideas, and could we see 
 the machinery at work it would be the most 
 wonderful of spectacles. We should look upon 
 tidal movements of thought, sweeping from 
 land to land and from century to century, 
 movements that are rhythmical, whose every 
 pulsation is according to law, working out 
 
 198
 
 THE INTERPLAY OF IDEAS. 199 
 
 a pre-destined result. We should see how 
 ideas, apparently the most opposed, obey a 
 law of mutual attraction, so that then- seeming 
 clash and collision turn out to be a marriage, 
 having for offspring a new thought-series 
 enriched from both sides. We should see 
 great idea-systems rising, developing, decay- 
 ing, dissolving, and in their dissolution setting 
 free new forces that work towards fresh com- 
 binations. Behind the uproar of the outside 
 world, without noise, without visible appearance, 
 lives and energises this mighty inner universe, 
 that silently shapes our life and destiny. 
 
 It will not, we imagine, be an unprofitable 
 study if we show how, in some different direc- 
 tions, this interplay of ideas has revealed itself 
 in history. The examples, taken by them- 
 selves, are sufficiently significant, but far more 
 so when viewed as a whole. The subject, seen 
 in its entire length and breadth, gives a won- 
 drous insight into the way our universe is 
 governed, and as to what, ultimately, we may 
 expect from it. 
 
 Beginning at the centre, in the sphere of 
 our most vital interests, we may notice, first, 
 how the organised movement of ideas has 
 worked in humanity's religious life. To-day,
 
 200 PBOBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 as since the dawn of history, the world offers 
 the spectacle of a number of rival and com- 
 peting religions. Up to a period well within 
 the lifetime of many of us, each of these 
 religions was regarded by its adherents as the 
 one truth, outside of which there was neither 
 goodness, happiness, nor salvation. To-day the 
 Western nations at least are learning better. 
 They are beginning at last to understand their 
 own religion and its true relation to the others. 
 Unique in the Person of its Founder, in the 
 character it moulds, and in the moral and 
 spiritual forces which it wields, Christianity is 
 seen, nevertheless, not to be alien from the 
 other faiths, but closely and lovingly akin. 
 For at its background is a system of ideas 
 which are not of one land or nation, but are 
 universal in humanity. Tindal, with his 
 " Christianity as Old as the Creation," made 
 a prodigious flutter amongst the orthodox of 
 the eighteenth century, and there is a great 
 deal in that singular work to which we should 
 be sorry to subscribe. But there was truth 
 in his idea all the same, and it was one which 
 Augustine, centuries before, had recognised and 
 was not afraid to enunciate. That surely is a 
 memorable passage where, in the " Betracta-
 
 THE INTERPLAY OF IDEAS. 201 
 
 tiones," the work of his later years, in which 
 he revised his earlier judgments, he writes 
 these words : " Res ipsa, quae nunc rdigio 
 Christiana nuncupatur, erat apud antiques, nee 
 defuit ah initio generis humani" (The thing 
 itself which is now known as the Christian 
 religion existed among the ancients, and in fact 
 was with the human race from the beginning.) 
 We understand that now, in a wider sense 
 even than did Augustine. We have oome to 
 recognise Christianity, not as an isolated 
 phenomenon, but as the culmination in history 
 of a set of Divine, redemptive ideas that have 
 been working amongst men everywhere from 
 the first. With the advent of comparative 
 religion has come a great knocking down of 
 barriers. The common element it reveals is 
 the scientific affirmation of the faith of the 
 nobler souls in every age. Zinzendorf declared 
 the good men of every nation to be his brethren 
 in Christ. Erasmus proposed to canonise 
 Socrates. The Greek fathers were never tired 
 of affirming that the struggle towards virtue 
 of the pagan races was the sign of the indwelling 
 Word. Even Tertullian, so fierce at times in 
 his exclusiveness, has his hours of illumination, 
 when he can pen noble utterances such as this ;
 
 202 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 " Man is the one name belonging to every 
 nation upon earth ; there is one soul and many 
 tongues, one spirit and various sounds ; every 
 country has its own speech, but the subjects 
 of speech are common to all. God is every- 
 where, and the goodness of God is everywhere." 
 And not the least, surely, of the evidences 
 of the common origin of these ideas is the way 
 they have worked. The resemblance of the 
 main features of the religious life in widely- 
 separated races and cults is too wonderful to 
 be ignored. All the great religions have 
 doctrines of incarnation, of sacrifice and sacra- 
 ments, of renunciation, of resurrection and of 
 judgment. The following statement from M. 
 Cumont of the followers of Mithras is not only 
 sufficiently accurate in itself, but might be 
 quoted with little variation of many another 
 faith outside our own : " Like the Christians, 
 the followers of Mithras lived in closely united 
 societies, calling one another father and 
 brother. Like the Christians, they practised 
 baptism, communion and confirmation ; they 
 taught an authoritative morality, preached 
 continence, chastity, self-denial and self-con- 
 trol ; like the Christians they spoke of a deluge, 
 and believed in the immortality of the soul
 
 THE INTERPLAY OF IDEAS. 203 
 
 and resurrection of the dead, in a heaven for 
 the blessed and hell as the abode of evil spirits." 
 There was a time, not so long ago, when facts of 
 this kind would have been staggering and con- 
 fusing to the evangelic consciousness. We 
 accept them now as a confirmation of faith. 
 They show the Gospel as Divine because so 
 intimately and universally human. They show 
 it to be the reaffirmation, under highest auspices, 
 of that great charter of spiritual deliverance 
 which is the common heritage of our race. 
 
 We may now come to another phase of that 
 great interplay of ideas by which the world 
 is at once governed and inspired. We spoke 
 at the beginning of the law of alliances by which 
 seeming opposites in the thought-world come 
 ultimately together, producing by their union 
 fresh, fruitful syntheses which combine in 
 themselves the older and once hostile elements. 
 The erstwhile enemies, by a mysterious inner 
 law which they cannot resist, become first 
 friends and then the parents of a new line of 
 spiritual descendants. This is what has been 
 happening in our own day in the supposed 
 conflict between science and religion. One 
 might almost fancy, studying the two great 
 lines of ideas, bred respectively in the regions
 
 204 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 of science and of Christian theology, that they 
 were alive. They peer out at each other from 
 their opposite sides, at first with suspicion and 
 aversion. More and more closely do they scan 
 each other's lineaments, and begin finally to 
 recognise a mysterious affinity. A mutual, 
 irresistible attraction draws them, till at length 
 they embrace, and discover themselves to us 
 as one. Evolution, forty years ago, seemed 
 to spell the ruin of evangelical doctrine. To- 
 day, with religion's most thoughtful exponents, 
 it forms one of its strongest bases, as well as 
 one of its most fruitful illustrations. 
 
 The attraction of ideas is stronger than any 
 human devices for keeping them apart. The 
 more exclusive communions have endlessly 
 multiplied these devices. They have built high 
 walls, carrying heavy artillery of anathema 
 and persecution to keep off aliens and intruders 
 from without. Romanism is the conspicuous 
 example of this method, and its present posi- 
 tion is an object-lesson on our theme. Its 
 embattled fortifications tower to the heavens, 
 but they cannot keep out the atmosphere, nor 
 the ideas with which it is charged. A French 
 bishop was a while ago lamenting in one 
 of the Ultramontane journals that the seminar-
 
 THE INTERPLAY or IDEAS. 205 
 
 ists, the students for the priesthood, in his 
 diocese, instead of studying Thomas Aquinas 
 and the orthodox exponents of the Vatican 
 creed, were actually reading Wellhausen and 
 the other leaders of the new Biblical criticism. 
 Alas for the bishop and his cause ! They 
 are on the losing side. Their weapons are 
 carnal and out of date. Of no avail are they 
 against the powers of the Spirit, against the 
 Divine ideas of truth and freedom which sweep 
 to-day across continents and across systems, and 
 are mighty for the pulling down of strongholds. 
 There is a side of the theme that demands 
 at least a word that of the interplay between 
 ideas and character. There is a whole world 
 of spiritual truth here which waits to be 
 investigated. Suffice it now to say that we 
 get no real religious solutions apart from inner 
 purification. The progressive elevation of our 
 spiritual life brings us, at each step of the pro- 
 gress, to new springs of noble thought. When 
 a man loves nobly, and acts and suffers nobly, 
 there come from such experiences legions of 
 ideas that are as winged angels out of heaven. 
 In Dante's feeling for Beatrice we see how a 
 human affection, free from every trace of 
 ignoble passion, becomes the etherealising and
 
 206 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 the eternising of love ; in his long exile, endured 
 for the love of justice and of his country, we find 
 the seed plot of that Poem for all time " on which 
 both heaven and earth had laid their hands." 
 
 Here, indeed, do we come to the pith and 
 heart of the whole matter. We have dis- 
 cussed the interplay between systems of think- 
 ing and of believing. But the whole signifi- 
 cance of this lies in what is behind. It would 
 be nothing to us to watch the flow of ideas 
 from continent to continent and from century 
 to century did we not discern here the evidence 
 of a flow that is deeper and mightier. The key 
 to it all is hi the interplay between heaven 
 and earth. The significance of religion lies in 
 this that here man has been thinking a 
 greater thought than his own. His history is 
 the working out, towards an ever-clearer 
 expression, of Divine ideas that in their com- 
 plete expansion offer to us the vision of immortal 
 beauty and of final perfectness. They suggest 
 our great poet's question 
 
 What if earth 
 
 Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein 
 Each to the other like ? 
 
 And they leave us in no doubt as to the answer.
 
 XXII. 
 Religion's Vocabulary. 
 
 IN his " Chips from a German Workshop " 
 Max Miiller describes the way in which, from 
 the study of the primitive Aryan language, we 
 may obtain an idea of the height to which the 
 earliest common civilisation had risen, before 
 the separate branches of the family broke off. 
 His method is to find the words which, in the 
 languages of all the Asiatic and European 
 peoples descended from the Aryan stock, are 
 traceable to a common root. That part of a 
 nation's vocabulary which cannot be shown 
 to derive from the same source represents 
 experiences of life that had been encountered 
 after the great separation. It is an ingenious 
 and most valuable method of research, which 
 yields all manner of striking results. But the 
 suggestions it opens go farther than the great 
 philologist's immediate application of it. For 
 language, properly investigated, tells more than 
 the story of a given group of peoples. Its 
 
 207
 
 208 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 history and development lay bare at every 
 stage the deepest truths about man's central 
 life. In religion's vocabulary, in particular, we 
 have new and fascinating ways opened to us 
 into the heart of the soul's mysteries. 
 
 Religion, it is true, existed before its vocabu- 
 lary. It had a language probably of signs 
 before it had one of words. There is suggestive- 
 ness in that view of a modern writer who regards 
 the attitude of kneeling and of clasping the 
 uplifted hands in prayer as originating in the 
 attitude of suppliant captives, who offered 
 their hands to be bound by the victor. And 
 religious experience comes before both the 
 sign and the word. Tertullian touches this 
 in his fine saying, " Unquestionably, the soul 
 existed before letters, and speech before books, 
 and ideas before the writing of them, and man 
 himself before the poets and philosophers." 
 Always, too, in its onward march, does religious 
 experience transcend its old word-tools and find 
 itself compelled to forge new ones. Newman, 
 in a well-known passage, speaks of all the 
 truths of the later creeds and confessions as hid 
 from the beginning in the bosom of the Church, 
 waiting, till time and necessity should bring 
 them to verbal expression. And advanced
 
 RELIGION'S VOCABULARY. 209 
 
 minds know also what it is to prepare homes 
 in what seem void places of the soul, for truths 
 that have not yet appeared, but which, they 
 know, are on the way, and will require, by and 
 by, their own special vehicle of utterance. 
 
 When, however, we turn to the language 
 which religion has already forged for itself we 
 shall, if we are at the proper standpoint, obtain 
 as nowhere else a sense of the height to which 
 man has climbed, and of the extraordinary 
 richness and complexity of his inner life. In 
 the words he has coined man gives the register 
 of the growth of his soul. Language is the 
 clothing of the new inner organs which it 
 is perpetually putting forth. And here, in 
 particular, we have one of the tests, singularly 
 little noticed by the average apologist, of 
 the place of Christianity in the human 
 movement. The religious public, including its 
 teachers, freely using, as they do, the ordinary 
 Christian vocabulary, have not, surely, paid 
 sufficient attention to the wonder of that 
 vocabulary in itself ? To get a proper sense 
 of it one needs to have a course of reading in 
 the classic literature of the old pagan world. 
 When, after a study of its poets, philosophers 
 and moralists, and the garnering of its highest 
 
 14
 
 210 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 thought, we come to the Christian ages, we 
 find ourselves arrested, for the first thing, by 
 something quite new in the sphere of words. 
 Something startlingly fresh has been added 
 to the human vocabulary. 
 
 We say this in full view of the reservations 
 that have to be made. Much of what the 
 average Bible reader regards as special to the 
 Gospel the scholar knows to be otherwise. 
 Judaism had created a vocabulary on which 
 the New Testament writers freely drew. The 
 great words applied to Christ, for instance, are 
 mainly borrowed. Philo Judseus speaks of the 
 Logos as " His first-begotten Son," and as 
 " the Image of God and First-Born of all 
 intelligent creatures." He describes God as 
 " appointing a Price and Ransom for the soul," 
 and declares it " necessary for a person per- 
 forming his duty to the All Father to apply 
 to His Son as an Advocate." From the 
 Book of Enoch we get also the " Day of Judg- 
 ment " with the " Son of Man " as Judge ; 
 the titles of Messiah as the " Christ or Anointed 
 One," the " Righteous One," the " Elect or 
 Chosen One," and " Michael " and " Gabriel " 
 as names of archangels. Comparative re- 
 ligion shows us the idea of the Trinity as a
 
 RELIGION'S VOCABULARY. 211 
 
 common possession of the old-world faiths, as 
 well as a familiar formulary of the ancient 
 philosophies. To recognise all this is, indeed, 
 for the Christian believer not so much an 
 admission as a further basis for his faith. 
 Have we not here the culmination of a universal 
 movement centring on the " Desire of All 
 Nations " as its ultimate end ? 
 
 But when this is said we are left with an 
 undiminished marvel in the Christian speech. 
 For it contains a whole range of new words that 
 have had to be created in order to express the 
 new facts. And the common phrases needed 
 to be put into fresh combinations and to bear 
 the weight of wholly fresh meanings. The 
 apostles, and the saints who have followed 
 them, when they talk of regeneration, of 
 conversion, of the baptism and fruits of 
 the Spirit, of sanctification, of oneness 
 with Christ, of Divine assurance, of the 
 heavenly rest, have had, as it were, to remake 
 a language that it might carry the new life- 
 treasures of which they were conscious. What- 
 ever these words may mean to us, they assuredly 
 meant something to them. If we are living 
 beneath their true significance, not less do 
 they represent a height to which humanity, in
 
 212 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 its choicer spirits, has, under the Christian 
 inspiration, at one time risen. Evolution 
 teaches us that expanding life aims ever at 
 creating organs adequate to its range, and 
 these words are nothing less than the organs 
 by which the soul at its loftiest has expressed 
 itself. 
 
 It is almost impossible for us properly to 
 estimate the addition to the wealth of the 
 human spirit when this great religious voca- 
 bulary first filtered down to the minds of the 
 common people. We have no calculating 
 apparatus that will give as the total of bene- 
 diction that came to men when a Wiclif and a 
 Luther threw the Scriptures open to the 
 general speech. In them the aspiration of 
 Erasmus was fulfilled. " I wish," says he of 
 the Epistles and Gospels, " they were trans- 
 lated into all languages of the people. I wish 
 that the husbandman might sing parts of them 
 at his plough, and the weaver at his shuttle, 
 and that the traveller might beguile with their 
 narration the weariness of his way." And the 
 people when these riches came in sight, were 
 not slow to grasp them. Says Foxe, " After 
 Wiclif's time some gave a load of hay for a 
 few chapters of St. James or of St. Paul." We
 
 RELIGION'S VOCABULARY. 213 
 
 have in these days grown careless, almost 
 oblivious of our wealth, from its very redun- 
 dance and ease of acquirement. Yet the easy 
 estimate of a surfeited and indifferent age will 
 not blind the instructed spirit to the magnifi- 
 cence of the inheritance to which it has here 
 succeeded. 
 
 But while all this is true we are, alas ! not 
 allowed to forget that there is a contrary 
 account. Religion's vocabulary is an affair 
 not only of living words but also of dead ones. 
 And the range of human vision contains few 
 things more unsightly than these withered 
 symbols out of which the life has gone. The 
 human loathing of cant is its healthy horror 
 of skeletons, of carcases, of decayed things 
 generally. Men shrink more and more from 
 religious functions that are stuffed with defunct 
 phrases. They hear in them the rattle of 
 gibbets. When the Church has these things 
 mainly to offer, men will keep outside. Within, 
 they scent the odour of putrefaction, and they 
 prefer the fresh air. 
 
 And in this sphere we encounter not only 
 words out of which the life has gone, but 
 debased specimens, alive, indeed, but with an 
 inferior vitality which is wholly mischievous.
 
 214 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 In the periods representing religion's upward 
 movement words, as we have said, are created 
 as the organs and expressions of its abounding 
 life. But there is also a word coinage of its 
 decadent periods, when men indulge in the 
 manufacture of vocables, because they have 
 nothing better to do. It is then we get 
 theological logomachies in which people fight 
 to the death about a syllable. It is of this 
 kind of manufacture that Edmond Scherer 
 says : " Le mot c'est Vartisan des idols" 
 Gregory of Nyssa gives us a vivid account 
 of this phase in the Eastern Church, when, as 
 he describes, " knots of people gathered at the 
 street corners of Constantinople discussing 
 incomprehensibilities. When a tradesman was 
 asked how many oboli a thing cost, he started 
 a discussion upon generated and ungenerated 
 existence. Inquiries of a baker were answered 
 by the assertion that the Father was greater 
 than the Son." We could have forgiven the 
 speculations if people had been good-humoured 
 over them. But these were the times when 
 bloody battles were fought over single words, 
 which nobody really understood. Well may 
 Dr. Hatch declare the darkest ages of the 
 Church " those which record the story of its
 
 RELIGION'S VOCABULARY. 215 
 
 endeavouring to force its transformed Greek 
 metaphysics upon men or upon races to whom 
 they were alien." 
 
 The evil of these word-wrangles is happily 
 abated to-day, though far from extinct. Our 
 personal concern with religion's vocabulary 
 lies elsewhere. It is commonly a twofold 
 concern. It is our urgent business, for one 
 thing, to know whether we can claim a share 
 in those great New Testament words which 
 stand for the soul's central truth and highest 
 life. Aloft in the spiritual firmament they 
 shine, beckoning us perpetually to their own 
 sphere. No man is rich apart from these 
 riches ; no life is blessed to which these words 
 have not opened themselves and shed the 
 fulness of their mighty meaning. 
 
 Our other concern will be with the religious 
 use of the common vocabulary. The old 
 Quaker's " thee " and " thou " have fallen into 
 desuetude, but his fine measurement of words is 
 a grand rule. To speak the simple truth with- 
 out fear, and to speak it in love, is one of the 
 greatest of human deeds. The common words 
 take on a new meaning when a disciplined 
 soul speaks them. The language, as a diction- 
 ary product, is the same for this man, and
 
 216 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 that ; but the one's " Yes " and " No " are a 
 feather-weight ; the other's carry a world. 
 Christ's " Sermon " was the simplest of utter- 
 ances, with not a theological phrase in it. 
 Yet it runs through the world and through the 
 ages as a fountain of living water. It is the 
 pattern of a religious vocabulary : the homely 
 human utterance, with love and heaven shining 
 through.
 
 XXIII. 
 The Discipline of Joy. 
 
 THE human story so far has been largely that 
 of a discipline of pain. On this point science 
 and religion are for once in agreement. Man 
 has won his present position at the sword's 
 point, and with sweat of blood. Nature has 
 been a rigid disciplinarian, a stern taskmistress. 
 It is impossible to think without a certain 
 emotion of that pre-historic ancestor of ours, 
 unsheltered, ill-clad, feebly equipped, carrying 
 on his fight against the elements, against 
 monstrous beasts, against disease and death, 
 and all for our sakes. We know nothing of 
 him as an individual ; we pay him no respect 
 as a separate personality. And yet, in that 
 dim past, our destiny was in his single hand. 
 Had he not kept his feet in the bitter strife, 
 sheltered against every gust the torch of 
 existence until he could hand it on, we had not 
 been. Evolution tells us of the terrific cost, 
 in endurances, in wholesale destructions, at 
 
 817
 
 218 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 which every advance in physical ability and 
 in mental quality has been gained. And 
 religion, as we have said, brings a similar 
 evidence. Christianity has been called " the 
 religion of sorrow." Assuredly it has fathomed, 
 as no other faith, the depths of suffering, 
 wrung from pain its deepest secret, set over 
 against it the Divinest consolations. Its centre 
 is a cross, and the human soul, whatever its 
 future fortunes, will carry that mark on it for 
 ever. 
 
 But it is easy to misinterpret this history, 
 and strange mistakes have been made about 
 it. The pain element in human education 
 has been exaggerated, and the wrong inferences 
 been drawn. It is natural that more should be 
 made on this side of the account than the other, 
 for man calls out when he is hurt, but gives little 
 record of himself when at ease. Thirty years of 
 peace will produce no such history as one year 
 of war. From the very beginning, notwith- 
 standing its hardships, life has been sweet to 
 the race. Our ancestor was happy in his own 
 way. Despite the costs, it was a good thing 
 for him to be alive. A false perspective here 
 has been the creator, amongst both heathen 
 and Christian, of much bad theology. The
 
 THE DISCIPLINE OF JOY. 219 
 
 sorrow element in man, exaggerated by his 
 imagination, has cast its shadow upon the 
 heavens, and created the religion of fear. 
 Paganism trembled as it snatched its joy. It 
 hardly dared to be prosperous, lest some god, 
 or malignant power, should be provoked to 
 jealousy. The saying in the " Agamemnon " : 
 
 And man's prosperous state 
 Moves on its course and strikes 
 Upon an unseen rock, 
 
 is typical of the entire attitude of the pre- 
 Christian world. The idea was abroad that 
 man was at the mercy of Powers who, at any 
 opportunity, would take it out of him to 
 satisfy their spite or for the pleasure the 
 spectacle afforded them. A remarkable passage 
 in Athenagoras, the early Christian Father, 
 testifies to this feeling in the second century. 
 In his Ad Gentes he says : " Who else than 
 demons could have persuaded the priests of 
 Diana to wound themselves in a thousand 
 ways, and others to tear themselves with 
 whips ? Whereas the true God would never 
 lead us to what was contrary to nature ; as 
 He is goodness itself, He is ever benevolent." 
 But, unfortunately for Christian theology, 
 the noble and clear -sighted views of the early
 
 220 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 Greek Fathers, of an Athenagoras, an Origen, 
 an Alexandrian Clement, were superseded by 
 a darker system, which once more shadowed 
 the heavens and made religion a thing of 
 fear. Asceticism founded itself on the notion 
 that human suffering and privation were in 
 themselves pleasing to God. Men deprived 
 themselves of every comfort, constructed beds 
 on which it was impossible to get an hour's 
 real repose, wore instruments of torture next 
 the skin which drew blood at every movement, 
 with the idea that they were thus perfecting 
 themselves spiritually and gaining merit with 
 heaven. On this whole business Sir Thomas 
 More, a devout Christian and a Catholic to boot, 
 has an admirable passage hi the " Utopia." 
 He argues that if the ascetic principle were the 
 true one our endeavours as Christians to pro- 
 mote the happiness and good estate of our 
 fellows must be a mistake. " For a joyful life, 
 that is a pleasant life, is either evil ; and if it 
 be so then thou shouldest not only help no 
 man thereto, but rather as much as in thee 
 lieth withdraw all men from it as noisome 
 and hurtful, or else, if thou not only mayest, 
 but are also of duty bound to procure it to 
 others, why not chiefly to thyself ? "
 
 THE DISCIPLINE OF JOY. 221 
 
 Far be it from us to say that the ascetic 
 cult was a wasted effort. That can be said 
 of no sincere moral experiment ; certainly not 
 of this. It was part of the movement upward. 
 And its revelation of the soul's capacity of 
 endurance, of winning even a secret, mighty 
 joy out of the heart of privation, has been a 
 lesson of inexpressible value in the science of 
 life. 
 
 But asceticism, the cult of many a noble 
 soul, carried in it no finality. It was a phase, 
 and not a whole. It was no key to the world- 
 system, no ultimate revelation of God, no 
 ultimate goal of human development. More 
 and more is it becoming evident that the 
 ministry of pain, mighty factor as it has been 
 in the making of man, will, in the future, play 
 a diminishing role. The race, tutored so long 
 in the school of hardness and adversity, is, 
 for a further stage, to be taken in hand by a 
 new educator prosperity. One of the great 
 ethical tasks of a swiftly-coming period will 
 be to adjust the human character to a vast 
 increment of enjoyment. Look where we will, 
 the signs of this are evident. On the negative 
 side we are parting with half the old world 
 pains. Science is on the track of disease,
 
 222 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 with full belief in its power ultimately to 
 master every ailment. Anaesthetics have 
 already substituted a pleasant sleep for many 
 a racking torture. And on the positive side, 
 in the more advanced communities, we see 
 an enormous increase, amongst all classes, of 
 the apparatus of pleasurable sensation. The 
 railway train, the bicycle, the free library, 
 the great organisations of sport, spectacle and 
 entertainment, the shortened hours of labour, 
 are all movements in one direction towards 
 a promised land of larger privilege. The whole 
 art of great living is coming in. 
 
 The question is, and it is a vital one What 
 does this amount to for the moral and inner 
 life ? Can man afford to enjoy himself more 
 than he has done ? Is gladness, as well as 
 sorrow, to be trusted as a spiritual educator ? 
 The average Christian is, on this matter, in a 
 curious jumble of thinking. Logically he 
 should be all on the side of joy as supreme 
 moraliser, for is not his heaven at once the 
 place of vastest delight, and yet of highest 
 perfection ? But with the other side of his 
 head he distrusts this doctrine. He tells you 
 he has seen so many characters rotting in the 
 sunshine that he is afraid of it. And the
 
 THE DISCIPLINE OF JOY. 223 
 
 entrance of a nation at large into a greater sum 
 of pleasures will, to his thinking, be the sure 
 herald of a moral decline. 
 
 His fears are not without foundation, but it 
 is doubtful whether he has sufficiently studied 
 the grounds of them. There are probably few 
 of us, indeed, who have accurately diagnosed 
 the new conditions. Is the frequently wit- 
 nessed moral deterioration in presence of 
 new-found delights an argument against joy, 
 or is it not rather an argument, loud and 
 clamant, for a new discipline of joy ? Is what 
 we witness and mourn over, after all, anything 
 more than man's stumble in a new situation ? 
 He is an old scholar in that earlier school of 
 privation. He is raw and untrained in the 
 new academy. It will take time to habituate 
 him to its ways. But this is his next stage, 
 and he will learn the laws of it and grow to 
 the possibilities it opens, not less certainly 
 than he learned and grew in that older pupilage. 
 
 Religion has been wavering and uncertain 
 in its doctrine of enjoyment, and philosophy 
 not less. There have been, and still are, 
 vast differences hi the schools as to the place 
 which pleasure takes in ethics. Bentham's 
 doctrine that the summum bonum is happiness,
 
 224 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 and that happiness is the sum of pleasures, 
 had a long and extensive reign, but there are 
 few now who would accept its naked Hedon- 
 ism without qualification. With an influen- 
 tial and ever-growing school of thinkers religion 
 and philosophy meet in the affirmation that an 
 essential element in our judgment of pleasure 
 is the question of its quality. The drunkard 
 over his cups and the martyr witnessing for his 
 faith both taste a pleasure, but the difference 
 in quality covers the whole range of ethics. 
 Between this qualitative conception and the 
 views, such as those of Professor Sidgwick 
 and others, who regard the self-realisation and 
 perfection of the moral being as the highest end, 
 and find the sense of duty, of " ought," to be 
 irreducible to any other term, there is hardly 
 any difference in fact ; for the highest self- 
 realisation can scarcely be separated from 
 the highest quality of joy. 
 
 What religion and morals have then to 
 provide for in the coming time is an education 
 in the qualitative value of the human joys. 
 That pleasure is one at least of the " cosmic 
 intentions " no man can doubt who takes the 
 trouble to look around him. The material for 
 it is so varied and so immense. We strike the
 
 THE DISCIPLINE OF JOY. 225 
 
 rock nowhere, but this spring bursts forth. 
 In a normal, healthy condition, enjoyment is 
 connected with our every movement, our every 
 phase of living. When we open our eyes, 
 or move our limbs, or breathe the air, or talk 
 to our friend ; in society or solitude, working 
 or resting, we find in every attitude and activity 
 its waiting joy. And ever as we get deeper into 
 life the springs become more numerous and 
 more copious in their flow. In a world so rich 
 we can only account for the pessimist on the 
 Horatian principle that " unless the vessel is 
 sweet whatever we pour into it turns sour." 
 
 But more and more, as we have said, the 
 choice and use of our joys will constitute for 
 us the discipline of life. The world has for 
 some ages now been a taster of the different 
 kinds, and its judgment of qualities and results 
 is one that by this time can be considered as 
 final. It has shown us which kinds lead down- 
 ward and which upward. Our spiritual destiny 
 forbids us to be sensualists. We turn as by 
 instinct from the " Sirenum voces et Circaea 
 pocula." And we will have nothing to do 
 with the softnesses and indulgence that breed 
 flabbiness of character. To-day, as in Seneca's 
 time, " Avida est periculi virtus " (Virtue is 
 
 15
 
 226 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 eager for danger). The great races keep the 
 finest edge of their quality by hardihood and 
 exposure, by mighty wrestlings with nature's 
 toughest problems for the body and the soul. 
 Also, if we listen to the best guides, we shall turn 
 with equal decision from the subtler allure- 
 ments that beset success. We shall enjoy 
 excellence, but not the vulgarity of excelling ; 
 find delight in our work rather than in the 
 applause it may bring ; a satisfaction in the 
 quiet things in the beauty of a spring morn- 
 ing, in the humble service of our neighbour, 
 in our communion with the spiritual in us and 
 beyond us far surpassing that of any external 
 and noisily-extolled performances. We shall 
 develop a taste even for certain " bitter 
 sweets," and say, with Christina Rossetti : 
 
 When I was young I deemed that sweets are sweet ; 
 But now I deem some certain bitters are 
 Sweeter than sweets, and more refreshing far^ 
 
 As this education, this discipline of joy 
 reaches its higher stages, the mind chooses its 
 delights as by instinct, and with a certain 
 infallibility. And hi these upper ranges what 
 exquisite distillations and essences of noblest 
 consciousness await the developed soul ! 
 What a heaven of intercourse is that which
 
 THE DISCIPLINE OF JOY. 227 
 
 Gregory Thaumaturgus pictures as enjoyed 
 by himself and fellow disciples with the 
 saintly Origen, when their society was " a 
 sacred fatherland in which was perpetual sun- 
 light, and where . . . the inspiration of 
 Divine thought prevailed over all continually " ! 
 And another Christian Father, Irenaeus, has 
 expressed for us in unsurpassable words the 
 consummation of this " discipline of joy " : 
 " For our face shall see the face of the Lord, 
 and shall rejoice with joy unspeakable, that 
 is to say when it shall behold its own Delight."
 
 XXIV. 
 Religion and Physique. 
 
 ON the great ecclesiastical festivals the Church 
 has its doors open, and attracts not incon- 
 siderable numbers of people. But the great 
 crowds are outside. High days and holy 
 days, including the fifty-two Sundays of our 
 year, are now marked by an ever-increasing 
 rush to the open. The spectacle is suggestive 
 of much. It is doubtful, however, whether 
 most of us, including the average ecclesiastic, 
 have caught the really vital point in the situa- 
 tion. What is happening around us will 
 bring by-and-by into the common view some 
 hitherto unnoted factors of the religious 
 position. It will then be recognised that the 
 things the theologians have been wrangling 
 over are not the essentials at all. The really 
 determining elements have all the time been 
 lying outside, waiting for a name. One 
 of these elements, neglected hitherto, but 
 about to enter its claim with an irresistible 
 
 228
 
 RELIGION AND PHYSIQUE. 220 
 
 cogency, may be stated as a proposition. 
 The Church's future, the whole question of its 
 teaching, services and organisation, will be 
 conditioned by its relation to life's physical 
 basis. The various communions Roman, 
 Anglican, Nonconformist seem separated by 
 immense gulfs of doctrine and practice, but 
 they are really reducible to one common 
 denominator. The articulus stantis aut cadentis 
 ecclesice of the future is something that stands 
 away from all their controversies. 
 
 An illustration will best explain what we 
 mean ; and it shall be a homely one. Let us 
 imagine two congregations, a Romanist and 
 a Methodist, listening, each in their separate 
 building, to their respective pastors. The 
 one proclaims salvation by Church and sacra- 
 ment, the other by faith and free grace. Great 
 are the apparent oppositions of theological 
 opinion and religious feeling. The camps 
 seem hostile. But now at the same moment, 
 in the two buildings, a new physical factor is 
 introduced. The atmosphere, let us say, is 
 denuded of its oxygen, and its place taken 
 by carbonic acid gas. A point will speedily 
 be reached when, with Romanist and Methodist 
 alike, the theological difference, the theological
 
 230 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 interest as such, will vanish. The one supreme 
 interest will be to get fresh air. 
 
 The illustration may seem far-fetched, but, 
 in fact, it is absolutely pertinent to the situation 
 of to-day. The Church of every denomina- 
 tion has to deal with a population that is 
 gasping for air. Here is a new factor that 
 will dominate the whole position. Our present 
 religious interests, our outlooks, regulations, 
 theologies have been developed under con- 
 ditions when this feature was not even dreamed 
 of. Nonconformity, for instance, lives on its 
 Puritan tradition, but the fact it has to awake 
 to is that this tradition was fitted to a world 
 that has passed away. The Puritan was of 
 an England whose whole population was smaller 
 than that of London to-day. He was an 
 Englishman who lived in the country. He 
 breathed a clear air, ate wholesome food, 
 found material conditions easy and without 
 strain. He was of the mould that Shakespeare 
 had in view when he speaks of the 
 
 Good yeomen 
 Whose limbs were made in England. 
 
 And it was these strong, sturdy men, with their 
 health and their leisure, who framed the re- 
 ligious ordinances and services which the
 
 RELIGION AND PHYSIQUE. 231 
 
 Church in our age has inherited, and which 
 it is astonished to find the present generation 
 is rejecting. 
 
 Is it not time we realised what is actually 
 happening ? The congregat'on, in other words, 
 the nation, is being denuded of its oxygen 
 and is rushing out in search of air. The Church, 
 we repeat, has now to take up as its most 
 imminent and urgent problem the relation of 
 religion to life's physical basis. The Puritan 
 never thought of this. He had no need. 
 The conditions were there, and they made 
 him what he was without his knowing it. 
 Do we imagine that his strength of conviction 
 and fervour of feeling could have been pro- 
 duced out of the stuffy air of crowded factories, 
 out of the unwho esome conditions, continued 
 through three or four generations, of our 
 swarming towns ? No. The inner power of 
 a Cromwell, of a Howe, was an affair, on one 
 side at least, of leisure and the open. It was 
 the vital force of the countryside, accumulated 
 through generations of sturdy forbears, stored 
 up in nerve and tissue and brain cell, as the 
 sun's force is stored up in the coal, that in these 
 men translated itself into the highest phases 
 of the spiritual life. For of religion we may,
 
 232 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 with another application, use Virgil's words : 
 " Ingreditur solo, et caput inter nubila condit." 
 Hiding its head in the clouds, it begins, never- 
 theless, upon the ground. Its supreme spiritual 
 significance will never, if we are wise, cause us 
 to ignore its constant and intimate relation to 
 the physical. 
 
 But when this elementary fact has been 
 fairly recognised it is bound to alter our whole 
 view of the Church's mission to the people. 
 Beneath and beyond all doctrines will be seen 
 to loom the fundamental doctrine that the 
 Church's raison d'etre lies in developing the 
 best type of man. The true religion is the 
 religion that is truly virile. With that for a 
 foundation we may begin to revise at once our 
 outlook and our programme. Many features 
 of the existing situation take on in this light 
 a new aspect. The fact, for instance, that such 
 multitudes in the present day are spending 
 their Sundays in the open will not have to be 
 put aside by a reference to original sin or to 
 the spread of religious indifference. Is it not 
 rather that the congregation cannot listen 
 because it is being stifled ? Is not the Sunday 
 rush to the country Nature's effort to keep her 
 pent-up devitalised children alive ? Have
 
 RELIGION AND PHYSIQUE. 233 
 
 we sufficiently taken it into account that our 
 Sunday services and schools under the existing 
 programme are largely a repetition of the con- 
 finement, the constraint, the stuffy atmosphere, 
 which throughout all the other days are 
 robbing our citizens of the very essence of 
 life? 
 
 At present our physical and our moral seem 
 all at odds with each other. At the margin 
 of civilisation we find a race of rough and 
 reckless pioneers, cowboys, miners, prospectors, 
 frontiersmen, with little or no religious observ- 
 ance and the crudest morality. The highest 
 spiritual laws are scarcely at all in view. Yet 
 on another side the life they are leading con- 
 tains the very making of manhood. This exist- 
 ence of hardy enterprise, of simple fare, of keen 
 winds, of wide, open spaces is storing up in 
 these men incalculable riches, the powers out 
 of which nations are made. With this at the 
 frontier, we have at the centre our highly- 
 organised religions, with services, teaching, 
 discipline arranged to tell with a constant, 
 urgent impact on conscience and feeling. 
 We have here devotees with an immense 
 sense of duty and the feeblest vitality ; people 
 who are mighty in prayer, but who are refused
 
 234 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 at every life insurance office ; great souls, and 
 bodies not big enough to decently cover them. 
 The Church, meanwhile, goes on with this 
 monstrous anomaly, and sees nothing wrong 
 in it. A revival of religion is for it still a 
 revival of services, of more stuffy meetings, 
 of more emotional expenditure. Thread paper 
 Christians, who have toiled in shops all day, 
 under this persuasion, spend their nights in 
 gas-poisoned rooms and become still more 
 attenuated. If it were not for our barbarians 
 outside, the whole race would be on its way 
 to extinction. Assuredly we are not to be 
 saved, for either this world or the next, by 
 a deoxygenated Christianity. Nature has given 
 her verdict in these matters in the campaign 
 of Goth and Vandal against the effeminate 
 later-Roman. The polished denizen of cities 
 goes down before the man from the open. 
 
 The Church must wake up to the new con- 
 ditions, or drop behind. Its immediate busi- 
 ness is to bring these two opposites together. 
 Each possesses what a healthy nation cannot 
 do without. These halves were made to fit 
 into each other. The spiritual must re-root 
 itself in the physical. With a population in 
 this country, between seventy and eighty per
 
 RELIGION AND PHYSIQUE. 235 
 
 cent, of which is crowded into the towns, 
 and engaged mostly in devitalising occupations, 
 organised religion has a problem such as never 
 in all its previous history has been offered it. 
 In such circumstances it cannot go on as 
 though nothing had happened. Many of its 
 arrangements must be revised and many 
 of its prejudices must go. The question will 
 be, not how many meetings can be crowded 
 into a week, but what can be done to restore to 
 us a virile humanity ? Believing with Ruskin 
 that " the only real wealth consists in noble 
 and happy human beings," the Church will 
 lay itself out in all ways to gain that high 
 end. It will henceforth know, and never 
 again forget, that the highest is rooted in the 
 lowest, and that either at its peril may ignore 
 the other. 
 
 The view of true religion as essentially virile 
 will, when fully accepted, lead to a decisive 
 verdict on many disputed questions. The 
 doctrine of fasting, which, during Lent, leads 
 numbers of anaemic priests and people to 
 keep themselves at starvation point in the 
 supposed interests of religion, will give way to 
 a wholesomer view. The " fast " of the 
 future will be the barring of the perpetual
 
 236 PROBLEMS OF 
 
 feasting with which the well-to-do are to- 
 day cramming their bodies with diseases, and 
 the return to an eating and drinking that are 
 healthful because they are simple. A virile 
 religion will be one that makes for a strong 
 character inside a strong physique. It will 
 cultivate not only limb-power but will-power. 
 It will, therefore, have nothing to do with 
 systems that put a man's intellect and con- 
 science in the keeping of another. Religious 
 hypnotism of this kind may be soothing to 
 weak nerves, but it is inner paralysis all the 
 same. Protestantism, despite its limitations, 
 has thrived and become the religion of the 
 foremost races, because, in its doctrine of a 
 man's own responsibility before God, it allies 
 itself with the central laws of inward power. 
 
 To sum up in a word. The loftiest spiritual 
 emotions are related to inexorable physical 
 conditions. The Church's greatest achieve- 
 ment will be the securing for humanity the 
 physique of the athlete with the consciousness 
 of the saint.
 
 XXV. 
 Religion's Higher Energies. 
 
 IN the previous chapter, dealing with the 
 Church's deficiencies hi view of present-day 
 problems, we discussed the position arising 
 from the changed physical conditions of the 
 time. To meet these conditions we urged 
 a readjustment of machinery and arrangement. 
 The new world we are in demands a revised 
 programme. But, on such a theme, to stop 
 in the sphere of the outward would be to 
 offer a miserably inadequate idea of the 
 Church's requirement. It leaves the chief 
 thing untouched. It is, indeed, the puzzle 
 of the world we live in that its physical and 
 its spiritual are perpetually obscuring each 
 other. We cannot do justice to both at the 
 same time. The physicist studies his side 
 and forgets there is a spiritual religion, living 
 in its own sublime conception, which in turn 
 ignores the material. Every now and then 
 they wake up to each other's existence, and
 
 238 PBOBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 then there is collision and deadlock. Nearly 
 all the difficulties of faith in this generation 
 have origin in our failure to unite the two in 
 one act of vision. We shall learn better some 
 day. Meanwhile, after our study of the 
 Church's external relations, we may now 
 adjust the balance somewhat by a consideration 
 of its inner and higher energies. For, after 
 all, it is from these, from its resources in the 
 invisible, that to-day, as of old, its victories 
 must come. In each age the religious position 
 has been fixed, not by method and machinery, 
 but by what has been going on hi the secret 
 recesses of some inspired, deep-communing 
 soul. 
 
 We say of some soul, for it is there, in the 
 realm behind the mere perceptive and reason- 
 ing faculties, that the higher energies reside 
 and show themselves. Only now, after cen- 
 turies of floundering in a false psychology, are 
 we coming to see this. It was necessary, we 
 suppose, to pass through the theological ages, 
 with their fierce word combats, in order to 
 obtain final demonstration that the real 
 spiritual power and value lay not in them at 
 all. Who goes to the fourth century for in- 
 spiration ? That age, when men staked every-
 
 RELIGION'S HIGHER ENERGIES. 239 
 
 thing on definitions and metaphysical con- 
 cepts, has rendered us one service. The arid 
 Soudan of Christian history, it has shown us 
 how utterly barren is theology, in itself, of 
 religious result. Huxley was at least half 
 right when, in that pathetic letter of his to 
 Kingsley, after the death of his firstborn, he 
 says : ' " Sartor Resartus " led me to know 
 that a deep sense of religion was compatible 
 with an entire absence of theology." Certain 
 is it that not out of the formula-grinding 
 faculty does man ever quench the thirst of 
 his soul. 
 
 The springs of history are more secret than 
 this. They are beneath our definitions. That 
 is why religion, fed from its inner fountains, 
 is continually baffling the average ecclesias- 
 ticism. Again and again the channels duly dug 
 for it, along which all the authorised toll- 
 houses are erected, seem suddenly to dry up, 
 and there is consternation in the official mind. 
 But there is no real shortage of supply. The 
 stream has simply broken out on a new line. 
 Shortage there cannot be, for religion is man's 
 relation to the Infinite, and escape can be 
 never from that supreme environment. Elected 
 spirits, specially endowed, stationed near the
 
 240 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 outer edge of the visible, are ever bringing 
 fresh news of the Unseen which bounds it, and 
 acting as channels of its mystic power. Capax 
 Dei, the religious man stands in the world 
 sure of his highest relationships, his soul a 
 perpetual absorbent, drinking inspirations as 
 the flower drinks sunshine, and exhaling subtle 
 fragrances of that summer land he knows. 
 
 Souls of this order are the true fountains 
 of religious energy. At the head and summit 
 of them stands the Christ. The Gospel shows 
 itself psychologically true, notwithstanding 
 the aberrations of its interpreters, by giving 
 as the source of its power, not a theological 
 system, but a Personality wholly absorbent 
 of, and saturated through and through with 
 the Divine. It was not mere mentality that 
 made the Christ. It was soul. What a 
 remove from the thing we call " cleverness," 
 the element which made Jesus supreme in 
 the hearts of His followers ! Was it by 
 " cleverness " that, in Ullmann's striking 
 words, " His mere presence passed a silent 
 but irresistible sentence upon those by whom 
 He was surrounded ? " Was it a mere trick 
 of the intellect that His look could break a 
 strong man's heart ? In this highest example
 
 RELIGION'S HIGHER ENERGIES. 241 
 
 we have demonstration of the fact that the 
 crowning endowment of humanity is beyond 
 and behind the intellect, using that only as 
 a tool. 
 
 As with Master so with disciples. The 
 higher energies by which they have swayed 
 men are always their own secret. Possessed 
 with their mystery of power they go about as 
 healers of souls, yea, also of bodies. Have 
 we reached any understanding yet of the 
 means by which men of religion have wrought 
 cures ? When Bernard preached the second 
 crusade things passed of this order of which 
 he himself could give no account, except 
 that, in his own words, " I have read of nothing 
 more wonderful even in Scripture." We re- 
 member Matthew Arnold's saying anent 
 Christ's healings : " Medical science has never 
 gauged never, perhaps, set itself to gauge 
 the intimate connection between moral fault 
 and disease. . . . The bringer of light 
 and happiness, the calmer and pacifier, the 
 invigorator and stimulator is one of the 
 chiefest of doctors." True words, but, as 
 an explanation of all that has happened in 
 this sphere, only a faint gleam upon the 
 surface of unfathomable deeps. From those 
 
 16
 
 242 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 same depths comes also the charm which holds 
 men in the thrall of the greater souls. What 
 an illustration we have of this in Old Thorpe's 
 account of Wycliffe ! ' ' Master John Wycliffe was 
 considered by many to be the most holy of all 
 the men in his age. . . . Wherefore very 
 many of the chief men of this kingdom 
 who frequently held counsel with him, were 
 devotedly attached to him, ancl^kept a record 
 of what he said, and guided themselves after 
 his manner of life." 
 
 From the same source comes that prophetic 
 element which belongs to the highest kind of 
 religious speech. No true teacher but in his 
 greater moments finds himself yielding to a 
 kind of inspiration in his words. There 
 emerges a tense and awful consciousness that 
 he is then but an instrument of a higher Power ; 
 that the word is far more than his own ; that 
 his very limitations, his weakness and defect, 
 his sense of personal nothingness, are but 
 factors of a movement in which he, indeed, 
 is taking part, but not as originator. This 
 was the note of the marvellous daily preach- 
 ings of Pere Vianney, the apostle of France 
 in the last century, preachings which pro- 
 duced their mighty effects with no other
 
 RELIGION'S HIGHER ENERGIES. 243 
 
 preparation than his ' constant occupation 
 with God." It was this which Madame Guyon 
 meant when, detailing her Grenoble experi- 
 ences, she speaks of being " invested with the 
 Apostolic state," and of revealing the inmost 
 condition of the souls of those who spoke 
 to her. The priests who crowded round for 
 her exhortations had themselves heard 
 Rome's " Accipe potestatem," but whatever 
 that did for them, it conveyed no such power 
 as this. What a striking hint, too, of this 
 truth of the soul is that given in Plutarch's 
 account of the daimon of Socrates, where he 
 speaks of the influence of a superior Being 
 upon the mind of the sage, " whose holy temper 
 fitted him to hear this spiritual speech which, 
 though filling all the air around, is heard only 
 by those whose souls are freed from passion 
 and its perturbing influence." In such utter- 
 ances have we the dim adumbrations of the 
 great truth of the Divine Spirit, the Paraclete, 
 and his ministration among men, which shines 
 in its full splendour in the Christian Scriptures. 
 This region of the soul's locked-up energies 
 is, alas ! an unknown world to most of us. 
 Only most faintly realised is it by the mass 
 of the accredited teachers of religion. Yet
 
 244 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 nothing is more certain than that the Church 
 will wait for the resumption of its influence 
 among men till it has reconquered these inner 
 realms. We are in an age of culture and of 
 general knowledge-grinding. More than ever 
 necessary is that for every teacher, but it is 
 only a beginning. In the higher natures mind 
 is only servant of the soul. Our qualification 
 for any grade of spiritual office is in the in- 
 cessant cultivation of our central and inner- 
 most. It is when we find our higher self, our 
 greater Ego, the infinite Ground of our being 
 to be more and more filling us and making 
 our life, that we can speak of progress. To reach 
 these states is by a discipline, the lines of which 
 we can only here in the barest manner suggest. 
 Our first need is the recovery of the almost 
 lost art of prayer. That the newer concepts 
 of the universe and of the uniformity of law 
 have affected in any way the reasons for prayer 
 is one of those modern superstitions which 
 every self-respecting thinker should by this 
 time have seen through. Prayer is one of 
 the laws of the spiritual nature as surely as 
 gravitation is of the physical. It is indeed of 
 itself a gravitation. It is the soul's inevitable 
 impulse towards its Centre and Source. The
 
 RELIGION'S HIGHER ENERGIES. 245 
 
 author of " Exploratio Evangelica," who dis- 
 cusses the religious problem in a spirit of the 
 severest science, finds prayer irremovably 
 grounded in the structure of the moral nature. 
 Its practice is its own vindication, for, begin- 
 ning as a kind of egotism, it ends, if truly 
 followed, ever in a self -surrender. " Man 
 learns that the higher the tone of his request 
 the more sure it is to be granted, and thus 
 there slowly dawns upon him the perception 
 of a Divine will which wills what is best. . . . 
 He seeks inner changes rather than mere out- 
 ward interpositions." It is in this Divine 
 air, in this " practice of the presence of God," 
 as " brother Lawrence " finely calk it, that 
 the soul grows. If we set our unaccustomed 
 feet upon this path we can hardly do better 
 for a beginning than to study the books, the 
 inspired legacies, of souls that have been 
 great in prayer. A Church in earnest will 
 turn afresh to the great devotional literature 
 of the past, in whose pages religion's higher 
 energies still live, exhaling heaven's own per- 
 fume, throbbing with heaven's own force. 
 As we read we are borne upward on these 
 wings of brother spirits till we find our own, 
 and are free ourselves of the upper airs.
 
 246 PKOBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 Following this line we gain that habit of 
 leaning on the invisible which is faith in its 
 essence. As true to-day is it as in tho time of 
 Heraclitus " that much knowledge of things 
 Divine escapes us through want of faith." 
 As we become experts in this line we shall 
 assuredly touch also the force which the nature 
 of things has wedded to sacrifice and renun- 
 ciation. Astronomers can calculate the power 
 of gravitation. Who shall measure for us the 
 sheer moral energy of a self -offering, of a suffer- 
 ing for the good ? As Westcott has truly said, 
 "A life of absolute and calculated sacrifice 
 is a spring of immeasurable power " ; and 
 St. Columba, who knew whereof he spoke, 
 " Whoever overcomes himself treads the world 
 under foot." 
 
 To sum up. We have spoken before of th e 
 Church's outwardness. Here have we some 
 thing of its inwardness. Vastly important, 
 and to-day imminently urgent, as we have 
 contended, are the claims of the outward. 
 But when all is said it is by the inner con- 
 dition that religion triumphs. For in the 
 twentieth century, as in the first, " the 
 weapons of our warfare are not carnal but 
 spiritual."
 
 XXVI. 
 The Soul's Secret. 
 
 MODERN society seems trying to persuade 
 itself that life is, after all, a very simple 
 business. Civilisation polishes off its rough 
 surfaces and makes all as trim as a suburban 
 grass plot. We are putting everything into 
 figures. Even morality is statistical. There 
 will be so many crimes to so many public- 
 houses. Our social value is a matter of rank 
 and of a banking account. Can any kind of 
 life be conceived of in Camberwell which 
 would not elicit the pitying condescension 
 of Mayfair ? Everything has been analysed 
 and made clear to us. A school of in- 
 vestigators has arisen that measures even 
 our sensations, and gives you the range and 
 rapidity of mental reactions in terms of 
 arithmetic. It all seems so plain, till we take 
 a step or two aside. We alter for a moment 
 our point of view, and it is as when, leaving 
 the saloon of an ocean liner, we walk out upon 
 
 M7
 
 248 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 the deck. Away below, within a few feet of 
 us, in that gilded scene, is society's latest 
 fashionable phase. But here, where we now 
 stand, all this is blotted from us as we watch 
 the infinitudes of space, immensities of starry 
 heavens, the sweep of tempests, ocean's 
 devouring depths. Our neighbour offers to 
 us day by day his saloon side, and we know 
 it to weariness. But behind is a world of 
 his own, full of strangest scenery, of which 
 he renders us no proper account, and that 
 because he cannot. 
 
 There is need to emphasize this side of 
 things just now, because the world seems 
 bent on ignoring it. It will do that at its 
 peril. To be careless of surface facts is 
 bad enough ; to take no heed of the central 
 ones is certain destruction. We are all now 
 for cultivating the surface. We are to ameli- 
 orate life by clearing the slums, by creating 
 garden cities, by cheaper transit, by model 
 public-houses, by old-age pensions. And we 
 are all keen on these things, for we can all 
 see their value. Yet when our politicians 
 and our religious teachers are filling up their 
 whole time with social programmes of this 
 order, our ear is caught by what seems a
 
 THE SOUL'S SECRET. 249 
 
 laugh from the innermost soul of things. 
 " What then," it seems to say, " is this your 
 pill for the earthquake ? And will your 
 fool be any less a fool if you take him sixty 
 miles an hour instead of twenty ? And your 
 latest electric system, which flashes news of 
 the last murder round the globe in a few 
 minutes, will it work anything for the moral 
 interior of your murderer ? " And truly 
 the laugh against us is justified. A blindness 
 more than Egyptian must be upon us if we 
 can see no further into our problem than this. 
 For this, after all, is the saloon side, and 
 the moment we get away to the deck we 
 note how all the aspects and problems have 
 changed. We see then that a man's life 
 means just what from day to day is going 
 on inside him. It is the secret of his soul. 
 He can never tell us what that is, because 
 the greatest part of it is far beyond the power 
 of words. If we regard, for instance, his 
 mere thinking, we find that, always behind 
 the ideas which seem clear to him, there is a 
 formative process going on of far greater 
 import, but dim and unknown, for which he has 
 no language at all. Have we ever carefully 
 studied that insensible turning of the mind
 
 250 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 towards a new conviction ? Some morning we 
 discover that an old portion of our creed has 
 lost its power, and can never again be to us 
 what once it was. Yet has our mind rendered 
 to us any exact account of the process which 
 brought this about ? No. The history here 
 is an illustration of Joubert's remark that 
 " in the mind there is going on perpetually 
 a circulation of unconscious arguments." In 
 like manner, before a new conception dawns, 
 there come glimmering from the deeps behind 
 mysterious flashes of intimation ; we realise 
 that room is being prepared within us for a 
 new truth, and that a large part of the process 
 is beyond our will is, in fact, a part of that 
 evolution of our personality which is the 
 secret of the soul. 
 
 But another process is daily going on within 
 of larger moment even than our thinking. 
 We are brought continually into the arena 
 of moral decision, and our interior is here 
 the strangest, most tragic of battle-grounds. 
 Outside there is nothing for our neighbour 
 to suspect. Our best and worst are alike 
 hidden from him. The surface is like the 
 exterior of a seemingly extinct volcano. 
 The ground for a long while has been given up
 
 THE SOUL'S SECRET. 251 
 
 to cultivation, and year by year smiles with 
 its fruits and flowers. No hint is there to 
 the casual observer of the chaotic forces that 
 storm below, and may perchance some day 
 cover the ground again with lava and ashes. 
 But down in this boiling cauldron is our life 
 perpetually in the making. The mystery is 
 that in the crises of our inner history we most 
 often do not know there is a crisis. Confused 
 fermentations are going on which we do not 
 stay to analyse. After all, does it amount to 
 much how it all turns out ? Of the higher 
 or lower choice presented to us is there any 
 spectator but ourselves ? It would be some- 
 thing if, after what is called " a moral vic- 
 tory," we received a sensational acclaim. 
 But there will be no illuminations, no huzzas. 
 The thing begins and ends inside us, and we, 
 too, shall end soon enough. So long as we 
 keep the surface swept for our neighbour's 
 eye, what need for further trouble ? 
 
 It is precisely at this point in our secret 
 history that all the materialistic philosophies, 
 all theories of " the greatest happiness of the 
 greatest number " as a sufficing moral support, 
 reach their Sedan. It is here, down deep in 
 the centre, we perceive the utter futility
 
 252 PBOBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 of any schemes of human betterment that 
 ignore the basal spiritual facts. Let any man 
 who has made progress in inward develop- 
 ment ask himself what has really happened 
 in the struggles through which he has come. 
 Why did we fight down that imperious lower 
 instinct ? What led us the other day to 
 sacrifice our personal ease in a service where 
 we knew there would be no glory, no pecuniary 
 gain, and very likely entire misconstruction 
 of motive ? Again, as we wait for answer, we 
 seem to hear the soul laughing quietly to itself. 
 Good-humouredly this time, as though it were 
 hugging its own secret. For here it is so 
 sure of itself. It knows there is no other 
 explanation than the transcendental one. 
 We did these things because of an Onlooker, 
 an Inspirer, because we know ourselves as 
 belonging to a spiritual order whose command 
 is upon us and in us. An order which tells 
 us that we are here to add to the sum of good ; 
 that the unselfish deed, the choice for purity, 
 work out of ourselves into results that are 
 permanent, and vaster than we can perceive. 
 
 We said a moment ago that there are no 
 trumpetings, no thunderclaps over these un- 
 seen battlefields. Yet assuredly are they
 
 THE SOUL'S SECRET. 253 
 
 not without witnesses. The results tell us that. 
 The results themselves indeed seem alive. 
 Is it not they that have at last raised those 
 invisible barriers that now shut us off from the 
 lower life that was once so near ? But they 
 would not work thus without direction. Says 
 Amiel, whose testimony is the more valuable 
 that it is wrung from the depths of a sceptical 
 temperament : " J'eprouve avec intensite que 
 rhomme dans tout ce qu' il fait de beau, 
 de grand, n'est que 1'organe, vehicule de quelque 
 chose, ou de quelqu'un de plus haut que lui." 
 (" Intensely do I realise that man in everything 
 great and noble he accomplishes is but the 
 organ, the vehicle of something or some one 
 higher than himself.") Here do we see how 
 the mere facts of the soul, as interpreted by a 
 sufficiently clear introspection, carry us straight 
 to the New Testament. Amiel finds out for 
 himself what Augustine had discovered before. 
 Da quod jubes, et jube quod vis. (Give what 
 Thou commandest and then command what 
 Thou wilt.) In other words, man lives in- 
 wardly by One greater than himself. As 
 Barclay, the Quaker apologist, puts it, " Chris- 
 tians now are led inwardly and immediately 
 by the Spirit of God, even in the same manner,
 
 254 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 though it befall not many to be led in the 
 same measure, as the saints were of old." 
 There is no way of right living in our soul's 
 innermost centre except by the overbrooding 
 of a greater Personality. We accomplish 
 our secret good and vanquish our secret evil 
 by the law and power which led Christ to 
 die on Calvary. 
 
 But do not let us suppose that this secret 
 of the soul, while finding its grandest ex- 
 pression in the Christian Gospel, has been 
 shut up there, has been confined only to 
 organised Christianity. The early Fathers, 
 better informed than their successors, never 
 dreamed of such a limitation. They knew 
 that it was fundamentally in the soul, by 
 virtue of its own existence and quality of 
 being. India knew it, and so did Egypt, and 
 so did Greece. What but a Divine leading 
 brought the Hindu mind to such a perception 
 as this of a man's true happiness ? We quote 
 from the Bhagavad Gita : " He becometh 
 acquainted with that boundless pleasure which 
 is far more worthy of the understanding 
 than that which ariseth from the sense 
 depending upon which, the mind moveth not 
 from its principles ; which, having obtained, 

 
 SOUL'S SECRET. 255 
 
 be respecteth no other acquisition, so great 
 is it ; in which depending, he is not moved by 
 the severest pain." 
 
 Indeed, ringing through both the Eastern 
 and Western world is heard the soul's laugh 
 of derision against the scheme which confounds 
 the highest good with a mere comfort- 
 philosophy. When we have brought White- 
 chapel to Belgravia's standard of luxury, 
 do we imagine that we have solved our world- 
 problem ? It does not lie there at all. When 
 our hog has got both foot and mouth in the 
 trough, it is enough, doubtless, for his hog- 
 hood. But the soul will not rest content in 
 the best furnished of styes. What is such fare 
 to a St. Teresa, who cries, " When persecuted 
 my soul is then so mistress of itself that it 
 seems that it is in its kingdom and has every- 
 thing under its feet " ? This hog philosophy 
 makes also our pity to be often so ludicrously 
 misplaced. Do we, from our snug citizen 
 ease, pity the warrior who is lying out there 
 in the wind and the rain, dying neglected 
 on the battlefield ? What business have we 
 with our pity ? Do we know his soul's 
 secret ? May it not be with him, as with the 
 young officer who, as has been recently related,
 
 256 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 wrote on his tablets before the cancer choked 
 him, " These have been the happiest months 
 I ever spent in my life ! " 
 
 What has been here urged will not, let 
 us hope, be misinterpreted. We are all social 
 reformers to-day, and the Church must be 
 the chief of them. No college curriculum 
 will henceforth dare to omit the laws of social 
 and economical well-being. They are part 
 of the constitution of the city of God. But 
 while we clamour for better legislation, for 
 purer air, for healthier physical conditions, 
 let us never forget that these at best are only 
 a scratching of the surface. Man himself 
 can never be effectively dealt with except 
 where his central mystery resides. The 
 weapons of this inner warfare are not carnal, 
 but spiritual. There is perhaps no country 
 where social organisation is being carried to a 
 higher perfection than Germany. But it 
 was a profound appreciation of the real condi- 
 tions of the problem which led the Kaiser 
 in a recent memorable address to exclaim, 
 " The man whose life is not founded on 
 religion is lost,''
 
 xxvn. 
 The Higher Lawlessness. 
 
 THERE are few more fascinating studies than 
 that of man's relation to law. His whole 
 story is here the story of his soul. The puzzles 
 in this story, its amazing inconsistencies, baffle, 
 yet entice us. We ponder them with the 
 feeling that behind lies the clue to everything. 
 But their mystery is great. It mocks seem- 
 ingly at all our pre-conceived opinions. One 
 of our most cherished convictions is as to the 
 sanctity of law, and the disgrace attached 
 to the transgression of it. To speak of a 
 people as " law abiding " is to pay it the 
 highest of compliments, while " a lawless 
 rabble " represents to us the zero of character. 
 And yet, striking full upon our feeling here 
 is the fact that the noblest characters in 
 history, and the most decisive of its upward 
 movements, are identified with an apparent 
 lawlessness. The prison which in one cell 
 holds thief or murderer may, in the next, 
 
 257 17
 
 258 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 contain a prophet of the new time, an apostle 
 of the higher living. The same authority 
 which crucified two robbers at Golgotha 
 stretched Jesus Christ on the middle cross 
 between. The law breakers, in age after age, 
 have included the best and worst of the race. 
 
 It is of the highest consequence, both to our 
 knowledge of life and for our personal conduct, 
 that we resolve this puzzle. And to do this 
 we must, it is evident, inquire first as to the 
 nature and origin of law. There are two roads 
 of investigation. We may study man and his 
 laws from the outside, or we may study them 
 from within. On the one side, evolution has 
 taught us much of the natural history of law 
 making and keeping. The tribal system 
 which is older than humanity, for it exists in 
 full vigour amongst the herds and flocks of the 
 animal kingdom is a combination which, by 
 its very nature, places a certain restriction and 
 discipline upon the individual. It is, we are 
 told by one school, in this tribal association 
 that we have the whole origin of law and of 
 conscience. The tribe was the individual's 
 larger self. Its approbation or disapprobation, 
 its vengeance or reward, rubbed into his mind 
 a set of interests, of desires, hopes and fears,
 
 THE HIGHER LAWLESSNESS. 259 
 
 wider than those of his private personality. 
 A breach of his tribal compact, even when 
 undetected and unpunished, brought reverbera- 
 tions to his interior soul from the larger con- 
 sciousness outside and oppressed him with a 
 guilty fear. Here, it is said, is the whole story 
 of man's law, and conscience, and sense of sin. 
 But to anyone who looks beneath the surface 
 this attempt to give the tribal system as the 
 whole truth will be absurdly superficial. At the 
 most the tribal system has been but an instru- 
 ment, one of the tools used in a vast process. 
 When we change our standpoint, and look at 
 this process from within, we get an entirely 
 new perspective. We see then law, both in 
 the individual and in society, appearing as the 
 register of moral progress. It is the perpetual 
 shaping of that Formless which is at the back- 
 ground of the soul into new act and new thought 
 the mystic breath which, touching at first 
 the highest natures, is felt at last over the whole 
 human surface, and crystallises finally into 
 constitutions, into canons, into legal codes. 
 The new thought thus becomes a common 
 standard of living, to which society, in the 
 general interest, demands adherence under 
 penalties.
 
 260 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 But what we next observe is that this 
 process is for ever going on, and that conse- 
 quently man's codified law is at no time in a 
 condition of finality. The Formless behind 
 and in him is always at work, pushing him 
 on from high to higher. In his ascent man 
 is continually discovering that what he thought 
 was universal is only provincial, and what he 
 thought final was only provisional. Even in 
 physical science he is continually breaking 
 through what once seemed fixed and eternal 
 boundaries. Darwinism, to take one instance, 
 is already being superseded. Natural selec- 
 tion, which a few years ago was regarded as the 
 one key to development, is now regarded as 
 only one amongst many. Even the law of 
 gravitation is becoming suspect, at least in its 
 earlier claim for a universal application. It 
 explains the motions of the solar system, but 
 nothing beyond. 
 
 But man himself is the great example of non- 
 finality. In him all the kingdoms of Nature 
 meet ; he is a general exhibition of their 
 systems of laws and of their transcendence in 
 succession by something higher. His bodily 
 life, by its vitality, walks clean away from the 
 whole law region of the inorganic world. He
 
 THE HIGHER LAWLESSNESS. 261 
 
 his stone gaily into the air, as though 
 his act were not an outrage upon all the old- 
 established and highly respectable laws of 
 statics. And higher yet, in the mystery 
 of his volitional freedom, he has the whole 
 reticulation of cosmic law, in all its gradations, 
 at his service, and plays with it at his will. 
 
 When we have studied in this way the 
 working of law, both in the outer regions of 
 man's nature and in his inner consciousness, 
 we find some glimmering of b'ght on the puzzle 
 which met us at the beginning. We begin to 
 understand why it comes about that man is 
 ever under a system of law, which, on the 
 whole, it is good for him to obey ; and why, 
 also, there arrive periods in his history when it 
 becomes natural, and even necessary, for him 
 to disobey. But even here the seeming law- 
 lessness is only apparent. The act of a higher 
 nature, in what appears a disobedience, is 
 always according to a law. The difference is 
 that it is a higher one, invisible at present to 
 those who are lower down. The stone flung 
 into the air is obeying a law in its ascent just as 
 certainly as when, feeling the tug of gravita- 
 tion, it falls again to the earth ; and the parallel 
 holds strictly in the moral world.
 
 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 In that sphere the revelation of the new 
 law comes, we say, first to the higher natures, 
 and it is their recognition of it, and of its 
 transcendence of the life-rules that have been 
 current hitherto, that puts them so frequently 
 in the category of transgressors. Here we 
 find Jesus Himself as the most outstanding 
 example. The saying concerning Him, that 
 " He was numbered with the transgressors," 
 contains more than is generally allowed to 
 it. He was indeed a transgressor, and that 
 of set purpose. He deliberately trampled 
 underfoot whole schools of laws, enactments, 
 regulations which had obtained amongst His 
 countrymen for generations, some of them 
 for ages, and which had been invested by them 
 with the most solemn religious sanctions. 
 His " It hath been said by them of old time ; 
 . . . but I say unto you " was a buffet, 
 crushing and deadly, struck in the very face 
 of law. It was entirely in the nature of things 
 that its paid custodians should prosecute Him 
 to the death. The old order has no notion 
 of being unceremoniously kicked out by 
 the new. It always makes a fight for it, and 
 generally contrives to land some ugly blows. 
 The prophet makes his account with that.
 
 THE HIGHER LAWLESSNESS. 263 
 
 The road upwards is so often across his body, 
 but he is glad, even at that price, to be a step 
 on in the glorious movement. 
 
 As with the Master, so it fared with His 
 followers. Christianity for three centuries 
 was, from the imperial standpoint, " a lawless 
 movement." It would be a wholesome change 
 for modern Christians, in search of something 
 new in their reading, to find it in a study of 
 those three centuries. There is a wide and 
 varied literature of them still extant. Much 
 of it is strange and even repellant to our ways 
 of thinking, but oh ! that note of quiet heroism, 
 of utmost scorn of consequence ; the calm 
 unblenching gaze into the face of hideous 
 torture ! Our emasculated generation, sur- 
 feited with comforts, would do well to think 
 itself back into that time, and then, may be, 
 it would appreciate a little better the inherit- 
 ance that was won for it at this price. 
 
 These were the transgressors of a lower law 
 for the sake of a new and higher. To us now 
 it seems amazing that men should be perse- 
 cuted for trying to be good. That is the 
 thought which occurred at times to the sufferers 
 themselves. What a touching, and at the 
 same time revealing word, is that which
 
 264 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 Arnobius utters, in his astonishment at their 
 treatment : " For why, indeed, have our 
 writings deserved to be given to the flames, 
 our meetings to be cruelly broken up, in which 
 prayer is made to the supreme God ; peace and 
 pardon are asked for all in authority, for 
 soldiers, kings, friends, enemies, for those still 
 in life, and those freed from the bondage of 
 the flesh ; in which all that is said is such as to 
 make men humane, gentle, modest, virtuous, 
 chaste, generous in dealing with their substance, 
 and inseparably united to all embraced in our 
 brotherhood ! " 
 
 But the story here has been continually repeat- 
 ed since. Man's ascent is always in spite of 
 himself. His deepest grudge is against the 
 disturber who wakes him from his sleep and 
 bids him resume the march onward. Those 
 times of awaking are ever the crucial points 
 of history. We watch what is going on with 
 breathless interest. It is like the moment 
 in the life of a butterfly when the grub state 
 is exchanged for the new form and sphere of a 
 winged creature. It is the grandest sight this 
 world affords, the spectacle of some man of 
 destiny, to whom the new law has been com- 
 mitted, revealing this mystery of life to his
 
 THE HIGHER LAWLESSNESS. 265 
 
 astonished contemporaries. And these men 
 are all law-breakers. Luther, with his justifi- 
 cation by faith, is the iconoclast of a thousand 
 venerable traditions ; George Fox, with his 
 freedom of the spirit and sufficient priesthood 
 of the individual, shocks Protestantism almost 
 as much as Luther had shocked Catholicism. 
 Wesley, with his bold Gospel-campaigning, 
 tramples under foot at every step the orthodox 
 conventions of his time. To-day we know 
 that their law breaking was a law making, and 
 that the world's highest interests could not 
 spare one of the strokes they struck. 
 
 The process is not over yet. Those who 
 imagine that religion is a manufactured 
 article, produced once for all in one given form, 
 which we are all to subscribe and keep to, 
 need to learn the first lessons both of history 
 and psychology. The human soul was not 
 built that way. If the English Free Churches 
 stood to-day for nothing else than the assertion 
 of the rights of the human spirit to follow its 
 own line of development, and to recast its 
 thought in accordance with every new Divine 
 unveiling, they would more than justify their 
 existence. 
 
 And further. When, in the sphere of public
 
 266 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 life, laws enacted in opposition to clearly 
 revealed principles of equity are thrust in 
 the face of religious men, and their submission 
 demanded under penalties, their education 
 alike in history and in the things of the spirit 
 will teach them very clearly how to act. 
 There are times when the highest law that such 
 men know imperiously demands a seeming 
 lawlessness. In obeying this they tread a 
 path their Master trod before them. The 
 people who propose to coerce them may well 
 think twice before entering on the conflict. 
 The question might even occur to the coer- 
 cionist which came to Meissner, one of the 
 examiners at the prosecution of Jacob Boehme, 
 " Who knows what stands behind this man ? "
 
 XXVIII. 
 The Logic of Life. 
 
 HOLT BUTTON records that Bagehot and he, 
 when lads, wandered once for two hours up 
 and down Regent Street, in the heat of an 
 argument as to whether the so-called logical 
 principle of identity (A is A) were a law of 
 thought or only a postulate of language. It 
 is safe to say the number of Englishmen is 
 strictly limited who would care to spend two 
 hours in Regent Street, or elsewhere, on any 
 such discussion. Formal logic is not our forte. 
 Most of us, in framing our arguments, are 
 blissfully unconscious of the " Barbara, 
 Celarent " of the ancient schools. The Hegelian 
 doctrine, which reduces the universe to a 
 syllogism, and makes all life to consist in the 
 strictly logical development of a fontal Idea, 
 is one that, if comprehended at all, would 
 sound strangely unreal to the average inhabi- 
 tant of these isles. 
 
 Nevertheless, ours is a logical world, and 
 
 307
 
 268 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 life only becomes intelligible in proportion as 
 we recognise the fact. The universe, when 
 we look more deeply into it, becomes to us 
 actually a mass of petrified thoughts. Out of 
 every particle of its matter peeps a mind. 
 You cannot pick up a stone on the road and 
 begin to describe it without, at every phrase, 
 referring yourself to the cosmic logic-book. 
 What is your talk of the stone its relation 
 to unity and plurality, to genus and species, 
 to time and space, to qualities, to similarity 
 or dissimilarity, and a thousand other things 
 but a recognition of the fact that this stone, 
 here in its world, is, as its first characteristic, 
 fitted into a system of thought-forms, that it 
 is part of a rational scheme, that its very 
 substance is penetrated with a mind that 
 answers to our own and works on similar 
 lines ! 
 
 But the point where ardent thinkers have 
 been most apt to get astray, and to create 
 confusion for themselves and their fellows, is 
 in failing to recognise that the cosmic logic 
 is, while similar to, yet so much deeper and 
 subtler than their own. The legislators and 
 the theologians have been alike in their zeal 
 for boundary lines. They have drawn these
 
 THE LOGIC OF LIFE. 
 
 lines with the assurance that they ran parallel 
 at all points with the universal scheme of 
 things, and have imposed them as such upon 
 their fellows. An Abbe Sieves at the French 
 Revolution draws up what he conceives to be 
 a perfect political constitution ; an (Ecumenical 
 Council defines infallibly the nature of the 
 Godhead and its relation to man. But, alas ! 
 the perfect constitution of our Sieyes fails 
 somehow to work ; and the lines of our theo- 
 logical scheme are being obliterated by that 
 very nature of things which they were sup- 
 posed to exactly determine. Divinity ! 
 Humanity ! What is Divine ? What is 
 Human ? The boundaries were so clear, so 
 precise. But to-day we are not so sure. The 
 material of our thinking on these points has 
 outgrown all our formulae. We know there is 
 a logic here, but it is beyond us : 
 
 Draw if thou can'st the mystic line 
 Which human, which Divine ! 
 
 In this field, indeed, we begin to discover that 
 the poets have done better than the theo- 
 logians. The singers, happy men, have been 
 able to express the power, the mystery, the 
 transcendent beauty of the universal, while
 
 270 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 realising that its ultimate facts went beyond 
 the range of our definitions. 
 
 For while, as we have said, any intelligible 
 view of the Cosmos supposes a logic behind it, 
 yet are we perpetually being reminded of the 
 marvellous subtlety, of the fineness beyond all 
 our discernment, of its processes. Men find 
 a deeper thing in themselves than their own 
 logic. Of their greatest actions they can give 
 no proper account. The final inner move- 
 ment that determines a man upon some deci- 
 sive course is beyond any theory he can frame. 
 When the Puritans of the seventeenth century 
 rose against Charles and Laud, it would have 
 puzzled them to explain to themselves or to 
 others why they should have borne so much, 
 and then have elected to bear no more. Why 
 endurance thus far, and defiance after ? A 
 Luther can give some of the reasons which 
 impel him at Worms to defy Pope and Emperor, 
 but not all. The secret inner compulsion, the 
 " Ich kann nicht anders " ("I can no other "), 
 while supremely imperative, is yet a mystery 
 to himself. He is, in fact, the result and expres- 
 sion of a deeper logic than his own. And it is 
 just that deeper logic which is making the 
 history of the world.
 
 THE LOGIC OF LIFE. 271 
 
 One of the greatest results of history is the 
 spectacle it affords us of the way in which the 
 world grinds out its own logic, and places 
 it in contrast with the productions, in this line, 
 of the theorists and formula makers. We take, 
 for instance, the story of Christianity. From 
 the time of its birth into the world, two sets 
 of dogmatists have been busy about it. There 
 have been, on the one side, its official inter- 
 preters and defenders, on the other its pro- 
 fessed opponents. The Church theologians 
 have defined its beliefs, erected within its 
 boundaries the immense edifice of the creeds, 
 and denounced, with tremendous imprecations, 
 all departures from their view of its meaning. 
 Meanwhile the Opposition, from Celsus and 
 Lucian to Voltaire and Bradlaugh, has been 
 labouring diligently to exhibit its inaccuracies 
 of science and history, and to show "the 
 absurdity, the impossibility, the turpitude " of 
 its doctrinal system. It has been a pretty 
 quarrel. Shrewd have been the blows of the 
 doughty combatants, and terrible the havoc 
 they have made of each other. 
 
 But while this wordy war has been going on, 
 another judge, working on quite other materials, 
 has been quietly formulating a decision on the
 
 272 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 matter. There seems a certain humour in his 
 aspect, as he regards the opposing camps. 
 "Go to, now," he seems to say, " stop your 
 stone- thro wing. You are both right and both 
 wrong. But wrong chiefly. Has it not 
 occurred to you that you may here be tilting 
 at windmills and missing the essence of the 
 matter ? " Who is this judge ? It is the 
 logic of life ; in other words, the Cosmos 
 itself, to which the Gospel, as a fact of human 
 history and as a theory and practice of life, 
 has committed its record for judgment. We 
 observe how that judgment is gradually un- 
 rolling itself. The nature of things, which at 
 the beginning took this new material into its 
 laboratory, exposed it to all the tests, stretched 
 it upon the apparatus of an age-long, thousand- 
 fold experience, is giving us now sentence after 
 sentence of its leisurely verdict. It is pro- 
 nouncing Christianity to be at once deeper than 
 its successive theologies and deeper than the 
 refutations of them. Clear enough is its pro- 
 nouncement on the Gospel as a life value. 
 Its summing-up on this point might, indeed, 
 be put in Lowell's memorable words : " When 
 scepticism has turned its attention to human 
 society, and has found a place on this planet
 
 THE LOGIC OF LIFF; 273 
 
 ten miles square where a decent man can 
 live in decency, comfort and security . . . 
 a place where age is reverenced, infancy 
 protected, manhood respected, womanhood 
 honoured, and human life held in due regard ; 
 when sceptics can find such a place ten miles 
 square on this globe where the Gospel of 
 Christ has not gone and cleared the way and 
 laid the foundation, it will then be in order 
 for the sceptical literati to move thither and 
 there to ventilate their views." 
 
 But the logic of life, saying this with immense 
 emphasis for the Gospel as a fact in history 
 and a practice of living, will have nothing to 
 do with our parochialisms of religious thought. 
 It admits much of the opposition argument 
 against the theologies, and may admit more 
 yet. It is creating in us a faith in universals 
 rather than in this or that particular. It 
 compels us to reverence the work of human 
 uplifting done by other forms of religion as 
 well as our own. It is revealing to us hidden 
 affinities in cults that seemed at first so alien ; 
 it is showing us that faith, love, sacrifice, 
 purity, forgiveness, brotherhood, are the same 
 in human souls the world over, the inbreathing 
 there of the life of the one Father ; it is opening 
 
 18
 
 274 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 the immense prospect of a universal faith 
 resting upon indisputable facts, upon common 
 aspirations, upon the participation of the same 
 spiritual heritage. From every quarter hands 
 are being stretched out for such a consumma- 
 tion. The best men everywhere see this 
 coming day. Is it not something to get a 
 word like this from India ? It is P. C. 
 Mozoomdar who speaks : " We look forward 
 to a day when Christian missionaries and 
 Hindu reformers will form a brotherhood, 
 different indeed in theology, but one in spirit, 
 in aim, in the inspired humanity of Jesus 
 Christ and the Fatherhood of God." One of 
 the greatest things, we imagine, that is at 
 present being done on the mission field is the 
 education of the missionaries themselves hi 
 the principles of this universal faith. 
 
 It is, indeed, not to the theologies, or the 
 camps of rival disputants, but to this logic of 
 life, producing its results from age to age, 
 that we shall look for the settlement of all our 
 controversies. Its pronouncements are final. 
 Our theory, however fine-spun, however based 
 in tradition or authority, if it conform not 
 to those findings, will fail to hold its ground. 
 Here, indeed, is our Vatican. Exasperatingly
 
 THE LOGIC OF LIFE. 275 
 
 slow is it in its processes, but sure as it is 
 slow, and certain in the end to win humanity 
 to its decisions. 
 
 The subject has immense personal applica- 
 tions. The leader of men is he who under- 
 stands the logic of life. Certain data, he realises, 
 will without fail yield certain results. His 
 view of things includes sight, insight and fore- 
 sight ; not only does he see the thing before 
 his eyes, but deeper, into the principles under- 
 lying it, and further into its future unfoldings. 
 He knows that facts are full of logic, and that 
 their developments will follow the spiritual 
 laws with which he has made himself familiar. 
 
 And our own individual experience will be 
 a constant education in the logic of life. We 
 take our theory of living and offer it as an 
 equation to that " nature of things " which 
 encloses us. It will yield back the answer to 
 the equation with an unerring accuracy. 
 There seems a certain grimness, indeed, in 
 this relation. Our personal contribution is 
 often so fitful, so stupid, and the answer that 
 comes back is so terrifically scientific ! We 
 have forgotten a given duty. The Cosmos 
 refuses to forget that we have forgotten. It 
 remembers our lapse and fails not to produce
 
 276 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 it to our confusion. We should be utterly 
 beaten in this business were it not for another 
 revelation that life brings us namely, that 
 there is something deeper in it even than its 
 logic, and that is a Grace that is infinite 
 and exhaustless.
 
 XXIX. 
 The Soul's Remaking:. 
 
 OUR word "poet," which signifies originally 
 " the maker," plainly fits other heads than 
 that of the polisher of verses. It belongs to 
 us all, for, as Hazlitt says, " poetry is the stuff 
 of which life is made." We are perpetually 
 weaving our epic, our comedy, our tragedy. 
 The maker, that is man's true title. He is 
 ever making his world, and ever making himself. 
 His record on the planet itself is truly a marvel- 
 lous one. Within certain limits, he is the 
 greatest cosmic force we know. With his 
 tool in hand and brain behind it, he transforms 
 in a few years the laborious handiwork of count- 
 less aeons. He carves continents and alters 
 the set of ocean currents. A river bed which 
 it has taken Nature ten million years to con- 
 struct is rearranged by this bantling in a given 
 number of months. As world-maker he is 
 indeed only now beginning to feel his power. 
 But we have just said he is maker, not only 
 
 277
 
 278 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 of his world, but also of himself. And even 
 more wonderful business is this latter, and one 
 which we have not yet sufficiently studied. It 
 was a great word of Heraclitus " that man is 
 a perpetual becoming." He is not, that is, a 
 thing, a finished product, but rather a passage 
 from something to something more. The 
 modern doctrine of evolution has put that 
 old truth into a new light. But with multi- 
 tudes a misconception has crept in as to the 
 way in which the evolution is accomplished. 
 The word has carried them over to a kind of 
 fatalism. They imagine themselves as simply 
 the resultant of the forces that are playing 
 upon them a something that is being shaped 
 and fashioned, the outcome of an irresistible 
 process. They are what they are made, and 
 are spectators of what is going on, rather than 
 active participants. Phrases of this kind form 
 one of those half-truths the use of which is 
 like rowing with one oar. There is no progress 
 that way. 
 
 Perhaps the greatest problem of life is here 
 before us : Can we to any extent remake our 
 minds ? Are we simply a product, or can 
 we be creators of ourselves ? Man, as we have 
 seen, is a revolutionist in his outside world.
 
 THE SOUL'S REMAKING. 279 
 
 There he levels mountains, turns deserts into 
 gardens, uses Niagaras to grind his corn. 
 Can he, as well, be a revolutionist within, 
 and there also make his desert into a garden ? 
 Let us try and examine this question with as 
 close a reference as possible to the facts of 
 the case. 
 
 If we study our present inward condition 
 we shall find there two sets of phenomena, or, 
 we may say, two phases of feeling. The first, 
 and the one perhaps most carefully to be noted, 
 is that of our immediate and involuntary- 
 response to each fresh appeal of the outside 
 world. By observing that response, we may 
 get to a nicety the measure of our present 
 selves. When, for instance, a new difficulty 
 or affliction confronts us, when a needy man 
 asks our help, when our rival secures a success 
 greater than our own, the feeling that first leaps 
 into consciousness is the thing for us, with a 
 rigorous and scientific exactness, to investigate. 
 For here have we the precise summing of our 
 progress or non-progress thus far. In that 
 first flash of feeling there working hi us, before 
 we have had time to think of its quality, we 
 see the point we have reached. Variations 
 of quality in these first impressions there
 
 280 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 may be, but we shall be safe in taking their 
 average. 
 
 The survey, if we make it searchingly and 
 thoroughly, will to most of us yield curious 
 revelations, often far from gratifying. What 
 uglinesses gleam out from that troubled surface ! 
 A photographic impression of it all, taken in 
 the raw, and before there has been any time 
 for trimming, will often show as much paganism 
 as an early chapter of Gibbon. Those instinc- 
 tive judgments of our fellows, those forecastings 
 of our future, those suggestions for action, 
 dragged now to the cold daylight and examined 
 there, are not an ideal picture ! Poor indeed 
 and all unlovely should we be if this were all. 
 
 But it is not all. For immediately behind 
 this surface impression we discern another ; 
 dimmer, in the background, but there and 
 profoundly modifying the picture. All of 
 us who are in any degree ethically alive know 
 that " something behind," which checks the 
 first impulse, questions it, turns it round, asks 
 whether it is worthy of us. Here, in this 
 second line of inner movement, have we that 
 secret of Heraclitus, that man is primarily a 
 becoming. For this is our better self in the 
 making. What goes on here in the region of
 
 THE SOUL'S REMAKING. 281 
 
 the soul is precisely what we find occurring 
 in our bodily exercises. There we know two 
 kinds of action, the automatic, which comes 
 first ; and behind that, the voluntary. Our 
 walking, our dressing, our ordinary speaking 
 are mainly automatic ; the activities come 
 of themselves. But a time was when every 
 one of them was a laboured effort, demanding 
 at each point a distinct exercise of will. We 
 are learning other things now, may be skating, 
 riding, a foreign language and the actions 
 here are still in the voluntary, effortful stage. 
 If we persevere they will in turn join our 
 automatic activities, and be part of our in- 
 stinctive selves. The passage of the conscious 
 into the instinctive is ever the sign of advance. 
 But what is true here of our physical evolu- 
 tion is equally true of the mental. The active 
 striving, behind our surface involuntary, of 
 something that judges, corrects and seeks to 
 supplant it, is our march upward. Here, 
 again, the voluntary is preparing to become in 
 its turn the involuntary. Wonderful, when 
 we come to think of it, that power in man 
 unknown, so far as we can discover, to all the 
 animal races of projecting, from out of his 
 interior, ideals that are ever ahead of his actual
 
 282 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 character, and that ever tempt and entice him 
 towards their realisation ! Wonderful, also, 
 that, ever as the straining actual mounts, does 
 the ideal in its turn mount, and give no sign 
 of stopping short till it reach the Infinite Per- 
 fection ! It is in contemplation of this faculty 
 in man that Plato in the " Symposium " bursts 
 into that wonderful description of the Eternal 
 Beauty and of the human quest for it. " Could 
 man's life in that vision of beatitude be poor 
 and low ? Or deemest thou not that then 
 alone it will be possible for this man, discerning 
 spiritual beauty with those eyes by which it is 
 spiritually discerned, to beget no shadow of 
 virtue, since that is no shadow to which he 
 clings, but virtue in very truth, since he hath 
 the very truth in his embrace ? . . . And 
 rearing virtue as his child he must needs 
 become the friend of God ; and if there be any 
 man who is immortal that man is he." 
 
 This projection of ideals is the first element 
 in the mind's remaking. We find the next 
 in the enormous elasticity and adaptability of 
 the material itself. No substance in nature 
 gives us any adequate illustration of the bound- 
 less spring, the format iveness and reformative- 
 ness of the human soul. It can apparently
 
 THE SOTJL'S REMAKING. 283 
 
 take on any shape and be educated to any 
 degree. This is, perhaps, best seen in the 
 lower ranges of its activity. You can train 
 yourself into and out of all kinds of tastes. 
 There is no original taste for port or champagne. 
 The hardened smoker endured agonies as a 
 boy over his first cigar. The medical student, 
 with whom dissecting has become a passion, 
 fainted at his first operation. We can place 
 no limit, indeed, to this adaptability of the 
 human consciousness, and that fact gives us 
 another ground for faith in the mind's remaking. 
 But an immeasurable adaptability, and an 
 inborn instinct towards its own betterment, 
 do not represent all that, along this line, is at 
 work in the soul. For, to reconstruct, we 
 need new material, and what we next discern in 
 our process is the continuous reception by the 
 mind of new spiritual elements. It is here with 
 our interior nature as with the planet we in- 
 habit. Everywhere within and without we 
 find a vast receptivity. The world would not 
 exist an hour but for its communications from 
 outside. We know something of what the sun 
 sends us. The stars also contribute their 
 quota. As a modern writer finely says : 
 " The solid earth, the ocean's floor, are covered
 
 284 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 with meteoric dust, the dust of the cosmic 
 wayside which we have gathered in our rush 
 through the constellations." And quite as 
 certain and as constant as this rain of sunlight 
 and star dust upon our world is the impact 
 upon the inner spirit of influences and powers 
 that move upon it from above. There is no 
 ethical consciousness of any degree of develop- 
 ment but is sure of this. At times, upon 
 specially sensitised natures, the inrush is 
 almost overwhelming. How many have had 
 an experience such as that which James 
 Russell Lowell once recounted of himself ! 
 " I never before so clearly felt the Spirit of 
 God in me and around me. The whole room 
 seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to 
 hover to and fro with the presence of Some- 
 thing, I know not what." 
 
 The co-operation, on the under side, with 
 this celestial incoming is what we know as 
 prayer. In his " Heart of Midlothian " Sir 
 Walter Scott has a fine passage which gives 
 half the truth about prayer : " Without enter- 
 ing into an abstruse point of Divinity one thing 
 is plain namely, that the person who lays 
 open his doubts and distresses in prayer, with 
 feeling and sincerity, must necessarily in the
 
 THE SOUL'S REMAKING. 285 
 
 act purify his mind from the dross of worldly 
 passions and interests, and bring it into that 
 state when the resolutions adopted are likely 
 to be selected rather from a sense of duty than 
 from any inferior motive." But Sir Walter 
 gives us here only the under side of the truth. 
 In its higher aspect prayer is the soul's 
 receptivity ; the spreading out of its upper 
 surface to the rain upon it of that light and heat 
 whose source is beyond the stars. 
 
 The Church's view of the mind's remaking 
 lies in its doctrine of conversion, a doctrine 
 which has to be reconstructed for our genera- 
 tion, and urged upon it as a veritable science 
 of the soul. The best thinkers are all coming 
 back to this, each in his own way. Professor 
 James, of Harvard, speaks of the process as a 
 voluntary union of a man's higher part of 
 himself " with a More of the same quality 
 which is operative in the universe outside him, 
 and which he can keep in touch with, and in a 
 fashion get on board of." What this union 
 can effect for man's remaking, and that over 
 every department of his nature, is writ large 
 in the history of religious experience, the history 
 which, of all literature, ancient or modern, is 
 the best worth reading.
 
 286 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 The story is a glorious one, and no man who 
 studies it need ever despair of himself. What 
 miraculous cures it contains of minds diseased ; 
 what renovations, what remakings of the inner 
 world, what liftings from hell to heaven ! 
 And all that has been done can still be done in 
 you and me. " Die Geisterwelt ist nicht 
 verschlossen." It is treason to the highest in 
 us ever to stop where we are. To be weaving 
 our nobler self is to be our chief occupation in 
 this world. It is the one that here and here- 
 after will yield an endlessly satisfying result.
 
 The Cosmic Accuracy. 
 
 THE saying of Epicharmus that " we live by 
 arithmetic and by logic " has for us a wider 
 extension than the old Greek philosopher 
 himself imagined. The early world, it is 
 true, had a very vivid sense of the element 
 of calculation in the world's order. Pytha- 
 goras, who discovered the relation of number 
 to the harmonic system, made it the central 
 feature of his philosophy and theology. And 
 one can dip nowhere into those old cosmic 
 schemes without being constantly met with 
 the idea of number as in itself full of mystical 
 significance. But modern research has brought 
 us some new ideas on this subject. Astronomy 
 has revealed the exactness of the cosmic 
 bookkeeping. It gives us, for instance, our 
 planet, doing its million and a-half miles 
 or so per day, with slackenings and accelera- 
 tions of speed at different points of its ellip- 
 tical orbit, and yet accomplishing its little
 
 288 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 run of between five and six hundred million 
 miles during the year, and coming in to time 
 to the minutest fraction of a second. 
 
 And as we ascend in the scale of life, we find 
 in the higher ranges the same story of minute 
 and errorless accuracy. Chemistry has been 
 one of the great revealers here. Its law of 
 combining proportions is a wonderful ex- 
 position of the arithmetic of matter. Nature's 
 bookkeeping takes account of every fraction, 
 of every atom. She allows no waste. We burn 
 up the fuel hi our grate, and there is an end 
 of it for us. Not for her. Dissolved into 
 the primitive elements, or caught up into 
 new, invisible combinations, the burnt-up 
 material, to its last atom, is there, ready to 
 answer her call, holding its place in the sum 
 of her working forces. And in the yet higher 
 complex which physiology offers, in the living 
 organism, the same thing meets us. Our 
 bodily life has its place in the ledger where an 
 absolutely true account of it is kept. The 
 air we breathe, the exercise we take, the food 
 we eat, our whole habitudes of work and 
 rest, of sleeping and of pleasuring, will be 
 figured out with a perfect exactitude into 
 their equivalent of vitality, of output and of
 
 THE COSMIC ACCURACY. 289 
 
 longevity. We can ourselves make a rough 
 kind of calculation in these matters, and it 
 is of the greatest importance we should ; 
 but our attempt at the best is only a guess. 
 It offers no parallel to the cosmic account- 
 keeping, which tots up the total to the last 
 decimal. 
 
 But now comes a question. When, in 
 our ascent, we cross the " Great Divide " 
 from matter into spirit ; when we reach that 
 mind's kingdom, where the freedom of the 
 will seems to transcend all the lower laws, 
 and to introduce a new and untrackable 
 factor into the world's activities, can we still 
 speak of a " cosmic accuracy " ? Are the 
 results in this sphere as certain and as calculable 
 as in the others ? We need not enter here 
 on the problem of Determinism. Our line 
 of investigation lies outside. The point is 
 not as to how the results are produced, but 
 as to the results themselves. And in this 
 region, the wider and the more intelligent 
 our outlook, the deeper, we believe, will be 
 our sense of a bookkeeping, patient, detailed 
 and entirely accurate that is going on, and 
 whose figures are at times vividly discernible. 
 
 The world, we know, is full of the cry of in- 
 
 19
 
 290 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 justice and of the feeling of it. As the scheme 
 of things grinds out its results, and presents 
 our appointed share to each of us, we fume and 
 revolt against the " glaring inequalities." 
 " So much," we say, " to this man and so 
 little to me ! " And it would be quite useless 
 to try and square this account to the satis- 
 faction of all the creditors. We, at least, 
 shall not attempt it. What can be said is 
 that amid the seeming confusions here, there 
 is discernible a working towards moral accuracy, 
 a broad law of treatment, a system of balancings 
 and compensations, of hidden payments and 
 rewards, of a deep working justice that, while 
 leisurely in operation, never relaxes the pursuit 
 of its end, that gives, to some of us at least, 
 a great hope and a great faith to live by. 
 
 After all, how sane and sure is the world's 
 final judgment of men and things ! Securus 
 judicat orbis terrarum. In the long run it 
 fits every man into his proper place. The 
 charlatan, the pretender may for a while 
 hold a position which does not belong to him ; 
 but, by-and-by, he will be found out and 
 reduced to his real proportions. Abraham 
 Lincoln has put the matter for us in his un- 
 forgettable way : " You may fool all the
 
 THE COSMIC ACCUBACY. 291 
 
 people part of the time ; you may fool some of 
 the people all the time ; but you cannot fool 
 all the people all the time." It takes us a 
 very long while to discover the essential 
 justice of the world's verdict about ourselves. 
 The personal equation here is the iron near 
 the compass, which deflects the needle and 
 totally vitiates the reckoning. " How amazing, 
 how exasperating, that this purblind, asinine 
 public fails so utterly to recognise my merit ! " 
 " No, sir. The public is fully as sane as you 
 are, and the cosmos behind is even saner. 
 You will get your place. Your niche, the 
 height of it, and the dimensions of ifc, will 
 be arranged and wrought with a hairbreadth 
 accuracy." Our world, which rolls us to and 
 fro in such amazing fashion, which batters 
 us this side and that with such seeming re- 
 morseless strokes, is, we eventually discover, 
 an artist, skilled yet kindly. Even humorous 
 withal. We find out that the rogue positively 
 pokes fun at us ! He makes sly use even of 
 our poor little vanity ! It is an element in 
 his calculations, part of the working force 
 by which he gets the most out of us. When 
 this dawns upon us, how can we do other 
 than laughingly acquiesce ?
 
 292 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 But the moral accuracy of the cosmos is 
 by no means all a laughing matter. In that 
 dim and awful region of the soul where volition's 
 battle incessantly goes on, and where alter- 
 nate victories and defeats shape the char- 
 acter and life, we discover an arbiter, a judge 
 who with a marvellous precision fits the 
 results to the acts. The Eastern doctrine 
 of Karma is a rough expression of this cosmic 
 truth. Plutarch in his " De Sera Numinis 
 Vindicta " is on the same lines in his fine 
 argument that punishment does not so much 
 follow upon injustice, but, as he finds in 
 Hesiod, that the two are contemporaneous, 
 and spring up from one and the same root. 
 So is it that, in external oppressions and 
 injustices, there is discernible in an ulterior 
 circle the working of forces that readjust, 
 in a wonderful way, the balance between 
 the wronger and the wronged. The tyrant 
 who oppresses is, in that subtler and yet most 
 accurate calculation, always worse off than 
 the victim of his oppression. The most clear- 
 sighted of the victims have ever recognised 
 this. " Beat on," said Anaxarchus to his 
 executioners, " beat on at the case of Anax- 
 archus ; no stroke falls on Anaxarchus himself."
 
 THE COSMIC ACCURACY. 293 
 
 And Justin Martyr is of the same mind when 
 he declares in the first Apology, " We reckon 
 that no evil can be done us, unless we be 
 convicted as evil-doers ; you can kill, but not 
 hurt us." The m3n who are fighting or 
 suffering for a good cause, even though, 
 like Plato's " just man," they be " stretched 
 on the rack and their eyes dug out," have 
 always the consciousness that they have 
 the upper hand in the conflict, and so have 
 an inner triumph in the midst of their pains. 
 
 This feeling that, in the most central re- 
 gions of the moral sphere, there is an absolute 
 accuracy of reckoning, is discernible through- 
 out the whole history of man's religious 
 thinking. It comes out at times in the strangest 
 ways. We see it, for instance, in those doc- 
 trines of Atonement, of substitution, which 
 in their cruder form have been so repellent 
 to modern thought. When the earlier Cal- 
 vinists spoke of Christ's sufferings as being, 
 in their quantity and intensity, an exact 
 equivalent for the sins of the elect, they were 
 exhibiting, in a manner congenial to the 
 thought of the time, their sense of the cosmic 
 accuracy. It was their way of saying that 
 the moral world possessed an arithmetic
 
 294 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 which reckoned to the last farthing. The 
 earlier fathers had a better, a more Christian 
 way of expressing the same truth. What a 
 fine sense, for example, of moral equivalence, 
 of a Divine humiliation and suffering for a 
 corresponding human uplifting, have we in 
 that passage of Methodius in which, speaking 
 of the cross, he says : " For the Word suffered, 
 being in the flesh affixed to the cross, that 
 he might bring man, who had been deceived 
 by error, to His supreme and Godlike majesty, 
 restoring him to that Divine life from which 
 he had become alienated." 
 
 The cosmic accuracy in these highest realms 
 is indeed our surest guarantee, and our best 
 incentive for the religious life. That the 
 spiritual laws can be trusted, that we can 
 commit ourselves fearlessly to them, as a 
 strong swimmer gives himself to the waves, 
 feeling himself at home there, and knowing 
 that they will bear him, here is the genuine 
 groundwork of a life of faith. Man's failure 
 with the higher laws is never the fault of the 
 laws. It is an affair of his unfitness and 
 ignorance. Once he has mastered their secret 
 he realises their utter fidelity ; they fail him 
 never. And we grow here according to our
 
 THE COSMIC ACCURACY. 295 
 
 faith and our works. We are building now 
 the spiritual house in which we shall dwell. 
 The structure will reveal the strictest arith- 
 metic. Its size, proportions, materials, will 
 be according to what we put into it. And 
 yet behind will appear a larger arithmetic 
 than our own the reckoning of that calculus 
 whose terms are the Infinite Grace and the 
 Eternal love. 
 
 It is when we think along these lines, and 
 come upon conclusions of this order that 
 there grows upon us the argument, whose 
 cumulative effect becomes at last irresistible, 
 for a life beyond the present. It is, indeed, 
 only on this supposition that the doctrine of 
 cosmic accuracy vindicates itself. For the 
 results which work out with such complete- 
 ness in life's lower spheres break off in the 
 upper and really important ones with so 
 startling an abruptness, that we are driven 
 to the supposition of a further ledger account 
 to which they are transferred, and where they 
 are completed. An apostolic word gives us 
 some hint of the features of that final summing : 
 " For I reckon that the sufferings of this pre- 
 sent time are not worthy to be compared 
 with the glory that shall be revealed in us."
 
 XXXI. 
 History's Secret Springs. 
 
 NOTHING perhaps expresses more strikingly the 
 bewilderment which has overtaken the modern 
 man than his interpretations of history. 
 Schopenhauer finds it the most unsatisfactory 
 of studies. It deals, he says, not like philosophy 
 and science, with ideas and conceptions, but 
 only with endless particulars, with things that 
 happened once and then ceased to exist. " It 
 does not rise to a universal law ; it is always 
 crawling on the ground of individual experi- 
 ence." Buckle, on the other hand, was sure 
 about his law of history. He found it in 
 material conditions. Given the climate, the 
 food, and the physical geography of a country, 
 and its fortunes might be predicted. Fonte- 
 nelle also thought history a comparatively 
 simple affair. " A man of great skill," he 
 says, " simply by considering human nature, 
 might guess all past and future history without 
 ever having heard of a single event." Mill, too,
 
 HISTORY'S SECRET SPRINGS. 297 
 
 it will be remembered, at one period of his 
 career, dreamed of constructing an " Ethology," 
 a science of conduct which should give us the 
 laws of past events, and enable us in some 
 degree to predict the future. 
 
 Other writers have been overborne with 
 a sense of the fortuitous in history. Condorcet 
 observed that had Xerxes been victorious at 
 Salamis we might still be barbarians. The 
 saying is akin to that of Gibbon, that, but for 
 Charles Martel's victory, Mohammedan doctors 
 might to-day be teaching the Koran at Oxford. 
 There is also a cynical view which, at recurring 
 intervals, gains vogue, that regards the written 
 histories as merely a full dress view of human- 
 ity, giving no true view of its real inwardness. 
 What actually happens, these people say, is 
 too sordid for recital. The story, so told, 
 would be a series of chroniques scandaleuses. 
 We remember Pascal's grim jest, " If the nose 
 of Cleopatra had been shorter, the whole face 
 of the earth would have been changed." 
 And this sardonic view of history could be made 
 entirely consistent, because every event and 
 series of events has two sides, an upper and 
 an under, and we can choose which we look at. 
 The English Reformation may be discussed in
 
 298 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 the light of the labours and sufferings of a 
 Tyndale and a Coverdale, or as an affair of 
 the relations of Henry VIII. with Anne Boleyn. 
 We might judge the Anglicanism of the 
 Restoration by the seraphic fervour of a 
 Thomas Ken, or by the action of his con- 
 temporary of Durham, who secured his bishop- 
 ric by a bribe of some thousands to Nell 
 Gwynn. Surely nothing exists in the wide 
 universe that lends itself to more opposite 
 interpretations than human nature and human 
 affairs. To the average observer they offer 
 almost irresistible temptations to take a side 
 view, and judge from that. But he will be 
 all wrong. He may accumulate innumerable 
 facts, but his perspective will be out of joint. 
 
 Plainly, not a too well-marked track this 
 science of history, and the philosopher as 
 well as the wayfaring man may easily err 
 therein. And yet the deeper minds, as they 
 have brooded this question, have felt a growing 
 certitude that the human story contained a 
 central secret of co-ordination, which, when 
 found, would be discovered to be not a sordid 
 one. It has often been said that Bossuet in 
 his " Histoire Universelle " laid the foundations 
 of the philosophy of history. It was laid long
 
 HISTORY'S SECRET SPRINGS. 299 
 
 centuries before his day. Augustine, in his 
 " City of God," propounds a view of the world 
 and of human nature in general which contains 
 too much of his early Manicheeism to suit the 
 modern conscience, but in his great sweep 
 of vision, in which he views the whole story 
 of the world as one vast drama with a pre- 
 determined end, he undoubtedly opened the 
 way which has been traversed with such 
 results by the Lessings and the Hegels of later 
 times. 
 
 As outcome of all these researches and ques- 
 tionings it remains that while, as we have seen, 
 at a far remove from anything like complete- 
 ness of view, we are at least able now to make 
 some affirmations. One is that the springs 
 of real history are ever hidden. We are all of 
 us more or less conscious of this. It is the 
 first feeling of the genuine student, as he turns 
 the pages of this or that authority. He longs 
 to get behind his Gibbon or his Macaulay to 
 the sources where they worked. And when 
 we are there we still want to press on. Behind 
 the parchments and the ancient chronicles 
 there is still a secret. Our feeling in watching 
 this turbid current of human life as it rolls its 
 vast volume before our eyes is that of Heroditus
 
 300 PROBLEMS or LIVING. 
 
 when he looked on old Nilus. We would, 
 with him, fain follow back to the head waters. 
 As we stand at gaze over this stretch of ages, 
 what, we ask, is the chief contributor to its 
 history ? We speak of wars, of migrations, 
 of heroes and their achievements. But we 
 are sensible that here, after all, is not the clue. 
 It is the simple fact to say that the one unfailing 
 source and feeder of the current has, from the 
 beginning, been the Unseen. We take a course 
 of centuries, and above the din and whirl of 
 events we discern every now and then, hovering 
 over the horizon, a thin streak of new light, a 
 fresh inspiration for the soul, let down as it 
 seems from the upper heaven. Of the earliest 
 of these we have no record. We only know 
 they have been there by the result. What 
 was it, we wonderingly imagine, that made that 
 stupendous difference between man of the 
 palaeolithic and man of the neolithic time ? 
 What had come in upon the race during these 
 two prehistoric periods that had changed our 
 ancestor from a seemingly non-religious to a 
 religious being ? 
 
 He is not there to tell us, but what has 
 happened since enables us to make a good 
 guess. As we come on these later stages we
 
 HISTORY'S SECRET SPRINGS. 301 
 
 find the same hint everywhere thrown out. 
 It is that of an unseen hand at work. On the 
 plains of Babylonia we find the old Accadians, 
 four thousand years ago, in possession of 
 arithmetic, of geometry, of the divisions of 
 time, of the Sabbath. Who had been their 
 teacher ? Then, spite of himself, man has 
 become moralised. Like a child born amid 
 wild beasts, the instinct of altruism, of regard 
 for others, appears amidst the horde of devour- 
 ing animal passions, and grows until it gradu- 
 ally dominates them. How did this come 
 about ? There is only one answer. Behind 
 the prehistoric, as behind the later and clearer 
 time, what we see is a perpetual secret feeding 
 of humanity from a spiritual source. The 
 story has been well compared to what happens 
 when a handful of iron filings, sprinkled on a 
 sheet of paper, are exposed to the action of a 
 bar-magnet passed underneath. Under its 
 influence the filings arrange themselves into 
 a series of symmetrical curves ; when the magnet 
 is removed the atoms resolve themselves back 
 into their original chaos. Human society 
 at present is at a far remove from an ordered 
 cosmos ; but it is equally remote from a chaos. 
 As Amiel says : " From the point of view of the
 
 302 PROBLEMS or LIVING. 
 
 ideal, man shows much of the sad and of the 
 ugly ; but judged by its origins the human 
 race has not altogether lost its time." The 
 secret is that the magnet behind the screen 
 has incessantly been at work. Man has been 
 the recipient of a perpetual inspiration. As a 
 Greek father puts it : " And sometimes the 
 ' power ' breathes in men's thoughts and 
 reasonings, and puts in their hearts strength 
 and a keener perception." 
 
 With this clue in our hands we may survey 
 what is going on around us with quiet con- 
 fidence, and at the same time with eager 
 expectancy. We are continually looking in 
 the wrong place for the manufacture of history. 
 As Dr. Creighton has well said : " We sometimes 
 speak as though nothing ever happens save 
 what is formally discussed and voted upon. 
 The most important changes are those which 
 are unperceived and unrecognised till they 
 have been accomplished." Nowhere does this 
 truth apply with greater cogency than in what 
 has happened and is happening in the history 
 of religion. We go continually on the supposi- 
 tion that spiritual progress is a matter of the 
 multiplication of churches and of the recon- 
 struction of our ecclesiastical organisations.
 
 HISTORY'S SECRET SPRINGS. 303 
 
 It has never been so. The source is always an 
 unseen one. The religious destiny of a genera- 
 tion has again and again, we discover, lain in 
 what was going on in the depths of two or 
 three elect and disciplined souls. How the 
 fortunes of Anglicanism, we now see, were bound 
 up in the thinkings, the discussions, the in- 
 ward struggles of two or three young men 
 in the Oriel common room in the thirties ! 
 Of what deeper significance for the religion of 
 the Anglo-Saxon race were the spiritual com- 
 munings of another young Oxford student 
 one John Wesley at Lincoln College a century 
 before ! What issues for Catholicism lay in 
 the broodings of the young Spanish knight 
 Ignatius Loyola, as he lay, wounded by a cannon 
 shot at Pampeluna, beguiling the weary hours 
 with a copy of the " Lives of the Saints " ! 
 
 Here, then, deep down in the consciousness 
 of great, earnest souls, lies the religion of the 
 future, as ever its fortunes have lain in the 
 past. But immediately, as we say this, the 
 question arises, Whence do these souls come ? 
 There are transcendental answers which a 
 Plato or a second century Gnostic would have 
 been eager to supply. But on a humbler and 
 less speculative side it is worth noting that
 
 304 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 a part, at least, of their secret is one of ancestry. 
 The immense spiritual force by which Wesley 
 re-endowed the Anglo-Saxon populace with the 
 Christian Gospel did not, let us be sure, begin 
 with him. It was a treasure, slowly accumu- 
 lating in the consciousness of those faithful 
 ancestors on both sides who, during successive 
 generations, had stood for what was best at 
 once in Anglicanism and in Nonconformity. 
 It is a lesson most inspiring and reassuring 
 in the continuity of spiritual force. Nothing in 
 this realm, any more than in the material one, 
 is ever lost. The humble follower of the Chris- 
 tian ideal, who to-day, in his family and his 
 private life, is striving to put what he knows 
 into his character and his work, may himself 
 be no prophet of the time. But it is in the 
 simple fidelity of such as he that we find the 
 hidden springs of a future greatness. It is 
 along these lines the spirit travels, to burst into 
 glorious illumination in some inspired soul yet 
 to come. 
 
 Human history, we say then, is from age to 
 age progressively yielding its secret. The 
 final analysis reveals a factor that infinitely 
 outweighs all of sordid and of discouraging that 
 we find there. It shows us an agent behind
 
 HISTORY'S SECRET SPRINGS. 305 
 
 the scenes, whose silence and slowness are 
 indeed often baffling to us, but whose mark is 
 upon every age, and whose results are ever 
 of one character. Von Hartmann spoke of the 
 human race as being cradled in illusions ; first 
 of a possible happiness in this life, next of 
 happiness in a life to come, then of a happiness 
 for the race in a future age. Deceived in them 
 all the only problem he declares now is to 
 close the illusion with the ending of existence. 
 But the \ ei'dict is not according to the evidence, 
 and we may dismiss it as the moan of a diseased 
 mind. It is indeed this pessimistic school, 
 and not humanity at large, that is cradled in 
 illusions. Busy with its muckrake amongst 
 the garbage of life, it has no time to look up 
 and discover the golden crown which hovers 
 above. For all who can see, the crown, never- 
 theless, is there. All the signs tell us that 
 history moves to a great consummation. The 
 secret spring that through the ages has fed the 
 world is none other than the River of God, by 
 whose living waters man shall yet find his 
 Paradise.
 
 XXXII. 
 Of Spiritual Appetite. 
 
 THE modern approach to religion through 
 psychology and physiology is continually yield- 
 ing us fresh results. These findings, while not 
 a contradiction of the earlier theology, offer 
 outlooks which that theology never contem- 
 plated. And their value is that they make 
 religion so new a thing to us, related in such 
 hitherto unthought-of ways to the realities 
 of life. Considerations of this kind press 
 on the mind in such a study as is before us. 
 The idea of "a spiritual appetite " as part 
 of our human equipment is familiar, probably, 
 to most of us, though held with a varying 
 degree of precision. It will be near enough 
 to the fact, and to our purpose here, if we 
 speak of it as a sense of the unseen, mingled 
 with a desire for the special experiences which 
 that sense brings. Religious minds associate 
 with it the deepest realisations, and the most 
 potent spurs to action that life possesses.
 
 OF SPIRITUAL APPETITE. 307 
 
 But in studying spiritual appetite, as thus con- 
 ceived, modern observation opens up a class 
 of considerations never imagined by the older 
 divines, and confronts a range of problems 
 which it is peculiarly the task of our day to 
 resolve. 
 
 One of the first results we get at here is the 
 somewhat puzzling discovery that spiritual 
 appetite, in the most conspicuous at least of 
 its forms, is intermittent in humanity. As 
 with our physical desires, it comes and goes. 
 It is a hunger which is diminished by what 
 it feeds on, until it cries " Enough ! " That this 
 is so the simplest reflection on what is daily 
 happening will prove to us. Let us imagine 
 the ablest and most earnest of preachers, 
 charged to his fullest capacity with Divine 
 influences, and before him a picked audience 
 of the most devout souls, hungering and thirst- 
 ing after God. A point would be reached in 
 his utterance beyond which it were well for 
 him not to pass. It would be the point of 
 repletion. Let him add more and yet more, 
 even of the highest things, and in time the 
 joy of the audience would be turned to pain 
 and repulsion. The physiologist would at this 
 point be ready with his explanation. The
 
 308 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 interest of the audience, he will tell you, de- 
 pends upon the freshness and activity of 
 certain brain centres, and its decline arises 
 from the fact that these centres become in 
 the end overcharged and fatigued. Spiritual 
 appetite, he will say, is a form of thinking 
 and feeling, and, as part of the law of 
 its action, must have its rests and alterna- 
 tions. 
 
 There wiU be more to say on this physical 
 side of the matter presently, but before drawing 
 any conclusions we may go on with our obser- 
 vations. Another notable fact in connection 
 with spiritual appetite is that in many, and often 
 notable persons, it coexists with all manner of 
 semingly most incongruous elements. For 
 a time it will be the ruling factor, revealing 
 itself with the utmost reality and intensity, 
 then to be succeeded by headlong rushes of 
 sensual passion, by all varieties of greed, 
 ambition, and lower interest, until its own turn 
 come again. There have been men who have 
 constructed their theory of life on this per- 
 petual alternation. Their soul is a wheel 
 which revolves, and they reck little as 
 to which side at the moment happens to be 
 uppermost. To yield fully to the passion of
 
 OP SPIRITUAL APPETITE. 309 
 
 the hour, whether it be a spiritual ecstasy or 
 a sexual debauch, is their view of tasting life 
 in its wholeness. Certain ages have been con- 
 spicuous for the production of this type. The 
 Italian Renaissance abounded in them. The 
 memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini offer us, perhaps, 
 the best exemplar. That extraordinary book 
 reveals the author as now reading the Epistles 
 of Paul with utmost relish, or, again, with 
 equal keenness pursuing his monstrous amours, 
 or plunging his dagger into the heart of his 
 adversary. In France we have his feminine 
 counterpart in a Margaret of Valois, who was 
 eqally at home in ribald stories, in lofty specu- 
 lations, and in the contemplation of God. 
 She seems to put one self into " The Mirror 
 of the Soul," her first work, and another, quite 
 different self, into the gross chronicles of the 
 Heptameron. In such souls there seems no 
 discrimination between one appetite and 
 another. Everything that comes along appears 
 equally good, equally worthy to reign. With 
 Marie Bashkirtseff, these people could choose 
 by turns to be Sardanapalus and Napoleon, 
 the Pope and the Devil. If they exercise 
 discrimination, it is one solely of age. They 
 would accept the witty Frenchman's appor-
 
 310 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 tionment, and be a pretty woman till thirty, 
 an ambassador till fifty, and a cardinal for the 
 rest. 
 
 This ebb and flow of spiritual appetite, 
 observable more or less in us all, has given rise 
 to abundant theorising and to abundant ex- 
 perimenting, in religion and life. In every age 
 there have been heroic souls, with a special 
 gift of temperament, who, rebelling against 
 the natural law, have conceived a life in which 
 the mind should keep ever at its topmost 
 strain, with no admixture of what was beneath. 
 For this they have been willing to pay the 
 price, and to cut themselves loose, as far as 
 might be, from the world's activities and in- 
 citements. But the common sense of humanity 
 has rejected asceticism. There is not blood 
 enough in its veins. Pascal's word, " that 
 man is neither angel nor beast, but in trying 
 to make an angel of him one often ends in 
 making him a beast," has sunk into the world's 
 memory, so verified as it has been by a long 
 experience. The revelations of the " Black 
 Book," compiled by Thomas Cromwell at his 
 visitation of the English monasteries, are a 
 proof, horrible, but for ever convincing, of 
 what Nature thinks of the violation, under
 
 OF SPIRITUAL APPETITE. 311 
 
 whatsoever auspices, of her fundamental con- 
 ditions. 
 
 It is, by the way, in this connection curious 
 to note that the Renaissance period, which 
 exhibited such strange admixtures of religious 
 fervour and animal passion, gave birth also 
 to a lofty attempt at the spiritualisation of 
 human love. We find in the Italy of the six- 
 teenth century women proclaiming a new 
 doctrine which relegated what they called 
 "matrimonial love" to an inferior moral posi- 
 tion as compared with the " celestial love " 
 which was to unite men and women in a nobler 
 bond. Cardinal Bembo writes eloquently on 
 this theme, declaring that the knowledge how 
 truly to love comes only in riper years, and 
 that its essence consists in eluding the impulse 
 of the senses, which only disturb the spiritual 
 rapture of pure affection. It sounds well, but 
 at best it was a doctrine for the elite, and one 
 that, so far as we know, had little enough effect 
 on the morals of the time. A daring attempt, 
 from another side, to solve the problem has 
 been in the Antinomianism, appearing under 
 various guises in different ages, and revived 
 in a peculiarly dangerous form by a modern 
 school of Continental mysticism, which has
 
 312 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 allowed the bodily life every kind of excess, 
 under the plea that the soul in all this is a 
 non-participant. 
 
 Truly the puzzle of how best to live in this 
 world has been a great one, and sorely have 
 our predecessors been bewildered in their 
 attempts to answer it. In our own solutions 
 we have at least the immense advantage of 
 their experience. They traversed every road, 
 and each band of searchers seems to have 
 brought back a bit of the answer. But they 
 are all tormented with the feeling that they 
 have not the whole of it. How the best in its 
 wholeness seems ever to elude these eager 
 travellers ! A second best, or a fragment of 
 the best, seems all they hope for. We can 
 sympathise so fully with that old thirteenth- 
 century writer who finds in himself an appetite 
 for three things, " honour, wealth, and God's 
 grace, in order that he should possess the ful- 
 ness of his power." But he despairs of getting 
 them altogether. " Alas ! It cannot be that 
 riches and honour and the grace of God should 
 come together in a single life." It does not 
 occur to him to ask " Why not ? " He is 
 obsessed by that Latin conception of God and 
 the world which made Augustine reproach
 
 OF SPIRITUAL APPETITE. 313 
 
 himself for his joy in music and in the sunshine 
 which gave so great a relish to life. 
 
 But what, then, are our own conclusions ? 
 Are we nearer than our fathers to the solution of 
 the enigma ? Are we to admit that spiritual 
 appetite and its satisfactions are an evan- 
 escence, a portion of that eternal flux of things 
 which belongs to the human consciousness as 
 well as to the outside world ; a something be- 
 gotten of a previous, different state, and pro- 
 ducing in its turn another mental condition, 
 often its opposite ? Assuredly in certain forms 
 of the soul's desire there is, as we have already 
 acknowledged, a to and fro, a coming and a 
 vanishing. Plotinus speaks of having three 
 times enjoyed the immediate vision of God ; 
 Jacob Behmen tells of a great experience in 
 which " the triumph that was in my soul 
 I can neither tell nor describe." But in all 
 these instances, and one could multiply them 
 indefinitely, we have ever repeated the old 
 story of the ebb and flow. These highest 
 reaches of the soul are but a moment in a life, 
 which the memory alone retains. And the 
 physiologist, as we have said, assures us that 
 the very structure of the body and brain makes 
 it impossible that it should be otherwise.
 
 314 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 But at this point physiology has another 
 thing to say to us. While it shows the spirit's 
 highest exercises as dependent upon an organ, 
 it points also to a power which in its turn is 
 operating mysteriously upon the organ and 
 making it anew. It is well known that the 
 brain of a great scholar contains deep and 
 crooked furrows, and hundreds of creases which 
 do not appear in the brains of ordinary men. 
 This means that mental toil is continually 
 transforming and developing the tool whicif 
 the mind works with. The soul is ever shap- 
 ing its instrument. And when we speak of 
 the volatile character of religious feeling and 
 desire, we have to remember that in the 
 spiritual evolution of humanity, the brain 
 channels along which man's highest perceptions 
 reach him will become immeasurably developed, 
 and his capacity in these directions correspond- 
 ingly strengthened. We are in this respect the 
 creators of ourselves. Every act of our will by 
 which we respond to the celestial voices, by 
 which we reject the lower and choose the higher, 
 adds to the perfection of the instrument by 
 which the heavens register themselves in us, 
 broadens and deepens the channels along which 
 flow the currents of spiritual power.
 
 OF SPIRITUAL APPETITE. 315 
 
 And that is not all. The spiritual appetite, 
 as a vivid form of consciousness, we say, comes 
 and goes. That of necessity. But what is to 
 follow it ? Shall a man, after a great inward 
 realisation, come away, eat and drink, play 
 with his children, listen to music, go to business 
 and make money ? Shall he, after divinest 
 things have passed in his mind, fill it now 
 with the thousand things which the world 
 offers, and allow them in their turn to fire 
 his ardour and to work on his will ? The medi- 
 aeval monk said "No." The modern man 
 has learned better. For he discovers that 
 God is in this world as well as above it, and 
 that he will not even know God in all His 
 aspects apart from a hearty use and enjoyment 
 of His material manifestations. The " seeing 
 all things in God " by which Malebranche 
 sought to solve the metaphysical puzzle of 
 perception, turned into " a seeing God in all 
 things," becomes at once his life's joy and 
 safeguard. And in this sense the spiritual 
 appetite, mutable as to its form, becomes in 
 faithful souls, an unchanging possession. They 
 have the broadest range, for the Kingdom is 
 infinite, but they will take nothing from the 
 world, not its wealth, or power, or beauty,
 
 316 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 which does not yield Him who is Holiness 
 and Love as the ground of their satisfactions. 
 " Are you recollected ? " Wesley was accus- 
 tomed to ask of his followers. He meant, 
 " were they in all their variety of pursuit 
 aiming ever at the highest ? " It is an excellent 
 question for us all.
 
 XXXIII. 
 On Being an Outsider. 
 
 SCHOPENHAUER, in one of his diatribes upon 
 life, compares it to a conjuror's booth, where 
 the old tricks are perpetually played on each 
 new generation, producing in them the same 
 illusions. It is a cynical illustration, with 
 which we have small sympathy. But there 
 is a side of the comparison which he does not 
 touch, but which might well have occupied his 
 sombre genius. It is that of the behaviour 
 of the crowd in front of the booth. Here we 
 see the outsider perpetually struggling to 
 become an insider. The specially-endowed 
 with thew and elbow worms and wriggles his 
 way from row to row of the narrowing circles, 
 until at last, panting with his exertions, he 
 finds himself at the centre. When there he 
 discovers usually that he has not gained much. 
 The show is commonly a paltry one. Is this 
 nearer view worth the crowding ? The outside, 
 if one only had thought of it, was so much freer. 
 
 317
 
 318 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 The fresh air and the infinite spaces lay there. 
 One could move at one's ease, whereas here 
 the air is stifling, and the pressure on every side 
 as of a strait-waistcoat. 
 
 Yes, in nine cases out of ten the outside of 
 the crowd is vastly the better, but in the world's 
 present humour you will have an almost 
 impossible task in getting your neighbour to 
 believe it. One finds everywhere an enormous 
 centripetal energy. In all departments the 
 great preoccupation is centre-seeking. To be 
 at society's middle point, of a community's 
 " inner circle," the member of a club whose 
 characteristic is exclusiveness, to be talked of, 
 digito monstrari, this is paradise, while to be 
 outside is, in Lord Beaconsfield's phrase, to 
 endure " the hell of failure." And as men get 
 further into the crowd, nearer their booth, 
 the airs they give themselves ! The disease 
 of swelled head is an old and inveterate one. 
 In his " Praise of Folly " Erasmus sketches 
 the literary lionlet of his time. " It is amusing 
 to see how easily a few favourable reviews 
 puff up all such scribblers, and if they chance 
 to become notorious enough to have their works 
 placed on the front row of the booksellers' 
 stalls, or to be themselves pointed out, or
 
 ON BEING AN OUTSIDER. 319 
 
 whispered about, while tramping the streets, 
 there is no living with them." The words 
 might have been written yesterday. The 
 modern ecclesiastic (of all denominations) 
 shares to the full the craze of centre-seeking. 
 The scribes and Pharisees of the New Testament 
 time were assuredly not in it for scientific 
 pushfulness with your cleric of to-day. In the 
 synagogue the chief seats are at a greater 
 premium than ever. The man of old time who 
 blew a trumpet before him and demanded 
 to be called " rabbi," would, in the light of 
 modern developments, have recognised him- 
 self as a child at the business. We have 
 learned a thing or two since then we who are 
 in the age of the limelight, of purchased bogus 
 degrees, and of the well-engineered newspaper 
 reclame. 
 
 And yet, in the midst of his utmost pushing 
 and elbowing, there arises at times in the bosom 
 of our struggler a doubt, a most disquieting 
 query, as to whether in all this he is not writing 
 himself down an ass ! After all, was not that 
 fresh air he left behind better than this stifling 
 breath ? And this strait-waistcoat of utmost 
 convention, though of gilt stripes and richest 
 material, is it not most uncomfortably tight 1
 
 320 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 Fancy a virile, full-blooded man compelled 
 to dress every morning as an archbishop ! 
 Must there not be at times, in the most reverend 
 bosom, a frantic desire for a desert island 
 where, if one chose, one could go naked and not 
 ashamed ? There are times and there are 
 natures in which the absurdity of the situation 
 seems suddenly to reveal itself, and then come 
 great revolts. We have princes and princesses 
 running away from Court, dropping their 
 titles and proposing to earn their living. 
 Religion has seen these revolts. The anchorit- 
 ism of the early Church was largely a move- 
 ment against convention. Jerome tells us 
 that the monks of his time loved their solitary 
 life, preferring the great free air of the desert 
 to the crowded cities. Every age gives us 
 born outsiders, people who flee from the reeking 
 centres to the farthest edge of the open. Of 
 then* number are the explorers, a Columbus, 
 of whom an Italian poet so finely says, " In 
 him the instinct of an unknown continent 
 burned " ; a Livingstone, a Chalmers, who 
 were only truly at home when in the wilderness. 
 The expansion of Britain means, in fact, 
 that the race inhabiting its borders has in its 
 soul this irresistible yearning for the great
 
 ON BEING AN OUTSIDER. 321 
 
 spaces, a yearning that sends it ever from 
 convention's narrowing boundaries to stretch 
 its limbs under wider skies. 
 
 Outsiders of this order have the feeling 
 as a kind of physical sensation. They cannot 
 be crowded. They want a view clear to the 
 stars and to the horizons without the interrup- 
 tion of their neighbours' chimney-pots. But 
 amongst the untravelled, who dwell all their 
 lives in the densest civilisations, there are here 
 and there primitive souls who, in another way, 
 insist on taking their liberty. You cannot 
 tame these men nor buy them. Their career, 
 in its simplicity and unworldliness, even in 
 what may be called its extravagances, is an 
 object-lesson in the real values of life. They 
 do not propose to sell themselves in the market 
 because they find the transaction unremunera- 
 tive at the price. They will let the other men 
 sweat for ambitious prizes, if only they may 
 be allowed to possess their own souls. 
 The crowded centre let who will get there, 
 and breathe its hot and foetid ah 1 , if that 
 is their taste. For them the riches of 
 their inner kingdom, with the universe for 
 their playground ! The tub of Diogenes is, 
 in this regard, more eloquent to us than the 
 
 21
 
 322 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 tub of most pulpit orators. We cannot 
 help a cheer, either, to Thoreau, when, amongst 
 his dollar-hunting Yankees, he declares, " If 
 I should sell both my forenoons and my after- 
 noons to society, as most appear to do, I am 
 sure that for me there would be nothing left 
 worth living for." Such men are worth watch- 
 ing. When a daring soul, under an irresistible 
 impulse, bursts the bonds of his time, and 
 commences to steer a course of his own under 
 the infinite heavens, we are often at the new 
 beginnings of history. 
 
 It is necessary, however, at this point, to 
 be more precise in our delineation. For there 
 is a fanaticism of the outside, as well as of the 
 inside, and before we can accurately pronounce 
 judgment here we need to have settled in our 
 own minds some preliminary questions. As 
 we look deeper into this matter, we discover 
 that the chiefest of the world's outsiders have 
 been at the same time the most central of its 
 insiders, and that they were the one by virtue 
 of being the other. They came away from 
 society's centres in quest of the real centres, 
 which seemed to them to be elsewhere. They, 
 too, were centripetal, in search of their middle 
 point. The two things they wanted were truth
 
 ON BEING AN OUTSIDER. 323 
 
 and life, and for these hid treasures they were 
 ready to sell all they had. When Xenophanes 
 declared the claims of religion would be best 
 advanced by cleansing the moral atmosphere 
 of the gods whose recorded lives were in oppo- 
 sition to purity, and when Socrates laid 
 down his life in defence of the same thesis, 
 these Greek apostles became outsiders to the 
 religion of their country, in order to lead their 
 compatriots to its true centre. Luther's stand 
 was exactly to the same purport. The papal 
 system had become a centre so remote from 
 the fresh air that the human soul could no 
 longer breathe freely there. 
 
 A terrible thing indeed is it for a nation or 
 an age when society's religious centre has 
 become so choked and encumbered that men 
 who want freedom and reality have to go out- 
 side in search of it. Such a state of things is 
 depicted for us by Basil, who, speaking of the 
 Church of the East in the fourth century, says : 
 " Sacred things are profaned ; those of the 
 laity who are sound in the faith avoid the 
 places of worship as schools of impiety, and 
 raise their hands in solitude, with groans and 
 tears, to the Lord in heaven." What this 
 exclusion of the outer air in religion means
 
 324 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 for our own day is exhibited at this moment in 
 France, where, as Pere Hyacinthe says, " the 
 Jesuits are masters of the Church, the Atheists 
 are masters of the Republic." The two con- 
 ditions are cause and effect. How the position 
 is working out on the popular mind is 
 illustrated by the spectacle of a Sunday in 
 Paris, described in the Chretien Franqais, by 
 M. Bourrier, where, in a pouring rain which 
 emptied the orthodox places of worship, an 
 enthusiastic crowd of some five thousand 
 people packed the Trocadero to celebrate 
 the " F6te of Reason," and where the orators, 
 while ridiculing " the dead gods on whom 
 the priests live," " saluted morality, moral 
 force, justice and the social order." M. 
 Bourrier thinks they were making religion 
 without knowing it. May be. But is it not 
 tragical that these people, in search of their 
 souls, have to go outside the organised Chris- 
 tianity of their land in order to find them ? 
 
 What is evident is that where, and so long 
 as, the Church centres are not the soul's 
 centres, there will be revolt and secession. 
 The problem of the hour is accordingly to 
 bring the spiritual fellowship everywhere into 
 line with the ultimate truths and laws of life. 

 
 ON BEING AN OUTSIDER. 325 
 
 The outsider who shows us these is the truest 
 insider. It was for this that Christ went out- 
 side the contemporary Judaism. For the 
 same cause His disciples " suffered without 
 the camp, bearing His reproach." No more 
 wholesome lesson on the true doctrine of 
 outside and inside can be anywhere gained 
 than by reading the records of the early 
 Christian centuries. Here we find the most 
 radical of outsiders who were also the most 
 tremendous of insiders. The unity of the 
 primitive Church, so jealously guarded by the 
 succession of its teachers, was felt to be a 
 unity round a true centre. Against the wild 
 imaginings of hare-brained innovators within, 
 as against the barbarian pressure of the world 
 outside, these fathers fought for the Christian 
 institution and the Christian tradition, know- 
 ing they had here a spiritual deposit, a record 
 of fact and a habit of life that represented 
 for them the midmost point of the soul's 
 kingdom. The Church fellowship of the future 
 will, in like manner, be preserved only by 
 a similar fidelity to absolute inner reality. 
 
 But it is, after all, in its personal aspects that 
 the topic has for us its greatest fascination. 
 It is the doctrine of all others for the humble
 
 326 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 and the unnoted. Are we outsiders from the 
 " select circles " ? The fact ought to touch 
 our sense of humour, if we have any. With 
 God's love in our hearts and God's work to do 
 in the world, though we be on society's utmost 
 verge, we have life's best. For our position 
 offers the choicest of all soils on which the 
 soul can grow. Outsiders ! Yes, but also 
 Insiders. If we look up from our work we 
 see enclosing us on every hand the walls of the 
 New Jerusalem.
 
 XXXIV, 
 Life's Refusals. 
 
 PERHAPS the most mysterious, as certainly 
 the most tantalising, of life's aspects is its 
 element of refusal. The world dangles before 
 our desire a million things, which it takes care 
 at the same time to keep well out of our reach. 
 Our vision is our torment. It mocks us with 
 the unattainable. In the mountain country it 
 catches at a glance a score of peaks, each one 
 of which we yearn to climb and cannot. Our 
 discontent on the mountain is exaggerated on 
 the plain. Social arrangements seem con- 
 structed expressly for the irritation and baffling 
 of desire. The irony for the hovel-dweller is 
 in his being able to see the palace on the farther 
 side of the road. The jest becomes too much 
 for humanity at times, and then there are 
 emeutes and revolutions. When the fighting is 
 over the people discover that the world is just 
 as full as before of things they wish for and 
 cannot have. And it would have been so had
 
 328 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 each one captured a bank and kept its contents. 
 For no social or political rearrangements can 
 stop for a moment the working of this system 
 of refusal. And for a good reason. It is 
 innate in the nature of things. 
 
 The world is sometimes divided into the 
 " haves " and the " have-nots." But that 
 really is only a surface division. We are all 
 fundamentally " have-nots," and were in- 
 tended to be. It is not enough, in discussing 
 such a theme, to dwell on the special cases. 
 One thinks, indeed, with tender sympathy 
 of those on whom life seems here to bear most 
 hardly : of the poverty-stricken ; of lonely 
 women to whom love and children have been 
 denied ; of the maimed, the disfavoured, the 
 invalided, who cry unavailingly for the strength 
 and beauty they see around them ; of men who 
 have been within an inch of fame and prosperity, 
 and seen at the critical point the cup dashed 
 from their lips. Pitiful, truly. But that is 
 only half the story. The other half is the 
 history of our so-called satisfactions. For it 
 is at the moment of " having " that man 
 is most acutely sensible of " not having." 
 The soul is never further from its inmost of 
 aspiration than when it has secured what it
 
 LIFE'S REFUSALS. 329 
 
 ssemed to be seeking for. The moment of 
 fruition is the moment of disillusion. We lift 
 the veil and discover there is nothing behind. 
 Have we quenched our desire in its so-called 
 fulfilment ? We have multiplied it and added 
 to its rage. We climbed our peak, and, 
 instead of that being the end, it opened up 
 simply a vast perspective of realms beyond 
 our scope. 
 
 This sense of life as a calculated refusal 
 grows upon us with the years. It is too 
 evidently premeditated. The animals have 
 no sense of what man here experiences. It is 
 his peculium to have a faculty of vision and of 
 consequent yearning which, on every side of his 
 life, transcends a thousandfold what it is 
 possible for him to obtain. And each stage of 
 his career rubs this fact deeper into him. For 
 with his ardour, his thirst for realisation all 
 undiminished, he finds in his later periods doors 
 which before had been wide open shut, one 
 after another, in his face. Passing strange, 
 is it not, that means of enjoyment which in 
 youth were in fullest activity should now, 
 when the soul's aspirations have reached their 
 greatest urgency, be withering and closing up ? 
 
 The problem here has pressed on the world
 
 330 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 through all the ages, and many are the proffered 
 solutions. The explanation of some is that 
 there is no explanationT" The early world 
 writer who declared that man is the plaything 
 of the gods is answered in our generation by a 
 Nietzsche, who thinks our planet a ridiculous 
 side-show in the stellar system, and by a 
 Huxley, who argues that moral sentiment is not 
 discernible hi the universe, but is a home 
 product for which our race may take consider- 
 able credit to itself. A Maeterlinck endorses 
 this verdict with his statement that justice does 
 not exist in the outer cosmos, but dwells alone 
 in the soul. But answers of this kind do not, 
 happily, find any permanent acceptance. If 
 they did they would speedily work moral 
 disaster. Man cannot keep the upward way 
 apart from the conviction that he is being 
 reinforced from outside. If the invisible 
 powers are indifferent, the world in its despair 
 will take the counsel of Propertius : " While 
 the fates permit, let us satiate our eyes with 
 lust, for the long night is coming, to which 
 there shall be no dawn." 
 
 Infinitely pathetic is it, indeed, to watch 
 man as, age after age, he has faced the Sphinx 
 and brought his answers. The Stoic reply
 
 LIFE'S REFUSALS. 331 
 
 was not unworthy. The situation, if it offered 
 no ground for hope, should at least be met with 
 fortitude. We must meet life's refusal with 
 our own refusal. " It is easier," says Seneca, 
 4t and more tolerable not to acquire than to 
 lose." " Diogenes," he continues, " so acted 
 that nothing could be taken from him. He 
 kept himself outside the fortuitous. It is as 
 if he had said : ' Go your way, Fortune. You 
 have nothing to do with Diogenes ! ' ' From 
 the East, from Buddhism, came an even more 
 uncompromising answer. Desire itself is the 
 root-evil of humanity. The only real deliver- 
 ance from the burden of life lies in the extinc- 
 tion of it, of the whole " will to live." 
 
 Such an outlook as this is, to say the 
 least of it, not exhilarating. And the in- 
 vincible optimism that lies at the root of 
 healthy natures tells us that it is not true. 
 All the theories we have been discussing break 
 down at one vital point. They fail to discern 
 the real nature, at once of life's refusals and 
 of its fulfilments. A deeper view discerns 
 here what can only be expressed in paradox. 
 It discerns that fulfilments are not fulfilments, 
 and that refusals are not refusals. And this 
 because there is no finality in either. What we
 
 332 PROBLEMS or LIVING. 
 
 call a refusal has always something behind it. 
 We discover by-and-by that it is a gift. Do 
 we imagine that when Nature takes from us 
 she leaves only a blank ? On the contrary ; 
 precisely as the so-called satisfactions are 
 recognised by the soul as not ultimates, so 
 with equal clearness does it affirm that the 
 disappointments are not ultimates either. 
 The dissatisfaction after a world-fruition and 
 the ache after a world-denial are practically 
 the same thing. They are agents towards a 
 farther end. Their message, to him who will 
 hear, is that desire, so far from being a mockery, 
 so far from being an evil, is of all human 
 prophecies the greatest. That man cannot get 
 his desires fulfilled, that what he has named 
 fulfilments are denied by the deepest in him, 
 is Nature's way of saying that he is launched 
 upon an infinite career. What he cannot find 
 is precisely the thing he is predestined to find. 
 That he drinks of every stream and thirsts 
 again is the surest mark of the eternal that is 
 in him. 
 
 It is here that Christianity fits in so perfectly 
 with the world-system in which we find 
 ourselves. It assumes that life's refusals are 
 part of our assets. The smart of the dis-
 
 LIFE'S REFUSALS. 333 
 
 appointment is one of the working forces in our 
 destiny. The pain of the process is never an 
 end in itself. It is a beginning. Could we see 
 into what by-and-by it will transform itself we 
 should say, as did Madame Swetchine when 
 her friends prayed round her death-bed, " Do 
 not ask God for me one day more nor one 
 suffering less." This is the attitude of Christ. 
 He has no thought of stifling life's desires. 
 On the contrary, as He contemplates the cross, 
 they are intensified. " With desire have I 
 desired." He knew that what He desired He 
 would obtain. Life's refusal would seem to 
 have reached its uttermost in the thought 
 of Calvary, but He takes it with the triumphant 
 calm coming from a perfect comprehension 
 of its meaning. His personal suffering is lost 
 in the largeness of the Divine purpose. He 
 yields to His fate, knowing that His fate 
 conceals within itself the ultimate best. He 
 could have said, with one of His early followers, 
 himself a martyr, " You may kill, but you 
 cannot hurt us." 
 
 It is when men have caught from Christ 
 this inner secret that life's refusals, the hardest 
 and bitterest, become transformed. A conquest 
 greater than aught achieved by Alexander or
 
 334 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 Napoleon has been obtained when the soul, 
 met by overwhelming loss or blankest dis- 
 appointment, questioning at that hour its 
 inmost self, finds there the clear-toned answer 
 that all is well. When St. John of the Cross 
 exclaims, " Whatever you find pleasant to 
 soul or body abandon ; whatever is painful 
 embrace it," we may gird at the extravagance 
 of the saying. But let us not in our censure 
 forget the marvellous richness of that life 
 provision which has made it possible for men 
 to strip themselves of every surface joy, in the 
 assured confidence that the void would be 
 straightway filled by something the soul recog- 
 nised as sweetest of all ! By sure experience 
 have they learned that 
 
 Some searching bitters are 
 Sweeter than sweets and more refreshing far; 
 
 Indeed, nothing in the history of humanity 
 has been more marvellous than the answer 
 which Christian souls, age after age, have made 
 to life's refusals. They have caught their 
 meaning, and with inner exultancy have applied 
 their lesson. These adepts have become world 
 conquerors. A Bernard who gives up a court 
 for a cell rules Europe with his counsels. Dr.
 
 LIFE'S REFUSALS. 335 
 
 Creighton, in a striking passage, speaks of 
 Hildebrand " as knowing well that only that 
 monk will help to subjugate the world who 
 shuns it. . . . Renunciation of the world 
 in the service of a world-ruling Church such 
 is the amazing problem that Gregory VII. 
 solved for the next century and a-half." 
 These men had taken and used the priceless 
 gift which lay in the hand of refusal. 
 
 The topic is for ourselves as the " have- 
 nots." We are all in that category. We are 
 maimed somewhere. The door has been shut 
 against us on one side or another. To some 
 the " No " seems to have been so much more 
 emphatic than to others, and they complain 
 at the harshness with which it has been dashed 
 in their teeth. Every day we hear the cry 
 of the smitten. The maimed, the aged, the 
 bereaved, the desolate ask for comfort which 
 we long to give. What comfort is there ? 
 So far as we know there is none greater than 
 that derived from a steady gaze into the true 
 inwardness of what has happened. For the 
 refusals are God's promises ; and of a special 
 kind. The words in prophet or gospel are 
 everybody's, and mine only in common with 
 the rest. But my sorrows, my weakness, my
 
 336 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 losses, these are the promises which belong 
 not to another but to me. Every one of them 
 is a prophecy, every one a force. They can no 
 more retain permanently their present shape 
 than can the fuel in the fire. They are evolving, 
 and on the line of an infinite progression which 
 carries me with it. If we bring to them faith, 
 even as of a grain of mustard seed, we shall 
 assuredly see in them all, as Stevenson puts it, 
 " the kindness of the scheme of things, and 
 the goodness of our veiled God."
 
 XXXV. 
 Life's Outer Edge. 
 
 WE have not touched the wonders and mys- 
 teries of our life when we consider it simply 
 as a daily thinking and acting. Marvellous, 
 indeed, is that side of it, opening at every 
 point to deeps for which we have no sounding 
 lines. But what we call our strictly personal, 
 our immediately conscious life is only a frag- 
 ment of our actual selves. To catch a glimpse 
 of what we really stand for in the universe 
 we need to get away from our nature's centre 
 and observe the prospect that opens from its 
 outer edge. A familiar illustration will make 
 our meaning plainer. We see the sun in the 
 heavens as a definitely outlined orb, occupying 
 always the same amount of space, a body of 
 given weight and diameter. But it would be 
 a curious mistake to regard the sun as ending 
 really with these outlines of it. Science shows 
 us that, leaping beyond the great disc, are 
 masses of incandescent gas that flame out for 
 
 837 22
 
 338 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 tens of thousands of miles into the surrounding 
 space. But that is only the beginning. For 
 the whole planetary system is really the sun. 
 These whirling orbs are born of it, receive their 
 motion from its initial energy, and live by 
 the light and heat which it pours upon them. 
 
 Now, our personality, in some at least of 
 its aspects, may be set forth in somewhat 
 similar terms. It consists not simply of the 
 well-defined orb of our actual thinking, active 
 life, but of innumerable, immense projections 
 which, flung off from our centre, and wander- 
 ing far afield, are, nevertheless, as potent as 
 the thought that is in us to-day. More, these 
 projections are at every moment representing 
 us in the general sum of things. It will be 
 worth while to note some points in the work 
 of this depersonalised activity, of this out- 
 reach of ourselves beyond ourselves. 
 
 Has it, for instance, ever occurred to us to 
 explore the mystery of our dormant relations ? 
 The phenomenon we know as latent heat has 
 a curious analogy here in our mental life 
 In certain natural processes, as in the passage 
 of matter from a solid to a fluid state, a mass 
 of heat seems to disappear. But no particle 
 of it is lost. It is simply latent, and a reversing
 
 LIFE'S OUTER EDGE. 339 
 
 process will restore it undiminished. In like 
 manner there is a latent heat of conscious- 
 ness, a force that seemingly disappears, but 
 which is all the time powerfully affecting our 
 relations with our fellows. There are numbers 
 of people in the world of whom from day to day 
 we do not think, and who do not think of us. 
 And yet through every moment a power is 
 binding us together. A part of us lies in them, 
 a part of them in us. The thing that passed 
 between us years ago, the word spoken, the 
 deed done, is there in each, alive and working ; 
 and the fruit of this working will show itself 
 with rigorous exactness the next time our 
 paths cross. It is curious to note the steadfast 
 persistency of this relative life. There is an 
 immortality in it. My old comrade in another 
 corner of the world may have had no inter- 
 course with me for years. And yet that he 
 is there is a fact for me almost as much as for 
 himself. His work, his quality, his goodness 
 are all a part of my possessions. If I do 
 not recognise this now, I shall do when he 
 is gone. 
 
 But this outer rim of what we have called 
 our dormant relations stretches ever farther 
 as we gaze. It opens upwards and down-
 
 340 PROBLEMS or LIVING. 
 
 wards, backwards and forwards in endless 
 perspectives. It puts, for instance, our past 
 in quite a new light. We are apt to think of 
 the bygone years as lost to us. Moralists 
 have for ages discoursed of the vanity of 
 things, because of the fateful transitoriness 
 that is in them. But that is largely an illusion. 
 The past is, though in another way, as much 
 alive as the present. When we are disposed 
 to ignore this truth, we get some rude awaken- 
 ings. The story of Jacob and Esau is here 
 a true verdict upon life. When the prosperous 
 supplanter, returning to Canaan with his 
 flocks and herds, learns that the brother whom 
 long before he had wronged is advancing with 
 four hundred men to meet him, he discovers, 
 as men have been doing ever since, that nothing 
 is so much alive, so crammed with vengeful 
 energy, as the evil wrought in the seeming 
 buried years. 
 
 And if the past is in this way alive, what 
 shall we say of the future ? That also do we 
 carry with us. All those peoples that are to 
 come, all the vast developments that the sun 
 is yet to look upon, are there, coiled and stored 
 in our personality. There is something posi- 
 tively eerie in the thought that the long defiles
 
 LIFE'S OUTER EDGE. 341 
 
 of the unborn generations are already taking 
 their destiny from us. Their whole outfit of 
 ideas, beliefs, and inner impulses, the woof 
 and web of their happiness and woe, is being 
 woven from what we are thinking, feeling, 
 performing to-day. They are not here yet, 
 but the relation between us is begun. That 
 vast non-existent looms already as an ac- 
 tuality. What a prodigious responsibility does 
 this lay on us to do and be the best we know ! 
 Our duty, to those we see, to our kinsfolk, our 
 fellow-citizens, is an ever-present stimulus to 
 an honest man. But these unseen myriads 
 who beckon to us out of the future touch us 
 with a more pathetic pleading. So helpless 
 are they, so utterly passive in our hands. To 
 the extent a man is spiritually educated will 
 he respond with all his nature to that un- 
 voiced prayer. He will strive, not only for 
 the present, but also for this other time that 
 waits. A mighty imperative is upon us all to 
 secure that, as the result of our being and 
 doing, 
 
 Sweeter shall the roses blow 
 
 In those far years, those happier years ; 
 And children weep when we lie lew 
 
 Far fewer tears, far softer tears.
 
 342 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 But the dormant relations belonging to our 
 past and future by no means exhaust the 
 facts that lie upon life's outer edge. Another 
 class of them appear when we consider what 
 is actually going on in the immediate present. 
 Modern investigations are bringing to light 
 the strangest results of what may be called 
 our depersonalised life. Of our disengaged 
 part that has cut itself off from our centre and 
 is working on its own behalf outside we get 
 every now and then bewildering glimpses. 
 What, for instance, are we to make of a case 
 such as that which the scientists of Salpetriere 
 relate of a young unlettered peasant girl of 
 Brittany, who in a certain stage of hypnotism 
 imagined herself to be a priest of the Middle 
 Ages and poured out a stream of monkish 
 Latin ? Here one might suppose that we have 
 the double of a personality, thrown off centuries 
 ago, and wandering through the ages to settle 
 and express itself once more through another 
 mind. Or, to take another case, what hidden 
 power of projection is represented by that 
 perfectly authenticated story of a man in 
 London suddenly made to think of an old 
 comrade in New Zealand, whom he had lost 
 sight of there for years, enduring for hours an
 
 LIFE'S OUTER EDGE. 343 
 
 unaccountable mental agony on account of 
 him, and discovering afterwards that at that 
 very time his friend was being tortured to 
 death by the Maoris ? We have at present no 
 satisfactory theory of these things. But what, 
 at least, they show us is that the life that has 
 left us, as well as that which beats in our pulses, 
 is an activity with a vast area of function, 
 and a seeming endlessness in its operation. 
 It is, indeed, precisely when we consider the 
 action of that part of us which has been dis- 
 lodged from our immediate self that we find 
 most deeply graven the word Immortality. 
 It is surely significant as to what is to happen 
 to our central Ego that for this outer edge of 
 us there seems no death. 
 
 And this brings us to another point. In 
 dealing with the future we have spoken of a 
 relation which is alive and conscious on our side 
 and dormant on another. The unborn, we 
 have seen, are the passive to our active. But 
 the very fact of such a tie suggests another 
 where the conditions are reversed. The con- 
 siderations already advanced reveal a uni- 
 verse of such illimitable spiritual potencies 
 that the next step is almost inevitable, to 
 the belief in relations where we are the passive
 
 344 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 subjects of higher activities. It would be 
 contrary to the whole analogy of life to sup- 
 pose that our perpetual forthgiving has no 
 complemental process. A strangely limited 
 being must he be who hears throughout the 
 universe no echo but that of his own footsteps. 
 Everything points to the fact that in our turn 
 we are perpetually receiving ; that the pro- 
 jection of life does not begin with us, but high 
 up through all the spheres of being. The 
 wonderful story of the vision at Dothan, 
 where the prophet beholds around him pano- 
 plied hosts invisible to unpurged eyes, is 
 authentic to the soul, accordant to all its 
 higher knowing. What the unborn generations 
 are to us, deaf and dumb as yet to all we are 
 doing and thinking on their behalf, so are we to 
 intelligences that are beyond us. Prophetic 
 natures, whose flesh walls have worn thin, 
 get glimpses here and there of what is behind. 
 We have nothing more than a hint, but the 
 whole movement of the universe, so far as 
 disclosed to us, is behind that hint. 
 
 In this view death itself is not so much a 
 fact as a suggestion. To Milton's great word that 
 
 Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth unseen, 
 Both when we sleep and when we wake,
 
 LIFE'S OUTER EDGE. 345 
 
 we may add Rothe's inspiring thought that 
 these angelic hosts are the developed human 
 personalities to whom death has been the 
 last refinement. And not the less near to us 
 that their activity is at present untranslatable 
 into aught our senses record. That we are un- 
 born to their sphere, as our posterity is as yet 
 unborn to ours, cannot, in the light of what we 
 know, be a bar to our faith in its reality. That 
 strain is too meagre in its message which sings 
 thus of love : 
 
 God gives us love. Something to love 
 He lends us ; but, when love is grown 
 
 To ripeness, that on which it throve 
 Falls off, and love is left alone. 
 
 No ; the love that kindled ours is not lost. It 
 may have become latent, but the hidden energy 
 is there, working in another form, waiting 
 the hour of retranslation and rediscovery to 
 its answering soul. 
 
 All this is, of course, the merest sketch. 
 But it is at least based upon reality, and needs 
 to be taken into any proper account of life. 
 At a time when the tendency is to belittle 
 humanity and the worth of existence ; a time, 
 too, when great physical catastrophes have 
 startled men into a new questioning of their
 
 346 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 cosmic status, it is well to see, along such lines 
 as these, the vastness of the scale on which 
 our life is planned, and the sublimity of the 
 end toward which its story points.
 
 XXXVI. 
 The Furtherance of Life. 
 
 THE earlier antagonism between Science and 
 Christianity is making way for a remarkable 
 alliance between them. The new relation is 
 indeed more than an alliance ; it is a fusion. 
 When we are told that the Gospel for the 
 twentieth century is to be a scientific Gospel, 
 we can, as believers in the message of the 
 New Testament, heartily endorse the state- 
 ment. For, when stripped of sectarian. badges 
 and of artificial accretions, Christianity stands 
 essentially as a science of life. " Learn to live, 
 not live to learn," says a modern French critic, 
 and it is Christianity which teaches us how to 
 apply the motto. The remarkable feature 
 of present-day scientific thinking is that its 
 main deduction, as applied to the human 
 position in the world, is precisely that which 
 Christianity has enforced from the beginning. 
 What Science tells us is that the whole effort 
 of Nature, as we see it, is directed to one point,
 
 348 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 the furtherance of life. Incessantly is she 
 striving to enlarge and perfect the organs which 
 may better express the soul of which she is 
 full. Her fierce competitions, her war of species 
 mean that. Types and races that fail to re- 
 spond to her call go down and make way for 
 others that understand her better. And Chris- 
 tianity is nothing other than the application of 
 this law to man's higher levels. It gives us first 
 a statement of the life of this upper side and 
 an ethic for its guidance, and then opens, for 
 those ready for it, a stream of influence which 
 expands and vivifies every organ and sets 
 the whole nature on a movement toward new 
 powers. 
 
 With this double clue, both of Science and of 
 the New Testament, as to the proper object of 
 human existence, it is strange that masses 
 of supposedly intelligent people should make 
 such a blunder of the business of living. The 
 " smart " circles in this view, are anything but 
 smart. The mercenary hordes who make exist- 
 ence simply a rush for gold and for the things 
 it purchases excite one's wondering pity. The 
 feeling is not so much of their moral obliquity 
 as of their essential, hide-bound stupidity. 
 They are not clever enough to see the plainest
 
 THE FURTHERANCE OF LIFE. 349 
 
 things. The individuals who imagine, and 
 tens of thousands do to-day, that a position 
 which gives them the privilege of loafing, of 
 limitless animal indulgence, of commanding 
 the services of others and of being absolved 
 from rendering service themselves, and the 
 further one of looking down with disdain upon 
 the largest possible number of their fellow 
 creatures, is of all things the position to be 
 desired, are hardly so much " miserable sinners " 
 as dolts and blockheads who need to be put to 
 the kindergarten department of the school of 
 life. When the world is a little wiser that is, 
 when its spiritual evolution has advanced a 
 further stage there will be a general smile at 
 this earlier folly. It will seem so strange that 
 people who were advanced enough to make all 
 kinds of experiments in chemistry and elec- 
 tricity, and to profit by them, should have been 
 incapable of reading the results of very simple 
 experiments on themselves. For the effects 
 of given lines of conduct register with the ab- 
 solute certainty of mathematics, and are under- 
 standable by anyone who is not a fool. The 
 results can be scientifically tabulated. Cha- 
 racter products arise from given constituents as 
 inevitably as does water from its combining
 
 350 PROBLEMS OP LIVING. 
 
 proportions of oxygen and hydrogen. And the 
 outcome of the diagnosis is to confirm at every 
 point the New Testament theory of life and to 
 exhibit the ruinous effects of its opposite. 
 
 This theory confronts the idea of ease with 
 that of strenuous endeavour, the pleasures of 
 animal appetite with those of the mental and 
 spiritual consciousness, the joy of being served 
 with that of the joy of serving, the gratifica- 
 tions of pride and arrogance with those arising 
 from reverence and humility. The list of 
 antitheses might be indefinably enlarged, but 
 these sufficiently outline the opposing positions. 
 The point is that whatever of these antitheses 
 we take up and judge according to the scientific 
 test of the resulting enlargement or diminution 
 of life, the result is the same. The Christian 
 ideal wins along the whole line. The godless 
 theory that opposes it is seen by experiment 
 to produce a shrinkage of the entire area of 
 human nature, a decay of its sensibilities, a 
 drying up of its life sources. Along the lines 
 it opens, on the contrary, there is a continual 
 widening of the consciousness, a growing 
 delicacy of perception, a new surface preparing 
 for hitherto unknown impulsions from the 
 unseen.
 
 THE FURTHERANCE or LIFE. 351 
 
 The question of feeling is by no means the 
 sole element to judge by here, but it is a large 
 one and may be safely called in evidence. 
 A dissipated Roman emperor offered a great 
 reward to anyone who could invent for him a 
 new pleasure. The question was in itself a 
 tragedy. It was a quest after some outside 
 stimulant potent enough to stir once again to 
 some semblance of life the faded, worn-out 
 sensual nerve which had supplied all that this 
 poor crowned wretch had associated with en- 
 joyment. And nobody was sensible enough 
 or courageous enough to tell him of 
 locked-up powers capable of rendering the 
 most delicate and growing delights ! To-day 
 there are multitudes of reputedly well to-do 
 people who are no better off. One won- 
 ders whether it ever occurs to them to consider 
 the kind of bargain they are making when, for 
 the ever-narrowing round of their easily 
 exhausted delights, they shut themselves off 
 from the vast realm of subtle and exquisite 
 sensibilities which belong to the spiritual life. 
 Does no hint ever come of that sphere of en- 
 joyment where, in Augustine's words, " there 
 shineth into my soul what space cannot con- 
 tain, and there soundeth what time beareth
 
 352 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 not away, and there exhaleth odours that the 
 breath disperseth not, and there tasteth what 
 eating diminisheth not, and there abideth 
 what satiety devoureth not " ? Strange taste, 
 to strum for ever on the bottom note of the 
 instrument while a whole gamut above waits 
 to be touched into melody ! 
 
 But there are others of higher moral and 
 religious pretension who, to their own grievous 
 hurt, are not less obviously neglecting the 
 Christian laws of the furtherance of life. One 
 meets people who pray fervently but shirk 
 all self-denial, and fancy they can do it with 
 impunity. They might as well propose to 
 ignore gravitation. The broken spiritual law 
 as surely as the natural one will have its revenge. 
 When a man because he is wealthy gives up the 
 strenuous life and falls back on idleness, there 
 is an immediate inward impoverishment. 
 Middle-class citizens will often, as they call it, 
 " retire from business," and in so doing retire 
 from manhood. No man should retire into 
 anything that keeps him back from the full 
 stretch of his every faculty. We should be 
 fishers in the sea of infinite life possibility, with 
 every net spread, and every line searching its 
 treasure-hiding waves.
 
 THE FURTHERANCE OF LIFE. 353 
 
 One sees, too, with commiseration the starved 
 and shrivelled natures that try to live by the 
 pagan law of receiving rather than by the 
 Christian law of giving. A man who is in- 
 cessantly served and waited upon ; who has 
 become accustomed to this and to nothing 
 else ; who places his main happiness on what is 
 offered to him by others, is truly in piteous 
 case. A millionaire he may be, but he is a 
 pauper essentially. Think of the abject mendi- 
 cancy of the proud man ! He goes starving 
 unless his neighbour incessantly feeds him 
 with homage. And the food is poison ; it 
 exacerbates his disease instead of affording 
 healthy nourishment. Contrast with this the 
 simple results of the New Testament law of 
 serving ! In obeying it a whole group of 
 beautiful life-forces begin to develop them- 
 selves. The joy here does not wait for any 
 outside response. It springs up in the act 
 itself, and is part of it. And as soon as we 
 serve, even if it be a dog or the most ill- 
 conditioned of our fellows, we begin to love. 
 And to love is a happiness of which no outside 
 happening can rob us. There are religious 
 people miserable in their domestic relation- 
 ships, and that simply because they are ignor- 
 
 23
 
 354 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 ing plain laws. They resent the neglects, the 
 failure of appreciation of themselves by wife 
 or husband or child. Alas ! they are handling 
 their happiness by the wrong end and spoiling 
 it in the process. Let them feel first of all and 
 exercise to the full their privilege of giving ; 
 let them do their whole duty of serving to 
 these seeming unthankful ones. In the act 
 itself a new surprise of inner delight springs 
 up, and soon the brightness of it will be re- 
 flected from those on whom its radiance strikes. 
 That this is the way and the only way to a 
 really successful life is further evidenced when 
 we consider the developments to which it 
 leads. In the course of a man's career all 
 manner of things subsidiary existences, one 
 may say arise, culminate and decay within 
 him. His bony skeleton has reached its 
 maximum at twenty. His muscular system is 
 at its fullest power before he is thirty, and shows 
 a speedy decline afterwards. Intellectual force 
 tends to diminish with the advance in years. 
 The passions have their flowering time and 
 their decay. Certain phases of mental and 
 emotional interest exhaust themselves and 
 cede their place. And then some people tire. 
 Goethe speaks of an acquaintance who was
 
 THE FURTHERANCE OF LIFE. 355 
 
 weary of seeing the green of the springtime, 
 and wished for a change of colour ! Marcus 
 Aurelius complains of the unvarying spectacle 
 of the world which goes on exhibiting the 
 same round of things, whether you live to be 
 twenty or a hundred. It is the easiest thing 
 in the world to make life a weariness. The 
 selfish, the indulgent and the idle are certain 
 of the achievement. 
 
 But along the line that working Christianity 
 has opened we escape these wearinesses and 
 these disgusts. With perfect insight did 
 Vinet describe Christianity as " the eternal 
 youth of the human race." The practice of 
 it gives the secret of a perpetual inner vitality. 
 It makes life endlessly interesting. For amid 
 all other decays the soul under its nurture is 
 ever consciously growing. The blows of cir- 
 cumstance are felt as furthering its life. It 
 infallibly accumulates wealth, for " the only 
 real wealth," according to the sane definition 
 of Ruskin, " consists in noble and happy human 
 beings." As the years pass and the fruits of 
 the discipline show themselves, the life pros- 
 pect becomes illimitable. There seem no 
 bounds either to the growth of the receptive 
 capacity or to the spiritual force which pulses
 
 356 PROBLEMS OF LIVING. 
 
 in on it from the unseen. More and more does 
 the surface widen on which the sunbeams play. 
 And the last act, in which the soul accepts 
 death itself as part of this widening process, 
 is its greatest venture of faith. For it proclaims 
 the seeming end to be only the next step in 
 " the furtherance of life." 
 
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 JAMES CLARKE AtfD CO.'S 
 
 Index 
 
 of Titles 
 
 ^^- 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PACK 
 
 Abbey Mill, The . 
 
 17 
 
 Christian Certitude . 
 
 7 
 
 America in the East 
 
 4 
 
 Christian Life, The . 21, 
 
 26 
 
 Ancient Musical Instrun ents . 
 
 20 
 
 Christian Life and Belief 
 
 12 
 
 Animal Gambols . 
 
 23 
 
 Christian of To-day, The 
 
 7 
 
 Animal Playtime . 
 
 23 
 
 Christian World Pulpit, The . 
 
 5 
 
 Animals in Fun-Land 
 
 23 
 
 Christianity hi Common Speech 
 
 25 
 
 Anne Killigrew . 
 
 3 
 
 Chrystabel . . .10, 
 
 17 
 
 Apocalyptical Writers The 
 
 
 Church and Modern Life, The 
 
 8 
 
 Messages of the 
 Apostles, The Messages of the 
 
 11 
 11 
 
 Church and the Kingdom, The 
 Church and the Next Genera- 
 
 21 
 
 Aspects of the Spiritual . 
 Asquith, The Right Hon. H. H., 
 
 7 
 
 tion, The 
 Church Questions of Our Tune 
 
 16 
 11 
 
 M.P 
 
 7 
 
 Cinderella . . 3, 
 
 17 
 
 At the Gatoa of the Dawn . 
 
 22 
 
 City of Delight, The 
 
 4 
 
 Atonement and Progress 
 
 16 
 
 Comforts of God, The 
 
 22 
 
 Atonement in Modern Thought, 
 
 
 Common Life, The . 
 
 9 
 
 Th . . ' . 
 
 8 
 
 Common-sense Christianity . 
 
 18 
 
 Augustinian Revolution in 
 Theology 
 Aunt Agatha Ann 
 Authority & the Light Within 
 Awe of the New Century, The 
 
 12 
 26 
 16 
 25 
 
 Conquered World, The 21, 
 Conquering Prayer 
 Courage of the Coward, The . 
 Crucible of Experience, The . 
 Daughter of Fife, A . 18, 
 
 13 
 
 18 
 
 27 
 
 Baptist Handbook, The 
 Barrow, Henry, Separatist 
 
 15 
 3 
 
 Days of Old . 
 Debt of the Damerals, The . 
 
 6 
 18 
 
 Beads of Tasmer, The . 11, 
 
 18 
 
 Divine Satisfaction, The 
 
 25 
 
 Beatitudes and the Contrasts, 
 
 
 Do We Need a New Theology ? 
 
 22 
 
 The .... 
 
 12 
 
 Dutch in the Medway, The . 
 
 10 
 
 Between Two Loves . 11, 
 
 27 
 
 Earlier Prophets, The Messages 
 
 
 Bible Definition of Religion, 
 
 
 of the .... 
 
 11 
 
 The .... 
 
 25 
 
 Earliest Christian Hymn, The 
 
 15 
 
 Birthday of Hope, The . 
 Bishop and the Caterpillar, The 
 
 26 
 26 
 
 Early Pupils of the Spirit 
 Ecce Vir 
 
 17 
 
 Black Familiars, The . 4, 
 
 17 Education of a Soul, The 
 
 II 
 
 Border Shepherdess, A . 
 
 1 1 Emilia's Inheritance . . 
 
 17 
 
 Bow of Orange Ribbon, The 18, 
 Britain's Hope 
 
 '-7 England's Danger 
 20 Epistle to the Galatians, The 
 
 26 
 15 
 
 Brudenells of Brude, The 
 
 17 
 
 Esther Wynne . . 10, 
 
 17 
 
 Burning Questions 
 
 20 
 
 Eternal Religion, The . 
 
 9 
 
 Canonbury Holt . . . 
 
 17 
 
 Evangelical Heterodoxy 
 
 7 
 
 Cartoons of St. Mark . 
 
 5 
 
 Evolution, Life and Religion . 
 
 5 
 
 Challenge, The . . . 
 
 14 1 Evolution of Old Testament 
 
 
 Character through Inspiration 
 
 -1 Relinion, The 
 
 8 
 
 Chats with Women on Every- 
 
 
 Exposition, The Art of . 
 
 6 
 
 day Subjects . 
 
 19 
 
 Ezekiel, The Book of . 
 
 2 
 
 Children's Pace, The . 
 
 21 
 
 Faces hi the Mist . 
 
 4 
 
 Children's Paul, The . 
 
 16 
 
 Faith and Form . 
 
 1!) 
 
 Christ in Everyday Life 
 
 13 
 
 Faith and Verification . 
 
 5 
 
 Christ of the Children, The . 
 
 17 
 
 Faith of a Wayfarer, The 
 
 19 
 
 Christ or Chaos T . 
 
 6 
 
 Faith the Beginning, Self-Sur- 
 
 
 Christ that is To Be, The 
 
 10 
 
 render the Fulfilment, of 
 
 
 Christ, the Church and the 
 
 
 the Spiritual Life . 21, 
 
 M 
 
 Child, The . 
 Christ, The Private Relation- 
 
 12 
 
 Family Pravers for Morning U-e 
 Father Fabian 
 
 10 
 
 17 
 
 ships of ... 
 Christ Within, The 
 
 5 
 21 
 
 Fifty Years' Reminiscences of a 
 Free Church Musician . 
 
 13 
 
 Christ's Pathway to the Cross 
 
 18 Fireside Fairy Tales 
 
 23
 
 CATALOGUE OF BOOKS 
 
 PACK 
 
 First Christians, The . . 9 
 Flower-o'-the-Corn . 3, 17 
 
 Forgotten Sheaf, The . . 20 
 Fortune's Favourite . .17 
 Fortunes of Cyril Denham, The 
 
 17, 27 
 " Freedom of Faith " Series, 
 
 The . . . .18 
 Friend Olivia ... 4 
 Gambia with Life, A . .10 
 Garrisoned Soul, The . . 22 
 Gloria Patri . . . .10 
 Glorious Company of the 
 
 Apostles, The. . .16 
 God's Greater Britain . .10 
 Golden Truths for Young Folk 23 
 Good New Times, The . .15 
 Gospel of Grace, The . . 8 
 Grey and Gold . . .17 
 Grey House at Endlestone . 17 
 Growing Revelation, The . 5 
 Harvest Gleanings . .15 
 Health and Home Nursing . 24 
 Health in the Home Life . 13 
 Heart of Jessy Laurie, The . 4 
 Heavenly Visions ... 6 
 Heirs of Errington, The . . 17 
 Helga Lloyd ... 3 
 
 Helps to Health and Beauty . 24 
 Higher on the Hill . . 6 
 His Next of Kin . . 10, 17 
 History of the United States, A 2 
 Holidays in Animal Land . 23 j 
 Holy Christian Empire . .27 
 Holy Spirit, The ... 19 
 House of Bondage, The . .17 
 House of tha Secret. The . 3 
 How to Become Like Christ . 21 
 How to Read the Bible . . i'3 
 Husbands and Wives . .17 
 Ideals for Girls . . .10 
 Ideals in Sunday School Teach- 
 
 ing .... 19 
 Immanence of Christ in Modern 
 
 Life, The . . .13 
 Impregnable Faith, An . . 13 
 Incarnation of the Lord, The 5 
 Infoldings and Unfoldings of 
 
 the Divine Genius . .21 
 Inner Mission Leaflets, The . 20 
 Inner Mission Pamphlets, The 16 
 Inspiration in Common Life . 18 
 Interludes in a Time of Change 7 
 Invisible Companion, The . 19 
 Inward Light, The . . 9 
 Israel's Law Givers, The 
 
 Messages of . . .11 
 Jan Vedder's Wife . 18, 27 
 Jealousy of God, The . . 21 
 
 PAOB 
 
 Jesus and His Teaching . . 8 
 Jesus and the Seekers . .12 
 Jesus or Christ ? . . .10 
 Jesus : Seven Questions . 8 
 Jesus, The First Things of . 7 
 Jesus, The Messages of, Accord- 
 ing to the Gospel of John 1 1 
 Jesus, The Messages of. Accord- 
 
 ing to tha Synoptista . 11 
 Joan Carisbroke . . .17 
 Joshua, The Book of . .3 
 Jowett, J. H., M.A., D.D. . 19 
 Judges of Jesus, The . .16 
 Judges, Tha Book of . .3 
 Kid McGhie . . 3, 17 
 
 Kingdom of the Lord Jesus, 
 
 The . . .21, 26 
 King George and Queen Mary 12 
 Kit Kennedy : Country Boy 3, 17 
 Lady Clarissa . . .17 
 Last of the MacAllisters, The 
 
 11, 18 
 Later Prophets, The Messages 
 
 of the . . . . 11 
 Leaves for Quiet Hours . .14 
 Let us Pray . . . .20 
 Letters of Christ, The . .18 
 LetterstoaMinisterinlSi.il . 12 
 Liberty and Religion . .14 
 Life and Letters of Alexander 
 
 Mackennal, The . . 5 
 Life and Teaching of Jesus, 
 
 Notes on the . . .19 
 Life and the Ideal ... 6 
 Life, Faith, and Prayer of the 
 
 Church . . .22 
 
 Life in His Name ... 7 
 Life's Beginnings . . .12 
 Lifted Veil. A . . .13 
 Loves of Miss Anne, The 3, 17 
 Lynch, Rev. T. T. : A Memoir 4 
 Lyrics of the Soul . . .13 
 Making of Heaven and Hell, 
 
 The . . .19 
 
 Manual for Free Church Minis- 
 ters, A . . . .19 
 Margaret Torrington . 17, 27 
 Marprelate Tracts, The . . 2 
 Martineau's Study of Religion 
 
 21, 2 
 Merry Animal Picture Book, 
 
 The . . .23 
 
 Messages of Hope ... 8 
 Messages of the Bible, The . 1 1 
 Millicent Kendrick . . 17 
 Ministers of the Abbey Inde- 
 pendent Church, The . tf 
 Ministry of the Modern 
 
 Church, Tha . . .13
 
 80 
 
 JAMES CLARKE AND CO.'S 
 
 PAGB 
 
 Miss Devereux, Spinster . 18 
 Model Prayer, The . .18 
 Modern Minor Prophets . 13 
 
 Modern Theories of Sin . . 7 
 More Tasty Dishes . . 24 
 Morning and Evening Cries . 16 
 Morning Mist, A . . .18 
 Morning, Noon, and Night . 24 
 Morningten Lecture, The . 4 
 Mora J ami a Vitoe . . .23 
 Mr. Montmorency'a Money 10, 17 
 My Baptism . . .16 
 
 My Beuef .... 8 
 My Neighbour and God . .14 
 New Evangel, The . .13 
 New Mrs. Lascelles, The .18 
 New Testament in Modern 
 
 Speech, The . . .14 
 Nineteen Hundred T . .10 
 Nobly Born. . . . 17 
 Nonconformist Church Build- 
 ings . . . .15 
 No Boom in the Inn .19 
 
 Old Pictures in Modern Frames 2 1 
 Old Testament Stories in 19 
 
 Modern Light . .18 
 Oliver Cromwell. . . 25 
 Oliver Westwood . . .17 
 Our City of God ... 9 
 Our Girls' Cookery . . 25 
 Ourselves and the Universe 9, 27 
 Outline Text Lessons for 
 
 Junior Classes . . 23 
 Overdale . . . 10, 17 
 Passion for Souls, The . .18 
 Paton, J. B., M.A., D.D. . 5 
 Paul and Christina . .11 
 Paul, The Messages of . .11 
 Pearl Divera of Boncador 
 
 Reef, The . . .10 
 Personality of Jesus, The . 11 
 Pilot, The . . . .14 
 Plain Talka . . . .22 
 Poems. By Mme. Guyou . 11 
 Poems of Mackenzie Bell, The 1 4 
 Poets, The Messages of the . 1 1 
 Polychrome Bible, The 2, 3 
 
 Popular Argument for the 
 
 Unity of Isaiah, A . .15 
 Popular History of the Free 
 
 Churches, A . . 4, 14 
 Practical Lay-Preaching and 
 
 Speaking to Men . .14 
 Prayer . . . .18 
 
 Preaching to the Times . .10 
 Price of Priestcraft, The . 22 
 
 PriJe of the Family, The . 18 
 Problems of Immanence . 13 
 Problems of Living . . 9 
 
 PAOB 
 
 Prophetical and Priestly His- 
 torians, The Messages of . 
 
 T'salraists, The Messages of the 
 
 Purpose of the Cross, The 
 
 Quickening of Caliban, The . 
 
 Quiet Hints to Growing 
 Preachers in My Study . 
 
 Race and Religion. 
 
 Reasonable View of Life, A . 
 
 Reasonableness of Jesus, The . 
 
 Reasons Why for Congrega- 
 tionalists 
 
 Reasons Why for Free Church- 
 men .... 
 
 Reform in Sunday School 
 Teaching 
 
 Religion and Experience 
 
 Religion and Miracle 
 
 Religion of Jesus, The . 
 
 Religion : The Quest of the 
 Ideal .... 
 
 Religion that will Wear, A . 
 
 Resultant Greek Testament, 
 The .... 
 
 Rights of Man, The 
 
 Rise of Philip Barrett, The . 4, 
 
 Robert Wreford's Daughter . 
 
 Rogers, J. Guinness 
 
 Rome from the Inside . 
 
 Rosebud Annual, The . 6, 
 
 Ruling Ideas of the Present 
 Age .... 
 
 Sceptre Without a Sword, The 25 
 
 School Hymns . .12, 
 
 Scourge of God, The 
 
 Sculptors of Life . . 
 
 Secret of Living, The . 
 
 Sermon Illustration, The Art of 
 
 Sharing His Sufferings . 
 
 She Loved a Sailor 
 
 Ship of the Soul, The . 21, 
 
 Ship's Engines, The 
 
 Sidelights on Religion . 
 
 Simple Cookery 
 
 Simple Things of the Christ ian 
 Life, The 
 
 Singlehurst Manor . 10, 
 . Sissie . . . .10, 
 
 ! Sister to Esau, A . 11, 
 
 Small Books on Great Subjects 
 21, 
 
 Smith, John, the Se-Baptist, 
 
 Thomas Helwys, and the 
 
 First Baptist Church in 
 
 England . . . 
 
 Social Salvation . 
 
 Social Worship on Everlasting 
 
 Necessity . .21, 
 
 Squire of Sandal Side, The 11, 
 
 26
 
 CATALOGUE OF BOOKS 
 
 31 
 
 St. Betha's . . 17, 27 
 
 Storehouse for Prchrs and 
 
 Teachers ... 20 
 Stories of Old . . .-17 
 Story of Congregationalism in 
 
 Surrey, The ... 8 
 Story of Joseph the Dreamer, 
 
 The . . . .16 
 Story of Penelope, The . .17 
 Story of the English Baptists, 
 
 The .... 9 
 Studies of the Soul . 9, 27 
 Sunday Afternoon Song Book 
 
 23, 27 
 Sunday Morning Talks with 
 
 Boys and Girls . .15 
 Sunny Memories of Australasia 20 
 Supreme Argument for Chris- 
 tianity, The ... 21 
 Tale of a Telephone, A . .26 
 Talks to Little Folks . . 25 
 Taste of Death and the Life of 
 
 Graoe, The . . 21, 26 
 Tasty Dishes . . .24 
 Ten Commandments, The . 16 
 Theology and Truth . . 5 
 Theophilus Trinal, Memorials of 4 
 Things Most Surely Believed . 13 
 Thornycroft Hall . . .17 
 Thoughts for Life's Journey . 12 
 Through Science to Faith . 4 
 Tools and the Man . . 6 
 Town Romance, A . .18 
 Transfigured Church, The . 6 
 Trial and Triumph . . 20 
 
 True Christ, The . . .12 
 Typee of Christian Life . . 21 
 Ungilded Gold . . 14, 20 
 Unique Class Chart and 
 
 Register . . .27 
 Universal Over-Presence, The 12 
 Unknown to Herself . .18 
 Value of the Apocrypha, The . 18 
 Value of the Old Testament . 16 
 
 Vida 3 
 
 Violet Vaughan . 10, 17, 27 
 Voice from China, A . .8 
 Warleigh's Trust . . .17 
 Wayfarer at the Cross Roads, 
 
 The . . .18 
 
 Way of Life, The . . .21 
 Way of Prayer, The . .19 
 Wayside Angels . . .24 
 Web of Circumstance, The . 4 
 Westminster Sermons . . 7 
 
 What is the Bible ? .6 
 
 Who Wrote the Bible T . .20 
 Why We Believe . . .14 
 Wideness f God's Mercy, The 1 8 
 Whining of Immortality, The 7 
 Wisdom of God and the Word 
 
 of God, The ... 6 
 Woman's Patience, A . .17 
 Women and Their Saviour . 22 
 Women and Their Work . 20 
 Words by the Wayside . . 20 
 Working Woman's Life, A . g 
 Woven of Love and Glory II, i g 
 Young Man's Ideal, A . .13 
 Young Man's Religion, A . 15 
 
 Index of Authors 
 
 PAGE TA.Q* 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Abbott, Lymau 4. 8 
 
 Benvle, Aa*r*w . 6 
 
 Burgees, W. H. . 
 
 5 
 
 A4ney, W. F. 8, 23 
 
 Betts.C. H. 12, 1$ 
 
 Burgin, Isabel . 
 
 4 
 
 Aked, C. F. .0 
 
 Blake. J. M. 18, 19 
 
 Campbell, R. f. . 
 
 g 
 
 Allin, T. . 12, 21 
 
 Blonndn-BurU>n 
 
 Carlile, J. C. !) 
 
 25 
 
 Andrews, C. C. . 18 
 
 J. . . .18 
 
 Cave, Dr. . 
 
 8 
 
 Angus, A. H. . 19 
 
 Bonner, Carey . 12 
 
 Cleal, E. E. . 
 
 g 
 
 Antrara, C. K. P. . 22 
 
 Boseley, I. . . 6 
 
 Clifford, John 10.-. 
 
 1,26 
 
 Armstrong, R. A. 
 
 Bosworth, E. I. . 13 
 
 Collins, B. G. 
 
 16 
 
 21, 26 
 Baker, E. . .22 
 
 Bradford, Amory 
 H. . . 8. 9 
 
 Cowper, W. 
 Crockett, S. R. :!, 
 
 11 
 17 
 
 Barr, Amelia E. 
 
 Brierley, H. E. . 22 
 
 Cubitt, James 
 
 16 
 
 4, 11, 18, 27 
 
 Brierley, J. 6,7,8,9, 27 
 
 Cuff, W. . 
 
 20 
 
 Barrett, O. S. . 15 
 
 Briggs, C. A. . 6 
 
 Darlow, F. H. . 
 
 20 
 
 Barrows, C. H. . 11 
 
 Brooke, Stopford 
 
 Davidson, Ghi.lv* 
 
 23 
 
 Becke, Louis . 10 
 
 A. . . 21, 26 
 
 Dods, MarciiH a. 
 
 21 
 
 Bell, Mackenzie . 14 
 
 Brown, C. . , 18, 20 Klias, F. 
 
 7 
 
 Bennett, W. H. . 3 Burford, W. K. . 24 Ellis, J . !iO, 
 
 23
 
 32 
 
 JAMES CLARKE AND CO.'S CATALOGUE 
 
 PAGE ! PAGE 
 
 PAGS 
 
 Evans, H. . .22 
 
 Kenyon, Edith C. Iff 
 
 Bold, J. . .7 
 
 Farningham, Mari- 
 
 Kirk, E. B. .5 
 
 Rickett, Sir J. 
 
 anne, 8, 10, 13. 
 
 Knight, W. A. . 19 
 
 Compton . 10, i'5 
 
 15, 20, 22 
 
 Lansfddt. L. .18 
 
 Riddette, J. H. . 27 
 
 Farrar, Dean . 8 
 
 La Toucho, E. D. 7 
 
 Robarts, F. H. . 15 
 
 FhJayson, T. Camp- 
 
 Layman, A. . 22 
 
 Roberts, R. .16 
 
 bell . . 26 
 
 Lee>, E. . . 3 
 
 Rogers, J. Guin- 
 
 Fiske, J. . .2 
 
 Lee, W. T. . . 14 
 
 ness . . 2 
 
 Forsytn, P. T. 
 8, 21, 26, 27 
 
 Leggatt, F. Y. . 19 
 Lewi*, E. W. . 19 
 
 Russell, F. A. .18 
 Sabatier, A. . 8 
 
 Foston, H. . .12 
 Freraantle, Dean . 8 
 
 Llewellyn, D. J. . 20 
 Lyall, David 4. 15 
 
 Sanders, F. K. . 11 
 Schrenck, E. von 8 
 
 Furnesi, H. H. . 2 
 
 Lynch, T. T. . 4 
 
 Scottish Presbyte- 
 
 Garrie, A. E. .12 
 
 Lynd, William . 20 
 
 rian, A . .24 
 
 Gibbon, J. Morgan 
 
 Macfadyen, D. 5, 11 
 
 Shakespeare. J. H. 19 
 
 7, 15 
 
 McFadyen, J. E. 19 
 
 Shepherd, J. A. . 23 
 
 Giborne, Agnes . 18 
 Gladden, Washington 
 
 Macfarlane.Charles 10 
 M'Intyre.D. M. . 7 
 
 Sinclair, Archdea- 
 con . 21, 26 
 
 6, 8, 20, 21 
 
 Mackennal, Alex- 
 
 Smyth, Newman . 4 
 
 Glover, R. . .22 
 
 ander . 21, 26 
 
 Snell, Bernard J. 
 
 Godet, Professor . 8 
 Gordon, George A. 7 
 
 Manners, Mary E. 26 
 Man of the World, A 12 
 
 8, 16, 18 
 Steuart, J. A. . 4 
 
 Gould, G. P. . 19 
 
 Marchant Bessie 18 
 
 Stevenson, J. G. 
 
 Greenhough, J. G. 
 
 Marchant, J. . 5 
 
 13, 14, 16, 17 
 
 15, 21 
 
 Marshall, N. H. 
 
 Stewart, D. M. 13, 22 
 
 Griffis, W. E. . 4 
 Griffith -Jones, E.5, 21 
 
 5, 12, 16 
 Martineau, Jas. 21, 26 
 
 Stuart Duncan . 3 
 Sntter, Julie . 20 
 
 Grubb, E. 16. 19 
 
 Mason, E. A. . 26 
 
 Swan, F. R. . 13 
 
 Gunn.E. H.M. 12, 27 
 
 Mather, Lessels . 24 
 
 Swetenham, L. .13 
 
 Guyon, Madame . 1 1 
 
 Matheson, George 
 
 Tarboltbn, A. C.. 16 
 
 Harnack, Professor 8 
 
 8, 12, 14, 20, 25 
 
 Thomas, H. Arnold 21 
 
 Harvey-Jellie, W. 6 
 
 Maver, J. S. .21 
 
 Tipple, S. A. .6 
 
 Haupt, P. . .2 
 
 Meade, L. T. .18 
 
 Toy, 0. H, . . 2 
 
 Haweis, H. R. . 16 
 
 Metcalfe, R. D. . 23 
 
 Tymms, T. V. 5 
 
 Heddle, Ethel F. 18 
 
 Meyer, F. B. 18, 22 
 
 Tynan, Katharine 3 
 
 Henson, Canon H. 
 
 Michael, C. D. . 17 
 
 Tytler, S. . .18 
 
 Hensley . 7, 10 
 
 Miller, Elizabeth . 4 
 
 Varloy, H. . .19 
 
 Hill, F. A. . . 2 
 
 Minshall, E. .13 
 
 Veitch, R. . 7, 9 
 
 Hocking, S. K. . 10 
 
 Moore, G. F. . S 
 
 Wain, Louis 23, 26 
 
 Hodgson, J. M. . 12 
 
 Morgan, Q. Camp- 
 
 Walford, L. B. 4, 17 
 
 Herder, W. Garrett 21 
 
 bell . 15, 18 
 
 Walker, W. L. . 12 
 
 Home, C. Silvester 
 
 Morison, F. .19 
 
 Warschauer. J. 
 
 4, 8, 13, 14. 18, 20 
 
 ! Morten, Honnor . 13 j 6, 8, 13, 19 
 
 Horton, R. F. 5. 
 
 Mountain, J. . 16 Warwick, H. . 12 
 
 8, 19, 21, 24, 25, 26 
 
 i Mnngor, T. T. 8, 21 Waters. N. MoO. 16 
 
 Hunter, John . 8 
 
 j Neilson, H. B. . 23 
 
 Watkinson, W. L. 18 
 
 " J. B." of The 
 
 Orchard, W. E. 7, 8 
 
 Watson. E. S. 6 
 
 Christian World 25 
 
 Palmer, Frederic. 7 Wateon, W. 13, 18 
 
 J. M. G. . .10 
 
 ! Paton, J. B. Weymouth, R. F. 
 
 Jefferson, C. E. . 11 
 
 11, 16, 20, 22 
 
 14. 15 
 
 Jeffs, H. 6,7,13, 14 15 
 
 i Peake, A. S. . 20 j White, W. . ."4 
 
 John, Griffith . 8 
 
 Pharmaceutical i Whiton, J. M. 
 
 Jones, J. D. 8, 13, 
 
 Chemist, A 24 
 
 7, 10, 17, 25 
 
 16, 18, 20, 22, 26 
 
 Picton, J. Allanson 17 
 
 Williams, T.R. 18, 21 
 
 Jowett.J. H. , 18, 19 
 
 Pierce, W. . .2 
 
 Wilson, P. W. . 14 
 
 Kennedy, H. A. 23, 27 
 
 Powicke, F. J. . 3 
 
 Worboiae, Emma 
 
 Kennedy, John . 15 
 
 Pringle, A. 18, 19 
 
 J. 10, 17, 27 
 
 Kent, C. F. .11 
 
 Pulsford, John . 21 
 
 Yatea, T. . .13 
 
 W. S?ai0M * ftmc. Prmtirt, FttUr Lam, <m<i*n, Jf.C.
 
 32 JAMES CLAB 
 
 PAGE | 
 
 Evans, H. . .22 
 
 Faroingham, Mari- 
 anne 8, 10, 13, 
 15, 20, 
 
 Farrar, Dean 
 
 Fmlayson, T. Camp- 
 bell . . 26 j 
 
 Fiake, J. . . 2\ T 
 
 Forayth, P. T. 
 
 8, 21, 26, 27 J 
 
 Foston, H. . . .Ill 1 
 
 Freraantle, DCATI . 8 ' 1 
 
 Fumess, H. H. . 2 j J 
 
 Ganrfc, A. E. .121 
 
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